Corporeal Difference as Ethnicity

Abstract

Stories of corporeal difference often present the reader with some kind of riddle. Why is the caballero’s hand so persistently pinned to his chest? How and why does Pablo Palacio’s La doble y única mujer both reflect and trouble her author’s philosophical obsessions? What purpose do such conundrums serve within the project of a given text? As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued in their analysis of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Oedipus’s disability, the result of the pinning of his ankles in infancy, allows him to solve the sphinx’s riddle, since he can link his own limp to the image of a man who walks with a cane (Mitchell and Snyder 61). Disability here provides the personal mark that binds Oedipus’s actions to his past, as well as the metaphorical link between individual story and overarching symbolism, “humanity’s incapacity to fathom the dictums of the gods” (62). Thus the classic riddle of the sphinx turns out to be the riddle of disability in narrative par excellence. In a similar sense, as discussed in Chapter 2, the caballero’s enigmatic gesture of pinning his hand to his chest, as if he were one-handed, creates the riddle that ultimately joins Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s text to Palacio’s and attempts to resolve the dilemma of corporeal difference that is both metaphorical and insistent on its own materiality. I emphasize the attempt rather than an actual resolution here, since the story of disability presented in Chapter 2 maintains this dilemma in suspension, as a hypothetical bridge among texts, bodies, and discursive sites.