February 24, 2017
Dear Readers,
What follows is a working draft of the preface to, and part of, the first chapter of my dissertation.
It focuses on El ángel de Sodoma because this novel easily demonstrates how discourses and
ideologies on sexual inversion are appropriated and, at the same time, deconstructed.
Although the title of my presentation for this workshop includes two novels, I am now
contemplating breaking my analysis into two separate chapters but as parts of the same section.
In other words, part one of my dissertation would focus on inverted masculinities and would
include a preface that illustrates the main theoretical and analytical threads of the chapters. It will
precede a chapter on El ángel de Sodoma (chapter one) and a second chapter on La juventud de
Aurelio Zaldívar. This will allow me to draw similarities between the two texts while treating
them as separate in their own portrayals of sexual inversion.
Thank you for taking the time to read this draft. I suspect that many of the changes and additions
needed are ones that I have given some thought to but that I have yet to incorporate. For the
moment, I would like to test-drive what I have written thus far with hopes that your questions,
comments, and suggestions will give me more insight on moving forward.
Sincerely,
Ebenezer Concepción
Concepción, Ebenezer 2
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
PART I. INVERTED MASCULINITIES: HERNÁNDEZ-CATÁ’S EL ÁNGEL DE SODOMA
AND LA JUVENTUD DE AURELIO ZALDÍVAR
1
Preface: “The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name”
On 25 May 1895, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was convicted to two years’
hard labor in prison for gross indecency with men, and as a consequence of his extramarital
liaison with British author Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945). His prosecutor, Charles Gill, used
Lord Douglas’s poem, “Two Loves,” against Wilde during his trial in order to underscore the
distinction that it presumably made between “natural love” and the “unnatural” kind, ‘that which
dare not speak its name.’ However, before referring to the poem, Gill gradually builds up to that
moment by cross-examining Wilde with a line of captious questions:
Gill — You are acquainted with a publication entitled The Chameleon?
Wilde — Very well indeed.
G — Contributors to that journal are friends of yours?
W — That is so.
G — I believe that Lord Alfred Douglas was a frequent contributor?
W — Hardly that, I think. He wrote some verses occasionally for The Chameleon, and indeed for
other papers.
G — The poems in question were somewhat peculiar?
W — They certainly were not mere commonplaces like so much that is labelled poetry.
G — The tone of them met with your critical approval?
W — It was not for me to approve or disapprove. I left that to the reviews.
(Excerpt from the transcript of Oscar Wilde’s testimony)
As stated in the introduction, Wilde’s life and trial was emblematic of the tighter controls
over sodomy and other forms of sexual deviance that before the nineteenth century had relatively
acquired some degree of legitimacy. And yet, what I find noteworthy about his prosecution is
how a literary work is used as evidence to mediate between two opposing discourses and
1
This is a phrase taken from the 1894 poem “Two Loves” by British author, Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945),
Oscar Wilde’s lover. It was used against Wilde during his trial as evidence of his alleged gross indecency with other
men.
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 3
ideologies on sexual desire and love, and how Wilde reaffirms the value of the writer’s aesthetic
in order to wipe clean the smear thrown on his moral character. Based on this model, a parallel
can be drawn between Wilde’s strategy and what Hernández-Catá does in his novels, particularly
with regard to how the discourse on sexual inversion is itself inverted to challenge the rhetoric of
shame and to demonstrate the inefficacy of the theory of moral degeneracy. Ultimately,
Hernández-Catá, in Wildean fashion, takes us back to the rhetorical uses of inversion as “the
turning of an opponent’s argument against himself” (OED) in order to show that the
appropriation of the term by the scientific, intellectual, and institutional Establishment is itself an
inversion that has less to do with sexuality than with a hypocritical sense of morality and the
repressive stigmatization of difference. For instance, in the epigraph to the first edition of El
ángel de Sodoma (Madrid, 1928), two friends converse about a veiled topic in which the first
speaker engages the respondent in a way that emulates Gill’s shaming cross-examination:
—¿Y va usted a escribir una novela de «eso»? ¡Qué ganas de elegir asuntos ingratos!
—De «eso», sí. Los poetastros han vulgarizado y afeado tantos jardines, tantos amaneceres, tantas
puestas de sol, que ya es preferible inclinarse sobre las ciénagas. Todo depende, del ademán con
que se revuelva el cieno, amigo mío. Si es cierto que hay en las charcas relentes mefíticos,
también lo es que ofrecen grasas irisaciones, y que lirios y nenúfares se esfuerzan patéticamente,
a pesar de sus raíces podridas, en sacar de ellas las impolutas hojas. Además, como la química
científica, la artística puede obtener de los detritus esencias puras. Más trabajo y menos lucido,
dirá usted. ¡No importa!2
Like most epigraphs, the one above states, albeit cryptically, the main theme of El ángel
de Sodoma: “eso” (“that”). What is peculiar about it, nonetheless, is that it does not explicitly
state what “eso” is, rather what it could be. While it is customary for writers to use epigraphs to
entice the reader with a snapshot of what is to come in the main narrative, Hernández-Catá seems
2
“—And you’re going to write a novel about ‘that’? What willingness to choose unpleasant subjects to write about!
—About ‘that,’ yes. The poetasters have vulgarized and made ugly so many gardens, so many dawnings, so many
settings of the sun, that it’s now preferable to favor swamps. It all depends on the manner in which the mud is
stirred, my friend. If it’s true that there are mephitic nocturnal dews in the ponds, it is also true that they offer greasy
iridescences, and that irises and water lilies, despite their rotten roots, pathetically make an effort to blossom their
unblemished leaves. What is more, artistic chemistry, like the scientific kind, can obtain pure essences from the
detritus. More work and less lucid, you’d say. It doesn’t matter!” (All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.)
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 4
to be doing more than that with the topic at hand, that is, sexual inversion. In most cases,
epigraphs are citations of quotations or sayings from other sources. In the one above, however, it
is an original, paratextual narrative piece in which Hernández-Catá seeks to portray himself as
the respondent, that is, the writer who inverts the perceived ideological and aesthetic
misconceptions of his interlocutor as a preamble to El ángel de Sodoma. In effect, the friend’s
description of “eso” as the pluralized “asuntos ingratos” (unpleasant subjects/matters)—that is,
as not referring to not one but many issues—is telling of the magnitude of the book’s thematic
content and its ideological and conceptual ramifications, those on which Hernández-Catá hopes
to elaborate in the main text despite his comrade’s objections. Although he does not actually
appear as a character, nor has a voice, in the text, the use of metaliterary devices allows him to
position himself both inside and outside of it, therefore making less tenable the separation
between author and characterization in the epigraph and, by extension, in the text that is to
follow. Through paratextual techniques, Hernández-Catá begins to form part of the dialectic
narrative as “the source for the aggregate of norms and opinions that makes up [its] ideology,”
(Herman 16).
In the epigraph, the reader virtually gets a glimpse of Hernández-Catá’s worldview as it
expands into the main narrative that succeeds it. The writer-respondent of the epigraph achieves
this when the topic of the conversation is turned into an extended metaphor comprised of
antitheses about poetic-literary content and form (fondo y forma) in a style that is metafictional
and metaliterary. On the one hand, it metafictionally features the respondent in the conversation
as a writer that could perhaps be the alter ego of Hernández-Catá, therefore alluding to a real-life
exchange between him and a friend in which the former responds to the latter’s disdain for
choosing to write about a topic (i.e., sexual inversion) that is distasteful and apparently taboo. On
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 5
the other, it is a metaliterary construction about the art of writing, literature, and aesthetic value,
as illustrated by the reference to poetasters and the comparison to scientific chemistry. As such,
the epigraph can be interpreted as the author’s attempt to frame the novel in a particular theme
about the inexplicit “eso” insofar as it establishes him and writers of narrative fiction as literary
and cultural authorities that weigh in on the use and interpretation of practices, ideologies,
discourses, and aesthetics that are in opposition to each other. Based on this idea of opposition, I
argue that Hernández-Catá’s representation of sexual inversion, of “eso,” in El ángel de Sodoma
goes beyond a mere portrayal of sexual practices. It is also a function of the inversion of (1)
ideological and discursive concepts and meanings through the use of literary devices such as
irony and antithesis, and of (2) the contradictory social values upheld by Euro-American
societies at the turn of the 19th century as expressed by the narrative voices and as portrayed by
the characters in the textual and paratextual elements of the novels.
If the epigraph to El ángel de Sodoma is read in light of Wilde’s response to Gill’s
citation of Lord Douglas’s poem, one can see the connection between the art of writing and
morality as a common theme that runs through both texts. They both talk about literature that
references same-sex desire, a desire that must be silenced, and a silence of both misidentification
and lack of identification, which both works problematize. Therefore, the respondent in the
epigraph and Wilde in his own testimony, strive to position themselves in an intermediary place
in which they address the subject at hand while reformulating its discursive presuppositions in
order to highlight their variety in meaning and their ambiguity. They challenge their
interlocutors’ misconceptions in order to emphasize the complexity of the issues at hand while
changing the narratives from shameful to virtuous ones, or in Hernández-Catá’s case specifically,
to one worth writing about. As a result, literature has an ethical function as both writers
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 6
undermine legal, moral, and scientific discourses in order to exalt the creative power of literary
artifice, which in their view is consubstantial with the beauty of same-sex desire as a virtue of
human dignity.
As in Hernández-Catá’s epigraph, Wilde counters and astutely inverts Gill’s arguments
against homosexuality by using tactful language in order to correct the prosecutor’s notions on
sexual misconduct:
‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a
younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his
philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep,
spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like
those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in
this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that
dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is
fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it
repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the
younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world
does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Wilde flips the script in order to fill conceptual gaps and to identify that which dares not speak
its name, that “eso” that is taboo. On one end, there is Wilde, who identifies it by placing himself
as the identified alongside literary and artistic figures. On the other, there is Hernández-Catá,
who does it by writing a story about a young man who struggles with sexual inversion. This
process, by which encoded meanings are reworked to revert dominant discourses and reoriented
toward marginalized individuals, is what José Esteban Muñoz describes as disidentification:
Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of
disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion
that both exposes the encoded message's universalizing and exclusionary machinations and
recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and
identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the
majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or
positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)
There is a performative element to Muñoz’s theory, or what he refers to as “disidentificatory
performances,” whereby culture is recycled and then remade (ix). In their writings, Wilde and
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 7
Hernández-Catá respond to encoded messages that are regulatory and universalizing by recycling
and then remaking them. These messages seek to wield the subject to conform to, and perform, a
heteronormative way of life molded by the institutional practices of society (the dominant
culture) and the repressive mechanisms of the state. However, as Derrida would have it,
performativity is not solely mimetic because a mark or gesture that is repeated would have
already occurred in a different temporal context from its original upon its repetition, therefore it
would have exceeded the sameness it attempted to emulate. In addition, if considered within
processes of identification, performing an identity does not remove a subject from other forms of
identification, affects, its body, and its agency, that is, from its ability to disidentify.
For instance, Wilde contests that there is more to same-sex desire that goes beyond Gill’s
perceptions. It is also spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. Furthermore, it is fluid and variable to
other forms of desire. In other words, he places himself in the place of identification but then
disidentifies. Sylvia Molloy, in her analysis on posing, reminds us that Wilde was not accused of
being a sodomite in his first trial but of posing as one, which was part of the reasoning for his
acquittal (145-146). In fact, the prosecution along with the accuser Marquess of Queensberry
(Lord Douglas’s father) caught on to the possible symbiosis of posing and being, which is why
they moved on to another trial, confident that they could then indict Wilde of actually being a
sodomite. These developments are noticeable in the use of the poem as evidence, which can also
be read as an allegory of the legal proceedings. The poem tells the story of a man who dreams of
himself meeting Love in a garden as personified by a youth who kisses him (also the
personification of the love that dare not speak its name). In that same garden is another man who
claims that the youth is lying. He says that the young boy’s name is not Love but Shame and that
he is the one true love, that which is between boys and girls:
A purple robe he wore, o’erwrought in gold
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Concepción, Ebenezer 8
With the device of a great snake, whose breath
Was fiery flame: which when I did behold
I fell a-weeping, and I cried, ‘Sweet youth,
Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth
What is thy name?’ He said, ‘My name is Love.’
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’
Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will,
I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’
(Last verses of “Two Loves”; my emphasis)
Like Wilde’s prosecutor and the first speaker in Hernández-Catá’s epigraph, the
opprobrium toward homosexual love is also seen in this poem, which is also the premise on
which Hernández-Catá bases his novel, La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar (La juventud; 1911). Its
story begins in medias res, right after the protagonist, young Aurelio, has had a same-sex
encounter with an older man, Mr. Velist. The encounter is not narrated in the novel. Instead, it
starts with a conversation about said encounter between Aurelio and his 54-year-old
mentor/father figure, Juan Antonio Méndez, in which Méndez tells Aurelio the following:
Yo en lo fundamental, nada le aconsejo…Creo que no debe abandonarse a estériles
desesperaciones; creo que, en todo caso, usted debe sufrir hipócritamente. Para la sociedad que
nosotros frecuentamos, ni una confidencia, ni una queja indirecta, ni un reproche; que Madame
Luzis, que Natalia Roca y M. Argely, que todos los que van a las reuniones de los Craud, no
sepan nada. (11)3
La juventud is the first text in which Hernández-Catá addresses sexual inversion. As in El ángel
de Sodoma, it is presented in this earlier novel as a veiled topic in a conversation between two
characters. However, contrary to El ángel de Sodoma, the conversation is part of the main
narrative instead of an epigraph. Juan Antonio advises Aurelio, much like the writer’s friend in
3
“I fundamentally cannot advise you…I think that you should not abandon yourself to sterile desperation; I think
that, all in all, you should suffer hypocritically. Not one confession, not one indirect complaint, not one reproach to
anyone in the society we frequent; let Madame Luzis, Natalia Roca, M. Argely, and all those that go to the reunions
at the Crauds, know nothing.”
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 9
the epigraph of El ángel de Sodoma, not to talk to anyone about “eso,” that is, his same-sex
sexual encounters, out of fear of shame and dishonor.
Although it does not have an original epigraph like the one in El ángel de Sodoma, the
narration of La juventud is followed by an epilogue in which Hernández-Catá admonishes the
reader not to judge Aurelio for his misfortune, his sexual indiscretions, and lost youth: “Y a los
hombres que desde el interior de sus viviendas, acariciados por las blanduras del bien vivir,
juzgan en una sola frase no precedida de reflexión las acciones de los que combaten en la
batalla…, a esos nada. La moral es como las lamparillas de aceite, que sólo sirven para
alumbrarnos cuando estamos dormidos” (275).4 In other words, upholding a self-righteous sense
of morale serves no purpose if one closes one’s eyes to its light, misguided by the expectation
that it will dissipate the darkness of inactivity on its own, regardless of our efforts to carry it as a
guiding star through life’s quandaries.
As shown above, inversion becomes much more than just a reference to a taboo subject
about gender and sexuality. It is the nucleus of a plethora of contested ideas, meanings, and
values that are equally inverted and that are expounded in the texts and paratexts of HernándezCatá’s novels. That subject matter, that “eso” consisting of inverted concepts and ideas, is the
focus of the next two chapters. By way of critical analysis, I would like to show how that “eso”
refers to both sexual inversion and its portrayal in El ángel de Sodoma and La juventud as a
repository of a number of equally inverted meanings and values regarding normalcy and
difference, tradition and modernity, and the pressures of family and societal duty on human will
and desire. In turn, I read both novels as an attempt to address sexual inversion as revelatory of
the ambiguous and hypocritical ethical and moral fabric of 19th and 20th century Euro-American
4
“And to the men that from their houses, caressed by the weak loftiness of the good life, judge in a phrase,
unprecedented by reflection, the actions of those that go to battle…, to them, nothing! Morality is like little oil lamps
that only serve to illuminate us when we’re asleep.”
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 10
societies and of the individuals that struggle to negotiate its deception and fatalism. I use the
word negotiate because as Muñoz points out in his book:
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to
assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; […] this ‘working on and against’ is a
strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent
structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of
resistance. (11-12)
As I hope to demonstrate, Hernández-Catá works from within the dominant ideology in
order to destabilize it from the perspective of the individual who resists, but that is unable to
disentangle itself from, various modes of marginalized identifications. In other words, sexual
inversion in Hernández-Catá’s texts is not only a descriptor for sexual practices among
marginalized identities in societies in Euro-America at the turn of the 19th century, but also a
corollary to the contradictory, antithetical, paradoxical—inverted—discourses and ideologies
that inform such practices and norms as instituted and propagated at the time by influential actors
in transnational/transatlantic territories of Euro-America. As such, the veiled, concealed,
euphemistic, or tacit treatment of sexual practices discussed earlier in both novels can justifiably
be read as the catalysts for a re-vision of the inverted subject. As Molloy points out in her
comments about Wilde: “The pose opened up a space in which the male homosexual was seen;
he became a subject and was represented and named” (Molloy 146).5 A subject that is both a
signifier for sexual phenomena and for an identity that is constantly negotiated amidst equally
universalizing and ambiguous systems of manipulation and individual ambivalence.
When Love in Lord Douglas’s poem sighs and says, “Have thy will, / I am the Love that
dare not speak its name,” it seems as if he is giving the other man who shames him the freedom
to claim love as only existing between a male and female, however, the young boy still reasserts
5
Wilde prosecutes the Marquess for accusing him of being a sodomite, however, evidence surfaces during that trial
that begin to confirm Wilde’s same-sex liaisons. He is tried two more times and convicted.
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 11
who he is—Love! It may be the kind of love that hides out of fear of retribution but that is
unwilling to completely relinquish its sense of self to one that is alien to its being; it disidentifies.
To a certain degree, the affirmation of anonymity In the chapter that follows, we will see how
this self-assertion is replicated in the protagonist of El ángel de Sodoma and the manner in which
the interpellation of “that which dare not speak its name”— that naming that calls and produces
the subject—in fact emboldens Hernández-Catá’s resolve to expose it and then redirect it back to
when it was unnamed and unfettered by monopolizing constraints. In fact, Hernández-Catá never
uses the word inversion, homosexuality, invert, or homosexual in his texts, ergo relinquishing his
own prejudices to the ineffability, irreducibility, and ambiguity of the tragic life of an angel.
Chapter One. Performing Disidentifications of Inversion in El ángel de Sodoma
As stated previously, Alfonso Hernández-Catá was a Cuban diplomat, journalist, and
cosmopolitan writer who lived through Spanish rule in the Americas, the occupation of Cuba by
the U.S., and the independence movements in Latin America. At the time that he writes El ángel
de Sodoma, published in Madrid in 1928, he had already established himself as a well-known
writer of short stories to the likes of Horacio Quiroga, Edgar Allen Poe, and Rudyard Kipling.
And although his novels were not as popular, El ángel de Sodoma became a bestseller once it hit
the market. Its success was clouded, however, due to the repressive dictatorships of Gerardo
Machado in Cuba and Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain, as well as to the sexual reforms and
eugenics movements that were taking place in Euro-America at the time. It hasn’t been until
recently that the novel has sparked some interest, particularly of critics in queer studies, and
especially due to recent reprints of the text by Letras Cubanas in 2009 and by Verbum last year.
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Concepción, Ebenezer 12
The story, in broad strokes, is about 18-year-old José-María Vélez-Gomara. After his
parents die—the mother from illness and the father by suicide—José-María is left to take care of
the house and the finances of the family, marry his two sisters, Amparo and Isabel-Luisa, and get
his brother Jaime through nautical school. Aside from the elderly Captain Bermúdez Gil, who
becomes their unofficial guardian, the town itself is counsel to the family as some sort of chorus
typical of the Greek drama. As a result, José-María takes a job as a banker and is recognized
everywhere he goes. Meanwhile, his brother goes abroad and returns accompanied by a woman
tamer of beasts and other members of a traveling circus. Upon Jaime’s insistence, José-María
begrudgingly accompanies him to the circus’s show. José-María struggles to turn his gaze from
the muscular male tamer of beasts and is awakened to a desire that he painstakingly hides from
his brother. From that moment, he goes through a psychological and emotional trajectory filled
with antitheses of turmoil, clarity, repression, and pleasure as he tries to come to terms with the
closures and possibilities of a newfound and growing desire for the same sex. He tries to make
sense of his condition and wonders whether it is a congenital degeneration or a curse. In a quest
for answers, he walks into a library and reads a scientific manual, prompting him to perform
heteronormative behaviors in order to pass as heterosexual.
On the one hand, he unassumingly tries to smoke and build muscle through extreme
exercise. In his room, he takes down the crucifix of a naked Jesus and he attempts to rid himself
of the female part of his name. In order to appear more heteronormative, he unsuccessfully goes
to bed with a prostitute and has a platonic relationship with a girl that does not lead to anything
and ends abruptly. On the other hand, the feminine aspects of his behavior and personality are
heightened throughout the story. For example, as a child he socialized mostly with girls, played
with dolls, and avoided playing aggressive games with boys. His mother doted over him, which
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Concepción, Ebenezer 13
then translated to his motherly care for his siblings, or as the text calls it, the role of “la
madrecita.”
In addition to his same-sex desire and androgynous demeanor, there are scenes in which
his sisters and him share an incestuous gaze. However, they don’t act upon it since José-María
strives to maintain his honor as new head of household and that of his sisters’ through marriage.
Once they are wed and Jaime has gone off to engage in contraband abroad, José-María realizes
that it’s his turn to live his life. He goes to Paris under a different name in order to flee from
provincial responsibilities and revel in the city’s nightlife. While in his hotel room, he beholds in
a mirror the image of his body wrapped in women’s clothing and in a moment of discovery, he
realizes that his condition is not a pathological one but that he simply is who he is because he
was born that way: “¡Así soy! ¡Fuera falsa virtud, fuera vergüenza de mostrarme según me
hicieron!” (178).6 After this declaration of self-affirmation, he meets a man at a bookstore and
they organize a rendezvous at a metro station. Before their encounter, however, José-María
receives a letter at the hotel from his boss announcing the death of his brother Jaime, the urgent
need for his return to work, and his obligation to family duty. A turning point in the plot, he’s
caught between his sexual autonomy and the pressures of the social establishment. He goes to the
metro station where he was scheduled to meet the male suitor, but before their tryst, he decides
to throw himself to the tracks of an incoming train, simulating, like his father, an accidental
suicide.
El ángel de Sodoma is not the first text in which Hernández-Catá treats sexual inversion.
He also addresses it in La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar, published in 1911, albeit in a more
subordinate way, and in the novella, El sembrador de sal (1923). At that time, several authors
had already addressed this topic in their writings, such as Brazilian author Adolfo Caminha in O
6
Queue Lady Gaga: “I’m on the right track baby, I was born this way!”
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Concepción, Ebenezer 14
Bom-Crioulo (1895), Spanish writer Ángeles Vicente García in Zezé (1909), and Marcel Proust
in À la recherche du temps perdu (France, 1913-1927). Notwithstanding, what the texts of all
these authors reveal is that sexual inversion was not a monolith. The very coupling of the term
inversion with the term sexual, along with the English coining of the term homosexuality in
1892, points to the fact that efforts to rationalize and linguistically constrict a cultural reality
involving a plethora of gendered and sexed bodies, affects, meanings, and values were well
underway.
Inversion, defined as “a turning inside out,” “a reversal,” or “a turning contrary to,” dates
back to the middle of the 16th century. Since its initial uses in the 19th century, this definition was
extended to sexual inversion, that is, the reversal of masculine and feminine behaviors, which
included homosexuality. David Halperin points out that the term homosexuality usually referred
to sexual object choice while sexual inversion denoted a number of practices that deviated from
conventional gender roles. Nevertheless, Sigmund Freud and other sexologists, physicians,
criminologists, and intellectuals in general, conflated the meanings of the terms. For as Halperin
makes clear, “Throughout the nineteenth century…sexual preference for a person of one’s own
sex was not clearly distinguished from other sorts of non-conformity to one’s culturally defined
sex-role” (15). El ángel de Sodoma illustrates this conundrum seeing that the meanings of both
terms are mixed in the text, and that José-María experiences them simultaneously. At the same
time, there was a clear notion of acceptable sexual practices that were delineated by the social
and physical sciences under the gender role binary, and that all fell under the vocabulary of
sexual inversion and homosexuality in a value system of sameness versus difference.
Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, coauthors of Sexual Inversion (published
in English in 1894), starkly disagreed with the use of homosexuality to describe very complex
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Concepción, Ebenezer 15
phenomena. According to Ivan Crozier, their book was the first study to combine “the political
motivations of homosexual rights activists…with a detailed assessment of European and
American sexology” (1). I suggest that El ángel de Sodoma mediates these two avenues as a way
of showing the effects of discursive contention. I argue that Hernández-Catá’s text performs
discursive practice and is instrumental to the veiled authorial voice and narrator who break the
fourth wall and invite its readers to engage in a dialogue on, and peer into the experience of,
gender and sexual construction and identification as illustrated by the life of José-María. As
such, I interpret the novel as both a performed and performative gesture that Hernández-Catá
makes by producing a dialectic of cultural discourse on the meaning and value of sexual
inversion that is not only fictional but actual with regard to the psycho-social constitution of the
modern subject as a repository of discourses on gender and sexuality at the turn of the 19th
century. My interpretation, as based on performance and performativity, hinges on the
polyphony and polysemy of the main narrative and paratexts of the novel, which I move to
describe now in further detail.
The first edition of El ángel de Sodoma was published as a paperback in Madrid by
Mundo Latino in 1928, with 199 pages comprising the main text. The front cover (image a),
featuring a title that is clearly an ironic twist to the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomora,
is followed by the inner flap of the dust jacket and a bookplate that reads, “From the Library of
Havelock Ellis” (image b).
Concepción, Ebenezer 16
This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin
America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
(a) Front cover of the first edition
(b) Front inner flap and bookplate
These features are followed by the first title page under which can be found the first dedication
of the novel, and it reads: “A Havelock Ellis con la admiración de A. Hernández-Catá” (see
below).
(c) First dedication
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Concepción, Ebenezer 17
Following is the second title page and a list of Hernández-Catá’s previous works (image d). It
shows that La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar had gone through four editions and other works
through five or six reprints, in addition to the promotion of his forthcoming homage to José
Martí, Mitología de Martí (1929). These details indicate two important facts: (1) Hernández-Catá
was well-versed in sexological literature and knew of Ellis and Symonds’s efforts to not only
decriminalize homosexuality but also to portray it as normal and natural and (2) he shared
Martí’s philosophies on justice and equality for the marginalized, therefore his penchant for
featuring such figures in most of his fiction, all of which is taken even further in the first
epigraph discussed earlier in the preface.
(d) List of previous works and second title page
If we recall from the epigraph, Hernández-Catá compares the sexual invert to irises and
water lilies that pathetically make an effort to blossom their unblemished leaves despite their
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Concepción, Ebenezer 18
rotten roots. He repeats this metaphor when referring to José-María: “Hasta su turbación al
esquivar o sostener algunas miradas de hombres, en la calle, tomaba sentido pleno, de acusación.
¡La madrecita alabada por todos era un monstruo, un lirio de putrefactas raíces!” (65, my
emphasis) (see image e below).
(e) The first epigraph.
In this first half of the novel, we get a very good sense of what is at play in José-María’s
characterization and constitution as a subject: a troubled youth whose ambivalence toward his
same-sex desire brings him guilt and straddles the contradictory impressions that society has of
him versus his own. The conceptual inversion of wholeness (pleno) and fragmentation
(acusación), and of his social repute versus an internalized notoriety of bestial dimensions, is
juxtaposed with the questioning of his masculinity and the inversion of gender roles. However,
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Concepción, Ebenezer 19
this is not an attempt to indicate that society did not play a role in his internalized repression,
rather his own psychological response to his surroundings in relation to what he feels inside.
Hernández-Catá conveys this very poignantly all the while constructing a narrative that is in
conversation with itself. It incites the reader to vicariously partake in José-María’s dramatic story
through self-reference and self-reflection. In addition to identifying with the character through
psychological introspection, the lily with rotten roots as a paratextual reference in correlation
with the main text drives the idea of identification and reader participation further into the
performative realm. In other words, how can we think the way in which Hernández-Catá writes
about a writer who tells his friend, in an epigraph about writing, that he will indeed write about
“eso” and then do so via novel writing that is auto-referential and that explicitly and implicitly
invites the reader? There are various dimensions of performance here that need to be unpacked,
especially in regard to what comes next in the book.
After the epigraph, the second dedication to the novel is shown and it reads: “A Gregorio
Marañón” (image e).
(e) The second dedication.
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Concepción, Ebenezer 20
Gregorio Marañón (1887-1960) was a Spanish historian and physician who replicated Freud’s
theories expounded in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in his own version, Tres ensayos
sobre la vida sexual (Three Essays on Sexual Life). In it, he argues that humans develop as
bisexual beings, but that one sex, either male or female, must eventually predominate, and
although he advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality, he still considered it a
pathological illness and the existence of sexual inversion in the human as an abnormality.
Turning to the next page, we’re given a second epigraph, which is an explicit biblical reference
that introduces the main narrative, and it reads: “Y acercose Abraham y dijo: ¿Destruirás por
igual al inocente y al impío? El juez de toda la tierra, ¿será injusto? Génesis 18.”7 Again, there’s
a questioning here of the ethics of, and moral justification for, marginalization through the
intertextual performing of Scripture.
(f) The second epigraph.
7
“And Abraham drew near, and said, ‘Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? … Shall not the Judge
of all the earth do right?”
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Concepción, Ebenezer 21
Hernánez-Catá’s responds to Abraham’s plea to God by beginning the novel immediately after
this epigraph, emphasizing the antithetical, paradoxical, and contrived nature of his aesthetic in
playfully sarcastic and ironic way (see image f):
La caída de cualquier construcción material o espiritual mantenida en alto varios siglos
constituye siempre un espectáculo patético. […] Y si su derrumbamiento final no puede
ponerse, por ejemplo, junto al romántico de la de Usher, es, sobre todo por las
particularidades al par vejaminosas y heroicas del postrero de sus varones, lo bastante
rico en rasgos dolorosos para sacar de su egolatría o de su indiferencia, durante un par de
horas, a algunos lectores sensibles. (11-12)8
Readers did, in fact, respond. After becoming a bestseller, a second edition of the novel
was published the following year in Madrid, again by Mundo Latino, and it includes the same
content from the first with a few notable changes. The front cover mentions a new 31-page
prologue by Marañón and a 17-page epilogue by Luis Jiménez de Asúa (1889-1970), a Spanish
criminologist who shared the same views as Marañón with regards to the pathological nature of
sexual inversion (image g).
(f) Front cover of second edition.
8
“The fall of any material or spiritual structure held in high esteem for many centuries is always a pathetic
spectacle. […] And, if its final demolishment could not be placed, for example, at the side of the romantic of Usher,
it is rich enough—above all else by the simultaneously vexing and heroic idiosyncrasies of the oldest of its boys—to
remove in painful strokes some sympathetic readers from their obsessive egotism or indifference for a couple of
hours.”
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 22
The book is not signed by Hernández-Catá, and instead of being followed by the epigraph on
“eso,” the publication information is followed by Dr. Marañón’s prologue, thus replacing
Hernández-Catá’s subversive epigraph with a symbolic retaking of authority by a morally driven
and scientifically bias essay. In order to make up for the loss, the epigraph citing Genesis 18 is
moved from the opening page of the main narrative to its own page before it. As a result, the
narration is bookended by the scientific and legal discourses of Marañón’s prologue and Jiménez
de Asúa’s epilogue, therefore setting the tone of the novel’s reception and what in their opinion
should be its “proper,” heteronormative, interpretation. The fear of censorship was a factor that
perhaps motivated these changes. For this purpose, Hernández-Catá probably dedicated El ángel
de Sodoma to Marañón in order to make a novel with such a controversial subject more
amenable to a relatively conservative public. On the same token, the new paratextual format of
the second edition makes his previous efforts to destabilize heteronormativity and patriarchy
more noteworthy. In order to visualize better the differences (in italics), I offer a comparative
look at the sequence of book parts in both editions:
First Edition
(1) Front cover
(2) Bookplate from Havelock Ellis’s library
(3) First title page and signed dedication to
Havelock Ellis
(4) Second title page with previous works by
Hernández-Catá
(5) First epigraph on “eso”
(6) Second dedication to Gregorio Marañón
(7) Second epigraph from Genesis 18 and
beginning of novel; invitation to readers
(8) Main text of the novel
(9) Colophon
Second Edition
Front cover announcing Marañon’s prologue
and Jiménez de Asúa’s epilogue
First title page (not signed by Hernández-Catá)
Second title page with previous works by
Hernández-Catá
Marañón’s prologue
Dedication to Gregorio Marañón
Second epigraph from Genesis 18 in its own
separate page before the beginning of the
novel
Main text of the novel
Epilogue by Jiménez de Asúa
Index
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 23
Butler describes the performative as “this relation of being implicated in that which one
opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to
establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of
contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources
inevitably impure” (241). As such, performativity is a process that presents an economy of
sameness that elicits a moral and political responsibility to the experience and meaning of
difference and otherness. As Philip Auslander suggests, performative resistance is brought about
precisely by not accommodating itself to political thought “but by challenging the processes of
representation itself, even though it must carry this project by means of representation” (31).
Hernández-Catá resists the symbolic domain of his time upon writing about the peripheral and
ostracized other. In turn, El ángel de Sodoma departs from a place of conceptual and discursive
inquiry that is carried out by the performative deconstruction of sexual inversion with which the
protagonist struggles.
The entire novel is framed to invert the disparaging meaning and value of sexual
inversion by performing the same discursive techniques and turning them contrary to themselves
via performative deconstruction. It can be argued that this is just a function of fictional writing.
On the contrary, it is a function of the handling of historically contingent discourses in dialogue
with a work of fiction in which narrow veins of resistance run against signification and its
essentializing implications. The characters in Hernández-Catá’s narrative equally demonstrate
this resistance through a performance of the body, the site of an ambiguous complicity and
ambivalent confrontation with monolithic discourses and hegemonic practices. Hernández-Catá’s
characters are marked by this idea in their response to their own social environments. And while
José-María does not live out his desires, Hernández-Catá delivers on his promise to extract the
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America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.
Concepción, Ebenezer 24
pure essences out of the detritus of his protagonist’s tumultuous struggle. And he does so by
making his character perform a discourse of sexual inversion that is eventually inverted through
the character’s self-affirmation and narrative innovation.
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Concepción, Ebenezer 25
-----. La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar. New ed. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914.
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