The Adventure of the Image of Perversion in Allende’s “Niña Perversa”

The Adventure of the Image of Perversion in Allende’s “Niña Perversa”

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora;

[My mind leads me to speak now of forms changed / into new bodies.]

—Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I.1-2, tr. Martin Charles

When that egg hatched in the swamp, Helen appeared. Some authors say

the Dioscuri were huddled in the same egg. So right from the start, Helen,

the unique one, is linked to the notion of twinship and division. The unique

one appears as the Double. When people speak of Helen, we can never know

whether they are referring to her body or her phantom copy.

 –Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 122

     Like a confused mirage in the distance whose tenuous form wavered between fantasm and corporeality, the image of Elena Mejías glided along the surface world of the short narrative of Isabel Allende’s “Niña Perversa,” as if this image awaited some real embodiment as its inevitable adventure.¹ And its adventure—even if forthrightly announced as her future of becoming “la criatura apasionada que en verdad era” [the passionate creature that she truly was],² a logically circular entelechy that the text already predetermined as her destiny—still remained resistant to Desire’s clasp, for it is the logic of Desire to keep the image and its realization always apart so that it can remain Desire.³ The “passionate creature that she truly was” remained disentangled, always returning as an image so that this perverted state only foregrounded the irreducible double work of forgetting and fantasy by which it can continue to exercise its subjective hold via deferral and imaginary substitutions in the libidinal guise of a passion.

     How do you locate an image in a text that is already an image of itself? There must be an adventure in it, a mix of risk and possibility, an opening into the future, into time and its other, and into time as an other. That is, it must deploy this adventurous opening as a language of transformation of forms of bodies into other forms of bodies. It does not matter yet if the absolute cause of this transformation cannot be ascertained (an Unmoved Mover). What matters for the moment is coincidence, the concurrent circumstantial appearance of several items in the same place. As an ancient language where we witness humans becoming birds, ancient forgotten gods becoming humans, and humans turning into stones, new gods, flowers or stars, metamorphosis always intervenes as if there were an always potentially unstable and porous barrier of differences that held all things apart in the universe. A barrier that keeps them all apart, yes, but at the same time cannot fully do so without failing to succeed (the ambiguity here is deliberate). For how can we expect transformation to continue to work if it finds itself suddenly and immediately diffused among mutually self-identical, homogeneous things, or among absolutely heterogeneous things separated by an unbridgeable gap?

    Thus, we read: “the transformation of Elena Mejías coincided with the arrival of Juan José Bernal, the Nightingale,” “a small-time adventurer.”* Of course, it will not just be Elena’s transformational adventure; it will be everyone’s as well: her mother’s and Bernal’s, too. This is the adventure that the text must undertake to locate Elena’s perversion (in both the passive and active senses, the possessive and the objective cases), the preparatory work of the language of narrative that is absolutely necessary so that it can find a way to dislodge her from her state of virtual in/visibility and carve out a means by which she can finally be displayed as an exemplar of the Subject of Passion (in all senses of this phrase) whose very emergence depended on a self-reflection activated by Bernal’s room filled with the signs of the other. That is, by the substitute traces of the desired other who is currently not present, but not totally absent either. This is the (dark) Room where the play of sameness and differences attain their most intense passage by the action of redoubled images bi-constructing a sexual fantasy that culminates in the emergence of the Subject of Passion as jouissance.⁴

     Let us, then, trace this movement. As a child that’s barely “noticed” by people around her, someone who blended so well with the decor that she was almost indistinguishable from the fixture of the pension house her mother owned and managed, Elena possessed attributes and aspects that played on metaphors of surface and depth, interior and exterior: “Nothing in her appearance revealed her torrid dreams nor announced the passionate creature that she truly was. She passed imperceptibly between the ordinary furniture and the faded draperies of her mother's pension” [Nada en su aspecto delataba sus sueños tórridos ni anunciaba a la criatura apasionada que en verdad era. Pasaba desapercibida entre los muebles ordinarios y los cortinajes desteñidos de la pensión de su madre]. “She came out only to go to school or to the market” [Sus salidas eran sólo a la escuela o al mercado]. In other words, there is a latent  homogeneity between her and the house itself (i.e., diegetic, both textual in essence), allowing her to play her role as her mother’s spy over the guests. “These spying tasks have accentuated the disembodied condition of the girl, who vanished in the shadows of the rooms, existed in silence and appeared suddenly, as if she had just fully returned from an invisible dimension” (my italics) [Esos trabajos de espía habían acentuado la condición incorpórea de la muchacha, que se esfumaba entre las sombras de los cuartos, existía en silencio y aparecía de súbito, como si acabara de retornar de una dimensión invisible].

     This network of voyeurism is portrayed to be under the control of Elena’s mother herself who “had an implacable practical sense and a very clear notion of what happened under her roof” [Tenía un implacable sentido práctico y una noción muy clara de cuanto ocurría bajo su techo]. Despite the innumerable responsibilities she has in running the pension house “like a seminary,” a daily business grind that leaves her very little time or energy to care for her only daughter, she is still somehow capable of not only maintaining a panoptical surveillance of the entire house but also of “infallibly detecting” Elena’s fantasies and whatever she was hiding. We find it therefore inconsistent to learn that, even with her very close eye on things, “she did not know when Elena began to mutate into a different being” [de modo que no supo cuándo Elena empezó a mutarse en un ser diferente]. And even after Elena’s discovery of her mother’s affair, the latter attributed Elena’s “twilight state” [estado crepuscular] and lack of appetite to the beginning of puberty. This proportional distribution of visibility and invisibility represents, hence, the structurality of the text’s transformational rhetoric, the text already foreseeing Elena’s entelechy in which the emergence of her image from the invisible dimension has been predestined. At the same time, this voyeuristic network is simply the mirror of the textual surface at work, opening up subjectivities to view not only as moments of passion but also as a simulation of the transparent and obscure topographies/typographies of the terrain of reading. We as readers espy on them spying on others and on one another, and thereby participate in the same game play of the differential/deferential dialectic between the Seen and the Unseen, or the Manifest and the Latent.

     To pinpoint the absolute source of metamorphosis is difficult unless we give in to the all-too-obvious idea of an original Source. In “Niña Perversa,” it is simply the arrival of an other with the name “Bernal” who was ordained to play the function of the narrative pivotal point around which Elena’s world would now take a new turn. It was as if the short story was rehearsing the many instances in Greek mythology where so many women’s lives suddenly took a turn after the arrival of a stranger. Look at Europa, Ariadne, Aura, Erigone, Coronis, and even Helen after seeing Paris. There was a time, as Calasso retells it, that the gods mingled openly with mortals, as if human beings had an absolute access to the Cosmos, a transparency that banished shadows, offered no disguises, or presented no doubles. But it all changed: “Then came another phase, during which a god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role he has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger.”⁵ After this, gods must transform and disguise themselves often, and the “most notorious motive which prompts the gods to undergo metamorphosis is erotic passion.”⁶ By some mythic logic, erotic passion always arrives in the safer form of the double of an absolute other, as if this paradoxical alterity triggered the arousal of Desire, and maintains this Desire only insofar as the other retained the traces of a stranger, a guest, an adventurer. The familiar kept our interest only if it had an inexhaustible reserve of the unfamiliar.

     The arrival of Bernal in the pension house had the same repercussions as did the arrival of Cadmus, the first Greek hero and the source of the Greek alphabet (hence, writing), in Queen Electra’s court, the mother of Harmony.

Why had her mother decided to give her to this stranger who told tall tales and had nothing to offer but the tackle of his ship? He was a drifter, a fugitive, a sailor, a man with neither hearth nor home. It wasn't Electra who finally convinced Harmony but the girl’s friend Peisinoe. She came and shut herself in Harmony's room with her. She wanted to confess, she had this sensation of emptiness just above her stomach, of burning, and she couldn't stop thinking of the handsome stranger. With a little girl's infatuation, she described Cadmus's body, fantasized his hand boldly touching her round breasts, fantasized herself uncovering the nape of his neck. Harmony listened and realized that something was changing inside her: she was falling in love with her friend's desire, and at the same time she went on looking around in desperation, because she knew that, if once she left, she would never see this room again.⁷ 

     Elena also at the start did not fall for the charm of the stranger, even if his very presence already announced that “all had changed” for her and her mother. “For several weeks, Elena hated that man who was claiming all the space in the house and all her mother’s attention.”* The stranger has taken over, and is now slowly changing the organizational configuration of the visible and the invisible in the whole house. Bernal did not fit the “image of the ideal boarder” in many ways; his habits, the way he turned the clock around, his mannerisms, his pretensions, his tall tales of adventure. It was only after hearing him play the guitar that Elena finally “felt the heartrending words of the songs and the lament of the guitar in every fiber of her body, like a fever.”* As someone barely noticed around the house, Elena was not yet seduced by the order of the Visible. That will now be altered by the order of the audible, that is, the Vibrational, the irresistible and inescapable tactility of invisible atoms undulating like the mythical music of Orpheus that made even stones dance: for what Orpheus sung was Desire itself for the missing body of another beloved, one phrased in deep mourning for his dead Eurydice. They who kept their eyes open to spy on guests now trembled or danced, as if for the first time there is an order of the body superior to the abstraction of the gaze; her mother with “her eyes closed and her head tipped back, [swaying] like a sheet drying in the breeze[,] lost in her dance.” In this very dance, Desire and Death, the Visible and the Invisible meet once more the same way warm and cold air do in the rotating vortex of a storm filling up with the fire of living bodies.

     Thus, when we read that “From that night Elena saw Bernal with new eyes” [Desde esa noche Elena vio a Bernal con ojos nuevos], this vision is not like the theoretical and spying eye whose goal is to lay out everything on a plane while remaining detached, a floating eye that sees but is not seen. Suddenly, this eye can tremble, can feel a flush on the skin, have confusion in the heart, or feel a fever. And even if she observed him stealthily still, it is no longer to regard as if from a distance, but to imagine how the other’s body can be inhabited by her desire, to make the other’s body her own body:

She was filled with an insupportable longing to be close enough to him to bury her face against his dark-skinned chest, to hear the resonance of the air in his lungs and the beating of his heart, to smell his scent, a scent she knew would be sharp and penetrating, like good leather or tobacco. She imagined herself playing with his hair, examining the muscles of his back and legs, discovering the shape of his foot, dissolving into smoke and filtering down his throat to inhabit his entire body.*

    

At the same time, there is a dread in meeting the other’s eye, as if Desire feared the very thing it desired:

But if he happened to look up and meet her eyes, Elena, trembling, would run and hide in the farthest and densest corner of the patio. Bernal had taken possession of her thoughts; she could not bear how time stopped when she was away from him. In school, she moved as if in a nightmare, blind and deaf to anything except her inner thoughts, where there was room only for him.... Later, when she heard him leaving his bath, whistling, she was tormented by impatience and fear, sure that she would die of pleasure if he touched her, even spoke to her, dying for him to do just that but at the same time ready to fade into the furniture, because although she could not live without him, neither could she endure his burning presence.*

     Here, echoing the elements of oblit, folie, and ira from Medieval French love poetry, and in the mode of classical Lacanian jouissance, the pleasure of the subject of Desire strains all the poles in the differential tug of war that maintains its central dynamic of possibility. Although orbiting around the fantasy of union with the other, this imaginary fusion also holds both a certain dread or terror and a pleasure bordering on pain and death. We are now at the very contradiction lying at the heart of Desire, which is also the desire of the text to inhabit a body that it itself imagined, to fuse with its imagined other in the adventure of reading.

     The body of the other is a “fiery presence” [ardiente presencia], perhaps recalling the pure theophanies of the gods without disguise, a searing and an electrifying unmediated presence that mortal shells cannot endure. Even though a most ideal situation, meeting a god face to face without his or her double will mean instant Death (pure indifference). Elena is no longer an image floating among the fixtures of the house, portrayed as a disembodied and almost unnoticeable entity, yet paradoxically already named well ahead, hence, already perceptible from the start, visible, readable. Her “invisibility” is actually just the effect of the narrative’s textual economy, her disembodied state a pure nomenclature which the text’s logic of transformational rhetoric will now revert or pervert by creating the semblance of giving her form a new body, but a body that can only be referenced in the image of the body of the other.

     Now, she has become more visible than the visible, and has finally arrived from an “invisible” dimension. That is, the image of the body and the body of the image encounter each other in a circular dance of passion, as if it were the critical moment required that Desire realizes itself beyond its form as subjectless persona and attains the full subject of passion it supposedly lacked before. By her status indistinguishable from the house at the start, Elena has not yet gained the image of herself reflected in the mirror of the other through which she now becomes the subject of passion that she truly was. The attainment of this subject of passion entailed the dual operative attribution of self-reflection and incorporation where the awareness of embodiment coincided with the moment of erotic self-recognition in the body of an other, as if the Subject were structurally Erotic through and through, are one and the same passion, entity, force, energy, substance, or drive.

     The transformational dynamics is cast in a series of metaphorical stages of development, topologically assigning sites of the surfacing of the passionate subject realizing itself in images, in absences, in veiled appearances, in spectrality: mirror, darkness, the darkening of the surface in inverse proportion to the brightening of the underground, passion as fire, or passion as excessive energy that is about to surface, the feeling of being filled with emotions, fear, etc. The whole metaphorical network that informs the textual scenes after Elena saw with “new eyes” can be seen to be divided and organized between the physics of reflective images and the physiology of living organic bodies.

     The central scene of the narrative is not when Elena attempted to effect a “real” union with the other, although the “rejection” here is actually just the second mirror of the impossible union in the mirror scene where Elena experienced jouissance (universal tumescence) in the “bodily” absence of the other, a jouissance that actually only required the disguised presence, double, or traces of the other. The impossible union of the self and the other that Desire perpetuates and that perpetuates Desire is the differential tension that allows the transformational rhetoric of forms into bodies and bodies into forms to become executionable in the form of the Subject of Passion (living death). The Subject of Passion that Elena becomes is not incarnated in the perversion of a proper body, but in its attribution as a body of Desire that, in the final analysis, is nothing but an image desiring its own body in the image of the other's body it imagines itself becoming.    

    

Notes

1. The word “adventure” will be used here in the various senses of "that which happens by chance, fortune, luck" and as that which is “about to happen," "to come," as if the unforeseen were the other of time or time as the other, the invisibility that is time itself. Thus, what arrives by chance is the invisible other, whose very arrival allows time to arrive as a visible fortune or accident. To adventure, then, is to open oneself to the adventure of time itself, to the vagaries of coincidences and the transformation of the other. The rich history of this word, its own adventures, cannot be explored fully here. See the entry under “adventure” at http://www.etymonline.com/word/adventure.

2. Unless otherwise indicated, the rough translation from the Spanish is mine. Peden’s cited translations will be marked by an asterisk (*). The title “Niña Perversa” by Isabel Allende appears as “Wicked Girl” in The Stories of Eva Luna, tr. Margaret Sayers Peden (NY: Washington Square Press, 1989).

3. Slavoj Žižek: "Desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire." In Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso 1997), p. 53.

4. The French word jouissance has had a varied history within French critical thought. In Barthes, it is a transgressive moment when a reading goes beyond the confines of the “readerly text” or explodes structural limits. In Lacan,

The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same time, the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful pleasure’ is what Lacan calls jouissance; ‘jouissance is suffering’ (S7, 184). The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his own satisfaction.

(In Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (NY and London: Routledge, ), p. 93.)

Here, I am using it primarily to indicate the moment when the subject “comes” into her own image as a form of passion or Deleuzian “intensity.”

5. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, tr. by Tim Parks (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 53

6. In Richard Buxton, Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 158, 164, we read:

The most notorious motive which prompts the gods to undergo metamorphosis is erotic passion.... The pursuit of eros, the wish to escape, the desire to conceal, the will to punish: these are the gods’ principal motives in self-transformation.

7. Calasso, op. cit., p. 383. Italics mine.