Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction

Helane Androne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137588548
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

This book arguesforthe necessary and further examination of the sacred as it is ritualized within Chicana fiction. It suggests that religious, spiritual, linguistic and political symbolisms reveal rites that structure narrative performances of coping with and healing from trauma. Helane Androne examines these rites of spirit, service, and story as they occur in Ana Castillo's So Far From God, Denise Chávez's Face of An Angel, and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo. Beginning with the implications of Gloria Anzaldúa's spiritual vision of Chicana identity alongside structural principles of ritual criticism, this study extends the discourse about the impact of the sacred in Chicana fiction.an>

© The Author(s) 2016

Helane AndroneRitual Structures in Chicana FictionLiteratures of the Americas10.1057/978-1-137-58854-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Helane Androne¹

(1)

Miami University, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Abstract

This chapter introduces the necessity for attending to the sacred in Chicana fiction. Beginning with the usefulness of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the chapter discusses the negotiations between the spiritual and material that occur within Chicana fiction. The chapter defines ritual, ritualization, and performance as it is used in the book and discusses the relationship between ritualizations and language as it occurs within Chicana fiction. The chapter also outlines the direction of forthcoming chapters.

Keywords

TranscendenceSpiritualRitualPerformanceGloria AnzaldúaMagical realism

End Abstract

Of the many biases leveled against Chicana bodies and identities, surely the negation of the continuing relevance of the sacred is among the least addressed in literary scholarship. There is ample criticism focused upon the biological, social, and political harm against the consciousness and even the physical bodies of women. Much of this criticism finds patriarchal systems, mounted upon the precepts of religion—in the case of Chicanas, it is almost exclusively Catholicism—as the culprit for the pervasive marginalization of Chicana agency. The question remains, however: If Catholicism has designed an unacceptable uniform of social, economic, and physical constraint, why continue to labor within it? Chicana feminists have answered this question time and again, recalling the garments of Catholic doctrines and iconographies, revising and altering the focus and form. In their fiction, they demonstrate these revisions and new aesthetics of mestiza consciousness, revising and resisting the limitations of racialized and gendered roles associated with that which is sacred. In doing so, they disentangle doctrine and tradition to reveal and do justice to female bodies and voices.

As we begin to recognize how Chicana feminist authors address traditions that have allowed and sustained violence against their identities, it becomes ever more clear that Chicana authors are doing at least as much mending of such structures as they are tearing through them. As Chicana authors access, revise, merge, and even profane sacred symbols and traditions in their fiction, they acknowledge the cultural import and pervasive influence of aspects of those traditions and beliefs that encourage transcendence and self-preservation. Further, such strategic literary agency exemplifies the enduring value of the sacred. Despite the rationalist underpinnings of post-modern literary criticism, we cannot continue to ignore that Chicana authors are indeed continuing to assert the import of the sacred and cultural traditions as dynamic, intimate, and communal parts of their identities that have been too often left out of the discussion of their work.

Chicana feminists have recast folklore, rites, and mythologies so deeply embedded within Chicano/a culture and consciousness; such alterations of traditions effect resistance to personal, familial, and communal destruction and dysfunction. Closer examination of the ritualizations present in Chicana feminist fiction allows simultaneous focus on identity and tradition, performance and process, and toward critical interest in the arising intersections between female positionality, language, memory, spirituality, and healing. A most clear example, as Clara Román-Odio argues, is found in the spiritual iconography, as in images and symbolisms of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who “Chicana feminists imaginatively retell … from the perspective of other women: seekers of sanctuary, a holy girl, a gang leader, archetypal goddesses whose virginity means personal independence and spiritual purity … she becomes a sacred space for hope and collective transformation … to meaningfully, critically, and self-reflectively engage with structures of power” (Sacred Iconographies 146). Such sacred symbols are associated with faith put to action often reflected in ritualizations and represented in repeated behaviors that imply desire for transformation. Ritual criticism centers around the mythologies, traditions, and symbolisms that Chicana feminist authors imbue in their characters to negotiate their resistance, transcend their circumstances, and testify to their presence. Such a direction in criticism is fitting since Chicana feminist authors depict and propose, both thematically and structurally, cyclic processes of coping and healing toward transcendence within their texts, creating work that has spiritual force and an activist impulse. ¹

Rites are analyzable acts, the results of human conditions that are at once performative and tied to performances of identity. By applying the precepts of ritual criticism, which focus both on individual and communal contexts involving spiritual and material realities, Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction suggests a framework that extends and inspires further insight into intersections of identity, language, gender, and ethnicity alongside the religious, supernatural/spiritual, and communal within Chicana fiction. Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction invites the interdisciplinary focus of ritual criticism into the conversation to show how these authors’ aesthetic use of rites demonstrates mestiza consciousness and reintegrates the sacred into the literary study of such works.

Unfortunately, it is only contemporarily that we even recognize the devices Chicana authors invoke to express spiritual, mythic, and hybrid ideologies. There have been few extended literary studies that address the connection between these beliefs and the structures that emerge from them. Instead, so often we are content to shimmy Chicana feminist work into the corsets of literary studies that acknowledge only the rational, leaving the spiritual and supernatural elements of the sacred faint and only partially supported or described. We have done thoughtful, important work that foregrounds gender, ethnicity, and sexuality as intersecting identities within oppressive realities, but are only beginning to approach, untangle, and examine the sacred elements and structures typically categorized within rationalist paradigms as magical, creative, or absurd. Scholars have even raised sharp criticisms against attempts to call upon sacred myths and symbols to address modern currencies of oppression; however, Chicana fiction arguably does reference, revise, and invoke both ancient and modern belief systems to address the complexity of identity and to use the sacred to advocate for its role in healing and transcendence. ² Indeed, Chicana authors have been flexing the anti-rational in their work. Rather than debating whether the application of such practices is suitable for the material realities of Chicanas, here we shall make the bold assumption that, as Gloria Anzaldúa suggests in Borderlands/La Frontera, the principles of the sacred as practiced within ritualizations are critical to understanding the multiplicity of Chicana identity and experience and therefore key to thoughtful analysis of such work. Thankfully, interdisciplinary voices are beginning to attend to the import and activist impulse inherent in the use of the sacred. ³

Courageous, anti-rationalist theoretical interventions by scholars such as Anzaldúa have proven useful for helping us understand the complex intersections of Chicana identity; likewise, we have begun to examine the traditions, beliefs, and practices as they emerge as tropes within Chicana fiction. There is a discourse that invokes religion and spirituality ⁴ into the patterns that structure meaning within these narratives, most carefully attended to by studying how ritual elements accomplish a recognition of the alter-ideologies, syncretism, and complexity that emerge within Chicana fiction. We would do well to attend to the ways in which Chicana feminist authors appeal to and make choices about the fluid mingling of the spiritual, physical, and psychic through myth, language, and their accompanying performances. Such attention reveals a relationship between the aesthetics of their fiction and the processes of ritualization.

In “Postmodern/Post-secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality,” John C. McClure suggests that:

many postmodern texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns … that they make room in the worlds they project for magic, miracle, metaphysical systems of retribution and restoration; that they explore fundamental issues of conduct in ways that honor, interrogate, and revise religious categories and prescriptions; that their political analyses and prescriptions are intermittently but powerfully framed in terms of magical or religious conceptions of power. But I mean as well, that their assaults on realism, their ontological playfulness, and their experiments in the sublime represent a complex and variously inflected reaffirmation of premodern ontologies-constructions of reality that portray the quotidian world as but one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos, or as hosting a world of spirits. (143)

It is the narrativized negotiation between the spiritual and material, that which is sacred and that which is profane, secular, or mundane, that makes Chicana feminist fiction such an interesting site for ritual analysis and criticism. The recognition of spiritual centers within these texts is more than an acknowledgment of the non-physical inner being; it refers also to the assumed interaction between body, ideology, and the supernatural. It also means we must acknowledge the ways in which authors locate both a realm outside our own and one within it, in which consciousness develops and is performed as desire, theory, and emotion simultaneously; it is a mode through which Chicana feminist authors position characters to perform integrations of physical, psychic, and spiritual being.

Here, we should return to the question of the relationship of Chicana identity to Catholicism; at the heart of any consideration of how that identity and those traditions play out in Chicana feminist fiction is Anzaldúa’s work. In Borderlands, her “religious imagination” suggests the fluidity between realms and concepts through her use of the term malinalli, which refers to passageways between the Nahua world through which “sacred powers moved up and down and throughout the cosmos” (Carrasco and Sagarena 227). My analysis emphasizes both the rational observation and anti-rational faith in a realm within which Chicana characters, living and dead, move fluidly. Carrasco and Sagarena conclude regarding the importance of Anzaldúa’s “religious vision” that it “provides a powerful model for understanding the role of religious imaginations … And we hope that scholars will begin to take this central feature of her oeuvre seriously and give it the recognition that it deserves” (238). Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction joins the discussion to take seriously Anzaldúa’s spiritual vision of Chicana identity. The definitive power of her articulations of the spirituality associated with mestiza consciousness is, here, an apt foundation from which to consider the aesthetic and revisionist invocations of the sacred within Chicana texts. Such a discussion invites inquiry into what connections might emerge when we apply elements of ritual criticism to Chicana texts.

In her essay, “Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poetic-Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond” (2012), AnaLouise Keating borrows Anzaldúa’s term, “poet-shaman,” to articulate an aesthetic form of writing that she argues:

represents an entirely embodied and potentially transformative intertwining of language, physiology/matter, and world … in poet-shaman aesthetics words have causal force; words embody the world; words are matter; words become matter. As in shamanic worldviews and indigenous theories and practices—in which words, images, and things are intimately interwoven and the intentional, ritualized performance of specific, carefully selected words shifts reality—poet-shaman aesthetics enables us to enact and concretize transformation … Stories and metaphors are as real as dogs, cats, baseball bats, the idea of God, nuclear fission, human beings, the chair you’re sitting on right now, Buddhism, and bricks. (Keating 51–2)

Keating’s suggestion of the power of words to shift reality is characteristic of the language performances that occur in the Chicana fiction analyzed in Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction. It reveals that language points to tangible boundaries to cross and tear down, permeate, and otherwise make room to cross. There is a powerful performance of social memory through words ritualized through and within the characters “telling,” both physically and linguistically. Such is the case in texts such as Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel, and Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. In one instance, personal testimony recalls lessons learned through roles played out in private and public spaces, roles that juxtapose Marianistic expectations alongside counter-narratives of such gendered archetypes. In another, the power of the telling manifests in the revisions of stories used to manage the emotions of social memories and oppressions through revised performances of rites within religious and social traditions. Finally, that power is also evidenced in informal and formal written and linguistic performances of social memories that interject in a layering of voices. These narrative moves reveal examinations of both spiritual and material realities such that analysis of the sacred, memory, and testimonio traditions leads to discussion of the structures that emerge.

Writing about ritual structures within Chicana literature is still implicated by definitions. In fact, defining ritual presents its own challenges; Catherine Bell suggests that ritual has been theorized as both thought and action, as an “analytical tool and as a universal experience” (Bell 16). Bell suggests that rituals convey beliefs that are intimately connected to particular sacred symbols. Similarly, they reveal symbols sacred to Chicana experience, most typically through structures that reveal coping, healing, and transcendence. Through Bell’s summation of rituals’ relationship to thought and action, we can begin to imagine how such a concept becomes useful for understanding intersecting performances of memory, race, and gender, and how the concept could be accessed to explain resistance occurring in texts.

Specifically, I follow the lead of Ronald Grimes, the founding voice of the field, and other religious and ritual studies scholars who define ritual as “the general idea of which a rite is a specific instance” (Grimes Ritual Criticism 10). Since within the idea of ritual is the potential for the enactment of a variety of rites, it follows that we refer to rites as that which people do and ritualizing as the deliberate development of such rites. To be sure, we can keep in mind that, as Grimes asserts, “any action can be ritualized, though not every action is a rite” as we consider the performance of rites versus the experience of ritualizations (13). For the examination of ritual structures—often ritualizations—within Chicana fiction, Grimes’ definition seems particularly applicable: “Ritualizing is not often socially supported. Rather, it happens in the margins, on the thresholds; therefore it is alternately stigmatized and eulogized … ‘ritualization,’ then, refers to activity that is not culturally framed as ritual but which someone, often an observer, interprets as if it were potential ritual” (Grimes 10). It is the process suggested by Grimes’ definition that is helpful for imagining its hermeneutical potential within Chicana fiction because the rites enacted within Chicana fiction often do fall outside the thresholds of general recognition, cycling in and outside of what may appear to be mundane and ordinary interactions easily taken for granted. Rites that might only be considered in passing as categorical markers of coming-of-age novels, magical realism, or absurdism can press us toward inquiry that suggests something much more processual and specific and lead us toward a better understanding of the role, meanings, symbolisms, and structures that determine and reveal that which is and remains sacred.

To understand the application of ritual criticism, one must remember that ritual studies is a platform that has emerged into a field of research, which might seem to be a reach when applied to literature since one may consider the seeming distance between the historic humanism of literary criticism and studies of the development and production of religion and spirituality. Ronald Grimes reminds us that in its early articulation, ritual criticism emerged as difficult to pin down: “Ritual criticism is neither ethnography nor literary criticism; it is not an established practice” (Grimes Ritual Criticism 3). Ritual studies as a field, not a discipline or theory, mingles religious studies, anthropology, liturgical studies, and theater studies with a number of sub-categories within those. The study (and criticism) of ritual implies the examination of ritual behaviors, performances, symbols, cultures, contexts, and positionalities as they reveal the dimensions and significance of the sacred and profane. A focus on ritual structures in Chicana fiction creates a multidisciplinary lens through which we can attend respectfully and skeptically to the complex experiences of ethnic, national, social, historical, political, and spiritual identity.

The use of rites is not unique to particular ethnic or racial contexts, nor are they from any distinctive historical or geographical moment. Even so, rites are specific, transformative, structured, and repetitive, making them particularly informative structures in the examination of the pervasive continuity of traumas that simultaneously trespass multiple identities. Because rites emerge from the negotiations we make with the sacred and the secular, examining them acknowledges that there is a complexity to the human condition that i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. “A Place from Where to Think”: The Application of Ritual Criticism to Chicana Fiction
• 3. Loca Malinalli: Centering the Spiritual in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God
• 4. “An Actress in a Play”: Service as Sacred Performance in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel
• 5. Reality Shifts: The Language of Nahuala in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo, or Puro Cuento
• Backmatter