Jana Carter
October 25, 1999
English 598
Como Agua Para Chocolate

Laura Esquivel's first novel Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate) has gained extreme popularity, popularity perhaps reliant on its presence as a work out of the tradition of Latin American Magical Realist fiction. The plot of the novel explores the ins and outs of love and family in pre and post revolutionary Mexico, presenting wildly unusual events as a family history. 

The story seemingly rests on a triumvirate of female archetypes.  The whore, the witch, and the mother are the three principal actors, although the roles are shared by various characters at various times.  This arrangement works well with the structure of the family in the book.  The family consists of a widow and her three daughters.  Although the family grows and shrinks through attrition, birth, and death, these four characters trail throughout the bulk of the piece.  Doña Elena, matriarch of the De la Garza family, is the first mother character introduced.  Outwardly she is strict and prim.  She abides by tradition, follows her expected role, and rules with an iron fist. 

Gertrudis is prompted to run off with a revolutionary in a fit of steamy delirium.  Her blatant and forthright sexuality and sensuality in light of Catholic sensibilities leads her to occupy the role of the whore.

Rosamunda, throughout the story, plays the role of the witch.  She marries her sister's love, mistreats her daughter--fully intending her daughter to be her caretaker as she grows older--and abounds with general bad karma.  She in effect denies Tita the love of her life, and then goes on to torment her further.

Tita, the youngest daughter and the protagonist of the story, goes through several roles.  She is a whore for carrying on an affair with her elder sister's husband, Pedro, and she is a mother when she acts as a wet nurse for her sister's child.  Like the other characters, she resists these archetypes throughout the story.

Interestingly, the resolution following the conflicts in the book has to do with dispelling these archetypes.  Tita discovers Doña Elena's aesthetic is a facade--she's had an affair with another man and Gertrudis is the evidence of her failure.  Doña Elena's humanity comes out through her hypocrisy.  She's lived a life parallel to Tita's, and in that's there's resolution.  Similarly, Gerturdis shows her mettle when she becomes a captain in the revolutionary army.  She is not the whore as presumed, but instead she is an assertive and politically aware woman--a woman for the 20^th century (and the new latina woman), again, resisting the archetype she was assigned.  Also, Rosamunda shows her resistance to strict classification when she relents from her usual condemnation of Tita's a Pedro's relationship, showing her humanity through asking her sister to help cure her flatulence and halitosis.

The story begins just before the birth of Tita, the protagonist. Tita, as an unborn child, is so sensitive to the onions being cut in the kitchen that she cries and cries.  The family cook, although half deaf, is able to hear her without trying (Esquivel 3). From this moment the audience begins to have an awareness of the literary tradition of which this book belongs. Esquivel juxtaposes a traditional reality--one where unborn children can't be heard--with the life her characters go on to live--one in which seemingly all things are possible.

As with all translations, there is something lost from the original once the translation is complete.  This book suffers the same, although this translation is fairly well done.  One of the most striking moments in the original, and in the film, comes near the end of the book and relies on the same matter-of-factness that floats the other "impossible" events.  After the wedding of Esperanza and Alex, and after the passion inspiring chiles, Tita and Pedro are finally left alone and finally able to make love freely.  Tita, on the verge of climax, "check[s] her passion" (Christensen 238).  She remembers something John had said to her:               

If a strong emotion suddenly lights all the candles we carry inside ourselves, it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin.  The soul longs to return to the place it came from, leaving the body lifeless. (Christensen 238)

In the original, John's wisdom comes across differently.  Quite literally, he says,  . . . before our eyes appears a splendid tunnel that shows us the path that we forgot at birth, and that calls us to find our lost divine origin (Esquivel 245).  Here the translators take the liberty of modifying the original language to approximate something with which the readership could identify: worn out language.  Show us the path becomes show us the way.  The Christian imagery in the original are already overt, but the translation puts it in no uncertain terms, drawing from clichés common to popular theology: the bright light, the concept of a tunnel, etc.

            Shortly after, there is another similar moment when the translation does not fully represent the original text.  Tita, after identifying that Pedro has died and that she will not be able to live without him, Tita decides to do something about it.  She dons the coverlet she has knitted (the translation reads woven) and decides to meet up with Pedro in this tunnel of light that John has described.  She takes a box of candles and she begins to eat them.  Tita reasons that "she needed to have plenty of fuel in her body" (Christensen 239).  In the original, she reasons that she must have plenty of phosphorus, or many paper matches, in her body.  The original plays with the words for match and candle.  In Esquivel's text it becomes clear at this point that Tita's intent to start a fire within herself is literal as well as figurative.  I'm not sure that that translation makes that distinction, however, it does pick up the slack a few lines later, saying that each "when the candle she chewed made contact with the torrid images she evoked, the candle began to burn" (Christensen 239).  The reader of the original text may have a better sense of what is going to happen earlier through the type of language Esquivel chooses to use.  This gives the reader a better sense of the characters' intentions.   Because there is a rationale for Tita to eat the matches, it may not seem to be so extraordinary that she would choose to do so.  Without this sort of rationale, I'm not sure it is clear to a reader of the translation exactly what is going on.

At moments like this the screenplay and film version of the book may act as a neutral ground between the original and the translation.  The narration, like in the two print versions of the text, overshadows the action, but the visuals provided by the film allow the reader to get a clear sense of how the director, if not the writer, read or recreated the text.

The 1992 film version of Like Water launched Mexican film and magical realism into the mainstream of American culture.  The film, with the screenplay written by Esquivel, and directed by her husband at the time, Alfonso Arau, became "the largest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States" (www.randomhouse.com).  The film received fair reviews, gaining accolades from national critics.  Leonard Maltin's review labeled the film, and the story, a "sumptuous fable--not without humor . . ." (seattle.sidewalk.com).  Esquivel was labeled a dream weaver and gained quite a following after this release which further popularized a romantic version of Mexican culture.

Esquivel's reception after her first success wasn't nearly as warm.    The release of her second book, The Law of Love, pigeonholed Esquivel as a popular one hit wonder.  Titles of reviews for this second novel range anywhere from "Like baloney for literature," to "Warm fuzzy fantasy spoiled by hairy metaphysics" (infoweb.newsbank.com).  Expecting the same fairy tale format--"A tall-tale, fairy-tale, soap-opera romance, Mexican cookbook and home-remedy handbook all rolled into one . . ."(review on back of jacket, San Francisco Chronicle)--both reviewers and readers were resistant to her experimentation with a multimedia format.  Although this work was just as innovative as the last, the fairy tale that the public expected didn't come to fruition, and didn't achieve the same popular success as the film and book version of her other work. 

The implications for a Latin American presence in popular literature or film are clear.  The text, although wonderfully innovative, and was after all a foreign film.  I would argue that although the reviews were good, they did their part to reinvent the otherness of Mexican culture: the presentation of Gertrudis' band of revolutionaries works to reinforce the stereotypes of Mexicans as politically disorganized, drunken incompetents; and John, the Great White Savior, rescues Tita from her emotional distress, and reinforces that Mexicans, and women, sometimes need to be saved.  All of the reviews I read of the book and of the film insisted upon its difference--its richness and fullness.  I agree that this text is incredibly rich, but I would be cautious to draw conclusions about cultural differences based on a 1hour 53 minute experience or a translation complete with authorial bias.   

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