Nine Cats How Many Legs

Ego: the self prosthetic Carlos stories Velázquez

Carlos Velázquez

Gilts rose black literature (Sixth Piso, Mexico City and Madrid, 2010)

At number 322, Chimera (October 2010), included an article by René Deloneon strange that seemed written under some kind of psychotropic substance. However, the text, published under the title "The subject as a video game," a lucid treasured quote Claudio Magris and some thought not entirely free of interest: " objetual inventory and use as base ontological data (purchased) that categorize the subject that generates / consumes . the protagonist in video games have to go scrambling to get things , whose acquisition will improve as a character and lets you summon to reach the end game. Consumer acquisition as a means of achieving the target . " We recalled this epileptic reading test is in excellent set of stories Gilts rose black literature (2010), Carlos Velazquez, on which we would like to delve.

1. Tuneable body : identity by extraction

your name is well.

Beauty, yes, beauty to exist in the limits

and left us behind, crippled, old.

Raúl Quinto, The flower of torture

Velázquez (Coahuila, Mexico, 1978), whose absence from a recent trade grouping absurd enough to disable Hispanic narrators, the book includes several details that indicate precisely this ontological connection-between subjects and the acquisition of things to complete or define it. This is a very ancient literature, of course, but Velazquez uses a special image processing to realize the deficit to strikeout, lack of completeness or wholeness: the image prosthetic. The prosthesis as defined DRAE "procedure by which artificially repair the lack of an organ or part of it, like a tooth, an eye, etc.. " The key process is the word "artificial", of course, and part of the academic definition that concerns us is the "lack" a term that we appreciate now in its aspect of psychoanalysis. Let's get to the point: the characters of Velázquez require intervention in many surgical cases, to complete their identity and thus repair lack original, what will it take for your identity coincides with the projection of fantasy his desire. That is, pursuing things to fill your satisfaction, but these things should join them, incarnated to achieve its target of others see them as they are, in phantom . Tino, the protagonist of the first story, is subjected to a diet of cocaine to lose weight, since your girlfriend does not want more than when thin (p. 15). That is, the amputation of his over body is the correlate of a failure: lack of thinness. Tino wants to recover not desire, but be desirable, Back to see himself as being desirable. For this reason, runs off to find the missing thinness through surgery just becoming prosthetic "liposuction was a success. I got rid of thirty-eight kilos overweight within hours of surgery. It took a few days of hospitalization to recover. I felt like a rock star. (...) I'm not going to conform with liposuction alone. I wanted a rhinoplasty. And I removed the chin "(p. 33). That is the desire to crack when it appeals to missing: no filling possible, it is not feasible to complete the process of filling, there is always something to be filled.

In the second story, "The Jack de Bergerac", the process is even clearer. The star Alexia (which is actually a man in drag, but let's keep it that) is a "goddess" of the night and a diva who engages with men for money. Your body is privileged, and is well equipped in every way to his office, but has one major flaw, one that plagued the hero of Quevedo's poem "To a nose." His nasal protuberance spoils what would otherwise be a beautiful female irreproachable and generates a huge size dissatisfaction. Appreciate that Alex does not mind his penis to be perfect, but his nose, as the appendix is \u200b\u200bwhat all people see, including her every morning in front of the quicksilver, "Jacks that we dress Women are amazing creatures, repeated in the mirror, and ignored the lump in your face "(p. 37). Alexia In this case also raises the prosthetic solution as ideal for the mess and settle desfazer body image to the dream image of itself ("rag pickers was the only solution", p. 38). In fact, the money for the operation is the leitmotiv of the whole plot of the story and his relationship with Cuban baseball Wilmar, who always promises the desired intervention. The importance of the prosthesis has to Velázquez is revealed here bluntly: "Alexia rekindled the desire only until he learned that plastic surgery can erase the identity of individuals. She needed to be different. The same body, the same ass, the same walk, but another. And that Alexia was so close. So close. Enough that the Cuban wielding the checkbook "(p. 56). Without revealing to readers the end of the story, say that the balance between the member and the member surplus generate missing phallic symbols aesthetic that would delight of Lacan. In fact, the psychoanalytic and ending with the will of Alexia chop your nose, cut his body to achieve the beauty that Procrustean bed, we have remembered books like Bang, bang, and where the lines converge (1977), by Brian W. Aldiss, or Freudian dystopia Limbo (1952) by Bernard Wolfe, a book based identities achieved amputations and prostheses, we have discussed elsewhere bringing this sharp quote from Slajoj Zizek: "cut your own body is a mark this: when I cut my arm, 'zero' in the subject's existential confusion, his blurred virtual existence, becomes the 'one' of an inscription signifying " [1 ] . Indeed, Tino wants signified by cutting their lipids, Alexia, through the sacrifice of his facial appendage. Both want to be less to be more . "(...) Tend to deconstruction. The body is a nation that constantly tore the flags. No difference is between holding the plate or to wield the scalpel "(p. 106). Is a consequence of the new sacralization of the body, long pointed David Foster Wallace in reference to television culture,

This very personal distress about physical beauty shows has become a national phenomenon with consequences throughout the country. (...) The boom of dietitians, health, gyms, tanning salons in every neighborhood, plastic surgery, anorexia and bulimia, steroid use among boys, the girls who throw acid of each other because the hair is more like a Farrah Fawcett than the other. Is it supposed that these things are interrelated? "Not with the apotheosis of physical beauty in television culture? [2]

And the Mexican essayist Martha Nelida Ruiz summarized for our purposes: "the body is placed in the number one place in the scale of the importance of all the material elements and materials that we make. (...) This is the body as a kit, like Faberge eggs, and carnival mask, as a den, as a decoy against the enemy, as the center of all desires " [3] . Most characters are Velázquez his body, satisfy, fill, tweak, polish it to perfection seems to be nonexistent nuclear part of its vital objective.

2. Full body: identity by adding prosthetic

Leaning to crack

Raúl Quinto, The torture flower

deficiency situations seem to lay waste to the male characters in this book, but also preying on women. Carol, Tino terrible girlfriend in "Do not lose your partner because of the grease" has a terrible lack of money, trying to satisfy the worst and most cruel of ways. Carmen, the wife of Damian in the masterful short story "The club of the dressed pregnant," she tells her husband: "I inseminated, Damien" (p. 100): what you need, what you want, is a valid sperm to supplement its maternity and fill missing mother identity. Insemination would, in this sense, another form of prosthetic intervention, artificial, intended to fill the gap, "Carmen housed inside a vacuum imagined achieve complete with a child" (p. 101). And then, completes the picture of an even more explicit: "I knew that people without children supplement emotional absences innumerable variety of animals and objects. Infertile people are fond of pets. Some buy fish to structure their time. The hard work to keep clean a fish tank distracts the thoughts concerning the subsidiary. But the void is not filled with a collection of fish. Concern arises time after buying a piano. The lessons become a restorative passenger. In the end, nothing satisfies them. Most women at the age of thirty years have not experienced motherhood, eventually performed liposuction or breast implant surgery or the nose "(p. 107).

In this story, the protagonist, Ordonez, and the said Damian join a club of men who pretend to be pregnant and mothering each other ( I have seen this paraphilia in an old episode of House ). It is another symbol of incompletion, of course, "rushed to the house of Ordóñez. Hiding in a closet milk powder, baby bottles, wigs, maternity dresses and belly prosthesis simulating an eight-months pregnant "(p. 110). Both Damian and Ordóñez carry out the execution of their plans for completeness, and extractive inclusive one another, reaching a superb climax absolute final atonement symbolism and regressive. No wonder the nostalgia of childhood is traditionally the emotional attempt to recover the lost .

prosthetically Another way to complete the identity takes place in the last story, the surreal and ironic "Gilts rose black literature," where the protagonist begins to write as a result of the inspiration that he tried his little pig Leonor, a pig nymphomaniac (do not know if that adjective can properly applied to that noun) and presumed that completes its charms with the literary muse. All goes well and the writer of romantic novels reaches a reasonably successful until the bastard dies, leaving him heartbroken and incomplete "without Leonorcita, I would dismiss the tianguis crazy outfit. And my literary career. There was still an unpublished novel. But then nothing. And I would not write on my own. I was never a writer. Never would be. All the talent was Leonor. Leonor was the artist "(p. 132). That is, Leonor was sponsoring ego of the writer. We will explain what it is that the sponsorship of the ego.

In the story "The agricultural alien", a hilarious portrait of the formation and fall of a band that moves from punk to "tecnoanarcumbia" thanks to signing of a keyboardist with Down syndrome, enter an interesting concept our semantic field, that of the self sponsorship. This opens the story: " When going through a critical stage, a sponsor of the ego becomes imponderable. A real sponsor, accomplished, not a mental puñeta I read in the ladies room of a concert hall "(p. 69). In the story, one of the most fun and amazing that I have read in recent years, the two main protagonists, guitarist and vocalist Lauro, who narrates in first person the ups and downs, continually demand of another person or sponsor your ego esponsorice to supplement its identity and strengthen their desire. The appearance of the alien Agriculture, Pepe, a farm boy with mental retardation, shoot the media possibilities of the group and with them the projection of fantasies of completeness of Lauro, soul and songwriter for the group. The narrator realizes that the story as it passes Lauro was itself the sponsor (a term that www.rae.es presented as "proposed to be deleted), so the move to change sponsor identity. The point is that Velázquez falls back on the idea of \u200b\u200bliving a historical moment in which people seek their self abroad are treated as people or things, such as fuses or platforms of desire, which means that in any case never beats the satisfaction one identity is always out, what will the infinite process, exhausting, overwhelming, endless, frustrating. The identity is configured like a hole impossible to fill, a gap incolmable, where more objects (and other subjects) and falling, never rear its outside by the curb of the well, as things and people falling through the maelstrom the story of Edgar Allan Poe, the strength of the vortex shatter against the rocks of the fund.

Conclusion

not expect political correctness in the accounts of Velázquez. Do not expect no mercy, human compassion, or social hope. Do not look for utopia, but rather the recreation of the Hogan desolate, and deceit, through the hollow. Do not look for anything more than people who sought desperately to be completed or completed unsuccessfully. Persons under continuous tuning physical or emotional that only leaves one unsatisfied. Nicole Kidman recently said he regretted having inoculated botox on his face. I think that's what you mean Carlos Velázquez in these stories written in a prose brilliantly rough, dirty exquisite and linguistically contaminated Anglicisms localism, in which diamonds are stained with mud, garbage flashing and the words cut like a knife.

(Relationship with the author reviewed: none. Editoria Relationship: none)

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[1] Slavoj Zizek, Parallax View , Fondo de Cultura Economica, Buenos Aires, 2006, p. 32.

[2] DF Wallace, "E Unibus pluram" supposedly fun thing I'll never do , Mondadori, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2001, pp. 69-70.

[3] Martha Nelida Ruiz, The mirror intoxicated. Hyper, overconsumption and hiperlógica in postmodern societies , octahedron, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2006, p. 54.