It’s 1972: a girl whom we will call Linda Lovelace, goes to a psychologist for a reason, she is unable to reach orgasm. The opinion of the doctor is toxically famous: apparently, the young girl from New York has the clitoris in her throat. That’s the beginning of Deep throat, the highest grossing pornographic film in the history of American cinema.
By then Umberto Eco was 40 and had a strange obsession with Linda Lovelace. He has not written yet El Nombre De La Rosa, but he is already terminal addict to pornography and he tries to disengage from it by reading lots of semiotic treaties and Cartesian meditations. Reading is a success, abstinence is a failure: Eco -educated in contemplation of Greco-Roman statues and Renaissance paintings- feels himself so dazzled by Gerard Damiano´s porn cinema as a teenager in 1997 by the Spice Girls.
Published by Lumen publishing house, Umberto Eco’s ¨Segundo Diario Minimo¨ shows very little -nothing- of this obsession. Just an article entitled “How to recognize a pornographic movie,” only real evidence of his damn pornopatia. However, there are several tantrums in the book that gradually form, by transitivity, an aesthetic: you find, for example, that for Umberto Eco pornography is an effective chemotherapy against Italian “auteur cinema”. There are evidences in European cinema of directors who psychologically tortured the viewer to “help him” to understand an argument: boy loves girl, but girl does not love the boy). There we learned that XXX movies are full of “dead time” -although some Spanish translator has stated that “when Eco says ‘dead times’, you know he is referring to time without having sex ”—: of couples losing minutes in the elevator ; girls playing on T-shirts and laces before mutually confessing they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. In the words of Eco -and the brave translator appears again: “in pornographic films, before seeing a healthy fuck, it is necessary to swallow an announcement of the Department of Transportation”. (Spaniards translate so “clearly” that in some moments, you forget that the book is written in Castilian.)
And near the end: “If Gilberto, to violate Gilberta” -in this time, for obvious reasons, I dropped the book terrified, “must go from Cordusio Piazza to Buenos Aires Avenue, the film shows us Gilberto driving, traffic light after traffic light , making the whole journey.” That previous situation -the subject unnecessarily loosing time for having sex with a girl- is a pre-seminal. (Yes, in principle we were all XXX actors). Because “a film in which Gilberto to always violate Gilberte, for the front, back and side , would not be sustainable; neither physically to the actors, nor economically for the producer. And it would not be it psychologically for the viewer: for the transgression to succeed it is necessary to be outlined on a background of normality. Therefore, the pornographic film should represent normality -essential for the transgression to acquire interest “.
I was thinking all this while reading assays by Víctor Fowler Calzada: Rupturas y homenajes (Union, 1998), La Maldicion: Una historia del placer como conquista (Letras Cubanas, 1998), Historias del cuerpo (Letras Cubanas, 2001) and Paseos corporales y de escritura (Letras Cubanas, 2013). I was thinking on a theory to recognize a book by Fowler, that Cuban writer -master of sex- who has, for me, the most ambitious critical account in our lyrics from ¨Lo cubano en la poesía¨; books that rise up against contraception of Cuban publishing scene; b ooks that are the transgression. And in that, Fowler is an escapist: t he Houdini of research. This is how it begins the dizzying succession of wonderful escapes that his books are. A gap in the three volumes of the History of Cuban literature (which are like the morning after pill: abortifacient). Victor against the flock of ghosts authors writing insane tomes -and carefully sterilized- about our tradition. Because if there is something that could well be the equivalent of 3D glasses to our literary criticism, that something is the Fowler bifocals.
Having said that -and considering its effects- it must be experienced. Let’s see: the object of study is a curious anthology by José Manuel Poveda: Poemetos de Alma Rubens, with which eroticize to anyone aged between 11 and 75 years. A book written by a man as if he were a woman (Alma Rubens), and we already know that: women who begin or end in the mind of a man are usually, at least, bisexuals. The poem at issue is entitled “Las caricias” and is dated July 30, 1923:
De algunos […], los más hábiles, me ha gustado la ansiedad con que buscaron, sin hablarme, […], las pequeñas cuerdas finas y escondidas.
De otros, los más crueles, gocé más los besos lentos, insaciables y febriles. […]
Más de todas las caricias la más dulce, la que no he de olvidar nunca, fue la tierna caricia de tus ojos compasivos, oh Diomedes, […] mientras ibas tú franqueando las dos puertas en las cuales nadie nunca había llamado.
What does Victor Fowler read with his 3D bifocals? : “A tercet as ‘Las caricias’ makes a clear apology of anal intercourse”. (Before continuing, a second reading is recommended). That level of elucidation -typical of a literary critical for perverts- is not common in our essayists , more familiar with failure than with lucidity (Relevant e xample: Alberto Rocasolano, whose prologue on José Manuel Poveda´s poetic work could well be titled “Essay on Blindness”). The Cuban literary criticism does not mark “Like” to anal sex. And, judging by what is published; in the Kamasutra of our researchers is only the Missionary.
Then Victor Fowler comes with his “body readings” and one discovers that in Cuban literature there is at least one piercing and several tattoos hidden. Revelation that appears most strongly in what is probably his most astute approach to homosexuality in Cuba: La maldicion : Una Historia del placer como conquista. The book was edited in 1998, but goes through periods where homosexuals who jumped the fence separating the public from the private discovered, among other things, that on one hand they were discriminated and on the other they were kicked.
And I have to say it: there is a primitive homophobic streak in this country:
1791: “Critical Letter of the man-woman” (published in Havana Newspaper):
Who can keep from laughing when seeing a bearded man spending most of a morning combing himself, dressing up himself, and watching his beauty copied in a mirror, like the vainest woman? […] Clumsy and abominable vice of effeminacy, former BOLERO, or disease that has contaminated a sizeable portion of men in our country. If it were offered to defend the country, what should we expect from such citizens? Can it be said that they have breath to tolerate weathering of War? How can strong and brave men […] flaunt their womanly and so timid spirit?
1888: “Los maricones” (The fagots) (published in La Cebolla newspaper ): ” Any foreigner”, yes, since 1888 foreigners matter the most, “who stroll the streets of San Miguel and adjacent ones, in Havana, will be surprised to see some implausible guys: they are women from the waist up; and men from the waist down. ”
1889: Reasoned dictionary of police legislation. We know, there is not need to repeat it, what word to search. “The effeminate and cowardly man -the one dealing with women’s tasks. -Certain men who imitate women in their ways, innuendo, and sometimes even in dress, replacing them in the most shameless acts “.
And in neon letters, here comes the most interesting suspicion of the book: “if we join the pieces, it seems that homosexuality had been everywhere and just a very violent social repression would explain us that has come down to us poorly.”
Wonderful: thinking the History of Cuba as a plot in which more than one would give anything to erase the signs of homosexuality, dissent, disenchantment and dissatisfaction of the hard drive of his memory. The History of Cuba, as certain bewitched houses- is much bigger inside than outside. For now, we just have individual parts, but it seems that Havana of the seventeenth century was a Tim Burton film. And the union of our historians and archivists was a community worthy of Dan Brown. Because, it is almost a proverb: “Until lions to have their own historians, tales of hunting will glorify the hunter.”
Victor Fowler’s assays deal with all this and more. I only miss certain clinical gaze at institutions -as exclusion policies agents- that Fowler does not seem to have inherited from that other freak that Michel Foucault is.
Victor Fowler is not Michel Foucault, but there is no doubt that he is a subject that should be monitored and punished.
