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.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo
Notes on “Pedro Paramo”
On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.
All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo,” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.
Certainly, Pedro and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. Juan Preciado could be little more than a carpet-bagger after the US Civil War, looking for whatever he has not found elsewhere. His mother's claim that his father--Pedro Paramo-- would "want" to know him is not borne out by that parent's neglect. Nor can we even know that Pedro is his father.
However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. I do, however, believe in the fluidity of time and reason, that past and present constantly inform each other, and this belief is marvelously (and horribly) present throughout the book. In English there is, alas, only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately human.
On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.
All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo,” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.
Certainly, Pedro and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. Juan Preciado could be little more than a carpet-bagger after the US Civil War, looking for whatever he has not found elsewhere. His mother's claim that his father--Pedro Paramo-- would "want" to know him is not borne out by that parent's neglect. Nor can we even know that Pedro is his father.
However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. I do, however, believe in the fluidity of time and reason, that past and present constantly inform each other, and this belief is marvelously (and horribly) present throughout the book. In English there is, alas, only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately human.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Final Mist / Maria Luisa Bombal
For me, “The Final Mist” is a ravishing and frightening tale of warning. Through the voice of the nameless heroine, Bombal creates a powerful vision of a deeply feminine perspective caught in the conflict of body and soul, reality and illusion, and immobilized by both the fear of life and the fear of death. But her story is Everyone’s. The narrator is not a proto-feminist; she yearns not for freedom, self-expression, or self-knowledge, but, rather, to be dominated by a stereotype stranger in the usual way.
Her erotic reverie mirrors a traditional Christian religious yearning, a failed tale of redemption. Her fault—if it is that—is that she “weds” herself to an ordinary, conventional fantasy incapable of carrying anything extraordinary. More, she uses this fantasy to stand in the way of any other connection, until, too late, she must recognize the ordinariness of even that waste—of time and possibility. She is lazy, and can neither accept nor reject life, which never comes in the guise one expects. She is both victor and victim, shamed and envious of her sister-in-law who has done what the narrator could only dream, poorly.
It is not a surprise that the mist and death first appear after she declines to comfort her weeping husband on their wedding night. The peculiarity of her sudden marriage to her recently widowed cousin is not a sufficient excuse. She knows this herself: “I move away from him, trying to convince myself that the most discreet reaction is to pretend absolute ignorance of his pain. But inside, something tells me that my attitude is also the most convenient, the least involved. More than my husband’s sobbing, the idea of my own selfishness disturbs me.” But not sufficiently to act differently. Instead she goes to bed and falls asleep instantly. Then her dream commences.
At the end, her husband will reward her moment of truth and awareness in the same manner. The power of the story is not in revealing the narrator’s failing (in which she is unexceptional—not to be condemned), but in how common and easy failure is.
Her erotic reverie mirrors a traditional Christian religious yearning, a failed tale of redemption. Her fault—if it is that—is that she “weds” herself to an ordinary, conventional fantasy incapable of carrying anything extraordinary. More, she uses this fantasy to stand in the way of any other connection, until, too late, she must recognize the ordinariness of even that waste—of time and possibility. She is lazy, and can neither accept nor reject life, which never comes in the guise one expects. She is both victor and victim, shamed and envious of her sister-in-law who has done what the narrator could only dream, poorly.
It is not a surprise that the mist and death first appear after she declines to comfort her weeping husband on their wedding night. The peculiarity of her sudden marriage to her recently widowed cousin is not a sufficient excuse. She knows this herself: “I move away from him, trying to convince myself that the most discreet reaction is to pretend absolute ignorance of his pain. But inside, something tells me that my attitude is also the most convenient, the least involved. More than my husband’s sobbing, the idea of my own selfishness disturbs me.” But not sufficiently to act differently. Instead she goes to bed and falls asleep instantly. Then her dream commences.
At the end, her husband will reward her moment of truth and awareness in the same manner. The power of the story is not in revealing the narrator’s failing (in which she is unexceptional—not to be condemned), but in how common and easy failure is.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Invention of Morel / Adolfo Bioy Casares
My initial response to “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares was a desire to defend it. As the work of a gifted 26-year old writer, “Morel” is extremely impressive, even powerful. I found it marvelously clever, at times deeply perceptive and very funny, and also prescient regarding technology and science, and contemporary societies’ obsession with these related features as carriers of the ideas of salvation and redemption, and the un-life-like aspects of life itself (such as the “consciousness” of chemical processes and certain machine functions). I was both tired of the tedious recursiveness and moved by the over-stuffed emptiness. I did not find it satisfying, but I do not believe Bioy intended that particular effect. It is haunting.
It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.
Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.
Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an "entire" invention of the narrator's mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.
In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.
It would be unfair and, I believe, incorrect to compare Bioy with Borges, though it is hard not to. Borges comes from a full world and describes the myriad ways in which totality/the incomprehensible expresses itself and in so doing connects to the living, and the living to each other; Bioy represents a stunted and fractured dystopia, alienated beyond the possibility of—or belief in—connection; sentimentality is something to aspire toward, so lost or inconceivable is any greater image of emotion.
Compare Bioy’s country-club set eternally eating the same lunch after a morning of tennis (in real-life or simulacra) to Borges’ character Pierre Menard. Menard chooses to devote himself to an incredibly rigorous, albeit apparently (and necessarily) absurd, task that can have meaning only to him, through his own eyes, which Borges shows the reader via the narrator’s incomprehension. Morel’s companions never do anything unexpected—they are already mere conventions.
Bioy’s creation (and that of his narrator) is, however, not unrelated to Menard’s (certainly the title is a pun intended to point to an "entire" invention of the narrator's mind). The narrator is, of course, a writer and his dilemma is creation itself, alienation and the isolation and justification of existence, and the question of whether there is any reality apart from that isolation and acts of creation. What Menard and Bioy’s narrator are doing is essentially the same: creating something that can show—especially to themselves—that they are not just reflections or reiterations of some ancient dream or act of chance—that they live. If making oneself into a simulacra can demonstrate that one actually “was”, it is the same as Menard.
In Bioy’s world, Malthus’ prediction has unfortunately proven to be un-true, or too slow: over-population does not necessarily “create” the checks of war and famine, or these checks cannot fulfill their purpose, and the result is misery and a world that is over-crowded such that there is no place, no order for anyone to fit into, except in the tiresome tyranny of clubs and institutions where individuality is entirely lost; indeed almost all relations seem to drain away the possibility of individual personality and liveliness. Without room or connection in the real world, they hope to find a place and partner in eternity.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Borges, The Aleph / House of Asterion
Though Borges accuses literature (and language) of being incompetent, in his hands it is anything but. A crashing and conflicted cosmos is ever at hand, pre- and post-Big Bang, simultaneously, as some physicists would agree. Emma Zunz is a marvelous contradiction/conflation of fact and point of view, both true and false at the same time, vengeful and redemptive. The Dead Man gets to live because he is already marked for death, therefore his actions do not matter (who is not marked, eventually, for death?) Flaminius Rufus realizes that he and the troglodyte (who will turn out, perhaps, to be Homer, more or less) have identical perceptions, but that they “live” in different universes: they coordinate and construct the same perceptions differently, in ways incomprehensible to each other.
I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.
Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.
Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction—a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the Garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.
Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?
I was very touched by one of the shortest stories: The House of Asterion. The progression of the story re-envisions a mythic tale and imaginatively evokes the budding awareness of a growing child. Asterion claims indifference to literature and words of any kind, but he is not entirely fulfilled in pure, marvelous, and unrelenting action and being. His favorite pastime is engagement with imagination, in which he envisions his “other” self.
Asterion is also a perfect image of the human experience: half beast, half human (drawing energy and substance from the organic element, controlling and developing its application with intelligent thought and intuition), these two forces must work together to create a whole, civilized being.
Borges marvelously involves the dissimilarities of belief and knowledge, how Asterion has come to understand that one thing in the world is singular—therefore outside the world, and alone—himself. Having been told, Asterion believes that he knows that his redeemer will come, a word he cannot (or could not previously) conceive, that corresponds to a feeling he has: weariness at the endless multiplicity of his world and his own solitariness. He yearns for reduction—a return to the simple innocence of the un-self-conscious world: the Garden of Eden, or, further, immersion back into the god-head itself.
Though he is “ready” for his redeemer, Asterion has no idea of what form it might take. This shapeless readiness without pre-figuration is an essential element of redemption. He gives himself to Theseus, and we cannot know if he was wrong. Did Theseus slay the minotaur or did the minotaur find redemption in Theseus?
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Fictions, J.L. Borges
Origin, originality, and time recur as principal touchstones in these highly original stories in which no originality per se is described—rather, endless re-creation of an all-encompassing and timeless original. The dreamer of “The Circular Ruins” finds out that he, too, is but a dream. Of course they are clever, but not merely clever—the source they return to every time is the transcendent and mysterious power that animates life, and the powers that reconfigure, slow and destroy it, in turn.
I understand that Borges is often referred to as foreshadowing post-modern literary concerns, such as the inclusion of the response of the reader (an idea that to me is marvelously Borgesian, because it identifies the book, not the reader, as being the active agent). Also, Borges will have to be credited with foreshadowing the current art world tendency away from the idea of genius as being individual or particular.
Any number of passages could be cited, but page 76 seems especially rich. In one paragraph Borges includes the principles of all perception, art, psychology, and Einstein’s definitions of relativity and acceleration in the “greater than” and “less than” reference—think of a black and white photograph that exists only as areas that are lighter or darker than each other. The next sentence includes the scientific notion that is most clearly associated with Quantum physics in the reference to counting, and how the act “changes” the outcome, a concept now universally understood in many fields, say, sociology, and Borges includes it here as a funny aside that contests the notion of fixed ideas of reality while at the same time suggesting that, at base, everything is “fixed”—just a different view of the one eternal “it.” And yet, at the same time, agreement is most often merely the predictable result of forgetfulness, or collective expectations and coercion.
My favorite of these stories so far is “Menard.” How perfect for the consummate artist to avoid tautology by working steadfastly on something not of his own creation (Cervantes’ “Quixote”). The principle theme that strikes me is life in its present moment, the only moment in which one can “do” anything. Menard is like a monk making a sand painting of the divine.
I understand that Borges is often referred to as foreshadowing post-modern literary concerns, such as the inclusion of the response of the reader (an idea that to me is marvelously Borgesian, because it identifies the book, not the reader, as being the active agent). Also, Borges will have to be credited with foreshadowing the current art world tendency away from the idea of genius as being individual or particular.
Any number of passages could be cited, but page 76 seems especially rich. In one paragraph Borges includes the principles of all perception, art, psychology, and Einstein’s definitions of relativity and acceleration in the “greater than” and “less than” reference—think of a black and white photograph that exists only as areas that are lighter or darker than each other. The next sentence includes the scientific notion that is most clearly associated with Quantum physics in the reference to counting, and how the act “changes” the outcome, a concept now universally understood in many fields, say, sociology, and Borges includes it here as a funny aside that contests the notion of fixed ideas of reality while at the same time suggesting that, at base, everything is “fixed”—just a different view of the one eternal “it.” And yet, at the same time, agreement is most often merely the predictable result of forgetfulness, or collective expectations and coercion.
My favorite of these stories so far is “Menard.” How perfect for the consummate artist to avoid tautology by working steadfastly on something not of his own creation (Cervantes’ “Quixote”). The principle theme that strikes me is life in its present moment, the only moment in which one can “do” anything. Menard is like a monk making a sand painting of the divine.
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