Week 4: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

I apologize to Neruda fans in advance for what is essentially a rant.

If I’m being honest, I don’t like poetry. With a handful of exceptions (Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot come to mind), the vast majority of it leaves me completely cold. I wish I could appreciate it better given how much I love poetry-adjacent writing in other formats (e.g. poetically-written prose or song lyrics), but something about poetic form almost always comes across to me as awkward, forced, and annoyingly pompous. It doesn’t help when I have to read in translation.

Bearing all this in mind, Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair failed to impress me after multiple readings. I can accept that much of the use of language is probably poetic genius to those who can appreciate such subtleties, but, as for the content, I found it at best vaguely evocative, at worst quite creepy, and, in general, frustratingly self-serious. Neruda clearly put his whole heart into these poems, and that’s probably why I find them so sickening. They’re totally lacking in that sense of playful self-aware irony that characterizes all of my favourite Latin American writers. If he were somebody else, I would forgive these as the passionate and juvenile creations of an emotionally volatile teenager (and, for what it’s worth, I am fully in support of teenagers being passionate and juvenile while they still have the chance), but knowledge of his later sexual escapades doesn’t help his case. Though it’s not as if I have any moral high ground to stand on – Borges was buddies with Pinochet, yet I find it easier to forgive him simply because he’s a much better writer – and I doubt I would have liked these poems much more had Neruda been an upstanding man for the rest of his life.

Despite my general distaste for them, there were themes that I could certainly relate to throughout these poems. The obsessive love for a person, the way that love can seem to breathe life into the rest of the world, the ambivalent interplay of presence and absence, and the attempt to find beauty in suffering are all things I, as anyone, experienced during my teenage years. But, rather than making me like the poems more, these moments of empathy had the opposite effect; they put on blatant display how silly all of those emotions seem to someone not currently experiencing them. I feel as if love, especially the kind of youthful, passionate, and honestly unhealthy love that is the subject of these poems, is something extremely difficult, if not impossible, to express in language; the only art form I have found capable of approaching that feeling is music, precisely because it doesn’t have the same need for language. Perhaps if I were to read this in a different mindset than I am in currently, or even if I simply put more effort into interpreting it, I could learn to like this collection better. As is, however, I found it frankly embarrassing.

For a question: which art form, whether literary or otherwise, do you think best conveys the experience of this kind of love?

Week 3: Cartucho

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When I first read excerpts from Cartucho for SPAN 280 in 2021, I was surprised at how difficult to read I found it. Not in the typical sense that it is difficult to understand, but in that it is hard to find anything constant to latch on to. Even having read the full book, this impression remains. The chapters are short and disjointed and characters are barely introduced before their often-gruesome deaths are narrated. Though some names do return in later sections, it is a struggle to recall who was who – afterwards, all that remains in my head are a handful of names disconnected from their stories. I suppose this is an accurate approximation of the disorienting experience of being in the midst of a warzone.

There were only three characters who recurred frequently enough to stick out to me from this blur of names and faces. The first is, obviously, the narrator, and the second is her mother. The third is Pancho Villa, whose appearances throughout the book link its disjointed narrative to the history of the revolution as it has traditionally been told. Perhaps he stood out to me only because I already knew of his significance; I wonder how different my experience reading would have been if I were not aware of his historical role. As far as I can recall, he never directly interacts with the narrator, yet he is omnipresent through his interactions with surrounding characters. Because of this, it’s hard to discern how much of his description is genuine and how much is mythological, especially given the differences there are between his depiction in the original edition and the 1940 edition as his reputation changed (according to Ryan Long in the interview video). At times he is described as brutal, as when he murders Pablo Siañez over an argument in “The Two Pablos,” while at others he is merciful and sentimental, as when he spares the concheños in “General Villa’s Tears.” Then there is the interesting case of “Nacha Ceniceros,” where two conflicting stories are given and one is denounced as propaganda to slander the revolution.

Despite this connection to grand historical narratives through the figure of Villa, the story is otherwise radically different from these narratives in another: the character’s motivations. The explicitly economic, political, or ideological motives that revolutions are traditionally attributed to are almost entirely absent. I’m sure much of this is simply on account of the young narrator’s disregard for such complex topics, but her account nevertheless reveals the degree to which interpersonal connections can shape historical forces. Many characters, including the narrator herself, seem to drawn to Villa’s side because of his charisma or kinship ties rather than a conscious weighing of conflicting ideological positions or economic incentives. Of course, such forces were working in the background, but they were only one part of a much larger picture.

What do others think of the role of Villa throughout this story? How much do you think his depiction is mythological and how much is personal?

Week 2: Mama Blanca’s Memoirs

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Considering that Teresa de la Parra is hardly as legendary a figure as some of the other authors in this course, I quite liked Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. As the oldest book on the syllabus, I expected it to read more like a nineteenth-century text, but found it to be quite stylistically modern, despite its setting. Maybe I’m searching for relationships that aren’t there, but many parts reminded me of Marcel Proust – the instable, fluid relationship to memories that are always already lost is the most obvious connection, but other themes like the preoccupation with the function of names, the fascination with that which is forbidden, and the critique of social norms through the eyes of a child seemed to recall passages from the Reserche. Given that de la Parra was living in Paris during the 1920s, I wouldn’t be surprised if Proust was an influence on her writing, though I am curious to know if there is any documented evidence of a connection.

One line towards the end of the book stood out to me as oddly troubling: “memories do not change, and change is the law of existence.” I understand the point she is making about the dissonance that can occur between our memories of things and their present reality. Yet the two halves of the quote seem to contradict each other, and I am drawn to agree more with the latter – are not memories a part of existence and thus subject to change? And is not the variability of memory integral to her entire story?

Memories are not static in two senses. First, there is their ebb and flow, forgetting and remembering; secondly, there is the way in which even those memories that seem so set in stone are constantly open to new possibilities for reframing. Both are subject to the contingencies of the present. One can learn something that radically changes how a memory is interpreted to the point of changing the memory itself (for lack of a better example from the text – the discovery that Papa is not, in fact, God). Sometimes this knowledge need not even be new; perhaps a buried memory that had seemed lost to time is unearthed and shakes one’s entire personal history. All this seems quite in line with Mama Blanca’s humble approach to life, aware that “our capacity for error is infinite” and always open to contingencies and reimaginings. Perhaps this reflection on the unchanging quality of memory is not said with the voice of the elderly Mama Blanca but with that of seven-year-old Blanca Nieves, who saw herself as “an experienced person who, aside from certain trivial details, knew all there was to know about life.” Or perhaps this freezing of memories is a conscious choice, a way to preserve the innocence of childhood that could otherwise be lost.

How do others interpret this line? Am I overthinking an offhand observation, or is there a tension between memory as a static object and a dynamic process in this text?

Week 1: Introduction

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Sorry for the late submission – I got a bit lost on the course website. My name is Owen Chernikhowsky and I’m an anthropology major with a minor in music. It’s hard to say which year I’m in exactly, but I started university at UVic in 2018, switched to UBC anthropology in 2020, and expect to graduate at the end of 2023. I’m taking this course for my second literature requirement since the topic is already an interest of mine. I first became interested in Latin America because of an ethnographic field school in Cuba that was set to take place in 2020 but was cancelled; thankfully, it will be this summer instead and I’m quite looking forward to it. Last year I took SPAN 280 on Revolution in Latin American Literature with Brianne Orr-Álvarez, and the region has also shown up in several anthropology courses I’ve taken. Additionally, I’ve already read some of the authors on the syllabus – Campobello, Borges (one of my favourite authors of all time), Rulfo, and García Márquez – while others I had been meaning to read anyways.

Since watching the lecture video, I’ve thought a bit about something that I said in class – that I associate Latin American literature with a kind of playful irony. This comes up against what Prof. Beasley-Murray said in the lecture – that we should not attempt to force any single overarching theme for a region that is already loosely categorized as a unity. Insofar as “Latin American Literature” is an arbitrary generalization, I agree entirely – but so is practically any presumed unity, all of which begin to disintegrate if prodded at. It seems as if it’s a duty for any arts course on a given subject to begin with the statement that said subject does not exist. While this point is always important to recognize, I don’t find it particularly interesting. Maybe “Latin American literature” is as arbitrary a category as the set of authors with names beginning with D, but is either really all that absurd? Obviously neither “Latin American Literature” nor “authors with names beginning with D” exist as unities unless we treat them as such, but both could serve as an excuse for a fun experiment, a way to extract through comparison themes that could otherwise be missed. I’m reminded of the critics in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” who “often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…” Maybe we cannot reach any external, transcendent principle of unity through such methods, but we can produce new ways of looking at things – only, however, through constantly keeping in mind that the frameworks we use to do so are temporary and fluid. I accept any suggestions for further arbitrary categories to play with until they run dry and must be abandoned for something new.

As for a question, I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on the categorization of something like literature – do you find literary labels such as “Latin American Literature” more useful or restrictive?