Tag Archives: literature

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 11: Distant Star

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I found Distant Star to be deceptively easy to read, maybe the easiest in this class so far, yet extremely ambiguous in its themes. It’s clearly another book that the shadow of Borges looms large over, both as an influence and a foil. Bolaño has a similar way of writing to Borges, full of literary name-dropping that blends real-world figures with fictional characters and speculation on the nature of writing with a first-person narrator who mostly serves as a stand-in for the author. I was fully expecting the ending to echo the twist in “Death and the Compass” by revealing that Romero’s contract was an elaborate hoax by Wieder himself in the hopes of leading the narrator into one of his traps; however, while it’s quite possible that Wieder was the unnamed employer, the book ends without any major shakeups. Yet Bolaño also seems distinctly anti-Borges at times, not least in his political themes and skepticism towards the avant-garde. Considering Borges’s infamous support for Pinochet’s regime, I have to wonder whether he had any influence on the character of Carlos Wieder.

Wieder/Ruiz-Tagle is clearly the centerpiece of this book: the mysterious poet/pilot with uncertain motives, the pioneer of fascist art, or, as I would argue, artistic fascism. “Fascist art” (if such a thing could be called art) brings to mind propaganda glorifying the supremacy of the fatherland (e.g. Triumph of the Will), and, though Wieder does partake in this (as in his “Antarctica is Chile” stunt), I got the impression that straightforward ideological faith wasn’t his guiding motive. He seems to understand fascism less as a program to be strictly upheld than as an aesthetic object free from moral judgement, valuable primarily as a spectacle representing the extremities of humanity – which is to say, his artistic values influenced his politics rather than the other way around.

Though the avant-garde is typically associated with the political left (understandably so, considering their shared critique of existing norms and the very fact that some degree of tolerance is a precondition for artistic experimentation), it isn’t unheard of for right-wing figures to make waves in otherwise forward-thinking art: Richard Wagner, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalí, even Borges himself. It’s hard to make sweeping generalizations about such figures, but they generally seem to see in fascism a bulwark against “degeneracy,” an elitist tradition that aggrandizes the role of the “higher arts” that must be upheld in order to be transgressed (but only so far as such transgressions are agreeable right-wing ideology). In the lecture, fascism is described as strictly separating art from politics; while this is sometimes the case, as with those “apolitical” artists who quietly supported brutal regimes (Dalí and Borges), it doesn’t account for the importance of figures like Wagner or Pound in inspiring nationalist pride, or Wieder himself, for whom politics and art are directly linked. If anything, fascism is the aestheticization of politics by way of propaganda, the reduction of complex multifaceted societies to the image of a shared national spirit based on an imagined tradition and contrasted against an antagonistic other. When fascism turns against art, it is because it questions the supremacy of this universal aesthetic, suggesting that there are other ways of living in contradiction to the state narrative. Thus, if Wieder was ultimately cast out of fascist circles and forgotten by Chile, this was because he took this aestheticization too far: he found artistic value in even the parts of Pinochet’s regime that weren’t meant to be made public. Whether he himself realized that his aesthetic adherence to fascism ultimately ended in its implicit critique is uncertain.

What do others think of the distinction between “fascist art” and “artistic fascism”? Which side do you think Wieder falls on?

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?