Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic

Antonio Alcalá González, Ilse Marie Bussing López

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000712148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic focuses on a recurrent motif that is fundamental in the Gothic—the double. This volume explores how this ancient notion acquires tremendous force in a region, Latin America, which is itself defined by duplicity (indigenous/European, autochthonous religions/Catholic). Despite this duplicity and at the same time because of it, this region has also generated "mestizaje, " or forms resulting from racial mixing and hybridity. This collection, then, aims to contribute to the current discussion about the Gothic in Latin America by examining the doubles and hybrid forms that result from the violent yet culturally fertile process of colonization that took place in the area.

Part I
Doubling the Self

1 Scalding Drops on a Naked Eye

The Motif of the Double in Seeing Red by Lina Meruane

Aurora Piñeiro

Lina Meruane belongs to a group of Chilean artists who compose, what the author herself has called, “a literature of post-memory.” This is a type of writing that depicts both the experiences of repression associated with the periods of the Chilean military dictatorship and post-dictatorship,¹ and characters who learned about such historical periods by means of whispers and silences more than actual utterances or denunciations. Thus, these artists seek to fill in the discontinuities with “relatos de segunda mano donde los narradores se hacen cargo…de lo que vieron a medias o intuyeron” [second-hand stories in which narrators deal…with what they half-saw, sensed or suspected] (Meruane qtd. in Querol).² According to Ricardo de Querol, the post-memory writers, born in the 1970s and 1980s, make up a heterogeneous group; nonetheless, they share certain common features: a revisionist attitude in relation not only to the dictatorship but also to the democratic transition in Chile; an intention to denounce the potential complicities of the previous generation and, in general, the mutism of the middle-classes; and a kind of writing with a diffused borderline between autobiography and fiction (see Querol), which also blurs the division between the private and political spheres and destabilizes notions of literary genre, among others.

When it comes to the case of Meruane, her works comprise a corpus with an unstable classification, and are clearly marked by different forms of hybridism. There are several examples of texts which may be read as representative of autoficción (autofiction, in French), as they emulate the conventions of autobiography but acquiesce “de manera voluntaria la no referencialidad, la imposibilidad para el sujeto de ser sincero y objetivo que [las autobiografías tradicionales] combate[n]” [non-referentiality in a deliberate fashion, the subject’s impossibility to be sincere and objective which [traditional biographies] combat] (Casas 193).³ In this sense, the strategies of autoficción become an efficient vehicle for destabilizing literary and political aims of a post-memory artist, but that is not enough for Meruane, whose childhood memories, packed with conundrums, would transform “en [un] personal archivo del terror” [into [a] personal archive of horrors] (Meruane, “Señales” 263). Thus, many of her works, which seem to be written in a realist key, gradually (or abruptly) overflow toward non-mimetic terrains and encompass other aesthetics, such as the Gothic one from which the motif of the double becomes recurrently present in her writing. Her first book, Las infantas (The Infants), a collection of short stories published in 1998, is a mosaic of Gothic rewritings of fairy tales, with the motif of the double represented in the characters of the two sisters whose desperate escape from the paternal home forces upon them a splitting of paths and identities. In her 2007 Fruta podrida (Rotten Fruit), we encounter the Gothic double in a new pair of sisters whose thorny relationship develops into the youngest and ill one usurping the identity of the other, just as Mr. Hyde takes over Dr. Jekyll, the figure that represented the rational and productive half of an artificially unified subject. Rotten Fruit is closely linked to the novel which will be the focus of the analysis here, not only because the topic of diabetes is common to both works, but because of the way the author deals with it. Illness becomes a dual force of destruction; it is a plague that invades the lives of the sisters in the story and also finds its double or amplified equivalent in the fruit fly that threatens to destroy the crops the eldest has carefully watched over, in the Chilean countryside, which is the dominant setting of the first half of the text. Both scourges are representations of that which ferments and putrefies from within, and they trigger a series of events in the plot that deal with binary pairs which later multiply into mutually contaminated opposites: rural and urban life (the second one represented in the Manhattan health-system scenes that stand for a modern notion of late-capitalist productivity); the Spanish and English languages, that symbolize ethnicities in conflict; the way the individual and collective spheres of existence clash and are, at the same time, inseparable. Hybridism is present at the level of literary experimentation as Meruane toys with autobiographical elements but within the dynamics of autoficción where transgressions are enhanced by the use of Gothic features neatly tied to the motif of the double as an obsessive principle of composition.

In Meruane’s fourth novel, Seeing Red (2012, translated into English in 2016), the protagonist suffers from an ocular trauma which has left her in a state of blindness. Lina/Lucina⁴—an ironic, doubling name for the protagonist whose job is that of a writer—describes her new condition of visual impairment in terms of an alter-ego or a dual status that facilitates the simultaneous experience of being asleep and awake, and which triggers the dynamics of multiple unfoldings and splittings throughout the novel. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how Seeing Red becomes a literary Doppelgänger which fluctuates between the conventions of autoficción and those of Gothic writings, at the same time that the main character struggles between vulnerability and ferocity. The motif of the double permeates not only the category under which the text can be labeled, but also the family sphere, love relationships, and the experience of ethnic, linguistic, and national crises represented in a human being who is torn between Manhattan and Santiago de Chile. The conflict extends between contemporary anglophone violence and the violence of the past in a Spanish language that is not entirely her own. Lina Meruane uses the figure of the double and Gothic aesthetics to explore the uncanny, the monstrous, the loneliness of ill people, as well as to reject infantilizing narratives associated with the condition of illness or mestizaje/hybridity. The cultural doublings in the novel are rooted in the experience of exile that was one of the consequences of the military dictatorship in Chile; thus, the notion of identity is unsettled at both the individual and collective levels and reinforces a post-memory type of writing.

Seeing Red is a novel divided into 63 sections that may represent the time lapse of two months and two days (it is mentioned, on page 33, that one of those months has 31 days), which is equivalent to the character’s lifespan from the moment of the eye stroke to the postoperative appointment following the second surgery. As a result, the narration builds onto a blindness that neither readers nor characters know to be temporary or definitive. Furthermore, the stroke is a symptom of a greater problem: in medical terms, the protagonist’s diabetes; in political terms, a symbol of bloodshed (a red fluid leaks into the retina) linked to the periods of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship, as the unexpectedness of the event and its traumatic consequences are made to coincide with those associated to a violent political change that brings disorientation and vulnerability with it. The text is a hybrid of autoficción and Gothic writing. In relation to the first one, Meruane problematizes authorship and blurs the borderline between textual and extratextual realities as she creates a character who is a Chilean writer named Lina, who lives in Manhattan and suffers from diabetes, which are all autobiographical elements in the story. In relation to the second one, the artist produces a type of Gothic that dispenses with the supernatural element, but not with the ghosts of the past, both individual and collective, as the dual level of interpretation of the eye stroke shows. The descriptions related to the ocular trauma seek to produce disgust and repulsion in the reader, in addition to fear of blindness as a tragic condition. This soon mutates into terror as the protagonist’s desire to possess the eyes of others becomes increasingly perverse and literal, and an intertextual dialogue with the Freudian study on the uncanny, its relation to castration anxiety, and the theme of the double all persist throughout the novel.

In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud links aesthetics with psychoanalysis in order to study the affect and the effect we define today as the ominous, that is, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1–2). In the first part of his essay, the author undertakes an analysis of the etymology of the word Heimlich (the familiar or domestic) and its diverse meanings in German and other languages in order to show the ambiguous condition of the term. It alludes to two spheres of ideas that, without being contradictory, possess distinct gradations: the group of meanings that associate it with the familiar and the one that relates it to what remains concealed. Thus, the term Unheimlich, which keeps or conceals the Heimlich, can be used not only as a plain opposite of the second, but as a subspecies of it; it becomes a linguistic place where the familiar, the obscured, the sinister, or what grows uncanny precisely for having once being known, all meet. Freud uses Friedrich Schelling’s words to define the uncanny as “the name for everything that ought to have remained… hidden and secret and has become visible” (Qtd. in Freud 4), and widens the concept, drawing on the interpretation of literary works as much as from his clinical experience, to affirm that: “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety, then among such cases of anxiety there must be a class in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs” (13). That variant is the uncanny which, since then, we have conceived of as an affect that “is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been stranged only by the process of repression” (13). In the second part of his essay, Freud interprets several works by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer whom he considers the unrivaled master of the uncanny. He focuses on two of them especially, “The Sandman” and “The Devil’s Elixirs.” His analysis of the first one reminds us that the text’s central figure and theme is the sandman, who removes children’s eyes, and whom Nathaniel, the child of the story, first identifies with Coppelius, the lawyer, and then with Coppola, the oculist or specialist in glasses. Freud thus correlates the story with an eye-loss anxiety, an infantile fear which frequently persists in adult life, and which stands for the fear of castration. The author associates this fear with the expression “the apple of our eye,” which in Spanish curiously translates as “la niña de mis ojos” [the girl of my eyes]. Such phrase points at something valuable, preserved, protected, or hidden, and it originates in the Book of Deuteronomy (32:10). In the Hebrew and Latin versions of The Bible, the literal translation of the phrase would be “la pupila de sus ojos” [the pupil of her/ his eyes], which became “apple” in English and “Apfel” in German, following the idea that the pupil is round like an apple.

When analyzing Hoffmann’s “The Devil’s Elixirs,” Freud asserts that the work’s themes are related to the idea of the “double,” that is a state when the “self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own,” a process related to “doubling, dividing and interchanging the self” (9). In this section of the text, Freud resorts to Otto Rank’s studies to explain that the double is, initially, a protection for the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death” (Rank Qtd. in Freud 9). But once the infantile or primitive stage of the individual is overcome, the double transforms into the harbinger of death, namely, consciousness or the faculty of self-criticism. A trajectory similar to the etymology of Heimlich is described, and the double stops being an impulse of self-preservation to become a vision of the terrible (10). The definition of the double and the analysis of Hoffmann’s second work enable Freud to complete the list of factors that transform a general experience of fear into the specific experience of the uncanny. These factors are animism, magic, the principle of “omnipotence of thoughts,” the human attitude toward death, the involuntary repetition or “principle of repetition-compulsion,” and, lastly, the already mentioned castration-complex (see 14).

In Meruane’s writings, blindness and castration are associated in the same Freudian terms explained earlier. In the novel Rotten Fruit, apples are the fruit in question. The protagonist, suffering from diabetes, living in Manhattan, and turned into an avenger of the ill, describes herself as “fruta de exportación” [a fruit for export] (112, 115). In the final scene of the novel, the nurse interrogating her in front of the hospital offers her an apple, “red delicious” (170), and the young woman asks her: “¿es chilena, su manzana roja? [Is it Chilean, your red apple?] (171). This fruit is later described in the following terms: “Esta perfectamente podría ser una manzana errante del siglo pasado; una manzana inmigrante que no sabemos adónde va ni de dónde viene… Una fruta subversiva que se cuela por las aduanas” [This one could perfectly be a last century errant apple; an immigrant apple we know not where it goes or where it comes from… A subversive fruit that slips through Customs] (171). At this point of the story, the woman’s eyes go blind because of diabetes, and she keeps her gangrenous foot inside a cast that conceals the remains of the limb, as well as the scissors with which she has carried out attacks inside the hospital. The weapon hides at the heart of putrefaction and cuts away that which is rotten to the core: a public health system that is run according to neoliberal policies of productivity, where organs have to be useful beyond the life of the individual to whom they belonged.

In Seeing Red, the apple of the diseased eye dilates until it becomes monstrous every time Lina has to offer her eye to medical inspection. In a scene where a nurse (of a Japanese origin) approaches the protagonist, the narrative voice says: “She stopped in front of me and I straightened up, understanding what her doubly foreign tongue was asking me to do: tip my head back. Her fingers separated my eyelids, and let fall, with precise Japanese marksmanship, two burning drops on my corneas” (31). And here the apples are double, as the eyes, and they represent the dynamics of doubling that nurtures the uncanny in the novel. The doubly foreign tongue of the nurse also stands for a dual (linguistic and cultural) violence exerted upon the character: that of the English and Japanese languages, as well as that of medical discourses and practices, which are equally alienating to her.

After the stroke, the main character is forced to perceive the world by means of other senses. The sonorous and the tactile are intensified, but the status of blindness is experienced, as the double, the other Lina, declares: “Being like this, in a fog, is like being asleep and awake at the same time” (28). But the first moments of vulnerability are replaced by ferocity. Sinking into the “haze” prompts the dismantlement of the mechanisms of repression and the emergence of the double, the “other,” who will not accept false sympathies, and who has regained the connection with other affects such as cruelty and the desire to vanquish others. During one of the first confrontations with Ignacio, her lover, the reader has access to Lina’s mind in the following lines: “And then I said to myself: I’ll never let you see what’s inside here, things I don’t even tell myself” (28). Morbid anxiety finds an outlet in a hunt for the eyes of others, the intertextual relation to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” growing stronger. The other Lina remembers the oculist of her childhood, associated with the char...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Doubling the Self
• PART II Double Bodies
• PART III Animals as Doubles
• PART IV Doubles and Spaces
• PART V The Double in Film
• List of Contributors