On the Propagation of the Unspoken: The Psychosomatic Plague of Silence in Las yeguas nocturnas by Atenea Cruz

Abstract

Removed from the merely passive value ascribed to it and set in opposition to the performative force of the word, silence partakes in the shaping of ideology within every discourse, for it operates as an integral element of a sociocultural and sociohistorical normative system that imposes a notion of order and, consequently, a specific form of censorship. Conceived as a “literary sign” (Boves Naves, 1992), silence can be examined through the lens of literary theory not only in relation to the contextual variables that delimit its meaning, but also from psychoanalytic perspectives, which allow to interpret it as a manifestation born of the human psychic conflict—from which it is possible to distinguish between social silence (stemming from Bourdieu’s doxa) and individual silence, linked to inner suffering, ancestral fears, hidden drives, the need for repression, and so forth—materialized in discourse through its somatization, a phenomenon that will be observed in its practical application to Atenea Cruz’s Las yeguas nocturnas. To these somatic responses—herein defined as psychosomatic silences—this article adds a proposal of subversion, as well as a categorization of silences, occasionally resorting to impossible figurations that emerge from the necessity of transgressing the imposition of order.