Tag Archives: Magic Realism

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 10, Bolaño, “Amulet”

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“All she, and Bolaño, can do is ensure that the echoes of their song, the traces of that generosity and courage, endure as both promise and warning.”

This statement from Professor Beasley-Murray, for me, was a very precise one-sentence summary of the meaning behind Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. Indeed, this story seems to be the living history of the student movements of 1968; beyond magic realism, which more or less covered up the realities of oppression and violence, Bolaño’s Amulet realistically portrays the memories of 1968 Mexico.

When I was reading the book, I noticed that the book had an interesting portrayal of temporality; in other words, I felt that Auxilio Lacouture’s life wasn’t confined to the natural movement of time (the order of past, present, and future). It seemed as if Auxilio’s thoughts were the drivers of time, and that the change of temporality in the book was a representation of the dynamism of Auxilio’s thoughts and memories. As such, the concept of time in this book was (and still is) so confusing to me. One passage that really made me feel as such is in page 32:

“[T]ime folded and unfolded itself like a dream. The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. […] I started thinking about my past as if I was thinking about my present, future, and past, all mixed together and dormant in the one tepid egg” (32).

Here, past, present, and future are intertwined within Auxilio’s thoughts (or dreams). Although mostly confused, I did feel a connection between this interconnected nature of temporality with the idea of the “birth of history”. My personal view on history is that it is the past, present, and the future. Mostly we view history as the past, but our analysis in our present is what makes it a history of the past, and we ultimately make predictions of the future based off of that historical analysis. I think something similar can be said about Bolaño’s Amulet. It is about an event of the past, however, it is revisited (though not quite analyzed, in a historical sense), recollected, and narrated with an aim to affect the future. In Amulet, Auxilio is the history of the event that happened in 1968; she is the living reminder of the “song of war and love” (184).

At first, I felt like Auxilio’s statement that she was the mother of Mexican poetry was a joke or an exaggeration; how could an unstable (referring to her lack of work) Uruguayan, a marginal outsider, possibly be the “mother” of Mexican poetry? However, I realized what this statement actually meant, in page 177:

“No, I’m nobody’s mother, but I did know them all, all the young poets […] of Mexico City, or […] other parts of Latina America and washed up here, and I loved them all” (177).

I ended up agreeing that Auxilio was truly the mother of Mexican poetry, the mother of the poetry that got washed up in blood before it was written on paper. She witnessed the sufferings, suffered herself from witnessing and living with the memory of the sufferings, and ultimately endured to keep the history alive.

My question: How did the unique portrayal of temporality affect your reading? Did this make you feel as if the story was being narrated in a different realm? Did it confuse or distract you at all?

  • PS. Sorry my blog is a bit over the 500-word limit. I used some long quotations this blog, so I had to exceed the limit by a little to add in more of my own thoughts. Hope that’s okay.