Book Review & Critical Analysis; Explosion In a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion In a Cathedral

by Alejo Carpentier

       “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world,” sang John Lennon at the end of the 1960s. In the same song he sang, “But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you, brother, is you have to wait,” and “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” He was wise in warning the radicals of his generation that the anti-war movement could turn violent, thereby undermining the cause of peace. His warning went over some peoples’ heads. After the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, urban guerilla groups like the Weather Underground and later, The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Angry Brigade, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang amongst others, emerged. The Peace Movement took a turn towards violence and bombings on college campuses, fighting with police, kidnappings, and armed robbery became a marginal part of the New Left. A full scale revolution never happened, but any student of political movements will tell you that if it had, it would have followed the same old patterns of violence that often result from political upheavals.

Let’s go back to the French Revolution. What started as an uprising against the French monarchy turned into the Reign of Terror in which the revolutionaries turned on one another. The mass slaughter of anyone not considered purely revolutionary enough began and the murderous rampage continued until the Napoleonic Wars brought order back to France...by turning the revolutionaries into soldiers so they could invade and slaughter the people of other nations. It’s debatable whether France, Europe, and the colonies overseas would have been better off if the French Revolution, fought in the name of human liberation, had never happened. This is the historical controversy in which Alejo Carpentier’s novel Explosion In a Cathedral is set.

The novel begins in an unnamed city which the discerning reader will recognize as Havana, the capital of Cuba. A wealthy merchant has just died and his estate gets inherited by his two children and their cousin. The oldest child, Sofia, is the matriarch of the trio of teenagers. Her brother is named Carlos and their cousin, Esteban, is a sickly boy who suffers from chronic asthma attacks. Note how the novel begins with a transition between the older and younger generations. The stodgy and distant deceased father represents the Old World and the commercial project of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. The trio of teenagers who inherit the estate and the business, represent Cuba’s move away from colonialism towards the goal of national liberation that later resulted in Cuba’s Wars of Independence.

The three kids are ill-equipped to run a business. They are intelligent and curious. They read avidly from books that are imported from overseas and Esteban sets up his own physics laboratory where he attempts experiments without any guidance from a trained scientist. Instead of managing the inherited business, they use shipping crates to build mountains and bridges inside the mansion where they live. They become insular and cut off from the outside world just like a colony is cut off from the fatherland, using what resources they have to build their own society, but ultimately becoming isolated and naive regarding the world outside.

They remain hermetically sealed inside the house until one night, a man shows up. His name is Victor Hugues and he runs a bakery in Port au Prince, Haiti. He has come to do business with the teenagers’ father, only to learn that the elder merchant has died. He sees the opportunity and takes the kids under his wing. He is a benevolent man who helps them organize their house, their warehouse, and their lives. Hugues is of an indeterminate age, but probably in his thirties. As altruistic as he might appear, you have to wonder why a man of his age would move in with three teenagers as if he were one of them. One night during a hurricane, Hugues tries to seduce Sofia. She rejects him violently, but she also begins to have feelings for him as she transforms into adulthood. Carpentier associates romantic relations between Sofia and Hugues with heavy rainfall, one of the many instances of explosions throughout the book.

The house in Havana sets the tone for who Hugues becomes later in the book. He enters the scene with the ambition to help the teenagers set their lives in order. But his good will and leadership result in disruption. One instance is how he brings in a mulatto named Oge who is between two worlds. On his white side, he practices scientifically sanctioned medicine while on his Afro-Caribbean side, he practices the kind of folk healing we would associate with Voudou or Santeria. Oge cures Esteban of his ailment by removing an herb from a hidden garden. This cure leads to a problem for Hugues and the three teens since the herb was being grown by the man who manages the family business. Since the toxic herb is both the cause of sickness and a means of profit, Carpentier links illness with corruption. Hugues, the outsider, has to enter the enclosed world and bring in a new way of thinking so as to bring health into their private world. Hugues’ pattern of invasion with the intention of setting things right is a pattern that repeats throughout the entire novel.

The removal of the herb reveals a hidden conflict between Hugues and the stand-in merchant who he accuses of keeping double books. The man counters the accusation by revealing that Hugues and Oge are friends because they are both Freemasons with revolutionary intentions. Here again we have the conflict between the Old World of colonialism in the corrupt merchant and the New World’s promise of healing and regeneration through cultural syncretism represented by Hugues and Oge.

A big turning point comes when Huhues hears rumors of a police crackdown on revolutionary cells. He also hears about a slave rebellion in Haiti so he decides to bring his new family to Port au Prince to be a part of it. Upon arrival he finds that the rebels have burned down his bakery and, since they are killing any white person regardless of their political ideology, he sends Sofia and Carlos back to Havana and takes Esteban to Paris. This is the first time when the idea of disillusionment with the revolutionary process occurs.

In France, Hugues and Esteban get swept up into the French Revolution. They connect with the Freemasons there, but soon reject them for being preoccupied with mysticism and the occult and not sufficiently progressive enough. They join in with the Jacobins and Hugues becomes a loyal supporter of Robespierre, the mass murderer whose excessive use of the guillotine ushered in the downfall of the French Revolution.

Something else of importance happens here. While Victor Hugues can be interpreted as the protagonist of the novel, Esteban takes over center-stage while Hugues fades into the background though in many ways remaining the central character. The two split when Esteban leaves for the Basque region in southern France to translate revolutionary propaganda into Spanish for the purpose of exporting the rebellion. When the Spanish army begins to hunt down and kill the French Revolutionaries, Esteban reconnects with Hugues on a ship going to the Caribbean. But Hugues has changed. He has been appointed a commanding officer of the French Revolution and sent on a mission to liberate Guadeloupe. Esteban notices that Hugues is no longer friendly with him. In fact, he is no longer friendly with anybody since, as Esteban points out, leaders are men who have no friends, only followers and people they can use like instruments.

Esteban’s growing disillusionment with Hugues and the French Revolution builds him as a character. As he gets put to work doing unfulfilling clerical tasks, he watches as the French invade Guadeloupe and force the English colonialists off the island. True to the ideals of the Revolution, Hugues, as governor of the colony, declares slavery illegal. This liberation results in mass celebration, but also mass slaughter via the guillotine for anyone who doesn’t fall into line. Hugues grows more and more tyrannical by the day. The slaves are reluctant to go back to work even as wage laborers since the pay is low and working conditions are harsh. Hugues abandons the ideals of the French Revolution like a pair of worn out shoes, living like a petty king without any concern for the people he rules over. Like The Who sang in their classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss.” Through the disappointed eyes of Esteban, a true believer in the promise of the Revolution, we see how Hugues has become nothing more than a new colonial despot. No progress has been made and all the bloodshed was for nothing except the consolidation of power over Caribbean island territories.

Esteban does, however, find reason for living in the natural world. He escapes in the jungle where he experiences a kind of religious ecstasy. In a later passage, when he sails away from Guadeloupe, he feels the same way in his encounter with the sea. These nature-oriented passages are the best descriptive writing in the novel and the celebratory aspect of life outside human society offers a solution to the problems of human existence. Immersing himself in nature may be merely escapism, but it renews him and becomes his only source of joy and pleasure in an otherwise dismal, meaningless existence. At least as a coping mechanism, it serves him well.

Contrast that to the time he spends in French Guiana where the jungle is too thick for him to enter. Unable to escape into the wilderness, he remains a prisoner in the colonial outpost of Cayenne When Victor Hugues is removed from his post in Guadeloupe, he gets sent to the South American coast to manage affairs there. Esteban goes with him and the two old friends become even further estranged as Hugues becomes more callous, more cruel, more corrupt, and more greedy. By this point, Hugues no longer even thinks about the ideal of the French Revolution. Even worse, he reinstates slavery there without considering that he fought for the end of that evil practice not so longer ago. Out of pure disgust, Esteban quits his job and returns to Cuba.

When he returns to the family home, he finds Sofia has married a man who now successfully runs the family mercantile business. Carlos has become his partner. The whole household and their associates are all aflame with enthusiasm for the Revolution. But, in a way, the inhabitants of the household are just as insular as they were in the beginning of the novel. They started out being unaware of world events outside the colony of Cuba, or even events in Havana outside their house, and when Esteban arrives they are unaware of the tragic failure of the French Revolution and its bloody events. If Victor Hugues arrived as a stranger bearing glad tidings of a political movement that would usher in a new era of liberty and justice, Esteban arrives as a defeated familiar figure with news that the Revolution was a human rights disaster. Despite this, Sofia and the family welcome him back with open arms and give him back his old room, but continue to believe in the ideals of freedom. They haven’t seen the results of the Revolution with their own eyes. Esteban remains a melancholy character until the end of the novel.

From this point on, Sofia takes over center stage as Esteban fades into the background. When her husband dies, the police come to arrest her for her association with a revolutionary cell. Esteban helps her to escape and she sets sail for French Guiana. She has had an unfulfilled desire for Hugues’ love ever since the night he tried to seduce her. In Cayenne she takes a boat upriver to find Hugues living in a colonial mansion on plantation grounds. Although she is shocked to see he has become the kind of rich merchant the Revolution was supposed to overthrow, she moves in with him anyways. A hurricane hits once again when they make love. She soon becomes disillusioned with him since he is more concerned with business and power than he is with her. So she leaves, never to return. The end of the book finds Sofia and Esteban moving into a house in Spain as Napoleon’s troops invade and ransack the whole town where they live.

The prose in this novel is incredible. Alejo Carpentier was a student of classical music and this story isn’t written so much as it is composed. It doesn’t have chapters, it has movements. The presence of explosions act like symphonic crescendos and the hurricanes are just as much explosions as the outbreaks of violence. The depth of character and situation, along with the contrast of moods, are also multi-layered in ways that remind me of orchestral arrangements. And all of this comes through even though I read it in translation. The original must be even more amazing, but unfortunately my Spanish isn’t quite good enough for reading an entire novel. The biggest flaw is that it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in literature: conversations are written in reported speech rather than in direct quotations. The effect is that of listening to somebody telling me what the characters are talking about while I can hear them talking. I don’t know if this is the fault of the author or the translator, but it is one thing that interferes with the execution of the story.

The writing is unconventional though. It could be argued that there is no lead character. While Victor Hugues may be the most important character, large parts of the narrative are told through the eyes of Esteban and Sofia without Hugues anywhere in sight. The meaning seems to be in how Hugues’ trajectory from good hearted ideologue to cruel egomaniac affects the perceptions of the two cousins. Carpentier uses the historical fiction genre as a vehicle for a deeper statement about the human condition and the conflict between ideology and reality. Since both Esteban and Sofia start out by being starry eyed followers of Hugues only to have their faith in him deflated when they see his lofty ideals eclipsed by his flawed humanity, Carpentier is showing how placing faith in someone else with big ideas can lead to disappointment and disaster. Some readers have tried to link this novel with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution even though it was written before that historic event took place. I can’t say they are entirely disconnected though. Post-Independence Cuba in the early 20^th century was a time of political turbulence. Havana was saturated with political gangs that were constantly plotting revolutionary overthrow of the government and ideological communists were a part of that. It is possible that Carpentier turned to history attempting to predict what could happen if a revolution came to Cuba and decided to write a novel warning of the potential disasters that could result. If that is the case, it is uncanny how much he got right. By the way, Carpentier’s Victor Hugues is based on a real historical figure.

In the end, Esteban and Sofia no longer believe in the French Revolution. But they die defending Spain against the invading French army. Carpentier is thereby telling us that even though revolutionary violence leads to disaster, there is still a cause worth fighting for. That cause is the defense of one’s own territory. Political violence in the name of ideology is futile, but violence in the name of self-defense is worthwhile and noble.

The idea behind the paiting titled Explosion In a Cathedral that reappears several times throughout the novel changes according to what is happening each time it is mentioned. But one overall interpretation is that the cathedral can be any place where you find peace, comfort, and sanctuary and the explosion is any outside force that intrudes and disrupts the place of home. The explosion could be a house, a man with sexual desires, a Caribbean colony, or a revolution, a political leader, or a small town in Spain. These explosions are inevitable though, and you can’t keep the outside world from coming in.

Explosion In a Cathedral is a fascinating and a memorable book. I’d say it is a must read for anyone who wishes to contemplate human nature and what it means to have aspirations for the improvement of the world. It may be an important work of literature for Cuban people, but it goes much farther than that. Due to its execution and universal themes, it reaches the heights of a novel to be respected on the world stage. Alejo Carpentier reached for the stars and accomplished just what he wanted. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal

His Name Was Death

by Rafael Bernal

      Don’t make the mosquitoes angry. Actually it’s probably too late. Mosquitoes worldwide think the human race is inferior to them and we don’t amount to much more than a food source for this insect we consider to be a pest. In fact the mosquito population has a plan to enslave humanity to make food production more efficient for them. There is only one small problem; without a common language between people and these flying bugs, their plan is impossible to carry out. This is the natural dilemma posed by Mexican author Rafael Bernal in his quasi-science fiction novella His Name Was Death.

Actually, the mosquitoes are only half the story. In the center of it all is a man without a name. He wants to be an author so all of humanity can praise his genius, but they reject his works and he descends into a nightmare of alcoholism, homelessness, and humiliation. After getting fed up with the human race, he heads out into the jungle in southern Chiapas, Mexico where he encounters two villages of Lacandon people, a sub-branch of the Mayan Indians. He kicks his drinking habit and the Lacandon people take a liking to him. They give him the name Wise Owl. They convince him to become a shaman and then, while listening to the buzzing of mosquitoes in his hut, he notices patterns to their sounds. Wise Owl records these sounds as musical notations in a notebook and begins imitating them using a wooden flute. Eventually he learns to communicate with the mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, Wise Owl gets chosen to be the chieftain of the Lacandon people because he convinces the mosquitoes to leave them alone. At this point his intentions are beneficient. He commands the two villages to stop fighting and unite into one. When they are reluctant to follow his orders, he directs the mosquitoes to harass them until the villagers agree to obey. Otherwise Wise Owl leaves the Lacandons free to do as they please.

Wise Owl signifies colonialism in New Spain. Like Wise Owl, the Spanish kingdom was in turmoil when the conquistadors arrived in the Americas. Unannounced and unnamed, they landed and the native Toltecs and Aztecs welcomed them, believing them to be the prophesied arrival of the sun god Quetzalcoatl. After Wise Owl appears out of nowhere and becomes leader of the Lacandons, they designate him as Kukulman which is the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl.

But the mosquitoes are not simply passive subjects to Wise Owl, the pretender to the throne of his own invented Mexican kingdom. As Wise Owl communicates with them, he learns about the structure of their society. It is a rigidly hierarchical society led by an unknown mosquito king and ruled by a governing council supported by an intellectual class and a military. At the bottom of the hierarchy is a class of slaves. The mosquitoes claim to be more advanced on the evolutionary scale than humans and they are furious because people have polluted the waters and deforested most of the Earth. Their plan is to eliminate most of humanity and breed what remains as a food supply, a lot like how humans breed cattle and other farm animals. Since Wise Owl is the only person who can communicate with them, they offer him unlimited power over humanity if he acts as their spokesperson. And that offer is too good for him to refuse.

This novella was written in 1946, so it is possible that Bernal intended the mosquitoes to be a representation of the fascist state of Nazi Germany, though you could easily insert any totalitarian system into that metaphorical slot. Their ideology, rigid political hierarchy, and conspiracy to dominate the world certainly resonate with the trappings of fascism the world was familiar with at the end of World War II. The mosquitoes are a strong counterpoint to the Lacandons in the story and by placing Wise Owl in the center of the two, a connection can be made between the project of colonialism in New Spain and the fascist political movements of modern Europe.

While Wise Owl pursues grandiose fantasies of domination, just like Hitler, a third element enters into the story. A team of anthropologists arrive along with a company of loggers representing the encroachment of modern science and education into the world of the colonized while profiteering modern industry disrupts the natural environment that the colonial subjects depend.

The loggers are one weakness in the story. After introducing them, Bernal does not have them do anything. He misses an opportunity to further explore the conflict between modernism and environmental destruction, a major point of contention for both the Lacandon and the mosquitoes.

In any case, the anthropologists are led by a professor named Wassell. Accompanying him are his secretary Ms. Johnes and an ehtno-musicologist named Godinez. Ms. Johnes and Godinez are engaged to be married although Wassell wants her for himself. This love triangle proves to be their undoing.

Wise Owl tells them of his ability to communicate with the mosquitoes. They think he is insane, but Ms. Johnes finds him interesting nonetheless. He appears to be a benevolent eccentric who has tricked the Lacandons into thinking he is a god which is ironically only partially true because he didn’t make any attempt to take over their villages; they thrust him into that position and he just accepted it.

In fact, as a reader you may wonder if Wise Owl’s pact with the insects is merely symbolic or hallucinatory until the scientists refuse to believe his story about the mosquitoes conquering the world. Wise Owl convinces the mosquitoes to eliminate the competition for Ms. Johnes since he has also started having feelings for her. Even after proving that he can command the mosquitoes to kill for him, they still refuse to believe Wise Owl is sane and end up paying the ultimate price for their disbelief. However, their disbelief is also the undoing of the mosquitoes’ plan for world domination since if no one believes Wise Owl, their plot amounts to nothing. Through this complex of events and ideas, Bernal informs us that one weapon in the fight against fascism is to simply disbelieve that the authoritarian ruler has a right to their authority. The authoritarian’s power is diminished when people refuse to acknowledge their superiority. A king is only a king because people define him as such and not because there is anything in his nature to make him superior.

Finally, Wise Owl has a moral awakening when he sees Ms. Johnes suffering after the death of Godezin. He decides to sabotage the mosquitoes’ conspiracy by secretly meeting with the mosquito slaves. He uses religion and belief in God to convince them to rebel against their masters in order to set themselves free. But it all goes horribly wrong. This is one of the worst parts of the book because there is so little description of the battle. Bernal could have taken a cue from Henry David Thoureau who described a fight between ants in such minute and vivid language in Walden. Bernal’s lack of visual input makes the narrative fall off a cliff.

Where does all this lead? Recall the title. Just like Jim Morrison sang, “no one here gets out alive.” No one, that is, except for the worst of the mosquitoes and some of the Lacandons. Wise Owl accomplishes nothing but destroying almost everything he touches.

Bernal’s novella raises a range of interesting topics. One is the psychology of tyranny in the person of Wise Owl. He is a loser at the bottom of society so he pursues power in order to be at the top of society for compensation. Bernal is saying that there is an internal weakness and insecurity that motivates people to seek out positions of strength. Another theme is that of our place in the universe. The mosquitoes are a reflection of humanity even though we might be inclined to think of them as evil for plotting to conquer the world and farm humans as a food source. But how can they be evil when their goal is to do what humanity has done? What makes it wrong for them to do what is right for us? We look at mosquitoes and see nothing more than a pest that carries diseases like malaria. Yet we never stop to consider that we carry diseases that harm nature and we could very well be considered a pest by the vast majority of nature’s inhabitants. And maybe we aren’t justified in hating the mosquitoes for conspiring to kill most of humanity when we have been attempting to exterminate the mosquito population ever since pesticides were invented. We haven’t even been clever enough to succeed. Maybe we aren’t any better than them after all and if so, what does that say about our place in the natural world? Do we even have a metric of judgment that takes nature from nature’s point of view into consideration? Maybe such short-sightedness is a weakness on our part, one that could do us irreparable harm in the end. Finally, the story poses the question of what ethical responsibility supposedly advanced people have in our treatment of supposedly inferior indigenous people. Bernal doesn’t propose an answer to that question in this story, but the theme hangs heavy over the whole book.

His Name Was Death is jam-packed with a lot of complex ideas. Despite being a quick and easy read, it is the kind of story you have to analyze long after you finish reading it to flesh out everything it has to offer. It has a few clunky parts in the writing, but the wealth of ideas and their presentation override any of its imperfections. It should make you uncomfortable in subtle ways if you give it the time to allow its philosophical implications to sink in. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

Terra Nostra

by Carlos Fuentes

      In literary and historical studies, we hear a lot about post-colonialism. We hear far less about pre-colonialism and what led colonialists down their destructive paths towards the domination of their conquered territories. In his monumental novel Terra Nostra, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes tackles this subject, taking into account a myriad of byways, sidestreams, and subplots that all feed into this massive literary undertaking.

This is one of those densely written novels that immediately confuses the reader with layers of symbolism, non-linear narrative, characters that appear in multiple times and places without any clear explanation as to whether they are the same or not, shifting time frames, dream sequences inside of dream sequences, multiple characters with the same name, improbable anachronisms, and so much more. I could write an entire essay alone on all the things in this story that are deliberately meant to throw the audience off track. Fuentes repeatedly pulls the magic carpet out from under your ass so you find yourself tumbling through the air into disorienting labyrinths of prose without giving you many clues as to how to get out or where you will be if you ever do.

The best way to approach this monster of a novel is go straight into its heart and summarize thmain character Felipe el Senor. Please note that this summary does not go in the order in it follows in the narrative. He is the king of Castile in Spain and successor to his father, also named Felipe. The kingdom is a feudal estate so that the king is entitled to everything produced by the peasants. The king is also entitled to have sex with any bride on the night of their wedding. This is what happens when the elder Felipe rapes a peasant girl named Celestina before she can consummate her marriage with her husband. This sets all of Felipe el Senor’s life into motion. The younger Felipe inherits not only his father’s kingdom, but also his father’s syphilis which is called “the French disease” throughout the novel. Felipe thinks of his father as a disgrace so he becomes preoccupied with ending the familial dynasty by not having any children thereby not having a son to put on the throne when he dies according to the law of primogeniture. Felipe el Senor also turns to religion and theology to purify himself in order to get closer to the Christian God.

As Felipe el Senor is coming of age, he runs off to a beach where he has a chance encounter with four subjects if his feudal estate. All of them have utopian dreams. Celestina, the same woman who was raped by Felipe’s father, dreams of a world where carnality is not considered sinful and dirty. The monk Simon wants to live where there is no sickness or disease. Ludovico is a student who wants to see a world without religion. Pedro is an old man who is building a boat to sail off to another land. In this, the foundations are laid for exploring the attitudinal themes current on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that led to the impulse of colonialism. Felipe tells them to forget their dreams because he can bring paradise to his home in Spain. They go through the villages, telling everyone no matter their age, race, gender, religion, or class status that utopia has arrived and takes them to his castle. They indulge in a massive orgy complete with food and wine. Then Felipe tells his four friends to leave and has his knights slaughter everybody partying in the castle. This passage is derived directly from alchemical symbolism and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Felipe’s motivation for this mass murder is that he wants to prove to his father that he can be powerful enough to be king.

In the first third of the novel, another plot element that gets introduced is that of the Three Bastards. When Felipe takes a deer hunting party to the hills near a beach, presumably the same beach where he previously met his four utopianist friends, three identical men wash up on the shore. Each has a red cross permanently marked on their back and each also has twelve toes. They are also accompanied by three green-glassed bottles with rolled up parchments inside of them. We learn more about the Three Bastards, who they are and what they represent, later in the third section.

As mentioned previously. Felipe turns to mystical Christianity to cleanse himself of the filth of existence. His initial impulse is to invade Flanders, hire a mercenary army of Teutonic knights, and slaughter a heretical sect called the Adamites. We later learn that this cult was founded by Ludovico and Celestina and boasted the painter Hieronymous Bosch as a member. After the Adamites are killed, the Teutons celebrate by ransacking a church, getting drunk, fornicating, pissing, shitting, and vomiting all over the floor. This is the first of Felipe’s existential crises because he sees first hand that you can not rid the world of filth by killing people you deem to be unclean. The second component of his crisis is that he meets Ludovico in the church who explains the Adamite philosophy to him. Sex can not be sinful because it was not sinful in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Therefore, Heaven can be reached by living the way Adam and Eve lived before she ate the fruit. Remember that Felipe has sexual hang ups due to the impurity of his syphilitic body and his desire to end the Castilian dynasty by not producing a son to be crown prince. He usually lives a life of celibacy.

The alternative version of Christian practice causes Felipe to return to his partially built castle and meditate in his private chapel on a painting of Jesus and his disciples that anachronistically moves around like a television screen. Felipe explores alternate interpretations of the New Testament like the possibility that Mary was promiscuous and her cuckolded husband Joseph made up the story of the virgin birth to hide his disgrace. Another idea is that Jesus escaped crucifixion by having another man substituted for him on the cross at Calvary. These ideas come from Gnostic Christianity, a heretical theology that gets examined in other parts of the book. Felipe doesn’t believe in these theories, but they cause him to consider that there might be different ways to interpret the Bible and it also causes a theological rupture for him too. His mind is steeped in Augustinian thought so he believes both that getting close to God means cleansing oneself of the filth of existence and that the eternal represents divine purity and perfection while the temporal and ever changing world represents impurity which is evil. Whatever doesn’t change is eternal and divine therefore the only things in the world that don’t change are death and literature. Since the medieval Bible manuscript he owns doesn’t change, he erroneously believes that the written word is eternal and perfect. Whatever dies stays dead, so death is also eternal and perfect. He has realized that killing heretics does not cleanse the world of filth and evil, so he turns inward, building a castle with a private chapel where he will isolate himself from his kingdom and the rest of world. The chapel contains a necropolis housing the relics of his dead ancestors and stands as a monument to eternal death which he thinks of as perfection and divine purity.

All is not well in the necropolis-castle. Felipe’s wife Isabella is sexually frustrated so she brings a homunculus to life in a mandrake root and tries to create a golem using body parts she steals from the necropolis reliquary. Meanwhile, two monks who live in the castle tower use their religious practices as a cover for secretly pursuing their passions for art and astronomy, again indicating the coming of the Renaissance. The peasantry, due to their rotten living conditions, begin discussion on rebelling against the king. And in the middle of all this is Guzman, Felipe el Senor’s chief advisor, who despises both the king and the peasants yet plans to play the two sides off against each other to exert his own power. Felipe falls further into crisis as he begins to doubt the accuracy of the Bible and could possibly be losing his mind due to syphilis. By the end of the third section, it is obvious that Felipe’s desire to get close to God is little more than a massive ego trip. He feels no remorse for killing innocent people be they heretics, Jews, Muslims, or peasants and grows more and more into obsessive self-absorbtion as a quest to reach God by separating himself from the world. His attempt at redemption has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with escapism into a fantasy world that negates all that exists.

In the second section, a story is told by one of the Bastards, known as the Pilgim, about a journey to a new world across the sea. He gets on board a ship with Pedro, the elderly ship builder introduced earlier in the novel who dreams of sailing away to a new land. They use the planet Venus as a navigational guide since it appears in the western sky every dawn. This is a subtle hint of the Pilgrim’s identity since the indigenous Azteco-Toltec people associated Venus with their returning sun god Quetzalcoatl. If you are familiar with the mythology and Mexican history, you can already see where this is leading.

The ship gets caught in a whirlpool and sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. This is obviously symbolic of a passage through a birth canal. They land on the shore of what is now Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico. Pedro, a symbol of the Old World, gets killed while the Pilgrim is welcomed into a community of indigenous people who treat him as a hero meant to replace their elderly dying chieftain. That chieftain is kept inside a basket that just might resemble a cradle, but in any case, he gives the Pilgrim some clues as to his true identity and what he must do to fulfill his destiny. Before going off on a series of adventures and encounters, the Pilgrim meets with a young witch whose physical appearance links her to Celestina. On their first meeting, she is a young woman who promises him love if he pursues her into the interior of the New World, Eros in pursuit of Thanatos. Along the way he encounters monsters who we later learn represent his dark side which he must incorporate into his being. This involves Quetzalcoatl’s alter ego the Smoking Mirror. Mirrors, self-reflection, and death are closely linked throughout the whole novel.

The second time the Pilgrim encounters Celestina, she is on top of a pyramid where various rituals are performed including a human sacrifice in which the victim’s heart is cut out of his living body. At this point Celestina has aged into maturity and takes on the aspect of a goddess who devours all the filth brought to her by the community for the sake of disposal. Again, she gives further information and instructions to the Pilgrim.

The third time he meets with Celestina, the Pilgrim is being hailed by the Aztec people in the city of Mexica as their god Quetzalcoatl who is prophesied to return and bring peace to their empire. They give the Pilgrim access to everything in the city but he rejects all of it for Celestina who appears for the final time. This time she is an old hag and tells him he can only receive her love temporarily before he is sacrificially killed.

This whole second section is heavy in mythological symbolism, alternate time dimensions that pop into the narrative occasionally, and parallels with other themes in the first and third sections of the book. One example is that the Pilgrim on his journey purifies himself, eliminating his filth, and eventually rejects the world’s wealth to be in solitude with his goddess in a way that parallels the crisis of faith suffered by Felipe el Senor. As we learn in the third section of the novel, the elder King Felipe is actually the Pilgrim’s father and his mother is Celestina. Recall how Felipe rapes Celestina at the beginning of the story. The cycles of death, birth, and return are constant throughout this whole book.

In the third section, the trajectory of Felipe el Senor’s life and ascetic rejection of the world continues. The story of the Three Bastards takes on more prominence. One of them , Don Juan, arrives and seduces Felipe’s wife, Queen Isabella and then moves on to all the other women in the castle, namely nuns and duennas. The second Bastard, the Idiot Prince, marries a dwarf and the two of them retreat into a relic filled coffin because he can’t handle the complexities of life. The Pilgrim tells his story to Felipe, who doesn’t believe it, but it inspires Guzman and others to build a ship and sail off to New Spain which we now know as Latin America. Before leaving, Guzman leads a failed peasant rebellion against the King and then takes the peasants who lost the battle overseas to colonize the Americas.

But then there is the backstory of the Three Bastards who are all sons of the elder King Felipe and the brothers of the younger Felipe el Senor. They are raised as wanderers by Celestina and Ludovico. All three boys represent different characteristics of Castilian Spanish society. Also, some characters speculate that the Three Bastards are actually all the same person since no one ever sees the three of them together.

That carries over into another theme. While living in a Jewish village, Ludovico gets a job translating between Hebrew and Spanish. While working with the rabbi, he begins studying the cabbala. The rabbi goes into a long discourse on numerology. These long passages can be a challenge for those of us who are not inclined towards mysticism, but the important part that applies to the rest of the novel is the first three numbers. Number one represents totality but also solitude. Number two is a factor of conflict because two individual entities can not synthesize into one. Therefore three is necessary to unify one and two , holding them together in a trinity. This goes on until number 24 or so, but the explanation of the first three numbers plays out throughout the entire novel. Whether this has symbolic meaning or if it is simply a narrative device is debatable.

Lastly, the colonization project of New Spain and the settlers’ return to Spain is given marginal literary space. Colonialism turns out to be a disaster for both the Spainish and the indigenous people who live in the colonies. But despite the extreme length of this text, the colonialism really emphasizes what the novel is all about. Before leaving for the New World, Spanish society was in a state of crisis as it transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. They were emerging from feudalism, religious backwardness and hypocrisy, poverty, disease, and a desire for impossible utopias to be reached into democracy, economic mercantilism, science, rationalism, and social justice. Fuentes demonstrates how this flux in social changes was transferred over to the colonies of Latin America, a traumatic birth for a new society that left it in a mess that only replicated and exacerbated the failures of the Old World.

Felipe el Senor does not believe any of this is happening because it is not written in a book. Aside from depicting the conditions that lead to the troubled birth of Latin America, this novel forces you to ask the epistemological question of how we can know what we know with certainty. Memory and the written word are imperfect and inaccurate, so how can we be certain of anything if we rely on these to make judgments about truth? Fuentes plays a sly trick when he has one character say that the Jews had preserved Greek scientific manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and yet, all the historians I have read say it was the Muslims who preserved those ancient Greek writings. But what if those historians were wrong? Fuentes forces us to confront the limitations of our own ability to know.

There is so much more that you could spend a decade or two explaining all the different ideas contained in Terra Nostra. Another point that Fuentes makes is that one lifetime is not long enough to reach completion as a human being. Is he suggesting reincarnation? Maybe. But one idea I get from that thought is that since we can only experience one life within our lifetime, through the lives contained in books we can have access to an infinite number of other lives lived either in fiction or reality. Even if the written text is inaccurate, those fragmentary understandings can still help us to live more than once, at least vicariously. Terra Nostra is not a book for everyone, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s worth the effort.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

      We commemorate death and dying. But death is not what matters. What does matter is the life we live from birth until our exit from the world. Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz is all about the life of a Mexican business man, revolutionary soldier, and failed lover.

This story begins with Artemio Cruz lying on his death bed, surrounded by doctors, a priest, a business partner, and his family, all of which have some degree of respect for him, but no particular feelings of love. Through flashbacks, memories, reminiscences, and recorded conversations being played back on tape, the story of Mexico’s most powerful businessman is told. If it sounds a lot like Citizen Kane, that’s because the film by Orson Welles was a huge inspiration on Fuentes in his writing of this story. This isn’t just a retelling of that classic film as it goes off into so many different directions, some of which are more personal. One difference is that an early passage in the book goes into extensive detail about Cruz’s body, described both internally and externally along with all the physical pains and discomforts he suffers as he dies. At first you may wonder why Fuentes went through the trouble of describing a body in all its details, especially when physiology is such common knowledge. But the body is the center of everybody’s life; without it we wouldn’t exist so it serves as a starting point for the biography. One thing we gather is that Artemio Cruz has the same body that most people have. He doesn’t start out in life being any different from most other people in that way. At the base of this extraordinarily powerful man is an ordinary body. Fuentes starts playing on our sympathies from the start. Add to this the physical suffering of Cruz and we are forced to see his humanity before any other details are added.

The details that get added are not always favorable to Cruz. As the narrative alters between past and present, we understand how terrible he could be as a businessman. We get taken back to the end of the Mexican Revolution when Cruz marries Catalina in order to inherit her father’s estate, an hacienda and a treasure trove of material wealth. Due to the laws of primogeniture, the estate should rightfully have gone to Catalina’s brother who died in the Revolution. She blames Artemio Cruz for his death, but marries him anyways. Cruz had originally joined the Revolution because of the promised agrarian reform, but in the end he uses that reform to acquire wealth and property, betraying the ideals and the other soldiers who fought by his side. As a shrewd and ruthless businessman, his empire grows The more successful he grows, the more callous he becomes until he is unable to have feelings for anybody, possibly not even for himself.

Artemio Cruz’s thick skin serves him well as he fights in the Revolution. Several flashbacks from his deathbed tell the stories of gunfights, battlefields, imprisonment, and how he connived his way out of getting shot in a duel. His actions could almost be seen as heroic even though he leaves one soldier to die when he could have saved his life. That incident is the big turning point in his biography. He abandons that wounded soldier to return to a village he had spent the night in before. He had fallen in love with a young lady named Regina and spent the night with her. Upon his return he finds that she has been hung from a tree, along with other villagers, by troops of Federales. Distraught by her murder, Cruz carries memories of her throughout the rest of his life.

If there is anything we can have sympathy for in Artemio Cruz, it is his inability to fulfill his desire for love. His wife Catalina does’nt love him and only stays in the marriage to hold on to her wealth which she I inherited through him. His daughter does not love him either and her sole concern is inheriting his money when he dies. One humorous scene has Cruz sick in his bed. His wife and daughter ask him where he keeps his will and he amuses himself at their expense by lying about where it is kept while watching them frantically dig through his possessions in search of it and then crying when they can’t find it. Catalina isn’t without love though since she does love her daughter and she loved her son whose death she blames on Artemio Cruz. Otherwise, Cruz spends his life pursuing misstresses who don’t reciprocate his love or who hold on to him for a short time because they want his money. He was luckless with love and this failure casts a melancholy tone over the whole story.

This all comes back to Regina. Cruz revisits her name throughout his life story in the way the word “rosebud” keeps reappearing in Citizen Kane. For him , she is the only woman who ever said she loved him like she meant it. She died the day after they met. After all his romantic failures, he ends his life with nothing more than a memory of one night. It is hard to tell if Regina even loved him. His memory could be inaccurate or he could be deceiving himself. She could have just been a prostitute that he hired for one night. We can never be sure how she truly felt. But he clings on to the memory of his love as if that one victory were the only one that ever mattered in his life, a memory that would crush him if he ceased believing in it.

The only other source of love in Cruz’s life is his son Lorenzo. When they travel together back to the derelict hacienda on the beach in Veracruz where Artemio Cruz grew up, they bond as father and son. And yet, the young Lorenzo tells his father that he has chosen to go abroad to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. (This might be a nod in the direction of Hemingway) It is there where Lorenzo dies. Catalina blames Cruz for the tragedy, but through a clever narrative device, we have to infer why from a later passage in the story.

At a ball thrown by Artemio Cruz for the upper classes where he lives, we learn how he has no friends. The attendees are nothing but entertainment for him. They are puppets and he pulls their strings. That is all he wants from other people. He wants to make them dance since his sole amusement in life is control over others. A young man approaches him and asks for a loan to start a business. Cruz lectures him on his philosophy of life. Power is the result of rebellion. Power has to be earned. During this explication, there are flashbacks to Cruz and Lorenzo riding horses in the jungle of Veracruz. If you put this conversation together with the cause of Lorenzo’s demise, you can deduce why Catalina blames her husband for their son’s death. The same narrative device is used to narrate the death of Regina. Cruz returns to the village and learns about the hanging of the villagers. He sees a body hung from a tree. One of them has the feet of Regina and he sees the hem of her dress. It is never explicitly stated that she died, but your mind is directed to a blank space in the narrative that is inevitably filled in. It is all the more horrifying because the brutality is shown indirectly, leaving your mind to see it subjectively. This technique is used in film. Notice that in the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, you never actually see the knife stabbing into the woman.

The closer we get to Artemio Cruz’s death, the farther back in time the flashbacks go. The story of his childhood is the last thing we learn about him before his demise. Although surrounded by the lush jungles of Veracruz and the paradise of the nearby beach, it is a childhood of poverty where he was raised by a mulatto on an hacienda that was burned down during an uprising. His unenviable childhood at the bottom of society comes full circle as Artemio Cruz dies as one of the richest and most powerful men in Mexico. As the birth and death of this man are tied together at the end of the narrative, Carlos Fuentes writes some lyrical passages portraying all the natural landscapes and the varieties of people inhabiting the land of Mexico. He thereby makes Artemio Cruz a cipher for the nation of Mexico and its entire history up to the modern era.

It is impossible to talk about this novel without mentioning its literary technique. Such a technique can be said to be nothing short of cinematic. In fact a lot of film techniques are used in the narrative construction. A craeful analysis reveals not only the use of flashbacks for narrative layering, but also camera techniques like overlays, close ups, panning, montage, and rapid cuts. The action sequences have the visual impact of western movies too. This is not accidental as Fuentes consciously used film techniques to write. It isn’t just visually cinematic though. Fuentes adds in the subjective dimensions of literature that are inaccessible through the medium of film. The sensation of feeling internal physical pain or the sadness one feels when haunted by the memories of failed love affairs can only be delivered through dialogue in cinema, but literature as a subjective form can use language to deliver these sensations in a direct way that other mediums can not. This is done successfully in this novel.

But as entrancing as this whole book may be, it does have its flaws. In a postmodern sense, the narrative has the feel of a collage incorporating different author’s styles in different passages. While Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway were previously mentioned, there are other passages that mimic the styles of Faulkner, Joyce, Sartre, Neruda, and others. At times this mimicry feels too obvious and derivative. Another flaw is that in the attempt to make Cruz an all-encompassing symbol of Mexico in the same way that James Joyce made Leopold Bloom a symbol of Ireland, doesn’t quite work. Although Cruz experiences Mexico at all the levels of its social strata and embodies the contradiction at the heart of the Mexican Revolution in the way he betrays its ideals, he isn’t quite big enough as a symbol to contain all that Mexico has to offer. The pre- and post-Conquest eras of Mexico up to the Revolution barely figure into his story, for example, and it’s not convincing to say that Mexico is as unlovable as a country as Cruz is as a person. Mexico really is a country that has a lot to love in its culture, its history, its geography, and its everyday people. Despite these flaws, this is still an amazing novel and one of those books that you really must read before you die.

The Death of Artemio Cruz is a landmark, a turning point, and a cornerstone in the development of Latin American fiction. The writing style is tricky and off-putting at first, but the effort to understand it is worthwhile. Against your better judgments, you may find yourself sympathizing in part with Artemio Cruz as he suffers while dying. Just give in to those feelings, but don’t forget the terrible things he does as well. That’s what literature is for. The world is a messy and confusing place and experiencing that through the written word can only enhance our understanding of it if we take the time to think.

 

Salman Rushdie attack: suspect charged with attempted murder

Suspect, 24, from Fairview, New Jersey remanded without bail over alleged attack on author in New York

Read the full article on The Guardian here