The Comps Reading Project part 7

A Goat's Song, Dermot Healy

Healy is sometimes called the "Celtic Hemingway," and his spare, meandering prose and stoic, broken male characters certainly belie that characterization.  Shoot, if Hemingway himself hadn't already used the title, then Men Without Women would have also been an apropos title for this novel, wherein a sad-sack Irish playwright named Jack Ferris relapses into alcoholism after his lover Catherine Adams leaves him.  Such a pariah has he become that the very theatre putting on his play prefers he doesn't attend rehearsals.  Only over the long course of the novel do we learn through flashbacks how Jack and Catherine fell in together and later fell apart.  Needless to say, theirs is a very toxic relationship--one which shades the seemingly happy ending, as well.

Published in 1996 towards the tale end of the Troubles, Ireland's political turmoil serves primarily as the backdrop to this disillusion of a love affair.  In fact, the entire 2nd part of this 4 part novel is given over to the history of Catherine's father Jonathan Adams, a Northern Irish Presbyterian zealot who fails to become a minister so instead becomes an officer in the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary).  Healy humanizes and sympathizes Jonathan while never excusing him: he portrays a Protestant police man who sees the Catholics as somehow behind both the fascists and the communists, as a benighted people to be both pitied and beaten, and that just in time for him to be caught on TV as one of the cops who beats a defenseless old Catholic protester in Derry, in what may well have been the event that ignites the Troubles.

Like Jack, Jonathan becomes a pariah, one doomed to forever see the clip of him beating a protestor in every TV montage of the Troubles for decades to come, one who finally must seek escape into the Republic of Ireland itself, ironically.  The great historical traumas that both begat Jonathan Adams and which Adams in turn begat, Healy seems to imply, continue to play out at the most intimate levels into the present day.

La última niebla [The Final Mist], Maria Luisa Bombal

Warning!  Do not, repeat, do not confuse this text for Bombal's House of Mist, which is often erroneously called the translation of La última niebla.  It is not--it is a rewriting of the original novella, and at least 100 pages longer!  La última niebla is a subtle critique and parody of the Gothic genre, a sort of brief Chilean Madame Bovary or Anna Karennina, reveling in how adultery and romantic suicide attempts can be every bit as banal and empty as the loveless marriages of convenience that the novella likewise critiques.  House of Mist, however, as Bombal's sell-out attempt to appeal to the much-coveted U.S. reading market, is transformed into the very Gothic text that her Spanish original resists--complete with fancy balls, mysterious pasts, orphans, drowned wives, etc, etc, cliches piled atop cliches.

The wilderness, which was the only real space of escape in La última niebla by which a woman could actualize herself, becomes retrograded as someplace dangerous and forbidden in House of Mist.  That is but one example of how every feminist impulse in the Spanish text gets utterly excised from the English one.  And yet House of Mist bizarrely continues to be marketed as the English translation of the Chilean classic La última niebla; in reality the latter has no major English translation that I am aware of, while the former has never even been translated back into Spanish.  What a strange translation history.

La Amortajada [The Shrouded Woman], Maria Luisa Bombal

A Latina version of Beckett's Malone Dies and The Unnameable--or is Beckett the Irish version of Bombal?  This novella and La última niebla often get published in the same book.  The text is narrated from the perspective of a recently deceased woman who can still somehow think and feel, as she considers each of the mourners approaching her at her casket viewing.  In a series of flashbacks we piece together the whole of her impassioned and dramatic life--Of her first love, Ricardo, who abandoned her for his career- who denied her when she became pregnant; of Alberto, her son, whose wife, Maria, was to had the "curse of beauty", and who causes tragedy among Ana Marie's other children, as first her son, Fred, then her son-in-law, fall in love with Maria; of Antonio, her husband, whom she loved only when she lost him to another--not since the French nicknamed sexual climax le petite mort has sex and death been so explicitly connected.

But really, no plot summary of mine or anybody's can capture the full, wild experience of reading this wonderful text--which, much like death itself, must be encountered to be understood.  It fits in comfortably with my theory that the Irish and Latino/as approach death far more naturalisitically and intimately than their Anglo counterparts (indeed, I think I can get a whole chapter comparing the Irish roots of Halloween with Mexico's Day of the Dead).

Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo

The lone competition with Cien años de soledad as the single most important Latin-American novel of the 20th century (in fact Marquez credits the text with breaking his own writer's block so that he could at last compose his masterpiece).  I first read this thin volume years ago on a trip to Mexico.  Fitting in with the theory that Latin-Americans encounter death far more intimately than Anglo-Americans, Juan Rulfo's sole novel opens with a man named Juan Preciado fulfilling his mother's death-bed wish that he visit her old hometown of Comala to finally meet his birth-father.   Before disappearing from the narrative entirely,  Juan learns that Comala is a literal ghost town--as in, there are ghosts matter-of-factly haunting the place, living side by side with the local, scarcely living denizens, practically ghosts already themselves.  

The titular Pedro Páramo (meaning "barren plain" in Spanish) was a cruel and powerful man who cynically gets involved in the 1910 Revolution solely to stave off the Raiders, buys and seizes all the town's lands, and impregnates many women (including Juan's mother) but only loves one, Susana San Juan, at whose death he allows the city to die as well in vengeance for them falling to properly respect her funeral when the town confuses it for a carnival.

Like Bombal's La Amortajada, any plot summary can never hope to communicate the strange experience of reading this most peculiar novel, which likewise fragments and collapses like the corpse in decomposition, the final destination of Comala, Juan, Pedro, and each one of us as well.

Los siete locos [The Seven Madmen], Roberto Arlt

Even before all-knowing wikipedia informed me that Arlt is considered "el Dostoievski porteño", I was already reading Los siete locos as a sort of Argentine Dostoyevski novel.  All the same elements are there--the seedy city, the desperate men giving in to madness, the long, passionate monologues, the temptations to murder, the morality of prostitutes, the unhealthy preoccupation with the superman, the profound despair at the loss of God paired with ecstatic encounters with deity--Erdosain is Raskolnikov in Buenos Aires.

Interestingly, the stories' central conspiracy--wherein a mad astrologist hopes to replicate the Ku Klux Klans' success by establishing an openly-cynical doomsday cult that will exploit radicals and reactionaries alike to destroy humanity through industrialism and death-rays, all in order to return the select survivors to an earlier paleolithic era of happy, uncritical religious faith-- could have been the main conceit in some supermarket spy thriller or sci-fi hokum.  But here, the crazed scheme is but the backdrop and impetus for all these colorful characters crazy soliloquies and ranting monologues.  That is, the conspiracy plot is treated as properly insane as the characters, indeed, as the novel's title itself.

The jungle as labyrinth is a key theme in Latin-American literature; what sets apart this 1929 novel is how the urban becomes a jungle labyrinth as well.  As Arlt's own (obviously unreliable) editor's notes indicate, this novel was published just before the 1930 coup in Argentina, yet the novel's Army Major in on the scheme utilizes the same rhetoric as the actual military would use to justify its fascist regime.  This was the same time period, after all, when fascism was not a dirty word (including for such Modernists as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot), but was seen as a viable alternative to the failures of democracy.  There was a reason, after all, why Winston Churchill felt prompted to say, "Democracy is the worst possible system of government, except when compared to all the others."