Tag Archives: War

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 12, Agualusa, “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers”

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Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s The Society of Reluctant Dreamers was a very interesting read. It felt surreal in one hand, but also had a lot of relatable, applicable lessons to take away as a reader.

The first thing that stood out to me was protagonist Daniel Benchimol’s unstable state. Although in the early pages Benchimol stated “I discovered I was able to live on almost nothing and be happy. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I was back then,” Benchimol’s life – as a husband, father, and journalist – wasn’t successful (albeit the term “successful” is only subjective) (12). Particularly interesting was his role as a father to his daughter, Karinguiri. I felt sorry for Benchimol when his ex-wife Lucrecia blamed him for the arrest of their daughter Karinguiri, stating “this is all your fault, you’re the one who gets her going, with that armchair revolutionary talk of yours.” I felt sorry because as Benchimol himself stated, he knew “it was true” (116). Benchimol, though he did not explicitly state this, would have felt guilty for his daughter’s suffering – going on a hunger strike in prison.

However, this sorry feeling changed when I read what Karinguiri had to say about this matter. In a letter to her father, Karinguiri stated, “I’ve ended up in this prison because I decided to be Angolan. I’m fighting for my citizenship. […] Fear isn’t a choice. There’s no way to avoid feeling fear. And yet we can choose not to give in to it. My companions and I have chosen to fight against fear” (217). Although Karinguiri might have been suffering physically, I think she was living true to where her heart was leading; she was doing what she believed was right, to get her world closer to happiness. In this way, I dropped my sorry feeling for Benchimol; instead, I was inspired by Karinguiri. Her life “divided between different worlds” and her fight for “the Angola of the poor” inspired me (216-217). In a way, it almost seems like Benchimol’s revolutionary talks laid the foundation for Karinguiri to “dream” – to dream of democracy, and a world for the poor majority of Angola. It is this other meaning of “dream” – as in an ambition or ideal in reality – that caught my attention, despite all the other talks about nightly dreams. In my interpretation, I think this other meaning of “dream” – especially relating to Karinguiri’s story – is worth nothing.

On the other hand, the more conventional meaning of dream – relating to sleep – also interested me. Specifically, the sleep imaging machine caught my attention. The idea wasn’t new, as I’ve heard of machines similar to that before, but it certainly was frightening. Knowing that dreams “express our forbidden desires,” as it was said in the lecture, the thought of this dream-imaging machine seemed to cruel.

Question: On page 171, it is stated “it might be possible for us to remember future events, if they’re very important or very traumatic.” On a similar note, the book suggests that “foreshadowing dreams” can be true. Do you think this idea of a “foreshadowing dream” was mentioned in a literal way – as in, do you think the author actually believed this idea was plausible? Or did the author want to imply a parallel between dreams and literature, trying to suggest that literature can affect the future?

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 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 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?