The Inscription of Sexual Identity in Aida Cartagena's Escalera Para Electra

Ever since Borges’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (1941) and Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) placed writing so ostentatiously at the center of Latin American fiction, many Spanish American authors have published works that concern themselves with their own composition. The novel, Escalera para Electra (1970), by the Dominican writer, Aída Cartagena (1918–1994), continues this metafictional trend. However, Cartagena breaks with the conventional narrative pattern by choosing to give voice to a woman writer.

Cartagena foregrounds the transgressive aspect of her narrative from its opening paragraphs:

BAJAMOS de Philopappos para volver a Licabette una de las colinas de Atenas. En el punto más alto está el Teatro de LICABETTE. (...) Repaso en el Hotel Acropol los textos de Esquilo, Sófocles y Eurípides que traje de Roma. El cuerpo resentido, deshidratado, es la estática. Lo otro es la mente o dinámica que mantiene activo el drama que, una vez más, se repuso en LICABETTE. Está. Estaba la skene. En el proscenio: ELECTRA Ana Synodynou y ORESTES Thanos Kotsopoulos. (...) Dos Electras para un cerebro es un tumulto. Electra en tierras de Agamenón. También en la historia de una familia amiga de la nuestra. Electra nació en mi pueblo.

Pensarlo todo a un tiempo, revienta. Si, lo pienso en el Hotel Acropol. Pero escribirlo ahora parece trivial. (...) Brota la cáscara y Swain es un recuerdo. Tiro la cáscara y queda como una pesadilla, cosa de cosas raras y malditas. Todo lo que desgastó el concepto de la virginidad en mi adolescencia.

(7–8)

That the scene of writing takes place in Greece, where the fictive writer rereads the major Greek tragedians, and attends a performance of Electra, points to the author’s desire to reappropriate the traditional narrative of female identity. The collage effect of an opening chapter that begins with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald and one from Cartagena’s own work, and includes quotations from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Samuel Beckett, as well as a fragment from Euripides’s play, before closing with three fictive postcards that, in turn, cite other texts, is emblematic of a novel that refutes Sara Sefchovich’s assessment of the normative female-authored text in Latin America: “la escritura de las mujeres (con las tan notables excepciones) muestra poca complejidad, menor problematización formal, una estructura plana y hasta lineal, un empleo menos rico del lenguaje, menor metaforización y en fin, menos experimentación e innovación” (II: 17). Through her self-conscious novel, Cartagena seeks to alter conventional readings of the mythical by reclaiming the story of female development from her male predecessors. By dramatizing that her novel is composed of fragments from the literary and other cultural realms, Cartagena lays bare the partial nature of sociocultural “truths.”

The project of defamiliarization is announced in the masculine-sounding name, Swain, that the author confers on her female protagonist, who, like her fictive writer, Helene, bears a non-Hispanic-sounding name that implies a redefinition of the universal. At the same time, the very foreignness conveyed by the female characters’ names, and the connection to Euripides seem designed to defuse the unsettling implications of a woman writer’s discussing topics that are conventionally excluded from feminine discourse in Latin America.

The Dominican version of the Electra myth is narrated in scrambled sequence as the disclosure of repressed memories of a cultural scene from which the fictive writer is separated in time and space. Not only is Helene reportedly reassembling Swain’s story during a trip to Greece, but the events she evokes are supposed to have occurred during her own teenage years. Swain’s story therefore posits itself to be prompted by a dual moment of rupture and, on the other hand, by a contrary impulse to repair the breach. At the same time, telling Swain’s story reportedly violates a maternal veto against mentioning Swain’s unspeakable acts. Helene’s avowed endorsement of the prevailing cultural values of “pudor” (53) and “discreción” (91) inscribes Swain’s story within the realm...