This chapter examines the erosion of Helen of Troy’s long-standing cultural authority as the hegemonic model of female beauty, tracking how her image was both amplified and destabilized in twentieth-century media, literature, and performance. Through three interlinked movements, the chapter traces the shifting conditions that eroded the visibility, integrity, and symbolic centrality of the Helenic body in the twentieth century. Section 7.1, The End of Hegemony, analyzes how the rise of photography and cinema reconfigured representational hierarchies, making iconic visibility more widely accessible. While early Hollywood adapted Helen’s body to suit its visual economy—favoring light skin and philhellenic Euro-Greek physiognomies that aligned with Anglo-American ideals—concurrent visual cultures in Latin America began to elevate other non-white bodies. Photographic archives in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru gave unprecedented visibility to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestiza women, often in civic or revolutionary contexts that positioned them as agents of national modernity. These developments signaled not merely a diversification of iconic forms but the loosening of the West’s representational hold. Section 7.2, Fragmented Discourses, Dismembered Bodies, turns to the adoption of disjecta membra aesthetics in twentieth-century poetry and its implications for the lyric body. This aesthetic, which foregrounds the use of fragmented body parts, discontinuous syntax, non-conventional punctuation—including, in many cases, its complete removal—and recursive structures, is deployed in the work of Ana María Martínez Sagi and Alejandra Pizarnik to articulate dissimilar experiences of war, exile, non-conforming sexualities, and psychic fracture. These poets abandon the premise of bodily or lyric coherence, favoring instead a poetics of splintering that no longer pursue iconicity as reified whole. The resulting lyric subject is not merely fragmented but structurally unable to assemble itself within any stable visual or textual economy. In this context, Helen’s form—not just her myth—is rendered obsolete, as the aesthetic of disjecta membra refuses the very legibility upon which her iconic power relied. Section 7.3, Drunk on the Ramblas, concludes the chapter with a study of Miguel del Arco’s Juicio a una zorra (2011), a theatrical monologue in which Helen reappears, stripped of glamour, symbolic capital, and beauty. Performed by Carmen Machi, this Helen delivers a bitter, self-aware account of her cultural fate, framed less as a defense than as a final reckoning. Helen’s demand for oblivion—“reclamo el olvido”—signals a decisive rupture with the broader rhetorical conditions that enabled her to function as an icon. Her figure becomes unmoored from both narrative and visual scaffolding, collapsing under the weight of accumulated distortions and interpretive violence. Taken together, these three sections articulate the conditions under which Helen’s icon begins to dissolve: first through the proliferation of alternative bodies in the visual archive; then through the dismantling of the lyric form itself via disjecta membra aesthetics; and finally through Helen’s own enunciative severance in a theatrical space that offers no restitution.

Drunk on the Ramblas: Helen Is Dead—Long Live Helen! By Way of Conclusion

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发表日期：

2025年

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Osvaldo Cleger

摘要

This chapter examines the erosion of Helen of Troy’s long-standing cultural authority as the hegemonic model of female beauty, tracking how her image was both amplified and destabilized in twentieth-century media, literature, and performance. Through three interlinked movements, the chapter traces the shifting conditions that eroded the visibility, integrity, and symbolic centrality of the Helenic body in the twentieth century. Section 7.1, The End of Hegemony, analyzes how the rise of photography and cinema reconfigured representational hierarchies, making iconic visibility more widely accessible. While early Hollywood adapted Helen’s body to suit its visual economy—favoring light skin and philhellenic Euro-Greek physiognomies that aligned with Anglo-American ideals—concurrent visual cultures in Latin America began to elevate other non-white bodies. Photographic archives in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Peru gave unprecedented visibility to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and mestiza women, often in civic or revolutionary contexts that positioned them as agents of national modernity. These developments signaled not merely a diversification of iconic forms but the loosening of the West’s representational hold. Section 7.2, Fragmented Discourses, Dismembered Bodies, turns to the adoption of disjecta membra aesthetics in twentieth-century poetry and its implications for the lyric body. This aesthetic, which foregrounds the use of fragmented body parts, discontinuous syntax, non-conventional punctuation—including, in many cases, its complete removal—and recursive structures, is deployed in the work of Ana María Martínez Sagi and Alejandra Pizarnik to articulate dissimilar experiences of war, exile, non-conforming sexualities, and psychic fracture. These poets abandon the premise of bodily or lyric coherence, favoring instead a poetics of splintering that no longer pursue iconicity as reified whole. The resulting lyric subject is not merely fragmented but structurally unable to assemble itself within any stable visual or textual economy. In this context, Helen’s form—not just her myth—is rendered obsolete, as the aesthetic of disjecta membra refuses the very legibility upon which her iconic power relied. Section 7.3, Drunk on the Ramblas, concludes the chapter with a study of Miguel del Arco’s Juicio a una zorra (2011), a theatrical monologue in which Helen reappears, stripped of glamour, symbolic capital, and beauty. Performed by Carmen Machi, this Helen delivers a bitter, self-aware account of her cultural fate, framed less as a defense than as a final reckoning. Helen’s demand for oblivion—“reclamo el olvido”—signals a decisive rupture with the broader rhetorical conditions that enabled her to function as an icon. Her figure becomes unmoored from both narrative and visual scaffolding, collapsing under the weight of accumulated distortions and interpretive violence. Taken together, these three sections articulate the conditions under which Helen’s icon begins to dissolve: first through the proliferation of alternative bodies in the visual archive; then through the dismantling of the lyric form itself via disjecta membra aesthetics; and finally through Helen’s own enunciative severance in a theatrical space that offers no restitution.