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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb>
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the
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Volume 13 Issue 5 (December 2011) Article 12
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar,
"The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011)
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature.
Ed. María Teresa Vilariño Picos and Anxo Abuín González
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/>
Abstract: In her article "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" María do Cebreiro
Rábade Villar attempts to arrive at an idea of character through a comparative analysis of various
artistic versions of William Shakespeare's Ophelia. Rábade Villar employs Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari's notions of transversality and devices of analytical enunciation in order to understand the
feminine literary character. Rábade Villar's corpus of the Ophelia motif include Iberian Galician
authors's work such as by Álvaro Cunqueiro, Xohana Torres, Chus Pato, and Marta Dacosta.
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" page 2 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
María do Cebreiro RÁBADE VILLAR
The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers
Translated from the Galician by Manus O'Dwyer
Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze developed the concept of "transversality" in their Rhizome (1976).
Based on psychoanalytical praxis, transversality can be substituted for transference as the operating
notion in analysis as it transcends vertical approaches (where the principle of hierarchy rules) or
horizontal approaches (where the possibility of substitution presents itself). Guattari and Deleuze
recognized the analytical potential of literary works with regard to Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Artaud, and
Beckett as being more decisive to a cartography of subjectivity than the works of Freud, Jung, or
Lacan. In Deleuze and Guattari's Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophronie, transversality is
conceived to uncover the mechanism of analytic enunciations. I postulate that this presents itself as
an ideal concept for a comparative study of character, in particular for the analysis of the feminine
character, in this case that of Shakespeare's Ophelia.
I employ the notion of tranversality in at least two senses of the concept: in the ontological sense
with the goal of questioning the one-dimensionality of character, particularly the feminine character
and in the methodological sense with the goal of method in comparative literature. We must wonder
to what degree the category of character resists the conception of written genres as a tree of
knowledge expressed in a linear and hierarchical manner. It is in this context that Deleuze's and
Guattari's thought are applied to the subject's rhizomatic cartography: the character transcends
genre, it appears in plays, novels, and in poetry (even if the poetic characterization has not received
as much critical attention as the dramatic or narrative one), and it appears in film, sculpture, painting,
and video art. Character can be used as a critical category revealing the mechanisms of sexual
differentiation which establishes a system of privileges. In this context, we might then ask, "what is a
feminine character?" or, as a figurative specification of this general enunciation, "who is Ophelia?" The
choice of Shakespeare's character as a starting point for this reflection is owing to her ambivalence
and ambiguity. These characteristics perhaps explain why Ophelia is both the starting point and model
for such an ample corpus of works not limited to literature only.
In his version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, originally published in 1959 and re-published with
modifications in 1974, Álvaro Cunqueiro presents Ophelia as the object of song, as the recipient of the
poems Hamlet composes. This is how the chorus explains: "Ever since they dressed her up as a
woman, she became his beloved. She is extremely pampered. She sleeps on embroidered pillows. He
brings her rings back from his travels and wavy hairpins for her hair. He used to sing verses to her"
(unless indicated otherwise, all translations are by Rábade Villar and O'Dwyer) ("Desque a vestiron de
muller, xa se puxo por súa namorada. Está moi herdada. Dorme en almofadas bordadas. Traíalle
anelos das viaxes e forquiñas rizadas para o pelo. Cantáballe versos" [32-33]) and to which Ophelia
responds singing: "He sang verses to me! / Darling, my heart that desires roses / desires oranges and
is an lonely nightingale / Darling, he is your master!" ("Cantábame versos! / Amiga, meu corazón que
pide rosas, / laranxas pide e é isolado reiseñor, / amiga, tente el por señor!" [33]). In this way,
Ophelia's singing of verses changes her into a singing subject, into a subject that bears witness, with
her own voice, to the preceding song by the chorus. In addition to taking refuge in song, Ophelia
takes refuge in insanity, a codeless language. The distinction made by Guattari and Deleuze between
insanity and illness is useful for my application to analyse the Ophelia motif. Ophelia is the madwoman
who refuses to subject words to things. As in the fable of the emperor's new clothes, the insane
woman, in her resistance, shows the world that the powerful one is naked and that reason is the name
of the suit he is not wearing. Compared to Ophelia, Hamlet is the neurotic one, the figure of Oedipus,
whose twisted reasoning generates the ambiguity between "convent" and "brothel" and whose use of
words reveals an opportunistic linguistic economy. Ophelia, on the other hand, chooses the vocal
language of song, not the consonantal language of reason. She chooses the lullaby, the means
through which the mother tongue was transmitted.
To die, the character chooses a connection with water and if there is one thing that characterizes
Ophelia as a character, it is her death. This is what the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais
observed in his often reproduced painting (1851-52). The work inspired a large genealogy of texts —
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" page 3 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
many of these poetic texts creating a physical model of a character that would find its clearest
manifestation, for example in Kate Winslet as Kenneth Branagh's Ophelia (1997). For a portrait of
death, the artist paints the dead. Ophelia is there, immobile, in a liquid coffin, mouth half-open, with
her last breath lingering on her lips: she is there, drowned, but with her hands out of the river. The
hands, which the classic canon considered the most spiritual part of feminine beauty, survive watery
death. The river that claimed Ophelia as she searched for flowers, for her song's object, is the river of
time, the river of the end of time, a symbol of her desire to interrupt the course of the ages to
immerse herself once again in its amniotic beginnings. But since it is impossible to float twice in the
same water, each rotation of the real wheel reveals itself, in time, as a revolution. Ophelia's end could
be accidental or voluntary. Literary works which draw inspiration in the character of Ophelia have a
tendency to see her as a victim of an accident, interpreting suicide as the culmination of an imaginary
fleeing that causes her to renounce logos in favor of poetry. Among the many characteristics of the
subjective repertory designed by Shakespeare, writers tend to choose innocence — representing her
as a girl rather than a woman — while assigning certain physical qualities such as whiteness, a symbol
of purity, and that defines Ophelia. In Cunqueiro's Don Hamlet, when the prince reveals his jealousy in
front of her, Laertes exclaims: "Don't speak like that in front of her! She has such a tiny heart!" This
Ophelia of the tiny heart would also seem to be the motor for As amantes de Hamlet (2003), a
collection of poems by Marta Dacosta, in which the character is converted into a collective subject
because of her capacity to represent the female condition. This ground zero, whitewashed writing,
breaks the silence but also perseveres in silence. Conversely, if we approach the Shakespearian motif
from the perspective of schizoanalysis, we find another reading: Ophelia is not a victim in the way that
her death represents a choice and therefore is of the order of reverted temporality. Marie-France
Castarède explored the implications of musical time understood as a voluntary reversion of the real.
Time in our lives, she maintains, is irreversible. On the contrary, music would construct a space of
reversibility associated with the reconquest of time.
Harold Bloom notes up to what point it is Freud who writes the seminal psychological novel of our
time. Designed as a thriller, so as to keep our attention, it is in large part influenced by Shakespeare's
work: "Hamlet, Freud's mentor, goes about inducing everyone he encounters into revealing
themselves, while the prince (like Freud) evades his biographers. What Hamlet exerts upon his fellow
characters is an epitome of the effect of Shakespeare's plays upon their critics. I have struggled, to
the limit of my abilities, to talk about Shakespeare and not about myself, but I am certain that the
plays have flooded my conciousness, and that the plays read me better than I read them" (xix-xx).
Just as there is a tragic irony, there is also theoretical irony. In his support of a text capable of
interpreting us, Bloom seems to invoke Jacques Derrida, who wished to be psychoanalyzed by a text.
It is necessary, in any case, that one does not overlook the fact that the prince celebrated by Bloom
exists as he does in large part because of the entrance of Ophelia, who, almost literally pulls him
outside of himself. In his transposition of Shakespeare's original, Cunqueiro takes advantage of the
enunciative distribution encouraged by the dramatic form, which makes Ophelia an echo of the voice
of Hamlet. While she thinks of herself as a "little tiny wind" ("pequeno ventiño"), Hamlet sees her as
"a cup" ("un xerro") from which he can drink. And after the prince tells her: "don't mix with me: I'm a
fermenation of low quality," Ophelia responds: "I love being your shadow," meaning that she loves his
negativity, a figure of a divided conscience. Ophelia is not the cup desired by the prince; she is its
emptiness. This problematic understanding of the subject is especially vibrant in the poem "Ophelia"
by Xohana Torres, where personal identity acquires the visage of a shattered mirror and not even a
restitution levied by the poetic word is enough to repair the initial breakage: "The mirror destroyed
with one hundred faces of the other, / how difficult to keep within my chest / the promises not taken
by the wind / smoke from fires, battle remains / Love, in this way, almost kills us" ("Roto o espello cos
cen rostros do outro, / qué difícil manter dentro do peito / as promesas que non levou o vento, / fume
de incendios, restos da batalla. / Dese modo, o amor, case nos mata" [316]). Thus, we see how the
character of Ophelia, subject and object of art, can be interpreted, through the lens of Deleuze and
Guattari's ideas, as a means of analytic enunciation, verifiable in multiple discourses including theatre,
cinema, poetry, painting, and the essay. The comparison is, at the same time, converted into a
demand within the textual makeup activated by the "Ophelia" vector and not so much a posteriori to
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" page 4 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
the investigation. Tranversality applied to character analysis can be understood as a micropolitical
intervention that brings to light certain particularities of the social constellation.
From the point of view of a comparative history of literature, character can be employed as a
transversal category which permits the decentralization of a traditional analysis of aesthetic
movements understood as a chain of events. Owing to her strong presence in the Western literary
imaginary, Ofelia embodies a prime example. On the one hand the stylistic confrontation in the way
she has been conceived by authors following Shakespeare reinforces even more Jorge Luis Borges's
hypothesis in the story "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote": literary time flows in at least two directions,
and Homer's Odyssey influenced James Joyce as much as his Ulysses has since influenced
contemporary readings of the Odyssey. In this sense, one recognizes that approaches by schools such
as poetic or pictoral symbolism do not necessarily correspond in their treatment of the character to
that designed by Shakespeare. She/he who writes, reads twice, and she/he that reads more than
once, also writes. Readers will superimpose the image of the other Ophelias imagined by literature,
film, plastic arts, or music onto Shakespeare's Ophelia, although at present less so in music than in
other forms of expression; the character is silent in the musical imaginary, from the Ballad of the
Death of Ophelia (1848) by Hector Berlioz up to Ambroise Thomas's opera Hamlet (1868), which give
her the soprano part — the whitest voice. And yet, it is in poetry where her character claims the most
protagonism, especially from the beginning in the nineteenth century. Ophelia dons symbolism's white
habits in the Poésies of Arthur Rimbaud and returns to her springtime meeting with Hamlet, whom he
doesn't name. She is also mad, but her insanity has much of the poetic fury described by Plato.
Rimbaud imagines the character at the heart of the infinite, which, in romantic poetics, is conceived as
the motor of creation. From the third section of the poem an affective identification between the poet
and Ophelia is produced. Reason drives Hamlet mad, holding him captive. Ophelia's madness, on the
other hand, transcends all reason, all dividing lines between life and death, between nature and
civilization. With Rimbaud, Ophelia is lulled by the trembling willows weeping upon her shoulders. The
willows illuminate her robust forehead. The wind kisses her breasts and it is she who translates
Nature's voice into a song.
When the expressionist George Heym converts Ophelia into the protagonist of his poem, he
substitutes the locus amoenus for a "no-place" in keeping with the sign of an industrial time of blood,
sweat, and machines. Ophelia is already without a soul and only her mind remains. The poem
abandons the admired symbolist condition, which tended toward exclamation ("O pale Ophelia!
Beautiful as snow!" as the adolescent Rimbaud would respectfully, and therefore with some distance,
say of Ophelia) and enters into the realm of questioning everything because it knows nothing. And
what it knows is, most likely, disliked by the reader. The poems approach the body more and more,
almost becoming obscene. Scenes are described in close up, cadavers are dissected. Shakespeare's
river gives way to Rimbaud's calm sea, practically a lagoon, and opens up into the dark foreboding
ocean. Synesthesias fill the poem: "red midday sweat," "yellow winds," "blue eyelids." These figures
are not ornaments, but, rather, ways to show that the world was broken, and that in order to
represent it language must work like an index finger, pointing to the exterior of language, and not
towards the moon. Language's exterior is the cruelty of this industrial society that is heard from the
field where Ophelia (who now has no spirit, and is no longer a person, only flesh) was found by the
poet. Heym describes the end of virginal nature, the end of an uninterrupted landscape by the
exploitation of men by and for other men. And woman, or the cadaver of woman, is a zone of transit,
a doorway between two worlds, that is also the pre-industrial and the urban present, given in the
poem, as needed, with its most sinister soul and its least welcoming visage.
The productivity of Ophelia insofar as the central character of modern poetry along with her
especially transitional character allows her to fashion poetics and develop them to such an extent that
they open up other forms that question them. At the same time, as I underline the little attention that
has been dedicated to the category of character in poetry, undoubtedly a result of the traditional
understanding of poetry as a modality heavily affected by the expression of authorial subjectivity, and,
correlatively, the radical difference between the terms "person" and "character" owing to the
restrictive placement of the character in the realm of literary fiction, and in particular, narrative and
theater. Many authors have questioned, from a poetic standpoint, the specific restrictive conceptions
of poetry taking advantage once again of the ambivalent Ophelia. The Portuguese surrealist António
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" page 5 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
Maria Lisboa, for example, begins with such processes as quotation and translation as motors for the
following text:
"The Love of Arthur Rimbaud to the Master of Silence"
In the mountain where the stars die
forests that existed one thousand years ago with
black hair like the moon and the afternoon breeze
when the softness enters like flower petals
that stand over the sleeping dead
and repeat mysteriously:
"On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
White Ophelia floats like a great lily"
half-out of the earth like an infinitely opened eye
dead a year ago since the moon was born
dead a day ago since the rose was born
dead a dream ago, dead a gesture ago
against the blowing of the night trees
it touched the infant breast of the spring
and mysteriously repeated
"O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!
Heaven ! Love ! Freedom ! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!"
transparent on the bland earth of star lava
on hair identical to the the desolate dead
dead one thousand years ago repeats:
"White Ophelia floats like a great lily"
the dead mysteriously says:
"There is a watch that makes no sound."
"O de Arthur Rimbaud o Mestre do Siléncio"
Na montanha onde moram as estrelas
bosques que existem há mil anos
de cabelos negros como o luar e a brisa da tarde
quando entra branda entre as pétalas das flores
que se inclinam sobre o morte que dorme
e misteriosamente repete:
"Sur l'onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles
Un chant mystérieux tombe des astres d'or"
semi-saído da terra com um olho infinito aberto
morto há um ano ao nascer da lua
morto há um dia ao nascer da rosa
morto há um sonho, morto há um gesto
frente ao sopro das árvores da noite
tocou o seio infante numa primavera
e misteriosamente repete:
"O pâle Ophélia! belle comme la neige!
Ciel! Amour! Liberté! Quel rêve, ô pauvre Folle!"
transparente sobre a terra mole de lava de estrela
sobre cabelos idênticos aos dos mortos desolados
morto há mil anos repete:
"La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys"
o morto misteriosamente diz:
"Il y a un horloge qui ne sonne pas." (1541)
Many of the motives for the description of the character of Ophelia, understood as an intertextual
continuum, once again find their point of connection here: youth, spring, love, death, infinity. The
poem does not seek to be an affirmative song, but rather the negative of the preceding poem, in the
way that, from Keats, we imagine language to be the negative of life.
In the case of António Maria Lisboa it is interesting to ponder the implications of the use of
linguistic alternance, of polyphony, and of collage from the point of view of an enunciative
understanding of poetry as a textual genre affected by the possibility of encasing voices, characters,
and subjects. Lisboa takes the identification of the poet with Rimbaud's dead woman to the extreme
by converting the same poet into a cadaver and placing those words he dedicated to Ophelia on the
river water as an epitaph. The relation between enunciation and character is, simultaneously, one of
themes of the following passages of m-Talá, which, as is often the case with the poetry of Chus Pato,
María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "The Ophelia Motif in the Work of Iberian Galician Writers" page 6 of 9
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
carries out an active dialogue with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and in which, not
accidentally, the processes towards renovating poetry interacts with its use in markedly different
settings, often bordering on the theatrical:
"On the Lyrical Subject of Poetic Enunciation"
not already 'identified' like one or any of the subjects of verbalization,
but rather a limit of language, empty — in any case unrepresentative or
figurative and out of which unfolds a truth process within the language,
of fictionality, of an opening towards the sensible. To deny this constructive capacity is to deny the language the
truth process that unlocks
words. It is because of this limiting quality that lyricim
can adopt all formulas and not just that of rhetoric but also of
other literary genres. In particular, the poem absorbs the world
within itself — we announce nothing new. Thus, its fictionality,
its trip towards, for example, the country of the oracles without ever being oracular, nor
prophetic (in today's world oracles are impossible); towards the Epopee country without
a happy return to native soil; towards the country of concepts without any temptation occurring to them. Horror of
horrors!
of a system; towards the country of the narratives without naturally being able to tell any stories, scientific
discourses or not; towards the drama and autonomy of different voices that compose it, and of course, towards the
country of mass culture, which means of the literary subgenres
We assert that his subject is a type of eighth passenger
of language
foreigner to all forms of country, but never outside the politically
"human"
Thus the need for the title of this dissertation "Ophelia, alien:
traveller of the stars,"
certain as I am about the rest that the similarity of this a-significant has not escaped any of my listeners with
certain conceptual aspects of the "feminine" in our current civilization and literary system.
"sobre o suxeito lírico da enunciación poética"
non xa identificado como unha ou calquera das persoas da verbalización
senón un límite da linguaxe, baleiro, en todo caso arrepresentativo ou
afigurativo e que desde aquí desprega un proceso de verdade na lingua,
de ficcionalidade, de abertura cara ao sentible. Negarlle esta capacidade de
construcción é negarlle á lingua o proceso de verdade que desblinda
as palabras. É por esta calidade de límite polo que este Eu do lirismo
pode adoptar todas as fórmulas non só da Retórica senón tamén de todos os
demais xéneros literarios. En definitiva, o Poema subsume dentro de si o
mundo — nada novo enunciamos — De aí a súa ficcionalidade, a súa viaxe
seguida cara, por exemplo, ao país dos oráculos sen chegar a ser oracular, nin
profético (hoxe en día son imposibles os oráculos); cara ao país da Epopea sen
retorno feliz cara a ningún solo natal; cara ao país dos
conceptos sen que se lle ocorra a tentación ¡horror dos horrores!
dun sistema; cara ao país das narrativas sen naturalmente chegar
a relatar ningunha historia, dos discursos científicos ou non; cara ao drama e
a autonomía das diferentes voces que o compoñen, e como non, cara ao país
da cultura de masas, é dicir dos subxéneros literarios
Subscribimos que este suxeito é unha especie de oitavo pasaxeiro
da lingua
estranxeiro a toda clase de patrias, pero nunca alleo ao politicamente
"humano"
De aí a necesidade do título desta disertación "Ofelia, alien:
viaxeira das estrelas" segura como estou polo demais de que a ningún dos
meus oíntes se lle escapou a semellanza deste a-significativo da lingua con
certos aspectos da conceptualización do "feminino" na nosa civilización
actual e sistema literario. (66)
The character of Ophelia, which will be central throughout the entire book, appears here subjected to
a productive mîse-en-abyme. As the text above allows one to see, Ophelia is simultaneously
protagonist, title, and theme. This deals with the theory of enunciation, and of which only a fragment
reaches us in cursive. It is important to note that the discourse is presented to herself as oral for
which the poem, or at least this part of the poem, is presented to be a transcription of a previous
intervention. In this way Pato plays at breaking the pact normally ascribed to poetry, as it is seen as a
space of immediateness and enunciative presences. In the same way as in As amantes de Hamlet,
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although from different presuppositions, Ophelia also represents a collective identity, the historical
feminine subject. There is a strict relation between character and person, a problematic relationship to
which language (poetics, in this case, but not only poetics) has contributed. Once again, it is
surprising that, often, the theoretical discourse on character does not match the level of its artistic
demand. While a structural study of character attempts to reduce the complexity of the subjective
fictional plot to a limited series of functions and inputs, a pragmatic focus underlines the eminently
linguistic function of character, and tends to categorically differentiate the notions of person and
character, an operation verifiable both in theater studies and studies in narratology. It is necessary to
point out that this striving for abstraction is not concluded without plot tensions, up until the point
that, in order to sustain it, many "intermediate" categories are often needed between the notions of
character and person (see Martínez Bonati).
Studies of pragmatic orientation are more useful the less they oblige one to a restrictive
comprehension of a character's active dimension determined by categories such as a "person who
speaks" or "person who reasons in speech" (see García Barrientos). It might be helpful to consider, for
example, the importance that silence as dramatic effect has in twentieth-century theater.
Furthermore, the intertwining multiplicity between the categories of subject, voice, person, and
character are worth considering. And it is important to consider that voice is not an exclusively
linguistic category, at least according to the structuralist tradition, which tended to focus on language
as a macro sign susceptible to decomposition and to internal analysis. The theater of Samuel Beckett,
often cited by theoreticians concerned with the crisis of the character category in contemporary stage
practice, makes very productive use of the voice as an almost spectral representation, of the person
(see Fuchs). In modern literature, characters are often spectral, a condition which is sharpened by the
representational consciousness that the receptor assigns them and which often thematizes by the
authors as the self-consciousness of the character that attempts to escape, without success, from
his/her fictive condition. In other cases, literature demonstrates the effects of the infinite chain of the
signifier on subjective representation. In the following poem by Leopoldo María Panero nothing is what
it appears, thereby signifying nothing, and the poem refuses to name its object, Marilyn Monroe:
Blond hair in which nothing is extended
live only in the caves
(pride therefore dies, in the caves
the monster stirs in the emptiness
"What is, therefore, the cause of your sadness
The blacks in the viscous darkness, death by water.
On the road everyone finds nobody"
On the road everyone finds nobody
the king hidden by flesh
shadow in which light is not seen
Marilyn (blue water) this poem
does not name you.
Cabellera rubia que en la nada se extiende
viva tan sólo en las cavernas
(el orgullo así muere, en las cavernas)
agitábase el monstruo en el vacío
"Cuál es pues, la causa de su tristeza
Los negros en la oscuridad viscosa, la muerte por agua.
"Todos por el camino encuentran a nadie"
Todos por el camino encuentran a nadie
El rey oculto por la carne
sombra que en la luz no se ve
Marilyn (agua zul) este poema
no te nombra. (96-97)
The referent of the text is one of the colored photograms from the Andy Warhol series based on a
photographic negative of Monroe. Death by water, which points to Phlebas the Phoenician from Eliot's
The Waste Land and the king move the poem towards fertility rituals, which in this case are frustrated.
The figure of a modern Aphrodite, embodying the attributes of a celestial and earthly goddess, Monroe
is in certain ways linked to the ambivalence of Ophelia. To both construct and take apart his own text,
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Panero probably begins with scenes from the film Something's Got to Give, filmed just before
Monroe's death where she swims naked in a pool that, for her, acts as a river.
By virtue of this ékphrase, constructed simultaneously over a fixed image and over various images
in movement, Panero manages to disrupt the same dynamic of the representative process. The object
of the poem is not a character; rather, it a representation of a person whose participation in the
industrial cinematic star system converted her, already in life, into character. An exclusively linguistic
understanding of the character impedes a vision, for example, of up to what point Monroe functions in
the imaginary, in more than one sense, as a modern Ophelia, affected by the duality between candor
and sensuality, always on the fringes of reason, tempted by the ghost of suicide, by the turgid river of
death. It is nevertheless curious that Monroe herself felt profoundly attracted by the character of
Ophelia and that she would have the chance to explore it with the goal of representing it on stage.
Truman Capote makes reference to a conversation with Constance Collier, an actor of English
origins specializing in Shakespearian theater and professor of dramatic art in New York. Collier
becomes mentor to Monroe, calling her fondly (according to Capote, who introduced them), "my
special problem." Capote reproduces the words of Collier, who, after assigning her the epithet
"beautiful child" emphasizes the inherently cinematographic quality of the actress. In evocative
expression, Capote, speaking as Monroe's mentor, attributes her delicateness to that of a
hummingbird, impossible to be captured by anything other than a camera. From Shakespeare's
Ophelia to Capote's Monroe, the category of character can open multiple pathways. To speak of the
feminine character demands focusing attention, therefore, in the way in which the heterocentric
direction of Western thought (and Western thought on literature and of literature itself as cultural
praxis) has conditioned the formation of feminine characters in literary works and, more decisively,
the imaginary (self)-perception of women in society.
Structuralism made characters into units of a system accentuating their dependency with respect
to narrative functions. The return of the character to the spectrum of theoretical literary priorities,
starting in the 1990s, supposed, in many cases, its being understood as "effects" (see Jouvé) or
"products" of the fictional traumas identified in narratology. Ophelia, on the other hand, always
resisted being narrated. She found a better fit in theater or poetry perhaps for the tendency of these
genres — at least in her modern manifestations — of questioning speaker and a tendency toward
divided subjectivity. Characters are not only words and when they attempt to be only this they sicken,
like Hamlet. The madness of Ophelia, on the other hand, is productive. Ophelia is embodied in distinct
aesthetics from symbolism to expressionism, passing through surrealism. A schizo-criticism of the
character, along the lines of Delueze and Guattari, allows one to transcend the elitist rigidity of the
cult/popular difference and explain her flexible ambiguity, capable of inhabiting more than two genres
and of contributing to all the arts.
Just like other deaths announced by post-structuralism, the "death of the character" (Fuchs) is
nothing more than theoretical reflection of a more ample crisis which not so much demands
overlooking the category of character, but, rather, a precise considering of which conditions determine
its conversion into object; its posterior weakening and its rehabilitation are an analytical tool in terms
of a comparative universal transversal literature. The proclaimed "death of the character" should not
be taken, therefore, as a sign of the real disappearance of an object, but, rather, as a symptom that
an artwork's personal structure can still generate new forms of subjectivity, surging as a specific
response to the crisis of subjectivity which has affected life and culture since the last century.
Note: The above article is a revised and translated version of María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, "O personaxe como
categoría transversal do comparatismo. De Ofelia a Marilyn Monroe," Boletín Galego de Literatura 33 (2006): 135-
57. Copyright release to the author.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Trade, 1999.
Capote, Truman. "A Beautiful Child." A Capote Reader. By Truman Capote. New York: Penguin, 2002. 578-89.
Castarède, Marie-France. La Voix et ses sortilèges. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1987.
Cunqueiro, Álvaro. Don Hamlet e tres pezas máis. Vigo: Galaxia, 1974.
Dacosta, Marta. As amantes de Hamlet. A Coruña: Espiral Maior, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980.
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss5/12>
Special issue New Trends in Iberian Galician Comparative Literature. Ed. M.T. Vilariño Picos and A. Abuín González
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Rhizome. Paris: Minuit, 1976.
Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
García Barrientos, José Luis. Cómo se comenta una obra de teatro. Ensayo de método. Madrid: Síntesis, 1992.
Guattari, Félix. Psycanalyse et trasversalité. Paris: Maspero, 1972.
Heym, Georg. Dichtungen und Schriften. Ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider. Hamburg: Heinrich Ellermann, 1964.
Jouvé, Vincent. L'Effet-personage dans le roman. Paris: PU de France, 1992.
Lisboa, António Maria. "O amor de Arthur Rimbaud o mestre do siléncio." Poemas portugueses. Antologia de poesia
do Século XIII ao Século XXI. Ed. Jorge Rei-Sá and Rui Lage. Porto: Porto, 2009. 1541.
Martínez Bonati, Félix. "Representación y ficción." La ficción narrativa (su lógica y ontología). Murcia: U of Murcia,
1992. 91-112.
Panero, Leopoldo María. "Alba (te fuiste, dejándome sin mí"). Poesía 1970-1985. By Leopoldo María Panro. Madrid:
Visor, 1986. 142-45.
Pato, Chus. m-Talá. Vigo: Xerais, 2000.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems. Trans. Martin Sorrel. Ed. Antoine Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP,
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Torres, Xohana. "Ofelia." Poesía reunida (1957-2001). By Xohana Torres. Ed. Luciano Rodríguez Gómez. Santiago
de Compostela: Pen Clube de Galicia, 2004. 315-16.
Author's profile: María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar teaches comparative literature at the University of Santiago de
Compostela. Her interests in research include gender studies, poetry, and the comparative study of literatures of
the Iberian Peninsula with focus on aspects of national identity. In addition to numerous articles, her book
publications include As antoloxías de poesía en Galicia e Cataluña. Representación poética e ficción lóxica (2004)
and As terceiras mulleres (2005). Rábade Villar is also a renown poet (in her publications she uses her first name
"María do Cebreiro"). E-mail: <m.rabade@usc.es>
Translator's profile: Manus O'Dwyer is working towards his doctorate in comparative literature at the University of
Santiago de Compostela. His dissertation is about animality in the work of post-war Spanish poet José Ángel
Valente. His interests in research include Spanish twentieth-century poetry, romantic literary theory, and
contemporary critical and post-humanist theory. Email: <manus.oduibhir@usc.es>
