Aesthetics Under Siege: Dirty Realism and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's Trilogía sucia de La Habana

Aesthetics Under Siege: Dirty Realism and Pedro Juan Gutierrez's TrilogÃ-a sucio de La Habana Guillermina De Ferrari teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of WisconsinMadison . She specializes in contemporary Caribbean narrative and Postcolonial theory. Her interests include Cuban literature of the 1990s, Pan-Caribbean cultural studies, and Latin American twentieth-century literature. Herartich "Cuerpo , enfermedad y utopÃ-a en Los pasos perdidos de Alejo Carpentier y Pájaros de la playa de Severo Sarduy" appeared in The Hispanic Review in Spring2002. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba sank into the worst economic crisis of its modern history. During this period, which came to be officially known as the PerÃ-odo Especial, Cubans were indeed very hungry. In 1993, during the XV Havana International Film Festival, the Spanish film Belle Epoque was screened. In Fernando Trueba's film, meals punctuate the progress of the plot, as Fernando, the young protagonist who has deserted the army after a failed Republican coup, successively falls in love with each of the four daughters in the house where he has taken refuge. Indeed, the food prepared by Fernando, who has been trained as a cook at the seminary, not only is exhibited, savored, and discussed, but also seduces, determines friendship, evokes memories, and even secures a wedding at the end. As my Cuban friends recalled, no sooner had Fernandos heavenly delicacies covered the big screen at La Rampa theater than the audience , only half mockingly, began shouting "Please, turn it off! This is torture!" Their proverbial good humor notwithstanding , Cubans, understandably, could hardly stomach the representation of food; food, that is, that they were unable to digest literally. The visceral response to the images of food in Belle Epoque, however, does more than just illustrate the hardships endured by Cubans following the collapse of the Soviet block; it also comments on a historically conditioned type of aesthetic response. For one thing, it shows how the audience's acutely alert senses had clouded their perception of the film to the point where hunger was hindering aesthetic contemplation. The hisArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 24 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies torical conditions of the PerÃ-odo Especial complicated the audience's response to Belle Epoque, making the film exhibitionist in unexpected ways, for hunger and aesthetic judgment are not quite possible at exactly the same time. In the work of thinkers such as Kant and Pierre Bourdieu, the denial of necessity is the mark of "pure aesthetics." Taste, as Kant originally defined it in The Critique of the Power of Judgment, is: the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful. (96, emphasis in the original) According to Kant, two main categories differ from that of the beautiful. On the one hand, there is the agreeable, i.e. that "which pleases the senses in sensation" (91); on the other, there is the good, defined as "the object of the will (i.e., of a faculty of desire that is determined by reason )" (94). Both the agreeable and the good are, each in its own way, inseparable from the concept of interest—the interest of the senses, in the first case, and the interest of reason, in the second. For Kant, then, the total absence of interest is the main condition that makes pure aesthetic reflection possible (96). In his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu departs from Kant's notion of pure aesthetic judgment in order to articulate how taste has become an instrument that helps establish and confirm a specific social cosmology. Before we examine this argument more closely, suffice it to say for now that the agreeable, defined by Bourdieu as the liking of an object that is primarily perceived through bodily sensations, serves to abolish the distance required by the audience to experience pure aesthetic enjoyment, as in, for instance, the case of pornography. Bourdieu characterizes the lack of freedom to reflect upon a given work of art as a form of violence that the work...