OEDIPUS AMONG THE CENTAURS: MOACYR SCLIAR, THE CENTAUR IN THE GARDEN
A horse ! A horse ! my kingdom for a horse !
[A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!]
William Shakespeare, Richard III : V, iv, 8.
How can one be a centaur in the 20th or 21st centuries? What is a centaur? In one of his Extraordinary Stories, Sarane Alexandrian (1927-2009) thus describes a young specimen from the herd of these creatures of Hellenic mythology that he imagines surviving today on a supposedly deserted Greek island:
…his body was that of a sorrel stallion, but in place of his neck rose a hairy man's torso, with muscular arms, with a snub head bristling with reddish hair and beard (2)
Here, the point of view claims to be that of a young girl, imagined by a male narrator/focalizer: it is a masculine fantasy embodying a symbol of virility, repressing an unconscious desire to be desired, an image worthy of the surrealists, whose influence Alexandrian underwent.
Before analyzing The Centaur in the Garden, a fascinating novel dating from the late 70s by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011), belonging rather to Latin American magical realism and North American Jewish literature, I would like to say a few words about the centaur myth(s).
It has been scientifically proven that the existence of a monster half-man, half-horse remains biologically impossible. The myth is therefore based on an illusion. Horses were introduced to Greece for the first time in the 16th century BC, first as draft animals. In Thessaly, the first horsemen, hunters, whose mounts charged head down, were mistaken from a distance for centaurs, which gave rise to various myths, including that of the centaur resulting from the union of Ixion, king of the Lapiths and Nephele, a cloud fashioned by a jealous Zeus, in the image of Hera, of whom Ixion was enamored. This original centaur mated with mares of Mount Pelion and founded his race of bellicose, libidinous beings, devourers of raw meat and heavy drinkers. A fierce war quickly broke out between them and the Lapiths. For the ancient Greeks, they represented the beast in man, a sort of pure id.
Now, certain exceptional centaurs distinguish themselves from their crude brothers, including the famous Chiron, of particular origin, engendered by Chronos transformed into a horse to seduce the oceanid Philyra. Educated by Artemis and Apollo, Chiron becomes "the wisest, most generous and most just of centaurs" (3). Very learned, as well as healer, hunter, prophet, musician and gymnast, Chiron will be the master of several Greek heroes, including Heracles and Achilles. Guédali Tartakovsky, the protagonist born a centaur in Moacyr Scliar's work, combines the talents and virtues of a Chiron with the unbridled sensuality and pleasure principle that govern ordinary centaurs.
The hybridity of body and character of the centaur is reflected in the form and genre that Scliar's writing adopts. Even if we can find in this novel an antinomic structure evocative of surrealism, it seems closer to magical realism, as defined by Laure Borgomano regarding the films of Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux (4).
Borgomano evokes, among others, two particularly pertinent elements: first the choice of a unique point of view, here that of Guédali, often an unreliable narrator according to Wayne Booth's term, whether he tells his own story or those of other characters; then the circulation of objects, which connects the different levels of narration. This fluctuation, corresponding to that of the plot, sows more and more doubts in the reader, less and less convinced by the equine side of Guédali's identity.
The Centaur in the Garden consists of ten unnumbered but chronological chapters designated by the time lapse and place where they unfold, framed by the circular discourse of a prologue and epilogue in the present, on the day of Guédali's 38th birthday, celebrated in São Paulo with his wife, their children and a group of friends in a Tunisian restaurant named The Garden of Delights. This appellation, a nod to Hieronymus Bosch (5), proves as ironic as the intention expressed at the end of the prologue by an already drunk narrator, to begin writing his memoirs on the tablecloth: "Better to scribble now, all is well" (CDJ, p. 14), in the best of all possible worlds, as Voltaire's Pangloss would say; the novel proves to be stuffed with intertextuality. At the end of his analeptic narrative that constitutes the body of the main text, Guédali recounts in the epilogue how his wife Tita relates a different version of the same story to her table neighbor at the restaurant. Magic of writing, certainly, but of all the stories in the novel, which pass without exception through Guédali's focalization, which one tells the reality of this fiction?
The plot takes place between September 24, 1935 and September 21, 1973, mainly in southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, São Paulo), in Morocco, and once in 1972, on a trip to Israel and Europe. At the beginning, around his birth, which he could only recount based on the stories of his relatives, Guédali the narrator inscribes some flashbacks in his already analeptic narration, to better explain the latter: these mainly concern the emigration of his parents, Léon and Rosa Tartakovsky, poor and persecuted Russian Jews, who with other Jews were able to flee the pogroms of their country at the beginning of the 20th century and settle in southern Brazil, thanks to the generosity of a wealthy patron. Their 4 children were born in Brazil.
The first chapter begins with the birth of Guédali, the youngest, who makes his mother scream and his father howl, because when the child appears:
…From head to waist, the child is normal. From waist to feet, I am horse. My father doesn't even know the name of this creature: I am centaur (CDJ: p. 23).
The father tries to understand. He cannot suspect his virtuous wife, who, for her part, remains in a state of shock for a long time after giving birth. Léon immediately loves his son and hopes that he suffers from a curable disease.
In a fascinating book (6), Marie-Hélène Huet traces from Antiquity to the 19th century a universal popular belief, which attributed the birth of monstrous children to the mother's imagination, or to her contemplation of representations of monsters or animals. Now, Guédali reports the horror of the pogroms his mother had witnessed, "the vision of black horses trampling the bodies of Jews" (CDJ, p. 21), and how, accepting Brazil poorly, she blames his father:
You dragged me to this godforsaken hole at the end of the world, to this deserted place, where only animals live. From looking at horses so much, my son resembles them (7)
Coming from a family of rabbis, the father develops two obsessions concerning his disabled son: making him a good Jew and protecting him from the surrounding society. He arranges for the boy's circumcision and Bar Mitzvah to be done in the strictest privacy. He locks Guédali in various golden cages, a large stable fitted out for him at the Rio Grande farm, and when the family settles in the city of Porto Alegre, a vast room isolated from the outside world. The young fiery centaur loves to gallop in the fields, but only has the right to do so at night. Until age 18, he hardly sees anyone but his parents and his two sisters who surround him with tenderness, spoil him and play with him. Only his elder brother Bernardo is hostile to him, out of jealousy. Apart from them he only meets the midwife who brought him into the world, a doctor friend of his father who photographs him as a baby, but whose blurred shots do not prove his centaur condition; the Mohel who performs the ritual circumcision on the child's enormous equine penis (obvious fantasy of the author); a potential buddy in the form of a little Indian, Peri, met only once and Pedro Bento, son of a neighbor, who betrays his secret and becomes an enemy. Guédali devours hundreds of books, cultivates himself, obtains diplomas by correspondence, but his autodidactic research brings no answer to his fundamental questions about his identity. Neither Greek mythology, nor Jewish scriptures, nor Marx, nor Freud satisfy him. His sexual urges torment him from age 12. Unable to approach any woman, he ends up losing his virginity with a beautiful white mare, whom he immediately chases away, because he desires to live a human life.
Passionate about astronomy, Guédali obtains a telescope, and by scrutinizing the sky, discovers a superb redhead living in the colonial dwelling opposite, about 2 km away. By dint of observing her, the young centaur falls in love and tries to communicate with her using a carrier pigeon, a mission that fails. One day a man appears beside the young woman. Guédali falls ill. Once recovered, he decides to run away, which marks the end of his protected childhood and the beginning of a nomadic period, between two lives. Guédali gallops at night, always southward, carried by his fetish hooves, hiding during the day and stealing his food. One day he wakes up in the middle of a circus, where he gets his first job. Passing himself off as a man disguised as a centaur, whose unsociable little brother provides the rear part, Guédali improvises a successful act, but his erotic impulses ruin him, which will become a recurring pattern. When he responds to the desire of a beautiful animal trainer, she screams in terror upon discovering the truth about her lover's body, who gallops away.
The next adventure begins like a chivalric romance, where the damsel in distress, pursued and threatened with a revolver by an old horseman in rut, is a ravishing 16-year-old centauress. Guédali rushes to defend her and seeing this, the terrified man has a cardiac arrest and falls dead from his horse. One thinks here of the death of Laius, but Guédali/Oedipus doesn't really kill this potential father-in-law. The little centauress cries but is quickly consoled by contact with a young and handsome fellow creature. Guédali learns that the old man was the fazendeiro Zeca Fagundes, master of the vast surrounding lands where:
He lived with his wife, Dona Cotinha, in a gigantic dwelling – imitation of a medieval castle, with drawbridge, walls and so forth. (CDJ, p. 120).
Irascible and great lover of horses, this domestic tyrant sequestered his numerous mistresses in part of the castle. It is there, in the heart of the harem, that the beautiful centauress Marta, called Martita or Tita, was born, "from an ugly, retarded and taciturn peasant woman" (CDJ, p. 124). Zeca Fagundes' paternity will never be established and Tita will be taken in by a whole gyneceum, with the blessing of Dona Cotinha who, alone and neglected, becomes attached to the hybrid baby, whom she raised in secret, as Guédali was. Dona Cotinha then welcomes with open arms the couple of lovers already formed by Guédali and Tita, whom she maintains and spoils like her children, leaving them entirely free to gallop and make love in nature. They tell each other their stories and then experience a true garden of delights: "Tita and I live happily. Happy from 1954 to 1959" (CDJ, p. 134). After five years, Tita, who desires to know the pleasures of the city and live like a real woman, like Eve, precipitates the fall that makes them tumble into the world of humans: "She was forgetting her nature as a centaur woman" (CDJ, p. 135). The serpent presents itself in the form of a Moroccan cosmetic surgeon, capable according to the press of operating on them. They hesitate for a long time, fearing the risky and expensive intervention. Finally, thanks to Dona Cotinha's generosity, who takes charge of the incognito trip and the clinic's expenses, they embark for Morocco.
The chapter on this first stay in the Maghreb constitutes a short summary. The operation succeeds for Guédali and Tita, who are transformed into full-fledged humans. After six months of convalescence, they are ready to return to Brazil. The traces of their centaur life are limited to their legs (the front hooves of centaurs) and their hooves, which will later mutate into feet, but meanwhile they must always wear long pants and boots specially made in Morocco. Guédali's enormous sex, which the doctor envies, has changed place but not size. The couple now knows the joy of no longer having to hide and being like others, while having lost that of galloping.
On their return they learn of the death of their dear Dona Cotinha, who bequeathed them an important part of her fortune. A paternal figure for Guédali, the Moroccan doctor had introduced him to international businessmen, contacts that soon prove useful. On the threshold of their adult life, Guédali brings Tita back to his family, in Porto Alegre, where they are welcomed, but Rosa poorly accepts her son's goy companion. They stay more than a year despite themselves, the father having had a heart attack from which he recovers, then leave for São Paulo and a new life. From now on, the couple will experience a series of uprootings, alternating between returns to the past and attempts to build the present, even the future, in a Freudian fort/da rhythm.
Thanks to the inheritance, Guédali and Tita buy a beautiful house in São Paulo, where they lead an idyllic existence. A burglary sends them back to their centaur nature, the thief having taken the boots that concealed their equine hooves. Moment of panic and Tita's first illness. They get out of it by ordering an express shipment of boots from Morocco at a high price. Guédali opens an office, but doesn't succeed in business right away. New obstacle, he meets his former enemy Pedro Bento, who has become a taxi driver in São Paulo, but the latter doesn't seem to recognize him. When Guédali makes his first sale, the couple discovers the Tunisian restaurant, The Garden of Delights, where they celebrate the event. They decide to get married. Tita painfully feels her absence of family and doesn't want to convert to Judaism. Guédali arranges with a rabbi about to leave the country, to obtain a conversion certificate. The wedding takes place in Porto Alegre, with the Tartakovsky family and some friends.
On their return, Guédali's business goes better and better, but Tita becomes depressed alone at home. Guédali then hires a teacher to educate his wife, who progresses well. They go out a lot and make friends, "young entrepreneurs and their wives, mostly Jews." Tita doesn't seem very happy, unlike her husband, who sees a lot of Paulo, his best friend. Inseparable, they run together, a new form of galloping. Paulo confides his problems with his wife Fernanda and their disabled daughter to Guédali, who never dares speak of his past or explain the omnipresent boots. Three other couples, Julio and Bela, Armando and Beatriz, Joel and Tania join them. This group of young executives, somewhat "champagne socialists," receive each other or meet at the restaurant regularly. A centaur appears in the street one carnival evening, it's a grotesque disguise worn by Pedro Bento and the circus trainer. The new anxiety caused by this irruption of the past increases with Tita's pregnancy. Guédali calls the Moroccan doctor who proposes an abortion, but Tita wants to keep the child. When the time comes, Guédali summons the old midwife who had brought him into the world. Tita gives birth to two completely normal boys, but remains depressed. Guédali imposes the circumcision of the twins on her and she suffers again from being goy in a Jewish family.
The rhythm of the story accelerates and other stories are added to that of the narrator. Projects are made as a group, that of a condominium takes shape and each invests their dreams in it. The Guédali-Tita couple is falling apart; one party evening, he makes love with Fernanda; a friend convinces Tita to undergo psychotherapy; Fernanda leaves Paulo, then disappears before the move.
The condominium apartment proves pleasant and luxurious. Guards protect them, they have a driver in the person of Pedro Bento, whose silence Guédali buys; he too tells his story. Everything is going well again. Guédali reconciles with his brother Bernardo, Fernanda returns, Paulo revives. Trust reigns among friends, Guédali spills his centaur story, no one really believes it, he gets drunk and tells the adventure with Fernanda; Paulo forgives him the next day and their friendship takes over.
Guédali's hooves open onto small fragile feet. He can finally wear shoes. In 1972, the group visits Israel, then Rome, Paris, London, Madrid. From there, Guédali and Tita go alone to Morocco, to visit the doctor. The doctor's decay, who has become an abortionist, and the pitiful places recall Baudelaire's "The Double Room." The surgeon speaks of their operation as his day of glory, shows them an unpublished text he wrote about them and tells them about the visit of another Brazilian centaur, Ricardo.
Back in São Paulo, they live a peaceful period, until the night of July 15, 1972, when Tita wakes Guédali, having heard someone downstairs. He refuses to go see. A few days later, having returned early, he finds Tita in the arms of a young centaur, it's Ricardo, who came to consult Guédali. The latter demands that he tell his story, quite similar to his own. One of Guédali's sisters had told him about the Moroccan doctor, whom he had gone to see but had fled without being operated on. Returning to Brazil, he met Bernardo, who gave him Guédali's address. Tita seems very much in love. Suddenly the door opens and the group bursts in, to celebrate the condominium's anniversary. General panic at the sight of the monster, someone calls the guards, the centaur jumps through the window, the guards shoot him down. Pedro Bento arrives, having had to finish off the dying creature. Tita sobs, Guédali rushes to the airport and takes the first plane to Morocco.
The following episode, the third and last taking place in Morocco, proves delirious. Guédali spends the summer of 1972 there. "The clinic was in a lamentable state" (263), the doctor has aged further, everything is dirty and deserted. Guédali suffers from insomnia and feverishly demands an operation to become a centaur again. Disoriented, he doesn't seem to know why... Perhaps it's because Tita fell in love with Ricardo, the double of the young centaur he had been? The doctor tells Guédali the story of his rather sulfurous social rise and fall, then insists on revealing his secret by introducing him to Lolah, a creature with a woman's head and bust and a lioness's body, in short a sphinx/sphinge, but without wings. Scliar seems to deliberately mix Greek and Egyptian representations of the sphinx: androgynous, the Greek sphinx generally has a woman's head and breast, wings, then a lion's body rather than a lioness's. However, this creature, whom Oedipus meets at the gates of Thebes, is considered essentially feminine, unlike its Egyptian counterpart, entirely masculine, with a man's head and a lion's body, not winged. Now, Morocco, a neutral and carnivalesque country in the novel, is located roughly equidistant from European Greece and African Egypt. What matters in Lolah is the animal and human hybridity, feminine equivalent of that of the centaur. Here is Guédali's initial reaction:
…I experienced a disconcerting sensation, a mixture of repulsion and desire, of pain and disgust. I felt that fraternity that invalids, abnormals, the sick feel among themselves; anger too. (CDJ, p. 273).
The doctor identifies the creature to whom he taught French, and refers to the riddle solved by Oedipus. As a greeting, she shouts Cambronne's word at them. Guédali learns that she had been captured alive by a hunter friend in Tunisia who, in love with her, wanted to have her operated on, an impossible thing, given her weak human component. After the hunter's death, the surgeon had kept her, and having become attached to her, had spared her the fate of a circus beast. Guédali then experiences a perverse passion for Lolah, the 6th object of his erotic desire, after the white mare, the red-haired neighbor, the trainer, Tita and Fernanda.
Lolah tells her story in turn, how she was born from a lioness and grew up among wild felines. The multiple roles of Lolah's character vis-à-vis Guédali correspond almost exactly to those that Yves Thoret attributes to the sphinge of Greek myth facing Oedipus; according to him, this murderous monster would also be a salvific animal mother, a harbinger of death, a poser of riddles and a seductress "avid for blood and erotic pleasure (8)."
At first platonic, the relationship between Lolah and Guédali quickly becomes sexual, despite the latter's hesitations before a body that "was that of an animal" (284). The enjoyment proves such that he returns to see her every night for some time. Simultaneously, the desire to be reoperated diminishes and he considers his request to the doctor as a metaphor. Lolah, very much in love, asks him to have a lion's body grafted. Guédali thus describes his extraordinary situation, in the third person, as if to detach himself from it:
He begins by being born a centaur, becomes human at great sacrifice; then, he becomes depressed and wants to become a centaur again; then he no longer really knows what he wants; in the meantime, here appears in his life a sphinx-woman who wants to transform him into a lion-man! Pure mythological delirium. (p. 289).
Faced with such a muddle, Guédali, already tired of Lolah, decides to flee, but the doctor, having sensed something, has begun preoperative treatment and comes to administer a sedative to him in the middle of the night, to be able to operate on him the next day. When Guédali wakes up still drugged, the intervention has not taken place. The sinister doctor explains to him that they had to kill Lolah who, in the grip of one of her fits of fury, had escaped from her cage and penetrated the operating room. Guédali understands that he must have forgotten to close the cage, and that the sphinge had gone to claim him, had clawed the hindquarters of a horse destined for Guédali's graft, then, as she was about to attack the surgeon, the assistant had killed her with revolver shots. Mad with pain, the doctor who loved Lolah blames Guédali and overwhelms him with insults, including those of their hereditary enmity:
Dirty Jew! Yet more proof of what you inflict on us, the Arabs! You dispossess us of everything, even tenderness and love! (p. 293).
Disoriented and bruised, but still a man, Guédali decides to return to Brazil.
He embodies the answer to the riddle posed by the sphinx to Oedipus. Here, the doctor, a sort of Tiresias, offers this answer (man) to Lolah, who, like the sphinge of myth, dies from it. Both psychologically blinded by their fate, Guédali and the doctor support each other by silently pacing the clinic's deserted garden for two days, until the ex-centaur's departure. At the moment of their separation, the false father refuses Guédali's money, then hands him a morbid fetish object: Lolah's left paw. During the previous visit, he had offered him a drum made from the skin of his own amputated hind hooves, which Guédali had bought, then had burned. Given the circumstances, the doctor hardly has the diabolic stature of a Mengele, even if he represents a sort of caricature of him.
Indecisive and dreamy like Hamlet, on his return Guédali avoids São Paulo and any confrontation with Tita, his children and his family responsibilities. He prefers regression and goes directly to his parents' house, in Porto Alegre. At 37, Guédali has just resolved his Oedipus complex, during his 3rd stay in Morocco, where he undergoes the threat of castration (the operation he no longer wants) from the false father, the doctor, for having transgressed the taboo of possession of the false mother, the sphinge. Arriving at his real parents' house, he rejects his mother, who lectures him and orders him to rebuild his family, to seek his father's company and ask him the questions that obsess him about his origin, like a child: "But Papa, did I have hooves or not?", which recalls the old song: "The little boats that go on the water, Papa do they have legs?" Not receiving satisfactory answers from his genitor, Guédali regresses further. Wanting to "find his roots," he buys back their first house and the land around it, the Rio Grande do Sul farm, in a state of abandonment worse than the Moroccan clinic, invaded by a generalized something rotten, to settle there alone, pray to the god of Abraham and work the land as penance, without any machine. He indulges in a death drive, a return to the earth's womb or is it a Buñuelian mysticism like that of Simon of the Desert (9)?
If Guédali flees others, they come to him. First an unemployed Indian, somewhat a sorcerer and better adapted than him to this hard life, settles in the stable and helps him a lot. He nicknames him Peri, like the indigenous boy met during his childhood. In his delirium, Guédali asks Peri to use his magic to make hooves grow on him. The Indian prefers to invoke rain. Finally, one day Guédali thinks he sees a centaur on the horizon, it's Tita, who has come to join him on horseback! After a week of honeymoon, they see their sons arrive, then the Tartakovsky family and the group of friends from São Paulo. At the end of the chapter, Guédali notes that he is cured, that he no longer wants to gallop and that he is ready to return to the city. Meanwhile he has discovered that like him, Tita has finally lost her hooves and that she has "Pretty little delicate feet" (325). Would both have therefore left their swollen feet/hooves or oedipus behind them? Not so sure...
The epilogue takes up the scene from the prologue, at the party for Guédali's 38th birthday, at the Tunisian restaurant in São Paulo, The Garden of Delights. In both parts of the frame, Guédali, increasingly drunk, daydreams and fantasizes. He often repeats that all is well and says the restaurant is "a nice place where you feel at home" (p. 8), which doesn't prevent him from criticizing it, because of the flies, the strident Arab music and the lack of hygiene: "the place is not impeccable, they certainly throw kitchen scraps in the patio" (p. 12). Guédali's ambiguous attitude toward the Arab and Berber staff of the place, which he himself calls "Jewish paranoia" (12), recalls his strange relationship with the Moroccan doctor in his decrepit clinic, and is part of the double discourse and his troubled vision of his own life.
In the epilogue, this duality manifests itself through the account of Guédali's life told by Tita to her mysterious table neighbor, reported by Guédali, sitting across from them. The story consists of a deformation of that of the book's body between prologue and epilogue, an expurgated version, where we no longer find centaurs or other supernatural creatures. Tita's scenario, according to Guédali:
…is as skillfully fabricated as a telenovela (10). With, as sole purpose, that of trying to convince me that I was never a centaur. (355).
It's about the realism that his entourage wants to impose on him, but Guédali remains obsessed with the magic of his former centaur identity and the freedom of galloping, anchored in his imagination. The tension between the two worlds blinds him and makes him lucid at the same time:
I might do better [...] to accept this reality that they want to impose on me [...] These mythological creatures that marked my life, do not exist. Neither the centaur, nor the sphinx, nor the winged horse... (pp. 355-56).
The winged horse brings us back to the circulation of objects, from one level, one time, one place to another. It's not so much an object as an image, a vision that pursues Guédali. We find it from the first page of the main narrative: "a winged horse flies majestically between the dark clouds" (p. 19), before circling around the house where Rosa gives birth to the centaur baby. It's surely not Pegasus, the apparition rather evokes the equine monster of Füssli's painting, The Night mare (1781), which means either "The Nightmare" or "The Nocturnal Mare." After his operation, Guédali stops seeing this frightening creature, which nevertheless comes to be missed in his Rio Grande desert; he then attributes a protective function to it: "according to certain mystics, it embodied a sort of guardian angel of centaurs" (315). The winged horse reappears as a fetish pendant between the well-shaped breasts of the pretty redhead facing Guédali at the restaurant, on the last page, in the company of other significant objects, including a sphinx, a centaur and a Star of David. These trinkets, to which the amulet collector hopes to add Lolah's mummified paw, refer to various aspects or episodes of Guédali's life. The young woman herself, hidden behind dark glasses and never named, embodies for the narrator/protagonist a metaphorical mirror of all his sentimental adventures included in Tita's narrative: like the white mare and later Lolah, "she arouses animal desire" (p. 335); she suggests that the trainer was perhaps her sister who lives in Rio Grande, and that she herself, visiting the region at the time, was perhaps the beautiful redhead he ogled through his telescope. Moreover, she insistently expresses the desire to appropriate Lolah's paw; then such complicit resemblance manifests itself between her and Tita, that Guédali can no longer differentiate their feet that he caresses under the table. Finally, the novel ends with an apprehension of the realization of a fantasy that Guédali has just had about the young woman: she would have gone to get something from her car, and he would have followed her for a brief but torrid erotic encounter, like formerly with Fernanda. In fact, Guédali, in the vapors of alcohol, gets up, as if to go there, that's all.
Three key words of the text are mythology, metaphor, lie, let's add mythomania, from the Greek mythos – narrative or fable, a word that doesn't appear in psychoanalysis dictionaries. Here's what the Petit Robert says about it:
Form of psychic imbalance, characterized by a tendency to fabulation, lying, simulation,
a definition that applies to Guédali and undoubtedly also, through self-derision, to his implicit creator. Like Thurber's Walter Mitty (11), to spice up his life, the narrator mythologizes and metaphorizes it, to the measure of his fantasies and waking dreams, equivalents of children's games according to Freud. When Guédali reports Tita's version of his story, he makes an extra-diegetic comment on the banalization by police and press of Ricardo's murder:
Lies. They are only layers of superimposed lies. They would require patient archaeological work to manage to extract a semblance of truth from them, if indeed a truth and only one really existed. (352).
Now, the word fiction, from the Latin fingere/to feign, like mythology, designates a form of lie. Here, the meaning of words and expressions, like the novel's title The Centaur in the Garden or the restaurant's name The Garden of Delights, drifts away. First the Tunisian restaurant in São Paulo (Lolah the sphinge came from Tunisia and represents an erotic garden of delights for Guédali); it's run by Berbers and Arabs, but its name refers to the Garden of Eden of the Jewish Old Testament. During their first stay in Morocco, confined to their room before the operation, like Adam and Eve, Guédali and Tita contemplate the paradisiacal gardens of the clinic through their window:
splendid gardens with rose beds and a fountain whose water lapped gently (149)
When they return, everything will have fallen into decay and the doctor, old fallen Prospero (12), will have lost his power. The Garden of Delights is also the title of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch where humans and all sorts of hybrid creatures frolic, but not necessarily centaurs. In the epilogue, Tita praises the merits of their latest house with garden to her new friend:
The delights, it's rather in our garden that we find them, she exclaims (allusion to the restaurant's name). And our fountain that murmurs in the moonlight, the masses of exotic plants, this breeze that stirs the branches of the dwarf palms, the beaten earth paths. (354)
Guédali adds that she:
passes over in silence certain hoof prints clearly visible on the black earth of the masses [...] she attributes them to the wandering horses that we glimpse from time to time in our neighborhood... (ibid.)
That's what Tita tells, but Guédali addresses her silently, while she talks about something else, to tell his wife that these are his own prints:
…I want to speak of someone whose body is human, including legs and feet, but whose way of placing the foot on the ground would resemble, unequivocally, the print of a hoof.
I want to speak of a centaur, Tita, or what remains of him. Tita, I want to speak of Guédali. (355)
For Tita, the centaur in the garden is also the memory of Ricardo, fleeing in the park of the former condominium, galloping toward his death.
In the final paragraph, Guédali metaphorizes himself as "winged horse ready to fly away," as "horse rearing on its hooves" and, in the very last sentence: "Or like this centaur in the garden, ready to jump over the wall, in quest of freedom." So, dixit Guédali: the Centaur in the Garden, the book, the title, the character, the image, the symbol, it's me, even if the centaur is no longer one, or exists only in his imagination. For Scliar, Guédali, it's me, but who is Guédali?
To be or not to be, to have or not have been a centaur, to have or not have loved a sphinge? Those are the questions and they prove complex. Guédali's story is written and told in past and present. At the end everything seems predictable, but there's no after, in Porto Alegre... he celebrates his 38th birthday and reminds us from the prologue, that "38 [...], it's the caliber of the residence guards' revolver," instrument of Ricardo's death, Guédali's young double. Magical realism thus remains a constant, even in the death drive that concludes the novel in aperture. Modern Oedipus, Guédali doesn't need to gouge out his eyes, because he was born metaphorically blind.
1 — . The novel O Centauro no jardim (late 70s), by Brazilian Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011), was reissued in Brazil in 2009, then translated into French by Philippe Poncet, Montreuil, Editions Folies d'Encre, 2011. (reference: CDJ). ↩
2 — . Sarane Alexandrian, "Les Insulaires insolites" (1991), in L'Impossible est un jeu/Histoires extraordinaires, Editinter, Rafaël de Surtis, 2012, p. 30. ↩
3 — . See the article on Chiron, Dictionnaire Larousse de Mythologie, 2003, p. 141. ↩
4 — . See Laure Borgomano & Adolphe Nysenholc, André Delvaux Une Œuvre-un Film L'Œuvre au noir, Brussels, Editions Labor, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1988, pp. 32-34. ↩
5 — . The central panel of a famous triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516) is entitled The Garden of Delights (oil on wood, 220x389cm), Madrid, Prado Museum. ↩
6 — . Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination, Cambridge, MA, London, UK, 1993. ↩
7 — . This quote (CDJ, p. 28), so close to the theory Huet discusses, is an interpretation of the traumatized mother's silence. ↩
8 — . See Yves Thoret, La Théâtralité, Paris, Dunod, 1993, pp. 73-80. ↩
9 — . Simon of the Desert, unfinished Mexican film by Luis Buñuel (1965). ↩
10 — . Telefilm. ↩
11 — . "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," famous comic short story by American James Thurber (1894-1962), whose protagonist invents a series of heroic parallel lives. ↩
12 — . Prospero, Duke of Milan and magician, protagonist of The Tempest (c. 1611) by Shakespeare. ↩