Tag Archives: Bricolage

Week 12 – Conclusion

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Throughout the past few months, this course felt like an endless seesaw ride, bouncing against different – yet similar – themes and cultures. In the beginning of the course, I questioned what “Romance Studies” was, or rather, what it could have meant. However, right from the introductory lecture, I realized I won’t be able to find a single answer to this. I therefore avoided trying to find the meaning behind Romance Studies. This allowed me to approach the texts with an open, unprejudiced mind; rather than seeking for a “hidden” theme, thus creating a filter between the book and myself, I allowed the book to speak to me in its most authentic form, in its most natural language, without any of my own thought filtration. Of course, getting rid of this “tendency to find specific meaning” took time to develop. I remember reading Proust and Aragon and feeling a bit lost as I couldn’t find anything that could answer what “Romance Studies” was. However, simultaneously, the lecture videos were of tremendous help. It guided me through the relevant themes of the story, allowing me to establish an understanding of key concepts without having to systematically “look” for them.

Looking back at the texts that we have read, the strongest commonality I personally found between all the books was the theme of “relationship”. First, there was the relationship between people. From the parent-child relationships shown in The Shrouded Woman, Agostino, Bonjour Tristesse, The Time of the Doves, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Amulet, etc., to the temporal relationship between one’s past, present, and future, as shown in “Combray”, Paris Peasant, W, or the Memory of Childhood, everything in our texts started off and ended with relationships. Reading about these different relationships – between people, nations, time, objects, literature – was in itself a truly remarkable experience. One big part that stood out for me was the relationship between narrators and literature – such as the mother’s bedtime stories in “Combray”, the narrator Cercas’ journey to write Soldiers of Salamis, and Auxilio’s obsession with poetry. The relationship between people and literature seemed to have a parallel with the relationship between people and time. Like how time can affect people, in that people can reconstruct the present with a recollection of the past, literature, too, seems to reconstruct people’s futures; in some instances, literature seemed like the key driver of people’s lives (especially for Cercas).

Requiring myself to read a book every week was the best thing I have done in this semester. Not only did I become a faster and better reader, but I was also able to experience a “new world” ever week, every time I opened a new text.

Finally, I would like to express my greatest gratitude towards Professor Beasley-Murray, Patricio, and Jennifer for everything they have done for this class this past semester.

My final question: Out of the numerous themes we have encountered, what stood out to you’re the most? Is it applicable to your life in some way?

Week 11, Cercas, “Soldiers of Salamis”

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Reading Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis was filled with many different emotions.

At first, reading about Cercas’ – the narrator – detachment from his literary career made me sad. However, upon quickly realizing that he had found a new impulse to write again, I felt excited for the narrator. This quote in page 55 resonated to me:

“[A]fter almost ten years without writing a book, the moment to try again had arrived” (55).

Until this point, I did not know the legitimacy of the narrator’s story; I knew it was Cercas, but I didn’t know if this was “imaginary” or “real” (as in real life). However, that had no effect on the empathy I felt towards the narrator.

Reading the “Part Two: Soldiers of Salamis” was a little “drier” compared to the story on how the narrator “Cercas” wrote the book itself. It was an engaging war tale; however, it had a very strong “autobiographical” or perhaps “non-fiction” feeling within it. What compensated for this “dryness”, though, was the context of how this story was created by Cercas. Throughout the whole book, Cercas goes through constant processes of validation. For example, when Cercas received Sanchez Mazas’ diary from Figueras, Cercas stated to have a suspicion “which insidiously crossed my mind as I read, that the notebook was a fraud, a falsification contrived by the Figueras family to deceive me, or deceive someone” (65). In response to his suspicions, Cercas seeks for and obtains documentary proof. As such, I think it was this process of validation which gave Cercas the motivation to write again. Cercas continuously made hypotheses of what could have happened; using his imagination and fragmented testimonies, he tried filling in the gaps between what was known and unknown about the moment Sanchez Mazas’ life was spared. It seemed like he was attracted to this process, feeling satisfaction and enjoyment.

Finding Bolano in the last third of the book was pleasant; it was nice to see a known name, so unexpectedly. One quote about Bolano resonated:

“Bolano felt profoundly sad, not because he knew he was going to die, but for all the books he’d planned to write and would now never write, for all his dead friends, all the young Latin Americans of his generation – soldiers killed in wars already lost – he’d always dreamt of resuscitating in his novels and who’d now stay dead for ever” (176).

I was quite moved by reading Bolano’s vision to write “for all his dead friends”, to keep the dead Latin American soldiers alive by his memories, books, and the history that he recreates. It reminded me of Auxilio Lacoutoure; it seems like Bolano himself felt the pressure of this “mission” to keep the dead Latin Americans alive through his remembrance.

Cercas and Miralles also seem to share this “mission”. An inspiring statement on 236 exemplifies just that:

“He remembers for the same reason I remember my father […] he remembers because, although they died sixty years ago, they’re still not dead, precisely because he remembers them” (236).

This re-creation, or continuation of the dead, through memory, is a very emotional topic. I think anyone can relate to this idea, regardless of how accurate or misleading the contents of this book are.

Question: Do you think Miralles was the soldier who spared Sanchez Mazas’ life? Or was it not him, like Miralles himself said? Or does it not matter?

Week 8, Perec, “W or The Memory of Childhood”

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While reading Georges Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, I specifically felt parallels with “Combray”. In “Combray”, the narrator reflects on his past, with the perspective he has in his present; in this way, his reflection of the past reconstructs his present, and offers a change to his future. Similarly, in W or The Memory of Childhood, Perec recollects his memories of the past, the memories that have “many variations and imaginary details [Perec] [has] added in the telling of them”, altering or distorting them greatly (13). However, the main difference I felt was that Perec didn’t seem to have a “progressive realization”. Perec, regarding writing about the memories he had with his parents, stated, “fifteen years after drafting these two passages, it still seems to me that I could do no more than repeat them: […] it seems to me that I would manage nothing more than a reiteration of the same story, leading nowhere” (41). This statement helped me realize that Perec wasn’t necessarily seeking for something (ex. For a change) through writing. In fact, he establishes a unique environment where temporality isn’t divided up into hierarchy. In his writing, past and present seem to have equal values; the possible inaccuracies of his memories don’t seem to affect his writing and recollection of the past.

When I first read the title of this book, I had wondered what relationship “W” and “the memory of childhood” had. Although I’ve been thinking of this mysterious relationship throughout reading the whole book, I feel even more confused and fragmented after finishing the book. Thankfully, watching this week’s lecture helped me bring a new perspective to this matter, that perhaps this unresolved question, these “compilations of fragments”, were indicators of the author’s post-modernistic narrative. I also found parallels of postmodernity in the description about W. W was characterized by specific sets of laws and methods that maximize the competitiveness of athletes; at first, these laws and methods almost seemed like the ideological background of W’s political system. However, throughout most of the later parts of the book, these methods are attacked and doubted. In one example, the description stated, “the problem with this method is obviously the risk that […] it will emphasize the differences between the contestants and produce in the end a kind of vicious circle” (92). This narrative, which attacked a method established within W, seemed very close to Professor Beasley-Murray’s description of postmodernity, a “competing claims to legitimacy and truth”.

To close off my blog, I would like to ask a question: Many parts of Perec’s autobiography consisted of a childhood story of which Perec admitted to have “made up” or “distorted”. Did this affect your reading at all? Do you think this affected the reliability of Perec’s narrative?

Week 7, Rodoreda, “The Time of the Doves”

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I was passionately engaged while reading The Time of the Doves, mainly for two reasons. First of all, I really enjoyed the narrative of the novel. I felt like the first-person narration of Natalia made the narrative more credible. Normally, first-person narratives are less credible than a “neutral” third-person view, but since this story was about Natalia’s life, nothing could’ve been more credible than her own thoughts; in this way, the benefits of a first-person narrative of this book resembled that of “The Shrouded Woman” by Bombal. In both books, I did not care if there could have been “another side of the story”. All I cared about was what the narrator perceived and thought, which made the first-person narrative most suitable and credible. Secondly, I really enjoyed the temporality and linearity of the book and plot. It felt like specific plot events did not take up majority of the pages; everything seemed more focused on Natalia’s thoughts and emotions. Moreover, I think the majority of the plot is more about how Natalia “lives on”. Though significant events happen throughout the book, the plot continues quickly without being stopped in one event for a long time. Considering that the narration was Natalia’s own thoughts, I felt like Natalia was too busy – with work, housework, raising children – with her life that she had no time to stop at a single event; life was continuous survival for her, survival through endless sufferings. She just had to keep living on.

While reading, I noticed (and indicated on the pages) a lot of instances where I found Natalia suffering: guilt after leaving Pere, on the motorcycle with Quimet, the disasters with the doves, having no choice but to send Toni away, living through times of war (hunger and pain), and marriage Antonio. The last suffering, marriage with Antonio, isn’t truly a suffering; in fact, it seemed like the foundation for Natalia and her kids’ lives to get better. However, reading the last parts of the book, I couldn’t stop feeling a bittersweet, guilty, and incomplete emotion. The actual events of Natalia’s life seemed to be leading her towards recovery from the terrors of hunger and pain. However, I felt like Natalie still suffered. She was unstable and always seemed preoccupied with thoughts of the past. The last few pages where she finally crossed a street implied that Natalia was recovering, that she was reconstituting her life in a positive way. However, the ellipsis after the last word of the book, “Happy . . .” bothers me. Some part of me doubts that Natalia is truly happy, while I truly wish she would become happy.

Although I feel like this blogpost was clustered with emotions and thoughts, I want to end with an organized question: Natalia’s life can be characterized as a “continuous effort to carry on”. Knowing this, do you think Natalia is truly happy by the ending of the story? Can Natalia ever become happy again, despite everything she has gone through?