Shaking the Soul, the Mind, and the Reader: Laura Esquivel and the Multimedia Novel

Author(s): Ana María Rodríguez-Vivaldi

Source: Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 38 (2003), pp. 25-32
Published by: Penn State University Press on behalf of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language
Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30037158 .
Accessed: 20/06/2014 11:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Penn State University Press and Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association are collaborating with
JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Pacific Coast Philology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Shaking the Soul, the Mind, and the Reader:
Laura Esquivel and the Multimedia Novel
AnaMarfaRodriguez-VKvaldi
State University,Pullman
Washington

Mexican author Laura Esquivel delights in breaking boundaries. Her first

novel, the best selling Like WaterforChocolate(1989) is a tourdeforcein which
the author used the skillful interweaving of serial novel standards, recipes,
history, and myth to create a seamless and original story of love, desire, and
edible seduction. Her second novel, TheLawofLove, published in 1995, goes
even further,exploring the use of music and illustrations as tools to influence
the reception of the literary text. In her most recent work, Swiftas Desire(2001),
a telegraph attached to a computer with software that automatically trans-
lates Morse code into Spanish is the device that allows the character's ailing
father to communicate his own story of longing and love gone astray.In all of
these novels, elements of popular culture and/or the past recombine with the
new, reflecting Esquivel's own desire to experiment, to renew old-fashioned
story-telling both by revitalizing the past and by engaging the reader in ways
that can be considered non-traditional to the contemporary act of reception.
In this presentation, I will explore briefly how one of these works, TheLaw
ofLove,functions within the dual perspective of the old and the new to effec-
tively promote a fusion of the past and the future, and how this perspective is
structurally and thematically arranged to have a specific effect on the recep-
tion. I propose that Esquivel's objective is to go back to a pre-literary produc-
tion of memories being recalled or created through the use of images, sounds,
and words, in her case using twentieth-century resources such as the CD and
printed illustrations. By doing so, she attempts to regain the collective, inter-
active, and actual experience of bringing forth an image, eventually adding to
the modem act of reading to change it from a fairly physically passive, soli-
tary practice to a more active and shared experience, because it is in this com-
munal encountering that her theme of oneness with the universe can be at-
tained.
If all this sounds a bit esoteric, it is because Esquivel frames this process
within the notion of a cosmic law of love where twin souls undergo a gradual
purification through reincarnation until they reach a point of absolute purity
where they are allowed to return to the origin, be it God's presence or a source
of spiritual energy, and be one again. To achieve this, she will take us on an
adventure that will span eight centuries.

25

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
26 Forum 2002

The time frames explored in TheLawofLovetie actions taking place during

the conquest of Mexico by HernminCortes in the 1520s to a present located in
Mexico City during the twenty-third century, with some stops in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries along the way. Dealing with very "new age"
notions of karma and reincarnation, the novel presents the conflict between
an Indian woman, Citlali, and one of the Spanish conquistadors, Rodrigo, as
the initial brutal disruption of the law of love. It was this disruption that caused
a cosmic imbalance which can only be rectified when the perpetrators are
purged of all hatred and can find the will to forgive and love. Given that
Rodrigo kills Citlali's newborn baby, and later on rapes her on the pyramid of
the Aztec goddess of Love (Xochiquetzal), and that Citlali in turn will kill
Rodrigo's newborn baby by his Spanish wife Isabel in revenge, forcing Rodrigo
to kill her and himself, and Isabel to die of grief hating the Indian woman, we
can safely say that there is a lot of karma to pay. So these three characters,and
their luckless babies, will have to be reincarnated to do so, finding each other
on occasion throughout the centuries, in various relationships, sometimes
managing to hurt each other all over again in some way. And so it will go on
until, finally, Citlali's baby is reborn as Azucena in the twenty-third century,
though we'll have to wait until chapter 13 (out of sixteen chapters), to find this
out.
After this prologue to establish the initial disruption to the law of love, the
novel places the reader within a new time and spatial framework: that of the
twenty-third century, whose characters will need to rework their way to the
original disruption, or sin so to speak, in order to finally restore the balance.
We find out that Azucena works as an astroanalystwho makes her living by
regressing people and exploring their past lives. Once this is achieved, Azucena
helps them heal the damage they find there. The world has evolved to the
point where people are aware of such things as reincarnationand its effect on
future lives, and advanced technology enables them to make the necessary
changes in the present in order to perfect their spirits for the future. The un-
derlying concept is that, through individual perfection, society as a whole
will achieve order,peace, and harmony. This part is tied thematically to Aztec
background in various ways. In the Aztec religious notion of monism, reality
is an organic whole where all things, particularlymen and women, are marked
by their complementarity, not their opposition (Taggart).Some scholars also
believe that human sacrifice performed as part of Aztec religious ritual gave
its victims an opportunity to be reborn as part of nature, and there were many
reincarnation myths among these people (Hassler). Thus, links begin to be
established in this chapter between Azucena and that earlier time; we find out
that she has been searching for her "twin soul" - someone who is exactly her
complement and who completes her so they can become this organic whole -

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Forum 2002 27

and that "after cutting through much bureaucraticred tape, she has been al-
lowed an early meeting (for in Esquivel's mythology, each soul must evolve
through 14,000 lifetimes in order to encounter its twin)" (Badurino). As we
will eventually find out, Azucena's "twin soul" is the conquistador Rodrigo
of the past who had killed her at the moment of her birth, and has the same
name as the present Rodrigo. Their meeting does take place but lasts only one
night. However, death also marks the beginning of this time frame: Rodrigo is
blamed for the killing of the American candidate for Planetary President, a
Mr.Bush, and is imprisoned in a primitive planet. In order to liberate him and
find the real culprit, Azucena needs to use an aurograph,a device that takes
photographs of a person's aura and can detect the presence of those belonging
to people who came in contact with him and thereby reproduce the body of
the person to whom it belongs. Since the only "aurograph"available is in the
COPEor Center for the Oversight of Previous Existences, she applies for work
there. It is during the required photomental exam (which examines her sub-
conscious thoughts and turns them into virtual images) that Azucena will hear
a "very pleasing music" (41) for the first time. She has never heard music
before, music beingforbiddenin this future, because it makes people regress or
think about past lives (41). This music, later described as "classical" (51), will
serve as the trigger for her to be transported to one of her past lives, in Mexico
during the 1985 earthquake, and for the story among all these characters to
begin unfolding. That story will appear before our very eyes, just as it appears
to her examiners, in the form of graphics that, using the conventions of visual
literacy texts such as comic strips, advance the story without the need for
words. As readers, we are suddenly transformed into participants of the
character's vivid experience, seeing and listening to what she does.
That brings us of course to the notion of using multimedia as part of a
literary work. As you may know, this work has been promoted as the first
multimedianovel.It is sold bundled up with the CD that includes eleven tracks
from genres as diverse as opera and Mexican danzdn.Coupled to the CD, the
novel includes six graphic narratives by the award-winning Spanish illustra-
tor Miguelanxo Prado that must be viewed while listening to specific musical
tracks, as cued by the author, in order to share the audiovisual experience
with the character.The graphics are always coupled to the classical pieces, all
taken from Puccini's operas (including MadameButterfly,Turandot,and Tosca),
and so are quite lyrical and tragic. The popular music tracks (five of them) are
intended to supply the reader with an intermission for dancing. In contrast to
the opera fragments, they are lively, and funny, and tend to relate to topics or
charactertraits that will appear in the next chapter.

The term "multimedia" as it pertains to this novel needs to be explained.

The term itself was coined to express how a combination of communication

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
28 Forum 2002

media, mostly audiovisual, could be used for entertainmentor education. When

speaking of multimedia, we tend to think of film, television, radio, and all the
interactive capacity of our beloved computers, be it through CD-Roms, DVDs,
or direct access to the Internet, that unite to create a fully-integrated "experi-
ence," as webmasters would say. These means of communication are linked
both by their method - the use of sight and sound resources - and by their
intended collective audience. In terms of their production, multimedia texts
make open texts even more open by assuming a sort of heteroglossia or mul-
tiple voices achieved through the use of text, images, and music. In its more
complex form, it requires a level of hypertextual thinking where images and
music add a second and third dimension to the text, relieving it from being a
potentially passive experience and turning it into a more interactive one. These
formal characteristicsallow and enable multiple readings and levels of inter-
pretation as well.
In this sense, we could say that Esquivel's experiment with these resources
is a remarkable, though not unprecedented, act of literary creation, even if it
does not reach the extreme of virtual novels that present us with a myriad of
reading alternatives. What I find more intriguing though is that creating the
new from a clear link to the past seems to permeate Esquivel's productions
and this novel in particular.We will see how the very notion of supporting
narrative with specific audiovisual links ties Esquivel's narrative to its cul-
tural context and gives the structure itself an organic quality very much in
keeping with its stated theme of harmony, balance, wholeness, and the fusion
of opposites. In the novel, the two main cultural contexts the story draws from,
the Aztec and the Spanish European, happen to share similar foundational
oral and visual literacy traditions. The medieval epic poems and early Renais-
sance narrative ballads, which were part of the cultural baggage of early six-
teenth-century soldiers, were either transmitted by nomadic jugglers who
would recite them accompanied by music or were part of popular lore passed
on orally from generation to generation. In the case of the Aztecs, a very abun-
dant poetic production of popular eloquence existed, treasured in the memory
and transmitted from parents to children. In this way, subjects ranging from
codes for a moral life and social conduct, religious myths and beliefs, to sto-
ries of past events were kept alive. Collective chanting, almost always accom-
panied by dancing, or the songs of a poet in a contest, both generally practiced
in the higher classes of society, were institutions as characteristicof Aztec so-
ciety as are our books, theaters, and social gatherings.
In terms of what was actually written or inscribed, both Aztec and Spanish
European cultures made use of visual images to support the abstract signs
that codified their language in such a way that they could be "read"or under-
stood by people who did not understand the original language of the speaker.

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Forum 2002 29

The Medieval and Renaissance codex, manuscripts, murals, and miniature

religious images find their counterparts in the examples of Aztec recitation
literacy that survived the destructive years of the conquest. These codices and
wall carvings and paintings were meant to be read aloud to audiences in a
public way. In the Aztec culture, the persons reading the glyphs would be
trained in their meaning, making the glyphs a kind of mnemonic device for
specially trained people. The codices could be unfolded and hung on a wall
and adepts could recount aloud to an audience what they contained. As Eliza-
beth Hill Boone has found: "TheAztec pictorial histories were read aloud to
an audience, they were interpreted, and their images were expanded and em-
bellished in the oration of the full story. The pictorial histories were painted
specifically to be the rough text of a performance [... . Those who read the
manuscripts had already memorized the histories, the stories, painted therein,
and they knew the discourses as familiar roads" (Boone 71). Sources such as
the Colloquies of the Twelve (1524) indicate that Aztec priests recitedthe cod-
ices; one of the CantaresMexicanosquotes a Nahuatl scholaras singing the pic-
turesofthe bookand makingthecodicesspeak(Boone);and the HistoriaChichimeca
describes how "philosophers and learned men [.. .] were charged with paint-
ing all the sciences they had discovered, and with teaching by memory all the
songs in which were embodied their scientific knowledge and historical tradi-
tions" ("Aztec books").
In terms of the actual format, with obvious differences, we can point out
parallels in the use of color, the use of pictures and writing, the division of
pages into sections by black or red lines, the fact that each page was intended
to be read from top to bottom and from left to right. In content, there is the
shared initial intention to educate, and to remind and preserve the collective
memory. Finally,in both cultures it will be found that these inscriptions evolve
and become the foundation for visual artistic expression.
To come back to Esquivel's text, it is clear that by using music to provide a
mnemonic aid for the character's search, by employing images to convey
meaning, and by having us share in that experience, Esquivel effectively in-
scribes her work as part of those traditions of the past that she explores the-
matically and emulates formally.
Tobegin with the book's graphics by Prado, though recognizable as part of
the contemporary comic strip tradition, they do follow some of the conven-
tions we have pointed out. They use color to bring out the starkness or the
magic of the subject depicted, in a sort of faded or muted way since these are
images of a regression to a past life. A technique that can be considered to
emulate the effect the passing of time has had on Aztec and Medieval art. The
book's graphics also divide the page and organize the visual narrationin simi-

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
30 Forum 2002

lar manner.And they depict acts of cruelty that tie them to many of the Aztec
human sacrifice representations,where blood spurts from wounds, as well as
to the Crucifixion of Christ and martyrdom of saints' depictions, some quite
gory as well. They convey symbolically, without words, a visual image of the
past that would have been lost otherwise. Esquivel and Prado interactedclosely
to bring forth these images, much as the scribes and artists of the past would
listen to the stories and try to recall them succinctly in their images. In this
case, Esquivel would tell or send Prado two or three sentences summarizing
the storyline. Then, he would bring forth a corpus of images to represent the
elements in the storyline, resorting to symbolic representation in some of the
elements, and then author and artist would get together to rework and final-
ize the strips. This collaborative act of creation is the link that locates this
production in the tradition of the past, where most texts were anonymous and
the product of collaboration.We know Esquivel and Prado of course, but what
we are dealing with here is the willingness to accept another person's vision,
to share the creative experience instead of placing it within the solitary space
of the ivory tower.
At the same time, the brutality these charactersinflict on each other is con-
veyed succinctly and quite forcefully by the images. It is undeniable that our
imagination is quite capable of providing the awful mental pictures to go with
words like rape, murder or child killing, but the author does her best to pro-
vide us not only with a description but with a concrete vision; she seems to be
saying: "This is what Azucena saw when she recalled that particular life, and
this is how I saw it too." At the same time, by including her own perspective,
not only Azucena's, Esquivel imposes what amounts to a third-person narra-
tive perspective to the images, and they can show us angles the characterwould
not have been able to see, like helicopters flying away after she has been killed,
for example (127).
In terms of the songs, personal collaboration is impossible of course, par-
ticularly for the opera fragments that carry the weight of meaning in the work.
However, it is undeniable that she has established a sort of dialogue with
Puccini by using only pieces of his work. Her use of dialogue can relate to the
recognition that Puccini's musical discourse is equivalent to the visual imag-
ery she brought forth with Prado, in its depiction of tragedy and human suf-
fering. Tied to this would be the notion of music in Aztec times. Music was
regarded as a communal rather than individual expression, and perhaps even
more important, Aztec music seems to have communicated in many instances
the same emotions to Indian and European audiences alike. Thus, "a sad song,
as the Aztec conceived it, was sad not only in the opinion of the Indians who
heard it and understood the words, but also in the opinion of the Spaniards

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Forum 2002 31

who heard it and did not understand the words"("Polifonia").In that sense,
the opera fragments from Puccini work in the same way: we may not know
the words but we can feel the feelings they convey.
Another parallel has to do with the function of music in this text. For
Esquivel, as for the Aztecs, music is one of the keys to memory. In her opinion,
when we listen to a particular musical piece, our consciousness is altered, our
souls "shaken," and our memories triggered to allow events from the past,
even those of past lives, to arise. So, by choosing these pieces, she in fact makes
us share in this experience with these people of the past, as well as with the
characterof Azucena in the present. And, since these fragments were chosen
because the feelings they conveyed were universal, their inclusion provides
the fusion she is aiming for. I should add that, at the same time, their lyrical
value provides a sort of buffer to the intense brutality of some of the illustra-
tions of rape, baby bashing, murder, impalement, and so forth.

By bringing forthAzucena's mental recollectionsin audiovisual, ratherthan

written, linguistic terms, art and music become more than aesthetic pursuits
and gain an ontological value - through these common sounds and visions
we all will reach an understanding of reality,of what is the ultimate substance
of this particularbeing - and a cosmological value, as the characterand reader
realize what Azucena's place is in the structure of the universe and why she
has been subjected to these travails. Eventually,Azucena embodies the quest
of every human being for self-discovery, for truth, for balance, for oneness,
and for love. And thus, thematically and structurally,the book will complete
this ultimate vision of the fusion of duality in its rousing finale: "Thezvoices
of
Nahuapoets chantedin unison with thoseof Spanishmonks"(255), and the Aztec
city of Tenochtitlanreappears and fuses with colonial Mexico City in a "unique
phenomenon"(255).
To conclude, I would like to share some last thoughts. Do I consider this
novel a harbinger of the end of Literature,as we know it? No. Words can and
do open up the reader to a world of senses and make him or her create audio-
visual images out of that which is proposed by the written text. However, we
should not discard the multimedia notion if it works, as it does here, as a
logical, plot-driven device that can actualize certain actions in the plot and
make them vivid and appealing for readers open to this non-traditional repre-
sentation. The transformation of culture in our last century and the present
has been fueled by new technologies, and we will have to learn how to inte-
grate them aesthetically because art and culture, very much like Esquivel's
work and like life itself, are dynamic concepts.

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
32 Forum 2002

Works Cited

"Aztec Books, Documents and Writing."Nahuatl section, TheAztecaWebPage.

12 October 2002. <http://www.azteca.net/aztec/nahuatl/writing.html>.
Badurino, Elizabeth. Rev. of TheLaw of Love,by Laura Esquivel. Rambles,a
Culturalarts magazine(1996). 2 October 2002. <http:/ /www.rambles.net/
esquivel_law.html>.
Boone, E. "Aztec pictorial records: writing without words." WritingWithout
Words.Ed. E. Boone. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 50-77.

Esquivel, Laura. TheLaw of Love.Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. New York:

Three Rivers Press, 1996.
Hassler, Peter. "Human Sacrifice among the Aztecs?" WorldPressReviewDec.
1992. 15 October 2002. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/4314/
aztec_sacrifice_index.html>.
"Polifonia mexicana virtual." OcarinaOriginators,1997 and 2001. 2 October
2002. <http:www.ocarina.demon.co.uk/Aztec2.html>.

Taggart,James M. Rev.of Myths ofAncientMexico,by Michael Graulich. Nahua

Newsletter 29.4. 12 October 2002. <http://ww.ipfw.edu/soca/
Nahua29.html>.

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:50:57 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions