The dialogic imagination of Salman Rushdie and Carlos Fuentes: National allegories and the scene of writing inMidnight’s Children andCristóbal Nonato
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Ariel Dorfman's La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) and Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn) explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves. Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. Reading these works through a feminist lens, I weigh the poetic and philosophical implications of telling a story from the point of view of gametic, embryonic, or fetal, but decidedly male, narrators against the symbolic exclusion and silencing of mothers that bear them. When rendered a biopolitical frontier in symbolic or actual terms, the pregnant body poses particular philosophical quandaries that require further investigation. As such, this essay weaves together discourses on poetics, philosophy, and politics in order to uncover the perplexity that the pregnant mother, as figure for the nation, induces.Keywords: feminist phenomenology; feminist philosophy; maternal body; pregnant body; pregnant subject; fetus; fetal subject; fetal person; personhood; metaphor; Ariel Dorfman; Carlos Fuentes; Chile; Mexico; postmodern aesthetics; biopolitics; metaphysics; metaphysical metaphor Ariel Dorfman's La última canción de Manuel Sendero and Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato 1 explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves (Dorfman 1982;Fuentes 1994). Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. 2 Reading these works through a feminist 1 I have chosen to use the official translations of these novels, since both Dorfman and Fuentes have authorized and collaborated in their production. See Ariel Dorfman, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (Dorfman 1987) and Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn (Fuentes 1989). When referring to the characters in these novels, I use the original character names. Please note that there are moments when both authors take the liberty to change the structure and content of their prose in the English translation. I have tried to remark on any substantial changes made in the footnotes. y la posibilidad de la heteroglosia, de la multiplicidad de sentidos, metas y orientaciones del lenguaje, y a los reformadores tipo [Jürgen] Habermas (1929). Estas últimas son las posiciones a las que acerco más, y que se basan en la pregunta y la reflexión de si es posible tener un proyecto de liberación renovado [...], un proyecto de liberación que incluya la gran diversidad de las culturas d...
Ariel Dorfman's La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) and Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (Christopher Unborn) explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves. Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. Reading these works through a feminist lens, I weigh the poetic and philosophical implications of telling a story from the point of view of gametic, embryonic, or fetal, but decidedly male, narrators against the symbolic exclusion and silencing of mothers that bear them. When rendered a biopolitical frontier in symbolic or actual terms, the pregnant body poses particular philosophical quandaries that require further investigation. As such, this essay weaves together discourses on poetics, philosophy, and politics in order to uncover the perplexity that the pregnant mother, as figure for the nation, induces.Keywords: feminist phenomenology; feminist philosophy; maternal body; pregnant body; pregnant subject; fetus; fetal subject; fetal person; personhood; metaphor; Ariel Dorfman; Carlos Fuentes; Chile; Mexico; postmodern aesthetics; biopolitics; metaphysics; metaphysical metaphor Ariel Dorfman's La última canción de Manuel Sendero and Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato 1 explore conception, gestation, and birth as points of origin for humanity and citizenship alike by giving voice to life/lives that cannot speak for itself/themselves (Dorfman 1982;Fuentes 1994). Dorfman and Fuentes employ metafictional techniques and postmodern aesthetics, interrogate history in order to express their political commitments to rights, resistance, and revolution, and link textual production and human reproduction in order to posit national futures. 2 Reading these works through a feminist 1 I have chosen to use the official translations of these novels, since both Dorfman and Fuentes have authorized and collaborated in their production. See Ariel Dorfman, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (Dorfman 1987) and Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn (Fuentes 1989). When referring to the characters in these novels, I use the original character names. Please note that there are moments when both authors take the liberty to change the structure and content of their prose in the English translation. I have tried to remark on any substantial changes made in the footnotes. y la posibilidad de la heteroglosia, de la multiplicidad de sentidos, metas y orientaciones del lenguaje, y a los reformadores tipo [Jürgen] Habermas (1929). Estas últimas son las posiciones a las que acerco más, y que se basan en la pregunta y la reflexión de si es posible tener un proyecto de liberación renovado [...], un proyecto de liberación que incluya la gran diversidad de las culturas d...
Man explores the difficulty of its protagonist in defining his identity within wider American society. At moments, he comes close to merging with it, but the prospects turn threatening, as they do when he becomes "one with the mass" of Harlem rioters, "moving down the littered street," "my personality blasted" (550). His heroism lies in his ability finally to wrest himself from the social mass and to stand alone, a liberated consciousness. In contrast, notice how Saleem Sinai, of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), succumbs to merger with the larger nation of India, disintegrating outward into "crowds without boundaries, growing until it fills the world": I am alone in this vastness of the numbers, the numbers marching one two three, I am being buffeted right and left while rip tear crunch reaches its climax, and my body is screaming, it cannot take this kind of treatment any more....[W]atch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down...only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons....Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust...suck[ing me] into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes. (532-533) Visioning the Body Mosaic: Enchanted Transracial Selfhood in Postsecular Amer...
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