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LITERATURES OF THE
AMERICAS
Series Editor: Norma E. Cantú

WOMEN IN
CONTEMPORARY
LATIN AMERICAN
NOVELS
Psychoanalysis and
Gendered Violence

Edited by
Beatriz L. Botero
 Literatures of the Americas

Series editor
Norma E. Cantú
University of Missouri–Kansas City
Kansas City, MO, USA
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in lit-
erature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
boundaries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the
United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contempo-
rary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is
rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include
cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial,critical race, and
ecofeminist approaches.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/series/14819
 Beatriz L. Botero
Editor

Women in
Contemporary Latin
American Novels
Psychoanalysis and Gendered Violence
Editor
Beatriz L. Botero
Faculty Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Madison, WI, USA

Literatures of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-319-68157-3    ISBN 978-3-319-68158-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954968

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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 pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
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tional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
A mi madre por enseñarme a amar y a Hernando
por ser el amor de mi vida
 Contents

1 Introduction: Liminal Females in Contemporary

Latin-American Novels   1
Beatriz L. Botero

2 Literature as Ghost Whisperer in 2666: Narrating the

Impossible  19
Chris T. Schulenburg

3 Retelling La charca: Osario de Vivos, Women, and

Con/Textual Aggressions in Puerto Rican Literature  43
Nancy Bird-Soto

4 Gender, Space, and the Violence of the Everyday in

Parque Industrial  61
Melissa Eden Gormley

vii
viii Contents

5 Mother, Nation, and Self: Poetics of Death and

Subjectivity in Julián Herbert’s Canción de Tumba  79
Raúl C. Verduzco

6 The Body in Rosario Tijeras: Between the Life and Death

Drives (Eros and Thanatos) 111
Beatriz L. Botero

Index 135
 Contributors

Nancy Bird-Soto earned her PhD in Hispanic Literatures at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic books include: Sara la obrera y otros cuentos: El
repertorio femenino de Ana Roqué (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), Escritoras puertor-
riqueñas de la transición del siglo XIX al XX: Ana Roqué, Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo
y Luisa Capetillo (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), and Los hipócritas de Franca de
Armiño (Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 2013). In 2014, she published Put Together: A
Minne-Memoir with Editorial Trance. Her novel in Spanish, Aries Point, was pub-
lished by Isla Negra Editores in 2016. Also, her collection of short stories, Sobre la
tela de una araña, was published by Editorial Tiempo Nuevo in 2016. You can
follow her on Twitter @nancybird75 and visit nancybirdauthor.com.
Beatriz L. Botero earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison in
Spanish and Portuguese literature and a PhD from Universidad Autónoma de
Madrid in psychoanalysis. She specializes in contemporary Latin American litera-
ture and teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore
Studies at UW Madison. Her research is oriented primarily towards topics in nar-
rative and psychoanalysis, with special emphasis on identity, body, and social con-
flict. Botero examines the relationships between national identity and personal
identity in novels, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s last novel, Memoria de mis
putas tristes. In her most recent work, Botero focuses on several visual artists and
photographers who explore memories of violence during dictatorships in the
Southern Cone and plastic artists in other Latin American countries, such as
Colombia, whose work revolve around issues of migration and displacement.
Melissa Eden Gormley is an Associate Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Platteville. Her research investigates the role of visual and literary cul-
ture as an integral component of the discourse on modernity during the Brazil’s
First Vargas Administration.

ix
x CONTRIBUTORS

Chris T. Schulenburg received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison

in Spanish and Portuguese Literature. He is Associate Professor in the Humanities
Department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Schulenburg teaches on
aesthetic and violence in Latin American Literature. His works has been published
in journals like Confluencia, Latin American Literary Review, as well in Hispania,
Chasqui, and Letras femeninas.
Raúl C. Verduzco received his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University
(2010) and is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Tecnológico de Monterrey,
Campus Monterrey, where he teaches Literary Theory, Mexican, and Latin
American Literature. He is the author of Memoria y Resistencia: Representaciones
de la subjetividad en la novela latinoamericana de fin de siglo (Bonilla Artigas,
2014), as well as several articles on contemporary Latin American and Mexican
literature. He is currently working on the aesthetic, cultural, and economic inter-
sections between Latin American Neobaroque, Dirty Realism, and Weltliteratur.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Liminal Females

in Contemporary Latin-American Novels

Beatriz L. Botero

Abstract Women in Latin America inhabit the margins of society. Latin

American literature reflects the consequences of marginalization, expresses
trauma, and shows the different scars that society has incorporated into its
narrative of identity. These novels talk about violence and rape, silence and
fear, and the way that society overcomes social problems. In this process,
we can see, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the gendered reconstruc-
tion of the body image. Contemporary literature shows how the boundary
of the body is stretching in the dyad between male and female. On the one
hand, “extreme masculinity” frames violence as part of normal behavior
(Franco, Cruel Modernity, Duke University Press, 2013, 15). On the
other, extreme female-body construction entails exaggeration of form and
hyper-sexuality in line with the aesthetic of television models and narco
values.

Keywords Margin • Women • Body • Extreme masculinity • Hyper-­

sexuality • Narconarrative • Psychoanalysis

B.L. Botero (*)

Faculty Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 1

B.L. Botero (ed.), Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels,
Literatures of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0_1
2 B.L. BOTERO

The Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, in a conference at University of

Wisconsin-Madison, once proposed that a woman represents the thresh-
old (umbral) “because she is the limit between life and death.” His words
find echoes in the objective of this book, the seeds of which can be traced
to a preoccupation with violence in Latin America and the precarious place
occupied by women in these countries.
“She” is the threshold in numerous ways. “She” is the entrance to the
penumbras, to the more intricate and profound relationship between chil-
dren and female figures. “She” is the limit between the Eros drive and the
Death drive and occupies a social position that gives her the option to
observe a range of human actions.
Not only do women in Latin America inhabit the margins of society,
but they also occupy the liminal space. I found the concept of “liminal”
appropriate for describing the positions of “in-between” that women per-
form in society as the entrance to life and the limit between public and
private spheres.1 To some extent, the concept of liminality in this book
resonates with multiple definitions regarding the concept, yet this book
offers another way of reading the liminal.
It is evident that the situation for Latin American women has improved
dramatically in the past century. There are women in politics, in science, in
high positions within economic emporiums, and in cultural arenas, too.
We can find women authors in bookstores and libraries and can read voices
that sound fresh in the immense world of masculine literature. Yet the
situation for millions of women is very difficult, and the novels studied in
this book address these women, the ones who occupy the lowest step of
the social hierarchy: the prostitutes, the uneducated, the gang females, the
bodies forgotten after sexual abuse, or the corpses found dead in places
where the police do not have the resources to investigate massive numbers
of crimes (or do not have the interest to pursue the criminals).
Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels discusses women who
inhabit the margins of society. In general, we can say that women occupy
the weaker part of the “male–female” dyad. In Of Grammatology (1976),
Jacques Derrida explains the importance of deconstructing binary thought
and oppositions, such as that of outside–inside, speech–writing, normal–
abnormal, or center–periphery. The semiology accompanying each term
in binaries has its own history, its own point of view. In the male–female
dyad, for example, the female position is relegated as secondary2 in the
social imaginary.
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 3

There is more than one way to talk about women in Latin America, and
women’s position depends on several factors, especially economic, cul-
tural, and social factors, whose interplay can create independent, fully
potentiated women. However, economic, cultural, or social status does
not guarantee women’s freedom from violence in private and public
spheres, because in Latin America, women deal with a culture of machismo
that is embedded in the social costume. In that respect, Latin American
feminism needs to rethink the basics. Machista culture pervades the social
structure, with a strong sense of masculine pride and the idea that impor-
tant matters are associated with the male. Therefore, men’s voices matter
more than those of women as the qualities of authority, autonomy, and
universality are labeled male, whereas love, dependence, and particularism
are labeled female (Ortner 1975, 179). When we study the role of women
in Latin American novels, we must not forsake the concept of machismo.
As Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega observes, “with their heartfelt
devotion to motherhood and their equally heartfelt refusal of fatherhood,
Latin machos have made lasting contributions to state-of-the-art
machismo” (58–59).
Sadly, violence has become part of daily life for numerous women in
Latin America. Violence, to be clear, ranges from constant micro-­
aggressions to murder. Most of this violence and death are associated with
the desire to punish and to control women’s actions, bodies, emotions,
and behaviors, which fits with the assumption that men own women
(Russell and Harmes 2001, 13–14). The figures for these cases are alarm-
ingly high—and growing. The 2014 Economic Commission for Latin
America’s (CEPAL) report on feminicide3 found that 2289 women were
killed by their partners in Mexico; 531 in Honduras; 225 in Argentina;
217 in Guatemala; 188 in the Dominican Republic; 183 in El Salvador;
145 in Colombia; 90 in Peru; 40 in Chile; and 32 in Paraguay (Navarez
2012). “Crimes of passion, killings due to an unexpected pregnancy, stab-
bings during theft and beheadings after a divorce” are but a few cases of
feminicide (Navarez 2015). Over the past seven years in Argentina alone,
1808 women have been murdered because of gendered violence. In Brazil,
on average, fifteen women per day die. The National Citizen Feminicide
Observatory of Mexico reports that “3892 women [have been] killed
across [Mexican] territory” (Navarez 2015). In the estimation of Jean
Franco, the situation is exacerbated by the desire of hegemonic institu-
tions to maintain social order.4 According to the Pan-American Health
Organization (PAHO), “[certain] forms of violence against women … are
4 B.L. BOTERO

often tolerated or even condoned by laws, institutions, and community

norms,” and some researchers argue that violence against women is not
only a product of “gender inequality, but also a way of enforcing it” (Bott
et al. 2013, 5).5 If we come close to the idea of gendered violence, we
need to think that when violence is seen as part of daily life it “[puts] to
sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for
perceiving, understanding and dealing with reality and factuality” (Arendt
1970, 8). In the relationship between power, speech, and desire, the
“instinct of domination” frames the issues of gender (Arendt 1970, 36).
Thus, violence may cover the entire space in which women live, and the
anonymity of victims keeps their suffering voiceless and merely rumored.
To amplify women’s voices, literature matters. The number of female
victims in Latin America increases year on year, but literature and culture
transform the anonymity of deaths by the simple act of naming and com-
memorating victims who are synthesized in female characters. Prime
examples include Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (1999), Roberto Bolaño’s
2666 (2004), and Julian Herbert’s Canción de Tumba (2011). These nov-
els shed light on the situation faced by women and describe—as honestly
as possible—women’s lived experiences. The authors not only portray the
difficulties women confront but also highlight the strength women enact
in their own lives. In these three novels, we see social problems from the
perspective of a female character; however, not one of the female protago-
nists in these novels speaks. This is the first of the three characteristics that
I want to point out with respect to the role of women in contemporary
Latin American novels.
The first point, to reiterate, is the absence of her voice. The female
characters speak “through” the voice of male characters. Readers cannot
hear the female voice; they only imagine it.6 The pattern is almost the
same in contemporary Latin American novels: Middle-class men with for-
mal education speak to the reader, repeating women’s words or rendering
them in the form of small dialogues.
Throughout history, the periphery has had no voice. The male expresses
ideas out loud while others, such as women, servants, and children, remain
silent and obedient. This tradition can be seen in the writers of El Boom.
We hear the female voice through that of the male in “La Maga” from
Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, the eponymous character of Aura by Carlos
Fuentes, Julia in La tía Julia y el escribidor by Mario Vargas Llosa, and
Delgadina in Memoria de mis putas tristes7 by Gabriel García Márquez.
These are only a few examples; the list is long.
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 5

That men command and others obey is a result of renounced power, a

renunciation that may be explained from the perspective of le sujet supposé
savoir. Jacques Lacan’s “subject supposed-to-know” describes the process
of transference and the symbolism projected in the figure of the psycho-
analyst, a conceptual tool useful for treatment that we can use in the
female–male dyad as well. Society is prone to granting certain roles the
power to speak. Hence, gender is filtered through a dynamic of power and
voice, and silence keeps women on the sidelines. Society gives this power
of speech, of knowledge, primarily to men, and this dynamic is reinforced
with each act, especially in the case of violence. Following Derrida, decon-
structing dyads is crucial. In fact, modernity bases its knowledge on binary
polarities, and postmodernity rejects these binary constructions, even
though we must still learn to navigate a world of constant tension that
arises from fixed relationships between race, gender, and class.
The second aspect that I want to underscore is rape in contemporary
narratives. Literature reflects trauma and shows the different scars that
society has incorporated into its identity narrative. Annis Pratt’s study
Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981) identifies patterns that can
be considered the closest equivalent to the female bildungsroman, and
one pattern is the trauma of rape. In other words, through the narration
of rape, women construct their identities. In fact, most members of vul-
nerable populations would unhesitatingly state that they prefer not to walk
alone late at night in their own communities.8 The fear of rape and vio-
lence is high in societies with ingrained violence. It is possible to trace that
to colonial times, when the native population was considered to be ani-
mals and women were considered less than that.
In El laberinto de la soledad (1950), Octavio Paz states:

If the Chingada is a representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate

to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in
the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women. The symbol
of this violation is doña Malinche, the mistress of Cortés. (18)

She is talking about the Indian women who were fascinated, violated,
or seduced by the Spaniards9 and, at the same time, the rape of these
women produces an image of double violence from the spectator’s per-
spective, as it contains sexual pleasure for the rapist and terror for the vic-
tim. It is a violence that combines sadistic pleasure with rejection and fear,
Eros and Thanatos, desire and aggression. The result is a psychological
6 B.L. BOTERO

and social cost for the raped and the absence of fatherhood in the social
imaginary, which can be represented as the rejection of the familiar envi-
ronment.10 This is one of the reasons why the male figure is complicated
and is manifested in social-politics as masculine leaders who perpetuate
violence even though that violence results in painful consequences.
The same way that we have scars in the skin, we can say that we have
scars in our own history. Social frustration can lead to trauma, scars, and
memory; society uses these same three aspects to express feelings and to
construct narratives that reinforce identity. In this book, each chapter ana-
lyzes, implicitly or explicitly, the social discharge of this frustration through
the lens of literature in a specific time and space.
Scars create a map on the skin that offers a historical account; a person
can generally remember the story behind a scar, the moment of pain and
drama, and so too can a society. We construct maps of our memories and
bodies. On top of this macro-level identity, we construct a narrative of
who we are and where we are: personal identity and national identity.
Cristina Moreiras makes this point a salient feature of her work Cultura
herida: Literatura y cine en la España democrática (2002), yoking the idea
of the Spanish dictator Franco with that of the scar. That painful historical
moment is still present in Spain more than forty years after the dictator’s
death. Further still, Slavoj Žižek turns to September 11, 2001, in Welcome
to the Desert of the Real (2002), where he claims that the day was more
than an attack on the Twin Towers: it also formed a scar on individuals and
on the modern global world.
Scars are indelible marks, marks of recognition. Traumatic moments are
those most vividly remembered, and those memories help to avoid their
repetition. As a society, we remember tragedy with monuments and by
passing on—via narration—the stories surrounding these events to the
next generation. In that sense, murmurs figure as another way of recon-
necting with the trauma of death. In murmurs, there are no clear words,
only sounds that connect two worlds: the visible and non-visible world, as
Juan Rulfo teaches us,11 the material world and the world of death.
The third aspect that merits analysis when discussing gender in contem-
porary Latin American literature is the “boundary stretching” of the dyad
between male and female. On one hand, “extreme masculinity” frames vio-
lence as part of normal behavior (Franco 2013, 15). On the other, extreme
female-body construction entails exaggeration of form and hyper-­sexuality
in line with the aesthetic of television models and narco values.12 This furi-
ous way of life, full of bullets, money, and women, is depicted as preferable
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 7

to a boring (and poor) normal life. The cultural products that talk about the
narco realm show both females and males as exaggerations.
As John Charles Chasteen states in Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise
History of Latin America (2001), access to the Internet and US television
creates an imaginary where the young want to adopt US-style consumer-
ism. The consequences extend beyond the economic sphere. For one,
there is imitation. Shows such as “American Dreams” and “Big Brother”
export US culture globally; children everywhere with television access
learn that, to some degree, there exists a happy, complete other world,
which they then compare to their own (with frustration being a common
outcome). On the other hand, women want to adopt this aesthetic in their
homes and on their bodies. The Latin American phenotype is closer to
indigenous and mestizo physiognomy; therefore, the difficulty of match-
ing the ideal US body images with which they are flooded breeds diverse
reactions, such as low self-esteem, individualism, ethical lapses, loneliness,
and internal violence, which cumulatively take a toll on society.
These three ideas, which pervade Latin American novels, are the expres-
sion of social problems that governments are willing to work on but are
unable to solve. Violence toward women, as public or private acts, has
become part of the murmurs of cities, towns, and neighbors.
In Chris Schulenburg’s chapter, the seriousness of voice and the impor-
tance of literary vision are explained by constructing a meaningful dia-
logue between a cultural murmur and the dead. Schulenburg explores the
way that 2666, by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, guides intellectual
voices to the anonymous voices of victims of femicide in Santa Teresa,13
where impunity is rampant.
Although Schulenburg’s focus is local, I would add Colombia and
other parts of Latin America to the list of areas witnessing violence of this
tragic nature. For her part, Jean Franco expands this violence from the
region to the globe:

The melancholy truth is that “femicide,” a term coined to describe the rape
and death epidemic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is not confined to that coun-
try. The rape and extermination of women in Ciudad Juárez and in Central
America in “peacetime” raise the uncomfortable prospect that atrocity of
this kind has now been “privatized.” (2013, 92)

Rape, for Franco, is a method of torture, “if torture is defined as the

infliction of extreme pain” (2013, 16). Rape and silence are the general
8 B.L. BOTERO

rules of societal turmoil in the twenty-first century. To connect with

Schulenburg’s work, rape and silence are closely linked to the murmur
present in Latin American literature in the twentieth century and beyond.
He engages in a nuanced “hearing” of ghostly voices made present by the
novelist and emphasizes liminal spaces.
In Roberto Bolaño’s novel, Schulenburg discerns different levels of
murmurs, including ones preserved in the work of literary critics around
the world and ones of the dead. These academic voices are official mouth-
pieces for the phantasmagorical voices of raped and murdered women. By
dint of the power of the written word, the author calls attention to the
violence along the border between the USA and Mexico. If the animated
body represents life, the ghost represents death in the sense of being the
closest to the limen, the farthest from the center without occupying the
limen/threshold or the center. In each case, the energies of life and death
have reached opposite extremes: to be alive or to be dead.
With regards to death, the author dives into the concept of liminal
spaces. Liminal spaces are points of transformation (e.g., international
borders or airports).14 These spaces are important for society; they are
where the marginalized and the privileged meet. Here, the periphery col-
lides with the center, and space itself becomes transformation, a liminal
site of the occurrence of change. Naturally, liminal space merges life and
death.
Women are crucial components of this space. Society, by means of judg-
ments and norms, controls the use of female bodies, and these norms take
on a biblical accent: “Thou shalt not sit down with uncrossed legs.” “Thou
shalt not provoke desire.” Guilt is cultivated with respect to sexuality, and
sex is sanctioned in certain places and at certain times. Society exercises
control over Thanatos and libidinal energy.15 Notwithstanding its power,
the Eros drive is systematically controlled by society. The body seduces
and maintains the energy of seduction. The body experiences the pain
inflicted by the macho. Indeed, the body is often the site of social punish-
ment, a historically traceable tradition.16
Jean Franco succinctly captures the problem, writing that the “torture,
mutilation, and rape of lower-class mestiza women not only demonstrated
and confirmed male domination but also publicized the power of the
­perpetrators to society at large” (2013, 222). In other words, feminicide
is the performance of a sovereignty that bolsters male omnipotence. Rita
Segato argues that the formation of masculine subjectivity and macho cul-
ture requires repeated confirmation, that is, stimuli to subjugate, which
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 9

manifest as jokes, soap operas, and Hollywood movies. This feeds into the
underrepresentation of women in mass media: “only 29 percent of speak-
ing characters in top Hollywood films are women” (“Media Literacy”).17
Moreover, most of these 29 percent are white and young (with a near
complete absence of old and indigenous women). We must address this
issue, especially given 50 percent of US teenagers spend almost half of
their days consuming media with rampant gender stereotypes that per-
petuate gender-related violence (“Media Literacy”). It would not be sur-
prising to find these statistics hold for teenagers in Latin America.
Nancy Bird-Soto’s chapter traces the trajectory of domestic violence in
Puerto Rican literature. She grants a historical perspective to inequality
and gender bias using two novels, Manuel Zeno Gandía’s canonical La
charca (1894) and a contemporary rereading, retelling, and reframing of
the mundo enfermo in Gean Carlo Villegas’s Osario de vivos (2013). In
Villegas’s text, world-sickness [mundo enfermo] pervades the plot: The
sickness of greed and masculinity’s control over death are fueled by the
novel’s treatment of drug traffickers and the structure of gangs or para-
militaries. Namely, women embody the stereotypical subservient role
(nourisher) and are sources of sexual pleasure, with perfect bodies replicat-
ing those of cast members from Baywatch or The Dukes of Hazzard.
However, these Caucasian bodies are different from the indigenous and
mestizo bodies of Latin America, and that does not even begin to account
for the starved or surgically enhanced bodies paraded by mass-media out-
lets. The kind of performativity carried out by women and men as part of
their daily lives is portrayed in literature and television series that glorify
the economy of drug trafficking and the mafia.18 Language and body aes-
thetically represent power.19
In the drug-trafficker’s mundo enfermo, daily life is suffused with vio-
lence (including domestic violence). This is a world in which only the
strong survive. Although this is far from the first story to begin with a
woman’s rape and her subsequent sense of shame and is certainly not the
first treatment of domestic violence, the novel’s innovation stems from its
performance of the idea of “extreme masculinity.” We have previously
touched on Jean Franco’s concept of extreme masculinity, and it is worth
developing further here: “What massacres, rape, and desecration suggest
is a meltdown of the fundamental core that makes humans recognize their
own vulnerability and hence acknowledge that of the other” (2013, 15).
This concept presupposes outstanding brutality in interactions with per-
ceived enemies. Likewise, it is present in the daily affairs of those who
10 B.L. BOTERO

inhabit the margins. In Latin America, violence takes place in both public
and private spheres and is frequently exercised against women: “The
implacable, all-powerful male requires subjugated victims,” thereby fram-
ing “rape [as] a crucial and symbolic weapon” (Franco 2013, 15). Rape
and violence against women in slums and rural areas—the site of insur-
gents, guerrillas, paramilitary groups, military groups, narco-military
groups, and common criminals—is all too common. Bird-Soto remarks
that much work remains to be done if we hope to solve this problem, for
the status quo has failed to ameliorate the conditions in which a society
becomes primed for the explosion of subjugated, marginalized sectors.
In her chapter, Melissa Gormley highlights social and political changes
in Brazil in the 1930s. Her approach stresses the female image in the con-
text of Getúlio Vargas’s military dictatorship. At that time, the metaphor
of sickness surfaced in political speeches and the media in reference to the
state of the country. Gormley describes the conversion of “sickness” into
a political orientation of what must be eradicated at any cost; the author
also discusses the repetition of this process in other Latin American coun-
tries run by dictators, for example, Argentina and Chile.
Women’s entrance into the wider economy gave rise to the massively
significant replacement of the private house for the public workplace.
Gormley elaborates on Edward Soja’s reflections on space and women, in
which the workplace at the turn of the nineteenth century helped to
establish production patterns and social relationships in a new era of
women’s work and consumption. Over time, more than just production
was impacted: Gormley follows the discursive changes brought about by
this transformation and coins the term Thirdspace, a space characterized
by emotional connections made between marginalized (female) and sites
of production (real and imagined). She reads Thirdspace in national
posters that called for progress and captured iconic images of the state
and war, filled with boys and men. In that respect, the state defined
nationhood as male and modern, whereas women were cast in “tradi-
tional” supporting roles as wives and mothers. That meant women were
far removed from the concept of progress, the fundamental idea of
Brazilian national identity. Gormley’s presentation of Parque Industrial
(1933) by Patricia Galvão (Pagu) examines Brazil’s wartime catapult into
modernity via industrialization from the perspective not of a traditional
narrator, but rather through the voices of marginal female factory work-
ers. The stories of these workers do not stray far from those of today’s
workers in São Paulo or other large Brazilian cities. Galvão must have
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 11

sensed the impossibility of opposing, discussing, or negating a system

that suppresses the interconnections among working women, for she
developed this theme in a Marxist vein.
In his chapter, Raúl C. Verduzco analyzes Julián Herbert’s Canción de
tumba. The novel’s narrator stands before his moribund mother, the for-
mer prostitute Guadalupe Chavez, yet we move from grandmother to
daughter in the character of “Guadalupe” and back to the narrator’s con-
templation of fatherhood. In this movement, Verduzco addresses the
oscillation between destruction and preservation, which he suggests is a
back-and-forth that must be iterated by a nation in order to consolidate its
identity and to construct unity. According to Sigmund Freud, the life of
organisms has an oscillating rhythm found in the mother, the nation, and
the self. Guadalupe is the nation, and she shows the importance of the past
in her present and the influence of her decisions on her (writer) son.
Naturally, the narrator ponders his own past as part of Mexico’s history.
Herbert’s novel questions the concepts of nationhood (including revo-
lutionary ideologies), masculinity, and fatherhood, and the novel also
blurs the limits of the self, reality, and fiction (the representation of the
real). Consequently, it complicates the limits between life and death. In
Verduzco’s and Schulenburg’s chapters, we see the idea of a ghostly figure
that permeates—albeit in different ways—literature and other cultural
products, such as the memory of a lost one. The writer plies his trade to
maintain the story and history by representing his own particular point of
view. At the same time, however, the author gives a voice to community,
nation, and national identity in an effort to control death, that is, the
uncontrollable.
Beatriz Botero’s chapter scrutinizes the conception of the female body
in the drug-trafficker’s mundo enfermo and contends that this world is
couched in seduction and murder. Botero interprets how the living body
and the corpse are handled to arrive at insights into how a culture (or
subculture, in the case of narcos) treats life and death using body as a lim-
inal concept. Interpersonal relationships become taut with tension between
fear and vulnerability, reflecting Judith Butler’s suggestion that “violence
is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability
to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we
are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life
itself can be expunged by the willful action of another” (28–29).
In Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (1999), Botero identifies the epony-
mous protagonist’s use of libido and Thanatos. Working as a mafia assassin
12 B.L. BOTERO

who offers seductive company, Rosario is permitted into the tight-knit

circle of rich criminals who view seductiveness (corporality) as the primary
marker of female identity. But Rosario’s life reflects the constant struggle
to minimize guilt and body mass in order to be seductive. Her tale broad-
ens the reader’s perspective of violence in both the public and private
spheres (and occasionally more poignantly in the latter). Rosario Tijeras
appeals to the power of libido and Thanatos in an ultimately vain effort to
control the power of these two energies when combined with money and
guns in an ethical vacuum.
Fredric Jameson proposes studying cultural phenomena as group-­
related, social, or communal responses rather than as individual ones: “our
objects of study [as intellectuals] consist less in individual texts than in the
structure and dynamics of a specific cultural mode as such” (408). From a
psychoanalytical perspective, cultural objects are the products of society
and its discharge of Thanatic energy. The best nonviolent form of dis-
charge is repetition of cultural objects that involve, and evolve around,
violence. It is here that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “abstract
machine” offers clarity: Such machines are agencies of assemblage and
organization that express a micro-regime of forces or structures that play
with the internal rules and interruptions of flow in relation to the subject,
which, after humanistic analysis, provide new ways of mapping different
collective phenomena. “A machine may be defined as a system of interrup-
tions or breaks” such that there is only a continuum instead of a begin-
ning/ending (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 38). Women in Contemporary
Latin American Novels recognizes the tension among forces and the way
that abstract machines form an ensemble to express a more delicate and
deeper problem, namely women and the relationship between life and
death.
If we take art to be a response to violence, then artistic expression is
framed as a symptom of the need to discharge the energy created by the
tension between our two essential drives. To say it with Freud, there is an
innate self-destructive tendency in the death instinct. He states in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920) that “[everything] living dies for internal
reasons” (38). According to one scholar, “these internal reasons are not
the decay and amortization of living tissues, but a psychically internal ten-
dency, a drive” (Razinsky 2013, 140). The present volume makes the
expression of our internal violent tendencies abundantly clear, even if from
a vicarious (reading) position. To some extent, all of the female protago-
nists in the novels studied in this book break the gendered silence, r­ evealing
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 13

the female and her power as the threshold, the gateway between life and
death. If we think that aggression begins with self-assertion as a response
to the assumptions from the other, then women have much to contribute
with respect to the difficult “returning of the gaze,”20 and in this sense a
precedent must be set. That is to say, women and the study of their posi-
tion in the violent literature of the margins can be considered an act of
subversion against the traditional and hegemonic role of politeness and
obedience that is expected of women. The gravity of this subversion can
be understood in terms of its price: In the novels studied, female protago-
nists die so that we, the readers, may live. In this process, the literary
object bestows us with the magical idea of controlling death. It is in this
repetition that individuals can discharge their own powerful energy of life
and death, an opportunity provided by literature’s capacity to examine and
to expose the liminal world.

Notes
1. The concept of liminality—etymologically traced from the Latin word
lı̄men, meaning threshold—has been used in multifarious areas of knowl-
edge. One example of liminality is the passage between rituals expressed by
the ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep and the anthropologist
Victor Turner; for these researchers, the liminal state refers to the moment
when participants no longer hold their preritual status but have not yet
acquired a new status. In postmodern theory, Gianni Vattimo proposed a
concept of liminal space. In feminist theory, the liminal has been framed as
the inseparability of a pregnant woman, who is one person though simul-
taneously on the cusp of being two people: the limit between I and Other
becomes a fundamental relationship in Luce Irigaray or Bracha Lichtenberg-
Ettinger’s concept of “matrixial borderspace.” The idea of the liminal has
also been used in the socio-political apparatus, per Michel Foucault’s anal-
ysis in Madness and Civilization. Homi Bhabha expands on this argument,
positing the third space of enunciation from the perspective of postcolonial
theory. In literary criticism, Yuri Lotman considers the limit between cen-
ter and periphery, namely spatial limit’s importance as a way of creatively
transforming culture. More recently, Hein Viljoen, in Beyond the Threshold:
Explorations of Liminality in Literature (2007) uses liminality in regards to
isolation, with humans viewed as living between imperial and nationalist
discourses.
2. See, for instance, the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [Le
Deuxième Sexe] (1949).
14 B.L. BOTERO

3. In the words of Jean Franco: “The terms “feminicide” and “femicide” are
both used, and different definitions are given. Johanna Ikonen of the
Human Rights Unit of the European Parliament defines “feminicide” as
the killing of woman and girls with brutality. In a discussion of the terms,
Rosa Linda Fregosoand Cynthia Bejarano write that “femicide” has been
defined as “the murder of women and girls” because they are female,”
whereas they define “feminicide” as “the murders of women and girls
founded on the gender power structure; it is both public and private, both
systematic and a crime against humanity” (Franco 2013, 92).
4. In “Apuntes sobre la crítica feminista y la literatura hispanoamericana,”
Franco writes: “Gender, therefore, is not an essential limit but an imagined
one. Derrida’s deconstruction implies an examination of the institutions
that strongly support the aforementioned hierarchies, such as genders—an
examination that the American disciples of the French critic have not fur-
thered. This underscores the need for a feminist theory that studies gen-
ders of discourse, the relationship between genders of discourse and
hegemonic institutions, and delves into the study of the resources used to
establish textual authority, as in the case of evaluative terms, for example,
‘mastery of language’ or ‘professionalization of writing,’ etc.” (my transla-
tion; 33).
5. To differentiate among classes of homicides, experts have defined femicide
or feminicide as including (though not limited to) intimate-partner femi-
cide, serial femicide, and lesbicide.
6. For more on this, see Beatriz L. Botero’s “El Yo ideal y el Ideal del yo en
Cobro de Sangre de Mario Mendoza.”
7. For more on this, see Beatriz L. Botero’s “La increíble historia de Memoria
de mis putas tristes y de Mustio Collado el abuelo desalmado.”
8. For more information, see Armando Silva’s Imaginarios Urbanos.
9. The image of the indigenous woman who has been raped is also repre-
sented in contemporary literature, as in Memoria de mis putas tristes
(2004), García Márquez’s latest novel, or the character of “La Oscurana”
in Toño Ciruelo (2017) by Evelio Rosero.
10. From there came the concept of malinchismo, a pejorative adjective that
applies to those who prefer a lifestyle different from their local culture and
are more influenced by foreign culture.
11. In Pedro Páramo (1955).
12. “In Colombia, more than 350,000 plastic surgeries are performed each
year; that is, 978 procedures a day, forty an hour and three procedures
every five minute … Plastic surgery is one of the most profitable branches
of medical services in the country … The demand for cosmetic procedures
responds to a massive need, fed by the hyper-sexism of the Colombian
society which limits the professional and personal opportunities for women.
 INTRODUCTION: LIMINAL FEMALES IN CONTEMPORARY... 15

Often, ‘being pretty’ is the only way forward for a Colombian woman”
(Ruiz-Navarro).
13. Santa Teresa, it must be pointed out, is none other than Ciudad Juárez.
14. Other such spaces include hospitals, funeral parlors, or any place where we
avoid spending more time than absolutely necessary on account of mixed
feelings, anxiety, and the irreducible power of sensing destiny’s hand.
Liminal spaces go hand in hand with transformations (internal, external, or
even both).
15. Freud’s fascination with Greek mythology is well documented. He derived
some of the most important terms from the Greeks. Case in point:
Empedocles mentions two basic human forces. On one hand, Eros is one
of the primordial gods, the god of Love, and Aphrodite, the goddess of
love, lust, beauty and reproduction. On the other, Thanatos is the god of
Death. In psychoanalysis, Eros is not only the drive responsible for sexual-
ity, union, and sexual relations. Eros encompasses much more: Eros is
responsible for creativity and construction, and it is constantly at work
when the subject places interest in growing and projecting him or herself
onto life. Thanatos, too, is always in the subject who always operates under
the tension of these two forces. Freud relies on the life drive (Eros), with
its libidinal energy, and the Death drive, with its Thanatic energy, to explain
the ego’s reactions to this tension. In both the Spanish edition of the
Biblioteca Nueva and the English edition of Strachey (editor of Freud’s
complete works), the life instinct and death instinct are used to refer to
Eros and Thanatos, respectively. In this book, we opt for the concept of
drive instead of instinct.
16. In the Cuban novel Cecilia Valdés, the female character urgently needs to
erase the violence linked with slavery and its related corporeal punishment.
For more on this see: Schulenburg, Chris T. “‘Cecilia Valdés’: The Search
for a Cuban Discursive Control.”
17. For more on this subject, see Miss Representation (2011), a documentary
produced and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Siebel Newsom’s proj-
ect arose from concern for her children, who were growing up in a culture
that values men more than women; it explores how television, advertising,
models, and movies affect young people and their self-image.
18. For more on this, see Gustavo Bolivar’s Sin tetas no hay paraíso. The nov-
el’s opening line is: “Catalina never imagined that the prosperity and hap-
piness of the girls of her generation would be a function of bra size” (my
translation; 1).
19. For more on language as part of identity, see Nancy Bird-Soto’s “The
Playful ‘i’ in Tato Laviera’s Poetry: An ‘Arte Poética.’”
20. For more information, see Paula Amad’s “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at
the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies.”
16 B.L. BOTERO

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analysis&catid=1505%3Aviolence-againstwomen&lang=en.
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 CHAPTER 2

Literature as Ghost Whisperer in 2666:

Narrating the Impossible

Chris T. Schulenburg

Abstract As a literary parallel to the largely unsolved violence against

maquiladoras workers in Ciudad Juárez, México, the city of Santa Teresa
in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 reveals waves of ghostly, and largely femi-
nine, voices. When these spectral presences attempt to communicate with
visiting international intellectuals, however, their desperate pleas illicit
scant scholarly attention. This chapter argues that the possibility of resolv-
ing Santa Teresa’s “femicide” depends upon reading the ghostly signs of
these crimes rather than privileging a wholly impractical hunt for the exis-
tentially empty figure of an obscure German novelist.

Keywords “2666” • Roberto Bolaño • Femicide • Globalization •

Ghosts in literature

It is tempting to want to close the book on Latin America’s monstrous

and notoriously violent political legacy of its 1970s and 1980s dictator-
ships. After all, now that the region is awash in vibrant democracies headed
by women in the Southern Cone (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in

C.T. Schulenburg (*)

la Universidad de Wisconsin-Platteville, Platteville, WI, USA

© The Author(s) 2018 19

B.L. Botero (ed.), Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels,
Literatures of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0_2
20 C.T. SCHULENBURG

Argentina, Rousseff in Brazil, and Bachelet in Chile until 2010, respec-

tively), and indigenous presidents in the Andes (Morales in Bolivia and
Ollanta in Perú), Latin America would seem to have turned the page on
its recent political horrors. Nevertheless, the economic exigencies intro-
duced by globalization and NAFTA have simply moved this nucleus of
violence to the polemical border separating Mexico and the USA. On
both sides—but especially prevalent on the southern one—grisly and often
unsolved murders are a plague. Mexico’s front pages move quickly from
the faces of one family’s lost loved ones to the faces of another’s tragedy.
Death has become a moving target for discourse to capture and attempt to
comprehend.
When compared with organized marches by relatives of the desapareci-
dos in South America, which frequently included the exhibition of large
photos of their kidnapped children or grandchildren, the reappearance of
cadavers in Mexican dumps, ditches, and industrial parks shortly after
death transforms the ghostly essence of these family members. For Jean
Franco, in fact, pictures of the disappeared from the Southern Cone serve
as a vivid reminder of “the ghosts that could not be laid to rest” (Cruel
Modernity 2013, 20). On the other hand, how does discourse treat the
victims of Mexico’s ongoing feminicidio, whose victims’ bodies and life
stories are forgotten soon after their macabre remains are discovered? In
the case of Roberto Bolaño’s monumental novel 2666 (2004), a wholly
ironic juxtaposition between a little-known German novelist and the dead
of the fictitious town of Santa Teresa offers a truly ghostly chasm of signi-
fication that resists efforts by academic discourse to bridge and satisfacto-
rily traverse it. In this chapter, I argue that Bolaño’s masterpiece volunteers
the figure of the ghost in Santa Teresa as a metaphorical means for ulti-
mately questioning the literary efficacy of ever truly comprehending the
city’s feminicides at all.

Speaking of Death…
Although death constitutes the epitome of an unknown subjective experi-
ence, the ghostly figure in Mexican cultural production is far from a bash-
ful one. From Juan Preciado’s exploration of Comala’s spectral universe in
Pedro Páramo (1950) and the stream-of-consciousness wanderings of
Carlos Fuentes’s walking-dead protagonist in La muerte de Artemio Cruz
(1954) to Laura Esquivel’s best-selling novel and subsequently successful
movie Como agua para chocolate (1989 and 1992, respectively) about
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
like cucumbers than men, and are introduced merely that the knight
may have the pleasure of slicing them.

We cannot claim any condensed poetical merit for the Metrical

Romances. They have very few quotable passages and fewer
vigorous single lines. Their merit consists in a diffuse
picturesqueness, and reading them is like turning over illuminated
missals in a traveler’s half-hour, which leave a vague impression on
the mind of something vivid and fanciful, without one’s being able to
recall any particular beauty. Some of them have great narrative
merit, being straightforward and to the purpose, never entangling
themselves in reflection or subordinating the story to the expression.
In this respect they are refreshing after reading many poems of the
modern school, which, under the pretense of sensuousness, are
truly sensual, and deal quite as much with the upholstery as with the
soul of poetry. The thought has nowadays become of less
importance than the vehicle of it, and amid the pomp of words we
are too often reminded of an Egyptian procession, in which all the
painful musical instruments then invented, priests, soldiers, and
royalty itself, accompany the triumphal chariot containing perhaps,
after all, only an embalmed monkey or a pickled ibis.

There is none of this nonsense in the Old Romances, though

sometimes they are tediously sentimental, and we wonder as much
at the capacity of our ancestors in bearing dry verses as dry blows.
Generally, however, they show an unaffected piety and love of
nature. The delight of the old minstrels in the return of Spring is
particularly agreeable, and another argument in favor of the Northern
origin of this class of poems. Many of them open with passages like
this:

Merry it is in the month of May,

When the small fowls sing their lay,
Then flowers the apple-tree and perry,
And the little birds sing merry;
Then the ladies strew their bowers
With red roses and lily flowers,
 The damisels lead down the dance,
And the knights play with shield and lance.

Some of the comparisons, also, drawn from Nature, are as fresh as

dew. For example, when a lady sees her lover:

She is as glad at that sight

As the birds are of the light.

Or,

As glad as grass is of the rain.

A knight is said to be

As weary as water in a weir,

a simile full of imagination.

The most airy glimpses of the picturesque occur sometimes; as

describing a troop of knights:

They rode away full serriedly,

Their gilded pennons of silk of Ind
Merrily rattled with the wind;
The steeds so noble and so wight
Leaped and neighed beneath each knight.

After quoting various specimens of these poems, Mr. Lowell gave the
following sketch of the manners and customs of Romance-land,
“condensed from the best authorities.”
If you are born in this remarkable country and destined for a hero,
the chances are that by the time you are seven years old your father
will have gone off to fight the infidels, and a neighboring earl will
have taken possession of his estates and his too-hastily-supposed
widow. You resent this in various ways, especially by calling your
step-father all the proper names you can think of that are improper.
He, for some unexplained reason, is unable to get rid of you, though
he tries a variety of plots level with the meanest capacity. You, being
of uncommon sagacity, are saved by the aid of three or four
superfluous miracles. Meanwhile you contrive to pick up a good
knightly education, and by the time you are seventeen are bigger
and stronger and handsomer than anybody else, except, of course,
the giants. So, one day you buckle on your armor, mount your horse,
who is as remarkable in his way as yourself, and go adventuring.
Presently you come to a castle where you are most courteously
received. Maidens as white as whale’s bone and fair as flowers (they
are all so in Romance-land) help you off with your armor, and dress
you in richest silks. You then go to dine with the Lord of the Castle,
who is a knight of very affable manners and agreeable conversation,
but with an aversion to religious topics. His daughter, the fairest lady
on the ground, assists at the meal. You are conducted to your
chamber, and after a refreshing sleep meet your host and hostess at
breakfast. At a suitable time you return thanks for your kind
treatment and ask for your horse. The knight, however, in the
blandest manner tells you that a little custom of his will interfere with
your departure. He is in the habit of fighting with all his guests, and
has hitherto been successful in killing them all to the number of
several hundred. This is precisely the account which you are fond of
settling, and after a few allusions to Mahomed and Termagant and
Alcoban, you accept the challenge and, of course, come off victor.
This seems to settle the matter for the young lady whom your lance
has just promoted to her inheritance, and she immediately offers
herself and her estates to you, telling you, at the same time, that she
had long been secretly a Christian. Though madly in love with her,
and interested in her religious views, which she details to you at
some length, you mount your steed and ride away, but without being
expected to give any reasons. You have a particular mission
nowhere, and on your way to that interesting country you kill a
megalosaurus (for whose skeleton Professor Owen would have
given his ears), and two or three incidental giants. Riding on, you
come to a Paynim-land, ruled over by a liberally-minded Soldan, who
receives you into favor after you have slain some thousands of his
subjects to get an appetite for dinner. The Soldan, of course, has a
daughter, who is converted by you, and, of course, offers you her
hand. This makes you think of the other lady, and you diplomatize.
But there is another Paynim-land, and another Soldan, who sends
word that he intends to marry your beautiful convert.

The embassy of the proud Paynim somehow results in your being

imprisoned for seven years, when it suddenly occurs to you that you
might as well step out. So you pick up a magic sword that has been
shut up with you, knock down the jailers, mount your horse which is
waiting at the door, and ride off. Now, or at some other convenient
time, you take occasion to go mad for a year or two on account of
ladye-love number one. But hearing that ladye-love number two is
about to yield to the addresses of her royal suitor, who has killed her
father, burned his capital, and put all his subjects to the sword, you
make some appropriate theological disquisitions and start to the
rescue. On your way you meet a strange knight, join combat with
him without any questions on either side, and after a doubtful fight of
a day or two, are mutually overcome with amazement at finding
anybody who cannot be beaten. Of course it turns out that the
strange knight is your father; you join forces, make short work with
the amorous Soldan and his giants, and find yourself encumbered
with a young lady, a princess too, all of whose relatives and vassals
have been slaughtered on your account, and who naturally expects
you to share her throne. In a moment of abstraction you consent to
the arrangement, and are married by an archbishop in partibus who
happens to be on the spot. As your late royal rival has slain all your
late father-in-law’s lieges, and you have done the same service for
him in turn, there are no adventures left in this part of the world.
Luckily, before the wedding-ring is warm on your finger, a
plesiosaurus turns up. This saves many disagreeable explanations
with the bride, whom you are resolved to have nothing to do with
while the other young lady is alive. You settle her comfortably on the
throne of her depopulated kingdom, slay the monster, and start for
home with your revered parent. There you overcome the usurping
Earl, reinstate your father, and assist cheerfully at the burning of your
mother for bigamy; your filial piety being less strong than your
reverence for the laws of your country. A fairy who has a particular
interest in you (and who, it seems, is your real mother, after all—a
fact which relieves your mind of any regrets on the score of the late
melancholy bonfire), lets you into the secret that ladye-love the first
is your own sister. This revives your affection for your wife, and you
go back to the kingdom of Gombraunt, find her reduced to
extremities by another matrimonial Soldan, whom you incontinently
massacre with all his giants, and now at last a prospect of quiet
domestic life seems to open. Dull, peaceful days follow, and you
begin to take desponding views of life, when your ennui is pleasantly
broken in upon by a monster who combines in himself all the
monstrosities of heraldic zoölogy. You decapitate him and
incautiously put one of his teeth in your boot as a keepsake. A
scratch ensues, physicians are in vain, and you die with an edifying
piety, deeply regretted by your subjects, if there are any left with their
heads on.

On the whole, we may think ourselves happy that we live under

somewhat different institutions.
 LECTURE IV
THE BALLADS

(Friday Evening, January 19, 1855)

IV
One of the laws of the historical Macbeth declares that “Fools,
minstrels, bards, and all other such idle people, unless they be
specially licensed by the King, shall be compelled to seek some craft
to win their living,” and the old chronicler adds approvingly, “These
and such-like laws were used by King Macbeth, through which he
governed the realm ten years in good justice.”

I do not quote this in order to blacken the memory of that unhappy

monarch. The poets commonly contrive to be even with their
enemies in the end, and Shakspeare has taken an ample revenge. I
cite it only for the phrase unless they be specially licensed by the
King, which points to a fact on which I propose to dwell for a few
moments before entering upon my more immediate object.

When Virgil said, “Arma virumque cano,” “Arms and the man I sing,”
he defined in the strictest manner the original office of the poet, and
the object of the judicious Macbeth’s ordinance was to prevent any
one from singing the wrong arms and the rival man. Formerly the
poet held a recognized place in the body politic, and if he has been
deposed from it, it may be some consolation to think that the Fools,
whom the Scottish usurper included in his penal statute, have not
lost their share in the government of the world yet, nor, if we may
trust appearances, are likely to for some time to come. But the Fools
here referred to were not those who had least, but those who had
most wit, and who assumed that disguise in order to take away any
dangerous appearance of intention from their jibes and satires.

The poet was once what the political newspaper is now, and
circulated from ear to ear with satire or panegyric. He it was who first
made public opinion a power in the State by condensing it into a
song. The invention of printing, by weakening the faculty of memory,
and by transferring the address of language from the ear to the eye,
has lessened the immediate power of the poet. A newspaper may be
suppressed, an editor may be silenced, every copy of an obnoxious
book may be destroyed, but in those old days when the minstrels
were a power, a verse could wander safely from heart to heart and
from hamlet to hamlet as unassailable as the memories on which it
was imprinted. Its force was in its impersonality, for public opinion is
disenchanted the moment it is individualized, and is terrible only so
long as it is the opinion of no one in particular. Find its author, and
the huge shadow which but now darkened half the heaven shrinks
like the genius of the Arabian story into the compass of a leaden
casket which one can hold in his hand. Nowadays one knows the
editor, perhaps, and so is on friendly terms with public opinion. You
may have dined with it yesterday, rubbed shoulders with it in the
omnibus to-day, nay, carried it in your pocket embodied in the letter
of the special correspondent.

Spenser, in his prose tract upon Ireland, has left perhaps the best
description possible of the primitive poet as he was everywhere
when the copies of a poem were so many living men, and all
publication was to the accompaniment of music. He says: “There is
amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called bards, which are to
them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or
dispraises of men in their poems or rhythms; the which are held in
such high regard or esteem amongst them that none dare to
displease them for fear of running into reproach through this offense,
and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men.”

Nor was the sphere of the bards confined to the present alone. They
were also the embodied memory of the people. It was on the wings
of verse that the names of ancestral heroes could float down
securely over broad tracts of desert time and across the gulfs of
oblivion. And poets were sometimes made use of by sagacious
rulers to make legends serve a political purpose. The Persian poet
Firdusi is a remarkable instance of this. Virgil also attempted to braid
together the raveled ends of Roman and Greek tradition, and it is not
impossible that the minstrels of the Norman metrical romances were
guided by a similar instinct.

But the position of the inhabitants of England was a peculiar one.

The Saxons by their conversion to Christianity, and the Normans still
more by their conversion and change of language, were almost
wholly cut off from the past. The few fragments of the Celtic race
were the only natives of Britain who had an antiquity. The English
properly so called were a people who hardly knew their own
grandfathers. They no longer spoke the language, believed in the
religion, or were dominated by the ideas of their ancestors.

English writers demand of us a national literature. But where for

thirteen centuries was their own? Our ancestors brought a past with
them to Plymouth; they claimed descent from a great race; the
language they spoke had been ennobled by recording the triumphs
of ancestral daring and genius; it had gone up to Heaven wafted on
the red wings of martyr-fires; mothers hushed their new-born babes,
and priests scattered the farewell earth upon the coffin-lid, with
words made sweet or sacred by immemorial association. But the
Normans when they landed in England were a new race of armed
men almost as much cut off from the influences of the past as those
which sprang out of the ground at the sowing of the dragon’s teeth.
They found there a Saxon encampment occupying a country strange
to them also. For we must remember that though Britain was
historically old, England was not; and it was as impossible to piece
the histories of the two together to make a national record of as it
would be for us to persuade ourselves into a feeling of continental
antiquity by adopting the Mexican annals.

The ballads are the first truly national poetry in our language, and
national poetry is not either that of the drawing-room or of the
kitchen. It is the common mother-earth of the universal sentiment
that the foot of the poet must touch, through which shall steal up to
heart and brain that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy, not with
his class, but with his kind.

Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with

any useless information. They had not wit enough to lose their way.
It is only the greatest brains and the most intense imagination that
can fuse learning into one substance with their own thought and
feeling, and so interpenetrate it with themselves that the acquired is
as much they as the native. The ballad-makers had not far to seek
for material. The shipwreck, the runaway match, the unhappy
marriage, the village ghost, the achievement of the border outlaw—in
short, what we read every day under the head of Items in the
newspapers, were the inspiration of their song. And they sang well,
because they thought, and felt, and believed just as their hearers
did, and because they never thought anything about it. The ballads
are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they
are models of nervous and simple diction because the business of
the poet was to tell his story, and not to adorn it; and accordingly he
went earnestly and straightforwardly to work, and let the rapid
thought snatch the word as it ran, feeling quite sure of its getting the
right one. The only art of expression is to have something to
express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured
and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical
machine, which a sufficiently muscular professor can grind out by the
dozen, and the wildfire of God that writes mene, mene, on the
crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.

It seems to me that the ballad-maker, in respect of diction, had also

this advantage—that he had no books. Language, when it speaks to
the eye only, loses half its meaning. For the eye is an outpost of the
brain, and wears its livery oftener than that of the character. But the
temperament, the deep human nature, the aboriginal emotions,
these utter themselves in the voice. It is only by the ear that the true
mother-tongue that knows the short way to the heart is learned. I do
not believe that a man born deaf could understand Shakspeare, or
sound anything but the edges and shores of Lear’s tempestuous
woe. I think that the great masters of speech have hunted men and
not libraries, and have found the secret of their power in the street
and not upon the shelf.

It is the way of saying things that is learned by commerce with men,

and the best writers have mixed much with the world. It is there only
that the language of feeling can be acquired.

The ballads are models of narrative poetry. They are not concerned
with the utterance of thought, but only of sentiment or passion, and it
is as illustrating poetic diction that I shall chiefly cite them. If they
moralize it is always by picture, and not by preachment. What
discourse of inconstancy has the force and biting pathos of this grim
old song, the “Twa Corbies”?

As I was walking all alone

I heard twa corbies making a moan.
The one unto the other did say:
Where shall we gang and dine to-day?
In beyond that old turf dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight,
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.
His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en anither mate—
Sae we may make our dinner sweet.
You’ll sit upon his white neck-bone
And I’ll pick out his bonny blue een;
With a lock of his golden hair
We’ll thatch our nest when it grows bare.
Many a one for him makes moan,
But none sall ken where he is gone;
O’er his white bones when they grow bare
The wind shall blow forever mair.
Observe, the wind simply blows. That is enough; but a modern poet
would have sought to intensify by making the wind moan, or shriek,
or sob, or something of the kind.

Mr. Lowell here quoted a ballad which tells a story of a child-murder.

It begins:

Fair Anne sate in her bower

Down by the greenwood side,
And the flowers did spring,
And the birds did sing,
’Twas the pleasant Mayday tide.

The ballad singers had all the advantage of that spur of the moment
which the excitement of speaking gives, and they also received the
magnetism which came from the sympathy of their hearers. They
knew what told, for they had their hand upon the living pulse of
feeling. There was no time to palaver; they must come to the point.

The Percy came out of Northumberland,

And a vow to God made he
That he would hunt in the mountains
Of Cheviot within days three,
In the maugre of Doughty Douglas
And all that ever with him be.

They plunge into deep water at once. And there is never any filling
up. The transitions are abrupt. You can no more foretell the swift
wheel of the feeling than that of a falcon, and the phrases flash forth
sharp-edged and deadly like a sword drawn in wrath. The passions
speak out savagely and without any delicacies of circumlocution.

It is worth thinking of whether the press, which we have a habit of

calling such a fine institution, be not weakening the fibre and
damaging the sincerity of our English and our thinking, quite as fast
as it diffuses intelligence.

Consider the meaning of expression—something wrung from us by

the grip of thought or passion, whether we will or no. But the editor is
quite as often compelled to write that he may fill an empty column as
that he may relieve an overfilled brain. And in a country like ours,
where newspapers are the only reading of the mass of the people,
there is a danger of a general contentedness in commonplace. For
we always become what we habitually read. We let our newspapers
think for us, argue for us, criticize for us, remember for us, do
everything for us, in short, that will save us from the misfortune of
being ourselves. And so, instead of men and women, we find
ourselves in a world inhabited by incarnated leaders, or paragraphs,
or items of this or that journal. We are apt to wonder at the
scholarship of the men of two centuries ago. They were scholars
because they did not read so much as we do. We spend more time
over print than they did, but instead of communing with the choice
thought of choice spirits, and insensibly acquiring the grand manner
of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves of such facts
as that a fine horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday
and that a son of Mr. Brown fell into the canal on Thursday, or that a
gravel bank fell in and buried Patrick O’Callahan on Friday. And it is
our own fault, and not that of the editor. For we make the
newspapers, and the editor would be glad to give us better stuff if we
did not demand such as this.

Another evil of this state of things is the watering, or milk-and-

watering, of our English. Writing to which there is no higher
compelling destiny than the coming of the printer’s devil must end in
this at last. The paragraphist must make his paragraph, and the
longer he makes it, the better for him and the worse for us. The
virtue of words becomes wholly a matter of length. Accordingly, we
have now no longer any fires, but “disastrous conflagrations”;
nobody dies, but “deceases” or “demises”; men do not fall from
houses, but are “precipitated from mansions or edifices”; a convict is
not hanged, but “suffers the extreme penalty of the offended law,”
etc.
The old ballad-makers lived in a better day. They did not hear of so
many events that none of them made any impression. They did not
live, as we do, in a world that seems a great ear of Dionysius, where
if a scandal is whispered in Pekin we hear of it in New York. The
minstrels had no metaphysical bees in their bonnets. They did not
speculate about this world or the next. They had not made the great
modern discovery that a bird in a bush is worth two in the hand. They
did not analyze and refine till nothing genuine was left of this
beautiful world but an indigestion.

The ballads neither harangue nor describe; but only state things in
the least complex way. Those old singers caught language fresh and
with a flavor of the soil in it still, and their hearers were people of
healthy sensibilities who must be hit directly and hard. Accordingly,
there is a very vigorous handling. They speak bluntly and to the
purpose. If a maiden loses her lover, she merely

Turns her face unto the wall

And there her heart it breaks.

A modern poet would have hardly thrown away the opportunity

offered him for describing the chamber and its furniture; he would put
a painted window into it—for the inkstand will supply them quite as
cheaply as plain glass. He would tell you all about the tapestry which
the eyes of the dying maiden in her extreme agony would have been
likely, of course, to have been minutely interested in. He would have
given a clinical lecture on the symptoms, and a post-mortem
examination. It was so lucky for those old ballad-mongers that they
had not any ideas! And when they give a dying speech they do not
make their heroes take leave of the universe in general as if that
were going into mourning for a death more or less.

When Earl Douglas is in his death-thraw, he says to his nephew:

My wound is deep; I fain would sleep;

 Take thou the vanguard of the three.
And hide me by the brakenbush
That grows on yonder lily lee.
O bury me by the brakenbush
Beneath the blooming brere.
Let never living mortal ken
That a kindly Scot lies here.

The ballads are the only true folk-songs that we have in English.
There is no other poetry in the language that addresses us so simply
as mere men and women. Learning has tempered with modern
poetry, and the Muse, like Portia, wears a doctor’s cap and gown.

The force and earnestness of style that mark the old ballad become
very striking when contrasted with later attempts in the same way. It
is not flatness and insipidity that they are remarkable for, but for a
bare rocky grandeur in whose crevices tenderness nestles its
chance tufts of ferns and harebells. One of these sincere old verses
imbedded in the insipidities of a modern imitation looks out stern and
colossal as that charcoal head which Michael Angelo drew on the
wall of the Farnesina glowers through the paling frescoes.

Mr. Lowell here read a number of passages from the old ballad
entitled “Margaret’s Ghost,” and compared them with a few stanzas
from an “improved” version of the same by Mallet. He also read from
the ballad of “Helen of Kirkconnell,” and from others.

Of the tenderness of the ballads I must give an instance or two

before I leave them. In the old ballad of “Clerk Saunders,” Margaret
follows the ghost of her lover to his grave.

So painfully she climbed the wall,

She climbed the wall up after him,
Hose nor shoon upon her feet,
She had no time to put them on.
 O bonny, bonny, sang the bird
Sat on a coil o’ hay,
But mournfu’, mournfu’, was the maid
That followed the corpse o’ clay.

Is there any room at your head, Saunders?

Or any room at your feet?
Is there any room at your side, Saunders?
For fain, fain I would sleep.

She’s sat her down upon the grave

And mourned sae lang and sair
That the clochs and wanton flies at last
Came and built in her yellow hair.

In further illustration Mr. Lowell read from the “Clerk’s Two Sons of
Oxenford.” He concluded his lecture thus:

I think that the makers of the old ballads did stand face to face with
life in a way that is getting more and more impossible for us. Day by
day the art of printing isolates us more and more from our fellows
and from the healthy and inspiring touch of our fellows. We
continually learn more and more of mankind and less of man. We
know more of Europe than of our own village. We feel humanity from
afar.

But I must not forget that the ballads have passed through a sieve
which no modern author has the advantage of. Only those have
come down to us which imprinted themselves on the general heart.
The new editions were struck off by mothers crooning their children
to sleep, or by wandering minstrels who went about sowing the
seeds of courtesy and valor in the cottage and on the hillside. Print,
which, like the amber, preserves all an author’s grubs, gives men the
chance to try him by the average, rather than the best, of his yield.

Moreover, the Review of the ballad-singer was in the faces of his ring
of hearers, in whose glow or chill he could read at a glance a
criticism from which there was no appeal. It was not Smith or Brown,
but the human heart that judged him.

Doubtless another advantage of these old poets was their out-of-

door life. They went from audience to audience on foot, and had no
more cramped a study than the arch of heaven, no library but clouds,
streams, mountains, woods, and men. There is something more in
sunshine than mere light and heat. I fancy that a kind of flavor we
detect in the old ballads is due to it, and that it may give color and
bloom to the brain as well as to the apple and plum. Indoor
inspiration is like the stove-heat of the forcing-house, and the fruits
ripened by it are pale, dropsical, and wanting in tang. There may be
also a virtue in the fireside which gives to the Northern wind a
domestic and family warmth, and makes it skilled to teach the ethics
of home. But it is not to the chimney-corner that we can trace the
spiritual dynasties that have swayed mankind. These have sunshine
in their veins.

Perhaps another charm of these ballads is that nobody made them.

They seem to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank
God for them. And we imply a sort of fondness when we call them
“old.” It is an epithet we give endearingly and not as supposing any
decrepitude or senescence in them. Like all true poetry, they are not
only young themselves, but the renewers of youth in us; they do not
lose, but accumulate, strength and life. A true poem gets a part of its
inspiring force from each generation of men. The great stream of
Homer rolls down to us out of the past, swollen with the tributary
delight and admiration of the ages. The next generation will find
Shakspeare fuller of meaning and energy by the addition of our
enthusiasm. Sir Philip Sidney’s admiration is part of the breath that
sounds through the trumpet of “Chevy Chase.” That is no empty gift
with which we invest a poem when we bestow on it our own youth,
and it is no small debt we owe the true poem that it preserves for us
some youth to bestow.
 LECTURE V
CHAUCER

(Tuesday Evening, January 23, 1855)

V
It is always a piece of good fortune to be the earliest acknowledged
poet of any country. We prize the first poems as we do snowdrops,
not only for their own intrinsic beauty, but even more for that force of
heart and instinct of sunshine in them which brings them up, where
grass is brown and trees are bare, the outposts and forlorn hopes of
spring. There never comes anything again like a first sensation, and
those who love Chaucer, though they may have learned late to do it,
cannot help imaginatively antedating their delight, and giving him
that place in the calendar of their personal experience which belongs
to him in the order of our poetic history.

And the feeling is a true one, for although intensity be the great
characteristic of all genius, and the power of the poet is measured by
his ability to renew the charm of freshness in what is outworn and
habitual, yet there is something in Chaucer which gives him a
personal property in the epithet “vernal,” and makes him seem
always to go hand in hand with May.

In our New England especially, where Mayday is a mere superstition

and the Maypole a poor half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east
wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe,—where frozen children, in
unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from
the milliner’s, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the
dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan dilustered
cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white
beard,—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that
dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his
harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast,—one has only to take
down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without
crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that
throb thick with song of merle and mavis. A breath of spring blows
out of the opening lines of the “Canterbury Tales” that seems to lift
the hair upon our brow:

When that Aprile with his showers soote

The drought of March hath pierced to the roote,
And bathed every vein in that licour
Of whose virtue engendered is the flour;
When Zephirus eke with his sweet breath
Enspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes; and the younge sun
Hath in the Ram half of his course yrun;
And little fowles maken melodie,
That slepen all the night with open eye,
So nature pricketh them in their courages.

Even Shakspeare, who comes after everybody has done his best
and seems to say, “Here, let me take hold a minute and show you
how to do it,” could not mend that. With Chaucer, the sun seems
never to have run that other half of his course in the Ram, but to
have stood still there and made one long spring-day of his life.

Chaucer was probably born in 1328, seven years after the death of
Dante, and he certainly died in 1400, having lived consequently
seventy-two years. Of his family we know nothing. He was educated
either at Oxford or Cambridge, or at neither of these famous
universities. He was, perhaps, a student at the Inner Temple, on the
books of which a certain phantasmagoric Mr. Buckley had read a
record that “Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a
Franciscan friar in Fleet street.”
In the thirty-ninth year of his age he received from Edward III a
pension of twenty marks (equal to $1000 now), and afterwards a
grant of a pitcher of wine daily, and the custody of a ward which gave
£104 a year, and two places in the customs. In the last year of
Edward III he was one of three envoys sent to France to negotiate a
marriage between the Prince of Wales and a daughter of the French
King. Richard II confirmed his pension of twenty marks, and granted
him another of like amount instead of the daily wine.

Chaucer married Philippa Pycard or De la Roet, sister of Katherine

Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. By this connection he is
supposed to have become a favorer of Wycliffe’s doctrines, and was
in some way concerned in the insurrection of John of Northampton,
which seems to have had for its object some religious reform. He
was forced to fly into Holland, and is said to have made his peace at
last by betraying his companions. I think one’s historical comfort is
not disturbed by refusing to credit this story, especially as it stains
the fame of a great poet, and, if character may ever be judged from
writings, a good man. We may grant that he broke the Franciscan
friar’s head in Fleet street, if it were only for the alliteration, but let us
doubt that he ever broke his faith. It is very doubtful whether he was
such stuff as martyrs are made of. Plump men, though nature would
seem to have marked them as more combustible, seldom go to the
stake, but rather your lean fellows, who can feel a fine satisfaction in
not burning well to spite the Philistines.

At this period of his life Chaucer is thought to have been in straitened

circumstances, but a new pension and a yearly pipe of wine were
granted him by Richard II, and on the accession of Henry IV these
were confirmed, with a further pension of forty marks. These he only
lived a year to enjoy, dying October 25, 1400.

The most poetical event in Chaucer’s life the critics have, of course,
endeavored to take away from us. This is his meeting with Petrarch,
to which he alludes in the prologue to the Clerk’s “Tale of Griseldis.”
There is no reason for doubting this that I am able to discover,
except that it is so pleasing to think of, and that Chaucer affirms it.
Chaucer’s embassy to Italy was in 1373, the last year of Petrarch’s
life, and it was in this very year that Petrarch first read the
“Decameron.” In his letter to Boccaccio he says: “The touching story
of Griseldis has been ever since laid up in my memory that I may
relate it in my conversations with my friends.” We are forced to
believe so many things that ought never to have happened that the
heart ought to be allowed to recompense itself by receiving as fact,
without too close a scrutiny of the evidence, whatever deserved to
take place so truly as this did. Reckoning back, then, by the finer
astronomy of our poetic instinct, we find that a conjunction of these
two stars of song did undoubtedly occur in that far-off heaven of the
Past.

On the whole, we may consider the life of Chaucer as one of the

happiest, and also the most fortunate, that ever fell to the lot of
poets. In the course of it he must have been brought into relation
with all ranks of men. He had been a student of books, of manners,
and of countries. In his description of the Clerk of Oxford, in which
there is good ground for thinking that he alludes to some of his own
characteristics, he says:

For him was liefer have at his bed’s head

A twenty books clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltery.
But albeit that he was a philosopher,
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer;
Of study took he the most care and heed,
Not a word spake he more than there was need;
And that was said in form and reverence,
And short and quick, and full of high sentence;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech,
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

What a pleasant, companionable nature the last verse testifies to.

The portrait of Chaucer, too, is perhaps more agreeable than that of
any other English poet. The downcast, meditative eyes, the rich