The Paradox of Narrative Seduction in Carmen Riera's Cuestión de amor propio

Purdue University

Critics and theorists have commonly equated literature and erotics: the pleasure of the text has been tied to its seductive powers, its capacity to elicit desire in the reader¹². For Roland Barthes, the reader is «a site of bliss» that the narrator must seek out, a site wherein lies «the possibility of a dialectics of desire» (4). Peter Brooks and Ross Chambers, inspired by structuralism, have set forth narratological models based on their understanding of the dynamics of erotic desire. Feminist critics and cultural theorists alike have related the process of narrative seduction, as well as the erotic metaphor itself, more directly to questions of power and of authority¹³. As Chambers suggests, the narrative act is never innocent in that it always establishes a power relationship between the addresser and the addressee(s) within a concrete communicational context (5).

It is a commonplace to say that all narrative acts presume the presence of an audience, either real or imagined. This audience represents the Other that the narrator must seduce in order to affirm his or her narrative authority and to «ensure his or her survival as storyteller». Thus, in order for narrative to exist, the desire of another must be inscribed in the discourse itself (Chambers 214; 218). According to Chambers, the textual inscription of another's desire often gives rise to a paradox. The Other has been created to lend authority to the narrator; yet, the Other -as an admittedly fictional construct- inevitably leads to the exposure of the narrative mechanisms upon which the narrator's seductive power depends in the first place. In specifically literary communication, this paradox often becomes foregrounded in the form of a self-reflexive discourse.

Cuestión de amor propio, a short epistolary novel by the contemporary Catalan author Carmen Riera, exemplifies a self-conscious text that dramatizes the paradox of narrative Seduction on various levels. The entire novella takes the form of a single letter written by the female protagonist, Angela Caminals, and addressed to her friend Ingrid in Scandinavia. Angela recounts, in an apparently confessional mode, her whirlwind love affair with a writer (Miguel), from which she emerges disillusioned and desirous of revenge. Yet this seemingly straightforward «confession» is the conscious creation of a writer -for Angela, too, is a novelist- who manipulates literary language in order to involve her reader in a complex narrative game. Angela's account of her seduction by Miguel can be seen as a subtext that reflects the seductive intention of her own epistle. Erotic and narrative seduction are thus inseparable.

The epistolary form of Riera's novel foregrounds the mechanisms by which the processes of erotic and narrative seduction mirror each other. As a critic, Riera conceives of the letter -which she characterizes in terms of its seductive intent- as a model for all literature: «ambas [la literatura y la carta] van a la búsqueda de un destinatario ... con el objeto de captar su atención y, si es posible, atraerle y aún persuadirle ... La literatura, como la carta amorosa se engendra en el deseo» («Grandeza y miseria» 148). The narrative

––––––––   282   ––––––––

structure of the epistolary form, like that of any other literary form, defines the relationship between the text and its performative context (or, as Chambers would put it, between narrative and narrative situation) in a unique way. First, the epistolary form allows for a constant and explicit presence of the narratee, the recipient of the narrative within the text. In Cuestión de amor propio, the narratee is Ingrid, Angela's confidante, whom the letter sets out to seduce -metaphorically speaking- with her version of the story, and whose complicity she seeks in planning revenge against Miguel. In order to carry out her seduction, Angela masks her intention by creating a duplicitous discourse. Yet duplicity, by definition, is self-betraying: the overdetermined nature of duplicitous discourse inevitably leads to the loss of authority, because it calls attention to its condition as language. Riera's novel dramatizes this paradox: the literary devices -the conventions of the epistolary form, intertextual references, clichés of romantic literature, among others- through which Angela seeks to achieve narrative authority ultimately lead to the dismantling of this power.

This paradox is evident from the very first pages of Angela's letter. As is characteristic of most epistolary beginnings, these pages establish the basic context of the communication: the long silence of the protagonist, Ingrid's anger at her silence, the close friendship between the two women, and references to the highly personal, even confessional nature of the account to follow. After a brief apology to her friend for her silence, Angela begins with a justification of her communicational medium -the letter- rather than launching directly into the «confidencias» that she promises. Significantly, while she justifies her choice of narrative medium -letter, as opposed to a phone conversation or a surprise visit to Ingrid's residence- for apparently practical reasons, she nevertheless dwells obsessively on the unreliable nature of this medium. Referring to the letter form as «este intermediario convencional», the narrator claims to distrust the lack of complicity that she finds in it: «puesto que escamotea todos los matices que quisiera conjugar con las palabras» (12)¹⁴. Yet even as she writes these lines, she takes advantage of the conventionality of this medium by setting a scene for her narrative based on the language of romantic literature: «La luz otoñal de un fugaz atardecer, la penumbra opalina de las cuatro de la tarde que tanto detestas hubieran propiciado el inicio de las confidencias mejor» (12). Similarly, in the following paragraph, she maintains her desire to be «directa y explícita» with her correspondent, soon after she calls attention to her «letra» as a literal -and metaphorical- mask behind which she is in the habit of concerning herself (13). In fact, by explicitly comparing the ink of her pen to her promised confession, Angela unwittingly reveals that experienced reality cannot exist independently of the linguistic form that it takes. The narration that she presents as a sincere confession is, in reality, a highly self-conscious construct of language through which she seeks to elicit the narratee's sympathy.

After reflecting upon the narrative medium of the epistle, Angela continues for several pages in what she calls the «preamble» to her story. In these pages, she consciously imitates romantic literature -whose model, significantly, is in Goethe's epistolary novel Werther- making use of such literary elements as the topos of sincerity, the motif of ineffability, and the pathetic fallacy. The predominance of these elements not only alerts the reader to the essentially literary nature of Angela's entire narration, but also poses questions concerning the relationship between reality and its linguistic representation. «Lo que escribo o digo es pálido reflejo de lo que quiero expresar» (18), she writes, affirming the incapacity of language to express reality; yet the self-consciously literary nature of her epistle renders doubtful the existence of any personal reality previous to language. The reader is ultimately unable to separate what the narrator considers to be real experience from the fictions that she deliberately invents in her novels. Her words, «la literatura es poco más que las palabras» (18), then, applies equally to the confession that we are about to read.

The «preamble» to Angela's account allows the reader a glimpse into her vision of reality. In a digression that sets the narrator's character in direct opposition to that of her correspondent, Angela professes her aversion to the strong Mediterranean light for which Ingrid is so nostalgic. «Esa rabiosa luz del sur ... resulta un obstáculo», she says, «porque nos muestra con crudeza lascas, aristas, protuberancias, y sin disimulos, con la máxima precisión, nos hace caer en la cuenta de que los objetos tienen perfiles ásperos, los vegetales tallos escabrosos y todo, o casi todo, muestra la agresividad del cuchillo...» (14-15). Using the romantic archetype of the Nordic versus the Mediterranean temperament, she adds: «¡Cuando más deseable me resulta el nimbo con que la penumbra invade las regiones del norte,

––––––––   283   ––––––––

los tonos difuminados que acercan los objetos y acortan las distancias!» (15). The narrator associates light with the uncovering of the mask of dissimulation through which she desires to view reality, and expresses her preference for the «penumbra» that veils the sharp outlines of the world around her. Considering the transparency of truth to be irreconcilable with the imaginative possibilities of romantic fiction, she questions the traditional tendency to privilege «light» -as a metaphor for truth- over «shadow» -as a metaphor for deception. Furthermore, her language suggests an identification between light, as a logocentric metaphor for truth, and the phallocentric economy of masculine sexuality: «a causa de esa poderosa luz, el mundo que divisamos parece erizado, como si estuviera en perpetua erección» (15)¹⁵. Once the world -and the word- achieves the «fullness» of erection, the possibility of textual pleasure and hence of fictional creation must come to an end.

The narrator's vision of reality, then, determines the process by which she transforms it into literary form. Significantly, she writes about her love affair not while she is undergoing the experience, but nearly a year after the fact. She underscores, furthermore, that she was «incapaz de escribir una sola línea» while she was involved in her amorous relationship with Miguel (19). For Angela, as for Wordsworth, the act of writing is «an overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility». The precondition for writing lies in the distance between experience and memory, as the narrator herself acknowledges. In her words, only «historias que ... somos capaces de transformar en un recuerdo hermoso» are worth living for, and she adds that her literary vocation was engendered by the creative possibilities of memory (17). Thus by the time Angela actually sets down her experience in writing, her original passion is little more than a pretext for the act of textual self-transformation through which she seeks to carry out her narrative seduction.

As a writer, Angela is intellectually aware that all narration is a form of erotic seduction. «Toda escritura es una carta de amor», she has the habit of pronouncing at literary conferences, «El texto no es más que un pretexto amoroso» (24). When she first meets Miguel, her lover-to-be, her imagination quickly transforms him into an embodiment of the writer's ideal interlocutor: «el único destinatario que me interesaba, un tú que justificaría a partir de entonces mi existencia y a quien, sin saberlo, había guardado tantas ausencias en una virginidad si no física al menos espiritual» (24). The metaphor of virginity is significant in this context, as Angela's desire for sexual fulfillment becomes inseparable from her search for the perfect «destinatario», without whom her narration cannot exist. Hence her authority as a writer, no less, is at stake in her ability to carry out her seduction of Miguel, the simultaneous object of her sexual and narrative desire. It is also worthy of note that the lovers' first acquaintance occurs at a writers' conference during a panel discussion on Clarín's La Regenta. While Miguel attributes Mesía's successful seduction of Ana Ozores to the latter's sexual frustration, Angela interprets this event in terms of the protagonist's desire to relive her only happy childhood memory: that of being told a story. Thus, by identifying seduction and narration in her interpretation of Clarín's work, she implicitly projects her own desires on the literary character. Later in her epistle the narrator appropriately describes her fear of sexual failure through the metaphor of a rare book upon which ink has been spilled: erotic failure is thus linked to textual obliteration.

Language, as the supreme instrument of the writer, serves as the means by which Angela pursues the object of her desire. Blinded by her literary imagination, she is incapable of discerning the utmost vulgarity of her situation: a 48 year-old woman pathetically in love with a married man who has an affair with her merely to satisfy his own ego. Instead, she recreates her existence in imitation of romantic texts and transforms her lover into a mirror image of herself. If Angela loses her ability to distinguish fiction and reality, Miguel, in contrast, steps into his literary role fully cognizant of his participation in a «juego de espejos» (34). By drawing on his repertoire of literary clichés (true to Angela's characterization of him as «un encantador de palabras» [27]), he is able to fabricate an idealized world that conforms to her desire. Their entire love affair is a collage of texts: from La Celestina to the works of Goethe, from the love poetry of Ausias March to that of Pedro Salinas. No form of communication takes place between the lovers without the mediation of literary language, nor is the narrator able to recreate her experience without abundant references to literary texts. At one point, Angela's imagination takes her to such an extreme that she even envisions, at Miguel's suggestion, the biographer's pen that is to engrave their love story into posterity.

What Angela considers to be the perfect love affair comes to an abrupt end when Miguel disappears from the scene following their first and last night together. For Angela, the unhappy conclusion of their relationship means more than the loss of a real lover: even worse for her pride as a writer, she has completely lost control over the literary fiction that she has created around her love affair. Several days later, after she sees Miguel with another woman in a magazine photo, she feels an obsessive need to recollect, analyze, and interpret the various signs in their relationship in order to make sense out of «ese final tan inesperado» (50). After reading and rereading his letters and novels, in which she sees a reflection of his true character, she begins to suspect that the real Miguel is no more than a duplicitous text that he has constructed by manipulating her desires. After all, she rationalizes, his literary vocation demands that he fabricate fictions, lies. Echoing the words of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, she affirms: «Ya sé que el poeta es un fingidor, que tiene incluso la obligación de serlo y que es en ese fingimiento donde debe mostrarse sincero» (48). She admires his ability to seduce his reader with empty words, with a «retahíla de falsedades»: «Y me sedujo, como siempre, el habilísimo manejo de los registros lingüísticos», she confesses (49). According to her interpretation, Miguel has relegated her to being a mere object of his (erotic and narrative) desire: he has seduced his lover in the same way that he recruits, as a creator of literary texts, the desire of his reader. Once the seductive act is completed, Angela is left with no more than the words to recreate her love affair: «[Miguel] Había escrito nuestra relación, no la había vivido. Tal vez ni él ni yo éramos otra cosa que un montón de palabras que ahora, de repente, se derrumbaba con dolor, ruido y furia para aplastamos» (49).

Yet Angela cannot fully accept the realization that she is about to be buried among the ruins of these words in which she once had complete faith. For some time after Miguel's silence, she continues to look for signs of his love -«una carta, una llamada, una visita, cualquier signo de amor»- and to make unsuccessful attempts to recapture her past illusion through the creative powers of her memory (57-58). Only her final phone conversation with him forces her to reinterpret her recently-ended relationship, «degradándola hasta convertirla en un magma pútrido en el que sólo podían sentirse a gusto las ratas de los albañales» (62-63). After several weeks of silence, Angela receives a call from Miguel. Masking his true character behind texts once again (his first words, Angela notes, are directly from Lorca's verse), Miguel makes an effort to pursue his game of seduction once again. She soon realizes that the true purpose of his phone call is to repeat to her the damaging words purportedly pronounced by the critic Martínez Camorera: «Angela Caminals es una escritora acabada» (61). These words are devastating to her, adding to her feeling of powerlessness as creator of her identity and her world. Later, when she discovers that Miguel himself -not Camorera- has uttered these words, her worst fears are realized. Her self-doubts overwhelm her, she submits her own books to the most severe scrutiny, and she is incapacitated from writing even a single line more.

Only after she gains some distance from this episode is she able to conclude definitively: «Fui para Miguel un espejo en el que basó su estrategia de seductor» (63). When this mirror is shattered by her awakening to reality, he seeks contact with her once again (hence, the last phone call) only to «recomponer en él su imagen de seductor» (65). The metaphor of the mirror evokes not only Miguel's narcissistic character -his capacity to see only himself in the other- but also the self-reflexive world of words and texts that he has invented. His creative activity, however, is not innocent, for his underlying motive is to seduce another through a deceptive text. The game of narrative seduction in which he has been engaged is, unquestionably, a game of power. Miguel's ability to recruit his lover's desire is at the expense of her self-respect as a woman and as a writer. Angela accurately observes that with the destruction of her illusion, «moría mi capacidad seductora, aunque la suya [de Miguel] permaneciera incólume» (64). She fears that her authorial power has always been a fiction, while Miguel, through his seductive art, has succeeded in exercising his authority over her by deceiving her with the illusion of power.

The final blow is yet to come when, months later, Angela receives in the mail a dedicated copy of Miguel's most recent novel, El Canto del Cisne. Upon reading the book, she discovers that its pages contain a plotline that reproduces almost identically the course of events in her own relationship with Miguel: she finds references to her physical appearance, to her state of mind, to their conversations, and even to their correspondence. Yet to her dismay, the story -their story- turns out to resemble a folletín rather than the romantic novels on which she has modeled her

––––––––   285   ––––––––

experience. The female protagonist, an image of Angela, is a degraded heroine of romantic disillusionment; her lover, in contrast, appears as a «novelista de moda, triunfador, brillante y excesivamente inteligente» (69). Their night of lovemaking, which her imagination has idealized to no end, is completely trivialized in the novel. Even the tide of the novel smacks of cursilería. Having inscribed his interpretation of events -his fiction- into writing, Miguel's authority seems to be complete. Angela, in contrast, has twice been the victim of her lover's seductive art: once in «life», and another time in his narration. Yet the question remains as to whether Angela, as the reader of Miguel's novel, is willing to be seduced yet another time.

Miguel's dedication to her: «Con la seguridad de que tú serás mi mejor crítico» reveals a tone of irony, even of derision; yet the literal meaning of these words is not far from the truth (68). As a reader and critic of his novel, Angela -like all readers- participates in the creation of textual meaning. She has the choice of being seduced by the text, or of somehow resisting its narrative authority. Although Miguel's novel has already been completed, the ending of her novel -the epistolary text that we are reading- has not yet been written. His text, which blurs the line between reality and fiction, becomes a metatext that mirrors the ambiguous status of Angela's own narration. She speculates that what has perhaps motivated his act of writing is: «la fascinación de comprobar hasta qué punto la literatura es, siempre, tributaria de la vida» (70). If literature is an extension of life, she realizes that she, too, holds the power to change reality through the act of writing.

Angela's epistolary activity represents her final attempt to recuperate her narrative authority. By generating her own ending to her story, she seeks to subvert Miguel's text and to regain mastery over her fictions. In order to accomplish this end, however, she needs the collaboration of another, through whose narrative seduction she will confirm her authority. This Other -Ingrid- is inscribed in the text as the reader of Angela's letter. Significantly, Ingrid is her antithesis in every respect. Angela is timid, idealistic, sentimental, and unliberated as a woman; her friend, in contrast, is emotionally strong, unimpressionable, sexually liberated, and fully capable of living by her feminist principles. Even the physical distance (between the northern and southern extremes of Europe) that separates them appropriately highlights their differences. The antithetical positioning of the two characters is important since the narrator's task is, precisely, to convince a reader whose vision of reality is likely to be alien, or even contrary, to her own. Angela's goal as narrator, then, is to bring about the reader's suspension of disbelief: only then will the process of narrative seduction be completed.

Given the structure of the epistolary form, it is inevitable that the narrator be constantly aware of the narratee's presence. At key moments in her narration, Angela anticipates her correspondent's disbelief, disapproval, or even anger, and responds to them. Such a tactic is designed to create the impression of narrative control, which Angela tries to achieve by keeping a step ahead of her reader. Furthemore, the success of her narration -and, hence, of her project of revenge- depends on Ingrid's final approval. In imitation of the picaresque convention Angela transforms the narratee into an authority figure who, after receiving «entera noticia de mi persona», is to be the final judge of her conduct (39). Yet, like the picaresque narrator, it is ultimately Angela herself who seeks authority by convincing the judge with her version of the story. Ingrid's verdict will take the form of her willingness, or unwillingness, to participate in Angela's plan of revenge against Miguel. Thus Angela manipulates her narration to this end, skillfully playing off «story» against «discourse»¹⁶. Interestingly compared to most epistles, «story» dominates throughout most of her narration, and «discourse» (an «I» that narrates directly to a «you») is kept to a minimum. The narrator is conscious that the illusion of a «story» without «discourse» holds the greatest possibility of convincing the reader through its verisimilitude. Thus Angela addresses Ingrid directly with her true motive only at the end of the letter, after she believes to have seduced her with her narration.

The real reader of Riera's novel will never know whether Ingrid will consent to her friend's request once she has finished reading the letter. We can see, however, that the overt self-consciousness of Angela's epistolary text exposes the strategies by which she seeks to carry out her narrative seduction, thus undermining her original project. The literary nature of her text ultimately betrays her duplicity and hence her unreliability as a narrator. We have already seen the countless literary texts that mediate the supposedly «direct» confession of her sentimental life. Even her experience of «disillusionment» leads her to identify herself with the protagonist

––––––––   286   ––––––––

of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, rather than forcing her to abandon the literary fictions that have led to the destruction of her self-respect in the first place. Only the reestablishment of her narrative power, if not the recovery of her previous illusions, can compensate for the damage done to her pride. Her final plan of revenge is thus a «cuestión de amor propio». She proposes that Ingrid destroy Miguel's prize just as he has done to Angela, if not through erotic seduction, through the more subtle art of verbal seduction. By convincing him that she has the inside scoop on Scandinavia when he comes to do a «reportaje», Ingrid is to deceive him with false, as well as outrageous information. Angela imagines, with satisfaction, that Miguel will most likely repeat this information in his «reportaje», thus making a fool out of himself in front of the Swedish Academy and ruining his chances of winning the Nobel prize. Angela's revenge, then, depends on her ability to beat Miguel at his own game by designing her own strategies for narrative seduction.

Ingrid has always criticized Angela for the latter's incapacity to: «dejar a un lado la literatura y apostar por la vida» 25). True to these words, the only way in which Angela knows how to live is through literature. She even describes Ingrid's final role in her plot of vengeance through the metaphor of the theater: «No en vano te has divertido con las vengadoras de su honra del teatro español ... y, mira por dónde, ahora tienes una oportunidad por persona interpuesta para interpretar ese papel» (74). She closes her epistle already anticipating the successful act of revenge carried out to the letter by Ingrid. Upon reaching the ending, the reader of the novel sees the narrator at the height of her duplicity and at the depth of her self-deception. In Angela's case, the ability to persuade the other through linguistic manipulation is not incompatible with a blindness to the mechanics of one's own desire. The identification between duplicity and self-deception produces the paradox of seduction at the center of Cuestión de amor propio. For Angela, the literary self-consciousness of her epistle is a mark of her authority as a creator of fictions. Yet for the reader, this same self-reflexivity, which lays bare the mechanisms of narrative seduction, undermines her authority as a narrator. As Angela makes a final attempt to master her narration, we are made even more aware of the supremacy of narrative desire, which ties language to an absent referent.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Baudrillard, Jean. «On Seduction». Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 149-65.

Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Random House, 1984.

Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1984.

Cixous, Hélène. «Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/ Forays». The Newly Born Woman. By Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 63-132.

De Lauretis, Teresa. «Desire in Narrative». Alice Doesn't: Feminism. Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. 103-57.

Kahane, Claire. «Seduction and the Voice of the Text: Heart of Darkness and The Good Soldier». Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric. Ed. Dianne Hunter. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989. 135-53.

Riera, Carmen. Cuestión de amor propio. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1987.

_____. «Grandeza y miseria de la epístola». El oficio de narrar. Ed. Marina Mayoral. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989. 147-58.

Winnett, Susan. «Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure». PMLA 105 (1990): 505-18.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 75, Number 2, May 1992