Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas

2. The Self in Exile: Luisa Futoransky's Babelic Metatext

2 / The Self in Exile: Luisa Futoransky’s Babelic Metatext Like Helena Parente Cunha, Luisa Futoransky, in Son cuentos chinos (They Are Chinese Tales) and De Pe a Pa (o de Pekín a París) (From Pe to Pa [or From Peking to Paris]), plays elliptically and ironically with the master narrative of autobiography. Like Parente Cunha, Futoransky writes novels that can be considered as fictional autobiographies, but are further problematized by their aspects as autobiographical fiction. They are fictional autobiographies in that they tell the life story of the fictional character Laura Kaplansky. They are autobiographical fiction in that they incorporate aspects of Futoransky’s life experiences. In his work on the autobiographical pact, Phillipe Lejeune asserts that works are considered autobiographical if and only if the authors declare their autobiographical intention. This obligatory statement can be made in the title, the dedication, the preface (most frequently), or in a concluding note, as Futoransky does in De Pe a Pa when she states that “Laura (Falena) Kaplansky was a character I created with part of my melancholy, my vision , my joys, pains and sorrows” (123).1 According to this criteria, then, De Pe a Pa and Son cuentos chinos, the other narrative featuring Laura Kaplansky as protagonist, can be considered as falling within that autobiographical pact. Futoransky’s texts work the definitional boundaries between autobiography and fiction, between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography. By writing at the borders, she bears witness to the constrictions imposed by the conventions of genre and seeks a freedom outside those conventions. Together, Son cuentos chinos, De Pe the self in exile / 41 a Pa, and Futoransky’s third novel, Urracas, can be read as a metatext, an extended series on writing, identity, marginalization, and exile. Indeed, in a 1993 conversation with Marily Martínez-Richter, Futoransky confirms that she had originally conceived of the three as a trilogy. However, her plan for the second novel was so ambitious that she ended up in the hospital: “There I realized that I should reduce my plans, that it was a question of life or death” (78). She also explains why she changed the protagonist’s name from Laura Kaplansky to Julia Bene: “As for the change of name, in order to escape with bitter irony and a pirouette, I will answer you that, since I was tired that in life things were going badly (male) for me, in order to exorcise the novel, I called Julia, Laura and Luisa bene” (78). That she gives Julia, Laura, and Luisa all the same last name would imply that the flesh-and-blood author and her fictional protagonists all occupy the same level of reality. Futoransky’s metatext serves as an excellent example of the problematic authority of the signature. Throughout this chapter, I explore how Futoransky uses a variety of tropes in her autobiographical fiction to explore issues frequently discussed in criticism and theory on women’s autobiographical writings. Her use of proper names highlights issues of identity and language, while her play with language and linguistic multiplicity function as signifiers of a radical Otherness, as a process that relentlessly foregrounds variance and marginality as the norm (Ashcroft, Griffins, and Tiffin 75). Her exilic texts foreground a nomadic subject who continually searches (in her life and in her writings) for a place to represent herself anew. The Self in Exile Luisa Futoransky and the protagonists of her autobiographical fiction share much in common, including the experience of exile. Shari Benstock argues that for women, the definition of patriarchy “already assumes the reality of expatriate in patria” and that “this expatriation is internalized, experienced as an exclusion imposed from the outside and lived from the inside in such a way that the separation of outside from inside . . . cannot be easily distinguished” (20). Futoransky’s inscription of exile clearly goes beyond the more common physical or geographical definitions to incorporate the status of women in patriarchal hierarchies.2 The exilic experience of Futoransky and her autobiographical protagonists includes that expatriation that is imposed from the outside and 42 / addressing the self lived from the inside. Experiencing displacement and disorientation on various levels, Futoransky uses her autobiographical writings to ponder if there can be greater misfortune than to be female, fortyish, alone, not at all thin, Jewish, South American, and prone to volatile passions? Hers is an abject identity constituted by all that is the negative of...