A Night in Chile / Roberto Bolano

For me in our reading so far, “A Night in Chile” is most resonant with Azuela’s “The Underdogs” in its overt and complex statements about a particular historical situation and its participants, real and fictional (though certainly, Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem” and Carpentier’s “The Chase” must be included).

In some sense a hero—any hero—is, by definition to his or her enemy, a villain, and vice versa. That individual (or group) may have particular characteristics, such as being more or less formidable for various reasons of, say, intellect or charisma, but they are essentially the “other” solely by contrast—whether that is defined by ideology, physiology, or which side of the street one lives on, and independent of whether those differences are perceived as real or known to be imagined.

“A Night in Chile” is especially compelling in the directness with which it addresses not so much (though neither so little) who is a hero or villain, but how the world goes so utterly and quickly astray. To pick only one small yet vital piece from the story, the section on Fr Antonio and falconry seems a perfect example. Problem solving, devoid of the time-consuming and difficult consideration of context (in its broadest, ever-changing, yet simplest implications), is inherently amoral, for it suggests an obscene equality among all possible responses and all possible situations. (An editorial in the N Y Times on Friday, 7 May 2010, about a young man who ran onto the field during a major-league baseball game and was stopped—instantly—by the police with a stun gun/Taser, asks the same questions about the relation of force and action.) The possible next step into immorality can be so transparent as to be invisible, and inevitable, and to appear, as the narrator at one point says of his own action, necessary—justifiable.

To kill all the pigeons and doves in the world if they threaten the physical well-being of the architectural structures of the Church (historic and aesthetic considerations included, as well as the recollection that “the Church” is, in its own definition, its adherents, not its buildings), is to vacate any understanding of the sacred aspect of life, and, if one so believes, in God’s creation. Fr Antonio’s doubt, fear, and pain at this expedient measure rings through the whole book, as does recognition of the value of the creation of art, of which the churches mentioned and the novel itself are exquisite examples.

The narrator has tried to avoid any real or meaningful probing of his own life and actions not so much by residing in a realm of culture apart, or because he too is a limited and flawed individual, but by being ever willing and ready to look no further than a solution to the next “problem.” He cannot even recognize that Mr Raef and Mr Etah are Fear and Hate in their most banal modern guise, at once backward and efficiently all business.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold / G Garcia Marquez

Many of the stories we have read have the notion of reality—or, what is real—as a central question. In this story the concern expands to include also the idea of inevitability. Though vastly different in the details of its story and how that story plays out, there seems to me a resonance with Borges’ “Circular Ruins.”

Santiago Nasar is dead before dying; on the last page he “speaks” of himself (correctly) in the past tense. Fate and fatality seem constantly alternating, and the idea expressed so differently in “Circular Ruins” remains central: is man the agent of his fate, or the helpless pawn of that fate (perhaps not even existing, except as smoke to a fire, or memory to incident). Is fate emblematic of character or is character determined by fate. Further, with these remarkable descriptions of place that are quite alive in their own way, is environment (psychic and physical) the actual active force that no one can over-ride? The notion of complicity on the part of everyone in the town—even the victim’s unwitting mother—complicates and enriches the ideas of culpability and eventuality.

Santiago may also have already fulfilled the small portion of life that was his part to play, contributing to a larger, boundless mystery. He is not allowed to re-create his parents’ loveless marriage with Flora Miguel, as he would if he could—that cycle is broken. Everyone who contributed to his death also, in a magical sense, contributes to the amazing love-awakening of Bayardo and Angela. In the end the aged bride and groom have become fulfilled, or reconciled, and are re-untied in some mystical fashion that necessitated, or that at least includes, the murder of an man who was probably innocent of the crime for which he was killed though not innocent per se.

The Cubs / Mario Vargas Llosa

My intuitive response to the title of this story—(in English) “The Cubs”—was that it would be some kind of tale of the law of the jungle. That it takes place within a comfortable middle-class neighborhood of Lima makes a very sad story sadder still. The imprecise nature of who exactly is narrating this story underlines the desperate and ever-shifting nature of social collectives and their illogical and unforgiving conventions, where remaining inside the dominant group and retaining that group’s dominance is all that matters (I am reminded of Michael Haneke’s recent film “The White Ribbon”). The innocent boys become conventional men, their irritation with their “wounded” friend Cuellar is that he will not conform to appearances. They do not actually care about his personal reality; they want him to not stand out or apart, to not complicate the conventions of their small lives with something so problematic as an individual identity different from their own. They want him to get a girlfriend like everyone else because his solitary state and wild acting out against his fate are not conducive to the smooth operation of their new status as boys with girlfriends.

They allude to wanting what is best for him, but in fact they are blind to the meaning or consequences of the shocking fact they already know. Their own cynicism and insincerity is horrifically broadcast when they tell him to take on a girl, just for appearances. When he sincerely asks them what will happen “afterwards,” their response is to dump the girl and get another—proposing an infinite round of posing, as if that could be a life. What they are in fact describing is their total inability to empathize, or to care what will happen to him—what is happening to him. Not at any moment can or do any of the other characters feel for him in his situation, rather they project onto him the same thoughtless generality they take for granted in their own lives—they want the problem that is him to go away, and do not understand that it is inextricable from who he is. Cuellar, too, wants it to go away. Pity and forbearance are allowed him as long as he stays within certain guidelines of convention—in other words, if he and his real condition will disappear or stay mute.

Since he participates in no way with his fate (he tries to avert it), it is not relevant to consider faux-psychological attitudes such as latent desire. Homosexuality is alluded to here and there with words and phrases, but it is exactly that Cuellar has no desire for the fate he has received that makes the story so potent.

As Vargas Llosa observes as he draws tight the net of social cruelty, no one wants to be the other—the outsider—everyone would much rather be comfortably, invisibly or transparently hidden within the pack of survivors; perhaps at the top, but inside.

Aura / Carlos Fuentes

The fantastic in Bombal or Bioy is easily seen as metaphor; Bombal tends toward the psychological, and Bioy toward the philosophical. For me, Fuentes brings these two approaches together and takes them a huge leap further. The essence of the story is now an expression—not just an analogy—of the nature of being and existence, and returns wonder far beyond charm to a world that is increasingly deadened through mechanical and technological patterns of reliability and predictability, and the worst aspects of rationality. It cannot be insignificant that Senora Llorente and the General are representations of bygone eras (Maximilian/Napoleon III), which were in their primes vastly diminished adulterations of previous heroic eras.

Sartre once said something to the effect that if one reads a story and enters or understands it—not with a wink to the character-accomplices or as if the entire work were an example of mass psychosis—but rather that somehow the absurd becomes credible by opening/expanding the seeming terms of what might be credible, then it achieves a genuine moment of the fantastic, where the opposites of real and unreal (irreal) reign in baffling equality. This seems to apply especially well to this story.

The younger instantiation of Consuela—Aura—is just that: a halo emanation of the old woman’s force and beauty, manifesting outside the realms of time and rationality. The old woman is not a demon-goddess, but is herself a personification of primal forces beyond comprehension, her own as well. –What a marvelous creative expression of the epigraph from Michelet.

Every era wants to believe that it has answered and exhausted the questions of all time; the endless repetition of history can persuade us to remember that the past of which we make fun or that we condemn, is little different than how our truths will appear to future generations.

The epigraph from Michelet can be understood via archetypes—that man will strive (through lifetimes) to find the animating source of his being/love, who is timeless and unfathomably imaginative in her embodiment of the powers and forces that animate all existence (relation to “Invention of Morel”?). Montero is compelled into re-instantiation, or finds himself, as the lover of the beloved who is herself the priestess (cat ritual) of the divine that is both monstrous and holy.

There are Faustian overtones as well as resonation with Turchetti’s “Fosca”—inspiration for “Passion d”amore” and Sondheim’s “Passion”, and Kenneth Branagh’s Hollywood send-up, “Dead Again.” In the first love transcends the ordinary, unconscious attraction of similarities; in the latter it transcends time; in “Aura” it transcends individuals.

The Pursuer / Julio Cortazar

I understand the theme of the piece to be the difficulty in the attempt to “live” fully and expressively in the moment (and also how un-seen and unappreciated that struggle can be/is by others, especially within any bourgeois context), and how this is at odds with all practical considerations of society and the desire to see oneself and one’s culture within historic development. The piece and its characters are as compromised, paradoxical, and difficult as the thing it attempts to reflect, as imperfect as lived life, which is always at a distant remove from the work of art that exists as a touchstone into deeper and other dimensions, and souvenir. (Borges’ Menard’s “Quixote” is an example of the impossibility of anything being “constant.”)

The piece is steeped in references to psychology, semiotics, Christianity, European literature and poetry, dedicated to Charlie Parker, and with epigraphs from The Apocalypse/Revelations and Dylan Thomas. (The schematic presentation of the life and death of the lead character is chiefly an imaginative blend of Parker and Thomas.)

The section in which Johnny is identified by the critic/narrator as the “pursuer” was, for me, particularly evocative of the struggle around expression and art. The critic/narrator is as paradoxical a character as Johnny, marvelously awful yet inescapable. The story of the history of art is itself problematic, any idea of development seems to imply limitation in that what has come before must stay put, to be appreciated as “historic,” but no longer capable of speaking immediately, let alone that any notion of aesthetics necessarily derives from a particular cultural point of view.

This story resonates with Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and ideas of permanence in opposition to lived life. Perhaps this applies to some extent vis-à-vis the essays regarding Latin American Literature—I am too under-exposed to the topic to have any opinion worth mentioning. The only thought I have about all of this is a reflection on a well-known line from Yeats, “Players and painted stage took all my love, and not those things that they were emblems of.” Johnny and the critic seem to speak of these two extremes—the numinous and the instantiation.

The Chase / Alejo Carpentier

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.

Jose Maria Arguedas

"Warma Kuyay" and "The Pongo’s Dream"


These seemingly simple stories are in some ways, for me, more deeply expressive of the feeling states that companion particular cycles of individual and/or cultural/social experience. The other works we have read tend to approach or include a feeling dimension as part of elaborate and masterful intellectualizations; these stories are stark and dark forebodings of helplessness and hopelessness.

"Warma Kuyay" marvelously captures the volatile and conflicting feelings and thoughts of young Ernesto, a boy—probably an orphan—at the cusp of adulthood. Arguedas conveys this instability in subtle ways, such as the vast network of names and relations that are never quite explained, and mirror the experience of a child or young person who knows very precisely his or her relation to particulars (however fleeting), but not necessarily how those particulars relate to each other, or how they fit into a larger order.

Sadly, the Indian knows all too well that no matter how corrupt, cruel, or unfair the prevailing colonial system may be, it is beyond his ability even to attempt to rebel against that system. He can only retreat farther into the countryside. He understands the cruelty of men, his own included, that preys upon whatever is weaker. Ernesto does not comprehend the darkness of his heritage, or how simple it is to love an innocent animal, but not another person, who is naturally filled with conflict and fear, and will not carry the projection imposed.

In "The Pongo’s Dream" no justice is meted out or even imaginable in this life, on earth. Rather, after death, in heaven, a reciprocal cruelty is commanded and enacted for all time. This second tale describes a hopeless cycle of injustice and revenge that echoes Old Testament dynamics in the name of St. Francis. The intrinsic problem with this idea, its deep sadness, is that it allows only for a reversal of position, not a changed dynamic. Arguedas brilliantly describes the pongo’s dream not as volition, but as yet another act of subservience, this time to a wrathful St. Francis; the pongo submits to the heavenly command as to the landowner, locked forever in an embrace with his former tormentor. One can only imagine that he might have preferred to be released from that relation.