Transsexual identities in a transcultural context: Jaime Bayly's La noche es virgen and the comic Bildungsroman

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Notes

 1. Both Northrop Frye (1957, pp. 308–310) and Robert C. Elliott (1960, p. 192) identify these two aspects as the Novel's principal structural and thematic concerns.

 2. Northrop Frye highlights the relationship between the utopian impulse of comedy, the comic novel and the Bildungsroman. According to him, the comic novel is simply an expression of the utopian impulse of dramatic comedy in which the resolution takes the form of a marital celebration and, more importantly, of a societal resolution between the protagonist and the formally dystopian society: ‘Dramatic comedy, from which fictional comedy is mainly descended, has been remarkably tenacious of its structural principles and character types’ (1957, p. 163). While not interested in the changes in comic form and themes in relation to changing historical and ideological contexts, Frye maintains that the utopian impulse of comedy in the comic novel is expressed principally (though not solely) through the protagonist's procurement of an individual identity and social rank. It comes as no surprise, then, that almost all the novels Frye cites as comic are or could be categorized as Bildungsromans. The novels Frye refers to here (Fielding's, Dickens' and Austen's among others) all end in a resolution between the fictional society and protagonist, who is often awarded with some kind of social promotion. But, being Bildungsromans, they are predominately concerned with the protagonists' individual development and acquisition of identity that, as Alden (1986) affirms, reflects the growing cult of the individual during the Enlightenment period. In this respect, the transference of the utopian impulse of comedy from stage to novel involved a shift of emphasis from social reconciliation to the narrative of individual identity acquisition.

 3. Henceforth the novel will be referred to as La noche.

 4. Social anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that the shape of human identity is neither ahistorical nor universal but culturally specific: ‘Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which we give a form, order, point and direction to our lives. And [the] cultural patterns involved are not general but specific’ (1973, p. 52).

 5. García Canclini states the following in reference to Latin America's cultural and demographic make-up at the end of the twentieth century: ‘Hemos pasado de sociedades dispersas en miles de comunidades campesinas con culturas tradicionales, locales y homogéneas, en algunas regiones con fuertes raíces indígenas, poco comunicadas con el resto de cada nación, a una trama mayoritariamente urbana, donde se dispone de una oferta simbólica heterogénea, renovada por una constante interacción de lo local con redes nacionales y transnacionales de comunicación’ (2001, p. 260).

 6. Brunner also links the fragmentation of individuality with cultural heterogeneity in Latin America (1995, p. 41).

 7. ‘In comic plays populated by women, two features prescribe what comedy's women can be: a basic inversion and a generally happy ending. To understand these two aspects of comic structure is to understand the limitations of comic women. Women are allowed their brilliance, freedom, and power in comedy only because the genre has built-in-safe-guards against such behaviour’ (Carlson 1991, p. 76). In other words, women in comedy are principally employed for two reasons: one, to act as a subversion of the ‘norm’ and two, to enable male dominance to re-establish social order via the subjugation of marriage. The comic structure's privileging of an ultimate return to the status quo over a merely temporary inversion may mean that its patriarchal formula is quite simply alien to the notion of female identity acquisition in the first place. While Carlson here is referring to the traditional comic play, her comments are equally relevant to the comic novel since, as Frye argues, it is simply another expression of the same structure and impulse. It is not difficult to think of comic novels in which female protagonists are denied the kind of individual and social autonomy allowed to their male counterparts. Even in Austen's utopian novels the protagonists win a social and individual identity by adapting themselves to a cultural code prescribed by a male-dominated society, however much certain characters such as Marianne (in Sense and Sensibility [1811]) attempt to bump against it. Furthermore, the marriage resolution at the end of the novels, though symbolizing societal inclusion from a certain perspective, place the female very much ‘in her place’; in other words, on the periphery. A pertinent example of this is Leopoldo Alas' satirical Bildungsroman, La regenta (1884). Here the protagonist Ana's marriage to an older man precipitates not the acquisition of individual identity (though a social one is attained), but a tug of war between the priest, Fermín de Pas, and the parochial Don Juan, Álvaro Mesía, who struggle for the rights to her soul and body, making her a conspicuously passive female character similar in type to the Romantics' favoured portrayal of the feminine. Tellingly, the novel ends with the protagonist helplessly prostrate and leered over by one of the many peripheral male characters in the novel, leaving the reader with the overwhelming impression that she remains in a perilous and vulnerable position at the hands of an all-powerful and hypocritical patriarchal society. No doubt the reader can think of many other examples. Restriction of space means they cannot be discussed here.

 8. For a broader discussion on the repressive and intolerant nature of the Fujimori regime, see Robert Ruz's chapter on the role of homosexuality in Bayly's work (2005, pp. 21–42).

 9. The information on the use and changes of meaning of Quechan words in spoken Spanish on the streets of Lima was taken from the Quintanilla Anglas (2001).

10. For Bakhtin consciousness is ‘on the border between the immediate reality of my own living particularity, a uniqueness that is only for me, and the purely abstract reality of the system that precedes me in existence and is intertwined with everyone else's ability to be a self in language. The instrument by which this dialogue takes place between the centrifugal forces of subjectivity and the centripetal forces of the system, which are rule driven and abstract, is the peculiar mode of being of the first person pronoun’ (Clark and Holquist 1984, p. 91). In a similar vein, Vološinov has this to say on the subject of self and language: ‘Thus the personality of the speaker, taken from within, so to speak, turns out to be wholly a product of social interrelations. Not only its outward expression but also its inner experience are social territory. Consequently, the whole route between inner experience (the “expressible”) and its outward objectification (the “utterance”) lies entirely across social territory. When an experience reaches the stage of actualization in a full-fledged utterance, its social orientation acquires added complexity by focusing on the immediate social circumstances of discourse and, above all, upon actual addressees’ (1986, p. 90).

11. In a more assertive study (than Ruz's) on the nature of gender representation in Bayly's work, Patricia Ruiz Bravo argues (2001, p. 21) that the portrayal of a male character who identifies internally with a female sensibility serves to undermine the dominant patriarchal image and can be seen as a politically gendered subversive statement.

12. According to Paco Vidarte (2005, pp. 77–111), this type of fluid and multiple identity is the typical composition of queer identity and queer politics that, in their appropriation and simultaneous rejection of conventional social roles and organizing bodies, constitute a heterogeneous and indefinable identity and body politic. However, what makes Bayly's representation of the queer ‘self’ particularly interesting is the transcultural and transnational politics and cultural prescriptions he draws on to delineate a contradictory and unstable queer identity.

13. I am of course well aware that homophobia and social exclusion exist in different forms in the United States as well as in Peru and other Latin American countries. Nevertheless, in the United States groups such as the Pink Panthers, Queer Nation and, indeed, the legitimized position of queer studies in universities meant that a tradition in which homosexual identity was actively viewed in a positive vein had secured a place in public discourse during the 1980s and 1990s. As far as I know, no such cultural tradition was available to Peruvians in this period.

14. The success of Bayly in Latin America, Spain and North America is documented by Ruz (2005, p. 370).

15. ‘The modes of utopia and satire are linked in a complex network of generic, historical, and formal relationships’ (Elliott 1970, p. 3). Elliot (1960, p. 4) also identifies the ancient and ritualistic roots from which the literary traditions of comedy and satire are thought to have stemmed.