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"

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.

::

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.

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."

The Comps Reading Project part 6

L'Irlande et l'Amérique latine.  This past week especially I've realized that the more I read of Irish and Latin-American literature, the more I have to account for France, of all countries.  But first, let me get William Trevor out of the way:

Fools of Fortune, William Trevor.

Trevor's reputation is primarily that of a short-story writer and, well, it shows.  This 1983 novel, as well-reviewed and critically revered as it may be, reads more like a collection of Trevor-esque short stories that happen to have recurring characters than a complete novel.  (Between this and Kavanagh last week, I'm starting to wonder if maybe most writers should just stick to the one genre they're good at).  The action bounces back and forth between England and County Cork (I'm noticing that a number of the texts I'm reading take place around Cork, making me all the more grateful that I visited there a couple weeks ago, and not Dublin).  Three different characters provide the three separate, intertwining, first-person narratives; along with Beckett, Banville, Joyce, and others, I'm starting to see Lloyd and Clearys' thesis about the centrality of orality to Irish Modernism made manifest.

In a more continental theorist vein, Rene Girard seems to me to be the most relevant philosopher for interpreting this meandering text; a Big House of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy is burned to the ground by the loyalist Black and Tans, in revenge for a loyalist found killed on their property during the 1920 civil war--this novel begins, in other words, where Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September ends (another novel on my reading list that I already read for a class last Spring).  This blaze kicks off an endless cycle of reciprocal violence between the English and Irish descendants of the mansion (Irish men take English wives throughout this text, consistently muddying up the ethnic strife, and rendering the two opposing sides the montrous double of the other, in Girardian terms).  According to Girard, this cycle can only be short-circuited by a pharmakos, a scapegoat, which Girard sadly notes is difficult to find in our modern era.

Does it seem strange perhaps to bring in French theorist into an Irish text?  I'm starting to think I don't acknowledge the French enough, as shown by the remaining texts I read this week:

The Land of Spices, Kate O'Brien.

Kate O'Brien could be a pair with Edna O'Brien, whose Country Girls was likewise about young Irish girls and the vicissitudes of being schooled in a Catholic convent.  Yet whereas the latter bitterly treated the nuns as primarily caricatures and obstacles, this excellent 1940 novel takes a far more nuanced, complex approach to nuns--Kate certainly does not romanticize convent life, nor sugar-coat the power-plays, petty rivalries, and power-dynamics that can dominate such a sphere.  But she also presents the nuns as sympathetic human beings, doing, as all human beings do, the best they can given their circumstances.

The nunnery in question is specifically a French order, one headquartered in Belgium, and the text itself is littered with numerous French phrases, and at least 2 complete letters written in untranslated French whose content I had to guess at by context, as my very limited French comprehension was stretched to the max (goodness, I got back from Ireland wondering if I should maybe learn Irish Gaelic, do I need to get fluent in French, too?).

Though the novel takes place in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century, and often foregrounds the homerule movement gaining momentum at this time, the French connections never feel incidental; Ireland has long historical connections with France, seeing this nearby Catholic superpower as a potential ally against colonizing Protestant England.  The Irish staged one of their many revolts during the French Revolution, erroneously hoping the new Republic would come to their aide while the English were distracted by the Napoleonic wars.  There is a very complex relationship between the two countries, which the novel does an excellent job of matter-of-factly representing.

As for the actual plot?  A surprisingly engaging one (for a novel about nuns); O'Brien got her career start as a playwright, and the way all the novel's action takes place in one self-contained, easily-staged location, as well as the excellent dialogue between characters and the Shakespeare plays staged throughout, shows her dramatic instincts.  Though a very Irish text, the protagonist is actually an English-woman, the convent's Reverend Mother, who takes a young Irish girl with a troubled home life (a gambling gather, a drunken mother, a tyrannical grandma, a brother who dies in a swimming accident at one key part) named Anna under her wing.

The two forge a strong bond, and the Reverence Mother is who finally swoops to her rescue in the climax when her evil grandma tries to cancel out her recently-won University scholarship.  Part of her leverage is her relationship with the local Bishop, who, though an ardent Irish homeruler who disagrees with her ethnically and politically, still share a mutual respect (something rare in Irish literature).  Throughout the text, it is the nuns who must constantly negotiate between tradition and progress, the past and the future.

Aura, Carlos Fuentes.

And here the French appear again!  France has very fraught historical connections with Mexico, too, particularly since Napoleon III tried to install Maximilian I as the puppet Emperor of Mexico during the 1860s (Cinco de Mayo, remember, specifically commemorates the Battle of Puebla, when the Mexican forces under Benito Juarez had their first major victory against France).  Keeping with Fuentes' themes of the inescapable weight of history on modern Mexico, this 1962 novella likewise harkens back to the French invasion of Mexico.  The rare book narrated in the second person, the text involves a young Mexican scholar (an aspiring historian) in Mexico City responding to a newspaper ad for someone fluent in French to come translate her husband's memoirs.  There are numerous French phrases littered throughout (which likewise taxes my terminally limited French comprehension skills).

For 4,000 pesos a month, he will live with this old widow he realizes must be over 100 years old, as her decades-long dead husband is in fact a survivor from the failed French conquest of Mexico.  Living with her is a young niece named Aura, who copies her Aunt's movements almost move for move.  One intriguing scene involves him watching Aura skin a dead goat for dinner in one room, then run over to the other room to see the old widow following these same moves--a goat in Spanish is a Cabra, root of the premier Spanish insult Cabron, or "Big Goat," with heavy connotations of cuckoldry--and given how (SPOILER ALERT) Aura turns out to be the magical apparition of the old widow's younger self, and the scholar himself the unwitting re-apparition of the old French general (further demonstrating the long-lasting scars of history that persist a century after that traumatic event), the implied sex with younger versions of yourself is heavily foreshadowed in that skinned goat (which can also be a scapegoat, which brings us back to Girard) (given Vargas' Feast of the Goat and Healy's A Goat's Song, the recurring theme of the goat across Irish and Latino lit feels worth exploring).

Is it also worth noting that "Aura" in Spanish sounds very similar to "Ahora"--now--emphasizing the collapse of temporal disjunctions on parade in this text?

El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World], Alejo Carpentier.

And the French yet again!  And in another Dictator novel, no less!  Last week I read Brian Moore's No Other Life, which featured a Haiti-stand-in called Ganae; but Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel just features Haiti directly, focusing on a fictional slave named Ti Noël (somehow it seems referent that he's named after Christmas), who is present for both the slave era, the slave revolt, is sold to Cuba (Carpentier's home island), buys his freedom, then returns just in time to experience the brutal dictatorship (and eventual suicide) of Henri Christophe.  This is intriguing, because it's not like Carpentier's native Cuba doesn't have its own fair-share of slavery and dictatorships to write about.  Yet Carpentier, like Moore, finds himself fascinated by and inextricably drawn towards the Franco-Caribbean.

What is it that draws them?  Is is Haiti's status as the only site of the only successful black slave revolt in European colonial history?  Is it the Voodoo that permeates the legend of the country, which offers new possibilities for alternative religions, alternative epistemologies, even alternative ontologies?  (The first part describes an escaped slave with a chopped-off arm who, legend has it, can metamorphose into any animal he wants to escape the whites who accuse him of poisoning the food; in the final part, where yet another Mulatto dictatorship replaces Christophe, Ti Noël actually does transform into different animals, interestingly).  Perhaps the Franco-Caribbean intersects with the Hispano-Caribbean by means of their shared island of Hispañola--Haiti actually did conquer the Dominican Republic for a stretch and free its slaves; in slave times, each side of the island was called Sainte-Domingue and Santo Domingo respectively (man, what is it with St. Dominic anyways?).  

In any case, Haiti's slave revolts and subsequent dictators clearly resonate with Latin-American experience, and has reverberation all the way in France and Ireland, too, where they all become enmeshed together (many Irish indentured servants escaped the Anglo-Caribbean to the Hispanic-islands, too, including in Cuba, further confusing and intertwining these three civilizations together).

The Comps Reading Project part 5

I was up in Lake Arrowhead, CA this past weekend for the gf's family reunion.  While a merry time was had by all, the combo of 4th of July festivities, Irish jet lag, and 10 hour drives across the Southwest meant that I got far less reading done than the week previous.  I still averaged 4 books a week, but only just barely:

Collected Stories, Frank O'Connor [Michael Francis O'Donovan]

No not Flannery, Frank--you know, the other mid-century Irish-Catholic master of the short story who goes by F. O'Connor.  Now, I have nothing against Flannery; "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" sticks with you for a reason, and it's not her fault that every last MFA student in America has been trying to ape it for the past half-century.  But in terms of sheer warmth, pathos, humor, and humanity, Frank is not only my favorite, but who I wish all these aspiring writers would imitate instead.  Go give "First Confession" another read, it is as hilarious and wonderful as you remember!  David Lloyd makes a big deal about the centrality of the mouth and orality in Irish literature, and I think that is what separates Frank from the rest: his tales feel less like texts than like recorded conversations with a close friend.  He's an all-too-rare reminder of how, despite the profound tragedy of Irish history, this people possess a grand sense of humor.

Collected Stories is his best known collection, and even that one is over 700 pages.  If you're pressed for time (as I am) but still would like to get the gist of his style and variety, here's what I have found to be his most essential stories:   
"Guests of the Nation," 
"The Bridal Night," 
"The Luceys," 
"The Babes in the Woods," 
"The Frying Pan," 
"Don Juan's Temptation," 
"First Confession," 
"Darcy in the Land of Youth," 
"My Oedipus Complex," 
"Freedom," 
"The Majesty of the Law," 
"A Sense of Responsibility," 
"Counsel for Oedipus," 
"The Study of History," 
"The Ugly Duckling," 
 "Fish for Friday," 
"Public Opinion," 
"The Mass Island," 
"There Is A Lone House," 
"The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland," 
"Ghosts". 

Tarry Flynn, Patrick Kavanagh.

Patrick Kavanagh is a great poet--and a terrible novelist.  Tellingly, this novel only found a publisher after his poetry became popular.  I mean, seriously, how many Künstlerromans does the world really need, especially since his countryman James Joyce had already deconstructed the genre so expertly clear back in 1916?  The novel's titular protagonist is Kavanagh with the name changed in the most insufferable manner possible--a sensitive young aspiring poet and farmer who sees the beauty in the very grass and stones, who is uncommonly handsome and attractive to the ladies, blessed with an intelligence that the rustic rubes who surround him are too crude to appreciate, who in the end leaves his poor Mother to care for the farm alone while he runs off with his Uncle for greener pastures.  Maybe Kavanagh was parodying the Künstlerroman as well, maybe I'm supposed to be exasperated by the protagonist, maybe this is yet another example of how the Irish Modernists sought to deconstruct the tyranny of narrative at every turn--doesn't matter, this book was still a chore to get through.  

No Other Life, Brian Moore.

This novel was a much needed palate cleanser after Tarry Flynn.  Moore is Irish-Canadian, and this 1993 novel focuses upon a French-Canadian Catholic Priest, Paul Michel, who narrates his role in the rise and fall of a Caribbean ruler on the fictional, former French colony of Ganae.  The title comes from a conversation he has with his mother in Montreal mid-novel; she had guided him towards the Priesthood, but as he arrives to comfort her in on her deathbed, she urges him to leave the Priesthood, that there is in fact no God, that "There is no other life."  The book does not delve too deeply into questions of religious doubt, focusing more on how Jeannot, this fictional president who was once a parochial student of Michel, seeks to rally and inspire the oppressed poor despite being beset by attempted coups by the military, and the suspicions of the Vatican against this latest manifestation of "Liberation Theology" (which gives this Irish text our most explicit connection to Latin-America).

Though focused upon the Franco-Americas (both Canadian and Caribbean), this text can be considered a variation of the other Dictator novels important in Latin-America, and does have a minor Irish character late in the text, who is a Catholic Priest unambiguously supportive of Jeannot--this feels important given how much Michel waffles back and forth on his duties, and even towards his very faith.  Given Ireland's long historical connections with France, the French settings feel more than merely incidental.  As for Jeannot himself?  He becomes the very Messiah figure the Vatican (and the military) fears in a highly ambiguous ending that you won't see coming.

::

(I keep mentioning Samuel Beckett--who is also on my reading list--in other posts, so it might be useful to here list the Beckett I have actually read for reference):

Prose:

Molloy
How can you tell if you haven't just been sucking on the same stone all along?  Just how small can a man's world shrink?  And just why is that man and his son hunting this poor cripple on his bicycle?
Mallone Dies
A death scene stretched out to novel length.
The Unnameable
The novel that opens by refusing to answer the three questions every novel must answer: "Where now?  Who now?  When now?"  The remainder then destabilizes your very sense of ontological continuity by morphing between multiple narrators, then finishes with "I can't go on, I'll go on," but doesn't.
How It Is
Bursts of text that can be read aloud in one oral breath, narrated by a man crawling through the mud.  The. Entire. Book.
The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989

"...and oh for it all to end."

Plays:

Waiting for Godot
The one work of his that requires no introduction.  Knock off the last 2 letters of the title character, and you understand why it's so blackly comic that he never arrives.
Endgame  
(Pause)
Play
Three melodramatic figures spout cliches and aphorisms while sitting in funeral urns.  (There's a killer version with Alan Rickman from 2001).
Breath
His shortest play.  A disembodied breath breathes in and out over 30 long seconds.

Not I
A single disembodied mouth on a stage, speaking alone.  Interrogated.  

Did I mention Beckett served in the French Resistance, so was often crawling through mud in the dark, waiting for indecipherable messages from contacts codenamed Godot, and under constant threat of being captured and interrogated by the Nazis?  Goodness, I wonder if that had any influence on his art...

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.