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Gender, Eroticism, and the Surrealist Subject in
Oliverio Girondo's Espantapájaros (al alcance de todos)

Patricia M. Montilla
University of Chicago

Espantapájaros (al alcance de todos), published in 1932, closes Oliverio Girondo's early cycle of avant-garde poetry. The book's opening calli-gramme and twenty-four numbered prose poems express a keen affinity for Surrealist ideologies and imagery, while questioning avant-garde representations of gender and eroticism. Specifically, Girondo mocks and subverts the male positioning of the Surrealist subject, for whom woman functions as an image upon which to project erotic desire.

The first numbered poem of Espantapájaros is colloquial in tone, as though the male poetic voice were engaged in a typical braggadocio assertion regarding his discriminating taste in women. Ironically, the speaker's standard for measuring the attraction of a woman is not based on her physical features, as the opening lines of the poem convey:

No se me importa un pito que las mujeres tengan los senos como magnolias o como pasas de higo; un cutis de durazno o de papel de lija. Le doy una importancia igual a cero, al hecho de que amanezcan con un aliento afrodisíaco o con un aliento insecticida. Soy perfectamente capaz de soportarles una nariz que sacaría el primer premio en una exposición de zanahorias; ¡pero eso sí! —y en esto soy irreductible— no les perdono, bajo ningún pretexto, que no sepan volar. (157)

In this familiar yet forceful voice, the speaker boasts of a complete lack of interest in a woman's appearance through a series of metaphors that disjoint and magnify body parts. This dismemberment is reminiscent of Surrealist art in which the female body is often severed and fetishized.¹ Both idealized and grotesque representations of woman are negated, taking the reader outside the expected realm of traditional erotic imagery. The text then leaps into the absurd, through the sudden declara

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tion by the poetic voice that the only real defect would be a woman's inability to fly.

This might seem unusual to today's reader, but the flying woman was at the center of Surrealist activities. Man Ray's famous 1924 photograph titled "The Surrealist Centrale" documents the Centres des Recherches Surréalistes, where founding members hung a reclining female nude from the ceiling. The flying woman also appears in the noted photomontage, published in 1929 in La Révolution Surréaliste, in which sixteen portraits of Surrealists (all male) with their eyes shut, frame a photograph of a painting by René Magritte depicting a nude woman and bearing the inscription, "Je ne vois pas la cachée dans la forêt." According to Susan Rubin Suleiman, these works are symbolic of the Surrealist subject, "who does not need to see the woman in order to imagine her, placing her at the center but only as an image," thus excluding any actual woman from the picture (20-21).

Girondo's poem comically brings together this well-known Surrealist image of the floating, (in)visible woman and actual woman. The notion of flight not only signifies movement through the air, but also the bestowal of sexual pleasure:

¡María Luisa era una verdadera pluma!

Desde el amanecer volaba del dormitorio a la cocina, volaba del comedor a la despensa. Volando me preparaba el baño, la camisa. Volando realizaba sus compras, sus quehaceres...

¡Con qué impaciencia yo esperaba que volviese, volando, de algún paseo por los alrededores! Allí lejos, perdido entre las nubes, un puntito rosado. "¡María Luisa! ¡María Luisa!"…y a los pocos segundos, ya me abrazaba con sus piernas de pluma, para llevarme, volando, a cualquier parte. (157-58)

The speaker recalls the ethereal woman as though in a reverie. Ironically, she is given the generic name of María Luisa, and appears conducting the household chores while flying through the air. But although she is called by name as though she was a person of flesh and blood, María Luisa only materializes as an image. She vanishes from sight, only to resurface when summoned by the speaker, who expresses urgency and anxiety over her embrace:

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Durante kilómetros de silencio planeábamos una caricia que nos aproximaba al paraíso; durante horas enteras nos anidábamos en una nube, como dos ángeles, y de repente, en tirabuzón, en hoja muerta, el aterrizaje forzoso de un espasmo.

¡Qué delicia tener una mujer tan ligera…[…]! (158)

María Luisa is not only aerial and vapor-like, she is also silent, a much prized quality in male fantasies of women, as in Pablo Neruda's famous verse "Me gustas cuando callas […]" (Neruda 37). The poetic voice describes their awaited union as a mystical experience, in which they engage in sex on a cloud. But just as the speaker reaches the moment of climax, which is described as a forced landing, he loses contact with María Luisa, plunging back to reality. The experience, therefore, can be viewed as a sexual fantasy in which the flying woman is imagined as an accessory to onanism, a practice that was discussed in great detail by the Surrealists participating in the twelve sessions dedicated to Recherches sur la sexualité. They concurred that masturbation is always accompanied by images of women.² This is comically reinforced by the last line quoted above, where "ligera" means not only light (as a feather) and quick, but also easy. The poem closes reaffirming a preference for the imaginary woman:

Después de conocer una mujer etérea, ¿puede brindarnos alguna clase de atractivos una mujer terrestre? ¿Verdad que no hay una diferencia sustancial entre vivir con una vaca o con una mujer que tenga las nalgas a setenta y ocho centímetros del suelo?

Yo, por lo menos, soy incapaz de comprender la seducción de una mujer pedestre, y por más que empeño que ponga en concebirlo, no me es posible ni tan siquiera imaginar que pueda hacerse el amor más que volando. (158)

The speaker's initial disregard for the female body is reiterated through a culturally accepted misogynist cliché in which woman is crudely likened to a cow. However, the speaker's musings over whether an ordinary woman can truly offer any significant advantages over a flying woman reveal a search for reassurance rather than a rhetorical inquiry. The poetic voice states that he is incapable of understanding, or knowing the seduction of a walking woman; as much as he persists in conceiving it, he can only truly imagine making love while flying. The verb concebir means to think or imagine, as well as to grasp or realize. The latter denotation

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suggests that the poetic voice must evoke the flying woman in order to "unburden" himself, since he cannot do so with an actual woman. Thus, the speaker's assertions that he is the object of female desire and seduction, and his predilection for flying women, are discredited and ridiculed respectively.

Influenced by Freudian ideas, the Surrealists held that dreams are no less real than events that occur in a waking state, and should therefore be regarded as equally significant.³ Girondo erases the boundaries between the dream world and waking reality in poem number seventeen, making it difficult to distinguish between events that occur in sleep and those that happen while awake. Delivered in the form of a testimony, the composition describes a sexual encounter with a demonic being:

Me estrechaba entre sus brazos chatos y se adhería a mi cuerpo, con una violenta viscosidad de molusco. Una secreción pegajosa me iba envolviendo, poco a poco, hasta lograr inmovilizarme. De cada uno de sus poros surgía una especie de uña que me perforaba la epidermis. Sus senos comenzaban a hervir. Una exudación fosforente le iluminaba el cuello, las caderas; hasta que su sexo —lleno de espinas y de tentáculos— se incrustaba en mi sexo, precipitándome en una serie de espasmos exasperantes. (189)

The account is narrated in a dream-like sequence, consisting of a series of physical actions leading to the moment of sexual satisfaction. The sex partner is described as having breasts and hips, suggesting that it is perhaps female, but the fact that its sex and pores are covered with thorns calls into question whether the figure is a human. Unable to fend off the assailant, the speaker is paralyzed in a violent embrace:

Era inútil que le escupiese en los párpados, en las concavidades de la nariz. Era inútil que le gritara mi odio y mi desprecio. Hasta que la última gota de esperma no se me desprendía de la nuca, para perforarme el espinazo como una gota de lacre derretido, sus encías continuaban sorbiendo mi desesperación; y antes de abandonarme me dejaba sus millones de uñas hundidas en la carne y no tenía otro remedio que pasarme la noche arrancándomelas con unas pinzas, para poder echarme una gota de yodo en cada una de las heridas…

¡Bonita fiesta la de ser un durmiente que usufructúa de la predilección de los súcubos! (189)

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The encounter is depicted as a sexual assault. Rather than acquiring a sense of power, however, the demonic creature seems to be fulfilling a need to nourish and reproduce. The poetic voice appears to have been a victim of a monstrous vampire. The moment of sexual climax and the vampire attack are depicted simultaneously, as though the creature were accomplishing the dual purpose of drawing fresh blood and sperm. The speaker is only freed having been depleted almost completely of both life fluids. But the violent tone with which the attack is narrated is comically undermined in the poem's upbeat closing lines, causing the reader to laughingly acknowledge the wet dream fantasy.

The speaker describes himself as "un durmiente," a sleeping man who enjoys being a favorite among succubi.⁴ The Surrealists frequently compared the images of succubi to those of women in masturbatory reveries in their research into sexuality. Breton discussed the distinction between the two in the study's first session on sex, published in the 1928 March issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, stating with the approval of his colleagues, that "one difference is that with onanism one chooses what one sees, one is indeed very particular about it, whereas with succubi one doesn't have a choice" (Pierre 7). In other words, one is a voluntary fantasy, the other an erotic dream. The sleeping man in Girondo's poem appears to have been awake during the encounter, and the succubus has left visible marks on her victim. Both of these factors make it difficult to separate the dream from waking reality. The final exclamation insinuates that despite the alleged aggression and nonconsensual nature of the encounter, the speaker derived pleasure from this and other succubine attacks. The event, therefore, appears more like a ritualized sexual fantasy, in which gender and falsely accepted notions of seduction are inverted: the male figure is portrayed as a sexual object of desire, whose pursuit and violation by an evil woman gratifies him. Furthermore, the difference supposed by the Surrealists between images of woman in onanism and those that appear in wet dreams is playfully challenged.

Although woman is often portrayed as an imagined or dreamt object in a great number of male Surrealist texts, she is rarely given the chance to speak. The third and fourteenth compositions of Espantapájaros, however, are narrated in part by female voices that adopt the concept of

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automatic spoken thought. Guillaume Apollinaire was among the first avant-garde poets to experiment with thought writing. Dadaists and Surrealists later developed the practice as a poetic device. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton ascribes this phenomenon to the primary definition of the term Surrealism:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (26)

Because unadulterated spoken thought is not confined by either logical or ethical restraints, it can be useful as a means of transgressing social norms. In the third and fourteenth poems, psychic automatism functions as a mechanism of subversion.

The third poem is introduced by a modest postal worker who appears to be participating in a conversation regarding his spouse, in which he complains of his wife's unusual habit of thinking out loud and freely stating whatever ideas float through her mind. To demonstrate this peculiar behavior, the mailman cites his wife remembering their early courtship upon which she recalls becoming sexually excited at the thought of her husband becoming a soldier. She embellishes the image of her husband in uniform as well as events regarding his sexual past:

"Eras fuerte. Escalaste los muros de un monasterio. Te acostaste con la abadesa. La dejaste preñada. ¿A qué tiempo, a qué nación pertenece tu historia?… Te has jugado la vida tantas veces, que posees un olor a barajas usadas. ¡Con qué avidez, con qué ternura yo te besaba las heridas! Eras brutal. Eras taciturno. Te gustaban los quesos que saben a verija de sátiro… y la primera noche, al poseerme, me destrozaste el espinazo en el respaldo de la cama." (162)

The wife's discourse portrays the creation of a sexual fantasy. First, she imagines her husband as a strong and virile man who commits a sacrilegious act of violence. This transgression is followed by a rhetorical inquiry, in which the wife ponders over what form her fantasy should take. The ellipses in the text not only mirror pauses in the functioning of thought, but also suggest possible omissions of other heinous sexual acts that the husband-protagonist has played out previously in his wife's imagination. This particular fantasy ends with an illusory recollection of the couple's

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first sexual encounter. The meek postman is transformed into a hedonistic and brutish libertine through a series of attributes that crudely appeal to the senses. The wife ultimately replays the moment of copulation, suggesting that these images of her husband (and others) function as means of auto-eroticism. In this poem, therefore, an actual woman is shown evoking images of man to accompany a masturbatory reverie. Or rather, a man's idea of a woman, for Girondo inadvertently slips by inserting the verb poseer in the wife's speech, an unlikely word for a woman to use in describing the moment of orgasm.

Psychic automatism is also linked to the impairment of reason in poem number fourteen. Like madness and other infirmities of the mind, dementia emerges as an emancipating force in this composition, in which a male narrator quotes the teachings of his senile grandmother. Unrestrained by reason and judgement due to her loss of mental powers, the grandmother's advice resembles uncensored spoken thought:

"Las mujeres cuestan demasiado trabajo o no valen la pena. ¡Puebla tu sueño con las que te gusten y serán tuyas mientras descansas!"
[…]
"Cuando unas nalgas te sonrían, no se lo confíes ni a los gatos. Recuerda que nunca encontrarás un sitio mejor donde meter la lengua que tu propio bolsillo, y que vale más un sexo en la mano que cien volando." (183)

While the tone of the lecture is familiar to the reader, the topic and treatment of eroticism is surprisingly vulgar and crass, creating an element of surprise and humor. The grandmother warns her grandson of the problems that may result from becoming intimately involved with a woman, and proposes that he instead dream them for pleasure, as in the first and seventeenth poems. She also counsels her grandson on the merits of self-gratification. Her run-on use of language causes her to alter images, resulting in colorful descriptions of auto-eroticism. For example, the grandson is comically urged to resist the temptation of a smiling buttocks, a sonrisa vertical, as opposed to that of a pretty face, and persuaded to conceal his sexual desire—even from cats. This last phrase prepares the reader for the subsequent statement, in which the grandmother claims that there is no better place for a tongue than one's own pocket. Though

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a hand in one's pocket would seem a more likely means for self-stimulation, the appearance of the word tongue, which was immediately preceded by a reference to los gatos, leads one to think of a cat grooming itself and licking its groins. This word substitution also allows Girondo to express what was otherwise not possible to publish in print in 1932.

The passage closes with a final allusion to masturbation, resulting from the grandmother's misuse of the common proverb: "más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando".⁵ The word pájaro, which is often used colloquially to designate the penis, is suggestively replaced with sexo, evoking yet another surreal image of onanism and flight. Yet the presence of irony in the grandmother's speech, which ridicules male behavior by presenting women and sex as innate forces that occupy and control men's lives, distinguishes Girondo's treatment of auto-eroticism from mere mimicry.

Girondo's Espantapájaros pushes the boundaries of Surrealism by assimilating its discourse into popular idiom and by exaggerating its authoritative male perspective to the point of ridicule. Surrealist notions of gender and sex are humorously mocked as mere fabrications of heterosexual male fantasies, and subverted through the creation of female voices who employ Surrealist rhetoric as a means of subverting both social and literary conventions. Parody, therefore, emerges as a method of renewal in Espantapájaros, allowing Girondo to simultaneously challenge avant-garde ideologies while composing new poetry.

Notes

¹ See Caws. [Return]

² See Pierre. [Return]

³"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak" (Breton 14). [Return ]

⁴In folklore, a succubus is a demonic woman who engages in sexual intercourse with sleeping men ("Succubus," Merriam-Webster's). [Return ]

⁵ "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." [Return]

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Works Cited

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1972.

Caws, Mary Ann. "Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art." The Female Body in Western Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 262-87.

Girondo, Oliverio. Espantapájaros (al alcance de todos). 1932. Obras de Oliverio Girondo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1994. 151-206.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 9^th ed. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1984.

Neruda, Pablo. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. 1924. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985.

Pierre, José, ed. Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932. Trans. Malcolm Imrie. London: Verso, 1992.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. "A Double Margin: Women Writers and the Avant-Garde in France." Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. 11-28.

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