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26

E

UR

A

MERICA

Anna’s articulation of the country always stuck in the

morning is coterminous with the arrival of modern technology in

urban everyday life. Rosca presents the moment of change by

means of turning Clarissa’s domestic management into a densely

lived moment, when she is ready to use the electric stove for the

first time: “she had the plug in her hand and was inching it toward

the wall socket when she felt a most unnatural silence fall on the

house, light itself turning diaphanous, and everything

wall,

kitchen counter, window, and sink

was suddenly bathed in a

nacreous shimmer, so that Clarissa thought she had awakened into

a dream moment,

a moment filled with this presence

, a presence

that stood behind her and watched as her hand advanced, pulled

back, advanced again . . .” (Rosca, 1988:

328; emphasis added).

This moment of intensive, almost electric connectivity to the

environment precedes the incident in which Anna, the child Luis

Carlos left behind to be brought up by Clarissa while he is away on

a journey of self-exile, suddenly bursts into language after many

years of silence. Here we have Clarissa

the plain-looking,

ordinary housewife who has been on the sideline of the major plot

development

moving into the zone of proximity with her

environment and serving as the conduit of modernity. The trivial

detail of plugging the electric stove stands out as a tremendous

experience of living in the density of the moment, which connects

one with the forces of historical change in a corporeal manner.

While Clarissa is affected by this dream-like moment of change in

everyday life, her affect of amazement becomes affecting. The gulf

between the life-world of Clarissa and that of Anna is dissolved,

and the two bodies enter a new relationship in which Clarissa,

affected by the social milieu of modern innovation, is able to reach

out and affect Anna, pushing the latter into speech act and social

life. Articulation on Anna’s part appears to be the outcome of the

force relations between technology, memory and the surrounding

of family. Her observation of the nation as stuck in the morning

stages her arrival as an alternative subject of history charged with