Author Archives: benjamin ranieri

Conclusions

Looking back on my first blog post, the only point that I really made is that I did not know anything about the content of this course. I definitely had no frame of reference for Latin American literature, and now I do. So, this course has definitely fulfilled my original curiosities and thoughts at the outset of the term. This may be just from the way the reading list was structured, but it is really difficult for me now not to see literature from Latin America as defined by Gabriel García Márquez. There is a distinctive style to literature from the texts we have read that definitely appears to revolve around García Márquez.

As to that distinctive style, I had a difficult time thinking of how to write about it without simply invoking the term magical realism. Obviously, the influences of García Márquez’s contributions to that genre have a lot to do with Latin American authors mimicking that style to a certain extent, but I found this course helped me with another way to communicate about this specific literary region. That is the concept of games. In some ways, I think the concept of games relates a lot to the fact that a lot of the texts we read this term take place from a child’s perspective. This includes texts like Mama Blanca’s Memoirs, Papi, and while I did not read it, Cartucho. Failing that, the main protagonist of a lot of texts tended to have a very youthful perspective, which lead to them growing up in a lot of ways throughout the narrative. Examples of this are Distant Star, and The Underdogs to an extent. So, games come up quite a lot in these types of perspectives as youthful eyes are more likely to comprehend the world around them through a more playful filter. On the other hand, I think the concept of games also relates to what a lot of the authors in this course do with the concept of literature itself. There is an almost playful nature to the amount to which authors will manipulate reality to suit the perspective they are writing in that is (somewhat) unique to the batch of authors we read for this term. I think this is an interesting way to regard authors of this region, as they seem among the most daring when it comes to breaking traditional conventions of representation in literature in favour of over-the-top imagery and symbolism to communicate deeper meaning.

My question then: how did the concept of games factor into your understanding and takeaways from this course?

Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (Week Thirteen)

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So, I am not going to even pretend that I understood any of the subtext for what was going on in this week’s reading as I barely understood what was happening on the surface of the narrative as I was reading it. I considered watching the Netflix film to fill in some gaps but I am not a fan of scary movies and there was a lot of imagery in this book that I feel like would have translated into some pretty disturbing visuals. Some examples of that kind of imagery from the text are all the animals that do not act as they are supposed to (like when the foal gets spooked and simply will not move) or all those recurring images of children yawning really widely. Simply put, I do not want to see that adapted visually so I am going to have to live with my ignorance of some of the finer details of the narrative’s plot.

Something that I noticed that was interesting to me near the end that I think (?) is the case throughout the text is that it is written entirely in the second-person perspective. It rarely comes up as Amanda rarely addresses David in the flow of her thoughts but once the veneer of her feverish remembrances fades, it becomes very apparent. I have only ever read one other thing that was written from second-person perspective, and that is the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. Totally off-topic, but if you are interested in eco-critical fantasy with a lot of literary merit, I would highly recommend it.

Returning to Fever Dream, all that I have left to offer in terms of personal thoughts and reactions is what I interpreted the book to be about before I watched Dr. Beasley-Murray’s lecture video. Obviously, after watching that video I know a lot more about unethical agricultural practices in Argentina and thus can make a very different interpretation of Fever Dream with that context in mind. However, I initially had none of that context and was trying to figure out what this story was about and came to a very different conclusion. I assume it is relatively common knowledge that the cinematic genre of horror is very interesting to study as it tends to reveal deeply-rooted cultural and societal fears that are shared by a lot of people to some extent. With that in mind, I read Fever Dream as a kind of reflection on all the horrors and anxieties that are brought on through motherhood. I say motherhood deliberately, as fathers in this text seem to be dealt with at arms-length and never seem to factor into the lives of their children. Thus, the poison that changes the children in the village can be seen as a stand-in as children aging. Carla fantasizes about starting a new life where she would still have a child that would “let [her]” take care of her” (Schweblin 52). Implying that David is changed now and does not allow this. While in the text this is because of the poison, it is not uncommon to hear older parents lament the fact that their children have grown into adults and no longer have the patience to be babied anymore. Amanda also questions whether she is a “bad mother” for letting her daughter succumb to the poison (73). Perhaps, if she had been a better mother, Nina would not leave her in the same way David left Carla. This interpretation was also inspired by the strange final scene between the two fathers. I still do not really know what to make of it, other than the fact that neither one of them really seems to care about their children? In my reading of this as a text about the scary side of motherhood, I guess this scene and the way these men are portrayed implies that fathers do not have that “rescue distance” that is more innate to mothers (14)? I do not think I necessarily agree with that, but that is what the final scene implied to me.

So I guess my question is: what do you make of the final scene between the two fathers? what does their attitude mean?

Rita Indiana’s Papi (Week 12)

Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star (Week Eleven)

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This week’s reading dealt head-on with some of the darkest themes we have discussed thus far this term, making it definitely one of the most emotionally challenging reads for me personally so far. Professor Beasley-Murray began his lecture by discussing the inherent barbarism at the heart of society, especially one which imposes hegemony. In the context of Latin America emerging from authoritarian governments into democratically elected states, this barbarism that is more obvious through systems of government like authoritarianism is nonetheless a very prevalent issue in democracies as well. I think this point was an important place to start for reading this text from Bolaño. The overarching perspective of a long period in history found in this novel mimics the reflective period of reconciliation that Latin America went through during this period. This text deals with and portrays the barbaric side of society in a much more impactful way than say, The Underdogs. As that text takes place during an active civil war, a lot of the brutality and results of the violence fade due to the disorienting and sparsely detailed writing style that Azuela employs. In Distant Star, the detached unnamed narrator (who I understand through a little research is an author stand-in character that Bolaño uses) brings an outside perspective that emphasizes the consequences and atrocities that come with war and violent conflict. Instead of thrusting his narration into the midst of the action, Bolaño’s much more reserved approach serves to highlight the horrific and traumatic events he details.

Bolaño grapples with representing atrocities and traumas of the past in a very interesting way, through the creative expression of poets and writers. As writers often serve as cultural creators in the sense that they give voice or form to nascent societal truths and desires, the narrator’s participation in writing groups can be seen as his attempt to contribute to or improve his society. The narrator’s obsession with Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and his ascription of all of Chile’s genocidal and authoritarian crimes against its population demonstrates a possible bias in the author to believe the most powerful political tool is a writer. This may in fact be true, as the narrator is later sent to a prison camp for holding socialist views. As the narrator undoubtedly is looking for explanations for the state of his home country, it does make sense that he views someone with the same profession but politically opposed to him would be instrumental in grand societal change. As may be evident, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the narrator’s obsession with Alberto, so for my question this week: why do you think that the narrator fixated so keenly on Alberto?

Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú (Week 10)

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This week’s novel satisfied something that I was beginning to notice about the readings I have done for this course thus far. That is: the lack of inclusion of the Indigenous population of South and Central America. Most of the texts I have read for this course tend to make some sort of reference to the local nation or some cultural traditions. However, these mentions are often fleeting and we rarely get to delve very deep into specifics about the Indigenous communities around the stories we’ve read. I, Rigoberta Menchú definitely defies that trend, as Menchú’s life narrative fulfills that aspect of Latin America that so far had been mostly missing in this course. The unique quality of this narrative is somewhat problematic, in my opinion, in the canon of Latin American literature. As the early boom of Latin American authors came from the wealthier and whiter classes, minority and Indigenous voices were very scarce in the literary world. Then, I, Rigoberta Menchú comes out and wins a Nobel Peace Prize, and I cannot help but wonder how much this flattened rather than expanded the presence of Indigenous realities in Latin American literature. When something so genre-defining also happens to compensate for decades of neglect in a literary sense for a certain community of people, that community then comes to be defined in relation to that work. In the Translator’s Note at the beginning of the novel, Ann Wright tells us that Menchú is telling the story of every Indigenous Guatemalan. Those are fairly large shoes to fill for one woman’s story, and I was left wondering if it is now paradoxically more different for Indigenous Guatemalans to tell different kinds of stories.

Another aspect of this novel that gave me a lot to think about was the nature and ethics of its translation. The fact that Rigoberta Menchú did not actually write the text of this book is very interesting to me. Both in a symbolic way as Indigenous communities of the Americas tend to favour the oral tradition of maintaining knowledge over a written one. Therefore, we can see Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in a lot of ways as more of the author of this text. The concept of authorship and the modern novel are things deeply steeped in Western culture, so to characterize Menchú in such a way does her a disservice. Instead, she is the narrator of the text. Through her voice, we gain a window into her understanding. Something that further muddles the translation of this text is that Menchú delivered her story in Spanish, a language which she had only spoken for three years at that time. All this to say, I think that the numerous layers of translation that this text comes to us through make it difficult to judge the authenticity and intent of its creation.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude II (Week 8)

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While One Hundred Years of Solitude has not become my favourite book of all time, after finishing it this weekend, I can certainly understand why many people consider it that way. It is difficult to discuss the impact of the ending and the feeling you are left after without sounding derivative; it has all been said already. The “gritty realism” that Professor Beasley-Murray highlights in the ending which results in the destruction of the town is portrayed in a very hopeless way. The last line of the entire novel reaffirms the fact that the history and success of the Buendia family, and the town of Macondo more broadly, “did not have a second opportunity on earth” (García Márquez 417). This despair felt by the remaining Buendias at the decline of their storied history is made manifest as every aspect of what their ancestors built crumbles before them. The cyclical nature of the Buendia is made manifest throughout the text, as fortunes and technologies rise and fall. This damaging feedback loop that eventually cripples all that the Buendias have built also signals the space for a different cycle of history to take its place. After all, the building of Macando was originally only possible because they found an undisturbed and isolated place. Therefore, I can’t help but read some degree of hope in the ending. Not hope for the Buendia family, as their time is clearly at an end, but hope for the possibility of new and better cycles of history inhabiting the same space. I believe it is possible that the rise and fall of technology, luck, and progress demonstrated by the Buendia family throughout the text highlight the frequency with which little pockets of existence and civilization grow and flourish constantly throughout history. After all, the “history” of the Buendia family will never actually fade, as it is encapsulated within the literature.

Someone’s blog post from last week (I can’t remember whose), talked about how this novel had a palpable magical feel to it, especially by the end. Magical realism became much more than just an abstract phrase to me by the end of this novel. After I had passed the halfway mark and was approaching maybe two-thirds of the way through, I found it increasingly more difficult to put down. My investment into the world of this family and this town felt real. Its impending and well-foreshadowed demise makes the fact that our experience of reading the novel is an essential part of that history remaining relevant and recognized.

Question: What stuck out to you in the ending? Did you interpret it as totally lacking hope or is there a brighter way to look at it?

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude I (Week 7)

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For once, it has been nice to have more than a week to read a book. With a novel of this size and pedigree, it is preferable to have more time to properly process it, instead of having to rush through. It feels as though as a class we finally made it to a topic we have sort of been discussing throughout the whole term. Dr.Beasely-Murray put it in a very succinct way in his first lecture on One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was that all Latin American literature is by default discussed somehow in relation to García Márquez. Whether it is viewed as a precursor or a successor, all literature of the region seems to be centred around García Márquez and his pioneering of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude. And the influence does not stop at literature. This cultural ubiquity that García Márquez accomplishes over the region surpasses even literature as I am reminded of the opening shot of the popular Netflix series, Narcos, which begins with a definition of the term Magical Realism. While I have not seen more than half of the first season of that show, it does not have much to do with magical realism as far as I can tell. The only unifying factor is that Narcos takes place mainly in Colombia, the same country that García Márquez hails from.

Turning to the text, I found it surprising how readable it was. Despite this, the somewhat whimsical and random direction that the narrative takes makes it very easy to follow and yet more difficult to understand. What I mean by that is, while all the events portrayed throughout the text are clear and coherent to me so far, I have not been very successful in parsing out a deeper meaning to some of the more random elements of the story. Perhaps that could be my own fault for trying to over-assign meaning to a text with such a storied history. It is also difficult for me to definitively say anything about the text when I have not finished it yet.

Take, for example, the insomnia disease that spreads, possibly from the Indigenous people to the citizens of Macondo. The collective impact of the insomnia sickness on the entire community of Macondo affects different people uniquely. The clearest interpretation I can come up with for what this episode means is that the insomnia sickness represents how trauma affects an entire community. Aureliano (the second? first? I think first) eventually crafts a cure from the specific root found on the riverbank near the town, demonstrating the need for collective action in the face of problems that affect everybody.

My question for this week is: what stood out to you in the first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude? Are there any specific events or episodes in the narrative that have impressed you for one reason or another?

Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (Week 6)

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Overall, I found that I enjoyed Alejo Carpentier’s novel, The Kingdom of This World, the most out of any text we have read so far this term. Not necessarily for any definable reason, although my cynical side wants to say I liked it because it was short. Regardless, it was interesting to read about Latin American history from the perspective of a French colony instead of a Spanish one. I do not know enough about the history of Haiti to know how much involvement the Spanish and French portions of Haiti had with each other, but this novel is obviously situated amongst the French half of the island. This might just pertain to this particular novel, but the political and social differences were made much more apparent than in previous texts we have read for this course. Previously, colonial and political realities were more obscure and less clearly defined than in The Kingdom of This World. The Underdogs is a good example of this. While the text concerns a deeply political event, the Mexican Revolution, the exact motivations and goals behind the violence are very opaque. Most characters involved barely seem to know why exactly they are fighting or who they are fighting against. As I said, this might simply be a coincidence of the texts I have read, but I do find it interesting that Carpentier himself was not from Haiti. From what I can gather from my super thorough Wikipedia research, he was in Haiti for the Revolution, but he entered it as an outsider. Therefore, it is easier to understand how he could have approached writing about the Haitian Revolution from a more academic perspective.

As for the text itself, I was very interested in how it compared colonial appropriation of the land and the people with how Macandal fused with his environment. The way in which “the one-armed [is] everywhere” evokes a mindset more akin to a spiritual connection to the land (Carpentier 24). Once again, I do not know the history of Haiti well enough to know if there was a native population there when it became a colony and if there was, what became of it. Whether this population was incorporated into the slave population or not, I can’t help but wonder if Indigenous spiritual philosophies inspired this line of revolutionary thinking. While this early foray into the possibility of a more reciprocal relationship to the land, the later events of the novel lay bare the violent realities that accompany pleasant revolutionary ideals.

Question: How much does an author’s origin affect their ability to write about somewhere else?

Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths (Week 5)

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While this week’s reading was not as inscrutable as last week’s poetry could be (especially in translation), its surreal quality made it almost as difficult to draw conclusions from. When I first started this, I mentioned that the only impression I had of Latin American literature was magical realism. This week’s text definitely fulfilled that expectation, with each story containing a dreamlike atmosphere that emphasizes the non-reality of the written word.

I obviously do not have the writing space to discuss every short story in the collection as each one has quite a lot worth dissecting. I will point out a few highlights for me from the collection, as I was doing research about the text these seem to be some of the most popular for most people. “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” a short story with one of the more literal labyrinths than those found throughout the text, explores how time branches off into a million different equally possible realities. The story reminded me a lot of an old sci-fi story similar to The Twilight Zone or something like that. The notebook that Dr. Yu Tsun finds reveals the future and raises a lot of poignant existential questions about free will and fate. The presence of the future notebook also brought up (what I thought were) very contemporary discourses concerning the precise nature of time. As knowledge of future events creates a paradoxical awareness of what is to come and impending time loops, Borges fundamentally questions the shape and linearity of time as it actually is instead of just how we experience it. These concepts such as time loops, rewriting the past, and a lack of free will all strike me as very modern science fiction tropes, so I was very surprised when I learned that ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths” was originally published in 1941. As this time period was arguably the cusp of 20th-century modernity, I wonder how many science fiction writers found inspiration in texts that employed magical realism to the effect that Borges did here.

Another highlight from the collection for me was “The Library of Babel” as it contained another unique setting that seemed straight out of science fiction. This story kind of resembles “The Garden with the Forking Paths,” as it also contains an object, in this case, a library, that holds the vastest and most unknowable quantity of something. In this case that something is information instead of time. The very scale of the library dwarfs the character’s attempts to ascribe it with coherent meaning. This enormity of information emphasizes the limitations of human knowledge and humbles people for even attempting to try to understand it.

Question: Do you enjoy magical realism? What is it about this genre that connects it so closely with “lesser” genres like fantasy or sci-fi but at the same time is always associated with literary merit?

Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems (Week 4)

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This week’s reading was quite a nice refresher compared to the past couple of weeks as it’s all poetry instead of prose. I have heard of Pablo Neruda before, as I am sure most people in this class have, but something that I learned from the lecture and that I find really interesting about this collection is that it is his most famous and enduring work, and yet he wrote it when he was only nineteen years old. Now luckily, I did not express any of my feelings or opinions on love in poetic form when I was nineteen. However, if I did, I imagine that looking back on it even now at twenty-three I would be absolutely horrified. Undoubtedly, Pablo Neruda is a better writer than I am but I can not help but wonder if this level of fame for this text was somewhat embarrassing for him, as I am positive it would have been for me.

In discussing the actual text, I find it a bit more difficult to broadly summarize its themes as the intricacies of poetry inherently negate such sweeping claims. So, instead, I wanted to focus on some powerful passages throughout that had an impression on me. In poem number fourteen, “Every Day You Play,” the final image: “I want / to do with you what the spring does to the cherry trees” was especially evocative to me (40-1). This passage does repeat an unfortunate tendency that Neruda has throughout the collection of likening women to inanimate aspects of the scenery instead of real people with their own feelings and desires. As Professor Beasley-Murray suggests in his lecture, it is still possible to understand and appreciate the underlying passion that influences this objectification. Nonetheless, this image likens new love to the blooming of a flower. We can understand how Neruda aims to communicate his desire to cherish his love the same way he would the earth around him. While I previously mentioned how likening a woman to the scenery is reductive, through this final image we can also see Neruda’s romanticization of the land as well as the people in his life. Comparisons to the beauty of the land are rife throughout this collection and through this pattern, we can identify Pablo Neruda’s evident love of his surroundings. Having not read Neruda in-depth, I can only assume that this pride in the land later influenced his political reinforcement and empowerment of the people of South America.

Question: Did you find that questioning the intentions of Neruda’s work helped your analysis, or were you better off enjoying the poetry and not worrying about some of the implications of what he was ultimately saying?