“That is So Funny It Breaks My Heart”: Melancholy and Mourning in Ana Menéndez’s “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd”

In Ana Menéndez’s “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd,” Máximo, a Cuban exile, has successfully integrated into his Miami life. He eats Cuban food and plays dominos with friends, activities that help him cope in his new environment. His memories, however, make this attachment to the present painful because they accentuate the grief he feels over the loss of his wife and his homeland. He tells jokes that reveal the ever-growing distance he feels from his homeland. These jokes offer the therapeutic benefits of humor and serve as the primary mechanism by which he attempts to acclimate himself to a life without his wife and without his connection to Cuba. The story of Máximo’s attempt to deal with his grief allows us to put to the test the conflicting positions of Sigmund Freud, who argues for the necessity of mourning and subsequent release, and Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek, who argue in favor of a melancholy that retains connection to the lost person or place. “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” suggests that joke-telling, and perhaps other forms of creativity as well, can reconcile the positions of Freud and Derrida and Žižek in a constructive way.

Much of the criticism exploring Ana Menéndez’s short story collection focuses on the stereotypical view that the 1.5 generation, as defined by Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, relies on nostalgic memory; some of these critics explore Máximo’s contentious relationship with nostalgia. Dalia Kandiyoti, for instance, states that the stories “present dominant discourses of nostalgia from the perspective of a character who undermines them and yet cannot help but suffer from the loss of the past” (89). Ana Luszczynska deals with deconstructive ethics and states that “Máximo … appears to understand the potential dangers of nostalgia and the fixed and reductive (alleged) truth it seeks to re-present” (95). Lene Johannessen, Maya Socolovsky, and Jennifer Ballantine Perera also explore the complicated role of nostalgia in the story. I argue, however, that Máximo feels little to no attachment or nostalgia for a lost Cuba. Additionally, nostalgia fails to adequately explain Máximo’s actions, specifically his relations to his hallucinations of his dead wife and his jokes about Cuba under Castro’s regime. By focusing our attention on melancholy as the primary explanatory variable for his actions and reactions, Máximo’s behavior becomes more understandable and poignant.

Rather than a Freudian mourning of forgetting, I suggest that Máximo enacts Jacques Derrida’s conception of melancholy. Derrida explores melancholy, stating, “Death will no doubt have changed this melancholy—and infinitely aggravated it” (135). We can apply Derrida’s analysis of melancholy to Máximo’s pain: he must carry the world of his wife and maintain the dialogue that was interrupted by death while he simultaneously loses his desire for his homeland. His vivid hallucinations disclose his connection to the life he shared with his wife (the interrupted dialogue), and his anxiety arises out of his fear towards time’s ability to dissolve his memory. The narrative explains, “Then the blank spaces in his life lay before him…. And what had he salvaged from the years? Already, he was forgetting Rosa’s face, the precise shade of her eyes” (29). The idea of something “salvaged,” Luszczynska aptly notes, “connote a recuperative keeping, holding on, rescuing, and preservation” (107). I suggest extending this salvaging to Máximo’s desire for his wife, a desire and memory he preserves. This recuperating enacts Derrida’s idea of mourning as failure while avoiding the Freudian idea of mourning’s second death. Máximo follows what Derrida says happens in mourning: “The survivor, then, remains alone…. At the least, he [the survivor] feels solely responsible, assigned to carry both the other and his world, the other and the world that have disappeared” (140 original emphasis). Máximo carries the world of his wife that has disappeared. While Máximo begins to forget the “precise...