La noche oscura del Niño Aviles (1984) by the Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá begins with an uncanny body: the title’s reference to Jose Campeche’s 1808 painting of a limbless child, his melancholic, suffering gaze transfixing the viewer. In the novel-the first of a tetralogy entitled Chronicle of New Venice– and its sequels, the child becomes a messianic figure and the eventual founder of Nueva Venecia, a fabulous utopian city built in the swamps and canals around San Juan and a refuge for maroons, rebels and outcast. Like the disturbing painting, the novel’s fabulations upset readerly expectations and project an uncanny alternate history, a phantasmagorical transfiguration of what never happened but which subsists in the historical unconscious as a nightmare. “Nueva Venecia became the dark reverso of our peaceful and respectable colonial history,” its invented historian Alejandro Cadalso summarizes. The novel’s conflictual styles pit a hyperbolic baroque (like its excessive use of the polysyndeton and profusion of demostratives) against anachronistic slang from the twentieth century, contamination the historical authority of colonial texts like those of Ledrú or Abbad y Lasierra with the unexpected and uncanny intrusion of the future. Finally the author has written of his creation itself as a product of hypergraphia-an uncanny automatism-whose “existence has left even me perplexed.” This intervention reads the novel’s uncanny bodies, uncanny fabulations, uncanny styles, and its uncanny coming to be as an emblem of Puerto Rico’s uncanny modernity. My project will culminate in a scholarly essay for eventual submission for publication to an academic journal dedicated to literary studies.
