From Cuba with a Song by Severo Sarduy
"From Cuba with a Song" is a unique work by Severo Sarduy that defies traditional novelistic structures by dismantling the concepts of character, plot, and theme. Instead of following a linear narrative, the book presents a fragmented, jigsaw-like composition comprised of three distinct narrative sequences linked by an introductory section called "Curriculum cubense." This foundational piece sets the stage for a drawing representing a central character surrounded by two women, symbolizing the diverse racial and cultural elements of Cuban identity—Chinese, African, and Spanish. Sarduy's text emphasizes language as the core of the narrative experience, suggesting that the essence of being and identity may be more complex than a unified self. The "characters" in the novel are portrayed as superficial constructs, reflecting a fluidity of identity and the role of language in shaping perception. Sarduy’s writing is informed by structuralist and poststructuralist theories, aiming to challenge established notions of origin and cultural identity within the Latin American context. The work thus serves as a provocative exploration of the interplay between language, eroticism, and the multifaceted nature of Cuban culture.
From Cuba with a Song by Severo Sarduy
First published:De donde son los cantantes, 1967 (English translation, 1972)
Type of plot: Comic narrative experimentation
Time of work: Undefined
Locale: A simulated Cuba: Havana’s Chinatown, Camagüey, and Santiago de Cuba
Principal Characters:
Help , andMercy , metaphysical twins in perpetual flux, in love with MortalThe Great Bald Madame , DeathLotus Flower , a beautiful Chinese actress of the Shanghai Opera HouseThe General (Mortal Pérez) , a blond Spaniard in pursuit of Lotus FlowerDolores Rondón , a mulatto woman from Camagüey, Mortal’s mistressChrist , a wooden symbol of Help and Mercy’s desire
The Novel
From Cuba with a Song is not a novel in the traditional sense; rather, Sarduy’s second work of fiction breaks down the founding conventions of novelistic genre: character, plot, and theme. The innovative thrust of From Cuba with a Song lies in its radical alteration of traditional plot. Instead of telling a story in linear fashion, From Cuba with a Song reads like a verbal jigsaw puzzle composed of three pieces or narrative sequences attached to a “head”—the introductory “Curriculum cubense.”
This first section traces a drawing that helps the reader assemble Sarduy’s experiment in the novel form. An Asian and a black woman surround a blond, white male at the center of the picture. He stands next to Help, one-half of the pair of twins who reappear throughout the work, and close to them the “Waxen Woman,” the face of Death, absorbs the entire scene. The drawing displayed in “Curriculum cubense,” “a giant four-leaf clover, or a four-headed animal facing the four cardinal points, or a Yoruba sign of the four roads,” fills in the outline of an empty plot. Each figure in the picture corresponds to one of the three fictions that make up From Cuba with a Song. The Chinese and the black woman become protagonists of their own tales—Lotus Flower in “By the River of Rose Ashes” and “Dolores Rondón” in her namesake piece. The white man, Mortal Pérez, fills the center of the drawing since he is in a relation of desire to the two women. Yet he is also the center of his own supreme fiction, “The Entry of Christ in Havana,” first as Everyman and then as a baroque Christ figure. The three tales are designed to depict the linguistic and erotic sensibility proper to the racial layers superimposed on the mosaic of Cuban culture: the Chinese, African, and Spanish elements.
Rather than a novel of plot, From Cuba with a Song is a novel of language. The linguistic texture of the novel constructs a verbal archetype or reproduction of Cuba. It appears that the pieces of the puzzle fit together in the totality of a culture: a whole Cuba integrated by its racial-ethnic components, as reflected in the drawing. Metaphor and poetic description qualify the Chinese tale; dialogue, colloquial speech, and a mock tragic tone exhibit the African flair for drama in the second tale. The last section testifies to the origins of Cuban lexicon and intonation in Castilian Spanish; it also bears witness to the Hispanic legacy of mysticism.
The presence of language in From Cuba with a Song compensates for an absence: Where is Cuba? As the original title in Spanish expresses it, the song may be from Cuba, but “where do the singers come from”? In the Spanish edition, the title is phrased without a question mark, resulting in an affirmative but syntactically ambiguous sentence. “Where do the singers come from?” is a verse from a traditional song by Miguel Matamoros, the “Son de la Loma” (the son is a distinctive rhythm that originated in Cuban folk music, reflecting the combination of Spanish and African musical forms). Hence, Sarduy’s fiction poses the problem of origin in terms of a question and answer, or an absence and presence. Is there really a “First Cuban Song,” an origin of self in culture, a beginning in language? In other words, does a Cuban identity (or that of any nationality) really exist?
At first reading, the four parts of From Cuba with a Song lead to an affirmative answer, since the “four different beings” appear as “four who are one.” Three races and etnias combine in one Cuba, just as the three fictions plus the “Curriculum cubense” result in one novel. The work ends, however, on a final “Note” in which Sarduy explains the mechanism of his novel—three cultures, three fictions, three themes (desire, ambition, religious zeal). This fifth “note” to the song unscrambles the puzzle again, leaving the reader with “the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question” asked consistently throughout the work: What is “the definition of being”? Sarduy’s fiction underscores the question of cultural identity with a more radical critique: He puts in doubt the transcendental, unified subject invented by Western metaphysics. The novel’s four parts turn into five, and the whole of Cuban culture becomes a pretext for revealing the hole inside Being.
The Characters
From this radical critique of identity and selfhood stems Sarduy’s debunking of character, just as radical as his undermining of plot. If traditionally a character appears in a novel as a simulated person, with a name and psychological depth, From Cuba with a Song shows character to be only authorial pretension, fictional playacting. The “characters” in the novel are mere appearances—not of real persons, but rather of the language in which the text is written. Help and Mercy, the two metaphysical twins that run wild in the Self-Service cafeteria of “Curriculum cubense,” best exemplify Sarduy’s parodic use of character. Named after the popular expression “Help! Mercy!” in Cuban slang, the pair of females glide through From Cuba with a Song as copies of characters, with no pretension that they are, in effect, “real” people. On the contrary, the first scene of “Curriculum cubense” shows Help and Mercy as devout “mannequins” in a fake House of God. Later, in the Self-Service cafeteria, they are depicted as artificial, mobile creatures, their faces covered with layers of makeup. Help and Mercy attest the allure of mimicry in Sarduy’s fictional world: Outside appearance, camouflage, and dress constitute their only “psychology.” As sheer verbal surfaces, Help and Mercy (and, later, Clemency) are cosmetic coverups for the lack of a fixed identity—hence their uncanny ability to take on different masks.
Since the unity of the self is so systematically corroded in From Cuba with a Song, the rest of the “characters” in the novel are split in two. They either come in pairs, like Help and Mercy or Narrators One and Two in “Dolores Rondón,” or they turn into doubles of themselves. Lotus Flower has a twin in María Eng, the other courtesan in the Chinatown brothel. The General, who lusts after Lotus Flower in the first narrative, becomes the politician Mortal Pérez in the second, and Dolores Rondón’s lover. As universal Everyman, he is mysteriously transformed into Christ by the grace and power of the Fates’ (the Siamese twins’) desire for him. Names—and the identities they signify—are only costumes to be shed at the next change of scene, at the turn of the page. Thus, in “By the River of Rose Ashes,” “the Ever-Present Girls” turn into “Help Chong” and “Mercy Si-Yueng.”
More than in any other character, the undermining of the subject is brilliantly depicted in Lotus Flower, the pale-faced soprano of the Shanghai District Opera. She is described as a shape that blends into the river landscape: “Try and see her. You can’t. Yes! her eyes, two golden slits, snake charmer eyes, betray her. . . . She’s mimicry. She’s a texture . . . she is pure symmetry. Where is she?” Does Lotus Flower exist? Is she real? Her only “existence” is as an object of desire, as source of the General’s longing, the motive of his lustful pursuit. Like a bird’s feathers that change with every season, Sarduy’s “characters” fluctuate, appear and disappear, according to the cycles of erotic demand.
Critical Context
From Cuba with a Song, Sarduy’s second work of fiction after Gestos (1963), marked a turning point in his development as a writer, for soon after the novel Sarduy also proved his talents as an essayist and literary critic. The essays collected in Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969) expound the theory of literature that makes From Cuba with a Song the “novel” novel that it is. Here are Sarduy’s views on the equivalence between sex-uality and text-uality, transvestism and literature, text and body, which surfaces in the fictions of From Cuba with a Song.
Sarduy’s theory of literature as wordplay and erotic inscription reflects the influence of French structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Critics such as Roland Barthes in Le Degré zéro de la écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero, 1968) shaped Sarduy’s insistence on the autonomy of language and of the literary artifact. Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte (1973; The Pleasure of the Text, 1975), like Sarduy’s own Escrito sobre un cuerpo, conceives the writing/reading process as an erotic exchange between author and reader. One outcome of these theories is the body/text of From Cuba with a Song, a work that unsettles the conventions of the novel genre by its self-referentiality and parodic inversion.
The parodic thrust of the novel is responsible for its impact in the context of Latin American literature. From Cuba with a Song represents one of the most radical rewritings of the Latin American myth of origin. The “novelty” of From Cuba with a Song is that it carries the demystifying tendency in the Latin American novelistic tradition to the point of showing that the only origin of self is the secondary condition of language.
Bibliography
Gil, Lourdes. “Severo Sarduy.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Sarduy and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.
Montero, Oscar. The Name Game: Writing/Fading Writer in “De donde son los cantantes.” Chapel Hill, N.C.: University Department of Romance Languages, 1988. Focuses on the narrative experiment in Sarduy’s novel.
Pellon, Gustavo. “De donde son los cantantes.” Hispanic Review 63 (Spring, 1995): 243-245. A review of Sarduy’s novel, edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Pellon points to Echevarria’s 74-page introduction and informative notes as an important contribution to the study of the novel.
Perez, Rolando. Severo Sarduy and the Religion of the Text. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988. A brief critical examination of Sarduy’s works.
Rivero-Potter, Alicia, ed. Between the Self and the Void: Essays in Honor of Severo Sarduy. Boulder: University of Colorado, 1998. A collection of insightful critical essays on the works of Severo Sarduy. Useful for gaining an overview of Sarduy’s life and career.