tara's tierra

The Unanswered Question

Doing a Ph.D. in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, I have learned, does not necessarily get you that far at cocktail parties with your average professionals -- doctors, lawyers, or jackass business men. While you are sipping on a Corona and they are swilling their froufrou $15 manhattans, if you elaborate on the fact that you study Latin American literature, or even more specifically, South American literature, they either say, "Oh. Cool. So, have you like been to Cuba? What's up with Castro?" or they say, "Oh. Cool dude. I read Gabriel García Márquez once. What's up with magical realism?"

As we have all been told at some point during the MA, the term lo real maravilloso was first used by Alejo Carpentier in the prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949). He claims he became aware of the mythological underpinnings to America on a visit to Haiti, a visit that is recapped in the novel. And at the end of the prologue he specifically poses the question: "¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real-maravilloso?" Well, Alejo, I think the answer is "Much more."

What exactly does he mean by a chronicle of the marvelous-real? Or, as expounded upon post-Carpentier, the magical-real? First of all, the word chronicle itself is entirely problematic in terms of the "telling" of the "history" of Latin America. See the Introduction and first chapter to Hayden White's Metahistory for some context on chronicles and narrative time.  Does he consider that the written emphasis of the word crónica excludes temporalities outside of an occidental-based philosophy? And does he consider that perhaps what he wants to make nameable, what he wants to center within the logosphere, as in his invention of the term "lo real maravilloso" is precisely what it is because it is not narrated fully, not named, not existent with the confines of rational Occidental reason, and by naming it as such he is simply pulling it into a system to which in precisely does not belong? Ever since the existence of the term, people hem and haw over whether or not such and such a text, for instance, an JMArguedas one, is or is not magically real. Classify classify classify, then you will understand.

It seems like the intention of too many literary critics is to understand everything. This entails going to archives where we dig and dig and try to find the perfect document that answers all of the questions we have always wanted to know about a certain text, a certain author, a certain reference on a certain page in italicized font. And this is a hugely important part of what we do. However, what we fail to often too often is that half of the reason why we study what we study is because it helps us see what precisely we will never understand; what we will never answer; what door we will never open. We don't think enough, I don't think anyway, about the confines of our own writing, our own learning, our own ways of understanding.

I finally, philosphically speaking, think I get it (or maybe I just continue to contemplate the small epiphanies I have every day with too much exuberance). A friend told me to think about not knowing a long time ago, but my mind was not quite ready. Now, I think I get it. At the moment, I think I'm going to redo magical realism, reunderstand it, but this time, it's not going to be named on terms that make sense to me based on my academic training. It's going to make sense on terms that reveal the limits of the names, the limits of the spaces, and the limits of the temporalities in which I/we (?) live.

Don't name what you want; that's the only way you will ever arrive to it. Otherwise, it's a slippery fall all the way to nowhere.

Dwelling

For Benjamin, 19th-century France (and Europe) was obsessed with the shell, the dwelling; the house with its furniture and adornments was a comfortable case for the human, with its velvety folds and brass handled dressers. But then swept in the twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the "well-lit" and "airy"; it has put an end to dwelling in the old sense.

Dwell. There is a magazine circulating these days called Dwell http://www.dwellmag.com/, whose  offices are  right in North Beach along the seediest strip of clubs. Their orange decorations always catch my wandering eye...like a flaneur...drawn to the glassy reflection?

In my Indigenismo class, I just read a book called Huasipungo. Huasi (or Wasi) means house in Quechua, and pungo (or punku) means door. During the early 20th century in Ecuador, there were land holding elites who owned massive estates with endless horizons of land as backyards. The indigenous peoples worked for the landowners and were given in return a tiny piece of land to live on, known as the huasipungo. Apparently, this name came about because the indigenous slept close to the door of the estate in the event that they should be needed during the night.  Jorge Icaza wrote the book, it would seem in a great hurry, in an attempt to reveal just a few of the social injustices associated with the huasipungo system. In the novel, Mr. Chapy, a U.S. entrepeneuer heads to South America pushing for the construction of a highway so that valuable resources can be tapped from Ecuador's verdant forests.  It is of course the huasipungueros whose arms and sweat will build the concrete path to PROGRESS. Cue the drum roll.

What Icaza's book lacks in literariness it makes up for, to me, in its vivid peek inside the indigenous peoples chozas, the houses they have constructed, on the little pieces of land they are given by the landholders. Within the novel, Andrés Chiliquinga, his wife, Cunchi,  their son and their dog live and love and die in their choza. When outside interests decide it is time for them to be moved, it's not they are devastaed about moving their "stuff"; it's about moving their history and their future to another place. By providing us a view inside their choza, I think Icaza lets readers of the time feel the weight of moving for them.  It's more than their heavy pot.

This theme came up all the time when I traveled as part of a job with Conservation International www.conservation.org. The four communities I visited (in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Bolivia) and interviewed all had unique senses of what their homes were and what the view out their window meant. Structurally, a home can be a mansion or a pile of twigs. But what happens inside is really the dwelling. This dwelling, it dwells over the door and out the windows, and up the chimney and through the cracks. The dwelling emanates from the structure, giving the place the aura it has perhaps only for those who dwell within it;  not those who simply visit.  It's the difference, the age old one perhaps, between a house and a home.  Understanding someone's home should be easier than it has been historically; we talk a lot about cultural differences but then neglect some similarities. A home. A house. A place to live. A place to dwell.

A Mouse in a Mansion

I'm in the library being quiet as a mouse. My every tap is echoing. Campus is serene and stark; the joshua trees are all trimmed, the students still gone for their break.  I hope they never come back. I am wondering what to do with myself, what to read next. There are many ways I could go. I could mix this with that or that with this. I don't know what I want. Why is it so hard to choose what one wants? After all this time I should know what I want. But I don't. Well, I do, sortof. I want to work with 20th century novels that represent indigenous ways of seeing. However, I have not even read that many of those novels. I've read a gazillion theoretical articles,  and books, but hardly any primary texts! Given that I will be teaching literature, I probably should do that. But is there an indigenous way of seeing in a novel? Is that an oxymoron?

But then, I always am bouncing back to well, what does it all mean? What precisely am I after? Do I want to draw on similarities between written narratives and art? Do I want to compare old ancient mansucripts with newer 20th/21st century novels? Do I want to study the theory of the novel period and ask why the novel itself exists, and how it exists for indigenous peoples? I just don't know. And then if I do know which of those things I might want to pursue, how do I advance? Like, what are my text steps? I guess I have to sort that out instead of blogging about it, but that's why I blog, to sort it out.

Do we say that Arguedas's novels are ultimately aimed at an indigenous audience since they somehow bring the indigenous population into view for a predominately white audience? Does he somehow see for them or does he further exaggerate their role as receiver of the seeing? What theorists should I use to talk about this? Should I take a class in rhetoric on seeing and being seen? Or am I just writing that way since I read the course description?

Who or what do we see in Los rios profundos? And who is the one revealing it to us? Ugh. I'm so mazy and dramatic. What am I trying to answer, why, for whom, in whose name, with whose eyes, with what lens? On and on........I'm a mouse in a mansion and I'm lost in the stacks.  Somebody throw me some cheese.  And I don't really mean to whine because this is a lucky lucky lucky mansion to be in even if it could stand to put a few tour guides along the way. It is supposed to be my project. My big grand project. So, what am I supposed to do now...?

Feeling Uncanny

. . . a particularly favorable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.

This quote comes from Freud, referring to the work of a German philosopher, E. Jentsch, who like Freud, wrote of the uncanny in 1919. Lately, I've found myself transitioning from a preoccupation with things real to for me, a more natural preoccupation with things subconscious or, in Lacanian terms, imaginary. I recognize that maybe I'm not letting myself dwell enough in the unconscious, where something rests that connects me to what comes before and after my narcissistic me lifespan; to the universal anxieties that cause me to dream of drowning, of kissing strangers, of being a murderer or being a man instead of a woman.

I think spending time alone is when one can most access this space of the unconscious and daydream in a way that partially enables escape from the form and content of the constricting ego. In Ecuador, alone, I used to walk for hours until I got to the point where I was walking but not really thinking any longer as myself walking; I was able to overcome that confine. I was able to see me walking and think from somewhere else, at the risk of sounding like some kind of flaky nut. I went through a weird period where I did question at late hours of the night whether or not I was a woman anymore. It became abstracted. It became an object to hold -- Me, a woman -- instead of a state of consciousness that I didn't question. I also started thinking about suicide in the abstract because it's a topic that is horrific but just a topic, if that makes sense. You can abstract yourself from you and think about it as an idea. What if the person that is me killed themselves? What would really happen? When you separate yourself from your body, you realize that you are not your form or your just your brain. You are something beyond that, that in a way supercedes life or death as an idea. Because, after your form is gone, you are reduced to the uncanny. You appear in other peoples' dreams; you fuel, somehow, the collective anxiety that the world experiences in its fight toward death.

Last night I dreamt I was in a swimming pool, having to swim freestyle, my least favorite stroke, and a couple of colleagues, one whom I like, one whom bothers the shit out of me, were in the lanes next to me. Of course, they were expert swimmers (being the males that they are) and I was trying to fake my way through the freestyle since I prefer (how female of me) the breast stroke. In the pool, I was gasping for air and wondering, as I always do in real life, if anyone could tell I was faking my stroke?

What paranoia! I can piece together why I had the dream I had, but I don't ever admit in real life that I have these terrible inferiority complexes (okay, there, I admitted it), and that I dream of drowning.

José Maria Arguedas' last novel, to me, is not afraid to go there, to go into the pool of the uncanny -- where foxes are writers and have as much power as humans -- in order to try to postpone suicide while at the same time, justifying his decision to do so. I think as evinced by his diaries, he had reached a place where he was able to separate his physical form and role on earth from a much larger essence of what he stood for and thereby find suicide a rather meaningless, if that is possible, action. He was ready to escape the confines of form and corporeal weight in order to dance with the foxes in the pool.

There is a lot more to the world than the symbolic realm of politics, representation, and fact. It's there for all of us to create from and access. It's just too scary to spend the time doing so because it makes us realize the insignificance of us.

Back to the basics?

When I started my master's, I decided I hated magical realism. It seemed so obvious. I knew plenty of English speakers who had read 100 Years of Solitude, and I was in search of something less prominent, underresearched, hidden. In a way, I wanted to rescue someone who was otherwise going to be forgotten. First it was Ileana Espinel, an Ecuadorean poet that I researched for a Fulbright I didn't get. Then it was Alejandra Pizarnik, a female poet from Argentina, whose suicide and constant searching for her identity as displalyed on the page made me feel connected to her in my soul. During these stages, I myself was in search of who I was as both female, as girlfriend to someone who seemed to dominate me at every turn personality wise, and very lost in terms of what I was going to be when I "grew up."

Then, I kind of got over being female, lost and a self-declared victim of suburbia (to the extent that one can; I don't think you ever 'get over' these dilemmas), and moved on to thinking about Anthropology for a good three years. Working at Conservation International I suddenly realized I could not just study poetry and art when there were real problems in the real world that seemed more grave than the problems of one individual's plight in pursuit of identity. My lens got huge, it expanded, it started thinking about big massive issues like the identity of a community. How did the community define itself, how did a community form, what did a community need? Literature was always sort of dancing on the periphery of these thoughts, but it seemed like I couldn't justify reading or thinking abstractly without having seen some of the stuff for real. Traveling along....roaming downn rivers....getting sweaty and dirty. But of course, all of that comes to an end.

Then I kind of decided, alright, some kind of combination of these two things -- this search for identity through art and this search for community or meaning through anthropological travel/writing -- was something worth studying. I turned back to literature and thought again about Jose María Arguedas and his literary projects as author/anthropologist/subject/one studied and started going in that direction a little bit...as I still am....

But then, in all of this thinking and producing of dead-ended ideas, it comes down to the fact that the reason my thinking is all over the place is that I don't want to study a text or an author; I don't want to study a date or a year; I want to understand all of this stuff at once by analyzing something that opens up the whole universe (which anyone could argue is anything, I suppose, given our subjective world). And where have I found myself?

SHIT. Back to magical realism. Why? Because the Latin American novel finds its stride, takes on its identity, becomes itself when it alters European surrealism to fit the novel. In Europe, the cool cats like Breton, Dada, Dalí, Schwitters, Alberti, and García-Lorca, just to name a few randoms, had nothing to do with the novel itself, but rather, looked for ways to break with the realist tradition the novel had embraced through much of the 19th century. Experimental poetry, new artistic forms like collage and found object ensembles became the norm and the novel, well, the novel was painfully "out."

However, in the Caribbean and Latin America, surrealism found and entered the novel. I think one of the byproducts of surrealism in the Caribbean/L American setting is magical realism itself. It is the incorporation of objects with auras into the pages of a previously real genre. So now, weary from doing nothing while moving all the time, I think I might have travelled so far only to realize that I've made my way back to the center. But, I could not of course have done that without going so far.

There is so much complexity in learning, but it is when you see the simplicity of that complexity that you realize once again that all learning comes together (again) after floating out to sea. Like collage, life is a process of gathering. Sometimes we have to go very far to get just one piece of our collage. We paste it all down and move the pieces quickly before they dry and form a whole. Then, we take the newest collage, put in next to the old one, and start building again...

I feel I have lost much coherency by now. But, there's beauty in the fissures of thought, or so I tell my undefined and non-glued self.

Who's Afraid of The Big, Bad Wolf?

Contemplating the novel again, and thinking it strange that we create characters to understand ourselves instead of contemplating or writing more philosophy. As we pick up novels, many of us find parallels between ourselves and characters. We look at those characters and think, "Oh, that Holden Caulfield, he reminds me of me." So why isn't Holden Caulfield just Salinger himself? Why do we feel like "we" (authors of the world) need to create a duplicated world (Edward Said) that never lives up to its quest of filling, what I think, are the philosophical voids of the time.

On the one hand, it seems a reassuring step to know that I can displace my own anxieties, worries, concerns, hatreds, loves, and insights onto other people that I put on pages to tell a story because it enables me (you, him, her, them) to escape myself/ourselves and shed light on issues that are concerning us in a more profound way. But on the other hand, do we necessarily need characters to fill this void and are characters the most effective way to fill it?

When we create characters and plot, we are primarily giving voice to some type of universal problematic embodied in the human condition. We are not talking about a 14 year-old named Ernesto in Los ríos profundos, but a condition in Peru that perhaps extends beyond Ernesto. However, by creating Ernesto, Arguedas has left critics to wonder, is Ernesto just Arguedas? Is Arguedas Ernesto? Is Arguedas the distanced narrator plus Ernesto? So why doesn't Arguedas just tell us, "Here's my DEAL" instead of writing a fictional account of what could be his deal but that we don't quite know if it really is. For instance, if I have a problem I think society would think was horrible, or couldn't handle, I might fictionalize it in someway to give light to it but save my "self." However, am I really saving my "self" by doing that? I don't know.

I wonder why humans have had to create fake stories to deal with life, which is part rational, part irrational. Why does death frighten us to the bone just because it's unknown? Why do we wonder what the end is when we never even knew the beginning? And why, do we create written accounts of fake people to understand ourselves, when all of us are sitting right here, idling away the hours, wondering who we are?

Some would say it is the market that enabled the novel and isolated us from ourselves and each other. In our pursuit for objects, we have created more things to buy up and read, in order to understand what is going on inside of our heads. When I find myself alone, really alone, and have time to forget about both other people, fashion, food (temporarily) and fiction, I think that's when I reach some kind of momentary transcendence. When I sit alone with loner philosophers and really get down to the point of Rayuela. The philosophy behind the shell of characters we hate, like la Maga. The meollo behind the fancy bark that just postpones our inevitable confrontation with death (the death at the end of a novel). I guess, the part of the novel that lives is the philosophy, to me, not the plot itself (except for the extent to which the plot determines it). I don't worry about Ernesto, but I worry about the split of the self and the fact that because people get caught up in nitty gritty details of word flow, that we miss the greater mission which is something much larger than a closed book.

Anyway, just wondering, is the novel postponing a reality we are too afraid to confront because philosophy scares us? Or am I just being overly cynical towards the novel? I love novels because I can zone out of my own little world for awhile. But, the essential question to me is why I need to do that? Why can't I deal with the world in front of me without checking up on Holden once in awhile?

I think, actually, I increasingly can and why I am anti-novel at this moment because it feels like we're avoiding "it," whatever it may be. The Big Bad Wolf is coming to get us, someday, and he doesn't want to know about characters, he wants to know about YOU.

The Novel

Where is the novel headed and why should this question be entertained? Bakhtin's chapter, Discourse in the Novel (in The Dialogic Imagination), lays out some of the defining characteristics of the European novelistic tradition as situated in relation to more closed genres, specifically, the epic. For Bakhtin, the novel is distinguished by heteroglossia -- the inclusion of many registers of speech within one text -- and is in need of a separate poetics from that applied to "traditional" poetry (he never quite pins down what he means by this, but I gather, formal sonnets, epics, etc.) since relative to poetic aesthetics, the novel seems "quasi-artistic" to some in its reflections of everyday "rhetorical" speech.

But enough about him! Here's what's eating me about the novel and its many theories: The novel, like the nation, or the market, is exclusive at the same time that it is heteroglossic. That's not a contradiction; that is just to say that it does not represent all voices (I know Bakhtin doesn't say it does, but he implies that it has the potential to, and I have my doubts given the way we approach it). From my desk in seminars, I have an uncomfortable reaction to talk of "the novel" because I realize (upon analyzing this anxious reaction) that I fundamentally think that it is every individual's job on earth, in part, to resolve economic and political inequalities, as well as gendered inequality to the best that we can (there are myriad ways to do that. I'm not speaking about full out Peace Corps type activism). And I have concluded that I am putting too much burden on the novel. But maybe that's not so wrong. I want every novel to represent the underepresented, or if not "them" per se, their plight. And when I look at the novel like that, of course it is always a grand failure because it is, indeed, not the sole solution. And when I find myself reading Bakhtin in part I want to vomit, because I feel like I'm continuing the intellectual tradition of old (not necessarily a bad thing, but theoretical invention is needed if we are to truly have a heteroglossic academy; maybe that's a good question: is that a feasible goal?).

I guess I don't want to accept that the novel is exclusive because that seems like accepting that there is no better solution to the world than as it is; there is not a better solution than, "Well, that's the way it is, because life is unfair" or "Well, we are talking about the European tradition afterall, of course voices are not included." Yes, we are. Thanks for pointing it out. And why are we doing that? Why are we not asking ourselves what the limitations are to reading Bakhtin if we are working in the Caribbean or Latin America? Not everybody turns their heads to Balzac and says, "What a master. Let me use him as my model." Shockingly enough as it is. But it's all a big labyrinth because why do I want indigenous peoples to "write" novels anyway? Isn't that imposing the same model I'm saying I dislike? Yes. But then, if they don't write, then they are marginalized as "oral cultures" who appear very great while on a brochure or in a text as some kind of "character" that the main protagonist bounces off.

Every argument has two sides. Bakhtin is great, don't get me wrong. He is accessible and digestable and a theorist (!). And it would be easier to simmer down and drink him up for what he's worth, and that's a lot. But can the theory of the novel itself ever come from the bottom, even if it's just to say, "Hey, we're down here, and frankly, we think the novel is for a bunch of moronic Westerners who have created so much distance between themselves and the earth, they have to build false, uncompletable, self-aborbed bridges to connect them to the truth (a truth that for Said, in Beginnings, is only a novelistic duplication of the real truth that is invisible in a sense but becomes more true by being duplicated aesthetically on the page. The "excess" [always a favorite academic term to toss about, in fact, I used it myself yesterday just to sound smart even though all I meant was "too much"], oh the beautiful excess makes the real more visible). Talk about savage minds (and what I really think). I'm exaggerating. He's brilliant and I'm not, but sometimes it's all a bit too much, even though I love it at the same time. But god, sometimes I just want to burst into laughter and be like, "can you believe we're freaking sitting around talking about excess signage and Barthes' goal of erasing the sign and the referent, leaving only the signified? AHhhhh HA HA HA HA". Of course these are fascinating questions, and of course they help us read texts more critically, but for two seconds, just imagine what this means to these authors we are reading and the worlds they come from! Do you think that Reinaldo Arenas, suffering with AIDS in New York City, after going through hell and back to get to the United States thought that some wackoff would sit around analyzing his homosexuality through Oedipal metaphors? Let's just pause and remind ourselves of that once in a great while. And then go back to Derrgheedagh, Fooocaugh, and Bohkteeen.

In any event, novels are works of art, and I hope we keep changing the world through them and understanding them from multiple angles. Where, in our approach to the novel, are we turning? Is there anywhere else to turn? And when does the novel die? Ever or never? I love you theory, I do, and I love you Jacques and M.M.

I think I have as usual lost my point...but I feel very happy.

Hmmm....