Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, and Otra vez el mar: The Struggle for Self-Expression

University of Michigan-Dearborn

Reinaldo Arenas’s Celestino antes del alba (1967), El palacio de las blanquisimas mofetas (1975), and Otra vez el mar (1982) -the first three novels of a five-book sequence described by the author as both a secret history of Cuban society and a writer’s autobiography- have not received significant critical attention, despite the fact that they have been published for quite a number of years and, moreover, constitute an intra-dependent unit within the author’s total novelistic production⁵⁴. Notwithstanding variations of intensity and explicitness, a careful analysis of these three novels reveals an argumentative center that persistently resurfaces: a staunch defense of man’s imaginative capabilities (self-expression) in a world beset by brutality, persecution, and ignorance. Although this preoccupation with individual freedom of expression and the struggles that unavoidably arise whenever human beings find themselves repressed by authoritarian systems of power are articulated in other novels by the Cuban author, the desire to develop and unfold this idea throughout a five-book sequence calls for special critical consideration, a project of study that this article attempts to identify and begins to examine⁵⁵.

Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, and Otra vez el mar present different moments of Cuban society as seen through the eyes of a constantly changing protagonist who, in the process of evolving as a writer, embodies the struggle for self-expression. The experiences of this protean character are presented first during his childhood in the poverty of the pre-revolution countryside, later through his adolescent years in a small provincial city during the dictatorship of Batista and the early moments of insurrection, and finally during his adulthood in Havana, where under the established revolutionary regime, he is identified as a mature writer-poet.

The protagonist Héctor, the writer-poet of Otra vez el mar, the central novel of the quintet, wrestles with the contradictions and ambiguities of language. His strong desire for self-expression, coupled with his profound skepticism of language as a precise tool of communication, produces a self-conscious inquiry into the possibilities of articulation. Part 2 of Otra vez el mar -focalized through the narrator-poet Héctor- is structured on a systematic unmasking of its own creative process (what Linda Hutcheon calls a «mimesis of process») that exposes the precarious situation of the writer in regards to the problems and progress of articulation⁵⁶. Considering the aesthetic questions that Otra vez el mar proposes, not only within the dynamics of the pentalogy, but also within Arenas’s entire work, the self-reflective search for expression in this novel will be analyzed at length⁵⁷.

In the most general sense, the protagonist in Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, and Otra vez el mar develops along two axes: one chronological, from infancy to adulthood, and the other environmental, from a provincial existence (an unspecified rural town in Oriente Province, Cuba) to an urban life-style (Havana). Still, throughout these developmental stages, one thing remains constant in the protagonist: an unwavering defense of individual creativity. This positive spirit indomitably rebels against all hierarchical systems of power that attempt to prevent or limit human creativity.

In Celestino antes del alba, the first novel of the cycle, we find a magical and poetic time-space where dreams, hallucinations, and memory crisscross in a non-sequential time⁵⁸. The novel lacks a conventional story line, chronology, and clear delineation of characters. Moreover, the

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story, the énoncé, is neither univalenced nor verisimilar by empirical standards, but rather multifaceted and, even magical. From the very first sentence of the text, the narrative is focalized through a young child-narrator whose unrestrained and whimsical imagination subjugates any respect for accuracy or objectivity. The reader’s expectations must adapt to accommodate the unreliable and contradictory statements of the child-narrator whose delirious transgressions propose a non-restrictive code of «reality»⁵⁹. It should be noted, however, that the personal frustrations and destitute conditions of pre-revolutionary Cuban peasants are not any less convincing or any less authentic for the reader as a result of the child-narrator’s fantasies. Ironically, the wretched conditions of the Cuban countryside become more convincing the more they are distanced from any conventions of logic or «truth». The reader senses the need of the child-narrator to redress, through his imagination, the harshness of his immediate surroundings. Hence, as the child-narrator blurs the boundaries and limits of empirical reality, the reader intuits the monstrous and crude conditions of an impoverished life where fantasy provides the only escape⁶⁰.

The child-narrator of Celestino antes del alba -nameless throughout the entire text- is persecuted by the desolate conditions of his surroundings as well as by the ignorance and conventionalism of his family. This narrative voice, unable to cope with such a grim reality, splits itself in order to create an alter ego, a more pure being, an imaginary cousin (Celestino) who is also a poet. In this manner, Celestino -the product of the child-narrator’s imagination- duplicates the creative capacity of the author, Reinaldo Arenas⁶¹. Since he is made up of dreams and fantasies, Celestino can neither be destroyed by the harshness of his surroundings, nor by the violence and ignorance of the family.

Celestino possesses a poetic sensibility that drives him to practice a mysterious form of writing that is scribbled on the leaves and on the punks of the trees. As can be expected, this unusual act of expression becomes a constant source of criticism and reproach by all who do not understand its secret code. This criticism takes on monstrously humorous proportions in the form of the grandfather’s hatchet, an instrument of menace and censorship with comic book dimensions⁶².Yet, beneath the hyperbolic excess of the swinging hatchet there exists a brutality and repression proportional to the resistance and self-determination of the child-narrator. Appearing up to 113 times on a single page of the text (83), the word «hachas» (hatchets) graphically blots out any attempt at expression. Swung unrelentingly by the authoritarian figure of the grandfather, the hatchet embodies the incessant antagonism against Celestino’s transgressive poetic expression. But in the face of this oppression and persecution, the child-narrator vehemently defends Celestino’s creative activity:

Celestino’s rebellious act of writing, although mute (that is, still unintelligible) nevertheless underscores an insatiable search for self-expression, the struggle to articulate, that intrepidly continues despite obstacles and intimidation.

Like the phoenix ensured its progeny, the child-narrator/Celestino is destroyed in Arenas’s first novel to reincarnate as the adolescent Fortunato in El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas. This novel is embedded in a concrete historical reality, the rebel forces of the Sierra Maestra in their fight against the Batista regime. Nonetheless, the aesthetic discourse is never sacrificed for any type of accuracy or transparency, any hope to faithfully reproduce historical reality at the level of language. Arenas’s concern here is not to re-write history, but to subordinate history to fiction, thus setting free all constraining boundaries that hinder further inquiry into human existence. The story, the énoncé, of this second novel of the pentalogy does not unfold as a regulated succession of events, but as an interrupted and temporally disconnected recording of conflicting voices. The notion of a rigid well-structured plot, providing the reader a sense of completeness, is subverted by the presentation of a narrative time-space of multiple possibilities that invites the reader to sort out the various narrative threads and, thus, to work out a larger meaning.

Reception theory sees the process of reading as a dynamic and complex activity where each reader actualizes/concretizes the text through a process of assumptions and revisions which initiates further inferences and modifications. As

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Wolfgang Iser has pointed out in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response: «It is the reader who unfolds the network of possible connections, and it is the reader who then makes a selection from that network» (126).

El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas requires an active reader who can make the text intelligible in spite of its violations and transgressions, a reader who can accommodate the shifting codes of a text in which everything is presented as possible and probable. Hence, the initial image of death riding on a bicycle is as equally «real» within the text as Fortunato’s frustrated attempts to join the revolutionary struggle. Fortunato’s walking on the roof while stabbing himself, Esther and Fortunato’s chats beyond the grave, demons and spirits dancing in the living room, the extreme poverty of the rural town, the insurrectional struggle against Batista, the grandmother’s blasphemies and insults, Adolfina’s sexual frustrations, and so forth, are all represented side by side and equally contribute to the novel’s textual validity.

El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas is constructed as a mosaic of contradictory voices, a repetitive rehashing of the same facts from different perspectives that produces an unending web of individual psychic moments. The repetitions of the same stories, called «agonías», of the different family members (re)echo within the chambers of the novel as they search for a receptive listener. This technique of focalization is best suited to represent the alienation of the characters, each a prisoner of his/her own suffering. It is in this babel of voices that Fortunato’s voice struggles to articulate his own visions, concerns, and dreams. Like the child-narrator/Celestino, Fortunato experiences the same urgency for expression as a means to survive the continual state of oppression he faces from his family, as well as from a town that he experiences and sees as: «cuadrado y comercial, de calles simétricas y gente invariablemente práctica» (37). Like the child-narrator/Celestino, Fortunato starts to fabricate and invent imaginary refuges that take him away from his asphyxiating situation. The young man begins to steal paper from his grandfather’s small vegetable and fruit shop in order secretly to write, a labor of passion that he faithfully carries out under the most oppressive conditions:

As we can see, both the child-narrator/Celestino and Fortunato are identified by their search for expression, their struggle to articulate. Both young men dream and idealize imaginative worlds and at the same time engage in the writing process. However, this writing is still of presignification, that is, what is written is a form of pre-writing, unintelligible and hidden from the other subjects in the novels, as well as from the reader. The child-narrator/Celestino’s literary efforts, as well as Fortunato’s, are constantly criticized and referred to as futile by the other characters. Yet the reader, even though he also is not given a key to decipher these writings, does perceive and recognize the writer’s need, obsessive at times, for expression. This need, whose first and foremost purpose is but a pure expression of freedom through the word, appears in both novels as an aesthetic search for beauty. The following quotes illustrate how both the child-narrator/Celestino and Fortunato temporarily escape their respective repressive and hostile environments by projecting themselves into their imaginative worlds:

It is this creative process, the search in itself, that both novels underscore, for it is during these moments of creative activity that both the child-narrator/Celestino and Fortunato are actualized. As Maurice Blanchot states in his essay «Literature and the Right to Death»:

Fortunato is destroyed in El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas to reappear in Otra vez el mar as the adult Héctor. With an entire history behind him (childhood and adolescence) Héctor,

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now living under an institutionalized revolution, continues questioning his tortured existence and marginality. Otra vez el mar is a text that demonstrates the novelistic genre’s capacity for change and renewal. The singularity of Arenas’s narrative voice is most evident in this structurally innovative work, a text that can unquestionably stand alongside the fictive worlds of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso. To enter the fictive universe of Otra vez el mar is to enter a narrative space that undermines the idea of authorship, the principles of coherent development, the clear delineation of characters, and the autonomy of the novelistic text. Furthermore, the novel combats common assumptions concerning reality/truth by not assigning privileged modes of being. Otra vez el mar -like all of Arenas’s texts- flatly rejects all forms of absolutes in favor of polysemy⁶³.

Structurally, Otra vez el mar is an interplay of two monologues of personal frustration that work as a duo. Part 1 (the wife’s discourse) and Part 2 (Héctor’s discourse) present the histories, dreams, memories, and hallucinations of this Cuban couple as they return to Havana by car from a brief six-day vacation at the beach. Part 1 is a straightforward narration (a «mimesis of product») that divides itself into six chapters, each corresponding to the six days spent at the beach. Part 2, narrated by the poet Héctor, is a dramatic meshing of poetry and prose divided into six cantos, each likewise corresponding to the six days of vacation. Furthermore, there exists an intertextual web that links both parts. Situations that occur in the first part are continued or resolved in the second.

The adult Héctor confronts the world with the same need for expression as the child-narrator/Celestino and the adolescent Fortunato. However, his cantos are no longer scribbled on the leaves and trunks of trees like Celestino’s, nor are they secretly written on stolen reams of paper like Fortunato’s. Héctor’s cantos are simply invented, thought out, sung to himself while the reader is finally given the opportunity to hear -or rather, overhear- the poet’s words. Héctor is a frustrated writer who has never published due to the political censorship in Cuba. Consequently, his cantos are those impressions and ideas that he has thought of writing, that he wishes and intends to express. At the end of the novel, as the car approaches Havana, the possibility of continuing to sing this imaginary poem begins to disappear. If he arrives, Héctor is well aware that he will return to the slavery of the city, to conventionalism and conformity. And for this reason he states: «No llegues, no llegues, porque llegar es entregarse» (416). In the end, Héctor’s car increases its velocity as it nears the city, suicide or apocalyptic freedom in death is the final outcome. As a result, the text is that which remains after death. The voices that reach the reader are those that remain posthumously and that will be repeated «otra vez» as the title of the novel suggests.

The story of Otra vez el mar commences precisely when the six-day vacation has ended and the couple abandon the beach and begin their return trip home by car. It is at this moment when both characters -first the wife, then Héctor- begin to speak, to remember, to imagine, to dream, to sing of their personal frustrations and disenchantment. Although the wife relates the entire first part of the novel she remains nameless throughout the text. The position of dominance of her discourse within the textual linearity of the novel (Part 1) sets up the reader to rely on the authenticity of her voice. However, her discourse, and very existence, is challenged in the last sentences of the novel when it is revealed that she is only an invention, a ghost or obsession of Héctor’s imagination: «Aún tengo tiempo de volverme para mirar el asiento vacío, a mi lado. Allá voy yo solo -como siempre- en el auto. Hasta última hora la fantasía y el ritmo... » (418)⁶⁴.

Like the child-narrator of Celestino antes del alba, Héctor has created an alter ego in order to survive in a repressive environment that, in his particular case, excludes and condemns him on two counts: for being a political dissident, and for being a homosexual⁶⁵. Héctor is the poet-creator, the searcher for beauty, who, like the child-narrator/Celestino and Fortunato, finds himself persecuted as a result of the conventions of a system recusant to any expression of difference. His personal moments of inquietude and unhappiness are the consequence of living under a regime unwilling to accept any textual or sexual expressions not contributing to the established order of the revolutionary hegemony. Yet, Héctor’s frustrations run even deeper . Although Otra vez el mar is Arenas’s most political novel, the text does not utilize politics as the only reason for the subject’s estrangement. In Otra vez el mar revolutionary Cuba appears more as a backdrop to Héctor’s general desperation. His personal dilemma goes beyond the political, and even beyond his sexual frustrations. Although these two factors aggravate his abhorrence, they are

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reduced to a second plane by the recognition of the inherent contradictions of man, signs of which Héctor sees visibly all around him. Héctor confronts the human condition, which denies man the satiating of desires and destroys all possibilities of permanent plenitude and satisfaction, through an urgent need to articulate, to cry out: «Escucha ahora mi grito de hijo desesperado» (199).

In his cantos Héctor struggles against the paltriness of man’s existence. Like the child-narrator/Celestino and Fortunato, his triumph, his redemption, is seen not so much in what he says, but rather in his demanding need to want to say. Still, Héctor is quite conscious of the fragility of this endeavor. The writer in the face of his writings constantly questions their usefulness, their purpose. Thus, for example, in the second canto we hear:

This anxiety, however, is not limited exclusively to the written word, but to all discourse (both oral and written) as can be seen when Héctor immediately adds: «Se ha perdido -¿Existió alguna vez?- la sinceridad de decir de voz a voz» (231) . This interrogative insertion -¿Existió alguna vez?- reveals the writer’s doubts and ambiguity⁶⁶. Therefore, this is not a deconstructive battle where the supremacy of the oral or written word is debated. What is underscored is that man does not dominate language as a transparent medium. Words, both spoken and written, upon naming are merely echoes, not rigid object-imitations of reality. Hence, since reality is inapprehensible, the illusion of art as an accurate representation of the world is destroyed. Otra vez el mar, like all of Arenas’s texts, dismantles the traditional concept of the literary work as a logocentric denotative agent of a singular exterior truth. On the contrary, Arenas’s texts rebelliously ramble and open themselves to contradictory and ambiguous digressions that unfold an infinite number of possible «truths».

Héctor’s skepticism of language as an effective instrument of expression -his obsession with the emptiness of speech- constantly resurfaces throughout the second part of Otra vez el mar. We read for example:

Still, as much as Héctor recognizes that his search for an adequate expression is illusory, he is forever forced back into language, for it provides his only solace. Héctor is ready to struggle with the word, to acknowledge its artifice, to enter language’s unsettling game of seduction. In a moment of doubt he questions himself: «¿Es que no puedes vivir sin la palabra?» (224). The answer is no, he cannot live without the word. As much as it divides and misrepresents him, the word is his vehicle of expression. And thus, he demands of himself, «Compón tu dolor antes de que sea aún más tarde. Di, señala, grita, canta tu padecer» (387). Héctor must articulate, sing, cry out, call attention to his suffering; he must express himself. In the tones of Héctor’s anguished cantos -whispered or imagined- he triumphs over his destiny. In the end, what lies at the center of Otra vez el mar is more than a denunciation of an authoritarian system. Far more urgent is an aesthetic search for an adequate expression, for an infuriating salvation, for a simple rhyme or reason.

Part 2 of Otra vez el mar is made up of the poet-Héctor’s literary activities that are incorporated into the cantos. These compositions include tales, poems, anecdotes, political testimonies, allegories, etc., that the poet-Héctor composes to himself privately and to which the reader -unlike in Celestino antes del alba and El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas- is finally given access. One of these compositions, entitled «Monstruo», articulates the poet-Héctor’s (as well as the writer Reinaldo Arenas’s) recognition of the writer’s precarious relationship with language. Before its appearance in the text, Héctor splits himself in order to question the possibility of composing a clear and truthful expression, an immutable composition. The writer initiates a process of fictionalization, recounted by a heterodiegetic narrator, that will be allegorized

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in the subsequent tale:

The possibility of composition, that is, of faithfully reproducing or transmitting Héctor’s personal truth, through words, is proposed. However, if one examines the above passage closely, at the same time that this proposition is being made, ambiguity, self-doubt, and controversy threaten to obscure the clarity of expression that Héctor hopes he will achieve. The heterodiegetic narrator first maintains that Héctor «imagines» that he «can» express what he capriciously desires to express («lo que se le antoja») or struggles against («pugna»). The suggestion that the creative process is not a straightforward enterprise, but rather the result of an incessant tension that exists between what the writer wants to say, and what he must struggle to say, is made. In addition, the verb «transmitir» (to convey) supposes the existence of an enunciator (writer) and an enunciatee (reader), a dynamic relationship that does not place the responsibility solely on the writer’s desire for expression, but on both the writer and the reader in their actualization of the text. It is further proposed that Héctor wishes to express «his» truth, not «a» or «the» truth, that someone (an enunciatee, a reader) will receive. Hence, the realization that the work only comes into existence when it becomes the intimacy shared by the person who writes it and the person who reads it is revealed. Moreover, the heterodiegetic narrator informs us that Héctor «imagines» that in spite of everything («o por lo mismo») he still «is». The statement in parenthesis contradicts the writer’s presumption that he exists, controlling the work, conveying precisely what he wishes, regardless of everything. The awareness that the writer, as Blanchot has stated, only exists as a result of his work, that he has no identity apart from the work, undermines the authority of authorship. Finally, the use of the verb «compone» (to compose), that is, to form/to construct/to connect from various sources a new order, presents writing as a composition of torn unity, always in struggle, never reconciled, an object constructed from conflicting discourses.

Regardless of the challenges that stand in the way of his desire for a clear and truthful expression, Héctor pushes forward in his attempt to articulate, to give presence to his ideas. The tale of «Monstruo» thus begins in the following way:

Due to the length of the tale I will limit myself to a summary until the moment of denouement. The beauty of the monster so impressed the inhabitants of the city that it inspired innumerable odes; for example, one dedicated to the delicate perfume the monster’s anus exhaled. Sonnets were also written inspired by the beauty of its mouth, a mouth divided into several compartments that saved the vomit the monster disgorged in its moments of greatest orgy. The city was so in love with the monster that when he shat, a line formed to inhale («de lejos») the great monstrous reek. Without a doubt, in the city, everyone loved the monster:

Before the composition, Héctor’s desire was to express/ transmit his personal «truth» through words. This, however, is totally undermined by the irony of the very tale that he composes⁶⁸. On the most basic level, «Monstruo» presents a criticism of all types of hegemonic discourses and those who blindly follow them. Yet, more importantly, this tale unmasks -in a self-conscious manner- the inherent ideology present behind all discourse. That is, the ideological power of the word that inevitably consumes whoever allows himself to be blinded by any illusion of pure objectivity or neutrality.

In «Monstruo» the precise words that start the

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tale are exactly those that the heroic man within the story uses to dethrone the monster, revealing his «true ugliness». At the same time, it is this very man -who has dared attack the monster from a position of so-called «truth»- who in the end is also revealed as the monster. The suggestion that a similar process will endlessly be repeated exposes the monstrosity of the narration itself. Still, let us not forget that it is the poet-Héctor who composes this allegorical tale that attacks all who place themselves in a discourse of power. Yet, Héctor himself is not above falling into the trap of seduction as the man within the story. The author of «Monstruo» is equally guilty of the same logocentric desire to present his «truth» -here, the desire to present the «truth» about the arbitrariness of «truth». This vertiginous deconstructive game reveals that as much as the writer attempts to escape from the ideological power of the word, he cannot, he is destined to fail. Héctor, who before the composition had wanted to suppose the possibility of expression, free of subjectivity, likewise fails. But in fact, and here the distinction must be carefully made, the writer Héctor recognizes and anticipates this inherent failure and actually inscribes it into the anecdotal level of the narration. That is, the awareness that all processes of articulation represent falsehood and betrayal -that words do not evoke, but rather murder the reality they attempt to name- is not avoided, but intentionally woven into the very fabric of the text. For this reason, «Monstruo» can be called a self-conscious or metafictional composition about the very process of writing⁶⁹.

Critical studies have made it common knowledge that the literary form is always ideological, even when written by those who claim their writing has no message. The writer of «Monstruo» (or rather the writers, Héctor and Reinaldo Arenas) reveal the fundamental ideological intention of their tale instead of hiding behind a supposed neutrality of truth. It is precisely here that the very honesty of this writing can be found, in revealing, holding up its condition of artifice for the reader to see. In «Literature and the Right to Death» Maurice Blanchot proposes that the language that most communicates or articulates is that which reveals its condition of artifice:

In Spanish American literature, thanks to Borges’s own reflections on these very ideas, Blanchot’s words are easy to assimilate. The inevitable failure and futility of any perfervid quest for truth or objectivity through the written form is a constant of the Borgesian text. Yet, despite this failure, the creative impulse, the desire for expression, is always present. Similarly, in Arenas’s texts, in spite of the risk and inevitable failure of the word, the need for self-expression asserts itself on the writer. Arenas’s texts display no attempt to produce an objective monolithic system of language, but rather to inscribe the writer’s own particular social and historical experiences into the text in an aesthetic game of reflections, deformations, and transformations. Dissonance, subversion, and questioning are inscribed into Arenas’s novels, works that do not presume to be anything else but what they are, pure fiction.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 75, Number 1, March 1992