Hybrid autobiography in "Certificate of Absence"
The political dimension by using the third person as indirect confession in "Certificate of Absence".
"Comienza a escribir una historia que no le deja: querria olvidarla, querria fijarla" (1st part, I: P. 13. Quotations come from the Spanish version)
Who is the Self starts to write a story in the beginning of "Certificate of Absence? Wheter is the author Molloy or the character "the writer", the reader is lead to question the identity of the subject, blurring frontiers between ficcion and reality. I do not mean "Certificate of Absence" is a pure testimonial gender, but the fact Molloy uses own personal data (either cities where she lived or the fact the character is a woman writer) creates both an hybrid and ambiguous autobiography - even Molloy does not use the first person to tell the story.
When Gilmore explains in the introduction of The Limits of Autobiography connections between trauma and a kind of testimony which "tests a crucial limits in autobiography" (2001:5), I think in what extent Molloy's choice for such an unclear autobiography can be explained because of the fact both subjects (the author and "the writer) are lesbians writers from a conservative society. It seems to me that she had to create a literary strategy to resist a literary canon derived from such society. Molloy does not inscribe, for instance, the word "lesbian" throughout the novel, which is the way heteronormativity names sexual relations between women. In silencing such denomation, the author refuses to become the Other, but at the same time the reader will know about lesbian relations amounting to acepted human/sexual relations. However, the disturbing element will remain thanks to the sadomasoquistic emphasis of relations of the "writer". In this sense, what seems both disturbing and marginal is not the relation between two women itself but the painful way it is developed.
As I asserted some weeks ago, one of the most interesting aspects of Molloy's texts is the fact that even "the writer" lives intense lesbian relationships, the author does not transform the novel in what we can call lesbian literature. Then, if we recall that this novel is out of the heteronormativity, maybe we can link it with the trauma associated in becoming an alterity inside a patriarchal society. While for such a society is still out of the norm - being either a woman writer or a lesbian -, Molloy creates a novel in which being a lesbian writer is an important data, but not the most important. In other words, what is shifted inside the fiction is the heteronormativity which tends to mark lesbian (and writers) as the Other. Molloy's option is both remaining unmarked and asserting step by step that "the writer" maybe is she, but only partially. This use of both the silence and the gradual information is gave to the reader seems a way to resist being appropiate by the heterosexual canon.
"Escribe lo que hoy hizo, lo que no hizo, para verificar fragmentos de un todo que se le escapa. Cree recuperarlos, con ellos intenta - o inventa - una constelacion suya." (1st pat, I: P. 13)
Deslindar. Si pudiera deslindar lo que busca cuando escribe de lo que busca cuando suenha de lo que busca cuando abraza." (1st part, VI: P.71)
In displacing the "I" as the rational subject of these memories, Molloy denies not only patriarcal basis of Latino American society (even living among US, France and Argentina, she wrote the novel in Spanish, then I assume Latino American readers are her first target), but cast a critique upon the heritage from the Enlightenment, so problematically developed in colonized societies. In this sense, her memories are both real and imaginary, that is, objective and subjective. Most important, it seems to me that Molloy overcomes binary relations. Molloy, different from Menchu for instance, cannot be acussed of lying: not only because she writes a fiction but because she mixes objective reality wih subjective memories. In a certain extent, the memory is the space of the second invention, nobody besides the author can claim veracity from this story.
Finally, I would like to tell something about the tension between public and private dimensions in Molloy's text, because is my purpose to discuss about the political dimension of texts as this one.
Instead of becoming a commodity spectacle about love affairs of a lesbian writer, Molloy creates a sadomasoquist relation between "the writer" and other women - specially Vera. In doing so, what we see is a closed universe with particular rules/relations. By telling a personal story in such a fragmented way, Molloy transforms it into something public without any great claim on behalf of lesbian rights. However, the reader is faced with the violent personal world of an specific subject: a woman who is lesbian who is writer and who is writing about her affective memories, and this is precisely the point in which personal achieves a public/political dimension that erodes both a literary and political male mainstream or what Schalau defines as "(...) power structure that privileges one group over other" (P.10).