Jane Bowles's grotesque crossings in "A Guatemala Idyll"
- Autores: Kathy Gentile
- Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / coord. por Gema Soledad Castillo García, María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Vincent Carlisle Espínola, 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 407-417
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The expatriate American writer Jane Bowles and her husband, the writer and composer, Paul Bowles, traveled in Central America and Europe and lived many years in Tangier. Several of Jane Bowles’ short fictions, including “A Guatemalan Idyll,” explore the slippages between cultures as well as genres. This story was originally incorporated in her novel, Two Serious Ladies, excised on the advice of her husband, redrafted as an unpublished play, and finally published as a short story. In the story, boundaries between Anglo and Spanish American cultures demarcate the boundaries of characters’ self-deceptions and moral codes. When a north-of-the-border traveler ventures into a Guatemalan pension, he is confronted by bodily practices that elicit disgust and disorientation that comically illuminate the limits of his narrow tastes and philosophy. The narrative slippages from the civilized to the barbarous, from the human to the animal, from tolerance to disgust generate carnival laughter that Bakhtin associates with grotesque “gay matter” into highly idiosyncratic, individual perception and choice, as in the traveler’s giddy, squeamish reactions to all things foreign in his border-crossing voyage into the lower regions of the North American continent.
