The Disembodied Subject: Resistance to Norms of Hegemonic Identity Construction in Carmen Naranjo’s Diario de una multitud

Costa Rica, whose civil war ended in 1948, represents a distinct literary space in which problematics of subjectivity were debated long before such dialectics appeared overtly in the rest of the isthmus. Carmen Naranjo’s novel Diario de una multitud (1974) is situated in this context, and her novel demonstrates a preoccupation with the heterogeneity of tico identity. Naranjo favors a collective representation of the urban citizenry. Through the perceptual liminality of the individual subject, the friction generated by its absence, the constant blurring that resets the boundaries of specific identities, and the disappearance of the private realm, Naranjo avoids inscribing lesbian desire. This novel has a disappeared lesbian. The urban multitudes are a spectacle of diversion that imply a mise en abyme of sexual desire, a speculation on the impossibility of liberating that desire. The blurred melancholy of the multitude replaces the blurred lesbian haunting the pages but never appearing in them. The splintered subjectivities, absence of sexual markers, and secretiveness of private lives imply the violence with which sexuality has been repressed. This study argues that denying embodiment to the subject(s) of Diario’s narration simultaneously obscures the lesbian and resists the violence that definition and even self-definition perpetrate on the subject. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/4 The Disembodied Subject: Resistance to Norms of Hegemonic Identity Construction in Carmen Naranjo’s Diario de una multitud Regan Boxwell University of Texas at Austin While the postwar period in Central America is traditionally defined in relation to the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in 1990, and the Peace Negotiations in El Salvador in 1992 and in Guatemala in 1996, Costa Rica, whose civil war ended in 1948, represents a distinct literary space in which the revolutionary problematics that engulfed the other Central American nation-states during the 1960-90 period were mostly absent. How then, do Costa Rican writers mark their beingness within the isthmus? Carmen Naranjo’s narrativity is situated in this particular context. Her 1970s literary production demonstrates a marked preoccupation with issues of identity, specifically, the heterogeneity of tico (i.e., Costa Rican) identity.1 In Diario de una multitud (1974) ‘Diary of a Multitude,’ henceforth shortened to Diario, Naranjo avoids constructing individual subjectivities in favor of collective representation of the urban citizenry. It is a fragmented text comprised of voices that alternate chaotically throughout the narrative, demonstrating the concrete lack of a privileged subjectivity. While this fragmentation serves to disorient and even unsettle the reader, leaving one without a sense of order or plot, it represents another type and form of narrativity and, therefore, a different kind of story highlighting the fractured constitution of the popular subject. This positionality is justified by the country’s socio-political situation and serves as a counterstatement to the myth of tico exceptionality, prevalent since at least the end of the nineteenth century, which continues 1 Boxwell: The Disembodied Subject: Resistance to Norms of Hegemonic Identit Published by New Prairie Press