A Language to Call My Own: Utopian Space in María Luisa Puga’s Pánico o peligro

Abstract

ALanguage to Call My Own: Utopian Space in Maria Luisa Puga’s Pdnico 0peli£[ro Florence Moorhead-Rosenberg B O I S E S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y And suddenly Ifeel everything rushing to acenter, anucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center. Completa. (Anzaldua 51) One should not be able to speak in pragmatic terms of utopian space. Utopia, literally ou topos, no place, is qualified in most dictionaries by such arbitrarily loaded adjectives as “imaginary,” “perfect,” and “ideal.” Con¬ strained by this level of subjectivity, questions of “perfect” to whom, “ideal” in whose eyes, surface almost automatically. There can be no universal utopia, only our own individual/individuated version. This situation pre¬ sents adisturbing double bind, aseemingly unsolvable catch-22. If we accept utopia as asolely imaginary construct—no where and no when— then we are left stranded on our flawless little islands, surrounded by companions who arise purely from our own desires, our own private fantasies. At best, this is arelatively innocuous, isolationist vision. In mediocre incarnations it turns ablind eye to all faults—real or imag¬ ined—and leaves us with the feeling that we may achieve autopian ideal if only we think about it enough. At its worst, traditionally male-inscribed utopia relies on the erasure or annihilation of all undesirable elements standing in the path of its realization and stumbles blindly on its way.^ Most North American women’s utopian fiction has attempted to circum¬ navigate this problem by locating itself firmly outside the constraints of real time and known space.Anne KMellor divides the tendencies of the genre into three categories, each of which then falls neatly into abinary classifi¬ cation of either “abstract” or “concrete” (respectively, abject fantasy or change which is potentially attainable within some hopefully foreseeable future). According to Mellor, “Feminist utopian writers ...have explored three types of feminist utopias: all-female societies, biological androgyny, and genuinely egalitarian two-sex societies” (241).^ It should be apparent almost instantly that the first two of these categories belong squarely to the realm of abstract utopias in that they are “generated out of pure desire and function as wish-fulfillment” (242). This may not be anegative characteristic. 7 8 Moorhead-Rosenberg—Language to Call My Own 7 9 especially if we take into account that “utopian authors construct ideal space in order to subvert inequality and inevitability” (Pfaelzer 282). However, the third, more concrete category seems pragmatically more desirable authentically feminist genre if we wish to designate concrete utopian discourse as potentially something more than an escapist narrative we read toeludemomentarilythedrudgeryofoureverydaylives.Thisisparticularly true if we agree with Mellor that, “concrete utopian thinking ... is inherently revolutionary: it offers avision of abetter world which we are both morally obligated and technically able to bring into being” (243). Iwould like to suggest aconnection here between concrete utopian fiction, the Latin American construct of literaturn comprometida and feminist theory in general. Literally “committed literature,” la literatura comprometida seeks to alter reality by existing in dialogue with it. Writers of literatura comprometida believe that there is a“significant utopian element in [the] view that speaking, reading and writing are subversive activities”(Pfaelzer283).Ifwesubsequentlyrelatethisconcepttotheidea that feminist theory is, at heart, utopian in nature, because it seeks to redress issues of “gender equality, asocial equality between the sexes which [has] never existed in the historical past” (Mellor 243), then we must conclude thatmostfeministnarrativeisconceivablyutopianinthatit“bothcritique(s) the present world and attempt(s) to prophesy or determine the future” (243). We might add that this future is necessarily prophesied as being fundamentallydifferentfromboththehistoricalpastandthepresentwhich spawnedit.^Furthermore,thisisastrueforoff-world,post-apocalyptic. North American, feminist utopian science fiction as it is for Hispanic women’s literatura comprometida. Beforeundertakingtheanalysisofaspecificexample,itisimperativeto underscore the following: not all women’s literature is necessarily feminist, norisit,byextension,utopian.Intermsofthepresentdiscussion,wemay borrowfromJaneFlax,instatingthatforaworktobeutopianinnamreit must answer, or at least address, the fundamental question of “how shall we live?” (21). Paradoxically, it is this somewhat un-postmodern question, so firmly embedded in the belief in aconcrete reality existing prior to its enunciation, areality in dire need of transformation, which intrinsically...