Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T11:28:07.617Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Working Through the Archive: Trauma and History in Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dean Franco
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 2 , March 2005 , pp. 375 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.Google Scholar
Bottalico, Michele. “Illness in Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues.” Cuadernos de literatura inglesa y norteamericana 5.1–2 (2002): 64–73.Google Scholar
Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: State U of New York P, 2000.Google Scholar
Boyarin, Jonathan. Thinking in Jewish. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Google Scholar
Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998.Google Scholar
Bruce-Nova, Juan. Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory, and History. Houston: Arte Publico, 1990.Google Scholar
Calderón, Héctor, and José David Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981.Google Scholar
Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Cypress, Sandra Messinger. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. Austin: U of Texas P, 1991.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Prenowitz, Eric. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. Juneteenth. Ed. John, F. Callahan. New York: Vintage, 1999.Google Scholar
Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth; Inst. of Psycho-analysis, 1973. 239–58.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander. “Introduction: Ethnicity-Ethnicities-Literature-Literatures.” PMLA 113 (1998): 19–27.Google Scholar
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996.Google Scholar
Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda. “Caras viejas y vino nuevo: Journey through a Disintegrating Barrio.” Lattin 289–97.Google Scholar
González Echevarría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gurpegui, José Antonio, ed. Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, Future Perfect. Tempe: Bilingual Rev., 1996.Google Scholar
Gutiérrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrera-Sobek, María. “Epidemics, Epistemophilia, and Racism: Ecological Literary Criticism and The Rag Doll Plagues.” Bilingual Review / La revista bilingüe 20 (1995): 99–108.Google Scholar
Islas, Arturo. The Rain God: A Desert Tale. New York: Avon, 1984.Google Scholar
Jiménez, Francisco, ed. The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature. New York: Bilingual / Bilingüe, 1979.Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.Google Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Lattin, Vernon E., ed. Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey. Binghamton: Bilingual / Bilingue, 1986.Google Scholar
Limón, José. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican American Social Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
López-Lozano, Miguel. “The Politics of Blood: Miscegenation and Phobias of Contagion in Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues.” Aztlán 28.1 (2003): 39–73.Google Scholar
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCracken, Ellen. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. The Brick People. Houston: Arte Público, 1992.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. Caras viejas y vino nuevo. Mexico City: Moritz, 1975.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. Personal interview. 6 June 1998.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. The Rag Doll Plagues. Houston: Arte Püblico, 1992.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. Reto en el Paraíso. Tempe: Bilingual Rev., 1997.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. La verdad sin voz. Mexico City: Moritz, 1979.Google Scholar
Morales, Alejandro. Waiting to Happen. San José: Chusma, 2001.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Viet. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ozick, Cynthia. The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Knopf, 1987.Google Scholar
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Trans. Kemp, Lysander. New York: Grove, 1962.Google Scholar
Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, ed. Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Durham: Duke UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001.Google Scholar
Rapaport, Herman. “Archive Trauma.” Diacritics 28.4 (1998): 68–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosales, Jesús. La narrativa de Alejandro Morales: Encuentro, historia, y compromiso social. New York: Lang, 1999.Google Scholar
Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.Google Scholar
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.Google Scholar
Sommers, Joseph, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1979.Google Scholar
Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000.Google Scholar
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar