A Brute of a Life
MATHEWSON, RUTH
Writers & Writing A BRUTE OF A LIFE BY RUTH MATHEWSON Now that the works of three writers as original and different from one another as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio...
...it is an elaborate entertainment about cultural impositions that are themselves parodic...
...Soon trainloads of scenery arrive with "antique temples a Scottish cemetery the Castle of Elsinore monasteries, grottoes and dungeons," to be followed by Caruso, Ruffo, Bori, Nicoletti-Korman, and other operatic luminaries...
...the Model Prison fills with suspects...
...Fortunately, the lists do not get out of control...
...inside the Opera City, the Capital of Fiction," he says...
...Writers & Writing A BRUTE OF A LIFE BY RUTH MATHEWSON Now that the works of three writers as original and different from one another as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar have become widely known here, it would be a mark of provincialism to anticipate the contents of a new Latin American novel, to expect that it will represent the immediate problems of a given country or conform to the familiar conventions of social protest...
...Compared to the mythos of suffering, mystery and love, the unforgettable parents and children of Garcia Marquez's powerful One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carpentier's unnamed Head of State??his main character??is a poster figure, motivated mainly by a pragmatic sense of the rough game he plays, and virtually all the other characters are faceless subordinates...
...As he swings in the hammock strung up in the servants' quarters of his old house, we are told he is not without "strength and dignity...
...It is as if Mussolini had lived to celebrate linguini and Maseratis and the poems of Gabriele D'Annunzio...
...Yet these authors have taught us to prepare for something??call it mythology...
...It was time to decide upon the protocols of the future and to plan a Tribunal of Redistribution...
...Carpentier surprises because he builds on the stereotype...
...The Arc de Triomphe outside his window replaces the "Tutelary Volcano" that watches over his capital city, and he loves the great houses, the company of academicians and poets, the ministrations of prostitutes who can impersonate a nun of St...
...His most spectacular achievement, though, is the construction of an opera house...
...they are seen, in all their profusion, as the colonizers of Latin America, the agents of distortion and deformity...
...Here the reader has a choice...
...As he stops to admire the South windows of Notre Dame, he is described as an atheist "who was nevertheless responsive to the dynamic quality of the Gospels, and recognized that their texts had, at one time, had the merit of causing a resounding devaluation of all the totems and zodiacal threats, of oracles, submissions to the Ides of March and inevitable fate...
...The General Strike that sends the despot packing is organized, instead, by a dreamy university reformer resembling the Mexican Francisco Madero...
...Everything focused on the French, so that in his youth the future president waited in waterfront oafes for the latest literary journals to come from France and dreamed, even then, of the country of Baudelaire...
...Carpentier's dictator has had European-style training, too: The Marista Brothers in his native seaside town taught him about the Nile Floods, the invention of printing, how the Eskimos made igloos out of ice...
...We have no difficulty, for instance, translating into our repertory a recent AP dispatch from Argentina on the closed trial of ex-President Isabel Peron for leading the country toward "moral and material bankruptcy," or adapting to our scenarios the unsuccessful attempt by a splinter group of Peronist guerillas to free the one-time cabaret dancer from her palatial retreat in a mountain resort...
...When we meet him he is "over there" in Paris, in his fourth term of the Presidency he has seized in a coup and consolidated through rigged elections...
...Enter The Student, a classical character out of a Russian novel-a nihilist rather than a politician, thinks the Dictator...
...Some writers run against clich6 and correct or destroy it...
...He may take Carpentier's rhetoric as merely a breach in his sardonic tone, or he may assimilate it with the larger ironies of the book's theatrical metaphor...
...they themselves in a favorite term speak of the "telluric" myth to convey the images of their earth??and we meet the myth-making halfway with our own melodramatic preconceptions...
...none is "telluric," of the Latin American earth...
...He continues to visit the whorehouses and the opera, but now "Carmen becomes confused with the Barbiere, because both take place in Seville...
...He will wait offstage, for he and his Marxist followers are not directing these demonstrations...
...Latin American writers-many of whom have been educated on the Continent, are currently in exile, or are in diplomatic posts (Carpentier is attached to the Cuban Embassy in Paris)??are in an excellent position to appreciate the irony of drowning out the native music by building opera houses in Bogota and Buenos Aires, as this novel demonstrates...
...There he is Patriarch to a court of two: his faithful housekeeper-mistress and his secretary...
...Incidentally, our tyrant dines wth that bizarre Futurist, and with fictional personages: Proust's composer Vinteuil and Mme...
...two bombs interrupt Aida...
...The Student tells a fellow delegate: "We've just got rid of a dictator...
...but nothing about the country he would control...
...To view this history as theater is to sacrifice its tragedy for melodrama sometimes brilliant, too often brittle...
...But as "background to their cadenzas,' the price of sugar falls...
...Now we're in the middle of the second, which in spite of new scenery and lighting, is very like the first...
...Not since Balzac, who is himself mentioned more than once, has a novel been so oppressively furnished...
...The end of his myth indulges a certain sentimentality, and we pity the tyrant as we would all aging creatures...
...As Diderot observed, the actor playing a drunken comedian must not himself be drunk...
...Carpentier risks the fallacy of imitative form with these tallies of real and imaginary trivia...
...There is danger of sentimentality, too, in the reappearance of the Student, bound with Jawaharlal Nehru and the Cuban Julio Mella for the First World Conference against Colonial and Imperialist Politics...
...With the enumeration of such pleasures we are introduced to the first of many long catalogs of smells, tastes, sounds, colors, brand names, literary tags, music, and details of fin de siecle painting and sculpture...
...the end of Traviata with that of La Boheme, because in both the heroine dies in her lover's arms...
...The curtain has gone down on the first act, and very long it was...
...Reasons of State, a rather old-fashioned "modernist" novel, suffers from a certain staginess and overcontrivance...
...With hundreds of peasants yoked to carts, working night and day, he builds a Capitol like the one in Washington, D.C...
...Carpentier, born in Havana in 1904, is a contemporary of Borges and Miguel Angel Asturias, although not so well known in the U.S...
...Myths, there are, but they are imports...
...The many details give the aging tyrant his identity...
...our attention to his tastes diverts us from his obscene criminality, just as the pre-Columbian mummy he has shipped to the Trocadero Museum distracts a Parisian public from news of the massacres that have earned him the nickname The Butcher of Cordoba...
...Of his several novels, The Lost Steps (1956, published in English in 1967) is considered his masterpiece...
...He leaves the cathedral by "the door of the Resurreotion of the Dead...
...Verdurin...
...subversive newspapers appear from nowhere...
...Carpentier invites our guilty feeling of concern for the Head of State's fate, then checks them by showing the double edge of his desire "to carry on this brute of a life...
...The soon to be ex-President waits in his native port city while the American Consul-sweating, drunk, looking like a music-hall comedian??arranges his departure...
...The more things change...
...The shot fired at Sarajevo gives the Head of State, now back in his native land, the opportunity to preside over a period of wartime prosperity...
...He is offended when the Consul quotes Baudelaire, "jealous at this incursion into my own territory . . [the poet was] all that I had left, the only plot ruled over by me in a country that was mine yesterday from North to South, from Ocean to Ocean...
...In a set-piece confrontation, the tyrant says, "I must seem a sort of Caligula...
...But it is no easy parody of coca-colinization...
...Nevertheless, the book is good enough to make me want to read the works that have earned Carpentier his considerable reputation abroad...
...audiences applaud outlaws, regicides and rebel troubadours, and hiss the infomers, governors and Spolettas...
...The tyrant still has Paris, however...
...And it is of such material, set back in the years before and after World War I, in an unnamed country resembling Venezuela, that Alejo Carpentier has constructed his new novel, Reasons of State (Knopf, 311 pp., $10.00...
...It doesn't really matter...
...Vincent de Paul or an English schoolgirl...
...The Student responds, "More like Caligula's horse," as he exits like a squirrel...
...His book is a fiction about the fiction Europeans and Yankees have created out of Hispanic America...
Vol. 59 • July 1976 • No. 14
