Grotesque Spectacles

Abstract

The work of the late Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas can be conceptualized as a giant tableau that seeks to portray within its multidimensional space the panorama of the sexual and sociopolitical order under which he lived, struggled, and wrote, that is, Castro’s revolutionary Cuba of the 1960s and 1970s, until his flight in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. The author himself constantly emphasized the need to see his literary production as an organic whole, in spite of the perpetual revisions to each novel, short story, or poem he was forced by circumstance to make within his lifetime. Arenas conceived a unity of five novels that he wrote and named the pentagonía, the fourth of which, El color del verano (1982; The Color of Summer) has the secondary title El nuevo jardín de las delicias (Garden of Earthly Delights) named after the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, which itself is a multidimensional tableau. The other four novels, Celestino antes del alba (1967; Singing from the Well, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (1980; The Palace of the White Skunks, Otra vez el mar (1982; Farewell to the Sea), and El asalto (1990; The Assault), respectively, seek to suggest this continuity at an intertextual level; episodes recur or are told with a different slant, names are recycled, characters resemble one another, titles are recouped and redistributed, and, in frequently witty asides, direct metatextual reference is often made about the existence or composition of other parts of the writer’s oeuvre.