Monthly Archives: February 2016

Just Ordinary People

During revolutions, we usually hear the about the heroic efforts made by individual men or about the grandiose goals that these men have for the revolution, but in the stories of Carutcho, we learn of these men made famous by the revolution who are not in any way special.  What these short stories truly do is humanize the men of the revolution, not just specifically the men of Villa or of the Federales we learn about the human elements of all men and women involved in the revolution. Much like we talked about last week in class in regards to Pancho Villa being portrayed as a mythical beast who without the revolution would have failed, the short stories work past the imaginaries of the battlefield and focus more on the human elements outside of the battles and conflicts. The interactions that Nellie had with both soldiers and men alike, both through stories or real life interactions shows us the humanity in the revolution. In both the stories of the lives of individuals to their deaths, we learn how they lived their lives or why they were killed. Some even killed too soon, but it is through the lives and deaths of those during the revolution that we not only learn of the ideologies of the revolution but of the humanity of the revolution.

One of the stories that stuck with me the most was of Nacha Ceniceros, one of the few female generals in the Villa army who supposedly got executed only to have run away from the revolution in order to rebuild her life away from it all. This story about someone re-establishing their lives during the revolution is rare like we mentioned last week in the Underdogs, most people who join the revolution cannot leave the revolution once they join they are forever stuck in a perpetual motion  like a stone rolling down a hill. The notability that Nacha was able to forge for herself in an almost man driven revolution is noted in her story, even at the end when she states herself that if she truly wanted she could have stayed in the army and marry one of the generals. It is her ability to give up becoming one fo the “most influential women” of the revolution to become a rancher instead. Although she is given a fake story to cover up her departure from the army, the fake story maintain’s her prowess and significance as both a general and a woman. The symbolism of the way that she died and many other died who infront of gun squads on both sides of the revolution is immortalized in these short stories. Deaths which otherwise may have gone completely unheard of as are those in many other revolutions.

Cartucho

Out of all three of the works we have seen and read on the Mexican Revolution, Cartucho is definitely the one that struck me the most. In a sense, Nellie Campobello’s novel / collection of short stories could be described as the diametric opposite of Kazan and Steinbeck’s Viva Zapata!. Campobello never makes any attempt of characterising or judging the revolution any further than the reactions of herself as a child, and her fragmented narrative doesn’t explicitly make any overarching point. Her writing style and attention to detail also bring across more authenticity than Marlon Brando`s improbably heroic and righteous version of Emiliano Zapata ever could.

This authenticity seems to come from the fact that Campobello is attempting to replicate the style of the various true stories she heard as a child. Cartucho’s dedication, which reads “To Mama, who gave me the gift of true stories” (p.4) seems to confirm this, and Rafaela Luna’s stories feature prominently in the novel, alongside her daughter’s own memories. This search for truth in storytelling can be seen in the amount of detail Campobello gives each of her vignettes, especially when it comes to violence and gore. In fact these are what appear to have struck her the most as a child witnessing the Revolution unfold in front of her house. Her descriptions in particular bring out her fascination for the violent deaths she witnessed by frequently veering into the lyrical, such as with Pablo Mares: “All the blood running in bubbling red threads over the rock begged forgiveness for not having sired strong children” (p.76).

However, it is just as easy to contest the fact that her account – even of her own perspective – can aspire to depicting some kind of truth. While her writing gives a very tangible and vivid edge to the events and impressions she describes, she is nonetheless recounting them at least ten years after she saw and felt them. As such, it is impossible to consider that the voice the author gives herself as a child isn’t at least somewhat fabricated, and according to the translator’s notes Campobello herself confirmed this. So, despite it being a genuine autobiographical work, unlike Azuela’s The Underdogs, it is nonetheless burdened by a certain, and probably inevitable distance from its subject matter.

While Campobello does use style and her potentially fallible memory to bring these snapshots of the Revolution to life, I don’t think these detract from the value of Cartucho as a piece of revolutionary literature. On the contrary, by writing in a lyrical style and using her own impressions, the author brings us emotionally closer to the revolution and its various actors than any factual account ever could. All the while, her commitment to describing real events and people separates it from The Underdogs, whose fictional characters can be more easily accused of being unrealistic stereotypes. Perhaps most importantly, these tales are essentially a continuation of the “true stories” Campobello – and probably many others – grew up with during the Mexican Revolution, and in that sense Cartucho is a truly authentic account.

Cartucho : any help to understand the Mexican Revolution?

After reading Cartucho, I would say it hadn’t enhance my knowledge to understanding the Mexican Revolution. In certain points, I can sense the violence death of the soldiers through Campobello’s vision. It lacks the essence to portray ‘revolution lives’, why and how the Villistas struggle to survive.  Bur how could I blame the innocent memory of a privileged child? What would children know about the cruelty of war game?

I would like to mention a soft description in part I, Nellie reveals that most Mexican soldiers can sing with a fine voice. Indeed, it is a traditional gift among Mexican men. This musical nature is the living proof nowadays. The men and boys are often perform singing, playing guitar, piano, and double bass either indoor or outdoor. No wonder in a statistic mark the Mexicans are the most happy soul in the world!!

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Cartucho : any help to understand the Mexican Revolution?

After reading Cartucho, I would say it hadn’t enhance my knowledge to understanding the Mexican Revolution. In certain points, I can sense the violence death of the soldiers through Campobello’s vision. It lacks the essence to portray ‘revolution lives’, why and how the Villistas struggle to survive.  Bur how could I blame the innocent memory of a privileged child? What would children know about the cruelty of war game?

I would like to mention a soft description in part I, Nellie reveals that most Mexican soldiers can sing with a fine voice. Indeed, it is a traditional gift among Mexican men. This musical nature is the living proof nowadays. The men and boys are often perform singing, playing guitar, piano, and double bass either indoor or outdoor. No wonder in a statistic mark the Mexicans are the most happy soul in the world!!

DSC03767

 

Cartucho

I enjoyed Cartucho more than I enjoyed The Underdogs. Mostly I think this is due to the style/format of Cartucho, which I thought to be quite refreshing. I think that many small anecdotes from a childhood perspective are a valuable asset to understand the Mexican Revolution through different terms. By seeing the action of the revolution through the eyes of a child, who does not sympathize with a side of the conflict, gives a neutral and rather innocent angle to the work. Since Cartucho is full of small anecdotes, I’d describe the book as being a “micro-history” or “intimate-history” work. By presenting many small instances of the revolution we get to see the bigger picture in a way we would not be able to see through a scholarly book or article. As a result of these small anecdotes, violence and death evidently becomes the main component of the book. It is quite startling to think that this little girl witnessed so much violence and death right at her doorstep in her everyday life. However, for many people who grew up during this time, this is exactly how the revolution played out in their eyes. The book is filled with stories of death, and there is a clear reason why. In The Two Pablos Campobello writes, “I think Pablo Mares stopped spraying bullets from his rifle, and his strong body-the gift he gave to the revolution-gradually keeled over his left side” (pg. 76). I think this sentence is highly important to understanding the book and it also touches upon a lot of what we have discussed in class. Pablo Mares gives his life for the revolution, as do all the people who die in Campobello’s short anecdotes. This made me think of the metaphor of the revolution as being like a hurricane, the revolution as being like an addiction, as well as the scene where Demetrio throws a stone into a lake that symbolized his own personal experience with the revolution. All these treat the revolution as a powerful and sweeping entity in which you have to commit, more often than not, with your own life. Dawson said that if you want to be part of a revolution you shouldn’t be one of the leaders because you are certain to die, however, as we see with Cartucho, whatever part you take in a revolution no matter how small, you always have the possibility that you will pay with your life.

Cartucho

Nellie Campobello, Cartucho

By their nature, revolutions are both confused and confusing. They are the point at which one regime of sense gives way to another: they register a break in the prevailing discourse and the birth of another way of seeing and telling. By definition, the old ways of describing the world are no longer fit for purpose when the revolution comes around; but the new ways are not yet fully formed. A revolution is always in some sense illegible, unrepresentable, as the conditions of its representation have yet to appear.

But as such, in retrospect, revolutions are always portrayed as too legible, too easily represented. The new discourse assumes the revolution that enabled its emergence as a ground that can never be fully questioned. Revolutions are, in short, quickly naturalized, and their illegibility is erased or over-written by what becomes the common sense of the new order. The moment at which everything is still in play is forgotten or even forcibly repressed in the name of a genealogy that has to secure the new regime of intelligibility.

The challenge, then, is less to explain the revolution than to recover the revolutionary perspective itself, from which what is going on is always beyond full comprehension. Anything else is (quite literally) counter-revolutionary, as it goes against or undoes the force within the revolution that disrupts the existing discursive regime and makes space for a future that has to be strictly unknowable. To put this another way: explanation is the prerogative of constituted power, a tactic by which apparently to confirm that the present is the past’s inevitable telos; but the constituent power that drives the revolution has no fixed end.

This then is the virtue of Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: that, though it was first published a decade or more after the events that it depicts, it strips them of the sense that had accumulated around them under the PRI. Campobello neither provides nor seeks explanation for the “tales of the struggle in Northern Mexico” that she relates. Rather, she conveys the revolution in all its confusion and indeterminacy, without ever sacrificing immediacy or concreteness.

The fragmentary style of Campobello’s text never aspires to unity or totality. There is no fixed beginning or end; instead, we are always in the midst of things, from the opening lines in which we are told that “Cartucho didn’t say his name. He didn’t know how to sew or replace buttons. One day his shirts were brought to our house” (6). It is not that temporal markers are entirely absent, it is just that they don’t pin the episodes down to any linear chronology, any all-encompassing narrative arc: “It was the fourth of September, but of what year?” (84). At any one moment Pancho Villa’s forces may be in town; but soon enough we will find ourselves among Carranzistas, before the Villistas sweep back in again.

There are endings, of course. Men die. Over and over, men die. But often enough the narrator doesn’t enquire why, and when we are given reasons they are as disparate and disordered as the ebb-and-flow of troops and weapons: “He died for a kiss the officer gallantly awarded him” (25); “He just had the face of a man lulled by fate” (55); “he was dying for a cause different from the revolution” (18). Even cause and effect are apparently inverted, as when one soldier is said to have “embraced the bullets and held on to them” (66), as though bodies drew bullets from guns.

Some of this effect is achieved through the device of a child narrator, whose memory clings to the sights and sounds of life in wartime, rather than to the justification that surround them: “I’m telling what impressed me most, no longer recalling any of the strange words or names I didn’t understand” (42). Overwhelmingly, however, there is also the sense that in a revolution, it is not just bodies that are felled, but with them a set of discourses that can simply no longer be spoken or heard. One man, before he is shot, cries out that “A man who’s going to die has a right to speak!” But moments later “everyone turned their backs on the grey form left lying there, pressing into the ground the words they never let him say” (52).