This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings,
image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories
and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951).
While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic
fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process
itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might
transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self.
Pedraza's works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a
character's ability to think differently is crucial to progress.
The fixed image, representative of an inflexible, socially
determined mindset, arises as an obstacle to maturation. In "Dias
de perros," for example, a triangular arrangement of coins in a
cigar box elucidates the connection between individual lives and
the social order or assemblage. Literary texts, such as this one,
serve as collective assemblages of enunciation, capable of exposing
fixed images as powerful instruments of control. "Tristes Ayes del
Aguila Mejicana" discovers fixed images among the icons of Colonial
Spain's exequias reales, used in this case to territorialize the
evolving identity of indigenous peoples. The territory that
Pedraza's fiction best illuminates is, in reality, the image. When
images remain fixed or territorialized, they uncannily infect the
assemblages over which they exert influence. Placing emphasis on
images that impact women, Pedraza, in "Anfiteatro," for example,
deconstructs "cat woman," which, albeit a potentially subversive
image in its early manifestations, eventually ceases to empower the
feminine, lashing it, rather, to a burdensome stereotype.
Territorialized, the feminine must, then, break free from the image
in order to discover representations more capable of illuminating
present-day challenges. The phrase "dark assemblages," drawn from
Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, gestures toward
societal stagnation as a decisive factor in individual evolvement.
Gothic fiction represents an uneven landscape, in that it tenders
the possibility of a social critique yet, equally well, lends
itself to the exclusion of specific identities and practices that
society brands as anomalous. Pedraza's Gothic fiction is, indeed,
subversive, in that it offers readers original perceptions of
modern day people and the assemblages, dark or otherwise, to which
they belong.
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