Abstract
It was a dewy morning when Juanita, with rose-pink cheeks and wearing a crisp skirt, went to the spring-fed pond at the bottom of the ravine. Her skirt flew in the breeze swept by a northern gale, and her hair whirled like tiny black snakes against her face. She was so happy seeing the scented trees running at her across the plain and gusts of fragrant winds filling her jar of joy. She bounced in her step, being swaddled in her laughter right in the middle of the meadow, the dog barking at her side chasing leaves that swam swiftly in the wind. The spring-fed pond was shaded by all kinds of fruit trees, surrounded by sleeping blue ponds like long and soft ribbons of sky and by greenish rocks sweating out the day. She sat down and, with imperious breaths, reined back her breasts that wanted to break free, fixed her shirt, caressed the dog, contemplated the branches bathing in the waters below, took a mirror and cast a loving gaze at herself. She was alone. Around the ravine a horseman rode by. The hooves broke the mirror of the waters. Juana recognized him and her heart hung in her chest. She could not run away, thus waited for him holding onto a leaf. The horseman hurried up and soon was by her side. He didn’t mind the dog’s lapping up the spring with its tongue and began to seduce her with the steady pace of the blowing wind. With gentle no’s and weak pulls, a delicate resistance was put up, then laments, sobs and after that, the eye of water blinked to carefully assess her reflection. With one arm over her eyes Juana remained in the shadows, her honor gone, in awe like the sleeping skin of the blue sky. A story that begins in harmony and beauty ends in rape. With this pleasant, soft, and delicate language, the writer poeticizes the disturbance of a quiet, candid life by impulse and power. Nothing further from the theoretical language of psychoanalysis; nothing more alien to a juridical debate. This is the onset of “La Honra,” a short story by Salvador Salazar Arrué (Salarrué) that begins in a clear morning, in a clean world, and ends in the shadows of rape and a suggested homicide. Juanita soon becomes Juana, the shaded meadows, a somber landscape, and the loving father, a murderer, shining dagger in hand.
A version of this work was published in TALLER DE LETRAS N° 47: 45–59, 2010 ISSN 0716-0798.
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Salvador Salazar Arrué. Cuentos de Barro. http://www.scribd.com/doc/12297595/Salazar-Arrue-Salvador-Salarrue-Cuentos-de-Barro#scribd
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In Vicky Bell’s text we find references to a 1978 debate in which Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, and Jean Danet discussed if the sexual relation between a child and an adult ought to be restricted by law. These three writers ask for a removal from the French Penal Code the law that prohibits the inciting or solicitation of minors as ‘debauchery’ and an end to the criminalization of the relationship between minors and adults. What this intervention is after is to make explicit the move from theory to politics and from a descriptive genealogy to a moral prescriptive state. Here we are reminded that the legal discourse produces, backs up, and supports, through disciplinary knowledge, what is presumed a natural division. We find ourselves, then, again, within Lévy-Strauss nature/culture debate, except on the other side of the divide, where the argument ceases to defend the common good and becomes something else. For Lévi-Strauss, the incest taboo is a cultural regulation applied to blood relations that underscores the transition from nature to culture. Sexual instinct is an exchange through which nature manifests itself, thus the transition between one structural order and another occurs in this domain. Horror before incest does not reside in blood contiguity but in the violation of paternity laws. In these laws, real blood displaces symbolic blood common to all members of the clan; and the structural effects over culture and social relations are the same as in the case of incest taboo. This is the reason why Oedipus’s figure is so emblematic. See Vicky Bell. Interrogating Incest. Feminist, Foucault and the Law. London: Routledge, 1993: 150 and 173. See too: Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other Writings 1977–1984. Trad. Alan Sheridan et al. New York: Routledge, 1988: 271–281.
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In tandem with Hartsock, for A. H. Maslow, sex, “in general…has far more intimate relationships with dominant feeling that it has with a physiological drive”; for Kate Millet “the pleasure of humiliating the sexual object appears to be far more intoxicating than sex itself”; and finally, for George Bataille, “sexual activity is a form of violence” (Hartsock 29).
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Silver (1993). Director, Philip Noyce. Joe Eszterhas’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel about voyeurism, starring Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenter. Red Dragon (2002). Director: Brett Ratner; Writers: Tomas Harris (novel), Ted Tally (screenplay); stars: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes.
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Linda Williams. Hard Core. Op. Cit.
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See the film Red Dragon, Op. Cit.
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See Cullen, Robert. The Killer Department. Victor Burakov’s eight-year Hunt for the Most Savage Serial Killer in Russian History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
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Stephen Heath. “Difference.” Screen, vol. 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1978), p. 92.
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Rodriguez, I. (2016). Incest, Pedophilia, Rape: Theories of Desire and Jurisprudence, The Case of the Other Rosita. In: Gender Violence in Failed and Democratic States. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59833-2_3
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