Sobre el autor y la obra
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Sarduy
o
Cuba, 1937-1993
o
Poet, author, and playwright
o
One
of the most famous Cuban writers of the 20th century
o
Lived
in exile (in France) after Revolution
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This
work is of post-Boom period
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Novel
is influenced by French structuralism (according to passed down comps notes)
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Dehumanized
novel with focus on language rather than plot/theme
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Influence
of neo-barroco
Comps Example
Questions
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Boom,
realismo mágico, and lo real maravilloso; postboom and neobarroco; precursors; modernity (see
the “Modernismo since 1940” section of list) and the controversy over
postmodernity in Spanish America. Authors: Borges, Huidobro, García
Márquez, Rulfo, Carpentier Asturias, Cortázar , Allende, Puig, Sarduy, Fuentes,
Poniatowska, Valenzuela. Note:
other movements which are associated with some of these writers, such as
surrealism (Cortázar) or the use of popular culture and other genres in
narrative (Puig), etc. Some suggested, secondary readings: Rodríguez Monegal,
Shaw, González Echevarría, Hutcheon.
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Metafiction
and historiographic metafiction: Borges, Huidobro, Puig, Allende, Sarduy,
Valenzuela, Vargas Llosa, etc. Some suggested, secondary readings: Waugh,
Hutcheon, Juan-Navarro.
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The
development of Spanish American identity and issues of race, class, and gender
in numerous authors, from modernismo
to the present (although they occur earlier as well). Authors: Agustini,
Arguedas, Argueta, Storni, Burgos, Castellanos, Cardenal, Ferré, Berman, Álvarez,
Williams, Puig, Barba Jacob, Sarduy, Menchú, Alzandúa, Paz, Fernández Retamar,
Galeano, Rama, etc. Some suggested readings: Foster and Altamiranda, Cornejo
Polar, Meyer, Castillo, Stabb, Martin, Kaminsky, Beverly and others under testimonio.
What Franco
says (Intro to Spanish-American Lit,
Chapter 11)
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Sarduy
lived in exile; left Cuba after revolution to live in France (339)
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De donde son los cantantes (1967) – complex
intertwining of Cuban ethnic identities that culminates in a chapter “The entry
of Christ into Havana” which figures as a carnivalesque version of Castro’s
famous victory (339)
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Fascination
with masquerade and constructed identities (339)
What Cambridge Companion: Latin American Novel
says (Chapters 4 & 6)
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Baroque tone (90-91)
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No
real narrative in a conventional sense (90-91)
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The
main characters seek their own meaning, but meaning is endlessly deferred
(90-91)
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The
plot is “dictated by phonetic associations or by the internal logic of language
itself” (90-91)
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Affirms
that Cuban culture is Spanish, African, and Chinese, as his characters
represent (134)
Basic idea: Wikipedia
De dónde
son los cantantes (1967) presenta una estructura tripartita (tres fábulas);
en cada una de estas partes intervienen tres personajes que van desenrollando
tres aspectos de la cultura cubana (lo africano, lo chino y lo español) hasta
conseguir mostrar una visión de La Habana disgregada a nivel identitario. El
texto también incluye un poema que funciona como epitafio y diez escenas dramáticas
en verso. Severo Sarduy afirmó sobre esta obra que había intentado hacer un
"colage hacia adentro". El estilo y tono de esta novela es
fuertemente paródico, carnavalesco, abundan los neobarroquismos y la subversión
permanente del lenguaje.
Random Ideas
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desmonta, deslee, deslíe la obra del Boom…there are
no linkers (like the Buendía family).
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Each
part of the novel represents:
o
Chinese
culture. Part 1: Spanish-origin general falls in love with Flor de Loto
from El Shanghai – “burlesco habanero ubicado en el barrio chino”. Flor tries
to avoid the gallego. Dos coristas sirven de medianera (Auxilio y
Socorro: travestis y prostitutas, celestinas), who try to get money and
gifts from general. At the end, General gives Flor a bracelet that will cut her
veins…and he waits to see them pull out the dead body.
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El burlesco, notorio en la Habana por
su grosería, se convierte [en la novela] en un ámbito de delirantes
transformaciones.
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also
plays on the fact that during Colombus’ time, Cuba was the orient
Themes/Important
ideas
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Post-boom
novel
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Heavily
experimental
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Experimental
style
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More
focus on language than on any plot/theme
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Parodic,
carnavelesque writing style
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Play
with temporality, unconventional sense of time
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Atypical dialogue – “aquí las personas
se expresan de manera deliberadamente artificial, using a wide variety of
registers (from literature, cinema, publicity, Cuba, USA, etc.)
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Postmodernism
o
Heavily
experimental
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Neo-barroco
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Similar
to aspects of postmodernism, possibly distinct to Caribbean region
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Some
traits: references to popular culture, intertextuality, idea of writing as
game, self-conscious writing, gender transgression, metafiction, idea of
spectacle
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Cuban
identity
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Sarduy
explores Cuban identity but in a mocking way, mocks different ethnic groups and
creates sort of parody.
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Cambridge
LA Novel: Sarduy affirms that Cuban culture is Spanish, African, and Chinese,
as his characters represent (134)
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“Currículum cubinse” (el título da la
impresión de una unidad cubana)
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“Junto al río de cenizas de rosa” (la
parte china)
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“La Dolores Rondón” (emplea una leyenda
afro-cubana)
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“La entrada de Cristo en la Habana” (a
la vez una referencia al cristianismo – la influencia europea – y a Castro y la
Revolución)
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Theatre
influence / teatralidad
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Some
descriptions that are like stage notes
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Some
descriptions of images like scenes
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Idea
of the novel as a performance or spectacle
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Novel
of exile, tone of nostalgia
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Various
subtle/implicit allusions to Cuba
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The
word “Cuba” never appears but there are constant allusions to it
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Tons
of Cubanisms
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Language
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Whole
novel is a play with language
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Constant
allusions to Cuba
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Use
of descriptions similar to stage notes/directions (like in theatre)
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Metafiction
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Narrator
interrupts text sometimes to say that he wants to entertain, or to say that
something’s not comprehensible
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Title
is ambiguous – question or response?
E-Notes: The Novel in General
From Cuba with a Song is not a novel in the
traditional sense; rather, Sarduy’s second work of fiction breaks down the
founding conventions of novelistic genre: character, plot, and theme. The
innovative thrust of From Cuba with a Song lies in its radical
alteration of traditional plot. Instead of telling a story in linear fashion, From
Cuba with a Song reads like a verbal jigsaw puzzle composed of three pieces
or narrative sequences attached to a “head”—the introductory “Curriculum
cubense.”
This first section traces a drawing that helps the reader
assemble Sarduy’s experiment in the novel form. An Asian and a black woman
surround a blond, white male at the center of the picture. He stands next to
Help, one-half of the pair of twins who reappear throughout the work, and close
to them the “Waxen Woman,” the face of Death, absorbs the entire scene. The
drawing displayed in “Curriculum cubense,” “a giant four-leaf clover, or a
four-headed animal facing the four cardinal points, or a Yoruba sign of the
four roads,” fills in the outline of an empty plot. Each figure in the picture
corresponds to one of the three fictions that make up From Cuba with a Song.
The Chinese and the black woman become protagonists of their own tales—Lotus
Flower in “By the River of Rose Ashes” and “Dolores Rondón” in her namesake
piece. The white man, Mortal Pérez, fills the center of the drawing since he is
in a relation of desire to the two women. Yet he is also the center of his own
supreme fiction, “The Entry of Christ in Havana,” first as Everyman and then as
a baroque Christ figure. The three tales are designed to depict the linguistic
and erotic sensibility proper to the racial layers superimposed on the mosaic
of Cuban culture: the Chinese, African, and Spanish elements.
Rather than a novel of plot, From Cuba with a Song is
a novel of language. The linguistic texture of the novel constructs a verbal
archetype or reproduction of Cuba. It appears that the pieces of the puzzle fit
together in the totality of a culture: a whole Cuba integrated by its
racial-ethnic components, as reflected in the drawing. Metaphor and poetic
description qualify the Chinese tale; dialogue, colloquial speech, and a mock
tragic tone exhibit the African flair for drama in the second tale. The last
section testifies to the origins of Cuban lexicon and intonation in Castilian
Spanish; it also bears witness to the Hispanic legacy of mysticism.
The presence of language in From Cuba with a Song
compensates for an absence: Where is Cuba? As the original title in Spanish
expresses it, the song may be from Cuba, but “where do the singers come from”?
In the Spanish edition, the title is phrased without a question mark, resulting
in an affirmative but syntactically ambiguous sentence. “Where do the singers
come from?” is a verse from a traditional song by Miguel Matamoros, the “Son de
la Loma” (the son is a distinctive rhythm that originated in Cuban folk
music, reflecting the combination of Spanish and African musical forms). Hence,
Sarduy’s fiction poses the problem of origin in terms of a question and answer,
or an absence and presence. Is there really a “First Cuban Song,” an origin of
self in culture, a beginning in language? In other words, does a Cuban identity
(or that of any nationality) really exist?
At first reading, the four parts of From Cuba with a Song
lead to an affirmative answer, since the “four different beings” appear as
“four who are one.” Three races and etnias combine in one Cuba, just as
the three fictions plus the “Curriculum cubense” result in one novel. The work
ends, however, on a final “Note” in which Sarduy explains the mechanism of his
novel—three cultures, three fictions, three themes (desire, ambition, religious
zeal). This fifth “note” to the song unscrambles the puzzle again, leaving the
reader with “the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question” asked consistently throughout
the work: What is “the definition of being”? Sarduy’s fiction underscores the
question of cultural identity with a more radical critique: He puts in doubt
the transcendental, unified subject invented by Western metaphysics. The
novel’s four parts turn into five, and the whole of Cuban culture becomes a
pretext for revealing the hole inside Being.
E-Notes: The Characters
From this radical critique of identity and selfhood stems
Sarduy’s debunking of character, just as radical as his undermining of plot. If
traditionally a character appears in a novel as a simulated person, with a name
and psychological depth, From Cuba with a Song shows character to be
only authorial pretension, fictional playacting. The “characters” in the novel
are mere appearances—not of real persons, but rather of the language in which
the text is written. Help and Mercy, the two metaphysical twins that run wild
in the Self-Service cafeteria of “Curriculum cubense,” best exemplify Sarduy’s
parodic use of character. Named after the popular expression “Help! Mercy!” in
Cuban slang, the pair of females glide through From Cuba with a Song as
copies of characters, with no pretension that they are, in effect, “real”
people. On the contrary, the first scene of “Curriculum cubense” shows Help and
Mercy as devout “mannequins” in a fake House of God. Later, in the Self-Service
cafeteria, they are depicted as artificial, mobile creatures, their faces
covered with layers of makeup. Help and Mercy attest the allure of mimicry in
Sarduy’s fictional world: Outside appearance, camouflage, and dress constitute
their only “psychology.” As sheer verbal surfaces, Help and Mercy (and, later,
Clemency) are cosmetic coverups for the lack of a fixed identity—hence their
uncanny ability to take on different masks.
Since the unity of the self is so systematically corroded in
From Cuba with a Song, the rest of the “characters” in the novel are
split in two. They either come in pairs, like Help and Mercy or Narrators One
and Two in “Dolores Rondón,” or they turn into doubles of themselves. Lotus
Flower has a twin in María Eng, the other courtesan in the Chinatown brothel.
The General, who lusts after Lotus Flower in the first narrative, becomes the
politician Mortal Pérez in the second, and Dolores Rondón’s lover. As universal
Everyman, he is mysteriously transformed into Christ by the grace and power of
the Fates’ (the Siamese twins’) desire for him. Names—and the identities they
signify—are only costumes to be shed at the next change of scene, at the turn
of the page. Thus, in “By the River of Rose Ashes,” “the Ever-Present Girls”
turn into “Help Chong” and “Mercy Si-Yueng.”
More than in any other character, the undermining of the
subject is brilliantly depicted in Lotus Flower, the pale-faced soprano of the
Shanghai District Opera. She is described as a shape that blends into the river
landscape: “Try and see her. You can’t. Yes! her eyes, two golden slits, snake
charmer eyes, betray her. . . . She’s mimicry. She’s a texture . . . she is
pure symmetry. Where is she?” Does Lotus Flower exist? Is she real? Her only
“existence” is as an object of desire, as source of the General’s longing, the
motive of his lustful pursuit. Like a bird’s feathers that change with every
season, Sarduy’s “characters” fluctuate, appear and disappear, according to the
cycles of erotic demand.
E-Notes: Themes and Meanings
If From Cuba with a Song has a theme, it is best
demonstrated in the middle section of the book, dedicated to the tale of
Dolores Rondón. An ambitious and attractive mulatto, Dolores leaves her native
Camaguey on the trail of Mortal Pérez’s political career. After reaching her
zenith in the capital (Havana), she suddenly falls from fame and returns,
penniless and defeated, to her hometown. The two narrators ask “what purpose
Dolores Rondón’s life serves.” The answer solves the riddle of the meaning of
Sarduy’s fiction: Nothing. Delicious Nothingness milkshake.” The “theme” of the
novel, then, is that literature—and all forms of verbal communication—has no
meaning, no transcendent message beyond its material substance as language.
In spite of the denial of ultimate categories in Sarduy’s
fiction, the interweaving stories of From Cuba with a Song leave the
lingering trace of the author’s preoccupation with the transcendent. This is
done, however, in the paradoxical “yes and no” style of the novel. For example,
the General opens up a store across the street from the Shanghai brothel that
is ironically called the Divine Providence. Sarduy’s gesture is to disguise the
longing for the absolute in terms of erotic desire. The encounter with Divinity
is as impossible as the fulfillment of the libido. Both God and the wanted one
fade and evade in the look of desire.
Sarduy’s characteristic mingling of erotic need and the
drive for meaning comes to a climax in “The Entry of Christ in Havana,” when
Help and Mercy’s intense longing for Mortal turns into divine fervor. A wooden
statue of Christ appears in the cathedral of Santiago de Cuba—the site where
Cuban music originated. Help and Mercy carry the statue in a spiritual journey
through the island that culminates in a snow-covered Havana. As the journey
proceeds, the wooden body of Christ rots away, and the tale “degenerates” into
unreality. In the end, Christ enters Havana but steps also into Death, dancing
to a mambo beat that brings the novel to a close.
This scene demonstrates that, for Sarduy, the quest for an
absolute begins and ends with writing, with the composition of From Cuba
with a Song. It is writing, the process of inscription, that binds the
“themes” of the novel together in a “hide-and-seek” game where the origin, the
love object, and the sublime are always pursued but never found.
E-Notes: Critical Context
From Cuba with a Song, Sarduy’s second work of
fiction after Gestos (1963), marked a turning point in his development
as a writer, for soon after the novel Sarduy also proved his talents as an
essayist and literary critic. The essays collected in Escrito sobre un
cuerpo (1969) expound the theory of literature that makes From Cuba with
a Song the “novel” novel that it is. Here are Sarduy’s views on the
equivalence between sex-uality and text-uality, transvestism and literature,
text and body, which surfaces in the fictions of From Cuba with a Song.
Sarduy’s theory of literature as wordplay and erotic
inscription reflects the influence of French structuralist and
poststructuralist thought. Critics such as Roland Barthes in Le Degré zéro
de la écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero, 1968) shaped Sarduy’s
insistence on the autonomy of language and of the literary artifact. Barthes’s Le
Plaisir du texte (1973; The Pleasure of the Text, 1975), like
Sarduy’s own Escrito sobre un cuerpo, conceives the writing/reading
process as an erotic exchange between author and reader. One outcome of these
theories is the body/text of From Cuba with a Song, a work that
unsettles the conventions of the novel genre by its self-referentiality and
parodic inversion.
The parodic thrust of the novel is responsible for its
impact in the context of Latin American literature. From Cuba with a Song
represents one of the most radical rewritings of the Latin American myth of
origin. The “novelty” of From Cuba with a Song is that it carries the
demystifying tendency in the Latin American novelistic tradition to the point
of showing that the only origin of self is the secondary condition of language.
General Notes
from Reading…
“Curriculum cubense”
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Begins
with Auxilio and Socorro
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HOLY
GUAC this is the most confusing conversation I’ve ever read. This is like
Spitta in a novel.
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Basically,
seems they are complaining about life. ‘
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*I read three pages of this
book and I’m giving up. I’ll read some articles and post that information.
Article: “Erotismo, Cultura, y Sujeto”
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Tres tópicos bisicos informarin este
analisis: la relaci6n entre el erotismo y la actividad de escribir, la noci6n
de cultura como sistema totalizante en el cual se inscribe la obra, y la
cuesti6n del ser, del sujeto que la actividad literaria tradicionalmente
implica..
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Para Sarduy, esta escritura producida por el exceso de
significantes es neobarroca, eco del barroco del siglo XVII.
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La escritura se hace una actividad er6tica, ya que es
puro exceso, superficie, y materialidad.
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Cada raza tendria un lenguaje propio
-la china, metaf6rico, la negra, coloquial,
la blanca, ret6rico (hist6rico-literario)- para componer un cuerpo particular.
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La escena del primer encuentro entre el General y Flor se
desenvuelve en el contexto de esta pintura china creada por el lenguaje metaf6rico. Como principio femenino del "yin," la presencia de Flor se describe por medio de la metifora, inscrita en
el paisaje mudo: "Cosida en
aquel paisaje, ejercitando su yin en pleno bosque de La Habana, era un pajaro blanco detris del bambi, un
prisionero in- m6vil entre lanzas" (25). De repente, la aparici6n del General causa una
violenta irrupci6n dentro de esta escena pacifica y estitica. La agresividad
del General, representante del principio masculino del "yang," se
describe, en cambio, por una
sinecdoque: "Asila sorpren- di6 el humito de Romeo y Julieta, el mejor de los tabacos habanos, y el medalleo" (25). La diferencia de
figuraci6n po6tica entre los dos cuerpos refleja la oposici6n entre los principios del erotismo chino.
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La figura se completa con la muerte del
objeto er6tico, como consecuencia de ese movimiento insatisfecho del fetichismo
y del sadismo: "Es cierto: G. habia terminado su parabola, cumplido su
ciclo. De mir6n a sadico. Quien posee por la mirada posee por la daga"
(53). Esta parabola sidica-textual china reproduce el movi- miento de
desplazamiento de la figura retorica barroca. Flor, centro ausente, falso
objeto del deseo, es perseguida por el General, centro presente, (falso) sujeto
que desea.
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La ambici6n de Dolores de ser famosa le
hace usar el deseo sexual para satisfacer el otro, y mis fuerte, deseo del
poder, a traves de su unibn amorosa con Mortal Perez, (el General), politico
provinciano que Ilegari a ser senador en la capital.
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