Tag Archives: capitalism

Week 13: Fever Dream

I sympathize better with people who had trouble with Borges after reading Fever Dream; I had no idea what was going on for large sections of the novel. I didn’t mind too much, though, and disorientation was obviously Schweblin’s intent. While I was mostly able to follow along with the main narrative, I couldn’t figure out the meaning of the structure of the book as a dialogue between Amanda and David. I thought that it had something to do with their souls being migrated to the same body via the woman in the green house, but also considered that they could just be in parallel beds in the hospital. At some points, it even seemed that they were conversing beyond the grave a la Pedro Páramo, a book that shared a lot of similarities with this one; I wonder whether Rulfo was a conscious influence on Schweblin while writing.

A couple people commented last week on the cinematic elements of My Tender Matador, how it felt as if it were written to be made into a movie. Though I myself didn’t get that impression from Lemebel, I felt something similar in Fever Dream. Maybe this is just because “psychological thriller” is a genre I’ve been exposed to through film more than literature, but this felt like something that could have been directed by David Lynch or Darren Aronofsky: a confusing flash of images that the reader is mostly left to piece together. Of course, Pedro Páramo does something similar, but Schweblin’s style seemed far more contemporary and visual than Rulfo’s writing. The use of the present tense helped in this: rather than recounting the story as something that happened in the past, its presentation makes it feel as if it is taking place in front of you, even while the narrators’ commentary makes it clear that these are memories. This cinematic feeling really reflects how new this book is compared to everything else we’ve read; I couldn’t imagine a 20^th-century author using a style so obviously influenced by modern film techniques.

As for the central theme of the story: I think my prior knowledge that the book was about water pollution lessened the disorienting effect (it was clear what the cause of the sickness was) while increasing anxiety in those scenes where water is present. Despite my expectations that this theme would be used in an explicitly political, environmentalist way, however, it really didn’t feel like a “political” story, at least not in the same way as other books we’ve read (basically everything except Borges and Neruda in my case). While these books have scaled from implicit (Hour of the Star) to explicit (I, Rigoberta Menchú) in the ways that they address the intersections of individual lives with broader social and political issues, Fever Dream’s political content was so implicit that I never would have guessed that such themes were even a concern if I didn’t know that background. This could also reflect the book’s relative recency; rather than taking place in an era of revolutions, dictatorships, and “modernization” where politics are obviously front and center, it comes at a time when political and economic forces are increasingly invisible and insidious, even while remaining as powerful as ever.

Did others notice further ways in which this book feels more recent/contemporary than other books we’ve read?

Week 10: I, Rigoberta Menchú

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I can’t say that I enjoyed reading I, Rigoberta Menchú. This was easily the most difficult read of the class so far and the only book that was a struggle to finish. However, “enjoyability” was hardly its intent, and I can’t imagine Menchú was considering literary interest while telling these stories to Elizabeth Burgess. If anything, the greatest strength of this book is how direct it is, minimally concerned with the norms and restrictions of broader literary practices. Of course, this isn’t to say that it’s completely unmediated, as is evident in her adoption of the Spanish language and references to untellable indigenous secrets. However, for the sake of movements to decolonize literature, it’s hard to imagine a more decolonial text than one by an illiterate indigenous revolutionary from the global south.

Given this distance from “literature” as I’m used to thinking about it, I really can’t evaluate this on the same terms that I’ve approached other books in this class. The most I can say is that it is a clearly a historically, anthropologically, and politically valuable text. Of course, we could get into debates over how all literature is all of these, but this clearly addressed these themes far more explicitly than even the most historical, anthropological, and political works of fiction we’ve discussed. And, insofar as it managed to spread awareness about the Guatemalan civil war, mobilize international aid, and document indigenous life in late twentieth-century Guatemala, it seems to have been quite successful in these departments.

However, as far as my own immediate reactions go, I, Rigoberta Menchú really didn’t move me as much as it seems to move others, though I wish that it did. The descriptions of exploitation, torture, and colonial injustices were certainly harrowing, and the accounts of indigenous traditions occasionally appealed to my anthropological interests, but, for the most part, I don’t feel like I actually gained all that much from reading this book. In some respects, it reminded me of how I felt while reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, another book that I respect more than enjoy: it was extremely effective at convincing me of something that I already believed. If I had read this book 5 years ago, it probably would have had a significantly stronger effect on me, yet, having read a fair amount of leftist and anthropological literature since then, it didn’t tell me much that really shocked me. Global capitalism has had disastrous effects on the third world and minority populations, with Latin America having been particularly hard struck; ideologies of racism and imperialism can destroy any semblance of morality in governing bodies and lead to horrific cruelties; collective organization of the exploited classes is the most effective tool for resistance to these economic, political, and ideological forces of oppression. I suppose the most interesting thing about this book was hearing all these familiar ideas from someone so far removed from the academic writers that I’m used to hearing them from, put into practice in such a concrete historical context. But, considering the sheer amount of controversy surrounding this text (and how obviously ideologically motivated many of its critics are) I would prefer to abstain from participation in broader discussion over a testimonial that I personally just didn’t find all that exciting, however much I may respect it.

Do others feel that this book changed their mind on any major points, or did it just reinforce or augment existing beliefs?

Week 9: The Hour of the Star

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I’ve always been fascinated by the country of Brazil. It’s the largest country in Latin America in terms of both area and population and is in some ways the South American equivalent to the United States: similar size, multiculturalism, and political/economic/racial divides. Yet, despite its huge population and international influence in the domains of music and sports, Brazil seems to have a surprisingly small international literary presence. There really aren’t any Brazilian writers with the same level of global success and canonization as Márquez, Borges, or Neruda (maybe with the exception of Paulo Coehlo, who could hardly be considered capital L “Literature”). Plus, it stands out to me that Lispector, both the only Brazilian representation in this class and one of the few Brazilian authors I had previously heard of (alongside Machado de Assis and Jorge Amado), wasn’t even Brazilian by birth but a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated at a young age – which I suppose further supports the parallel between Brazil and the United States, another country defined by immigrants.

Now, onto the actual text: I could tell from the opening sentence I was going to love this book. There were so many themes throughout that appealed to me immensely: the blending of the cosmic and the mundane, the ambiguous relationship between author, narrator, and protagonist, the existential tension between affirmation and nihilism, the ironic narrative style where nothing can be taken at face value, social commentary that doesn’t explicitly make its position clear, and so many seemingly throwaway lines with massive implications. Despite its short length, the sheer complexity of it all has honestly made me feel like I’m not qualified to give any general interpretation after only one reading, so the most I can offer are initial impressions that barely even touch on some of the themes that I found most intriguing.

The portrayal of capitalism in this book was very different from what I had expected. In contrast to One Hundred Years of Solitude and next week’s I, Rigoberta Menchu, both of which show capitalist exploitation from the perspective of production, Lispector instead focuses on the psychological effects of capitalist consumption. Perhaps Macabea is exploited in her work as a typist, yet the real sense of exploitation comes instead as her role as a mindless consumer whose personality and ideals are shaped by market propaganda. Yet she herself hardly seems distressed by this situation, so lacking in self-awareness that “she didn’t even know she was unhappy” – so who are we to make that judgement for her?

Adding further complexity to Macabea’s ambiguous position is the odd figure of the narrator, Rodrigo S.M. If Macabea is completely lacking in self-awareness, Rodrigo is self-aware to a fault, so self-aware that he can barely write without losing track of his narrative in questions about himself in relation to it. At many points where his narration came to the forefront, he reminded me of the similarly neurotic narrator from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground who also seems to stumble over himself in an attempt to justify the act of writing at all. Yet, Rodrigo is clearly not Lispector, as is ironically alluded to in his dismissal of female writers near the beginning (the story of a woman told through the voice of a man written by a woman!). His biases call the entire character of Macabea into question: she is only ever portrayed through his mediation and it can be hard to tell whether any aspect of her description can be taken as more than Rodrigo’s own reflection or counterpart.

I’m already well over the word limit so I’ll have to cut my thoughts short here. As for a question: do you think there is any theme, statement, or message in this book that can be taken at face value as the voice of Lispector, or is everything called into question by its ironic, ambiguous style?