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“Recibir con ambas mejillas”:
Rosario Castellanos’s Painterly Discourse
by
Ron Friis
Furman University
El
otro, la mudez que pide voz
al
que tiene la voz
y
reclama el oído del que escucha.
El
otro. Con el otro
la
humanidad, el diálogo, la poesía,
comienzan.
-Rosario
Castellanos
Rosario
Castellanos (1925-1974) employed an ironic sense of humor and strong emotions
in her poems in order to open her readers’s eyes to the condition of Mexican
women. Castellanos’s focus on the consequences of betrayal, loneliness and
insecurity, and her intimate and confessional style have led some critics to
the conclusion that her work is overly autobiographical. As María Salgado has
noted, Castellanos’s use of irony creates self-portraits that are in her image,
but are not true reproductions of the writer herself. The Rosario Castellanos
we read in her supposedly autobiographical poetry is actually a caricature,
“una estampa-máscara vacía” used to highlight society’s expectations for women
(70). As we shall see, there are many parallels between the process of creating
these verbal masks and certain methods common to the visual arts. This essay
will focus on how Castellanos uses ekphrasis, collage, and framing techniques
to create poetic self-portraits of great impact.
Comparisons
between the visual and the verbal arts and the barriers between poetry and
painting have long been a source of theoretical debate and have engendered a
particularly large body of critical commentary. Even a superficial reading of
the work of W.J.T. Mitchell, Wendy Steiner, Murray Krieger, James A.W.
Heffernan and Mary Ann Caws, as well as the hispanists Hugo Méndez-Ramírez,
Margaret Persin, Cecelia J. Cavenaugh and Frederick de Armas, provides a sense
of the current state and surprising complexity of this much contended
controversy.[1] The study of
language, a temporal medium, and its capacity to portray spatial dimensions
introduces a host of difficult scientific, theoretical, and even theological
implications. Such debates over space and time eventually lead back to
redefinitions of mimesis and the metaphor itself and throw all of language’s
ability to represent forms into question.
Opponents
of what today is termed “intermedial” intertextuality have, since G.E.
Lessing’s Laocoön of 1766, regarded
the visual and the verbal as “radically different modes of representation”
(Mitchell, Iconology 44). Still, the
proponents of intermedial studies far outnumber the critics. In the seminal
study The Sister Arts, Jean Hagstrum
writes that “However much lip service may be paid to the view that art imitates
nature, good art also imitates other art, both in the same and in other media”
(xx). More recent studies, such as those cited above, attempt to articulate new
ways in which tropes such as ekphrasis can serve as interpretive tools for
unlocking the affinities between poetry and sculpture or painting. W.J.T.
Mitchell, for his part, debunks the supposed incompatibility between space and
time in art and contends that: “We cannot experience a spatial form except in
time; we cannot talk about our temporal experience without invoking spatial
measures” (“Spatial Form” 276). The relationship between the two, he writes, is
one of “complex interaction, interdependence, and interpenetration” (“Spatial
Form” 276).
One
of the fundamental differences between visual and verbal representations,
according to Sigurd Burckhardt, is that when an artist paints a tree, he or she
is creating an image. But when a poet
writes the word tree, he or she is
triggering a private association in the mind of the reader of a tree.
Burckhardt writes that:
If
many key terms of literary analysis - ‘color,’ ‘texture’ and ‘image,’ for
example
- are in fact metaphors borrowed from the other arts, this is the
reason:
poetry has no material cause. Words already have what the artist wants to
give
them - body.
(quoted
in Krieger, Ekphrasis 266)
Keeping
in mind that there is no “master trope” when it comes to comparing the visual and
the verbal (Mitchell, Iconology 155),
I am using the term “painterly discourse” as a way to classify a method of
writing that engenders what Ulrich Weisstein calls “literary works in whose
creation certain techniques or modes borrowed from the visual arts have been
employed” (8). The tension in the term reflects the friction present when two
media meet and combine. For Mitchell, such pressure is central to intermedial
criticism. In fact, he sees the resistance to interartistic comparison as
running deeper than “mere professional insularity.” Mitchell goes on to suggest
that:
the
comparative study of verbal and visual art would be leavened considerably by
making
this resistance one of its principal objects of study, instead of treating it
as
an annoyance to be overcome.
(Iconology 156)
Tension
is a key element of ekphrasis, the most common approach to painting and poetry,
and the extent to which critics limit the boundaries of the trope varies
widely. On one side, we find definitions confined to the literal re-creation
of, or allusion to, specific works of art within a poem. On the other hand, we
find broad interpretations like this one by Margaret Persin, who recently
described the ekphrastic text as one that:
makes
reference to a visual work of art, whether real or
imagined,
canonized or uncanonized, and thus allows that art object, in truth the
framework
of the poetic text.
(Getting the Picture 18)
In the end, Persin’s understanding of
ekphrasis boils down to the affirmation that it “comes to represent art’s
questioning stance faced with Otherness” (Getting
the Picture 30). This remark brings additional complexities of the term to
the fore that are particularly relevant to the study of Rosario Castellanos.
Ekphrasis, in any of its forms, triggers issues that are at the heart of
Castellanos’s poetics: subjectivity, gender, conflict, dependence, stillness,
silence, and sacrifice. The same is true when critics such as Murray Krieger
write of the ekphrastic text’s “dependence on the mission of another art” (6)
and the price of movement when gained at the expense of stillness. The
symbiotic character of the ekphrastic text reflects Castellanos’s poems in
which the concept of otherness transcends all, even gender (Ahern 9).[2]
As
Margaret Persin has shown, it is not until late in her career that Rosario
Castellanos wrote directly ekphrastic poems. In fact, three of her most
explicit commentaries on art appear side-by-side in the section “Viaje
redondo,” toward the very end of Poesía
no eres tú, her obra poética of
1972. “Mirando a la Gioconda,” for example, is a poem about contemplating the
Mona Lisa in the Louvre and wondering about the source of her mysterious smile.
The portrait, Castellanos writes, is smirking at the tourists’s misconception
that culture is something like a chic disease that can be most easily
contracted at especially contagious places:
¿Te
ríes de mí? Haces bien.
Si
yo fuera Sor Juana
o
la Malinche o, para no salirse del folclore,
alguna
encarnación de la Güera Rodríguez
(como
ves, los extremos, igual que a Gide, me tocan)
me
verías, quizá, como se ve
al
espécimen representativo
de
algún sector social de un país del tercer mundo.
Pero
soy solamente una imbécil turista de a cuartilla,
de
las que acuden a la agencia de viajes para que
les
inventen un tour. Y monolingüe
¡para colmo! que viene a
contemplarte.
Y
tú sonríes, misteriosamente
como
es tu obligación. Pero yo te interpreto.
Esa
sonrisa es burla. Burla de mí y de todos
los
que creemos que
la
cultura es un líquido que se bebe en su fuente,
un
síntoma especial que se contrae
en
ciertos sitios contagiosos, algo
que
se adquiere por ósmosis.
(325-26)
There
are a number of painterly techniques at work here. Besides the obvious subject
matter, Margaret Persin has noted the concrete image of a frame utilized by
Castellanos in the graphic layout of the poem: the first and third stanzas
focus on the Gioconda while the middle one centers on the speaker (“La
mirada...” 57).
The
use of the second person appears to acknowledge the subjectivity of the
painting. In fact, the speaker seems to place the painting on an equal plane with
herself. First she sarcastically refers to herself as “una imbécil turista de a
cuartilla” (9) but then reassumes her place as a privileged viewing subject: ”Y
tú sonríes, misteriosamente / como es tu obligación. Pero yo te interpreto”
(13-14). This statement reveals Castellanos’s obsession with subjectivity and
her tendency to cast it out onto portraits or mirrors, or turn it back onto
herself. The confusion caused by the switches of subjectivity and what is lost
between them reflects the combination of the visual and the verbal in the text.
Persin has also analyzed the ekphrasis of this poem and writes that Castellanos
attempts to invert:
la
relación sujeto activo (masculino)/objeto pasivo
(femenino)
para poder subvertirla, e intenta destruir la
imagen
de la mujer cosificada, resultado implícito de
esta
mirada masculina.
(“La
mirada...” 54)
Paris
seems to have triggered an ekphrastic reaction from the Mexican writer. In
“Conversación entre viajeros,” for example, the speaker questions another
passenger, an older woman, seated next to her on a train, about her life. The
terms she uses are intensely visual and reflect the ekphrasis of the other
poems in the section:
le
pregunto: su historia ¿tiene alguna coherencia?
¿El
mosaico de días y de acciones
formó
alguna figura que pueda contemplarse?
¿Se
escribiría un libro con su vida?
¿Se
pintaría un cuadro con su cara?
(6-10)
The
woman’s embittered reply to these questions is that she has a bank account
large enough “Como para comprarse galerías, bibliotecas, todo lo que los otros
han ordenado y hecho” (15-17). Castellanos caps the poem off with one of her
familiar sarcastic zingers: “Y que no necesita de ninguna otra cosa” (18).
“La
Victoria de Samotracia” is the finest example of direct ekphrasis in the
section. The text is based on a Greek sculpture from 190 AD, called the Nike of
Samothrace or simply the Winged Victory in English. Although archaeologists at
the Louvre were able to reconstruct the statue from 118 disparate fragments,
they were unable to find a number of very important pieces, including the head.
The poem reads:
Avanza
como avanzan los felices:
ingrávida,
ligera, no tanto por las alas
cuanto
porque es acéfala.
Una
cabeza es siempre algo que tiene un peso:
la
estructura del cráneo que es ósea y el propósito
siempre
de mantenerla erguida, alerta.
Y
lo que adentro guarda.
(326)
The
title and first stanza set the ekphrasis into motion by conjuring up the image
of the statue. If the reader is not familiar with the specific piece, then he
or she can create his or her own mental vision of the body. Still,
Castellanos’s is not a direct reproduction of the original because this figure,
although headless, is in motion from the poem’s first syllable. Furthermore,
the description of the weight of the head, which is in direct contrast to the
rest of the figure’s weightless stride, really puts the reader in the scene, as
if probing a skull with his or her own hands. Mitchell reminds us that vivid descriptions
of the sense of touch appear to construct space and “embody this dimension in
the implicitly tactile metaphor of a ‘text’ (literally, that which is woven;
web, texture)” (“Spatial Form” 279).
In
both its form and content “La Victoria de Samotracia” supplements the visual
image of the statue by giving its body life with verbs of movement. As Wendy
Steiner writes, “Since sculptures are not illusions of bodies, but bodies as
such, the barrier between them and life is animation itself, motion” (49). Thus
the gift of motion bestowed by the poet and the reader during the process of
reading the poem creates the statue’s own moment of victory as it strides
forward once again.
The
feminist implications of reanimating a beautiful yet headless female statue are
not lost on the poet -- indeed Persin calls the poem “la victoria del cerebro
femenino” (“La mirada...” 61). She also describes the statue as “un objeto
sexual, cuya importancia reside en su cuerpo, específicamente en su tronco,
como receptáculo de todo lo que le impone el sistema patriarcal” (“La
mirada...” 58). Castellanos’s work is filled with references to the heads of
women. From the brainwashing hair dryers of El
eterno femenino to her obsession with the autorretrato, Castellanos’s poetry urges women to fill their heads
with knowledge and to disregard the myths that attempt to stop them from
engaging in critical thought. This pressure comes from both genders in
Rosario’s work. It is equally present in the male imposition of inconsequential
and unattainable social expectations such as beauty, manners, and style, as
well as in the female refusal to rebel against these directives. As we shall
see shortly, Castellanos’s head-centered perspective creates a confrontational
atmosphere similar to the haunting eyes of the Mona Lisa or the self-portraits
of Frida Kahlo.
Poems
such as “Nocturno” and “Mala fe” are powered by another artistic technique that
has its roots in the avant-garde: collage. “Mala fe” is a fine example of
Castellanos’s fixation on the self as subject and her frequent juxtaposition of
the visual and the verbal. After dismissing any interest the speaker might have
in philosophy, the poem’s second stanza reads:
Me
conmueve más bien la vastedad
del
espacio, la inmensa
magnitud
de los tiempos
y
las cosas que son y las que ocurren.
(6-9)
Time
and space are at first mentioned by name and then are employed in the creation
of a collage:
¡Tantas
cosas! Orugas, tempestades,
hiedras
alrededor de una columna
a
medio destruir,
casitas
suburbanas, tractores, incunables.
abrelatas,
tratados de paz, mesas de bridge,
piedras
semipreciosas, recetas de cocina
y
más y más y más.
Y
yo erigiéndome
en
el centro del mundo
y
sintiéndome el foco de la atención de todo
lo
que existe o de aquel que lo creó
si
es que lo que existe ha sido creado.
(10-21)
In
these lines, Castellanos creates a chaotic, almost surrealistic, collage in the
center of which we find her speaker wondering at the ability of her words to
create. The swirl of objects with only personal meanings serves to frame the
subject and make her both the linguistic and the visual center of attention.
Framing
is also central to “El encerrado,” a particularly arresting poem due to its
many levels of meaning. It begins with an indirectly ekphrastic passage that
paints the image of a framed portrait. The relationship between the poetic
voice and its addressee creates a composition that resembles the gaze of the
visual artist and his or her “subject.” This “subject,” which is, in truth, an
object in the eyes of the painter, is portrayed more as a face than as a
person: “Cara contra los vidrios, fija, estúpida,/ mirando sin oír” (1-2). The
familiar feminine characters are absent in this poem, though the text’s message
is still in conjunction with Castellanos’s feminist thought. The visual image
of the window literally frames the addressee who, as in a painting, is a silent
observer. In the third verse, the distance between the subject and the object
or addressee is established: “Aquí afuera sucede lo que sucede: algo” (3). What
follows in the poem is a series of politically charged images of social unrest
and oppression visible through the insulting barrier of a pane of glass:
Las
especies feroces devoran al cordero.
El
látigo del fuerte
chasquea
sobre el lomo del miedo y la cadena
del
opresor se ciñe a los tobillos
de
los que nunca ya podrán danzar.
Uno
persigue a otro, lo alcanza, lo asesina.
Y
tú presencias todo,
maravillado,
ajeno, sin preguntar por qué.
(7-14)
The
mute bystander in this text resembles a portrait that is marked by passivity
and inaction in the face of events such as the massacre at Tlatelolco. In this
variation of a visual representation, the text veils its use of the second
person until the very end and when the word tú
is delivered, it is surprising in its indictment of us readers. Instead of a
Castellanos self-portrait, what we find is that we readers are being portrayed
and examined by the poet. This technique succeeds in raising our consciousness
and highlighting society’s tendency to shy away from political activism.
One
of the most characteristic qualities of Castellanos’s work that is related to
her focus on the head is the use of masks. Castellanos uses facial disguises in
the figurative sense (persona poems) as well as quite literally through the use
of wigs and makeup. The speaker of the much read “Autorretrato,” for example,
quips:
Rubia,
si elijo una peluca rubia.
O
morena, según la alternativa.
(En
realidad, mi pelo encanece, encanece).
Soy
más o menos fea. Eso depende mucho
de
la mano que aplica el maquillaje.
(10-14)
Makeup
also reappears as a way to paint with words in “Valium 10” and “Evocación de la
tía Elena.” In the later poem, the speaker’s aunt is artistically framed in a
mirror, studying her face, as the poetic voice wonders “¿Es lícito destruir la
obra de la belleza / cuando sólo enmascara al sufrimiento?” (10-11). In these
two texts, Castellanos focuses on the private moment of removing one’s mask and
revealing what was previously covered or perhaps hidden.
As
María Salgado has noted, Castellanos recurrently adopts exterior points of view
to create ironic self-portraits that parody stereotypes of women. In the process,
the reader is often led by the hand through a personal “little shop of horrors”
as poetic speakers display their wounds and describe the depths of their pain.
For W.J.T. Mitchell, any such prompts that guide our temporal experience of a
text help create a map or a spatial experience (“Spatial Form” 286). Just as
the verbal depends on the visual to create its imagery before sacrificing
itself as the mind evokes a picture, the meeting place of masculine and
feminine in these poems is a similarly difficult place full of conflicting
needs and paradox.
In
a poem like “Pequeña crónica,” Castellanos goes even further than creating
artificial masks by using bodily fluids themselves as ink and paint. The text
first mentions the blood of a broken hymen that binds two lovers and then
speaks of other humors that “color” the relationship and create a situation in
which the very body of the female poet-speaker assumes the role of the canvas
or blank page upon which is painted a story in reds, greens, and shades of white:
Entre
nosotros hubo
lo
que hay entre dos cuando se aman:
sangre
del himen roto. (¿Te das cuenta?
Virgen
a los treinta años ¡Y poetisa! Lagarto.)
La
hemorragia mensual o sea en la que un niño
dice
que sí, dice que no a la vida.
Y
la vena
-mía
o de otra, ¿qué más da?- en que el tajo
suicida
se hundió un poco o lo bastante
como
para volverse una esquela mortuoria.
Hubo
quizá, también, otros humores:
el
sudor del trabajo, el del placer,
la
secreción verdosa de la cólera,
semen,
saliva, lágrimas.
Nada,
en fin, que un buen baño no borre. Y me pregunto
con
qué voy a escribir, entonces, nuestra historia.
¿Con
tinta? ¡Ay! Si la tinta
viene
de tan ajenos manantiales.
(283)
An
analysis of the colors of this text reveal a particularly interesting level of
meaning that may otherwise not come into play in others readings. From
beginning to end, the poem appears to speak solely of a relationship between a
man and a woman but the prominent colors of the text, red, green and white, are
also those of the Mexican flag. Taken as such, this “crónica” provides a
possible political reading as well, especially in its final stanza.
Castellanos’s works, as with much of Mexican literature, return time and time
again to the image of the country as a violated woman, used and then abandoned
by Spanish, French or American imperialism. This image is also connected to the
theme of purity (“Virgen a los treinta años” (4), “Nada, en fin que un buen
baño no borre” (15)) and corresponds with two of Castellanos’s frequent alter
egos, the Virgen of Guadalupe and la Malinche.
The
commonplace of Mexico as woman and woman as Mexico is based on the creation of
a text that is the locus of violent conflict. Castellanos often uses doubling
and dialogue to achieve these effects in her work. In “Entrevista de prensa,”
the conversational tone, sarcasm, and demonstrative adjectives and pronouns
help display a visual image:
¿Quiere
pasar a ver mi mausoleo?
¿Le
gusta este cadáver? Pero si es nada más
una
amistad inocua.
Y
ésta una simpatía que no cuajó y aquél
no
es más que un feto. Un feto.
(23-27)
The
colloquial tone with references to implicitly visual images is repeated in the
famous second Kinsey Report poem as well:
Porque
¿no lo ve usted? estoy envejeciendo.
Ya
perdí la esperanza de casarme
y
prefiero una que otra cicatriz
a
tener la memoria como un cofre vacío.
(19-22)
All
of this self-portraiture demands that we focus on vision itself and give
ourselves an extensive eye examination. Nowhere is this more evident than in
Castellanos’s political poems like “El encerrrado,” discussed earlier, and the
moving “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” written about the slaughter of student
protestors in the Plaza de Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco) on October 2, 1968. The
poem lashes out against the government coverup of the facts by focusing on
images of darkness. Just as she did with the Winged Victory, at the end of the
“Memorial de Tlatelolco,” Castellanos seeks to personify justice and have it
become tangible, visible: “Recuerdo, recordemos / hasta que la justicia se
siente entre nosotros” (38-39). Murray Krieger has stated that the original
function of an epigram was as an explanatory inscription at the base of a
statue and when we find such an epigram without the accompanying object, we
have ekphrasis (16). Castellanos’s gloss of an event veiled in darkness and
deceit thus serves as an epigram, one that ekphrastically usurps its function
as a mere supplement and contradicts the “offical story” by helping to shed the
light of truth on that dark and confusing night.
The
quotation in the title of this essay, “Recibir con ambas mejillas,” comes from
“Lecciones de cosas,” one of Castellanos’s more popular poems in which she
describes her role as a well oiled screw in the larger machine of society. The
poem is all about obedience to religious dogma and societal customs and how the
speaker fought against pressure to silence her. Castellanos’s portrayal of
women who turn the other cheek is a strategy against silence and the status
quo. By employing techniques borrowed from the visual arts, Castellanos
reinforces her longing for a better world, one in which justice is literally
incorporated by her words and equality is given action, just as the Winged
Victory was brought back to life by the power of the written word.
Notes
