Sites of Disquiet

The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations

Ilka Kressner

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781557536549
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492889
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Some of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, and García Márquez, have explored ambiguous sites of a disquieting nature. Their characters face merging perspectives, deferral, darkness, or emptiness. Such a space is neither a site of projection (as utopia or dystopia) nor a neutral setting (as the topos). For the characters, it is real and active, at once elusive and transforming. Despite the challenges of visualizing such slippery spaces, filmic experimentations in Spanish American cinema since the 1960s have sought to adapt these texts to the screen. Ilka Kressner's Sites of Disquiet examines these representations of alternative dimensions in Spanish American short narratives and their transformations to the cinematic screen. The study is informed by contemporary critical approaches to spatiality, especially the concepts of atopos (non-space), spaces of mobility, sites of différance, of a self-effacing presence, and sonic spaces. Kressner's comparative study of textual and cinematic constructions of non-spaces highlights the potential and limits of inter-arts adaptation. Film not only portrays the sites in ways that are intrinsic to the medium, but during the cinematic translation, it further develops the textual presentations of space. Text and film illuminate each other in their renderings of echoes, gaps, absences, and radical openness. The shared focus of the two media on precarious spaces highlights their awareness of the physical and situational conditions in the works. Therefore, it vindicates the import of space and dwelling, and the often underestimated impact of surroundings on the human body and mind. Despite their heterogeneity, the artistic elaborations of these ambivalent atopoi all share a liberating impulse: they assert creative and open-ended interactions with space where volatility ceases to be a negative term.

Chapter One

Into Spatial Vagueness

Jorge Luis Borges’s and Miguel Picazo’s
Hombre de la esquina rosada

A major element in many of Borges’s short fictions is the relationship between reality, human perception, and language. How do we make sense of the world around us and of ourselves within it? Is our language a reliable tool to communicate or is it a means of dispersion and misunderstanding? Borges’s texts do not present single answers. Instead, they evoke puzzling worlds with doubtful protagonists who are uncertain whether they dream or are awake, or whether they are criminals, victims, or even the creators of the fictitious webs in which they live. Donald L. Shaw, in Borges’ Narrative Strategy, compares the texts with “parables or fables which illustrate aspects of the general collapse of rational or religious certainties in our modern world, and the bewildering possibilities which thus emerge” (2). Containing an “implicit ‘what if…?’ [or] ‘suppose that…’” (2), as Shaw describes it, the short stories expose dizzying, vertiginous, and fantastic universes, where any previous ontological certainties have been abandoned. Shaw notes that the conclusions of many of Borges’s texts “call into question one or another of our accepted ideas and beliefs” (2). I suggest that among other thematic elements, the spaces convey the main idea of a metaphysical disorientation. The ambiguous settings radically question any naïve assumption of a stable, reliable world and challenge the characters’ ability to make sense of the three-dimensional space around them and of themselves within it. Through the spatial descriptions and the protagonists’ perceptions of their surroundings, Borges’s writings call into question some of our taken-for-granted ideas and practices of space and make us aware of the medial difficulties or limitations to convey any three-dimensional space in literature.

Few literary critics have studied space in Borges’s texts.¹ This may be surprising, since space is a central theme in many of his works. His described topoi are never mere static backgrounds or metaphorical spaces. Instead, the seemingly inconspicuous sites become increasingly intricate and active forces. Often, the narrators only indirectly allude to space through the characters’ reactions to or excessive iterations of it. The sites transform into riddles, which propel a questioning of spatio-logical certainties.

The topic of space is elaborated in many ways in Borges’s work (Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction 8–12). “Las calles” (“The Streets”), the opening poem of the early collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (Passion for Buenos Aires), begins with a meshing of the outside and the inner spaces: “Las calles de Buenos Aires / ya son mi entraña” (OC 1: 17). Several of his late poems contain nostalgic creations of a poetical Buenos Aires, revealing an endeavor to enumerate different spaces of the past. In his autobiographically inspired “Elegía” from El otro, el mismo (The Other, the Same, 1964), written in Bogotá in 1963, he enumerates many cities he has lived in and describes his unfulfilled yearning to capture a space of his own.

Oh destino el de Borges,

haber navegado por los diversos mares del mundo

o por el único y solitario mar de nombres diversos,

haber sido una parte de Edimburgo, de Zürich, de las dos Córdobas,

de Colombia y de Texas,

haber regresado, a cabo de cambiantes generaciones,

a las antiguas tierras de su estirpe,

a Andalucía, a Portugal…

haber errado por el rojo y tranquilo laberinto de Londres,

haber envejecido en tantos espejos…

y no haber visto nada o casi nada

sino el rostro de una muchacha de Buenos Aires,

un rostro que no quiere que recuerde… (OC 2: 311)

What is a place, asks the poetic voice, but a name, a mere signifier of an absent, perhaps nonexistent signified? For the lyrical instance, the names of the cities become placeholders for various spatial constructs, individual, historical, as well as poetical (the metaphorical “rojo y tranquilo laberinto de Londres” and the metonymical “rostro de una muchacha de Buenos Aires”). The only presence the spaces could possibly acquire is textual, where they may inspire future spatial associations by the readers.

The evocation of space is also a central narrative element in Borges’s short stories. Many of the protagonists are characterized by an ardent passion for cartography and geographic research.² Several of Borges’s preferred symbols are spatial metaphors. One might think about the allusions to the labyrinth, this man-made, artificial world of possibilities, as in the beast’s infinite domicile in “La casa de Asterión” or the labyrinthine garden in “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan.”³ Another important symbolical space is the library, described in “La Biblioteca de Babel” as an infinite sequence of repeated, hexagonal galleries with reflecting mirrors, multiplying the identical sites.

One of Borges’s most intriguing motifs also alludes to a particularly rich space: the aleph. In the short story of the same title, the narrator encounters a minimal spot, containing the whole universe, perceived from any possible viewpoint. He describes how he saw “el aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el aleph y en el aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto… cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo” (OC 1: 625–26). The motif of the aleph, as with many others in Borges, is ambiguous. Although the narrator precisely names the size of the sphere as being a few centimeters in diameter, the evoked space radically subverts any essentialist concept of spatiality. The impetus to measure it is overthrown, since its microcosm has no limits and comprises the macrocosm of the whole universe. The discovery of this paradoxical, unimaginable space is immediately related to the writer’s difficulty to render it in a text: “Ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza, aquí, mi desesperación de escritor… el problema central es irresoluble: la enumeración, siquiera parcial, de un conjunto infinito” (OC 1: 624–25). In the here and now of the writing, in the center of the tale, the narrator meditates on the limitations of language to capture and transmit the radical space he has just seen. Similar to the poem quoted above, where the names of cities are described to be placeholders for something absent, the space of the aleph is evoked by a cipher. For the cabbalists, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet includes all letters, and therefore contains the whole universe (Agheana 177–86). The sphere, seen in the darkness of a dirty cellar in Buenos Aires, exists only as an indication, made of five letters on a page, referring to something, which cannot be represented in the literary act. The narrator only indirectly alludes to the trace of the space’s ubiquity and three-dimensionality within the successive structure of language.

While “El aleph” and the poems cited above elaborate on spatial metaphors and the challenge to verbalize a slippery non-space, the short story “La intrusa” presents an unfathomable site that becomes an active character. The story narrates a murder. After the two protagonists have killed the woman they both love, their surroundings change. The dark wasteland around them, “iba agrandándose con la noche” (OC 2: 406). In the context of the story, this is not a mental image or hallucinatory impression by the characters, but a description of a characteristic of space itself. The narrator does not give further explanation for the drastic change. This narrative disregard or meager reference to the site may be one of the reasons why these specific spaces in Borges’s writings have not received much critical attention. In the following, I will distill the uncanny presence of the atopos and its impact for an intermedial aesthetics in Borges’s first short story. I read the text as the initial example of this challenging of a fixed space toward a volatile spatiality, which I see as a prominent trend in the writings belonging to the emerging Latin American Boom movement of the 1960s.

According to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Borges started working on his “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (“Man on Pink Corner”) in 1927 and finally published it in 1933, under a pseudonym (27–28). In 1935, he included it in his collection Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy). Before reading about the life and ethos of the compadritos, the tough and violent knife fighters, the readers mentally have to design the space of a painted corner. What does a “pink corner” stand for? Andrew Hurley, in the notes to his translations of Borges’s stories, Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, explains that in the Buenos Aires of the beginning twentieth century, many walls were painted with bright pastel colors (530). For those readers who know about the former appearance of the buildings, the cheerful color evokes a Buenos Aires of the past. The corner, according to Hurley, may be interpreted both as an actual street corner and as a generalized neighborhood and hangout of the poor of the slum, possibly on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (530). The pink corner, while mentioned in the title, does not appear in the text itself.

The “man” in the title has no definite article. “Hombre de la esquina rosada” can be an allusion to read the story “visually,” which has been suggested by another translator of the text. Pierre Bernès, in the introduction to the French translation of Borges’s collected works, published by Gallimard as Œuvres complètes, notes: “The title of the original publication, which omits the definite article, reminds the reader of the title of a painting given in the catalogue of an art exhibit. It stresses the graphic aspect of the scene, which Borges, in the preface to the 1935 edition, called the ‘pictorial intention’ of his work” (qtd. and trans. Hurley, Borges, Collected Fictions 530). This resemblance between the title of the story and the title of a visual work opens the text to an intermedial approach. The short story is indeed rife with allusions to the visual, mainly because of the evocations of space. In the prologue of the first edition of Historia universal de la infamia, Borges himself pointed out the visual impetus of the short story and noted that the experience of cinema had had a major impact on his writings (OC 1: 28). This technique of an initial description of the setting is yet reminiscent of another genre. The terse spatial reference alludes to a stage direction at the beginning of a theater script or filmscript. The title of the short story can be interpreted as a sign for the reader to primarily “set” a mental stage for the fiction to follow.

From the beginning of the story, space is primarily presented as a territory of domination. The narrator describes Francisco Real as an intruder in the microcosm of the slum: “ésos no eran sus barrios porque él sabía tallar más bien por el Norte, por esos laos [sic] de la laguna de Guadalupe y de Batería” (OC 1: 331). Real challenges the hero of the outskirts, whose power is equally expressed by a spatial metaphor: “Rosendo Juárez el Pegador, era de los que más fuerte pisaban por Villa Santa Rita” (OC 1: 331). Juárez is admired by the narrator, because he walks firmly and steps on the place, dominates its inhabitants, and fiercely defends his honor against the slightest offense.

The short story mentions two main spaces: the dancing bar as the social center of the neighborhood of Villa Santa Rita, and the dark outside of the dirty streets. It is in the crowded milonga that Real calls out Juárez and dishonors him, and with him, all the inhabitants of the slum. The narrator’s inner monologues and clandestine vengeance, on the contrary, take place in the atopic outside. The narrative instance refers to the milonga as follows: “El salón de Julia… era un galpón de chapas de cinc, entre el camino de Gauna y el Maldonado. Era un local que usté lo divisaba desde lejos, por la luz que mandaba a la redonda el farol sinvergüenza, y por el barullo también” (OC 1: 331). Through a deictic device, the narrator places the (fictive) readers in the textual setting. He directly addresses them, when evoking the visual and acoustic quality of the place.

Again, the scene is described in a sensorial and mainly visual manner. The dance whirls the people, divides and reunites them according to its rhythm. The narrator, who is one of them, recalls that “el tango hacía su voluntá con nosotros y nos arriaba y nos perdía y nos ordenaba y nos volvía a encontrar” (OC 1: 332). When the intruder enters the bar, all the dancers obsequiously open the way for him. “Los primeros… se abrieron como abanico, apurados” (OC 1: 332). Space is used to visualize power. When Juárez refuses Real’s challenge, his voice is weak, and does not penetrate space like his opponent’s (OC 1: 333). The story unfolds almost exclusively through the description of the characters’ movements in space. Their physical reactions translate the tension before and during the confrontation.

The narrative voice evokes the main object of desire, the knife, which is in the very center of the coded space. Everybody’s eyes are drawn to the glinting sticker in the intruder’s hand. “Ahora, le [a Real] relucía un cuchillo en la mano derecha. … Alrededor se habían ido abriendo los que empujaron, y todos los mirábamos a los dos” (OC 1: 333). Juárez, on the contrary, remains motionless. His lover, Lujanera, gets his knife out of his pocket and gives it to him. Instead of finally defending himself, he swiftly throws the weapon through an open window, out into the darkness of the Maldonado River, where he himself will hide shortly afterwards. Space, with respect to Juárez, is presented in terms of dispersion and decentering. He first discards his cigarette, later throws away his knife, and finally leaves town: “Agarró el lado más oscuro, el del Maldonado; no lo volví a ver más” (OC 1: 334). He disappears into an inscrutable, atopic darkness.

The second time the milonga is portrayed, it reflects Real’s total loss of power. In clear contrast to the first encounter, where he was described as much taller than everybody around him, he is now lying on the floor, while the villagers, forming a circle, are looking down on him. The speaking instance stresses the collective perspective of domination: “El hombre a nuestros pies se moría” (OC 1: 335). Borges’s narrator evokes the urban battlefield of the orilleros in a visual, partly theatrical manner, which translates and reinforces the structures of power. Space “narrates” and interprets the story via its own sign-system (special positions, vectors in the room, the dualistic inside of the milonga versus the outside of the Maldonado River).

The second, and much more intriguing and imprecise, site described in “Hombre de la esquina rosada” is the narrator’s individual space. He is mainly alone, either in a corner⁴ of the bar, or outside in the darkness. When Real enters the bar, the narrator is hit by the swinging door: “Me golpeó la hoja de la puerta al abrirse… [Real] estiró los brazos y me hizo a un lado, como despidiéndose de un estorbo… Me dejó agachado detrás [de la puerta]” (OC 1: 332). Ill-treated and humiliated, he leaves the place of confinement after Juárez’s dishonor. Outside, while contemplating the infinite sky, he regains self-assurance:

Me quedé mirando esas cosas de toda la vida—cielo hasta decir basta, el arroyo que se emperraba solo ahí abajo, un caballo dormido, el callejón de tierra, los hornos—y pensé que yo era apenas otro yuyo de esas orillas, criado entre las flores de sapo y las osamentas. ¿Qué iba a salir de esa basura sino nosotros, gritones pero blandos para el castigo…? Sentí después que no, que el barrio cuánto más aporriao [sic], más obligación de ser guapo. … Linda al ñudo la noche. Había de estrellas como para marearse mirándolas, unas encima de otras. (OC 1: 334)

This description echoes another meditation on man’s condition in a similar setting. About 200 years before Borges, Immanuel Kant wrote about two things that would fill the mind with awe: the immense firmament above and the moral law within every human being (Critique of Practical Reason 258). Borges’s lonesome narrator, admiring the night sky, echoes this dictum. He perceives the grandeur of the firmament in sharp contrast to the shabby surroundings and (differing from Kant’s observation) to his inn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Spotting the Non-Space
• Chapter One: Into Spatial Vagueness: Jorge Luis Borges’s and Miguel Picazo’s Hombre de la esquina rosada
• Chapter Two: The Power of Staging: Spaces of Emulation in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tema del traidor y del héroe” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno
• Chapter Three: Screening the Void: Julio Cortázar’s “Cartas de mamá,” and Manuel Antin’s and Miguel Picazo’s Filmic Translations
• Chapter Four: Echoes in the Dark: Pedro Páramo on the Page and on the Screen
• Chapter Five: Toward Amor Vacui: Gabriel García Márquez’s and Ruy Guerra’s Eréndiras
• Epilogue: The Non-Space Revisited
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Book and the Author