asserts a woman's rights to an estranged linguistic property as her personal possession but is also involved in a makingone's-own of oneself, of realigning alienating categories, and of creating a new understanding of what is proper in the careful and intentional use of improprieties. 'Apropriamiento' is the public assertion of rights to that personal and private space. It is to take that which has been assigned to another for her own, for the first time to take herself and take for herself the woman customarily appropriated by another as his property. 'To take' and not 'to take back': the original appropriation — of words, of bodies, of power — is credited to human nature. It is an insight that can be extended to other kinds of appropriation as well.
Thus, in Doris Sommer's words, referring to the politically active women of Bolivia's 'Housewives' Committee,' 'These women who take up men's tools also use language in a way that doesn't fall into a 'visceral emptiness' [Elaine Marks's term] but rather adjusts and challenges the very codes they adopted from their admirable men.' These are far too busy and far too committed to worry about emptiness other than the emptiness of their children's stomachs. Nevertheless, they provide a concrete instance of the practice taken up at more theoretical or abstract levels: traditionally marginalized writers take up both tools and language, and in so doing forge new instru-641- mentalities. In the Latin American context, as Valenzuela reminds us, a subtle transformation occurs with the appropriation of critical weapons — she calls it an injection of estrogen into dominant ideologies — so that when the sensitized readers — male or female — look again at canonical texts — male or female authored — they too begin to appropriate the texts differently. Texts like those of Luisa Valenzuela, Reina Roffé, or Manuel Puig that subtly employ heterosexist/masculinist assumptions against themselves require attentive gender- conscious readings with special urgency. It is this type of reading that they were prematurely born to elicit, and are in fact eliciting in the interstices of even the most traditional critical discourse, marginally undermined along the double-voiced fault lines of what is said to be, of what is called, of the preemptive 'as if' of an incomparable, unexpected appropriation.
For Francine Masiello, Latin American writing at its best displays what she calls, following Bakhtin, a 'double discourse,' a hybrid language 'that recognizes the structures of power at the same time that it offers an alternative.' In Julieta Campos's work, the discourse is never solely double, never offers only one alternative. Then, too, her best work links the recognition of social and political structures of power to a forceful recognition of the equally significant rhetorical structures that are among power's essential building blocks. Furthermore, her reader is not complicitous but embattled, engaged in a struggle for control within the universe of the fiction. The novel, says Campos in her Función de la novela (1973; Function of the Novel), 'is a reality created by the word and the fabula, a constant gestation of…an estar siendo, a gerundial universe where the author, the characters, and even the reader fight incessantly for life.' The point here is precisely the unorthodox and untranslatable play between the two Spanish verbs of being, ser and estar. English uses the gerund 'being' to represent the noun; in Spanish the infinitive is employed: 'el ser' (never 'el estar'). Campos's proposition of a gerundial form, 'un estar siendo,' brings together the two modes of being, both the gerundial and the infinitive — responding to cultural as well as linguistic imperatives — and brings together as well two nuances of existing, a peculiarly Spanish shade of meaning, one the shadow-dreamreflection of the other, and does so in a world that slips in and out -642- of conventional fictional illusions, or slides from the illusions of fiction to the illusions of 'reality.'
Deeply problematized in the rereading of the body's poetic topography is the role of the reader or viewing public. The audience's gaze upon these public/private spectacles is hypothetically voyeuristic, but the issue becomes more complicated because the circuit of exchange involves a recognition of the audience as voyeur looking upon a primal scene of narcissistic self-contemplation that is, nevertheless, a staged scene, meant to be overlooked. In the archetypal economy, the man (lover, writer, critic) reads (seduces/is seduced by, writes, interprets) woman (the mistress, the work of art, the text). But what happens where 'you' is a female reader? Is the text unreadable? Does the reader automatically reposition herself as a transvestite? Is the female reader a she posing as a he posing as a she?
One of the most extended and concrete explorations of this problematic can be found in Julieta Campos's novel Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina (1974; She Has Red Hair and Her Name Is Sabina). In this novel, written almost entirely in the conditional tense and in the subjunctive mood for verbs (an observation already made by Alicia Rivero Potter), writers, critics, editors, readers, and commentators proliferate around a single character — a woman — and a single action — looking out to sea. One of the voices tells us that the only certainty in the novel is the one given in the title, that is, that the woman has red hair and her name is Sabina. Readers external to the text are inclined to believe this voice, if only because the assertion reappears in both French and Spanish and is reinserted on the cover and the title page of the book. There is, certainly, no other reason for accepting this assertion over any of the other contingent, inconsistent, and contradictory assertions made in the book about the woman, her present circumstances, and her past. My own inclination would be to discount the assertion 'she has red hair and her name is Sabina,' like all the other parallel assertions made in the text about the woman, her life, attitudes, genealogy, etc., as totally gratuitous. In fact, I would argue that the primary narrative node generating the text is not the title phrase but another also seemingly straightforward statement, also frequently reiterated, this one couched not in the third but in the first person: 'I am a character that looks out to sea at four in -643- the afternoon…from a scenic overlook in Acapulco.' This single assertion is the crucial starting point for the adventure of reading and writing, what Stephen Heath calls the 'scriptural' of narrative in this text. From this statement depends, first of all, a nonsystematic sequence of relationships among the various agents of the verb: 'I' refracts into 'you' (both the informal 'tú' and the formal 'usted'), as well as into 'he' and 'she.' 'I,' 'you,' 'he,' 'she,' and intermittent 'we' and 'they' in turn serve as nodes organizing a proliferation of other characters, or character-positions, some of whom carry on dialogues with each other, some of whom ignore each other's existence, some of whom contradict each other or logically cancel each other out, some of whom occupy the space of the subject in near-simultaneity: 'The novel that she, I, you would write begins at last to displace the other, the one that he would be writing.' Likewise, the concept of 'character' itself serves as another nodal juncture. At one extreme, the reader could suggest that the novel has only one character, the woman who looks out to sea and whose entire fictional existence is consumed in that gaze; at the other, the various novelists, readers, critics, editors, and characters from other novels (by Campos, by other contemporary Latin American and European writers: the novel is to some extent a postmodern literary detective's delightful garden of allusive clues) impinge and infringe upon this space, gazing (voyeuristically) at her, defining and interpreting her look, situating her in a particular fictional construct that says more about the needs and desires of the narrator/reader/critic/literary canon than it does about the simple action of gazing out to sea. In the same manner, the sea becomes, at different moments, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean; four o'clock in the afternoon indistinguishably fades into other times, 'It's twenty to ten…. It is midnight and/or it is noon'; the overlook may be a dock, a hotel room window, or an imagined/remembered scene; Acapulco is Havana, New York, Venice, a movie backdrop.
For Campos, the operative metaphor for the surface/depth discussion can be found in her obsession with the sea. One could attempt to argue that the sea is both feminine and explicitly maternal in her work. Sabina, for example, is dedicated 'to Terina de la Torre, my mother,' and the dedication page is followed by an epigraph from Chateaubriand: 'Je reposerai donc au bord de la mer que j'ai tant-644- aimée' [I will rest beside the sea I loved so much]. The juxtaposition of dedication and epigraph suggests the familiar and much-exploited play on 'la mer' (sea) and 'la mère' (mother). Such a reading is plausible, but requires nuancing. At this point, let me just say that while the images of the sea, repeated throughout Campos's work, are associated with the female characters, the sea itself, while beautiful and strangely compelling for Campos's female characters, is not itself particularly feminized. It is in no wise a metaphor for an imagined maternal depth, but rather a metaphor of the more generalized human need for surfacing from meaningless voids. The sea, simply, is the place where a human being must remain afloat to live, and the depths of the sea bring not enlightenment but death: 'And it involves telling something it is because one supposes that things happen that do not explain themselves and that look for words in order to come to the surface [para salir a flote] like someone on the point of drowning looks for a piece of wood to grab onto and hold oneself up.'
The reader, constantly, is called upon to respond to the experience of reading by the same chorus of contradictory voices that determine the labyrinthine structure of the self-conscious text. Clearly, this novel, like
