An Aesthetics of Dissidence: Reinaldo Arenas and the Politics of Rewriting

Reinaldo Arenas engaged in a particular form of intertextual ity when he rewrote two nineteenth century colonial works, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier's memoirs and Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdes. Not only were his novels, El mundo alucinante ( 1 965) and Loma del Angel (1987), notably explicit about their relationships to these earlier texts, but also Arenas boldly inserted his own first person voice into the narratives such that his / entered into overt dialogue with Fray Servando, Villaverde, and their works. As Ottmar Ette explained in his article Traicion, naturalmente, Ambas novelas se caracterizan por una subyacente identificacion del escritor cubano con los autores de los intertextos respectivos (103). In this article I explore the nature and implications of such an underlying identification. In 1985, Arenas wrote an article entitled La vanguardia como reescritura de la libertad, a version of which would become the prologue to Loma del Angel, in which he outlined his own ideas on the process and purpose of rewriting. It becomes evident that for Arenas, rewriting was a creative way to question the author