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CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS
OF GROTESQUE REALISM
A6
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MS
A thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment o f
the requirements for
the Degree
UJ L I T
Master of Arts
In
Comparative Literature
by
Jon-David Wesley Settell
San Francisco, California
Fall 2015
Copyright by
Jon-David Wesley Settell
2015
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Carnivalized Desire and the Cult o f the Flesh: the Erotic Ethos
o f Grotesque Realism by Jon-David Wesley Settell, and that in my opinion this work
meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at San Francisco
State University.
Assistant Professor
CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS
OF GROTESQUE REALISM
Jon-David Wesley Settell
San Francisco, California
2015
Engaging with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dual literary tropes o f the carnival and the
grotesque body, each a part of what he calls grotesque realism, this project traces the
carnival’s revalorization o f Eros, a kind of carnivalization o f desire, and its ethical
implications. Carnivalized desire, through its dialogization of poetic discourse, invokes
becoming for the authoritative lyrical voices in Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” and
Pablo Neruda’s “Caballero solo” [“Single Gentleman”]. In novelistic discourse,
carnivalized desire enacts these becomings through a masochistic and highly eroticized
cult of the flesh in Virgilio Pinera’s La cam e de Rene [Rene’s Flesh], and through the
similarly cult-like and sexually charged world of John Rechy’s City o f Night. In each text,
desiring bodies invoke and enact the grotesque body’s acts o f becoming, in turn
postulating an ethical vision of selfhood that is exuberantly incomplete, constituted by
difference, and multiplicitously loving.
•ect representation o f the content o f this thesis.
Date
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction.............. *..................................................................................................................... 1
The Human Body in and as Discourse...........................................................................6
Matrices of Becom ing.................................................................................................... 10
Chapter One: Whitman and Neruda’s Desiring Bodies in Discourse.................................. 22
Chapter Two: Eating, Hurting, and Loving the Grotesque B o d y .........................................47
Eating the Grotesque B ody........................................................................................... 50
Wounding and Wanting the Grotesque B ody.............................................................60
Love in a Time o f B ecom ing....................................................................
77
C onclusion ................................................................................................................................. 93
End N otes...............
103
Works C ited ................................................................................................................................105
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Introduction
“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things;
then I shall be one o f those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love
henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do
not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And
all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” - Friedrich
Nietzsche.
In writing, the human body takes on a discursive dimension shaped by the form of
its representation. Mikhail Bakhtin, in Rabelais and his World, makes a distinction
between two of these forms in European art and literature, the classical and the grotesque
body. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque image of the body in literature uses laughter
and parody to subvert hegemonic systems o f meaning-making embodied in the “entirely
finished, completed, strictly limited” classical image of the body (320). The grotesque in
literature draws deeply on High Middle Age carnival traditions, where the exuberant
chaos of the carnival temporarily suspends social hierarchies and class with its joyful
mockery and frank treatment of the functions of the body. An ethos of change and
renewal pervades the laughter and festivities of the carnival, creating a “world inside out”
that asserted the “gay relativity o f prevailing truths and authorities” (Bakhtin 11). Eating,
copulating, suffering, defecating, and giving birth, the grotesque body is the site of a
downward movement in the body o f degradation and renewal, a perpetual exchange
between the flesh and the earth; it is a body in “the act o f becoming” (317). In the gay
relativity of the carnival, the grotesque body gives birth to a corporeal semiotics that is
fleshy, porous, and subject to a perpetual cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration.
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The origins of the carnival can be traced to the Roman Saturnalias (Bakhtin 7),
riotous ritual festivities in honor o f Saturn, god of fertility, regeneration, and liberation.
These traces linger in the carnival time of the High Middle Ages, when feasting and
pleasuring, self-parody, bisexuality and cross-dressing, obscene language and gestures,
and the masking and shifting of identities created a material cosmology centered on the
regenerative forces of life and the unbounded creativity of working people (Stam 93).
The space and time of carnival draws on its Saturnalian roots to invert the religious
cosmology of the Church and its idealization o f “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract,”
grounding itself in a material cosmos of flesh and earth in chaotic and perpetual
exchange. Bakhtin describes the material lower bodily stratum, “that is, images o f the
human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (18), as central to this
carnival cosmology. Oaths and billingsgate, obscene jokes about the functions o f the
body, and self-parody all form part of a culture of folk humor in literature that he calls
“grotesque realism,” based on the degradation o f “all that is high, spiritual, ideal,
abstract.” In grotesque realism, Bakthin traces a carnival spirit and folk heritage that he
identifies as carnivalesque, contained “not in the biological individual, not in the
bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed”
(19). Through the exuberant chaos of carnival and a cosmology grounded in degradation
and the material functions of the body, grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s formulation voices
the creative, regenerative force of ordinary working people.
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Desire and pleasure are at the heart of this carnival cosmology, part o f the
revalorization o f Eros central to the camivalesque (Stam 94). Bakhtin coins the term
camivalization to describe the “defeat through laughter” o f the “official conceptions of
hell and purgatory,” punishment for verboten desires and pleasures. He argues that the
camivalesque marshals humor, parody, and the image of the grotesque body to overcome
the fear and “mystic terror” engendered by the “official Christian point o f view” (395). I
adapt his term to describe a similar process in the grotesque imagination of desire, what I
will call the camivalization of desire. As a term, carnivalized desire is intended to bridge
Bakhtin’s dual tropes of carnival and the grotesque body, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari’s re-conceptualization of desire as positive and productive. I use the term in an
attempt to describe the creative, regenerative force that propels the grotesque body’s “act
of becoming” in its discursive deployment in literature.
In this investigation, I will argue that carnivalized desire overwhelms the
repressive force of what Bakhtin calls the “correct” word, or authoritative discourse,
through the erotic congress of grotesque bodies in the literary imagination. In subsuming
authoritative discourse, carnivalized desire invokes the grotesque body’s “act of
becoming,” a move with considerable ethical and political implications. As a first step
toward exploring these implications, I situate my concept in relation to Bakhtin’s
camivalesque and Rosi Braidotti’s ethics of nomadic subjectivity, before briefly moving
to position it within contemporary discourse on desire. Throughout this work,
carnivalized desire’s invocations and enactments will be examined in diverse literary
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texts linked by grotesque realism, with an eye toward an answer to the age-old question
of the uses of literature. In the first chapter, I take up Bakhtin’s invitation to explore the
revival of grotesque realism in early modernity with a comparative analysis of
camivalized desire and its transformative effect on an authoritative lyrical voice in two
poems about grotesque bodies by Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. In the second
chapter, I turn my focus to the study o f two strikingly different cults o f the flesh, each a
modern Saturnalia linked by the grotesque body. Carnivalized desire for the material
lower bodily strata o f young male protagonists lies at the center o f each cult’s material
cosmology, carnivalesque inversions of the religious cosmology o f the Church. We will
see this in Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera’s absurdly anthropophagic 1953 novel, La cam e
de Rene [R ene’s Flesh] and in US writer John Rechy’s sexually revolutionary 1963
novel, City o f Night. Taken together, these texts form part of a revival o f grotesque
realism in the Americas.
At the heart of this work is my intention to show how camivalized desire in
literature, and specifically in grotesque realism, invokes a movement toward what
Braidotti calls nomadic subjectivity, a constitution o f the self that, like Bakhtin’s
grotesque body, is “open to the world” (25) and always becoming. Carnivalized desire’s
capacity to provoke ethical questions in readers about the constitution o f the self in
relation to others makes it a fruitful site for an investigation of the ethical force of
literature. These particular texts are well suited for this work, since in each a
transformative and revolutionary process occurs, a kind o f becoming driven by desire.
Desiring bodies enact these becomings, drawing on the regenerative chaos o f the lower
bodily stratum, its exuberant multiplicities, and the multi-voicedness of its discursive
deployment.
But not all erotic writing produces the “crossing of multiplicities” that defines my
use of the term becoming (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus 239) to describe a state of
incompletion, openness to the world and its multiplicity o f voices, and productive
exchange with difference. These erotic texts are unique in part because of their places
within a historical context of radical change spanning a hundred years. Whitman’s text
was written just before the US Civil War and the end o f slavery, while Neruda, closely
affiliated with the Communist Party, wrote during its decades-long rise to electoral
victory in Chile. Similarly, Pinera’s novel was written shortly before the Cuban
Revolution, while Rechy’s was published at the start of the sexual revolution in the
1960s. I do not intend to claim that the texts sparked these radical political and social
changes; instead, I explore the contributions each may have made with its invocations
and provocations, and what they have to offer contemporary readers.
In the first chapter, I show how Whitman’s “This Compost” invokes becoming by
subsuming a singly voiced narrator’s anxiety in the fecundity o f a joyous biological and
social exchange between the body and the earth. Neruda spoke at length of the influence
in his own work of W hitman’s exuberant transgression o f boundaries between the body
and the earth; in “Caballero solo” [“A Single Gentleman”], we see echoes of Whitman.
Another kind of becoming takes place in this text for a similarly anxious and singly
voiced narrator, one driven by the force of an exuberant, anarchic sexual congress of
different bodies and desires. Each becoming signals the triumph of a fleshy materialism
that, in the second chapter, takes form as literal and metaphoric cults o f the flesh. In the
two novels under consideration, we see not subsumption, but transformation, part o f the
grotesque body’s desire-driven invocation to become. The masochism, dark humor, and
homoerotic consumption o f Rene’s flesh in La cam e de Rene [R en e’s Flesh] initiates a
becoming, part of the rites o f a literal cult of the flesh. In City o f Night, a metaphoric cult
of the flesh actively subverts the “correct” uses of the body as defined by the Church and
State of the text’s historical context (pre-sexual revolution US society); the consumption
o f male bodies and fluids in a kind o f fun-filled carnival o f “incorrect” sex enacts a
similar becoming. Each of these grotesque bodies is in the act o f becoming, and each act
is fundamentally driven by carnivalized desire.
The Human Body in and as Discourse
As a discursive formation o f humorous resistance to the Church and State’s
approved uses o f the body, the grotesque stands in stark contrast to the classical image of
the body. Bakhtin, referring to the changing literary norms o f the Renaissance, describes
the emergence of a new official literature with “correct” literary language and a new
canon o f the classical body:
[Official literary language] presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly
limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That
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which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its
limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of
the body are clo sed .. . . The verbal norms o f official and literary language,
determined by the canon, prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy,
childbirth. There is a sharp line o f division between familiar speech and “correct”
language. (.Rabelais 320)
In this formulation, an official literary language that privileges the classical body and its
idealized, “correct” forms marginalizes difference as embodied in concealed “sprouts and
bulges” rather than as the open orifices of the grotesque body. In this official discourse
lies an implicit judgment: speak and write correctly, without reference to the shameful
functions and irregularities of the body, and be approved. Speak and write o f the
grotesque, and be censured, disapproved, declasse. Official language insulates the
classical body as a discursive formation from the chaos o f the world and its vast field o f
difference. The literary representation o f the grotesque body, in contrast, contains the
potential for the voices of people with ordinary lives and ordinary bodies to emerge in
comic, carnivalesque resistance to “correct” language and its discourse o f authority.
Bakhtin describes this effect as dialogic (multi-voiced and in dialogue), part of a
carnivalization of language and literature that has lingered discursively long after the
dispersal of carnival traditions; it reflects, he claims, the multi-voicedness o f folk culture
that has resisted official, correct language for hundreds of years.
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Bakhtin argues that the dialogic character o f the carnivalesque is best found
within certain kinds of novelistic discourse. The lyrical voice of poetic discourse is,
according to him, primarily monologic,1 a term Bakhtin uses to describe a discourse
dominated by a single voice and connected to a singular view o f the world: “the language
of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside o f which nothing
else exists and nothing else is needed” (Dialogic 286). Monologism, in this view, leads to
the closure of the self to the world through the use o f “correct” language that instantiates
a hieratic authority; Bakhtin will go on to call this part of an “authoritative discourse.”
In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin develops this concept o f authoritative
discourse:
The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own;
it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us
internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative
word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt
to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word o f the fathers. Its authority
was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse.. . . It is given (it
sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as
it were, hieratic) language. (Dialogic 342, emphasis in text)
As an official language, authoritative discourse is “religious, political, moral; the word of
a father, of adults and teachers, etc.”; it is fundamentally a discourse that seeks unity in
the service of hierarchical control masked as higher truths. Correct ways o f speaking and
writing, correct bodies, and correct desires conspire to create authorized and unauthorized
ways of being, thinking, and living; the “correct” is a hierarchy o f truth determined by
people in positions of power (“religious, political, moral; the word o f a father”). In the
classical body, we see the triumph of the correct. In the literary imagination, the classical
body is part of a discursive formation o f sameness, closure, and completion that
embodies a self/other dynamic wherein the self is same and the other is different, in
permanent opposition to the self.
From this perspective, the discursive formations o f the human body (the classical
and the grotesque) take on a whole new dimension o f critical and ethical relevance.
Writing of the “tendency to assimilate others’ discourse,” Bakhtin argues that language
itself (“the words of others”) is deeply significant in processes of ideological becoming:
“another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models,
and so forth - but strives rather to determine the very bases o f our ideological
interrelations with the world, the very basis o f our behavior; it performs here as
authoritative discourse and an internally persuasive discourse” {Dialogic 342, emphasis
in text). Authoritative discourse, like the official language o f the classical body, performs
a closure of meaning in its fixing of ideological consciousness; like the correct word, this
discourse authorizes and forbids, accepts and rejects, includes and excludes. Internally
persuasive discourse, in contrast, reflects the multi-voicedness o f the world that
primordially preceded the authoritative word; it invokes the opening o f the self to the
different perspectives and voices o f others (“others’ discourse”). Learning to reject
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authoritative discourse is a process of self-awareness grounded in the responsibility of the
self to the other, what Bakhtin calls an ideological becoming shaped by internally
persuasive discourse. Bakhtin’s ethical self is one who transgresses the boundaries of
authoritative discourse to engage in dialogue with others, learning to adopt and adapt the
other’s discourse so that it becomes “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (Dialogic 345).
As discursive formation, the grotesque body in literature is often the site for this
becoming. As Bakhtin notes, the literary representation o f the regenerative chaos of the
grotesque body enacts becoming: “The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a
body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built,
created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and
is itself swallowed by the world” (317). The grotesque body, never complete and always
becoming, subverts through self-parody and laughter the classical ideal o f complete,
perfect bodies; it is an internally persuasive discursive formation.
Matrices of Becoming
I have so far argued that grotesque realism laughingly invites us to become the
mature subjects of Bakhtin’s dialogic world through the internally persuasive discourse
of its grotesque bodies. Braidotti, writing o f a materialist theory o f becoming, locates
desire at the heart of this constitution of the self, noting that “the construction o f a
thinking subject cannot be separated from that of a desiring subject: affectivity and
intellectuality grow together in such a way as to make it difficult to separate reason from
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the imagination” (71). Bakhtin’s mature subject is what Braidotti calls the nomadic
subject: it is a self in perpetual exchange with others, whose meaning and identity shifts
nomadically through the opening o f the self to difference. In grotesque realism, desire in
the broadest sense propels this nomadic subject formation.
At the same time, the grotesque body (bizarre, ugly, deformed, or lewd) hardly
seems at first glance to be a likely locus of an ethically productive desire. Exaggerated
and obscene sex acts, messy and disgusting feasting, mischievously and humorously
described scenes of defecation: each of these functions o f the human body was raucously
celebrated in the folk humor traditions of carnival. Today, these copulating, defecating,
eating, and sneezing bodies belong firmly to the realm of lowbrow humor, with its fart
jokes and dirty sexual innuendos. But through humor, these images continue to satirize
“the bourgeois conception of the completed, atomized being” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 24) and
the “aesthetics of the beautiful as conceived by the Renaissance” (29). The grotesque
image stirs derision and disgust at the same time as it provokes desire, as Patrick West
notes in his work on psychoanalytic theories o f desire in language: “ [the grotesque] is
that which simultaneously repulses and attracts us” (245). By unabashedly representing
unapproved, “ugly,” and taboo uses o f the body, these images repel and attract, offering
tantalizing glimpses of the verboten.
Repulsion and attraction are tightly bound in a rhythmic exchange, as Friedrich
Nietzsche points out in The Will to Power, for without displeasure, there would be no
pleasure, and without disgust, no attraction (371). Between these seeming antinomies lies
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what Braidotti calls a positive difference, one that, in the construction of the nomadic
subject, is both constitutive and desired. Positive difference, a crucial concept here,
challenges the notion of difference as part o f a binary system linked through negation to
sameness. For Braidotti, positive difference operates as and/and instead o f either/or. In
her formulation of what she calls a sustainable modern subjectivity, Braidotti elaborates a
model of subjectivity composed of matrices of becoming. Like Bakhtin’s grotesque body
(“constantly open to the world”), her nomadic subject transgresses what she calls the
dialectical interconnection between Self/Same and Other/Different and its subsequently
negative positioning o f difference:
They are two positively different others or sames, de-linked from the dialectical
interconnection . . . the Other is a matrix of becoming in his or her own right, and
it generates a new kind o f entity on which the same actually depends for their own
self-definition. What matters is what occurs in the in-between spaces, the
intervals, the transitions between their respective differences . . . the unfolding of
positive difference. (72)
This positive difference unfolds matrices of becoming both within and without the
grotesque body. Difference in the grotesque body is seen in the changing textures of the
body in copulation, in the introduction and expulsion o f difference through its orifices,
and in conception, pregnancy, and birth, to name only a few examples. Unlike the
classical body with its excised sprouts and growths, it is both constitutive and
regenerative, part of the “inverted cosmology” o f constant flux and chaotic exchange
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between the earth and flesh. The nomadic subject, like Bakhtin’s grotesque body, opens
itself to the world and the voices o f others through a constant shifting of meaning and
being - it is a fundamentally nomadic ontology that embraces difference as constitutive
of the self; for without difference, in this model, there can be no self. As a constitutive
element of subjectivity, difference is as desired as it is necessary.
Difference and desire interact productively and rhythmically in each o f the texts
under consideration here. Whitman and Neruda’s monologic narrators anxiously swat
away the percolating force of a multitude of distasteful desires, the desires of others', the
main characters o f Pinera and Rechy’s homoerotic novels struggle against a similarly
taboo (and fundamentally different or other) desire for the grotesque body. Writing about
Deleuze’s affirmation of difference in his vision o f the postmodern subject, Braidotti
notes that, “ [for him], the ‘other’ is not the emblematic and inevitably vampirized mark
of alterity - as in classical philosophy . . . It is a moving horizon o f exchanges and
becomings, towards which the non-unitary subjects o f post-modernity move, and by
which they are moved in return” (71). Deleuze envisions positive difference as an
otherness that is not just complementary, but inextricably and productively bound to our
concept o f self; it is part of Bakhtin’s mature s e lf s “half-another’s, half-ours” discourse.
For Braidotti, this vision of otherness is central to her concept o f nomadic subjectivity,
part of an ethically productive exchange and becoming between the self and the other.
Otherness, as a concept of relational difference, finds unique expression in
queemess. As a word, queer connotes atypical, different sexual desires and gender
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expressions; it contains both a threat to sameness and a promise o f becoming different.
Etymologically, the meaning of the word can be traced to difference. R oget’s English
Thesaurus lists the following synonyms, among others, for the word: strange, funny,
peculiar, bizarre, uncanny, freakish; unconventional, unorthodox, unfamiliar, abnormal;
puzzling, perplexing, baffling; the antonym is given as “normal.” The word itself defies
categorization, moving between its position as a pejorative term that describes sexual and
gender difference in the sense o f unhealthy abnormality, and, within sexual and gender
minorities, a term of political resistance that embraces difference as positive in its
defiance of heteronormative categories of meaning, being, and desiring. In each iteration,
the term illustrates the shifting limits o f language and representation, much like the
grotesque body’s orifices signify “openness to the world,” the transgression of
boundaries, and regeneration. Judith Butler notes this in her article, “Critically Queer”:
“If the term queer is to be the site of a collective contestation, the point o f departure for a
set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in
the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a
prior usage” (19). In the anti-identitarian aspects of queerness that Butler describes, the
word itself becomes, part o f a continual transformation and transgression of boundaries,
meaning, and identities. Desire in this becoming is central: queerness centers on different,
non-heteronormative desires and fluid identities.
Because o f the centrality o f desire in these processes o f transformation and
transgression, I will use the terms becoming, and, where specifically useful, becoming-
queer, drawing from Bakthin, Deleuze, and Braidotti to describe the shifting o f
conceptions o f subjectivity, away from a polarizing self/other relationship and toward a
nomadic subjectivity that embraces difference as complementary and constitutive.
Similar in many ways to Deleuze’s psychoanalytic concept o f becoming-animal in its
ontological de-territorializing (severing meaning from social, political, and cultural
contexts) and re-territorializing (attaching meaning to new contexts), I use the terms
becoming and becoming-queer to describe a process o f subjectival de-mooring from
fixed identities and stability, a dismemberment of the whole body and its rebirth as fleshy
parts that resist definition.
In grotesque realism, carnivalized desire propels this becoming in a kind of
ontological movement beyond the boundaries of the self and toward the other (and back
again). Speaking similarly o f the transformative force within the grotesque body, Gaurav
Majumdar in an article on aesthetics as ethics describes this force as a “jolt.” Like the gay
relativity of carnival, the jolt of the grotesque upends social relations and temporarily
suspends rank and authority, invoking a becoming with enormous ethical potential. He
writes that the grotesque body in literature “does not merely acknowledge [the voices of
others], but in its very form, it accommodates the other . . . showing an inclusiveness, the
presence of difference on its own body, a capacity for transformation, and a welcome to
alterity” (36). The literary representation of the grotesque body invites readers to explore
the contours of its becoming; in its incompletion, its bizarre excrescences, and its cyclical
life force (conception, growth, death, rebirth), we come face to face with an embodiment
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of difference and the fluidity of the self as subject. This accommodation of difference is,
according to Majumdar, sparked by the jolt o f the grotesque; such an aesthetic invokes
“an ethics that mirrors its endless emigration and immigration across ‘feeling consistent
with its e lf” (49). In the literary representation o f the inconsistency and change of the
grotesque body, sameness itself is upended, along with the authoritative linguistic regime
that derives its power from the exclusion of those determined to be too different, too
other. An “endless emigration and immigration” o f meaning opens the self to infinite
variety and fecundity, making room for the multiple voices of others - the self can
become “half-ours and half-someone else.”
Carnivalizing Desire: Toward an Erotic Ethos
Like Majumdar, I locate a rich ethical potential in this dialogizing o f the self
invoked by the internally persuasive language o f the grotesque body; the force of
camivalized desire is part o f the “jolt” of the grotesque. I intend to add to his work on the
ethical promise of the grotesque by focusing on the revalorization of Eros in the literary
representation of the grotesque body, and specifically in the movement between the erotic
and disgusting. Sigmund Freud conceptualizes the pleasure principle and the death drive
as opposing forces, offering one way to make sense o f these links between desire and
disgust, most often linked to the death drive. David Lomas notes this in his work on
surrealism, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity: “That which incites disgust, the disgusting,
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is another one o f the presentations of the death drive” (175). But in desire for the
grotesque body, it becomes clear that these drives are not antinomal.
The grotesque body provokes in each o f these texts a strange attraction rooted in
disgust and desire and stimulated by laughter and parody. To begin to unravel the
seemingly oppositional positions o f these forces, I make use o f Nietzsche’s
conceptualization of these drives. He links them to the Will to Power, and calls the drives
not opposites, but parallel “rhythms” (371); in this way, the constant movement between
pleasure and pain, between desire and disgust, forms a rhythmic part o f the cycle o f life,
site of perpetual exchange and movement between fertility and reproduction, and
vegetable and mineral states. This rhythmic process mirrors in many ways Bakhtin’s
concept o f the fecundity of the grotesque body.
Nietzsche conceptualizes these rhythms as part of a primary driving life force in
humans, a kind of self-overcoming deeply linked to a positive vision of power. In AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Guattari turn away from the traditional psychoanalytic
conceptualization of desire as a negative Oedipal force emanating wildly from the Id,
mediated by the Ego, and controlled by the Superego. Instead, they seek to bridge
Nietzsche’s concept of power as life force and Freud’s similar positioning o f the libidinal
impulse by re-conceptualizing desire as a positive, productive force. I draw on Deleuze
and Guattari’s re-conceptualization to situate the desiring grotesque bodies o f these texts
within an ethically productive cycle o f regeneration, chaos, and constant becoming.
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The exuberantly productive and different desires in each o f these texts stands in
clear opposition to what has been described as the “dominant traditions of Western
thought since Plato” : desire as lack, an absence and longing for the other that is
inherently negative (Moss 175). Recall Jacques Lacan’s dual formulations of desire as
lack: “le desir est la metonymie du manque a etre” [“desire is the metonymy o f the lack
of being”] (251) and “le desir de l’homme est le desir de l’Autre” [“m an’s desire is the
desire of the Other”] (300). Karmenlara Seidman attempts to link this conceptualization
of desire and the camivalesque, arguing that “the drive towards excess in Carnival
performances is an indulgence seeking fulfillment that is actually metaphysical, and
nearly unfulfillable. The performed excesses are expressions o f the desire to apprehend or
reach the absolute Other, the ultimate infinitude o f desire” (19). To conceptualize desire
as a lack of being, a “nearly unfulfillable” longing for the Other, moves desire into the
realm of the negative through its focus on perpetual absence and “infinitude.” Lacan’s
lack acknowledges, much like the perpetually deferred meaning within a chain of
signifiers, the anxious impossibility of desire: what is wanted is what is not present, what
is absent, what will always be absent. In this sense, desire becomes intimately linked to
what can be taken away (through symbolic castration) or what can never be (through the
incestual impulse).
Michel Foucault in The Care o f the S e lf traces this negative movement in the
history of sexuality, noting the increasing politicization and eroticization o f the body: “A
whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasure seems to mark, in the
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first centuries o f our era, a certain strengthening o f austerity themes. Physicians worry
about the effects o f sexual practice, [and] unhesitatingly recommend abstention” (235).
Desire acquired, as a consequence, a patina o f shame, one that Freud would go on to link
to the incestual impulse. If, as Freud asserts, desire at its core is incestual, then it stands
to reason that desire must be repressed, despite the unconscious imperative for it to be
released. Such a conflict leads to the sublimation o f desire in aggression, war, hysteria,
and clinical pathologies. Like me, Braidotti turns to Deleuze and Gauttari to formulate a
vision of positive, productive desire, one that propels the self toward nomadic
subjectivity and away from a “negative vision of desire” :
Adopting Nietzsche’s figurative style of speech, Deleuze (D+G 1980 [in 1000
Plateaus]) dubs as slave morality Lacan’s negative vision o f desire, his
metaphysical notion of the unconscious as the black box o f deep ‘inner’ truths,
and the emphasis on castration and lack. He prefers to posit the unconscious in
terms of displacement and production, and desire as affirmation. (71)
The lack, as a force negativized by social and psychic repression, invites repression,
pathology, aggression, what Deleuze and Guattari call a “slave morality” o f fear, anxiety,
and obedience to cope with the threat of the destabilizing force of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari list the lack among the “three errors concerning desire”
{Anti-Oedipus 111). They go on to note that, “from the moment lack is reintroduced into
desire, all of desiring production is crushed, reduced to being no more than the
production of fantasy.” For Deleuze and Guattari, negative desire is linked to the Oedipal
20
complex, a “sham image” they call “the bait, the disfigured image by means of which
repression catches desire in the trap” (Anti-Oedipus 116). The Oedipal complex arises,
they argue, from the social and economic need to repress desire within the nuclear family
structure, which they argue to be particularly useful for capitalist economies in its
ongoing production of workers “already Oedipalized” and ready to submit to hierarchies
o f power and production. By disfiguring desire in this way, desire can be displaced and
repressed, making the nuclear family into an “agent o f repression” that maintains the
structures necessary for the perpetuation of bourgeois ideological hegemony.
While desire-as-lack contains a dangerous potential for social and psychic
repression, positive, productive desire is dangerous in a very different way:
Every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question
the established order o f a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it
is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without
demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think, desire
is revolutionary in its essence - desire, not left-wing holidays! - and no society
can tolerate a position of real desire without it structures of exploitation,
servitude, and hierarchy being compromised. (116)
Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is dangerous precisely because of its inherently
productive nature; in this sense, it contains the potential to produce the very becoming
Bakhtin describes at the heart of the grotesque body: “Eating, drinking, defecation and
other elimination . . . all these acts are performed on the confines o f the body and the
outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body” (Rabelais 317). Each of these
acts, from copulation to consumption, is driven by productive, at times uncontrollable
desire: the desire to eat, defecate, copulate, and so on, involves a wanting that produces
this becoming. In grotesque realism, this wanting is a carnival wanting, one shaped by a
revalorized Eros that revels in the materiality of the body. In the grotesque body’s
constant movement between the old and the new, desire is a productive and positive force
that itself becomes carnivalized in the joyful exuberance o f the carnival. To trace this
carnivalization and its subsequent ethical invocations, I turn now to Whitman and
Neruda’s grotesque realist poetry.
22
Chapter One: Whitman and Neruda’s Desiring Bodies in Discourse
In Nuevas odas elementales [New Elemental Odes], published in 1956, Neruda
includes a poem titled “Oda a Walt Whitman” [“Ode to Walt Whitman”]:
Toque una mano y era
la mano de Walt Whitman:
pise la tierra
con los pies desnudos,
anduve sobre el pasto,
sobre el firme rocio de Walt Whitman.
[I touched a hand and it was
Walt Whitman’s hand
I walked the earth
barefoot
I walked on the prairie on the firm dew
of Walt Whitman. (Rumeau 51)]
A rhapsody to W hitman’s influence on Neruda, the poem proclaims a direct link to
Whitman; he is in the earth Neruda treads, the air he breathes, and the dew under his bare
feet. Neruda calls him his American “camerado,” mirroring W hitman’s use o f the word to
mean both comrade and companion (Rumeau 48).2 What leads Neruda, fondly called the
people’s poet, to identify so strongly with one o f the leading figures o f American
romanticism? The language he uses to describe his affinity for Whitman offers key clues:
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Si mi poesia tenia algun significado, es esa tendencia espacial, ilimitada, que no
se satisface en una habitation. Mi frontera tenia que sobre pasarla yo mismo [...]
Otro poeta de este mismo continente me ayudo en este camino. Me refiero a Walt
Whitman, mi companero de Manhattan (“Viviendo con el idioma” [1973], as
cited by Peter Earle 193).
(If my poetry has any meaning, it is that spatial tendency, without limits, not
satisfied in a room. I had to pass beyond my own borders, a lo n e.. . . Another poet
from this continent helped me along this road. I ’m referring to Walt Whitman, my
comrade from Manhattan.3)
Neruda’s need to “pass beyond” borders and boundaries frequently finds satisfaction in
rich, often grotesque, descriptions of the body and its functions in similar ways to
Whitman; this lies at the heart of Neruda’s affinity with Whitman. This transgression of
corporeal boundaries takes place in the literary imagination of the grotesque body, with
its downward movement, ugly excrescences, and chaotic biological and social exchange,
in a kind of joyful opening o f the body and the self to the world.
For Whitman and Neruda, transgressing the limits of the body and opening it to
the world was an erotically charged event; in imagining encounters with other bodies
both natural and human, they often turned to acts of love. Bakhtin describes the act of
love as a core function of the grotesque body and its opening o f the self, part o f the
carnival’s revalorization o f Eros. Depictions of copulation, pregnancy, birth, and, in the
body’s return to vegetable and mineral states, the promise of regeneration, celebrated the
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victory o f life and “the historic, progressing body o f mankind” (Rabelais 367). In
Whitman’s poem “This Compost,” published in the 1855 edition o f Leaves of Grass, the
“diseas’d corpses” within the earth form part of an erotic cycle o f regeneration marked by
licking, penetration, conception, and renewal. In “Caballero solo” [“Single Gentleman”],
a poem Neruda wrote between 1925 and 1931, the copulating bodies o f young, working
class men and women enact a similar cycle. Neruda’s poem is a carnival o f sexuality, a
carnal feast of fools, where a single gentleman is ironically positioned as a monologic,
narrating voice. The same phenomenon occurs in W hitman’s poem, where a monologic
voice describes a fear of the “foul meat” of the earth and the sea and its desire to “lick my
naked body all over” (391). The monologic voice of the narrator in each poem struggles
against the exuberance of a chorus of voices unmuted by carnivalized desire, the
dialogizing force in both Neruda and W hitman’s grotesquely realistic poems.
In this chapter, I undertake a comparative analysis of these two texts to show how
carnivalized desire in poetic discourse enacts the “dialogic illumination” Bakhtin locates
within the polyphony of Dostoevsky and Rabelais’s novelistic discourse. He writes:
In Dostoevsky’s world all people and all things must know one another and know about
one another, must enter into contact, come together face to face and begin to talk with
one another. Everything must be reflected in everything else, all things must illuminate
one another dialogically... . What is necessary for this is carnival freedom and carnival’s
artistic conception of space and tim e .. . . A carnival sense o f the world helps Dostoevsky
overcome gnoseological as well as ethical solipsism. A single person, remaining alone
25
with himself, cannot make ends meet even in the deepest and most intimate spheres of his
own spiritual life, he cannot manage without another consciousness. One person can
never find complete fullness in himself alone. {Problems o f Dostoevsky’s Poetics 111,
emphasis in text)
In both poems, this dialogic illumination, a kind o f ethical consciousness provoked by
meaningful engagement with others, takes place through a chorus of desiring bodies in
erotic congress. By comparing the way that camivalized desire drives different
incarnations o f polyphonic, carnivalesque freedom, I hope to show how these writers’
different projects of conceptualizing selfhood work to “overcome gnoseological as well
as ethical solipsism.” In this way, erotic writing about grotesque bodies raises rich ethical
questions about the nature o f the self/other relationship at the same time as it proposes a
model of postmodern subjectivity, what Braidotti calls the nomadic subject, constituted
by desire and perpetually made and re-made in polyphonic exchange with others.
W hitman’s poetry has been described as polyphonic by many critics, among them
Michael Shapiro and Gilles Deleuze (Shapiro 194), while Bakhtin attributes a
carnivalesque multi-voicedness to Neruda’s work {Rabelais 46). In Whitman’s poetry,
this chorus of other voices belongs largely to nature; in Neruda, however, they are the
voices of other desiring bodies. In “This Compost” and “Caballero solo,” the voice o f the
poet is ironically situated - fearful, anxious, but on the verge of transformation vis-a-vis a
productive desire situated among the excess o f carnival. Carnivalized desire drives this
movement toward Bakhtin’s mature self, a nomadic subjectivity that is “half-ours, half-
26
another’s.” In the erotic opening of the grotesque body to the world through its open
orifices and the introduction of an/other into the body, these narrators are provoked into
becoming, a “verb with a consistency all its own” (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus 239).
Speaking about Whitman at the University of Chicago in 1965, Jorge Luis Borges
imagines how Whitman would welcome these multiplicities: “He thought, ‘I will have to
write a poem, a poem of democracy, that is to say, a poem where there shall be no central
hero, or rather the central hero shall be everybody, ‘Everyman,’ to use the old name”
(710). He goes on to note how “for the first time in the history o f poetry, a man is talking
about the act of love. H e’s not being bashful or daring about it” (716). Borges talks o f
having first read Whitman in 1917, when he was 18 years old, and “since then I have not
reread Walt Whitman. I have not reread him because Walt Whitman has become a part of
m yself’ (711).
Both Neruda and Borges lay claim to W hitman’s legacy. Borges points to, among
other things, W hitman’s frank treatment o f the act of love as a major turning point in US
and Latin American poetics. He argues this is because “ [he was] working out a new
pattern. Whitman thought o f the past as being feudal. He thought of all previous poetry as
mere feudalism” (710). Bakhtin takes a similar position toward poetry, arguing that
poetic discourse is a “unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else
exists and nothing else is needed” (Dialogic 286); for Bakhtin, the lyrical voice o f the
poet is monologic, feudal and authoritative in its “official” literary language.
27
At the same time, Bakhtin acknowledges the possibility of a dialogized poetic
discourse in Rabelais and His World, locating within Neruda’s work a “new and
powerful revival of grotesque realism . . . related to the tradition of realism and folk
culture [that] reflects at times the direct influence o f carnival forms, as in the work of
Neruda” (46). Neruda’s work has already been extensively cited as an example of
Bakhtin’s realist grotesque in poetic discourse, as Manuel Jofre notes in his article linking
Bakhtin and Neruda (72). While Bakhtin’s project in Rabelais was the literary origins of
grotesque realism in the writing o f Renaissance authors like Miguel Cervantes and
Francois Rabelais, he invites scholars to explore its revival in early modern literature. I
take up this invitation here as part o f my investigation into the force of carnivalized
desire in grotesque realist literature.
The poetry of Walt Whitman, much like Neruda’s, is an important part o f this
revival of the grotesque, specifically in the dialogizing force o f the grotesque body. This
by itself is not a particularly new insight. Shapiro makes a similar point about the dialogic
force of W hitman’s poetry, calling Bakhtin’s “restriction of dialogics to novels . . . unfair
to poetry and to Whitman specifically.” He goes on to cite Deleuze, who wrote that
“W hitman’s poetry offers as many meanings as there are relations with its various
interlocutors: the masses, the reader, States, the ocean” (Shapiro 194). In light o f how
W hitman’s poetry “break[s] the hegemony o f the lyric voice,” as Shapiro convincingly
argues, it is hardly surprising to discover that Neruda was one of W hitman’s most famous
interlocutors. A lifelong Communist Party member, Neruda’s 1950 magnum opus, Canto
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General, boldly attempted to disrupt European cultural hegemony. Taken together,
camivalized desire in each author’s discursive formation o f the grotesque body sheds new
light on the carnivalesque’s re-valorization of Eros, its own disruption o f hegemony, and
the shift in subjectivity that it invokes.
Neruda, according to Delphine Rumeau’s work on the influences of Whitman on
Neruda’s poetry, “considered Whitman as a pioneer, as the poet who opened the door for
American poetry. One of the things Neruda focuses on is what he calls ‘Whitman’s vital
lesson’: his embrace of the world, of the whole world” (48). Rumeau describes the
profound impact of Whitman’s poetry on Neruda, noting the images o f Whitman hanging
on the walls of Neruda’s homes in Chile, the odes to Whitman in poetry and his public
speeches, and his avid collecting o f editions o f Leaves o f Grass (47). Whitman’s
unabashed and lyrical eroticism embraced the earthiness o f the human body and its
cosmic connections to the whole world; his work is a clear antecedent o f the democratic
eroticism of Neruda’s poetry.
Writing about the eroticized body in Whitman’s poem, “I Sing the Body Electric,”
Martha Nussbaum notes:
Traditional metaphysicians, [Whitman] suggests, do not know “the curious
sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body”; or, if
they do, they have aggressively eliminated it from their accounts o f human love.
And they hasten, too, in their different ways, to disengage their art from the sense
of bodily weight conveyed in this bulky line, with its awkward human g ra c e.. . .
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All our acts are bodily acts, and all our art is naked meat, and all our sympathy is
blood. (110)
Nussbaum points out that W hitman’s engagement with the “naked meat o f the body”
opposes traditional philosophical conceptualizations of desire as negative and the body as
subordinate to the head. In the erotic representation o f the downward movement o f the
body (eating, copulating, defecating, decaying, and conceiving) and its perpetual
biological and social exchange with the earth, W hitman’s eroticized bodies presage
Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the radical, democratizing potential of grotesque realism.
In Neruda, the “touch of W hitman’s hand” is felt in the erotic congress o f the grotesque
bodies of ordinary people that fill his poetry.
Whitman found inspiration among the chaotic cacophony of bodies and spaces in
his native Manhattan; the chaotic exchange o f nature and bodies in his native Chile
similarly inspired Neruda. David Wall, writing about contemporary prose descriptions of
Manhattan in the 1850s, when Whitman lived there, argues that these visions contain the
“dominant tropes of the carnivalesque - deformity, disproportion, oaths and obscenity,
and mocking laughter - invoked in order to situate the unruly lower orders irredeemably
beyond the margins of civilized life” (524). He goes on:
It is a “fetid” world “knee-deep in filth,” filled with “human swine,” “bleary-eyed,
idiotic, beastly wretches,” and “abandoned women of the lowest grade.” The
social and geographical formation of the city, then, becomes the spatial
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embodiment of the individual physical body o f the low Other, both o f which are
discursively structured as “grotesque.” (524)
The grotesque in this contemporary prose description o f W hitman’s Manhattan, as Wall
notes, is used to marginalize the low Others of the city; this would appear to contradict
Bakhtin’s assertion of the subversive power of the representation of grotesque bodies and
“the dominant tropes of the carnivalesque.” And yet, many o f W hitman’s poems exalt
W all’s “fetid world,” as we see in his joyous paean to Manhattan, “Mannahatta”: “A
million people— manners free and superb— open voices / — hospitality— the most
courageous and friendly young men” (485). For Whitman, the voices o f a million people,
“free and superb— open voices,” make the city his: “My city!” It is precisely the low
voices o f the others o f the city that Whitman exalts; they are part o f him, as he is part of
them.
I return to Wall to note the similarities between the fetid world of W hitman’s
Manhattan and Bakhtin’s grotesque body: “Like the vulgar intemperate bodies of the
prostitutes, drunks, immigrants, Negroes, and Jews, the city too ‘swallows’ and ‘vomits,’
for, taken together, the social body of the city and the physical bodies of the lower orders
threaten the collapse of the categorical imperatives o f bourgeois ideology” (524). In
“This Compost,” the earth “draws off all the foul liquid and meat” (390), swallowing and
vomiting the social and physical bodies of the city, a becoming that the anxious voice of
the narrator and interlocutor affirms when he asks, “Are they not continually putting
distemper’d corpses / within you?”
31
This anxiety takes form as a fear of the earth in the poem’s first stanza:
Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip my clothes from my body to meet my lover
the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to
renew me. (390)
An abnegation takes places here, one linked, as we will soon learn, to the narrator’s fear
of the “foul liquid and meat” interred in the earth and sea. Whitman calls the sea his
lover, one awaiting his naked body; similarly, he writes o f touching his flesh to the earth
as he would “other flesh.” Despite the narrator’s anxious fear of corruption and the
disgust it provokes in him, the eroticism of these lines performs a tentative desire-driven
elision of flesh and earth, and o f the body and the sea. Carnivalized desire produces this
rhythmic movement between wanting and fearing, lust and disgust. It will, by the end of
the poem, overwhelm the narrator, afraid and anxious, startled by his desire to walk,
afraid to strip his clothes from his body, disgusted but strangely allured by the thought of
touching his flesh to the putrid earth and its rotting interred bodies.
In the poem’s first stanzas, the narrator conceives o f his desire as a negative force
in a voice tinged with fear and anxiety similar to the hysteria Freud links to repressed
(incestual) desire: “Something startles me where I thought I was safest.” As a kind of
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negative desire, it impels his abnegation, like an act of repression. The voice is a
monologic one, a single voice speaking fearfully. I pause here to note that the monologic
voice, much like the Greek monologos from which the word is derived, speaks alone; the
voice controls and suppresses what Bakhtin argues to be the inherent dialogism of the
natural world. Wielding monologic discourse like a shield, W hitman’s narrator represses
his desire to meet his lover, the sea, and refuses to embrace the earth; he is protecting the
unity of the self from a vast world o f other voices. We see this in the language itself. In
the second-person narrative form o f address used in the first two stanzas, the narrator
addresses himself to a familiar other throughout the text, at times incredulous (“How can
you be alive you growths o f spring?”) and at times accusing (“Where have you disposed
of their carcasses?”). He addresses himself to this other that scares him and threatens the
safety of his unified self; fear, abnegation, disgust, and incredulity surge in his repeated
questions to an/other familiarly addressed as “you.” And yet, the narrator speaks of his
“lover the sea,” of his desire to press his flesh to the earth. His repression o f that desire is
tremulous and unsteady; though the grotesque body, rotting and bleeding, scares him, at
the same time it calls to him and invites him to love it. In this sense, his monologic
discourse - his own voice that accuses and defends - controls this engagement with
others and protects him from their grotesque bodies.
In light of the politicization o f the body in Western philosophy and, as Foucault
points out, the “increasing recommendation of abstention” from sexual practices (235), it
is not surprising to find that the desire he represses is a desire for the grotesque body:
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Where have you disposed o f their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off their foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any o f it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am
deceiv’d,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade
through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall explore some o f the foul meat. (390)
This monologic lyrical voice purposefully excludes the multiple voices that, as Bakhtin
has argued, erupt dialogically in novelistic discourse. It is, like a monologue, a form of
direct address, a lyrical voice controlled authoritatively by the “I” o f the text and directed
toward a “you” whose voice in these first two stanzas we cannot hear. So far, then,
Bakhtin’s argument that poetic discourse is primarily monologic appears to be borne out.
And yet, the erotic draw of the sea and the earth undermines the narrator and overwhelms
his repressive act. As he speaks of pressing into the earth with his spade, his productive
desire begins to overcome the (hysterical) fear that his spade might “explore some o f the
foul meat”; it is hardly necessary to point out the psychosexual symbolism o f plowing the
earth with his “spade.” In this way, the text metaphorically links death and birth to
natural processes of decomposition and fertilization, a dialogic double act o f dual
contraries held together in the grotesque body.
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Renewal is weakly restrained by the negativized desire acting on the monologic
narrator’s voice. This weak restraint, what I earlier called an abnegation, happens in the
final line of the first stanza, when the narrator refuses to find renewal in the earth as he
does in the body o f another: “I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to /
renew me.” But to refuse to find renewal in both spaces acknowledges the possibility of
doing so. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the repression of desire reflects its erotic
potential: “if it is prohibited, it is because it is desired” (Anti-Oedipus 114).
This barely repressed possibility of renewal connects the body to the earth in a
cycle of regeneration. Driven by the force of productive desire, this renewal initiates a
penetration of the narrator’s monologic voice. This penetration continues and is
developed throughout the poem, taking form in the buds and sprouts that push through
the “fetid world” of the poem:
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person— Yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear o f the onion pierces u pw ard,. . .
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk— the lilacs bloom in the door-yards;
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata o f sour dead.
(390)
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In this carnival of fecundity, these multiple protuberances, themselves a kind o f language
o f nature, are birthed by the productive potential of desire to renew and regenerate, a
potential acknowledged in the narrator’s refusal to embrace the earth. The erotic potential
is only briefly contained by abnegation, similar to the ways in which desire is negativized
and sublimated by psychic repression, only to re-emerge in distorted and displaced forms
or as pathology. We see hints of that distortion in the narrator’s fear that digging may
uncover “foul meat.”
Ultimately, this desire is both consummately productive and productively
uncontainable, as the regeneration at the heart o f the poem shows. Bakhtin notes this
regenerative potential when he calls the grotesque body “a body in the act of becoming.”
In the rotting bodies the narrator fears, we see a process o f becoming:
What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash o f the sea
Which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body with
its tongues,
That all is clean forever and forever . . . (391)
This fecundity o f the earth and the body parallels what Bakhtin locates in the literary
representations of the lower bodily stratum and its regenerative functions. For Bakhtin,
this constant becoming and renewal was a source of infinite possibility and vitality, one
36
with the potential to suspend and subvert social and political hierarchies: “Man, properly
speaking, is not something completed and finished, but open, uncompleted” (364).
Bakhtin’s mature subject, “man, properly speaking,” transgresses the boundaries of
authoritative discourse with its correct words and ways o f being to engage in dialogue
with others, dispensing with hierarchy to become part o f the collective voice o f the
people.
In Whitman’s poem, productive desire propels the narrator toward a similar
becoming grounded in the grotesque body. Nussbaum notes W hitman’s recognition of
this “political significance o f this recuperation o f the body” in “I Sing the Body Electric” :
“Have you ever loved the body of a woman? / Have you ever loved the body o f a man? /
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the
earth?” (118). As Nussbaum notes, the desiring body is for Whitman the basis o f human
equality. We begin to see here the potential o f camivalized desire in literature to
transform the monologic voice and, in so doing, invoke a movement toward nomadic
subjectivity with its promise of equality through positive difference.
I have thus far described the productive force o f these desiring bodies as
camivalized because it enacts the fecundity o f becoming on physical and natural bodies,
much in the way Bakhtin envisions the function of the carnivalesque. As a force,
camivalized desire subverts the closure of the classical body and its monologic lyrical
voice, opening the narrator’s body to the different voices o f natural others and inviting
social and biological exchange between people and nature, and between the self and the
37
other. This becoming opposes the closure of meaning and the subsequent silencing of the
voice of the Other/Different that occurs in the privileging of the Self/Same; the richness
of human difference and the equal value of every person inhere within the productive
chaos of constant exchange and regeneration. Within the fecund world of camivalized
desire, the (becoming) buds and sprouts of nature and the tongues o f the sea take on a
carnival character that counteracts the fearful, anxious monologue o f the narrator. Note
that Whitman describes the sensation of submersion in the sea as being licked by tongues.
The personification of the sea as a lover with multiple tongues deploys nature as a
camivalesque counterweight, with multiple tongues suggesting multiple voices. In the
erotic licking of the narrator’s naked body, these tongues and their multiple voices eat
away at the anxious fear driving the narrator’s monologic discourse. In this sense, then,
we see the political potential o f the grotesque body, “basis o f human equality,” to subvert
the monologic discourse o f the narrator, of negativized desire, and more broadly, of the
authoritarian power of “correct” discourse on ways o f being and loving.
We have seen thus far how Walt W hitman’s grotesque bodies and his embrace of
carnivalized desire are part o f Bakhtin’s revival o f the realist grotesque, with all o f its
revolutionary political potential. This revival continues with Neruda, whose “Oda a Walt
Whitman” (“Ode to Walt Whitman”) similarly references the poet’s body and the bodies
of nature. Recall how he touches Whitman’s hand and feels him in the dew under his
feet; in this sense, Neruda enacts a Whitmanesque exchange between the body and the
earth.
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In “Caballero solo” (Single Gentleman”), we can trace the evolution o f this
revival of the grotesque realist in the Americas, and the role o f carnivalized desire within
it. In Neruda’s poem, desire acts on the grotesque bodies o f young, working class men
and women in both a productive and a subversive sense, producing through desiring the
regeneration and constant becoming that emerges through literary representations of the
lower bodily stratum. I described “Caballero solo” earlier as a carnival o f sexuality, a
carnal and polyphonic feast of fools. Much like the narrator in “This Compost,” the single
gentleman is ironically positioned as a monologic voice “licked by the tongues” of
carnivalized desire. The text subtly satirizes the speaker’s alienation from a chorus of
desiring bodies, a “collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales” (68) [“necklace of throbbing
sexual oysters” (69)]. Although this single and singly voiced gentleman, alone in his
solitary residence, resists these exuberantly polyphonic, “throbbing” voices o f the enemy,
the productive force o f desire subsumes his voice much like the buds and shoots of spring
in W hitman’s compost pile. Recall our earlier discussion of Bakhtin’s monologic voice,
one he describes as a discourse dominated by a single voice and connected to a singular
view of the world. In this sense, the narrator’s voice is fundamentally monologic, as a
single voice besieged by the voices of others, enemies surrounding his lonely closed
world. Fearful, anxious, and defended by the authoritative force of his monologic voice,
the narrator is ironically situated on the verge o f a transformation made possible by
carnivalized desire:
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Losjovenes homosexuales y las muchachas amorosas,
y las largas viudas que sufren el delirante insomnio,
y las jovenes senoras prenadas hace treinta horas,
y los roncos gatos que cruzan mi jardin en tinieblas,
como un collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales
rodean mi residencia solitaria,
como enemigos establecidos contra mi alma,
como conspiradores en traje de dormitorio
que cambiaran largos besos espesos por consigna. (68)
[The homosexual young men and the amorous girls,
and the long widows who suffer from delirious insomnia,
and the young wives thirty hours pregnant,
and the raucous cats that cross my garden in the dark,
like a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters,
they surround my solitary residence,
like enemies established against my soul,
like conspirators in night clothes,
who had exchanged long, thick kisses by command. (69)]
The single gentleman besieged and surrounded by “palpitantes ostras sexuales”
[“throbbing sexual oysters”], describes them as enemies and conspirators. Notably, these
enemies besiege him not with guns or rocks, but with carnivalized desire - their weapons
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are “largos besos espesos [long, thick kisses],” deployed on command in an atmosphere
of raucous carnival revelry. In light o f what Deleuze and Guattari call the revolutionary
potential of desire and its explosiveness, it makes sense to call these desiring bodies
“enemies.” The bodies give voice to an unrepressed desire (note the “jovenes
homosexuales”) that threatens the structures o f psychic and social repression. These
voices are the enemies of repressed desire, “conspiradores” [“conspirators”] that surround
and, as the poem progresses, subsume the monologic narrator’s voice: “Los atardeceres
del seductor y las noches de los esposos / se unen como dos sabanas sepultandome” (70)
(“The twilights of the seducer and the nights o f the spouses / unite like two sheets
burying me” [71]). These voices, overheard from the balcony o f the single gentleman’s
lonely home, bury him under sheets and “eternamente me rodea” (“eternally surrounded
[him]”).
Carnivalized desire is the force surrounding and subsuming the narrator. I have so
far alluded to its productive potential in the text, specifically in its power to surround,
engulf, and transform. Earlier, I described a similar force behind the polyphony of
W hitman’s poem. In Neruda’s poem, camivalized desire unmutes the polyphonic chorus
o f textual voices embodied in the desiring bodies outside the narrator’s home; this
becomes clear in the final stanza’s dark surrounding and engulfing o f the narrator that,
grotesquely, resembles a womb-like embrace. Copulation, conception, birth, death, and
renewal, all functions of the grotesque body, converge in a final narrative transformation
that invokes the nomadic subjectivity of Bakhtin’s mature subject.
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Fernando Alegria, writing about Whitman and Neruda’s use o f the body in poetry,
notes the principle of enumeration at work in both poets’ oeuvre. Neruda, according to
Alegria, expands on W hitman’s “bare enumeration to express a materialistic exaltation of
[the] body” (90). Neruda’s poem uses enumeration in an attempt to decipher the chaos
engendered by the near-infinite possible combinations of desiring bodies made possible
by carnivalized desire. In an environment that is unmistakably carnivalesque, the desiring
bodies of humans and animals are described as “este gran bosque respiratorio y enredado
/ con grandes flores como bocas y dentaduras / y negras raices en forma de unas y
zapatos” (70) (“this great respiratory and entangled forest / with huge flowers like mouths
and teeth / and black roots shaped like fingernails and shoes” [71]). Reminiscent o f
carnival masks and the playful carnivalesque distortion of reality, these desiring bodies
become a breathing, interlinked forest o f limbs and roots and flowers that surround the
narrator in his fearful and anxious solitude. Much like “This Compost,” the text joins
bodies and earth to “securely surround” the narrator; like a cycle of decomposition and
regeneration, desire in its most carnivalesque form overwhelms and subsumes the
narrator’s monologic voice.
In contrast to W hitman’s poem, these voices do not penetrate the earth and lick
the body; instead, they engulf and surround, breathing and, in a sense, thickening the air
that the narrator breathes. A sense o f suffocation lingers at the end of this poem, as the
breathing forest and its tangled roots securely surround the narrator. And denied air, the
monologic voice cannot speak. In this sense, the carnivalesque roar o f desiring bodies
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outside the narrator’s solitary residence overwhelms the solitary gentleman; these voices
are those of desiring bodies, copulating animals, and the fecund natural world, a
polyphonic chorus that speaks over the narrator’s fear and anxiety. A lack that represses
and is repressed, his negativized desire is subsumed in the downward movement o f the
grotesque body (from “unas” [“nails”] to “zapatos” [“shoes”]) by a carnivalized desire of
productivity, chaos, and regenerativity. Neruda’s enumeration in this text radically spans
human, animal, plant, and mineral worlds, locating desire firmly within a carnivalesque
cacophony. In this cacophony, we finally recognize the narrator liberated from
negativized desire and securely surrounded, womb-like, by the carnivalized desire he has
struggled to repress; it is as if he were about to be re-bom.
In a transformative and revolutionary process, these desiring bodies enact a
grotesque becoming, as the lower bodily stratum’s copulation, masturbation, birth, and
consumption mingle with blood, mouths, teeth, nails, and a thinly veiled allusion to
throbbing genitalia, “palpitantes ostras sexuales” (“throbbing sexual oysters”). Simon
Williams, writing about desire and bodily disorders, argues that the human body is a site
for transgression performed through the breaking or crossing of “corporeal boundaries.”
These transgressions, he argues, are performed by the productive nature of desire, excess,
and the subversive potential o f the lower bodily stratum (60). Similarly, in her work on
Samuel R. Delany’s softcore gay porn novel, The M ad Men, Mary Catherine Foltz argues
that the uses and re-organization o f the body through copulation and “perversities” allows
for the radical deconstructing of subjectivity, with the grotesque acting as a
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deconstructing agent, pointing towards the ways in which “desire for waste [shows us] a
pleasurable way to interact with that which we may previously have deemed abject” (54).
I add to Foltz’s work to point out these “pleasurable interactions,” through the
camivalization of desire, include the other and her voice, excluded by the tautological
closure of authoritative discourse. While this discourse discards her voice like a kind of
waste, camivalized desire for the grotesque body opens the self to the multiplicity of
others’ voices.
Williams and Foltz’s analysis is largely borne out in the final lines of Neruda’s
text, as corporeal transgression (the narrator is securely surrounded, like a tight embrace)
and waste in the grotesque form of “negras raices en forma de unas y zapatos” (“black
roots shaped like fingernails and shoes”) seem to deconstruct the narrator’s monologic
subjectivity in an act o f metaphoric violence richly symbolic o f both the promise of
liberation and the threat to what Walls calls the “categorical imperatives of bourgeois
ideology.” In Neruda’s text, these grotesque bodies reject closure and sameness, as
represented in the solitary gentleman’s fear and disdain o f the desiring bodies o f others
outside his fortress-like home, in favor o f a transgressive, boundary-crossing openness to
difference and the multiple voices o f “ordinary people,” the others of authoritative
discourse. Camivalized desire drives these corporeal transgressions; similarly, this desire
is at the heart of the “perversities” (recall the poem’s opening words about homosexual
young men) that surround the voice of the solitary gentleman. In this sense, then,
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negativized desire has been subsumed in the exuberant excess o f the image of the
grotesque body and in the carnivalized desire that embraces it.
Neruda and Whitman, in these texts, enumerate the grotesque body in a cyclical
staging of conception, birth, death, and regeneration. In both texts, desire acts on these
bodies as a transgressing and potentially liberating force. Nussbaum notes that for
W hitman’s America, “the flaw that for him lies at the heart of hatreds and exclusions, is a
horror of one’s own softness and mortality, o f the belly exposed to the sun; the gaze of
desire touches that, and is for that reason to be repelled” (119). The horror at which
Whitman recoils is negativized desire. Note that Nussbaum refers to “the gaze o f desire,”
which in Lacanian terms describes the perpetual manque o f the mirror stage. If desire is
carnivalized, however, then the gaze of desire can become a powerful productive force.
She goes on to argue that, “over against this flawed America, Whitman sets the America
of the poet’s imagination, healed o f self-avoidance, fear, and cruelty, and therefore able
truly to pursue liberty and equality” (119). Thus we find in W hitman’s poetry a
vindication of the potential for poetic discourse to exhibit Bakhtin’s carnivalesque
polyphony, with all of its revolutionary potential and with carnivalized desire as its
driving force. In Neruda’s poetics, W hitman’s democratic impulse is propelled forward
by the same vision of desire, with the anarchic force o f the people’s carnival behind it; in
the work of Whitman and Neruda, we find evidence o f a full-fledged revival o f grotesque
realism.
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The political and ethical implications of this revival resound today. In the January
2015 edition o f Harper’s, Emily Witt writes about Neruda’s buried body. As part of an
investigation into his death several days after the violent coup that overthrew Salvador
Allende’s democratically elected Marxist government, Neruda’s body was exhumed to
investigate possible foul play. Witt goes on to describe Neruda’s lifelong commitment to
economic justice and his membership in the Communist Party. As Witt notes, it is
common in Chile to say that Neruda died o f a broken heart (38). She quotes from
N eruda’s Canto General to tell us how he had asked to be buried in Isla Negra, his small
coastal home in Chile:
Let the gravediggers pry into ominous
matter: let them raise
the lightless fragments o f ash,
and let them speak the maggot’s language.
I ’m facing nothing but seeds,
radiant growth and sweetness.4 (44)
In imagining his death, Neruda recalls the potency o f the grotesque body, drawing on his
American camerado’s elision of earth and body. He envisions gravediggers “speaking the
maggot’s language” of regeneration and rebirth. There is a certain radical equality in the
literary representation of the lower bodily stratum: everyone sneezes, eats, copulates, and
defecates. If these same people make hierarchies of power and economic production, then
other people can unmake them. Each of these voices becomes equal in the image of the
grotesque body, and here lies its radical potential. Even the maggots are voiced, part of
Whitman’s natural polyphonic chorus. Much like the camivalized desire that drives this
regenerative cycle and embraces the image o f the grotesque body in all of its bleeding,
rotting, rutting resistance, Neruda anticipates “radiant growth and sweetness” in the
fecundity o f the earth. In death, he becomes W hitman’s Everyman: part o f the earth, licked
by the tongues o f the sea, belonging like everyone “to the immortal people who create
history” (Bakhtin 141).
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Chapter Two: Eating, Hurting, and Loving the Grotesque Body
“But it is always odd to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems o f the
world.” - Samuel R. Delany, The M ad Man
In W hitman’s poem, natural voices amorously invoke becoming; in Neruda, the
erotic congress o f desiring bodies makes this invocation. In Virgilio Pinera’s 1953 novel
La cam e de Rene [Rene’s Flesh] and John Rechy’s 1963 novel City o f Night,
carnivalized desire enacts becoming. The young men at the center o f these novels have
much in common with the singly-voiced speakers of Whitman and Neruda’s poems: they
are anxious, disgusted by flesh, and loyal to “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.”
Like these speakers, they will be surrounded by carnivalized desire; unlike the poems,
however, their objectification sparks a transformation o f subjectivity that can be traced in
each novel.
In La cam e de Rene, this transformation occurs through Rene’s unwilling
leadership of a revolutionary group fighting ostensibly for the right to consume
chocolate. Rene soon discovers that chocolate has little to do with the group’s struggle,
and that they believe only in the “choque de una carne con otra” (208) [“collision o f flesh
against flesh” (235)]. He will pejoratively call the group a “culto de la carne” (167) [“cult
of the flesh” (183)]. For our young protagonist whose flesh becomes an object of desire
for the adherents o f this cult, learning to suffer masochistically is key to his eventual
transformation. In Rechy’s City o f Night, an unnamed young man unwittingly enters a
similar cult o f the flesh centered on the sexual worship o f the bodies of young men like
him. Like Rene, this young man initially resists, but unlike him, he will at times
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feverishly rush towards the cult-like worship of male flesh. In both novels, these cults of
the flesh invert from spiritual to material the religious cosmology of the Church and State
of the novels’ historical contexts; within this material cosmology, camivalized desire
overwhelms disgust and anxiety with a lusty, comic exuberance.
Writing about the literary imagination of yet another cult o f the flesh, masochism,
Gilles Deleuze asks, “What are the uses of literature?” (15). He goes on to note that the
names o f the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch “have been used to
denote two basic perversions [sadism and masochism], and as such they are outstanding
examples o f the efficiency of literature.” Each author imagines through fiction sex acts
and sexualities so different from officially sanctioned ways of loving and desiring that
they transgress the boundaries o f language to describe and represent them. In this way,
the literary imagination efficiently creates new signifiers to create a system o f signified
sex acts (masochistic or sadistic), imagining and writing the unspeakable.
Deleuze, who rejects the categorization of Sade and von Sacher-Masoch’s novels
as pornographic, alludes to this efficiency in his use o f the term “pomological,” in the
sense of sex-studying, to describe these novels. As he notes, “pornological literature is
aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a
non-language (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken)” (22). As
pornological literature, Sade and von Sacher-Masoch’s texts “confront language with its
own limits” in describing sex acts and ways of loving so different that they are unspoken
and unspeakable. Deleuze’s term can be productively applied to La cam e de Rene and
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City o f Night. Like Sade and von Sacher-Masoeh, these deeply erotic novels confront the
limits of language in their representation of unspeakable desires.
And yet, these novels do more than study sex or confront the limits o f language.
As novels o f carnivalized desire centered on the grotesque body and its functions, they
map out a discursive transformation o f subjectivity. In Whitman and Neruda’s poems,
carnivalized desire invokes this transformation (“Behold this compost!”); in these two
novels, we imagine what this invocation is asking us to become.
In this chapter, I move beyond the invocation made by carnivalized desire to
examine the ways in which it fosters the imagination of what Braidotti has called
nomadic subjectivity. Moving nomadically in worlds turned upside down, fleeing the
flesh at the same time as they pursue it (or are pursued by it), the protagonists o f these
two novels defy the cult of the flesh in their flight and subvert the law in their
submission. Carnivalized desire moves the protagonists of these two novels outside the
laws of Church and cult, and outside those o f the State and its resistance movements.
Carnivalized desire provokes this movement, one with deep ontological implications, by
introducing difference into the grotesque body. To explore these implications, I will focus
on showing how carnivalized desire in grotesque realist literature propels the self into
contact with the other in three ways: through literal and metaphoric anthropophagy;
through another’s pain and suffering; and through love for the other. These desires
(eating, hurting, loving)5 define a carnival cosmology that lies at the heart of the cults of
the flesh in each novel; each desire centers on a function of the grotesque body.
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Eating the Grotesque Body
Eating, one of the most important functions o f the grotesque body, is a central
m otif of Pinera’s novel; in the sense of oral copulation and the consumption o f male
fluids, it is also a major theme of Rechy’s. In the opening scene of La cam e de Rene
[Rene’s Flesh], the inhabitants of the novel’s unspecified country and time stand in line at
the butcher’s shop after days without meat, staring longingly at the piles o f meat in the
display cases. Almost to a person, they revel in the scent o f coagulated blood and the
sight of chunks of animal flesh hanging from hooks in the ceiling. The scene opens with
“senoras elegantes y mujeres del pueblo, criadas, jovencitas” (10) [“elegant ladies and
women from the villages, maids, young girls” (4)], mingling in excitement reminiscent o f
the moments before the start of a carnival. The narrator describes the day as such: “Es,
por asi decirlo, un dia de fiesta nacional” (10) [“It is, as it were, a national holiday” (4)].
Rene remains unmoved by the glistening sides o f meat; in fact, the sights and
scents o f bloody flesh nauseate him, and he faints. The son o f a man with “un marcado
gusto por la carne” (10) [“a pronounced taste for the flesh” (4)], he has been sent to the
butcher’s to continue his slow but methodical induction into a cult o f the flesh, one in
which his father plays a leading role. In this first scene of the novel, Rene overcomes his
repulsion and obtains several pounds of meat “con lamento de animal herido” (17) [“with
the wounded cry of an animal” (12)]. The novel will conclude, tellingly, with Rene being
measured by a different kind of butcher, who notes with pleasure that he has, just like in
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the opening scene, gained several pounds of flesh. Rene runs from the cult o f the flesh,
though he eventually surrenders and offers his body without resistance. In contrast, the
unnamed “Youngman” from Rechy’s City o f Night runs both away from and towards a
different kind o f cult of the flesh, one more like a carnival of fleshy consumption; in this
case, the consumption of the human body through copulation, oral sex, and the exchange
of fluids.
In grotesque realism, eating and feasting signal a riotous celebration o f the cycle
of life, as represented in humorous scenes of consumption, digestion, and defecation. In
the scenes of Gargantua farting, burping, and swallowing whole animals in Rabelais’s
novel La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel [The Life o f Gargantua and Pantagruel],
Bakhtin locates a subversive power to interrupt the closed, complete, and idealized
perfection of the classical body, and in so doing, to destabilize authoritative discourse. He
describes this function of the grotesque body as its “most distinctive” :
The most distinctive character o f the grotesque body is its open, unfinished
nature, mostly fully revealed in the act o f eating where the body transgresses its
limits. The encounter of the man with the world, which takes place inside the
open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one o f the most ancient, and most
important objects o f human thought and imagery. Here man tastes world,
introduces it into his own body, makes it part o f himself. . . . M an’s encounter
with the world in the act o f eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the
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world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits between man and
the world are erased, to man’s advantage. (281)
In La carne de Rene, the act of eating, and specifically eating meat, is intimately linked to
Rene’s refusal to surrender to the cult o f the flesh. He is disgusted and terrified by meat:
“Le horroriza cuanto sea carne descuartizada y palpitante. Un cadaver no le causa mayor
impresion, pero la vista de una res muerta le provoca arqueadas, despues vomitos y
termina por echarlo en la cama dias enteros” (10) [“Butchered, throbbing flesh horrifies
him. A corpse doesn’t make the least impression on him, but the sight o f a dead steer
provokes him to nausea, then vomiting, and finally leaves him bedridden for days at a
time” (4)]. At the same time, his absurdly violent disgust for meat (corpses, unlike
“throbbing flesh,” cause no impression on him) is deeply comic, as he trembles and turns
pale when confronted by it. Rene’s fainting, picking at plates o f meat, and his
ridiculously delicate constitution belie the description of him as a “semi-dios griego” (11)
[“Greek demi-god” (11)], making him from the very start o f the novel a parody of the
classical body. This becomes even funnier when we recall that the novel was written in
Argentina, a country well-known for its people’s voracious production and consumption
of meat. But this fear of meat contains a deeper and richly carnivalesque meaning.
In an article on the codification o f homosexuality as grotesque in Pinera’s work,
Ana Garcia Chichester points out “among other taboos connected to the homosexual
perspective ... is that of anthropophagy” (302). She notes that in Pinera’s short stories, he
plays a “semantic game” between the two meanings o f the word carne (flesh and meat) to
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create what she describes as an ambiguity at the heart of La cam e de Rene, “ [Pinera’s]
most personal testimony regarding homosexual panic” (303). The “game” makes the
literal consumption of cam e that opens the novel a metaphor for the consumption of
Rene’s body, as the guerilleros o f “la causa de chocolate” [“the cause of chocolate”]
insist that he submit his own flesh to a “descuartizacion” [“butchery”] not unlike that of
the sides of beef hanging in the butcher’s shop. Similarly, this wordplay imbues the
phrase “carne palpitante” [“throbbing flesh”] with sexual meaning. Games and gameplaying are integral parts of the “gay relativity” of carnival time; between Rene’s parody
of the classical body, the semantic game play between meat and flesh, and the playful
homoerotic allusions to devouring a young man’s body (the book is, after all, titled La
cam e de Rene), the text sets the stage for desire’s camivalization.
This camivalization becomes explicit when Rene’s flesh begins to harden in
resistance to the school o f the flesh, in a scene of torture by licking: “Volvio a sacar la
lengua y la emprendio con la nariz, que a los dos o tres pasadas se file hinchando y
enrojeciendo. Cochon lamia de arriba abajo, lo que provocaba violentos estornudos en
Rene” (97) [“He stuck his tongue out and started on Rene’s nose. After two or three
passes, his tongue began to swell and get redder. Swyne was licking from top to bottom,
which made Rene sneeze violently” (97)]. Licking and sneezing, consumption and
expulsion are each functions o f the grotesque body; in this scene, they are both disgusting
and hilarious. As we imagine the fat tongue o f Swyne, a dw arf described grotesquely in
the text, sliding over Rene’s hardening flesh, the implicit reference to oral sex is hard to
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miss. Rene’s sneeze and the dw arfs sticky saliva are disgusting elements o f this strange
scene of desire. The grotesque humor o f the scene mediates the disgust and the desire;
readers are invited to laugh at the absurd image of a prostrate Rene, Christ-like, being
licked by the fat tongue of Swyne.
Later, the best student in the school, an upperclassman, will be part of the large
group of students called to “soften” Rene’s hardening flesh through licking: “Roger lamio
profundamente la frente de Rene. Movio la cabeza con aire de duda. Paso la lengua por
los labios del rebelde. Volvio a mover la cabeza. - ^Que pasa? - pregunto Cochon
ansioso. - Petrea - se limito a responder Roger” (103) [“Roger licked Rene’s forehead
profoundly. He shook his head in doubt. He passed his tongue over the rebel’s lips. He
shook his head again. ‘W hat’s wrong, Roger?’ Swyne asked. ‘Hard as a rock’ (104)]. As
he touches Rene’s lips and licks his body, he notes that Rene has become “hard as a
rock.” In a scene reminiscent o f a Saturnalian orgy, the licking continues for hours, as the
students disrobe and continue their licking of Rene’s flesh, eventually drinking alcohol
poured on his body, feasting on meat, and urinating and vomiting. Rene resists all of
these absurdly funny attempts to soften his flesh and metaphorically open his body to “la
causa” and the world. Like the fearful speakers in Whitman and Neruda’s poems, Rene
will cling to a religious and spiritual cosmology that spurns the material world until the
very end.
Desire for Rene’s flesh fuels this humorous opposition of the classical and
grotesque bodies. Pinera’s text points to a carnivalesque conceptualization of desire and
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the body whose principal constitutive element is change and difference, not stasis and
sameness. In his refusal to submit to education by licking, Rene marks his difference
from the others in the cult of the flesh, much as he marks his difference in his refusal to
eat came. We see this throughout the novel as Rene’s flesh grows progressively harder
and harder, only softening by the end o f novel after submitting to the homoerotic cult o f
the flesh; in this sense, the text playfully alludes to the hardening and softening of the
male body, to erections and oral sex, to effluvia in the “cause o f chocolate,” and to
jouissance in submission, in a sexual cycling o f the body that is, according to Bakhtin’s
formulation, fundamentally grotesque.
Rene’s resistance to the cult o f the flesh and the hardening of his body embodies
the opposition Bakhtin describes between the aesthetic representation of the classical
(closed, perfect, idealized) and grotesque (open, chaotic, constantly becoming) body.
Significantly, throughout the novel Rene will be confronted with scenes of the classical
body made grotesque through the addition of arrows, blood, lashings, and so on. In a
picture book given to him by his first sex partner, Dalia, his father transforms the
classical images of male and female bodies by removing the women entirely and defacing
the male figures with Rene’s face and grotesque tortures: there will be a scene o f Rene as
St. Sebastian (one of the earliest gay icons known for his Apollonian beauty) pierced by
arrows, and of Rene skinned alive. The defacement of the classical body will be repeated
when, in his room at the school o f suffering, Rene encounters a life-sized plaster statue of
himself as Christ on the cross, with “la risa de una persona satisfecha” (61) [“the laughter
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of a contented man”(57)] on his face. Each image’s defacement reflects a carnivalesque
parody of the classical body. In the scene o f licking and feasting on Rene’s body, the
“encarnacion de un semi-dios griego” (11) [“the living incarnation o f a Greek demi-god”
(11)], a similar defacement of the classical body transpires, a kind o f corporeal
Saturnalia.
For Bakhtin the representation o f the grotesque body is deeply rooted in the selfmocking humor o f folk culture. A refusal to acknowledge particular functions of the
grotesque body (in this case, consumption, digestion, and defecation) obfuscates working
people’s “essential relation to life, death, struggle, triumph, and regeneration.” For, as he
points out, “if food is separated from work and conceived o f as a private e v e n t. . .
nothing is left but a series of artificial, meaningless metaphors” (282). Importantly, Rene
not only refuses to eat carne', his body hardens and turns cold, like a classical sculpture of
a Greek god, defying the softness o f the flesh and its openness to the world through the
mouth and other orifices. Rene’s obstinate hardness is ultimately a refusal to
acknowledge the fleshiness of his body; similarly, his disgust for carne is a metaphorical
flight from the cult of the flesh. Rene seeks out the “artificial, meaningless metaphors” of
a classical aesthetics that denies the flesh to privilege a hierarchy o f reason and authority.
Yet, by the end o f the novel, Rene submits to the homosocial world o f la causa and its
consumption of carne, even allowing himself to be weighed in a closing scene
reminiscent of the text’s opening in the butcher shop. In submission, Rene becomes the
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“carne palpitante” [“throbbing flesh”] in the butcher’s shop that so disgusted him; his
flesh is, by the end, similarly available for consumption.
These disgusting scenes of torture, feasting, and licking are as absurdly funny as
they are weirdly erotic. Humor and parody defeat the disgust engendered by the fat
tongue of Swyne and the urinating, vomiting boys licking Rene’s body; in this sense,
what Bakhtin calls the “complete liberty” o f laughter is an integral part o f the
carnivalization of desire. Laughter mediates the grotesque otherness o f men licking other
m en’s bodies. Laughing, the homoeroticism and sexual difference of these scenes
becomes less threatening to heteronormativity while simultaneously subverting it through
the language o f pomological literature, a form o f writing the unspeakable. As Bakhtin
notes, “fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is
defeated by laughter.. . . Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless
world” (47). Laughter gives readers permission to acknowledge that, all along, Rene’s
flesh was the object o f our desire; we too have been feasting on his carne.
In Rechy’s text, eating and ingesting the body is an explicitly sexual act, unlike
the implicit homoeroticism in the metaphoric anthropophagism of Pinera’s text. In City o f
Night, the protagonist, an unnamed Youngman, leaves his rural home to travel, nomad­
like, through urban underworlds of illicit homosexual sex in public places. In these “cities
of night,” the bodies of young men are purchased and sold, like carne, for the sexual
gratification of older men not unlike the teachers and leaders of the cult o f the flesh in La
carne de Rene [Rene’s Flesh]. Youngman quickly becomes a hustler, selling his body to
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older men and, eventually, giving his body freely, as part o f a carnival cosmology where
the bodies of young men are the objects o f worship. Desire, not money, propels
Youngman through this carnival feast o f oral and anal copulation:
I felt myself in a constant state of highness - and I no longer sought out either the
joints of maryjane or the pills: senses on pinpoint as if I were drunk without
liquor. And what I was high on was the furious unsurfeited search. Now the
subterfuge that I did it only for money - even though, as early as New York
(especially when the act was executed in public places), I had not adhered to it began to disappear. It was now a matter of numbers. (219)
Similar to the symbolic and sexually charged consumption of Rene’s flesh that occurs
throughout that text and, finally, implicates its readers, in City o f Night readers are led
through an unflinching description of hundreds of sexual encounters, each a kind of
consumptive act (oral copulation’s swallowing o f male fluids, and anal copulation’s
ingestion of male fluids). In this way, the text invites the reader to participate in a
carnivalesque feast o f taboo sex acts that, by the end o f the novel, has afforded
Youngman an intoxicating sustenance (“constant highness”) through the introduction o f
literally hundreds of different bodies into his mouth and others’. Not surprisingly,
Bakhtin attributes a triumphant force to eating: “In the act o f eating, as we have said, the
confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body: it triumphs over
the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world’s expense” (283).
This is an obvious point for Rechy’s Youngman, whose voracious sexual consumption of
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male bodies in public and private spaces parodies and openly resists the law, in this case,
police and “vice cops.” Throughout the novel, authoritative discourse as represented by
the police will be mocked through the grotesque body, as cops are sexualized, seduced,
and consumed themselves.
For Rene, submission to the cult o f the flesh and its privileging o f the
consumption of cam e represents a similar triumph grounded in parody, subversion, and
resistance. “La causa de chocolate,” is, notionally, a revolutionary organization, the
raison d ’etre of what he dismisses as a cult of the flesh; and yet, by virtue o f its
dedication to chocolate (not justice, not equality, not wealth or fame), la causa parodies
revolution, the law, and even subversion itself; readers, much like Rene, are dared not to
laugh at the absurdity of the situation. In both cases, consumption (of cam e, chocolate, or
male bodies and fluids) represents an opening o f the body and a transgression o f its
confines through the mouth; carnivalized desire is at the heart of each of these acts of
consumption.
In La cam e de Rene, carnivalized desire propels this transgression of the body on
two levels: textually, as Rene himself is licked and masochistically tortured into a
curiously powerful submission to a homoerotic cult o f the flesh more about the “choque
de una came con otra” (208) [“collision of flesh against flesh” (235)] than chocolate or
dissidence; and on a meta-fictive level, as the reader is invited to participate in a
metaphoric and strangely liberating consumption o f his flesh, through reading his body we hold it in our hands, since the book is named after him. In City o f Night, feast-like
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sexual consumption, particularly oral sex, is a central m otif o f the novel. Eating, then,
one of the most important functions for Bakhtin of the grotesque body and a literal and
metaphoric m otif of both novels, is a force for introducing, expelling, and introducing
again difference into the body. It is also a force driven by desire: desire to take
sustenance, to live, to thrive. The literary representation of this function of the grotesque
body, through its self-parody and literal consumption of difference, is an erotic invitation
to become.
Wounding and Wanting the Grotesque Body
This corporeal transgression, however, occurs not only through eating or
copulation; as the picture book of Rene’s body shows, transgression of the body’s
boundaries can quite literally occur through torture and the piercing (or flaying) o f the
skin. In these texts, desire is masochistically entwined with the suffering of the tortured
body. Masochism is implicit in La carne de Rene and explicit in City in Night. David
Sigler, writing about the literariness o f masochism in the philosophy of Deleuze and
Lacan, notes that “Sacher-Masoch teaches readers to love the mark of the signifier, and
the disruption of narrative, as erotic accessories. What one really learns from SacherMasoch is how to read for pleasure.. . . Sexual enjoyment in the novel [Venus in Furs]
springs from acts of reading” (193). I turn our attention first to La carne de Rene, where
this phenomenon is what I argue to be an explicit function o f the novel. The metaphoric
consumption of Rene’s body is signaled6 with a table o f contents that reads like a menu in
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a restaurant: “La carne ehamuseada” [“Scorched Flesh”], “La carne perfumada”
[“Perfumed Flesh”], and “La carne de gallina” [“Goose Flesh”]. The final chapter even
makes the mouth water: “Tiema y jugosa” [“Tender and Juicy”]. At the same time as
readers are promised these carnal delights, Rene’s flesh is being systematically tortured
and abused. In an act of reading that mirrors a masochistic encounter, readers endure the
painfulness o f Rene’s torture, empathizing with the hapless young m an’s seemingly
unending torture, while awaiting the pleasure that comes both with the end o f the novel
and his complete submission to the flesh. The act of reading is, in this case, like a
masochistic contract: it promises to deliver great pleasure after a duly stipulated period of
pain. Laughter in both texts mediates between the grotesque (in this sense, the torture of
one’s body and the sexual functions o f the lower material stratum), the disgusting, and
the erotic; this comic mediation, however, reflects a subversive impulse.
Ana Serra, writing about the novel’s masochistic “morality” (itself a kind of
contract), notes the presence of “a masochistic code o f behavior which is built on the
basis of the inversion or displacement of the patriarchal code of behavior, that is a set of
prescriptive morals which men design and impose on themselves and which destroys
them” (486). She goes on to note, “Pinera himself stated that he had written this novel
‘with shreds of his own flesh,’ and indeed the text is permeated by physical pain, fear of
torture and mutilation, and, above all, anger.” The novel can be painful to read, by
design: Rene’s school motto is “Sufrir en silencio” (57) [“Suffer in silence” (53)]; and, as
the headmaster tells him on his first day in the school, “Hay que sufrir para aprender”
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(58) [“One must suffer in order to learn” (53)]. Reading about Rene’s suffering has the
potential to produce a meta-fictive suffering, as the body o f our Greek demi-god is
systematically abused. At the same time, Rene’s situation as an unwilling defender of la
causa, and a young man being asked to endure unspeakable pain and humiliation in the
defense of his people’s right to consume chocolate, is as absurdly funny as it is
disturbing.
In City o f Night, masochism makes a much briefer appearance in a single series of
scenes with a masochist character who will be brutally mocked by Youngman.
Masochism in this text is not a narrative frame, which I attribute to the fact that Rechy’s
text is not, like Pinera’s, one of implicit homoerotic desire unfettered by submission to
punishment and pain. Instead, it reflects the near-infinite forms o f desire that the
grotesque body can contain and produce. For this reason, Rechy’s work has been
considered a precursor to queer theory, through a “queer imagination [that] finally leads
to the most radical questioning and denormalizing of a heterosexist epistemology”
(Libretti 161). In this sense, the series o f scenes in which Youngman experiments with
masochism reflects the richly diverse forms desire can take when unleashed from the
confines of censure and prohibition. Take, for instance, this scene, where Youngman tries
and quickly rejects an invitation to participate in a masochistic contract:
And then, burying his finger into the collar o f his shirt to exhibit a tiny
chain on which dangles an “M,” he announced proudly: “Do you know what that
means? It means Im a masochist. It means I adore pain.” . . . [after Youngman
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refuses to hurt the masochist] “I feel cheated, then,” he said. “Not because of the
money - but because I somehow expected so much o f y o u . . . . Wont you . . . let
me . . . Idolize you?” he said slowly. “W on’t you be brutal?”
I have always been repelled by pain, either inflicting it or receiving it.
Why then did I feel a dart o f excitement at the m an’s words? (294)
Despite his repulsion, Youngman “feels a dart of excitement”; in this sense, the text
depicts disgust and desire, like pleasure and pain, as rhythmic exchanges. Like the disgust
provoked by the reading o f scenes o f torture o f Rene’s flesh (recall the licking of his flesh
by the fat tongue of the dwarf, Swyne), readers here are given permission, like
Youngman, to feel “excitement” at the thought of being brutal, despite revulsion or fear
of pain.
The pairing o f pleasure and pain startles Youngman (like a “dart”) as much as it
disgusts and attracts him; for readers, these pairings are part o f a jolt o f the grotesque that
invites us to think differently about these affective states and the possibility of their inter­
relatedness. In an unusual passage7 from Will to Power, Nietzsche uses pain, or
“displeasure,” and a particular function o f the lower material bodily stratum (specifically,
copulation) to challenge the categorization o f pleasure and pain and, by extension, desire
and disgust, as antinomies:
This is the case, e.g., in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act o f coitus: here
we see displeasure at work as an ingredient of pleasure. It seems, a little hindrance
that is overcome and immediately followed by another little hindrance that is
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again overcome - this game o f resistance and victory arouses most strongly that
general feeling o f superabundant, excessive power that constitutes the essence o f
pleasure. The opposite, an increase in the sensation of pain through the
introduction of little pleasurable stimuli, is lacking; for pleasure and pain are not
opposites. (371)
According to Nietzsche, pain and pleasure and, similarly, desire and disgust, work in a
“rhythmic sequence” that “arouses most strongly that general feeling o f superabundant,
excessive power that constitutes the essence o f desire.” That he should choose to use the
body in coitus as an example indicates the potency of the representation of the lower
material bodily stratum in undermining the classical binary o f pleasure/pain. Deleuze and
Guattari, whose re-conceptualization of desire as a positive, productive force draws
extensively from Nietzsche’s concept o f the Will to Power, combine Nietzsche’s locating
of power as a primary human drive with Freud’s similar positioning o f desire.8 Most
important here is the concept of a rhythmic sequence of pleasure/pain and desire/disgust
that can be located in the grotesque body. For, as Nietzsche goes on to argue, without
pain there can be no pleasure, and without repulsion, no attraction.
Writing about desire, disgust, and the grotesque body, Adam Komisaruk asks
whether the representation of pain in literature constitutes a “sensory arrestment or a
liberation, a severance of the subject’s relationship to his/her own body or a sealing of
that relationship” (30). Deleuze, in an essay on masochism titled “Coldness and Cruelty,”
engages with this question through a critical reading o f Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s
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Venus in Furs. As he notes, Theodore Reik “deserves special credit” for enumerating the
four basic characteristics of masochism: fantasy, disavowal, suspense, and persuasion
(75). At the start of this chapter, I described masochism as a contract (pain in exchange
for pleasure). Deleuze notes this, writing that “it is curious that Reik, no less than other
analysts, neglects a fifth factor which is very important: the form o f the contract in the
masochistic relationship.” Because a contract can be willingly entered into, and is made
by agreement between parties, it is fundamentally different from a law, though as
Deleuze points out the underlying impulse of the contract is toward the creation of a law.
Despite this, the contract moves away from institutions and hierarchies o f power.
Masochism plays a central role in La cam e de Rene; the “form of the contract” in
the text will help us situate masochism as a form o f carnivalized desire acting on the
grotesque body. Rene does not, in any typically masochistic sense, submit willingly to the
torture of his body and the school of suffering to which his father sends him. In fact, he
refuses this contract until the very end o f the novel. Rene resists, constantly and actively,
until eventually he learns the lesson of masochism - that willful suffering can also be
resistance. Wrisley, writing about the value o f suffering in Nietzsche’s philosophy,
argues that “suffering can be given a meaning, we can answer the question “Why do I
suffer?” with, “I suffer, not as a punishment, but in order to become better and stronger...
Suffering is not to be endured as a deserved punishment, but embraced because it is
pregnant with possibilities for growth and power” (n. pag). The “pregnant possibilities”
of suffering are what, by the end of the novel, Rene comes to accept through submission.
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In his final submission to “la causa,” the pregnant possibilities o f suffering
become clear. In the text, the guerrilleros who claim Rene as their new leader seek the
freedom to consume chocolate. At the same time, none o f the fighters actually drink or
even care to consume chocolate; they have simply formulated a contract with their
pursuers, through “la santa causa del chocolate.” The absurdity of the struggle for
chocolate parodies both the guerrilleros and the law. In this sense, it brings to mind
Deleuze’s remarks on the subversive humor at the heart of masochism: “The masochistic
ego is only apparently crushed by the superego. What insolence and humor, what
irrepressible defiance and ultimate triumph lie hidden behind an ego that claims to be so
weak” (124). The fighters for the cause o f chocolate, so ostensibly weak in their constant
flight from battle, conceal a triumphant zeal for defeating the law as laid out by their
opponents.
But as Rene eventually learns in a conversation with an old fighter for la causa,
the fight for chocolate ended long ago:
El fondo de la cuestion no es el chocolate. Nunca se alabara bastante esta
infusion. El chocolate se presenta ante la carne con mirada implorante, con ojos
arrasados en lagrimas y le dice: «estoy en peligro mortal, salvame, los enemigos
me acosan. No olvides que salvandome te proporcionas lo que mas anhelas en
esta vida, tu propia perdition. Se que estas deseosa por ser bianco de balas y
cuchillos». Y con sonrisa chocolatesca da un salto y se escuda tras la carne, que al
momento cae segada en fior por los seguidores. (206)
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[At the bottom of all of this is not chocolate. Never can such an odorous infusion
be praised highly enough. Chocolate looks at the flesh with an imploring gaze,
eyes bathed in tears, and says: ‘I’m in mortal danger. Save me. Don’t forget that if
you save me, I will offer you what you most desire in this life: your own
perdition. I know you long to be a target for bullets and knives.’ And with a
chocolatey smile, it leaps and shields itself behind the flesh, which is cut down in
its prime a moment later by the pursuers. (233)]
In this scene, Deleuze’s concept o f the masochistic contract and Nietzsche’s formulation
of suffering as growth intersect productively, particularly in terms of the fostering of a
nomadic subject that is our focus. Take, for instance, the chocolatey contract these
revolutionaries enter into, one that compels them to resist an institution (a government
that oppresses its people by forbidding the consumption o f chocolate). While the
prohibition of chocolate is itself a law, interestingly, Pinera’s text takes care to point out
that the defenders of chocolate never consume it, while those who prohibit it, drink it in
secret. The humor of the situation, in the revolutionaries’ manufactured zeal and the
prohibitionists’ guilty desire, makes their struggle ridiculous and subversive in ways that
parallel masochism.
As I alluded to earlier, Deleuze points out that “the specific impulse underlying
the [masochistic] contract is towards the creation of a law, even if in the end the law
should take over and impose its authority upon the contract itself.” This differs
substantively from sadism, which he argues is propelled towards the creation o f an
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institution that seeks “the degradation of all laws and the establishment o f a superior
power that sets itself above them” (77). In this sense, masochism is unique in that it both
creates and subverts law: “The law now ordains what it is what it was once intended to
forbid; guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment makes permissible
what it was intended to chastise” (Deleuze 102). In the case o f la causa, the defense of
chocolate is a contract that, perversely, guarantees the suffering o f its defenders and their
ultimate demise. For the prohibitionists (who drink chocolate in secret), their guilt for
breaking the law is discharged through their contractual obligation to suffer pain and
bodily harm in the defense of the law. As we have learned, chocolate was never “el fondo
de la cuestion” [“at the bottom o f this”]; instead, both groups long for the pain and
suffering of penetration by “balas y cuchillos” [“bullets and knives”], adding a rich layer
of psychosexual irony. In the contract to defend (and prohibit) chocolate, these men
become free to be penetrated as often and as much as they choose. Their suffering in this
way becomes pregnant with other possibilities: for penetration, for Rene’s body, or for
the satisfaction of other “guilty pleasures.” In the eroticization of pain and suffering,
masochism’s relation to carnivalized desire becomes clear. With humorous insolence,
masochism subverts the law and upends social relations; it eroticizes the opening of the
body through dismemberment, flaying the flesh, and bleeding, functions of the grotesque
body tied to death and regeneration.
Rene ultimately joins with these men in their suffering, making his submission to
the cult o f the flesh one o f subversion of the law, power through the contract, and
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pleasure in bodily pain and dismemberment. Nomad-like, he will run from this
submission until the very end. After this encounter with the old man, Rene will take
refuge in a cemetery; this is his final retreat. In fleeing the flesh, he seeks out the comfort
of the dead, of flesh that is no longer “tierna, ardiente, jugosa” (209) [“tender, passionate,
juicy” (236)]. This refuge, though, is a temporary one, for Rene is living - and his flesh is
tender and juicy. Even in the cemetery, the grotesque body is at work, decomposing and
returning to the earth as part of the cycle o f life. From the cemetery, Rene will leave to
join la causa, in yet another staging of the fecundity of the grotesque body.
Rene leaves the dead flesh of cemetery to return to the throbbing flesh that is the
real focus of the la causa. In his return, we see a confluence between Deleuze’s
enumeration of the other features of masochism (disavowal, suspense, fantasy) and
Bakhtin’s grotesque body, site of the subversion of reason. As Deleuze notes, “Disavowal
is a reaction of the imagination, as negation is an operation of the intellect or o f thought..
.. Nor is disavowal in general just a form o f imagination; it is nothing less than the
foundation of imagination, which suspends reality and establishes the ideal in the
suspended world” (128). In the text, despite its absurdity, la causa functions to suspend
reality and establish a battle for chocolate that, ultimately, contractually permits the
attainment of an ideal; in this case, the masochistic abuse and subsequent pleasuring of
the guerrilleros’ flesh. Similarly, Rene, as the leader of la causa, becomes the literal
“incarnation” of their ideal, one seen in the erotic undertones of Rene’s hardening and
softening flesh. This is clear from the start, when, as mentioned earlier, Rene is described
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as the “encarnacion9 de un semi-dios griego” (11) [“the living incarnation o f a Greek
demi-god” (11). In this way, the eroticization o f Rene’s classically ideal body occurs
ironically through its wounding and dismemberment, like the ritualized violence of the
carnival, in turn initiating a cyclical sexual hardening and softening o f his flesh. His
classical body, worked over by carnivalized desire, becomes grotesque; like all
becomings, it is cyclical and changing, permanently impermanent.
Itself a kind of carnivalization of desire, the masochistic violence that propels
Rene’s becoming takes place in a carnival-like atmosphere o f humorous mockery (of
Rene, the two opposing forces, la causa, and so on), suffering, and pleasure. Deleuze
links masochism to humor and rebellion; and indeed, they lie at the heart of the
masochistic tortures and misadventures that plague Rene. Sigmund Freud has described
humor as “not resigned, [but] rebellious,” as Michael Billig notes in his article on the
language of humor. “Jokes, like dreams and slips of the tongue,” Billig writes, “bear the
traces of repressed desires. Sexual and aggressive thoughts, which are forbidden in polite
society, can be shared as if they are not serious. Humor then becomes a way o f rebelling
against the demands of social order” (452). Rene’s tortures are gruesome and violent, and
yet absurd and sexually charged, like the attempt to “soften” his hardening flesh by
licking. Deleuze argues that masochism transgresses the law, for “You must not do that”
changes through the masochistic contract into “You have to do that!” He goes on to note
that “the masochist is insolent in his obsequiousness, rebellious in his submission; in
short, he is a humorist, a logician o f consequences” (89). Desire lies at the heart of this
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rebellion, since the consequences are a punishment that makes way for the guiltless
satisfaction of sexual desire. Deleuze points to Lacan’s conceptualization o f the law as
being the same as repressed desire (85); it bears noting that at the time of this novel’s
publication in Argentina in 1952, homosexuality was against the law, making the law
particularly unjust for queer people. Not surprisingly, Rene will ask the old man from la
causa about not just the law (for we already know chocolate is against the law), but
justice:
- Pero digame: £no se toma en cuenta la justicia?
- No hay justicia, jefe, solo hay carne - concluyo
Salirse de los
limites de la carne significa caer en el vacio y en la anfibiologia. No se
haga ilusiones. Solo hay el choque de una carne con otra carne. (208)
[“But tell me: don’t you take justice into account?”
“There’s no such thing as justice, chief. There is only flesh,” the
old man continued. “To go beyond the bounds of the flesh is to fall into a
conceptual vacuum and amphibology. Don’t build up your hopes. All that
exists is the collision of flesh against flesh.” (235)]
Here Rene begins his final submission to the cult of the flesh, one that in true masochistic
fashion also represents a triumph over the law. By submitting, Rene enters into a contract
to “suffer in silence” for la causa. Accepting such a contract, however, implies that Rene
also has the power to withdraw and reject it. For Rene, ultimately there is no Right, no
final law; there is only the collision of the flesh and the infinite possibilities it sparks.
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Following Deleuze’s formulation, in the deferral of guilt and the acceptance of
punishment, Rene finds a different kind o f justice based on the guiltless satisfaction of
homoerotic desire that masochism, in defiance o f the law, makes possible.
Amidst these confluences o f pleasure and pain, hard and soft, flesh and spirit, the
reader’s desire becomes itself masochistic, as suffering alongside Rene’s tortures defers
the final pleasure of his submission (and the end of the novel). Daniel Balderston notes
this, as he locates within Pinera’s work an aesthetics o f the grotesque that has a unsettling
capacity to terrify and amuse the reader: “Si la vida cotidiana se percibe en los relatos de
Pinera como amenaza, la respuesta no es en ellos una exaltation de la existencia
cotidiana, sino del arte, cuyo poder es el de detener la angustia, de detenerse en la
angustia” [“if ordinary life is perceived in Pinera’s work as a threat, the answer to that
threat is not an exaltation of ordinary existence, but o f art itself, whose power is to detain
anguish, and to linger in that anguish” 10] (175). Rene constantly flees threats, and his
body is relentlessly tortured. At the same time, the text uses humor, absurdity, and
irreverence to invite readers to “linger” masochistically, alongside their hero. Like
Nietzsche’s example of the displeasure provoked by tickling during coitus, laughter and
sorrow, like pleasure and pain, are invoked when Rene’s flesh is electrocuted, tickled,
pinched, stabbed, and licked. But why bother detaining ourselves in the “anguish” of
reading La cam e de Rene? Perhaps a different kind o f contract, the agreement between a
reader and a text, is at play here.
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For those readers who finish the novel, they have continued to read, lingering in
Rene’s anguish, fulfilling a kind of literary contract that forms part o f what Balderston
calls the power of art itself. Serra, in her article on masochism as morality, arrives at a
similar conclusion:
For the reader, R ene’s Flesh is profoundly disturbing and unsettling: the rhetorical
effect o f the text is parallel to that of the Law o f the Flesh, it constitutes an
aggression. And yet, once one has read the novel and been the object o f its
aggression, one wants to go back to [it], this time truly enjoying one’s pain. (489)
While I heartily disagree with her position that the novel as a bildungsroman “calls all
men to wound themselves, to learn to withstand pain and renounce bodily pleasure,” she
is correct in that the novel functions as an aggression, with the reader as masochistic
object. I suspect that, much as Deleuze argues that pleasure flows after the discharge of
guilt through punishment, for readers of La carne de Rene, a similar mechanism is at
work.
The promise o f additional pounds of his flesh for us to eat, and the ending of the
experience of reading (a similarly consumptive act), invite us to feel a note o f pleasure
among the other emotions the scene might provoke. Flesh in the text is marked for our
consumption, like the menu-esque table of contents and the picture book o f images of
Rene’s body posed in different scenes of torture (50 [44]). I noted earlier that arrows and
penetration mark flesh in one scene reminiscent of St. Sebastian, with Rene surrounded
by hundreds of arrows aimed at his body. The third image shows Rene skinned alive, his
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flesh glistening like a rack of butchered meat. Rene’s horrified “reading” of these scenes
of torture mimics our own reading o f scenes of Rene’s torture, in a meta-fictive move that
initiates a shifting representation of the subject; notably, desire and the grotesque body
(eating, licking, bleeding) enact this shift, like a disruption. Sigler, writing about the
literariness of masochism, points out that masochism “produces something at the level of
language that disrupts the libido, producing instead a pure difference necessary for the
masochistic relationship” (205). This difference manifests in the masochistic contract,
where, for example, one person will receive pain and suffering, and another will be
directed to inflict it.
As Sigler notes, the masochist is “someone who introduces desire into an entirely
different system” ; the picture book itself, with its leaves tom out and its images of
handsome young men defaced with marks, bruises, and arrows, narratively depicts the
introduction of difference. For readers, the picture book’s brutal transformation from
sultry soft-core pom to hard-core masochistic fantasy mimics Rene’s, as he transforms
from statuesque Greek demi-god to, by the end o f the novel, pounds o f throbbing flesh
for our consumption.
In Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, masochism’s literariness emerges in a
similarly meta-fictive way, as the narrator describes being given (and subsequently
reading) a manuscript that describes a masochistic relationship (151). Sigler writes,
“Sacher-Masoch teaches us to read suprasensual erotics as a carefully orchestrated
network of desire, dependent upon narrative fiction, which makes intrinsically plural the
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subjects that it fixes in place. Masochism is a network rather than a crisis o f any one
subject’s desire” (207). In its careful negotiation o f pain and pleasure through the
contract, and its narration of fantasy and the world of imagination, masochism’s
literariness becomes clear. For Lacan and Deleuze, he notes, the masochist has “a
confidence in ‘the glory of a mark,’ both a world completely and possibly enveloped by
signifiers and ‘the mark [of the rod] on the skin’” (192). In La cam e de Rene, we see the
importance of signifiers and “the mark of rod” in an early scene where Rene is initiated
into the cult of the flesh through branding and marking his buttocks; the picture book,
too, shows his skin covered in marks, each a signifier of pain and suffering erotically
transposed, like a network o f desire, on the classic beauty o f his body.
And yet, cam e itself is a network of desire that spans those who love meat, those
who love Rene’s tender flesh, participants on both sides of la causa, and, crucially, the
reader eagerly consuming his narrative flesh. In this sense, consumption (another core
function of the grotesque body) becomes a masochistic act. Rene metaphorically resists
consumption, in his disgust for meat, and literally in his refusal to submit his body to “la
causa,” seeming in this way to defy masochism through a refusal to participate or, per
Deleuze, agree to a contract. But by the end of the novel, Rene submits to pain and the
cult of the flesh, sealing the masochistic contract that has been in the making since the
start of the novel. At the same time, as readers, we are being invited contractually to
consume Rene’s flesh without breaking the contract by refusing to finish the novel. In
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turn, we can derive pleasure through “lingering in the anguish” and the text’s implicit
eroticism.
In the text, Rene’s body is licked, tortured, and, finally, weighed for consumption
like the toothsome slabs of carne in the opening scene at the butcher’s. His body, by the
end, is “solo carne de tortura” (226) [“nothing but flesh for torture” (255)]. Carnivalized
desire, taking the form of masochism, has softened Rene’s hardened flesh. Like the
grotesque body that Bakhtin calls “a body in the act o f becoming” (317), his body
changes from hard to soft, and in the erotic implications o f consuming his “carne
palpitante”(10) [“throbbing flesh” (4)], hard again; provoked by carnivalized desire,
Rene’s flesh becomes. As an erotic corporeal cycle o f resistance (growth that hardens
carne) and submission (consumption, digestion, and evacuation that softens carne)
situated in a context of self-mocking humor and pleasure, Rene’s becoming flesh enacts
the fecundity of the grotesque body, eating, copulating, digesting, defecating, and
renewing. This fecund cycle opens his body to the world and his own becoming. By the
end, Rene has become nothing more than flesh; at the same time, his flesh is a “network
of desire,” interconnected through the functions of the grotesque body, cycling between
hard and soft, constantly becoming. Provoked by carnivalized desire, Rene’s flesh
becomes the skin for a nomadic subject who subverts the law, comically and exuberantly
engages with difference, and creates his own fleshy justice; his becoming offers readers
one path among many toward nomadic subjectivity.
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Loving the Grotesque Body
Following Deleuze, I have so far argued that the “literariness o f masochism” can
provoke a becoming through the breaking of identities and the forging of diffuse ones,
similar to the function of the grotesque body. In City o f Night, as Kevin Arnold points
out, “the sex act for Rechy is not about pleasurable, arbitrary bodies in contact, but a
specific and particular masculine body” (126). In this way, the hard masculinity
eroticized in Rechy’s text is deeply linked to the hardening and softening o f Rene’s flesh,
for there is a similar becoming at work in City o f Night.
Youngman, the unnamed central character of the novel, begins his engagement
with the queer underworld he calls “cities of night” as a hustler, where hard, masculine
flesh was a prized commodity; the text will explore the tensions between “hard” or butch
men who love other men but call it hustling, and the feminine “softness” o f gay men, or
queens. Brad Epps, writing about grotesque bodies and the space o f the subject, notes this
tension in the writing o f Reinaldo Arenas, a contemporary o f Pinera who was also
incarcerated for his homosexuality in post-Revolutionary Cuba. In writing about his
experience, Arenas makes ample use of the grotesque in describing his fellow inmates:
“his fellow prisoners [are] shrill, vulgar, weak, and unbearably campy queens ... ‘they’
are submissive, absurd, and disgraceful, ‘corrompiendolo todo, hasta la autentica furia del
que padece el terror’ [‘cheapening and corrupting everything, even the authentic rage of
the man who suffers terror’]” (49). In many ways, this description fits the representation
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o f Rene, ultimately “submissive, absurd, disgraceful,” and yet, deeply erotic with
hardening (and softening) flesh his torturers and readers are eager to consume.
Rechy makes a similar textual move in City o f Night, with his Youngman who
despises the “campy queens” who pay him for the use of his body and temporary love. At
the same time, Youngman achingly desires their bodies and this sexual exchange, in yet
another kind of love. But unlike Rene’s subversion of the law through masochistic
submission, Rechy’s characters openly defy the law, through billingsgate, bodily
transgression and transformation, and acts of sexual love linked to the functions of the
grotesque body. The hardening and softening o f Youngman’s flesh as he travels between
these cities of night is explicitly sexual, linked not to metaphoric consumption and
masochism but to other forms o f camivalized desire that enact becoming. Youngman will
start the novel as an outcast, anxious and afraid; desire will transform him from outcast to
outlaw.
In an interview with Debra Castillo, Rechy describes his textual move away from
representations of the outcast and toward the figure of the outlaw: “ ‘Outcast’ suggests a
cowering exile, victimized, defeated. ‘Outlaw’ suggests defiance, an acceptance o f being
‘outside the law.’ It carries an implication that the law itself may be wrong, therefore to
be questioned, overturned. Oh, yes, let’s face it, the ‘outlaw’ is a romantic figure” (113).
Rechy’s concern with the outlaw extends to his use o f language, which breaks with
convention in purposeful ways, incorporating street slang and obscenity, similar to the
billingsgate of the carnival. But even on a structural level, his use of language is defiant.
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In the textual citations that follow, note Rechy’s omission o f apostrophes, the abundance
of dashes and ellipses, and similar signs of a defiance of convention coded within his
language, like a system of signs within signs. Written into the text itself is a language of
the grotesque body; it refuses to submit to an official language that persecutes and
excludes difference, especially queerness.
In the novel’s opening sentence, Rechy ascribes a modern carnival character, with
all o f its rich potential for subversion and defiance, to this world o f sexual difference:
“Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times
Square to Hollywood Boulevard - jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning” (15).
Throughout the novel, Youngman will describe the bars, cinemas, and streets o f this
queer underworld as a kind of sexual carnival. The text vividly describes queer desire,
sexual practices, and generalized resistance to the encoding of heteronormatively ranked
desire through official, authoritative discourse; their world is, in many ways, an
essentially carnivalesque revalorization of Eros.
A scene early on in the novel demonstrates this carnivalesque character. At the
start o f the scene, one set in a hustler’s bar in downtown Los Angeles, an “obviously
drunk” queen (an effeminate man), climbs on top o f the bar, begins a striptease, and
sings, “Ssssssssssssufferrrrrrrrrrrr . . . ” Later in the scene, the “queens” initiate a
grotesque dressing down, a kind of carnival uncrowning remarkably similar to Arenas’s
dismissive description of the queens in the labor camp:
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I looked, and theres Pauline - a heavily painted queen who thinks she
looks like Sophia Loren - with a collar like the wicked queen’s in Snow White.
Miss Destiny said icily: “Pauline ... is a lowlife...prostitute.”
Trudi: “A cheap whore.”
Lola, in her husky m an’s voice and glowering nearsightedly: “A slut.”
Trudi: “A common streetwalker.”
Lola: “A chippy.”
Miss Destiny: - conclusively, viciously: “A cocksucker/” (129)
The queens use a carnival language of obscenity, similar to the billingsgate Bakhtin calls
an integral part of the camivalesque and grotesque realism (16). The language differs,
however, in that it is hardly ambivalent or humorous: in fact, the language is “vicious.”
How can such viciousness be part o f the camivalesque’s raucous humor? Part o f the
explanation lies in examining the context of defiance and resistance within which these
queens use this billingsgate; in the viciousness, similar to the masochistic impulse, there
is a cold humor that is equally subversive.
This humor is ultimately a grotesque one, grounded in the functions o f the body
(copulation and consumption, in this case). It reflects an envy, a jealousy for this queen’s
successful representation of femininity; her success in picking up a male hustler for a
night of love is contorted, absurdly, into “prostitution.” Trading insults in this way might,
like billingsgate, serve as a mechanism for fostering a sense o f equality between Pauline,
successful in her sexual hunting and for this reason temporarily occupying a higher rank.
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Bakhtin calls profanities and insults like this “the unofficial element o f speech . . . oaths
began to be considered as a certain rejection of official philosophy, a verbal protest”
(189). Most significantly for our analysis, these insults function like what Bakhtin calls a
carnival “uncrowning” :
The abuse and thrashing are equivalent to a change of costume, to a
metamorphosis. Abuse reveals the other, true face o f the abused, it tears off his
disguise and mask. It is the king’s uncrowning. Abuse is death, it is former youth
transformed into old age, the living body turned into a corpse. It is the “mirror of
comedy” reflecting that which must die a historic death. But in this system death
is followed by regeneration . .. therefore, abuse is followed by praise. (198)
Pauline’s “uncrowning” is followed by an insult that, curiously, reflects a pleasure that
each of the queens themselves is seeking: oral copulation. By calling her a “cocksucker”
as the conclusive oath they hurl towards her, they invert the negative power of the term
by acknowledging what Pauline will do, and what they would like to do themselves. In
this sense, we see not only the opening of the body to the world through the mouth but
also the fecundity that Bakhtin attributes to abuse of this nature. Pauline is abused and
decrowned, but she is then given a new crown that celebrates her sexual/consumptive
success. Her carnival recrowning, in this scene, occurs through the force of camivalized
desire: Pauline will be the one to go home with a young stud for the night, not the others.
Similarly, Arenas’s abuse of the “campy queens” reflects an inversion of suffering,
through a return to its “pregnant possibilities,” by acknowledging and confronting
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difference in the grotesque body. Negation of the negation, in this case, invests it with a
productive power. In these darkly comic uncrownings and recrownings, we see the force
o f a carnivalized desire that transgresses, through the open orifices o f the grotesque body,
the boundaries and laws of official discourse and its heteronormatively ranked desires
and loves.
Pauline, as a “cocksucker,” breaks the laws of Church and State (and their
authoritative discourse) through her carnivalized desire, in turn becoming a kind of
sexual outlaw. This will occur time and time again throughout the novel, as Youngman
travels nomadically between cities o f night; the novel is organized by “cities” and offers
an enumeration of sex acts and partners, a search for love defined in hundreds o f different
ways. Ultimately, as a hustler who regularly insults and abuses the queens acknowledges,
“Man, you gotta admire those dam queens like Darling Dolly an them . . . They sure have
got guts. They live the way they gotta live... ” (164). Similar to the consumption of
cam e in La cam e de Rene, Pauline will consume the body of the young male hustler. In
this act of consumption, the grotesque body transgresses its limits, through the mouth and
the genitals, into the fertility of “guts,” and through the death and rebirth o f defecation.
Pauline’s carnival crowning, driven by an anthropophagic desire for the flesh
(“cocksucking”), is an act o f becoming that continuously reflects the queer power o f the
outlaw.
Rechy, in the interview cited earlier, goes on to criticize those within what he
calls the gay liberation movement who seek to disown the queens like Pauline and other
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“gay stereotypes.” He explains: “That enrages me, the rejecting o f those shock troops of
revolution, outlawed outlaws. It was the ‘flaming queens’ who most often resisted arrest
during raids, including at the Stonewall Inn” (116). In the text, the figure of the flaming
queen, target of billingsgate from her peers, abused and attacked by those within the law,
becomes a kind of carnival queen, a figure o f immense defiance and power who is
“crowned” after thrashing a heterosexual tourist who insulted her for her “grotesque,
clumsy drag” :
A queen.
A flamboyant, flagrant, flashy queen. A queen in absurdly grotesque,
clumsy drag.
But there was something else. ...
With the cigarette holder clenched between her second and fourth fingers
- the third finger, erect, supporting the holder - she aimed an unequivocal fuckyou symbol at the world Outside - and she rasps loudly:
“Hey, world!” (395)
Pauline’s uncrowning, and this queen’s crowning, are temporary: Pauline, like the other
queens, will remove her makeup and drag in the light of day and conform as best she can
to heteronormativity. But in the space of carnival, Pauline defies authority and is
carnivalesquely crowned for it. The crowning and uncrowning o f these queens, a process
of continual change and renewal, recalls the fertility o f the grotesque body at the heart of
the carnivalesque, a fertility based in resistance that is the “something else” o f the text.
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Outlawed desire both propels carnival acts, and is part o f a carnivalized desire for the
grotesque body: “And so Main Street is an anarchy where the only rule is Make It!”
(124); “it” is love in all o f its different forms. Main Street in Los Angeles was, according
to the text, the site of an anarchic sexual carnival, part o f the “vast city o f night”
described in the first sentence o f the text. Bakhtin ascribes to the carnivalesque an
anarchic quality, similar to the anarchy o f Main Street, where all is permitted. In the
carnival atmosphere o f Main Street’s gathering place for sexual outlaws like the hustlers
and queens of the text, rules are suspended, except, critically, for one driven by the force
of carnivalized desire: “Make it!”
Throughout the novel, consumption and copulation take place in carnivalesque
settings. From the carnival atmosphere of Main Street to the bacchanalia of Mardi Gras,
the grotesque body is represented in all o f them as an object o f desire. This desire propels
the anarchic force of the people’s carnival, as we see in the text when, at a bar called
“The Carnival,” Youngman observes a dancing queen:
From somewhere, lured by the jungle sex sounds - a dark Latin queen rushed
frenzily onto the small clearing of the dance floor: beach-hat with lurid dyed
feathers, red polka dotted loose-sleeved blouse tied at her stomach, white
kneelength beach pants glowing purplish in the light, a gaudy gold butterfly
pinned to her hip . . . Dark body gleaming, thin and sinewy, she twists, grinds lips parted, teeth gnashed. In convulsed, savagely rhythmic movements,
accompanied by guttural groans, she writhes the reptile body, contracts it
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suddenly - simulating a woman’s orgasm.. . . More than a dance, it has been a
demand for Recognition of her mutilated sex. (280)
In the space and “gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Bakhtin 11) fostered
by the carnival, this queen dances towards liberation in the form of Recognition; of her
sexual difference, but more broadly, of subjectivization and personhood; her dance
demands this and, in the space of carnival, she “makes it.” Outside these spaces, in the
daylight world of police and vice cops and an obligatory heteronormativity, this queen
could never dance, not in those clothes or in that way. The queen’s body is represented as
grotesque: “reptile,” “savage and guttural,” “lured by jungle sex sounds.” At the same
time, her body gleams and she moves in ecstasy, propelled by camivalized desire. The
space and time of carnival, for her, brings a “suspension o f hierarchical rank” (Bakhtin
10); only in her case, this is also a suspension of similarly hierarchical, heteronormatively
ranked desire as she asserts the primacy and potency o f her own camivalized desire.
The queen’s desire for male bodies, for a gender identity that only she defines,
and, ultimately, for love, goes unrecognized outside o f these carnival spaces; in fact, at
the time of the novel’s publishing in 1963, these desires were illegal and deeply taboo.
Excluded in this way from official discourse, the carnivalesque character of the text’s
“cities o f night” does much more than accommodate her desire: the carnivalesque
subsumes it, overwhelming and subverting official discourse through a desire that, in
these spaces and through these grotesque bodies, is productive, positive, and ultimately
dialogic in its openness to the voices of others; it is in this sense that her desire becomes
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carnivalized. It produces for queens like her “Recognition o f her mutilated sex,” as well
as what Braidotti, drawing from Bakhtin, calls the unfolding o f positive difference in
processes o f becoming (72). Differently than the invocations to become seen in Whitman
and Neruda, the queen’s dance is itself a kind o f chrysalis-like metamorphosis that will
unfold difference as a positive force. Like Rene’s hardening and softening flesh, the
queen’s grotesque body “is a body in the act of becoming,” since outside these carnival
spaces she will become someone else. Her subjectivity constantly shifts and changes,
nomadically; in this sense, it is a becoming-queer propelled by carnivalized desire.
Love in a Time of Becoming
According to Braidotti, these becomings and metamorphoses produce a kind of
“radical immanence” that aptly describes the queen’s own becoming:
Radical immanence: this means I want to think through the body, not in a flight
away from it. This in turn implies confronting boundaries and limitations. In
thinking about the body I refer to the notion of enfleshed or embodied materialism
. . . I call this the materialism o f the flesh school in that it gives priority to issues
of sexuality, desire and the erotic imagination . . . [one that] produces an
alternative vision of the subject. (5)
For Bradotti this alternative vision o f subjectivity is nomadic, constantly shifting and
becoming through the materialism of the flesh. Much like the grotesque body, her
nomadic subject is open to the world and its multiplicity of voices; significantly, she
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locates this opening in the flesh, and more specifically, within “sexuality, desire and the
erotic imagination.” Through the confrontation of corporeal boundaries and unjust laws,
Youngman becomes the outlaw hero Rechy describes in his interview. Rene is a similar
outlaw: he subverts “la causa,” and then, in his masochistic submission, subverts the law
itself. For authors writing in a time when homosexuality was illegal in most countries, the
outlaw stance of the main characters makes sense. It is a stance uniquely suited to
Braidotti’s nomadic subject, who moves between boundaries and limitations to constantly
become, with desire as a constitutive force.
And yet, Braidotti will go on to ask, rightly in my opinion: what does this loss of
unity, of a kind of self-immanence, imply for the subject? Much like the queen who
becomes Recognized in the space o f carnival, only to become male again outside,
Youngman hears a threat in the dialogic nature o f carnivalized desire and the becoming it
propels:
This is The Message, bright boy: Mardi Gras aint just any old carnival. Them
others got it all wrong. Im gonna tell you The Real Truth: People wear masks
three hundred and sixty-four days a year. Mardi Gras, they wear their own faces!
What you think is masks is really - . . . Themselves/” She seemed to be about to
spring at me, her face mere inches from mine. “Witches!” she shouted at me.
“Devils! Cannibals! Vampires! Clowns - lots o f e m . . . . And some —” she said,
relenting slightly, “just some, mind you: some - . . . angels! . . . ” Her strange
sudden laughter followed me into the street. (352)
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Fraught with violence and danger, “devils, cannibals, and vampires,” the Youngman will,
like Rene, flee from the fleshy camivalesque cities o f night time and time again. For
Youngman, carnivalized desire confronts and transgresses all boundaries, from the
unbearably selfless love offered to him outside the space of carnival, to the violent
masochism asked o f him by an older man within a carnival space o f costumes and masks.
In both cases, Youngman answers, “Tm sorry,’ I repeated, ‘but this scene is nowhere!” ’
(265). Braidotti argues that “the key idea here is that desire is the first and foremost step
in the process of constitution of a self. What makes the entire procedure possible is the
will-to-know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, to think and to represent” (71).
Similarly, Youngman, propelled by the force of carnivalized desire exerted on the
grotesque body, textually represents a self in the process o f becoming. Paradoxically,
Youngman flees at first towards, and then away from a scene that he desperately wants to
be part of, but has been taught to be believe is “nowhere.”
Moving nomadically in worlds turned upside down, fleeing the flesh at the same
time as they pursue it (or are pursued by it), carnivalized desire makes Youngman, like
Rene, into an outlaw; they defy the cults in their flight and subvert the law in their
submission. As nomads and outlaws, subjects and objects of desire, they model the
constitution o f Braidotti’s nomadic subject. In the degradation o f all that is “high,
abstract, spiritual,” the grotesque body defies the authoritative discourse o f the laws of
Church and State; carnivalized desire, in turn, eroticizes and embraces the rich
multiplicity of human difference as a kind of internally persuasive discourse.
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At the same time, Rene and Youngman’s flight towards and away from desire
points to what Braidotti has called the threat inherent in the dissolution of the self as a
closed and complete site of meaning, a kind o f self-immanence grounded in the
prioritizing of the individual over the collective. Their flight reflects this fear o f
dissolution, a becoming that Deleuze and Guattari describe as made up o f “only relations
o f movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least
between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles o f all kinds.
There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective
assemblages” (A Thousand Plateaus 266). The subsumption o f one’s identity in a
“collective assemblage” necessarily involves others, with their diverse voices, desires,
and haecceities; in this formulation, the self depends on the other for its very existence.
Acknowledging and desiring this interdependence is as frightening as it necessary.
Julia Kristeva, in Tales o f Love, describes love as “rooted in desire and pleasure”;
at the same time, she will go on to write that love is “both a fear and a need of no longer
being limited, held back, but going beyond. Dread of transgressing not only properties or
taboos, but also, fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries o f the s e lf’ (6). Love,
then, born of desire and pleasure, is also a fear and a dread; in this formulation
Youngman’s fearful flight towards and away from the others who desire him, pleasure
him, and would love him starts to make sense; Rene’s flight from the flesh similarly
mirrors this formulation of love. Kristeva calls love “an affliction” that “we invent each
time, with every necessarily unique loved one, at every moment, place, or age” (6).
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Desire, pleasure, fear, and affliction: for Kristeva, each is a component o f love, a potent
force for transgressing the boundaries of the self.
The carnival’s revalorization o f Eros frees love from the dread and fear of
transgressing these boundaries and taboos. In the camivalization o f desire, love takes
many forms, from the quick physical loving o f anonymous copulation in “vast cities of
night,” to the love of eating carne, to the love of pain and suffering, to the unbearable
affliction o f love that renders Dalia, Rene’s first and only lover, unable to speak. In each
form, love is “invented every time”; it is part o f the camivalization of desire that has been
the subject of this investigation.
To speak o f love in novels like these, full of suffering, pain, and sex seemingly
unmoored from any sentimentality, is itself an act o f subversion. Critics like Serra have
called Rene’s masochistic final submission to the flesh not a different kind o f love but an
act o f violence and a renunciation of bodily pleasure. Similarly, critics dismissed
Youngman’s sexual carnival as pornographic and repulsive (Arnold 116); love was
inconceivable in these queer configurations. At the same time, following Kristeva’s
formulation, love afflicts and causes suffering through the transgression o f boundaries,
and through the threat that accompanies the opening o f the self to another. For the
nomadic subject, this makes sense: she is one who knows, despite the assurances of
authoritative discourse, that she does not know; that she cannot know, and that the voices
of others are as important as her own. To cultivate difference instead o f sameness is an
act o f resistance; in this sense, it can be terrifying. Similarly, to love queerly, especially
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in the historical context of these novels, required suffering. It was, as Kristeva writes, an
affliction.
So far, I have sought to show how carnivalized desire, whether through eating,
hurting, or loving, propels the grotesque body’s opening to the world, and its subversion
of an authoritative discourse of repression and heternormativity that seeks sameness at
the cost of difference. And while I have argued that carnivalized desire enacts becoming
(and becoming-queer) for the young men at the center o f these novels, it is an impossible
claim for every reader, everywhere. And so, finally, I return to Deleuze’s question: what
are the uses o f fleshy, erotic novels like these? Ultimately, these becomings driven by
carnivalized desire offer readers a lesson in the vast potentiality of the dissolution of the
unity of the self and the propulsion toward the other, similar to how masochism subverts
the law and undermines guilt. In this dissolution and propulsion there is yet another
possibility, one that makes room for the violent desire of the masochist and the tender
selfless love of the queer young men who plead for Youngman’s love. Kristeva, speaking
o f love, describes the impossibility of an unchanging identity: “Indeed, in the rapture of
love, the limits o f one’s own identity vanish, at the same time that the precision o f
reference and meaning becomes blurred in love’s discourse . . . Do we speak o f the same
thing when we speak of love? And of which thing?” (2). One lesson o f the carnival, then,
and its anarchic, productive desiring for the grotesque body, is that each o f us speaks of
different things, in love and in life. Disgust and desire, pleasure and pain: each of these
rhythms moves differently in each o f us. As we finish these novels, laughing, lusting,
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crying, or shuddering, perhaps we too can say to ourselves: “And so, at last, youve
acknowledged that love might be possible” (Rechy 442) - for everyone.
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Conclusion
“Let me say, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by
feelings of love.” - Che Guevara
“Ours is a crisis of aesthetics,” a recent edition o f the anti-capitalist magazine
AdBusters proclaims, placing the words in a semi-circle, like an emoji smile, below a
blown-up image o f a doughnut covered in colorful, sugary sprinkles. With cracks in the
wan pink sugar coating, bright and cheerfully artificial sprinkles, and pools o f grease on
the dough, it is a strangely grotesque object of desire, one many o f us will want and find
repellent simultaneously. For AdBusters, it emblematizes a crisis o f aesthetics grounded
in what they call the neo-capitalist dream of perpetual abundance and consumption, one
that has produced record levels of income inequality, homelessness, environmental
degradation, and labor alienation. The editors go on to trace the ways in which modern
and postmodern Western aesthetics have been deeply influenced by capitalism. In
modernism, they cite as examples the reflection of commodity-culture in Cubism’s
“abstract planes and cultures,” and in Mondrian’s “utopian grid of abstract flows and
forces.” They argue that while the Cubists systematized, Abstract Expressionism in turn
reflected a growing sense of alienation and the “emptied meaning” of systematized space
(,n.pag.). The editors then use a series o f visual images, a pastiche o f pop art (starting with
a close-up of a Lichtenstein woman crying) and ironic hipster fashion, to intimate that
postmodernism is a kind of swansong of commodity-culture.
With few exceptions, according to AdBusters, these movements form critical parts
of a superstructure that maintains capitalist hegemony through cultural production. Their
claims are expansive, but what interests us here is their call for a new aesthetics that is
94
socialist in nature, and that “moves the spectator/participant into action” (n. pag.). They
go on to cite street art and graffiti as models for this movement; such art has long been
controversial, often dismissed as ugly and grotesque blemishes on classical bodies of
architectural perfection.
In their call for a “new aesthetics,” the editors o f AdBusters are definitely on to
something: as we have seen in our survey of grotesque realist texts, there is an
insurrectionary potential in aesthetics. Bakhtin, writing shortly after the Russian
Revolution, contemplates this potential from an ethical perspective in his work on the
role of the author and the hero in aesthetic activity. He notes the power o f aesthetics to
project the self into contact with the other, in this case through the imagining o f another’s
pain:
Let us say that there is a human being before me who is suffering. The
horizon of his consciousness is filled by the circumstance which makes him suffer
and by the objects which he sees before him. The emotional and volitional tones
which pervade this visible world of objects are tones o f suffering. What I have to
do is to experience and consummate him aesthetically (ethical actions, such as
assistance, rescue, consolation, are excluded in this case). The first step in
aesthetic activity is my projecting myself into him and experiencing his life from
within him. I must experience - and come to see and know - what he experiences;
I must put myself in his place and coincide with him, as it were. (25)
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Bakhtin describes the projection of the self outside the boundaries of the subject and
toward the other as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon, an experiential event like
writing or reading a poem, or viewing a painting. He goes on to note the aesthetic nature
of experiencing another’s pain:
But in any event my projection of myself into him must be followed by a return
into myself, a return to my own place outside the suffering person, for only from
this place can the material derived from my projecting m yself into the other be
rendered m eaningful. .. aesthetic activity proper actually begins at the point
when we return into ourselves, when we return to our own place outside the
suffering person, and start to form and consummate the material we derived from
projecting ourselves into the other. (26)
In this sense, Bakhtin’s conceptualization o f the ethical potential of aesthetic activity
concords with AdBusters and their call for a “new aesthetics” that responds to the crises
of contemporary capitalism. Bakhtin describes aesthetics as the “forming and
consummating” of sensations and experiences (“material”) gained from the projecting of
the self into the other and back again. Aesthetic activity, seen from this perspective,
deeply implicates the self as subject. Intriguingly, then, in the literary invocations and
provocations to move toward a nomadic subjectivity that have been the subject o f this
investigation, we may find the beginning of a solution to what AdBusters calls our crisis
of aesthetics.
96
I respond to their call for a new aesthetic with an even broader call for a radical
restructuring of our social and economic relations, one that can occur through the
“forming and consummating” o f material gained through aesthetic activity. At the core of
this project has been the hope that, in turning toward the aesthetics of the grotesque body
and its carnivalization of desire, we may find one path among many for restructuring
these relations. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, describes the role o f cultural
labor in the maintenance of social and economic power, what he calls hegemony.
Gramsci argues that “intellectuals,” producers o f the art and culture that form the
superstructure, perform “the subaltern functions o f social hegemony and political
government. “Spontaneous consent,” according to Gramsci, is given by the “great masses
of the population,” the base of the superstructure, because o f the historic “prestige (and
consequent confidence) the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in
the world of production” (673). This concept is particularly powerful because, in essence,
he is suggesting that capitalism can be undermined by a “war o f position,” or in other
words, a shift in cultural consciousness. Viewed in this light, AdBusters’’ call for a new
aesthetics begins to make sense. Like Bakhtin and Gramsci, I believe that aesthetic
activity, as part of cultural labor, plays an important role in restructuring human relations.
As Bakhtin notes, aesthetic activity “forms and consummates” what we experience when
we project ourselves into the other; in literature, the author imagines this projection of the
self into other, and as readers, we experience this projection and reflect on it. Any
decisions about what, if any, ethical moves to make come after this experience of
97
another’s world. These ethical moves are the starting point for radically restructuring
human relations.
In this investigation, I have focused on four literary texts from a 100-year time
period spanning the US Civil War and the end of slavery, and two different kinds of
revolutions, one political (the Cuban Revolution), and one cultural (the sexual revolution
in the US). Each o f these texts, examples of a revival o f Bakhtin’s grotesque realism with
all o f its vast ethical and political implications, address historical moments o f radical
social and political change. In these texts, grotesque realism’s opening o f the body to the
world, with its weed-like excrescences and “ugly” bodily functions, points to a
conceptualization of human relations that is communal and egalitarian, breaking with
capitalism’s hierarchical individualism.
Speaking contrastively of rhizomes and trees in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari use the concept o f arborescence, or tree-like
structure, to describe capitalist systems of human relations with vertical hierarchies o f
power, a center o f power (the trunk), and inherent inequality (the smaller branches are
less equal than the trunk). They contrast this with “acentered systems, finite networks of
automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or
channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable” (A Thousand Plateaus
17). Deleuze and Guattari call such a system rhizomatic. In Whitman and Neruda’s
poetry, we see this rhizomatic structure unfold, with its invocations o f change and
becoming propelled by carnivalized desire. As a productive force, it invokes this
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becoming through the voices of the “amorous sea” (Whitman 391), the buds and sprouts
o f the earth, and “throbbing sexual oysters” (Neruda 69). In the metaphoric and literal
consumption of the body, the sly subversion of the masochist, and the exuberant sexual
difference of the outlaw, Pinera and Rechy’s texts enact this becoming, offering a kind of
map for a revolutionary re-structuring o f relations. Deleuze and Guattari note the
centrality of sexuality in a rhizomatic approach to human relations: “What is at question
in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality - but also to the animal, to the vegetal, the world,
politics, the book, things natural and artificial - that is totally different from the
arborescent relation: all manner o f becomings” (A Thousand Plateaus 21). The rhizome,
with its hundreds o f different stems and shoots, ugly roots and beautiful outgrowths,
fundamentally re-orders vertical hierarchies, as we see in epistemological examples like
the “tree of languages” or literatures; in this model, there is a central trunk from which all
others emerge, beholden to the center and linked through sameness. In its exuberant
difference, the rhizome is an exuberantly queer phenomenon, deeply entwined with
sexuality as part of the productive force of desire.
Like a rhizome that sends its shoots and buds through the earth, the
camivalization o f desire that occurs in grotesque realism drives a movement toward the
other, in a kind o f subjectival de-mooring that fosters a nomadic subjectivity. Braidotti’s
formulation of the nomadic subject is fertile ground for an aesthetics that restructures
human relations, specifically in its turn away from the ethos o f liberal individualism at
the heart of capitalism: “nomadic subjectivity critiques liberal individualism and
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promotes instead the positivity o f multiple connections.” She goes on to note the role of
desire in this movement toward the formation of the nomadic subject: “it [nomadic
subjectivity] also eroticizes interconnectedness, by emphasizing the role of passions,
empathy, and desire as non-aggrandizing models o f relation to one’s social and human
habitat” (266). Carnivalized desire, as invocation and provocation, is just such a “non­
aggrandizing model” o f human relations: it eroticizes not only interconnectedness, but
difference, and in so doing subverts the monologic discourse o f authority and power. In
literature, this subversion is necessarily discursive, though its imagination o f dialogic
human relations and nomadic subjectivity offers a model for a rhizome-like defiance of
power and hierarchy that takes the form of becoming.
Throughout this investigation, I have repeatedly invoked becoming to describe the
dissolution of fixed, singular identities provoked by carnivalized desire. Deleuze and
Guattari write extensively on the sweeping potential o f becoming in the re-shaping o f
human relations, noting how Virginia Woolf, much like Rechy, opposed the idea of
writing as a person with a singular identity defined by others: “She was appalled at the
idea o f writing ‘as a woman.’ Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as
atoms o f womanhood capable o f crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of
contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming” (A Thousand Plateaus 276).
Becoming, with its permanently changing and transitory state, is “a rhizome, not a
classificatory or genealogical tree . . . Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own;
it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or
100
‘producing” ’(239); what produces becoming is desire and its carnivalization.
Carnivalized desire in literature is not evolutionary, but alliance-based, like the becoming
it invokes and provokes: “Becoming is not an evolution . . . it concerns alliance .. . There
is a block o f becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasporchid can descend” (238). In this sense, becoming and, as I have suggested, becomingqueer, do not produce permanent states; instead, becoming-queer is a way o f “crossing
and impregnating,” shaping and informing a new kind o f consciousness and subjectivity
that is fundamentally nomadic and transitory.
I have so far focused on the ethical potential o f nomadic subjectivity, specifically
in its constitution by difference, its fostering of human interconnectedness and deep
engagement with the other, and its rhizome-like horizontal structures o f power and
equality. But what exactly are the political implications of this shifting position o f the
self? I turn to Tim Libretti’s work on sexual outlaws and class consciousness to approach
a formulation of the political potential o f nomadic subjectivity. Libretti points out that
“Marx and Engels argued that the working class, as the direct object of the most
fundamental form of oppression - though not the only form of oppression - and as the
one class whose interests do not rest on the oppression o f other classes, can create the
conditions for liberating all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself’ (163).
Working people, alienated from their labor and oppressed by the accumulation of capital,
and having no vested interest in oppressing other classes, are uniquely situated to
“liberate all human beings.” Similarly, sexual outlaws, hustlers, masochists, and the
101
whole world of differently loving queer people, can play a critical role in the
restructuring o f human relations, or what Libretti calls liberation. He notes that Rechy
and other “theorists of gay liberation,” identify queer people as “the motors of history and
valoriz[e] queer consciousness as the most comprehensive political consciousness
because gay liberation requires the destruction o f capitalism and the development of an
altogether new way of life” (Libretti 163). Much as Deleuze and Guattari attribute the
negativization o f desire to the capitalist need for workers produced and “Oedapilzed” by
the nuclear family, Libretti links the enforcement o f heteronormative sexual ideology to
capitalism and the maintenance o f a class system. He cites James Baldwin’s work on the
“masculine ideal” in US culture that creates stifling gender and sexual paradigms1
(“cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies,
butch and faggot, black and white”) to argue for a “queer consciousness” (168) that
defies these paradigms. Libretti concludes that a queer consciousness is central to “the
radical imagination seeking to invent new political subjects or write new narratives of
class struggle and liberation,” especially if we are seeking “a genuine blueprint for
revolution.” The nomadic subject invoked and provoked by carnivalized desire is very
much part of this blueprint, a kind of “new political subject.” It is an exuberant,
rhizomatic outgrowth of the grotesque body that has been the site of the “radical
imagination” since the inscription o f carnival in the literary tradition of grotesque
realism.
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At the heart o f carnivalized desire’s invocations and provocations to become is a
call to shift one’s subjectivity nomadically and to revel in positive difference. What
Libretti calls a queer consciousness resonates deeply with the concept o f becoming and
becoming-queer, especially in the Deleuzian sense of “crossing and impregnating an
entire social field, and o f contaminating men, o f sweeping them up in that becoming.” In
the discursive formation of the grotesque body, much as the author is projected toward
the other in an aesthetic experience that results in a call for ethical action, reading these
projections of the self outward produces a similar call for ethical decision-making. How
should we treat the queer young men we read about, whose sexual appetites might disgust
or enthrall, but whose search for love triggers a cognitive recognition of the vast field of
difference that makes us human? At the same time, these ethical calls to action will be
ineffective without a parallel call for political action: we cannot enact the fullness of an
ethical engagement with Rechy’s Youngman while he is systematically oppressed. The
nomadic subject straddles this confluence o f ethics and politics, always becoming,
propelled toward the other by carnivalized desire. During these crises o f capitalism, if we
turn toward our grotesque bodies, reveling in our messy imperfections and mocking the
staid discourses of authority, power, and capital, we can begin the arduous labor o f
radically restructuring human relations. A blueprint for this revolution already exists: it is
written into our grotesque bodies and carnival desires, and in the multiplicity o f our love.
Notes
1In the first chapter o f this investigation, I join several critics in refuting this claim,
arguing that poetic discourse in the tradition of grotesque realism contains a multiplicity
of voices that purposefully subsume the monologic character of the lyrical voice in
“official” literature [see Shapiro and W all’s work for more on this],
2 As only one example, recall the first line of W hitman’s “Poem 85” : “As I lay with my
head in your lap, cam erado...”
3 My translation.
4 Witt provides no citation for this quote; future versions o f this paper will include the
original text and translator name.
5 These three forms of camivalized desire are by no means representative o f the infinite
forms it can take; they are, however, examples o f what Deleuze calls the efficiency of
literature in confronting language, and, as I intend to show, provoking a transformation in
the relationship o f the self to the other.
6 In the first edition of La carne de Rene, this section is included as an index. In
contemporary editions in English and Spanish, the section is included as a Table o f
Contents. The section can be considered a kind of menu before a meal, or as a map to a
recently consumed one; in either sense, it signals a metaphorical anthropophagy.
7 Thanks to George W risley’s “Nietzsche and the Value o f Suffering - Two Alternative
Ideals” for pointing me to this passage.
104
g
•
•
This is discussed in detail in the previous chapter on Whitman and Neruda’s grotesque
bodies.
9 Note the wordplay implicit in encarnacion [incarnation]: the grotesque can transform
even the divine into carne, and eat it.
10 My translation.
11 Similar examples can be drawn from the Americas, like the valorizing o f the same-sex
loving macho (“active” or insertive sex partner, loosely equivalent to the term butch, and
considered particularly virile) and the social shaming o f the maricon (pejorative term for
a passive or receptive sex partner generally presumed to be feminine) in Mexico and
Central America [see David William Foster’s work on homophobia in the Americas for
more examples].
105
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