Of Melons, Heads, and Blood: Psychosexual Fascism in Griselda Gambaro's Bad Blood

Of Melons, Heads, and Blood: Psychosexual Fascism in Griselda Gambaro's Bad Blood ERIC 1. NUETZEL Griselda Gambaro's Bad Blood is a complex and disturbing play. It probes the link between sexism and fascism in dramatic form. The playwright stuns the audience with a cruel theatre of trauma, assaulting the viewer with images of sadistic psychosexuality and malignant misogyny. Sandra Cypess has noted that Garnbaro's early theatrical work (The Walls, The Blunder, The Siamese Twins, and The Camp) communicates "by means of gestures, movements, noises, and the use of inanimate objects that function with a dramatic vitality '" and that the "manipulation of space, sounds, objects, gestures, and actions creates a hostile environment in which both the character and the spectator feel threatened and tormented by objects as well as people.'" These observations apply equally to Bad Blood. My aim is to elucidate the multiple ways in which Gambaro depicts psychosexual fascism in this drama of family life. Garnbaro's work belongs to a Latin American theatrical genre known as Theatre of the Grotesque.3 I know little of this genre, Latin American history, politics, and culture.' I do not speak or read Spanish, so my access to the work is through an English translation by Marguerite Feitlowitz and through viewing the 1994 Washington University Performing Arts Department production of the play. My response to the play is entirely subjective, informed by my profession, psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in North America is quite different from psychoanalysis as practiced in Latin America, at least as concerns its theoretical orientation. Mainstream North American psychoanalysis has been heavily influenced by classical Freudianism, whereas Latin American psychoanalysis has followed the lead of one of Freud's early followers, the influential British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. To a North American psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein's theories appear fantastic and, I dare say, grotesque. In Melanie Klein's psychology, the first year of life is all important. Thus, her psychology is marnmocentric rather than phallocentric, as Freud's psyModern Drama, 39 (1996) 457 ERIC J. NUETZEL chology is. One might say that Melanie Klein was a protofeminist psychoanalyst . In Klein's view, infants think in tenns of part-objects, such as good breast versus bad breast. The representation of the bad breast becomes incorporated into the mental representation of the penis in the course of psychological development: penis equals breast in early psychological life.' Children have a rich but dark fantasy life, organized around the management of destructive impulses, especially those directed at mother. Images of mother are split along a good-bad axis; if we think of the wicked Witch of the West and Glenda the Good in The Wizard ofOz, we have a sense of this split. Klein believed that we begin life in a schizoid position and develop into a paranoid position in which all that is bad is expelled and projected to objects or part-objects outside the self. Thus, Kleinians write about mental representations of breasts, vaginas, and penises with teeth. The mother is the object that the child projects destructive impulses onto and into. Simultaneously, she is an object of deep envy, for she possesses that which she gives. As a child begins to realize that all objects, as well as the self, have good and bad qualities , infantile narcissism and grandiose omnipotence is mourned in a phase known as the depressive position. What is bad is no longer split off and projected onto something outside the self but accepted as part of the self.6 A Kleinian might argue that, in Gambaro's Bad Blood, Dolores undergoes the transition from the paranoid to the depressive position. A failure to move beyond the paranoid position might be invoked to explain the psychological roots of Father's sadism. Perhaps a Kleinian could shed some light on the malignant misogyny at the heart of this play. But I am not a Kleinian, and I am outside my competence in trying to provide a Kleinian fonnulation for the nightmare world that this play depicts. In this English translation of Gambaro's work, the grotesquery includes a hunchback, multiple sadistic physical and psychological assaults, blood, fetishism , murder, melons, and decapitation.' The story concerns a wealthy family in...