Opium of the Masses

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...

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

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

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

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)

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?

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.