Corpse Photography in Roberto Bolaño's Estrella distante and Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar
2014; Routledge; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820.2014.886904
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish Culture and Identity
ResumoAbstract This article considers corpse photography in novels by Bolaño (1996) and Rivera Garza (1999) and argues, following the ideas of Elizabeth Bronfen, that it serves male characters as a technique for the disavowal of two enigmas that permanently threaten the male subject: death and femininity. Parallels are drawn with necropornographic precedents in the novela negra and with contemporary Post-Boom novels by Diamela Eltit and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Artistic practice in the novels is related to the photographic theories of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, affirming a profound association between the photographic medium and death, as well as to the Surrealist doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and the work of contemporary corpse photographers Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano. Corpse photography is considered as an exemplary manifestation of major trends in twentieth-century art and mass-media culture, as described by theorists such as Néstor García Canclini ('morbid spectacularity'), Alain Badiou ('passion for the real'), Hal Foster ('return of the real') and Paul Virilio ('pitiless art'). Corpse photographs are shown to set up a dynamic of approximation and distancing termed 't(h)an(a)talization'. The article concludes by arguing both photographic and literary representation, converging at the textual site of the corpse photograph, fail incessantly in their aspiration to apprehend the real. Key words: Roberto BolañoCristina Rivera Garzanovela negracorpse photographynecropornographicPost-Boomrealt(h)an(a)talization Notes 1 Joan Ramon Resina, El cadáver en la cocina. La novela criminal en la cultura del desencanto (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1997), 76. For Resina, as for other critics of the detective novel, it is the confrontation between the detective subject and the victim's cadaver (icon of abjection and 'Otro absoluto del sujeto') that activates a narrative mechanism in which the detective seeks to fill the vacuum of meaning ('fuga de sentido' or 'succión del significado') generated by the dead victim. 'La inasequibilidad de la víctima en cuanto sujeto, su inaccesible presencia, confiere estatuo metafísico a la fórmula de la novela policiaca, abriendo la perspectiva de la detección para perderse en una infinita regresión de la incógnita. La opacidad de la muerte trastorna el orden narrativo, fundando la promesa de la transparencia. Vestigio de la violencia, la víctima resiste no obstante la violencia de la significación en cuanto objeto in-vestigable' (El cadáver, 74). Thus, according to Resina, 'la operación textual, en cuando manifestación de un poder (hermenéutico, desmitificador, crítico), exi[ge] un cadáver' (El cadáver, 79). 'En última instancia, lo que asegura la complicidad del lector es un interés lúgubre por la extrañeza radical del cadáver, esa cesación absoluta que no se puede deducir del cogito del detective ni construir en el interior del lenguaje que la exorcisa' (El cadáver, 83). 2 Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble write that 'the uniqueness of photographic textuality resides in the unassailably referential nature of the photographic entity […]. What distinguishes the photo-image from any other form of representation is its inextricable, material link to reality. […] [A] tension […] obtains between the culturally fabricated nature of the photographic artifact and its fundamental indexicality, that is, its status as "a trace of the real"; and an evidential manifestation of "what has been" ' ('Introduction', in Phototextualities. Intersections of Photography and Narrative, ed. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble [Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2003], 1–16, [p. 4]). Charles Sanders Peirce defined the photograph as consisting of iconic and indexical signs: 'Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection' (quoted in W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], 59–60). 3 Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch speaks of 'lo innombrable y lo indecible del acá de la muerte. Lo indecible se refiere evidentemente al carácter vago, confuso y difuso, a la indeterminación misma del acontecimiento que acorta nuestro tiempo vital […]. El carácter evasivo de la finitud mortal es como un desafío al logos, si la vocación del logos es determinar y precisar' (La muerte, trans. Manuel Arranz [Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2002], 67). He continues: 'la muerte es a la vez la negación pura y simple de la esencia y la negación pura y simple del ser […]. No es ni la Nadería fundacional ni la Nada creadora, sino el llano no-sentido del sentido y el puro y simple no-ser del ser. ¡Ante todo No-sentido!' (La muerte, 75). Death, for Jankélévitch is utterly unspeakable: 'la muerte no es únicamente inefable e indescriptible, es además inenarrable, pues que interrumpe toda continuación' (La muerte, 227). 4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 24; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 92. 5 Néstor García Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1999), 28. 6 On the relation between detection and the 'double enigma' of death and femininity, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 293. While there are considerable distinctions between national traditions of crime writing in the Spanish-speaking world, the writers of the neopoliciaca variant of the novela negra have established a common international project over the past four decades. For details on differences and commonalities, see my Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7 Juan Martini, Tres novelas policiales (Buenos Aires: Editorial Legasa, 1985), 255. 8 Martini, Tres novelas policiales, 141. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia U. P., 1993), 39. 10 Diamela Eltit, Los trabajadores de la muerte (Buenos Aires: Norma, 2001), 20. 11 Susana Rosano describes the incessant publication of photographic images of Eva and Juan Perón as one of the pillars of Peronist propaganda during his first presidency: 'La historia del peronismo, impulsada por la intensa campaña publicitaria que durante los primeros gobiernos de Perón llevó a cabo la Subsecretaría de Informaciones, tuvo dos soportes principales. Por un lado, una extraordinaria profusión de fotografías que diariamente eran publicadas en los periódicos oficialistas como Mundo Peronista, Democracia y La Causa Peronista, y la impresión de imágenes de Perón y Evita en los libros de lectura obligatorios que se impusieron en los sistemas primarios y secundarios de educación, además de la innumerable cantidad de pancartas y folletos que eran distribuidos en cada uno de los actos multitudinarios' (Susana Rosano, Rostros y máscaras de Eva Perón: imaginario populista y representación [Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2006], 143). 12 Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita (México D.F.: Joaquín Mortiz, 1995), 204, 304, 24. 13 Jason Cortés, 'Obsesiones necrófilas: Autoridad y ética en Santa Evita de Tomás Eloy Martínez', Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 42 (2008), 329–50 (p. 343). 14 Glen Close, 'Open Up a Few Corpses: Autopsied Cadavers in the Post-Boom', Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 17:1 (2008), 121–37. 15 Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004). 16 Alicia Gaspar del Alba, Desert Blood. The Juárez Murders (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005); Traspatio/Backyard, screenplay by Sabina Berman, directed by Carlos Carrera (Maya Entertainment, 2009). Berman's script was first published in Gestos. Revista de Teoría y Práctica del Teatro Hispánico, 39 (2005), 107–81. 17 Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000), 97. Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 18 Béatrice Menard, 'Violence, poésie et mémoire dans Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño', in Figures de la violence dans la littérature de langue espagnole, ed. Amadeo López (Paris: Centre de Recherches Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines, Univ. de Paris X-Nanterre, 2003), 399–410 (p. 403). 19 Joaquín Manzi, 'Mirando caer otra Estrella distante', C.M.H.L.B. Caravelle, 82 (2004), 125–41 (p. 135). 20 Manzi, 'Mirando caer otra Estrella distante', 135. 21 Gonzalo Aguilar, 'Los amuletos salvajes de un novelista', Clarín, Suplemento Cultura y Nación, 25 de marzo 2001, (accessed 21 January 2012). 22 Roberto Bolaño, ' "Si hubiera otra vida y fuera posible elegir, escogería ser mujer". Entrevista por Ima Sanchís', in Bolaño por sí mismo. Entrevistas escogidas, ed. Andrés Braithwaite (Santiago: Ediciones Univ. Diego Portales, 2006), 79–81 (p. 80). 23 Roberto Bolaño, 'Déjenlo todo, nuevamente', El Interpretador. Literatura, Arte y Pensamiento 31 (2007), (accessed 21 January 2012). 24 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1971), 32. 25 Roberto Bolaño, La literatura nazi en América (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996). 26 Michael Semff and Anthony Spira, 'Introduction', in Hans Bellmer, ed. Michael Semff and Anthony Spira (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 9–13 (p. 9). 27 Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors. The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press/New York: International Center of Photography, 2001), 15. 28 Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 15. 29 Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 16. 30 Semff and Spira, 'Introduction', in Hans Bellmer, ed. Semff and Spira, 10, 12. 31 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 2005), 40. 32 Agnès de la Beaumelle, 'Hans Bellmer: The Stakes at Play in Drawing Les Jeux de la poupée', in Hans Bellmer, ed. Semff and Spira, 33–47 (pp. 34, 35). 33 'And was the collapse of the World Trade Center, apropos of Hollywood's catastrophe movies, not like the snuff pornography versus ordinary sadomasochistic porn films? Herein resides the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: one can effectively perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentieth-century art's "passion for the real"—the terrorists themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it. The authentic twentieth-century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances that constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate "effect", sought after from digitalized special effects through reality television and amateur pornography up to snuff films (which, in their very attempt to deliver the "real thing", are perhaps the ultimate truth of Virtual Reality. There is an intimate connection between the virtualization of reality and the emergence of an infinite and infinitized bodily pain, much stronger than the usual one' (Slavoj Žižek, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real [Reflections on 11 September 2001]', in Žižek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, 2 vols [New York: Continuum, 2006], II, 267–88 [pp. 269–70]). 34 Witkin quoted in R. H. Cravans, 'Joel-Peter Witkin', Aperture, 133 (1993), 54–63 (p. 57). 35 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Malden: Polity Press, 2007), 53. 36 Badiou, The Century, 54, 64. 37 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 124. 38 Foster, The Return of the Real, 166. 39 Wieder the photographer resembles the anatomist in Gabriel von Max's painting Der Anatom as characterized by Bronfen: 'his analysis is from the position of the survivor, with the intention of displacing the knowledge of mortality on to the dead woman or of analysing death by proxy' (Over Her Dead Body, 10). Bronfen alludes to the painting's 'double "arrestation of death" ', in that '[t]he woman's animated body has been arrested in death, while traces of death, like decomposition and decay, have likewise been arrested […]. It is an aesthetically pleasing corpse, suggesting harmony, wholeness, immortality, because it is a 'secured dead body' […]. Above all its beauty marks the purification and distance from two moments of insecurity—female sexuality and decay' (Over Her Dead Body, 11). As we shall shortly see, many of Bronfen's insights are as applicable to Wieder as to Rivera Garza's photographer Buitrago. 40 Menard speaks of Wieder's 'poésie-réalité' in 'Violence, poésie et mémoire', 403. The Badiou quote is from The Century, 116. 41 'El libro nació de la seducción de un retrato ciertamente, aunque no uno de la colección de Ana Vargas; eso llegó un poco más tarde. Me explico: los expedientes del manicomio La Castañeda incluyen, además de las historias médicas de los internos, datos de identificación básica, como las fotografías que aparecen en el extremo superior izquierdo de cada documento. Así, antes de entrar al expediente, tienes que enfrentar la mirada a veces distraída, a veces fija, de la persona que merodeas. Fue de esta manera que me vi vista por los ojos de la mujer que terminó llamándose Matilda Burgos. Después llegó la vida del fotógrafo Joaquín Buitrago, que nació, él sí, de las dos letras que firman los retratos que encontró Vargas en La Lagunilla.' (Rivera Garza quoted in Angélica Abelleyra, 'En busca de las respuestas de los más débiles, los desquiciados', La Jornada, 7 septiembre 1999, (accessed 21 January 2012). 42 Ana Vargas, La casa de citas en el barrio galante (México, D.F.: Grijalbo/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1991). 43 Cristina Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2003), 18. Further references to this work are given in parentheses in the text. 44 'Volvió a creer en la posibilidad de fijar la singularidad de un cuerpo, un gesto […]. Las mujeres se volvían hacia adentro, hacia donde se veían como ellas querían verse. Y ése era precisamente el lugar que el fotógrafo anhelaba conocer y detener para siempre. El lugar en que una mujer se acepta a sí misma. Allí la seducción no iba hacia fuera ni era unidireccional; allí, en un gesto indivisible y único, la seducción no era un anzuelo sino un mapa. Joaquín estaba convencido de que era posible llegar a ese lugar' (Nadie me verá llorar, 18–19), 45 Susan Douglas, 'In Camera, Andrés Serrano', Parachute, 78 (1995), 12–19 (pp. 14, 19). 46 Douglas, 'In Camera, Andrés Serrano', 19. 47 Peter Schjeldahl, 'Andrés Serrano', in Columns & Catalogues (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1994), 80–82 (pp. 81, 80). 48 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 66. Laura Kanost explains as follows Buitrago's failure to capture the identity of the novel's protagonist, Matilda Burgos: 'Joaquín never realizes that his goal of a perfect representation of Matilda's identity is doomed to fail […] because he is unable to conceive of listening to her narration without smoothing out the patchy areas with his own interpretive systems. Joaquín ultimately fails at reading Matilda because he relies too heavily on totalizing strategies rather than accepting gaps and detours in the narrative […]. Before meeting Matilda, Joaquín has complete faith in his own ability as a photographer to capture from the outside a person's innermost identity and thoughts. He firmly believes that he can perfectly and accurately represent a woman's true nature without any participation on her part' (Laura Kanost, 'Pasillos sin luz: Reading the Asylum in Nadie me verá llorar by Cristina Rivera Garza', Hispanic Review, 76:3 [2008], 299–316 [p. 307]). When Rivera Garza discusses the voicing of her protagonist, her language reflects a determination to avoid Buitrago's failure: 'me resistí ante la tentación de usar el "yo" imperial y usurpador. ¿Quién era yo, después de todo, para presumir saber más sobre ella que ella misma? ¿Quién para capturarla y fijarla en mi texto? Nunca me sentí, pues, ni con el afán ni con el derecho de interrumpirla por dentro' (quoted in Javier Fernández, 'Cristina Rivera Garza: la escritura de la distancia exacta', Literate World [diciembre 2002], [accessed 21 January 2012; italics added]). 49 Badiou, The Century, 131. 50 Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, xiii. 51 Pierre Mac Orlan, 'Preface to Atget photographe de Paris', trans. Robert Erich Wolf, in Photography in the Modern Era. European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 41–49 (p. 43); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 70. The term 'thanatographie' was coined by Philippe Dubois. See L'Acte photographique (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1983), 160–65. Eighty years ago, Pierre Mac Orlan observed that 'the power of photography consists in creating sudden death […]. The camera's click suspends life in an act that the developed film reveals as the very essence' ('Preface to Atget photographe de Paris', 43). 'To be able to create the death of things and creatures', Mac Orlan added elsewhere, 'if only for a second, is a force of revelation which […] fixes the essential character' ('Elements of a Social Fantastic', trans. Robert Erich Wolf, in Photography in the Modern Era, ed. Phillips, 31–33 [p. 32]). Much more recently, Eduardo Cadava argued that 'photographs bring death to the photographed […]. The conjunction of death and the photographed is in fact the very principle of photographic certitude: the photograph is a cemetery' (Words of Light. Theses on the Photography of History [Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1997], 10). 52 See Derrida's Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1976). Some exemplary phrases from this volume: 'All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or referent' (69); 'Writing carries death' (292); 'death […] shapes the interior of speech' (315); 'The image is death' (184). Bronfen summarizes thus: 'Any representational discourse implies the absence, non-being or death of the object it seeks to designate, because the text is substituted for the body, the material object of its reference' (Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 144). Bronfen also recalls that for Lacan the symbol 'manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing' (27). 53 Maurice Blanchot, 'The Two Versions of the Imaginary', in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254–63 (pp. 255, 256). 54 Blanchot, The Two Versions of the Imaginary', 260. 55 Quoted in Yanet Aguilar Sosa, 'Cristina Rivera Garza, el arte de escribir desde las fronteras', El Universal, 3 enero 2007, (accessed 21 January 2012). 56 Quoted in 'Elogia Carlos Fuentes la obra de Cristina Rivera Garza', El Universal, 26 diciembre 2002, (accessed 21 January 2012). 57 Maurice Blanchot, 'Literature and the Right to Death', The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1995), 323. 58 Gareth Williams, 'Sovereignty and Melancholic Paralysis in Roberto Bolaño', Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 18:2–3 (2009), 125–40 (pp. 129, 132). Williams' trenchant reading of Estrella distante and its precursor volume La literatura nazi en América addresses the limitations of Bolaño's approach to the political through consideration of the modern notion of sovereignty and Carl Schmitt's theory of the friend/enemy divide. He asserts that between 1973 and 1979, 'there would have been no Chilean state to speak of without the calculated biopolitical relation between the excesses of systematized torture and the silencing of language' (139, n. 2). 59 Summarizing Virilio's argument, John Armitage writes that 'twentieth-century art, through its expectation of the contemporary politics of hate, has added to the downfall of pitiful art and the rise of a pitiless art' ('Art and Fear: An Introduction', in Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose [London: Continuum, 2003], 1–24 [p. 5]). 60 Virilio, 'A Pitiless Art', in Art and Fear, trans. Rose, 27–65 (pp. 35–36). With regard to the link between art and politics, Virilio writes: 'Inseparable from the suicidal state of representative democracies, the art of the twentieth century has never ceased dangerously anticipating—or at least saluting from afar—the abomination of the desolation of modern times with their cardboard cut-out dictator that keeps popping up, whether it be Hitler or the "Futurist", Mussolini, Stalin or Mao Zedong' (33). For him, the ascendancy of presentative over representative art at the end of the twentieth century 'reinforces the dreadful decline of representative democracy in favour of a democracy based on the rule of opinion, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of virtual democracy, some kind of "direct democracy' or, more precisely, a presentative multimedia democracy based on automatic polling"' (35). 61 Virilio, 'A Pitiless Art', in Art and Fear, trans. Rose, 37. In the same essay, Virilio quotes Ignacio Ramonet's recognition of the centrality of our 'disturbing fascination with images filmed live, with scenes of violence and gruesome interest stories' (quoted p. 36), and he alludes, like Žižek, to snuff as the ultimate manifestation of 'a kind of exhibitionism that imposes its own terrorist voyeurism: that of death, live' (43). Virilio terms this emerging sensibility 'thanatophilia' (58). 62 Virilio, 'Silence on Trial', in Art and Fear, trans. Rose, 69–96 (p. 91). In this essay, Virilio reiterates that today 'the AUDIO-VISIBLE of the mass media reigns, beamed out twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week […]. Media presentation dominates everywhere you turn' (82). 63 Virilio speaks of 'derealization' and 'the spectacle of abjection ('A Pitiless Art', in Art and Fear, trans. Rose, 56, 57) while 'virtualization' is Žižek's term from the quote reproduced above in note 33. These terms relate closely to García Canclini's 'espectacularidad morbosa' and my earlier discussion of necropornography in the novela negra.
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