Latin American Labyrinths
RODMAN, SELDEN
Latin American Labyrinths Terra Nostra By Carlos Fuentes Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 778 pp. $15.00. The Autumn of the Patriarch By Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
...suppose, for instance, the Trojans burn the horse, that a girl is born in Bethlehem...
...So is the sainted wife, devoured surrealistically by wild dogs and remembered by tawdry monuments...
...Pragmatic critics compliantly accept excesses of obscurantism that would be dismissed in native talents as self-indulgent...
...Clarity and precision could destroy chaos...
...All that has existed will exist in the future, and all that will be has already been...
...Their personalities were captured in a line, an exclamation...
...There was masterful dialogue...
...Does this simply reflect a fear of the foreign and unknowable...
...And this I fear above all, that the new world will not in truth be new, but a terrible extension of the world we are living here.' Fuentes' characters—incarnated in each of his three worlds with identical names but (presumably) different identities—long for a world free of servitude, illness, sin, and God...
...He idealizes the new world of constant change, sensual awareness, love and solitude, freedom of body and mind, tolerance, doubt, and life...
...Called "The Free Spirit," he preaches "Take everything you want for yourself, nothing is sinful except what you imagine to be so...
...With patience one can weed out facts...
...One of the cross-branded 12-toes becomes the messiah of the future...
...for the Latin world is already too ambiguous for U.S...
...The prose is an obstruction rather than a key...
...The ponderous intellectual fantasizings of such once-lucid novelists as Miguel Asturias and Mario Vargas Llosa have never been targeted for what they are: unreadable and dull...
...History for Fuentes is not linear but circular...
...He lives in a soiled palace where cows roam wild, casually takes concubines (he removes his boots only for his wife), and fathers 7-month runts with the aid of his "herniated" whistling testicle...
...Everything is created to be shared, freely by all, everything the eye can see and desire, stretch out your hand and take take it by force, women, food, money " El Senor has him executed, but, says the author, "the new world already exists in the imagination or in the desire of all those who heard the youth speak...
...The Communist regimes we know not only deny freedom to the individual but are incredibly puritanical...
...Marines and retained power through a lethargic bureaucracy...
...Vague, opaque, plagued by tenses that go backward and forward, first-person subjects that turn to he's and their's mid-sentence, sentences running for pages, 30-page paragraphs—the book is more self-indulgent and excessive than its anti-hero...
...This is particularly disappointing, for the Colombian's first book, Nobody Ever Writes to the Colonel, was filled to the brim with pointed vignettes of South American life, and peopled by strong, dour, stubborn, resigned, full-blown characters...
...The young man, in turn, succumbs to a dark goddess, re-enacting Adam's fall in an Aztec milieu...
...To a Mexican (or Colombian) intellectual it may make some kind of sense, for their culture identifies the sexual repressions of the Church with the mind-Iessness of unrestricted capitalism...
...Succumbing to the Latin penchant for worship, they endow their political figures with mystical overviews, resisting rational analysis, feeding the simplistic U.S...
...In One Hundred Years of Solitude the author moved on to a broader view of life, encompassing and defining a whole culture...
...Paragraphs were longer, sentences more complex, dialogue sparse, but man was still the central figure set off in bold relief against his environment...
...Moses, Christ, Apocalypse—the third element required to bring unity to the duality of thought and matter...
...There is the omnipresent El Senor, in one incarnation the brutal King Felipe of Spain, destroyer of virginity, corruptor of innocence, who builds the Escorial, immortalizing death and denying the Moorish gardens of life...
...We never learn what motivates such a man, what the people think of him, how he wields power...
...His gift, a mirror, brings death to an aged priest, for a true self-image is more than the decaying primitive can bear...
...Carlos Fuentes' equally ambiguous but more wide-ranging historical panegyric, Terra Nostra, is an easier read but just as inconclusive...
...notion that in Latin America realism is surrealism...
...He ruminates at length on the mystic number three: father, son and spirit...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes are the latest of the Latins to completely abandon character, action, scenes of real life, in favor of labyrinthine theoretical abstraction...
...If life is an endless repetition, one cannot hope for improvement...
...Thus the Marxist writer comes finally to the recitation of his polemic...
...All dialogue is gone, and so is the poetry, the sharpness of observation, the perception of character...
...Like the eternal triumvirate, the book is divided into three parts: Past, Present and Future, separated into segments yet melded into one...
...minds in search of solutions—and, one suspects, for comprehension by Latins themselves...
...In Part II, two men, the first young and the second old, arrive in the New World...
...Or reverence for mere size and intractability...
...One wonders whether they have traveled merely from Europe to Mexico or if an allegory is intended...
...There is the Old World (Spain), the New World (Mexico) and the Next World (Revolutionary...
...In his fourth book, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Garcia Marquez renders a psychological portrait of a despot without ever showing us the political realities that allow him to retain control...
...There is Celestina, raped and demented, bearer of cross-branded children who have 12 toes...
...Against that shifting panorama individuals stood out briefly, capturing our attention if not our sympathy...
...Things simply exchange places...
...Have they perhaps crossed the dark sea and entered via the pearly gates of turtle eggs into the Kingdom of Heaven...
...fire, water, air...
...They do not really believe, though, that it is attainable...
...The book is so full of symbols that the reader may see what he wants, believe what he chooses, or (like the reviewer for the Sunday New York Times Book Review) catalogue symbolisms without drawing any conclusions at all...
...And this being so, nothing is born or dies completely...
...Maybe it is time for Latin America's political novelists to stop focusing so relentlessly on the depravity of their rulers and devote some of their admirable talents to analyzing the conditions that support such monstrous tyrannies...
...in the few instances where they have been given any choice, have not been so naive...
...10.00...
...Fuentes works his way out of the inevitable cycles of cause and effect by hypothesizing variability and free choice: Suppose in tie next world all the decisive moments are reversed...
...Encountering natives, the elder fights to the death but the younger attempts a trade, an exchange to preserve the natives' lives and his...
...mother, father, child...
...The old world we know (carefully weighted) consists of nothing but ohange-lessness, extermination, ignorance, power, repression, and death...
...Now, in his latest, Garcia Marquez offers only the senile ramblings of an unnamed general who has ruled a Latin land for some hundred years...
...All effort is an exercise in futility...
...Withal, the general is a many-sided figure, tenderly caring for his dying mother even while ordering the murder of a thousand children...
...export trademark...
...The bastard son of a peasant woman, the general has risen from the ranks, been installed by U.S...
...The Autumn of the Patriarch By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Gregory Rabassa Harper & Row...
...269 pp...
...white race, black and red...
...Barely answering the journalist's "what" and "when," Garcia Marquez fails to ask the novelist's "why...
...But the Latin American masses...
...One suspects the author comes to identify with him so completely that he finds him more sympathetic than repellant, for there is certainly some pathos in a man who "had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority," a man who had become such a vague myth that only as a corpse was it "possible to believe in his real existence...
...And so is the general himself: Arousing neither hatred nor pity, he is a profound bore...
...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "South America of the Poets" It is difficult to understand why this country's literary establishment stands in awe of the latter-day Latins...
...There is always the suggestion, explicit or latent, in the works of these writers that evil (none of them is comfortable with the good) bears a U.S...
...The peasant mother, who prefers the company of the servants, worries about washing sheets, and is canonized by her influential son, is a stereotype...
...Guilt...
...To an American, the equation of sexual and personal liberty with Communism is an affront to reason...
...That is too bad...
...All are drawn with poetic license and give no clues to the mechanics of power politics...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 24
