"The Pains of Memory": Aberrant Spaces, Historical Anxieties, and National Images of Mourning in Puerto Rican Art and Literature

The Space of Mourning

Francisco Oller's ElVelorio (The Wake)(c. 1893) (Fig. 1), Puerto Rico's most famous folklore painting, portrays a space of grieving memory on a canvas. As a national treasure, The Wake is a source of pride and national identification. I want to argue that this canvas depicts the space of the nation through its work of mourning. Oller's own description of the painting, when it was unveiled in the Salon of 1895, points to its "criticism of a custom that still exists in Puerto Rico among country people and which has been propagated by the priests [...] This is an orgy of brutish appetites under the guise of a gross superstition [...]" ("Crítica sorprendente de una costumbre que aún existe en Puerto Rico entre los campesinos y que ha sido propagada por los sacerdotes [...] Esto es una orgía de apetitos brutales bajo el velo de una superstición grosera [...]"; Marimar Benítez 193).² The painting depicts a folkloric scene in which the wake of a child, a baquiné—"the wake of a little angel" ("velorio de un angelito")—is taking place. But in Oller's depiction the event is one in which disorder rules. The child is center stage, portrayed with a monstrously pale, disfigured face—a demonic face attached to a distinctly non-angelic body. It actually looks more possessed than dead. The mourners surrounding the child display a startling lack of solemnity: they play guitar, drink, talk, laugh, run, and generally mess around. An even more outrageous scene is pictured in the left foreground, where there is a couple in full-fledged romance grabbing each other. Plantains and corn cobs hang from the ceiling. And to add a heightened level of surreality, a roasted pig is brought into the scene through the back door.

The chaotic scene, or jorgorio, represented in the painting sharply contrasts with the idyllic pastoral landscape that can be viewed, through the main doors, in the left side of the painting. As if concealing a painting within a painting (and similar to the rococo style of José Campeche), the idyllic scene depicts two men in perfect harmony leaving behind the collective palaver. As the quintessential representation of Puerto Rican criollismo, The Wake is embedded in multiple layers of representation that seem disconnected from the dead child at their center. Indeed, what is most striking in the painting is the general apathy with respect to the dead child, as if everything were taking place under the spell of a collective forgetting. The sole exception to this general apathy is the figure in the painting's center, the Afro-Caribbean character who stares in the direction of the child; this character carries a cane, has a curved back, is barefoot, wears humble clothes, and touches his gray beard with his left hand in intense contemplation. His demeanor accentuates what I would call a space of national recognition. In its departure from European thematics and its embracing a new sense of Puerto Ricanhood—a national space in the process of mourning—The Wake symbolizes a defining moment of national aesthetic consciousness. But this canvas also registers a critique of the orgiastic reality that has been "propagated by the the priests" (as Oller noted), who recall the role of founding fathers. Hence The Wake depicts the death of a young nation; it figures the truncated possibility of a nation in its youth and shows the mourning of a redundant space of thwarted possibilities in a Puerto Rican context. The Wake signals the spaces of art and mourning that are constitutively forgotten in the formation of Caribbean nationhood.

In this essay I discuss the role of the discourse of art criticism as a forgotten component, an overlooked discursive spatiality, in contemporary discussions of nation-building in Caribbean societies. In...