The Comps Reading Project part 4

I got in more reading than usual this week, thanks to some looong transatlantic flights to a little place called IRELAND! I presented a paper at University College Cork, before the Society for Irish and Latin American Studies (see guys?  Other folks study this too, my Comps Reading list isn't totally insane!)

The trip was way too short (ah shucks, I guess I'll have to revisit someday), but I did squeeze in a trip to Castle Blarney...

 ...where I did do the single most touristy thing you can do in Ireland...

...kiss the Blarney stone!

Speaking of Ireland and Latin-America, this week I read:

El Señor Presidente [Mister President], Miguel Angel Asturias.

Sincere question: do a lot of Latin-American authors write with em-dashes instead of quote-marks to indicate dialogue?  Because I remember how HG Wells, reviewing Portrait in 1916, said he found Joyce's em-dashes distracting--like it was always "flicking" at him--and claimed that if Joyce had attempted to reform English orthography here, then he had failed.  Yet though the practice never quite caught on in England or North America, it apparently did in Latin-America--or at least with Asturias, in this landmark Dictator Novel that eventually won him the Nobel.  I think I can see why these writers choose to do this: it keeps the dialogue embedded in the text, as opposed to separated out from it, so that you are never allowed to think of your rhetoric as divorced from reality.  Words do in fact matter terribly, the em-dash argues, and the place of art is not in some idealized, ethereal realm beyond this sordid world (as so often happens in Anglo-centric and Continental poetry), but in the same living, breathing, bloody world that we inhabit.

The novel itself is a sort of week in the life (at least the first 2 parts) of a Latin-American dictatorship, as the random murder of a colonel by an insulted beggar is exploited by the titular (and rarely seen) dictator to frame one of his political rivals.  A thread of Oedipalism (as was much more exploited by Marquez in Autumn of the Patriarch) creeps up in the character of the political prisoner who, as an illiterate peasant, accidentally takes down a poster celebrating the President's mother's birthday.  What is it about Oedipal complexes that drive these tyrants to cruelty?  Is it an unspoken castration-complex that seeks to emasculate all other potential rivals for the mother's affection?  The irony then comes in the story of the imprisoned mother who is force-fed lime by the interrogators so that her crying infant won't feed at her breast--the dictatorship's oedipal complex paradoxically destroys mothers and continuation of life.

Lies and betrayals compound lies and betrayals in this text--which is not just Orwellian, but a demonstration of the destructive power of narratives themselves.  One wonders if the lies spread about the wives of political opponents taken as mistresses by the President (to crush the spirits of his enemies) was the thread taken up by Vargas for Festival of the Goat.   The conversations between prisoners and their torturous interrogations are positively Beckettian--or (again) is Beckett positively Asturian?

Ireland: Selected Stories, William Trevor.

Of all the contemporary Irishmen I've read so far, Trevor is who most carries on the tradition of Joyce's Dubliners in holding up a highly polished mirror to his people of their own paralysis and self-imposed tragedy.

Speaking of Oedipal complexes, the story "Death in Jerusalem" seems to offer another example of how motherhood can be strangely connected to a sort of tyranny.  Trevor likewise demonstrates the incalculable influence Joyce has had on modern Irish letters--for better and for worse--through the story "Two More Gallants".  "Beyond the Pale" and "The Distant Past" also demonstrate the inescapable weight of history that afflicts these peoples' relationships.

Book of Evidence, John Banville.

Nabokov's Lolita if Humbert Humbert was a murderer instead of a pedophile. Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov if he was in Notes From Underground instead of Crime and Punishment.  Beckett's Molloy if he was a criminal instead of a cripple.  A beautifully-written first-person prison confession narrated by a sociopath who fears he may not actually be a sociopath.

Las babas del diablo [The Devil's Drool], Julio Cortázar.

I read this famous Argentine short story first in Spanish, was confused, then read it again in English (despite its notorious difficulty to translate), and was still confused.  The plot involves an amateur photographer in Paris snapping a pic of a couple in a park; the woman is angry at him for invading their privacy, though he suspects that he has just helped liberate the young man from being pimped out to an older gentleman in a nearby car--the latter of which he only identifies after later developing and blowing up the photograph.  Somehow this elicits a psychic break in the narrator, a loss of any grip with reality.  Is he an unreliable narrator?  Or is this commentary on how photographs make reality seem less real, not more?  Or is it the opposite?  The prose and plotting is as labyrinthine as it is confusing.

The Dalkey Archive, Brian O'Nolan [Flann O'Brien].

This late-period O'Nolan novel peaks early, with a mad scientist claiming to invent a chemical that will remove enough nitrogen from the atmosphere to kill off humanity (which he claims needs to be killed off anyways); yet this same chemical in small samples, breathed in an underwater cave, also allows him to call forth ghosts of the early Church fathers to interrogate them.  A hilarious conversation with St. Augustine especially is a delight to read!  I wondered if this novel continued the tradition of that much-older Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, who in Gullivers Travels likewise features a magician who calls forth the spirits of the dead.  I really could have read an entire novel of mad scientists interviewing ancient theologians with the fate of the human race in the balance!

Which is why I'm still baffled as to why O'Nolan then immediately backs away from such an engaging premise; instead of the delectable mad scientist, he instead focuses on the narrator, his tangential girlfriend troubles, his conversations with a policeman who thinks we transform into bicycles if we ride them too much, and a rather disappointingly anti-climactic resolution to the fate of the world.  His meeting with a James Joyce who faked his death in Switzerland and is now a half-witted old bartender who doesn't even remember publishing Ulysses or Finnegans Wake and now seeks to join the Jesuits, probably sounded better on paper than it does in practice.

I was initially excited to read this text, especially since the title is used by the famed publisher of High Modernist texts.  Sadly however, this one was the first real disappointment on my list.

The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien.

I really don't have enough women on my list, do I.  I recall my old AP English teacher (while teaching Joyce's "Araby" no less) saying that, to overgeneralize, most Catholic school graduates either grow up to appreciate (though never romanticize) the experience, or they grow up to bitterly resent every moment of it.  Edna O'Brien falls firmly in the latter camp of that binary. 

The Comps Reading Project part 3

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien [Brian O'Nolan].

This is a book you experience more than you really understand.  I must confess: I have a weakness for books like these--utterly digressional, insane, labyrintine in both prose and structure, everywhere and nowhere at once.  Decades before Italo Calvino, several stories are started, abandoned, returned to, intertwined around each other, layered on top of each other.  Characters rebel against authors--characters of authors who are also characters created by other authors, presumably all the way up to Flann O'Brien--who himself is the pen-name (and therefore the fictional construct) of Brian O'Nolan.  Given how O'Nolan always disavowed this book and its "youthful excesses," I think we can safely play with the idea that all of these various rebellions were successful.  Given Ireland's historical preoccupations with independence and rebellions, these authorial revolts are thematically apropos.  Given that this book debuted the same year as Finnegans Wake, I think it's fair to say that the Irish Modernists were very much obsessed with deconstructing the stories, the linear narratives, that had been used to justify their colonization--as well as constructing elaborate labyrinths to hide themselves away from the colonizer.

El otoño del patriarca [The Autumn of the Patriarch], Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Marquez published his 1975 Dictator Novel in Spain the same year Franco died--where it promptly became a best-seller.  In many ways, it is the inverse of Vargas' Dictator Novel, El fiesta del chivo--whereas the latter is awash in historical specificity and precision, the former is dreamlike, meandering, wandering, featuring a fictional unnamed dictator of some fictional unnamed Caribbean island that is nevertheless a composite of many horrible, brutally real Latin-American dictators.  Large swaths of this novel are told in sentences that go on for 20 pages at a time--the sentences never seems to end the same way that death sentences from the General never seem to end--like his reign never seems to end--like time itself never seems to end.  But end it all inevitably does: in fact, the novel opens with the vultures creeping into the palace, alerting the populace that the dictator they all so feared really is dead, that they might at last enter the palace with impunity.  The General had seemed to control time himself, from the holidays to the clocks to the movements of the trash around the island.  Time, however, stays in control throughout, particularly as the General's mother ages.

Heavy oedipal overtones feature in this novel, from the General's unhealthy obsession with his poor mother who herself prays for her son's overthrow, to the peoples' own patricidal fear of the Patriarch (a key word-choice on Marquez's part).  This is the labyrinth you can't escape, as opposed to the Irish labyrinth you use to escape.

A Long, Long Way, Sebastian Barry.

In Vargas' 2010 novel Dream of the Celt, Roger Casement tries to convince Irish volunteers to the British army during WWI to defect to Germany; in this 2005 novel, Sebastian Barry explores more in depth the world of these Irish soldiers themselves.  Among their many paradoxes: those from southern Ireland thought they really were fighting for Irish Homerule in exchange for their faithful service, while those from Ulster thought they were fighting for the inverse.  Most of the novel takes place in the trenches--it's a sort of latter-day All Quiet on the Western Front--with only a couple quick Leaves granted back to Dublin, where protagonist Willie Dunne learns of the Easter Uprising.  A stray moment of sympathy for a murdered Republican ruins his relationship with his ardently Unionist father.  Almost a work of prose-poetry, the novel loses the Irish within the labyrinth of the trenches, of political firestorms, and literal ones too.  It ends about as depressingly as you'd expect.

Cuentos de la selva [Jungle Tales], Horacio Quiroga.

This 1918 children's book, featuring short stories about anthropomorphized wildlife interacting with human settlers amidst the steady modernization of Uruguay and Argentina, is basically a South American version of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, only without any sort of anchor-character like Mowgli, a slightly more eco-aware sensibility, and with slightly less troubling imperialist overtones.  An early example of the labyrinth of the jungle prevalent in 20th century Latin-American literature.

(Below are other books on my reading list that I had already read multiple times before this summer began).

Dubliners, James Joyce.
The groundbreaking 1914 short-story collection about the stories we tell ourselves.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
The groundbreaking 1916 künstlerroman about the stories James Joyce told himself. 

Ulysses, James Joyce.
The 1922 magnum opus about the stories that tell us.

Ficciones [Fictions], Jorge Luis Borjes.
The groundbreaking 1944 short-story collection about the stories we create that in turn create us.

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce.
The unclassifiable 1939 work that deconstructs the tyranny of stories once and for all.

Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude], Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Ground-zero of Magical Realism (a heavily disputed term); the novel is often treated as avant-garde, which is ironic, given how rooted in familial oral tradition Marquez insists it is (but then, according to Lloyd and Cleary, the Irish avant-garde was likewise firmly rooted in the oral and the traditional, and hence might serve as useful points of comparison).

El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude], Octavio Paz.
The famed 1950 essay collection by the Nobel-prize winning poet about how the Mexican, in his dual identity as both Spanish and Aztec, is representative of modern man altogether.

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos.
Dual-language edition of the collected known works of Puerto Rico's national poet.  Romantic. Liberatory.  Free.  In every sense of those words. 

Complete Poems, William Butler Yeats.
Some days I seriously consider the possibility that I don't actually enjoy poetry, that I only muscle through it out of some misbegotten sense of English-major duty, that really I find it all forgettable at best, actively irritating at worst.  Then I re-read Yeats, and I'm in love all over again.

On Charleston, South Carolina and Forgiveness

(We bring you this break from our regularly scheduled Comps Reading Project to flush these thoughts out of my system).

Here there was no ambiguity: no conflicting witness accounts, no hackneyed defenses of police over-reaction, no possibility for victim blaming--simply, a deeply racist young man, sporting the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and the Confederacy, entered a historically black church famous for opposing slavery and Jim Crow, sat quietly in their Bible study for an hour, then shot 9 people to death for the stated reason that they were black.

I generally oppose the death penalty (there have been far too many posthumous exonerations for me to support it); nevertheless when the governor of South Carolina called for the death penalty, I found myself nodding my head.  Even when I could restrain my blood-lust to mere Life in Prison, I still found myself secretly hoping that he would get sent to a penitentiary filled with black prisoners who would beat him to death for me.

Which is why I found the responses of the families of the victims in the court room so remarkable; by all news accounts, they went around one by one, and even as they gave full expression to their grief and anger, still finished with "I forgive you."

Sweet merciful heavens, I have learned more about forgiveness from these people than from years of Sunday School.

Because this is the final, hardest test of one's Christianity, isn't it--to forgive each other, to love one's enemies.  There's a reason that "Love Your Enemies" comes at the end of Matthew 5, as the grand finale of the whole "Ye have heard it said, but I say unto you" section.  Christ is constantly upping the ante with each new parallelism: "Ye have heard it said, Thou shalt not kill," he recites, but Christ then amplifies that to Don't Insult Your Brother--Freud had said that he who threw the first insult instead of a stone invented civilization, but Christ maintains that even throwing insults is uncivilized of us. 

But then, not throwing insults is easy compared to: "Ye have heard it said, Thous shalt not commit adultery," but Christ amplifies that to Don't even sexually objectify women in your mind; men protest that that's nearly impossible, but Christ will accept nothing less.

But even that is not nearly as hard as "Ye have heard it said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you love your enemy." Because what we often elide when we quote that scripture is the fact that sometimes our enemies are our enemies for very good reasons.  "Wicked" is a borderline anachronistic word nowadays, but there are in fact wicked men out there: ones who open fire in churches, people whose only desire is to hurt as many people as possible for the most vile of reasons.  If ever non-forgiveness was justified, it was here.

But they forgave him anyways.

This is no small thing.  French theorist Rene Girard argued in Violence and the Sacred that vengeance breads only more vengeance, as each competing group constantly retaliates against the last murder, until one or both groups are completely wiped out by the violence.  We've seen this between Israel and Palestine, Catholic and Protestant Ireland, the Serbs and Croats, the Tajiks and Uzbeks, etc, etc, etc.  This is the plot of the Book of Mormon.  This is the history of racial violence in the United States.  Girard argued this is the reason for the pharmakos, the scapegoat that short-circuits the endless cycle of retributive violence; for Girard, this is why Christ died for our sins.

And these black Christians in South Carolina, who have every valid historical reason to withhold forgiveness from such a despicable, unrepentant creature, followed the example of Christ and gave it anyways.  This does not mean that the shooter will not be held accountable for his actions; only that Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and He will repay.  This is a lesson I will not soon forget.  And as the debates rage angrily over the coming days concerning gun-laws and institutional racism and so forth, I will need to remember this same Christian example.

The Comps Reading Project part 2

(I calculate that I need to read on average 4 books a week this summer in order to complete my massive reading list for comprehensive exams, and I have enlisted my blog in the cause of keeping me accountable).


Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800-2000, David Lloyd.

The mouth is the focus of David Lloyd's 2011 study on Irish history--the mouth that sings and speaks in oral tradition, the mouth that keens in mourning and protest, the mouth that drinks in despair, the mouth that is empty during the Famine, the mouth that breaks out in laughter against a prison's code of silence, and in turn the mouth that refuses to confess under torture.  Speaking of torture, Lloyd argues that the Troubles in Northern Ireland were a laboratory and precursor to the West's contemporary state-sponsored violence.  (Guantanamo Bay began in Belfast, in other words).


La muerte de Artemio Cruz [The Death of Artemio Cruz], Carlos Fuentes.

This 1962 novel is about Mexico.  That may sound a tad reductive, but that's exactly what this book's about.  The text is narrated in a fragmentary pastiche of stream-of-conscious recollections by the titular Artemio Cruz on his deathbed in the late-50s--the style is positively Beckettian (or is Beckett positively Fuentian?).  The titular Artemio Cruz has been around for some of the most important developments in Mexican history of the first-half of the 20th century: he fights in the civil wars following the 1910 revolution, and, as his wife later accuses him, he had to betray his own brother to survive it.  The betrayals continue post-war, as Cruz becomes part of the political machinery that sells-out on the very principles for which the Revolution was fought, e.g. worker's rights, exploitation of the indigenous, and domestic control by foreign (especially U.S.) capital.  Artemio Cruz represents Mexico, in other words, and his death is part of the passing of a past-Mexico that has bequeathed all of its troubles onto modern Mexico.  

This was by far my favorite novel so far, and Fuentes' reputation as one of the premier writers of not only Mexico, but the entire Latin America Boom, is well-deserved.



Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels.

In this comprehensive 1996 study of Anglo-American Modernism, Benn Michaels argues that in the early-20th century, "American" was for the first time something you became, not just something you are.  By means of the works of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cather, the Harlem Renaissance, and many others, Benn Michaels examines how racialized "Americanness" became, which resulted in culture becoming  intertwined with race in the popular imagination.  He concludes by arguing against racial culture as intrinsically incompatible with pluralism--we can only have one or the other, which is a claim I am still mulling over.

The Pearl of the Antilles, Andrea O'Reilly Herrera.

Though not a major work, this 2001 novel was put on my list largely because the author is Irish-Cuban American, and my Spanish professor thought it might be interesting to see what relevance it might have for my larger dissertation project.  The book itself is set in Cuba, both in the years leading up to the Revolution and in its immediate aftermath, and follows several generations of women from one aristocratic family in particular.  The text makes no bones about the abuses of either the ancien régime or of the communist government.  The novel is written in a combination of both third-person omniscient and epistolary.

The novel appears to center (at least in its second half) upon the character of Margerita, who is forced by the U.S. consulate to abandon her child when she flees to Florida during the Revolution.  When she later learns her son was killed by anti-Castro guerillas, she cuts off all contact with the island to salve her pain.  She later marries a gringo who, I assume, is Irish-American; I say this because Margerita's daughter Lilly turns out to be the main character, as she pieces together her silent Mother's Cuban family history from old letters and photographs, and announces her intention to become a writer.  Lilly is O'Reilly Herrera, in other words--and Herrera is Irish-Cuban (but then, given the history of the Irish in the Caribbean, it is entirely possible that Margerita was already at least partially Irish before she ever left Cuba).

The Comps Reading Project part 1

This coming November is my PhD comprehensive exam, the most foreboding part of which is the massive reading list.  The list is composed of 2 parts: 1) 70-100 books of novels, poems, plays, and scholarship on a specific historical period--in my case, Irish and Latin-American 20th century literature; and 2) 30-odd books on another "special topic"--in my case, the "canonization" of Transatlantic Anglo-Modernism.  I am attempting to read all of the novels and at least some of the major criticism over the course of this summer, before Fall semester begins.  My goal is to average at least 4 books a week.  To keep myself accountable, I will publicly record what I've read each week here, along with my brief, general, grammatically-erratic impressions of each.  Here's what I've completed since the summer began:

El general en su laberinto [The General in His Labyrinth], Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

There is a surprisingly robust sub-genre of Latin-American novels about famous Latin-American dictators; it's debatable as to how Marquez's 1989 novel fits into that sub-genre.  Engaging in free indirect discourse, the novel's sympathies seem at first blush to be primarily with Simon Bolivar, the legendary "liberator" of South America from Spanish rule, now old and sick and on his death bed, as he goes on one last river ride after being forced from office, his dream of a United "Grand Columbia" of South America collapsing and fragmenting into its current political matrix.  The intent of this novel would appear to be provide a humanizing, pathos-ridden portrait of a great man in his final defeats.

Yet I also remember how Marquez warned of his earlier novel Love in the Time of Cholera that "you have got to beware of my trap," as his tale of long-deferred love causes you to sympathize with a character who is, by all textual evidence, a sexual predator.  Marquez clearly enjoys manipulating his readers into identifying with the monsters, and I suspect El general continues that game; for Marquez makes no bones about the fact that Bolivar sought to set himself up as dictator-for-life of Grand Columbia, believing that the form of representative government recently established in North America was unreproducible in the South.  Bolivar's life may be a tragedy of epic proportions, Marquez seems to imply, but part of that tragedy was self-inflicted--as was the mess of Caudillos who followed in his wake, following his example.  (Man, what I wouldn't give for someone to write a similar sobering portrait of George Washington...)  The novel also features 2 Irishmen who were close confidants of Bolivar, part of my larger project of analyzing the intersections and overlaps between both literary traditions.

The King of Ireland's Son, Padraic Colum.

First published in 1916, this children's novel is very 1001 Arabian Nights-esque in its intricate series of nested stories interweaving in and around each other.  If Joyce was constructing labyrinths in his prose, Colum here is doing the same with structure.  It is a written Book of Kells of sorts, one that interweaves many old Irish myths and folk-tales for the benefit of the youth of Ireland, in the same manner as the illuminated manuscripts of old.  (As you can probably tell, the theme of the labyrinth in both Irish and Latin-American literature will be a predominant theme in this project).

El sueño del celta [The Dream of the Celt], Mario Vargas Llosa

It's probably not going to get more directly relevant for me than this: Vargas' 2010 novel (the same year he finally won the Nobel) is the Peruvian author's fictionalized account of the Irishman Roger Casement, the real-life explorer and activist who first brought British popular attention to the horrific abuses of rubber-harvesters by Belgium in the Congo, and again to the abuses by Peru (Vargas' homeland) in the Amazon.  For his efforts, Casement was knighted by the British Empire and became an international celebrity, but this did not prevent him from becoming radicalized against all colonialism, inevitably resulting in him becoming an ardent Irish Republican executed after the 1916 Easter Uprising.  The irony is that Casement opposed the timing of the Uprising, preferring to hold it off until he could convince the Germans to distract the English with a counter-offensive during WWI--for which treasonous activities he was summarily executed.

The novel's structure involves a trade-off between chapters of Casement sitting in an English prison, anxiously awaiting to find out if his numerous friends can commute his sentence (spoiler: they can't), and longer chapters recounting his anti-colonial activities and adventures.  Over the course of the novel, Casement begins to slowly befriend the prison guard who hates Casement in part because his own son was recently killed by Germans in the war.  Although Vargas' own epilogue acknowledges that the debate continues to this day as to whether the journals that revealed Casement's homosexuality and possibly pederasty were faked by the British in a nefarious plot to discredit him, the actual novel's text plays it straight, as though the journals were true.

The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner.

Oh my goodness, why can't all criticism be this fun to read?  This is scholarship as inventive, wild, and insane as its topic.  This 1971 book is widely considered instrumental in formally canonizing Ezra Pound as central to the entire Modernist movement.  It does not attempt to skirt his fascism, only explain it; it has many a fascinating close-reading of the Cantos; you learn much about Joyce, TS Eliot, and others by means of the labyrinthine prose and structure ("Thought is a labyrinth" is the closing line); it's not quite a biography, nor quite a study, but a bizarre sui generis all to itself that no summary of mine can possibly do justice to--like the works of Pound as well.  Serious, this book was a revelation to me, and I'm so happy I got to read it!

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary.

See, this is what most criticism is actually like--organized, clear, distinct, informative, dry, dull, and kind of a chore to get through.  Don't get me wrong, this 2014 collection is cutting edge in how it seeks to define Irish Modernism as clearly distinct from the more general British Modernism it usually gets lumped with.  The book also does well at cataloging the many fascinating contradictions of the era--how it could be so provincial and international, so backward-looking and forward-facing, all at the same time.  Nevertheless, once you've read The Pound Era, you can't help but wish these scholars couldn't maybe be as fascinating to read as their subjects.

La casa verde [The Green House], Mario Vargas Llosa.

Here's where I started to get sick of Vargas--and where I started to realize that his whole schtick appears to be that of bouncing back and forth in time between marginally-connected episodes and characters.  Maybe it was inventive the first time he did it in 1965, but the formula started to wear on me quickly--and the tale of a whore-house in early-20th century Peru and of the jungle and of a nunnery's self-righteous mistreatment of Native children never quite cohered for me--and the fact that it probably was never supposed to cohere didn't really help me get through it, either.  Yes, it's very well written, but (and maybe this marks me as irredeemably Anglo) I'm gonna have to side with Team Marquez in the great Marquez/Vargas literary rivalry (and the fact that Marquez is such a bigger household name in North America compared to Vargas is probably worth exploring).

La fiesta del chivo [The Feast of the Goat], Mario Vargas Llosa.

And now to totally contradict myself: all of Vargas' atemporal tricks and schticks that I found so irritating in La casa verde I actually really enjoyed in this 2000 novel.  Maybe it's the more fascinating subject material: the text bounces between the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo (the titular goat) on the eve of his assassination in 1961; the assassins themselves in wait and in the immediate (and horrific) aftermath; and to 1996, focusing upon the fictional daughter of one of Trujillo's closest advisers, revisiting Santo Domingo (and her own father) for the first time in decades.  She was sexually assaulted by Trujillo as a young girl, as part of her father's attempt to curry favor with him, prompting her to escape to the U.S. and cut off all contact with her family.  The novel, then, telescopes in from the widest geopolitical (Kennedy, Castro, and Europe are all major players in this novel) to the most intimate, in painting a picture of Trujillo's tyranny.


The Dublin Trilogy ["The Shadow of the Gunman," "Juno and the Paycock," "The Plough and the Stars"], Sean O'Casey

These three plays, written in 1922, '24, and '26 respectively, are commonly grouped together as The Dublin Trilogy, inasmuch as they all deal with the fallout of the civil wars that plagued Dublin in the Civil Wars post-Easter-Uprising, specifically with how they affected the working classes.  O'Casey writes heavily in dialect, both Irish and English.  In all 3 plays we encounter a rigorous, remorseless de-romanticization of the Easter Uprising, of the failure of rhetoric and poetry in the face of such violence.

"The Shadow of the Gunman" is a sort of bottle play, concerning a pair of roommates in a Dublin slum in 1920.  Donal is a young poet often mistaken for an IRA gunman on the run, which he does not refute, as it helps with his popularity and romantic prospects with a certain Minnie Powell.  Of course, this cannot last, as someone hides a bunch of bombs in his apt. just as the diabolical Auxies raid the place.  Minnie makes off with the bombs herself, and is tragically killed trying to escape.  In Donal and his roommate Seamus we get a sort of contrast between theory and praxus, idealism and pragmatism, in a manner reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands decades later.

"Juno and the Paycock" likewise concerns poor Irish tenants during the Irish Civil War, in this case the Boyle family.  The patriarch Jack is an old sailor, a character as colorful as he is ultimately insufferable.  He never works anymore, and the family suffers because of it; that is, till they learn a relative has left them a substantial inheritance, prompting them to go on a spending spree on credit.  Of course, it turns out this is an empty promise, as the will only specified the "my first and second cousin," of whom there are many competing claimants.

The inheritance is eaten up by legal fees; the neighbors who had sold to them on credit come with a vengeance to reclaim their goods; a son who had lost his arm in the civil war but had also betrayed one of his comrades is caught by the IRA and executed; the daughter is seduced, impregnated, and disgraced by the English lawyer who had drawn up the fraudulent will--the latter presented himself as an enlightened figure, but (like all the English) shows his vile true stripes.  Believing in false promises--both Irish and English--is a recurring theme in these plays.

"The Plough and the Stars" is the largest of the 3 plays--both in length and in staging.  Long, patriotic quotations of Patrick Pearse are utilized ironically as civilians are caught in the crossfire of the Easter Uprising.  Unionists, Republicans, and Communists are each in turn bitterly mocked in equal measure.  All the wrong people are killed.  

Adventures in Arguing Opposites

Strange things happen when students are forced to examine their opponents' arguments: sometimes they actually change their minds!

Not often, of course, but just often enough to keep you reasonably optimisitic.

I had required my students this last semester to submit a thesis statement--then flipped it on them, by announcing that their next essay would require them to argue the opposite.  "Those who do not understand their opponent's arguments don't fully understand their own," I quoted to them amidst their groans, promising them that this was resistance training, to make them stronger arguers for what they actually believed in.  If nothing else, this essay would really make them earn their own opinions, I said.

If they actually changed their minds too, that was just an added bonus.

And most didn't.  And that's fine.  I didn't even want most of them to change their opinions.

But a few did!  The next assignment, you see, was a class presentation on what they actually believed in--but with the twisty caveat that it had to be a topic upon which they had previously changed their mind, to keep them constantly interrogating why they believe what they believe.

And about a half-dozen students cited their last assignment as the mind-changing moment!

One student was initially going to argue for a ban on prescription drug TV ads; but after learning how ads help drive up the revenue that covers the astronomical development costs, as well as how many folks remember to take their pills in the first place thanks to 'em, he changed his mind.  Another, a film-major, actually decided that the Academy, for all of its glaring mistakes in the Best Picture category (e.g. awarding Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, etc), actually gets it right more consistently than we realize.

Two different female Chinese students actually came out as anti-plastic surgery after their essay, citing how South Korean models and beauty pageant contestants all look uncannily the same nowadays (the ol' Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" kept popping up in my notes).  Another female Chinese student determined that feminism is still necessary in the 21st century (apparently, in terms of gender roles, it's still the '50s in China?). 

Of course, it couldn't all be sunshine and rainbows: one Lebanese student in her presentation explained how she had finally lost faith in the peace process, cataloging the provocations of Israeli security forces in their abductions of Lebanese borderland civilians (including a childhood friend of hers), the seizure of Palestinian homes in '48, and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.  I'm sure there were students in my classroom who disagreed with her assessment, who felt her too obviously one-sided; but I think all of us instinctively felt that none of us had the moral authority to comment.

Not that she couldn't still later change her mind, I suppose.  Or even that the other students who changed their minds could still just as quickly change back.  But I need some slivers of light, something to hang my hat on, when I consider how rarely any of us in real life ever actually change our minds on anything.