Only Joking? Gustavo Sainz and La princesa del Palacio de Hierro: Funniness, Identity and the Post- Boom

The Mexican Gustavo Sainz has been seen as one of the initiators of the Latin American Post-Boom, largely because of the humor, accessibility and interest in popular culture that characterize some of his work and are often said to characterize the Post-Boom in general. His 1974 novel La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (The Princess of the Iron Palace) is a representative case. However, the Post-Boom's incorporation of "popular" elements within a relatively sophisticated "new novel" framework is a highly problematic process. This can be seen, in this novel, in the broad relationship of the "funny" and the "serious." The protagonist appears to revel in her comic account of transgressive adventures while revealing her simultaneous socialization into the norms of family and gender that are seemingly transgressed. At the same time, her own "fun" narration (transgressive of frivolous) is problematized further by the commentary of an implied author, figured as an intellectual and, possibly, a male. The function of the novel's humor thus emerges as both to transgress and mark the transgression, creating an interplay between the desire to affirm identity and an awareness that all identity is a construction based on hierarchical models. It is this sense of the contingency of identity that perhaps underlies the shift in emphasis and textual character represented by the Post-Boom. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss1/8 Only Joking? Gustavo Sainz and La princesa del Palacio de Hierro: Funniness, Identity and the Post-Boom Philip Swanson Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London If there is anything approaching a consensus on what distinguishes the Post-Boom from the Boom in Latin America, it would appear to have something to do with the relative accessibility of the former in reaction to (or, at least, in contrast with) the narrative complexity of the latter. In particular, this supposed accessibility is often related to the incorporation of humor and elements from popular culture.' The 1974 novel La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (The Princess of the Iron Palace) by the Mexican Gustavo Sainz, with its foregrounding of "pop" or youth culture, its playfully colloquial language and its apparent sense of fun, would therefore seem to be a perfect representative of the Post-Boom.' It betrays most of the characteristics that Antonio Skarmeta has seen as typical of this new generation of writers (see Shaw 88-89), and Donald Shaw himself, following the line of Sainz's contemporary and compatriot Jose Agustin, even regards Sainz, rather than (as is often claimed) Manuel Puig, as the key initiator ofthis trend in the Post-Boom (90). However, while it may be tempting simply to see a work like La princesa del Palacio de Hierro as a funculture rites-of-passage novel, the entire question of the Post -Boom's attempted incorporation of humor and pop(ular) culture is highly problematic. One has but to think of some of the transitional novels of major Latin American authors: Puig's El beso de la mujer arafia (Kiss of the Spiderwoman) (1976) where there is considerable instability in the relationship of the appealing and revalorizing popular movie narrations of the subaltern protagonist and the more "difficult" and "knowing" narrative structure of the text as a whole; Mario Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) (1978) where the popular perspective in an essentially entertaining 1 Swanson: Only Joking? Gustavo Sainz and La princesa del Palacio de Hierro: Published by New Prairie Press 102 STCL, Volume 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1995) novel is undermined by the ending's inscription of the power and authority of a mature "serious" author; or Carlos Fuentes' La cabeza de la hidra (The Hydra Head) (1978), another Mexican urban novel, where a (spoof?) spy-thriller plot line is combined uneasily with both literary self-reflexivity and external referentiality.3 La princesa del Palacio de Hierro may prove to be similarly less straightforward than at first sight. The most basic level of criticism would already seem to suggest this. The novel (and the more general phenomenon of the Onda or "Scene" with which Sainz was in the past associated) has been seen as either funny or serious, as a trivial glorification of youth culture or as a critical commentary on its underlying values.4 Perhaps a key to this uncertainty is the question of "funniness." Following Susan Purdie's terminology, wherein "joking" can be termed to refer to those occasions where the characteristic effect of "funniness" is generated, and glossing Lacan, "joking paradigmatically involves a discursive exchange whose distinctive operation involves the marked transgression of the Symbolic Law and whose effect is thereby to constitute jokers as 'masters' of discourse" (5).5 This idea of joking discourse operating as "the aberrant case whose marking defines the central field" (Purdie 158) provides a valuable inroad into the "problem" of reading Sainz' s novel. In it the unnamed protagonist (the Princess of the title) gives an account of a series of comic adventures in which she transgresses the norms of family and gender while simultaneously inserting herself within them. Moreover, her transgressive narration is possibly neutralized by an implied commentary by an implied author to an implied reader. Yet, at the same time, the appeal of the bulk of the novel to the reader must rest upon the very transgressiveness oftheprincesa and her narration. Thus writing and reading (or speaking and listening) emerge, like notions of gender and family, as means of structuring reality, while those very processes, and the relationships between them, are concurrently problematized. It is frequently remarked that the shift from the modern to the postmodern is a shift from epistemology to ontology. In a parallel way, the slippage from Boom to Post-Boom may reveal, behind all the apparent transparency of the latter, a break with the "totalizing" tendency of the Latin American "new novel" and a surging mood of insecurity before an increasingly contingent sense of identity. A commonplace, by now, of much contemporary critical theory is that identity is constructed rather than given. The very title of La princesa del Palacio de Hierro suggests this. The protagonist has no name to individualize her, but simply a title or definition of her role 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 19, Iss. 1 [1995], Art. 8 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol19/iss1/8 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1364