Unravelling compulsory happiness in exile:
Cristina Peri Rossi’s The Ship of Fools
A number of feminist critics of Latin American women writers in exile have suggested that women in exile may flourish as they are freed from the traditional gender restrictions imposed on them in their home countries. In this article I reexamine the association of exile with liberation through analysing Cristina Peri Rossi’s 1984 novel La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools) in the light of the tension between Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian affirmation of feminism as a ‘joyful nomadic force’ (1994: 8) and Sara Ahmed’s critique of compulsory happiness (2010). Peri Rossi juxtaposes the prescriptive worldview of the captivating medieval ‘Tapestry of the Creation’ in the Cathedral of Girona in Catalonia, which depicts the Biblical story of Genesis, and the diasporic and unpredictable wanderings of the protagonist Ecks on his journey to feminist enlightenment. I argue that while the novel seems to champion nomadic subjectivity, it also highlights the deceptive charm of imperative positive affect that may function as a disciplinary force, compelling subjects to follow a conventional path in life, and invalidating those who ‘stray’ from it. My reading of the novel calls for a nuanced approach to exile and diaspora that takes into account wider questions of the privilege and ease of movement – or, indeed, settling – enjoyed by or denied to various subjects.
A number of feminist critics of Latin American women writers in exile have suggested that women in exile may flourish as they are freed from the traditional gender restrictions imposed on them in their home countries. For example, Kate Averis argues that distance from home may offer ‘a new space of agency’ and ‘a site of creativity’ (2014: 3). In a similar vein, Amy Kaminsky describes women’s ‘discovery within the self of a capacity to survive and grow in the new environment’ (1993: 37). Concepts such as ‘creativity’, ‘agency’, ‘growth’ and ‘transcendence’ abound in these two critics’ considerations of women’s experiences in exile. The argument that women may enjoy more freedom for self-creation away from their country of birth accords with Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian theory of subjectivity in which she posits that ‘a joyful nomadic force’ (1994: 8) is the best basis for a forward-looking feminism.
Braidotti calls for a ‘nomadic consciousness’ that she describes as ‘the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour’ (1994: 5). Although she deploys the concept of nomadism in a figurative sense, stating that it is ‘the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling’ (Braidotti, 1994: 5), the literal and figurative are deeply interconnected, and at some points merged, in her work. For example, while she notes that she is not referring to the literal act of travelling, she talks about a non-unitary subjectivity as being ‘embedded and embodied’ and warns against speaking from ‘nowhere’ (Braidotti, 1994: 4). Indeed, the title of the book in which she outlines her position – Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994) – emphasises embodiment and the nomadic subject rather than metaphorical nomadism.
The fluidity between the figurative and the literal in the unsettled thought about grounded lives that characterises Braidotti’s theorisation of nomadic subjectivity means that it lends itself to the critical analysis of works that combine ‘nomadic thought’, i.e. the challenging of dogma, and literal movement. I first came across Braidotti’s work when I was reading Cristina Peri Rossi’s The Ship of Fools, a novel that is often cited as a key example of experimental Latin American exile writing.1 In her analysis of Peri Rossi’s oeuvre, Claire Lindsay has contested the reductive alignment of Peri Rossi’s treatment of the exilic condition with her physical exile. Counter to a number of critics, she argues that even in Peri Rossi’s early work that seems firmly rooted in Uruguay, the author writes in the mode of an alienated writer in the Kafkaesque space of symbolic exile, critiquing society from a mental, rather than necessarily physical, distance (Lindsay, 2003: 29–30, 34–35). Lindsay’s reading has much in common with Braidotti’s figurative use of the nomad. Braidotti’s theory proves particularly compelling in the analysis of works written from or about exile, symbolic or otherwise, that call into question the authoritarian discourse of military regimes. I was struck by the resonances that exist between the explorations of nomadic thought and subjectivity in Braidotti and Peri Rossi despite the different contexts in which they were writing.
Peri Rossi’s novel was originally published around twelve years after she fled from Montevideo to Barcelona in exile. She left Uruguay just before the military took power, marking the start of a twelve-year dictatorship. The literary response of many left-wing writers of the Southern Cone to authoritarian regimes in the 1970s was to trouble conventional monolithic linear narratives in an attempt to expose and challenge the regimes’ control of language and manipulation of reality. Peri Rossi’s novel is a powerful example of the disruption of teleology in which ambiguity and the proliferation of meaning prevail. She contests centralised authority as the site of creating and controlling meaning. The novel is characterised by fragmentation and formal experimentation and consists of chapters describing the expansive, meandering travels of the protagonist Ecks (X) – a perpetual wanderer who, like Peri Rossi, seems to be a political exile – and those he meets on his journey without any firm direction. The novel relentlessly complicates binaries such as movement and stasis, drift and grounding, freedom and control, as Mary Beth Tierney-Tello has demonstrated (1996: 173–208). In its subversion of convention and challenging of social norms, it is a powerful precursor to Braidotti’s theorisation of the unsettled and unsettling force of nomadism.
The Ship of Fools can be read as a feminist bildungsroman due to Ecks’ growing awareness of privilege and oppression during his endless journey. It explores the connections between gender, sexuality, nomadism and power through accounts of Ecks’ travels, including his encounters with a sex worker and groups of women travelling from an unspecified country where abortion is illegal to London to undergo the procedure. The novel begins and ends with descriptions of Ecks’ dreams that emphasise the feminist enlightenment that he has undergone as a result of his diasporic travels; at first ambiguity overwhelms him, but by the end of the novel he welcomes it.
Interspersed through the tales of the characters’ diasporic wandering are descriptions of the ‘Tapestry of the Creation’ in the Cathedral of Girona in Catalonia, a medieval depiction of the Biblical story of Genesis that Ecks sees on his travels. The descriptions of the tapestry stand out as separate to the rest of the text as they are written in italics and on separate pages to the rest of the novel. My analysis focuses on how Peri Rossi’s ekhphrastic text picks at the prescriptive worldview depicted in the tapestry. Her weaving of the wandering outcasts into the tears and seams of the tapestry disrupts both conventional narrative and the societal convention espoused by such a worldview. However, the inclusion of the tapestry’s happy vision suggests that it cannot be dismissed outright.
Peri Rossi’s emphasis on diasporic, eccentric and unsettling ways of writing and being offers further tools for conceptualising, grounding (paradoxically, perhaps) and, indeed, questioning a celebration of ‘nomadic consciousness’. I deploy the novel, written before the affective turn of the mid-1990s, as a form of creative theorising that offers provocative interventions into what would later become philosophical debates about affect and feminism. Crucially, my reading of the novel complicates Braidotti’s coupling of ‘joy’ and ‘nomadism’. I argue that Peri Rossi highlights the deceptive charm of imperative positive affect which may function as a disciplinary force. I consider her unravelling of the tapestry in the light of Sara Ahmed’s compelling critique of compulsory happiness in The Promise of Happiness (2010), in which Ahmed explicitly challenges Braidotti’s call for joy for the exclusions it may unwittingly enact (2010: 87, 214–216). Ahmed is particularly critical of Braidotti’s alignment of ‘negative passions’ with a ‘reactive mode’, of pain with passivity (2010: 215).
I bring into dialogue Ahmed, Braidotti and Peri Rossi, despite the temporal and geographical distances between them, as all of their works combine considerations of affect and ‘foreignness’; the figure of the stranger, the outsider, those ‘out of place’. All three writers address the problems and pleasures in challenging convention. A dialogue between these writers offers enriching perspectives on how feminist theory and practice may be more inclusive, particularly at a time when feeling is being exploited to fuel hatred, exclusions and divisions. It is my contention that debates about affect, feminism and migration would benefit from more contributions from non-Anglophone perspectives. The exchange I forge between the works, each situated within a specific sociohistorical context and yet each with broader relevance, helps thought not to settle, not to become complacent – in a spirit that the works themselves encourage – but to challenge always any new exclusions and Eurocentric assumptions that may have surreptitiously crept into its foundations.
Below, I explore how the diasporic wandering of the novel’s characters resonates with Braidotti’s later account of ‘joyful nomadic subjectivity’. I then consider how the struggles and suffering that the characters, principally Ecks, experience and observe on their paths to feminist enlightenment call into question imperative positive affect. I argue that Peri Rossi’s probing of compulsory happiness is reflected formally in the scattering of the ‘happy’ tapestry amongst tales of ‘wretched’ wanderers. I go on to reflect on the risks of retaining the ideal of ‘nomadic subjectivity’, even when it is decoupled from joy, highlighting the ease with which new exclusions may emerge in feminist theory. In the final turn of my nomadic argument, I call into question the association of home with stasis, and diaspora or exile with transgression.
In one scene in the novel, Ecks arrives in a new city and sees a local woman who reminds him of someone he has met previously. He politely asks her to have coffee with him. She agrees but soon regrets the decision as her prejudices surface. She considers Ecks to be, first and foremost, ‘a foreigner’; in Spanish, ‘un extranjero’. Peri Rossi explicitly links the ‘ex’ of ‘extranjero’ with Ecks (X), exile, excess, estrangement, the expelled, the errant – all terms that point to dispensable or excluded elements of a xenophobic society. Eventually the woman, displaying no empathy at all, assumes that Ecks is mad and runs away from him. She describes her irritation at Ecks’ incursion into her day: ‘That’s it […] now he’s going to tell me his clinical history, how he escaped from the hospital, and I’ll have to call the police. How I hate getting involved with other people’s problems …’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 26). Her routine life takes priority over his desire for human connection, pathologised as a sign of an ‘unstable’ mind.
In the same chapter, the narrator comments on the fact that Ecks has at times found it difficult to get a job due to the fact that ‘people suspect a stranger’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 23).2 With echoes of Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum on ‘woman’ – ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ ([1949] 2011: 330) – the narrator remarks that those ‘who live always in the same place […] do not realize that to be a stranger is a temporary situation, one that can be altered; in fact they assume that some men are strangers and others not. They believe that one is born—and does not become—a stranger’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 28). Ecks himself points to the incidental nature of his ‘foreignness’ when the woman in the cafe asks him if he is a foreigner: ‘“Only in some countries,” he answered, “and hopefully, I will not be one forever”’ (1989b: 24). A journalistic piece by Peri Rossi on her own nomadism written in 1989 echoes Ecks’ response. She writes, ‘I am a person who is a little nomadic and I have grown used to living in hotels, bracketed off from daily life. Hotels remind me that I am in transit in life: I am not here permanently, but transiently. I do not own, but borrow’ (Peri Rossi, 2005: 48; translation mine). The references to ‘borrowing’ and ‘transience’ contrast with the sense of entitlement Ecks notices in those who feel themselves to be anchored rightfully in a particular place. In some ways, then, Peri Rossi’s novel shares Braidotti’s celebration of ‘nomadic subjects’ and her disdain for ‘very settled, anchored, sedentary people [who] are amongst the least empathic, the least easily moved, the most self-consciously “apolitical”’ (1994: 35). However, a closer reading of the novel led me to question the imperative tone of Braidotti’s insistence on positive affect in her conceptualisation of feminism as a ‘joyful nomadic force’.
The lure of a happy path to the ‘good life’ is represented in the novel by the tapestry seen by Ecks. The central part of the tapestry depicts the creation of the world by the Pantocrator (i.e. Christ represented as ruler of the universe, from the Greek for ‘ruler over all’), who is situated in a circle in the centre. Around this circle are representations of light and dark, day and night, creatures of the sea and sky. The positioning of the elements around the Pantocrator symbolises his control over their ‘rightful’ place. The sense that each creature has an assigned place in the universe that is part of a greater order is emphasised by the prominent decorative lines that radiate out from the Pantocrator, dividing the segments of the tapestry. Around the edges there are depictions of the tasks typically undertaken in the different months of the year, such as ploughing, sowing and harvesting. The tapestry seems to stand for a vision of happiness based on stasis or the following of a fixed path.
The narrator notes that the design of the tapestry is ‘the product of a religious system, a world, that is perfectly concentric and ordered’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 13). Despite the restrictive path it implies, the descriptions of the work in the novel acknowledge its vibrant, colourful beauty that captivates the observer. The tapestry is described as ‘a convincing and pleasing structure, moreover a happy one’ (15), suggesting that the images of the path it outlines trigger positive sensations in the observer, and, by extension, insinuating that following the path it outlines may lead to ‘good’ feelings, to a ‘good’ life. ‘Captivating’ is indeed an appropriate word with which to describe the work; it holds the observer’s attention, but also draws him/her/them into its extremely narrow and limited vision of the world.
In the same section of the text, the use of the impersonal verb form and the first-person plural has the effect of universalising one subjective reaction to the tapestry: ‘We value in art the exercise of mind and emotion that can make sense of the universe without reducing its complexity. Immersed in such art one could live one’s life, engaged in a perfectly rational discourse whose meaning cannot be questioned because it resides in an image containing the whole universe’ (14). But who is this ‘we’, the universal ‘one’ that the text refers to? Who is it that flourishes in this intelligible, mapped, totalising vision of the universe?
The novel highlights the exclusions on which the ‘happy world’ of the tapestry is based. While the narrator describes the comforting familiarity and sense of oneness with other elements of the design that the observer is encouraged to feel – ‘Everything is so arranged that man can feel in harmony with the design’ (13) – we do learn that it is a certain type of person (the reference to ‘man’ here is not incidental) who feels this sense of harmony when the narrator states that ‘Art like this beckons man to live within its world, freed from the sins of the other one’ (14). The implication is that the sinners of the other world are those who do not fit this model and who challenge the way of living in the divine design. The violence and exclusions of the world depicted in the tapestry are alluded to even more explicitly in a footnote to the description: ‘such harmony assumes the destruction of those aspects of reality which oppose it’ (13). Those who do not obey, the ‘perverted’, the ‘deviant’, are excluded, so as not to jeopardise the happiness of the rest of society. We learn that ‘Ecks studied the tapestry as one might read an old legend whose rhythm fascinates, but which evokes no nostalgia’ (13). Ecks’ lack of nostalgia in response to the beautiful tapestry that observers supposedly long to enter highlights the exclusivity of its appeal.
Peri Rossi suggests that the very insistence on happiness and joy can be what stifles certain groups. We learn that the tapestry depicts sea creatures who are described as ‘marvellous monsters which […] inhabited the seas, only to be glimpsed in the lightning’s flash or in terror as the mast came crashing down’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 11; emphasis mine). The narrator’s seemingly contradictory comment, following the description of the terror the creatures and monsters prompted in sailors, is relevant to our consideration of happiness:
The sea monsters of the tapestry do not inspire fear. They join harmoniously in the great system of creation, together with the birds and plants. Strange-looking creatures they are, but their extraordinary appearance does not terrify […] They seem to glide naturally through the waves with no apparent desire of emerging or attacking, and beside them, unthreatened, swim the smaller fishes. (114–115; emphasis mine)
In the sea, the creatures inspire terror; in the tapestry, they do not terrify. Despite their containment, these creatures are described as integrated, in tune with the wider system. They are curious to just the right degree not to be threatening and apparently display no will to break free of their containment. The fact that the monsters appear beneath the Pantocrator highlights their suppression.
The narrator also comments that aquatic animals ‘occupy a large area of this section of the tapestry, as if sea-monsters were the most important part of creation’ (113). The segment’s size points to the importance to the divine plan of ensuring that the containment of these monstruous elements is visible. Peri Rossi thus signals that positive feelings may not be a sign of liberation but of succumbing to pernicious conformity. Her description of the monstruous creatures in the tapestry brings to mind Ahmed’s point that ‘happiness is used to justify oppression’ (2010: 2). Ahmed draws on de Beauvoir who states that:
We cannot really know what the word ‘happiness’ means, and still less what authentic values it covers; there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the pretext that happiness is immobility. ([1949] 2011: 37)
These monsters, who had once been both threatening and marvellous, are now neutralised in their stagnation. Those who are not able or willing to stay in place happily presumably populate the world of sins that does not appear in the tapestry, and from which those in the tapestry are saved. We will return to them below.
In The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed offers us some clues as to who the implied universalised observer of the tapestry might be. She takes as a point of departure the commonly uttered and usually covertly manipulative statement, ‘I just want you to be happy’. She argues that happiness has come to be a disciplinary force that leads subjects to believe that following a particular path in life (heterosexual marriage, property ownership, children, accumulation of material wealth) will lead them to a happy and ‘good’ life, and that deviating from this path is to sacrifice one’s own and others’ happiness and well-being. Indeed, the notion of compulsory happiness recalls Adrienne Rich’s conceptualisation of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ (1980). Ahmed calls for resistance to this trend of compulsory happiness and the obligatory nature of ‘positive’ feelings which serve to validate some lives and dismiss others. She states that ‘rather than assuming happiness is simply found in “happy persons”, we can consider how claims to happiness might be how social norms make certain forms of personhood valuable’ (Ahmed, 2010: 11). Ahmed highlights figures of resistance to a form of happiness that sees “the unhappy” as obstacles to society’s well-being. For example, she points to the unconventional ways of living of ‘melancholic migrants’, ‘unhappy queers’ and ‘feminist killjoys’ (Ahmed, 2010), all three of which appear in Peri Rossi’s novel. Ahmed explicitly engages Braidotti’s call for joy and argues, in response, that we should not assume that suffering is ‘stifling’ (2010: 216).
We can see, then, that a pleasant feeling of happiness may quash dissent. While directing people’s behaviour, happiness may lead them to believe that they are acting on their own desires. Therefore, the tapestry’s happy containment of monstruous ‘nomads’ of the sea poses a challenge to Braidotti’s association of feminist insurrection as ‘joyful nomadism’ in revealing how positive affect can coax subjects to conformity. Such a reading of the novel suggests that ‘joyful nomadism’ may be oxymoronic.
In this section, I suggest that the idea of happiness as a unidirectional ideological imperative that leads subjects down a conventional path – Ahmed traces ‘convention’ back to its root, ‘to convene’, from the Latin ‘convenire’ meaning to come together, to agree or to fit (2010: 64) – can be seen as having its narrative correlative in linear plots in which meaning is mastered.
The ‘universal’ happy observer’s experience of the tapestry reflects a teleological vision. The narrator remarks that ‘either from the long seat of carved wood placed in front, or standing a few feet away, [one] can see it fully extended, one’s gaze travelling from left to right or from top downwards’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 13), therefore enjoying a sense of control over space. Given that the tapestry can be conceived as a whole demonstrates that the path, as ordained by a divine being, is clear and pre-determined. It supports the statement in the New Testament that ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life’ (Matthew 7:14), the origin of the English phrase ‘straight and narrow’ that refers to the obedient following of the ‘good’ path. Using the first-person plural again, the narrator states that what ‘we love in any structure is a vision of the world that gives order to chaos, a hypothesis which is comprehensible and restores our faith, atoning for our having fled and scattered before life’s brutal disorder’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 14). The description of disorder and dispersion as ‘brutal’, in contrast with an ordered and comprehensible depiction of the world as comforting and restorative, reveals a preference in the implied observer for mastery of the universe.
Peri Rossi frustrates the desire for mastery, structure and predictability through drawing attention to movement in the tapestry’s seemingly fixed and ordered world. In between the central circle and the borders depicting activities that take place each month, there is an in-between space. The narrator states that: ‘Everything here indicates movement: the air escaping, the full leather bags, the studied position of the limbs of the angels as if they were riding. The inclusion of the winds, so close to the circle of Creation, at the side of the Creator Himself, suggests that all is moving; nothing in the Universe remains still’ (165). Even in what is physically present in the tapestry there is the hint of disruption to a static vision of the world, or, perhaps, the acknowledgement that there is inevitably drift within apparent stasis.
Aside from the disruption to stability in what remains of the tapestry, the narrator makes multiple references to its incompleteness. For example, he/she/they state(s) that the ‘passage of time—whole epochs in revolt—has destroyed almost half of it’ (14). Indeed, the final words of the novel refer to its missing parts: ‘The tapestry is missing January, November, December and at least two of the rivers of Paradise’ (198). Its incompleteness is symbolic of the unknown, unpredictable, messiness of life that Peri Rossi explores in the other parts of the novel, which perhaps offer some clues as to the nature of alternative routes to ‘paradise’, routes cleared by ‘revolt’.
In another point of confluence in Peri Rossi’s and Ahmed’s texts (and text derives, fittingly, from the Latin verb ‘texere’, to weave), Ahmed describes her project through textile metaphors: ‘My aim is to follow the weave of unhappiness, as a kind of unravelling of happiness, and the threads of its appeal’ (2010: 18). Peri Rossi pulls into tatters the already disintegrating tapestry through scattering descriptions of it throughout the novel. So, contrary to the mastery of the universe that the material tapestry as a whole might have represented, its eroded state and textual scattering represent the undoing of the binds of ‘religion’, from the Latin ‘religare’, ‘to bind’, and the unravelling of the Catholic narrative – with Catholic stemming from the Greek katholikos, meaning ‘universal’ or ‘relating to the whole’– as well as the unpicking of the threads of the appeal of happiness.
The narrator states, again using the first-person plural, that: ‘What one admires in the work, besides the fine execution, handsome texture and harmony of colours, is this structure—a structure so symmetrical, so dependable that even when complete, it is possible to recreate the whole, if not on the cathedral wall, then within the framework of our imagination’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 14; emphasis mine). The fact that the tapestry can be recreated even though parts are missing is a nod to its predictability – emphasised through the repetition of ‘structure’ – and, perhaps, its continuing appeal. On the other hand, even in this comment on predictability and ordered form, there is reference to the creative mind, ‘the framework of our imagination’. The tapestry’s fraying points to the possibility of imaginative wandering, of alternative visions offered by the lives of those not depicted in, and in fact excluded from, the legible universe of the tapestry. Therefore, the narrator’s restorative or redemptive hypothesis – that ‘it is possible to recreate the whole’ (14) – contrasts with the novel’s creative hypothesis in which the holes in the tapestry’s vision of the world point to an opening up to the unexpected, the unmastered and the unmasterable.
The apparent order and symmetry of the tapestry that contains a depiction of the entire universe and is described by Kaminsky as ‘a sort of map that makes order out of chaos’ (1993: 48) contrasts with the expansive, spontaneous and, crucially, unmappable journeys of the nomadic Ecks. The narrator states that ‘it is almost impossible to trace the stages of Ecks’ journey on any map’ (32–33). Through depicting his travels, Peri Rossi seems to advocate a messier and more engaged experience of the city. The contrast between the desire for mastery that the totalising vision of the tapestry represents and the ‘unmappability’ of Ecks’ journey recalls the difference that Michel de Certeau highlights between distant voyeurs and pedestrians in the city (1984). De Certeau contrasts the voyeur’s gaze from atop the pre-September 11 World Trade Centre towers with that of the walkers down below, who write the city’s ‘illegible’ tales. The tower ‘makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text. […] The voyeur-god created by this fiction […] must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviours and make himself alien to them. [… The walkers’] bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 92–93). In the tapestry, the ‘voyeur-god’ is in a separate circle to the ordered, legible world that he has created, a world that can be read by the ‘universal’ observer with a dominating gaze.
Ecks’ wandering, in contrast, is illegible. Ecks, emphasising the role of chance, notes that: ‘For the past few years, due to special circumstances having more to do with the way the world turns than with my personal wishes, I have travelled from one place to another without any firm direction’ (78). In a journalistic piece titled ‘The Last Pedestrian’, Peri Rossi casts herself as a wandering Ecks. She displays her pride in being one of the last remaining true pedestrian inhabitants of Barcelona, also emphasising chance, surprise and unpredictability in the act of walking. She writes: ‘To walk is to roam, that is, to move around on foot without a fixed route, deliberately losing yourself in the streets; to walk is to wander […] Walking means leaving room for chance, for surprise, in the midst of our increasingly scheduled and routine lives […] it means leaving time for imagination’ (Peri Rossi, 2005: 141–142; translation mine). Peri Rossi’s reference to chance or fate, in Spanish ‘el azar’, can be linked etymologically with ‘hazard’, that is, with risk. In the happenings of the life of Peri Rossi’s wandering protagonist, where imagination is celebrated, happiness is not guaranteed; for Peri Rossi, nomadism is not necessarily ‘joyful’.
Similarly, Ahmed associates ‘hap-piness’ with its etymological root of ‘hap’ in the sense of a chance occurrence, the ‘perhaps’. She refers to happiness as a possibility rather than an objective:
A politics of the hap is about opening possibilities for being in other ways, of being perhaps. If opening up possibility causes unhappiness, then a politics of the hap will be thought of as unhappy. But it is not just that. A politics of the hap might embrace what happens, but it also works towards a world in which things can happen in alternative ways. (Ahmed, 2010: 223)
So, whereas Braidotti calls for a ‘joyful’ approach as she believes that much critical theory practised by those she terms ‘the melancholics’ contains ‘too much critique, not enough creativity’ (2014), Ahmed believes that it is the very emphasis on the idea of ‘flourishing’, ‘happiness’, ‘joy’ etc. as imperative that actually shuts down creative possibilities for resistance through its exclusion of those who are portrayed as ‘getting in the way’ of the path to happiness. In the novel, Ecks’ diasporic encounters with sadness, suffering and discrimination contribute to his eventual enlightenment and challenging of privilege. Both Peri Rossi and Ahmed posit, then, that imperative joy, as a gesture of mastery, may ultimately uphold the status quo.
The characters in the The Ship of Fools are wretched exiles, those who are cast out of the utopian religious vision of the tapestry, whose perspective leads us to question the implications of an increasingly normalised compulsory happiness. Ahmed points out that the adjective ‘wretched’ came from ‘wretch’ which was a reference to a ‘stranger, exile or banished person’ (2010: 17). Those who are cast out of a particular society, community or nation are considered to be ‘wretched’. Ahmed asks: ‘Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? […] The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar’ (2010: 17). Rather than considering the universe from the point of view of the content universal observer implied in the tapestry descriptions, or from the perspective of the centred Pantocrator, Peri Rossi draws our attention to the ‘unhappy’ perspective of the wretched.
Unhappiness and suffering may be, in themselves, forms of resistance that show the limitations and injustices of the status quo and the endorsed way of being of a particular community or ideology. For example, Chapter IX describes the experiences of a political exile from the same country as Ecks who was held in a torture and detention centre for two years before being released. The exile, Vercingetorix, is haunted by the disappearances, torture and death of many of his compatriots and, particularly, by the fact that life outside carried on more or less ‘as normal’ for many people: ‘Perhaps at this very moment, as he lay smoking stretched on his bed and thinking of a factory killing them bit by bit, somewhere, not far from his narrow bed and his green canary […] there would be another camp, another hell, with its inmates dying without trace, either thrown into the sea or buried in common graves, no name, no memory. And he couldn’t live with this thought’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 57). For Vercingetorix, going on ‘happily’ would be an act of forgetting. As Ahmed states, the:
assumption that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed allows historical forms of injustice to disappear. The demand that we be affirmative makes those histories disappear by reading them as a form of melancholia (as if you hold on to something that is already gone). These histories have not gone: we would be letting go of that which persists in the present. (2010: 217)
Ecks’ encounters demonstrate that ongoing imbalances in privilege have an effect on the ease with which characters may happily break free from the ‘straight and narrow’, in exile or otherwise. The sex worker who he encounters has been beaten up and the women travelling to London to have abortions that are illegal in their own country are disempowered. Peri Rossi thus acknowledges the inevitability of feelings not traditionally regarded as ‘positive’ in the process of developing more just communities that are not based on the exclusion of those who challenge the oppressive nature of societal norms or simply expose the privilege of those who make such norms seem ‘normal’. The acceptance of negative affect and discomfort rather than its exclusion or pathologisation is summed up poignantly in a poem by another writer who, like Peri Rossi, moved to Barcelona from the Southern Cone. In the words of Neus Aguado: ‘The mission of the soul is errancy/ and that of the body is to make mistakes,/ doubly disorientated we search for the light/ to find, very often, a slither of night;/ the very night that leads to the dawn’ (2000: 40; translation mine).
As mentioned earlier, the novel begins with a dream, a ‘slither of night’ in which the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds is rewritten. The parable is from the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 13: 24-30), the first book of the New Testament; its rewriting mirrors Peri Rossi’s unravelling of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, through her treatment of the tapestry. The parable states that in the final judgment, wheat will be gathered by angels and admitted to heaven and the weeds, children of evil sown by the devil, will be burnt. In Peri Rossi’s reworking of the Biblical version, Ecks is separating wheat and chaff when a woman appears and encourages him to mix first a weed, then a stone and a mouse with the wheat. She then disappears. Ecks says: ‘When she had gone, I was confused. The straw seemed more beautiful and the grain, unyielding. Doubt overwhelmed me. […] Under the gray sky the horizon is a smudge, and no voice answers’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 1). The woman in the opening sequence sets the tone for the other encounters Ecks has on his journey of feminist enlightenment.3 Counter to the pleasure in harmony the narrator emphasises in many of the tapestry descriptions, the dream scene suggests that there is beauty in disrupting order and neat categorisations, and questioning widely held beliefs and assumptions, even though this may involve moments of bleakness (‘the gray sky’), uncertainty (‘doubt overwhelmed me’) and loneliness (‘no voice answers’).
Beyond the questioning of convention in general, the image of unseparated wheat brings to mind the symbol of the fasces or fascio littorio adopted by Mussolini’s fascist movement. The fasces is a bundle of wooden twigs with a protruding axe, based on a Roman symbol of power over life and death. It is used in a number of national symbols, particularly to represent institutions relating to law and justice. Most relevant to our analysis are two emblems that would have been familiar to Peri Rossi in both Montevideo and Barcelona. The emblem of the Spanish national police, the Guardia Civil, enforcers of Franco’s authoritarian rule, and the shield of the Uruguayan police, upholders of military rule in Uruguay, both include the fasces. The wood is often depicted as yellow, as in the emblem of the Guardia Civil, and therefore looks like wheat. The mixing of the wheat and chaff in the novel’s opening could be read as a challenge to the ideals of purity, segregation and order on which fascism is based.
In El libro de mis primos ([1969] 1989a, The Book of My Cousins), Peri Rossi’s first novel, which depicts the generational struggle between the older members of an aristocratic family in Uruguay and the dynamism of the younger generations associated with the guerrillas, Peri Rossi exposes the Paraguayan fascist dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s recourse to ‘happiness’ in a speech used to promote national unity and vilify dissent: ‘What matters to us is the happiness of every man on earth. Our hearts and conscience are disgusted by the thought of adding a mere atom of malice to that which already exists, that would contribute to dividing and separating men, whom God and the state united as brothers’ ([1969] 1989a: 100; translation mine). If fascism aligns happiness with order, Peri Rossi’s textual mixing of wheat (the tapestry) and chaff (the stories of the diasporic wanderers and exiles) undermines a vision of happiness based on an order synonymous with separation and exclusion.
Like the errant soul that Aguado evokes, Ecks passes through darkness to reach the light. The narrator describes the segment of the tapestry in which the Angel of Light appears: ‘An angel in pilgrim’s dress walking somewhere. In this section the colours are brighter’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 83). In the segment, the letters ‘LUX’, Latin for ‘light’, appear. In some senses, this angel prefigures the appearance in the novel of Lucía (the Spanish equivalent of Lucy), whose name derives from ‘lux’. Lucía is the aptly named character who brings Ecks to his feminist en-light-enment. She is one of the women he met while working for a company who charged women to be taken to have abortions in London from a country where it was illegal. Significantly, Satan himself masquerades as an Angel of Light in 2 Corinthians 11:14, hence the name ‘Lucifer’. Picking up on the ambivalence of light in the Bible, Lucía goes against what traditional religion would deem to be the ‘natural order’ first through abortion and then through the sex acts she performs on stage in a club that runs transvestite shows. She comes to represent both ambiguity and multiplicity; a plural subjectivity.
Ecks sees her in the dressing room of the transvestite club towards the novel’s close:
Lucía presented the perfect androgynous image […] he felt overpowered by that ambiguity. He saw the unfolding of two parallel worlds in all their splendour; two different calls, two messages, two appearances, two perceptions, two languages […] He was aware that the beauty of one increased the beauty of the other, that two pairs of eyes looked at him, four lips whispered, two wonderful heads shone in their harmony. The revelation was unbearable […]. (202–203)
It is at this ‘unbearable’ point that Ecks realises the answer to the riddle that has been posed to him in his recurring dream by a king who is in love with his daughter and does not want to let her leave his control. The king asks all of his daughter’s suitors the same question: ‘What is the greatest tribute and homage a man can give to the woman he loves?’. In Ecks’ dream the daughter is Lucía. He must answer the riddle in order to free her. Upon seeing Lucía dressed as a man in the club he realises that the answer to the riddle is ‘virility’, particularly ambiguous in the original text due to the unspecificity of the Spanish possessive pronoun ‘su’ in ‘su virilidad’ which could mean his, her or their virility, as Mary Beth Tierney-Tello has eloquently argued (1996: 203). The dawn of The Ship of Fools subsequently comes in its triumphant feminist ending that seems to signal the collapse of patriarchy, at least in the protagonist’s mind. In the final lines of the novel, the king disappears: ‘he falls to the ground, blends with the mud; overcome, beaten, the poor little king disappears. He dies with a whimper’ (204). The novel’s climactic ending advocates what Geoffrey Kantaris has described as the ‘cutting of the cultural bond between authority, power and male sexuality’ (1995: 262).
Ecks’ enlightenment takes place when he realises that there are multiple perspectives, multiple paths, multiple desires in one person. It is significant that in order to reach this moment he literally passes through a dark basement before reencountering Lucía, through Aguado’s ‘night’ to reach the ‘dawn’. Whereas in the opening dream, ambiguity left Ecks feeling bleak and lonely, in the final dream, he is enlightened by it. It is not incidental that Saint Lucy is the Patron Saint of the Blind, representing both what we see and know, and what we do not or cannot see. Ecks’ transformation is ultimately an acceptance of the impossibility of fully knowing another being. In Strange Encounters, Ahmed is critical of discourses of multiculturalism in which, she argues, a dominant culture remains dominant. She is also critical of an ethics of ‘yes-saying to the stranger’ which she believes to be inadequate as it assumes that the stranger can be known. She states that ‘there is never simply an encounter between self and self, or between self and other. There is always more than one and more than two in any encounter’ (Ahmed, 2000: 141). Ecks’ encounter with Lucía in all her ambiguity and multiplicity emphasises that there are aspects of others that we cannot know and access, just as the universe is not legible to us in its entirety.
In the spirit of the impossibility of mastering the universe, others and ourselves, the scattering of the tapestry descriptions amongst the tales of the exiles’ nomadic wandering, fragmenting the novel’s already fragmented form, can be considered in the light of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on dissemination, which can be linked etymologically with ‘diaspora’, from the Greek for ‘dispersion’, ‘to sow’, ‘to scatter’. In the note to her translation of Dissemination, Barbara Johnson states: ‘The Book, the Preface, and the Encyclopedia are all structures of unification and totalization. Dissemination, on the other hand, is what subverts all such recuperative gestures of mastery. It is what foils the attempt to progress in an orderly way toward meaning or knowledge, what breaks the circuit of intentions or expectations through some ungovernable excess or loss’ (Derrida, 1981: xxxii). The protagonists’ diasporic wandering in the novel leads us to question attempts to master the universe and others in it and to challenge prejudices, be these the cause of hostility towards individuals or groups or a premature acceptance, both of which are based on an assumption of knowing what cannot yet, or perhaps ever, be known. Peri Rossi’s disruption of conventional narrative through textual fragmentation and multiple narrative digressions can therefore be seen as a formal counterpart to her thematic questioning of compulsory happiness, which is equated with ideological mastery over the universe and its inhabitants.
As we sail towards a conclusion, I wish to tug at a key thread of the argument, in the spirit of Braidotti’s nomadic consciousness as thought that resists settling. So far our analysis of the novel has taken us from Braidotti’s ‘joyful nomadism’ to the novel’s ‘wretched wanderers’ unravelling convention, but the emphasis on ‘nomadism’ has remained. In this section, I will suggest that while Peri Rossi’s novel celebrates the potential in exilic and diasporic nomadism, it also demonstrates a wariness of new hegemonies and new exclusions.
Braidotti states of her own life that it is ‘based on the permanence of temporary arrangements and the comfort of contingent foundations’ (1994: 11), with the use of the word ‘comfort’ hinting at the privilege of her nomadic position. Indeed, it is on the basis of this grounded privilege that Braidotti’s theory has been criticised by critics such as Dick Pels (1999). For many, such as some of the women Ecks meets in the novel and, to give an example from our contemporary reality, refugees currently trying to enter Europe, ‘contingent’ situations could not be considered to be ‘foundations’, and there is certainly little ‘comfort’ in their state of forced nomadism. In the chapter that shares the novel’s title, ‘The Journey, VIII: The Ship of Fools’, we read of a hauntingly resonant scene in which a boat of ‘madmen’ is abandoned to its fate at sea as the crew disembarks. In these inhumane times, it does not require much imagination to draw a connection between the eponymous ‘Ship of Fools’ and the boats carrying refugees on treacherous journeys to European shores that, in many cases, they never reach.
In the novel, a number of the characters forced into exile long to return home. Averis recognises that ‘the freedom enabled by mobility must be considered alongside that of the freedom to stay at home’ (2014: 30). Ecks, for example, tries to establish some sense of continuity through surrounding himself with familiar objects: ‘The books which Ecks buys as soon as he arrives and settles in a new place are almost always the same’ (Peri Rossi, 1989b: 31). He finds some consolation in things not changing: ‘When Ecks came back to the city, he looked for the bar and it was there. That comforted him: it hurt him to return to places and discover that so much had changed’ (41). The sex worker whom Ecks meets who has visible signs of violence on her body longs for a sense of home: the ‘radio was the only object which could be said to decorate the room; it showed that the owner was particularly fond of it, nurtured an uncontrollable passion for it’ (Peri Rossi, 1984: 193). These characters’ longing for a sense of home suggests that celebrating nomadism is often only possible from the privileged perspective of those who have previously had or still have the comfort of stability against which to rebel.
The novel’s call to be mindful of privilege recalls Ahmed’s wariness of the indiscriminate dismissal of family, home and stability in feminist thought. She draws on Audre Lorde’s association of ‘freedom-from-family’ with white feminist consciousness, suggesting that due to slavery and ongoing discrimination that has torn apart black families, black feminist consciousness may involve ‘freedom-to-family’ (Ahmed, 2010: 86). In the Southern Cone context, the 1976–83 Argentine military junta constituted an infamous attack on the ‘freedom-to-family’. The military dictatorship shattered families through disappearing at least 30,000 citizens, often arbitrarily, in attempts to ‘counter subversion’. Babies born to disappeared political prisoners were, in many cases, stolen and assigned new identities in right-wing military families. Under these circumstances, attempts by the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to reconstitute biological families were a politically defiant act against the ‘official forgetting’ imposed after the dictatorship through ‘Amnesty laws’ (see Amado and Domínguez, 2004: 13–37).
Peri Rossi’s novel, with its representation of imbalances in privilege in all of the places that it takes the reader through, suggests that celebrating the freedom afforded by exile or nomadism risks simplifying the complex realities of both the home country and country or countries to which the exile travels through, offering a homogeneous vision of ‘backward’ or ‘progressive’ approaches to gender identities and roles. While some queer critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa have problematised home – Anzaldúa points to a student’s reading of homophobia as ‘fear of going home’ (1987: 20) – Ahmed critiques the tendency to homogenise ‘home’ as a negative place in some writing about exile and migration in which the critic assumes that home is ‘a purified space of belonging’ that must be overcome. In Strange Encounters, Ahmed highlights the over-simplification inherent in this position, arguing that ‘[t]here is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance’ (2000: 88). This statement also applies to those who celebrate the casting off by women of the gender binds they face in their home countries upon arriving in another country. Although family pressures might not be as present as directly as in one’s home country, in some cases gender oppression is actually experienced more acutely in exile, especially where it is combined with racism and xenophobia. For Latin American women who challenged gender norms in the countries where they were born, their gender-bound experience might be exacerbated in Spain, for example, as they are faced with the triply marginalising force of being women, immigrants and Latin American (see Benítez Burgos, 2015). They may well enjoy less cultural privilege than in their previous lives, if indeed they had such cultural capital before exile.
The Ship of Fools suggests that the possibility for subjects to feel belonging in a state of unrootedness is deeply bound up with privilege and capital, be it financial or cultural. In accord with Ahmed’s view that ‘Ethics cannot be about moving beyond pain toward happiness or joy without imposing new forms of suffering on those who do not or cannot move in this way’ (2010: 216), the novel suggests that an indiscriminate celebration of a ‘joyful nomadic force’ is problematically exclusive and risks reinscribing the very hierarchies that feminism seeks to overcome. Nonetheless, Peri Rossi does seem to posit an exuberant nomadic opening up to chance, possibility and the imagination. Hers, however, is a nomadism which may involve suffering and which may also, in some cases, lead to a state of homely settling or return, which, she suggests, is not necessarily incompatible with a transgressive mode of being. The association of nomadism with groundedness is, in fact, more in line with the seasonal patterns of movement and settling of original nomads, as Sophia McClennen has pointed out (2004: 48). Braidotti herself also notes that the word ‘nomad’ comes from ‘noumos’, meaning a plot of land. Originally a ‘nomad’ was a clan elder who supervised the allocation of land to the tribe (1994: 26). Therefore the criticism levelled against Braidotti’s privileged position of stable intellectual ‘nomadism’ by critics such as Pels does, in some ways, hark back to the privilege and groundedness embedded within the term ‘nomad’, despite the fact that nomadic groups later came to experience great discrimination. Indeed, in her rebuttal to Pels, Braidotti highlights and critiques the deep prejudice in his argument that implies that the ‘authentically’ underprivileged are incapable of intellectual thought (1999: 90).
We can conclude, then, that revisiting all three writers’ perspectives on feminism and affect in the light of The Ship of Fools’ relentless challenge to binaries leads us to see within each position the kernel of its own anti-thesis. After all, Ahmed does acknowledge that there can be a certain pleasure in resisting the happy settled life endorsed by societal convention: ‘There is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness […] There can even be joy in killing joy’ (2010: 87). Braidotti points to the nomad’s ties to land and also acknowledges that her joyful perspective and that of the Derridean ‘melancholics’ are ‘branches of the same family’ (2014). Read together, then, the texts suggest that there can be settling within drift and drift within stasis, a certain happiness in ‘melancholically’ resisting a societally prescribed path to happiness and a melancholic entrapment in following these very same ‘happy scripts’.
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the AHRC (Grant Number 1376944).
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