SOURCE: Jones, Julie. “Text and Authority in Elena Garro's Reencuentro de personajes.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 18, no. 1 (March 1991): 41-50.

[In the following essay, Jones explores notions of identity—particularly Mexican identity—and authority in Reencuentro de personajes.]

Reencuentro de personajes involves a cast of Mexican expatriates whose sense of self is based on their having met Scott Fitzgerald years ago and their conviction that he has described them in Tender Is the Night and that they also served as models for characters in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The protagonist of Reencuentro, a young Mexican woman modeled on Garro herself, has left her husband for one of this group, “un salvaje vestido a la inglesa” (42), who uses her as a cover for his homosexual liaisons and as an object of humiliation. The plot turns on Verónica's attempt to decipher who, or what, Frank is, and through him, who or what she is herself. Central to the novel is the question of identity—cultural, sexual, personal, and literary—and the related question of authority. These matters are especially problematic in a text that frames other texts and that is further complicated by Garro's hidden agenda. In addition to Tender Is the Night and Brideshead Revisited, another intertext is incorporated covertly and parodically in the novel: El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz's exploration of the Mexican psyche. Further, the novel hints that the reader should look beyond literature to life, specifically Garro's failed marriage to Paz. The title, with its emphasis on self-conscious fictionality, is disingenuous. The mystery of Frank's identity, based on a complex interplay between texts, is solved, not in the works of Fitzgerald or Waugh, but in the character of Paz himself.

Riven from context, the earlier texts are refocused from a marginal perspective. Here secondary characters of ex-centric origin loom large while the protagonists virtually disappear. The originals are inevitably distorted by being trans-contextualized. In her book on parody, Linda Hutcheon argues that a work can be parodic without including ridicule and without being comic. What is essential is the ironic inversion of an earlier text. She cites as example Euripides' Medea, long considered to be a parody of Sophocles and Aeschylus because the hero was replaced with a protagonist who is both a woman and an outsider (6). In this sense, Garro's treatment of the Fitzgerald and Waugh novels is parodic (and it is in this sense that I shall be using the term here). She is not, however, interested in writing an extended parody of these works; instead, she uses them as points of departure for a very different novel.¹

Garro cannibalizes both Brideshead Revisited and Tender Is the Night to make a satiric point about a certain kind of Latin American, the kind that looks to foreign models for definition. Together the two novels exercise an almost biblical authority over the characters in Reencuentro, who find in them a culture to be emulated and keys for understanding their destiny: hence the extensive, reverent use of quotation. The parodic elevation of both works to sacred texts of Western culture points to a concern that Garro broaches in an interview. She argues that there is a close link between a sense of national identity and the great works of fiction:

[e]l escritor es el que da el patrón de cómo vamos a ser. Homero inventó al griego. A partir de Homero todos los griegos fueron iguales. Todos fueron Aquiles. Cervantes inventó al español. A partir de Cervantes, hubo Sancho Panza y el Quijote. O'Neill ha inventado a los americanos. Scott Fitzgerald inventó toda la época moderna. Pero el mexicano. Todavía no ha nacido el genio que nos diga cómo somos, o cómo debemos ser.

(Sommers 215)²

Lacking this model, Garro's characters are forced into an absurd dependence on the foreign text.

Garro, then, treats questions of origin, legitimacy and authority here as functions of the written word. In Reencuentro we are faced with characters whose sense of self has been fixed by the literature of other peoples—hence Frank's insistence on speaking English, wearing English suits and inventing friendships with people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the tenacity with which everyone in his group clings to the memory of their brief meeting with Scott Fitzgerald. By claiming a stake in the novels that define the modern period, they hope to arrogate for themselves some portion of the authority, the legitimacy, reserved for the elect of the time—the North Americans (and to a lesser degree the English), triumphant expatriates who claimed Paris as their own during the Jazz Age. The Latin Americans were distinctly eccentric, in both senses of the word—Anthony Blanche's absurd affectations, Francisco's nickname—“The Queen of Chile”—and Campion's penchant for public displays of weeping come to mind. Dependent on foreign sources for definition and fixated on an earlier period, Garro's characters are a congery of pretensions and gestures enclosing a void, not personas but personajes, as the title suggests, reduced to repeating the secondary roles that are meted out to them. Watching them gathered together, Verónica reflects that,

Había algo fantasmal en aquella reunión, algo artificial, como si cada uno de los huéspedes jugara un papel ya representado muchos años antes por los verdaderos protagonistas de alguna comedia que Verónica ignoraba, pero que al mismo tiempo conocía a través de la literatura, del cine y de los periódicos de la década de los años veinte. …

(213)

Finally, she concludes that they are all impostors.

This effort on the part of the characters to appropriate an identity, to assert their right to a position in the center rather than the periphery of an ethnocentric world, in other words, to affirm their legitimacy in terms of society is underlined by the question of personal legitimacy. Paz argues that “la cuestión del origen es el centro secreto de nuestra ansiedad y angustia” (72). Both Frank's and Eddy's mothers are notorious for their affairs, and Eddy argues that “todos los sudamericanos estamos hechos del mismo barro. Su madre era una vieja puta y su padre un viejo cornudo” (216). Frank has his father certified. The act of usurpation allows him to feel secure about his origin—he is, imaginatively at least, self-engendered—and also makes it possible for him to assume the father's authority, which in the Oedipal scheme is absolute. Even more brutal in his search for social legitimacy, Frank resorts to illicit, not to say anti-social, means: he murders Logan, the rich North American whose fortune he and his partner (Logan's new wife, Cora) will share, and later murders at least two other people who threaten to expose him.

Frank and Cora are both mestizos—literally and figuratively—caught between the world of high civilization, represented by Paris and the English public schools, and an archaic world in which violence offers a natural solution to difficulties: “Algo que venía del fondo de los siglos lo empujaba [a Frank] a conducirse de una manera bárbara y lo dejaba solo, en posesión de un universo ajeno al [de Verónica], en el que tenían sucesos oscuros, olvidados hacía ya mucho tiempo …” (41-42). The key to Frank's character is not really to be found in Fitzgerald and Waugh. Rather it is furnished by a text never mentioned in the novel: El laberinto de la soledad, a book which sets out to do what Garro denied had been done for the Mexicans: to tell them who they are.

In El laberinto, Paz describes the Mexican man as isolated, hermetic, hidden, his relationship with the outside world governed by his concept of life as “una posibilidad de chingar o de ser chingado. Es decir, de humillar, castigar y ofender. O a la inversa” (71). Frank is a parodic version of Paz's Mexican. He, too, is solitary—“Se movía en un mundo aislado y donde él llegaba se producía la soledad absoluta” (94)—, hidden—he lies, uses different names, assumes different attitudes, pretends to be dead—and a real chingón. Having failed in his attempt to form a new identity based on foreign cultural models (Frank never really cuts the mustard in Europe), he simply moves on to another rôle, asserting his hombría over the vulnerable. Homosexual himself—and this, of course, is a logical extension of machismo—he picks as targets the passive homosexuals for whom, according to Paz, the Mexican reserves his scorn (71), and Verónica, who becomes a social outcast when she leaves her husband. By humiliating Verónica, who looks English and is socially adept, Frank manages to revenge himself, however obliquely, on the culture that has rejected him.

Yet for all her sophistication, Verónica, too, believes in a world divided along lines of authority and obedience. For her, the concept is idealized in the relationship between father and daughter. As she sees it, her unhappiness is the direct result of filial disobedience: “Su primer mal paso había sido desobedecer a su padre y casarse sin su consentimiento; después había caído sobre ella el diluvio y desde ese día el terror se apoderó de ella” (29). Like all adults, Verónica must now live, irremediably, in the fallen world, but for her there is no notion of felix culpa; instead, she longs for an impossible return to childhood: “Si pudiera volver a su casa y olvidar que alguna vez salió de ella para enfrentarse al mundo dejaría de estar aterrada” (202). The paternal home continues to represent for her an ideal of stability and order:

Cuando era niña, en su casa de niña las palabras, el pan y los gestos tenían un lugar exacto y los efectos eran tan permanentes como los colores de Fra Angélico, las Puertas del Paraíso de Gluberti (sic) o la música de Mozart. Ahora no tenía casa, sus hermanos se hallaban perdidos entre cuñados y cuñadas extrañas (sic), la selva había invadido a su familia.

(43)

In his discussion of the radical solitude in which the Mexican lives, Paz comments that in some cases, among them those involving separation from the parents, “la soledad se identifica con la orfandad y ambos se manifiestan como conciencia de pecado” (58). While some races may transcend the loneliness and the shame that accompanies this consciousness of separation, he argues, the Mexican remains closed up within the self (58). For Verónica there is no question of redemption; she subscribes to an Old Testament morality that accords well with the Mexican popular story about the little girl who is transformed into a monster because she disobeyed her parents. Convinced of her essential guiltiness and terrified of new punishment, Verónica readily accedes to the demands of Frank, who is much older, calls her “chiquita,” keeps her in a state of total dependence and punishes her for her transgressions.

Eddy says, “A los niños hay que educarlos en la desobediencia, sólo así pueden librarse de personajes tan funestos como Cora y Frank” (214). Verónica's idealization of childhood and her habit of obedience make her an easy prey for these exacting step-parents. Rather than an inversion, the drama played out in the stark Paris flat is a stripped down version of the play enacted at home. The relationship between Verónica and Frank lays bare the structure of control which in the familial relationship is naturalized. The furnished apartment Verónica and Frank rent in Paris is a heartless version of the paternal home:

Las chimeneas de mármol blanco estaban apagadas y los muebles de seda eran inhospitalarios. … De ese piso de techos altos y muros blancos [Verónica] sólo recordaba el aire frío que corría por las cortinas y soplaba sobre su cama de dosel. Había una presencia opresora en el apartamento. … ‘Aquí hay un maleficio,’ se decía.

(94-95)

Upstairs, the landlord's quarters are decorated with erotic objects that proclaim his interest in necrophilia. Verónica notices in particular a doll that hangs inside a black cage. Later she associates Frank's love-making with the landlord's necrophilia and her own fate with the doll's (104), and notes that in Frank's hands, “se convertía en objeto y el acto amoroso en una mecánica erótica” (94)—natural outcome of a view that reduces the world to a place where you use or get used. The home, then, that should provide protection, itself becomes a source of danger, a prison instead of a shelter, where the act of love is associated only with death.

The city is an extension of the apartment. Garro shows no interest in rendering either the dense life or the monuments of Paris. Although the characters talk constantly of Fitzgerald and Waugh, no street scene brings a passage to mind. There are no street scenes. Except for a network of spies and accomplices, the city seems emptied out, depopulated, an absence rather than a presence. Verónica is occasionally reminded of its beauty, but it remains inaccessible. Instead, she faces a landscape out of nightmare in which “vampiros” (138) “circulan en la noche” (133). For Véronica, it is coterminous with adulthood, the post-edenic world she identifies with her sense of terror (cf. 29 and 202).

Ironically, for all that Paris represents in terms of the social validation so dear to the heart of the Mexicans as they are rendered both in this novel and in El laberinto de la soledad, the city is derealized here; it is a blank screen against which primitive struggles are projected, a place where the darker forces are loosed under the cover of anonymity. Having failed in his attempt to penetrate “el centro de la sociedad” (193-94), Frank takes advantage of his ex-centricity. In Mexico where he is known, he is careful about observing the social norms (even his elopement with Verónica is a sanctioned part of male behaviour), but in Paris he gives free rein to his impulses. The city serves as an open field in which to practice the very Mexican sport of doing to others before they can do to you (Paz 71).

Finally, like many Latin Americans whose social expectations are frustrated, Frank returns home. There his display of European culture and North American wealth command respect. His life has followed a trajectory similar to his mother's, who begins by embracing all that is English and winds up in her old age imitating Dolores del Río (82). In Mexico, where he lives with his mother, his wife and his four children, Frank enjoys the authority of the señor: “Había logrado envejecer con honores. Vivía en su país rodeado de lujo y de respecto” (249). Verónica stays on in Paris, a victim more of her own fear than of Frank, endlessly rereading Tender Is the Night and Brideshead Revisited because she is convinced that her destiny is inscribed in the pages of those novels. For her the city is a prison.

As I suggested earlier, Fitzgerald's and Waugh's works function here as the sacred texts of Western culture; they represent the Word and, as such, serve the characters as both a model for behaviour and a source of revelation. Viewed as reenactment, the characters' lives seem to be already written, therefore predestined, and their identities subsumed in the rôle—hence the title. But these works are inevitably distorted in the translation as they are put to uses that the authors surely never envisaged. Further, the two novels are infiltrated covertly by a third text—El laberinto de la soledad. As a result, Anthony Blanche is found conspiring with a beautiful mestiza to murder a rich North American and assure his own place in the beau monde, and Fitzgerald is chided for missing the mark in his portrayal of the “Queen of Chile” because he did not understand “Frank.” Like much parody, Reencuentro de personajes sets out to amend the earlier works, supplementing here what it sees as inadequate. Finally, the novel—juncture of these three texts—remits the informed reader to a fourth source—Garro's version of her failed marriage to Paz.

Although she never openly alludes to the marriage, she does provide clues suggesting that for her portrait of Frank she drew not only on El laberinto de la soledad, but also on its author. She and Paz were married, in a ceremony of dubious legality, in 1937; in 1945, they moved to Paris, where, like Frank and Verónica, they took an apartment on the Avenue Victor Hugo. Her comments show that she felt herself victimized by a Paz whom she saw as high-handed and prone to give orders while she herself was only too obedient (“A mí se me ha ocurrido todo al revés” 41 and passim). This novel, like Testimonios sobre Mariana, which also involves characters modeled on Garro and her ex-husband, was written before she left Paris in 1964 but after Paz had deserted her and married again (Garro 1986, 69). At the end of Reencuentro de personajes, Verónica is left alone in Paris, still controlled at a distance by Frank and too fearful to go to the police with the notebook that would reveal his crimes. Garro, too, was fearful of publishing the novel in which she would expose the ‘real’ Paz (I am speaking, of course, of the version of Paz adumbrated here). As she told Joseph Sommers in a 1965 interview, “Es muy terrible y no me atrevo a publicarla” (217). She did not do so until almost twenty years after she wrote it.

In writing and ultimately, if belatedly, publishing the work, Garro stakes out her own claim to authority, but she does so obliquely, hiding behind Fitzgerald and Waugh, structuring her account of the relationship as a crime story (as, indeed, she may have seen it). One of her goals apparently was to defame Paz in such a way that he would be unable to defend himself. The novel hints that the key to Frank's identity involves Garro's ex-husband but states that the solution to this enigma is to be found in Tender Is the Night and Brideshead Revisited. In his review of Testimonios sobre Mariana, Daniel Balderston discusses the deployment of gossip as a narrative strategy: “[a]taca al acercarse al terreno del mundo real, y se defiende al refugiarse en el terreno de la imaginación” (115). What makes it so effective, he suggests, is the ease with which it moves from one world to another. This use of gossip accords beautifully with the requirements for revenge: that the offender recognize that vengeance is being taken and that the avenger escape punishment for the revenge.

The intricate play between texts which marks the novel is, then, in part a cover-up, but it also points to a legitimate concern with the problem of Latin American identity—specifically, the sense that Latin Americans are the creation of other, more powerful, cultures, that they are, to quote Paz, who is summarizing Zea, “pensados por otros” (152). Garro uses parody here to a satiric end: to expose both the Anglo-American arrogance of attitude toward what they would consider “Wogs” and the inferiority complex that led many Latin Americans to share this attitude. She takes the idea seriously, but treats it playfully. How else can we explain why her characters conceive of the absurd notion that their destiny has been written by Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh and that they are stuck with the minor rôles assigned to them?

But Garro also explores a counter-movement that reverses the direction of the Conquest; i.e. the exploitation of Europe, particularly Paris, by picaroons like Frank who acquire the cultural trappings and the wealth there that will enable them to retire to the good life at home, much as the indianos once did after making their fortunes in America. If Paris had at one point become synonymous with self-fulfillment and freedom, a kind of utopia of the spirit, it takes on here the more material guise of an El Dorado open to plunder. Verónica calls it “la ciudad irremediable; cuando ya no queda nada por hacer, los desesperados buscan siempre a París” (84-85). Like the American wilderness, it is populated by the castoffs of other societies. The only French character in the novel is the maid, Yvette; the others are Latin American, East European, and Turkish. For Verónica, it is a penal colony where she is condemned to harsh labour in the modern Parisian equivalent of the mine: the boutique.

This exploitation and inversion of cultural expectations is reflected at the level of the text by Garro's blatant appropriation of the earlier novels. In Reencuentro, as we have seen, they become part of something quite different. Oswald de Andrade describes this process of active textual and cultural consumption as “anthropophagy … a critical devouring of the European contribution, and its transformation into a new product” (paraphrased in Campos 231). Although Garro does not openly attack Fitzgerald's and Waugh's texts, her focus on the marginal and the exceptional conveys an implicit criticism of their ethnocentric view of the Latin American.

Garro supplements this inadequate view with types borrowed from El laberinto de la soledad, portrait of the Mexican written by a Mexican. But this work too is undercut in Reencuentro, where Garro exaggerates—and consequently ironizes—Paz's ideas, presenting the archetypal Mexican as a homosexual thug with a veneer of culture and a history of crime, and his consort as a victim who is terrified that her lover will murder her. Recast as melodrama and focused from the perspective of the woman, Paz's text is destabilized and he himself is accused of the related phenomena that he analyzes: imitation and hombría.

Garro parodies Paz's text here with a double intent. She mounts a ferocious argumentum ad hominem, but she also explores the effects of the patriarchal system on an intelligent and cultivated woman. She is very aware of the sexual analogue of literary and cultural colonialism. The protagonist of Reencuentro is a woman whose part has been assigned her (in other words, who has been thought up) by others—her father (who has cast her out for disobedience), her husband (whom she flees), Frank, Fitzgerald, Waugh and, indirectly, Paz. The sense of terror infusing the novel comes not so much from Verónica's exile in the adult world as from her being helplessly caught in a plot—both meanings are relevant here, as well as the Spanish complot—that she does not quite understand and whose text she dares not edit, only interpret. She is in a very literal sense the lector-hembra to which Cortázar derisively refers, entrapped in that rôle by the cultural forces that created her.

Yet curiously enough, although parodying it, Garro does not reject Paz's concept of Mexican identity. Indeed, her experience must have authenticated that vision of a society in which the strong exercise an unwritten right to prey on the weak. Yet her outrage is directed not so much against the system, as against the allocation of power. The novel is a plea not for a more humane approach to human relations, but for a shift in power. Verónica's response to Frank's cruelty is the reiterated threat, “Me pagarás,” a promise she cannot make good. In Reencuentro, only Garro is the final source of authority, arrogating for herself the say-so that escaped her in the marriage as it does her helpless surrogate, who reads her fate in the works of others. Garro claims the authority of the victim, of one who has suffered and learned from real experience. The appeal to life authenticates her position; it is through the text that she asserts it, and she intends to have an influence that goes beyond the literary. The transformation from victim to author—someone who wields authority in the text—by means of the pen suggests a parallel sexual transformation from “chingada” to “chingona.” The novel is brilliantly calculated to humiliate her ex-husband. In doing so, Garro demonstrates, quite unconsciously I suspect, the concept of Mexican identity that Paz both decries and, according to her, embodies: the vision of life as “una posibilidad de chingar o de ser chingado.”

Notes

1. The game of literary doubles is fairly complicated. Briefly, Garro identifies Frank with Francisco, “the Queen of Chile,” a character who makes a brief appearance in Tender Is the Night. The scene is cited in full in Reencuentro. The young man's father asks Dick Diver to use his skill as a psychoanalyst in order to cure the son's homosexuality. Diver interviews Francisco, but soon determines that he does not want to be cured and so refuses to take the case. Garro identifies Eddy with Luis Campion, a lachrymose fellow who appears more frequently in the novel. Fitzgerald uses both Campion and Francisco to point up his theme of moral decay. According to Garro's novel, he met their prototypes while he was staying in Lausanne at a time when Zelda was under treatment at a nearby psychiatric clinic. If such a meeting did take place, it would have been in 1930-31, but there is no reference in the Fitzgerald literature to the author's having any definite models in mind for Francisco and Campion. Garro claims in an interview that she herself met these people in Paris around 1961, but she does not mention names. (In the interview with Michele Muncy, she explains the inception of the novel in terms of this meeting—67, but I shall argue later that she had a more pressing motive for writing.) As for Brideshead Revisited, Garro argues that Frank, who sometimes uses the alias Arturo F. Bartlett, served Waugh as the model for Anthony Blanche, “el esteta por excelencia. El modelo perfecto de la iniquidad” (260, Garro cites BR in translation). Blanche contributes to the downfall of Sebastian, an innocent figure connected in Reencuentro with Mikel, who was seduced and abandoned by Frank many years before and whose fate and appearance are repeated in Verónica. Most authorities agree that Waugh's portrait of Anthony Blanche was based primarily on his good friend Harold Acton—much to Acton's dismay—with a few traces of Brian Howard. See the discussion in The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (791, 797). In Verónica's judgment, “Fitzgerald no entendió a Frank, lo juzgó banal e intrascendente, no supo descubrir el mal que yacía activo en aquel jovenzuelo” (261). It is Waugh, she believes, who understood Frank's potential for evil. In Brideshead, then, Garro seizes on Blanche's cruelty and his air of viciousness and, of course, on his cosmopolitan background—he is an Argentine Jew, educated at Eton—while choosing to overlook both the comic elements in Waugh's portrayal and his insistence on Blanche's great intelligence.

2. Implicit in the comment, as I shall argue later, is the insistence that Octavio Paz, who has set out to do just what she describes here, is not that genius.

Works Cited

Balderston, Daniel. Rev. of Testimonios sobre Mariana, by Elena Garro. Hisp 36 (1983): 114-16.

Campos, Haroldo de. “Beyond Exclusive Languages,” Latin America in Its Literature. César Fernández Moreno, Julio Ortega and Ivan A. Schulman, eds. Trans. Mary G. Berg. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980. 221-43.

Garro, Elena. “A mí se me ha ocurrido todo al revés,” CHA 346 (1979): 38-51.

———. Reencuentro de personajes. México: Grijalba, 1982.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. London: Methuen, 1985.

Muncy, Michele, ed. “Encuentro con Elena Garro,” HisJ 7.2 (1986): 65-71.

Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad [1950]. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.

Sommers, Joseph. “Entrevista con Elena Garro,” 26 autoras del México actual. Beth Miller and Alfonso González, ed. México: Costa-Amica, 1978. 204-19.

Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Michael Davie, ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.