Voices of Solitude: The Modern latin American Novel
Valis, Nöel M.
Voices of Solitude: The Modern...
...Need I point out the acute similarity between this monstrous dehumanization and the garbage-can existence of Beckett's characters in End Game...
...There is, for instance, the image of the peeling onion which Manuel Puig uses in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth to describe the main character's personality growth: Under each layer is another chronological 14 The American Spectator December 1978 piece of Toto's character until there are no more layers, "because he's just born, only a bud is left, a sprout, the heart of the little onion...a perfect little baby...
...author of Philadelphia Gentlemen and The Protestant Establishment...
...Both Paradiso and Cobra are governed by poetic images whose ultimate secret can only be decoded by the novelists them-selves...
...It can be coherent, but it is always a fragment, only a piece of the whole...
...And all are marked by an irradicable air of solitude, hence the title and the major theme of the book...
...literary advisor of Charles Scribner's Sons...
...The characters are the instruments through which the novelist beats his breast about the general crumminess of the world, including humankind's perennial proclivity for brutality and barbarism...
...This shredding of a character's individuality is also evident in the other contemporary Latin American novels...
...To the inner most bit it's nothing but layers, smaller and smaller...
...1. It has been said that nothing ages so fast into dullness as religious quarrels...
...But even if he does find out where the pea is, it is still only a dried-up, little pea...
...In short, language as technique overwhelms the vision of the human: The voices of Puig's mostly unsophisticated, insensitive characters are converted into literary mannerism...
...All other voices are swallowed up inside the extraordinarily long inner monologue of the Biblically-named patriarch who, in characteristic Garcia Marquez style, dies somewhere between the age of 107 and 232 years (and who continues to die or appears to die at a number of points throughout the novel...
...Unfortunately, the dialogue between Javier and Elizabeth is often tedious and melodramatic, of the soap-opera variety...
...Noel M. Valis Voices of Solitude: The Modern Latin American Novel The monologues of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Manuel Puig, y otros...
...Roles are interchangeable...
...This disembodied voice pervades such technically and thematically disparate works as Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral (1975), Carlos Fuentes' A Change of Skin (1968), Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971), Jose Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night (1973), Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1971) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976), Jose Lezama Lima's Paradiso (1974), Severo Sarduy's Cobra (1975), and Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers (1971...
...The reader understands that the questions of homosexuality and of the writer's creativity provide the mainspring to Paradiso, and that transvestism (an image for the metamorphosis of personality...
...a wall of silence is constructed between him/it and the rest of humanity...
...Puig presents the language of these disembodied voices, most often the vernacular of popular and even street culture, in series of phrases and thoughts connected by repetition of the conjunction "and...
...But as we shall see, it is not the voice of the storyteller, of the wandering jongleur, rich in tradition and human contact...
...The hermetic and arcane language in books such as Lezama Lima's Paradiso, Sarduy's Cobra, and even Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers often obscures meaning, and thus requires "deciphering...
...The original Aureliano Buendia, founder of Macondo, dies alone and unnoticed, leaning against the tree where he has passed the last few years of his life in voluntary mute confinement...
...If only man exists and he is miniaturized, like the white-dwarf version of Cobra in Sarduy's novel, if his deeds are mocked and his world shorn of significance, then what is left...
...Even if we were to regard One Hundred Years of Solitude as a fictionalized Colombian history, the repetition and sameness of events and characters betray a profound negation of man's place in the historical passage of things...
...At times it is carried to the extreme: to the disintegration of identity and the ultimate de-humanization of the individual...
...What is more, it often makes for a rather demanding, and at times unrewarding, reading experience...
...16 The American Spectator December 1978...
...for all the mastery and glorification of technique, language as a game finally becomes boring...
...These parts of the novel, which cannot fail to remind one of other literary treatments of the theme of guilt and complicity, such as Steiner's Treblinka and Shaw's Man in the Glass Booth, are nevertheless filled with compassion and anguish...
...Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral is a case in point...
...2. The opposite movement, away from the contemporary, is also valuable: Greatness in men may paradoxically increase with distance...
...Marquez' novel describes the rise and fall of the Buendia family, a fictional Colombian dynasty, and of Macondo, the town they established...
...Myth is essentially atemporal: It denies not only the historicity of man, but the uniqueness and individuality of particular men...
...Nevertheless, at times the Latin American novelists fail where their progenitors did not...
...for regionalism, though not dead as a school of writing, has become anathema to modern Latin American novelists...
...Cobra's deliberately disordered structure is made noclearer by knowing that Sarduy is obsessed with language itself as the ultimate (?) reality...
...Because that thin wire of sound we hear through the telephone displaces us both temporally and spatially...
...John Henry Newman dominates the scene less than one would sup-pose, true history being always a return to the original perspective at the expense of hindsight...
...As a result, the characters lack substance, they seem mere shadows or, more accurately, mere voices to be manipulated by the author...
...Are we never coming to the kernel?...There isn't one...
...No longer can we categorize literature from down yonder in mere geographical terms, i.e., as the Argentinian, Mexican, or Chilean novel...
...Whether or not it accurately describes all modern novels, the phrase certainly applies to the Latin American novel of the last decade or so...
...Hence, the characters themselves, as in Fuentes' Change of Skin, are repetitions, recurrences of other characters...
...From my view, Adams in the long run had the greater half-truth than his dear friend Jefferson did, and it is my guess that he will come into his own in the next decade...
...War, greed, and personal tragedies too numerous to recount here play a major part in the final destruction of both...
...The many neo-baroque metaphors in Paradiso require still more keys after the first key...
...And here the historian brings us unpublished material that modifies still further the conventional image one so readily takes for reality...
...It irritates and finally benumbs the reader, who after a while just wishes the two of them would end it all (and soon...
...In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful advice, but also some insight into the workings and frolics of fourteen extraordinary minds...
...This sense of solitude, of the solipsistic, of the solitary voice hearing only itself and entrapped within its thin, disembodied, metamorphosing personality, is characteristic of nearly all of these modern Latin American novels...
...From the opening conversation of Puig's novel, in which various unidentified characters talk at cross-purposes in only semi-connected fashion, to the chapter-long monologues which comprise most of the book, we are given mere voices, each of which makes his or her individual comment on the state of the universe...
...In 1973, a young Argentinian woman published a book of interviews called Seven Voices (Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert) and in it Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban novelist, had this to say about the modern novel (and I take it deliberately out of context): "it's all voice and no text...
...Only words...
...Marquez even includes a deluge—this one lasts four years, eleven months, and two days...
...and at times as a kind of double, or substitute, for Don Jeronimo...
...author of The House of Intellect and Clio and the Doctors...
...Unfortunately, I am rushing to finish a book and have not been doing much reading this year...
...Thus, in Garcia Marquez' novel, what occurs at the end—the incestuous coupling of the aunt and her nephew, the subsequent birth of the monstrous, almost pre-human (primitive, prehistoric, in this sense) child, and the final downfall of the Buendia family—all this has already happened as we and the last Aureliano discover on the final page of the book which is, in reality, the final page of the magical gypsy Melquiades' manuscript written a hundred years before...
...but even in this novel time is not linear, but The American Spectator December 1978cyclical: All things recur so that nothing, in essence, changes...
...A voice...
...The generality is disproved every time a historian has the talent to recreate the milieu, the emotions, and the men who fought...
...rather, it is disembodied and most temporary, fragile and seemingly unreal...
...For the reader working under the old set of rules, the traditional cultural context of Western society, the piecemeal voices of dialogue, inner- and outer-directed monologues, theater, singing, and just plain talk, talk, talk, do not cohere because there is no ordering principle to the universe...
...But Fuentes manages to trivialize the pain of existence by interspersing his narrative with long passages of squabbling and bickering between the other couple, Javier and his wife Elizabeth...
...Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who has passed through the crucible of isolation, brutality, and chaos and recovered the whole man in his writing, these artists cannot see beyond man's dehumanization and irremediable sense of isolation in a meaning-less, absurd universe...
...They are not whole men and women, people of flesh and blood, came y hueso...
...Just as the world is coming apart around them (Fuentes also intercalates scenes of conquest and carnage in Hernan Cones' time to show that these global movements are repetitive), so the personal universe of the man and his wife is atomized into useless accusations and worn-out emotions...
...and, again, writing itself inform the world of Cobra, but what of it...
...But for all his virtuosity with language, Cabrera Infante's language is no less obscure...
...There are at least sixteen Aurelianos in One Hundred Years of Solitude...
...later, as the secretary for a local man of property, Don Jeronimo...
...Indeed, one could say that there is a strong antihistorical bias in the modern Latin American novel, evident even in the most straightforward of the works cited, One Hundred Years of Solitude...
...His ideas, his myth-making, his politics, and his love affairs have been well reported on for some time, but not until the appearance of his Uncollected Prose in two volumes (ed...
...They are, more than anything else, very self-conscious artists, acutely aware of themselves as sons of William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Tristan Tsara and the surrealists, and the French New Novelists, as much as sons of their native soil...
...or he simply allows his characters' thoughts to run on without connectives, pauses, or transitions...
...Time as history, once again, is negated: The only temporal events of significance are the long and very imprecise reign of the dictator, whose mind continually wanders back and forth through time, and his recurring death, which both opens and closes the novel...
...Much more ambitious in scope than Conversation in the Cathedral is Carlos Fuentes' Change of Skin, in which two couples are forced to spend a night in a small Mexican town...
...But the talk, the voices, both inner- and outer-directed, do not forge together into a Noel M. Valis is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Georgia...
...Never mind the fact that an onion has no heart or bud, as Henrik Ibsen pointed out in Peer Gynt: "There's a most surprising lot of layers...
...unified whole...
...The introduction of sin, in the guise of incest, brings about the apparently inevitable Fall, and final retribution comes as an apocalyptic wind at the end of the book...
...Donoso's Obscene Bird of Night offers the most horrifying and grotesquely poignant example of this reduction of man to less-than-human status when Mudito, in 15 his ceaseless transformations of personality (which merely prove to him over and over again that he does not know who he is), finally is converted into an object, a jute sack covered by layers and layers of more sacking...
...I love both men but the beauty of the book is that it gives one great insight into the optimistic and pessimistic aspects of our heritage: The popular Jefferson, as Macaulay would have put it, was "all sail" when it came to equality and democracy with a capital "D," while the unpopular Adams saw that even Democrats were subject to sin and needed an "anchor...
...Characters in Fuentes' book have a variety of names, masks, and roles: The Jewish girl, Elizabeth, for instance, is also called, among other identifiers, Ligeia, Beth, Betele, and Liz, and is probably a surrogate for Hanna, Franz' lost Jewish maiden...
...E. DIGBY BALTZELL Professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania...
...In the novel, Franz Jellinek, once an architect of Nazi crematoria and concentration camps, now a salesman, is obsessed with guilt and haunted by memories of a Jewish girl, Hanna, whom he once loved and later saw caught in the fires of the Holocaust...
...By declaring them to be derivative, I do not deny them a strong dose of originality, particularly in their technical virtuosity...
...Thus, in myth, timeless universals are stressed and not the distinguishing characteristics of either person or place...
...The talk which takes place in a lower-class tavern (the "Cathedral") between upper-class Santiago and his father's former chauffeur, Ambrosio, is broken through by shards of the past, by Joycean leaps through space and time...
...The Latin American novelist, like his modern predecessors, has changed the rules, has thrown out the idea that the universe possesses meaning...
...Just as the voices of Donoso's Mudito, Puig's Toto, and Vargas Llosa's Ambrosio and Santiago are isolated, sealed-up pieces of insubstantiality, so the novelists' language becomes, logically, increasingly insubstantial and secretive as it conveys the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the novelists' universe...
...The 23-year-old Isabel is, apparently, a counterpart to the middle-aged Elizabeth since both her name (the Spanish equivalent of Elizabeth) and her role in the novel indicate she is another Ligeia, a younger lover of Javier...
...Being deaf, blind, dumb, a small sexless package," he is reduced to a thing...
...Puig clearly intends to present the complexity of personality, the multiplicity of reality, and yet, after a while, both his technique and the characters seem all too mechanical...
...in character, statism, and university life...
...But here the reader runs into considerable difficulty...
...More importantly, by removing man from his sense of history and chronological time, by fragmenting his personality so that it loses wholeness and individuality, by sewing him up in a sack of solitariness, the Latin American novelist has destroyed the sense of community so critical to literature in general and fiction in particular...
...Christmas Book Recommendations We offer here gift suggestions from some of the writers and statesmen whose books and collected utterances would top our own list of recommendations...
...However, I was tremendously impressed with a short little paperback, Adams and Jefferson, a Revolutionary Dialogue (Merrill D. Peterson, Oxford University Press, 1976...
...It is obvious that the reader will find himself in terrible difficulties with books of this sort precisely because there is no coherence of content...
...Man's place in Garcia Marquez' universe, a fabulous yet very real creation because the inhabitants are imperfect, not idealized Arcadians, is perceived in Biblical terms: There is a Fall and there is retribution...
...Just as characters are delineated through the unsubstantiality of a voice or a series of voices, so time and space are controlled by the same instrument...
...The determining voice of Donoso's novel belongs to Mudito, an apparent mute of indefinite age (shades of Faulkner) who travels back and forth between the past and present, perceiving reality precisely as he wishes or as some inner necessity compels him to...
...This is what Marvin R. O'Connell does superbly in The Oxford Conspirators —The History of the Oxford Movement: 1833-1845 (Macmillan, 1969...
...in literature and the art of wriggling...
...Here we have a chorus of jarring voices, a scene of mocking theatricality which, in the Brechtian mode, merely underlines the alienation, not only of the characters, but probably of the reader as well...
...Throughout the novel, time and space are internalized, made subjective to the point where neither element makes much sense if separated from the person perceiving it...
...Nature's a joker...
...JACQUES BARZUN University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University...
...personality is continually metamorphosing, breaking into pieces of one's past and another's present...
...The novel has been interpreted as both a disguised history of Colombia (and much of South America itself) and as a personal re-creation of the universal travails of all mankind...
...Time, then, becomes mythical, in both Biblical (the Fall and retribution) and Oedipal (the incest motif) terms...
...Jose Donoso's Obscene Bird of Night, in my view probably the best of these novels along with Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a good example of this...
...If I were to choose an image from the real world which corresponds to the voices of these novels, it would be the voice on the telephone...
...Despite their oddly funny and frequently charming idiosyncrasies, Marquez' characters, who some-times seem like endearing eccentrics, are not real individuals, for each new character is a variation of a previous one...
...The story of those twelve years is full of lessons in party and personal politics...
...Such is the voice of these novels...
...It is not surprising that he might suspect the old shell game...
...Three Trapped Tigers is a better book and is rather fun to read, composed as it is of theatrical puns, jokes, and hundreds of word plays...
...But the absurd precision of the duration of the rains, as well as other exact dates and numbers which are continually contradicted throughout the book, merely reiterate the novelist's rejection of chronological time...
...but for the most part the complexities of their novels, and the difficulties these create for the reader, are the complexities of much of 20th-century literature...
...In another of Marquez' novels, The Autumn of the Patriarch, solitariness is stressed by the very fact that only one voice is of any consequence, the single and ultimately monotonous voice of the grotesque dictator, Zacarias, who wallows in self-pity and worries over the perennial problem of all tyrants: the insecurity of power...
...In this sense, the idea of time and circumstance as history has very little significance in either The Obscene Bird of Night or any of the other novels mentioned...
...John P. Frayne, Columbia University Press, 1978) has it been possible to gauge the amount of thought Yeats put into the battle for Irish culture—a battle fought on two fronts, Irish and English, for in such matters compatriots are not automatically friends...
...Despite some temporal capering, the story appears to move for-ward chronologically, and the principal voice is the traditional third-person narrator...
...It is a delightful analysis of the greatest friend-ship in American history...
...Neither Toto nor any other character in Puig's novel is ever presented, if the pun will be forgiven, in toto...
...The world's anguish is further diluted by the culminating mock-trial scene between a hip group called the Monks and a house of prostitutes...
...He sees him-self as a young, struggling student whose father is impressed by social connections and wants his son to make a name for himself...
...Indeed, the enormous importance of this literature to writers and critics everywhere derives in part from the curious voice heard coming from it...
...Language in these novels prevents us from gathering a coherent vision of the universe because it is language itself which creates the disorder...
...Nor should they, says Vargas Llosa, for neither he nor his fellow novelists feel justified in providing the wherewithal to unify the fragments of reality, both past and present and, in some works, future (as in One Hundred Years of Solitude...
...This is surely true of Yeats, the last of the large-scale poets...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
