SOURCE: "The Ambiviolent Fiction of Severo Sarduy," in Symposium, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 49-60.

[In the following essay, Prieto focuses on the characters in Sarduy's Cobra and Maitreya, maintaining that destruction—"the prodigal squandering of self"—becomes the "gateway of change" for the transformation of the characters.]

To say that ambivalence, exaggeration and multiplicity play a major role in the recent novels of Severo Sarduy is to belabor a point for reasons which only the temper of these very works can justify. Saturation and redundance, even critical, are as topical to Sarduy's fiction as transformation and evolution are typical of his characters.

The narrative subject in Cobra as well as in Maitreya develops through a transmutational process in every way antithetic to the classical notion of character unity. Its kaleidoscopic nature becomes clear only in the light of Lacan's maxim, "Je ne pense pas là où je suis, et je ne suis pas là où je pense." Furthermore, the impermanence of Sarduy's subject-in-process is made evident at all levels: sexual, nominal, and morphological. La Tremenda, the protagonist of Maitreya, is also la Colosal, la Monumental, la Masiva, la Contundente, la Diva, la Prima, la Obesa, la Toda-Masa, la Delirium, la Divina and la Expansiva. Cobra is a transvestite, a castrato, male, female, square root of itself, and, after many upheavals, a whimsical prima donna in a Moroccan nightclub where she shares the spotlight with la Divina, la Adivina, la Di Vina, and Lady Vinah. The protean characters of Cobra and Maitreya even coexist with their own images, sometimes stunted (Pup: Cobra), sometimes reflected, such as the fabulously identical twins la Tremenda and la Divina:

eran tan idénticas y gritonas que había que marcarlas con puntos de colores en la frente para saber cual había ya mamado y a cual había que darle dos cucharadas de cocimiento de yerbabuena o dos nalgadas suavecitas para que se durmiera. [Cobra]

Referring to the evolution and expenditure characteristic of the narrative subject in Cobra several critics, among them Emir Rodríguez Monegal, have mentioned the affiliation between Sarduy's fiction and the work of Georges Bataille. However, while it is true that in the figuration of eroticism and dilapidation the work of both authors is immediately comparable, no one will deny that their respective portrayals of death (which is both the driving force and seminal feature of their narrative universe) differ dramatically.

For Bataille eroticism is "L'approbation de la vie jusque dans la mort." [Georges Bataille, L'Érotisme, 1975]. It is through the erotic act that two individuais are joined together and communicate. But eroticism, claims Bataille, "ouvre à la mort. La mort ouvre à la négation de la durée individuelle." Therefore, in fiction at least, and always through the body, the protagonists of Bataille's universe are relentlessly driven to their own end, whereas those of Sarduy's novels brandish death as a beguiling plaything which always signals a new beginning. Since death and life are histrionically (and logically) wedded in Sarduy's conception, the onto-logical process of Cobra and Maitreya unfolds as an ostensible contradiction which I propose to analyze and summarize here in one question: how can violence, castration and death function as a kind of tectonics of the body, as a generative magma begetting fecundity from barrenness and growth from decay? Having noted that the process of character expenditure in both novels serializes its hermeneutic complexity along three rungs—rejection, discontinuity and transformation—I propose to open discussion by examining each of these features in detail.

The protagonists of Cobra and Maitreya are maimed from the outset by what should be labelled (in keeping with Sarduy's iconoclastic parody) a "tragic flaw" essentially amounting to an undisguised mockery of the inherently failed human condition. As Biblical man turns to his maker besmirched by the onus of original sin, so does Cobra, frenzied by the unsightly feet which deface her otherwise dazzling beauty:

¿Por qué me hiciste nacer si no era para ser absolutamente divina?… ¿De qué me sirve ser reina del Teatro Lírico de Muñecas, y tener la mejor colección de juguetes mecánicos, si a la vista de mis pies huyen los hombres y vienen a treparse los gatos?

In the same manner, in Maitreya, La Tremenda laments: "Dios o Big bang…. ¿Por qué … me has hecho vulnerable, blanco indefenso de los rayos, y permites que con revigidos artilugios birriagen el dibujo de la voz que te loa?" Furthermore, in both novels the initial flaw is merely a prelude to the eventual and inevitable breakdown of the entire bodily machine:

Mas poco duraba la majestad de la engreída diosa paquidérmica: a los primeros esterntores trompetados caía en un stress germánico: resacas, come repletas de crustáceos, en la cabeza, relámpagos úricos en las bisagras mandibulares, fuacatazos en la campanilla, nudos vocales y tizones en la garganta, cuyas cenizas tupían los canales del laberinto. [Maitreya]

All does not function as it should in Cobra and Maitreya; things fall apart. But the ubiquitous flaws and universal inadequacies should be seen for what they really are. In Sarduy's fictional portrayals insufficiencies are clearly symptoms of a profound dissatisfaction, deceivingly featured as a rejection of part of the body (the feet or the sexual organs) when in fact they signal an overall negativity, a rejection of the entire self which the discarded appendage (Cobra's sex, for example) will come to symbolize, metaphorically. Furthermore, as Freud has made amply evident, negativity (Nachfolge) should be seen as the equivalent of expulsion or, more exactly, of the instinct of destruction (Destruktionstrieb). And this equivalence explains why Cobra's rejection of his feet heralds a wish to negate or annihilate his whole self. Fueled by desire, Cobra enacts the primal fantasy of the dismembered body which, according to psychoanalysis, masks castration anxiety. Wishing to reduce the size of his tormented extremities ("los pies de Cobra eran su infierno") the protagonist ends up shrinking his entire body and becomes Pup, the "white dwarf." Then, to attain the summit of wish-fulfillment after being shamed in part by his own dwarfness, he submits his own parts of shame, his "residuo grosero, lo que de tí se desprende informe" to the eager blade of Doctor Ktazob "que en taimado raspadero tangerino arranca de un tajo lo superfluo y esculpe en su lugar lúbrica rajadura."

Mutilation and decay are pervasive figurations of both Cobra and Maitreya but should not be seen as signs of discontinuity, however. As the narrator of Maitreya indicates: "un don perdido implica el surgimiento de otro." This is why the faithful Tibetan followers who cast the rest of their dismembered Master to the air discover that "la cabeza, como un planeta desorbitado que al caer volviera al estado de lava, de cal o de nácar, en un despliegue helicoidal y luminoso, quedó convertida en una concha marina tornasolada y gigante." This process in which expenditure is a requisite ingredient of transformation and, therefore, of production, is also dramatically different from the Bataillean notion of negativity. In Bataille's fiction the "negativité sans emploi" turns out to be an affirmative dispersion in which the characters (such as those of Histoire de l'oeil or Ma Mère) engage in an unfettered passage towards death, the one and only rebuttal of human isolation (what Bataille terms "l'ipseité"). In linguistic terms, Bataille portrays negativity as a series of ellipses (the blank pages of Mme Edwarda) where all and nothing are equally unspeakable.

In contrast to Bataille in these respects as well, Sarduy turns his back on verbal avarice, on the white page, and his own process of dépense generates a widespread sense of prodigal squandering. So too, mutilation in his novels functions as a confirmation of the heterogeneous nature of his narrative subjects always portrayed in a complex verbal system which can be labelled "motivated," if we abide by the term coined by Russian Formalism. By this I mean that in Cobra and Maitreya the polyvalence of signs is a reflection of the ontological plurality which is one of the major themes of both novels. And this polyvalence is created by means of two mechanisms: the paragrammatic movement, and what I label hybridization to betoken an agglutination of signifiers.

One of the most significant uses of hybridization in Cobra stems from the very name of the surgeon who "arrance de un tajo lo superfluo," Dr. Ktazob. This patronymic simultaneously contains and delivers a network of signs axiomatic to the capital problem in the text: castration anxiety. First and foremost, zob designates the phallus in Arabic and is a word freely used in current French jargon. Furthermore, cazzo [Katzo] in Italian is a synonym for zob and, finally, a phonetic reading of the surgeon's name [K] [ta] [zob] would define in Spanish one who castrates (i.e., "quita" zob).

The "superfluo" mentioned in the text is what is never specifically mentioned in Spanish in this section of the novel: the zob or [katzo] which the protagonist is missing and which the surgeon (whose signifier is male organ by definition, i.e., [katzo] and zob), severs with one blow, "arranca de un tajo." We might add that the phallus is conspicuously absent, and its absence directly parallels the lack or loss in Cobra's own castrated body.

We must not forget, either, the significant role of the consonant "Z" for any student of Roland Barthes such as Sarduy. As Barthes has demonstrated in S/Z, the letter "Z" is "l'initiale de la castration" housed in the medial axis, the vital center of Sarrazine, protagonist of Balzac's short story. Like Sarrazine, the one who [K] [ta] [zob] displays in the very heart of his name, which is his textual body, the "Z" emblematic of the emasculation which Cobra desires. Offering his body as an oblation to Ktazob's blade, the protagonist denies his virility, in the general and abstract sense, as well as the object which represents it and which he is about to discard. And it is not surprising that he rejects this one part of his body, the phallus, because metaphorically speaking it is the very emblem of his identity. The synonymity of both signifiers—phallus/Cobra—is manifest in the section immediately following the castration scene in the chapter entitled, "La Conversión." After the suture which puts an end to the operation, Cobra's pillow remains smeared with "almidón límpido o semen" secreted by "lengüetas acanaladas, ásperas." And immediately after the operation Cobra's behavior is described with an ambiguous terminology which could equally refer to the male organ and to the reptile: "Se yergue … Se desdobla … la cabeza tiangular que corona un arco … esa ojiva de bulbos babosos … Con la respiración del durmiente se contrae y dilata la cuenca estriada" … and "enchumbarán, apretadas las esponjas … chorros de jugos corrosivos, salivazos fénicos…."

The nexus between phallus and reptile is not only evident in the text describing the castration ceremony but throughout the entire novel as well…. For example, it is said of the Alexandrian saint who emasculates himself in a static rapture: "amputóse de un tajo el basilisco." The text is equally explicit when it identifies Totem's organ to a reptile: "Le fosforece enroscada en el sexo, una serpiente. Al glande se adhiere blanda, la cabeza. Afilada, goteando leche, penetra la lengüeta" [Cobra].

Occasionally identified with other male characters in the novel, the phallus is, nonetheless, most emphatically and most often coupled with Cobra himself and is in every way the sign of (what becomes after the castration scene) his/her identity. We are further convinced of this identification when the protagonist loses his/her name after the castration ceremony to retrieve it only during the initiation in "Cobra II." Besides his name, after Ktazob's operation the protagonist loses its alter ego, Pup, the white dwarf which is a reflection, "un otro yo" of itself. As the surgeon informs Cobra in a sentence which clearly identifies the dwarf alter ego with the severed organ: "ella … no es más que tu desperdicio, tu residuo grosero, lo que de tí se desprende informe … cuerpo de tí caído que ya no eres tú."

The process of hybridization which foregrounds the topic of discourse by its very absence corresponds, therefore, to the lack which denotes in this instance the loss of the male organ and also, as we have noted, the loss of identity or, more exactly, of specificity. Cobra is essentially kaleidoscopic and Sarduy portrays its plurality by continuing to represent the facets or personae which it ostensibly discards through what Kristeva has defined as the paragrammatic movement. As Gerardo Vázquez Ayora indicates, this movement is based on "mecanismos de generación y selección que exigen la figuración de cada elemento citado por lo menos con dos referencias" [Geraldo Vásquez Ayora, "Estudio estilístico de Cobra de Severo Sarduy," Hispamérica 23-24, 1979]. Aside from the "linear" reading which reveals the stream of events, Sarduy's system fosters a discontinuous communication whereby the reader can link one clause with its recapitulation in a dramatically different context. In Cobra, for example, the paragrammatic movement permits the contiguity of two antithetic fictions. Sarduy structures the text so that the protagonist can be both masculine and feminine, not in succession but conjointly.

In the chapter entitled "¿Qué tal?" which follows the castration scene Cobra appears "envuelta en una capa negra, cubierta por un sombrero de cardenal." This description becomes codified as a leitmotif which reappears later in the novel: "Un sombrero rojo cuyos cordones, cayendo hasta una capa negra, del rostro ocultaban las flores de oro" and comes to represent Cobra as a female character. However, at this point in the narrative (the chapter entitled "La iniciación") the protagonist's sexuality has evolved once again. When the leitmotif was codified Cobra had just been emasculated and he was indeed she. But in "La iniciación" he has reverted to his male persona: "con los nudillos se acarició la barba." Thus, the paragram used to portray Cobra as female shares the narrative space in which he is undisguisedly male. In this manner, Sarduy convincingly portrays two antithetic fictions simultaneously: Cobra as he is and Cobra as he wishes to be.

The protagonist's castration fantasy extemporizes his will to be "other." This is a yearning he satisfies by transforming his inmost being into a prurient furrow of flesh, an empty space which allows her to house and therefore to possess the phallus she covets. Ktazob's operation permits the protagonist to evolve from being to having; it is only by virtue of her newmade womb, in other words, that Cobra will legitimize the possession of the phallus inside her body in a culminating paroxism of narcissism. This is why it is helpful to remember at this point how, according to Freud, the decisive element in the genesis of homosexuality is a fixation on the mother whose body is a receptacle by definition and therefore embeds and reclaims the male organ. As Julia Kristeva so pertinently observes: "Son corps plein, réceptacle et répondant des demandes, tient lieu de tous les effets et satisfactions narcissiques, donc imaginaires: c'est dire qu'elle est le phallus" [Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, 1974].

I have already noted how phallus and Cobra are metaphorically substitutable in Sarduy's novel. Now, I should like to discuss how the loss of the protagonist's name after the castration scene further corroborates this synonymity. After Cobra loses his masculinity he is never identified by his signifier (which he has, we could say, "perdido de un tajo") but rather by four of the signifieds which define him: "copenhague bruselas amsterdam"; "appel alechinsky corneille jorn"; "serpiente venenosa de la India"; "recibe en la pagaduría su salario." The loss of the phallus motivates the lack of signifier and the loss of identity; as Kristeva notes in Révolution du langage poétique: "pour qu'il ait énonciation il faut que l'ego se pose dans le signifié, et ceci en fonction du sujet manquant dans le signifiant…."

The protagonist recovers his missing identity only after affirming himself as subject of the novel. Until the initiation, Cobra is object of the text, third-person pronoun, the voice that Emile Benveniste defines as the "non-personne." However, after the ceremony begins the protagonist speaks in the first person: "ahora da vueltas alrededor de mí, mirándome," that is to say, he takes possession of the text since, as Benveniste has demonstrated, the first person is the voice that appropriates the narration: "les indicateurs je et tu ne peuvent exister comme signes virtuels, ils n'existent qu'en tant qu'ils sont actualisés dans l'instance du discours, oú ils marquent par chacune de leurs propres instances le procés d'appropriation par le locuteur" [Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de Linguistique générale, 1966].

The use of the first person, following the castration scene, emblematizes access to the symbolic function which is language and, in this instance, the act of writing. Becoming "yo" Cobra becomes the text, the "boca que obra," emitter of the symbolic discourse which dresses itself as parody of mimetic representation.

Furthermore, the affirmation of the narrative subject is the culminating moment of the initiation ceremony during which the protagonist receives a name, that is to say, the only sign he is still lacking:

le trazó en el jacket, sobre la espalda, un arco vertical que se abrió en la piel, chorreando, embebido por la felpa, retorciéndose como una serpiente macheteada.

"¿Cobra?" pregunta Escorpión.

"Cobra: para que se envenene," responde Totem.

But even the investiture of the male Cobra does not hinder the periodic figuration of the protagonist in his female incarnation as a constant return of the repressed. The previously quoted paragram, "un sombrero rojo cuyos cordones…." underscores the plurality typical of this novel and makes amply clear that in Cobra the thematic development is a process affirming the heterogeneous nature of all narrative characters.

As is amply evident, the heterogeneous subject of Cobra and Maitreya is mirrored by the polyvalence of signs underscoring the multiplicity of sense contained in both novels. In Cobra, Eustaquio's colossal "tube" dazzles la Señora in a Turkish bath house. The sight of it stirs her deeply as a potent reminder of Ganesha, the legendary elephant god of India. Later on, when more than the mere view of this member thrills to gayness the dancers of the "Teatro Lírico," la Señora exclaims: "Dios mío,… a esta casa la ha perdido la trompa de Eustaquio." By means of this intertextuality (the elephant's trunk figuratively likened to the Eustachian tubes which metaphorically mask the maleness of the Indian makeup man) Sarduy forges yet another paragram which fully corresponds, in its plurality, to the kaleidoscopic characters of his novel and contrasts with the element of expenditure represented by violence and mutilation. In other words, the novel is composed of ever-expanding (ever ambiguous) signs, ostensibly in contrast with the rampant erosion disabling the characters. In Cobra, Pup tears off the ears from a little girl so she can steal "unos aretes de caramelo." Totem slices off his tongue and Cobra's feet succumb to a "morado lezamesco" followed by "grietas en el tobillo, urticaria y luego abscesos subiendo de entre los dedos, llagas verdinegras en la planta." In Maitreya characters are scourged, raped and mutilated even after death. The Leng sisters "raspaban, de un cadàver, las viruelas; con una lima, le desgastaban los dientes." Later in the novel other characters "jugaban con excrementos … con agua sucia … se entregaban a los oprobios prescritos."

But characters are not exclusively disabled, demolished and spent in these novels. For the most part, they turn away from any fruitful enterprise as well. Intercourse is conspicuously absent from Cobra and Maitreya although it figures in the fantasy conceived by the characters themselves. For example, at one point in the later novel Iluminada describes a couple she sees reflected in a mirror:

lo que aquello apretaba entre los brazos, con dedos separados y curvos, sin presión, era su pareja blanquísima, patiabierta y vuelta hacia él, senos enormes y cintura estrecha, caderas grandes que movía lenta, cubierta de coronas pesadas y pulseras de piedra sin brillo, mientras se dejaba hundir entre las piernas un falo rojo y enorme, sin venas….

The wanton voyeurism of this scene may well obscure the lack of creative urge actually portrayed in the text. But careful reading soon reveals that what Iluminada describes is a mere hallucination brought on by infusions of laudanum. In addition, both the dehumanized subject of the sentence, "aquello," as well as the description of a phallus "rojo y enorme, sin venas" put the overt sensuality of this passage in proper perspective allowing us to see the alleged love tryst as a sterile allegory of the sexual act and not as the act itself.

Sexual communication is avoided in Cobra as well; the erotified tableau of the four "blousons noirs," for example, culminates in a total lack of contact, in a rejection of all partners: "Totem: Nos masturbamos; Tigre y Tundra; Escorpión y yo. Cada uno terminaba solo. Nadie toca la leche de otro. No nos miramos." Leng masturbates as well and only as a last resource does he squeeze his body between that of his partners, avoiding all genital contact:

Ya cuando sentía que la centella germinadora subía por los alambiques ovillados, entonces se acercaba a la frazada que envolvía a los bultos simétricosy, entre su ropa sudada, como un jabalí en la gruta, se escurría ligero. Las estremecidas, vueltas una contra otra, lo incrustaban entre sus volúmenes….

Given the pervasive sterility of Cobra, it is not surprising that the major erotic fixation in the novel which comes after it should be sodomy, and specifically what Sarduy labels in Maitreya "f. f. a." or "el consuelo digital" which violates "los anales del imperio." In Maitreya the homing hand ("En ano metia primero las yemas unidas de los dedos, como para cerrar una flor o acariciar el hocico de un tapir"), functions just as much on the thematic level (as an emblem of perversion and sado-masochism) as on the symbolic. We have seen how, in Cobra, the reptile metaphorically deisgnates the phallus. The same transference of sense from one sign to another is at work in Maitreya, with one difference, that to decode it we must refer to the doctrines of Tantrism which play such a pivotal role in Sarduy's narrative conception. According to Kundolini yoga, the hand can symbolically emblematize the phallus. We learn in the Satoakranirupana that Kundolini is the serpent residing in the median line of the body (dehamadhyaya in Sanskrit). When it is properly awakened with Hatha yoga, Kundolini travels through the six vital centers, or cakras, of the body until it reaches the seventh, sahasrara cakra, the lotus of a thousand petals, found at the crown of the head. Only when Kundolini reaches this center does the disciple attain enlightenment (mukti).

What is particularly interesting about this process is that the second cakra, svadhistana, is situated at the base of the male organ, lotus with six vermillion-colored petals, and, according to the dogma, it is associated with an element (water), a color (white), one of the senses (taste), and a part of the body (the hand). This symbolic equivalence between the hand and the phallus would convincingly clarify the otherwise mysterious parthenogenesis of la Tremenda in Maitreya:

Entonces el iranio, escupiéndose la mano, los dedos reunidos en un cono, la hundió hasta las falanges, en el túnel que se iba delatando a su paso … La Tremenda amaneció cosiendo y cantando … Esa misma noche empezó a hincharse … Agarrada al árbol plástico … la Tremenda dió un gran pujo. Sobre una colcha … cayó parado, como sobre una flor de loto, la mano derecha alzada y abierta, sonriente y rojo, como de sangre fresca o de porfirio, el engendro….

But being born on his feet is hardly the only idiosyncracy of the marvelous child who "presentaba una protuberancia. El pelo, trenzado a la derecha, era azulado … El lóbulo de la oreja tres veces mas largo que lo normal. Cuarenta dientes sólidos y parejos protegían una lengua larga y afilada … y una fina membrana le unía los dedos de las manos y los pies." In fact, all these features correspond to the thirty-two which distinguish the last historic Buddha (who precedes Maitreya) born….

Even such brief excursion into Tantric thought demonstrates how the polyvalence in Maitreya functions on two levels at all times. On the symbolic plane Tremenda's "hijo caudal" confirms the generative power of the hand and the nexus between this extremity and the phallus, whereas on the thematic level, the hand corroborates the difference between the Bataillean notion of dépense and Sarduy's prolific conception.

The characters in the work of both authors are portrayed in a context of expenditure. However, in Sarduy's fiction, violence, castration, and death are decorative mannerisms, rhetorical figures along a generative chain. The prodigal squandering of self in both Cobra and Maitreya simply signals the beginning of one and all transfigurations. Being is forever becoming and the body defamed, rejected and mauled is soon after the germ of a fledgling creation. As Sarduy says in Cobra: "La muerte—la pausa que refresca—forma parte de la vida." Before all, therefore, destruction in his works is always ambiviolence, gateway of change.