Tag Archives for memory

The Savage Detectives IV: A Chill Descends from the North Pole

Part Two of Bolaño’s novel ranges far and wide, both temporally and geographically. As its subtitle indicates, it covers the period from 1976 to 1996. And it takes us from Mexico to Europe (France, Spain, Austria…), the Middle East, and then Africa (Angola, Rwanda, Liberia).

Yet in another sense, all this is encompassed in a single night in a Mexico City apartment, sometime presumably in November or December, 1975, in which Amadeo Salvatierra talks to the “boys,” Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, about the forgotten poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Part Two opens with Salvatierra’s account (apparently recorded in January 1976): “My dear boys, I said to them, I’m so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home” (143). We also periodically but consistently return to their conversation as Part Two continues, breaking what is otherwise the chronological order of events and interviews. And it ends back in Salvatierra’s apartment, with the dawn breaking and the streets outside the windows beginning to fill up with people, with one of the boys (we do not know which) leafing through the magazine containing Tinajero’s sole published poem, and the other asleep or half-asleep on the sofa but still somehow responding to Amadeo’s query as to why they want to find Tinajero now: “we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. [. . .] we’re going to find Cesárea Tinajero and we’re going to find the Complete Works of Cesárea Tinajero” (587–88). This, however, elicits a “shiver” from Salvatierra, and the sense, as one of the boys puts it, that “the North Pole had descended on Mexico City” (588). Part Two ends with a chill, perhaps a blast of cold air sweeping over the boys’ youthful ambitions. Or are those ambitions themselves the source of the chill that seeps into Salvatierra’s apartment? Or is it that the aged Salvatierra, looking around the wreckage not only of one drunken night but also of a lifetime (“my books, my photographs, the stains on the ceiling”) knows that the path Lima and Belano are taking will lead them only to failure and disillusion?

The book is not yet over (we still have Part Three to come), but Lima and Belano’s stories are now done by the time Part Three ends. Their fates, and that of the other visceral realist group, are briefly summarized by one Ernesto García Grajales, who claims to be “the foremost scholar in the field, the definitive authority” but also “the only person who cares” (584). Not that García Grajales seems to care all that much: all this is merely fodder for a “little book” that he hopes “will do well” (585). And so he goes down the list: “María Font lives in Mexico City. [. . .] Shte writes, but she doesn’t publish. Ernesto San Epifanio died. [. . .] Ulises Lima still lives in Mexico City. [. . .] About Arturo Belano I know nothing” (594–85). And of course, of our voluble narrator from Part One of the novel: “García Madero? No the name doesn’t ring a bell. He never belonged to the group. Of course I’m sure. Man, if I tell you so as the reigning expert on the subject, it’s because that’s the way it is” (585). So much for expertise, of course. (We know otherwise, and better.) But also so much for García Madero, so full of hope and expectation when we last caught sight of him, over 400 pages ago, but who has been completely lost to memory, either official or unofficial, almost as though he had never existed.

What mark does our passage through this world leave? What impact do we have on those around us, or even on fate or destiny? What remains of us when our story comes to an end? Who will tell our story when we are gone? These, I think, are some of the questions Bolaño asks us, and his answers may sometimes leave us chilled.

Arguedas Tour: Puquio

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Arguedas’s life was full of movement, and this transience began in his early childhood. Son of an itinerant mestizo lawyer, whose wife (Arguedas’s mother) died while young José María was still an infant, he was constantly on the move, often cared for by relatives. Initially, his travels and displacements took him around the southern highlands, and the provinces of Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Cusco. Later, he would be enrolled in secondary schools on the coast, first in Ica and then in Lima, with a stint in Huancayo (in Junín) in between.

Some of this time was spent in or near the town of Puquio, in Ayacucho, which today is on the road that connects Nazca to Cusco (and on, even as far as Brazil). Puquio was the home of Arguedas’s stepmother, who holds a special place in the writer’s childhood trauma and mythology: apparently resentful of his very existence, she relegated him to the kitchen with the household’s Indigenous servants, who taught him Quechua and “treated [him] just as if [he] were one of their own.” This association with Peru’s Indigenous culture would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Arguedas would go on to revisit Puquio both as an anthropologist, undertaking fieldwork and research in and around the town, and as an author, making it the setting for his first novel, Yawar fiesta (1941), whose title combines Quechua (Yawar) and Spanish (fiesta): “Blood Festival.”

Yawar fiesta is as much about the town as it is about any individual characters. Indeed, arguably most of the characters are collective: the “mistis” or “principales” who are the landowners and merchants; the subprefect who represents the state; the town residents who have migrated to Lima, but now return for its annual celebration of national independence; and above all the “comuneros,” members of the town’s four ayllus, or Indigenous communities. The ayllus both collaborate and compete to put on the show that gives the novel its title: a bullfight that the other characters disdain as barbaric and dangerous, but which, when plans to modernize or “civilize” it fail, the mistis ultimately embrace as if it were their own.

Moreover, the novel opens with a visual description of the town as seen by a traveller arriving at the pass that gives access to the valley in which the town is set, offering a view in which the rooves and spires of the ayllus stand out: “‘Indian town!’ exclaim the travelers when they reach this summit and spy Puquio” (1).

We must have gone through or near this pass on our way to Puquio, but in the early dawn as our coach from Lima approached the town, it was not about to stop for us to take in the view. Later, however, we had lunch at a restaurant on the other side of the valley, from which we could see a similar vista to the one Arguedas describes. And although the landowners’ dominance has long faded, with agrarian reform and the break-up of the haciendas, the four distinct communities, each with their own small plaza and church, are still clearly visible.

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It doesn’t take too long to walk around Puquio, which has scarcely grown (only from 14,000 inhabitants to just under 16,000) in the decades since Arguedas was here. We visited all the plazas and churches. There are few modern buildings, though the town hall had to be rebuilt after it was bombed by Sendero Luminoso in 1992. Few if any buildings are more than two stories high. On the outskirts of town, on a small hill, is a bullring, fenced off and contained.

My friend Carmen’s father comes from Puquio, and her family still has a house there, a few blocks from the main square. It is rundown and barely habitable; the family has neither the time nor the resources to figure out what exactly to do with it. But it is also a very material connection, remnant and reminder for a generation that moved to the coast and reinvented themselves there, becoming fully limeños, but without ever forgetting their ties to the sierra.

There are plenty of signs of Arguedas in Puquio. A school is named after him, and a restaurant has the name “Misitu,” after the untamed bull that the comuneros bring down from the mountains in Yawar fiesta. In the main square is a statue of the writer, standing and wearing a flowing poncho, book in hand, apparently reading or declaiming to us below. In another square is a statue of a condor atop a bull, a version of the yawar fiesta (or turupukllay) that Arguedas’s novel mentions, but doesn’t describe at length, but which here and elsewhere has come to stand in for the novel as a whole. So this remembering is in part a misremembering.

Similarly, some have suggested that Arguedas’s own childhood reminiscences are unreliable. In José María Arguedas: Biografía y suicidio, Hugo Chacón Málaga argues at length that the writer’s mother was actually an Indigenous woman with whom his father must have had an affair. Whatever the truth of the matter (it seems unlikely to me), the point is that Arguedas’s story about the past was generative for his subsequent work: a story that, either way, is about fictive kinship, imagined relations that come to outweigh the real.

As the sun went down, we went to a small café run by a friend of Carmen’s. He called on a couple of musicians, who played huaynos (Andean ballads or laments) on a guitar and a charango, chatting and drinking with us for several hours. The songs came from various regions of the southern highlands, and the talk was both of Puquio and of other places, near and far. It was a very Arguedian way to spend the evening.

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Luna de lobos

Llamazares, Luna de lobos

Julio Llamazares’s Luna de lobos reads a little like a story of one of the so-called Japanese “holdouts,” soldiers who continued to fight the Second World War long after the official end of hostilities. In this case, though, the post-Civil War stragglers keep fighting not because they are unaware that the war is over, but because they know that in fact it isn’t.

At first, there are four of them: the narrator, Angel; Ramiro, who quickly establishes himself as the group’s leader, and his brother, Juan; and Gildo. They have been fighting on the Republican side in Asturias, in Spain’s Northwest. When the front collapses in the Autumn of 1937, they find themselves too far from the zones of continued Republican control (either around Madrid and further South or in Catalonia to the East) and a long way from the French border. So their only option is to take to the hills, near their home villages, hoping for some kind of support from their family and friends, without ever being able to go back home so long as the fascist civil guards remain in their pursuit.

Their tale is recounted in four parts, each a snapshot of a distinct year as the war comes to its conclusion and then the post-war reprisals continue: 1937, 1939, 1943, 1946. They are armed with machine gun and pistols, and make some small incursions on the hamlets in the valley, but these are mostly defensive or to secure food and shelter. Even before the war as a whole is over (and despite a vague plan proposed by one of their contacts), it is abundantly clear that they are fighting not for the Republic but for their own survival. And as time goes by, one by one they lose this war, too. Juan is the first to be killed, as he disappears on a quest to see his mother and bring back food and blankets. Then Gildo, betrayed and ambushed as they desperately try to rustle up money to bribe a local stationmaster to get them on a train to freedom. Then Ramiro. Until finally there is only one.

As this small remnant of the Republican army gradually diminishes still further, it becomes increasingly spectral, less and less human. Almost from the start, they are compared to animals, particularly the wolves of the novel’s title. They may still be alive, but theirs is a “bare life” indeed. They become ever more cut off from the community, as those who initially help them out (a shepherd who provides them with a sheep, a doctor who attends to a wound, for instance) become increasingly reluctant, either for fear of reprisals or in hope that they will simply go away. Towards the end, Angel imagines that in his years haunting the villagers he has become a “legend,” renowned as a man “indomitable and invisible [. . .] observing them from somewhere [. . .] immortal as his shadow, distant as the wind, astute, intelligent, invincible” (136). But when finally even his sister rejects him, having allowed him to rest in what is almost literally a subterranean grave under the farmyard, he realizes that he is at best an unquiet ghost, and that those who are still fully in the land of the living would rather he disappear once and for all.

Ramiro, before he dies and while he still has revenge of his own to enact, tells the local priest that the holdouts are “like God: we see everything from up there” in their hidden cave high on the hillside (93). And the narrator, the last of the group, is an angel by name and perhaps also by nature when he tells us he has “descended” at last, to visit his father’s grave (137). But he is also aware he has become “a pest for real,” “a pest whose proximity spooks both humans and animals” (125). He stands in no doubt for a memory that has to be erased for his loved ones to lead anything like a normal life. In the end, indeed, you can’t help feeling sympathy for them. His soul, he tells us, is “white” but also “rotten” (145). He is the living dead, a zombie as much as a revenant. When his sister tells him that “this land has no forgiveness. This land is cursed for you” (151), she is speaking out of simple realism.

But then there is the performative contradiction of the novel itself. It seems to be arguing for forgetfulness, in favour of the wholesale oblivion to which the Republican cause was consigned at the end of the war. It makes little effort to ingratiate either the so-called wolves or the lost cause as a whole with us: we are told, for instance, that Angel was once a teacher, but have little sense of his past life and still less idea as to why he took up arms for the Republic. The case it seems to be making is the same one made by the villagers, that these men are better off dead, that the past should remain firmly past. And yet it does so precisely by resurrecting these restless ghosts, by returning to their still-fresh graves. For something to be forgotten it first has to be remembered, and Luna de lobos is as much about remembering the collective edict to forget as it is about repeating it.

Los girasoles ciegos

Los girasoles ciegos

Los girasoles ciegos was Alberto Méndez’s only book of fiction, and he published it late in life, at the age of 63. Indeed, he died shortly after its appearance, and so didn’t live to see the extent of its tremendous critical and popular success, its multiple prizes and its film adaptation a couple of years later.

Méndez was less a writer than an editor: he worked for many years in the publishing industry. And this is nowhere more evident than in the second of the four interlinked stories that comprise this brief collection: “Second Defeat: 1940 or Manuscript Found in Oblivion.” For what else do editors do then deal with manuscripts and attempt to rescue them from actual or potential oblivion? And here the story is framed and consistently interrupted by editorial interventions that remind us both of the materiality of the text and the limits of our powers of interpretation. For the project to rescue anything from oblivion can never be fully successful. Something (as they say) always escapes.

But not every escape is successful. Or rather: for every escape there are as many blockages and dead ends. For here, the manuscript is the narrative of a failed attempt to flee Franco’s Spain. A young man and his pregnant wife have trekked up into the hills, but the woman dies in childbirth leaving the father and infant child in an isolated hut as winter approaches. In a tattered notebook, with a script that becomes steadily more cramped as the physical limits of writing and body alike loom ever closer, the man documents what he knows will be a voyage without return. Much of what he writes, especially on the margins of the page, is illegible or uncertain, and much else is unstated or indescribable. But we glean that he is a former poet, a youthful rebel and somewhat romantic adherent to the Republican cause. Now, however–and as the editor notes, he writes this in all caps and in a style imitating print–he declares himself “A POET WITH NO VERSES” (47).

Méndez’s book is devoted to such silent poetry, or poetry of silence. And he is aware that writing will never redeem the oblivion of defeat; on the contrary, the fatal seduction of writing is its claim that such redemption might be possible. Rather, it is careful editing, attention to the limits of the text, that reminds us that ultimately what is once forgotten can never be unforgotten. The best we can do is to recover the oblivion itself. Or in the words that he takes as his epigraph, from Carlos Piera’s introduction to an anthology of poetry (another series of texts embedded within other texts), the task is to “[accept] the existence of a void as part of us” (9).

This void is perhaps the same as the one that recurs in the book’s final pages, as the denouement of the title story, the “Fourth Defeat.” Here, a man who has been forced into hiding in his own house (another failed escape) finally emerges to save the honour of his wife, pursued by a lecherous priest, but also because his confinement has become intolerable. He recognizes that by showing himself he also dooms himself, that all he can manage is a final gesture that at one and the same time accepts and refuses the finality of defeat. He throws himself into the atrium of his apartment building. This leaves his son with an impossible memory–impossible because he realizes that he could not in fact have been tall enough to look though the window and watch his father’s body disappear from view. Like Méndez himself (born in 1941, after the war), he cannot have witnessed the trauma that haunts him. But nor can he now forget it.

See also: War; Spanish Civil War novels.

Adrianne Wadewitz

Adrianne Wadewitz

“Awadewit hates us,” murmured one of a small group of students as they shuffled into my office. I was teaching a course on the Latin American dictator novel, a course that I had given the title “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem.” One of the assignments asked students to write or edit Wikipedia articles. And as part of this project, we had come into contact with numerous Wikipedia editors, who often went by strange monikers such as EyeSerene, Wrad, Karanacs, and Geometry Guy. One of the editors who stood out and had helped the most went by the name of Awadewit. And Awadewit had bad news for my students: large parts of their contributions to the article they were editing, about the classic nineteenth-century text Facundo, were plagiarized. Hence this meeting to discuss what felt like a crisis.

Awadewit was firm but absolutely fair with my students. There was no tolerance for plagiarism, and the relevant sections were cut from the article forthwith. But there was no demonization, either. The students were well-intentioned, but hazy as to how to deal properly with sources. This was a wake-up call, and a sharp but surely effective way to learn what plagiarism was and why it was significant. This was a lesson they were not going to forget. Where they were fortunate was in that there was still time to fix the problem. And indeed, after plenty more work from the students as well as other Wikipedia volunteers, “Facundo” went on to pass peer review and be declared one of the very few (0.5%) of the online encyclopedia’s entries that are deemed “good articles.”

What was extraordinary, however, was the effort and care with which Awadewit had reviewed the article and my students’ contributions. Tracking down the plagiarism, for instance, had required reading some of the relevant books and scholarly articles that the students had used as sources. This effort was well above and beyond what was expected of these pseudonymous and anonymous editors we had been learning to work with in this assignment. It was no wonder that Awadewit had won deserved renown on Wikipedia not only as a prolific writer of so-called “featured articles” (the 0.01% of entries that are a cut above even “good articles”), particularly in the field of British Romanticism, but also as a careful and conscientious, but very supportive, copy-editor and mentor to other editors whatever their interests or expertise.

At some point, Awadewit and I started exchanging emails, from which I discovered that behind the moniker was Adrianne Wadewitz, a PhD student in English at Indiana University. We had a series of conversations I consistently found illuminating and inspiring, not least because this was someone from a similar background with similar goals. But she was much more familiar with Wikipedia than I was, and had been thinking longer about some of the issues involved in using it in the classroom. She was above all passionate about opening up scholarship beyond the Ivory Tower, and about writing articles on (particularly) women authors such as the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wikipedia offered space and scope for introducing such figures to a new audience, while retaining scholarly standards and rigor. At the same time, she and I were dissatisfied in similar ways with the current state of the encyclopedia, not least the limited and constricting ways in which (particularly) literary topics were treated. She was unsure about how exactly to bridge the gap between Wikipedia and the academy, or how to calm the mutual suspicions on both sides, which was in part why she still adopted a pseudonym online, albeit one that retrospectively seems relatively transparent.

As time went on, and as academic or pedagogical use of Wikipedia and other online digital resources came to seem more respectable, if still often experimental and cutting edge, Adrianne felt more comfortable with her dual role, and even began assuming a leadership role. She changed her Wikipedia username to Wadewitz, and organized or was invited to seminars and workshops in the burgeoning field of the “Digital Humanities” around the country. A few years ago, she invited me to participate in a panel she organized in Bloomington for a conference on “Writing Across the Curriculum,” and at last I had the chance to meet her in person. It was a delight. She was as smart, charming yet serious, thoughtful but good humoured, as I had expected; if anything, more so. We chatted about her work (she was on the job market by then) and it was clear she had a bright future.

Over the years, we have sporadically been in touch via email and Facebook, as well as on Wikipedia. In the wake of the Bloomington conference we co-wrote an article. Adrianne moved to Los Angeles, where she had a postdoctoral fellowship at Occidental College, learned to drive (in LA, quite a feat), and took up a new activity, rock-climbing, about which she began writing articles (especially about women climbers) on Wikipedia. She became involved in HASTAC, the pioneering “Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory,” and she asked me to write the Wikipedia article on FemTechNet, a feminist project to rectify online bias, not least on sites such as Wikipedia. She wrote frequent and insightful blog posts on issues such as gender representation online, and reflections on pedagogy and teaching. All in all, Adrianne was becoming an authority, and also an inspiration and mentor to others. She was interviewed and quoted by the Huffington Post and the BBC.

Most recently, she and I had been discussing the Wiki Education Foundation, a new entity spun off by the Wikimedia Foundation to run their educational programs in the US and Canada. I had proposed that Adrianne join their board, and I was happy when the WEF took up the suggestion with some alacrity. She was a perfect match for them, and I hoped that she would help reinvigorate and give direction to the fledgling organization. At the end of February, I happened to be going to LA for a talk, and got in touch to see if she had time for a coffee or the like. In the end, she drove across town to have lunch with me, and on a beautiful Southern California spring day, we spent an hour or so chatting about the WEF but also about the next chapter of her life: her recent job interviews, and the prospect of perhaps moving across the country to the East Coast. Again, it was lovely to see her, and it was good to see her happy and excited about the future.

Last week came the dreadful news that Adrianne had died, following a climbing accident in Joshua Tree National Park.

Adrianne’s death is a profound loss. She was a leader in Digital Humanities and in Open Education, and one of the most insightful and knowledgeable commenters on Wikipedia, pedagogy, and gender. She affected many lives, perhaps more than she herself would have suspected, such as those of my students whom she guided and inspired. A couple of times in the past few years, Adrianne suggested that we co-write an article that she proposed calling something like “The Professor and the Wikipedian.” The sad thing is that now she will never take up her rightful place as professor herself. But on the other hand, she already played both roles for so many people. Indeed, she was professor, Wikipedian, activist, feminist, critic, writer, editor, scholar, as well as pianist, climber, daughter, and so on. Awadewit, Wadewitz, Adrianne had so much impact on so many people. Her memory and her legacy will endure.

Felisberto Hernández

Felisberto Hernández, Piano Stories

The Wednesday quotation, part XIX: I’ve been reading Felisberto Hernández, a very striking Uruguayan writer from the first half of the twentieth century who is practically unknown, especially in English. Some of his short stories have been translated, in a collection entitled Piano Stories (introduced by Italo Calvino, which should give a sense of why they might be of interest), but so far as I can tell this book never sold well and is now long out of print.

“The Stray Horse” is a story that begins by giving life to very concrete things: a marble bust, for instance, or furniture, or a pencil that “was anxious to be allowed to write” (17). Before long the narrator, a child depicted with his grandmother and with his piano teacher, Celina, with whom he is obsessed, can say that “the objects were more alive than we were” (18). As the story progresses, however, it takes on the perspective of the man that the child has become many years later and turns into a long disquisition on memory and on aging in which abstract ideas are presented with surprising vividness, as though they were tangible objects. It is as though the two halves of the story were mirror images of each other: the life of things, and the things of life that unite in (or divide) the narrator’s consciousness.

For in time, with the effort to recollect the past, the narrator finds himself multiplied, fragmented, transformed. He imagines a shadowy partner, who follows him wherever he goes and whom he dimly discerns to represent or incarnate the world of others around him. Though the two are often depicted as at odds, they also make common cause in the narrator’s adventures in consciousness and memory. This leads to an extraordinary passage that ultimately proves to be about something like creativity:

I have to thank him for the times he followed me at night to the edge of a river where I went to see the water of memory flow. When I drew some water in a jug and was saddened at how little and how still it was, he would help me invent other containers for it and comfort me by showing me its different shapes in the different vessels. Afterward we invented a boat in which to cross the river to the island where Celina’s house was. We would take along thoughts that fought hand to hand with our memories, knocking over or displacing many objects in the house. Some of the objects may have rolled under the furniture, and others we must have lost on our way back, because when we opened the bag with our hoard it was always down to just a few bones, and the small lantern we had been holding over the soil of memory dropped from our hands.

Yet the next morning we always turned what little we had gathered during the night into writing. (43-4)

Meanwhile, here is something I wrote a few years ago specifically on “The Daisy Dolls” (“Las hortensias”).