Sally’s MODL5304 Blog

The Sterility of Pedro Paramo April 14, 2007

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.

P.P. Cuellar and Hamm April 8, 2007

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.

Césaire’s Criticism of Blacks April 2, 2007

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.