Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Karen Rodríguez, Small City on a Big Couch (New York: Podopi, 2012) / Alejandro Puga
<1> The image of the city as body in Mexico is addressed broadly in fiction and cultural writing, especially at midpoint in the Twentieth Century and after. The gendered mapping of Mexico drawn by Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Luiz Zapata, Carlos Monsiváis and writers of the Onda generation, is revised by the later work of Angel Rama, Néstor García Canclini and others who have dedicated their writing to examining the city, usually Mexico City, as a locus for an encumbered national identity. Among these authors, spaces are delineated as feminine, masculine, queer, and colonized. Drawing from some of these big-city Mexican sources, especially Paz, and from broader psychoanalytic and ethnographic readings, and very particularly from Julia Kristeva’s authorial trajectory, Karen Rodríguez asks, what of the provincia, the “small city” of her title, and what of the city as psyche? In Small City on a Big Couch: A Psychoanalysis of a Provincial Mexican City, Rodríguez assumes the position of psychoanalytic interviewer and imagines the analysand as Guanajuato, Mexico. The “big couch” can be read twofold in Rodriguez’s scenario. It is at once the breadth of “symbolic” psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Lacan, Klein, Kristeva) that facilitates and informs the interview, and, in a much more “bodied” and “semiotic” sense, the “big couch” is Guanajuato’s very layout, a non-angular bowl shape that Rodríguez casts as feminine and associates with Kristeva’s “chora,” the open site that seeks playful engagement with the symbolic order, as opposed to Octavio Paz’s image of the rajada, the scarred and shamed feminine identity that must be covered and contained.
<2> This counterpoint of identity, the “vertigo” to which Rodríguez alludes at the end of her book, is illustrated through a relay-style procession of actors, images, and situations. Favoring tourist gazes and presence, the city’s plazas and zócalos are the quadrilateral, Ramanian structures of the “lettered city” that limit, and at times exclude, the public. Threats to this colonial and masculine vision of the city tend to be discarded. Such is the case during the nostalgic Festival Internacional Cervantino, where a poster depicting a young, sexually ambiguous Cervantes is banned in favor of more quaint imagery. Later in the book, the open spaces of public gardens and open-air markets redirect operatic performances back to the public, and rewrite them into daily life. In the book’s early chapters, women’s sexuality is enclosed by churches and the limited options of motherhood or prostitution, but sexual identity re-emerges on the street as questioning and self-defining. Rodríguez finds in a popular t-shirt that reads “I’m no virgin, but I can perform miracles” resonances of the (re)embodiment of the Virgin of Guanajuato when she is let out to the street during her festival. For Rodríguez, the recognition of corporeality and sexuality beyond Catholic dogma will enact a subjective city identity and the creation of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones,” negotiations of identities that don’t succumb to the purely symbolic. These transformations are not immediate. They require confession, inquiry, statements of concern, transference, and counter-transference between Rodríguez and her city-analysand. Rodríguez concludes that “what is birthed through the contact that therapeutic analysis engenders is a new interpretation of old symbols, myths, discourses, and new constructions of the analysand’s self and her others,” namely visitors, advertisers event organizers, and the city’s own cultural patrimony.
<3> The book’s chapter layout describes the arc of this psychoanalytic interaction. The introduction of each chapter is offset by a different font, indicating the therapist’s pre-interview notes. It is easy to be reminded of another recent urban text, Cristina Rivera Garza’s No One Will See Me Cry, a Mexico City novel that likewise is structured on the template of the psychiatric interview and the interspersing of analyst notes and analysand memoirs. The first chapter of Rodríguez’s book exposes the city-analysand’s “presenting problem,” the nausea of consuming, containing and living up to nostalgic expectations. This is a very fitting analogy indeed, given Rodríguez’s casting of the city as a woman trying to fulfill a patriarchal prescription, and suffering for it. The individual, feminized identity is mirrored in the city’s collective historical baggage, marked by “an emerging pattern of depoliticizing and quieting of images that represent either ambivalence or rebellion” (53), especially towards the city’s monumental role as the site attributed to the beginning of Mexico’s Independence War of 1810-1821. The pathology of this role-fulfillment is the subject of Chapters 2 and 3. Clearly, even though Rodríguez addresses the city as a troubled psyche, the body remains a central concern in the therapeutic interview. Citing the enclosure of Don Quijote and his author in both the Feria Internacional Cervantina and the Museo Iconográfico del Quijote, Rodríguez underscores how Guanajuato’s identity as provincia, a safe space for colonial and capitalistic intervention, threatens to de-body her. Rodríguez describes a framed image of Cervantes on an admissions ticket as “decapitated” (castrated in Freudian terms), just as the sexuality of the Virgin Mary is extracted in Mexican Catholicism. Chapter 4 interrogates some of the city’s attempts to normalize itself through imagined or watered-down cultural patrimony, mainly in efforts to reference the muralist Diego Rivera and the novelist Jorge Ibarguengoitia, two artists who were born in Guanajuato, but who, through their absence, in fact levied critiques of the city’s social stagnation. Rodríguez adds to this discussion a portrait of the city’s mining legacy as depleted in terms of product and demographic sector, a condition that the city deflects through monumentalizing the image and narrative of the miner. In Chapter 5, Rodríguez attempts to demonstrate to her analysand some of the contradictions of her sexuality, as seen through anglicized advertisements for a day-after pill. While the product and the messaging would seem to connect the city with a more secular and contemporary understanding of sexuality, the roles available to the consumermaternity or a slightly prolonged adolescence—reveal a continued dependence on the nostalgic, colonial identity.
<4> It is in Chapter 6 that all of these conflicts cause a break in therapy. Rodríguez-as-analyst questions her own ascriptions of the city as “Debordian spectacle” (96). It is of particular note that Rodríguez here questions Kristeva’s own conceptualizations of the city, and women in the city, as often conflicted negotiations between the semiotic and the symbolic. Just as Guanajuato is an analysand in progress, Kristeva becomes an author in progress, an author who, through writing about an urban identity that seeks subjectivity and complex, unreduced sexuality, effects the “tiny revolts” of semiotic engagement. These “tiny revolts” emerge in Guanajuato’s writing in the final chapters of Rodríguez’s book, where multilingualism, gender variance, and cultural appropriation merge. Chapter 7 imagines the possibility of these alternative texts through existing legends and practices that allow the mother/virgin out on the street. In Chapter 8, a series of advertisements in which Day of the Dead and Halloween seem to coexist contrast sharply with the boxed-in tourism ads of the first chapters. In these last images, no single culture can claim ownership or co-optation of practice. This breakthrough in the city’s therapy leads to one of Rodríguez’s most pointed questions about the exterior consumption of cities like Guanajuato. It is both a question and a conclusion as it transfers the city-analysand’s malaise to her patrimonial influence: “Can global urbanities remove their own need to make place into an icon, to freeze these ‘traditional’ or ‘maternal’ sites into something that will assuage their fears?” (151) While Rodríguez is correct to insist on her affirmation of the small city as a dynamic site of “inner resources” (150), some of the most engaging moments of her book occur when her city’s progress toward subjectivity confronts the ever-consuming and ever-imposing Mexico City and U.S. presences.
<5> All along, it has been the interlacing of visual texts—posters, admission tickets, billboards, and other image projections—that mark the progress, and often regress, of Rodríguez’s city-analysand. As a member of the University of Guanajuato’s Visual Arts Department, Rodríguez lends with great care and empathy her verbal and visual sensibilities to her therapeutic work. It is this relaying between image and text that makes her book a convincing reference for any critical inquiry on the Mexican city, and it is what gives Small City on a Big Couch a strong intertextual presence among the aforementioned authors. One might ask of a subsequent edition of her book to enlarge these crucial images, and so enhance the interplay between exposition, description, and introspection that is so central to Rodríguez’s project.
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