Sally’s MODL5304 Blog

I think that I have decided on this topic for my final project, since the story of Pedro Paramo is so full of fertile material on this subject.  All around us in the story we see the barrenness of the land, the town and the people in the story.  The land only produces bitter oranges and guavas, and the town is deserted, all the people having died or left for the big cities.  Several of the characters in the story are engaged in incestuous relationships because it appears there is no one with whom they can have a normal sexual relationship.  Is this sterility because of the evil pall that Pedro Paramo has spread over the land?  And if so, are the people of Comala and the Media Luna complicit in this evilness?

The challenge is to find two critiques that deal with this subject so that I can buttress my argument or disagree with the argument the author makes.  There is certainly plenty of scholarship on this story, being so prominent a work in Latin American literature. 

So this is where I begin, making my case, and over the next few weeks, I will be digging into the subject in order to complete the project without too much indigestion.

What a contrast between the beginning of life for P.P. Cuellar in The Cubs by Mario Vargas Llosa and the end of life for Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame.   P.P. Cuellar suffers through his life with an embarrassing injury that he received while very young. He is surrounded by many friends as we follow him through adolescence and a downward spiral of risky behavior which ends in his premature death.  While P.P. is surrounded by friends during his short life, Hamm suffers from isolation and a lack of friends in his old age, finding himself totally dependent on his helper Clov and memories of his parents, who “pop up” from time to time.  Even the style of writing of the two stories accentuates this difference.

P.P. grows up, surrounded by friends who at first tease him about his injury, giving him the nickname “P.P.”.  Later they try to get him to go steady with a girl and seem to be unaware of his fear of what might happen if the couple ever decided to have sex.  We watch with sadness as this physical affliction sets him apart from his friends and leads to occasional fights and alienation from friends. As he grows older he obviously feels he can’t participate in the “dating game” that his friends enjoy.  His abuse of himself continues throughout adolescence with occasional lapses into acceptable behavior, before returning to his downward spiral of self-destruction.  Throughout his short life his friends encourage him and act as a force pushing him toward more acceptable social behavior, but he always reverts to destructive behavior in spite of the affection shown by his friends.

Hamm, on the contrary, doesn’t seem to have any friends, other than one mentioned in the play who is in a psychiatric hospital.  He is totally dependent on Clov to tell him what is going on in the world outside, and he treats the helper with much disdain and British coldness.  While he is in the “endgame” of life, we don’t know much about Hamm or Clov other than a few places in the play where insinuations are made about how Clov came to live with Hamm and the relationship that Hamm had with his parents.  The reader must imagine for himself/herself how Hamm came to this isolated state in old age and why he has no friends. 

The language used in the two works provides a sharp contrast.  Llosa uses a “chatty” writing style that mimics the conversational tone of young people, interrupting each other’s thoughts, and running together in a constant flow of narrative that could be sung like a quartet with different voices coming in before the previous one finishes his/her thought.  In spite of the broken chain of thought in the writing, Llosa gives us a fairly clear picture of what was going on in the story. 

In contrast, Beckett’s sparse style leaves much to the reader’s imagination.  We can only imagine why Hamm is so isolated, where Clov came from, and what his parents are doing popping up out of trash cans.  But this style emphasizes the isolation of the two main characters and their symbiotic relationship which shows how they are both dependent on each other because they have no other friends.  This writing style also emphasizes the bleakness and coldness of the environment in which the story takes place, and adds to the gloomy mood of the play.

Both “P.P.” and Hamm end their life isolated and alone.  The circumstances leading up to the conclusion of both stories provide a contrast between youthful isolation and isolation in old age.  But both lives end with sadness for the reader.

The poetry of Aimé Césaire is characterized by fascinating use of language, even in translation. It is so full of anger and disparagement, especially toward slavery, that I had to stop and reread many of his phrases because they were so breathtaking.  What is surprising is the amount of venom that is directed toward his fellow blacks, rather than toward the colonizers. 

One of my favorite comments that expresses how Cesaire feels toward slaves who were complicit with their masters  is on page 32 where he calls the “silver-braided bullshit of the postillion of Havana” a ‘lyrical baboon pimp for the glamour of slavery”. Whew!  Now that’s telling the slave who plays along with the white master just how low he is, a pimp. 

He even criticizes his own citizens for their lack of initiative, saying that “I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without ambition, at best conscientious sorcerers” (28).  I would expect him to show some sympathy for his less fortunate fellow countrymen, but instead they don’t escape his sharp tongue either.  We can’t all be distinguished poets.

Comparing the blacks of Martinique to the ancient African empires and their warriors he says “We don’t feel under our armpits the itch of those who in the old days carried a lance” (27). In this reference to earlier African conquerors, his countrymen receive more criticism from him since they don’t even have the ambition of these cultures for the glories (??) of conquest.  Yet these African conquerors were most likely as brutal as the colonizers of the New World.

The prejudice suffered by the descendents of slaves is seen throughout the poem. He tells us that for so many years Martinique considered blacks “bestial brutes” and “walking compost hideously promising tender cane and silky cotton” (28). Later he refers to his people as “We the vomit of slave ships” and “We so drunk on jeers and inhaled fog that we rode the roll to death” (28).  The blacks of Martinique have been subjected to so much abuse and discrimination that they are “drunk on jeers” and have never been treated with human dignity even after the abolition of slavery. 

It’s unfortunate for Césaire who is so precocious and talented that there are so few countrymen with whom he can relate.  He was forced to go to the seat of colonial power, Paris, to continue his education, because that is where the intellectual elite of the French empire live and work.  And so he embraces the educational system of the colonizers for his own intellectual development, in spite of his hatred of colonialism. But the most hatred and disgust is reserved for those who are black.

While reading Pedro Páramo, it occurred to me that there was a striking similarity between Pedro Páramo and Enrique Otway in Sab.  Both male characters while at the top of the social ladder in their society are portrayed as villains.  Pedro marries Doloritas (Dolores) because her family is his biggest creditor and Enrique marries Carlota for her money and inheritance (land).  From the beginning of Pedro Páramo, we understand that Pedro has cast aside his wife for unknown reasons. She tells her son on her death bed “Don’t ask him for anything. Just what’s ours” (Rulfo 3).  It’s only later that we discover how Pedro got rid of his debts, by marrying Doloritas because he owed her family more money than anyone else.  He will stop at nothing to aggrandize his holdings, including killing people who get in his way.  So once Pedro gets the land that belonged to Doloritas, he tires of her and sends her away to live with her sister.

Although the style of Sab leaves no room for doubt about the motives of Enrique, he is just as villainous in Sab as Pedro is in Pedro Páramo.  While the style is more descriptive in Sab, leaving no doubt about Enrique’s intentions in marrying Carlota, he is just as scheming as Pedro in marrying the “right woman” to ensure he benefits from the marriage.  He even schemes to cut out Carlota’s younger sisters from the inheritance of their father’s land, to his own benefit, and to Carlota’s dismay and disgust. 

The writing in the two novels could not be more different. In Sab, the florid style details the inner thoughts of Enrique at every stage of the story, leaving no question in the reader’s mind, while in Pedro Páramo the sparse style with little detail other than conversations and thoughts of the characters makes the reader come to his/her own conclusions about the motives of Pedro, with only hints about what really happened, as in the death of Susana’s father.  The contrast in style could not be more dramatic, but the villains both share the same bad characteristic of marrying for the financial benefit that will come to them, rather than for love.

How can life be so bleak?  How many elderly people live this kind of Endgame? My neighbor, Eldon, who died at 96, sat every day on his front porch for 5 years, unable to get any further than the sofa on the porch, where he watched the comings and goings of the neighborhood.  One day he called me 34 times while I was out, the answer machine recording each one of the plaintive requests from him to please come help with his water bill. I felt like Clov, at his beck and call.  Without any physical exercise during that time, he finally began to fall, and was put in a nursing home, where he didn’t die until his only child died, two months prior to his own death.  What stamina to remain alive with only minimal contact with the outside world!  In spite of this bleak existence, he hung on to the thread of life like it was worth living, even if alone.

This poem by Ruben Dario is dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, epitome of masculinity and energy and symbol of the emerging power of the US at the time of the writing of the poem.  Roosevelt represents all the jingoistic characteristics of the US for Latin Americans at the time of the Spanish American War.  This has not changed much in the one hundred years hence, although there have been Presidents who have made an effort to listen to our southern neighbors, not just overwhelm them with money and arms for acting in our best interest.

The references to historical and mythological places and people are innumerable in the poem and certainly require a classical education to understand the deeper meaning of the poem.  It’s understandable that the modernistas did not find a large reading public in Latin America for their style combines so many terms from different eras, Pre-Colombian and Colonial history, Western Hemisphere politics at the turn of the 20^th century, names from antiquity, and mythological people and places.  The reader must be well educated to begin to understand all the references. 

And while Dario criticizes the US for its attitude toward Latin America, the Spanish conquistas were certainly at least as cruel, single-minded and rapacious in their conquest of Latin America as their North American neighbors.  I only have to think of Pizarro’s words to the Inca king: “Where’s the gold,” to be reminded how greedy and uninterested they were in the indigenous peoples of the New World. 

So one hundred years later, the US is still seen as the bully of the New World.  And, while Dario makes reference to the potential ascendancy of the Argentines and the Chileans, these are currently not the countries considered strongest in Latin America, A good case could be made for the success of the Chilean economy and government, but the real powerhouse today appears to be Venezuela because of the liquid gold that they control.

In spite of all of this, the attitude of the poet toward the US and its overbearing approach to Latin America is understandable. But it certainly seems to be a subjective view of the contribution of the Spanish to the area, which still suffers from the way the countries in Latin America were ruled prior to independence.

Flaubert, as one of the exponents of realism, according to Rene Wellek in the article titled “Realism in Literature”, shows a mastery of describing contemporary life in France during the middle of the eighteenth century (Wellek 2).  This style of writing is characterized by giving a “truthful representation of the real world” and a study of “contemporary life and manners by observing meticulously and analyzing carefully” (Wellek 2). In describing contemporary life writing should “do so dispassionately, impersonally, objectively” according to Champfleury who lived during the same time as Flaubert and who wrote about the realistic style in essays titled Réalisme (Wellek 2). 

There are many examples of this style in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and sometimes a truthful representation of the world is not very pretty. When Flaubert describes the conditions in the prison where 900 inmates, including his friend Sénécal, are being kept during the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, we can almost smell the stench coming from the jail:

There were nine hundred men there, packed together chaotically in the filth, black with powder and coagulated blood, shaking with fever and shouting with rage; and those who died were left among the living. (Flaubert 363)

As Henry James says in the Art of Fiction and other Essays, and quoted in the book titled Realism edited by Lilian R. Furst ”The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (43). We can assert that Flaubert is skilled at representing the life of his times in even the minutest detail.  After Moreau had thrown a plate at the viscount Cisy, Flaubert describes the scene down to the pieces of broken crockery: “. . . the waiters were mopping up the wine and picking up the broken crockery from the floor” (240).  When Moreau goes looking for his friend Regimbart to tell him about the incident, Flaubert describes the tavern where Regimbart is eating as “A candle on the edge of the bar lit up the deserted room. All the stools had been placed on the tables, with their legs in the air” (240-241).

As a result of Flaubert’s use of such a realistic style, we can actually feel like we are walking the streets of Paris and living at the same time as the story was written.  Such is the talent of a writer like Flaubert to transport us into the Paris of the 1840’s.

In looking at the last two books we have read, I find the style of writing in Sab to evoke quite a different reader reaction from the style of Candide.  Without knowing much about romantic literature, Sab fits the stereotype of a romantic piece, full of flowery descriptions of nature and emotional passages brimming over with passion and tears.  The style of Candide, by contrast, is very matter of fact, even understated, in describing the most horrific events in the story which the hero has to endure before finding the secret to life.

We see Sab’s unrequited love for Carlota described in subjective and poignant terms.  As Sab himself says in the letter he leaves to Teresa, “Love soon had exclusive hold over my heart”, and “I would have won Carlota at the price of a thousand heroic deeds” (Avellaneda 142).  The scenes of nature, especially the tropical storms that develop, are particularly well developed by the author.  When Sab and Enrique leave for Puerto Príncipe as a storm approaches, against Carlota’s wishes, the author describes the scene by saying “The heavens opened, spewing fire through innumerable openings” (Avellaneda 50). 

But in Candid the events are described in such an understated, simple way that it almost seems funny the author could be talking about such terrible events.  When his teacher, Dr. Pangloss, is hanged, Voltaire, in a matter-of-fact tone, states “the Biscayner, and the two men who had refused to eat bacon, were burnt, and Pangloss was hanged, though that was not the custom” (Voltaire 13). What understatement!  We see no emotion expressed nor outrage at the event, but just the comment “The same day the earth sustained a most violent concussion” (Voltaire 13).  While this last statement does indicate nature’s disapproval of the deaths of the three men, it is certainly not like the violent storms depicted in such detail in Sab.  Even when Candide is separated from his beloved Cunegonde in South America, he only manages to say “What shall we do without Cunegonde?” to his servant (Voltaire 32). This is certainly not the level of passion exhibited by Sab in his burning love of Carlota. 

The comparison that comes to mind is the difference between Beethoven’s Apassionata Sonata and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.  The emotion that the Romantic writer/composer is able to evoke has more raw emotion in it, while the pleasure of the classical musical style or Voltaire’s Enlightenment writing seems more cerebral.

In this charming poem, I can see the horrors of the Industrial Revolution appearing in the story of the young Chimney Sweepers, Tom and his friend who is telling the story.  Thinking of all the soot that wafted into my London flat from who knows where, I can imagine an army of chimney sweepers going out each day to the houses to sweep and clean the chimneys when my flat was only one floor of a grand house on Goldhurst Terrace.  I wonder how many of them were orphans like Tom.  Certainly it sounds like no life for a child, having to work all day, but maybe he was able to at least eat and have a warm place to sleep. Think of the children of Darfur with distended stomachs and the life of a chimney sweep doesn’t seem so bad.

Every day there seem to be stories of child laborers around the world being forced to work in sweatshops.  Stories of Cambodian families selling their daughters off to be sex slaves while they are still just children were on CNN just the other day.  I suppose in comparison to this kind of life, the life of a chimney sweep is preferable.  At least you don’t die from AIDS when you are 13 years old. 

So, the question is, are children any better off today in third world countries than the child chimney sweeper of London at the turn of the 19^th century? 

I was struck by the description that Stephen Greenblatt gave to the concept of culture, describing it as being defined by opposites, constraint and mobility.  These terms caused me to reflect on the nature of culture as a means of controlling the behavior of its members and how it defines the boundaries of acceptable behavior.  Greenblatt calls them “models to which individuals must conform”. 

    The author uses the terms “improvisation, experiment, and exchange” to describe how cultural boundaries are established.  I think about our own culture and how it changed during my lifetime.  Whereas today we Americans are used to a wide latitude in acceptable social behavior and have few limits put on our mobility, not so many years ago, especially in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, the boundaries were being tested and moved.  All I have to do is think of the scandal that Elvis produced when he first jumped on the stage and started gyrating in front of his audience.  The cultural changes that started during this time are manifest today in such social phenomena as the large number of marriages ending in divorce, single-parent households, and gay lifestyles.  Was the old order better?

The role of literature in the enforcement of cultural boundaries is another subject the author discusses.  By using praise and blame in literary works an author can pronounce judgment on members of a culture of whom the author either appreciates or disapproves.   But as Greenblatt says, the arguments used lose their effectiveness as time goes by and as the culture changes. For us today to understand works like these requires knowledge of the culture portrayed.   

  With respect to literary style, Greenblatt says that literature that pushes against the boundaries of culture is what “students of literature reserve their highest admiration for”.  This is what I like in literature, too.  I couldn’t have said it better.  I’m always looking for works that are “different”. For example, I particularly like Emily Dickinson for her odd perspective on the world and I always think of her poem “I’m nobody, who are you?” as an example of her unique perspective on the culture of her time.  

Cultures are constantly evolving and as they do the boundaries of acceptable behavior are moving.  I only wonder what our culture will look like in 100 years. Certainly it won’t be like today, but we probably won’t even notice the changes because they will take place so gradually.