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  • Cuba and the Fall: Christian Text and Queer Narrative in the Fiction of José Lezama Lima and Reinaldo Arenas
  • Brett Levinson
Eduardo González . Cuba and the Fall: Christian Text and Queer Narrative in the Fiction of José Lezama Lima and Reinaldo Arenas. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2010. Print. 296 pp.

In the "Introduction" to Cuba and the Fall: Christian Text and Queer Narrative in the Fiction of José Lezama Lima and Reinaldo Arenas, Eduardo González refers to his "queer choice" of "'sex' over 'sexuality'" in order to indicate his disapproval of "the abstract discursive dumbness of sexuality in gender politics" (5). González prefers to address, directly, the treatment of sex in Lezama and Arenas, thereby dispensing with the various contemporary theoretical models that seem to find sexuality everywhere in literature—except in sex. It is somewhat queer, then, that González adopts the term "queer," which in recent years, via queer theory, has emerged as every bit as asexual as sexuality. Most likely González, rarely politically correct, is precluded by a certain correctness from deploying the adjective that actually captures the thrust of his focus, which is "perverse." Linking Lezama and Arenas, who along with Virgilio Piñera form the great homosexual triumvirate of Cuban letters, with perversity, González would invite unfortunate misunderstandings. The concern of Cuba and the Fall, all the same, is perversion. Lezama and Arenas navigate a twisted or per-verse thoroughfare through sex, meaning that they go right at it, since sex itself, in their works, is a warped and warping force, while writing is the tracing of the bend. Cuba and the Fall, therefore, not only addresses but represents a performance of "perversity" as it strives (impossibly) to get straight, and get straight to, that which does not come straight at all but, in Arenas and Lezama, askew.

The blurb on the book's cover refers to the "tyranny of place." One typically imagines an individual, an ideology, an institution, or a state as tyrannical—but place itself? In fact, in Cuba and the Fall, one finds relatively few critiques of the Cuban state, even when tackling Arenas, whose assault on Fidel Castro is the most fierce among all Cuban writers. The tyrant, for González, is indeed place, and more specifically, place of origin. It is so, on the one hand, relative to textuality. Not unlike Lezama himself, González maps his Cuban authors through a font composed of the Bible, Plato, Homer, Aristophanes, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Ruskin, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, to name the principals. González follows Lezama's and Arenas's "queer," off-track journey, trying to locate or even invent the material that the authors reconstruct and misconstrue into works of art. At one point (128), González notes how Arenas, in The Assault, deploys as chapter heads fragments of other texts, ones that seem to bear no relation to either the novel's form or content. Arenas deploys the tactic as a symbolic gesture, calling into question the relation of origin and offspring, father and son, author(ity) and obedience, cause and effect. González, though limited by the genre of literary criticism, undertakes a similar task, pasting Faulkner and Hawthorne motifs, for instance, onto Arenas texts in which they do not materialize openly.

Like Arenas, González sticks his tongue out—but without calling attention [End Page 1152] to the gesture—at the establishment, embodied not by Fidel but by Latin American and literary studies. The former, rooted in "identity politics" (even if under another name), compels the critic to turn literature into a reflection of the territory that represents its (literature's) "true" ground, Latin America, in the name of an institutionalized politics that bears this name, politics, for reasons that Cuba and the Fall finds puzzling—but in which no sex of the type elaborated by Arenas and Lezama, which is the opposite (if there is such a thing) of sexual identity, can find purchase. The latter, literary studies, seems determined to obliterate literature by reducing fiction to reflections of half-baked, tiresome sets of theoretical signifiers. Cuba and the Fall is not "anti-theory"; it embraces...

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