9 posts tagged “postwar”
I had to do a little fact-checking for the fiction. (To clarify: I would not describe this project as being in any way about the 1960s.) It's more reasonably written than that cover picture would lead you to believe, although a lot of the gestures toward scholarly objectivity were interpreted by at least one previous reader as a betrayal of the Cause, prompting large pink marginalia - "Um... no! Asshole!... a) you're biased and b) you got there after the fact... Fuck you Rorabaugh, you're a bitch!" I assume this person is a careful student of Plato's Phaedrus and likes to pick fights with books because they don't talk back.
Since I'm starting the semester with two of my very favorite books, I took the opportunity to go back and read this in Spanish, which I'd never done before. (I wish I could show you the awesome cover of my edition, which appears to depict a skull eating a watermelon.) Páramo in Spanish means a barren stretch of land; apparently Eliot's Waste Land was first translated into Spanish as El Páramo in 1930, but it's unknown if Rulfo ever came across it.
To the extent that there are traces of modernism in this book, it's modernism of a certain stripe only. The jumbled chronology and focus on a rural past could have been another case of Faulkner gone south, but Rulfo's terse sentences give precisely the opposite effect; and if Quentin finds himself in limbo at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, compelled to narrate the past, Rulfo goes one better by putting his young narrator six feet underground and breaking his consciousness completely apart. The narrative that emerges is in a sense historical, but not really interpretive; a tragic structure gradually comes into view, but as with old Aeschylus the facts are formidably bare, somehow discouraging psychological explanation. (The reigning critical controversies tend to do with ambiguities of fact - who kills who at the end, whether the narrator is dead all along, etc.) And the book's brief length draws a sharp limit to what can be said about history -- if such a sordid hodgepodge of events even deserves the name. In the end you can only stare at it.
I wish I had something to say about these poems that didn't just feel like wrapping them in a bunch of cotton wool.
Das angebrochene Jahr
mit dem modernden Kanten
Wahnbrot.Trink
aus meinem Mund.--------------------
The broached year
with its rotting crust of
madnessbread.Drink
from my mouth.
I never believed in the spirit of history
an invented monster with a murderous look
dialectical beast on a leash led by slaughterersnor in you -- four horsemen of the apocalypse
Huns of progress galloping over earthly and heavenly steppes
destroying on the way everything worthy of respect old and defenselessI spent years learning the simplistic cogwheels of history
a monotonous procession hopeless struggle
scoundrels at the heads of confused crowds
against the handful of the honest courageous awareI have
very little leftobjects
and compassion
Oh, that developing world! Where everything is so arbitrary, and strange, and brutal, and unpredictable, it's almost... an allegory for human existence! For aren't we all metaphorical rich Americans in the metaphorical waste, under no compulsion but that of our own poisoned wills, drifting with the sands...?
Well, in one sense I'm being pretty unfair, because sentence for sentence I really do like Bowles's writing. It's only the metaphysical bits that turn him into D.H. Lawrence's irritating nephew. See here:
A lion's muzzle! It's arresting, and perfect, and a damn shame that it precedes three sentences which would never occur to the character in the stress of the moment, and which a philosopher at his leisure should know better than to write down. If you're that good with particulars, why would you put yourself out making them stand for something?Turning her back to the rain she gripped the iron railing and looked directly into the most hideous human face she had ever seen. The tall man wore cast-off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haïk. But where his nose should have been was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. For no reason at all she thought of a lion's muzzle; she could not take her eyes away from it. The man seemed neither to see her nor to feel the rain; he merely stood there. As she stared he found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face who tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption. Port would say that in a non-materialistic age it would not be thus. And probably he was right.
The existential novel migrates south and gets wryer and less histrionic. It makes a good read. For a while in the middle I was getting the feeling I sometimes get from Bellow, of looking over the side of the boat and not being able to tell whether it was moving. But in the end a boy-girl plot and a kind of ethics takes over, and that is generally enough for me.Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counterattack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.
Posthumous collection of pieces from several decades. Despite the title, not much on Joyce other than a short piece on Exiles, if you care about Exiles. Especially good on Yeats, Auden, Stevens.
I do not think it has been remarked that Stevens is unsympathetic to only one of the thirteen ways, Number 11, in which the protagonist is not "I" but "He."
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.The error of the man in the glass coach -- and glass is almost always a bar to sight in Stevens's poems -- is that he sees the blackbird merely as death; the further proof of his error is that he has not seen the blackbird, has seen only his own dark mind, the shadow of his equipage. And so, like the man in "Madame la Fleurie," he abstracts the blackbird from nature and sees only fear in it.
I feel very close to this one temperamentally, and it might remain important to me for a long time. It's a Peruvian childhood not as a blank slate but as a deliberately staked position, aligned with nature, womanhood and indigenous life against a venal and cruel society. On its first appearance it apparently got attacked by socially conscious types as not being political enough.
As the narrator grows older he becomes more aware of his human environment, and in that respect the world does change around him; but he stands firm against that world, as Arguedas seems to have stood firm against it until he shot himself in 1969.Cantaban, como enseñadas, las calandrias, en las moreras. Ellas suelen posarse en las ramas más altas. Cantaban también, balanceándose, en la cima de los pocos sauces que se alternan con las moras. Los naturales llaman tuya a la calandria. Es vistosa, de pico fuerte; huye a lo alto de los árboles. En la cima de los más oscuros: el lúcumo, el lambra, el palto, especialmente en el lúcumo, que es recto y coronado de ramas que forman un círculo, la tuya canta; su pequeño cuerpo amarillo, de alas negras, se divisa contra el cielo y el color del árbol; vuela de una rama a otra más alta, o a otro árbol cercano para cantar. Cambia de tonadas. No sube a las regiones frías. Su canto transmite los secretos de los valles profundos. Los hombres del Perú, desde su origen, han compuesto música, oyéndola, viéndola cruzar el espacio, bajo las montañas y las nubes, que en nunca otra región del mundo son tan extremadas. ¡Tuya, tuya! Mientras oía su canto, que es, seguramente, la materia de que estoy hecho, la difusa región de donde me arrancaron para lanzarme entre los hombres, vimos aparacer en la alameda a las dos niñas.
The calandrias were singing, as if trained, in the mulberry bushes. They usually perch on the highest branches. And they were singing, balancing themselves, in the few willows that broke up the mulberries. The natives call the calandria tuya. Eye-catching, with a strong beak, it takes flight into the treetops. From the heights of the darkest trees--the lúcumo, the lambra, the avocado, especially the lúcumo, which is straight and crowned with branches forming a circle--the tuya sings; its small yellow body, with black wings, shows against the sky and the color of the tree; it flits from a lower branch to one higher, or to another tree nearby, and it sings. It changes its song. It doesn't go up to the cold regions. Its song carries the secrets of the deep valleys. As long as they have existed, men of Peru have composed music upon hearing it, upon seeing it cross through space beneath the mountains and clouds which nowhere else in the world are so extreme. Tuya, tuya! As I listened to its song, which is surely the material from which I am made, that diffuse region from which I was torn to be thrust among men, we saw the two girls appear in the grove.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993 (1963).
Title from a slave song: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! Two essays, the first a brief and moving letter to Baldwin's nephew, the second a longer autobiographical piece that turns into a meditation on how the problem of American race relations is essentially white America's problem with itself. Highlights include a visit to Elijah Muhammad and this:
White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad and that, God help us, is exactly the way that most white Americans sing them - sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been "down the line," as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing "I Feel So Good," a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She's coming home. It is the singer's incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing "Lonesome in My Bedroom," or insisting, "Ain't we, ain't we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don't today, we will tomorrow night." White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironci tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either.
