SOURCE: "Gender Monologue in Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 3, No. 2, March, 1996, pp. 346-67.

[In the following essay, Millington asserts that "there is no doubt that what is achieved in Los pasos perdidos by the narrator is a masculist discourse of exclusion and manipulation, offset by some irony or counterpointed fragmentally when other voices become briefly audible."]

In section XII in chapter 2 of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator reaches an area of the South American jungle which, in his calculation of his movement back through the stages of civilization, he calls "Tierras del Caballo." As always, his immediate reaction is highly wrought description—the construction of a complex semantic web to make sense of the unknown. This description of the "Tierras del Caballo" emphasizes physicality: the vivid sounds, smells and colours associated with horses and blacksmiths are invoked and also an imagined male rider's display of horse and self for a young woman. These romantic associations lead into a description of the "man" who inhabits this geographical-cumtemporal environment: "En las Tierras del Caballo parecía que el hombre fuera más hombre." And the passage continues through a celebratory characterization of this archetypal "man." His attributes are centred on control of the materials that he works, of the horse that he rides, and of the women whom he knows how to subdue:

[El hombre] volvía a ser dueño de técnicas milenarias que ponían sus manos en trato directo con el hierro y el pellejo, le enseñaban las artes de la doma y la monta, desarrollando destrezas fisicas de que alardear en días de fiesta, frente a las mujeres admiradas de quien tanto sabía apretar con las piernas, de quien tanto sabía hacer con los brazos. Renacían los juegos machos de amansar al garañón relinchante y colear y derribar al toro, la bestia solar, haciendo rodar su arrogancia en el polvo.

It is not clear if these skills have any priority one over another, what seems important, however, is that the "man" is in charge: his skills give him power, and, by implication, he can perform his masculinity for his chosen audience: women. This is consistent with the earlier stress on physicality, since the relationship that women seem here to appreciate makes no mention of an emotional bond. "Tierras del Caballo" is a place for breaking horses, overwhelming bulls and possessing women, and these "juegos machos" are part of the proof of masculinity, the other part being the visible evidence. Or rather the visible parallel: it is the sexual organ of the horse, not the man, whose impressive presence is registered. Horse and man are identified via sexual power:

Una misteriosa solidaridad se establecía entre el animal de testículos bien colgados, que penetraba sus hembras más hondamente que ningún otro, y el hombre, que tenía por símbolo de universal coraje aquello que los escultores de estatuas ecuestres tenían que modelar y fundir en bronce, o tallar en mármol, para que el corcel de buen ver respondiera por el Héroe sobre él montado, dando buena sombra a los enamorados que se daban cita en los parques municipales.

The link between man and horse is explicit and will be confirmed shortly after by a reference to "centauros." But the crude phallic assertion of the passage is doubly deflated. When it comes to the monumental sculpting of the rider and horse, the narrator becomes remarkably coy—he cannot name the symbol of power (the horse's penis) resorting rather weakly to euphemism, "aquello que los escultores […] tenían que modelar." This sudden inhibition is compounded in its deflationary effect by the bathos of such assertive symbolism of phallic power being reduced to casting a shadow over lovers, not on the open plain, but in municipal parks. On one level, this reference undercuts the imaginary archetype of the "Héroe" (a rapid transformation from a mere "hombre"), whose sexual equipment is compared (in somewhat optimistic fashion) to that of the horse—hence the "mysterious" quality of the solidarity, one supposes. On another level, the reference figures the prevailing gender economy of everyday life, suggesting how heterosexual relations are dominated by such phallocentrism, and not without a certain banality.

The use of horses, bulls, and rather far-fetched archetypes to establish a definition of masculinity and male sexual behaviour is symptomatic of a certain strand in the novel. However, Los pasos perdidos does deploy a degree of irony to deflate some of this gender paradigm. And that irony is evident in the juxtaposition of the celebratory passage that I have just examined with the immediately preceding passage, which reveals a layer of self-doubt in the narrator concerning his sexual prowess. He feels insecure in the new location, especially as far as making advances to Rosario is concerned. He stresses cultural differences which he is still learning about, but he cannot disguise a fundamental sexual anxiety:

hubiera querido acercarme más libremente a Rosario, cuya entidad profunda escapa a mis medios de indagación[…]. A cada paso temo ofenderla, molestarla, llegar demasiado lejos en la familiaridad o hacerla objeto de atenciones que peudan parecerle tontas o poco viriles.[…] Junto a ella me desasosiega continuamente el temor al ridículo, ridículo ante el cual no vale pensar que los otros "no saben," puesto que son ellos, aquí, los que saben.

In brief, the narrator does not know how to perform his sexuality for Rosario. The celebratory version of man, sex, and horses which follows is a crudely assertive counterweight to his fear of being thought more like a woman than a man. The sheer exuberance of the phallic assertiveness now begins to appear as a compensation for the moment of self-doubt: recourse to generalized archetypes offers imaginary salvation. However, the doubt is registered, and this interplay of insecurity and forceful assertion constitutes a potentially revealing moment in the discourse of the novel, since gender is a fundamental factor in the articulation of its meaning, albeit a factor which is hardly ever explicitly alluded to. Perhaps most revealing of all of the gender commitment of the narrator is the passage shortly after the insecurity/assertion oscillation when the narrator does finally make love to Rosario: when the moment arrives, he entertains no doubts but finds it in himself to act positively like all the men around him and the rider in his imagined scenario. All of which poses the question of how different the narrator's culture and that of the "Tierras del Caballo" really are when it comes to gender: the narrator insists that his journey takes him back through the stages of civilization, but he seems to know this element of cultural behaviour well. The further question here, therefore, concerns how much changes in the narrator's gender identity whilst (he claims) so much is changing in the other aspects of his identity.

There is here a contradiction in the narrator's presentation, for the jungle through which he travels is represented as alien to the world and culture that he has previously lived in. The customary view of the jungle accepts the narrator's characterization of its otherness. And this is underlined by the idealizing effect of his European cultural references: this tends to set up a neat binary. The jungle as Other is a strange, powerful force: in a word, it is "natural." It appears to be no accident that it is a sudden cloudburst that sets the whole expedition in motion: rain, of an almost tropical violence, "naturally" forces him to seek shelter in a concert hall, and this is a prelude to his meeting with his former mentor, the Curator. That meeting takes him to the jungle where he starts to live according to "natural" rhythms. The jungle, he claims, can totally disorientate him: the familiar clarity of perception is lost. Moreover, the people of the jungle are supposedly simply "what they are," perfectly adapted to their environment, with no need to intellectualize it (although the narrator intellectualizes their not intellectualizing it). The important point is that he produces the jungle as significant, in a structure of thought which seeks to articulate the quest for a new self. The jungle is other than New York, a "natural" space, one that allows him to re-establish contact with what he names as his roots. But the idea of this virgin territory, untouched and available as a space of self-discovery is highly questionable and naive. There is nothing natural about his version of the jungle: not only does he write a highly freighted version of it (full of Western cultural references), but this representation of the jungle only has meaning in the binary with the city. Hence this jungle is already a cultural projection, and largely the product of the narrator's alienation. Moreover, in one respect at least, life in the jungle is very similar to life in the city: the patriarchal gender economy in operation is similar in both locations. His relationships with women, especially in their sexual dimension, are fundamental in articulating his life in the city and also his renewal and self-discovery (insofar as these occur) in the jungle. This dependence remains the same. It is not insignificant that there are numerous other outsiders in the jungle engaged in quests—for diamonds, plants, religious converts—, and all are men articulating masculine desires for purpose and meaning. Not only does that coincide with the dominant cultural "imperative" in the West for men to identify with and manifest agency (men do things), but also the different kinds of quest in parallel with the narrator's suggest that he is not so different from his culture as he thought: where others seek the jungle's mineral, human and botanical resources, the narrator seeks first its musical resources and then its sheer geographical remoteness to pursue his own desires in it.

It is lack in the narrator that drives the narrative and the quest—it is the desire for "authenticity" which impels him. In sum, the jungle is a cultural construct that serves as the scenario for self-dramatization. On the surface, the narrator seeks renewal and change in himself, but it is not clear that he does change anything, despite his voluble claims. It is significant that he expresses admiration for all the other men on their quests in the jungle: despite his (apparent) reflexivity, one thing that he never puts in doubt is the gender dimension of his lack and his quest; he never tries to move out of his initial gender identity, nor does he raise the question as to why the others on their quests are all men. These things are too close to him to be perceived. As a symptom of that blindness, the narrator produces representations of the women characters which constitute them in varied roles of otherness as a function of his narcissism.

What is striking in the deployment of the other characters is the sheer geometry of the system. There is a careful preparation of clearly defined and differentiated roles: each character helps delineate the narrator; he is the axial figure. Most important in this defining role are the women characters who are largely functions designed to articulate the different stages of the narrator's quest and to elicit reactions and values from him. They constitute possibilities or (mostly) obstacles on the narrator's path to self-realization. They are what the narrator uses to confirm who he is or is becoming, or what he needs to denigrate and abject. The use of the women characters in this way indicates the nature of the heterosexual economy of the novel: it is a patriarchal heterosexuality which exploits and contains women.

Ruth is referred to quite often in the novel but only appears near the end. As the narrator's wife she is shown as constituting an obstacle to him. She is an actress, but, symbolically, she is trapped in the unimaginative tedium of repeating her performance in a successful play. Her stultified creativity in New York parallels the narrator's own, but Ruth does nothing to alleviate it.

Significantly, it is Ruth who has the narrator brought back from the jungle by sparking the search for him. On his return, he finds himself caught in a blaze of publicity and expected to play the role of the grateful husband, which is not one that he has much experience of. At this point he starts to combine the two roles that he has ascribed to Ruth—wife and actress—and he projects her as playing her greatest part: the faithful wife. He demystifies this "play-acting," pointedly exposing what he sees as the fictional roles that Ruth and the media want them to play. In fact he insists on this inauthentic performance with elephantine excess, the ironic effect of which is to cast himself in the role of critical observer while all the others are taken in, though this example of his role-playing is not considered.

His ruthlessness is manifest in his disabusing Ruth about his future plans, in which she does not figure. When she learns that he has been in the jungle with another woman (Mouche), it is inevitable that he will represent her reaction as a performance of tragic proportions. Whilst Ruth articulates her response to his betrayal of their marriage, far from his expressing any regret, he insists on her skills as a tragedienne with their room serving as her stage. He implicitly accuses her of a monologue lasting half an hour, the irony being that it is the narrator who occupies the text with a monologue since he cannot remember what Ruth actually says and so contents himself with his own extensive words of deflationary sarcasm. He entertains no possibility that his betrayal of her might have caused her real hurt. In essence, he is contemptuous of his wife: the only truth of emotion or understanding is arrogated to himself. But the effect of his efforts is to concentrate attention on the supposed performance of Ruth who is implicitly accused of hypocrisy for her reaction, when the basic hypocrisy is the narrator's own since he committed the first wrong by having a relationship with Mouche. This double standard is reinforced during the divorce proceedings when the theatrical metaphor continues and the narrator finds himself cast in the role of unfaithful husband. This is doubly ironic: firstly because it is the narrator who normally casts others in roles to support his own ego; and secondly because this is no role since he has been a profligate husband. Nonetheless, he tries to manipulate events so that he can appear the victim and Ruth the guilty party: she is made responsible for bringing him out of the jungle when he willingly left it to acquire pens and paper, and to divorce Ruth. His desires were what mattered to his return, as they are dominant in his evaluation of all that he does. His representation of Ruth is a refusal to assume responsibility for his own actions and guilt, the result being that he frames Ruth in quite hypocritical fashion and shows no respect for her at all.

The narrator's view of Mouche shows her to be as much an obstacle to his desire as Ruth, but it is also clear that she is as necessary to the production of his own ego narrative. The negative depiction of Mouche operates consistently through the attribution to her of all that he wishes to cast off or leave behind as he penetrates the jungle: she is the repository for the cultural practices and values that he strives to jettison and which he vilifies. Hence the contrast between Mouche's and his reactions to Latin America is pivotal: the polarization begins as soon as they set foot off the plane, and is reinforced day after day. Whilst the narrator is overwhelmed and moved by the discovery of a new environment, Mouche is at best untouched, at worst hostile. And the hostility derives from the physical discomfort produced by the journey. The result is that her appearance deteriorates rapidly, rendering her less sexually attractive: if she cannot make up her face and dye her hair her beauty disappears—it is artificial. The narrator returns to this theme and spells out his disdain for her vanity in making up and falsifying the reality of her appearance, although those efforts obviously played a part in attracting him to her previously. Her current appearance alienates him and he finds her incapacity to adapt to her new context a severe limitation. The stress on Mouche's failing beauty and the minute dissection of her physical decline rely on the narrator's unexamined assumption that what matters most to a woman is her physical attractiveness. He even reaches the senseless extreme of criticizing Mouche for being the one to be bitten by a mosquito. Such crass unfairness is an example of the irony deployed by the implied author against the narrator:

A dos jornadas del término de mi encomienda, cuando hollábamos las fronteras de lo desconocido y el ambiente se embellecía con la cercanía de posibles maravillas, tenía Mouche que haber caído así, estúpidamente, picada por un insecto que la eligiera a ella, la menos apta para soportar la enfermedad.

In such sweeping dismissals the narrator shows as little respect for Mouche as he does for Ruth. Mouche has been his mistress for two years when the journey starts, but there is no mention of his affection for her, on the contrary, theirs was a strongly physical relation. This is not uncharacteristic of the narrator. Mouche appears to have been useful to him in maintaining a certain gender profile: bored with his wife, he takes a mistress to whom he has no deep commitment. His representation of Mouche, while undercut in places by the irony of the implied author, reaches grotesque proportions: she can do no right, every attitude or value that she displays is declared anathema. So while he tries to fulfil his musical mission and his quest for identity, he presents Mouche as interested in tourism, and as quite prepared to forge the musical instruments which he seeks. Curiously, while the narrator is intent on leaving behind many aspects of Western civilization (all of which he castigates Mouche for displaying), he clings firmly to Western "High Art," and consequently when it comes to visiting the opera, in order to maintain the utterly negative view of Mouche it turns out that she is a "musical philistine" and is content to adopt the "fashionable pose" of rejecting opera as an art form. Whatever the narrator's commitment, it turns out that Mouche contradicts it, so rigid is the polarization. By contrast with her, his values and views are implied to be solid, healthy, and individual—though perhaps not entirely tolerant.

Not surprisingly, it is Mouche who is castigated for being unfaithful to the narrator. He claims to be deeply injured by her relation with Yannes and talks of punishing her, but he utterly fails to consider his own recent admission of desire for Rosario, or his long-standing betrayal of his wife precisely with Mouche. The implied author indicates this double standard by an undramatic reference to Ruth in the midst of the narrator's recriminations, although she is not relevant to the immediate context of his response to Mouche's "infamia." Blind to his own hypocrisy, the narrator soon starts to wrap himself in the severely patriarchal logic of the jungle culture, though he does not explain why two people who were formed elsewhere should now start to judge their personal relationship according to the rules of the local culture:

Para los que con nosotros convivían ahora, la fidelidad al varón, el respeto a los padres, la rectitud de proceder, la palabra dada, el honor que obligaba y las obligaciones que honraban, eran valores constantes, eternos, insoslayables, que excluían toda posibilidad de discusión.[…] Como en los más clásicos teatros, los personajes eran, en este gran escenario presente y real, los tallados en una pieza del Bueno y el Malo, la Esposa Ejemplar o la Amante Fiel, el Villano y el Amigo Leal, la Madre digna o indigna.

The attraction of such rigid stereotypes to the narrator must surely be that they safeguard male dominance, so that the alternative views of Mouche, and of women in general, can be ignored. "Hombría" holds sway here, and life and death are in its gift.

The problems and hypocrisy in the narrator's representation of Mouche reach their lowest point in dealing with her relationship with the Canadian woman painter. In this context, the narrator displays not just homophobia but a somewhat fevered imagination, since he makes "accusations" for which he has no evidence. Moreover, he cannot even name the "terrible reality" which he has imagined—his language becomes very prim:

Yo sabía que cuando ella bebía se tornaba particularmente vulnerable a toda solicitud de los sentidos, y aunque esto no significaba una voluntad real de vilipendiarse, podía llevarla al lindero de las curiosidades más equívocas.

Later, he admits that he has no proof "against" Mouche, but that is insufficient to inhibit his mounting a sort of trial of her with the (still unnamed) charge of lesbianism. In the first place he sets up lesbianism as a despicable form of sexual behaviour and then he finds Mouche "guilty" of it. He observes her and the painter closely, vainly trying to detect a secret glance or phrase that will reveal the "truth" which he has decided is there. But his reaction is all about his own uncertainty and jealousy: it appears that the narrator fears a relationship that excludes him, one which is sufficient without a male component. His superfluousness inspires a kind of panic resulting in his petulant attempt to put the pair into a category which for him is (literally) unspeakable. For a man who constantly congratulates himself on his individuality and difference from the trivializing and unreflecting attitudes of his society, in this respect he displays extraordinarily narrow-minded conventionalism. But, all his gender and sexual commitments show the same unquestioned adherence to forms of exclusive, hegemonic masculinity.

After this damning treatment of Mouche in the jungle, the narrator continues his denigration on their separate returns to New York. He blames her for ruining his chance of capitalizing on media interest in his story: in fact, much of what Mouche tells the press is merely the truth about his affair with her and with Rosario and is no more than a corrective to his own falsifying and self-promoting story. If it is true that Mouche is taking revenge for his flight with Rosario, she is successful and is doing no more than readjust the balance of power between them. Having vitiated his financial ambitions, Mouche becomes the one responsible for all his misfortunes as he slides down the ladder to destitution. She remains the figure on whom he casts out all the negative features of his life. For all that "monstering" and abjection, however, Mouche has regained her physical attraction for him and she now becomes a "devious temptress": she plies him with alcohol and he finds himself having sex with her. His subsequent hypocrisy—firstly in ascribing the role of seducer to her, and secondly in finding her efforts at love-making boring—is self-evident. Again the implied author leaves little doubt of the narrator's self-righteous behaviour. Indeed, the treatment of Mouche in New York is really rather crude, so crude in fact that the irony at the narrator's expense is largely ineffective. The implied author becomes complicit with this representation of Mouche because of enabling it in the first place and because of its sheer relish. The narrator is so obviously and coarsely ironized that the irony has little effect, and what remain are the shockingly thorough exploitation of Mouche as a device in the novel's gender economy and the suspicion that the relentlessness of Mouche's negativity exceed what is strictly necessary for the narrator's purposes and so express a patriarchal culture's desperate desire in relation to women.

Rosario's role in the narrator's account is captured in two paradigmatic moments very near the start of her arrival in the novel. One comes when the narrator is recalling the opening paragraph of Don Quixote but finds that he cannot complete the quotation. As he struggles to recall the text, the still unknown Rosario points to a hillside out of the bus window and speaks its name: La Hoya. This turns out to be a homonym for the key word in the forgotten sentence from Don Quixote: "Una olla." This coincidence releases what the narrator had forgotten. The lack in him is filled by Rosario, but as always the narrator is absorbed in literary allusions and Rosario is concerned with concrete reality. So while she helps him to retrieve what he had lost—not just the quotation, of course, but his roots in Latin America—, it is not a conscious process, indeed it is not one of which Rosario is in the least aware: she and the narrator exist on different cultural levels.

The other paradigmatic moment is her first sighting, and it is heavily overdetermined. She is sitting on a bridge over a deep chasm with a torrent audible at the bottom. The symbol of the bridge is an allusion to the narrator's transition back to his roots, and it is clear that Rosario only appears when that transition has already begun: he has had to return to Latin America and begin the journey into the interior before he can meet the symbolic figure of Rosario, representative of the Americas, halfway across the bridge. The narrator makes it clear that Rosario is a summation of the continent—all its races mix in her:

Era evidente que varias razas se encontraban mezcladas en esa mujer, india por el pelo y los pómulos, mediterránea por la frente y la nariz, negra por la sólida redondez de los hombros y una peculiar anchura de la cadera[…].

At different points of his narrative, the narrator is also keen to stress Rosario's condition as a natural force, her closeness to rhythms of the natural world. Given this construction of Rosario, the contrast with Mouche and the narrator is obvious, although it is clear that, in this representation of Rosario, the "natural" is heavily involved with the social and cultural structures of patriarchy. The development of their relationship is rapid and its sexual dimension is called direct: the narrator bids for an elemental quality in it since Rosario has features which are supposed to precede social structures. Not surprisingly, therefore, the narrator describes his desire for her as the "incontenible apremio de un celo primordial."

In this respect, Rosario's role in the narrator's quest is clear. She is a focus of positive qualities which resuscitate forgotten areas in his inner life and which prompt him to take major steps out of superannuated social and cultural structures into the (re-)discovery of something vigorous and natural. It is, therefore, a culturally significant moment when the narrator "recognizes" that Rosario is beautiful. He has observed her intently for some hours and ascribed to her various qualities to do with nature and Latin America. In other words, he gradually crystallizes around her certain qualities which he now values. Simultaneously, after just one day's travelling by bus, Mouche has a headache and is feverish. Just as Mouche shows her weakness in the rigours of the natural world, Rosario shows her resilience and authenticity. As this geometry of rejection and desire falls into place, what for the narrator is inexplicable (but for the wary reader perhaps less so) dawns on him: "No sabía decir por qué esa mujer me pareció muy bella, de pronto[…]." This realization is "de rigueur" in the machista gender economy that the narrator (and frequently the implied author) subscribes to. And Rosario's beauty is restated as the journey progresses, and, more significantly, as Mouche's physical attraction fades—the inverse investment in the two women is obviously symmetrical. The narrator even spells this out:

la joven crecía ante mis ojos a medida que transcurrían las horas, al establecer con el ambiente ciertas relaciones que me eran cada vez más perceptibles. Mouche, en cambio, iba resultando tremendamente forastera dentro de un creciente desajuste entre su persona y cuanto nos circundaba.

It is the identification (or lack of it) with the environment which is the decisive factor in his perception of the women's beauty (or loss of it).

Just as Mouche and Ruth are expressions of the narrator's unstable negative desire rather than portraits of independent characters, so Rosario is the object of positive desire, but still desire centred in a particular gender economy. There is arguably no comment made by the narrator about any of them which serves to establish a character that can be seen as separate from his needs and lacks. He is profoundly unreliable and blind to this projection of gender need: he needs these women characters to give him the illusion of definition. It is therefore not insignificant that Rosario is represented as conforming to a constricting patriarchy in the jungle. The journey that she is making is a return to help her dying father: in the early phase of the narrative she plays the role of the dutiful daughter. Just in time (for the narrator's purposes), her father dies allowing Rosario the freedom to carry on travelling with the narrator, although the point about filial duty has been made. It is but a short step from that to her passivity with him. Hence, even though it is Mouche who invites Rosario to accompany them upriver, Rosario waits for permission to do so from the narrator. More problematically, when she and he settle into a sexual relationship, Rosario casts herself in the role of servant. She calls herself "tu mujer," thus making herself an appendage of the male, and undertakes menial chores for him. He interprets Rosario's view of their relation in naturalizing terms, which makes it unnecessary (for him) to analyze what is (really) happening:

se cumple un destino que más vale no andar analizando demasiado, porque es regido per "cosas grandes" cuyo mecanismo es oscuro, y que, en todo caso, rebasan la capacidad de interpretación del ser humano. Por lo mismo, [Rosario] suele decir que "es malo pensar en ciertas cosas."

This is somewhat convenient for the narrator. But there comes a moment when Rosario clearly has thought out an independent line and his dominant discourse falters. He is reluctant to consider marrying Rosario despite the urgings of Fray Pedro, but he guesses that Rosario would be happy to marry him—after all, it would confirm his view that she wishes to be dependent on him. To his surprise and annoyance, she firmly declares that she does not want marriage, and for clearly elucidated reasons:

cuando creo que se va a agarrar de la oportunidad para hacerme el protagonista de un cromo dominical para uso de catecúmenos, la oigo decir, asombrado, que de ninguna manera quiere el matrimonio. Al punto se transforma mi sorpresa en celoso despecho. Voy hacia Rosario, muy dolido, a pedirle explicaciones. Pero me deja desconcertado con una argumentación que es la de sus hermanas, fue sin duda la de su madre, y es probablemente la razón del recóndito orgullo de esas mujeres que nada temen: según ella, el casamiento, la atadura legal, quita todo recurso a la mujer para defenderse contra el hombre. El arma que asiste a la mujer frente al compañero que se descarría es la facultad de abandonarlo en todo momento, de dejarlo solo, sin que tenga medios de hacer valer derecho alguno. La esposa legal, para Rosario, es una mujer a quien pueden mandar a buscar con guardias, cuando abandona la casa en que el marido ha entronizado el engaño, la servicia o los desórdences del licor. Casarse es caer bajo el peso de leyes que hicieron los hombres y no las mujeres. En una libre unión, en cambio—afirma Rosario, sentenciosa—, "el varón sabe que de su trato depende tener quien le dé gusto y cuidado."

Yet again the double standard is in evidence: it is acceptable for him not to want to marry her but not vice versa. And the fact that Rosario produces an entirely coherent argument (which he cannot accept is hers but which he supposes borrowed from others) adds insult to his (self-inflicted) injury. He cannot resist trying to patronize her (though the word "sentenciosa" rings hollow uttered by him), but Rosario effectively silences him with her sophistication: "Confieso que la campesina lógica de este concepto me deja sin réplica." He attempts to continue condescending ("la campesina lógica"), but his attitude is undercut. For once, another voice (if only momentarily) registers its presence in the novel. Ultimately, however, it may be that Rosario's actions speak louder than her words, for the narrator learns that, after his absence in New York, Rosario has formed a relation with another man and is pregnant: she takes the decisive step which is an incisive commentary on his egocentric behaviour and attitudes.

The novel opens with the narrator in a crisis of identity and the repercussions of that crisis sustain the whole narrative. The question of the definition of the crisis and whether it finds any resolution is one of the novel's major focal points. That and a further question concerning the gender dimension of the crisis (of which the novel is, at best, only partially aware) are what concerns this analysis.

The narrator begins the novel suffering from a feeling of uneasiness about the freedom to think about himself with which he is presented. He has three weeks without obligations, but his capacity for self-determination is nil. He is led to reflect that life has been flowing over him without any real impact. When talking to the Curator of the museum, his mentor, the narrator paints an entirely negative picture of his recent life. While the vehemence of this self-portrait can, in part, be ascribed to the fact of speaking to his role-model from earlier life with whom he has had no recent contact, there is no doubting the force of his self-denunciation:

"Además—gritabayo ahora—, ¡estoy vacío! ¡Vacío! ¡Vacío!…" […] Y así como el pecador vuelca ante el confesionario el saco negro de sus iniquidades y concupiscencias—llevado por una suerte de euforia de hablar mal de sí mismo que alcanza el anhelo de execración—, pinto a mi maestro, con los más sucios colores, con los más feos betunes, la inutilidad de mi vida, su aturdimiento durante el día, su inconsciencia durante la noche.

In particular, the narrator identifies a chasm between "el Yo presente" and "el Yo que hubiera aspirado a ser." This chasm amounts to a lack in being, a crisis in his ego and a recognition of a failure to sustain a desire for an ego-ideal. He suffers a total sense of self-distance, and begins to express it by an unremittingly bleak appraisal of New York and his circle of friends, and of his own work there. He accuses himself of sacrificing his gifts to commercial needs. This detailed self-condemnation is as much a symptom of his crisis as his anxiety, since the picture that begins to emerge is rather simplistically polarized: unnuanced blame attaches to those around him in New York and to his own activities, and seems to invoke a necessary counterbalancing positive project. The assessment is patently emotive and appears self-dramatizing.

In this state, the meeting with the Curator is fundamental: it not only forces an acutely negative self-confrontation (significantly, the narrator sees himself in a mirror as he lies about himself), but also offers the chance of self-renewal. It is as though in returning to the Curator the narrator had the chance to begin afresh, and this is clearly freighted with Oedipal connotations. The Curator is an obvious father-figure whose authority can be taken to signal the narrator's condition of castration: he accepts the position of child in the Curator's presence. And he catches sight of himself in the mirror in that guise: "Me veo con la tiesura de un niño llevado a visitas en la luna del conocido espejo que encuadra un espeso marco rococó." This image within an ornate frame is a sign of a particular containment: this is a self within a certain complex (rococo) cultural environment. And the project of reconstruction offered by the Father to the male child (the financing by the museum of the expedition to search for the rare musical instrument), when seen as part of the Oedipal process, comes to seem highly conformist: the narrator accepts the power of the Curator/Father and his own castration and so he takes on the mission set for him to find the instrument, as it were to assume the paternal inheritance, to strive to possess the phallus. In accepting this itinerary, he is not self-determining but dependent on symbolic structures. And those symbolic structures are bound up with hegemonic masculine imaginings. The opening lack is created by the perception of living a lie: the narrator has been untrue to what he conceives of as his "true self," the self that could have been a serious composer or musical scholar. The Curator/Father apparently provides the path to recover the self, to reconstruct its identity, This would supposedly fill his lack in being and recuperate the damaged ego. And the recuperation of the ego-ideal is particularly pregnant in that the narrator's mission takes him back to his Latin American roots and allows him to recover the Spanish language. This return to roots suggests that New York is an exile from the self and that it can be restored by an effort of will-power, by the affirmation of masculine agency. In the gender economy operative in the narrator's thinking, the self is to be revalidated by recourse to the traditional identification of men with action, preferably with heroic connotations. At this stage, therefore, Los pasos perdidos conforms to the classic paradigm of the Western Oedipal narrative in which the male child is transformed into a man.

The initial identity crisis and the route to escape it provided by the Curator/Father are deeply implicated in the dominant symbolic system of the West and in the narrator's way of thinking with humanist notions of the self and its capacity for (restored) homogeneity and wholeness. On the other hand, the novel can also be read against the grain as showing the narrator as constructing or dramatizing the self in a way which undermines such humanist convictions. The theatrical metaphor set up at the very start and later used by the narrator to criticize Ruth for the inauthenticity of her behaviour ironically applies to the narrator himself. His response to his identity crisis is precisely theatrical. In the first place, the crisis is expounded by the narrator in polarized terms which seek to dramatize the self. In the second place, the perceived lack in the self is to be covered up by the acting out of a particular mission, one full of gender presuppositions. That performative dimension is especially evident when the narrator wants to make sexual advances to Rosario but doubts his capacity to fulfil the expectations of virility within the local context. The point here is whether he will be seen adequately to perform the role of assertive, controlling male. The self-doubt is a form of gender panic in relation to the selected ego-ideal. Having chosen to recreate his identity via the encounter with the tough frontier culture of the jungle, does he know how to play the man with Rosario? Is his cosmopolitan sophistication not likely to be perceived as feminizing, a diminution of his masculine credentials? In short, anxiety reduces the narrator to the position of an adolescent with first night nerves. To live up to expectations, he plays the part of the protective male and fights Yannes when Mouche has foolishly encouraged the Greek's sexual advances, and the result is hardly a great success. Shortly after, in order to impress Rosario with his macho assertiveness, he plays the jealous lover in relation to Mouche so as to mitigate the perceived effeminacy of his delicate shirt. For all the self-questioning in New York, there is no attention paid by him to the crucial point that at least part of what is in crisis is the masculine ego. His dilemma is largely the breakdown of masculine self-affection and it appears to trigger a narcissistic desire for self-regeneration and re-representation, a process which in practice means renewal as repetition of the self-same not as innovation or change.

It is the manner of reconstituting the narrator's ego after the early crisis which is crucial in uncovering the implicit gender economy in Los pasos perdidos. And in that regard, it is helpful to bear in mind the psychoanalytical view of the narcissistic ego which posits the ego not as an entity, agency or psychical content, but as constituted via the subject's relations with others. In this model, various libidinal investments in others are decisive for the ego's outline and features. As Lacan theorizes it, the ego is oriented and shaped around two functions, one being a joyful, affirmative self-recognition (in which the ego delights in a perceived unity of self-image), and the other being a paranoiac condition which issues from a divided, vulnerable subjectivity. On this view, the ego oscillates between a thirst for pleasure and self-aggrandizement, and the insecurity and frustration emerging from interpersonal relations. This duality is apparent in the narrator's relations with the women characters (as outlined above), insofar as he represents them as either utterly negative and damaging to him (Ruth and Mouche), or vital for his self-affirmation (Rosario). The point is that the construction of objects of aggression and otherness and of objects of desire is an inseparably dual process and part of the oscillating instability of ego constitution.

In the light of such a view of the ego and its libidinal investments, it is not surprising to see the mutations in the narrator's ego-ideal as circumstances change. The finding of the rare musical instrument which is his ostensible mission in the jungle releases a sense of fulfilment, of a self in control and in conformity with desire (the narrator lives up to his own and the Curator/Father's expectation). But once the narrator has decided to renounce the West and its values, he feels uncomfortable with the instrument that he has appropriated. Just as he switches his sexual desire from Mouche to Rosario in the course of the novel, so he now searches for another way to consolidate his ego and his object becomes a way of life in harmony with his surroundings. He stresses a kind of mythic quest for roots, a return from a decadent social being to a "natural" life in the jungle, and he praises himself for losing fat and overcoming his accumulated urban tensions: he affirms his physical and mental well-being, just as he rhapsodizes about Nature and silence in the jungle. The musical instrument becomes part of the rejected other—the West—which has so damaged him with its values and impositions. Here one sees precisely a process of affirmative desire being superseded by decisive othering as the narrator's ego slithers between identifications. But the West cannot be expunged so easily: the new attempt at self-recognition in the jungle is no more than the West's own fantasy of a pure object of desire—the "simple life." The truth of that delusion is manifest at the end when the narrator cannot return to Santa Mónica and cannot reappropriate Rosario, who is now another man's partner. Both aspects of this frustration disrupt his ideal and he reacts by seeking a defence: faced with the denial of his desire and the failure of the Oedipal narrative, a new image of the self is proposed which amounts to an affirmative misrecognition. The narrator's self-reconstruction consists in falling back on the Western myth of the archetypal cultural outsider: the frustration of self-fulfilment is transmuted into a revalorized isolation; being denied a return to the "prehistoric" world of Santa Mónica, he affirms his "tragic" identity as one of the select few who cannot escape his time:

la única raza humana que está impedida de desligarse de las fechas es la raza de quienes hacen arte, y no sólo tienen que adelantarse a un ayer inmediato, representado en testimonios tangibles, sino que se anticipan al canto y forma de otros que vendrán después, creando nuevos testimonios tangibles en plena conciencia de lo hecho hasta hoy. Marcos y Rosario ignoran la historia. El Adelantado se sitúa en su primer capítulo, y hubiera podido permanecer a su lado si mi oficio hubiera sido cualquier otro que el de componer música—oficio de cabo de raza.

The narcissistic ego is thus reaffirmed via the myth of the creative artist destined to suffer, and it is notable that the mention of "raza" projects an identity over which the individual has no control: this is a self-affirmation in passivity, and that is a convenient alibi for failure with the previous image of the self. The effort at self-aggrandizement in the face of the frustrated desire appears even more fragile if one considers the grounds for the narrator's claim that his identity is constituted as that of "composer," for in what sense is he really a composer? He repudiates his professional musical life at the start of the novel, and in the jungle manages to write part of one piece of music. This is a rather flimsy basis on which to affirm an identity. The affirmation here is at best a partial misrecognition, but cannot lay claim to any totalizing unity. This is another imaginary device that, despite an earlier apparent turning against the West, is a reaffirmation of a central Western cultural myth of identity.

The reaffirmation is hardly surprising, however, as the West remains central to (if often negative in) his mode of thinking throughout. He rejects much of what is associated with the West as part of his effort to valorize the other and another identity: the criticism of the West and the valorizing of Latin America are always paired. He dismisses the West as in terminal decline because of the loss of its authority in World War Two: Nazism is taken as a synecdoche for this decline, witnessed by him in travelling through Europe in the aftermath of the war. However, the decline of the West and the rejection of its values succumb to a rather gestural rhetoric—his insistence on ending and rupture are hardly in evidence in his own cultural performance. For, despite the rhetoric of rupture, there is a crucial continuity within his values and assessments. The narrator's discourse is saturated with cultural references to the West which seek to create a framework to understand the new. Western culture, far from being in decline and remote, is constantly reactivated in this process. There are detailed references not only to Western painting and to the Bible, but above all to Western literature and music. So frequent are the literary and musical allusions that they become rather mannered and predictable: no new encounter or experience can pass without being understood by some cultural analogy which comes to seem domesticating.

In clinging to Western music the narrator is repeating a process which is consistent in all aspects of his life. González Echevarría pinpoints this contradiction in him, relating it to Carpentier's writing:

lo que Carpentier anhela es poder crear un arte que se escape de la influencia europea, donde las cosas ya tienen nombre. La dificultad de esta empresa comienza por el hecho de que la misma noción de escapar de Europa tiende a ser, como en este lugar común mismo, europea. El drama del protagonistanarrador de la novela se encuentra en este deseo que le resulta imposible satisfacer, y que lo traiciona a cada paso.

So, the narrator "goes back" in time only to set himself the task of composing "authentic" twentieth-century music. The same is true of his gender identity: for all his alienation from Western culture, the structure of masculine subjectivity acquired in it is never put at risk. The discourses of literature, music, philosophy and the Bible which saturate the writing of the narrator are a sign of his commitment to a certain imposing gender identity: his agency and power are heavily inscribed in the process of making sense with this material. This arrogant mastering almost obliterates the other, despite the rhetoric of renewal. The representation is monological—a totalitarian pretension seeks to control everything. This pretension appears to be a function of the masculine ego, such that the discourse deployed in the novel can be seen as entirely congruent with his mission to forge an identity: the perspective of the novel aims at narcissistic self-replication.

The narrator's voracious interpretation of the world is also manifest in his use of dialogue. It is not just that he hardly ever presents the actual words of his interlocutors, but that, in paraphrasing his own and others' words he constantly introduces explanations, interpretations, justifications and criticisms to diminish others and to enhance his own position. So he meets three young artists in Los Altos, but their conversation is obliterated beneath what matters more to him: his own opinions about them and modernist art. Or he admits to having forgotten what Ruth said to him in criticizing his selfish behaviour with other women but nonetheless delivers a wholly critical assessment of her "tragic performance" of betrayal, as though he had not been unfaithful to her. This way of treating the speech of interlocutors begins in the very first dialogue with the Curator, and it is clearly a manner of exercising power and consolidating his ego. He constantly interprets others and justifies himself, so that his ego virtually saturates the text. The voice of the other can hardly be heard to speak. Those very few occasions on which the direct words of others are presented are all highly revealing, showing a resistance to or incisive comment on the narrator. These are moments of truly dialogic potential, in the Bakhtinian sense. Hence, when Mouche says: "'Este viaje estaba escrito en la pared,'" it has a far-reaching resonance, and, as González Echevarría points out, it has a real relevance to the question of freedom or determinism for the whole of the narrator's enterprise. Similarly, Mouche's crazed cry of "'¡Cochinos!'" when she sees the narrator and Rosario making love openly in front of her, is an effective deflation of all of his words of self-justification for abandoning her for Rosario. When the narrator's discourse momentarily falters, a clear (if brief) critique of him is usually apparent. For example, his jealousy about Mouche's relation with the Canadian painter (whether sexual or not) leaves him incensed and full of homophobic accusations but utterly unable to say the word "lesbian." His coy circumlocutions and flimsy imaginings are ironic proof of his inability to tolerate the other. Such momentary interruptions of his discourse need to be very carefully noted in order to achieve perspective on his egocentric viewpoint.

Some of the difficulties in the novel concerned with the monologic gender and cultural blindness are encapsulated in a description which the narrator makes of his musical composition, Treno. He says that he aims to combine polyphonic and harmonic writing:

pensaba yo lograr una coexistencia de la escritura polifónica y la de tipo armónico, concertadas, machihembradas, según las leyes más auténticas de la música, dentro de una oda vocal y sinfónica, en constante aumento de intensidad expresiva, cuya concepción general era, por lo pronto, bastante sensata.

Now polyphonic music involves the combining of independent voices in a counterpoint: different lines sound together. In harmonic music one melodic line is complemented by other layers of sound which enhance or underpin its effect. The narrator's aim is to combine these two major types of writing and it is significant that they are described in gender terms as "machihembradas." It is not clear whether it is appropriate to assume that one of the compositional styles is inherently masculine, the other feminine. But the key issue would be whether such a compositional fusion would be possible. On the evidence of the narrator's literary writing, I would suggest that it is not. However, González Echevarría proposes in a footnote that the musical objective is achieved in the novel, maintaining that it is polyphonic:

En varios sentidos esta descripción del Treno parece corresponder a la novela misma: polifonía de voces alrededor de la del protagonista-narrador. Es decir, muchos textos que se entretejen alrededor de su voz.

Unfortunately this assessment misconstrues the nature of polyphony, since, for other voices to be organized around that of the narrator, implies an harmonic relationship with a dominant voice. Moreover, González Echevarría does not mention here the role of harmonic writing, which in the narrator's theory is supposed to coexist with polyphony. In fact, the narrator perfectly describes the dominant format of the novel which is organized around a dominant voice: the narrator's own. And one might call that an harmonic (or monological) arrangement. There are multiple texts and references in Los pasos perdidos, but the question is: how are they deployed? The answer appears to me to be that they are deployed almost always within the mastering discourse of one voice. Truly polyphonic, dialogical moments are rare indeed. If one followed the narrator's own lead and saw the different compositional or writing styles in gender terms there is no doubt that what is achieved in Los pasos perdidos by the narrator is a masculist discourse of exclusion and manipulation, offset by some irony or counterpointed fragmentedly when other voices become briefly audible.