Apparitions can be read as many things: a tribute to women’s sexual emancipation; a cautionary tale of the disintegration of patriarchal family structures; even a meditation on the brutality of the Catholic Church and its frenzied devotees.
Margo Glantz’s prose – her book Apparitions is published by LAB Partner Charco Press – can be eye-watering, oscillating between the hyper-pornographic and the ultra-violent in the blink of an eye. The novel, first published in 1996, now finds its English-language audience thanks to Ellen Jones’s new translation, which leaves nothing to the imagination.
A tumultuous plunge through the immense repressions of daily life, Apparitions can be read as many things: a tribute to women’s sexual emancipation; a cautionary tale of the disintegration of patriarchal family structures; even a meditation on the brutality of the Catholic Church and its frenzied devotees.
The shock factor of Glantz’s text is aided by the wideness of its scope, with a fragmented style that flits between different narrative worlds and perspectives. What results is a Tarantino-esque drama that, though sensationalist on the surface, slowly peels back the skin to reveal an incredibly thought-provoking reflection on sex, violence, and what it means to be a woman who desires.
The narrative follows what seem, at first, to be three separate points of view: an unnamed mother and wife, whose relationship with her husband bleeds out pretty consistently as a cry for help not amiss in doctors’ waiting rooms; an author figure on the precarious edge of writer’s block; and the two nuns that she brings to life, Sisters Lugarda de la Encarnación and Teresa Juana de Cristo. These discordant voices jostle for attention alongside one another, drawing the reader’s attention from the dirty secrets of bourgeois Mexican society to the cloistered nooks and crannies of the Church.
At its core, this is a story about the body. The mother, berated and bent into dehumanising sex positions by the family patriarch, is haunted by the spectre of her own daughter, who lounges around the house in a perpetual state of adolescent disaffection. Here, the female body becomes a stage upon which the most natural of movements must be disciplined for provoking, enticing, or simply mimicking the sovereignty of the masculine: physical actions as innocent as lying on the sofa with one’s legs spread (the daughter’s signature look) are repeatedly attacked. This corporeal vessel, Glantz hints, is one forbidden to move on its own accord: her women are marionettes, puppets on steel-laced strings, battered by abuse both verbal and physical into the shapes that are demanded of them.
This mother/daughter dynamic is also filled with eerie encounters and unspoken animosities. The mother is gripped by the fear that her daughter might walk in on her in the sex act, an anxiety that is jeered at and demeaned by her domineering partner. As these coercions into demeaning acts of social and sexual discipline fail to falter, Glantz shows us how the cycle repeats itself: we watch, helpless, as the girl is subjected to the very same iron fists of desire that mould, hammer, and slice at her body.
Still more disturbing is the ease with which these blows are absorbed, both by the mother and her pubescent daughter. The female bodies in Apparitions are subjects that participate in the very violence that castrates them: they are propelled by the desire for affection, the appetite for sex, and the perverse yet delectable inclination towards one’s own brutalization. Yet the phantasmagorical prospect of escape always lingers in the background: in the face of so much profound entanglement, how does one even start to cut oneself free?
These narrative threads are accompanied, just as shockingly, by the other main thread that twists through the narrative: the nuns and their wild flagellations. The reference to the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of Mexico’s foremost literary figures and an ardent proponent of women’s right to write in the seventeenth century, is not lost here, especially as the very existence of these nuns is explicitly underpinned by the translucent presence of their unnamed writer. For the most part, the latter fades into the background after fleshing out her characters, and Lugarda and Teresa Juana surge forward with ever more disorienting vigour, committing themselves to new extremes of self-flagellation in the name of heavenly salvation.
This is no Rosalía album cover, no white and graceful figures dozing serenely off in the sunlight. Glantz’s invocation of the Catholic Church verges on the blasphemous, as torture becomes melded to an indestructible spiral of desire. What results is the explicit, the carnal, the deeply uncomfortable. Amid all these contradictions, Glantz gives voice to a disarming meditation on the eroticism of worship. Of course, if Jesus can be freely depicted as bleeding and brutalized, why can’t his brides?
But the sex and violence embedded in Apparitions is more than schlocky surface-level aestheticization. Glantz’s willingness to confront the cruel trappings of desire head-on forces us face-to-face with its weightiest contradictions. Who dominates us? Who do we allow ourselves to be dominated by? Is there a ‘wrong’ or a ‘right’ to who we allow access to our bodies? When we open ourselves up too wide to the desires and demands of others, is it even possible to close ourselves off again?
Perhaps these questions unsettle us so because they spring from mouths that should, by no right, be allowed to speak. The inclusion of the writer in Apparitions, the spectral narrator that appears and disappears with astounding agility, insists upon what is really the core demand of the novel: the right to wield language and with it, power. Glantz’s women are unconventional to the extreme, or so we might think at first glance. But really and truly, aren’t they all of us?
As Apparitions makes its English-language debut, in the era of emerging subcultures like ‘trad-wives’, ‘incels’, and ‘the Manosphere’ that demand a return to ‘traditional’ gender roles, the world Glantz once imagined may have changed dramatically. But the questions she asks, as much as the bodies that inhabit our brave new century, are still very much the same.
Apparitions, by Margo Glantz, translated by Ellen Jones, is published by Charco Press, £11.99
