Concluding Blog Post – Is “Romance Studies” Meaningful?

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Hi everyone! It’s pretty hard to believe we’ve reached the end of the course, and it’s a pretty bittersweet occasion. I’m definitely looking forward to the summer, but having the opportunity to explore the Romance world has been an amazing experience. I’m very glad I read all the books I did, and was exposed to key themes in modernism, surrealism, and postmodernism. A lot of people are talking about their favourite books, and I figured I’d add mine as well! The Society of Reluctant Dreamers probably stood out the most; it beautifully explored the tumultuous world of contemporary Africa through dreams, with themes of postcolonialism and political revolution. The runner-ups would probably be Nada and The Shrouded Woman because I really enjoyed the writing styles and themes.

I learned lots through our discussions as well. One standout was the Zobel discussion we had in which we talked about articulating trauma and understanding colonialism, something that was “beyond language” in José’s Martinique. I was totally blown away by the realization that in some ways, it was impossible to allocate mere sentences to describing trauma and experiences (which we saw in Nada as well). We often talk about how Romance Studies can entail a complete, overarching understanding of the Romance world, and I believe that Zobel argued that without this ability to give a voice to the oppressed, it was fundamentally incomplete.

That said, at the start of the term, we were asked if there was such a thing as Romance Studies, and I would like to argue now that there is. I think that we’re free to define new subjects as we wish, and that having these new fields of study is only important insofar as they provide new connections that previous subjects couldn’t, so maybe I should say that I believe the idea of “Romance Studies” is meaningful. Having read those books together, I felt that there is some connection that studying one language’s literature in isolation couldn’t achieve. Themes like colonialism, trauma, and issues of being are fundamentally cross-national and transcend languages, like we saw in Laforet, Zobel, and Lispector.

Maybe a single language provides incomplete descriptions of these phenomena existing anywhere (I say this having read every book in English), ones transcending language, but by seeing how different writers living in different worlds tackle them gives less of an incomplete idea. Even if our Romance studies is merely a subset of “comparative literature,” by giving it a name and distinguishing it, we illuminate new possibilities for understanding the world.

As for my question, do you think there’s something special that studying Romance languages in particular can provide, as opposed to a general survey of comparative literature? I’m inclined to say yes; the Romance world’s turbulent 20th-century history is marked by themes we grapple with today, like legacies of colonialism, political violence, and the struggle for freedom, but beyond that, I’m not sure.

Week 12 – “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers”

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The Society of Reluctant Dreamers has probably been my favourite book all term and I would recommend it to anyone, especially people interested in postcolonialism or contemporary Africa. I was really fascinated by the idea of giving life and artistic representations to dreams, and I think the book added an interesting perspective to issues of historical and future truths we’ve been exploring for the past couple weeks with Bolaño and Cercas. In particular, I wanted to talk here about how Agualusa used dreaming (about “fictional worlds”) as a method of making sense of a real world.

I thought that the dreams in the novel could represent a subconscious understanding that there was a way forward or a method of action, and Moira’s efforts to paint them was to give reality to them. In that sense, Hélio’s machine also could represent something people use to see reality clearer, whether it’s through unrealistic dreams displaying the workings of the subconsious or dreams reflecting reality. Additionally, when Hossi died and appeared in others’ dreams everywhere, it seemed like the nation grew to understand that change was necessary, seeing the man in the purple coat as a symbol or a trailblazer. I felt that there might have been a Biblical undertone in the final scenes as well, where Hossi was known to be dead, but his twin comes back in the purple coat (what the dream foretold) to confront the president and force him to release the dissidents on the hunger strike. Even though the president knew Hossi didn’t really come back to life, the symbolism was present.

In the story though, dreams can be more than just symbolic: many of them are truthful, representing history or the future. I think having written this post, I believe that in the novel, dreams are only as powerful in our reality as our understanding of their symbolism enables them to be. The place Karanguiri called the “Angola where almost all Angolans live” had a national dream of equality and one against corruption, but it seemed to take the collective dream of Hossi, the “unknown soldier,” marching up to the President and demanding it, that made it more of a possibility. The unity it provided, with even the president himself believing that the “fake” dream ultimately had some truth, was the only reason Jamba’s entrance could have worked.

My question this week is “In the novel, what do you think gave dreams (like the dream of Hossi or Daniel’s dreams) their power to reflect reality?”

Reality and Fiction in “Soldiers of Salamis”

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Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis was really unique in how it seemed to blur lines between reality, history, and fiction and pose interesting questions about knowability in the process. Throughout the first part, I felt that the book was more “lifelike” than many of the others I’ve read, probably because it takes place more recently and Cercas’s experiences seemed more “ordinary” compared to Amulet, for example. I actually chose to deliberately not Google whether things or people were real or not, like how Bolaño seemed to argue that the embellished truth can be more “real” than the actual truth, and that reality itself betrays the narrative reality seems to provide at times.

I figured that Cercas wanted to convey that many details of history are to an extent unknowable, but there were broad chronological ideas, narratives, or lessons to be found within them. Those ideas and narratives are usually what we mostly take away from history as opposed to just records of what happens, just as Cercas (the narrator) wanted to make a point about war in his book, which was possibly best conveyed through revising his interview with Miralles. History might only be as knowable as witnesses want it to be, but that might show that our understanding of “real history” as a complex set of narratives is fundamentally incomplete, and it wants to be filled. In that sense, to answer the lecture’s questions, I felt that the lies in the fictional recount of Mazas’s experience serve to promote that broad narrative and there are consequences of that. It won’t be a beacon of historical accuracy, but the book in itself contributes something to the discourse of commemorating and remembering the War.

I also found myself questioning whether the facts Cercas presented were real or not really frequently, and I felt that this confusion was deliberate. Cercas’s choice to make the narrator have the same thing as him or to title the second part the same as the novel encouraged me to look deeper at this division between fiction and reality. There are some “easier” facts to verify, like how Sanchez Mazas and Javier Cercas were real people, but also falsehoods, like Javier’s initial description of his life, which I thought made clear to me that not everything in the story was strictly true. That said, as soon as Part 2 began, my interest in distinguishing between truth and fiction seemed to wane as though it diminished in importance. I think that the main thing I took away was an increased awareness of how fiction pretending to be real is an avenue into reality.

My question this week is that Bolaño says that “All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that matters.” What is the nature of this truth?

Bolaño’s Amulet: Some Thoughts on Temporality and Memory

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Amulet was a really interesting look into themes of modern Latin American history for me, and I really enjoyed reading about Auxilio’s stories about the past and her eventual literary “history of the future,” from the lecture. The first few lines stuck with me for the entire part of the book that I’ve read, about how everything Auxilio said was a horror story. The lecture seemed to hint that this horror of history had to do with the “storms” and social issues surrounding Latin America as the generation of younger poets she hung around was slowly lost to them, including when students were taken away during the occupation of the UNAM.

The strange sense of time present in the novel stuck out to me initially; the narration supposedly takes place over a few days in September 1968, but Auxilio frequently alludes to the future when discussing events such as Arturo returning to Mexico in 1974 after helping overthrow Allende’s government. I thought that this memory of the future found meaning in commemoration, and she became an emblem or a witness of the military occupation specifically. It seemed like remembering was closely related to acknowledging to Lacouture, and acknowledging the future of that lost generation and of the literary world was to commemorate and honour how it would live on, seen from a bathroom of a building dedicated to just those ideals of change and literary excellence. Even after reading the lecture, I don’t fully understand how this temporality functions, but nonetheless, Lacouture’s depiction of Latin America through only her peripheral eyes in the bathroom, convincingly and beautifully shows how history itself can be a horror story.

Finally, the way Bolaño tackles narration was really interesting to me as well; the lecture mentioned that Auxilio lives on the periphery of the violence and revolution characterizing much of 20th-century Latin American history because the book rarely gave details of violence, but mainly relied on observations and indications that the occupation was happening. Both books by Spanish-speaking Latin American authors I read this term (Bombal and now Bolaño) have narrators who tend to take a peripheral view of the world; Ana Maria’s narration often highlighted Chile’s status in the world relative to Europe and the dominant social role of men in her life, and Lacouture sees the world from the periphery of the bathroom. As a result, I was wondering about whether a common theme in 20th century Latin American literature is this “peripheral” perspective and understanding of the world, as the region itself experienced revolution, development, and tumultuous political change when parts of Europe and English-speaking North America seemed to dictate the world order. I wanted to ask whether, based on other Latin American literature you’ve read, this sense of being peripheral comes up or reveals itself. 

Exploring Paranoia and Surveillance in Manea’s “The Trenchcoat”

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Manea’s The Trenchcoat was a really fascinating read; I enjoyed diving into the slightly unsettling atmosphere of stagnation, censorship and being forced to say “correct” things that pervaded the dinner party and the initial drive there. It seemed like social convention had an extremely strong influence over the attendees’ actions.  For example, before the party, it seemed that Dina’s invitation to show the guests around the house was a bit forced because of the use of the word “must,” as though it was an obligation. I think that that atmosphere contributed to the actual reveal of the mysterious trenchcoat by building up a feeling of paranoia and that one was being watched.

Paranoia generally seems to be a major topic that Manea explores, making what seemed mundane into a world filled with suspicion and fear. The lecture mentioned that he had to avoid writing names and or being specific, and the lack of openness about location names or specific details seemed like the narrative of someone who knew they were watched, and was a stark difference from previous weeks’ books. The censorship that the characters were subjected to reminded me a bit of Nada, where Laforet had to avoid making direct references to people involved in the Spanish Civil War, writing in a society full of open secrets that could not be named.

The other thing I wanted to discuss was the appearance of the trenchcoat, which almost made me feel a sense of dread for the characters. The lecture mentioned that Manea’s writing thrived upon introducing small differences into monotonous life, and I felt that the couples’ initial conversations gave me an impression of stagnation toward progress and change. I also associate trenchcoats with a kind of surveillance or spying, deliberately designed to conceal appearances, so when it appeared among the guests, it served to me as a reminder of how the people in the privileged dinner party were not above surveillance. The trenchcoat is also described as being almost completely indistinguisahble; it is like “the one you see in all of the stores.” To me, it symbolized both an anonymous power that seemed to constantly weigh on the Romanians’ lives and their overt knowledge that it was present and could not be ignored.

A question I wanted to ask the author was “How did your experiences with social interactions under communism in Romania inform the symbolism of the trenchcoat and its significance to the plot?”

Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”

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W, or the Memory of Childhood has been one of my favourite books this term because of the unique storytelling style and the way it explores a lingering presence of trauma and history in the more autobiographical narrative. I was initially a bit skeptical of how two unrelated stories could provide so much coherence and support each other to the point where you could intertwine them and call it a single book. I ultimately felt that the history of W was an interesting way to describe mechanisms of social inequality and a slightly terrifying look into societies centred around hierarchies (under the more innocent pretense of sports).

For the first 100 pages or so, I felt that W had a culture in which victors and the “top” were glorified; it seemed like Winckler’s narrative deliberately ignored the non-athletes and losers of the games, by mentioning how only athletes and athletic-adjacent people lived in the villages. I wondered what happened to the “others” pretty quickly after because they weren’t discussed as prominently. By shifting the narrative to the victors and the athletes, it seems that a society based on glorifying victory and treating the “non-victors,” or the people not at the top, poorly, can have an outward appearance of prosperity and happiness, but there are some underlying issues to be dealt with.

The semi-autobiography part felt like a much more standard recount of experiences, somewhat similar to what I read in Black Shack Alley, but there was a kind of erasure of experiences during the narrator’s formative years. I initially assumed that was because they had trouble coming to terms with the horrors and realities of the war, and that forgetting everything (and conveniently not having photographs) represented a way to cope with trauma. There seems to be a deliberate focus on memories unrelated to war, with Perec only making passing references to it (like how the trauma of Nada is never explicitly put in context of the civil war), and I thought that putting the issues with Nazi Germany into a story about a fictional sporting island was a way to process those emotions.

The allegory of W ultimately helped me understand how the narrator must have seen the intrusion of “unrelated” and seemingly “unimportant” things like sports (or religion in his case) into important things like people’s nutrition and social status. As a whole, I felt like W, or the Memory of Childhood was an interesting way to discuss memories of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism without feeling like it disrespected people’s experiences.

As a result, the question I wanted to ask was “How is the narrator’s understanding of the history and trauma surrounding himself reflected and expressed in the story of W?”

Week 7 – Lispector’s “The Passion According to G.H.”

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I’m mostly finished reading The Passion According to G.H. at this point and it’s ranged from being an incredible experience to a completely confusing (and even boring) one at times; I’m still trying to make sense of everything. There’s an interesting take on truth that I’m not really sure how to unpack, and I felt a profound sense of struggle between disorganization and unity as everything in G.H.’s world seemed to unravel.

In the beginning, G.H. seems to harbour some kind of fear of definitive forms, writing that “My first contact with truths always defamed me,” or that “a world fully alive has the power of a hell,” for example. It sometimes felt like Lispector made confronting the fact that we are undeniably living terrifying, like something with no escape; we can easily dispel jokes or fantasies we find dissatisfying, but not reality. Finding a sense of horror or fear in things I traditionally assumed to be good was really radical and interesting to me, despite having trouble understanding what she meant. I can’t really come away feeling like I can give a good interpretation of that, but watching ideals like freedom and truth get turned into something scary because they could reveal what the formless couldn’t, was really fun.

Disorganization and a “breaking-apart” of established ideas seems to be a recurring idea in the novel as well. I noticed that even when G.H. introduces herself or walks into the maid’s room, Lispector emphasizes how the action of seeing (oneself or the unfamiliar) seems to disorient herself and begins doubting various preconceptions about herself. Later, the emptiness of the white walls make them seem like a canvas upon which G.H. can conjure up all sorts of ideas and dissociate from reality. The notion of an “I” is distorted when G.H. looks at the matter coming out of the cockroach as well, and sees “I” in all of her surroundings, writing that “I was always in life … I am the roach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of whitest light on the plaster of the wall ….” To me, the repetition helped emphasize how G.H. saw the concept of “I” as extending beyond just her life, and various explorations of basic ideas like that one helped define my reading experience. Overall, I think that the lack of plot elements allows Lispector to deeply explore how even basic elements of reality, like a bare, white, wall, devolve into meaninglessness when analyzed enough.

My question for you guys is “How does setting (in a bare room over the course of a few minutes) contribute to Lispector’s description of G.H.’s crisis?”

Some Observations About Narration in “Black Shack Alley”

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Zobel’s Black Shack Alley is a fascinating look into the impacts of colonialism throughout childhood in Martinique, and the racialization and trauma that comes with it. It seemed to me while I read that José did not frequently dwell on and confront notions of race, but it was clear that race and struggles with identity pervaded much of the novel, so I wanted to talk about the “unsaid” aspects of José’s narration, and how they shed light on issues of race, identity, and injustice in Martinique.

In addition to the events he describes, like M’man Tine and Médouze slowly working themselves to death in the sugar cane fields to watching the white lycée students buy cakes at lunch, José reveals much about his worldview in the words he chooses to express his experiences. I noticed that colour and contrasts between white and black are subconsciously included in many of José’s descriptions. For example, a chalk on a blackboard is likened to whiteness on blackness, or whites “standing on” and relying on black labour, and when he imagines M’man Tine’s death, he sees her black hands hard from years of work lying on white sheets, as though living in the “whitened” world of colonial Martinique caused her that pain. José grows up in a racialized environment, in which the békés, or whites, enjoy a position of privilege over the blacks, who in his experience take up hard plantation work or become servants. Many of his perceptions revolve around a conflict between white and black.

José is also relatively young for most of the novel, and he has trouble adequately expressing his dissatisfcation with the injustices of racism and colonialism, especially because white people, as opposed to “the békés,” as a whole, are rarely highlighted. At a young age, he expresses this feeling through a desire to be violent, writing that he had a “desire” to hit a béké, but as he grows up, there seems to be some pent-up anguish and anger over M’man Tine’s working conditions and his unequal opportunities. This reminded me a bit of Nada last week, where Andrea had to navigate war’s anguish and trauma that no one could articulate, and face her reality of living in poverty compared to many of her friends.

Finally, just as how the lecture mentions that the French language seems to fail to properly describe or represent postcolonial society, José, though later literate and “learned,” sees his life as not entirely worthy of communicating. He wishes at some point to be able to write brilliant novels after becoming captivated by the power of the books he reads, but does not see black stories, and began to believe that they were not worth telling, even as he tells his story. The narration in Black Shack Alley provides powerful insight into colonial experiences, but I think there’s a lot more to explore, so my question is “How does José’s narration show how French colonialism has impacted his worldview throughout his childhood?”

The Nothingness in Laforet’s “Nada”

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I think that Nada has been my favourite book of the term so far, providing an fascinating look into postwar trauma, mental health, and class inequality set in unsettling, broken Barcelona. There are quiet acknowledgements of the war’s atrocities, like the old houses turned to rubble that are merely the subject of Gerardo’s comments, that almost seem to betray a collective resignation to what happened. I didn’t think too much about the title until I realized from the lecture that Andrea’s tendency to look at the events unfolding in her life as stories seemed to conflict with the secrets and imperfections of her family and the distance between her expectations and her reality, like at Pons’s party.

It actually seems like nothingness pervades much of Andrea’s life and ultimately becomes something to tolerate, especially when she looks for meaning or narrative qualities in her life. Ena, whose family is described as simple and “respectable,” becomes dissatisfied with her mundane life as well and seeks to find something interesting in Calle de Aribau, leading to her becoming involved with Román in an increasingly vicious “battle” that seemed to terrify her at times, as she later reveals. As Andrea’s life seems to plunge deeper into sadness, watching Juan become increasingly violent, staying silent about her grandmother’s hunger so she can eat a passable amount of food, and beginning to suspect something about Ena and Román, she begins longing for the simplicity of being at the beach with Jaime and Ena and for happiness without censorship and without secrets.

At one point, she thinks, “Who can understand the thousand threads that join people’s souls and the significance of their words? Not the girl I was then.” That quote highlights how the web of interactions she has suddenly been dropped into is far deeper than a simple narrative, but as she grasps at snippets of meaning in her world that are slowly revealed to her, some lessons about love and betrayal begin to surface. As she prepares to go to Madrid and reflect upon her year in Barcelona, she claims to have taken nothing from Calle de Aribau, and materially, she is right; she is not better-off and has not found love as she wished. However, she discovered enduring, pure friendship with Ena, surviving various challenges, and matured to see the world of abuse and open secrets of Barcelona, censored only from being explicitly verbalized. I felt that in that sense, Nada was almost a twisted celebration of simplicity and nothingness, in addition to a depiction of Spain’s trauma burdening individuals.

My question is “In what ways was Andrea forced to piece the narrative of her family and the war’s impact on them together, and what were the emotional consequences?”

Bombal’s “The Shrouded Woman” and Knowledge Beyond Life

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As a whole, I really enjoyed reading The Shrouded Woman; it never seemed to drag on or feel intractable to read and the prose was really nice as well, with some great quotes and insights. It  aligned with my preconceptions of what was archetypally “Romance literature”, with some sense of foreignness (from a Canadian perspective) and an unabashed explorations of human emotions like jealousy and love, with some events defying rationality (like the ) mixed in. I didn’t interpret the novel as a vindication of “peripheral modernism” like what was discussed in the lecture, but looking back, I can see how it argues for creative value in the periphery, with a Chilean female author writing a book with a female narrator.

Like a bunch of other posts, one of the first unique things that struck me about the book was the narrator’s insight, or hindsight, on her life, writing “Must we die in order to know?” I think that quote framed the way I read the rest of the novel, because I figured that in that transition between life and death, one becomes almost a spectator, powerless to change anything. If we have no ability to change the past or affect the course of the future in death, I thought that maybe there would be some impartiality that could provide some new insight.

I often felt that Ana Maria expressed many feelings in such a way a living narrator might not have; even though narration is fundamentally created by a living author at the time, it can mean something different from the dead narrator. For example, at the end of the 15th chapter, when talking about Fernando, she thinks “From that time on, in order to feel myself alive, I needed your constant suffering by my side.” That statement initially surprised me because that feeling of “suffering” or facing adversity to feel alive was oddly familiar, but it felt unspeakable in the context of love. Knowing that no one was there to judge her thoughts and she was no longer constrained by social norms or expectations of women, it felt like she was honestly confronting her feelings, which made it more powerful to me.

The often haunting description of nature takes on new power as well. When Bombal describes the forest as “shed[ding] a kind of eternal silence” or likens the buzzing of the bees to phantoms, it emphasized a haunting, tranquil nature to me, as though someone who was immediately confronted with eternal silence, living at the interface between life and whatever comes after could see the world in a new, beautiful way. In light of those observations, my question is “Do we gain a new perspective on our lives in times close to death, from hindsight or reflection without others’ judgment, and what might be the nature of this knowledge?”