au pied de la montagne

Anti-Ethics

2008-04-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on which to conclude.

Ethicism rests on the claim that actual responses can be had towards fictions: philosophers may debate the reality of fiction induced emotions such as pity or fear, but no one would deny the reality of pleasure or displeasure one feels toward fiction. Appeal to actual responses is important because it allows the ethicist to circumvent the objection that, since a reader cannot actually possess responses he only imagines, he cannot be held morally responsible for them. For the ethicist, this is to be denied for two reasons: first, since imagined responses are expressive of a one’s moral character, a person can be ethically condemned for his imagined responses. Second, since the attitudes manifested by works toward fictional entities implicitly manifest the same attitudes in regards to real entities of that kind, it follows that artworks can be aesthetically flawed due to the morally reprehensible character of emotions implicitly directed at real situations. These reasons force the ethicist into the uncomfortable position of adopting a discourse of moral condemnation, both in regards to works that approve of evil and the people who enjoy them: the reader aroused by scenes of sexual torture in Juliette, or the sexual relationship that transpires between a tortured prisoner and her torturer/lover’s son in La hora azul, is to that extent morally depraved, since his responses are a reflection of a corrupt character; de Sade or Cueto’s work is aesthetically defective to the extent that it fails to condemn its morally reprehensible subject matter. Though I agree that the ethical and aesthetic domains are intertwined, I find these reasons excessively moralistic. The ethicist thesis condemns representations of rape, pedophilia, sexual torture, incest—whether in the mind or in art—at face value, without considering the dark and damaged reaches of the human soul from which they spring. It is my feeling that literature, as form of rationality, is the expression of reason’s darker, subterranean other half. Perhaps the mark of a truly ethical work of fiction is that it brings this darkness to light, fully and without moral condemnation.

Argentina as Faust

2008-03-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Virginia Guevara, one of Las viudas de los jueves’ two main narrators, arrives with her family at Altos de la Cascada after having got a real bargain (un negocio redondo) on a house whose owner, Antieri, a reclusive military man whose name curiously resembles Galtieri, Argentina’s de facto president during the country’s murderous last military dictatorship, committed suicide. Profiting from tragedy is a recurrent theme: not only does the enthusiasm with which Virginia negociate the transaction lead her to a thriving real-estate career built on the financial woes, job losses and marital breakdowns of her clients, but the insistence of one of her neighbours, that one should take advantage of the incredibly cheap New York hotel deals following 9/11, reminds us of our own self-interested motives—who didn’t think of popping down to post-crisis Argentina for a holiday, when the cost of living plummeted and bargains were to be had aplenty to holders of strong currencies? Hay que aprovechar. The novel opens with a fictional suicide that not only resonates with the recent past, but also forshadows the collective suicide of its dénouement, itself analogous to the near destruction of a once prosperous country having sought immediate happiness through a Faustian bargain with the US dollar and having paid a heavy price. When visiting Antieri’s house for the first time, Virginia finds empty bookcovers of Goethe’s masterpiece, which suggests a willed ignorance of the consequences of commerce with the devil, or, in Argentina’s case, with the International Monetary Fund.

The personal and the political

2008-03-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

The personal and the political coincide in Agosto y fuga, a novel in which a group of citizens in Mexico’s capital find their intimate lives intertwined with the political events of the day, namely the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the Mexican elections of August, 1994. Though the ‘intense solitude’ of these educated, cosmopolitan characters is convincing, the connection between it and the larger national drama in which this solitude unfolds—the formal axis on which this novel is based--is less so. Unlike Las viudas de los jueves, in which the personal and political are structurally integrated in such a way that the events leading to Argentina’s 2001 economic collapse inform both the novel’s form and the psychological makeup of its characters, I often had the impression that the dramatic historical events of August 1994 were tacked on to an otherwise very engaging novel about relationships. Villegas’ novel requires a seamless integration of micro and macrocosm to succeed, but instead provides a succession of disjunctive registers in which the existential and romantic collide against the political—the latter being replete with acronyms potentially confusing to the Mexican reader. Agosto y fuga is good but only have so.

laberintos de perplejidad

2008-03-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

I read Órbitas. Tertulias like a rendez-vous manqué, a desencuentro in which, alas, estabamos condenados a no coincidir. Grasping it is similar to the author’s attempt at grasping his dream: se mueve casi sin límites por el mapa…de tan nítido el sueño se ha vuelto borroso. Am I dozing off out of genuine fatigue, or is Orbitás itself the somnífero? As is often the case when reading blurry phrases—Pero me gusta el dark. Super Dark. Recontramosfostrofólico—I’m never sure whether their impenetrability is a formal characteristic of the work, or whether it owes more to my limited access to the Spanish language. In the case of Mirko Lauer, it is probably both. Reading the experimental cut-ups of a writer like William Burroughs (whom Lauer apparently frequented and with whom he seems to share a fondness for peyote) is work enough in English. But reading his Hispanic imitators, or in this case Czecho-Hispanic, is work and then some. ¿Enjoyadísimo? Hardly. Quite frankly, I’d rather be watching Burroughs eat lunch naked; or, like participants in a nautical tertulia, be drinking vulgar but honest wine; or be buying second-hand clothing in London; or even be reading Dé Hache Lawrence.

What is uncomfortable about this is that it subverts any confidence I might have in making a plausible aesthetic judgment—No te entiendo Mirko—, making it tempting to fall back on the prestige generated by the cultural economy—¿Primado en París? It must be good—to make it for me. But that would be too easy. I’m as susceptible to the aura of Parisian cultural mandarinism as the next guy, but not a slave to it. So I will only risk a question: Could Oribitas. Tertulias be surfing the same waves as Lauer's poetry, those cargada[s] de dioses varios que va[n] llevando [al autor] hasta [su] propria parodia?

It's about the prize

2008-02-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

In the Economy of Prestige, James F. English continues Bourdieu’s (and Weber’s) work of disenchantment. Bourdieu demystified ‘pure’ art’s illusion of transcendence by identifying its inner logic as one moment in a dialectic of merchandise and signification, money and art, bourgeois and avant-garde. This antagonism generates the cognitive pre-conditions necessary for the field of cultural production to exist and allows for symbolic value to be consecrated on its products. English isolates a specific moment in the process of consecration, the attribution of artistic and literary prizes, and demystifies it by exposing its unacknowledged rules and dialectical workings. His main idea is that works of art receive symbolic value, not through the awarding of prizes, but through contempt for the awards process itself: that critics rail against misguided awards committees incapable of recognizing true art presupposes that the latter exists and maintains the unconscious collective belief (illusio) that art is a special commodity owing its prestige to the fact that it inhabits a realm above crass political or mercantile interests. The prize is an example of symbolic value production, in which value is conferred onto that which lacks it intrinsically. In the symbolic economy, products such books or paintings have little value as physical objects; what counts is that they be recognized as valuable, which is neither automatic nor intuitive but constructed by institutions, among them the prize industry, that allocate worth onto that which is otherwise worthless. Prizes maintain the illusion that recognition of good art is intuitive, self-evident; when they go to the wrong pearson (such as Sully Prudhomme and not Tolstoy, or Larry Heinemann and not Toni Morrison), the resultant scandal—“the instrument par excellence of symbolic action”—confirms our belief that artistic greatness announces itself while obscuring the fact that artistic value is a cultural commodity socially produced by critics, professors, award committees, by all those agents with vested interests in believing in it. Distaining the prize industry reassures us that art has value; or rather, it reassures those of us who need to believe that art is valuable. I am one who needs such an illusion.

It's about the money

2008-02-05T15:09:00.001-08:00

Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of artistic and literary production would seem to support the claim that, in the post-Enlightenment France, art has replaced religion. By analyzing the dialectical opposition between the logics of money and art, Bourdieu expands on Weber’s characterization of rationality as either instrumental or substantive, the former being oriented toward economic efficiency, the latter toward ultimate ends whose value is judged according to religious or metaphysical worldviews. Weber saw modernization as the progressive rationalization of all aspects of social life, a process in which instrumental rationality becomes embodies itself in capitalism and substantive rationality dissolves into autonomous cultural value spheres (Bourdieu’s fields), each with its own logic. Modernization for him was also the disenchantment of the world, or the de-sacralization of social life in which “the old mysteries of religion are clarified in the cold light of scientific day”. Bourdieu’s sociology, which investigates the unthought, pre-reflexive conditions underlying social practices, participates in this disenchantment and his analysis of symbolic goods de-mystifies art much like Enlightenment thinking demystified religion.

What is striking in Bourdieu’s analysis is just how much the logic of ‘pure’ art functions in secular France like that of religion in pre-modern societies. Bordieu views schools as homologous to churches, both of which, in Weber’s words, "found and systematically delimit the new victorious doctrine and defend the old against prophetic attacks, establish what has and what does not have sacred value, and make it penetrate into the faith of the laity”. Something of the Protestant work ethic, the impetus behind capitalist modernization, survives in the (anti-) economy of pure art, which must appear disinterested in money order to make money: “The vision that makes of asceticism in this world the condition of health in the hereafter finds its principle in the specific logic of symbolic alchemy that maintains that investments will not be recouped unless they are (or seem to be) operating at a loss”. Avant-gardism, which “offers no other guarantee of its conviction than its indifference to money”, thus only appears as the new asceticism. The logic of pure art partakes in Weber’s substantive rationality as residue of the pre-modern and pre-enlightenment in a fully rationalized world, but the artwork’s ‘economic angelism’, its claim of transcendence, of obeying a telos superior to the merely instrumental, of existing as the metaphysical purity of the thing-in-itself (l’art pour l’art), is an illusion. This illusio is constitutive of art’s very mode of being; the appearance of transcendence is its fundamental law. Art obeys a theological logic and must be permanently produced and reproduced by celebrants and believers whose conviction is based on a collective misrecognition that art is not all about the money. This is the only way Editions de Minuit’s 1952 publication of Beckett’s En attendant Godot could make money, and making money, even if it must be deferred as the symbolic capital of consecration is accrued, is the reason why was published in the first place. There is nothing outside of instrumental rationality.

Bourdieu does not explain why this post-Enlightenment transfer took place, why the illusion of religion was replaced by the illusion of art. Could it be that, imprisoned within the iron cage of capitalist-instrumental rationality, we have no choice but to collectively generate illusions to make it bearable?

Pastoral de desengaño

2007-04-07T21:37:00.000-07:00

I use the above as title for this last blog entry on 100 años because I think it is suggestive of the book as a whole. A pastoral is a literary genre portraying an idealized version of country life. From its early days as an utopian Eden where death is unknown and things have yet to be given names, to its final days as a dystopic Sodom of decadence and corruption, the story of Macondo is one of progressive disenchantemtment, of a pastoral gone wrong. It is one replete with biblical references; from paradise to paradise lost, Macondo is the site of an epic deluge, of spiritual decay and final apocalypse. When José Arcadio (II) squanders Ursula's hidden treasure by transforming the Buendía house into a decadent paradise of "equivocal pleasures", one of which includes bathing in champagne with naked adolescent boys, the reference to Sodom is clear and one might suggest A Hundred Years of Sodom as an alternative title. (In a book whose female characters conform so firmly to traditional gender codes, the use of homoerotic evocation to denote sin and foreshadow biblical apocalypse is not really surprising). Yet Macondo is not destroyed for the sin of homosexuality (which is only hinted at), but rather for having been founded in bad faith as an attempt to free its founders from the shame of incest and murder. This unresolved shame condemns the successive generations of the Buendia clan to seek out solitude and silence as a way to avoid communication, change, truth. Members of this clan rarely change, remaining two-dimensional static entities caught up in "un engrenaje de repeticiones irreparables, una rueda giratoria que hubiera seguido dando vueltas hasta la eternidad, de no haber sido por el degaste progresivo e irreperable del eje" (471). Once the truth is finally known, once Aureliano Babilonia draws the curtains to the city of mirrors and deciphers Melquiades' parchments, nothing can stop the ants' final invasion and the wind from erasing the memory of Macondo and its melancholy inhabitants forever. Sometimes repetition is preferable to change, silence to truth, especially when the latter threatens to overwhelm. Fortunately literature exists as a means of documenting the compulsion to repeat, and by doing so, breaking it. Perhaps there would be less solitude were literature not relegated to cargo class.

A few last words on repetition in art:

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the [symbolic] repetitions of death, through which we make sport of our own mortality.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

Opium of the Masses

2007-03-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

Marx used the term opiate of the masses in reference to religion, but I think think it applies equally well to Mexican telenovelas, a cultural phenomenon that inspires a cult-like following and which, like mainstream Catholicism, diverts attention away from the unjust social conditions so characteristic of Mexican society through a highly seductive deployment of beauty and money. Despite (or because of) its charm, a show like Corazon salvaje perpetuates the pernicious racial and class divisions that separate Mexico into working mestizo masses and privileged white oligarchies, whose legitimacy it shamelessly celebrates. The reactionary politics of Corazon salvaje's producer, Televisa, are well-known, the company, which is the world's largest Spanish-language media firm, having recently been criticized for partial coverage of (losing) left-wing Presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the last Mexican elections. Corazon salvaje as a cultural product is one moment in an ideological superstructure whose function is to preserve the status quo and block progressive social change. As for those who affirm the counter argument that Televisa soaps are harmless fluff and that spectators are far too clever to absorb their ideological biases, I hope you be right!

Plus que ça change...

2007-03-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

All this talk in class about repetition and difference got me thinking about the philosophic dimensions of 100 años, and specifically the concept of eternal recurrence. The latter refers to a cosmological theory according to which the exact history of the cosmos, being cyclical and not linear, endlessly repeats itself. Marquéz's book affirms eternal recurrence and at the same time denies it. It is both dynamic and static, moving forward while it looks back, proliferating difference while reproducing the same. Its treats time, as both linear and cyclical, in the same way it treats its material, as both realistic and fantastic. Cyclical teleology is here magical realism's structural counterpart, a different expression of the same phenomenon, namely the dialectical interplay between European (linear) rationality and Native-American (cyclical) cosmology.

Eternal recurrence was taken up by Nietzsche, who, unconcerned with its truth or falsity, uses it as a heuristic device whose affirmation allows him to formulate what he considers the correct attitude toward life. Ideally, we should respond to being told that we will have to live our present life again and again with joy and not despair. Despite its repeated sufferings, we should love life enough to respond joyfully to the truth of eternal recurrence and be willing to repeat the whole process eternally. 100 años presents a seemingly endless proliferation of Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos whose (often tragic) character traits are transmitted, like their names, from generation to generation. The exuberance with which Marquez represents this epic disaster seems to suggest, in Nietzschean fashion, that life, despite being a never-ending succession of catastrophes, is worth living over and over again.

Chupete on the Rocks

2007-03-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

literature: written works, especially those considered of superior quality or lasting artistic merit.

To paraphrase the OCD, literature is, in the strictest sense, a work comprised of writing, a fortiori if judged to be of superior quality or lasting artistic merit. The first characteristic is objective, while the second two concern aesthetic judgement and are thus subjective. In light of this, is Quino's 10 años con Mafalda literature? Regarding the first characteristic, the answer is unequivocally yes: since 10 anos is a work comprised of writing, it is necessarily literature. Regarding the second two characteristics (superior quality, lasting artistic merit), I would say equivocally yes to the first, equivocablly no to the second. Within the comic strip / historieta genre, Mafalda seems, if not superior, then at least better than average: definitely better than Charlie Brown, but not as good as Bizarro or The Far Side. Malfalda is of lasting merit (we're still reading her years after she was put to rest), but this merit is probably more social than artistic: Malfalda is worth reading today, not for being aesthetically pleasing, but for her world-weary humanism and her bitter but gentle humour.

100 años as Gesamtkunstwerk

2007-03-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

In Marquéz's obra maestra, the recurring phrase "muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento" (or variations thereof) seems to function as a leitmotif, a musical term used to refer to a recurring theme denoting a particular person, place or idea. Wagner's use of leitmotifs (Grundthemen) allow him to bind together the disparate material of his sprawling operas into a coherent whole. Cien años is similarly sprawling and its epic scale, cyclical structure and textual richness bring to mind another meisterwerk: Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Both spin out the destinies of successive generations of protagonists (3 in the latter, 6 in the former), both end apocalyptically. Perhaps Marquéz's interest in filmmaking inclined him to use such a technique (Wagnerian-style leitmotifs in soundtracks are common as structural elements in films), in which case Cien años could indeed be considered a kind of Gemantkunstwerk, or synthesis of different art forms.

Another idea: could the 1oo years of solitude refer to Ursula´s 1oo or so solitary years? She is after all the matriarch who binds the Buendía family together, a woman who alone suffers "la mortificación de la guerra, la ausencia de Aureliano, la brutalidad de Arcadio y la expulsión de José Arcadio y Rebeca" and many more indignities.

negative dialectics

2007-03-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

Piglia writes that in Arlt style and thematic content are one, that his "estilo alquímico, perverso, marginal, no es otra cosa que la transposición verbal, estilística, del tema de sus novelas". I see Arlt's transgression of literary values as one moment in a generalized transgression, one which uses the novel as a site for the transvaluation of all values. In this he is consistant, his dialectic inversion systematic, rigorous. Stylistically, bad writing becomes a sign of its quality, just as, thematically, pain becomes the site of pleasure, negation of positivity, and sin of virtue. Arlt denounces the lies of the dominant class and proposes his own, which are truer that those they replace. As Piglia shows, he subverts the 'good' writing proscribed by a reactionary elite concerned with preserving a national indiom whose 'purity' immigrants threatened to corrupt. By doing so he gives expression to Argentina's national indiom as it really is, as something composed of incoherant fragments whose expressive force comes from corrupting its own purity. Badness here is not a rhetorical deployment but the unapolagetic affirmation of language as a 'contradictory surface' whose sincerity is measured by gramatical errors, questionalble syntax and unintelligible French citations.

In world in which God is dead, culture nothing more than a disguised commodity and politics a grotesque comedy, Erdosain can only confirm his existence through crime, through the negation of virtue. Only the latter can perfect the suffering necessary for salvation and tranform him into Christ with Hipólita as Mary Magdelene at his knees. Arlt saves himself by writing badly, an act of courage that opens the doors to the black house of man's desire, liberating its repressed content and anticapting so many horrors to come. If Erdosain is an anti-hero, Arlt is a hero.

Imitation is the Best Form of Flattery (100 anos 1)

2007-03-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

When the epidemic of insomnia and forgetting arrives in Macondo, Aureliano hopes that by marking objects with their names (bridging the gap between signifiant and signifié as it were), he will help the townsfolk remember things. This works until they start forgetting how to read. It is only once Melquiades returns and provides his magic drink that their memory is restored. Both epidemics appear as natural phenomena within the Macondian universe and, far from seeming fantastical, are viewed by their victims as entirely prosaic occurences. By destroying the line between real and fantastic, Marquez gives us here a perfect example of magical realism, which was described in class as a manner of treating the extraordinary as if it were ordinary and hybridizing European rationality with the supposed 'magical' mentality of the Indian.

Having read Como agua para chocolate previously in the semester, I have the impression of meeting two key points in the life of a (now exhausted) literary mode, with Esquivel (who cashed in on magic realism´s appeal so thoroughly as to kill it) at one end and Marquez (whose formulations were so alluring as to inspire a generation of New and Third World writers) at the other. I am also reminded of Bolaños´s critique of Isabel Allende as a pseudo-writer in whose "scribbles" one finds imitations of Marquez. Reading the latter makes Esquivel and Allende appear even worse and confirms one of the criteria for bad literature we came up with in class: resorting to tried and tested formula to compensate for imaginative deficiency.

Angstlich Argentine or Buenos Aires Beat?

2007-03-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

Mention was made in class of Roberto Arlt's affiliation with existentialism and Los sietes locos does indeed echo many existentialist themes and ideas: Remo Erdosain appears as a River Plate Raskolnikov who derives his sense of being from a criminal act ("sólo el crimen puede afirmar mi exitencia, como sólo el mal afirma la presencia del hombre sobre la tierra"); an Nietzschean ubermensch who seeks to "pergonar la audacia, la nueva vida" by "violar el sentido comun"; and a Sartrean angoissé preoccupied by the nothingness of things and the meaningless of a life "movida por el automatismo de la costumbre".

I would like to suggest another affiliation. Juan Carlos Onetti's description of Arlt as a (non) writer dismissed by Buenos Aires' stylish martini set reminds me of Truman Capote, himself a stylish martini-drinking New Yorker, who said of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, its typing". Kerouac and Arlt are not without similiarities: both were outsiders born into poverty; both were anti-establishment figures who distained the language of "los mandarinos"; both took as their subjects the marginalized and mad ("The only people for me", wrote Karouac, "are the mad ones, the ones who...burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"); and, most interestingly, both have entered their countries respective national canons despite (and/or because of) their scorn for bourgeois taste and respectability. Breaking open literary language and liberating it from the hold of the cultured elite is what makes these "bad writers" good, a badness to which Allende, Coehlo and Esquivel could only dream of aspiring.

reflexions at midpoint (SPAN490)

2007-02-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

Like the class, hate the books. The hardest thing about this class is actually having to read the books, though in the end it's worth it for the discussion they provoke. For example, last week I read Felisberto Hernandez and Laura Esquivel and my immediate reaction was that the first was brilliant and the second crap without being able to say exactly why. The class encourages one to ponder the grounds for one's subjective evaluations and what seems self-evident and in this sense is similar to an aesthetics class in that it explores the rational basis of taste and the possibility of standards in art. It has also made me aware of my own snobbishness (which, despite it all, remains intact) and gender bias. Regarding the latter, I recently discovered that almost every author in my bookshelf is a man and that I don't think I've ever actually read a female novelist--despite having started but never finished novels by Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, and Virginia Wolfe not withstanding, whose Mrs. Dalloway I had to read for a first-year liberal arts course and which literally put me to sleep. A course on bad literature is necessarily a course about canon formation, a pantheon that has largely, for better or worse, been determined by men.

reflexions at midpoint (SPAN365)

2007-02-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

I am thoroughly enjoying SPAN365. I have found each text, apart from Cumandá (which for me lacks literary merit and reinforces my distaste of nationalism, literary or otherwise), to be a gem. From the tropical warmth of Mamá Blanca and the cold winds of Piedra callada to the brilliantly depicted perverion and madness of Hortensias (a deceptive title if there ever was one), my only regret is having to pass through them so quickly. Regarding the Uruguayan pianist, he is about to be admitted into my own private canon of personal faves and I am keen to read everything he has written.

Regarding span365´s hilo conductor--representations of la familia--I'm not sure I really get it. Sure, we've seen a normatively catholic family (Cumanda), a bourgeois family (Memorias), a dysfunctional family (Piedra) and a psychotic pseudo-family (Hortensias), but I still don't have the sense that family is the dominant theme in these texts. Each seems to stand alone and demand treatment respecting its singularity. I admit this attitude may have something to do with my own prejudices: I spent much of my twenties calling decrying the heteronormative family (though age and the recent legalization of same-sex marriage has softened my attitude somewhat), the over-determination of the latter (and the homophobia that goes with it) in Latin America being for me one of that region's least appealing characteristics. My preference would have been for a course structured chronologically around geographic region and genre.

Cute

2007-02-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

Of the three novels we have read so far, Como agua para chocolate leaves me the most indifferent. In fact, this is the third time I've started this blog, following two aborted attempts at wracking my brain for something clever to say (I thought of posting an entry called Las tetas de Tita on the importance of Tita's breasts, but my better judgement prevailed). I've never spent much time in the kitchen, and Sor Juana Iñes' affirmation that cooking lends itself to philosophical speculations falls on my deaf ears. Nor have I ever actually read a book, besides Eva Luna, that some might place in the 'chick lit' category. In both cases, I'm surprised at how much sex there is. So far, almost nothing 'sticks' with me (apart from the rather appealing image of a naked Gertrude on horseback), and I tend to forget the chapters (recipes) as soon as I read them. This has not been the case for the other two novels we have read. Eva Luna's narrative structure was irritating though the novel did pique my interest with political references, some revolutionary action and a subplot regarding transsexual liberation. I hated The Alchemist as anti-Enlightenment neo-spiritualist nonsense, though if provoking a reaction is one of literature's aims, then on that level it succeeded. In both cases I questioned their authors' good faith: were these novels not conceived of as vaches à alaiter, that is, as cows to be milked for monetary worth, as means of padding bank accounts? I don't get that feeling with Esquivel. She seems sincere and her book is pleasant enough. Located somewhere between good and bad, high and lowbrow, it is totally unoffensive, lacking anything really controversial for me to grasp on to. The word cute comes to mind.

Anger (mis)management or how not to raise children

2007-02-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

In Piedra callada anger reveals itself as a Janus-like figure, one of whose faces is passive (represented by Eufrasia) the other active (represented by Bernabe). Anger propels the narrative forward, intensifying at each step until only one conclusion becomes possible: the splitting of the two heads, or, which comes to the same, their integration.

Although Eufrasia, like her son-in-law, beats her daughter, this is not the dominant expression of her ire. The latter expresses itself silently, as an "hosco silencio" that makes her rigid and methodical, cold and indifferent, progressively "más dura, más recondita, más ahicada". It reveals itself in the pressure with which she squeezes her lips and the obsessiveness with which she works. She repeats the phrase "que sufra si es que tiene que sufrir" mechanically as if to subdue the rancour and resentment gnawing at her innards, corroding her from within. Only occasionally does she lash out verbally. But her anger can only be contained for so long. Remaining silent and torturing birds as a means of releasing tension ("desahogaba su mal humor en los párajos...tocados siempre por la piedra de su honda) no longer suffices. Hatred must be channelled from within to without in a single act of revenge.

Bernabé represents the active, aggressive face of anger. His is that of a brute: externalized and unmediated by judgment. It flows directly from his chest "como algo vivo que le anduviera en la sangre", poisons his brain "con su corrosivo veneno" and migrates into his hands, with which he slams doors and beats his children "de costumbre", indiscriminately, arbitrarily, "por cualquier cosa...por nada". Anger compels him to action ("remecer el rancho...destruirlo, agarrar a la vieja...echarla a la laguna") and overwhelms his already limited intellect. His eyes are "apenas lucientes" and his mental functioning "lerdo". One presumes the latter to have been compromised during the thrashings he undoubtedly received as a boy. His anger becomes persistent, generalized ("odiaba a la vieja. Odiaba a los hijos. Odiaba al patrón. Odiaba a la Esperanza"), transforming him into a pathological despot ready to starve his children on a whim.

Eufrasia and Bernabé are two faces of the same coin. Both are submissive to their employers and authoritarian to their children. Both treat the latter as possessions, blaming them for their misfortune and using them as receptacles for their rage, be it passive-aggressively in Eufrasia´s case or physically violent in Bernabé´s. Both are "corroded" by unprocessed rage originating, presumably, in their own destroyed childhoods. By murdering Bernabé, Eufrasia integrates the other side of anger and becomes its perfect expression.

Teresa de la Parra impresionista

2007-02-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

Las memorias de Mama Blanca is impressionistic like the painting on its cover. The latter's visible brush strokes of green, yellow and white create a portrait--one imagines the woman Blanca Nieves will become--that is static, delicate and feminine, qualities of the novel itself. Like the works of impressionist composers, who used short thematically autonomous forms such as nocturnes and arabesques, Las memorias is tableau of independent impressions or atmospheric fragments whose formal coherance is as rigourous as a string of hazy memories. It is static in the same way that memories are static, as mental images contradicting the passage of time. It is delicate in the same way that a Debussy prelude is delicate, where mood and colour predominate over action and strong emotion. And it is feminine in that its narrative impusle lacks the forward thrust of an idea whose inner logic demands, insists on being developped. Here being is more important than becoming.

SPAN490 and the Transference Dyad

2007-02-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

Darja's blog brings to light students' 'tendency' 'to subscribe to the opinion of their professors. I believe this tendency is unconscious and may be related to the transference phenomenon, whereby individuals 'transfer' or redirect desire unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new object. In this sense, Darja's interesting observation that we students tend to modify our comments in accordance with Jon's lectures, instead of expressing a lack of critical insight or independent thought, would refer to our unconscious desires for approval from a prof posited as a paternal substitute. Far from being neurotic or dysfunctional, I suspect this dynamic to be a normal part of classroom interaction and beneficial to learning. Darja is right is stressing the importance of independent and critical thought--without which we would be little different than the sheep in Santiago's flock--but I also think it is important to recognize that critical thinking is something developped intersubjectively and not individually given and that there are unconscious and affective elements implicated in its formation. Recognizing them is, in my view, part of what being self-aware and self-critical is all about.

But back to The Alchemist. What I find most offensive about this novel is not its message--that realizing our dreams is a necessary condition of our being happy--but rather its claim that this message is universally applicable. It seems to me that there is a whole series of material and psychological conditions (like comfortable economic circumstances and sound mental health) that need to be in place before we can even contemplate realizing our 'God-given' potential and that these conditions are available to a minority of people. As someone who was out during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, I saw many a gay brother die the most horrific of deaths without ever being given the possibility of exploiting their talents as human beings. It seems utterly tasteless to speak of 'personal legends' in this context. If all that was written, it was so in the sickest of books.

The Magic Formula

2007-01-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

I suspect Coelho in The Alchemist has discovered the (not so) secret formula for writing an "international bestselling phenomenon", which I will summarize as follows: combine a bit of simplified neuro-linguistic reprogramming psychology (learn positive thinking) with a drop of Westernized Buddhism (live in the now). Add the promise of instant happiness and shameless wealth (the American dream/ protestant work ethic) and voila, a guaranteed place on the New York Times bestseller list. Also, if the author is so inclined, work said elements into a fictional form (the non-fiction self-help market is saturated), preferably of the children's fable variety. This will allow a prospective publisher a fourfold expansion of its target readership, marketing the product to both children (as a new Little Prince) and adults (as a new Candide) as well as to literature and self-help consumers. Essential to this marketing strategy is the literature = prestige equation, according to which consumers who normally wouldn't be caught dead in the pop psych section of Chapters are initiated into the self-help genre and regular consumers of the latter are encouraged to feel they are consuming 'serious' literature. That the author come form an exotic sounding third-world country is also advantageous. This will lend credibility to the essentially American belief that instant happiness is possible. Its a win-win-win formula for all involved.

crepuscular shipwreks of love

2007-01-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

Reading Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada reminded me of my first love. Like the 2o year old Chilean poet, I too was filled with youthful ardour, romantic sentiment and desire to be a creative artist. Unlike the 2o year old Chilean poet, the muses ignored me entirely. Attempting to express my love in verse, I composed a shockingly bad sonnet, filled with impressive words whose meanings I only dimly understood and cliched metaphors which horrify me when I think of them now. Its one virtue was that it strictly conformed to Shakespearean (or was it Spencerian?) formal conventions, but only after much excruciating effort. Years later, I found my love poem ripped and crumpled at the bottom of a box in my (then former) lover's closet. Had I any talent, I would have been better to follow Neruda's example of simple language (Este es un puerto./ Aqui te amo.) and clear metaphors (eres como una nube). Here sea, twilight and solitude inspire verses of a love at once erotic (Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava), obsessive (eres mia...estas presa), unsure of itself (Amame...No me abandones) and most keenly felt in absence (Me gustas cuando callas poerque estas como ausente).

Cumanda: nationalism and false reconciliation

2007-01-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

I admire Mera's attempt to use literature as a way of reconciling two cultures made hostile by the Conquest. Any sincere attempt to understand the other is to me commendable. However, there are (perhaps epistemological) limitations to such attempts and recognizing them is perhaps the surest sign of respect of the other's singularity. The reconciliation enacted in Cumanda--expressed most clearly in the scene where Padre Domingo and Tongana/Tubon forgive each other--fails for two reasons: 1) it does not respect the singularity of the other, and 2) its sincerity is compromised by nationalism. The discourse with which Mera chooses to represent otherness is that of noble savagery, a fantasy created by a French philosophe (Rousseau) disabused by the 'civilized' pursuits of aristocratic salons. The reactionary or dark side of Rousseau's ideas, and a romantic movement characterized by anti-enlightenment irrationality to which they contributed, has been underlined by many scholars, most notably Habermas. The only way Mera is able to bridge the gap between americano and criollo is by representing the former within the morally suspect European ideology of romanticism and an archetype that is more a reflection of a bored Frenchman's imagination than it is of American reality as it really is. Secondly, Mera's attempt to project a literary reconciliation of the two cultures seems compromised by his nationalist politics. Is he really interested in understanding his indigenous countrymen (the condition sine qua non of any reconciliation, literary or otherwise) or is Cumanda more a contribution to the project of pacifying a Nacion imposed by criollos and created to serve their interests?

Eva Luna or the art of kitsch

2007-01-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

More than once did I say to myself on reading Eva Luna this is trash, I can't believe I'm reading this, it just gets worse and worse. Yet upon reflection I'm not so sure the novel is as trashy as it seems. As was mentioned in class, the novel exploits from the first chapter almost every possible stereotype the gringo associates with Latin America. Yet the fact that they are so obvious suggests that Allende is consciously manipulating them in a way that playfully brings to light their arbitrary nature. Does this compulsively entertaining fluff also betray a critical element, one that elaborates a pastiche of stereotypes in order to diffuse them? As was also mentioned in class, Eva Luna does possess certain formal qualities characteristic of modernist (highbrow) novels. The independent narratives whose progressive rapprochement drives the novel forward contrasts the staticism of the individual chapters or sections, which have a cuento-like quality in that they stand alone as narrative units in a way similar to the individual episodes of a telenovela. The use of two narrative voices--first person in the case of Eva Luna, third in that of Rolf Carle--could also be considered a clever modernist device, though I found this inconsistant and annoying. The semanic contrast between romantic and political registers is another axis on which the novel is structured. That both end inconclusively points to a anti-ideological postmodernism that favours open-ended resolutions. By conjoining modernist technique with kitch material, the novel seems to subvert the distinction between high and low brow, another aim of postmodernism. That it was published in 1989, when pomo was at its height, would also suggest an afiliation with this movement.

Cumandá (1)

2007-01-16T18:42:00.000-08:00

Shouldn´t Cumandá be included in the reading list for the bad literature course? In my first blog for that course, I tried in vain to find an aesthetic criterion for judging a book bad and found that most of what I considered bad resulted from subjective taste. But now I think I have found one on reading Cumandá: literature that is explicitly didactic and propagandistic is bad literature! An artist who uses art as a tool with which to inculcate a set of values tends to make bad art. And Cumandá is bad art. Mera´s intention is political and as a consequence the creative worth of his work suffers. Take, for example, character development. There is none. Both Carlos Orozco and Cumanda are totally flat characters without any psychological depth whatsoever. Since Mera´s aim is to exalt the two constituent races of his Nación so as to suggest their possible reconciliation, he resorts to stereotyped idealizations of noble savagery and christian charity and abandons the hard creative task of developing the nuanced characters with flaws who evolve over time necessary for such a reconciliation to appear credible. As a reader I felt nothing towards these most unlikely of characters.

Why is Cumanda not only pale skinned but christian? What are Mera´s intentions in representing her as such? To make her more palatable to racist criollo readers perhaps? If this is foundational fiction, the nation is off to a bad start indeed.

span490 Eva Luna (1)

2007-01-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

Lukas Carlé represents Hitler on micro level. Here we have another example of how family structures can reproduce themselves on the national level, most notably in countries where reactionaries control power.

I found the transformation of Rolf Carlé from son of a Austrian psychopath to South American golden boy hard to believe. Despite the fact that the war spared him much of his father´s tyranny, he nevertheless lived through significant childhood trauma (being forced by the Russians to bury gazed Jews, witnessing the incident preceding his brother´s exile and the hanging of father). His metamorphosis into a charming and cultured young man in the New World seems inconsistent with his Old World background. Allende will probably link his desire to denounce injustice in the form of documentary film to the expression of his rage against his father´s brutality, but this seems contrived. Will Eva Luna make a similar transformation, from orphaned street urchin into articulate militant?

Allende likely based la Colonia on the German towns in the Lakes District of Chile, where you can buy Kuchen and stay in B and B´s called Kleine Salzburg written in Gothic characters.

The worst (literary) book I've ever read (and why).

2007-01-10T08:49:00.000-08:00

What first comes to mind is a clearly biased history of Chile I read while in that country that stressed the 'civilizing mission' of the traditional ruling elite from the establishment of the colony to the present. Yet I could not qualify this well-written book as bad soley on the basis of its (in my view) objectionable politics.

So perhaps being poorly written is the main criterion for bad literature. In that case a recent anthology of gay erotica I read would fit the bill. Most of its writing was amateurish and clichéd. Yet it did not intend to be anything other than titulating (which it was) and in this sense served its (non-literary) function. Another example of possibly bad literature I read is a short story an old roommate gave me to criticize. It was about a father-son fishing trip in Northern Ontario which imitated Hemingway's style to such a degree that I had a hard time taking it seriously. Yet am I justified in qualifying as bad an unpublished work by a young writer still struggling to find his voice? I have a snobish Argentine friend who considers Mario Benedetti's writing as "popular" and therefore bad. Yet I quite like him and find much of what he writes serious and well-written. I thought Kerouac's On the Road was crap when I read it, yet only last night did I discuss this beat classic with a UBC creative writing student who quoted by memory I line which, I must admit, had a certain bebop rhythmic quality and a definite coolness. I am thus hard pressed to name the worst literary work I've ever read--a right-wing history, some dirty gay fiction, a friend's attempt to emulate Papa Hemingway, "popular" prose by a well-known Uraguayan, the bible of the beats--it's all good.

La relación entre literatura y familia

2007-01-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

Given that family determines self, it is no wonder that the former figures prominently in literature, which can be seen as an entreprise devoted to the understanding of the self. Reading fiction, theatre or poetry can thus function as a form of imaginative pyschotherapy in which the self is brought to light through identifaction with characters whose family life was perhaps similar to one's own. This bringing to light is especially significant when neurotic families determine disfunctional selves, since disfunctional selfhood so often plays itself out in a dynamic of repression in which the self is alientated from its authentic self. Literature can serve to bring the self back to itself. This homecoming is nevertheless incomplete since the identification of alienated selfhood with imaginative selfhood is necessarily vicarious and often only subconsciously perceived. When it is consciously perceived, it can only but provide the self with the ilumination necessary for its own emancipation. Literature can thus be seen as an instrument of freedom and as a middle term in the reconciliation of family and self.