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Article Excerpt
[E]s o sera santa, prostituta, reina, mendiga, virgen, adultera, martir" writes Octavio Paz, listing the roles Maria Felix played on and off the screen. At various moments, Mexican, Chicano, and Chicana cultures have characterized La Malinche in similar terms, prescribing the cultural role of visible women through her cultural and literary trajectory. In the figure of Ramon del Valle-Inclan's Nina Chole, the confluence of La Dona and La Malinche resounds across cultures and across historical landmarks, creating a connect-the-dots vision of the staying-power of gendered metaphors for culture. Reading the canonical Spanish novel Sonata de estio and the star-studded Mexican film Sonatas through the lens of post-nationalist Chicana feminism evinces the international application of La Malinche's capacity as the quintessential symbol of loss in nationalist discourses on both sides of the Atlantic.
The late nineteenth-century Spanish traveler in Ramon Maria del Valle-Inchin's 1903 Sonata de estio (1) relives Cortes's conquest of Mexico in fantasy-laden sexual encounters with the Mexican Nina Chole, a thinly veiled Malinche and the stand-in for Spain's onetime colonies. Beyond the artful romance and adventure characteristic of Valle-Inclan, a nostalgic and nationalistic agenda produces a historical allegory that describes an alternate path better suited to the author's national vision for recently post-imperial Spain. Through the techniques of the Latin American historical, national allegories of the nineteenth century and allusions to the 16th century chronicles of the Conquest, Valle-Inclan fictionally restores Spain's lost empire. Having tried independence in the arms of the allegorical Mexican governor-husband, La Nina Chole/ Malinche rushes back to the arms of the novelistic descendant of Cortes, the Marques de Bradomin--narrator and protagonist. Bradomin recovers Spain's lost imperial past in La Malinche's reassuring embrace.
The narrator in this historical allegory reminds the reader of Spain's conquest of Mexico through the precise geographic setting, the characters, and the plot, giving Sonata de estio many attributes common to the Romantic historical novels that rewrote the history of the emerging Latin American nations following independence. The Nina Chole symbolizes and substitutes the Mexican territory as she fills the traditional role that La Malinche plays in historical novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries, beginning with Felix Varela's Jicotencal (1826). (2) In Sonata de estio, as in several nation-solidifying novels of post-colonial Latin America, the author transforms the nation's past according to his political agenda, thereby altering his vision of the present. Doris Sommer tells us that in the immature state of the history of the newly independent nations there lie "epistomological gaps that the non-science of history leaves open, [into which] narrators could project an ideal future. The writers were encouraged both by the need to fill in a history that would increase the legitimacy of the emerging nation and by the opportunity to direct that history toward a future ideal" (76). The literature of the post-colonial (and post-imperial) period thus responds to a national crisis of self-definition--in Latin America and in the Spanish Generation of '98 alike. Spanish writers such as Miguel de Unamuno, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Azorin, Pio Baroja, Antonio Machado, and Ramon del Valle-Inclan, known for pondering and lamenting the diminished state of Spain after the loss of its colonies, also engaged in the process of defining the national entity and its future path. Valle-Inclan, in the writing of his Sonata de estio fictionally makes Spain an enduring imperial power that recuperates its colonies through the use of fantasy, historical allusion, and allegory. He presents the other side of postcolonial literature--the post-imperial side. As the novelists of nineteenth-century Latin America invent a native perspective and substitute the Spanish histories of the colonies written by the colonizers with histories that support their contemporary sociopolitical needs, Valle-Inclan invents a (hi)story that affirms Spanish male authority over the colonial woman--Spanish imperial rule through romantic metaphor. Michel de Certeau observes in The Writing of History that "each telling and retelling of the past is no more than a projection of the present onto the past: In fact, historians begin from present determinations. Current events are their real beginning" (11). The historical novel retells history from a perspective that changes the reader's perception of the past and thereby of the present as well. Valle-Inclan uses this phenomenon, mastered by the post-independence novelists of Latin America, and changes the narrator's present perception of himself by altering the history allegorically. His nostalgic and decadent narrative agenda fantastically recuperates the Empire through the substituting history with fiction, thus in a sense, rewriting his history.
The fictional story of the Marques de Bradomin and La Nina Chole of the Sonata is grafted onto the symbolic story of the allegorical (and historic) couple Hernan Cortes and La Malinche. Two layers of symbolism work as the narrator-protagonist of Sonata de estio uses La Nina Chole to stand in for La Malinche's body, which in turn symbolizes the lost colony.
The story begins with El Marques de Bradomin's departure from the port of London for a romantic adventure after contemplating bittersweet memories of a former voyage on which he lost a lover, Lili. He arrives in Veracruz on a tall ship, and he meets La Nina Chole--in his words a beautiful "princesa india"--who is married to Mexican General, Diego Bermudez. El Marques and La Nina decide to travel together in the same party, he forces her into sexual submission, and she subsequently falls in love with him. After she is sexually and sentimentally conquered by El Marques, her husband and father General Bermudez violently reclaims her from the hands of the Spaniard. La Nina finally escapes from the Mexican patriarch and returns the arms of her Spanish lover, reassuring his dominion with her embrace.
While many critics address Valle Inclan's literary and biographical relationship to Mexico, they have not connected the chronicles of the Conquest or the nineteenth-century historical novels to the Sonata de estio. Obdulia Guerrero Bueno affirms in her analysis of Valle-Inclan's writings about the Americas, "Valle-Inclan ama profundamente la tierra mejicana y por extension toda America hispana. Esta es una verdad indiscutible" (13). Her analysis, however, does not consider the possibility of an allegorical reading or of allusions to the Conquest. Luis Mario Schneider's exhaustive collection of Valle-Inclan criticism in Mexico includes essays by Alfonso Reyes, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Roberto Barrios, and Emma Susana Speratti Pinero--all of whom discuss the author's characterization of Mexico, but do not tie the Sonata de estio to La Malinche. Though the connection to the rhetoric of the Conquest is not exploited in Valle-Inclan criticism, regular references to the decadence and nostalgia of Spanish Modernismo abound. Valle-Inclan himself describes this Sonata a year after publication stating that "El mundo artistico de las Sonatas ha desaparecido, y lo sustituye otro primitivo, elemental, y milenario" (qtd. in Phillips 189), a statement which may explain the colonial desire in this Sonata. Its hidden political agenda surprises the typically "art-for-art's-sake" style of Valle-Inclan's prose and jests at the "woe is me" Spanish intellectuals of the early twentieth century.
Valle-Inclan's narrator claims not to share the afflictions of the writers of the day: "Los decadentismos de la generacion nueva no los he sentido jamas. Todavia hoy, despues de haber pecado tanto, tengo las mananas triunfantes ..." (100). The characteristic decadence of the Spanish Modernistas that resides in Spain's loss of its imperial status would not apply to the Marques de Bradomin because in his version of the past, the colonies are not lost, and logically, there is no reason for decadence. The narrator's opinion of the "generacion nueva" appears in the first two pages of the novel, where the narrator has not yet left the narrative present to tell his tale. This introductory section acquaints the reader with the narrator and provides the retrospective context of the story that he will tell. El Marques tells us that, "al sentir cercana la vejez," he will do as the lovers of his youth ("de mis tiempos") would do, and confess (99). This first clue to his age, followed by the narrator's distancing himself from the events to be narrated ("Por aquellos dias de peregrinacion sentimental era yo joven y algo poeta, con ninguna experiencia y harta noveleria en la cabeza" [99]), give the reader an idea of the time that passed between the action and its narration while also suggesting that literature and...
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