Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Portraitures of Institutionalization

2004; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ncr.2005.0008

1539-6630

Jacqueline Loss,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

With a photographic and bilingual narrative exposé on life in mental institutions around the world, and especially in contemporary Cuba, the 2002 Madness issue of the Benetton fashion-house magazine named Colors reconstitutes identity and commodifies difference in a manner that departs from the more expected representations of Cuba in the "Special Period" encountered on the Internet, in film, in music videos, and in all sorts of fashion, travel, and cigar magazines. This article brings together Colors's Madness and El infarto del alma (1994), another photoessay that focuses on the insane asylum, written by Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz. Colors's Madness, produced by the multinational corporation Benetton, and El infarto del alma, published by Francisco Zegers, a small editorial house focusing on theoretical works in Santiago, Chile,respond to distinct readerships as well as historical and geographical frameworks—differences which may be seen to impede any comparative account.2 However, they both transform the genre of the testimonio, and in so doing, compromise the fads of markets with their marketing of madness. The fact that the magazine belongs to a corporation whose contradictory politics epitomize the ethical [End Page 77] projections of the neoliberal world, a principle object of Eltit and Errázuriz's critique, makes Madness appear in the form of an imprecise parody of El infarto del alma. However, a closer reading of the two texts in their respective contexts reveals that the tactics of transgression and containment in which they are involved sometimes approximate each other. The focus of El infarto del alma is the Philippe Pinel institution in the village of Putaendo, Chile, built in the 1940 s for the purpose of housing tuberculosis patients, and then converted into a state hospital for the mentally ill and indigent once the epidemic ended. Implicated in the economies of exchange prevalent within the Chilean Transition as well as in authoritarianism, El infarto del alma does not promote a single ideology, but rather strives for decentering and lack of unified endings. While those aesthetic tendencies historically have been perceived as going against salability, we would be remiss not to acknowledge that they are also in line with global and academic marketplaces. Furthermore, the many discourses that Eltit utilizes to represent the asylum replicate the multiple voices that the insane are believed to possess. That Eltit's own writing resists the market's forces has had very real effects on its circulation within Chile, on its resonance within crítica cultural, and on the scholarship about the discipline of Latin Americanism largely generated in the United States. In the past five years, Eltit and Errázuriz's critique of the politics of the Chilean transition into democracy has begun to find another home, albeit friction-filled and provisional, in the North American academy. It is a marketplace of its own that, in part, running parallel to the globalizing one, relies on micropolitics and the aestheticization of difference for its categorization of identity and disciplines. Eltit's election to the Modern Language Association as an honorary member in 2000 attests to the degree to which her work has been canonized. Along with Eltit's 1989 El padre mío,El infarto del alma has so convincingly been placed on the other side of a representational axis from the testimonio that cultural critics seem almost obliged to address them as shocking. Another instance of the attention that Eltit has received as a political and artistic provocateur is the homage paid to her by the Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, but La Semana del autor cannot be separated from Eltit's already constituted position within the field of Latin American and cultural [End Page 78] studies in the United States, where her reputation rests on viewing her neo-avant-garde oeuvre as resistant to coercive and dominant structures. As the Casa bulletin on La Semana del Autor explains, the latter is about "'betting' on a poetics that marches against the mainstream." I...