The Comps Reading Project part 9

El recurso del metodo [Return of the Method, but usually translated as Reasons Of State], Alejo Carpentier.

When I initially groaned at how much Carpentier my Spanish professor put on my list, I didn't realize that he would become my new favorite novelist before the end of the summer. His failure to be awarded the Nobel is one more strike against the organization.

In yet another Dictator novel with a strong French connection, we get a sort of sarcastic third person omniscient narrative of a central American caudillo known only as the Head of State, and of how all the rebellions he must brutally suppress get in the way of what he really wants to do: just hang out in Paris in the lap of luxury. It's totally unfair! What's even more unfair is how the French he loves--the only people on earth whose good opinion he actually craves--start avoiding him due to his flagrant human rights abuses. He's a very petulant dictator, who would be funny in his cliches if he wasn't also so brutal.

Published in the 70s but taking place around WWI, the Head of State turns away from "decadent" Europe (the endless tension between the old and new world is a constant theme of this novel) towards North America. Partly he just wishes to avoid a similar US occupation of Haiti (!) by staying friendly with the exploitative United Fruit Company. But this new alliance proves a double edged sword when Santa Claus takes over their Christmas holidays, and again when his repeated oppressions cause even the deeply racist US to turn on him (absolutely no one on this novel--Europe, North America, South America--comes off well in this text). That the cynical US ambassador who helps him escape the country, is passing for white, is just the icing on the cake.

Eventually, what is perhaps the only successful non violent general strike in literature ousts the Head of State once and for all, where he dies in ignomy in the very Paris he once spurned and was spurned by. The Descartes quotes that open each chapter (and where the title comes from) further highlights the fraught relationship between France and Latin America.

He is buried near Porfirio Diaz, along with some earth he hoped would be from his homeland, but is really just from the nearby Luxembourg gardens.

Five Faces of Modernity, Matei Călinescu.

Now at last, late in the summer, I return to my special topic reading list, on the canonization of Anglo Modernism. In this influential 1976 study (with an extra chapter on Postmodernism added on 1986), Romanian scholar (and Cold War defector to the U.S.) Matei Calinescu traces the history and etymology in the Western tradition of the terms Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, and Kitsch. He explains when and how in the past 500 years these terms have been used both interchangeably and in opposition to each other (he spends a lot of time especially on the difference between Modernism and Avant-Garde; the former he claims is subtly traditionalist in its anti-traditionalism in how it attempted to keep art and life separated, while the latter provides a more radical critique that seeks to overthrow that divide, and bourgeois society with it), with a primary focus upon these terms' relevance to early 20th century Western art.

Though thorough, the text is overwhelmingly eurocentric, touching only lightly upon North America, and utterly eliding how Lain America grappled with these same questions, to say nothing if Africa and Asia.

::

Irish poets on my list: rather than try to provide summaries as I have of the novels, I will instead just try (and doubtless fail) to capture the gist of each poet's M.O. for future reference; and then rather than review their best known collections, to instead provide a list of their most anthologized poems, which hopefully will provide a reference list for their most popular and/or most-critically-regarded works.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Born in Inniskeen, near Ulster; much later moved to Dublin.  Traditional rhyme schemes, quatrains, blank verse.  Accounts of rural Irish life, finding the "epic" and the profound in the common and quotidian.  A sort of pastoral rejoinder to the High Modernists and Post-Modernists.  Though on its surface escapist, his poems still possess a subtle political streak, as in "The Great Hunger,"  and "The Twelfth of July," which commemorates 1690 Protestant victory over the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne. 

Most anthologized poems:
"To the Man After the Harrow"
"Stony Grey Soil"
"The Great Hunger"
"The Twelfth of July"
"Tarry Flynn" [the poem, not the wretched novel]
"A Christmas Childhood"
"Father Mat"
"Elegy for Jim Larkin"  [a famed trade union leader]
"Epic"
"Innocence"
"Kerr's Ass"
"The Hospital"
"Inniskeen Road: July Evening"
"Shandcoduff"
"Art McCooey"
"Tinker's Wife"
"Canal Bank Walk"
"In Memory of My Mother"
"October"

Padraic Fallon (1905-1974)
From Galway. A poetic late-bloomer; most of his best known work produced late in his career.  Worked as a radio-dramatist, and that meter-less orality (such as in the "Item"-news organizing structure of "A Flask of Brandy") and flair for the dramatic crosses into his poetry, as well.  "Yeats at Athenry Perhaps" provides a subtle critique of the elitism of the Celtic Revival.

Most anthologized poems:
"A Flask of Brandy"
"A Kilkarten Legend"
"Yeats at Athenry Perhaps"
"Three Houses"
"A Bit of Brass"
"Odysseus"
"For Paddy Mac"
"Weir Bridge"
"The Head"
"A Hedge Schoolmaster"
"Daranelles 1916"

Brian Coffey (1905-1995)

Dubliner.  Of the same generation and movement as Samuel Beckett, as shown by his discomfiting experimentation (e.g. "Headrock"), his verbal austerity, and his exile anxieties (in this case, from teaching at St. Louis University in Missouri for 5 years, as opposed to living in Paris).  Has two long poems, "Advent" (1975) and "Death of Hektor" (1978).

Most anthologized poems:
"Missouri Sequence"
"Headrock"
"Cold"
"Advent"
"Death of Hektor"
"For What for Whom Unwanted"

John Montague (b. 1929)

Not just an exile, but a dual citizen with a dual consciousness, reflecting the status of many Irish today; born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, so technically Irish-American (and certain of his poems take place in New York. i.e. "The Cage"), but was still educated in Dublin, is identified as one of Ireland's greatest living poets, and in 1998 was named to Ireland's Chair of Poetry.  But he has also lived and taught in New York and California ("All Legendary Obstacles" references Sacramento and San Francisco), reflecting his mobile identity.  His poetry is marked by a definite intimacy, privacy, and withdrawn introspection.

Most anthologized poems:

"A Bright Day"
"All Legendary Obstacles"
"That Room"
"The Answer"
"A Lost Tradition"
"Witness"
"The Wild Dog Rose"
"The Cage"
"Lament for the O'Neills"
"A Grafted Tongue"
"Last Journey"
"Windharp"
"The Leaping Fire"
"Falls Funeral"
"Tracks"
"Herbert Street Revisited"
"The Silver Flask"
"Process"
"A Flowering Absence"
"Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, the Old People"
"The Trout"
"A Drink of Milk"
"A Chosen Light"
"Family Conference"
"The Same Gesture"
"Last Journey"
"Small Secrets"
"Dowager"
"The Cave of the Night"
"Herbert Street Revisited"

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

Arguably the one Irish poet besides Yeats who requires no introduction, being the last Irishman to win the Nobel for Literature (1995).  Born in Derry--yes, that Derry, of Bloody Sunday fame--and hence much of his poetry centers explicitly on the experience of being of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.

Yet though references to bombs and checkpoints ("The Strand at Lough Beg," "The Frontier of Writing") and the Troubles ("Summer 1969", "Station Island") and funerals ("Funeral Rights", "Casualty") and pens-as-guns ("Digging") scatter across his work, the mundane and the simple--potato digging, the countryside, bicycles ["Wheels within Wheels"; a Beckett allusion?]--also feature prominently in his work.  Always there is this tension in his poetry, I would argue, between the calm (not necessarily the peace) of the landscape and the potential for explosive violence lurking perpetually in the peripheries.

Most anthologized poems:
"Digging"
"At a Potato Digging"
"The Wife's Tale"
"The Other Side"
"A New Song"
"The Tollund Man"
"Summer 1969"
"The Strand at Lough Beg"
"In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge" [An Irish war poet killed in WWI]
"An Ulster Twilight"
"Station Island"
"Canton of Expectation"
"Clearances"
"Churning Day"
"Broagh"
"Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication"
"Funeral Rights"
"The Harvest Bow"
"The Birthplace"
"Sweeney Redivivus"
"The Frontier of Writing"
"Wheels Within Wheels"
"Lightenings"
"Keeping Going"

Paul Durcan (b. 1944)

Born in Dublin, educated in Cork, which he still calls home.  Winner of the 1974 Patrick Kavanagh award for poetry (revealing the latter's reputation in Ireland).  Once toured Russia at an invite from the Soviet Union.  His poems are marked by a dark streak of humor, poems-as-vignettes, and an inescapable feeling of loneliness, despite the well-intentioned who try to help us feel otherwise.

Most anthologized poems:
"Wife Who Smashed Television Set Gets Jail"
"Going Home to Mayo, Winter, 1949"
"10.30 am Mass, June 16, 1985"
"Bewley's Oriental Cafe, Westmoreland Street"
"The Turkish Carpet"

Tom Paulin (b. 1949)

A Northern Irish Protestant for a change; born in Leeds, England, raised in Belfast.  Like many homerule Protestants, he likes to remind that it was Presbyterians in 1798 who launched the homerule campaign, though he is also critical of how Irish Protestantism later became complicit with empire.  A sort of Protestant counterpart to fellow Northern Irishman Seamus Heaney, with a similar focus upon unrhymed meters and the vernacular.

Most anthologized poems:
"Pot Burial"
"Where Art Is a Midwife"
"Desertmartin"
"Off the Back of a Lorry"
"A Written Answer"
"The Lonely Tower" [parody of Yeats]
"Under the Eyes"
"Surveillances"
"The Impossible Pictures"
"And Where Do You Stand on the National Question?"
"Black Bread"

 Nuala Ní Dhohmhnaill (b. 1952)

I don't have enough women on my list, do I.  Born in County Kerry on one of the western peninsulas, where Irish is still spoken natively.  She is perhaps the premier Irish-language poet writing today, with English translations performed by no less of admirers than John Montague and Seamus Heaney, among others (which also reveals their own familiarity with Irish Gaelic).  But she is far from some revivalist or traditionalist, no--her Irish poems are often sensual, sexy, heterodox, playfully combining the old with the new, which as Joe Cleary argues is one of the chief characteristics of Irish Modernism (though others might also argue is a chief characteristic of Modernism altogether).

Most anthologized poems:
"Labasheedy (The Silken Bed)"
"The Shannon Estuary Welcoming the Fish"
"Parthenogenesis"
"Feeding a Child"
"The Race"
"As for the Quince" [in which I learn there is an Irish Gaelic translation for Black & Decker]
"Annunciations"
"Miraculous Grass"
"The Broken Doll"
"The Unfaithful Wife"
"The Language Issue"
"Cathleen"