Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold drew me in immediately and I liked especially García’s interweaving of vivid characters. His depiction of village life via a composite of characters’ points of view on an event for me evoked Pedro Páramo though the two works are very different: García’s village is a lively place, ethnically diverse with many characters who exert a measure of control over their destinies (Angela Vicario, for example becomes “mistress of her own fate;” p. 93). They have strong friendships and some happiness in marriage. Rulfo’s Comala, however, having been destroyed by its cacique, is populated by ghosts, buffeted by forces outside their control. By contrast, two of García’s villagers butcher their cacique for taking advantage of one of their sister.

García’s narrator suggests that Santiago did not understand why the Vicario twins planned to kill him (p. 112), leaving some uncertainty that Santiago Nasar did have sex with Angela. García, however, depicts Santiago behaving completely entitled towards Divina Flor, and it’s possible he had the same behavior towards Angela, who evidently he would not have considered his equal (contrast, for example, his fiance Flor Miguel).

I read Chronicle of a Death Foretold in English and the English title threw me off- “a death foretold” I understood as “a death predicted.” The novel, however, works with the paradox of “una muerte annunciada” - the fact that the Vicario twins have made it public knowledge that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar, and that paradoxically in this town where everyone knows each other and each other’s habits, a multitude of opportunities to halt the murder were missed.

Vargas Llosa: The Cubs.

Vargas Llosa: The Cubs.


The Cubs, a powerful work, gripping to read and difficult to write about, concerns a group of four boys of age 8 or 9 and a fifth boy, Cuéllar, who joins their school and their group of friends. The story follows Cuéllar through the eyes of the group of friends, as he struggles to find a place the society into which they come of age after he has been rendered impotent by a dog mauling.

Narration begins in third person but immediately shifts to first person, then alternates. Although in the beginning the narration sometimes indicates direct discourse (“taffy, lucky stiff, Choto would say to him, they give you a bigger allowance than all four of us get” p.2), later it is less clearly indicated: “and then we spent Saturday, whole Sundays, men dancing with each other, at Lalo’s house, no, at mine it’s bigger, it was better, but Choto had more records, and Manny but I’ve got my sister who can each us and Cuéllar, no, at his house, his parents already knew and one day, here, his mother, sweetheart, they gave him that hi-fi, just for him?” p. 2-3). This narration is intense. I think that, although third person narration describes the group of five (“they”), the first person narration is always one of Cuéllar’s four friends, and that there is no first person narration for Cuéllar, with the result that as a character he is both part of and outside the group.

As Cuéllar matures physically he is more and more left out of the social processes of his peers. Their cruelty feeds a growing pain and anger which his four friends don’t comprehend. In the accident Lalo slams the dogs snout in the door of the shower where Cuéllar still is, inciting the dog to rage. The four friends betray his secret with a cruel nickname that circulates to all. They fail to understand why he wants to hear about their experiences with girls, and then when he falls in love with Teresita, try to talk him into lying to her, don’t understand why he can’t. The end of Chap 5 (p. 40) depicts most clearly how separate Cuéllar’s experience is from that of his friends, when crying about life is passing him by, he tells them “and also out of pity for the poor, for the blind, for cripples, for those panhandlers …” while they insist he is feeling fine now.

I see some possible Christian allusions in the story. Cuéllar surfing in Holy Week “spread his arms, rose up” p. 37) strikes me as a crucifixion allusion, and of course the dog is named Judas.

Carlos Fuentes: Aura.

Aura: “1. Irradiación luminosa que algunas personas perciben alrededor de los cuerpos. … 4. Ave rapaz Americana, parecida al zopilote pero con la cabeza de color rojo y el pico amarillo. Sin: gallinazo. [Diccionario didactico Avanzado; SM de Ediciones, 2007 Mexico, D.F.]

In “Aura” a 109 year old Consuelo Llorente ensnares 27 year old high school history teacher, Felipe Montero to remain with her as lover/ husband by entrancing him with Aura, her projected double, the image of herself as a young girl. Consuelo works black magic culminating in intercourse with Aura ingestion of a (presumably) Eucharistic wafer that Aura first touched to her vagina.

The story is eerie and narration in the 2nd person makes it more intense. Although we guess some of the setup before Felipe, I find a number of things yet unclear: is Felipe really the double of General Llorente, Consuelo’s husband? or has the spirit of the general been called up to occupy his body (“engendered his double” p. 412). Dinner the first two evenings has four places set, Aura and Felipe, Consuelo and, I conclude, the General. When Felipe succumbs to Consuelo’s spell, the narration mentions his “true face”, he experiences “an invisible hand” ripping “off a mask he’s worn for 27 years” (p. 415).

Regarding the eating of liver, evidently goat's liver, did that have some magic element to it? Fuentes employs much animal and bird imagery, and the second meaning of Aura (vulture/ zopilote) seems to me connected with Consuelo’s hatred of/ torturing of cats. Then what was the garden Felipe saw from the roof with cats fighting and burning – a recollection of his past life or a glimpse into Consuelo’s true nature? Was the rabbit Saga what we would call her familiar?

Finally, to me the name Llorente evokes the Mexican mythic figure La Llorona, who weeps for her children (in some versions the children have died, in some version she killed them herself).

On a happier note, I stayed at Donceles #95 in a very nice hotel (Hotel Catedral) once and include 2 pictures taken from the roof terrace.

Cortázar: The Pursuer.

The Pursuer (who may be the artist who pursues transcendence or the jackals who pursue the artist) explores the gap between jazz musician Johnny Carter and his parasitic entourage, especially the narrator Bruno V, author of the definitive work on Johnny’s music. The novel sets Johnny’s search for the transcendent in opposition to Bruno’s reductive appropriation of Johnny’s work to tame his art and advance Bruno’s academic career. Bruno narrates with disdain for Johnny as a person and for African Americans in general. When Johnny wants to give up jazz for Mexico, wealthy patron and hanger-on Tica causes his death (my interpretation, strongly implied though not explicitly stated, p.55).

That the parasites are not simply greedy hangers-on but actively damaging Johnny Cortázar implies via references to Dylan Thomas, a book of whose poetry Johnny has annotated, especially “The Mask” quoted twice (p. 1, p. 55). The implication that Tica caused his death is in this vein. The setup of the novel, however, suggests to me a narrative polemic against Theodor Adorno’s, writings on jazz (esp 1933, 36, hence available to Cortázar well before he wrote The Pursuer), which claim that jazz does not partake in “progressive art” but is part of “the culture industry”. Adorno traces the origins of jazz to “Turkey in the Straw” and “Old Zip Coon” – USA folk tunes. Cortázar includes several references to straws and one to turkey when Johnny, speaking about his search for the divine and transcendence in his art (p. 51) berates Bruno. Johnny points out straws on the River Seine and mentions “Lan and the girls are waiting for you with a turkey in the oven” (p.51. I refer only to the English translation, don’t know what word Cortázar has for straw here.) Let me say as a film artist, a student of classical music and admirer of Schoenberg and Berg myself, I have even more disdain for Adorno’s patronizing Eurocentric essay than Bruno has for Johnny. Cortázar, assuming he is responding to Adorno, recasts Adorno’s categories to show the culture industry and hangers-on led by a German intellectual to be jackals bringing down the jazz artist and eventually consuming him by appropriating his work (the incident re: Amorous is illustrative).

Johnny confronts Bruno for attributing to him a concept of God foreign to Johnny’s actual belief (p. 49) and much can be said about the religious imagery especially quotations from Revelations (8:11 star called wormwood; 11:8 bodies lie unburied in the streets). The urns, however, is the image I liked the most in The Pursuer because of how Cortázar fully exploits it. I think Cortázar may be using the image of whitewashed sepulcher (Matt 23:27) from the woes against the scribes and Pharisees (Matt 23) – “woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. I love his use of the urns

Alejo Carpentier. The Chase

I find Alejo Carpentier’s The Chase to be a compelling and disconcerting work. The flowing style of the English translation full of chronologically digressive subordinate clauses I believe remains close to the original (from reading a short story in the original believe the translation conveys his style quite well – but note: the scholarship student speaks of Aztec eagle and leopard warriors – this should be eagle and jaguar -tigres o jaguars- warriors).

The novel follows four principal characters – the ticket taker-music student, the former architecture student, the old woman, his former wet nurse and later landlord, living in the house with the belvedere. Carpentier explores the deteriorating mental state of the former student as he seeks refuge with the old woman, takes her food so she starves to death waiting to extort financial and visa security from a high official, reflected thematically in the crumbling buildings of the city around him.

A pivotal moment finds Estrella (she is the only named character) the prostitute recognizing the student as a whore, though I need to ponder more what connection Carpentier suggests between Estrella and the architecture student – I think they parallel each other, in the long description of Estrella’s observance of Holy Week and how she has detached her body from her core sense of self. The architecture student has a religious revelation after he doesn’t eat for 2 days, then proceeds to take all the old woman’s food while holding on to his concept that he has religious insight. Is this an order of magnitude worse than Estrella? Or a parallel?

The passing of the thought-to-be counterfeit note has a parallel in Tolstoy’s short story The forged note, the theme of which Robert Bresson used in his remarkable film L’Argent. Carpentier, however, if he was developing Russian literary themes, strikes me as exploring Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground) rather than Tolstoy.

José María Arguedas

José María Arguedas: Two short stories.

“The Pongo’s Dream” and “Warma Kuyay” both sketch interactions between hacienda-owner and Indians, emphasizing how in the contrasting social positions where the hacienda owner holds such power over the Indians violence is ever-present. “The Pongo’s Dream” contrasts the lord with his humblest worker, the lord’s hatred of the house servant and gratuitious violence towards humiliation of him. The religious settling of accounts, via the servant’s dream, connects with the Inkarri myth. The setting of the lord’s mistreatment of the servant, at the saying of prayers (Hail Mary) emphasizes the hypocrisy of the lord and has echoes of Luke’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). In the parable the rich man and Lazarus never meet – Lazarus is a beggar lying outside the gate who is taken up to heaven beside Abraham, while the rich man suffers in Hades.

“Warma Kuyay” explores the gap between hacienda-owner and Indians in the interactions of the young people. Ernesto, though spending time with the Indians, and loving their festivals, cannot accept the wrongdoing of his uncle, raping Justina, and though thinking of himself as a kind and tender lover of animals, is responsible for tremendous violence towards the animals and Kutu. The story explores in a concise way the violence set loose through the system of relationships and the blindness of the hacienda owner’s son to the power relationships. I especially like Arguedas making use of the role of the animals in exploring the perpetration of human violence and in both stories Arguedas’s evocation of the tremendous disdain the powerful have for the Indians.
: Two short stories.

“The Pongo’s Dream” and “Warma Kuyay” both sketch interactions between hacienda-owner and Indians, emphasizing how in the contrasting social positions where the hacienda owner holds such power over the Indians violence is ever-present. “The Pongo’s Dream” contrasts the lord with his humblest worker, the lord’s hatred of the house servant and gratuitious violence towards humiliation of him. The religious settling of accounts, via the servant’s dream, connects with the Inkarri myth. The setting of the lord’s mistreatment of the servant, at the saying of prayers (Hail Mary) emphasizes the hypocrisy of the lord and has echoes of Luke’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). In the parable the rich man and Lazarus never meet – Lazarus is a beggar lying outside the gate who is taken up to heaven beside Abraham, while the rich man suffers in Hades.

“Warma Kuyay” explores the gap between hacienda-owner and Indians in the interactions of the young people. Ernesto, though spending time with the Indians, and loving their festivals, cannot accept the wrongdoing of his uncle, raping Justina, and though thinking of himself as a kind and tender lover of animals, is responsible for tremendous violence towards the animals and Kutu. The story explores in a concise way the violence set loose through the system of relationships and the blindness of the hacienda owner’s son to the power relationships. I especially like Arguedas making use of the role of the animals in exploring the perpetration of human violence and in both stories Arguedas’s evocation of the tremendous disdain the powerful have for the Indians.

Juan Rulfo. Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo. Pedro Páramo

I know there are many great works of world literature, but the great works to which I attach myself make up a much smaller set, of which Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is one of the top. It may be that I was prepared for Juan Rulfo’s literary strategy by first studying in Spanish class in Mexico two short stories, “No oyes ladrar los perros?” and the heartbreaking “Es que somos muy pobres” hence gripped by his capacity to extend the poetic into novel form. Pedro Páramo is a work of sparse, poetic language. In January I saw an exhibit of Juan Rulfo photographs, powerful and sparse just as the writing. In the same exhibit, was an exhibit of black and white photographs of Oaxacan village life taken by an anthropologist. Juan Rulfos’ photographs showed the people and landscape as if from inside, as if the subjects had taken the pictures of themselves, in contrast to the anthropologist’s pictures which looked at the subjects from outside, trying to arouse curiosity, interest, compassion or other emotions in the viewer.

Pedro Páramo works as a mosaic with each short incident a tile, that fits into the whole, through complex intertwining structures. I’m not going to try to resolve structural issues in this post because the complexity of the work makes that impossible and I plan to write my final paper on Pedro Páramo (analyzing structure). Rulfo’s characters are integral with the landscape, which has both topographical and emotional qualities. Narrated events in Pedro Páramo are from various times, principally the time of the narrator, and two or three time periods from the title character’s life. The overall sequence moves in reverse, for example, a principal character we meet in the beginning, the narrator’s guide Abundio Martinez, appears also towards the end in a defining incident from years before.

Among the structures, Juan Rulfo works with are what I think is a poetic structure of “catch phrases” that pick up the threads across similar time periods. He also seems to me to be working with a Dante Divine Comedy type structure, not sequentially but interwoven. (Pedro Páramo, as far as my reading at present, depicts the institutional church unambiguously negatively.)

The town of Comal is described as an inferno (hot as a comal), to which Abundio, the guide, leads the narrator. (As far as location names go, the reference to Sayula will be worth exploring.) The narrators “experiences” arriving in Comal have a purgatory quality to them. Susana St. Juan seems to be linked with Paradiso elements and she is reminiscent of a Beatrice figure – we first meet her flying kites, and Pedro recalls seeing her ascent to heaven when she dies (this incident recalls to me the John’s gospel version of the “empty tomb” where Jesus tells Mary “do not grasp me [in Greek it’s the word for sexual intercourse] I have not yet ascended to the Father”. The description of Susana’s descent into the skeleton-strewn mines, and it’s placement near her death, also plays into a Christ-Susana resemblance.] In my opinion the Dante analogy is suggestive, not rigid, one of many strategies that give multiple layers to the concreteness of each incident

Maria Luisa Bombal. A Final Mist

I like A Final Mist very much. The narrator, emotionally distant from her husband Daniel from the outset but passive, internalizing her desperation contrasts with Regina, who carries on a passionate affair and eventually shoots herself in her lover’s house. I like that the novel depicts the female characters sympathetically yet shows both partners in the marriage suffering in and contributing to the emotional distance. The overall impact is of a terrible unbridgeable isolation – not the fault of the individuals but perhaps of the institution of marriage. At the end of the novel, after they visit Regina in the hospital, Bombal’s narrator throws herself under a vehicle, but Daniel rescues her. He “pretends ignorance of my suffering” (p. 47) as she did of his suffering on the night of their arrival at his house. She will “live correctly” “cry from habit and smile out of duty” and the narration concludes with “The fog settles over everything like a shroud.” (p. 47).

The novel proceeds via scenes heavy with thematic motifs – many of them nature related - of forest, leaves, trees, the pool, mist and fog, gardens, death, others of perception - sounds and silence, difficulty seeing, blindness, and the dream life.
The viewing of a dead girl early on in the story has no real narrative context, hence, juxtaposed to the narrator beginning her marriage with Daniel, seems to allude to Daniel’s dead wife and to the narrator’s fate (“she appears never to have been alive” p. 6).

It is ambiguous whether the narrator really left the house at night and met a lover, or whether, as Daniel claims, they both fell deeply asleep from the wine (and perhaps made love imagining that the other was someone else). I think, however, that the novel presents the meeting with the lover as real, but because of the circumstances uncertain, and hence even more inaccessible to the main character.

I see several echoes of Tolstoy in the novel and like how Bombal explores the female character’s perspective on the echoes; Regina’s piano playing awakens the pain of isolation and absence of passion in the narrator (not passion in her lover or jealousy in her husband), something that Bombal presents as a vital part of being alive; the scene where the narrator mistakes a boy practicing violin for the moan of her lover may also echo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer sonata. And “What more repugnant and useless gesture than the suicide of a woman approaching old age” (p. 46) after “the act of throwing oneself under the wheels of a vehicle” and echo of Anna Karenina.

Adolfo Bioy Casares: Morel’s Invention.

I loved reading this novel, indeed I find it compelling. When I try to describe why, however, my words are turning out too large and clumsy to capture the fine brushstrokes with which Bioy paints his narrator’s daily survival tasks, his persistent investigation of his surroundings, the ups and downs of his emotions, and the ambiguously transformative effect of his love for Faustine.

Before he sees the image of Faustine, the narrator recounts his flight to the island as a falsely condemned fugitive. The Italian rugseller who told him about the island described the death of people he said were from a ship that had been at the island, people we later understand are Morel’s guests and victims. At first the narrator views the people (images) as intruders and fears their capacity to turn him in (p. 3; Eng. p 11). As he falls in love with Faustine, however, he overcomes the spatial limitations set by his fear. He persists in exploring what he thinks to be dangerous space in the Museum and pursues his inquiry about the images until eventually he “explains everything” (p. 87; Eng 99).

Early on he described his situation as unbearable/ deplorable” (p.4 Eng. 10). His description of his efforts to remain alive on the island in the first few pages is similarly grim. Gradually his effort to get close to Faustine become the center of the narration. Towards the end of the novel the motif of his life being intolerable resumes (p. 82, 84 Eng. 93, 95), but now it is intolerable to be separated from Faustine. His desire join her culminates in him transforming himself into an image accompanying hers, with the hope that someday someone will find his writings and have the technology to recreate him and her together.

As noted in the introduction, the name Morel alludes to Moreau; Faustine’s name evokes Faust – though no one character in the novel really resembles Faust, certainly not Faustine. I think the name Faustine simply signals that the novel deals with the themes of Goethe’s Faust. It deals with them in a very different way, however, in my opinion.

Antepasados

Los de Abajo: The figure of Demetrio Macías

The novel consists of vivid scenes based on Azuela’s experiences, linked through the central character Demetrio Macías. Though the scenes themselves strike me as raw, subtext and literary allusions, especially in Part III, together with the figure Luis Cervantes, offer an interpretation of the sequence.

Part III opens with a letter from Luis Cervantes written in 1915 from El Paso, where Azuela wrote the novel in 1915. The novel shows Luis Cervantes cowardly vis a vis battle, though Luis (from Ludovicus, “famous in battle) means the opposite, and using his skill with words to manipulate others, betraying the literary significance of his surname. Azuela emphasizes his character’s oppositeness to Miguel de Cervantes by writing Luis Cervantes 107 of the 108 occurrences in the novel. The unique “Cervantes” (in this edition) occurs I, vii, p. 12 “Anastasio … con suavidad tomó el brazo de Cervantes”).

Three Biblical references stand out in part III. The poet Valderrama quotes Genesis 3 (and gives the Latin original), just after Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden (III, I p. 61 “—Los serranos —le dijo con énfasis y solemnidad—son carne de nuestra carne y huesos de nuestros huesos... "Os ex osibus meis et caro de carne mea"... Los serranos están hechos de nuestra madera... De esta madera firme con la que se fabrican los héroes... “).

This citation suggests looking more closely at Luis Cervantes and Solís, for references to the serpent, though I will not do that here. Part III, iv (p. 64) refers to their march as Exodus and a sequence of references to the crucifixion are set in motion when the poet Valderrama reenacts Peter observing the transfiguration of Jesus (just before his arrest and crucifixion) in III, iii p. 63 making a clear identification of Demetrio with Jesus.

—`;Señor, Señor, bueno es que nos estemos aquí!... Levantaré tres tiendas, una para ti, otra para Moisés y otra para Elías."

Demetrio as indigena is another point. The narrative points out Demetrio’s pure indigenous features in I, xv (p. 23), contrast the various güeros. Allusions to Aztecs occur throughout. It is a complex topic that I will not pursue further here.

The allusions in Part III, however, culminate in an intriguing allusion that for me goes to the issue of Azuela writing this novel in mid-Revolution. Demetrio’s name, which means “follower of Demeter”, goddess of grain is a classical name. Part III, which is choc full of allusions, describes Demetrio’s meeting with his wife – a storm comes up and they take shelter in a cave (III,vi p. 66)

La lluvia comenzó a caer en gruesas gotas y tuvieron que refugiarse en una rocallosa covacha.

after which she pleads with him not to leave her, suggesting an allusion to Aeneas’ “marriage” to Dido when they take shelter in a cave. All of my copies of The Aeneid, having taken shelter from the exploding hot water heater in my building, are unfortunately inaccessible for comparing the wording. (Note that Camilla is also a character in the Aeneid, leader of the Volscian women warriors.) In light of this description, the opening description of Demetrio’s wife fleeing with the child against the backdrop of the burning house (recalled later in the middle of the novel) evokes (in inversion) Aeneas fleeing burning Troy carrying his father on his back. The emphasis on Demetrio’s son is interesting in this connection. Aeneas must leave Dido, must travel on, though he himself is not destined, nor is his son, to see Rome, the city their descendants will found.

Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges draws on his vast knowledge of world literature, history and religion, to weave his fictional characters so seamlessly into an historical or scholarly context that one doubts that one is reading fiction. Through the vividly detailed worlds he creates Borges explores issues of causality, reality and appearance, humanity and divinity, death, art, literature and learning, and determination of meaning in human life (have I left anything out?). The first set of stories (Garden of Forking Paths) is more cerebral, whereas the second set, Artifices, most of the stories of which concern death directly or indirectly, explores more emotional elements, and among which I find “The South” to be particularly compelling.

Among the “Garden of Forking Paths” stories, I find The Library of Babel, which explores limits of human knowledge and the limits of human knowledge of the limits of knowledge, interesting and funny. And I find The Lottery of Babylon to be ingenious as Borges’ the Company follows a logical sequence of actions that render the inhabitants lives devoid of logic.

I am more drawn, however, to The Circular Ruins, in which “the man” creates a son via dreaming. Though utilizing many ancient philosophical and religious creation concepts, Borges explores poignantly the emotional ties of the creator towards his created. “Circular Ruin” describes the inner process of the creator all the while incorporating references to more impersonal ancient accounts and concepts of Genesis (“the man”- haadam in Genesis 1; sleep – through which the human being is made male and female in Genesis 2; the opening reference to clay alluding to Genesis 2 and the Mesopotamian Atrahasis creation account, to name just three), gnostic/ neoplatonist type concepts of series of lower and lower orders of creation through emanation (the man dreams his creation but learns that he is the creation of a previous creator), and the Christian allusion of father-son imagery. I find the end of the story very touching. Borges depicts the man fearing for his son off on his own, separated from him; and thereby, I would say, depicts the creator poignantly embracing his finitude.