MODL 5304 Postings

Before the accident, Brother Augustine quotes the Roman poet Juvenal, “Mens sana in corpore sano”. This Latin expression points to the complementary relationship that the body has to the mind. The idea being that a sound/healthy mind can be found in a sound/healthy body and this describes Cuellar’s position as a young schoolboy at the beginning of the Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Cubs. Cuellar is not only able to be the first of his class academically, but over the winter he overcomes his athletic disadvantages to become a first-rate footballer. Juvenal’s line translated vice versa to the true meaning argues that an unsound body leads to an unsound mind. With Cuellar’s emasculation his body became unsound, affecting the way people treated him and eventually transforming his mind from sound to unsound. At first, Cuellar seems to recover and even has hope that his manhood can be restored, but as time goes on this hope fades and he faces an ever-widening gap between himself and his barrio and the rest of society. However, it is not society that ostracized him, but his own mind. He watches his friends fall in love, marry, and have children, but his physical emasculation conditioned his mind to bitterness. Just as the dog snarled and attacked him physically, he snarls and attacks his barrio with jealousy. The story is told in the voice of the barrio. There is a continually flow of description and dialogue between the friends of the barrio, not as in a play, but rather as choppy prose. The remembering voices stumble over each other, telling the story of Cuellar’s descent from merely physical deformity to mental and emotional derangement.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1947) expresses Aimé Césaire’s understanding of black consciousness, which he called negritude. Césaire’s juxtaposition of European and African realities and expressions during and after colonialism reveals a need to distinguish black culture as something unique. Even in his style Césaire is defiant of western culture in that the effects of the Harlem Renaissance, French Surrealism, and Post-colonialism merge in the Notebook to create a long poem free from convention. Reading the Notebook is like being tossed back and forth between the Atlantic waves and the island of Martinique to the point of becoming seasick at the continual movement of fluid sensual imagery and concrete historical descriptions.
Césaire proposes three traits that have defined the white/black, European/African relationship for the past five centuries. He argues that even though Europeans uprooted Africans and tried to domesticate and Christianize them in the Americas, their “prodigious ancestry” continues and will throw off that tyranny (32). Although Césaire has “sworn to leave nothing out of our [black] history” he is selective in his memory (27). He boldly and rightly derides the enslavement and abuse of Africans by Europeans, but to pass all the blame of the transatlantic slave trade on whites and to present blacks as uprooted victims ignores African agency. The slave trade with Arabia and between kingdoms in Africa is documented well before Europeans discovered the Americas. Once transatlantic slavery ensued in the sixteenth-century, Africans sold Africans as slaves to Europeans.
Césaire’s argument begins to make more sense once Africans have been brought to the Americas and the historical process of domestication began transforming free men into slaves and eventually into humbled, second-class Americans under colonial rule. It is in this development that Africans were “inoculated with degeneracy” so they might be preyed upon (33). In Césaire’s phrase “remember-the-old-saying: beat-a-nigger, and you feed him” the propaganda of colonialism is found and the curse of Ham justified.
Closely tied to the idea of domestication is a Christianization that has been grounded into the minds of Africans so that they make the “sign of the cross without perceptible motive” (3). He criticizes the Eucharistic communion that religiously united whites and blacks, but realistically reinforced the hegemonic situation through “the bread, and the wine of complicity” (6). Instead, Césaire calls for a return to non-Christian practices that would separate blacks from whites as he chants the shamanistic mantra “voum rooh oh that the promised times may return” (21).
Césaire desired to be “a trustee of its [negritude’s] resentment” (37) and truly much anger concerning the past is expressed in the Notebook. Much of the power of the poem is found in the keen use of language which simplifies people into good and evil, black and white. Although many of Césaire’s sentiments are justified, the complexity of the historic relationship between Europeans and Africans are not resolved in his quest for negritude, but rather reduced to an unhealthy perception of “us” versus “them.”

Surrealism.  I found Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo hard to read, but interesting.  It definitely succeeded in invoking a sensation of eeriness.  In one sense the work was very fleshly and sensual but at the same time mystical and otherworldly.  In the town of Comala, which is described as a type of hell/purgatory where dusk fills the sky with blood, there is not a sharp distinction between those who are dead and those who are alive.  Rulfo intertwines descriptions of the flesh and the spiritual world so that they almost seem as one.  Against the storyline of Juan Preciado’s mission to find his father, Pedro Paramo, is the spooky telling of the past events of the town of Comala in which the Paramo family wrecked havoc through murder, rape, and illegal bullying.  Throughout the novel there are cries for redemption and in most cases it seems out of reach.  Important to the story is the Catholic understanding of confession and absolution.  Upon the death of Miguel Paramo, the priest Renteria refuses to grant Miguel’s father’s wish to bless him and pray for his soul.  In speaking to God Fr. Renteria says, “For my part, I hope you damn him to hell” (26).  The Paramo family was not the only ones denied forgiveness.  The whole town, which was abandoned by the bishop, seemed in a state of lonely misery as their spirits wandered the ghost town and murmured “Pray for us” (59).  Juan Preciado’s mission turns out to be less about finding his father as much as discovering the spirit of his father.  The work ends with Pedro Paramo’s death and no narrative is given concerning Juan Preciado.  He has entered a world unknown to most, somewhere between life and death and the question arises whether or not he can return to the “real” world.

“All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge”.
-Soren Kierkegaard
My first impression of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” was this is postmodern meaninglessness. It seems a denial of everything with value and what value is placed on things in the play is not that important. After finishing the play my thoughts changed as I realized he wanted us to think about what we are doing here on earth and to realize that we will not be here forever. This is not a play to entertain, in the sense that the reader is rejoicing or weeping throughout, but rather Beckett wants the reader to contemplate death, the end – what matters?
The play’s setting is a mystery. Not only is a year or country not given, but even the room where the play takes place is not clarified. Is it a bomb shelter? I’m not sure, but perhaps this is meant to implore the reader to apply this absurd situation to his own place and time.
Although the play overall seems anti-religious, there are a number of biblical references, ie “what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene?” (12) (A reference to Beltashazzar’s party found in the book of Daniel). I am not sure I understood the story of the tailor on pages 22-23. In comparing the trousers and the world I would interpret it as a critique of the world made by God which apparently has gone to pot.
An Act without Words also seems a critique of God, or some higher power outside of man, who continually taunts man. What man is offered in life is only temporary and often out of reach. Man seems only to notice what others have called to his attention.
The article on existentialism was helpful in understanding the technique of absurd writing. The aim of “existentialists,” was to expose the illusions of everyday
life and recall men to a more serious view of their responsibilities. This is what I found in Beckett.

“And, even accounting for the rest, you lack one thing: God!”
-From “To Roosevelt” by Rubén Darío
In Dario’s poem despising the political strength of Theodore Roosevelt, he accuses the United States of being “the future invader of the guileless America of indigenous blood that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks in Spanish.” Recurrent in the poem is Darío’s insistence that despite the power wielded by the English-speaking people of the Americas, the heart and soul of the western hemisphere resides in the Spanish-speaking peoples who have faith in someone bigger than the United States. What the United States lacks is religious virtue and when virtue “takes the form of a cross”, as Jose Marti puts it, “they cast it off in horror.” Dario seems to say that it has been Latin America that has born the cross and is destined for future glory.
Both Dario and Marti desire to create a connection between contemporary and ancient Americans. Marti argues that “The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked.” So he is willingly to cut off American ties with Europe, not only socially and economically as he argues elsewhere, but also historically in order that Americans may take pride in their indigenous roots. Dario also speaks this way when he talks of “the guileless America of indigenous blood”, hinting not only at Latin Americans’ ancient character, but also of their innocence.
Despite Marti’s rejection of Europe and its ways, and Dario’s despising of the United States they both point to Christianity, not native to the Americas, as a unifying factor and a strength of Latin Americans. That said, Latin American Christianity has historically been syncretic as Christian practice was often commingled with indigenous religious traditions. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Virgin of Guadalupe who was the unifying symbol during the Mexican Revolution in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe replaced an indigenous one without losing its non-Christian aspects. The Creoles, Mestizos, and Indians adopted the symbol of the Virgin of Guadalupe as something unique and defining of New Spain, a religious identity that gave them a special place in the sight of God. If anyone is interested in this topic a good book is Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence (1994) [in Spanish it is Memoria mexicana (1987)] by the Mexican author Enrique Florescano who argues ways in which the peoples of Mexico unified themselves through the adoption of symbols and the rewriting of history in order not only to give themselves a place in the world, but to distance themselves from Spain. When I read Marti and Dario it seemed as if the spirit described by Florescano continued or perhaps was revived during the Modernismo movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

One of Flaubert’s friends commented on Sentimental Education that it is “a book with a non-existent subject, no plot at all and featureless characters. It’s rather interesting” (xxvi). After reading this quote the first thought that came to mind was George’s, on Seinfeld’s “The Pitch”, response to Jerry’s question “Well what’s the show about?” George emphatically states: “It’s about nothing.” There does seem to be a lot of similarity in the outline and overall worldview of Seinfeld and Sentimental Education, specifically in the idea that despite all the “somethings” that are happening it feels as if “nothing” really matters nor is anything being accomplished.
Just as Flaubert set out to record the morality of his generation, Seinfeld appears to be doing the same thing. There is a point where one asks oneself “what really matters?” For Flaubert’s protagonist, Frederic, it is his almost self-destructive love of an older married woman. From the outside his actions and thoughts are pitiful and illogical, but then one thinks of the odd and seemingly pointless things one does on a daily basis and it is easier to relate to Frederic.
By the end of the novel all Frederic and his friend Deslauriers have are memories. Deslauriers states that they both failed to realize their dreams because, “I was too logical, and you were too sentimental” (458). There was always a reason why Frederic could not be fulfilled. Always an “if” such as: “If I’d had a woman who loved me, I might have achieved great things” (20). He is never fully contented, except in fleeting moments of rapture when she pays a bit of attention to him. Instead he is continually disgusted with others’ happiness because he sees them as settling for so little when he can never obtain his ambitions.
It seems that Frederic needs a lesson from Candide on being content and striving for achievable goals. Of course the fact that he can never truly be with his love, similar to Sab perhaps in some ways, is not only the tragic drama of the book, but also what makes it appealing.
Because of his money, Frederic had time for this ridiculous passion that led to immense times of ennui. At the costume party where everyone appears to be enjoying the pleasures of life, Frederic “caught sight of whole worlds of misery and despair” as a woman dressed as a Sphinx commented that “Life isn’t much fun” (137). As is apparent in the novel, life is not fun because everyone is focused on their own selfish ambitions. There is nothing in the novel to bring people into a truly happy communal setting.
To tell the truth I prefer Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Hugo offers hope and sacrificial love whereas Flaubert offers ennui and infatuation. Flaubert can be complimented perhaps on bringing to light the morality of his generation, but if anything it is an example not to follow. Like Seinfeld, Sentimental Education may reflect the day-to-day reality that we can all relate to, but truly there has got to be more to life than that.

“It can be that at times the soul is free and noble though the body be enslaved and base” (30). -Sab

I enjoyed Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda y Arteaga’s Sab more than I though I might. I thought the similarities between Sab and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written a decade later, were interesting, specifically the way in which the main African slave characters were sacrificed, or rather in each case offered themselves up as sacrifices, in a society that could not appreciate their souls.

A theme I saw repeated was the idea of transcendence of the soul over the body. For Sab this is a crucial concept because he realizes that he will never be able to express his earthly/material love for Carlota, but he dreams of uniting with her in a heavenly realm when his soul leaves his body in pursuit of his angel. In Sab’s dying lines we read his expression that “I no longer live…yet I still love” (147). In many of Sab’s quotes there is the romantic idea of “self” – that is a part of a human (ei: the soul, love, etc.) which though contained in a body, can transcend it and therefore is the more important part of our being.

I thought Carlota’s dream of living in Cuba, amongst the innocent nature of Pre-Columbian times, was interesting and perhaps comparable to our discussion on Candide. Candide experienced type’s of gardens and of course the best one, El Dorado, did not satisfy him because of his ambition. In Carlota’s desire there is a longing for a utopia, a type of Garden of Eden, but it was just a dream and the reality she had to live out was anything but utopian.

Overall I thought the work was well constructed, humane, and touching.

Enlightenment thought took on various characteristics depending on the thinker, but in general it was a time of challenging accepted laws and doctrines with scientific and natural explanations. With his novella Candide (1759), Voltaire took the literary opportunity to contrast the recent thought reflected in Pangloss’ argument that “this is the best of all possible worlds”, with reality.  One of the questions answered in Candide is, “what is the natural state of human nature?”  Instead of blaming the nature of humanity as tainted with original sin, Voltaire argues that humans are naturally good and it is the illogical social conventions, the hypocritical religious institutions, and the ambitious martial/political machines that jade and corrupt an otherwise happy existence.  The lack of cosmopolitanism is obvious throughout the work both on a general and individual level.  The naïve and good-natured Candide traverses a world where he sees armies that rape and murder innocent civilians, religious persons who beat and burn their fellow neighbor, and social elites who separate humans according to the manufactured ideas of noble and common.  After Candide has murdered the Inquisitor and the Jew, Cunégonde asks how someone “born so good-natured” could commit two murders in as many minutes.  Candide’s reply reveals Voltaire’s contempt for the institutions that change good into evil, and innocence into degradation:  “when one is in love, jealous, and has been whipped by the Inquisition, one becomes a stranger to oneself” (18).  Voltaire argues that even though murder is a crime against nature it is the unnatural actions of others that corrupted Candide.  While being horribly whipped to the rhythm of religious hymns Candide questions “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what on earth are the others like?” (13). The one community in which Candide does find harmony is in El Dorado.  In this mythical city Candide experiences a society that lacks many of the attributes that Voltaire sees as destructive in the contemporary world.  When Candide asks, “you don’t have monks who teach, who argue, who rule, who conspire, and who burn people who don’t agree with them?” the reply is an unequivocal “We’d have to be mad” (39).  In El Dorado Voltaire defines the perfect religion as the acknowledgement of one God who is continually thanked.  There is not the “religious zeal” that leads to “dreadful excesses” as experienced previously by Candide (7). El Dorado’s monarch interacts as an equal with the people he governs.  Candide is astonished at the protocol to embrace the king, as humiliation and inequality are unnatural.  There are no jails, no courtrooms, and no political or military ambition.  In Candide’s world there are laws for war, but the only law mentioned in this utopia is the law against tyranny.  Instead of expending their time with killings and humiliations, the people of El Dorado devote themselves to scientific achievement as is revealed in their huge gallery of “mathematical and astronomical instruments” (40).  By the end of the novella Candide accepts the imperfection of the world and determines with his companions to avoid evil through manual labor.  Voltaire’s enlightened vision involves a world devoid of “boredom, depravity, and poverty” because humans are united in the belief, “Let us work without philosophizing” (78 & 79).  The limited cosmopolitanism found at the end of the story is summed up in the narrator’s words that they all “did something useful” (79).

“I am a historian, for I can trace a complete picture from individual extant data, and I know where parts are missing and how to complement them.” –Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831)I thought this quote, found in our Enlightenment article, was both bold and yet revealing of the truth about history.  I do not use the words “truth” and “history” in the same sentence lightly for it reminds me of the work by Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob entitled Telling the Truth About History (1994) in which, similar to Hayden White’s article, the objectivity of history is challenged, and specifically for what we are talking about this week in class the positivism of the Enlightenment historians.  They argue some good points, but in a sense they destroy more than they build.  They attempt to leave the reader in doubt of not only religious, but also scientific understanding.  In the end all they offer is relativism, which of course is in vogue in many circles, but I see as destructive.  Hayden White’s “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” attempts to reduce history to fiction by arguing that “the manner of making sense of it is the same” (98).  In other words the means, which is using a narrative style, using metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, etc., in the writing of history necessarily makes it fiction.  In Keith Windshuttle’s book The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past a defense is made in the name of traditional history.  One of Windshuttle’s targets is White whose arguments he contends are incoherent.  In response to White, Windshuttle basically argues that if the historian performs a “poetic act” in choosing a framework, which is mutually exclusive – for White acts as if the definability of the four tropes is powerful and determinative – than how can historians overlap, merge, and create dual existences of tropes in their writing?  Historians are not so confined as White contends.  They are free to choose a variety of stylistic devices in the construction of history, but they embellish and explain rather than predetermine its outcome.  Niebuhr’s quote is bold in the sense that he claims to not only be able to put together the puzzle pieces of history, which are often complex or missing, but also to complement them in such a way that they flow together.  Between the two I feel that Niebuhr is more balanced than White in that both admit that history is constructed, but Niebuhr struggles to find what truths can be brought forth, whereas White denies its existence.  My question to White would be if everything is a fiction, than what truth are we to take away from his arguments?  I am not trying to demean everything White argues because he makes some good insights on which historians should reflect.  However, fully accepting his arguments that history is fiction and that its origins are in the “literary imagination” (99) leads to the denial of any kind of truth and undercuts who we are as human beings, for in the end that is what history is about.        

“My two usual guiding lights are so hidden:

Reason and art so drowned by the waves,

That I begin to despair of finding harbor.”

From “The Voyage”

By Francesco Petrarca, (1304-1374 AD), more commonly called Petrarch

In this last stanza of the poem Petrarch mourns the elusiveness of “reason and art” which is paralleled by the appearance of “Scylla and Charybdis” in the first.  The sea monsters of Greek mythology not only reveal Petrarch’s dramatic feelings in the classical style of the danger of lost understanding, but also his attempt to integrate Greek literature into his own work.  Referred to as the “Father of Humanism”, Petrarch is often credited with creating the concept of the “Dark Ages” as a reference to those centuries after the decline of the Roman Empire and before the contemporary period.  One of the key distinctions that separate the “Dark Ages” from the classical and renaissance periods in Europe was the influence of the eastern part of the old
Roman Empire, the Greeks.  

In the article “The Origins of Humanism” Nicholas Mann outlines the emergence of humanist thought in the Middle Ages.  The climax of his article, that is the point at which he argues that “humanism may be said to have entered a new phase” (17) is when the Greek language reentered the circles of educated Europe allowing them access to all the philosophical, theological, scientific, and literary works of both the classical and modern Greeks.

Only a few centuries after the beginning of the first millennium the
Roman Empire was becoming more and more separated, not only administratively, but also religiously.  Although the official split in the Christian Church, which divided Catholic West from Orthodox East, did not occur until 1054 AD the divergence of the two cultures had occurred centuries earlier.  Greek thinkers with their wealth of knowledge and literary works were content to center themselves around
Constantinople and other major cities of the eastern empire. 

During the crusades the East-West divide was evident as easterners like Anna Comnena, princess of Byzantium during the First Crusade, commented on, what she considered, the uncouth and unreligious Westerners who were pouring through Byzantium into the
Middle East to shed blood in the name of Christ.  The fact that a woman was able and allowed to write such a history as Anna Comnena’s Alexiad helps to demonstrate the cultural difference of Latin West and Greek East. 

Once
Byzantium was overrun by the Turkish armies in the fourteenth century, expatriate Greek scholars helped to revive classical learning in the West which already had been rebirthing the ancient Latin texts in, what Nicholas Mann calls, the “centres of proto-humanism” (6).  Mann notes such humanists as Desiderius Erasmus, Leonardo Bruni, and Guarino of Verona who were influenced by the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoras. 

The focus in Mann’s article is Renaissance Italy and therefore Catholic humanist scholars are those mentioned, but the Protestant Reformation began not long after Greek and Latin studies penetrated the academic centers of
Europe.  One notable Protestant humanist was Philipp Melanchthon, a protégé of Martin Luther, who was a professor of Greek at Wittenberg and founded a number of classical schools across the Protestant kingdoms of
Germany.  Melanchthon not only drafted the first systematic outline of Protestant theology, but also translated the major doctrines of the Lutherans into Greek and sent it to the Patriarch of Constantinople.  Melanchthon hoped that some accommodations could be reached between the Eastern Church and the Western Protestants that might unite them religiously, if not also politically.  However, this was not to be.  East and West remained divided religiously and politically.    

I agree with Nicholas Mann’s focal argument that the entrance of Greek and the literature that came with it into
Europe propelled what might have solely been a renaissance of Latin into a more diverse and intellectually deeper movement.