Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature (review)

Gustavo Pérez Firmat's task in Tongue Ties seems like a tall order, almost a reckless dare: to show how a very heterogeneous group of authors are somehow connected in meaningful ways and how revealing what links them can lead to valuable insights into their works. Consider the authors in question and try to think what unites them: George Santayana, Pedro Salinas, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Luis Cernuda, Calvert Casey, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, María Luisa Bombal, Richard Rodríguez, and Judith Ortiz Cofer.

My initial skepticism turned into admiration the more I read: this book's first virtue is to have brilliantly achieved what it set out to do. Pérez Firmat demonstrates convincingly that all these writers are beset by a linguistic anxiety whose source is bilingualism, a condition that varies in kind and degree from one author to another but that affects them all at the core of their works and lives. By delving into the specifics of each case the author comes up with truly original (sometimes astonishing) readings of their works and maps out an approach, a method, that could be fruitfully applied to other writers and even to entire literatures, such as what has come to be known as Latino literature in the United States. By putting together writers traditionally studied by diverse academic disciplines—philosophy, Latin American Literature, modern Spanish literature—Pérez Firmat implicitly creates a new field: Anglo-Hispanic literature. Few books can claim to do so much, which is why I would be inclined to call Togue Ties a masterpiece of criticism.

In the introductory chapter, "Bilingual Bliss, Bilingual Blues," Pérez Firmat surveys the topic of bilingualism and writing going back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when authors routinely wrote in Latin, for instance, to underscore that the deep relationship between mother-tongue and literary creation and between imagination and the nation, is a fairly recent construct, dating chiefly to Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. It was then that the anxiety about possessing and being possessed by a language really arose (though in Dante and Cervantes there are harbingers of this). He sets out a three-faceted approach based on the emotional attachment of each writer to his or her language: language as lengua, language as idioma, and language as lenguaje. In the first, the association of language with the tongue, that is, with the body part, reveals the emotional charge involved in the relationship, more specifically the erotic element. In the second, it is the national nature of the language and its immersion in a community. In the third, language is a system, a code, a structure.

Pérez Firmat takes the logo-erotic temperature of each of the writers by prying not only into their texts but also into their lives. His is a holistic approach that eschews the antiseptic phobias of most recent criticism. Pérez Firmat writes about people who write, not about subjects constructed by abstract forces, hence he avails himself of all that is known about them. For all its imaginative flair, this is a book anchored in solid and wide-ranging research on the works and authors in the most traditional way. Pérez Firmat has to be indiscreet to make his discrete analyses, leaving no vista beyond the bounds of his inquisitive eye. Ultimately, of course, Pérez Firmat's criticism reaches down to what he coyly calls twice the "existential" (29; 81), which in most cases involves a psychoanalytical dimension. In other words, his insights emerge from or lead to an extratextual area governed to some degree by chance: where a writer was born, how the avatars of politics or family life led him away from the mother or the motherland, the sexual choices related to these events. Remarkably, however, and departing from Pérez Firmat's well-known previous books, this one does not immediately focus on Cubanness as a determining factor, except in the chapters on Cabrera...