Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction

CHAPTER FIVE: Sick Bodies, Corrosive Humor: Armon

95 CHAPTER FIVE / Sick Bodies, Corrosive Humor: Armonía Somers Fiorella, feeling like her old self, wanted to laugh as in better times, but she couldn’t manage it: that first burst of laughter caused her such convulsions that she relived the horror of those first treatments. Armonía Somers, Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora . . . what pulls the discourse back from the edge of non-sense or psychosis, what in the end enables the speaking being to cope with the contradictory horror and fascination of the abject, is a kind of leveling humor, what Kristeva terms ‘un rire apocalyptique.’ Elia Geoffrey Kantaris, referring to Sólo los elefantes in The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women’s Narratives from Argentina and Uruguay Like Luisa Valenzuela’s señora in Realidad nacional desde la cama, Armonía Somers’s protagonist in Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora [Only Elephants Find Mandrake] (1986) is in bed for all but the duration of the novel, but her illness is real and life-threatening, full of abject symptoms and Svengalian medical treatments. Told that she suffers from a disease about which little is known, the ill woman with the improbable name of “Sembrando Flores Irigoitia de Medicis”1 is soon referred to by the hospital personnel simply as “The Case” [“El caso”]. An unusual object of curiosity for the team of doctors, surgeons, and hospital personnel who hope to probe her deliquescent body for new scientific findings, she is first and foremost a “caso” or “test case” reminiscent of the much-publicized nineteenth- and twentieth-century 96 HUMORING RESISTANCE medical case studies of women’s bodies.2 But her idiosyncratic behavior turns her into another kind of “caso” as well.3 As her chronic inability to stop her hallucinated flow of words becomes more and more evident with every chapter , she becomes the hospital’s most eccentric patient; even, perhaps, the hospital’s hysteric. Deciding to lay claim to her madness—“with or without the couch” (40)—the patient opts for spending whatever time she has left (which is nearly the entirety of the novel) reconstructing personal history through a seemingly unstoppable flow of stories. To readers acquainted with this author’s violent fiction, Somers might seem an odd candidate for a study of humor—any humor. Yet more than any of the other narratives I discuss in this book, her novel Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora nourishes the link between a particularly dark brand of feminocentric humor and women’s bodily “humors” from beginning to end. Largely narrated by a middle-aged woman suffering from a rare pulmonary infection called chylothorax,4 Somers’s experimental novel is a multigenred hybrid about everything and nothing (or, rather more ominously, Nothing). Yet ultimately the novel is about leaky bodies—mostly female—and female bodily fluids’ potential for disrupting dominant masculinist discourses, narratives , and myths.5 The author’s cynicism, set in motion by the narrator’s persistent and cutting sarcasm, threatens to dissolve systemic certainties of all types, but especially those that sustain the disembodied epistemologies of the twentieth century (medicine, politics, existential philosophy, psychoanalysis). It is difficult to imagine a feminocentric cynical humor that did not have transgression or subversion as its aim. Nevertheless, the fact that this novel’s black humor stems from a body that cannot be made to stop oozing liters of lymphatic fluid as a defense mechanism against a mysterious infection that doctors can neither locate nor identify raises the subversive and anarchic temperature of the dark comic transactions to new levels of unease. As the novel begins, what appears to be an aborted meditation on time gives way to the narration of lived time in a hospital room, as experienced by the woman who becomes the elusive but monumental subject and main narrator of this multilayered novel.6 Noting that there is “nothing more difficult and more compromising than speaking of a value called time” [“(n)o habrá nada tan difícil y comprometido que hablar de un valor llamado tiempo”] (11), the narrator goes on to say that for her the difficulty of writing about it is made even more daunting by the fact that time has “coagulated like blood or milk” [“coagulado como sangre o leche”] (11).7 An apt description for the state of lived time in a hospital room, in this case the adjective “coagulated” serves as the perfect first clue for a novel in which all pretense...