The Comps Reading Project part 8

I've completed all but 3 novels on the Irish half of my historical list, and am now trying to similarly work down the Latin-American half.  Sweet heavens, I might actually be making progress on this impossible list!  This week: two Jungle novels and the biggest Dictator novel of all.

Los pasos perdidos [The Lost Steps], Alejo Carpentier.

My very first post on this silly blog over 5 years ago entailed a discussion of how certain books need to hit you at just the right age; you need to read Harry Potter when you're small, Catch-22 when you're 17, Great Expectations not in your teens but your 20s, etc.  In said post, I noted how the novels of Virginia Woolf, though I admired them, didn't particularly resonate with me, and I suspected it was because I was not yet a middle-aged wreck reviewing the lost potential of my life. ("Remember when your potential was a promise instead of a regret?") I fear I'm fast approaching the age when these sorts of novels are starting to have an effect on me.

1953's Los pasos perdidos is exactly that sort of text.  Beautiful, pristine, haunting, it's the first-person narrative of a once-promising musicology scholar derailed by WWII, who ends up in a loveless marriage to an actress imprisoned within a smash-hit production (cause we're all performing in a prison, get it?), working a meaningless day job in New York, who one day receives a call to adventure from an old professor to retrieve a rare Native drum from the depths of the Amazon rainforest. 

The fabled drum of course recedes in relevance as he proceeds up river; the journey through the jungle becomes first a sort of re-discovery of his own Latin-American roots; an abandonment of the pretensions of modernity, academia, and intelligentsia; then a sort of trip through time and history, back to the medieval, the ancient, the classical (there's even a Greek character on the voyage), the paleolithic, the Edenic, to the roots of all human art and civilization.  The most primitive and primal inspirations for all human creativity is the overriding obsession of this text (as it was for many of the Modernists), as the narrator finds his mind liberated at long last to compose the concertos he'd long wanted to write.

He almost settles down with a Native woman named Rosario, when a rescue plane, misinformed of his disappearance, "rescues" him.  The tragic ending is a case-study for the impossibility of modernity to recover Eden, or of bottling lightning twice--or as Martin Sheen warns in Apocalypse Now, "Never get out of the boat...Unless you were goin' all the way."


La Vorágine [The Vortex], José Eustasio Rivera.

But then what happens if you do go all the way?  Does the jungle devour you?  If Carpentier's 1953 novel saw a trip into the jungle as some sort of recovery of Eden, Eustasio Rivera's 1924 novel sees it as exactly the opposite, as a descent into a Heart of Darkness.  I use the Konrad allusion deliberately; as Vargas claims in Dream of the Celt, the Irishman Roger Casement is who first apprised the young Polishman to the horrors of King Leopold's Belgium in the Congo, before Casement found similar atrocities among the Amazonian rubber plantations of Vargas' native Peru.  Eustasio, similarly, in his lone novel exposes the full horrific violence of the rubber plantations of his native Colombia at the turn of the century.  The jungle here is not a return nor a potential redemption, but where the worst of both man and nature comes to fruition.

A secondary character, Clemente Silva, an escaped rubber slave, seeks his son's bones in the wilderness. A rescue party seeking to liberate the rubber workers,  of whose final fate we only learn that the jungle "devours them whole", according to the austere epilogue.

Of course, the text must build up to that frightening ending; it opens optimistically enough (of sorts), with a quick prologue from an arrogant young poet named Arturo who knocks up Alicia, a girl from a "respectable" family, runs off with her to the plains to live with the gauchos, the cowboys.  It sounds romantic at first, living free in the wilds like that--yet still this place is burdened with cock-fights (both figurative and literal), arson, and Alicia running away with a flatterer who turns out to be a slave finder for the rubber plantations.  

The second part brings Arturo into contact with the Natives as well as Clemente, in his search for Alicia. The third part, forebodingly entitled "The Vortex Triumphs," takes him into the heart of darkness of the rubber planetations itself. He does at last get his vengeance, but what hollow victories those are compared to the vortex of the jungle. 

Arturo's speech is elevated and pretentious, but what was fun to find was how Caribbean everyone elses' diction was: "uste" for "usted," "muje" for "mujer," "naa" for "nada," "ocupao" for "ocupado," etc.  Took me straight back to Puerto Rico, it did.  Even in the plains, at the foot of the forest, language begins to dissipate in the vortex.

Yo el supremo [I The Supreme], Augusto Roa Bastos.

Tristam Shandy as a Latin-American dictator (remembering that Laurence Sterne was Anglo-Irish, as well).  Stories embedded in stories, a meta-narrative that blurs art and reality, history and story ("historia y historia"), in the great Spanish tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote (which is also the tradition of the 1001 Arabian Nights that likewise occupied the medieval Iberian penninsula--as well as Padraic Colum's The King of Ireland's Son). (Borjes: in another 300 years will some other Pierre Menard write us word-for-word another Yo el supremo?).

In its expansiveness, endless digressions, strange footnotes, appendices, and faux-collages of official documents, it's a sort of Paraguayan precursor to Infinite Jest--or of a prenatal House of Leaves with the horror rooted in the historical rather than the supernatural (though there are monsters near the end).  A "Perpetual Circular" like Finnegans Wake.

The ontologically-unstable narrator of Beckett's The Unnameable if he was José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia.  Free indirect discourse that both absorbs the dictator's subjects and makes them complicit; both the celebration and the fear of orality.  The textual-anxieties of Roa Bastos' 1974 French contemporaries Derrida (whether there can be anything outside the text even as the text inherently self-deconstructs) and of Roland Barthes (the death of the author in the face of the "tissue of quotations"), as though continental philosophy actually matters.  The linguistic labyrinth both built by absolute power and that undermines absolute power.

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George Bernard Shaw
I have a bit of a man-crush on G.B. Shaw, and if anyone wanted to get me a really awesome Christmas gift, his collected plays and/or writings would tickle me pink.  The realization that Shaw is my favorite playwright, Yeats my favorite poet, and Joyce my favorite prosist, is what solidified Irish Modernism as my field of choice (despite an utter lack of Irish ancestry of my own).

Shaw's writings are dominated by a tremendous wit, great dialogue, memorable bon mots (seriously, why isn't he has beloved as his fellow Irish playwright Oscar Wilde?), and above all a preoccupation with Nietzsche's concept of the Superman--but with the twist that his Übermensch is liberatory, independent, magnanimous, feminist, and socialist.  (So, not the version that the Nazis exploited).  Say what you will about him, but Shaw was one of a kind.

The following are the plays I have already read so far of his, though only the first 3 are on my reading list:

Pygmalion: The original non-musical--and far more feminist--version of My Fair Lady.
Man and Superman: The revolutionaries' handbook.  A strange dream sequence of Don Juan in hell.  An Irish millionaire who escaped the Famine to America.  This new fangled contraption called an automobile.  I love this play.
Heartbreak House: A bickering upperclass English household that would have made fellow Irishman Eugene O'Neill proud (not to mention Chekhov and Ibsen), on the eve of WWI, with the implication that people like these are why we drifted into self-destruction in the first place.
Arms and the Man: Also sometimes performed as The Chocolate Soldier, Shaw's brilliant and hilarious deconstruction of war, class, and romantic convention.
Caesar and Cleopatra: For once, a Cleopatra production that is not a love story!  Julius Caesar as Shaw's magnanimous Superman par excellence.
Candida: A sort of companion to Joyce's Exiles in plot, structure, and execution.