Erotics of the Border, Compulsions of the Self: Grappling with Luisa Josefina Hernández
"Witness to a Silent Prayer." Image of a Buddha looking down from the exterior of a building. Mexico City, Mexico. August, 2022. Image by Lu Han. Copyright Lu Han, 2022.
The question of the border as a question of genre is no new affair for the examination of the symbolic and discursive affordances of the former. Already in 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa turned to ethno-poetics as a field that was capable of refining the relationship between literary discursivity and her theorization of the border. Thus, while she observed that “The ability of the story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic” (Anzaldúa 66 et passim), it was to clear to her that to speak of prose and poetry at the border implicated a specific injunction for theory—a move away, so to speak, from Western aesthetics, or, at the very least, a certain thorough tension. The problem resurfaces in the review of 20th century Mexican writing that engages with the border in ways that could be deemed traditional, that is, in ways that are all too familiar to a sense of poetics that does not necessarily manifest the stylistic influx that the issue carried for someone like Anzaldúa. A problem of genre, in other words, as a problem of apparent reference and apparent distance, but which still demands a fair amount of attention, particularly when—as Ericka Beckman has argued very recently—even modes of writing as consolidated as literary realism elicit the suspicion of newer-yet-old forms of reading Latin American modernities (69-70). In that sense, almost two decades after Castillo and Tabuenca Córdoba contended for the de-metaphorization of the border on the Mexican side of it, retaining, in turn, the materiality that eluded its U.S.-based commentary, the task of reading the realist work of Luisa Josefina Hernández—in particular, the work that posits that the historico-national border is prone both to routinary acts of metaphorization and the not-that-ordinary game of psychologism—may hold some importance for literary history and the problems of poetics dwelling within.
But why Hernández and why the border? If we insist on imagining borders, like Heidegger did, as “not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized…[as] that from which something begins its presencing” (154), we might consider that the realism of Hernández is all about the act of presencing, of laying bare that which persists behind the alleged transparency of realist imagination. And, while her work can hardly befit the labels of “border writing” or “literature of the northern border,” a material sentiment concomitant with said subsets of the written permeates the travel logs, diaries, itineraries, and found letters that constitute her novels. It seems to me that the commentary on Hernández is betrayed by a false security with respect to the ultimate horizon of her preferred themes and endeavors, and that such reductionism is to be done away if one ought to envision the radical potential of her realist undertakings.
Luisa Josefina Hernández’s work spans several decades of scrutiny of Mexican modernity, from the early years of the Second Federal Republic until her passing in 2023. All throughout her more than fifteen novels, there is a tendency to thwart thematic reductions. For instance, Las confesiones [The Confessions, 2020], one of her last novels, disguises itself as a semi-autofictional take on the problem of sincerity, while characterizing in superbly eloquent fashion the challenges that mid-century Mexico held for the autonomy of female literary writing. The novel that interests me the most now is Los palacios desiertos [The Deserted Palaces, 1963]. In it, Hernández explores the effects of border imagination upon a form as old as the psychological-detective novel, without abandoning her fidelity to the well-known tactics of continuous introspection, meandering descriptions, and a modernist faith in psychological profundity: in Hernández’s words, the quest for “honesty,” for “family, political or interior truths” (Molina 41).
Critics of Hernández have repeatedly observed that her novels delve into questions of ethics while considering the themes of love and self-destruction, amounting to a modality of realism that privileges psychological complexity over any sort of political critique.¹
And this is true, at least to some extent, as Hernández’s characters often find themselves in situations that demand from them to go through the ordeal of never-ending autoanalysis, pushing the historical to a background rather tempting for critics to dismiss. This is the case with most of Hernández’s novels up to the late-sixties, when her work evinced an increased interest in social history and the shortcomings of Mexican institutions. But even before that, Los palacios desiertos ought to be considered.
There is a corpse at the center of Los palacios desiertos: the body of Rob Marlon, an American letraherido, both a painter and a writer, who once set out to try his luck south of the border and wended his way into the lives of Elena Gonzaga and Luis, the narrator of the novel—both Mexicans, both enthralled by Marlon’s tragic eccentricity. Marlon was 33 at the time of his suicide, with which the story begins. He was both the narrator’s neighbor and Gonzaga’s lover. He is somewhat shaped after Lowry’s Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul from Under the Volcano. And he is, like Gonzaga and Luis, most prominently a reader, to whom the question of the border—of migration and rootlessness—befalls any consideration of writing.
Some might see in Los palacios desiertos a fable that inversely mirrors Rulfo’s “Paso del Norte,” published ten years earlier. However, while the author of El llano en llamas, who reviewed Hernández’s novel shortly after its publication,² inscribed a tale of sonhood within the crevices of the Odyssean trajectory, ruminating on the border as a locus of violence, Hernández’s novel is all about absences and the queries they prompt. Marlon’s corpse at its frontispiece does not set off an investigation akin to that of a detective novel, whereby, if we are to believe Jameson’s outcry, the organicity of the artwork is superseded by the fetishization of the ending (Jameson 132). Luis’ investigation (“why did Marlon commit suicide?”) is structured as a sequence of readings, each of which provides us with complementary pieces of the jigsaw: the reading of Elena’s diaries, of Marlon’s unpublished novel, of the narrator’s harrowing testimony. Yet there is no point in subordinating them to a final revelation, be it that Elena Gonzaga’s allegorical analysis of Marlon’s psychology triggered his suicide, be it that the task of analysis may only encounter ghosts behind the facades of the quotidian.
There is no point in doing that because Los palacios desiertos introduces its readers into a hall of mirrors wherein any key to their distortion solicits the consideration of the border as both a material and a psycho-symbolic reality. Its most reified version renders the novel a sequence of discursive strata, so that the Heideggerian act of presencing is only possible once the border is fully granted the status of both psychosexual metaphor and figure of melancholy. Its psycho-symbolic dimension makes itself felt through the assumption that what Anzaldúa called shamanistic may not be apt for everyone: the body resting at the center of the novel, the body of Rob Marlon, attests to the fact that letting oneself be “transformed by the storyteller into something or someone else” may carry unforeseeable effects. Whatever figure of duplicity, whatever dyadic setting impinging upon a theory of language or the text, can be traced back to the effects of the border Rob Marlon has crossed—the border that infuses the novel with a peculiar sense of the tragic, as Rob Marlon never stops seeing himself as “A frightened North American who sees in Mexico, not the city, but the desert where he seeks himself” (Hernández 57).³
¹ See, for instance, Elsa Margarita Saucedo’s dissertation from 1990 (still one of the most ambitious studies of Hernández’s narrative work), in which Saucedo studies Hernández’s existentialism alongside her paradoxical approach to feminist discourse, whereby inquiries into individual freedom seem to overshadow historical concerns.
² In Rulfo’s brief review he opines that Hernández’s novel “demonstrates the efficiency of her method of analyzing characters, for apparently antagonistic personalities are nevertheless united in the same frustrating existence” (294).
³ “Un norteamericano aterrorizado que ve en México, no la ciudad, sino el desierto donde se persigue a sí mismo” (Hernández 57). Translation is mine.
About the Author
Arturo Ruiz-Mautino is a PhD Candidate in Spanish at Cornell University. His current project studies the emergence of posthumanist ways of thinking about the works of memory in contemporary Latin American fiction. Drawing from memory studies, fiction theory, animal studies, and critical posthumanities, he is working on a transregional genealogy delving into contemporary literary production from Mexico, the Andean region, and the Southern Cone. His most recent publications deal with philosophy of technology, Iberian Medieval poetics, and 20th century Mexican literary realism. He received his BA and licenciatura from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and his MA from Cornell University.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute, 1987.
Beckman, Ericka. “The Historical Novel in Peru: José María Arguedas’ Yawar Fiesta.” Mediations, vol. 33, no. 1-2, 2020, pp. 69-84.
Castillo, Debra A., and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. The U of Minnesota P, 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by and with an Introduction by Albert Hoftstadter. Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 145-61.
Hernández, Luisa Josefina. Los palacios desiertos. México D. F., Joaquín Mortiz, 1963.
Jameson, Frederic. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text, no. 1, 1979, pp. 130-48.
Molina, Javier. “Luisa Josefina Hernández: una obra pródiga.” Tramoya, no. 12-3, October-December 1987, pp. 40-2.
Rulfo, Juan. Review of Los palacios desiertos, by Luisa Josefina Hernández. Books Abroad, vol. 38, no. 3, 1964, pp. 294.
Saucedo, Elsa Margarita. Las Tres Etapas en la Narrativa de Luisa Josefina Hernández (1959-1980): Una Perspectiva Feminista. 1990. U of California Irvine, PhD Dissertation.