blurred boundaries: julieta campos's theory and practice in "tiene los cabellos rojizos y...

Blurred Boundaries: Julieta Campos's Theory and Practice in "Tiene los cabellos rojizos y sellama Sabina"Author(s): Reina BarretoSource: Letras Femeninas, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Invierno 2008), pp. 31-44Published by: Asociacion Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina HispanicaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23021924 .

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Blurred Boundaries: Julieta Campos's Theory and Practice in Tiene los cabellos rojizosy se llama Sabina

Reina Barreto

Peninsula College

Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina, originally published in 1974, exemplifies Julieta Campos's textual experimentation.1 The

experimentation in Campos's novel results from her use of metafictional

narrative strategies and self-conscious narrators-protagonists who

comment on the writing process.2 The emphasis Campos places on the

writing process can be understood through her ideas presented in her

four books of literary criticism, La imagen en el espejo (1965), Oficio de leer

(1971), Funcion de la novela (1973), and Un heroismo secreto (1988). The

act of writing is not only a theoretical preoccupation in Campos's essays but also the main theme of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina. In

this analysis, I examine Campos's novel in relation to her ideas on writing and creative freedom in Un heroismo secreto. I add to previous studies

on the intertextual and metafictional traits of Tiene los cabellos rojizos

y se llama Sabina by establishing connections between those traits and

Campos's theories on writing as a liberating and subversive activity.

Campos has often commented on the relationship between her theory and her own writing by stating that they blur together, becoming one and

the same. In an interview by Evelyn Picon Garfield, Campos is quoted as

saying, "Now my reflexive and critical discourse and my fiction slide so

imperceptibly by each other that it is difficult to separate or distinguish

Reina Barreto teaches Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture at Peninsula

College in Washington State. She has published articles on female identity and repre sentation in the work of Cuban writers and artists. Her current research focuses on the

self-portrait and representations of the female body by Cuban women artists.



32 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIVNumero 2

them. [... ] Each time, my criticism is less isolated from narrative forms

in a kind of symbiosis between criticism and fiction" (82). A reading of

Campos's essays alongside her literature indicates that her main ideas

about writing also happen to be the primary themes of her narratives, the major theoretical concerns of her narrators, and the structures that

shape her texts.

The relationship between writing and freedom that Campos develops in her essays is also present in her novels whose themes and forms evade

ideologies, formulas, and readers' expectations. Campos's "experimentos narrativos," as she calls her texts in the introduction to Reunion defamilia, share similar characteristics with the self-reflexive, intertextual, and

metafictional literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s by the French

New Novelists, Mexican writers of the Onda, and postmodern Cuban

novelists.3 Some of those similarities include a blurring of genres, texts, and narrative voices, an emphasis on linguistic and self-reflexive games, the importance of the reader in the text's construction, and an overall

subversion of literary tradition. Campos's Sabina draws attention to its

construction by experimenting with multiple narrative levels and by

rejecting literary conventions. Her text replaces linear time, plot, and

psychologically developed characters with fragmentation, repetition, and

metafictional narrative voices. Campos's experimental narrative reveals

the essence of her writing: a commitment to creative and intellectual

freedom.

For Campos, writing represents a form of rebellion, of saying the

unspeakable, of filling the silence, of revealing the gaps, and of unleashing desire while relying on creative freedom, independence, and authenticity: "Lo que el creador organiza con la imaginacion es lo que permanecia

reprimido en el inconsciente: lo que no se constituia como lenguaje, lo que hasta entonces habia sido lo indecible, lo que no era discurso"

(Un heroismo secreto 118). It is primarily in Un heroismo secreto that

Campos discusses the act and purpose of writing. In this book of essays, she describes the act of writing as "un silencioso, secreto heroismo"

and further defines it as "compromiso del escritor con la veracidad de

su imaginacion y la libertad de sus suenos" (7). Campos believes that

creativity in writing must be preserved by maintaining the freedom of

the writer.

Campos explains the relationship between writing and freedom in

the following manner:



Barreto 33

Ninguna obra autentica es la celebracion de un orden sino el

ofrecimiento de algo que la realidad no da, la satisfaccion de una

promesa que solo es formulable en el espacio de lo imaginario: su

condicion unica es la libertad. Por eso solo con la libertad puede

comprometerse legitimamente el escritor. (Un heroismo secreto

121-22)

Campos refers to the act of writing as a secret heroism not only because of its relationship to creative freedom but also because it attempts to create order out of disorder and expresses what is repressed in the

unconscious. According to Campos, this setting free of the imagination and the unconscious is what makes writing subversive: "La verdad de

la literatura siempre ha sido y sera sospechosa para grandes y pequenos

inquisidores: es subversiva porque siempre esta en rebeldia contra lo real"

(123). In addition, writing as a secret heroism represents a game: "Un

juego que consiste en ir llenando los huecos de lo real y en descubrir un

diseno que organice lo disperso del mundo" (116-17). Campos explains that a secret heroism includes the act of writing about literary encounters

with texts other than her own. In her preface to Un heroismo secreto, she

begins by stating, "Hay libros que se escriben al margen de otros, propios

y ajenos" (7). Campos describes the relationship with other texts that

characterizes her own secret heroism in the following manner: "Con eso

que nos desborda escribimos sobre libros que han escrito otros, damos

cuenta de las incidencias de otros universos en el nuestro, registramos la

experiencia que va destilando en otro espacio una novela" (7). According to Campos, writers who embark on a journey toward the origins of their

writing and maintain their creative freedom while engaged in reading other writers' texts participate in a life of secret heroism.

Campos's Sabina serves as a literary example of her theory on the act of

writing as a secret heroism. With its evasion of literary formulas, narrative

conventions, and readers' expectations, it allows for the exploration of

writing as an open process that includes multiple narrative possibilities and the active participation of the reader. Sabina is a 113-page novel

consisting of one long paragraph with a nonlinear narrative structure,

multiple unnamed narrators who at times blur together into one self

reflexive voice, no psychologically developed characters, and countless

intertexts. These traits rightfully earn the novel's description by critics as

an experimental work escaping classification.4 From the first page of her

novel, Campos presents the readers with a protagonist-narrator who is




the red-headed Sabina as well as the novel's writer: "Soy un personaje que mira el mar a las cuatro de la tarde. Pero tambien soy alguien que imagina a ese personaje que soy yo misma" (261). The protagonist-narrator named

Sabina begins to introduce the countless narrative possibilities available

to her in the process of writing a novel. Before she gets too far beyond the first sentence, Sabina demonstrates indecisiveness in the face of so

many options: "La verdad es que nunca he sabido por donde empezar.

Hay tantas palabras y tan poco que decir" (261). In her article "Navigating the Metafictional Text," Beard appropriately

describes Campos's novel as a "kaleidoscope filled with myriad fragments of text that can be fashioned into a seemingly endless number of designs" (46).5 A typical page of Sabina reads like this:

Treinta anos despues yo, Isabel Barreto, casada en segundas nupcias en Manila con don Fernando de Castro, capitan de la Nao de Acapulco

y de la China, unica mujer distinguida con el honroso titulo de

adelantada y gobernadora por voluntad de mi primer y ahora finado

esposo don Alvaro de Mendana; yo, Isabel, me imagino viendo Hover

en Macondo, mientras espero en el puesto de mando de la nave que ha de conducirme, por primera vez, al puerto de Acapulco, [. . .] y anticipo la mirada de otra mujer, que mira el mar desde Acapulco. (362)6

Sabina's kaleidoscopic narrative, unrelated characters, events, places, and dates lead the reader nowhere and everywhere. The only recurring words in the novel describe the image of a woman looking out at the sea at four o'clock in the afternoon from a vantage point at an Acapulco hotel on May 8,1971. As the kaleidoscopic protagonist-narrator, however, the woman who has reddish hair and whose name is Sabina undergoes constant transformation. First-, second-, and third-person voices speak through her at different times in the novel:

Esta el personaje que ella cree ser, los que le atribuyen los demas, los

que podria haber sido, los que ha inventado, los que la inventan a ella: estan todas esas voces. ^ Voces que la acosan, que interfieren con la

que seria su propia voz? Voces apenas articuladas, que rebotan entre ruidos imprecisos y se pierden en el espacio abierto de una terraza situada entre acantilados. (272)



Barreto 35

Numsiri Kunakemakorn aptly explains, "Each glance at this image seems to introduce new voices, perspectives and characters, creating an

endless proliferation of images" (653). As a result of Sabina's constantly

transforming identity, the first-person narrator questions the purpose of

Sabina's existence: "Mira el mar, sabiendo que los limites del horizonte

son enganosos. ^Cual es su vision? ^La de algo incesante e interminable?

Todavia no lo se con certidumbre y quiza nunca llegue a saberlo" (271). The narrator even reveals her own uncertainty over what verb tense should

be used to write the novel: "Yo me pregunto si esta novela debera, debe

escribirse en presente o en pasado. Escribirla en futuro seria el unico

recurso inteligente, pero nadie ha escrito nunca una novela en futuro"

(272). On the very next page, the uncertainty finally leads the narrator

to declare the novel's nonexistence: "La novela no existe" (272). In addition to the woman who looks at the sea from the balcony of

her hotel room called "El mirador," the other guests at the Acapulco hotel

include a male narrator who is writing a novel in the style of Truman

Capote's In Cold Blood in a room called "El laberinto"; a woman who sits

at a maple desk writing in a notebook; and another woman writer who

sits on the steps of a promontory next to a man who reads Unamuno.7

Throughout Sabina, the female narrator of "El mirador" juxtaposes her

novel against that of the male narrator of "El laberinto": "Porque hay dos novelas, la de el y la mia, que se confunden y pugnan por abrirse

paso y prevalecer y desplazar la una a la otra" (269). She claims that he

attempts to write a novel destined to be a best-seller, while she tries to

create something new and original: "En cuanto a mi libro. No, no tiene

que ver con ningun antecedente, ni con las demas novelas que pudieran o

debieran escribirse en Latinoamerica" (270). Real-life writers (including

Julieta Campos herself) and texts also inhabit Sabina's pages, which

contain numerous references to such literary figures as Capote, Borges,

Proust, Cortazar, Shakespeare, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Woolf, Rilke,

Elizondo, Mistral, and Xavier Villaurrutia (after whom the literary prize

Campos received for this novel is named).

The repeated image of the woman looking out at the sea and the

references to various narrators, writers, texts, and possible novels give the reader a sense of what Campos meant when she described her

own writing in the introduction to Reunion de familia as a "ficcionar

fronterizo." In the 1997 edition containing all her literary works, Campos defines her literary practice as "Aquel ficcionar fronterizo que bordeaba

siempre el relato sin acabar de abordarlo" (15). Through its proliferation




of kaleidoscopic images and nonlinear narrative, Sabina reflects the

elusiveness, ambivalence, and confusion that Campos experienced as

she attempted to integrate what she describes as her "memoria personal" with "dos memorias historicas:"

Eludir el relato, rondandolo sin cesar, no fue ocioso escarceo de

virtuosismo, sino imperativo para decir el hiato entre mi memoria

personal y dos memorias historicas que me solicitaban y me eludian

por igual, dejandome sin mas opcion que la de un espacio-tiempo en vilo, inexpugnable por lo mismo a la corrosion de todo lo que acontece y tiene un termino. (Reunion defamilia 15)8

In her introduction, Campos compares her situation and feelings to those of Sabina: "^Como no reconocer mi propia tesitura en la de

Sabina, asomada sobre un mar que se mordia la cola como la serpiente del relato en donde ella misma estaba atrapada?" (15).

Campos's explanation of her own writing as an avoidance of a story

by going in circles, made vivid by the image of biting one's own tail,

helps her readers comprehend the struggles of Sabina's first-person narrator who views writing as an ongoing process of reinvention and

an attempt at presenting endless possibilities. The narrator suggests that the novel being written (Sabina) is a work in progress: "Me

parece adivinar que esa novela sera unicamente el work in progress, la demostracion practica de ese caotico proceso mediante el cual se

escribe una novela" (357). The idea of Sabina as a work in progress echoes Campos's perception in Funcion de la novela of the novel as

"una gestacion constante" and "un estar siendo." Sabina allows for

a constant reinvention of both the writing process and reality. As

Campos stated in La imagen en el espejo, "Esa imagen del mundo que crea el arte es mas bien otro mundo, un mundo que empieza a existir

con su propia vigencia y su propia libertad" (5). Sabina and the various

narrators exist in that "other world" where everything is in a constant

state of becoming and being, "un universo gerundial donde pugnan incesantemente por la vida el autor, sus personajes y el propio lector"

(Funcion de la novela 66).9 Sabina's "universo gerundial" reinforces

Campos's belief in the writer's commitment to imagination and creative

freedom. In addition, the narrator's constant search for words and

narrative possibilities allows for an exploration of the open quality of

Campos's writing style.



Barreto 37

One of the ways Campos demonstrates that openness is through the

blurring of boundaries between her own texts and between her texts and

those of other writers. References to Campos's first novel, short stories, and essays are scattered throughout Sabina and reflect Campos's vision

of her texts as a family. On one occasion, Campos surfaces as the creator

of her literary family with a reference to her story "Todas las rosas": "La

enfermedad de las rosas es siempre premonitoria (yo ya lo sabia y he

escrito un cuento, hace anos)" (327). Sabina s first-person narrator, who

identifies with Campos as the author of essays that appear in Oficio de

leer and La imagen en el espejo, discusses some of Campos's theoretical

preoccupations:

Julieta Campos, que soy y no soy yo, ha escrito un ensayo sobre una

novela llamada El hipogeo secreto y otro sobre una novela llamada

La amplification. En los dos casos se trataba del mismo tema que a

ella le obsesiona: el motivo de la imagen en el espejo o, lo que es lo

mismo, de la representacion del mundo y de la necesidad que tienen

ciertos artistas de representarse dentro de esa representacion en el

acto mismo de representarla. (350)

The above quote neatly demonstrates Campos's merging of her theory and practice and her attempt to diminish the barriers separating the fiction

and nonfiction in her writing. The elimination of boundaries between Campos's texts extends to

the creation of a woman, Sabina, who evokes Campos's previous female

characters. In her novel, Campos places her female protagonist in the

public space of a hotel rather than in the enclosed domestic space of a home

typical of her other narratives. Yet throughout the narration Sabina remains

practically motionless in her room "El mirador." Like Laura in Campos's first novel Muerte por agua, who becomes overwhelmed by so many life

choices, Sabina is frozen in the face of endless narrative possibilities. But as

Kunakemakorn suggests, "the plethora of possibilities that surround one

moment in time" can actually be positive for the writer, the reader, and

even the characters of a text by encouraging each of them to formulate their

own views, project their own desires, and create a space for themselves in

the text (654). Kunakemakorn's explanation corresponds to Campos's ideas

set forth in La imagen en el espejo, Funcion de la novela, and Un heroismo

secreto regarding the connection between writing and freedom and the

perception of art as another way of existing in the world.



38 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIV Numero 2

In Sabina, the woman with reddish hair provides a vantage point from

which to examine Campos's ideas on writing as an open, experimental, and liberating process. At the end of the novel, Sabina, like the female

protagonist who commits suicide in Campos's story "Celina o los gatos," decides to take control of her destiny by ending her fictional life.10 A

narrative authorial voice attempts to understand Sabina's death:

O, haciendo un abuso insospechado de su libertad personal, decide

violar las reglas del juego, es decir, de esta novela que es un juego donde yo creia mover las fichas a mi antojo, de esta novela que ha

pretendido hacer de ella una criatura indecisa y generosamente

disponible para ser, por fin, su propio personaje, saltar desde la

terraza y convertirse en un cadaver estrellado y desfigurado al pie de

la barranca, quiero decir del promontorio. (372)

For Sabina, death leads to liberation since it represents a resistance to

traditional means of representation and narration. It is through death that

Sabina rescues her own life as well as that of the text. Sabina's death and the

"punto final" the narrator places at the end of the novel actually marks the

beginning of Tiene los cabellos rojizosyse llama Sabina: "Me advierten que es indispensable, por lo menos, una apariencia de termino, la ficcion de

un punto final. Y lo pongo. Pero este no es el fin, sino el principio" (374). The narrator not only conceives of a new life for Sabina and the novel,

but also for other texts and writers. Campos's previously published works as well as those by other writers find a place in Sabina's pages as part of an intertextual network. As is the case with the following example, the

references to Campos's texts are at times introduced in relation to other

texts and writers:

Ella podria escribir una novela donde la lluvia disolviera los seres y las cosas hasta el aniquilamiento. Esa novela se llamaria Muerte por agua, aludiendo a la vez a Heraclito y a T.S. Eliot, y seria el primer momento de otra donde una mujer, frente al mar, pretenderia reconstruir con la coherencia propia de los suenos una vida y una memoria dispersas en mil fragmentos, [...]. Esa mujer se imaginaria a Hamlet y el fantasma de su padre. (368)

Campos's novel, like the sea she describes in each of her texts, acts like a mirror that reflects her own and other writers' literary creations. In



Barreto 39

her introduction to Reunion defamilia, Campos describes the allusions to

other texts as part of "un juego interminable de referencias entrecruzadas"

(16). In Sabina, the repeated allusions to Garcia Marquez's short stories,

Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Elizondo's El hipogeo secreto, and Mauriac's L'agrandissement create multiple reflections wherein "cada texto es un espejo que refleja a otro, que refleja a otro" (Reunion defamilia 16). The reflections consist of texts that share

similar thematic concerns with Campos's novel, such as the representation of time, the function of the novel, the writing process, and the Caribbean

as a space of encounter. The Caribbean as a space of encounter serves in

fact as a metaphor for Campos's novels in which various texts, writers,

characters, and possible narrations intersect.

For Campos, however, the act of writing is ultimately a solitary one:

"Escribir es un acto solitario que nos devuelve, una y otra vez, al instante del

origen" (Un heroismo secreto 53). In Un heroismo secreto, Campos expresses her belief in writing as a solitary act that returns her to the origins of the

creative process where she comes in contact with the unconscious: "Lo que el creador organiza con la imaginacion es lo que permaneda reprimido en

el inconsciente" (118). For Campos it is in the solitary act of writing that

knowledge of the many levels of existence begins to crystallize and a new

order arises: "lo que era informe se condensa, se endurece, se cristaliza,

se crea algo que no estaba antes, que el artista no habia adivinado siquiera cuando empezo a escribir su libro" (La imagen en el espejo 81).

The unrelated fragments, images, characters, texts, and multiple allusions to writers that converge in Sabina make sense within the context

of Campos's vision of the novel's function as one of integration. As Campos states in Funcion de la novela, the novel integrates what remains dispersed in life: "ata los cabos sueltos, encuentra un sitio definitivo para todo aquello

que corre el riesgo de perderse" (112). Throughout Funcion de la novela,

Campos discusses the writer's need for integration, which initially arises

from a search for order among various possible narratives, characters, and

settings and a desire to recuperate what remains lost or dispersed in life.

According to Campos, the process of writing a novel allows her to convert

"lo inorganico en organico, lo disperso en coherente, lo desintegrado en

integrado" (Funcion de la novela 82). For Campos art also results from emptiness, an emptiness that the

artist feels a strong need to fill: "llenar los espacios vacios con una obra y otra obra que es, a la vez, una manera de poner un orden en el caos y de



40 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIV Numero 2

rescatar algo de la muerte sin fin hacia la que tiende todo" (Un heroismo

secreto 23). And likewise Campos believes that art functions to fill the

emptiness: "Hay un vacio en el escritor y a su alrededor, una angustiante insatisfaccion que s6lo puede llenarse con palabras" (Funcion de la

novela 137). Campos argues that, for a woman writer, the need to fill the

void and create order with words is even greater than for a male writer

because "cuando el novelista es mujer se acentua la dispersion del ser, la fragmentacion de la persona, que se comparte mas entre numerosas

exigencias, demandas que el mundo le hace de donacion, de entrega"

(Funcion de la novela 140-41). Writing counteracts the dispersion of self

by creating a literary space for the woman writer, "ese 'cuarto propio' del

que hablara Virginia Woolf" (141). Here Campos adopts Woolf's image of a room of one's own and develops it to mean an actual literary work

that the artist can create and inhabit.

Sabina writes against the emptiness in her hotel room "El mirador"

and the loneliness she feels as a woman writer by filling the pages of

the metafictional text she creates and inhabits as writer, narrator, and

protagonist. The first-person narrator in Sabina reiterates Campos's idea concerning literature's capacity to integrate and transform: "Pero

el artificio, la ficcion, aparecen en un momento dado como los unicos recursos accesibles para aclarar algo de los hechos que ocurren y mas aun

de los que no ocurren, de los gestos que se esbozan y de los que se quedan a punto de, de las palabras que se dicen y de las cosas que se quedan flotando en el plasma de la conciencia" (326). The attempts in Sabina

to recuperate and integrate dispersed elements provide the possibility for endless transformation, reinvention, and creative freedom, all of

which correspond to Campos's description of writing as a "gestacion constante."

The narrative freedom displayed in Campos's novel allows for

multiple interpretations and the active participation of the reader.11 The

text invites its readers into the narration by addressing them directly and indirectly as well as by including them as characters. The first

person narrator recognizes the reader's participation in the text and the

uncertainty the reader may feel in the face of multiple narrative options and kaleidoscopic images:

El lector se preguntara quiza si a el le toca mostrarse perplejo ante la multiplicidad de voces que, ya a estas alturas, dicen yo como si se

tratara de un yo unico, ubicuo y omnisciente, o si debe aceptar la



Barreto 41

proliferacion de yos con la complacencia de alguien que mirara a su

interlocutor a traves de un magiscopio. A mi me es indiferente. Yo, no

como en un rito sino como en un juego, escojo para el lector, para el

critico posible pero improbable, algunas frases clave y se las ofrezco

en bandeja de plata. (347-48)

While in the process of claiming her autonomy from the author and

the text, Sabina also acknowledges the reader's presence and adds to the

reader's confusion: "No soy yo quien me ahogo sino tu, en un mar de

palabras. Tu que me lees y que con mis ojos miras al mar y con mi deseo

te dejas sumergir en el mar" (368). Sabina's statement highlights Campos's idea of writing as a game, a game that grants the writer creative freedom

and gives the reader an escape from everyday reality. At the end of the novel, the narrator suggests that it is essentially

the reader who is left to recreate the text and give it new life by seeing it

through Sabina's eyes rather than those of the narrator:

Y, sin embargo, yo aseguro que ella, tu, yo, no se ha movido del

mirador ni se movera, mientras yo la recuerde y te haga creer que la

recuerdas, mientras alguien, en alguna parte, formule una vez mas,

una por una, las palabras que en secuencia forman este libro [. . .]

y ese alguien, desde el rincon donde lee, empiece a ver, con los ojos de una mujer de cabellos rojizos llamada Sabina, el promontorio y el mar. (374)

The reader forms an essential part of Campos's novel as the one

who continues the creative cycle started by the writer. The collaboration

between writer and reader reflects Campos's belief that the reader

actively participates in the creation process and that writing and reading are the two extremes of the same movement toward openness and an

encounter between various narrative voices, texts, writers, characters,

and interpretations.12

According to Campos, the idea of literature as a game reflects

literature's relationship to that other world: "el de lo Imaginario" (Un

herotsmo secreto 115). In this same book of essays, she describes literature's

nature as one of play because of its association with imagination and

fantasy and its capacity to create a new and different level of reality. What

makes Campos's own game-like novel unique is her intention not to evade

or trick the reader as she suggests other writers do. Rather, she attempts




to make her literary games another means for the reader to participate in the text and to recreate it endlessly. Campos believes that the text's

ambiguity arising from its game-like quality gives its readers a space for numerous readings: "Es un enigma que reclama y admite respuestas

multiples" (Un heroismo secreto 119). In her novel, Campos plays with

different possibilities of writing a text, which suggests to the reader the

many possibilities for reading her text.

In Sabina, the act of writing becomes the focal point of the narrative.

The novel's constant engagement with various narrative possibilities, voices, and intertexts maintains the writer's creative freedom. Campos's narrative rejects the limitations imposed on a writer's originality by the

literary conventions of plot, characters, and point of view. Her novel

reflects a constant gestation of images, characters, and words that always return the text to the beginning of yet another possible narrative. Sabina

adheres to Campos's idea of writing as a "gestacion constante" and a

"ficcionar fronterizo" by allowing not only the narrators and characters

to reinvent themselves and the narrative but also by allowing the reader's

participation. Campos's novel, then, represents a culmination of Campos's secret heroism based on writing as a freeing of the imagination and the

unconscious. It creates a new order, that "algo mas" Campos suggests in

Funcion de la novela, which goes beyond what everyday reality can offer

to the writer and the reader.

NOTES

11 am using the edition of Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina pub lished in Reunion defamilia. This 1997 volume, which contains all of Campos's novels, short stories, and her play, is a result of Campos's rereading and rewriting of her own texts.

2 According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction "is simultaneously to create a

fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction" (6). Critics who have examined the metafictional strategies in Tiene los cabellosjojizos y se llama Sabina include Hugo J. Verani, Martha P. Francescato, Alicia Rivero Potter, and Laura J. Beard.

3 Juan Bruce Novoa describes Sabina as "prosa experimental" and "escritura

innovadora latinoamericana" within the context of Latin American literature

of the 1970s (83). 4 Picon Garfield, Rivero-Potter, Bruce Novoa, Francescato, and Beard are among

those critics who have written articles on Sabina's experimental qualities, describing the novel as "metafictional," "self-reflexive," "open," and "intertextual."



Barreto

5 Beard notes in her article that Rivero-Potter in "The Role of the Reader

in Julieta Campos's Tiene los cabellos rojizosyse llama Sabina" also refers to the

novel's "kaleidoscopic protagonist and plot" (56). 6 The reference to "Isabel viendo Hover en Macondo," the title of Gabriel

Garcia Marquez's story published in 1968, is also a reference to the title of one of Campos's essays in Oficio de leer wherein she describes Isabel's situation in the following way: "asiste sobrecogida a su propia muerte y solo despues de ese

descenso al abismo, podria recoger el hilo de la vida que se le habia perdido siete dias antes, cuando comenzo a Hover" (72). A few years later, Campos would

publish a novel with a woman named Sabina who like Isabel must experience

a descent into the abyss and even her own death before she can recuperate the

life she lost seven days before when she began both her vacation in Acapulco

and her fictional life as a character in Sabina. 7 The references to Capote and Unamuno are suggestive of the woman

narrator's criticism of a literary canon dominated by male writers. 8 "Dos memorias historicas" is a reference to Campos's own background:

Cuban by birth and Mexican by adoption. 9 Beard considers the narrator's focus on the present moment, "the moment

of writing," as an indication of Sabina's "universo gerundial" (48). She also

comments on Rivero-Potter's article "La creacion literaria en Julieta Campos,"

in which Rivero-Potter states that the frequent use of the conditional and sub

junctive verb tenses characterizes this novel's potentiality. 10 The first-person narrator explicitly points to an intertextual connection

between Sabina and Celina when she unexpectedly declares: "Yo soy Celina"

(295). 11 Rivero-Potter's article, "The Role of the Reader in Julieta Campos's Tiene

los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina," offers an in-depth analysis of the relation

of author to reader and the interplay of reader and text. 12

Campos's ideas on the relationship between writing and reading are stated

in Funcidn de la novela and Oficio de leer.

WORKS CITED

Beard, Laura J. "Navigating the Metafictional Text: Julieta Campos' Tiene los

cabellos rojizosyse llama Sabina." Hispandfila 129 (2000): 45-58.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. "La 'Sabina' de Julieta Campos, en el laberinto de la

intertextualidad." La sarten por el mango. Eds. Patricia Gonzalez and Eliana

Ortega. Rio Piedras, PR: Ediciones Huracan, 1984. 83-109.

Campos, Julieta. Funcion de la novela. Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz, 1973.



Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIVNumero 2

—. La imagen en el espejo. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de

Mexico, 1965.

—. Oficio de leer. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1971.

—. Reunidn defamilia. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1997.

—. Un heroismo secreto. Mexico City: Editorial Vuelta, 1988.

Francescato, Martha P. "Un desaffo a la critica literaria: Tiene los cabellos

rojizos y se llama Sabina de Julieta Campos." Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana_ 7.13 (1981): 121-25.

Kunakemakorn, Numsiri. "Subtle Subversion: The Politics of Becoming an

'Open Work.'" Romance Languages Annual 10 (1999): 653-657.

Picon Garfield, Evelyn. Women's Voices from Latin America: Interviews with Six

Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1985. 73-96.

Rivero-Potter, Alicia. "The Role of the Reader in Julieta Campos' Tiene los cabellos rojizos y se llama Sabina." Hispania 73.3 (1990): 633-40.

—. "La creacion literaria en Julieta Campos: Tiene los cabellos rojizosy se llama

Sabina." Revista Iberoamericana 51.132-133 (1985): 899-907.

Verani, Hugo J. "Julieta Campos y la novela del lenguaje." Texto Critico 5 (1976): 132-49.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. New York: Routledge, 1985.



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