Tag Archives: Symbolism

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.

Week 9, Manea, “The Trenchcoat”

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When I first finished reading Norman Manea’s “The Trenchcoat”, I felt way too confused. However, after watching the lecture video and reading blogposts of my peers, I realized that confusion – especially regarding the Trenchcoat – was a central theme of the story. For me, the anonymity and lack of description for the Trenchcoat made me read the story with a suspicion; looking back at the notes I have made throughout my reading, there are a lot of question marks.

The start of the story felt rather mundane and perhaps boring. However, one short sentence caught my interest. That is, “The future: small and immediate. Already present, already past, already small, shrunken . . . enormous” (192). I think this sentence explains well the hopelessness of life in Romania at that time. Although this sentence did not explicitly indicate anything about people’s “boredom” and “lack of progressive ideas”, I think it shows an attitude that corresponds to Professor Beasley-Murray’s statement that “Nothing really happens in Romania; all ideas of progress have been abandoned”.

Another interesting part of the story was in the early part of the book, where Iona argues how “dinner parties have been disappearing” and that “it’s the desire, above all, it’s the desire to get together that has disappeared” (193). It was interesting to learn about the context of this book, specifically the Communist Regime in Romania. Although I can only imagine, I think the world people in Romania at the time had to live through would have been characterized by mistrust, suspicion, disconnection, and boredom (or hopelessness). People, full of mistrust and lack of hope for the future, “lost the desire to get together” (193). Perhaps, it is within this life of boredom and suspicion where the Trenchcoat becomes so significant, something that attracted the attention of Dina.

I’m still confused over the numerous hypotheses of the appearance of the Trenchcoat. At first, I thought it was just left at the house by one of the guests at the dinner party. However, that seemed untrue as Dina’s phone calls proved. Then, the possibility that it was left deliberately as some sort of experiment posed a new suspicion. Finally, the constant suspicion between the visitors worsened the confusion, and made the situation look much more serious than it looked at the beginning. Reflecting on my experience as a reader of the various hypotheses of the Trenchcoat, I feel like I always had a strong suspicion towards all the characters; every time a new suspicion was posed, I was attracted to believing it. In this way, I feel like the Trenchcoat was a device that allowed Manea to share the experience of living through a “world of suspicion, distrust, and boredom (hopelessness)” to the readers. At least he certainly did for me.

Question for the author: The appearance of the Trenchcoat was left an unresolved mystery. In your mind, was there an answer to this mystery? Why and how did the Trenchcoat appear?