The Role of the Reader in Julieta Campos's Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Traditionally, the problematic relation of the author to the reader was resolved by considering the author to be an omnipotent entity. The passive reader's task was to faithfully interpret what the writer meant when he created the literary work. Over time, the reader gained importance concomitantly with changes in the role of the author. Although Cervantes in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), Unamuno in Niebla (1914), and Pirandello in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921), among others, questioned the authority of, the conventional author, his demise and the subsequent «birth» of the reader was not proclaimed until 1968 by: Barthes in «The Death of the Author». By then, the reader had acquired a new status as a co-producer of the text; he had become the focus of Reader-Response criticism⁷⁶.

Tiene los cabellos rojizos elicits the reader's participation in its construction. An enigmatic, narrative puzzle, Tiene can be studied fruitfully using reader-response concepts. The following will be employed to analyze Tiene: (1) openness (or indeterminacy) and (2) contradictions, which induce the reader to collaborate in the composition of the text, as Castellet, Iser, and Eco have demonstrated; (3) the «informed», ideal reader -in order for the reader to comprehend a work, he needs to have linguistic, semantic, and literary competence, according to Fishz⁷⁷ and Culler

José Castellet's observations are particularly applicable to Tiene dos cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina:

Castellet aptly describes the challenge facing the modern writer and reader. However, his notion that a reader can exhaust the polysemy of an open novel is misleading. The reader makes sense of a bewildering work such as Tiene provisionally. Each individual reader's readings, as well as those of every other reader, reassemble the work that the author initially structured, producing different ways of understanding the text. Meaning is, not exclusively within the work: it results from the interplay of reader and text⁷⁹. The particular strategies the «informed» reader utilizes to make the work meaningful in Tiene are related to his puzzle-solving function, which this paper will probe.

Potential novels within the novel, the many partial stories outlined in Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina invite the reader to fashion his own text. They prevent complete closure, although some intersect and complement one another. Tiene provides ostensible hints as to how it should be decoded at the same time that the narrators contradict those very clues⁸⁰. These tactics compel the reader to reappraise his own approach to the work continuously.

Tiene develops and perfects techniques that are evident in other experimental Spanish American narratives, especially those written during the «Boom» of the 1960's and 70's, of which Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963) is a prime example. With its fabled «Tablero de

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dirección», Rayuela defies the reader to be come involved in the text. Rather than following the accustomed numerical order that pagination dictates, the «Tablero» suggests one of many possible ways of reading, of ludically skipping around the text in order to construe it. Tiene, with its fragmented characters and story-line, and its multiple narrative voices, frustrates passive readings to a greater extent than even Rayuela does.

Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina proposes that the story it contains is

He who rotates a kaleidoscope or assembles a puzzle can ultimately find a particular pattern into which all the parts fit. Paradoxically, the protagonist, Sabina, and the reader discover that no single tale accommodates the elements of Tiene in an organic, harmonious whole. There is no unity of plot as in the traditional novel. Most of the temporal and spatial references shift (12 midnight, 12 noon, 1 blown-up second, 2 or 3 minutes, 7 days, 2 months, in Havana, Venice, and so on). Yet, the novel revolves around Sabina, who looks at the sea and the other guests of a hotel in Acapulco at 4:00 p. m. on May 8, 1971, while she attempts to write a novel.

Sabina is 22, 30, 40 years old or any age whatsoever, according to the text. She does not have a fixed identity, unlike a standard character. Sabina coincides with a female photographer and women supposedly at various stages of writing Tiene los cabellos rojizos, even Julieta Campos's own persona. By using the author as a character, Campos exposes the underlying supports of the narrative and reminds the reader that the text is a fictional construct, not reality. Campos also notes this in Función de la novela (60-61). The same holds true for the fictive reader, as will be seen. These techniques are typical of other twentieth-century Spanish American texts.

In Severo Sarduy's De donde son los cantantes (1967), for instance, characters often metamorphose (with the added twist that many are androgynous or homosexual) and include a mask of the writer himself. The author as character can be found in still earlier Latin American works such as Vicente Huidobro's «La cigüeña encadenada» in Tres inmensas novelas (1935), co-authored with Hans Arp. Not only do human characters change in this short story, but animals and objects, which are characters too, are also transformed. The reader is a character in more than one narrative of Huidobro and Sarduy.

Sabina recalls fragments of events and imagines others in Tiene los cabellos rojizos, discarding them constantly. She considers myriad possibilities for the novel she would like to write. Nevertheless, Sabina is unable to project her partial visions into a finished product. Were she to do so, the very latency upon which Tiene los cabellos rojizos is based would cease. Rather than touch upon the visionary aspect or how Tiene is structured as a work in progress, both of which have already been dealt with elsewhere⁸², the potentiality of Julieta Campos's text will be examined in conjunction with the puzzle image, for it is central to an understanding of the reader's function in Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina.

The inchoate novels within Tiene either contain anonymous character types, such as the playboy, the girl in a bikini, etc., or ones with actual names -Marcuse, Gabriela, and Fernando, for example. Characters are not developed fully. A few of those sketchy narratives have titles: «La pasajera», «La invitada» «en el mirador» (or «El día séptimo»); the majority are untitled.

The playboy's handsomeness, a necessary attribute, is not described but his seductive tactics are detailed. A narrative voice contemplates using him in a frivolous and readily consumed story concerning an affair on ship-board. This tale is scrapped because Sabina feels she would deal ineptly with him in her novel. He passes by an interested young woman in a bikini and her jealous boyfriend. The same couple appeared several pages earlier, where their routine of playing games was mentioned. Almost as quickly as in the instance regarding the playboy, this narrative strand is dropped as unsuitable. By her own admission, the indecisive Sabina is unable to utilize them as characters, in contrast to the traditional, self-assured, stereotypical male writer who is staying in a room called «El laberinto» He wants to make Sabina a vulnerable

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female character in his own violent novel.

Sabina has trouble writing because she has no confidence in language. Unlike many nineteenth-century authors and the man in «El laberinto», Sabina cannot employ words without hesitation, since she does not believe in the conventions of realism. For her, language is opaque: it is not a transparent vehicle for reality. A specular novel, Tiene does not mirror primarily the world of objects, people, or events but of fiction. It is an inward look at the act of reading and writing, as Velázquez's «Las Meninas» reflects the viewing and painting of his work, a theme Campos treats in her essays⁸³.

An elderly man staying at the same hotel as Sabina is named «Marcuse» by her. Sabina's mind converts him into a retired Britisher who spends a month in Acapulco every year and lives in the Bahamas. One of the narrative voices rejects him as incongruous. Sabina replies that it does not matter since his story will not be the main tale of Tiene either. Despite their sadness in parting, Gabriela and Fernando separate for unexplained reasons. All of the above characters and situations are elements of novels which could be but are never written.

«La pasajera», «La invitada», and «en el mirador» have some aspects in common; «La invitada» and «El mirador» parallel Tiene. The protagonist of «La pasajera» a woman with a lung illness whose death is uncertain, goes by ship from Acapulco to Vancouver. Snatches of her trip are interspersed throughout portions of Tiene los cabellos rojizos and merge with those of other travelers. Vancouver is a destination imagined by the narrator of «Celina o los gatos» a short story whose title is the same as that of the collection in which it appears, written by Campos; for him, the voyage serves as a mental escape from his surroundings. «La pasajera» is similar to «La invitada» in the setting, since «un hotel y un barco son, igualmente, residencias transitorias» (103)⁸⁴.

The plot of «La invitada» resembles that of Tiene insofar as the woman at the hotel is on the verge of discovering a secret just as she is about to leave, like Sabina. «La invitada» ends with a startling statement that suggests once more how utterly fictional the text is: the bellboy offers condolences to the protagonist on her death and expresses his happiness at seeing how well things have gone for her since her untimely demise. His comment is seemingly unconnected to the rest of Tiene los cabellos rojizos. Nonetheless, the title of the novel the man in «El laberinto» is writing, «En el mirador» corresponds to the name of Sabina's room. In his text, the female protagonist would unwittingly witness a crime she does not report to the authorities and, guilt-ridden, perhaps she would commit suicide. Sabina attempts to kill herself at the end of Tiene los cabellos rojizos. She does so for a different reason than the man's character, in defiance of her authors.

What the reader is expected to do with the truncated tales summarized above is patent: he is to piece them together as he must do with the remaining elements of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina. The sort of reader he is still has to be examined further.

The reader is an implied character of Tiene when the work addresses him indirectly. A narrator self-consciously points out, for instance, that the word «escenografía» («staging») has already been used too often. It should not be abused in the remainder of Tiene los cabellos rojizos, «si no se aspira a inducir al lector a una curiosidad desmesurada por sus probables implicaciones simbólicas» (89)⁸⁵. Tiene presumes the reader is «informed», that he is aware of the conventions of reading and writing. The narrator assumes the reader is familiar with the idea that recurrent words should be taken into account in interpreting a text. Thus, the reader would infer that he is expected to ascertain the significance of the term «escenografía», which is precisely the opposite of the desired response in the passage. Whether any clues can safely be followed by the reader in making sense of the fragmented protagonist and novel is often called into question either obliquely, as it is here, or explicitly.

Sabina's identity is «compleja, confusa, múltiple, ambigua» (130)⁸⁶, adjectives that are equally appropriate to describe the novel as a whole. They intimate there are few helpful exegetical hints. A key to deciphering the novel is proffered when it is announced that Sabina's glance, to which the reader is to join his own, is the nucleus of the novel. Included in Tiene, then, are the perspectives of Sabina, several writers, and the reader.

When a young woman in a black sweater

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who can, be construed in several ways walks by, the fast person-narrator leaves it up to the reader to decide if she is important or not. This is what the reader has had to do with the arbitrarily ended stories which were discussed earlier. A narrative voice also indicates that by removing punctuation from the novel the reader would have to work more actively to decode the text. While Tiene usually has punctuation, there are incomplete sentences that finish as abruptly as those tales. The burden of filling in these blanks falls on the reader. He is once again an active participant in the assemblage of the text.

Then reader's task is not only to accept the bewilderment that is an integral pact of Tiene; but also to acquiesce in his own fictionalization, caught between Seylla and Charybdis. One of the two principal narrators states that «la confusión del lector deberá superar, en este punto de la novela, a la del personaje: tendrá que perderse entre la multiplicidad de las máscaras; los rostros y las voces para encontrar; si es que lo encuentra; un indicio caricaturesco de su propia imagen»⁸⁷. The other narrator retorts:

That woman turns out to be Sabina: A premise contained in this quote, as well as in Campus's Función de la novela (62), is shared by Walker Gibson and Wayne Booth: The three argue that unless the «mock» reader adopts the attitude that the text requires, he will refuse to continue reading. It could be countered that one can read a book even if he does not like the work or agree with the role into which it casts him as reader. Undoubtedly, the reaction that Gibson, Booth, and Campos foresee is more common; it's typical of a passive reader who prefers to be entertained and dislikes being forced to work by the text. Reading incessantly against the grain requires an ideal reader, «informed», critical, and adept at puzzle-solving; «ideal» should not be taken to mean there is only one correct interpretation.

In order to go along with what the second narrator (cited above) concludes, the reader must break with the reality of the objective world. Campus's novel suggests this in the reverse fashion of Jorge Luis Borges's «Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius» in Ficciones (1944). In the Borgesian short story, fantastic objects slip into the world of the characters and, by extension, of the potential readers, who are addressed directly by the narrator at the end of the tale⁸⁹. The reader is asked to enter into Campus's narrative by becoming a character of the novel. His own fortune is playfully tied to Sabina's; this blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. By virtue of his new ontological status, during the time of the reading the reader of Tiene becomes as ethereal, as unreal as the protagonist. Both allow themselves to be fascinated by the siren's song the words that constitute the text, their existence, and the reading and writing of Tiene los cabellos rojizos. Tiene emphasizes its own artifice and that of novelistic discourse. Like other metafictional works, Tiene problematizes its relation to reality simultaneously affirming that it is a written and read aesthetic object composed of words⁹⁰.

The unwary reader resents the ironical «slight digression» that one of the narrators purports to intercalate briefly, sarcastically asking the «dear reader» for permission to do so (157). Such procedures come as no surprise to the «informed» reader; since the novel itself is digressive. The passive reader is chided in Campus's Oficio de leer: «cuando el lector no es activo sino pasivo; cuando pretende recibir sin dar nada, sólo siente un enorme vacío» (15)⁹¹, in opposition to the creative satisfaction the active, ideal reader will reap as a result of his efforts:

The ideal reader is also portrayed in Tiene as the Jakobsonian addressee: The communicative model is presented and parodied by the narrators/writers: «Debes pensar en alguien con quien te gustaría comunicarte. ¿Dónde estaría ese alguien? Bueno: ahora piensa en un mensaje: ¿Qué le mandarías a decir?»⁹² One of the narrators complains, «¿A poco no nos pasamos la vida conversando mentalmente con un interlocutor imaginario? El escritor es alguien que deja constancia de ese diálogo...» (140-41)⁹³. The difficulty in locating the individual to whom a writer would address the dialogue that is the literary work is obvious in these remarks. The flesh and blood writer is never in actual contact with the reader as speakers would be in a conversation. The ideal reader is an abstract construct

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and the Jakobsoniam model is limited in scope; albeit Campos's essays echo Jakobson's paradigm. In Officio, Imagen, and Función, reading and writing are seen as two aspects of the communicative act, as an indirect dialogue between the author and the reader. Accordingly, for Campos the reader, the «tú», is the implied, interlocutor to whom the literary text is addressed (Función 51).

Tiene satirizes the traditional; regionalistic interviewer/critic, who panders to the undiscerning public's view of literature. Towards the beginning of the novel, the authorial «I» is asked a series of questions by an anonymous character who refers to her formally as «usted». He cannot conveniently pigeonhole her novel for it eludes his simplistic classifications⁹⁴. He wants to know more about her projected novel and that of the male writer in «El laberinto». The interviewer is hostile towards self-reflexive writing, which is precisely what Tiene is. Even though the «yo» banishes this character, he crops up later on to ask how she writes; whether she fears being influenced by other authors, and if inspiration plays a part in her work. The text does not always list his actual question; but his reaction to them is recorded. When this happens, the reader has to imagine for himself what the interviewer/ critic may have inquired.

The degree of the reader's participation in the text is increased by the conflicting narrative voices. These are characteristic of Tiene and of other modern Spanish American fiction, such as the narratives that Severo Sarduy wrote after Gestos (1963) and Manuel Purg's Boquitas pintadas (1968).⁹⁵

From the start of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabrina, an equivocal dialogue is established between a first person and a second person narrator, «yo» and «tú» respectively They primarily (but not exclusively) represent Sabina and Campus's personae, who are doubles of each other. On occasion; the reader is specifically identified as «tú». Often, however, it is unclear who is speaking and who is being addressed, which effectively draws the reader into the work.

The text pretends that it can anticipate and answer any questions the reader and critic may have. Tiene is «una novela que agotara todas o casi todas las posibilidades de interpretación y hasta de crítica que pudieran hacerse...» (154)⁹⁶. By stating that it takes into account most approaches to it, the novel would have one believe it is an impossibly closed work. Instead, transcendental meaning is relentlessly postponed even when the narrators claim to favor some interpretations over others; this underscores the polysemous, open nature of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina.

The authorial «I» ridicules the unperceptive reader and critic. She revels in their discomfiture over the numerous «I's» which circulate in the novel and are not indicative of the godlike, authoritative writer of yore: «el lector se preguntará quizá si a él le toca mostrarse perplejo ante la multiplicidad de voces que [...] dicen yo como si se tratara de un yo único, ubicuo y omnisciente, o si debe aceptar la proliferación de yos [...]. Como en un juego, escojo para el lector, para el crítico posible pero improbable; algunas frases claves [...]» (139)⁹⁷. She then proceeds to recapitulate fragments from Tiene. After enumerating these hints, one of the narrators asks the other: «¿se las ofreces sólo para decirles después que esas claves no son las buenas y obligarlos a buscar otras?» (140)⁹⁸. Whether reader by choice or actual critic by profession, he who reads this novel must do so analytically; especially in light of the unreliable information provided by the narrators. The «informed» reader must draw his own conclusions; he cannot depend on any clues the text facilitates.

Even the value of assembling the parts of the text is disputed: Sabina's identity is composed of «mil pedazos que sería vano tratar de volver a armar en el rompecabezas de una novela» (132)⁹⁹. This is what Sabina and the reader initially endeavor to do in Tiene: Rearranging the photographs of the promontory which entrances Sabina would not decipher the novel either.

Page numbers are given in which the technique of conflicting statements is highlighted. In this case they are the correct pages where those statements are found: «hay [...] una contradicción obvia entre dos afirmaciones que se hacen; respectivamente; en la página 45 y en la 43» (145)¹⁰⁰; both assertions are subsequently quoted. Such numbers do not always correspond to what the narrator indicates and cannot necessarily be trusted.

Contradiction' indubitably involves the reader in the construction of the novel. The

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work calls itself into question ceaselessly, thus making the reader's role more arduous and rewarding. He has to sort through the pieces of the puzzling text, decide which are false leads, reconsider and alter his interpretations as he progresses bit by bit through the novel. The title of the book provides the single clue in Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina which is not a pitfall, as the «I» declares twice, once in French, once in Spanish.

With its multiple, inconsistent narrators and fictive writers, Julieta Campos's novel is an excellent illustration of the meaning of «text» as a fabric, a braiding of voices:

Tiene los cabellos rojizos is a narrative about reading and writing a novel. The work can be woven together in countless ways. No single solution is ultimately privileged; closure is infinitely deferred.

The author as well as the reader intertwine the strands of the open, polyphonic text, structuring and restructuring it. The reader is one of the writers of Tiene. Conversely, the author is another reader of the work: «yo que escribo, o tú que me lees, o los dos que leemos lo que yo o tú o los otros escriben» (175)¹⁰¹ are the weavers of the text. This does not mean that author and reader are identical.

For Julieta Campos, the author is a visionary with special insight into the nature of the literary work and of reality, as is evident in the essays of Oficio and Función. Once the text is published, however, the author has no more authority over his work than the reader, no more rights as owner than those that the law accords him¹⁰². Campos's comments in Oficio emphasize that the important thing is not what the author intended to do in a particular text but what that book suggests to the reader (43). Although reading and writing are not the same, they are similar, creative operations, as Julieta Campos theorizes in Función and skillfully puts into practice in Tiene los cabellos rojizos.

Campos maintains in Oficio, Función and Tiene that each successive reading or reordering of the text enriches and vivifies it. The circular ending of Tiene harks back to the opening sentence of the novel. Fictive writer, potential reader, and Sabina are joined, preventing her death. The ending proclaims that as long as someone reads the sequence of words that make up the text, Sabina will remain alive and the reader's and the protagonist's perspective will be one. As the «I» is aware, all literary works must come to an end, but she does not resort to finishing the story tritely by killing off the main characters. Sabina will Eve in a fictional sense, as will the masks of the author and reader, as long as someone reads the novel and only for the duration of that reading. Thus, the capricious period which is the last punctuation mark of Tiene is not an ending but a beginning. It commences the work and the interaction with every «informed», puzzle-solving reader of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina.

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Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 73, Number 3, September 1990