Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Body Movement: Transgression And Difference in Pasto Verde [Green Grass] by Parmenides Garcia Saldaña
Department
Modern Languages & Literatures
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2011-2012
Abstract
Parmenides Garcia Saldaña one of the least remembered novelists in contemporary Mexican literature. Pasto verde [Green Grass, 1968] is a highly experimental text in which the protagonist, Epicuro Aristipo Quevedo Galdós del Valle Inclan, is a "shaggy" rebel who smokes marijuana and steadily moves across Mexico City using its "Peter Pan boots." These sudden shifts confuse the reader since they are inserted into a narrative in constant motion because it plays with the narrator, the language and confuses reality with dreams. This paper analyzes the role of movement in the novel from its relation to the body, as movement stands as an affront to the system, particularly the middle class and patriarchal ideology, which constrains the body. Thus, the movement becomes a performance of the difference, as the text breaks up dominant discourses including gender: the long hair and unkempt appearance of Epicuro are worth him the title of a person of "the other side" (a homosexual). Thus, in Pasto verde [Green Grass], body and language are part of a movement that reveals the cracks in Mexican revolutionary discourse of national unity in the late 60's.
Conference Name
XVII Congreso de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea
Conference Location
El Paso, TX
ScholarWorks Citation
Fortes Gonzalez, Mayra, "Body Movement: Transgression And Difference in Pasto Verde [Green Grass] by Parmenides Garcia Saldaña" (2011). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 225.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/225
