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.