Tag Archives: fiction

Week 13: Conclusion

I don’t entirely understand what I’m supposed to write about in this conclusion. I can offer my overall feelings on the course and return to some of my early ideas about Latin American literature, but on the whole, not very much has changed. This isn’t to say that I didn’t gain anything, however, far from it: it was one of the most enjoyable courses I’ve taken in my five years of university. It was possibly the most I have ever had to read for a single-semester class, but it didn’t feel overwhelming at all. I’m somebody who likes reading anyways, but something about a book being assigned for a class usually seems to decrease its potential for enjoyment; here, however, there was a perfect balance between reading for fun and reading for academic achievement that made it more enjoyable than either on their own. This was aided by the option to choose between texts for most of the weeks and the fact that some I had already read either in whole or part (Borges and Campobello) or were on my reading list anyways (Carpentier, Rulfo, García Márquez, Lispector, and Lemebel). While my favourite of the books remains Labyrinths, which I loved long before this class started, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hour of the Star have also solidified themselves among my favourite books over the course of the class, and I hope to return to them and other books by García Márquez and Lispector in the future. There were times that I had trouble figuring out what to write about for blog posts (this one most of all) but, ultimately, I always managed to come up with something.

I feel obligated to return to my original statement about the playful, self-aware element of irony I have found in a lot of Latin American literature. Though there were obvious exceptions (especially Rigoberta Menchú, who was clearly divorced from any broader Latin American canon), this did seem to hold true for most of the books we read, most prominently those following Borges and García Márquez. I was never particularly attached to this claim, though; it’s little more than a vague generalization pointing to a recurring theme in a handful of well-known classics, a bit like how Russian literature is so often characterized as “depressing” or “existential.” A lot of this seems to derive from the huge presence of Borges and García Márquez (I couldn’t imagine Lemebel or Bolaño writing the way they did without their influence), but it also preexists them in writers like de la Parra and Carpentier, arguably finding its real origin in a mixture of the influence of Cervantes and the peculiar position of Latin America as an oft-forgotten bastard child of imperialism in the twentieth-century world. However, I do wonder to what extent this preconception influenced my reading of these books and whether I would have thought the same if any of them had been written by a writer from elsewhere.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on whether themes of irony or self-awareness play any special place in Latin American literature, or is this simply a matter of perspective?

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?

Week 9: One Hundred Years of Solitude II

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Since I already addressed the whole book in my first blog post instead of splitting it up into two halves, I’m going to take a different approach this week: comparing Márquez’s style and themes against Borges’s. Whether it’s justified or not, the two often get paired together as the two great authors of Latin America and I certainly went into this book expecting something comparable to the otherworldly sensation of reading Borges. While they are obviously wildly different in countless ways, this expectation was satisfied even better than if the novel were truly Borgesian: it presents a picture of the world as original as Borges’s, yet so different that it’s almost as shocking as reading Borges for the first time was. Plus, I always find it interesting to compare my favourite books to each other in an attempt to extract which shared themes appeal to me.

One of the first differences I noticed between Borges and Márquez was their opposing authorial voices: Borges usually writes from a first-person perspective and includes the narrator in his stories, while Márquez is detached and absent from his subject matter. As the interview with Gerald Martin indicates, however, this technique of Márquez was a trick; though he takes the position of a distant observer, he is truly writing about his own life and memories as alienated from himself, comparable to the situation Borges explores in “Borges and I.” Relating to this, Borges has a tendency to spell out the possible implications of his stories, at times reading like a critic of his own work. Márquez, in contrast, leaves the wider themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude largely unspoken, or at most only vaguely hinted at; even later in life, he refused to elaborate on his intentions with this book. Despite Borges’s reputation as enigmatic and impenetrable, Márquez almost comes across as the more mysterious figure in this contrast.

In my post on Borges, I described his works as an attempt to illustrate infinity. Perhaps infinity isn’t the scope of Marquez – a hundred years isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things – yet this book gave me a similar feeling a vastness. While Borges manages to condense theoretical conceptions of infinity into stories no more than a couple pages long, Márquez paints a concrete world teeming with intersecting threads full of more detail than anything Borges ever wrote. The endless variation of minute differences that Borges imagines in “The Library of Babel” is realized in a story in which it’s practically impossible to keep track of everything at once, even while everything always seems to repeat. It’s only in the final chapter that this history is totalized, condensed into a moment through Melquiades’s manuscript. In the lecture video, this was compared to climactic scene in Borges’s “The Aleph,” a connection I also noticed. “The Immortal” (also not included in Ficciones) occurred to me as well as another story of a people as lost in time and doomed to repetition as the Buendias.

Did others notice further similarities and differences between Márquez and Borges? Or do you think comparing the two is even justified or worthwhile?

Week 8: One Hundred Years of Solitude

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I read One Hundred Years of Solitude during the winter break two months ago – spoiler warning for those who haven’t finished since it’s hard to separate the first half from the second in retrospect. Some of the details of the plot have faded from my mind, yet the overall effect remains: this is a beautiful book. This didn’t fully hit me until the last chapter; though I enjoyed it immensely the full way through, the final scene was like waking up from a dream and discovering that I had practically been in a trance for the past few weeks. As cliché as it is, there really is no better word to describe it than “magical.” The whole thing is infused with this sense of playful wonder and it has quickly cemented itself among my favourite books ever.

A defining characteristic of many of my favourite books is the elevation of the mundane to incredible through literary elaboration; Ulysses is my favourite book of all time yet almost nothing actually happens in it. Márquez does the opposite and achieves a similar effect. So much takes place throughout the century this book covers, yet it can feel like nothing happens at all. Even the most marvelous events are portrayed in the same deadpan historical tone and no character is given much inner development; at times, it barely feels like a work of fiction at all. Despite this, it is one of the most imaginative books I’ve ever read. There really is something childlike about it all; it’s like seeing the world without all those preconceptions that we’ve picked up, freed from expectations of reality, morality, modernity and narrative for a smooth plane in which everything is equally possible and nothing is elevated above anything else.

While reading, I kept trying to figure out who the real protagonist of the story was. Early on I figured out that José Arcadio Buendía and Colonel Aureliano Buendía were decoys; as important as they are in certain sections, both are absent for too much of the narrative to fulfill this role in the bigger picture. I then convinced myself that Úrsula was the real hero for how long she persisted and kept order while others came and went. This theory was also disappointed when she too died well before the ending. My next option was Pilar Ternera, who, though seemingly marginal, lives longer than anyone else, first appearing in chapter 2 and not dying until the last chapter. Or was it Melquiades, the mysterious traveller from the opening chapter who survives two deaths to reappear as a spirit and ultimately predict the demise of Macondo in the final scene? None of these possibilities was really satisfying. Ultimately, a book as decentered as this one has no need for a protagonist; if anything, Macondo itself is the protagonist. Or, if we can permit a bit of pretension, maybe that titular spirit of Solitude who comes to visit everyone sooner or later is the real central figure. Maybe a stretch for any other book, but for one such as this where anything is possible, why not?

Who or what do others think could best be characterized as the “protagonist” of this book?

Week 5: Labyrinths

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It is practically impossible to condense everything I think about Jorge Luis Borges, in competition with James Joyce as my favourite author, into 500 words. The man can do more in five pages than most writers could do with their entire lives; nearly everything I have read by him has left my mind swimming and permanently imprinted itself on my consciousness. I first read Ficciones (in Collected Fictions translated by Andrew Hurley) over two years ago, and, even before rereading for this class, I remember every story vividly. Some of the mock-academic details, such as the early works of Pierre Menard, obviously faded from my memory, but I don’t think I could ever forget some of the problems raised by his stories. He deals with philosophical topics in a more thought-provoking way than most philosophers, never concerned with upholding an argument so much as with proposing questions without truly satisfactory answers.

The first time I read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” still my favourite of all his stories, it felt like I was rewiring the fundamental structures of my mind. It touches on every element I love in his writing: mysterious investigations into arcane topics, the blending of reality and fiction, moments of surreal comedy, and philosophical speculations with implications that go far beyond the fourteen pages (unusually long for Borges) of the text. I feel like I could adequately summarize many of his other stories in a couple sentences, but Tlön in its entirety always escapes me; every sentence is packed with ideas to the point of overflowing and attempting to summarize it feels a bit like crafting the map in his “On Exactitude in Science” (pg 325 in Collected Fictions).

As someone who can sometimes have trouble suspending disbelief while reading fiction, Borges demolishes any boundaries separating the reader from the text. It frequently feels while reading him as if I am literally within the story, that life as we live it is simply a higher level of metafiction, and that we too are as imagined as the protagonist of “The Circular Ruins” in an infinite sequence of impermanent, contradictory realities. Many of his stories – “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Aleph” (unfortunately not included in Labyrinths) – are like attempts to illustrate infinity, effectively implicating the reader within that. But this is not done in a nihilistic way; human existence is not denigrated for its insignificance so much as expounded for its finitude. This is demonstrated nowhere better than in “Funes the Memorious,” where the burden of infinity crushes the titular character’s mind and renders him incapable of abstract thought. The infinite exists for us only as finite observers; Borges is not referring to some abstraction somewhere out there, but something that exists within us and that we are inextricably bound up in. If the questions he raises have no satisfactory answer, this is because the only possible answer is this inexpressible infinite that can only vaguely be alluded to in writing but stretches into every aspect of our lives and beyond.

As a question, where else do people see the concept of infinity in Borges’s writing?