Abstract
In a short story entitled ‘The God’s Script’, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has Tzinacán, an Aztec priest, tell the tale of his incarceration.2 The priest, who has conducted ceremonies of human sacrifice, has been captured by Spanish conquistadores, tortured and condemned to life-long imprisonment in a hemispheric dungeon. The dungeon is divided in half down the middle, and the other half, across from the priest, is inhabited by a jaguar. Once a day a keeper opens a trap door at the top of the dungeon to let down food and water, and during those few seconds of light the priest can see the jaguar through a barred opening between the two cells. Tzinacán, after languishing many years underground, remembers that somewhere in the world is written a secret magical message of God, and then later recalls that the jaguar is ‘one of the attributes of God’ (170). He spends many more years studying the patterns of the animal’s spots and at last, in an ecstatic, revelatory moment, discovers the divine message there. It is a fourteen-word formula that, were he to utter it, would make him all-powerful. But Tzinacán does nothing. The experience has transformed him so that he no longer has interest in mundane things, and the story concludes with him lying in his dark cell, looking forward to nothing but death.
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.
… [I]f we are able imaginatively to grasp the symbolic trajectory that leads from tattoos and ritual mutilations to the constitution of erogenous zones in modern men and women, we would have gone a long way toward sensing the historicity of the sexual phenomenon.1
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Notes
The first quotation is from the Gospel of John 8:6. The second quotation is from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981) p. 64.
Publishing information on all creative texts discussed in this chapter is listed below. Page numbers of the texts from which quotations are taken are given in parentheses following the citation. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The God’s Script’, tr. L. A. Murillo, in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 1964) pp. 169–73.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Ellen Gilchrist, ‘Crazy, Crazy, Now Showing Everywhere’, in Victory Over Japan (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984) pp. 129–42.
Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, tr. Edwin and Willa Muir, in Stephen Spender (ed.), Great German Short Stories (New York: Dell, 1960) pp. 180–209. ‘In der Strafkolonie’, in Franz Kafka, Erzählungen und kleine Prosa, vol. 1 (New York: Schocken Books, 1946) pp. 181–213.
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
John L’Heureux, ‘The Anatomy of Bliss’, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 239/4 (April, 1977) pp. 66–74.
Pauline Réage, Story of O, tr. Sabine d’Estree (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965).
Patrick White, Voss (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960).
Cf. James D. Watson, The Double Helix (New York: New American Library, 1969).
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trs Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 148.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) p. 140.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952) p. 429. That Story of O may be an intentional fictional commentary on de Beauvoir’s work — a possibility suggested to me by Sharon E. Greene — is reinforced by Jean Paulhan’s declaration in his preface to Story of O. He says, ‘And yet, in her own way O expresses a virile ideal. Virile, or at least masculine. At last a woman who admits it!’ (xxv).
Other texts on writing, mutilation and the body that were helpful to me are Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984);
Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983);
Gabriele Schwab, ‘Genesis of the Subject, Imaginary Functions, and Poetic Language’, New Literary History, vol. 15/3 (Spring, 1984) pp. 453–74;
and Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
I am indebted to Sharon E. Greene for pointing out the pervasive marriage imagery in Story of O. For a Marxist analysis of the fetishized female body in the evolution of the novel cf. Jon Stratton, The Virgin Text: Fiction, Sexuality, and Ideology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).
Luce Irigaray writes of the male ‘desire to force open, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of the stomach in which he was conceived, the secret of his conception, of his “origin”.’ Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken Books, 1981) p. 100.
Susan Gubar, ‘“The Blank Page” and the Issues of Female Creativity,’ in Elizabeth Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 77.
Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) p. 169.
Max Charlesworth, Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1984) p. 10. Quoted by Geoffrey R. Lilburne, ‘Religious and Scientific Views of Space: Aboriginal Dreaming and Our Own’ (unpublished).
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© 1989 Robert Detweiler
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Detweiler, R. (1989). Sacred Texts/Sacred Space. In: Breaking the Fall. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09991-7_5
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