Abstract
Body and women identity is expressed in narco-narrative novels. The chapter scrutinizes the conceptualization of the female body in the urban drug-trafficker’s world. Employing the psychoanalytic concepts of Eros and Thanatos in Rosario Tijeras, we can observe pulsions that result in cultural illness. Rosario’s mouth is a double-edged sword: she kisses before she kills; her mouth seduces and destroys. The mouth in the novel evidences the way she punishes herself, eating with guilt and gaining weight (overeating, satiating the mouth), and how she tries, without success, to mask her social identity by keeping her mouth closed in certain circumstances.
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Notes
- 1.
For sociologist Daniel Pécaut (1997), “the social imaginary of violence ” feeds Colombia’s memory, such that social and political relations are both achieved and maintained through violence , and, as of yet, other ways of establishing relations remain unknown; “there is an imaginary of violence present that it is not ready to disappear” (929) that perhaps helps to explain the continued conflict.
- 2.
The book La Violencia en Colombia de Guzmán, Fals Borda y Umaña (1962) [La Violencia in Colombia According to Guzmán, Fals Borda and Umaña] narrates the ways in which violent acts, such as slit throats, mutilated corpses, pregnant women with their bellies cut open, are the reiteration of the same horrible scenes, part of the imaginary of violence.
- 3.
To this, we must add that Mariano Azuela’s novel Los de abajo (1916) is the exception confirming the rule.
- 4.
The early years of the 1960s were of special significance for Latin American literature in general. In 1963, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa won the Seix Barral Prize (Spain) for his novel La ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero]. In so doing, he helped to divert the cultural focus previously fixed on European literary production to that of Latin America, thereby improving cohesion for each of the continent’s national literary and cultural organizations. From there, writers from a number of Central and South American countries began to read each other’s work, causing the phenomenon whose name connotes an explosion of styles: The Literary Boom .
- 5.
This expression is used by the eminent Colombian author Laura Restrepo to refer to novels of La Violencia with occasionally feeble narrative threads that “justified” their illustrations of raw violence.
- 6.
Gabriel García Márquez , in his 1959 work Dos o tres cosas sobre la novela de la Violencia writes: “The exhaustive inventory of decapitated, castrated, raped women, sexual organs strewn about and guts ripped out, and the in-depth description of cruelty with which these crimes were committed probably fail to represent the path traversed by these novels. The drama lies in the atmosphere of terror brought about by these crimes. The novel was not about the dead missing their innards, but rather about the living who were forced to sweat bullets in hiding, knowing full well that with each heartbeat, they ran the risk of losing their own intestines” (n.p).
- 7.
See Felipe Oliver’s 2007 analysis: “Después de García Márquez: tres aproximaciones a la novela urbana colombiana.”
- 8.
This is a portmanteau of sicario (hitman) and picaresque.
- 9.
For an in-depth study of the novel of La Violencia, see Oscar Osorio’s “Siete estudios sobre la novela de la Violencia en Colombia, una evaluación crítica y una nueva perspectiva” (2006).
- 10.
It has been used as an obligatory text in advanced high-school classes and in some universities; furthermore, the novel inspired the eponymous film directed by Emilio Maillé in 2005 and a sixty-episode television series in 2010.
- 11.
Triebe in the original German has been translated in the new Standard English version of Freud’s complete works by James Strachey as drive; in the Spanish version translated by Luis López Ballesteros and published by Biblioteca Nueva, it is rendered as instinto—the same word employed by Jaramillo in the Spanish version cited and translated above. However, I opt for pulsión in Spanish and concur with Strachey on drive in English.
- 12.
Medellín is the second-largest city in Colombia and is the birthplace of large Colombian drug cartels.
- 13.
“En effet c’est à un rapport si béant qu’est suspendue la position du psychanalyste. Non pas seulement est-il requis de construire la théorie de la méprise essentielle au sujet de la théorie : ce que nous appelons le sujet supposé savoir.” [In effect, it is a relation so gaping that the psychoanalyst’s position is suspended. Not only is he/it required to construct the theory of error essential to the subject of the theory: it is what we call subject-supposed-to-know sujetsupposé savoir.]
- 14.
Melodrama’s protagonist is a homosexual man in Paris grappling with the seduction of a boy-adolescent, Vidal.
- 15.
This ritual is highlighted in the film version of Rosario Tijeras.
- 16.
The pressure society exerts on the body can reach unbearable proportions for a teenager who spends hours in front of the television on daily basis. This translates into teens seeing almost exclusively “fit” bodies in ages ranging from 18 to 35—figures that do not even come close to capturing half of the population. It is imperative that we, as a society, revise these restrictive and unrealistic standards of beauty .
- 17.
According to statements made by Bogotá’s current mayor, Gustavo Petro, in the magazine Semana in January 2015, the number of hitmen in Bogotá has increased. “The capital’s leader points out that in [Bogotá ], there are groups dedicated to money laundering activities, and when it comes to clashes, these groups are responsible for murders. ‘The problem is figuring out how to dismantle a large drug trafficking organization laundering four billion dollars in the city of Bogota .’” The mayor, in addition to pointing out the link between assassins and drug smuggling, makes it clear that drugs are a huge business, and that a business of such proportions is hard to bring down. I would add that violence in this context engenders more violence, becoming part of a vicious, self-perpetuated circle.
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Botero, B.L. (2018). The Body in Rosario Tijeras: Between the Life and Death Drives (Eros and Thanatos). In: Botero, B. (eds) Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68158-0_6
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