5. Reading as a Realist
Expanded Literacy in Helena María
Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus
The great secret is that class matters, very much, in this society dizzy with the illusion of classlessness. Writing about class is to write about power relationships as they really are, in their nakedness, and so to write about how this system actually works.
Martín Espada, Zapata's Disciple
In a book that is about the relationship between identity, interpretation, and agency, it is perhaps fitting that I conclude with a reading of a novel that is centrally concerned with these same issues. In Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena María Viramontes develops an expanded notion of literacy that figures “reading” as a skill involving a human agent's total engagement with the world. In the process, the novel poses, and proposes answers to, a number of questions about how, what, and why people should read. Some of the questions the novel asks are: How do people learn to read? What kinds of texts do they read? What are the processes by which people become better readers? And finally, what are the connections among interpretation, understanding, and agency? As she develops it in this novel, Viramontes's expanded notion of literacy posits a person's ability to “read” as a precondition for effective human agency.
Before I proceed with my argument, I want to situate the novel within a literary and critical context. I do so both in the interest of clarifying my theoretical intervention and to explain why I compare it to the novels that I do. I contend that this novel should be placed within the tradition of American social realism, and that it is more usefully compared to novels like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Tomás Rivera's … y no se lo tragó la tierra,
[1] This problem becomes acute when, for example, a woman of Mexican American descent writes a novel with a theme that is not overtly, or even arguably, “ethnic.” Cecile Pineda is a notable example. For more on the literary reception of Pineda's work, see Gonzalez, The Postmodern Turn, chap. 6.
While such interpretive practices are generally sound, in some cases they do a disservice to the text under consideration by limiting the range of interpretive frameworks that will be brought to bear on a work of literature.Paradoxically, it is the concern with the activity of reading inUnder the Feet of Jesus that makes this novel difficult to read within contemporary critical paradigms set forth by Chicana and women of color literary criticism. Up until this point, Chicana and women of color literary criticism have tended to privilege tropes and themes other than that of reading— tropes and themes such as coming to voice, talking back, breaking down boundaries, crossing borders, making what was hidden visible, and resisting the patriarchal repression of female sexuality.
[2] Two common tropes of feminist literature and criticism, including work produced by Chicanas, have been those of coming to voice and breaking down the boundaries between the public and the private. Think, for example, of Carol Gilligan's groundbreaking book, In a Different Voice. Debra Castillo and bell hooks both have books entitled Talking Back. Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera breaks boundaries on a generic level, privileges border crossing on a thematic level, and includes an essay entitled “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in which she asserts her right to speak in Spanglish, Caló, and Chicano Spanish. Sandra Cisneros's collection of short stories is aptly titled Woman Hollering Creek, and Maxine Hong Kingston'sThe Woman Warrior is very much concerned with the young protagonist's ability to find her voice. The subtitle of Cherríe Moraga's book Loving in the War Years, “lo que nunca pasó por sus labios,” carries dual implications of coming to voice and making visible a female homosexuality that has been repressed by a patriarchal society. Moraga's Waiting in the Wings serves the purpose of making visible queer motherhood, while Sandra Cisneros's two books of poetry, Loose Woman and My Wicked Wicked Ways contain poems that thematize female sexuality, sometimes in exhibitionistic ways, in an attempt to resist patriarchal control of female agency. A 1998 graduate student conference on Latina feminism at Berkeley, entitled “Oppositional Wetness,” a 2000 Latina/o studies conference on Latina/o queer theory at the University of Michigan, entitled “Sin Vergüenzas,” and the artwork on the cover of Carla Trujillo's edited volume Living Chicana Theory also participate in the logic of resistance through exhibitionistic sexual display. Chicano cultural critics have also found the tropes of coming to voice and crossing borders especially powerful and appropriate to their projects. Alfred Arteaga's edited collection is entitled An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, while Carl Gutiérrez-Jones titled his book Rethinking the Borderlands. Finally, José David Saldívar has co-edited a anthology with Héctor Calderón entitled Criticism in the Borderlands and titled his single-author book Border Matters. This list is not intended to be exhaustive; I include it simply to illustrate the pervasiveness of these tropes within these fields of study.
While these tropes and[3] See, for example, Lawless. Although her essay contains many useful insights on the novel, she errs by reading the novel in terms of the commonly privileged tropes of “home” and “borders.” Her decision to read the novel through these tropes leads her to some strange conclusions, such as that Petra, in an act of female resistance to male patriarchy, moves her cooking and other domestic activities “outside the walls of the house to expand domestic intimacy into the public world: she makes the inside become outside” (374–75). I suspect that Petra's behavior in these instances is conditioned more by material necessity than by some sort of impulse, conscious or not, to resist patriarchy: she cooks at the grill and bathes her children outside because the shack they live in has no kitchen or bathroom.
Viramontes's challenging novel thus presents its critics with an opportunity to expand the range of interpretative concerns usually brought to bear on literature written by Chicanas. It does so by calling for a theory of interpretation that foregrounds the material aspects of the interpretive process itself. I demonstrate in this chapter that the novel implies a post-positivist realist approach to identity and interpretation on at least three different levels. On the metaphorical level, Viramontes analogizes words to tools to figure the act of interpretation as a materialist engagement with the world. On a structural level, she employs the narrative strategy of focalization to emphasize the epistemic status of identity. Finally, on a the-matic level, the novel documents Estrella's transformation of consciousness and her personal empowerment by tracing the process through which she becomes a better reader of her social world.WORDS AS TOOLS:
VIRAMONTES'S EXPANDED NOTION OF LITERACY
When Estrella, the young protagonist of Under the Feet of Jesus, first comes across the red tool chest of her mother's new boyfriend, she
The link between tools and language that Viramontes dramatizes in this scene is central to the expanded notion of literacy that she develops in the novel. Viramontes sets up a series of associations that make explicit the connection between communication, interpretation, and agency. The metaphor of the “tool” figures the connection: language as a tool of communication; a tool as something that has transformative potential; language as a tool that has the power to transform the world. It is a metaphor that recalls the notion of “complete literacy,” which Luis Rodríguez develops in his autobiography Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. In his preface to that book, Rodríguez defines “complete literacy” as the “ability to participate competently and confidently in any level of society one chooses” (9).
[4] Because participating competently in society at any level involves a range of cultural as well as cognitive skills, Rodríguez's notion may be (in practice) unattainable. Nevertheless, it is suggestive and offers us an ideal with which we can work.
It is a conception of literacy that is not confined to reading printed texts, but encompasses theSimilarly, Viramontes figures literacy as a skill involving a human agent's total engagement with the world.
[5] By developing their expanded notions of literacy, Rodríguez and Viramontes are evoking an older meaning of the Latin verb legere, from which is derived the Spanish verb leer (to read). According to literary critic Walter Mignolo, one of the original meanings of legere was “to discern.” He argues that with the rise of alphabetic writing the meaning of the verb began to be applied more exclusively to the idea of discerning the letters of the alphabet in a text (105). Moreover, if one accepts Mignolo's compelling argument that the Spaniards and the Mexicans during the encounter had “not only different material ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge but also, as is natural—different concepts of the activities of reading and writing,” then Viramontes and Rodríguez are returning to a conception of “reading” that is in accord with the way their Amerindian forebears would have understood the concept. See Mignolo, esp. chap. 2.
It is worth noting that when Perfecto teaches Estrella the meanings of the tools, he does so by showing her how to use them. Immediately following the scene involving the tool box is another in which Perfecto and Estrella work together to manipulate their living space in order to make it more habitable for the family. The scene clearly demonstrates that Estrella's cooperation is necessary for Perfecto's ability to accomplish the task efficiently. It begins when Perfecto, who is kneeling on the floor to plug a hole, calls Estrella in from outside to help him.—I'm not your papa. But you're getting me old with your…
—Where did you put the lantern?
—Stay away from the barn, hear me?
—You're right. You're not my papa.
—That should do it.
Although reluctant at first, Estrella helped him up from his knees by cupping her hand under his elbow. The room was now clean and safe to spread the blankets. They held a sky-blue sheet between them to divide the rooms. He held one corner, she another, and he nailed one corner, passed the hammer to her, and she did the other. He hammered a thick nail near the entrance and plucked off his hat and hung it. He then placed a bucket in the corner for the weak bladders of the twins who refused to go outdoors in the night.
—It will be good to sleep laying down, he said, dragging his feet outside.
― 180 ―—Where did you put the lantern? she asked again, following close behind. (27–28)
The smoothness with which the sheet is hung and the lack of any verbal communication about how to hang it demonstrate how accustomed Estrella and Perfecto have become to working together. Their coordinated movements imply a mutual attentiveness (Perfecto does not need to ask Estrella to help him up) and a recognition of the needs and abilities of the other (Perfecto does not doubt Estrella's ability to wield the hammer). What is even more remarkable about their silent cooperation is that it takes place within a relationship that is otherwise characterized by resentment (“You're right. You're not my papa”). However Estrella and Perfecto might feel about each other, they recognize their mutual inter-dependence. By portraying the process of learning to read as similar to the communicative process by which an apprentice is instructed in the use of tools, Viramontes portrays the acquisition of knowledge as necessarily intersubjective and tied to the material effects that words (as tools) have on the world.
Embedded within Viramontes's expanded notion of literacy is a thesis about the nature of language. Under the Feet of Jesus figures words as more or less powerful to the extent that they refer outward, beyond language as such, to actions or objects in the world.
[6] The conception of reference that I am working with is not one of perfect correspondence. Rather, I am working with the notion of partial denotation developed by philosophical realists such as Field and R. Boyd.
Where words lack a more or less determinate referent they are figured simply as noise. Estrella's father, for instance, never delivers on his promise to return to the family from Mexico. His promises are meaningless; his words fail to correspond to lived behavior. Not surprisingly, he is portrayed as someone who uses language carelessly, whose “words clanked like loose empty cans in a bag” (16). In this, he provides a contrast to Perfecto, whose refrain, “trust me,” keeps Petra, Estrella's mother, from worrying overmuch that he will leave her. Although we as readers who are privy to Perfecto's thoughts understand much more clearly than Petra does howEstrella's friend Maxine is another character in the novel who often uses words carelessly. As someone who “rattle[s] on like a broken wheel on a shopping cart,” she provides an important foil for Estrella, who is represented as reticent, as careful with her speech (34). However, Maxine's meaningless and annoying chatter becomes both meaningful and destructive when she touches on an issue related to Estrella's life. My point is that when Maxine's words start to refer, they cease to be noise and become words that can wound. The incident that ends the two girls’ friendship begins one evening when Maxine asks Estrella why her papa is “so old.” When Estrella explains that Perfecto is “not [her] papa,” Maxine responds by asking why Estrella “let [her] grandpa fuck [her] ma fo’?” Such activity, Maxine explains, “makes for one-legged babies” (34). Estrella's enraged answer that Petra “isn't fucking him” merely causes Maxine to press the matter further.
—And how'd you know that?
—’Cause he's not my papa.
—Jesus Henry Christ! Maxine replied incredulously. She began to laugh, her giggles bubbling like welling water when the irrigation pipe was twisted on. Sweet toast, don't you know nothin’?
—Shut your trap!
—They ain't dry-humping. (35)
Maxine's careless, but accurate, remarks about Petra and Perfecto have the effect of forcing Estrella to see her family from a different perspective. She is forced to realize that people she has been taught to look down on have been simultaneously judging her family and finding them wanting. More importantly, Maxine's remarks compel Estrella to confront the truth of Petra's sexuality and her unsanctified relationship with Perfecto, the man who is “not [Estrella's] papa.” Because Maxine's words refer to a verifiable aspect of Estrella's life—the relative truth or falsity of which is discoverable—they are meaningful. They have the power to wound.
Another passage in which words are figured as tools with the ability to injure involves Estrella's experience with an uncomprehending and uncaring school system. When Estrella's teacher, Mrs. Horn, “asked her how come her mama never gave her a bath,” Estrella realizes, for the first time, that “words could become as excruciating as rusted nails piercing the heels of her bare feet” (25). Before then, “it had never occurred to
On one level, the novel's thesis about language is unremarkable. Most people would readily agree that words have meaning only to the extent that they refer to something. It is a thesis that becomes controversial only in the context of structuralist and poststructuralist debates about the nature of language. In the wake of theorists such as Saussure, de Man, and Derrida, postmodernist literary critics have been loath to admit that language, as a system of signs, has a referential relationship to anything beyond itself. While the postmodernist turn spawned by poststructuralism has crucially informed many cultural critics’ understanding of the constructed nature of our social world, some critics have argued that it has also had a debilitating effect on the academic left's ability to theorize and justify progressive social action.
[7] See, for example, Benhabib; Calhoun; Eagleton; Lazarus; McGowan; Mohanty, Literary Theory; Moya and Hames-García; Norris.
In an article about the problems in theories of working-class representation, Peter Hitchcock argues that, at the very least, constructionist theories of representation can be distracting: “For the constructionist, the lure here is ironically the role of the deconstructionist, for the artful play of the signifier can become a full-time occupation, and what [Stuart] Hall calls ‘the work of representation’ offers to be simultaneously meaning's primary mode of production and its ultimate abyss: this ‘workday’ never ends” (22). Hitchcock worries that when too much attention is given to the productivity of language, the givenness of class as a socioeconomic category begins to disappear from view (22).At stake for Hitchcock, and for Viramontes, is the “aboutness” of working-class representation. Although neither would deny the constitutive role of language in how people understand and experience the social world, both are concerned with retaining a role for the referent in meaning-making practices of representation and interpretation. Viramontes has a message she wants to convey, and although her medium is a linguistic one, her message refers to something outside her medium. As I have argued above, Viramontes approaches the problem at least partly through a novelistic meditation on the nature of language. In Under the Feet of Jesus, the power of language resides in the contextually determined meaning that becomes actualized in the process of human communication. Words in this novel are figured as noise until they serve the function of transmitting some (more or less determinate) meaning from one human consciousness to another.
The link between meaning and reference is perhaps most clearly figured in the character of Estrella. As I noted above, Estrella is not much of a talker.
[8] Lawless astutely observes that characters in this novel are as likely to communicate through gestures as with words (371). Lawless interprets this to mean that the characters are still struggling to build a home for themselves “within different sedimentary layers of language,” but I would argue instead that the characters’ use of gestural language figures the insufficiency of words that are unconnected to actions and objects in the world (362). Talk is just noise unless it impels a human agent to do or feel something that will help change the material conditions of her life.
She distrusts casual conversation and is quick to criticize words that do not correspond to action.[9] When Petra remarks that “for the pay we get, [the growers] are lucky we don't burn the orchards down,” Estrella rebukes her by saying, “No sense talking tough unless you do it” (45).
Notably, when Estrella does talk, her words have all the more impact. When, near the end of the novel, Estrella thanks Perfecto for driving Alejo (a fellow camp worker who is dying of pesticide poisoning) to the hospital, he is deeply affected.Perfecto sat behind the steering wheel, the warm hum of engine under his feet. He had given this country his all, and in this land that used his bones for kindling, in this land that never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude, he was struck by how deeply these words touched him. (155)
This passage illustrates that words can heal as well as wound. When Estrella says “thank you,” her utterance is performative; it performs the act that it names. Moreover, her utterance is productive; it creates in
Before I conclude my discussion of Viramontes's expanded notion of literacy, I want to return to the passage with which I began this section in order to focus on the way in which Perfecto interacts with Estrella. In what turns out to be the first instance in the novel that we see him barter his valuable skills for necessary goods and services, Perfecto barters his knowledge for Estrella's voice—and her help. Throughout the novel, barter is represented as a social relation that requires both parties to an exchange to take into account the unique needs, desires, and capabilities of the other. For example, when Perfecto approaches Estrella about tearing down the old barn, he does not order her to help him. Instead, he appeals to what he knows is Estrella's considerable love for her mother. He explains that he has asked her to help him because to split the money with someone else would mean “less for [her] mama” (74). Later, when Estrella finally does assent to Perfecto's request, she renegotiates the terms, asking him for something that she wants more than money for her mother. Importantly, she asks for something that she knows that Perfecto will be able to give her. When Alejo becomes very ill, Estrella wants to help him but does not have the resources to do so on her own. So, she barters her labor to Perfecto in exchange for his promise to drive Alejo to the doctor. In their exchanges with one another, Perfecto and Estrella each “read” the other—that is, they attempt to discern the concrete needs, desires, and capabilities of the other in order to work out an acceptable and fair exchange. Each must recognize the particularity, the “otherness,” of the other, even as they view the other in relation to the self. What is missing from representations of barter in this novel is the element of exploitation. As such, barter represents an alternative to relations of capitalist exchange that otherwise structure the world of migrant laborers. Thus, Viramontes represents barter both as a form of mutual recognition and as an ideal form of communicative interaction— one that stands in opposition to coercive and exploitative forms of human exchange.
The expanded notion of literacy that Viramontes develops in this novel is thus embodied, intersubjective, and egalitarian. It is embodied because Estrella's ability to read the world develops as a result of practical activity; it is intersubjective because what Estrella knows depends on
“THE HUMP AND TEAR OF THE STITCHED PAVEMENT”:
FOCALIZATION AND THE PARTIALITY OF PERSPECTIVE
Earlier, I asserted that Viramontes employs a narrative structure in Under the Feet of Jesus that demonstrates the epistemic status of identity. In this section, I discuss precisely how this works. Through the use of variable character-bound focalization, Viramontes demonstrates the partiality of individual perspective. In the process, she reveals how social location and social ideologies influence characters’ identities and, by extension, their understandings of the world. Although all novels—indeed, all acts of representation—are focalized, Viramontes's signature use of variable character-bound focalization is unique in the way it attempts to call into existence an ideal reader for the novel. She employs a narrative structure, I argue, that is designed to reproduce in her ideal reader a transformation of consciousness similar to the one Estrella undergoes.
Focalization is a term that was introduced by the French literary critic Gérard Genette in 1972 to make clearer the distinction in a narrative “between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator?—or more simply, the question who sees? and the question who speaks?” (186). The distinction, Genette points out, is one that is not adequately limned in narrative theories that attempt to describe narrative perspective in terms of “point of view” (186–89). Since it was introduced,
Focalization refers to the mediation (the prism, perspective, or angle of vision) through which a story is presented by a narrator in the text. As such, it describes a relationship between the “ ‘vision,’ the agent that sees, and that which is seen” (Bal 104). In such a relationship, we can distinguish between the focalizer, the point from which the elements are viewed, and the focalized object(s), or the element(s) viewed. A focalizer can correspond to a character, in which case the individual perspective of that character orients the narrative. In such a case the focalization is said to be internal to the story. The focalizer can also be an anonymous agent situated outside the story. The focalization is then said to be external. It is important for understanding the concept of focalization to remember that the focalizer and the narrator can, but need not, be the same. It is quite possible, for example, to have a third-person narrator that presents the perspective of one or more characters in the story. It is also possible for the narrator and the focalizer to converge. The case of the so-called “ominiscient narrator” is an example of external focalization in which the narrator and the focalizer are one and the same; both are located outside the story (Bal 104–10).
Rimmon-Kenan points out that all focalization involves perceptual, psychological, and ideological facets. The perceptual facet has to do with sense perception and is determined by the coordinates of space and time. A character-focalizer, for example, can orient the narrative only toward those objects that she has smelled, seen, touched, tasted, or heard (or heard about). Moreover, her “vision” will necessarily be affected by such material factors as her stature and physical location. The psychological facet has to do with the focalizer's emotional state and cognitive capacity. A character-focalizer who is ill, upset, depressed, worried, or tired will perceive the world very differently from one who is enthusiastic, joyful, happy, or well rested. Additionally, a character's age and level of experience will influence how she perceives events or objects that are unfamiliar. Finally, the ideological facet has to do with a character's general system of viewing the world conceptually. How a given character interprets any event will be influenced by the social ideologies she is presented as having grown up with. These ideologies, which are constitutive of her fictionalized
Although Under the Feet of Jesus is narrated in the third person, its focalization is neither omniscient nor stable. Rather, the narrative perspective shifts among four main characters so that the world portrayed literally changes character—often from one paragraph to the next. Although all the characters in the novel occupy the “same” physical world, they experience and perceive it very differently. So, for example, when the members of Estrella's family arrive together at the shack that will be their new home, they each look around and see very different things: where Perfecto sees utility, and Petra sees danger, Estrella, younger and less jaded than both, sees adventure and possibility. The “furniture” of the world they occupy and perceive simultaneously thus changes according to who is doing the perceiving: Perfecto looks at crates and sees an altar for Petra's religious statues; Petra looks at her children's bare feet and sees the threat of scorpions; Estrella looks at a row of eucalyptus trees and sees dancing girls fanning their feathers (8–9).
[10] For more on the realist conception of the universe as an empty room that is “furnished” by people's conceptual choices, see Alcoff, Real Knowing, esp. 169–70.
The novel's variable character-bound focalization thus emphasizes the partiality of perspective even as it pulls together different perspectives and juxtaposes them so that the reader is placed in a privileged position vis-à-vis the characters. The reader is frequently allowed to see the same world, the same event, through several different characters’ eyes.[11] Bal writes, “Character-bound focalization (CF) can vary, can shift from one character to another. In such cases, we may be given a good picture of the origin of a conflict. We are shown how differently the various characters view the same facts. … Nevertheless, there usually is never a doubt in our minds which character should receive the most attention and sympathy. On the grounds of distribution, for instance the fact that a character focalizes the first and/or the last chapter, we label it the hero(ine) of the book” (105). Thus, even though the narrative is focalized in turn by Estrella, Alejo, Petra, and Perfecto, we know Estrella is the protagonist because she focalizes the beginning and end of the novel.
Because of this, the reader comes to understand that how each character interprets the world is largely determined by her social location (the particular nexus of race, class, gender, and sexuality in which a given character exists in the world) and by her understanding of her place in the larger society (whom she identifies with or against, what her experiences have been, what social ideologies she has grown up with, and what possibilities[12] See, for example, how differently Estrella, Alejo, and Gumecindo interpret the sound made when the door of the old barn swings open. For Estrella, who sees the barn door open, it “squeaks worse than the brakes of Perfecto's wagon” (10). For Alejo, who hears the sound from afar without seeing what caused it, the sound is suggestive of “cats fighting” (10). Gumecindo, meanwhile, hears the sound and thinks of La Llorona, the wailing women of Chicana/o and Mexican mythology (10). For more on the myth of La Llorona, see chapter two, note 9. Another example involves the breaking of Petra's statue of Jesus Christ. We see the incident first from Petra's perspective (167) and then again from Estrella's perspective (170).
In short, how each character interprets the world is largely determined by her identity.Viramontes's use of variable character-bound focalization calls to mind William Faulkner's use of this narrative technique in The Sound and the Fury. Like Viramontes, Faulkner employs four different focalizers. Unlike Viramontes, however, he segregates the focalizers into four different sections of the text. The novel is divided into four sections (each of which takes place on a different day), the first three of which are focalized and narrated by different members of the Compson family, an aristocratic Southern family whose fortunes have declined concurrently with the demise of the old South. Each of the three character-focalizers focalizes and narrates his own actions as well as the actions of others within his immediate purview. The first section is focalized by Benjy, the “idiot” Compson whose cognitive capacities are quite limited. Because Benjy's capacity for organization and analysis is extremely limited, he focalizes much that he does not himself understand. Moreover, because Benjy confuses past and present, his section does not obey the constraints of chronological time; as a result, his is a difficult section to read. The second and third sections are focalized and narrated by Quentin and Jason Compson, respectively. Both sections obey the constraints of chronological time and are differentiated from each other by the characters and worldviews of Quentin and Jason. The fourth and last section, significantly, is focalized not by a character but a by a narrator who is external to the story. The use of external focalization in the last section allows Faulkner more authorial control over the climax and the denouement of the novel. By making the last focalizer external to the story, Faulkner is able to move the narrative quickly from one locale to another and to invoke a simultaneity that his previous use of multiple, but segregated, character-bound focalization had not allowed.
[13] In the last section, as Dilsey serves lunch to Benjy and Luster, she notes that Jason is not coming home. This provides the cue for Faulkner to note that Jason “was twenty miles away at that time” (317). The narrative focus then shifts to Jason until the narrator tells us, “He wasn't thinking of home, where Ben and Luster were eating cold dinner at the kitchen table” (329). At that point, the narrative focus transfers to Benjy and Luster and remains on them until the conclusion of the novel—despite the fact that Jason shows up briefly near the end.
It also allows the[14] The following passage is representative of the near-omniscient status of the final, external narrator: “Jason got in and started the engine and drove off. He went into second gear, the engine spluttering and gasping, and he raced the engine, jamming the throttle down and snapping the choke in and out savagely.… He thought how he'd find a church at last and take a team and of the owner coming out, shouting at him and of himself striking the man down. … Of his niece he did not think at all, nor the arbitrary valuation of the money. Neither of them had had entity or individuality for him for ten years; together they merely symbolized the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it” (321).
The focalization in the final section of The Sound and the Fury is further distinguished from the other three sections in that its principal focalized object is Dilsey, the elderly black servant whose labor and loyalty have served to keep the Compson family together as a (dys)functional unit. Curiously, however, despite the fact that the narrative follows Dilsey around, focalizing her actions, she is never herself the focalizer of the narrative. Nor does the narrative intrude into her thoughts and feelings as it does into the thoughts and feelings of the principal Compson characters. Consequently, the reader, who is watching Dilsey along with the narrator, often does not know why she does what she does until something happens in the story that reveals her probable motivations.
[15] Note how in the following passage the reader cannot understand why Dilsey goes outside until Luster enters the scene and Dilsey asks him where he has been. Only then can the reader surmise that she has gone looking for him: “She returned to the kitchen. She looked into the stove, then she drew her apron over her head and donned the overcoat and opened the outer door and looked up and down the yard. The weather drove upon her flesh, harsh and minute, but the scene was empty of all else that moved. She descended the steps, gingerly, as if for silence, and went around the corner of the kitchen. As she did so Luster emerged quickly and innocently from the cellar door. Dilsey stopped: ‘What you up to?’ she said” (288). Compare this passage to the one cited in the previous footnote, which focalizes Jason Compson. In that passage, the narrator gets into Jason's head and we understand why he acts as he does while he is in the process of doing it.
Effectively, this means that Dilsey, as an exemplar of the working class or the marginalized in Faulkner's novel, is the “object,” but never the “subject,” of her own and other characters’ representations. While the externalThe question of what character is, or is not, allowed to orient the narrative in a novel is not an innocent one. As Bal has stated, focalization is “the most important, most penetrating, and most subtle means of manipulation” available to an author of a narrative text (116). She notes that a character who is allowed to focalize the narrative has the “advantage as a party in [a] conflict. [Focalization] can give the reader insight into its feelings and thoughts, while the other character cannot communicate anything” (110). Focalization thus sets up a situation of inequality in a text that influences the sentiments of the reader. Consequently, we should not pass over too quickly the question of why Dilsey, as one of four main characters in The Sound and the Fury, is the only one who does not act as focalizer. What is noteworthy about Faulkner's departure in the last section of the novel from the pattern of focalization he sets up in the first three sections is his apparent inability, or unwillingness, to view the world from the perspective of a black female servant. Such a departure is even more marked in light of his willingness, and apparent ability, to allow Benjy, the “idiot” Compson, to orient the perspective of the narrative in the first section of the novel. We might want to ask: What mechanisms of silencing and erasure along lines of race, gender, and class— consciously or unconsciously employed—are taking place in the narrative of this otherwise quite extraordinary novel?
I have devoted so much space to the question of focalization inThe Sound and the Fury both because it is a canonical example of the use of that literary device and to emphasize the contribution to an American literary canon that novels like Viramontes's can make. Viramontes's novel, after all, is focalized entirely from the perspective of Mexican-origin migrant farmworkers. It is certainly not the first novel to center on the lives and struggles of working-class people; John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, for example, also treats the lives of migrant farm-workers. But Viramontes's novel can be distinguished from Steinbeck's in two important ways. First, Viramontes's novel treats Mexican-origin farmworkers. Second, Viramontes does not employ an external narrator-focalizer to guide her reader's interpretation of the novel. InThe Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck included fifteen “inner,” “intercalary,” or “general”
[16] See Dircks; Emory; Howarth; Owens and Torres.
His willingness to guide his readers’ interpretation of the novel in a way that might seem heavy-handed was ultimately very successful.[17] The novel, which was released in March 1939, was a huge commercial success, and was translated into ten different European languages. By April, it was selling 2,500 copies a day. By May, it had reached the top of the best-seller list. In 1982, the New York Times reported that it was the “second-best-selling novel ever in paperback in America, with 14,600,000 copies printed” (Wyatt 3).
I mention Steinbeck's “psychological trick” partly to distinguish it from the kind of manipulation Viramontes achieves through her variable character-bound focalization.
[18] Steinbeck himself refers to the use of the inner chapters as a “psychological trick” (Dircks 91).
More precisely, however, I want to emphasize the difficulty Viramontes's narrative strategy presents to readers who are accustomed to having their interpretations of a novel guided in a more or less explicit way. Viramontes does not hit her reader over the head with the political message of her novel; indeed, her prose has more often been described as “lush” and “poetic” than as polemical.[19] See Miner; Chambers.
Instead, through the use of variable character-bound focalization, Viramontes challenges her reader to become a better, more sensitive, interpreter of the social world represented in the text. By allowing the four main characters to take turns orienting the narrative perspective, Viramontes encourages her reader to empathetically identify, in turn, with each of the character-focalizers and to undertake, without intervention or help from an external narrator-focalizer, the hard work of ordering[20] Lawless notes the interpretive demands placed on the reader of this novel and observes that “the narrative demands an active role from the reader, we must make an effort not to become lost amongst the different time locations framed by blank spaces” (368).
Only by creating the conditions through which an ideal reader can dialectically transform her consciousness—and, in the process, reproduce Estrella's transformation of consciousness—does Viramontes unobtrusively guide her reader's interpretation of the novel.I turn now to a scene in Under the Feet of Jesus that demonstrates the epistemic effects of social location by focalizing a familiar object—a highway—from a perspective unfamiliar to most middle-class readers of novels. Petra (after her husband's desertion but before Perfecto's arrival) faces the challenge of transporting her five children on foot across a busy highway in order to buy the food they need to survive. The scene is inserted into the novel immediately after a passage in which Perfecto contemplates leaving the family. Its placement highlights how difficult it is to be a working-class woman alone with children.
Petra knew the capricious black lines on a map did little to reveal the hump and tear of the stitched pavement which ascended to the morning sun and through the trees and no trees, and became a swollen main street and then a loose road once again outside the hamlets that appeared as splat dots on paper. They had travelled by foot, in and out of the orchards, until they reached the main highway and Petra could feel the heat pulsating from the asphalt. The oil of the pavement mirrored like puddles of fresh rainwater though it hadn't rained in months. The family stood in file on the thistle belt of road and rested.
Under the strutting powerlines, Estrella sat on her haunches. The floral fabric of her dress was thin from repeated washes and the reddish blue violets paled against the searing sunlight. She sunk her white thumbnail into the pavement and slowly sliced a sliver on the melted tar. Not far across the highway, the rickety store stood as desirous as a drink of water. (103)
Petra, who focalizes the above passage, conveys how different a highway looks, feels, and smells from the perspective of someone who must travel it by foot as opposed to someone who travels it by car. The highway, which for people with cars is an aid to rapid transit, is for Petra, in her present circumstances, a physical barrier she must surmount to get food for her family. The tar, which provides a smooth surface for automobiles to travel on, is for Petra and her children a concentrator of solar heat and a source of unpleasant smells.
In the scene immediately following the one recounted above, Petraencounters
The Bermuda man looked at her over the hood of his lime green car, and the sun reflected wavy green on his face. Petra wore mismatched clothes and had chosen the clothes for their blues because blue was a cool color against the hot tempered sun and that was why she was dressed the way she was and she hoped he would stop staring. The man crumpled up the blue of his towel into a ball and tossed it on the ground and the twins watched it slowly unfold. (106)
The scene recounted above illustrates the asymmetry in social relations between people who occupy different locations in a hierarchical economic system. Notice that Petra's envy of the man takes the form of attributing to him knowledge that she does not herself possess. Moreover, she becomes self-conscious when he looks at her: the functionality of her clothing does not protect her from internalizing the middle-class expectation that she should be dressed in an aesthetically pleasing way. Evidently, the asymmetry in economic relations is rein-forced by ideological narratives that reinforce the relation of inequality. Petra does not look down on the man; rather, she feels inadequate in his presence. Moreover, although she knows things he might not, such as what it is like to be a woman abandoned with her children, or what the highway looks like to someone who travels it by foot, she imagines him as someone who “knows” things. In contrast, it is unlikely that the
I do not mean that the Bermuda man is meant to represent an evil person—or even someone who consciously embraces an exploitative socioeconomic system. Nor do I mean to suggest that his character cannot, in principle, understand his economic relation to Petra. Rather, my argument is that the Bermuda man functions in the novel as a stand-in for the middle-class American whose social location inhibits his apprehension of the real economic relations in which he exists. The possibility that Petra may have something to teach the Bermuda man about the world they both live in would probably not occur to him. Because, presumably, such a man does not come into regular contact with migrant farmworkers, at some conscious everyday level he could imagine that the agricultural products he consumes simply come from the grocery store. Although he might well “know” that they are picked by someone or something out in a field somewhere, the socially produced blindness he would have developed as a result of his individual experience might not have given him the imaginative resources by which he could adequately reconstruct that process. And because the Bermuda man lives a comfortable existence— because he speeds through the world on plump white seats in a shiny green car—he might well lack the motivation to transcend the limitations of his own partial perspective. The isolation his relative wealth provides would thus perpetuate his socially produced blindness and facilitate his unconscious disregard for Petra's and other farmworkers’ well-being.
Viramontes imparts significance to the Bermuda man's disregard for Petra and her family by giving him a cameo role in a novel that powerfully champions the cause of social and economic justice for migrant
[21] California's Proposition 187, which was passed in 1994 by California voters by a majority of almost 60 percent, was intended to make undocumented residents ineligible for public social services, public health care services (except for emergency care, under federal law), and public school education at elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels; to require various state and local agencies to report persons who are suspected undocumented residents to the California attorney general and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service; to mandate the California attorney general to transmit reports to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and maintain records of such reports; and to make it a felony to manufacture, distribute, sell, or use false citizenship or residence documents. As noted in chapter four, note 8, the core provisions of the proposition were never implemented.
By depicting what is normally invisible to American consumers—that is, the effect on a migrant farmworker family of the systematic economic exploitation to which they are subjected—the scene at the gas station implicitly calls for a reconsideration of their place within American society.My claim that Viramontes intends to contest farmworkers’ outsider status is further demonstrated by the first of two eponymous moments in the novel. The first moment brings together the related themes of citizenship,
Partiality of perspective, as I noted in my initial discussion of focalization, involves perceptual, psychological, and ideological facets. An individual who wishes to become a better reader of her social world, then, must first recognize and then examine for adequacy the ideological as well as the perceptual and psychological biases that structure her own perspective. While we cannot hope to apprehend the world free of mediating theories and biases, we can strive toward less distorted understandings of our social world. One of the central tenets of postpositivist realism is that not all ideologies are equally illuminating. As I have argued throughout this book, some in fact serve to obscure real social and economic relations. To the extent that a reader of a social text can recognize distorting social narratives, then, she has a better chance of coming to a more objective understanding of her social world. Something of this sort is what Estrella is able to do after Maxine rudely alerts her to the possibility that there may be an alternative, and perhaps more accurate, interpretation of the text of her mother's life. The incident that ends Estrella's and Maxine's friendship, which I discussed briefly in the first section of this chapter and to which I return now, brings to light some of the obstacles, in the form of social ideologies, that Estrella needs to over-come in order to become a better “reader” of her social world.
Ironically, it is only because Estrella can read at all that she and
This is the context within which Maxine makes her careless remarks about Estrella's mother. Maxine's assertion that Petra is “fucking” Perfecto is difficult for Estrella to accept. Estrella, after all, has been socialized into Mexican Catholic norms of morality and respectability. As far as Estrella is concerned, her mother cannot be having sex with Perfecto because they are not married. Petra, Estrella reasons, is still married to her father. Good Catholic women do not have sex outside of marriage; they remain married to and true to their husbands. Furthermore, mothers (according to Estrella's naive Catholic worldview) are not sexual beings; rather, they are self-abnegating madonnas who engage in sexual relations only for the purpose of reproduction. From Estrella's perspective, Petra is both her mother and a good woman; therefore, she cannot be having sex
Meanwhile, the relative material security that Perfecto's labor has provided for the family since his arrival, and the real value of his companionship to Petra's sense of well-being, has gone unnoticed by Estrella. In a crucial way, the real exigencies and moral dilemmas her family faces have less ideological relevance for Estrella than do the norms of respectability and Catholic religious values that she has internalized as a result of growing up as a working-class Mexican Catholic child in the United States.
[22] A real moral dilemma explored in the novel, but one which I do not treat in detail in this chapter, involves Perfecto's decision to remain with, or abandon, the family.
As part of a normal process of socialization and identification, Estrella has incorporated into her identity certain social ideologies that have blinded her to the lived realities of her existence. Moreover, Estrella has been as blind to these social ideologies as she has been to Petra's sexuality. Only after Maxine's remarks jolt Estrella into seeing herself from an another perspective does she realize that there are other ways of viewing her mother's situation. Only when she realizes that her views about her mother can be contested does she worry about whether what she has known all along to be true is in fact true.Maxine's remarks and her accompanying laughter do more than simply challenge Estrella's sense of reality. They also oblige Estrella to see herself and her mother, with whom she strongly identifies, as outsiders to the norms of bourgeois acceptability and, more disturbingly, as inhabitants of a freak show capable of producing one-legged babies or children with no mouths. These visions provoke in her a violent reaction. In an instant, Estrella's contradictory feelings about having been abandoned by her father (and so forever excluded from bourgeois respectability and Catholic piety), about occupying a position of economic marginality, and about having been betrayed by a mother whose sexuality exposes them both to ridicule, come rushing to the fore. All of Estrella's anger, hurt, and fear become concentrated on Maxine, and she pulls “Maxine's stringy sandy hair with such pure hatred it startled even her. For a moment she felt as if she could kill the white girl” (35). The fight is eventually broken up by Maxine's mother; it ends before either girl is seriously injured, but not before the friendship is permanently destroyed.
Why does Estrella turn on Maxine with such ferocity? First, at some level Estrella knows that what Maxine has said is likely to be true. Her anger at Maxine is thus, to some degree, displaced anger at herself for
[23] The focalization of Maxine is actually what Bal would describe as “complex.” Bal points out that various focalization levels can be distinguished in most narratives. When an external focalizer on the first level of focalization delegates focalization to an internal focalizer on the second level of focalization, we say that the character-focalization is embedded within the all-encompassing view of the external focalizer (110–15). Because my interest in this chapter is in how the different character-focalizers in this novel view the world, and not in developing or elaborating a theory of focalization, I have chosen not to spend a great deal of time distinguishing between different levels of focalization in this novel. Nevertheless, acknowledging the existence of an external focalizer that more frequently than not yields focalization to one of the four character-focalizers helps us to make sense of passages such as the one describing Estrella's fight with Maxine (35). Portions of the fight are described in such a way that Estrella, as a participant, could not have perceived them. And since Petra, Perfecto, and Alejo do not witness the fight, we must assume the existence of an external focalizer. Significantly, though, the bulk of Under the Feet of Jesus is focalized by one of the four main characters; the appearance of an external focalizer is infrequent.
When Estrella attacks Maxine, she expresses not only the anger she feels as a result of her father's abandonment, but also the ambivalent rage she feels toward the consumer culture which Maxine, as a white girl, momentarily represents. Like many girls her age, Estrella wants to be able to buy things, have fun, and be attractive to boys. But her exclusion, by virtue of her race and class, from that consumer culture gives rise to a volatile mixture of resentment and desire that erupts in her attack on Maxine.[24] The attack on Maxine brings to mind another passage in the novel in which Estrella dances with the Quaker oatmeal container in an attempt to distract the twins from their hunger. In that passage, Estrella “headlock[s] the Quaker man's paperboard head,” “drum[s] the top of his low crown hat,” “slap[s] the round puffy man's double chins,” and “beat[s] his wavy long hair the silky color of creamy hot oats.” Metaphorically, the Quaker man, with “chubby pink cheeks,” “double chins,” and “hair the silky color of creamy hot oats” on a “red white and blue” cylinder, stands in for a complacent and well-fed American populace oblivious to the hunger and despair of its most economically disadvantaged members. The violence of the terms describing Estrella's actions suggests the anger that fuels the amusement she concocts for her siblings (18–19).
The irony, of course, is that Maxine, by virtue of her socioeconomic class, is as much outside that consumer culture as Estrella.That Estrella's anger and hatred is not really directed against Maxine as an individual, but rather against the consumer culture and social ideologies that Maxine momentarily stands in for is made clear by Estrella's bewilderment the moment the fight is broken up. Estrella holds no grudge against Maxine and wants only to pick up the friendship where it left off. But it is too late. Shortly after the fight is over, Big Mac the foreman visits Perfecto and Petra to tell them that they must leave the camp. The family is forced to pack up and leave without collecting wages for the last few days of work. The experience is instructive for Estrella, and it clears the way for her to let go of some her illusions in order to better understand the actual social relations in which she, her mother, and Perfecto exist—an understanding that proves necessary for Estrella's eventual ability to transcend her own particular perspective by entering into an empathetic identification with Petra and Perfecto. As a result of the incident with Maxine, Estrella loses a friend, but becomes a more discerning reader of her social world.
FROM BONES TO FUEL: PERMUTATION AND THE
DYNAMICS OF ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION
Estrella's increasing ability to “read” her social world is depicted in the novel not simply as a process of accumulating ever-increasing amounts of information but also and primarily as a process of learning to distinguish between more and less illuminating theories of the social world. Part of that process necessarily involves choosing the right metaphors or tropes by which she can organize the various bits of information she receives. Estrella seizes on the trope of fuel, and the process by which it comes into being, to help her understand the dynamics of economic exploitation in which she and others like her are caught.
The trope of fuel is first introduced in connection with Alejo, the young man who becomes infatuated with Estrella at the beginning of the novel. For Alejo, migrant farm labor is not a way of life; rather, it is a way of earning some extra money during the summer to help his grandmother, who is raising him, with expenses. Unlike Estrella, Alejo attends high school during the school year in Edinburg, Texas, and plans to attend college, where he hopes to study geology. It is Alejo who introduces Estrella to the principle of permutation (the process whereby one thing is changed into another). He does so inadvertently when, as part of his seduction of her, he shares with her his fascination with the geologic processes through which tar oil pits come into existence. One day during
The first time we see Alejo, he is in the orchard with his cousin Gumecindo filching peaches which they intend to sell during the weekend for extra cash. It is from his perch in a peach tree that Alejo first spies on and becomes infatuated with Estrella. The fact that Alejo and Gumecindo need this extra money raises the question of just compensation for migrant farm labor, even as the consequence Alejo suffers for his actions introduces into his mind considerations of sin and punishment. In a subsequent scene, the two young men are once again out picking peaches when a biplane approaches to fumigate the orchards. Because the plane has arrived one week ahead of schedule, Alejo and Gumecindo are caught off-guard. Unable to get out of the tree in time, Alejo is drenched in the poisonous spray of the pesticides. The scent of the poison (like ocean salt and beached kelp) and Alejo's experience of drowning in sand evokes the image of the seabed on which organic matter is slowly transformed into oil and tar (77). This image, in turn, suggests that Alejo might yet become one of the people who gets “stuck” in the metaphorical tar pit—that his very bones might be sacrificed to the social and economic mobility of others. The specter of this possibility becomes more apparent when the biplane approaches for a second sweep. Alejo closes his eyes and imagines sinking into the tar pits.
He thought first of his feet sinking, sinking to his knee joints, swallowing his waist and torso, the pressure of tar squeezing his chest and crushing his ribs. Engulfing his skin up to his chin, his mouth, his nose, bubbled air. Black bubbles erasing him. Finally the eyes. Blankness. Thousands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones. Splintered bone pieced together by wire to make a whole, surfaced bone. No fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone. (78)
As the poison invades his system, Alejo feels what it might be like to be erased by black bubbles of tar that squeeze his chest, crush his ribs and reduce him to bone. It is an experience that affects his sense of self and initiates a possible transformation of his identity. Whereas previously Alejo had believed himself to be a “solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space” and had assumed that he would “not only [become] a part of earth's history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity” (52), now, faced with the shock of the poison to his system, he confronts the possibility that he may become—like the girl who was trapped in the La Brea tar pits—a nameless, faceless, history-less sacrifice to the mobility (through the profits ensured by corporate agribusiness) of others: “no fingerprint or history, bone. No lava stone. No story or family, bone” (78).
Part of what is at stake for Viramontes in this fictional representation of a migrant farmworker community is the risk that life stories like Alejo's might have no historical meaning. The full recognition by others of Alejo's humanity (both as an individual and as a representative of the thousands of other farmworkers who labor and die in relative obscurity) depends, to some extent, on how well his needs, desires, abilities, and experiences are represented in the social world. Just as creating a personal narrative is a way of constructing a sense of self, so is learning about an individual's history a way of recognizing that person's membership in a human community. But because historical meaning is a human construct, its existence is tenuous and subject to erasure. The danger is that in the absence of a complete and accurate historical record, some humans risk becoming nothing more than organic material that may be useful for someone's else's purposes.
The climactic scene in the novel, which is brought about by Alejo's poisoning, brings together the themes of communication, interpretation, and agency introduced in the tool box passage that I began with. Unsure how to handle Alejo's illness, Alejo's very young and panicked cousin places him in Petra's care. Not only does this place further strain on the
The inauspicious appearance of the clinic does not bode well for the quality of medical care Alejo is likely to receive. In fact, the nurse, who has been preparing to leave work, is visibly annoyed by the family's late arrival. She checks her watch more than once, mutters to herself, and separates herself from the family's predicament by adopting a bureaucratic demeanor toward them. Before attempting to assess the situation, before even informing them that there is no doctor on the premises, the nurse rips a fresh sheet of paper out of a tablet, picks up a pen, and begins filling out her forms. Her eventual diagnosis, for which she charges them $10, is that Alejo is too sick for her to treat. Having dispatched what she understands as her responsibility to the family, she advises them to take Alejo twenty miles further away to the hospital in Corazón.
By this time, after having spent their gas trying to get out of the sink-hole and having paid the nurse their last $9.07, they have no gas, no money, and a dying man on their hands. The nurse, however, is concerned only with getting them out of the clinic so that she can lock up. She waves away Estrella's repeated efforts to barter Perfecto's labor in exchange for the “services” she has rendered—even as she maintains her self-image of generosity by patronizingly accepting their last $9.07 in lieu of the $10 she charges them. It is unclear whether she even hears Estrella tell her that the money is all they have, for her bureaucratic mode of interaction does not require her to actually listen to them. After giving them a carbon-copy receipt and clicking off the fan, the nurse stands impatiently waiting for the family to leave. Her behavior in this scene speaks clearly: their problems are not worth her time.
The problem that Estrella and her family confront in this situation is that of being heard.
[25] The Mexican feminist Rosario Castellanos writes of the necessary relationship between mutual recognition and the act of “speaking with”: “The meaning of a word is its addressee: the other being who hears it, understands it, and who, when he answers, converts his questioner into a listener and understander, establishing in this way the relationship that is only possible between beings who consider themselves and deal with each other as equals. And that is only fruitful between those who wish each other to be free” (“Language as an Instrument of Domination” 253). Black feminist bell hooks suggests that black women have had to struggle to be listened to. In her experience, black women have always spoken, but their speech was frequently understood as the type of speech that could be disregarded. “Dialogue,” hooks tells us, “is the sharing of speech and recognition” (Talking Back 6). It takes place, in other words, between those who recognize and acknowledge each other as equals.
Although Estrella speaks to the nurse, and the nurse responds to her, there is a profound failure of communication. It is a failure rooted in the nurse's refusal of empathetic identification. Because the nurse refuses to recognize Estrella and her family as similar, in some crucially human ways, to herself, she feels relieved of the responsibility to act in a way that might alleviate Alejo's situation. As a result, she can dismiss Estrella's attempts to change the terms of their interaction. She can refuse to consider seriously Perfecto's offer to fix the toilet, or recement the poles, or sand and paint the wall in lieu of the cash she demands. The nurse's resistance to bartering with Estrella thus signals her inability to “read” the family, to discern their concrete and particular needs, desires, and capabilities in order to work out an acceptable and fair exchange. Because she cannot or will not see the family's predicament from something even approximating their own perspective, she is unable to conceive the existence of a relation to them outside one of abstracted commodity exchange. Her socially produced blindness thus prevents her from recognizing the potential value to herself of the family's labor—either in their capacity as producers of her food or as potential parties to a fair exchange of value. Like the Bermuda man before her, the clinic nurse remains in a relation of exploitation, rather than of equality, to Estrella and her family.Estrella's response to the nurse's refusal to hear her is to give up on words nd resort to action. First, however, she engages in an act of “reading” that allows her to better understand her situation. Once the nurse declines any responsibility for Alejo's situation, the full weight of his predicament falls on Estrella's shoulders—primarily because she is the only one willing or able to accept it. Standing in the clinic, dismissed by the nurse, the thirteen-year-old Estrella looks around the room and deliberates on what appears to be an impossible situation.
Estrella thought for a moment as the heat condensed into sweat which trickled between her breasts in the trailer room when the nurse clicked off the fan. She tried to make her mind work, tried to imagine them back on the road with an empty gas tank and wallet and Alejo too sick to talk. She stared at Perfecto's tired face. The wrinkles on his face etched deeper with the sweat and soil and jagged sun. Was this the same panic the mother went through? There was no bartering this time. If only the nurse would consent. Estrella knew she couldn't get him home, but the hospital was only twenty miles. A simple nod, a break. If only God could help.
Estrella stared at her mother's resentfulness, at whom, what, she didn't know. They were not asking for charity, not begging for money. She stared at Alejo's forehead. All that was left of his fall was a darkened scar. They would all work, including the boys if they had to, to pay for the visit, to pay for gas. Alejo was sick and the nine dollars was gas money. (147–48)
It is at this point that Estrella begins to transcend her individual perspective and transform her understanding of her place in the world. As she looks around the room, Estrella imaginatively projects herself into the lives of the others in the room. She stares at Perfecto's tired face, sees his desire for escape, and intuits her mother's panic at the threat of another abandonment. She stares at her mother's resentfulness and feels the injustice of being charged for the privilege of being told what they already knew. She looks at Alejo, remembers his earlier lesson about the tar oil, and extracts from it the principle of permutation in order to understand by analogy the dynamics of her family's disadvantaged economic situation.
She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse's car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn't the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her. (148)
By looking around at the people in the room and imagining what they are thinking and how they are feeling, Estrella engages in a process of empathetic identification. By imaginatively projecting herself into the thoughts and feelings of the people she lives among, she does what the nurse could not and transcends her own particular perspective. She merges and incorporates the others’ diverse perspectives into her analysis (or “reading”) of the situation and experiences a transformation of consciousness that provides her with a more objective understanding than she previously had of her own and her family's situation of exploitation.
Estrella's activity of synthesizing the various perspectives of the people she lives among in this climactic scene powerfully evokes the last chapter of Tomás Rivera's remarkable novel… y no se lo tragó la tierra. In that chapter, Rivera brings together all the different voices that have animated his novel, juxtaposing and then filtering them through the consciousness of the young boy who serves as the “chronotopic point… around which the collective subjective experiences of [his] Texas-Mexican farmworkers coalesce” (R. Saldívar 75). Although at the beginning of the novel the young boy inhabits a state of existential confusion, by the end he succeeds in ordering the events of his life and synthesizing the perspectives of the others with whom he lives into a more or less coherent and intelligible whole. The young boy's quest for understanding is rewarded, and he has not only regained the year he thought he had lost, but he has also acquired a sense of his own agency.
Se dio cuenta de que en realidad no había perdido nada. Había encontrado. Encontrar y reencontrar y juntar. Relacionar esto con esto, eso con aquello, todo con todo. Eso era. Eso era todo. Y le dio más gusto. Luego cuando llegó a la casa se fue al árbol que estaba en el solar. Se subió. En el horizonte encontró una palma y se imaginó que ahí estaba alguien trepado viéndolo a él. Y hasta levantó el brazo y lo movió para atrás y para adelante para que viera que él sabía que estaba allí. (75)
(He realized that in reality he hadn't lost anything. He had made a discovery. To discover and rediscover and piece things together. This to this, that to that, all with all. That was it. That was everything. He was thrilled. When he got home he went straight to the tree that was in the yard. He climbed it. He saw a palm tree on the horizon. He imagined someone perched on top, gazing across at him. He even raised one arm and waved it back and forth so that the other could see that he knew he was there.)
[26] The English translation, by Evangelina Vigil-Piñon, appears in the bilingual version of the novel.
(152, emphasis added)
Although Rivera's novel differs from Viramontes's in a number of significant ways—for example, in its insistence on the necessity of temporarily withdrawing from the world in order to gain a perspective on it (“Apenas estando uno solo puede juntar a todos. Yo creo que es lo que necesitaba más que todo. Necesitaba esconderme para poder comprender muchas cosas” [75])
[27] “Only by being alone can you bring everybody together. That's what I needed to do, hide, so that I could come to understand a lot of things” (151).
—it is similar to Viramontes's novel in some other very important ways. Both novels focalize the social world from the perspectives of Mexican-origin farmworkers. Both novels center around a young person who models the process of coming to a more adequate understanding of the world he or she lives in. Both juxtapose, in achronological narratives, a variety of farmworkers’ subjective experiences that a careful reader must order and synthesize before they can be understood as an intelligible whole. And finally, both posit the activity of interpretation as a necessary precondition to effective agency.[28] Both also powerfully contest a Catholic worldview, although I have chosen not to dwell on the religious aspects of Viramontes's novel in this chapter. I plan to address this issue in a separate article tentatively titled “‘Standing on the Verge of Faith’: Religious Imagery and Secular Humanism in the Fiction of Helena María Viramontes.” That essay will look at the way in which Viramontes's fiction employs religious imagery to undermine conventional Catholic religious beliefs and to construct a secular humanist faith that runs counter to postmodernist skepticism. For essays that treat Rivera's rejection of religious idealism, see R. Saldívar, Chicano Narrative, esp. 77–84; J. D. Saldívar, Dialectics of Our America, esp. 60–61.
Rivera's novel, however, ends just as the young boy comes to his understanding. His wave is the physical act that symbolizes his newfound will and prefigures what might be a more revolutionary act in the as-yet-unfulfilled future.[29] For Rivera's own statement on the connection between interpretation and agency in his novel, see his essay “Remembering, Discovery, Volition.”
Viramontes's novel, by contrast, carries us past Estrella's moment of understanding to a moment of physical, even violent, resistance to economic exploitation.Estrella's response to the nurse's refusal to empathize with the family's predicament is remarkable both for how uncharacteristic it is of her and for how decisive it is. In an epiphany-like moment, Estrella gives up on God, turns and walks out of the clinic, returns to the car, grabs Perfecto's crowbar, and walks back into the clinic, where she demands that the nurse give them back their money. It is crucial to note that although Estrella is driven to desperation, hers is a deliberative, not desperate, act. When she demands the money, when she slams the crowbar down on the desk, shattering the pictures of the nurse's children and sending pencils
Estrella's ability to abstract from her own situation some general principles about the socioeconomic system she lives in is premised on her increased ability to interpret correctly, or “read,” her world. Importantly, that ability has been accrued both through physical labor in the fields and in the home and through embodied and empathetic identification with others around her. The knowledge that she gains as a result of her ability to “read” her world is thus historically and materially situated and fundamentally social. The notion of expanded literacy Viramontes develops in Under the Feet of Jesus thus helps to reveal both the social and material bases of individually arrived-at knowledge.
As before, Viramontes stages this scene in a way that encourages the reader to identify with Estrella and her family. The nurse functions as a symbolic figure whose epistemic and moral blindness—her see, hear, and know no evil attitude—is put on display for the reader as a cautionary tale. Moreover, because Viramontes does not allow the nurse to focalize the narrative, the reader is discouraged from identifying with the nurse; she remains a one-dimensional yet all-too-real character. It is in part by guiding
“SHINY AS NEW LOVE”: THE POWER AND LIMITS
OF INDIVIDUAL TRANSFORMATION
Although the long-term consequences of Estrella's action are never revealed in the novel, her actions benefit Alejo and the family in the short term. Estrella recovers their money, and the family successfully transports Alejo to the hospital in Corazón. Along the way, however, Estrella has a conversation with Alejo that illustrates why identity must be considered in any account of the production of knowledge. Only by paying careful attention to the epistemic effects of identity can we theorize the individual nature of socially based knowledge.
On the way to the hospital in Corazón, Alejo, who appears moments away from death, wants to know whether Estrella has physically harmed the nurse. At first, Estrella tries to turn his concern toward a consideration of why the nurse had refused to identify with his predicament. But Alejo is persistent, and his questions eventually provoke Estrella's anger.
—Did you hurt her?
—Sweet Jesus, what do you think? Her anger flared. Does it matter now?
—For what? he whispered.
—For what? Estrella asked. For what? For nine dollars and seven cents! Alejo did not understand her sarcasm. He seemed not to understand anything.
—Don't make it so easy for them. The fevers had drained him. He couldn't keep warm enough, and he trembled. Estrella continued to wipe his forehead with the handkerchief, but he grabbed her hand slightly and held it. His eyes welled and became glassy. I'm not worth it Star. Not me.
― 210 ―—What a thing to say, she replied, forcing her hand away from between his cold fingers. (151–52)
The novel juxtaposes Estrella's disappointment with Alejo's lack of understanding with her sudden recollection of the discouragement she once felt at seeing a thing of beauty too easily destroyed. Immediately after pulling her hand from his, she remembers having once been struck by the unexpected brilliance of an incandescent mosaic of red, green, and yellow bell peppers built in the shape of a pyramid in a ranch store that she had visited with her mother. But she also remembers that before she was able bring it to Petra's attention, a woman walked into the store and “toppled the peak by removing the top single red one, shiny as new love” (152–53). The ease with which a thing of beauty can be destroyed or, in this case, an epistemic gain can be refused is then metaphorically tied to the ease with which one can “kick a can on the road” (153). Thus, although Estrella still very much cares for Alejo, her disappointment with his lack of understanding is palpable.
—That's a stupid thing to say, Estrella replied, not able to disguise the tone of disappointment. She forgave him because he was sick. You don't make it so easy for them. (153)
Alejo's lack of understanding and his condemnation of Estrella's actions make evident the individual nature of Estrella's socially constituted knowledge. Although Estrella drew on Alejo's teaching and on the teachings of her mother and Perfecto in the course of her reflections, her “reading” of the situation—which includes as one of its elements a more objective understanding of the socioeconomic system they all live in— remains within the bounds of her own interpretive consciousness. The reasons why Estrella is the only one who comes to this better understanding are complex, and are related to the fact that each character exists in a slightly different social location—each of which brings with it differing concerns and interests. As a mother, Petra is most concerned with the day-to-day upkeep and well-being of her family, while Perfecto, as an elderly person, is most interested in finding respite from the hard work and responsibility that he no longer feels able to shoulder. They both correctly perceive that Estrella's violent actions have the potential to disrupt, at least temporarily, their abilities to fulfill these interests. While we might want Perfecto and Petra to acknowledge what Estrella has come to understand and to set aside their own particular concerns in the larger interest of taking political action designed to change the system
Alejo, meanwhile, is still caught within the bourgeois sensibility that prompted him to steal peaches in order to set himself and his cousin up as independent entrepreneurs. Even on the brink of death, Alejo still believes in the American dream. He still believes that if he works hard, studies diligently, and follows the rules of those in power, he can “seize the chance and make something of [himself] in this great and true country” (54). For Alejo, cheating within the system (i.e., stealing the peaches) is permissible for getting ahead, but resisting with violence the rules created by those who benefit from that exploitative economic order (“Can't you see they want us to act like that?”) is not. While Estrella has come to understand that there is more than one way to kill or do violence to someone (“Can't you see they want to take your heart?”), Alejo holds fast to a set of values that considers armed resistance to the capitalist economic system as the only real “criminal” behavior (153).
Alejo's inability to comprehend the rationale behind Estrella's action reminds us how difficult it is for individuals to transcend the cherished social ideologies by which they organize their lives. Alejo's sense of self and his understanding of his place in the world have been intimately formed through at least two very powerful social ideologies. The first, as noted above, is that of the American Dream, with its promise of equal opportunity for all regardless of circumstances of birth. The second is Mexican Catholicism, with its heavy emphasis on sin and retribution. Because Alejo believes that his poisoning represents divine retribution for his thievery, he is at some level prepared to play the part of the martyr who sacrifices his life (“I'm not worth it Star. Not me.”).
[30] The association of Alejo with Christ is made firmer by the fact that Alejo is literally “crucified” by the shadow of the plane that sprays the pesticide: “Alejo had not guessed the biplane was so close until its gray shadow crossed over him like a crucifix” (76).
For Alejo toThe fictional situation Viramontes presents here illustrates the theoretical point Susan Babbitt makes in her claim for the epistemic significance of non-propositional knowledge.
In many cases supplying people with information that would be useful to them in individual deliberations is not a matter of providing increased access to propositional truths; instead, it is a matter of the bringing about of different, more appropriate, social and political situations. … [I]n order for some situations to be understood, it is not just new concepts that need to be introduced but new relations, and new relations sometimes constitute epistemic standards according to which concepts can be more properly evaluated and applied. (“Feminism and Objective Interests” 257)
Estrella understands that she cannot simply tell Alejo what she has learned (that is, she cannot simply provide him access to her propositional truths) because she knows that he will not understand what she is saying; the conceptual framework he would need to accept her actions as justified is too much at odds with his bourgeois sensibility and his Mexican Catholic morality. Moreover, she realizes that she is in no position to bring about the conditions that would enable him to understand why she behaved the way she did. This is why, despite the disappointment she feels, she is able to forgive him.
However empowering Estrella's decisive action during the climax of the novel might appear, the novel refuses an unambiguously happy ending. We never find out, for instance, whether Perfecto will stay with the family, whether Alejo will survive the poisoning, or whether Estrella will escape the legal charges that might result as a consequence of her actions at the clinic. Nor are we assured that the rest of Estrella's family will ever fully understand the rationale behind Estrella's actions. Because of this, we cannot assume that they will join together with her and other farm-workers and activists to form a collective that will resist, with violence or through strikes, the economic exploitation they face. Indeed, this novel— written during the late 1980s and early 1990s and published in 1995,
What the novel does offer is a hopeful, if tentative, conclusion regarding Estrella's enhanced ability to transform the conditions of her own life. But like the effervescent beauty of the “top red single [bell pepper], shiny as new love,” carelessly toppled by the woman in the ranch store, the epistemic gains that attend individual growth are tenuous at best. As long as an insight remains confined to an individual consciousness, it will be as easy for others to refuse as it is to “kick a can in the road.” In other words, what Estrella has come to understand about the socioeconomic system she lives in will not become knowledge in the true sense of the word until she successfully shares it with others—that is, when it becomes a social, and not simply an individual, understanding.
The novel thus implicitly warns the activist or academic interested in theorizing possibilities for social change that she cannot ignore the epistemic consequences of identity. Not all farmworkers can be expected to think the same way. The activist interested in building an effective long-term coalition must do more than simply provide accurate information about the injustices people face. Indeed, she must also work to foster the conditions that will enable people to recognize and understand the larger social and economic forces that constrain and enable the choices they can make. Rather than bemoaning the fact that all people do not think alike, or that different people will need different circumstances in order to transform their thinking about the world, the real lesson of this novel might be that enacting social change is a complex and multifaceted process that will involve, among other things, a great deal of what feminists have long called “consciousness-raising.”
I end this book with a reading of Helena María Viramontes's novel Under the Feet of Jesus in part because it so effectively demonstrates both the individual and social character of knowledge. It stresses the social constitution of knowledge even as it recognizes that knowledge manifests in and through the interpretive consciousness of individual people. It thus theorizes an epistemological position that is neither objectivist (true knowledge is unmediated by interests or ideology) nor subjectivist (knowledge is a reflection of power and bias). It refuses both the vulgarly marxist position that those who do not understand the nature of reality are simply mystified and in need of enlightenment and the skeptically