Amy Sara Caroll
Duke University
Email: asc7@duke.edu

Below find something very rough (not even organized enough to call "a paper"). It began as a comparative project. In the course of writing it, I realized I had more than four to five pages to say about each of the works in question. Perhaps for next year's seminar, I will submit my analysis of Sabina Berman's Feliz Nuevo siglo doktor Freud (2001); for now, you'll have to imagine Berman's play as Los hijos de Freud's imaginary interlocutor in my arguments (especially those concerning postmodernism)…

A Farcical Periodization: Pastiche and Parody in Los Hijos de Freud

There is more than one way to haunt a house: Liliana Felipe and Jesusa Rodríguez draw upon farce as a methodology, as an aesthetic practice of political critique, utilizing prior constructions of its limitations to reformulate the trope's exchange-value. Specifically, the pair takes seriously readings, which would posit governmentality as the ultimate farcical drama qua kitsch/cursi. As such, their work is performative to the extent that they, like Victor Turner read social and theatrical drama as not only metaphoric, but interdependent. Yet, in focusing on the "tragicomedy" of contemporary Mexicanidad, the pair literalize Néstor García Canclini's hunch that a reformulation of the popular might do well to heed "the importance granted by a few authors to melodrama" [1995 (1992): 204]. So, here's a distinction I'm bound to reiterate: Felipe and Rodríguez utilize humor not only to consider the theatricality of the state, but, to consider the specificity of this theatricality as ultimately one of farce, which fails to take into account the dangerous limitations of, in this instance, "los pecados del neoliberalismo" and recyclical nationalism. Put differently, their work takes literally Karl Marx's attentions to performativity in "The18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" [1977 (1851)].
In "The18th Brumaire," Marx, using the metaphor of the stage and comedy, in particular, to ruminate on history's performativity, revises Hegel's observations "that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice," sardonically appending, "He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce" (ibid: 300). Marx's words, might, in fact, be read as a cautionary tale regarding the limitations of recycling language and concepts (and, by extension, a meditation on the limitations of repetition with a difference). But, of course, Marx's essay is also a ghost story [something Derrida is quick to note (1994)]. Marx writes, "On the threshold of the February Revolution, the social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost" (314). Comedy, then, in Marx's estimation, is at best, a "tragicomedy," one, which, for the purposes of my argument, will require a postmodern reappropriation of melodrama (a third appearance of what is "of great importance") to anticipate its critical value. In the context of Rodríguez and Felipe's work, this postmodern reappropriation is intimately tied to a camp aesthetic, which doubles the trouble (and pleasure) of traditional Mexican albures, well-documented by "national essayists" (see Ramos 1934 and Paz 1950) and foreign anthropologists (see Lewis 1961) alike. It is an aesthetic, which, while queerly sympathetic, cannot be confined to the adjective "queer." Humor, in Rodríguez and Felipe's work, allows the pair to up the ante of the a priori in their overall efforts. By this, I mean, humor facilitates Rodríguez and Felipe's generous assumptions regarding the "viewing-level" of their audiences-humor becomes the vital ingredient in their "molcajete" vision of cabaret-theatre.
Quintessentially based in improvisation, Rodríguez and Felipe's philosophy-turned-aesthetic attempts to act as "a basket to hold the voice of the popular… as a space, which brings together the preoccupations of a general public" (my translation, Rodríguez 2001). Moreover, as a philosophy, it pokes fun at and improvises upon its own tenets. For instance, after suggesting that it represents a basket, Rodríguez partially recanted the metaphor, arguing instead, that it might be more accurate to compare hers and Felipe's version of cabaret to a molcajete, in which one mixes chiles, tomatoes, onion into something spicy and beautiful. Conceptually, the primary ingredient in this mix is humor as a ghostly political tactic. Humor, for the pair, represents a weapon in a discursive "war of maneuvers," where the very battle over questions of censorship too often occludes, "other concerns including who has access to staples as basic as food and medicine" (Rodriguez 2001). Humor in the oeuvre of Rodriguez and Felipe works to mediate contradictions, to illuminate bipolar interpretations, so that the tacking of an either/or, a neither/nor is rendered once again irrelevant. Humor encourages the ambiguous, Rodríguez's proposition,
I propose a line full of humor, not as gratuitous or frivolous jokes, but humor as a manner in which to see the world from distinct angles, in all its ambiguity and ridiculousness. Let's be ambiguous, let's break with the taboo of ambiguity, as something we permit ourselves only in dreams, like incest. Let's be ambiguous, not as something involuntary, but full of intention, as an objective; let's assume the ridiculous and failure as options in the move toward growth and self-knowledge. Against order, against precision, against the rigidity of putting on a play, against the solemnity of Mexican theater, I propose ambiguity, not in order to achieve a "theatre of the masses," but to satisfy the vital necessity-like that of eating-of public expression. [Rodríguez quoted in Seligson quoted in Constantino 189… one's gotta love the nomadism of this citation!]
Ambiguity in this formulation, then, does not dismantle national performatives, but points toward inherent paradoxes, ironies, role-reversals, cross-dressing in these performatives' templates (the ghostly remains of alternatives inherent in "the hegemonic"/"the normative"). Additionally, as an addendum to a farcical methodology, it makes a pastiche of parody. Indeed, one could trace a tacking movement throughout Felipe and Rodríguez's hundreds of shows in the space of El Hábito, in the contents of their street actions, and in their varied public appearances (on behalf of PRD candidates, in defense of the Zapatistas, in the gay and lesbian movement, in the name of various feminist interventions, including their regular written and musical contributions to the Mexican journal Debate feminista). I choose to examine one of their recent farcical productions Los hijos de Freud because it underscores the spectatorial and specter-like relationship between "comedy" and "tragedy" that situates the pair's humor in the postmodern camp of farce--that which refutes Fredric Jameson's claims that postmodernism approximates, "the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible" (1998: 5).
Au contraire, Los hijos de Freud (Pastorela inconsciente)/The Children of Freud (An Unconscious/ Thoughtless Pastoral) (2000) by Carmen Boullosa and Jesusa Rodríguez pushes the absurd to an extreme, generating an environment in which pastiche itself is the medium and object of parody. To begin, the play's title alludes to, not only the relation between psychoanalytic theory and drama (one might surmise this to mean to each's attentions to repetition), but, to the common Mexicanism "hijos de la chingada"/ "children of the fucked (woman)," Oscar Lewis' classic ethnography The Children of Sánchez (1961) and to the more recent Mexican public obsession with "Los hijos de Fox," President-elect (a PAN candidate when the play was written) Vicente Fox's adopted children. In fact, the title's excessive citationality sets the tone for the entire production, which pivots upon the power of the pun, albur, and double-entendre. The Children of Freud clarifies "farce" as a noun AND verb (in English), its function as both "a light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot" (noun) and that, which "makes (something) more acceptable (as a literary work) by padding or spicing" (verb) (where the second definition might epitomize Rodríguez's description of cabaret as a molcajete, her pronouncement's inherent baroque-like qualities). In addition, the play splices into itself various mass cultural references.
The Children of Freud opens with a mockumentary, "John Houston's film Freud, a Secret Passion, with the script written by Jean-Paul Sartre" (Boullosa and Rodríguez 2000, 301). A voiceover in Spanish speaks of "three blows to Man's vanity": Copernicus' revolution, Darwin's theory of evolution, and Freud's discovery of the unconscious. When the brief video-clip ends, the audience is introduced to what will be the stage's division: Dr. Freud's and Dr. Scholl's two areas of consultation. In Freud's office, we find Ernesto Zedillo, the then-president of Mexico, discussing his marriage and public policy with Freud, where Freud is played by Jesusa Rodríguez and Zedillo by an actor in El Hábito's company. Yet, while Rodríguez offers live dialogue, the second actor lipsynchs clips from Zedillo's presidential campaign materials, the standard politician's lines. So, to questions like Dr. Freud's, "Once in awhile do you watch pornographic films?" (my translation, ibid: 302), Zedillo generically responds, "For us, for my wife and myself, it is a great pleasure" (ibid). This opening sets the tone for the entire play, which offers a scathing critique of the new PRI's advocacy of neoliberalism and its recyclical attentions to various cultural nationalisms, including a psychoanalytic nationalism (made famous in and by Ramos and Paz's classic meditations on Mexican character/Mexicanidad).
The plotline of the work is loose, to say the least. If Dr. Freud counsels illustrious members of the PRI, Dr. Scholl administers to the country itself, noting that "this patient has the worst looking feet that he has seen in his 132,800 clinics" (ibid). Dr Scholl assures, "Your feet will soon cease to be autochthonous fast-food" (ibid: 303), although the good doctor simultaneously admits to Freud, "I think that these adorably destroyed feet are a good sign that a new era is commencing for Dr. Scholl's clinics in Mexico. What I want to do is improve my holdings (literally "mi economía") in Mexico…" (303). Dr. Scholl's admission represents the occasion for one of the play's many wordgames; for Freud's response to his colleague, "Mmm, aquí todo es econosuya"/"Mmm, here everything is your holdings (where the pun is on the word 'economía in Scholls' admission) …" (303). Quickly, then, The Children of Freud establishes a tension--specter- versus spectatorship. If initially one might identify the play as addressing "specters of Freud," one soon suffers the sense of having been corrected-that The Children of Freud marks the relationship between these specters and "specters of Marx," insofar as Jacques Derrida suggests, "Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly of the ghost" (1994: 45).
Viewing this production, one is left with the sneaking suspicion that although Dr. Scholl and Dr. Freud both seem to represent "foreign" interests/investments in Mexico, Dr. Freud perhaps best approximates the apparatus of the official state party PRI, ready to sign away either of his daughters to his colleague for half of Scholl's clinical fortune (although one might need to take into account the concept of transference here). But, the kinship diagrams are more incestuous than such a facile reading would permit: As the play progresses, Dr. Scholl falls in and out of love with Ana's extraordinary fecundity in favor of Sofía's eccentricities. Meanwhile, Freud is pushed to the brink of confession in the work's penultimate scene. Admitting to being the "madre varón"/male mother (Boullosa and Rodríguez 2000: 314) of Ana, Sofía, and Dr. Scholl, he asks in gut-wrenching camp, "How could it be that my perverse polymorphism sprinkled with hysterical symptoms governed reality to the point that it enabled me to have three children?" (ibid: 313). The confession brings Freud to his pseudo-deathbed, or rather, death on his own office's divan (a peculiar form of autoanalysis), which precludes the revelation of the results of his investigations as to why "Mexicans rob so much and among themselves, treating the State as a father castrator…" (ibid: 315).
Of course, the thematic of "thieving Mexicans" is introduced early on in the production's plotline in both Freud's asides to the audience and by Liliana Felipe, as the native-informant lesbian, affectionately referred to as the "Gurugay" (read Guru gay), the only one who seems to be able to make any sense of the curious position Freud finds himself in (robbed of his Mont Blanc pen) and "symbolically of his masculinity" (ibid: 309). One would be tempted to interpret Felipe's appearance as being something like the opposite of "comic relief," i.e. she's a reality-check for the comic-gone-ballistic, stepping in and laughing with the audience at the absolute ludicrousness of Freud's project to uncover the origins of "Mexican kleptomania," "before departing from this world" (ibid: 308). But, things keep disappearing: The feet of Dr. Scholl's patient, Dr. Scholl's socks, Ana's Body Shop brassiere, Dr. Freud's hypnotic state that the Gurugay had put him in, Sofia's "balls" (oops, someone has to tell her she didn't have any to begin with), the waiter's tips (this happens when the play is presented in El Hábito), the Gurugay's tampon… the list goes on and on. What the Gurugay does reveal is what the disappearances all have in common: Prior to the loss of each person's possession(s), someone mentioned the name Oscar Espinosa Villarreal. The "hysteria" of the production, then, has to do with disappearances, which establish correspondences between money, the body, and the vanishing nation. Moreover, because hysteria's such a loaded gun (gendered in Freud's oeuvre), inevitably The Children of Freud cannot resist pilfering the discourse of clinical (ef)feminization to parody parallel anxieties about the nation. In a veritable paeon to the hysterical Woman, Felipe sings, "Las histéricas somos lo máximo!/Extraviadas, voyeristas, seductoras, compulsivas/finas divas arrojadas al diván de Freud y de Lacan./Ay! Segismundo, cuánta vanidad!/infantiloide y malsano el orgasmo clitoriano? Ay! Segismundo, cuánta vaginalidad,/el orgasmo clitoriano se te escapa de la mano./Ay! Segismundo de tan macho ya no encaja/no me digas que el placer es pura paja" (sorry, I'm hesitant to translate this, it's just so good in Spanish, one's inclined to want to hum it all day long… Priego, Rodríguez & Felipe 2000: 317), poking simultaneous fun at Freudian and Lacanian constructions of femininity, feminist essentializations of the feminine (and, of course, referencing perhaps the most famous soliloquy of Spanish drama, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's rumination on life as dream/simulacrum). The location of this song sutures "the hysterical" to "the national"-suggesting an alternative, perhaps additional, diagnosis for postmodernism(s) as periodization, apiece with the work's polymorphous attentions to pastiche AND parody.
Indeed, parody as pastiche (pastiche as parody) flies so fast and furious in this production, it's hard to keep track of the play's objects of critique; but, this, of course, is the point: To resist identitarian narratives, one can't dwell too long in any of their hospitalities-a suggestion, itself illustrative of Rodríguez's pragmatic approach to
-isms. Rodríguez notes, "I think that any sectarianism--nationalism, for instance--is useful at a particular moment but the following day it might be useless and we have to jettison it. I think that we often fall in love with an idea and the idea is a dead one and we are still in love with it" (Rodríguez in Franco 1994: 172). What Rodríguez does ultimately hold an allegiance to is a belief in the I.Q. level of "the popular" and or practices, which improvise, appropriate, recycle. Yet, rather than viewing these practices via the so-called neutrality of postmodern pastiche-Rodríguez and Felipe claim to convert the popular into the modicum of political critique by generating high-low hybridizations. Reassembling (versus disassembling, or simply, resembling) constructions of femininity, "high art," consumer culture, and the Mexican political party PRI, The Children of Freud does not separate its parodic analysis of popular culture or critical theory from its critique of political economy. Leaving nothing iconic, it even ironizes the very lesbian iconicity it offers up, commenting on El Hábito's signature appropriation of the School of Fontainebleau's 16th century (anonymous), sometimes called "Portrait of the Beautiful Gabrielle and the Maréchale de Balagny" (the theatre-bar's logo reconstructs this classic, its two women, one pinching the nipple of the other). Freud explains to Ana and Sofia, "This painting documents the horrible syndrome of breast envy, which only happens to human beings like you two who had a male mother" (Boullosa and Rodriguez 2000: 314). But, perhaps, The Children of Freud's spastic performance of "sacrilege" is only meant to prepare its audience for its final mandated suspension of disbelief.
The play's close takes the liberty of bringing back together the pieces of Mexico, where suddenly the cast is presented with an array of body parts neatly wrapped--the feet of Dr. Scholl's patient, the Gurugay's "chichi" (slang for breast), one of Dr. Scholl's "huevos" (slang for balls), a liver, a heart, a vagina with a pen in it ["My Mont Blanc!" Freud exclaims (ibid: 315)]. Again, the list proliferates…. And, each body part appears with a neat gift card, signed by a PRI party member or with the ransom note, "For the safe return of this person, named 'La Patria,' we are asking for 4,000,000 dollars and your unconditional vote for the new PRI…" (ibid: 315). Still the production will not end; i.e. the PRI will not have the last word. Instead, the play circles back around to its opening's form (and contents), presenting a final video cut-this time in English with Spanish subtitles. Bookending the mockumentary that opens The Children of Freud, the clip offers up its ultimate diagnosis (a periodization of a Mexican present):
Today, in the year 2000, at last we have generated the final change that humanity awaited, the fourth. The ultimate blow to the conscious. We have to accept that we are no longer the same. Before, we believed that robbery and degradation was the product of seventy years of paternalism. Now, thanks to Francisco Labastida Ochoa (the then PRI party candidate for President) we know that corruption is a conscious act that exists in a region darker than our collective unconscious that could rule our very lives. This is the story of the descent of Labastida and his wife to a region darker than hell: The new PRI. But this is another story…. (again, please note this is my translation, ibid: 316)
What's to be made of this postscript (that "another story" it references)? Moreover, what are we to make of it in light of my attempts to link Rodríguez and Felipe's efforts to discussions of the postmodern [when Roselyn Constantino has cautioned against this elsewhere, "One might argue that her work is postmodern or Brechtian, but Rodríguez emphasizes that her choices have more to do with Mexican history, culture, and people than with broader aesthetic or theoretical discussions" (2000a: 63)]? Here's the abridged version of an argument (which for now, is aware of, but does not begin to address, the skepticism exhibited by a variety of scholars concerning the relationship between the postmodern and the minoritarian and the debates regarding the possibilities of postmodernism in Latin America. I did highlight the word abridged): Fredric Jameson tries to make a distinction between pastiche and parody in periodizing postmodernism. While acknowledging that pastiche and parody depend upon mimicry, imitation, he argues parody "capitalizes on the uniqueness" of modernisms "to cast ridicule on the private nature of these stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness and eccentricity with respect to the way people normally speak or write" (1998: 4). In contrast, he contends, "pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor" (ibid: 5). I wonder: Do we really need to generate another divide? Is it possible that certain cultural producers might engage in pastiche and parody to the extent that they would play the pair off of one another? And, if that were the case, then, could we suggest, "There's something funny about postmodernism…"? In the context of Felipe and Rodríguez's work the combination of pastiche and parody do not require that the spectator decide whether their work is EITHER "postmodern" OR concerned with "Mexican history, culture…." Instead, the pair's methodology (re)produces the genre of farce as a medium through which to channel and critique "modernization, post-industrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism" (ibid: 3). As such the pair's efforts depend upon and illuminate the haunting effects of "the sins of neoliberalism," paving the way for speculations concerning a postmodern Mexican situated consciousness, which approaches its ectoplasmic subject matter through the lens of a keenly-developed sense of humor.
Works cited
Berman, Sabina. Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud. Mexico: Ediciones El Milagro, 2001.
Boullosa, Carmen and Jesusa Rodríguez. Los hijos de Freud (Pastorela inconsciente). Debate Feminista 21 (2000):
301-318.
Constantino, Roselyn. "Visibility as Strategy: Jesusa Rodríguez's Body in Play." Corpus Delecti: Performance Art
of the Americas, Ed. Coco Fusco. London: Routledge: 2000a.
---. "Jesusa Rodríguez: An Inconvenient Woman." Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 11:2 # 22
(2000b): 183-212.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Franco, Jean. "A Touch of Evil: Jesusa Rodríguez's Subversive Church." Negotiating Performance: Gender,
Sexuality & Theatricality in Latin/o America, Eds. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham: Duke U.P.,
1994. 159-175.
García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridias. México: Grijalbo, 1990.
Gutiérrez, Laura G.. "The Economics of Excess: Nation, Melodrama, and Sexuality in Contemporary Mexican Performance." Performance, Spectacle, and Dramatic Writing in Mexico. MLA Convention. Sheraton, New York.
29 Dec. 2002.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.
Lewis, Oscar. The Children of Sánchez:Autobiography of a Mexican Family. New York: Random House, 1961.
Marx, Karl. Selected Writings, Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977.
Priego, María Teresa and Jesusa Rodríguez (words) and Liliana Felipe (music). "Las Histéricas." Debate Feminista
21 (2000): 319-320.
Rodríguez, Jesusa. Interview with the author. 4/7/01. México, D.F..