SOURCE: Ibsen, Kristine. “Self-Representation, Silence, and the Discourse of Madness in Testimonios sobre Mariana.” Confluencia 14, no. 2 (spring 1999): 93-102.

[In the following essay, Ibsen examines the meaning of Mariana's silence in Testimonios sobre Mariana.]

Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
Nor with a Stone—
A Whip so small you could not see it.

—Emily Dickinson

In societies where the female subject has traditionally been more closely affiliated with the private, rather than the public, sphere, the act of writing itself may suggest a transgression of authority. The integration of autobiographical elements in female-authored texts violates cultural boundaries twice over: not merely by writing, but by making public details of a private life. In her controversial novel, Testimonios sobre Mariana (1981), Mexican author Elena Garro (1920-1998) simultaneously diverts and subverts this impasse by presenting the life-story of her protagonist, Mariana, through three conflicting narrative perspectives, or “testimonies.” Although the outlines of the characters are clearly—and admittedly—modeled after Garro's turbulent marriage to the poet Octavio Paz, conspicuously silent, and silenced, in the novel is the voice of Mariana herself.¹ Always the object, and never the subject, of her own narration, Mariana is a center that is absent. At the same time, however, it is precisely within this absence that such facile dichotomies as private/public, reality/fantasy, madness/sanity are put into question. Ultimately, by challenging the nature of perceived reality the rejection of the center becomes an ideological position of its own.

Conventional mimetic notions of the representation of the self are similarly decentered as Garro effects a textually mediated game between the offered and the deferred, the revealed and the hidden. Indeed, despite the use of referents from Garro's personal history, the fact that neither Mariana nor her husband, Augusto, participate in the narration deflates the notion that the text may be read as unmediated autobiography. Mariana's apparent suicide at the end of the novel further problematizes the identification between life and literature. The witnesses' testimonies, moreover, prove conspicuously limited: most notably, none of them knows exactly what caused the break between Augusto and Mariana, and their narrations provide few clues to guide the reader towards the resolution of this central puzzle. Since all three narrators—Vicente, Gabrielle and André—admit their limitations, each, like the reader and, perhaps, as Delia Galván suggests, like Mariana/Garro herself, must try to discern the boundaries between fiction and reality, memory and imagination, between private and public (65). Each witness tries to create a coherent account of Mariana and her relation with Augusto according to preconceived notions of reality, but discovers that the representation of the “truth” is difficult to capture in words. Indeed, the only written texts that remain of Mariana are not exploited: Mariana's diary and Vicente's letters, which could help clarify the mystery, are left by Gabrielle at the bottom of a trunk; and Mariana's letters to Vicente are alluded to only in passing, although they corresponded frequently and for many years.² Although, as Gabrielle insinuates, Augusto's position precludes the revelation of the “trágica verdad sobre una bella desconocida” (282), it remains unexplained why she does not use these documents as sources for her testimony. The “true” story, the novel suggests, is left in silence.

Faced with such textual gaps, the witnesses, much like the reader, attempt to “read” Mariana, either situating her in a preconceived textual frame or projecting on to her their own fallibilities. The verbalization of lived experience is further complicated in the novel by the literary function of each witness as reader and as writer. At least one narrator, Gabrielle, is writing a novel about Mariana, upon which she has contrived a happy ending where she professes as a nun. Barnaby, who appears only as a secondary character in the novel, has also published a book about Mariana. In addition, as Kathy Taylor points out, Vicente's memory of their relation is continually rendered in literary terms (65), as characters: “veo que ambos quedamos escritos en el tiempo, como esas palabras escritas con tinta secreta y que sólo mediante determinada substancia resultan legibles, a pesar de aparecer en un papel en blanco o de llevar visible otro mensaje” (11, emphasis added); or as readers of life: “Imaginé que en la vida de cualquier lector asiduo, como era mi caso, debía aparecer alguna vez una muchacha como ella, ajena a las lecturas y hecha sólo para tener aventuras fulgurantes” (22). Vicente alludes to life as “un juego literario” (53), declaring that Augusto, as a symbol of power, “había cerrado el capitulo” of his relation with Mariana (74). Gabrielle also uses literary metaphors as she observes that “La vida de mi amiga no era su propia vida, estaba determinada por personajes que se acercaban a ella, dejaban su huella y desaparecían” (194, emphasis added); she further alludes to the fragile line between fiction and reality when she notes: “Fue entonces cuando se me ocurrió escribir una novela sobre su vida, recordé que la naturaleza imita al arte y decidí darle un final feliz, que cambiaría su destino” (209, emphasis added). More significant still are the words Gabrielle as author uses to describe her power to guide her fictional Mariana back to the comforting refuge of a “happy ending”: “[M]i personaje era complejo, su vida era un inexplicable laberinto, pero yo la conduciría a través de aquellos vericuetos tenebrosos a una salida inesperadamente luminosa” (209, emphasis added). Nonetheless, for all their literary pretensions, ultimately, the witnesses are poor readers: hindered by the precariousness of subjective memory, their testimonies reveal more about themselves than about Mariana.³ Of course, the ultimate irony is that the narrators themselves are literary creations of Garro. In short, Mariana exists only as a verbal creation of others, and this creation itself is shaded by memory; or as Taylor observes, she is “the memory of a memory” (65).

The circles of reality with which the reader must contend are further expanded by the discourses of others and in particular, by the “chorus” of testimonies surrounding and manipulated by Augusto. These embedded narrations produce a tension between definitions from outside and lived experience. Vicente “knows” Mariana first through what his friend Pepe tells him, and his version of events continues to be shaded by Pepe's testimony. When he finally meets Mariana, he attempts to fashion her in accord with that mental picture he has created, regardless of its discrepancy with what he observes directly. Despite the degree of intimacy eventually established between them, Vicente's perceptions continue to be shaded by Augusto's reading. It is through the repetition of Augusto's words that Vicente attempts to justify his abandonment of Mariana: “‘Se hará vieja pronto y ya no podrá seguir haciendo males,’ había dicho Augusto unos días atrás y me sorprendí pensando lo mismo” (99). Seeking to humiliate Mariana, Vicente takes her to a hotel for prostitutes only to discover that he is still in love with her. He refuses to admit his feelings, however, because, even though she seems to be the same, Augusto's words have convinced him that it is a façade: “Mariana era la misma, sólo que ahora la sabía perversa. Recordé a Augusto y recordé sus palabras: ‘Farisea y prostituta’” (110).

Gabrielle's narration is the longest of the three and perhaps the most well-developed of the testimonies. Significantly, although both Vicente and André are described as Mariana's physical doubles (161, 203, 308), Gabrielle shares something more fundamental: like Mariana, she is obligated by Augusto to keep silent. There are numerous episodes in which Gabrielle states that she disagrees with what was happening or with what was being said, yet she leaves her doubts unvoiced to protect her position as Augusto's assistant: “Quise contestar, pero me paralizó la idea de perder mi empleo. Para obtener un puesto es necesaria una amistad y para conservarlo se necesita una complicidad” (132-133).⁴ Although sympathetic to Mariana, once appropriated by the power structure represented by Augusto, Gabrielle comes to doubt not only Mariana but, indeed, her own memory and sanity: “Yo misma creí haber visto el cheque que Vicente envió para el viaje. ‘No, no puedo estar loca yo también’” (220). Indeed, despite having witnessed first-hand Augusto's verbal abuse of his wife and his treacherous attempt to have her committed to an insane asylum, she often finds herself inclined to accept his version of Mariana: “Por la noche me asaltó la duda: ¿y si el marido de mi amiga estuviera en lo justo? … Sentí compasión por [él] … Era verdad que castigaba con dureza sus fantasías, pero pensándolo bien, vivir con una embustera patológica resultaba vergonzoso. Pero ¿en verdad era una embustera? … Me hundí en un mar de confusiones” (219).⁵ Gabrielle's description of Mariana frequently reverts to conventional positions of representation and duplicity: as narcissism, as masochism, as voyeurism; yet she resists Augusto's authority when she refuses his demand to serve as the “third witness” to have Mariana committed to an insane asylum. Moreover, as Vicente recalls, Mariana considers her friend “una santa” (35) and it is to Gabrielle that she entrusts the trunk containing her most intimate secrets.

Although André's testimony, strategically situated last in the novel, is perhaps the most sympathetic of the three, his meetings with Mariana are similarly characterized by a tension between the testimonies of others and direct experience. Like Vicente, André initially relies upon the testimony of another (his cousin Bertrand) to decipher the enigma that is Mariana and does not begin to understand her until after her death. Skeptical when Bertrand informs him there is apparently no relation between Mariana's scandalous behavior and her moral integrity, he reacts angrily when she spurns his advances: “no supe si era malvada o simplemente fría” (288). Shortly after, when Augusto refuses to return her identity papers and Mariana asks André to help her find a hotel where such papers are not required, his first assumption is that she is interested in an affair (297). Moreover, like the first two witnesses, he doubts his own experience in the face of what he has heard from Augusto and his circle of friends: “Recordé las palabras de Augusto: ‘Es como su familia, miente como respira,’ y la miré iracundo. Augusto tenía razón, no era tan inocente como parecía … ¿Tienes un amante?” (308).

As Taylor notes, the reader occupies a similar subject position as the witnesses, since his or her interpretation of Mariana must be willing to revise its preconceptions as each new testimony of the character is presented (62). Moreover, just as the reader's perception is influenced by previous readings outside the text, the witnesses depend on their literary memory to reconstruct the character of Mariana. It is this textually mediated memory that converts Mariana into archetype: as woman-child, as witch, as prostitute, as madwoman, as nun, as phantom. The notion of Mariana as mad, to which all three witnesses attest (see, for example: 33, 63, 146-147, 298-299), is perhaps the most significant of these categorizations, not so much as it reflects upon the public image of Elena Garro—and it does, of course—but in the way this mental instability is simultaneously reflected and refuted in the fragmentary and digressive structure of the narrative. Clearly, the splintered narrative perspective and lack of a conventional beginning, middle and end in the novel violates the traditional pattern of the autobiographical account; linear progression is further subverted by the death and re-appearance of Mariana in the final sequence. In addition, the repetition of the same fragments and, in particular, the obsessive reiteration of certain themes (for example, Augusto's sadism, Mariana's fear) from three differing points of view further suggests a cyclical configuration reminiscent of madness. Notably, two of the most pronounced textual resonances in the narration are novels that allude to madness. Vicente's description of Mariana bears many similarities to André Breton's Nadja (1928), while André's narration is conspicuously marked by Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia (1855).⁶ By foregrounding the narrators as readers, the novel also implicates the actual reader since, as Shoshana Felman suggests, reading itself “is a kind of madness since it is based on illusion and induces us to identify with imaginary heroes. Madness is nothing less than an intoxicating reading” (Madness and Literature 64). These framing strategies are also significant for the limited role afforded these female figures in the male narration: as Simone de Beauvoir observes, whether incarnated as phantom or as obscure object of desire, the ideal woman in both Nerval and Breton is the object, and never the subject, of the narration that bears her name (Second Sex 222-223).

The presence in the novel of the work of two authors closely affiliated with the nineteenth-century ideologies of madness⁷ makes a comparison of the terms used to describe Mariana with male-authored assessments of women diagnosed as hysterical especially pertinent. In the late nineteenth century, doctors, as Elaine Showalter affirms, “found their hysterical patients selfish, deceitful, and manipulative” (“Hysteria, Feminism and Gender” 302). Henry Maudsley, a British doctor, denounced the “moral perversion” of such young women; while Jules Falret, his French contemporary, described them as “‘veritable actresses’” who derived pleasure from deceit: “‘the life of the hysteric is nothing but one of perpetual falsehood; they affect the airs of piety and devotion and let themselves be taken for saints while at the same time abandoning themselves to the most shameful actions’” (Maudsley 397; Falret 502, emphasis added).⁸ References to Mariana's “abnormal” sexuality and pathological deceit appear throughout the novel. Augusto, who accuses his wife of prostitution (90) alleges that she has invented her affair with Vicente “para justificar su anormalidad frente a los hombres” (128) and that “Sexualmente era patológica a pesar de su aspecto saludable” (141). He further assures Gabrielle that Mariana “Se creía artista y sólo es artista para la mentira … es una simuladora” (146-147). Vicente uses similar language as he alludes to “dos Marianas, una dulce y otra perversa” (98); “Todo en ella era farsa; su amor por mí, su fe en Dios, su sufrimiento” (97; see also 7, 15, 57, 110). André, who doubts the sincerity of her religious devotion (308), interrupts her prayers in the Cathedral of Notre Dame with a kiss, then responds to her continued lack of interest in him by concluding “Augusto tenía razón, Mariana estaba loca y su locura residía en la mentira” (309).

This textualized version of the madness of a creative woman is also significant in light of the association of female hysteria with excessive education in general and with reading in particular (Beiger 49, Brachet 103, Richet 346, Landouzy 264). In the late nineteenth century, as Gustave Flaubert's fictional Emma Bovary illustrates, sexual transgression provoked by the act of reading was posited as a common cause of hysteria (Bernutz 281-282). Freud, who had worked with Jean-Martin Charcot, retains this notion, declaring in one of his most well-known case histories, the story of “Dora” (1905), that “where hysteria is found, there can no longer be any question of ‘innocence of mind’” (61). In “Dora,” Freud associates his female patient's readings with erotic fantasies (34), and indeed, asserts that the dream of her father's death represented her desire to “read or love as she pleased” (122, emphasis added).⁹ Reading the novel through Freud's account of Dora offers an interesting perspective on Mariana's (and Garro's) silence. In his introduction, Freud, who cites the inability to verbalize a coherent life story was as evidence of neurosis, observes that gaps in patients' life stories are frequently the result of omissions—conscious or unconscious—that eventually are replaced by a loss or falsification of memory (24-25). Nonetheless, as with Mariana, Dora is never permitted to work toward filling in those gaps herself. She is rarely allowed to speak directly in her own narrative: her speech is indirectly reported, interpreted and thereby controlled by Freud, as psychoanalyst and as narrator, yet her resistance to his often suspect interpretations of her story manages to infiltrate the text (47, 84, 86, 90, 131). Much as Freud asserts discursive authority over Dora as the author of the textualized account of their sessions, Augusto converts Mariana into a blank page upon which he may illustrate his theories of society and human behavior before an audience of his followers. As Gabrielle recounts: “Augusto escogía a su mujer para ilustrar … su educación, sus tendencias autodestructivas, su frigidez sexual, su lesbianismo latente, su rechazo a la sociedad y su esquizofrenia. … Aquellos psicoanálisis públicos me dejaban atónita” (140). Augusto's interpretation, reinforced by the chorus of embedded narrations, demonstrates the power he exercises to impose his version of reality upon Mariana. Although the events described suggest Mariana is the victim, she is continually evoked as the victimizer. It is perplexing that the witnesses find themselves doubting Mariana and giving credence to Augusto, since one of the points in which the three perspectives coincide is in their presentation of Augusto as a sadistic figure. Moreover, although his behavior is categorized as cruel, Augusto's mental stability is never questioned, even though he is a willing and even active participant in their games. “La conducta de ambos era irregular,” Gabrielle reflects, “pero Augusto tenía a su favor la posición y el poder” (156). In short, Augusto's access to discursive authority permits him to influence the perspective of the witnesses; this, in turn, is translated into a tension between madness and reason that replicates the unequal power relation in their marriage.

Because male norms are used to measure reason—and rational discourse—the male authority may, as Felman notes, appropriate women's madness “by claiming to ‘understand’ it, but with an external understanding which reduces the madwoman to a spectacle, an object which can be known and possessed” (“Women and Madness” 7-8). By categorizing Mariana as mad, Augusto is able to position his wife as object and himself as the impartial and paternalistic authority who must control her every move for her own good. Branded a hysteric, Mariana's voice is unreliable and suspect. To Augusto, her refusal to follow his rules is synonymous with insanity because it violates a hierarchy of discursive authority dependent upon female silence and submission (Makward 96). Whenever Mariana attempts to contradict her husband, she is either humiliated into conformity or silenced altogether: “¡Cállate—ordenó Augusto” (10); “Te prohibo que hables—le ordenó su marido” (139); ‘Siéntate histérica’ le ordenó Augusto … y la sentó de un golpe” (199). Valerie Crêtaux Lastinger notes that: “one of the main difficulties of the representation of women stems from the aberration of woman speaking: women's use of language in patriarchy is an inherent oxymoron” (132). Indeed, as Showalter's work demonstrates, the absence of the voice of the female patient in nineteenth century asylum case studies in England and in France was often the result of a conscious silencing of their words, since “therapeutic authority depended on domination over the patient's language” (The Female Malady 60, 154).¹⁰ Although Augusto never speaks in the novel, the voices of the witnesses and the chorus of embedded narrations ensure that his authority will not be displaced. This absent yet dominant voice suggests that he may be associated with the disembodied power of law, language and order. Tillie Olsen alludes to the “hidden silences” of writers, of work “aborted, deferred, denied” (8), and indeed, perhaps the clearest example of the relation between Augusto's command over Mariana occurs when she becomes pregnant with Vicente's child. Literally appropriating Mariana's creation, Augusto coerces her into an abortion, declaring that the child will legally be his; when Mariana protests: “Entonces ¿La verdad no importa frente a la ley?” Augusto responds, impassively: “Mariana, la ley es la verdad” (176, emphasis added). After Mariana's disappearance/death, this discursive hierarchy is again foregrounded by Augusto's desire to destroy her memory by refusing to name her, recounted by both Vicente (120) and Gabrielle (123).

Mariana, silenced by isolation and then death but with access to mythological time, lives madness in a perpetual present, while the witnesses, who assume the male subject position, appropriate the voice of reason to report her insanity in the past tense. Nonetheless, since the vision of Mariana is determined from outside, her dream-like discourse is bracketed within multiple narrative voices that counterpoise a critical mode of discourse. Taylor has alluded to the absent center of the novel left by Mariana's silence (63-64): this absence puts into question not only textual representations of “self” but the notion of discourse itself by denying a single, univocal locus of meaning. Ultimately, then, there is no resolution, no one definitive answer, that fits comfortably within the confines of reason and reality. Each witness claims to hold a stake in Mariana's “truth,” from Vicente's acceptance of Augusto's view (97) to Gabrielle's imaginary vision of her in the ballet to alleviate her own feelings of guilt (283). Only André approximates the nature of truth when, toward the end of the novel, his cousin Bertrand comments, “Algún día sabremos la verdad” and André replies: “la verdad tiene tantas caras como la mentira” (319). Perhaps, as Felman notes, what each narrator and the reader him/herself discover that the only reality is that of “a radically de-centering resistance; the real as, precisely, Other, the unrepresentable as such, the ex-centric residue which the specular relationship of vision cannot embrace” (“Women and Madness” 10). Neither the witnesses nor the reader possess sufficient information to answer the question “¿Quién era Mariana?” At the same time, the very act of concluding that the question is unanswerable may serve to subvert conventional notions of truth and reality.¹¹

In Testimonies sobre Mariana, the textual signal of the hysteric and of the discourse of madness suggests a disruptive force that questions the canon. At the same time, by decentering the character of Mariana, Garro delineates how the categorization of the creative woman as hysteric ultimately traps her in silence. Garro has created three versions of herself in the character of Mariana, clearly indicating, at the same time, that none of these versions is an accurate portrayal: nevertheless, it is through the voices of these multiple narrators that the separation between reason and madness is put into question. By making the novel the structure within which the tension among myriad versions of reality are played out, Garro unmasks the mechanisms that produce conventional relations of power and authority since access to truth proves elusive at best when mediated by representation.

Notes

1. For a discussion of Garro's relation to Mariana, see Carballo.

2. This reference underscores the discursive manifestations implied by Mariana's life story. It may also be considered another example of the game of disguise and revelation activated in the novel since it is well-known that Garro's first novel, Los recuerdos del porvenir, was abandoned for many years in a trunk. In a letter to Emmanuel Carballo, Garro reveals that the trunk also contained love poems dedicated to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whom she describes in Bretonian terms as “el amor loco de mi vida” (485). Since this article was written, Elena Garro's papers became available at the Princeton University Library and a number of excerpts from them have been published in the Mexican and Argentinian press.

3. Patricia Rosas Lopategui's study focuses in detail on this aspect of the novel.

4. Natalia, Mariana's daughter, is another double ordered to silence by her father. She rarely speaks and could almost be seen as a shadow to Mariana if it were not for the gravity of her enunciations when her speech is admitted into the text. The scene in which André sees Mariana “and her double” at Cannes is also reminiscent of a similar scene of the adolescent Berthe and her mother in Madame Bovary (Garro 313, Flaubert 141). Like Mariana, Emma Bovary also “loses” a son, the reflection of an imagination cut short by reality.

5. Because she simultaneously suffers Mariana's silence and articulates for the reader the power relations that make such subjugation possible, Gabrielle's ambivalence would seem to corroborate Felman's assertion that the double may suggest both the subject's “narcissistic preoccupations” and a “projected image of likeness dramatizes the impossible, incarnates the sign of a prohibition” (Madness and Literature 68).

6. Nerval's narrator sees Aurélia as death, “pale and hollow-eyed” (4) and it is the intervention of a character he imagines is called Saturnin that precipitates the miraculous apparition of Aurélia, with whom he flies on a white mare (67-68). Mariana, who also materializes as a phantom, “miraculously reappears” to André, dressed in white and with the assistance of Saturnal (335-346). When he seeks guidance from Saturnal, André finds himself citing Nerval (344). For other points of correspondence between the two texts see Nerval 18, 30-31, 37, 44, 59. The intertextual references in Gabrielle are perhaps less obvious, although I believe to have detected some resonances in her narration of Les Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir's semiautobiographical account of post-war Paris, particularly in the similarities between Gabrielle's ambivalence toward Mariana and the love-hate relationship between Anne and Paula.

7. Nerval's novel poetically recounts his own descent into madness, experience in the asylum and subsequent marginalization from society. Breton, although ostensibly distrustful of psychiatry (Nadja 141), had worked as an intern with Joseph Babinsky, Charcot's most famous pupil and one of the leading specialists on hysteria (Suleiman 126-137). In 1928, the same year Nadja was published, he celebrated hysteria with Louis Aragon as “la plus grande découverte poétique de la fin du XIXe siècle” (Breton/Aragon 20).

8. See also Charles Richet's analysis of the hysteric as capricious, histrionic, and dishonest (344). Hysterics, he concludes, “sont femmes plus que les autres femmes” (346). The relationship between hysteria and femininity in nineteenth century medical narratives is discussed in Showalter “Hysteria, Feminism and Gender” and The Female Malady.

9. As Evelyne Ender points out, the phonological similarity of these words in German (lesen and lieben) underlines this correspondence even more tellingly (13). Ironically, although it is essentially Freud, and not Dora, who invents these fantasies, he expresses “personal repugnance” to the sexual imagination of his young patient, which he characterizes as “perverse,” “horrible,” “revolting,” and “excessively repulsive” (61-62, 64).

10. Showalter cites as an example the words of the British doctor Robert Carter: “If a patient interrupts the speaker, she must be told to keep silence and listen; and must be told, moreover … in such a manner as to convey the speaker's full conviction that the command will be obeyed” (43). Freudian case-studies are no better: for while the psychoanalyst allows his patient to speak, the textualized version does not admit the voice of the patient: he and he alone is permitted to interpret this speech. Ironically, the “most troublesome symptom” of Dora is her loss of voice (30).

11. Even photographs, which promise a realistic depiction of reality, prove treacherous. Thus, as Mariana gradually fades from Vicente's memory she also “disappears” from the photographs he has taken of her. Only one remains, in which first he imagines that she has turned her back on him (82) and then that she is waving goodbye (122). André has a similar experience when Mariana and Natalia “vanish” from photographs as the negatives are mysteriously destroyed (326).

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