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

Epilogue

149 Epilogue / Humor does not invoke a truth more universal than that of the masters; it does not even struggle in the name of the majority by incriminating the masters for being a minority. Humor wants rather to have this recognized: there are only minorities. Jean-François Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble One of the turning points in the project that grew into this book was the realization that while I had been preparing to treat the presence of humor in Latin American women writers primarily in terms of intellectual wit and verbal humor, their works would oblige me to devote much of my time reflecting on the many ways in which gendered bodies can slip, slide, or perform their way through sociopolitical and cultural frames intended to contain and control them. Another was realizing that as the level of comic aggression increased, so did the sense of ambivalence and ambiguity regarding the strategic use of the ludic tactics deployed. With every turn of the color lens toward the darker side of the humor spectrum, the ideological agenda behind the practice of diverse types of humor became less easily definable. In other words, the more disruptive the humor, the less concrete its politics. All situations that engage tactics of comic exceess aim to destabilize or temporarily upset the prevailing context in which they take place. Yet while milder or lighter forms of humor operate their destabilizations by resorting to reversals or exaggeration, more entropic comic transactions deploy multiple means of disruption in order to create a general sense of disorder or chaos. As Freud observes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, uncertainty and ambivalence regarding its ultimate meaning, intention, or effect is 150 HUMORING RESISTANCE an unavoidable aspect of tendentious humor. Operating, as it generally does, through mechanisms difficult to account for and even more difficult to explain within the logical economy of verbal (or bodily) grammar, the deployment of humor is likely to result in as many alliances as divisions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the affirmation of plural voices that do not cohere into a single vocal register is a common trait of the works examined in my book. A good illustration of this point, Luisa Valenzuela’s novel Realidad nacional desde la cama insists on turning the national dance with which the novel ends into multiple and mutable regional dances. Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado similarly refuses to privilege a single point of view or a single cause. Discontinuous and fragmented, the novel becomes a site where everyone is a “circus performer” of one kind or another but no one ever manages a successful balancing act. Armonía Somers’s comic cynicism in Sólo los elefantes dissolves any hope of an “imagined” community; the corrosive satire eats away and through the fantasy of an imagined national community in a place where vampires, minotaurs, lepers, anarchists, fascists, and brilliant but bitter ill women compete with each other in a mad contest to impose their version of history, or at least of their own history. Even in its most conciliatory form (as illustrated by my discussion of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate), comic disruptions have the effect of unhinging and fragmenting family, regional , and national units. Admittedly, some of these tendencies toward fragmenting the possibility of what Benedict Anderson famously termed “imagined communities” of nation can readily be found in the work of contemporary women authors whose writing does not evince a comic, carnivalesque, parodic, or camp vision. Mentioned in my introductory chapter, Nelly Richard’s summary of the techniques that qualify for a practice of a “refractory aesthetics” incorporates many of these tactics. Because Diamela Eltit is often summoned as the contemporary writer who best exemplifies this refractory aesthetics, alluding to her her extraordinarily “resistant” oeuvre for purposes of contrast is useful. Eltit’s fiction fully engages the previously listed tactics of excess, duplicity, mimicry, inversion, and disorder. Yet it also implicitly (and only implicitly) proposes a solution to the plural marginalization(s) that these refractory techniques signal by conveying an aesthetics of the margins that also contains a marginal but tactical politics. Describing Diamela Eltit’s aesthetics in Eltit’s novel Lumpérica, Julio Ortega observes the extent to...