Self-Consuming Second-Person Fiction: Jose Emilio Pacheco's "Tarde De Agosto" (August Afternoon)
1994; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
ResumoI offer you explanations of yourself, theories/about yourself, authentic and surprising news/of yourself. (Jorge Luis Borges) Pacheco's Tarde de agosto (from the collection of stories El viento distante [The Distant Wind]) juxtaposes two commonplace versions of male initiation in a fresh and ironic take on both: embarrasses himself in front of first love and war makes men of boys. Told in the Spanish second-person familiar by a narrator who is never explicitly identified, the action takes place in a single afternoon during the narratee-protagonist's adolescence. Sleeping, waking, or immersed in his Bazooka novels, the quiet boy dreams of glorious wars and of the only person who pays him any attention: Julia, his twenty-year-old cousin. On the afternoon in question he is sent along with Julia and her boyfriend, Pedro, to a park where the usual posted prohibition against disturbing the animals or picking the flowers sparks fantasies of desperate forays into enemy territory. Transported to Tobruk, Narvik, Dunkerke, Las Ardenas, Iwo Yima, Midway, Monte Cassino, El Alamein, Varsovia (23), the boy becomes a combat hero, capable of any action. When Julia mentions she would like to take one of the squirrels home as a pet and Pedro refuses because habia cien, mil, cien mil guardabosques para guardar bosque y las ardillas (24) (there were a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand rangers on patrol to protect the park and the squirrels) (69),(1) the boy has his orders. A moment later he is cornered in a tree and both the branch and his soldierly courage begin to give way. Ten interminable minutes pass before he can descend, pale and tearful and bereft of his illusions of valor. Julia reproaches Pedro for laughing at him, and no one speaks during the tense ride home. Although the boy consigns the Bazooka collection to the flames of the boiler, the memory of the afternoon is indelible. While the mechanisms and implications of the coincidence of protagonist and narratee are important in relation to the initiation story, a second and more complex fusion of narrative elements occurs in Tarde de agosto when it becomes apparent that the narrator is most probably the protagonist as well. When narrator and protagonist become one, the consequence is hardly unusual: the result is first-person fiction. But in conventional first-person fiction the narrator is not also the narratee. Since the protagonist here has already been identified with the narratee, a commutative logical process (narrator equals protagonist, but protagonist already equals narratee, so narrator equals narratee) would leave the narrator telling himself about himself. Can second-person fiction somehow be squared, or is there an arithmetical regression? When the narrator is joined with an already merged narratee and protagonist set, does the second fusion produce some form of first-person fiction? The second section of the article will examine the consequences of the fused narrator-narratee-protagonist and the distancing mechanisms by which this configuration is opened up. It becomes apparent that the tu addressed in Tarde de agosto is not the actual reader when specific situating details about this tu and his circumstances are adduced from the second sentence on: the narratee is fourteen, about to finish high school, his/her father is dead and his/her mother works in a travel agency. (Although the narratee's interest in Bazooka novels suggests that he is male, gender is not specified until the use of the masculine aceptado [accepted] in the third paragraph.) As the characteristics of this tu are specified, the probability that it corresponds to a given reader becomes vanishingly small. The tu's role as a protagonist in the events to be narrated is explicit: this is a story about his coming of age, el dia en que era necesario vivir, desayunar, ira la escuela, crecer, dolorosamente crecer, abandonar la infancia (20) (the day, therein to live, eat breakfast, go to school, grow up, painfully grow up, abandon your childhood) (67). …
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