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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