Narrative transgression and disembodied voices: the reconstruction of identity in the novels of Carmen Boullosa

Carmen Boullosa (Mexico, 1954) has been a productive and consistent author in the last two decades of the century and her fiction shares many of the concerns of current writing and thought in Mexico and of other literature that can be analyzed on both a regional and global level. This study presents a postmodern-feminist analysis of Boullosa's nine novels published between 1987 and 1998. Boullosa's writing continues and adds to many of the innovations initiated by earlier twentieth-century authors in Latin America and, in this way, interrogates textual representation in the process of identity construction through an ongoing dialogue with the past and its literature. The present study examines the strategies employed by the author in order to engage a more active reader, present plural perspectives, and challenge established social and literary institutions. The disembodied narrative voices in Boullosa's novels are often disconnected, fragmented, and seem to speak from a point elsewhere in order to construct an identity through textual self-representation. By narrating from a point that is elsewhere, the characters embrace and affirm not only their marginalized existence but also their difference, the very Otherness or Alterity that places them on the periphery of traditional representation. These transgressive narrative strategies also serve to reveal and question the repressive systems that caused the disappearance, disintegration, death, or exile of the narrators. In this way, Boullosa opens up textual space for the representation of other perspectives and a plurality of voices formerly marginalized by hegemonic discourses. Her writing presents a revision of the self and Mexican identity in the twentieth century. This study proposes to add to the understanding of Carmen Boullosa's writing in an effort to situate it within the larger context of literature at of the end of the twentieth century and to encourage further investigation of her works.