Abstract
This chapter investigates three related issues in Arturo Ripstein’s cinematic interpretation of the Carvajal story in El Santo Oficio: the construction of marranismo (or crypto-Jewishness), the use of allegory, and the representation of interrogation, each of which is structured around the inaccessibility of the truth of the other. In a discussion of these three interconnected phenomena, the essay underscores their structural compatibility: Specifically that the marrano, a subject understood to guard a secret, and allegory, a rhetorical tool that disguises the “true story” by speaking otherwise, bear a formal resemblance to interrogation, which is fueled by a desire to access the hidden truth of the other. The philosophical-critical works of Jacques Derrida, Ricardo Forster, and Walter Benjamin is referents throughout the essay.
Parts of this essay have appeared in “Aporias of Marranismo: Sabina Berman’s En el nombre de Dios and Jom Tob Azulay’s O judeu,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 187–216. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. “Ante la ley: Interrogación, interpelación y la producción de la culpa,” Revista Iberoamericana 257 (2016): 759–774.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, I draw upon the idea of “secret” as “irreplaceable singularity” discussed by Jacques Derrida in Aporias (74). The marrano is a subject that guards a secret par excellence: not secret as content (i.e., the clandestine practice of a particular Jewish custom or rite) but rather as form, or as empty form: singularity as void, as ellipsis. This is perhaps why Derrida opts to speak of the “universal Marrano… beyond what may nowadays be the finished forms of Marrano culture” (74). The crypto-Jew in particular and the crypto-subject in general bear a secret that is constitutive of their identity while at the very same time making identity impossible.
- 2.
Unless otherwise stated, all citations are taken from the published screenplay (1980), while discussion of visual aspects of the work refers to the cinematographic version of the film (1974).
- 3.
Bensadon argues that “the fact that Luis decides to circumcise himself directly after his encounter with [prostitute] Justa [Mendez] and exclaiming the circumcision as a sacrifice are indicative of the Catholic influences in his interiority” Bensadon, Deborah, “Modernity and Crisis: The Writing of ‘the Jew’,” in Trans-Atlantic Literature (Diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2011), 73.
- 4.
The act (and the crime) of circumcision is a central trope in Derrida’s autobiographical, “confessional” piece, “Circumfession.”
- 5.
Fredric Jameson, Doris Sommer, Alberto Moreiras, Idelber Avelar, and, most recently, Kate Jenckes stand among the myriad scholars that identify in Latin-American literary production a stubborn persistence of the allegorical. After Jameson infamously makes the claim in 1986 that “all Third World texts are . . . national allegories” (141), Doris Sommer argues for an allegorical reading of nineteenth-century national romances in her 1991 book Foundational Fictions (instead of the second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political,” Sommer asserts that the erotic is the national). Her study, while crucial to the understanding of literary practice in the early stages of national independence, risks proposing what Jameson describes as a “one-to-one table of equivalences” in which each figure possesses a corollary in “reality” (146–147, qtd. in Jenckes Kate, Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History [Albany: SUNY Press, 2007], 69). Alberto Moreiras makes a significant critical departure from the idea of national allegory in favor of an approach to Latin-American literary and cultural studies that would eschew both identity and difference (seen as opposite sides of the same coin) in Tercer espacio (1995) and The Exhaustion of Difference (2001). In the spirit of Moreiras’s deconstructive criticism, finally, Kate Jenckes takes up the idea of allegory as allography (derived from the Greek for “other writing”) in her book Reading Borges After Benjamin (2007).
- 6.
My reading of Ripstein traverses a path between these two alternatives: While I absolutely depart from the former reading in favor of Avelar’s, I want to insist upon the attractiveness of the former and its relevance, precisely because of its desirability, to a discussion about the way in which allegory works, that is, the way in which it produces meaning.
- 7.
Although, as Jenckes reminds us, de Man distinguishes between “temporality,” which “denotes a passive unfolding,” and “history,” which “introduces the possibility of interrupting such unfolding” Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), xii.
- 8.
In his well-known essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser accounts for the way in which the modern subject is formed through ideological interpellation: “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ . . . the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 174.
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Graff Zivin, E. (2019). Marranismo, Allegory, and the Unsayable in Arturo Ripstein’s El Santo Oficio. In: Gutiérrez Silva, M., Duno Gottberg, L. (eds) The Films of Arturo Ripstein. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22956-6_5
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