Diana Princess of Wales: The Myth that we Needed
but to force their secret, not only to be loved by them,
but to be fatal to them...
the art of making disappear the other.
That demands a whole ceremonial"
Jean Baudrillard
In order to Diana become a myth so quickly (for me is a fact, not a presage), it was needed that once again, ending the millennium, we find ourselves, all together, facing the same pain. Quickly a myth, quickly legendary, as may be expected in this moment, when history goes with a quick rhythm, in the cold and wise cables of the postmodernity: the INTERNET, in the screens bombarded by CNN twenty-five hours per day, the eight days of the week, in the two thousand publications which we have access per minute, in messages that were sent to us only one second ago from the most remote regions, and are already arriving to our house through the fax or the e-mail, and in the alive programs produced by BBC of London for the whole world. Monroe, James Dean and Che Guevara needed more time than Diana has taken in order to be converted in the last myth of this torrid century. That's why I don't agree with Elton John and his beautiful and anachronic lyrics for his new version of the song written for Norma Jean a while back: "your candle's burned out long before, your legend ever will." The candle of the princess still lit, and her legend already is.
In accordance to Jean Francois Lyotard, in the postmodern condition, with the presupposed progress of the science and the technology, the narration has lost its perfunctors: the great hero and the great purpose. Diana has defeat this notion and with her death she has become our postmoder heroine, above any time or space condition. She is not our new heroine by having fought against the chemical weapons (how many anonymous heroes have fought from decades for the disarmament?), by having given up the possibility of being queen (Edward VIII did it before), by having divorced (Enrique VIII created a church in order to get divorced and stop beheading women), or by having given her brilliant smile to the AIDS positive persons (remember Elizabeth Taylor). Diana take us to the true contemporanity, turning herself into the absolute merchandise, in a market that thinks about itself before we do it (we, the ones who know without knowing). The princess is our myth because she knew how to seduce us. The language of her body decided it. She allowed us to touch her beyond our hands. She made us see her sitting next to the moribunds, those that will never touch nothing better than her. Dressed by Versace, and bending down while kissing Mother Theresa, she was the mother of the future king from England; the person that left Prince of Wales completely in ridicule with his harrowing lover. She made incline the Queen Elizabeth head, in front of her parasites court, just to remain in the imaginary like the princess that delivered a blow to the xenophobia, racism and to the arrogance of the English monarchy (and we have a single example: Dodi Al Fayed's millionaire father was honored with the Legion of Honor in France, giving new life to the legendary Ritz Hotel cadaver and to the Windsor dukes house; the English Queen, on the other hand, denied the citizenship to someone who made more for the British economy than many members of her stupid family. Beyond all the above-mentioned, the last irreverence of Diana was to die being loved. Loved by a Muslim (who possibly made her vibrate much more than the Dumbo prince), a person not to be happy with, because we, those who knew her secret, had put price to her head. We needed her to be immolated in a tunnel of Paris, in order to know that we feel, that we still alive and that if there was nothing behind her mask was because a while ago we were wearing her face.
Diana invented for us the reality we needed: the unreal. Step by step, the paparazzis, her solitude and her homeless soul, her glamour and her beauty, went making us victims of whom she would look from the Mercedes window, to see what we really were: their executioners. Because the only legitimate rebelliousness that we could feel in this time where we paid anything for an adrenaline drop is the one that we felt in front of our prefabricated identities, and for that reason we needed to fabricate the other's in order to make them ours without blaming ourselves. Diana Spencer , Princess of Wales, has been able to move us, the ones who consider ourselves survivors, in a world without ideologies. She asked us: " what do you want from me"?, and we answered: "You." she gave us herself. She seduced us by saving her and saving us. She allowed us to invent a life that was not our but her. Now we are she and she will be always we, and her legend is some kind of a return to the sacred. She made cry the whole planet. The world that has supported genocides, destroyed cities, lethal virus, incurable illnesses, the children of Bosnia and Biafra, etc., etc. etc., have met in her T.V. and cybernetic vigil, in order to cry for the only thing that we were not willing to tolerate: the death of our princess. The death of whom made us forget all the other tragedies, and even our life. Now we are alone, facing our penuries, so we can think about it. Having seen her in the frozen images from a videotape carried out only eight minutes before her death, hugged and relied on a nonexistent future, there is nothing more to know. She seduced us and we possessed her: we were always the guardians of her secret.
(c)Martha Rivera, from her column Enemigo Rumor, published in the Listín Diario Newspaper. September 1997. All rights reserved.
© 1997 martha.rivera@codetel.net.do
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