SOURCE: "On the Trail of the (Un)Holy Serpent: Cobra, by Severo Sarduy," in Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 57-69.

[In the following essay, Weiss examines various events depicted in Cobra and discusses their significance in terms of the psychoanalytic and semiological theories of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes.]

The serpentine trail of Sarduy's un-hero/ine opens in scenes of decadence and exquisite transvestism in a Hindu lyrical theatre of dolls, dominated by the rivalry between the leading players, Cobra and Cadillac, and by one obsession: Cobra's feet are too big and she attempts to shrink them, ending up by shrinking herself into a grotesque dwarf. It proceeds with the pilgrimage of Cobra, accompanied by her dwarf-double and the Madam, in search of Dr. Ktazob, a reputed master of the trans-sexual operation, to the final scenes of motorcycle gang-cum-exiled Tibetan lamas (complete with death rites; a penultimate scene of relatively nice realism, set in India, and what appears to be a final sunyata). In pursuing this trail one can orient oneself by keys set up at convenient points along the critical service road by the new school of Latin American criticism. The principal key is perhaps the most inclusive and conclusive—a reading of the novel as playground for one protagonist: Language. Truly so; his primary critical interest, as a student of Barthes, Lacan and Derrida, being in the conscious and unconscious structures of language and writing, Sarduy set out to create a fine work of criticism within a superb work of fiction.

Some tendency to overemphasize the surface (signifiers) has resulted in the underemphasizing of the process of signification as a function of meaning; the meaning, in Cobra, is not of necessity solely negative, despite the overwhelmingly sardonic tones in which Sarduy writes. Although Sarduy may be making fun of oriental religion as a Western fad, a truly integrative experience remains possible—given, of course, a favorable subject and favorable circumstances.

A symbolic reading will show that Sarduy's seriousness about "self-realization" or freedom is serious insofar as it represents, over and above the immediate problem of loss and absence, a possibility of unity with and within the text and the reader through the ritual of reading/writing (viz., coding/decoding) the figuration and transfiguration of the functional protagonist, Cobra. The figurative symbolism is crucial, and serves as a link between the ideologies of the West (psychoanalysis and structuralism—the Tel Quel group) and the Orient (tantric Buddhism—Octavio Paz et al.). One should move, conceivably, beyond the decoding suggested by Sarduy himself, a series of puns on Cobra.

Before abandoning the word games entirely, however, one might digress to etymologies, in order to draw upon the close correspondence of "cobra" and "cobre" (copper) in the cultures that have influenced Sarduy. The Spanish paradigms cobra/cobre correspond to the semitic paradigm na[×]as/ne[×]os, with identical semantic values attached to the full syntagmatic and paradigmatic correspondences, and a further paradigmatic and semantic association with Buddhist/Hindu mythology. Cobra=na[×]as=serpent, and cobre=ne[×]oset=copper. The sacred value of copper (read also bronze) and its interchangeability with gold in some instances, common to the West African nations prior to the disruption of the empires by European slavers, persists, in a diluted form, in the Cuban cult of Osun or the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre; the sacred serpent Dan of Dahomey comes to Cuba as the voodoo loa of fertility, Damballah, who in the hierarchy of West African spirit gods might rank with the creator-god Obatala or be equated with Ogun-Shango. The magical powers of both copper and serpents have parallels throughout the mythologies of the Indo-European world, the most famous conjunction of the two paradigms occurring in the tale of Moses and the brazen serpent, the ne[×]ustan. The sacred serpent of ancient Egypt was the najas (na[×]as?), identified generally with the hooded cobra.

Moving eastward, one recalls that Naga was the serpent prince who supported Vishnu in the water, and is identified as a water deity and symbol. A contrast is immediately apparent between the primary identification (male) of this deity and the primary identification (female) of water deities in Afro-Cuban cults (Osún, Yemayá, Oyá).

Connected with the Serpent Prince were the nagas, genii appointed as keepers of life-energy and the sea's riches. They were entrusted by Buddha with keeping sunyata until mankind was ready to receive it; "about 700 years later, the great sage Nagarjuna (Arjuna of the Nagas), initiated by the serpent kings into the truth that all is void […] then brought to man the full-fledged Buddhist teachings of the Mahayana" [Ananda Coomarashwamy, Buddhism and the Gospel of Buddha, quoted in Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, edited by Joseph Campbell, 1946].

Semiotically or semantically, then, one might with some stretching arrive outside the text at a correspondence which Sarduy sets up within the text through an almost arbitrary commutation technique.

Although the Nagas themselves may retain a masculine figuration, a Hindu-Buddhistic reading of Naga's realm tends toward the dissolution of the binary value attached to liquid substance in favor of what one might call a bi-valence—i. e., from semen vs. milk to semen/milk, from female=passive vs. force=male to female/force. The psychoanalytic decoding of the serpent symbol, on the other hand, is a fairly clear-cut paradigm of the phallus, seen in Freudian terms as one part (the dominant) of a binary sexuality, the other part (the passive) corresponding to the serpent's medium, water.

A case could be made for the ideological correspondence, in Judaeo-Christian mysogyny, between the serpent as death-denotation and the Evil Female who, as death-connotation, takes on certain ophidian attributes (perhaps by analogy to stereotypical female role-acting or a male interpretation of it). We thus have a merging of Thanatos-female.

Add to this the value of maleness and Eros of the serpent-phallus, and the sum total is a characteristic binary value attached to the serpent according to Western thought.

An unmistakeable tension is established in Sarduy's writing between binary tendencies representing occidental mythologies and a bi-valence or conjunctive impulse present in an oriental world-vision. (The Afro-Cuban vision lies somewhere between these two, in view of its recognition of androgynous orishas and of the possession of individuals of both sexes by any orisha.)

In the same way, Cobra, the genetic male who in Madam's Indian theatre of Cobra I strives to perfect his female characterizations, is from the outset presented as a protagonist with a sexual duality which becomes progressively more conflictive before it is resolved in death/sunyata.

If Cobra were able to portray to perfection the characters s/he plays, all would, we are assured, be well and good; his one flaw is the size of his feet. Such large feet ruin the finest impersonations and are the one area where Cadillac, Cobra's nearest rival, seems to best him. They are, moreover, the one visible sign defining or exposing the sham and indicating any conflict; they project a bivalent image where the player is striving for the essence of femaleness, being in fact the only key, in Freudian terms, to Cobra's genotypic identity, since Sarduy refers to his character as she throughout the first part of the novel. Cobra is, then, a kind of closet Oedipus, a swollen-foot of tell-tale maleness, and for the sake of her art Cobra the artiste declares war on nature and sets out on a pseudo-psychoanalytic journey.

The pomades, plasters, and other applications turn Cobra into a constantly shifting legscape of mold, poisonous vegetation, gangrenous sores, and rot; the drugs s/he ingests turn her finally into a freakish dwarf. Though the magic of fractions there are now two Cobras: one, the 'normal' performing star, and the other, Cobra, who is known as Pup, by analogy to the White Dwarf, Sirius' companion, a star "that has reached the end of its evolution" [Fred Hoyle, Astronomy]. While Cobra is away in India attempts are made to return Pup to her original size. All methods fail, including the temporarily successfully "snow" therapy which, in addition to giving us the first visions of the snowcapped mountains of Tibet through Pup's hallucinations, also gives Pup an almost fatal addiction.

The major conflict, which precipitates Cobra's decision to seek perfection through the scalpel (applied this time to the source of the problem, in the hope that, as a secondary characteristic, the feet will inevitably shrink), is her rivalry with Cadillac, whose envy has no bounds. Cadillac sees the trio (Madame + Cobra (+/=) Pup = (3/2) off at the station, on their way to seek out Ktazob.

Their long voyage takes them through Spain (where monks and priors try to dissuade them from their heretical goal, and where they meet Help and Mercy, two pilgrims from Sarduy's earlier novel), and North Africa, where Cobra sings tangos and dances mambos in filthy dives. Here, willing to follow any lead to the elusive Dr. Ktazob, Cobra talks with Count Julian, who in a theatre box confides that the good doctor operated on himself and was now a very dowdy housewife retired from the business. She talks to William Burroughs, who appropriately enough introduces sadistic connotations for Ktazob, through indirect indicators—his (Burroughs') own primary identification as a writer of pornographic fiction, and his reference to the Nazis: Ktazob accumulated his wealth through the "configuration of new Eves and the disfiguration of old Nazis."

The last encounter before the appointment with Ktazob takes place in Cobra's dressing room after a show. A slick pimp, exuding vulgarity in words and gestures, enters the room and aggressively reveals himself to be none other than Cadillac, whom Ktazob has "couillonné au carré." "Tired of her rags" she had sought out Ktazob herself, and was given an Abyssinian's member; teasing and inviting Cobra to "reserve the première" for him when she gets "creased," he advises her that Ktazob, like a purloined letter or the name of a country on a map, cannot be seen for being in the most obvious places, in the "center of the center," and that is where he is to be sought.

Ktazob is found, and he discusses his surgical method, which is no more, no less, than a classical Sade set-up of pain-transference. In order to perform the operation, with no anaesthetic, on Cobra's body, he has Pup conditioned by an instructor to receive the pain, to become in a sense the non-body. This complex section, the climax of Cobra I, furnishes certain important paradigms for Cobra II, chief among them being (a) the obvious—Cobra's new gender-identity, and (b) the diamond pattern—represented … by the strange relationship of unity between givers and receivers and termed by Sarduy "a graph of the mutation."

Cobra, perfected as a female body, moves into the second part of the book in the masculine gender, although it may be she who appears in flashes as a frightened woman coming out of the Métro and walking hurriedly along the wall. The conversion is complete; not merely, it turns out, a sexual conversion, a coming together, through crossing over or over-lapping points, of the two sexes, but a final conversion of West to East, paradoxically through the passageways of North Africa and the dives of Amsterdam (with its parodies of orientalism) and only much later to India.

The first active meditation, in the first person, takes place in a white room, as an introduction to Cobra II. In this second half of the novel repeated encounters, in the men's room of bars and drugstores (with phony gurus, murderous police, bikers and opium-dealing hippies) are seen alternating with lyrical prayers and with paeans to the bikers of the totemic names (Tiger, Scorpion, Tundra, and Totem) who initiate Cobra. Audiences with the guru are freely repeated, word for word, as dialogues with a fortune teller. The bikers' ritual is later concluded as the ritual prescribed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, over Cobra's corpse; the bikers are the lamas, and suspiciously resemble the Amsterdam hippies…. Finally, the sado-masochistic ritual of the leather cult bears some definite resemblance to the tantric rites although, among other distinctions, the bikers' ritual stops short of death while the lamas' begins with death.

Alternating in intensity and detachment, the language in Cobra strives for what might be best described as non-attachment. Cobra moves through mortification and physical changes to a state of pure tolerance. As the biker-lamas announce when they arrive to pick him up for his initiation: "… Because to be a leader you have to pass through submission, to gain power you have to lose it, to command you have to first lower yourself as far as we want: to the point of nausea." Cobra must, as part of the initiation, submit to the transgressions associated with Tantra, which are connected with food and sex. Watered-down in the extreme, the ritual is conducted solely through symbols:

TOTEM: "You will drink of my blood"—and he poured a bottle of ketchup over him—; "of my cum"—and he opened a container of yogurt over his head.

TIGER: "I am going to blind you"—a flash, in his eyes.

TUNDRA repeated yawning "You have gone through submission, you have lost power, etc."…

SCORPION: "Now what, do we kill him?"

TOTEM: "He has to be fucked."

TIGER: "No. Let him loose. He's got to get dressed now."

This contrasts, in its mildness and humour, with the actual transgression recorded after Cobra's death, around his corpse. The transgression represented by ingesting tantric food (the bodily secretions and excretions) seeks to reintegrate all substances. Octavio Paz sees this as a rejection of sublimation, an alternative to the psychoanalytic path. The symbol in Tantra is not differentiated from reality, which might explain the ease with which the taboo substances are ingested as symbols, and their symbols (ketchup, yogurt) as the actual substances.

The real or symbolic eating of excrement corresponds in tantric Buddhism to seminal retention. In Cobra II sacramental eroticism is experienced by the narrator at or about the time that the protagonist is "processed" for the other world, an operation that includes the ingestion, by the officiating lamas, of their foul secretions and excretions. On introducing the question of enlightenment through seminal retention, Paz notes that the body "for Tantrism is the real double of the Universe which is, in turn, a manifestation of the diamond-like and incorruptible body of the Buddha." Seminal retention, which proceeds in stages through the six cakras or nerve centers, is interpreted as the awakening of Kundalini energy, which rises like a coiled serpent and is finally "released transformed and sublimated until [the] perfect unfolding and conscious realization are merged in the highest centre, […] and Kundalini [is] finally united by Parama-Siva." Kundalini rises, moving along the male and female channels, seeking to unite Sakti and Siva (Purusha and Prakriti), together the balance of form and energy, seen sometimes as the perfect lotus, sometimes themselves transcended as the Diamond of Buddhahood, or sunyata. The two channels of the body correspond as well to the male and female sides of speech. Language, like religion, is in Tantrism "a system of incarnated metaphors." Writing, according to Paz, is a double of the cosmos; like tantrism, it is lived, as a body analogous to the physical body, and the body is read as writing.

Kundalini as uncoiling nagas, najas, nehoshet or cobra.

Is there possible in the text itself an exercise of that tantric system which leads to the lotus-head, to the Diamond itself? Considering the close connection between Sarduy's and Paz's texts, this would appear to be undeniable. If the body of writing corresponds to the yogic body (both being doubles of the cosmos), certain experiences common to both should be noted, some of which have already been described (the willingness to transgress, to change, to travel to the very gates of chaos, pain, loss of identity and death before reaching sunyata).

If, in Derridian terms, the proper decoding or deconstruction of a text consists, in a way, of triangulating the 'absence' (often the centre), then all throughout Cobra, much as it is in the chapter dealing with Pup's heroin experience (where the taboo word is never once expressed), taboo is the 'absence.' Totem, as signifier and signified, is on the other hand a powerful presence, constituted as element in opposition to the term taboo, which might be seen as zero-term.

Western (and, conventionally, Eastern) taboos, identified earlier on as transgressions involving food, the handling of corpses, sexuality, and various degrees of atrocity including homicide, are transgressed from within the functionally outcast communities of the theatre, the demi-mondes of Moroccan bars and alleys, of drugs and motorcycles, and the exiled group of lamas. The term 'taboo,' never supplied by the author, is one of the reader's most significant contributions to a reading of the text, albeit probably on a subconscious level, and possibly never verbalized. The irony, of course, resides in the reader's being forced to confront his or her conventionality: a trap set by Cobra, where the reader, in confronting this attachment to the taboo principle (hence to an un-revolutionary system), is short-circuited, so to speak, in absentia.

Cobra, already an anomalous entity early in the game, travels the length of experience until s/he becomes taboo, as the object of taboo rituals, and in a broader sense is taboo, moreover, as subject of the novel. This process becomes apparent as the narrator-figure, in yogic postures, comes within sight of the ultimate totem, the Diamond. The experiences of narrator and protagonist, then, together follow the tantric precepts, which are not doctrine/theory, but praxis/practice.

Another manner of viewing 'absence' in the novel, here in a way more closely analogous to the idea of the zero degree, is through sexuality. Binary sexuality and the systematic struggle away from it, or rather through it, dominate symbolically; the terms (male and female) are connoted usually in opposition to the subject's circumstance in Cobra I and II, respectively. These are, however, also viewed largely as in a house of mirrors which are significant indicators, principally of the absence of any precise, definable 'reality.'

The ordering of the experiences suggests a causality that can only be ascribed to a free play of the unconscious surfacing in language. It is free-associative within the accepted system (ritual) of writing (Tantra): syntax, which is like a mirror of the author's body. Its purpose may be to chase vainly after a definition of reality, or, having achieved the wisdom to recognize the psychoanalytic-linguistic impossibility of ever reaching such a definition, simply to enjoy the game and glide through the self and the writing.

In such a state of non-attachment, derived through experience rather than as etic denial, both the self and writing become viable for the realization of individual freedom on several planes: the plane of writing proper ('creative expression' or symbolic projection), where maximum freedom accrues proportionately to "the freedom to combine sentences …, etc" [Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 1968]; the existential plane, where through a syncresis of East and West the writer can resolve certain contradictions inherent in intellectuality and sexuality—the active-passive dichotomy; the plane of sexual identity, where through a symbolic psycho-analytic-cum-yogic journey, the conflictive question is resolved, first by means of the deliberate assumption of full female characteristics in the bejewelled and perfumed world of the Lyrical Theatre of Dolls, then by means of the return to an exclusively male-identified world (motorcycles, monks)—never, granted, without the playful interference of signs of the opposite value—so that the final, suprasexual state is achieved as the culmination of a prolonged androgynous stage. The entire novel might indeed be seen as a perfectly androgynous piece of writing, where metamorphosis and bi- or polivalence in the characters are functions of an active binary sexuality as much as they are a game of signal-crossing. The significant concern seems to be to erase definition, which whether episodic, sexual or sentimental stands for the illusoriness of attachment.

Every attempt to empathize, or fix a scene as an isolated episode, or speak of someone's sex, ends back in the maelstrom of Sarduy's language, always in motion along unpredictable paths and at an unpredictable pace. Yet Sarduy is ultimately no more in control than the reader. He has marginated himself from the writing, and it is the novel that writes itself. Cobra, the pilgrim, the brazen serpent, the energy rising to find its rest in form; form moving to find its balance in energy, "the energy of the word" [Roland Barthes, "The Baroque Face," Review, No. 6, 1972]. And the writing is the tantric exercise in which Cobra, author and reader might reach some measure of realization and even of meaning.