The Moving Target of Fixated Desire: Felisberto’s Paper Dolls

Abstract

Our narratives of the perverse have up until this point shown little enthusiasm for the psychoanalytical narrative broadly construed. We started at the end, with Puig in the 1970s. Molina’s populist understanding of homosexuality, in which it is the product of a doting mother and a distant father, is indeed bolstered by the novel’s roughly pro-Freud footnotes; but Freud is not sufficiently liberatory for the novelist’s sexual politics and must be completed by Puig in drag as a Danish psychoanalyst; meanwhile, the events in the narrative of Molina and Valentín in their jail cell seem at times to consciously mock the earnest left-Freud argument in the footnotes. When we look back some forty years to the generation in which the middle classes began to accept a Freudian vocabulary for describing their sexuality, we confront Paradiso and Lezama’s utter hostility to the Freudian project, although this hostility arises precisely because Lezama has no desire to free himself, his protagonist, or his island from patriarchal erotics or poetics. The period of Oedipal struggle in which the son would like to kill the father, or fears that the father would like to kill him, is very plainly expressed in this novel but just as plainly denied. Whatever we think of Lezama’s portrayal of the father–son relationship in Paradiso, however, the novel refuses to accept the idea of paternal castration or maternal smothering as the origin of male homosexuality.