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.