O. Henry’s Novel Novel

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Guy Davenport.


     Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry’s only novel, is hardly a novel at all, but then his short stories are hardly short stories, either. Far from the “realism” widely practiced during his lifetime, O. Henry composed his work according to a structural standard which owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe’s use of abstraction and rhetoric more than to Flaubert's realism. Thus, his trademark surprise endings ignore plausibility, preferring the formal maneuver of an ironic reversal. His themes are trivial, often commonplaces or forgettable sentimental emotion, often nothing more than the most available idées reçues, yet his work is entertaining, carefully crafted, and presents a consistent and original vision.
     Cabbages and Kings is a collection of short stories, presented as narrations by various characters who play a role in the story. Their tales are bound not just by a common cast, setting, and narrative frame; the central issue, more a mental puzzle than a dramatic conflict, is resolved only at the end, when the medium changes from raconteur story-telling suddenly to motion pictures, at that time nearly new. Just to require more ingenuity of himself and his clever readers, the author has added an apparently adventitious correspondence to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Every addition is not so much part of a solution as it is a retarding of any solution at all. The author is a juggler whose audience gasps as he puts yet another object into the air.
     In the work as a whole one is never engaged by a central problem more momentous than a challenging crossword. One looks often in vain for psychological insight, absorbing specific detail, or moving emotion in O. Henry’s novel, often finding instead the most available and conventional thought. The same sort of patterning is observable on the smaller scale of the sentence. O. Henry’s favorite rhetorical device, the use of ironic semi-comic periphrasis, evident on every page of the novel, does not so much provide information useful for understanding as it makes wisecracks, abstracting the reader, making emotional identification unlikely, but allowing the intellectual delight of the author’s formal play. In both the work as a whole and a good many of its subsidiary units, the author is delaying the action, as one after another of the oddball characters take a turn, as throw-away one-liners fall this way and that from a marvelous almost hypnotic sparkler.
     It was such techniques that endeared the popular American author with the most advanced Russian Formalists. To critics such as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum [1], William Sydney Porter, who churned out stories for the market, almost four hundred before his death at forty-seven, who published a story a week in the New York World’s spectacularly illustrated Sunday Magazine for over a year, was a literary avant-gardist. The theorists of the revolutionary Soviet Union applauded a writer who used racist expression less for promulgating white supremacy than for simple convenience.
     Abstraction is characteristic of much comedy, in which the protagonist is viewed as flawed by the normative reader. Characters reduced to a single trait in the Theophrastian sense are familiar from Menander through Jonson to Neil Simon, and Cabbages and Kings can boast no psychological development or complexity. The authorial tone is consistently acceptance and warm amusement. The general run of locals are terminally soporific in the most familiar sort of tropical stereotype, [2] though their leaders combine a similar idleness with rapacious avarice and the capacity for violence. The expatriates of Anchuria are likewise capable of combining phenomenal laziness with terrific greed, but as outsiders they are a bit more cautious about hedging their bets.
     Every now and then what seems a point of principle intrudes, though it may in fact be nothing more than the occasional absurd demands of ego. Such “actions generated by core beliefs” such as “Beelzebub” Blythe’s conscientious refusal to blackmail someone who is standing him drinks or Carolus White’s inability to do a portrait to order that falls short of his artistic ideals are likely to seem more peculiar than principled. In general, though, this is a land in which everyone is out for number one. Their selfishness is a fact of nature, like the Vesuvio Fruit Company’s exploitative domination of the land.
     In a comedy like Cabbages and Kings no real harm can come to anyone, so the reader may simply relax and make the most of the passing drolleries. Though occasionally a death may be mentioned, the reader’s sympathy is never engaged in the least. The linkages of the various narratives only emerge in the conclusion, the reader having been pleasantly suspended until that point (stymied perhaps more by the unlikeliness of the plot as by its brilliance). As in a whodunit mystery, the point of the plot is to remain concealed until the conclusion.
     Apart from the broad and comely design of the whole, the strongest element in O. Henry’s novel is the wit and ingenuity of his richly comic periphrases. The prose regularly erupts in jokes released like a string of slightly damp firecrackers. Yet none of the jokes advances the story. Each acts to delay and distract the reader, passing time, running out the clock, until the final curtain.
     For example, the story proper begins by setting the scene, yet it is less a scene from nature than it seems a motif of a tropical shirt or perhaps a neon barroom fantasy. “Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.” With details like “vacuous” and “guarded” irrelevant except to underline misogynistic conventions, O. Henry entertains his readers while they await anything likely to launch a storyline. In this Margaritaville “the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.” (9) Since this world is satirical, the dancers must be “awkward” and the prima donna doubtless acts the role of a comically temperamental diva of the sort portrayed in Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor.
     In his role as consul John Atwood discusses with a pair of entrepreneurs their plan to introduce the phonograph to Anchuria. He warns them that the locals, being “simple-hearted children of nature” (73) might react in one of two ways. “They may become inebriated with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ or they will get excited and transpose the key of the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon.” (74) The series of moves, from the unlikely lexical choice of “inebriated” to the image of the Confederate officer, presumably apoplectic at hearing the Union anthem, then to the musical metaphor and the sudden rather Gothic axe and dungeon. It makes little sense – after all, both alternatives are hostile -- but it maintains an effervescent string of phrases, keeping the reader slightly off balance while suggesting the unpredictability of the plan.
     His method reliance on received ideas, in common with most comedy, is manifest. When Henry Horsecollar runs interference to free his own private co-conspirators from the threatening crowd of local conspirators by whom they are outnumbered, the rhetoric rises in a pyrotechnic display of racism.


"Then that cultured Red Man exhaled an arrangement of sounds with his mouth that made the Latin aggregation pause, with thoughtfulness and hesitations. The matter of his proclamation seemed to be a cooperation of the Carlisle war-whoop with the Cherokee college yell. He went at the chocolate team like a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter. His right elbow laid out the governor man on the gridiron, and he made a lane the length of the crowd so wide that a woman could have carried a stepladder through it without striking against anything." (83)


     Even the very opening term here is twisted to the point of dizziness. Horsecollar, who has seemed as sensible as anyone else in the story and more admirable than many, had been introduced to Mellinger as an “Injun. Tame Injun” (75) to indicate that his presence would be inoffensive. Yet in this critical moment the success of this “cultured Red Man” does not depend on his social suavity but rather on an altogether savage utterance wild enough to paralyze his antagonists. It is yet unclear to what extent their craven abashment is due to their being not quite white themselves, but a “Latin aggregation.”
     Racist bomblets continue to detonate in the following phrases. A Carlisle war whoop is a ironic reference to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the federal government’s most important Native American educational institution for forty years, whose goal was total assimilation to mainstream American culture under founder Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan "Kill the Indian: Save the Man." Then, in a reverse use of racist stereotypes, the “Cherokee college yell” makes an ironic comparison between an indigenous barbarian and an American college football fan. Somehow the careless use of racial pejoratives proceeds to proliferate out of control. The Latin Americans are christened “the chocolate team,” a belittling tag predicting their lack of resistance in the face of the masterful Horsecollar who himself is oddly equated to “a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter,” a phrase opening a nasty glimpse into nineteenth century Southern life (and into O. Henry’s readiness to make use of racist jocularity).
     O. Henry’s deft ear is attracted to such clichés and seeks sometimes to redeem them in better coin. To start the spin, a centuries-old proverb is put to the service of the most mercenary of interests: the Anchurian bureaucrats. “Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hand forever point to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.” (97) The reader can only sit back and watch as the author rings his changes on the topic of milk from the opening twist and the slyly pedantic slightly evasive “lacteal” through the effective image of graft and corruption as “milking time” to the dramatic climactic mention of “rich cream.”
     The national characteristics of Anchuria, while resting securely in racist stereotype, do convey some information about the Honduras that Porter came to know during his year residence there. The filibustering of private citizens and the neo-colonialism of the Vesuvio Fruit Company are indeed drawn from life. [4] The rapacious opportunism of individuals, institutions, and governments is a given, a subset really of the readiness of everyone in this fictional world to grab at the main chance. Meanwhile, though, until that big score arrives, all are satisfied with indolence, their ambitions daily delayed to make time for a drink and a sunset and some diverting conversation. In the last analysis, O. Henry’s theme is simple: “There is nothing doing now, let us tell a few stories before night falls.”
     Cabbages and Kings, indeed, may be said to be made up of such chatting. The experience of reading it offers pleasures not unlike those of the oysters as they enjoyed “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/ Along the briny beach.”


The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
   

     If the reader has been beguiled by the many conversations by the Coralian shore, as entertained, perhaps as the ingenuous mollusks, the denouement upon reaching the last page is not so final as theirs. To be devoured by O. Henry means no more than to relish passing a bit of time absorbed by the Vitagraphoscope [3] of his imagination.




1. See in particular the latter’s “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

2. Stereotypes may have their claims, of course. I recall entering more than one Nigerian office during the heat of the afternoon and finding half the workers dozing, heads on their desks.

3. The word Vitagraphoscope seems to be a neologism, perhaps compounding Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and sold by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Biograph, a film production and exhibition company founded by William Kennedy Dickson also in 1895. Dickson had broken from Edison.

4. Included in the long list of individual Americans (apart from U. S. military forces) who have meddled militarily in Latin America are William S. Smith, William Walker, William A. Chanler, Gregor MacGregor, and James Long. The Vesuvio corporation, of course, represents the United Fruit Company, which once dominated Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, leading to dictatorships of collaborators throughout the region and to such events as the violent repression of striking workers in Colombia in December of 1928 in which three thousand workers are thought to have been massacred.

Conservatism and Popular Art

     Popular art, which belongs to the masses either as oral literature and folklore or as mass commodified culture such as movies and television shows, might seem likely, to one who has not studied such work, to suggest progressive themes, voicing social protest and proposing reforms that would benefit most people. This is hardly the case. Indeed, popular art is most often quite conservative, siding with the status quo or with reactionary alternatives.
     Indeed, literature can sometimes encourage critical thinking about one’s preconceptions and can introduce or spread new ideas. To some the artist is thought even to occupy a privileged viewpoint, from which literary works may enrich their consumers’ knowledge of any subject, be it psychology, politics, indeed even theology. Yet surely the only field in which writers excel others is in the use of words. Further, when poems or stories do foreground their themes, by which I mean what they suggest is true about lived reality, they seek to reinforce the views readers already hold more often than they introduce new ones.
     Unsurprisingly the works that reinforce preexisting prejudices are in general not only more common but more popular (which comes to much the same thing) than those which challenge them. Traditional oral literature and modern works directed at a mass audience teach for the most part what is already accepted in a given culture while those which emphasize new ideas, ambiguity, and mystery, those which violate conventional thought, are characteristic of elite art consumed by only a few. This distinction by no means implies a value judgement. Beautiful poems and stories occur at either extreme of the spectrum and at any point along it, and the same may be said of failures.
     While it may be impractical as to provide adequate definitive support for such a grand generalization, evidence is ample. In the first place in traditional societies, in which all art is “popular,” which is to say, consumed by all people alike, the role of song and story is primarily and explicitly dogmatic. Rituals, folk-tales, indeed all genres, tend to transmit the assumptions of the past to each generation. The young are systematically taught how a man should behave, or a woman, or a child, what priests are capable of, what the animals have to tell people, and the secret meaning of the stars. Each young person learns the culture’s cosmology and ethics, not systematically but anecdotally, as it were, through the accumulation of lyrics and stories, forming in the end a coherent pattern.
     It is only in belated societies like our own that the artist is seen as a rebellious outsider, and people look to works of art for new ideas rather than those which have been accepted and validated over a long period of use.
     What is true of oral literature is largely duplicated by recent mass culture. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart were quite right to label Donald Duck a tool of imperialism. [1] Plots of the family situation comedies of the nineteen-fifties, shows such as Make Room for Daddy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave it to Beaver, are regularly based on minor conflicts or misunderstandings that test the strength of connubial love, parental authority, or other accepted norms, only to be resolved after twenty-two minutes of action with an emphatic reinforcement of social convention. In very much the same way, police and detective stories always concluded with retributive justice that reassures the viewer that all is basically right, the police do what they should, malefactors are punished, and, though a few bodies of the upright may fall in sacrifice along the way, the most important good people prosper in the end.
     With widespread literacy and the rise of middle-class leisure and lending libraries, Victorian fiction provides a useful field of data. Among those who enjoyed genuine popularity as well as critical acclaim during this period were Scott, Dickens, and Trollope. Each was prolific enough to record a detailed image of the society of his day. (It matters little that Scott wrote about earlier periods. The politics in his novels is always far more reflective of his own present time.) Each is profoundly conservative. While they were able to perceive social injustices in their own times, and to urge some measure of relief, none was able to imagine a systematic response to the evils of early capitalism.
     Sir Walter Scott was clear and consistent about his support for the status quo and his opposition to the reform movements of his day. He endorsed what E. P. Thompson called the myth of paternalism, trusting in the landed gentry to be the most wise and secure governing class. These would, due to their upbringing, recognize their obligations under the principle of noblesse oblige. Though more often in financial straits than comfortable affluence, he as a baronet was an active participant in local government as well as serving as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. To him the country gentleman is, as a part of the order of nature, "the natural protector and referee of the farmer and the peasant." [1] He considered that the Scots suffered less privation because of their benevolent landlords looked after them than laborers in the south where “accursed poor-rates” in fact oppressed those they aimed to assist. He blamed poverty and want not on an exploitative economic system, just then shifting from a feudal land-based aristocracy to an urban capitalist one, but rather to the loss of old ideals in a welter of “reforming mania.” [2]
     When his Toryism conflicted with his Scots nationalism, he chose conservatism over regional pride. In Old Mortality, for instance, the struggle of the Covenanters is represented as in part justified by the high-handed actions of rogue dragoons and by the claims of religious conscience, but he satirizes mercilessly the more militant leaders such as the fanatic preacher Habbakuk Mucklewraith and the violent John Balfour. Henry Morton is depicted as the reasonable moderate whose good will and common sense is far preferable to the extremists’ ideology and zeal. In fact, Morton has no quarrel with the better representatives of the crown. Conflict appears to be generated not by the order of society, but by its abuse, caused by bad actors in both parties.
     Scott’s most explicit comments on current events are perhaps in the anonymous pieces titled The Visionary (1819) in which he calls for a sort of reactionary popular front in which all patriots belong, all Britishers, in fact, but the wicked radicals. “All must unite now . . .in support of our existing laws and constitution, or all will be swallowed up in a ruthless despotism – a despotism that would soon crush all useful spirit.” He calls for all people of good will to “put a bridle on the jaws of the Leviathan multitude.” Rob Radical appears in a dream to destroy a noble house which, admittedly imperfect, was, like the system, yet grand and well worth preserving. To Scott radicals are “the wildest of untamed animals,” their representative a “half naked ruffian,” “rather brutal than human.” Though the poor are kindly offered makework by their benevolent betters, they remain ungrateful and unsatisfied until they have entirely ruined economic production through agrarian reform. The result is that “we have stirred up the cauldron so efficiently, that the dregs are now uppermost,” and the ignorant masses end by crowning an emperor.” Raising the specter of Napoleon seals Scott’s case.
     Dickens, the only one of the three who could be said to have endured at least some of the trials of the underclass, is generous with charitable feeling, to the deserving poor, at least. In fiction the convention of retributive justice guarantees that all will come out right in the end. Yet he portrays a revolution as a terrifying mob in Tale of Two Cities and the opportunities that magically open up for long-suffering lads such as Pip in Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield come by way of private charity: from Magwitch, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie, and Betsey Trotwood. While well aware of the horrors of the life of the poor in Victorian England, he was never receptive toward any of the numerous schemes to uplift them other than the benevolence attentions of the comfortable. The novel that most directly engages the working class movement is Hard Times in which all Dickens’ sympathy for the exploited workers, exemplified by the upright but tragically doomed Stephen Blackpool [3], does not lead to his sympathy for their cause. Blackpool’s antagonist in fact is the mendacious union organizer Slackbridge.
     Though never in danger of the factory work in which Dickens found himself at the age of twelve, Trollope, descended from landed gentry with a title of baronet descending to his cousins, felt himself in straitened circumstances until elevated by his popular success as an author. Yet never a hint enters his novels, many of them directly concerned with politics, that society would be well-served by fundamental changes. His model for social intervention in his own private practice of charity was Urania House, a “Home for Homeless Women” funded by heiress Angela Burdett Coutts. Though the institution, in which Dickens took a direct management role, was certainly more humane than the alternatives offered by the church and the state to assist “fallen women,” it today seems fatally paternalistic, with its emphasis on sewing and laundering, system of points and demerits, and the ultimate goal of the women’s emigration and marriage abroad. Urania House sought to ameliorate the harshest conditions for the most virtuous but never otherwise challenged society’s assumptions.
     When he stood for Parliament, it was as a Liberal, but in a district in which corruption so governed the outcome that he had no hope of winning, but only of proving his opponents’ criminality. Perhaps the clearest expression of Trollope’s political views is to be found in his account of this political foray in his Autobiography.in which, while conceding what he calls “terrible inequalities,” he still fears any “sudden disruption of society in quest of some Utopian blessedness.” He is obliged to take shelter behind the unassailable walls of religion, which one might here call the very last refuge of a scoundrel, saying that, while certain “enthusiastic but unbalanced minds” have been so bold as to imagine equality, they prove only by their efforts “how powerless they are in opposing the ordinances of the Creator.” Trollope’s conscientious Conservative, “being surely convinced that such inequalities are of divine origin, tells himself that it is his duty to preserve them.” After all “We do not understand the operations of Almighty wisdom” and are thus unable to understand “why so many, should have so little to make life enjoyable, so much to make it painful, while a few others, not through their own merit, have had gifts poured out to them from a full hand.” [4] Radical social reform was to him tantamount to blasphemy, and this conviction justifies his resistance to change while admitting the evils of pocket boroughs and all the other defenses of the old ruling class.
     It is precisely this sort of certainty that defines an ideal allowing popular writers to note the extent of people’s falling short. Often such a model rests more securely in the imagined past than a hypothetical future. Further, a work is more like to reach a mass audience if it may be rapidly understood with unambiguous meaning; such themes typically rely on fully formed codes of conduct. Because of the privileging of innovation, not to say idiosyncrasy, since the Romantics, it is necessary again to stress that popularity does not imply lesser value. The business of literature has always been equally to affirm preconceptions and to challenge them, often simultaneously.
     Such affinity of art with ambiguity reminds the critic that the rule associating popularity with conservative views is by no means absolute. Exceptions abound, in particular those cases in which what is accepted by a subculture is rejected by a majority. Thus bebop, rap music and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg may be both transgressive and “popular” with a well-defined audience. The ambivalence so frequently highlighted by art may at times make judgements less than straightforward. What effect do the words of the deceased Achilles in the Odyssey have on the valor of the hero in the Iliad when alive? Does Falstaff’s dismissive “there’s honour for you” make the honor of Hotspur and Henry IV (and the V) meaningless? Though popular art may be in intention conservative its reception and use may point in the opposite direction.
     The fact remains, however, that, though the more sophisticated of our own era make a hero of the rebel and the outsider, every society prescribes, indeed, enforces norms of behavior. The works which appeal to the greatest number will be quite naturally those representing a common denominator of belief, by definition then “conservative” in the fundamental sense of seeking to preserve and transmit standards. The system would be static, however, were it not that inscribed within every conclusion is a nagging doubt and within every daring proposal a warning against change.



1. See How to Read Donald Duck. Compare Shaan Amin’s “The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism” s in The Atlantic for Dec. 30, 2017. Amin details the racist and classist Hindu nationalism taught by popular Indian comic books.

2. Life of Napoleon.

3. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity, 68.

4. See in particular the chapter titled “Men and Brothers.”

5. Chapter XVI “Beverley.”

The Elasticity of Myth in “La Llorona”

The texts of “La Llorona” in versions sung by Chavela Vargas and Angela Anguilar follow the essay.


     In Guadalalajara a week ago, enjoying the Day of the Dead festivities which included numerous stages in the plazas with a variety of musical, dance, and theatrical productions, often featuring local amateurs, I halted my promenade at the sound of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, with a big voice, singing a powerful and passionate version of the classic “La Llorona.” Dressed casually, without makeup of either the glamour or skull-face variety, she captured her audience with the power of the old familiar song.
     The ranchera “La Llorona” is extremely popular in Mexico. It has been recorded many times by popular singers and continues to circulate in folk performance. Also widely known in the American Southwest, its soulful tune is as well perhaps the Spanish-language song most familiar to English speakers after “La Cucaracha” and “Cielito Lindo.” Those innocent of its language may have heard the tune in Julie Taymor’s popular film Frida and their children will remember it from the Disney studio’s Coco.
     A dramatic performance enacting La Llorona is annually presented on Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco in a production that advertises itself with the line “our nation was born from the tears of La Llorona.” [1] In Paz’s seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude La Llorona is an intermediate figure between the perfection of Mary, the immaculate mater dolorosa, and the treachery of la Malinche, Cortés’ Aztec mistress and translator. In the first identity she is the “long-suffering” Mexican mother celebrated on Mother’s Day, while in the second she is not so much wicked as chingata, “screwed.” Paz declares that all Mexicans are “hijos de la Chingada,” adding “when we shout this cry on the fifteenth of September, the anniversary of our independence, we affirm ourselves in front of, against and in spite of the ‘others.’”
     The story of La Ilorona appears in many forms and with widely varying implications. Its roots in pre-Columbian legend and its parallels around the world are extensive and significant, but not the present focus. The plot elements most commonly included may be briefly summarized. La Llorona is fundamentally the woman who has had the worst experience imaginable. Her lover, with whom she has borne children, is unfaithful to her. Often the two are racially distinguishable, with the woman an india or mestiza and the man whiter. In fury, the woman drowns her children and then, falling into despair at this act, she compounds her sin by committing suicide. She has lost salvation as well as romantic and maternal love. For her monstrous crimes, she is condemned to weep and search for her children, often snatching those who are not her own. If she is a bogeyman to the little ones, she is said also to be a siren who exacts her insatiable revenge against men by luring them to destruction through her beauty and pitiable cries.
     Even that basic narrative, which is subject to a great deal of variation in the songs, stories, poems, plays, and films of La LLorona, may generate a markedly broad range of thematic territory. A simple list of those most prominent tensions and conflicts her story evokes would have to include the following.


1. maternal love
2. male/female power relations in general
3. sexual love
4. fidelity to the church
5. racial inequality
6. national identity
7. the use of violence
8. fear of the female


     Other possibilities lurk within the same material. For instance in recent decades horror movies such as American Michael Chaves' The Curse of La Llorona have reduced La Llorona to a monster ultimately destroyed by the hero. [2] While the popular cinema represented one group of reactions to the story, scholarly journals produced another, often featuring feminist revisions. [3]
     Yet surely the context in which the story most belongs is neither the movie theater nor the university library, but within the family, either as a cautionary figure with which to frighten (and thrill) the young or in songs, either on recordings or performed by amateurs influenced by those same recordings. An examination of two versions of the song, one by senior diva Chavela Vargas, originally from Costa Rica, a longtime street singer and reputed lover of Frida Kahlo and the second by Angela Anguilar, a teenager born in Los Angeles, will suggest the elasticity of the La Llorona myth and a remarkable thematic elasticity born of underdetermination.
     As in most original texts bearing mythic material, “La Llorona” in both Vargas’ and Anguilar’s versions proceeds with oblique references rather than a linear narrative. Vargas opens by intensifying the complaint of betrayal by adding the issue of racial identity to that of gender. In a turn reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, [4] she says she is called “el negro,” while she herself adds “negro pero cariñoso,” thus projecting a suspicious or hostile social set [5] and asserting her own value. (The word “pero,” of course, acknowledges that a swarthy complexion is regarded as a deficiency.) With the liquid sounds of her name ringing in the background like the continuous soft wail of suffering humanity, La Llorona is pitched on the restless seas of love, her position imperiled by the envy of others and her vulnerable position as a woman and as a person (in some sense) of color.
     She lingers luxuriously, the listener may think, even seductively, on her appeal in the second verse in which a parallel self-description; she is “picante pero sabroso” “como el chile verde.” Here the woman draws on the archaic association of females with the vegetative earth, identifying herself with a favored New World food. The definitions of picante range from a simple “tasty,” through “hot spicy,” to “racy” and “naughty,” adding a note of adventure and danger, deepened as before, by the plangent word “Llorona,” breaking repeatedly on the shore of every verse.
     Verse three delivers on that promise of danger with an opening cri de coeur from the depths “ay de mí,” succeeded by the liquid sounds of the river water washing over a sinking object “llorona, llorona, llorona,” and then the chilling request, “lévame al río.” No longer offering herself as an exotic love object, she is consumed with sorrow and either seeking her drowned children in the river or wishing to end her own days there. On the other hand, though, she may, like the Sirens, a number of medieval faeries, or the faux-folk Lorelei be luring some man to his doom in the waters of dissolution.
     The speaker has turned suddenly from seduction to pathetic appeal. Her spectral cold intensifies her despair and devastation as she pitiably requests the favor of a blanket as though just a bit of warmth could relieve her. ”Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona,/ porque me muero de frío.” Having by her acts exiled herself from romantic, parental, and divine love, she can do little but wail.
     This touching plea is then reinforced by the central image of the song. The singer cannot say why, but the very flowers of the cemetery seem to be weeping with her as they sway in the breeze. The entire world is mourning.


No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando


     Following this poignant example of the pathetic fallacy which enwraps everything in the singer’s grief, Vargas then decrescendos with the repetition of the verses about the river and the rebozo. In the whole of the song the listener has heard nothing about any of the events of the story: the unfaithfulness of the lover, the death of the children, and the suicide of the mother. The emotion itself is foregrounded, naked of circumstance, yet traces remain, for those competent in the myth, of each of the themes inherent in the plot.
     A generation of two later Anguilar’s recording of “La Llorona” provides evidence of the song’s perennial popularity, and its words are largely, though not wholly, the same as Vargas’s. Her youthful voice, like that of the child I heard in the Guadalajara plaza, suggests that the harrowing experience of La Llorona is part of the prudential instruction that women must understand as they attain maturity. While Vargas’s version is, except for the repeated “llorona,” spoken by La Llorona herself, Anguilar’s assumes the voice of the man, admiring the lady as she leaves church. His appreciation for her beauty, amounting almost to the glory of the Virgin, is, with delicate taste, attributed to her huipil (the use of the indigenous term for the garment emphasizes the woman’s identity as an Indio). The association with the divine is reinforced by his confidence that “la virgen te creí,” (“the Virgin believes you”) and the need for the Virgin’s sympathy – the horrific murders of her children – is only heightened in drama for being unstated.
     With the heartfelt exclamation “ay de mí” Anguilar then evokes the weeping flowers, in her lyrics, not said to be in the churchyard, but rather “campo lirio” (“a field of lilies”) again recalling the Song of Songs. [6] In the tones of a Troubadour declaring the laws of love, the next verse equates love and suffering, paradoxically suggesting by the use of the term “martirio” (“martyrdom”) that her passion and pain have a penitential or redemptive quality.
     The description of the flowers which seem to weep as they are blown in the wind of fate and the request to go to the river and to be covered by a rebozo follow in very nearly the same words as in the earlier version of the song. Yet in a curious oscillation, since the persona had been the man from the start of Anguilar’s rendition, it seems now unclear who is suffering the cold and seeking as a last resort the waters of dissolution. The rebozo is, after all, a woman’s garment. Is the man villain or victim? Is the woman a traitor or the one betrayed? The formal dance of the figuration makes all of these possibilities available without insisting on any.
     More broadly, the performed versions support all the potential themes, and their signification is the more exact and precise for its economy. The mention of a few concrete specifics, when delivered with the power and depth of Vargas, Anguilar, or the anonymous young heiress of tradition I heard in Guadalajara, is sufficient to trigger access to profound emotion with psychological, religious, and political reverberations spreading ever outward.
     The glimpse of a woman’s garment, the swaying of flowers in a breeze, such details are here not atoms in the random drift of quotidian life, but rather the entry points into a mythic and visionary system built to order and interpret experience. On this framework are displayed and tested such axes of struggle as that between lovers or between an individual and the state. The story of La Llorona reflects the capacity for violence in humankind. But the most enduringly memorable sound of all is the sobbing of La Llorona, a lament at once for self, for family, for community, a complaint in the end at the all-but-impossible demands of simply being alive. We all weep together.



1. Though the phrase is quoted a good many times on the internet, I was unable to locate its source prior to the History Today article titled “The Wailing Woman” by Amy Fuller dated October 31, 2017.

2. This describes the treatment in the American film The Terror of La Llorona by Eric Elias Flores, released in 2019. Other film versions include Peón’s 1933 Mexican version La LLorona, the 1961 Mexican film The Curse of the Crying Woman by Rafael Baledón, and a Guatemalan La Llorona in 2019 by Jayro Bustamante.

3. One sample of such work is Jacqueline Doyle, “Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’" Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1996), pp. 53-70.

4. “I am black, but comely.” Song of Songs I:5. In the thicket of Jewish and Christian commentary on this passage, the color is sometimes thought to suggest that the bride is Pharoah’s daughter or, alternatively and in contrast, that she has rustic origins. Symbolically the darkness has been associated with sin or physicality and with Israel’s condition in the wilderness.

5. Similar to Catullus 5 with the censure expected from the “senum severiorum” or Troubadour songs with their hostile and gossipy “jealous ones.”

6. Song of Songs, 2, 1–2. The plant in the second verse, is rendered as “lily” in many translations, including the King James, though the identification of the plant, which here seems to be red, has been disputed. Due to a close association with Mary, the white lily, the Lilium candidum has since the Middle Ages been popularly known as the Madonna lily.



Chavela Vargas 1961

Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso
Todos me dicen el negro, llorona
Negro pero cariñoso

Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso
Yo soy como el chile verde, llorona
Picante pero sabroso

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío

No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo
No sé qué tienen las flores, llorona
Las flores del campo santo

Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando
Que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona
Parecen que están llorando

Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río
Ay de mí, llorona, llorona, llorona
Llévame al río

Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío
Tapame con tu rebozo, llorona
Porque me muero de frío


Angela Anguilar 2018

Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.
Salías de un templo un día, Llorona,
cuando al pasar yo te vi.

Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.
Hermoso huipil llevabas, Llorona,
que la virgen te creí.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona,
Llorona de un campo lirio.

El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.
El que no sabe de amores, Llorona,
no sabe lo que es martirio.

No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.
No sé qué tienen las flores, Llorona,
las flores de un camposanto.

Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.
Que cuando las mueve el viento, Llorona,
parece que están llorando.

Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.
Ay de mí Llorona, Llorona
Llorona llévame al río.

Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.
Tápame con tu rebozo, Llorona,
porque me muero de frío.