Tag Archives: memory

Week 6: The Kingdom of This World

I broke the rules a bit this week and ended up reading both Pedro Páramo and The Kingdom of This World since they were both on my reading list anyways. I enjoyed both, but I’m writing about the latter since I read it more recently so it’s fresher in my head. Though I don’t want to spend too much time comparing the two, I do have to comment that I find it surprising that, between the two books, Pedro Páramo is the one most often regarded as the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both in style and content, Carpentier seems far closer to García Márquez; he shares the same neutral, matter-of-fact tone and the blending of history with myth, while Rulfo’s writing is more intimate and dramatic with a focus on characters rather than historical events.

Otherwise, The Kingdom of this World was not what I expected it to be. Having read about the Haitian Revolution in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, I expected any fictionalized account to focus on the dramatic shifting of political alliances and the violent warfare that took place across the island. As it was, the novel almost jumped over the actual revolution – it depicted the first stirrings of revolution in Voodoo rituals, then skipped straight to the rule of Henri Christophe after independence had already been achieved. Toussaint L’Ouverture, easily the most famous figure in the revolution, was mentioned only once in passing, as was Jean-Jacques Dessalines; on the other hand, names like Dutty Boukman and Henri Christophe were as important in Carpentier’s fictional narrative as they were James’s historical one.

There’s a way in which this is an accurate representation of the way one experiences history through their own personal memories. I think we’ve all had moments when we found out that some major event that everybody else seemed to know about somehow just passed us by, only discovering it after it has already become enshrined as part of history. Other historical events can dominate our lives as much as they do a history textbook. However, even when we are aware as historical events take place contemporaneous to us, there’s still a kind of alienation between our own experience and history as such, that grand narrative stretching back to the origins of human storytelling. Perhaps we can intellectually accept that we are part of the same temporal sequence that included such historic events such as the Haitian Revolution, but those semi-mythical moments never really exist in the same way our daily affairs do.

Yet, as Carpentier would suggest, we do not all participate in the same history, but only a limited number of many histories. It’s somewhat like Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but the paths don’t only fork; they twist over and under each other, some reaching outwards and others turning back on themselves. It’s not just that Macandal either died or survived, or even both; each story only has significance insofar as it is remembered, transmitted, and acted upon. If one version of the story is “true,” that is because, from our position, that is the story that has been transmitted to us and appears most relevant, but alternative stories are still exercising their own subterraneous influence under and against it.

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?

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?