Marx

Comunist Manifesto is one of those books that make me think about the strength of ideas and texts. I don’t mean that “the text” actually is the responsible about something, buy his reader do.

The idea that opens the text is the one that declares the philosophical perspective of the world: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. That means, in philosophical terms, taking dialectic as the main position. But, in oppose to Hegel’s dialectic, the main issue will not be the ideas, but the materialism. Or in other words, the work force. In the middle of the XIX Century, Marx is thinking about the next revolution: the proletarian revolution. This one, will put end to the modern State reigned by the bourgeoisie and will be the first step to reach the communism.

It is very interesting the idea that Marx propose about the elimination of national borders. Especially, if we consider that the author is speaking in the middle of the process of nation-building. In this way, seems to be that one of the elements that stop the communist revolution is precisely the national borders. That’s why Marx thinks that the first step to finally reach the revolution is the union of the working class all over the world.

I would like to think now about between the relation of this text and literature. For me is a little bit hard to find an strong connection between them. Even when I know that there is a long tradition of literary studies related to Marxism. I think that at least we have two ways to find a connection. The first one, is related to the content of the text. We can try to read any text in a dialectic reading of characters, means of production, society critic, etc. I think this kind of reading will support the idea that dialectic is the way the world and literature works. Other perspective, and that is more related to what have been doing in the last years what is called “The new historicism”, is to link the text to it’s material conditions of production. In this way, we can understand literature as a cultural product insert in determined context.

Freud

The main thesis of Freud is that someone (him, in this case) is able to make the “right” interpretation of dreams. For him, dreams reveal the existence of something called unconscious where lies our deepest fears and secrets.

His first step in this process of interpretation is to create the category of Dream-thoughts and Dream-content. Both of them occurred during the process of the Dream-work. The first one is related to the first interpretation. To everything that shows up in a dream (people, location, smell, etc). In his words: [they] are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. On the other hand, Dream-content: “is expressed as it where in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts”. After this, follows the process of “condensation”, where all the element mentioned before became together in one brief dream.

Is very interesting the way that Freud shows how this procedure works analyzing different dreams. First, he starts with the narration of the dream, identifying the main objects and characters that appears in the scene, and of course, the scene it self. Then, he says how the interviews with his patients and the information they were giving to him helped him to interpretate every dream.

I would like to stop a little bit around the relation of these kind of work and literary studies. I think than in some way we can try to apply Freud´s methods to literary texts. That means, try to get to the author and his unconscious through the text. This would be a very interesting approach, and I’m sure that many people have try it. However, we have to keep in mind that if we try to follow this kind of proposition we are against other kind of ideas, like Barthe`s,  that there is no way to reach the author. For Freud, there is a final meaning that must be found in order to get the right interpretation.

Finally, I think that is very interesting the relation between psychology and literature. After all the crimes agains mankind of the last century, literature had become an important object of psychological analysis. May be now we are not worried about the “final interpretation” of a dream, but does matter all the links that we can establish between the author and his text (or work to use Barthe´s concept).

Barthes and the problem about the “Author”

Is hard to put in just one piece of “text” (to use Barthes´s concept) three different texts that are quiet interesting by separate. So, I will try to put in a kind of “union” a short reflection about Roland Barthes`s texts. I think that “The death of the author” and “From work to text” are two argument of the same idea: there is no relation or link between text and author. The main focus of Barthes is on the reader. According to his own words: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. Is precisely that idea the one that leads the distinction between “work” and “text”. The first have a filiation to his creator, the author, who, according to Barthes, points a determination on the “piece of work”. Barthes (if we follow his rules I can´t use the word “author”) thinks that the text can be read without the “guarantee of his father”. For him,  the “author” of a text is just one more character (for example in a novel), and there is no relation between “him” and the text.

One of the main arguments of Barthes to say this is the quality of “multiple” that a text has. As he says at “The death of author”: “We know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”. This idea means, in other words, that there would be no creation in something related to language. Everything was previously “said”. So, would art or “creation” mean just a “new way” to put things together?

What Barthes does in his book Mythologies is an interesting exercise of analyzing different kind of texts. I would like to refer to the part of Einstein´s brain as an interesting case. As the author says (roll in your tomb), there is huge “myth” around Einstein´s brain (when he died, his brain was stolen by someone from the hospital and cut in slice to be studied). His brain become a kinf of “icon” of intelligence. The interesting part, more than the “case”, is what Barthes does “reading this phenomenon as a text”. He says that after Einstein`s dead people thought that the secret of the universe closed to them, the only one who was able to reveal the “truth” about the universe has gone. In this example we can notice that appears one of the main characteristic of the text, there is no author. Is “just there”, reality as a text to read.

Finally, I would like to say that I disagree about the maun issue of Barthes. I do think that there is a link between text and author. But is not a relation in terms of “the last meaning” of a text, is a relation in terms of space-time. If we “kill” the author we are destroying the relation of a discourse with it’s context, and I think that knowing what is “out” of a text (what leads to the interesting discussion about “in” or “out” of a text” and the problem of a “border” in a text) we can open the debate about it. I don’t think that linking text and author we are forced to look for “the real interpretation” of a text. Barthes says that the author means a “limit” to the text, I think that “the author” opens a wide range of possibilities of interpretations instead of close them.

Saussure

Saussure`s text is probably one of the most important text in the western tradition of the 20^th Century. Is also, a foundational text. Even when the text was well known after a few decades of his original publication, is doubtless the starting point of most of the scholar reflection about language across the past century. His proposal is very precise: There is something call “the sign” that has two different parts, but, both of them constitute it. The first one is called “signified” and the other “signifier”. The first one, refers to the “sound image” of what we usually call “a word”, and the other one, to the concept that it refers to.

I liked the idea he exposed about “Two classes illustrated by Comparisons”. There, he exposed about two ways of approaching to the study of a language, synchrony and diachrony. Is interesting because, at the end, he is not choosing one of them, just exposing that there are this two ways of deal with the study of language. Anyway, he recognizes that to language is always a matter of “state” or “moment”. That’s why he uses the comparison of language and chess. This means that language is always “contextual”. There is no option to attribute to the language some kind of “eternal meaning”. Language is a system that changes constantly. So, we can make the study of language in a “certain moment” or state, or try to figure out the transformation that have been experimenting in time. In his own words: “synchrony and diachrony designates respectively a language-state and an evolutionary phase” (p. 64).

I think we can link this idea to Bakhtin`s proposal. Both agree in the constantly moving of the language and it’s internal and external transformation. Also, we can find a relation between Saussure’s idea of opposition and Bakhtn`s idea of dialogue inside the language. In both cases, there is a interaction of the element that compose the system. We can read the ideas of “arbitrary” and “opposition” in Saussure’s text, as a dialogue inside the system. There is always this dialogue and interaction among the different part of the systems, is precisely that dialogue that turns language into a constantly moving object of study.

Art as Tecnique. Viktor Shklovsky

The main issue that Shklovsky wants to develop is about what art means. But, his starting point is the problem of perception. The author says that in some moment we start to not be surprised about reality. We just are “use to it”. When that happen, we can make the exercise of  turn all ours perceptions into an algebraic” expression (following the example of Pogodin). For him, that is not the way art works. His answer to the question What is art? is that “art” is what make people to “recover the sensation of life” (p.16). That it means to get surprised –by art- about “reality”. In other word, make thing that are familiar to us into unfamiliar. In this way, art is the opposition to what he calls the “automatism of perception”. The examples he gives in the text show how some authors (especially Russian) are able to describe some issues (like war or property) from the point of view of someone who is completely surprised about it. So, what art must do, is to create a “new perception” about the reality for the “viewers” (or readers) of it.

For the Russian author, the purpose of studying art (especially literature in both forms, poetry and prose) from a phonetic and lexical point of view is just to prove that the artist is actually using and creating his work to desautomatized the perceptions of the audience. In this aspect, he follows Aristotle’s argument about the relevance of the poetic language as something “strange and wonderful” (p.19).

One of the main questions that I have after reading this text is about the role of creativity and expression. If the only thing you need to create art is to make your audience feel surprised about every day situations and objects, can we have art that actually mean “nothing”? Beside this, if art means really that, would imply that art only can “exist” in a specific time and place. Cancelling any chance that art can go from moment to another, just because perception varies every time and every where. In some moment, “people” was used about flogging, for example, but not today (in “western world” at least). So, actually, what he calls “automatic perception” is something that changes constantly. In other words, art may only be “contextual art”.

What is not clear at all, for me, is the distinction between poetic speech and prose. Even when the author doesn’t go deep on that point there is a difference that I couldn’t understand.

The dialogic imagination. M. Bakhtin

The main idea that Bakhtin wants to develop in this text (and that give the name to the book) is the notion of dialogue. For him, dialogue is property of any kind of discourse. But he doesn’t think only in one kind of dialogue, actually, he thinks in a big variety of dialogues coming together. Here is when the notions of “Heteroglossia” and “Utterance” are important. The first one is “the base” where any discourse is created. Heteroglossia refers to the situation (or context) where social and historical conditions interact. This means that discourse (and also Utterance) can not escape to this “jail” of time and place. If we think about the literary creation, the argument is that the literary work can’t escape to his socio linguistic and historic context. In Bakhtin`s words: “Everything that the poet sees, understands and thinks, de does through the eyes of a given language” (p.286).

The idea of dialogue works also on his idea of a “unitary language”. For the author, language is a unit in terms of the “abstract grammatical system of normative forms” (p. 288). But this “unit” is immediately shaped by the different genres that exist in any language. Genres make a stratification of language what turns this “unit” into a dialogue among them. And is because this wide variety of genres that languages are finally modified. The responsible of this is, again, the notion of dialogue inside the language.

One of the concepts that is very interesting for me is the “double-voiced discourse”. This means that at the same time we can perceive the existence of two speakers. Bakhtin refers to this point when he thinks about the novel. He says that in an specific moment, for example when some character is speaking in a novel, there actually two speakers. First the character and second the author. Both speakers have a dialogue in one discourse. According to Bakhtin, is a novelist doesn’t understand the dialogization of the discourse inside the novel, he would never be able to “create” a novel. This idea of dialogue inside the novel can go even further with the idea of “hybridization”, where to different types of languages (or genres) can be involved at the same time.

The final point that I would like to prfecise is the notion of “re-accentuates”. Here we find a new dialogue, but now, is in the relation of literature and history (or the pass of time). For the author, this concept is one of the keys to understand the history of literature. In his own words: “The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-acentutation” (p.421). In other words, there is always a dialogue between a new “age” and the past literature. The “image” of a novel is able to be transformed trough the time, keeping the dialogue not only with the context that produced the text, but also with the one who receives it.

As a conclusion, I think that the notion of dialogue is extremely important to understand any text. There is always some “relation” of a text whit it’s context, language, historic situation, etc., that can not be avoid.

Antón es un cuento que permite, sin lugar a dudas y pese a su brevedad, un amplio abanico de lecturas e interpretaciones. No obstante lo anterior, quisiera centrar mi breve análisis en dos elementos que a su vez se entrelazan en uno: la relación entre el género y el trabajo en el marco de la Francia de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.

Como bien se sabe, la revolución francesa significó, entre otras cosas, el triunfo de la burguesía y el derrocamiento de la nobleza. El siglo XIX en general, ligado a los procesos industrializadotes transformaron totalmente la forma de concebir el ser humano. Entre las nociones trastocadas está sin duda las construcciones de género (de lo femenino y masculino) junto con la relación con el trabajo. Se pasa de una producción de subsistencia a una que apunta a la acumulación, el intercambio y el trabajo remunerado.

Pensemos a continuación de qué modo se refleja lo anterior en el cuento de Maupassant. Antón, protagonista del cuento y quien da nombre al relato, es el dueño de la que es –probablemente- la única posada del pequeño pueblo de Tournevent. Lugar que, como da a entender el autor en las primeras líneas, sólo se constituía de un reducido número de casas que eran “una especie de feudo para el señor Antón”. El evocar la idea del “feudo” nos traslada inmediatamente a un escenario de “Antiguo Régimen”, más aún, al comprobar que efectivamente el protagonista vivía y gozaba acorde a una lógica laboral que no era propia de la sociedad burguesa. Este es precisamente el reproche que le hace constantemente su señora (la que como buena “mujer burguesa” no puede huir de su rol de acompañante): “La molestaba su alegría, su fama de hombre campechano, su inquebrantable salud, su obesidad. Le miraba despreciativamente al verle ganar dinero sin hacer nada y al verle comer y beber por ocho”. Es precisamente el hecho de que su marido no trabaje y gane dinero (al igual que en un régimen feudal), mientras que ella sí trabaja para ganar dinero (engordando pollos), lo que hace que ella se enfurezca.

El momento de la parálisis de Antón representa en cierta medida la saturación de una forma o estilo de vida (nobiliario si se quiere) del vivir sin esfuerzo. Es precisamente en este momento en que su mujer lo lleva a transformar su masculinidad desde una percepción propia del antiguo régimen a una burguesa, el trabajo. Es allí cuando la mujer (trabajadora) debe transformar a su marido en un elemento “útil”. Es interesante que la paradoja que se presente sea precisamente que la “utilidad” de Antón derive de su “incapacidad física”. Mientras tuvo salud no trabajó, pero cuando careció de ella debió hacerlo. Es precisamente esto lo que le recalca su mujer al acomodar los huevos bajo sus brazos: “Antón, asombrado, preguntó: -Pero ¿qué piensas? – Que sirvas de algo: incuba”. En ese momento debió entrar bajo la lógica del trabajo capitalista del siglo XIX, o trabaja o muere de hambre, sólo que esta vez no es “el mercado” quien procede a ejecutar el castigo sino su mujer.

Es precisamente en este momento en que se genera una transformación interesante en términos de género. Antón, quien seguía un modelo aristocrático de vida y masculinidad, pasa a desempeñar un papel femenino ligado a la maternidad. Sin embargo, esta maternidad no es en un sentido aristocrático, sino más bien burgués. Esto se evidencia principalmente en las últimas líneas del relato. Al nacer el último de los pollos, la alegría del protagonista no puede ser escondida: “Y el gordo, borracho de alegría, besó al último con tanta efusión, que a poco más lo espachurra entre sus labios. Quería quedárselo en la cama toda la noche, dominado por una ternura de madre hacia el pobre ser que debía la vida”. Sin embargo, una vez pasado el éxtasis inicial, se aprecia aquel elemento tan cotidiano en un contexto industrial, la utilización del hijo como fuerza laboral, o dicho o en otros términos, la utilización de los hijos para la supervivencia de los padres y la familia. Es precisamente aquel elemento el que aparece en el último diálogo del texto: “—¿Me convidas, para cuando estén ya cebados, a comer uno con tomate? La idea sublime de comer un pollo con tomate iluminó el semblante de Antón, el Triple Antón, con sincero entusiasmo repuso: — ¡Vaya si te convido! Quedas convidado para lo que dices, yerno”. Y así fue como Antón, quien nunca tuvo hija ni casada ni por casar, terminó por acceder a engullir lo más parecido a un hijo que había tenido. Por supuesto, la proyección del cuento queda abierta, no sabemos si tras el parto Antón volverá nuevamente a su vida aristocrática, lo que sí sabemos, es que al menos por el instante único del relato, se lograron trastocar las nociones de clase y de género en la posada del pequeño pueblo de Tournevent.

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