Abstract
This article proposes an interpretation of Estella in Three Trapped Tigers as a marginal figure of the Cuban literary canon. Whereas for Lorenzo García Vega, the canon consisted of the mother-militia woman polarity, Cabrera Infante’s character is a nocturnal protagonist who disregards both the Origenist maternal domesticity and the revolutionary warmongering. The narrator Códac characterizes Estella through her oceanic voice and monstrous body; her presence operates as an initiation to a kind of abysmal listening in the narrator. Playing with Paul Ricoeur’s concept of recognition, Wolfgang Kayser's theory of the grotesque, and Roland Barthes's typology of listening, “Ella cantaba boleros” (“She Sang Boleros”) is interpreted as a parodic transformation of the epic narrative mode. Survival occurs through novelesque memory, the matrix of the narration. Estella is a synecdoche of a vanishing Havana.
Keywords:
Cabrera Infante; grotesque; listening; Cuba