For me, Carpentier’s "The Chase" resonates with the language and voice of some of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, and also with Bombal’s “Final Mist,” Bioys’ “Invention of Morel,” and Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
The florid language of the first chapters mirrors, describes, and locates the (male) characters’ aspirational status. The upper class audience in the concert hall makes little effort to be other than itself—that is, perhaps, the real privilege of advantage. The impoverished ticket seller/musician and the provincial architecture student/revolutionary cannot find a way to rise, or to commit to their chosen fields. This is not only because of the corruption and immobility of colonial social externals, but also because of a failure within each character—a failure that expresses the contradiction of the inability to accept human limitation and yet attempt something greater than animal existence. Both characters relish expressions of dominance—not in their chosen fields, or mastery of self—but against others, especially Estrella. The arts and religion mentioned in the text are no longer potent instantiations of the transcendent to which one can dedicate oneself, but rather degraded enterprises that cannot prevail against the force of the body itself, or the humiliations of the alienated individual in a post-heroic world.
The quote from Beethoven is especially interesting, as well as the fact that the performance that takes place during the course of the novel’s “real” time is the “Eroica” symphony (composed 1803)—originally to be dedicated to revolutionary “liberator” Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. Beethoven believed that Napoleon’s imperial action was the mark of a prideful “tyrant” who had descended from the higher ideals of democracy. Similarly, the ticket seller and the architecture student fall from their higher ideals and aspirations.
Supposedly, the quote is what Beethoven said to Prince Lobkowitz, his patron and the “new” ostensible dedicatee of the symphony: “Prince: You are what you are by the accident of birth; but I am what I am because of myself!” The exact words from Beethoven to exclaim his triumph of achievement—I am what I am because of myself—also explain the ticket seller/musician and the architecture student/revolutionary. The first could not resist the temptation of the large banknote, leaving the performance for which he had prepared for weeks, to visit the prostitute; the second gave up his studies for the sophisticated liberties of cosmopolitan life (sex, drinking, and “style”) and was swept beyond his control into a revolutionary movement for which he had no real appetite, interest, or understanding. His inability to endure an attack on his literal masculine pride renders him a traitor to his revolutionary group, from which he is then hopelessly on the run for his life.
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I think you are right that the reference to Beethoven functions in a dual manner in the novel. It refers, as you mention, to the topic of the self-made man, an aspiration of both the ticket seller and the would-be revolutionary. But it also raises the issue of the revolutionary and the revolutionary fallen from grace, both topics central to the novel.
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