Keys to Success in AP Literature and Composition

1. Reading recursively and querying the text to discover and to construct meaning.
2. Discerning patterns and signals in the text; drawing inferences as to purpose and effect of same.
3. Connecting and synthesizing observations about textual detail (e.g., figurative language, imagery, symbolism, diction, setting, characterization, tone) to make meaningful claims about the larger elements of structure, style, and theme.
4. Engaging in intelligent discussion, including active listening and constructive speaking.
5. Describing how language contributes both literally and figuratively to the meaning of a work.
6. Writing to capture and clarify ideas.
7. Forming meaningful claims and offering detailed textual proofs in cogent and effectively composed arguments and analyses.
8. Composing genuine, well reasoned critical essays, making reasonably sophisticated decisions about semantics, register, rhetorical device, syntax, organization, and structure.
9. Investigating meanings and nuances of new vocabulary and incorporating new language into working repertoire.
   

Welcome!  I’m so glad that you’ve decided to join me in English IV- AP Literature and Composition.  This pre-course assignment is a little different from what you might be accustomed to, so be sure that you follow the yellow brick road.  (The last sentence contains an allusion.  Be ready to identify and explain it when you get to class.  By the time that you complete this assignment, you should be able not only to explain where the phrase comes from, but you should be able to tie the image to its archetypal roots!)

You will need to purchase the following three texts for this assignment.  These texts actually will be used throughout the entire course.  They are:

Foster, Thomas C.  How to Read Literature Like a Professor:  A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines.  New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003. [ISBN 0-06-000942-X]

Murphy, Barbara L., and Estelle M. Rankin.  McGraw Hill 5 Steps to a 5:  AP English Literature.  New York:  The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., 2002.  [ISBN 0-07-137719-0]

Murphy, Barbara L. and Estelle M. Rankin.  McGraw Hill 5 Steps to a 5:  Writing the AP English Essay.  New York:  The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., 2004. [ISNB 0-07-141110-0]

 In addition, you will make extensive use of what you have previously thought of as internet cheat sites.  Bet you never would have dreamed …

Assignments:

Read the Foster book, cover to cover.  This is NOT a novel.  It’s easy to read and, as advertised, entertaining.  Moreover, it will unlock many of the mysteries about why teachers see things in books that you sometimes miss.

 Thoroughly read and internalize Chapters 1 and 2 of 5 Steps … AP English Literature.  Take the sample test in Chapter 2.

 Thoroughly read, internalize and do all exercises in Chapters 7 and 8 of 5 Steps … AP English Literature.

 Thoroughly read, internalize and do all exercises in Chapters 1 and 2 of 5 Steps … Writing the AP English Essay

Go to your favorite literature cheat site (actually, some are better than others) to read and study context, plot summary, chapter or act summary, theme, motif, etc., and discussion questions for all of the works I’ve listed below.  Make sufficient card notes to be able to carry on a reasonable conversation about these works.  Why would I do this?  Well, it turns out that there is a perfectly legitimate way to use such sites as these, as long as you realize that you’re getting a filtered look at the original text.  None of you has read widely enough to be conversant about some of our most important works of literature and some of those most commonly referenced or iterated in other texts.  I will continue to add texts to this “skim list” as we go through the course.  As you read Foster, you will quickly begin to realize that our literature is hugely intertextual; becoming knowledgeable about a broad base of works will make your AP Literature experience richer and it will make your university life (the school part) more rewarding.

List of Works:

The Iliad (Homer)

The Book of Job (Bible)

The Odyssey (Homer)

The Aeneid (Vergil)

Beowulf (Unknown)

The Divine Comedy (Dante)

Faust (Goethe)

 A Word to the Wise:  You will, no doubt, immediately note that there’s no big essay to produce.  I’m treating you like the college level students I’ll expect you to be when you get to class.  Believe me, by the end of the first week of classes, you will be much happier to have done this assignment (and done it very thoughtfully) than not to have …!

 With that ominous caution, I’ll wish you a happy summer!

 kk

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The Remains of the Day

General Procedures for Preparing A Text:

• Read the first 50 pages, then select three (3) of the Past Q3 Prompts (Click here) that appear to be useful with this text.  Continue reading, now annotating evidence that supports each of the topics you selected.
• Note and describe the author's narrative technique.  Annotate evidence to support your claim.
• Note and describe the author's predominant literary devices.  Annotate evidence to support your claim.
• Select three (3) passages the are representative of the author's techniques, devices, tone, and theme.

As you read, note evidence that would help you to support a claim about each of the following:

• Narrator Reliability
• Author’s technique of moving between frames of time
• Author’s technique of authenticating fiction
• Characteristics of language  (Here, please examine not only Steven’s language, but the language of Lord Darlington, Miss Kenton, Senator Lewis, and M. Dupont, as well.)
• Characterization of Steven
• The author’s voice:  tone and cultural insight
• Establishing intimacy with the reader
• Layering historical moments and personal lives

Prepare to write or speak to each of the following:

• The significance of the title
• Ending vs. end of text (see Lodge, 224)
•  Conclusion as negation (see Lodge, 224)
• The significance and generalizability of Mr. Stevens’ tiger story.

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General Procedures for Preparing A Text:

• Read the first 50 pages, then select three (3) of the Past Q3 Prompts (Click here) that appear to be useful with this text.  Continue reading, now annotating evidence that supports each of the topics you selected.
• Note and describe the author's narrative technique.  Annotate evidence to support your claim.
• Note and describe the author's predominant literary devices.  Annotate evidence to support your claim.
• Select three (3) passages the are representative of the author's techniques, devices, tone, and theme.

As you read, note evidence that would help you to support a claim about each of the following:

• Narrator Reliability
• Author’s technique of moving between frames of time
• The author’s voice
• Establishing intimacy with the reader
• Author's use of setting as character

Examine Chapter 1 for all descriptions of Wuthering Heights and for all descriptions of the people who live there (whom you encounter in this chapter, only).  Explore how Brontë uses Wuthering Heights (the place) to extend and develop these characters.

Examine Chapters 1-7 for all descriptions of Thrushcross Grange and for all descriptions of Wuthering Heights.  Explore Brontë’s use of these settings to lay the groundwork for the novel’s conflicts.

Brontë reveals the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine with remarkable economy of detail.  Examine Chapters 5-7 and make a list of the details (maybe dialogue, incident, etc.) that reveal the force of the bond between the two.  Explore the effectiveness of this authorial decision as opposed to a decision to engage in a more robust revelation of the bond.

Review the visit from the Linton children in Chapter 7.  Explore how this visit, Edgar’s treatment of Heathcliff, and Hindley’s banishment of Heathcliff to the attic begin to warp Heathcliff’s impulses toward self improvement.

Review Chapter 8 to examine how Edgar, Heathcliff, and Catherine are presented.  Now how each is characterized.

Re-examine Chapter 9, making a deliberate effort to overlook your own emotional reactions and analyze the logic of Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar.  Explore the possibility that Catherine’s logic is sound. 

In Chapters 12-14, note examples of foreshadowing and prophesy.  Explore what narrative purposes are served.

In Chapter 15, examine Catherine’s description of what it’s like to love Heathcliff.  In Chapter 17, examine Isabella’s description of what it’s like to love Heathcliff.  Explore how their explanations are alike and how they are different.

Examine Nelly Dean’s discussion about Hindley and Edgar and their reactions to their wives’ deaths.  Explore how  Hindley and Edgar’s  reactions are reflective of their environments?

In Chapter 21, we read Heathcliff’s comparison of Hareton and Linton.  He says of Hareton, “[He is] gold put to the use of paving stones,” and of Linton, “[He is] tin polished to ape a service of silver.”  Note Heathcliff’s metaphors and their intent.

Assume that Heathcliff is the protagonist.  What is his objective.  Who are his antagonists?  Who wins?  What are the plot problems inherent in this design?  Assume that storm and calm are the opposing forces.  Which wins?  Are there plot problems with this design?

Read the paragraph (approximately on the second page of the novel) beginning, “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. …”  Now read the last paragraph in the novel.  Explore how these paragraphs help to establish the novel’s theme?

Wuthering Heights is a frame story.  Briefly note the content of the exterior story and of the interior story.

Explore the narrative and structural techniques Brontë uses to shift smoothly from one narrator to another.  (There are two narrators of note.)

Explore how Brontë resolves the potential problems of having an apparently educated outsider and an uneducated insider as the two main narrators?  Examine Chapter 7 for help.

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1. Any reader bewildered by the opening pages of Absalom, Absalom! will realize immediately that its greatest challenge lies in its complex narrative structure.You must learn how to read it as you go. How many narrators are there, and what is their relationship to one another? What are the sources of their authority as tellers of the Sutpen story? What, so far as you can make out, "happened," as opposed to what is conjectured by the various narrators? Why might Faulkner have chosen such a challenging narrative form, despite the difficulties it presents for his readers?
2. At the center of the novel is the gigantic figure of Sutpen--a man who drives himself to extraordinary lengths in the pursuit of his "design." Sutpen means different things to different people: to Rosa, he is a monster, but one she would have married; whereas, to Colonel Compson, he is a human being with sympathetic characteristics. How does your view of Sutpen change as the web of his story emerges? How do you come away from the novel feeling about him? Is he evil? innocent? superhuman? mad? heroic? Does Sutpen's history, which he has told to Colonel Compson, justify his behavior?
3. Why do the various tellers of the story interpret and embroider the tale so differently? What is Faulkner telling us about the human need to order and interpret the past? How does each teller affect your response? Whose version of events do you find most attractive, most compelling? Whose version makes most sense to you? Is "truth" largely irrelevant?
4. Faulkner's original title for the novel was "Dark House," and as in much of his work, we see in Absalom, Absalom! strong elements of the gothic literary convention: a ruined and possibly haunted house, a demonic hero, family secrets, hints of incest, a melodramatic plot, an overwhelming mood of decadence and decay. Yet in its depth and intensity, the novel clearly transcends the often trivial melodrama of much gothic fiction. How does Faulkner's use of gothic elements contribute to the novel's dramatic effect?
5. Consider Faulkner's brilliant development of the character of Charles Bon, the son that Sutpen has cast off. In both Quentin and Shreve's retelling and in Miss Rosa's, he is a figure of romance, while in Mr. Compson's version he is an opportunist, using both Judith and Henry to revenge himself upon his father. Which of these perspectives is more satisfying to you, and why? Why is the element of doubt about Bon's motivation--even about the extent of his knowledge about his origin--so crucial to Faulkner's plan?
6. The book's title is taken from the biblical story of Absalom, son of King David, told in the second book of Samuel--a dynastic tale of incest, rebellion, revenge, and violent death. How is your perspective on the novel enlarged after reading the Absalom story? How does the biblical tale inflect the novel's themes of incest, dynastic hopes and failures, rivalry between father and son? How does David's grief at the death of Absalom (2 Samuel 18:33) compare with Thomas Sutpen's seeming lack of feeling for his sons--or for anyone else?
7. Charles Bon is at heart of the incest plot, and it is the dual threat of incest and miscegenation that ruins Sutpen's great design. How do incest and miscegenation mirror each other? What is it that makes these two forms of mixing blood--endogamy and exogamy--so taboo? Do you agree that it is the thought of miscegenation, rather than incest, that Henry can't endure? Why do rage, self-loathing, and masochism play such a large role in the stories of Charles Bon's two direct descendants, Charles Etienne St. Valery Bon and Jim Bond?
8. What do you think of Mr. Compson's theory of the incestuous triad formed by Henry, Bon, and Judith, described as follows: "The brother...taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride" [p. 77]? Does Faulkner assume that a strong incestuous component is part of the psychology of every family? Or only of extremely unusual families like the Sutpens?
9. The concept of racial hierarchy is at odds with the domestic intimacy in which blacks and whites lived together in the South. During the Civil War, Judith, Clytie, and Rosa live together as sisters, eating the same food, working side by side. But when Rosa returns to the house in 1909, she warns Clytie not to touch her: "Let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too" [p. 112]. How does the novel expose the mental convolutions by which people tried to maintain the notion of an essential difference--a species difference--between black skin and white, even among members of the same family? What, in these circumstances, do you think of Clytie's loyalty and her efforts to protect Henry?
10. To what degree do you see the self-destructiveness displayed by just about all of the figures in this novel as Faulkner's deliberate allegory of the South?
11. Many critics have commented that Faulkner takes his stylistic eccentricity to its most involuted and exaggerated extremes in Absalom, Absalom!, making inordinate demands upon the reader's attention and patience. An anonymous reviewer for Time called this book "the strangest, least readable, most infuriating and yet in some respects the most impressive novel that William Faulkner has written." What use does Faulkner make of repetition, circularity, accumulation, and confusion? Are there aesthetic and intellectual reasons he takes his rhetoric and syntax to such exhaustive lengths, or do you feel that his style is too self-indulgent?
12. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about the meaning of history, and about the extreme pressure of the past, particularly in the South, upon the inhabitants of the present. More importantly, it is about the doubtful process of coming to know, reconstruct, and come to grips with history. Mr. Compson says to Quentin, "We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales...we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting...performing their acts of simple passion and violence, impervious to time and inexplicable" [p. 80]. Why does Quentin, who is unrelated to Sutpen, seem to understand the tale as bearing directly upon his own identity and fate? If history is "a dead time" [p. 71], as Mr. Compson calls it, why does it command so much mesmerized attention in this novel?
13. Absalom, Absalom! shares certain characteristics with classical tragedy, and Faulkner uses Mr. Compson to make the connection clear. He alludes to Aeschylus's great play Agamemnon with his discussion on pages 48-49 of the name of Sutpen's daughter by a slave, suggesting that Sutpen might have meant to call her Cassandra rather than Clytemnestra. Elsewhere, Mr. Compson sees the story as a dramatic tableau, with "fate, destiny, retribution, irony--the stage manager" [p. 57]. Aristotle noted that a certain blindness, a character flaw he called hamartia, was common to tragic heroes. What are the flaws in Sutpen that contribute to his tragedy? If Sutpen is a character who stands for pure, unswerving will, what role does fate play in the story?
14. Why does Faulkner have Quentin tell his story to Shreve McCannon, a Canadian, in a room at Harvard in January, 1910? Why does this reconstruction of a uniquely Southern tale take place on Yankee soil? What is the meaning of the relationship between story and setting, as contained in the following phrase: "that fragile pandora's box of scrawled paper which had filled with violent and unratiocinative djinns and demons this snug monastic coign, this dreamy and heatless alcove of what we call the best of thought" [p. 208]? What do you make of the book's final line, in which Quentin hysterically insists that he doesn't hate the South?
15. In the last few pages of the novel we learn at last, as in a mystery, what Quentin's role in the story has been. He has entered into the final chapter of the nightmare of the Sutpen family with his own eyes, accompanying Miss Rosa to Sutpen's Hundred, where he sees the dying Henry. He seems unable to emerge from this experience into ordinary life. Why does the past have such hallucinatory power for Quentin? What does his meeting with Henry mean to him? Do you see Clytie's burning of the house, with herself and Henry in it, as a final purgation of the family curse? Why then does this history seem to be a nightmare from which Quentin is unable to awaken?

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Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Guide

These were combined because they are integrally tied in this book.  The Point of View is fluid – ostensibly it’s first person, limited – from the point of view of the Chronicler, a friend of Santiago’s who happened not to be present on or around the square at the time of the murder and who spent many years interviewing others to learn what took place on that morning.  The chronicler’s reliance on stories of other’s, however, introduces us to elements of the story from multiple points of view and gives the chronicler something of an omniscient quality.

The setting is not so much revealed to us from the chronicler’s point of view as from the points of view of the interviewed characters.  Much of the color of the setting comes to us through these characters.  Pay attention to the fact that most of the action takes place on and around the square – which serves as a kind of microcosm, or miniature cosmos.  We do, however, travel to other settings.  For example, we travel to the home of Angela Vicario (pig farm), to the home of Xius, and to the home of Angela Vicario, some 27 years after the event of the murder.

The fact that most of the names have some religious connection may or may not be of major importance, except to further underscore the importance of religion in the lives of these peasants.  Names with some religious overtone are not unusual in Latin cultures.  Santiago’s fiance, Mercedes, is named for Garcia Marquez wife.

Pay attention to the setting and to the classes and races in the village.  This is a patriarchal society and a village with three classes:  the servant and lower class, the mercantile class, and the landed gentry.  Note that the upper, or gentry class has its way with the other classes.  Note the open racial identification and the open racial tension evinced in the blatant slurs:  whites, mulatto, Indian, Spanish, Turk, Jew, Negro, etc.  This class-divided, race-conscious society is anathema to Marxist-communism.

Pay attention to the characters who are central to the action.  Look at the role that each plays and look at the attitude of each with regard to the central action.

Irony/Chance

Although irony and chance are at least as old in our literature as the Greeks, this novel appears to be especially heavily imbued with them.  Be sure that you can identify major examples of irony and chance and that you can hypothesize what their extensive use might indicate about Garcia Marquez’ world view.

Superstition/Magic

The novel certainly is replete with examples of both.  Be sure that you can cite examples extensively.  The major element of superstition, thinly veiled, is religion.  Be sure that you are able to explain GM’s view of religion as superstition and that you can explain the novel in light of religion as superstition and in light of the enormous irony of the total set of events on the day of the murder.

Style

GM’s style is characterized by irony, chance, magical realism, religious symbolism, hyperbole, superstition, etc.  Be sure that you can locate and explicate a text selection that fully illustrates GM’s style.

Themes/Ideas/etc.

Here’s the heart.  What is GM writing about?  Is this merely a journalist, fictionalized account of an actual occurrence, richly imbued with the local color of the village and its people?  Or, is it historic in an epic sense?  Be sure that you can speak competently about GM’s tone – that is, his attitude about his subject matter.  Doing so will require that you tie the novel to GM’s political and philosophical thinking and that you thoroughly understand GM’s use of symbols, metaphors, archetypes, and other literary devices

Examine the possibilities:

Angela as a Marxist revolutionary.

The last scene as an uprising of the proletariat.

Duty to kill Santiago as a duty to rise up against oppression.

Latin culture and preparation for suffering.

Light and its shades as metaphor for knowledge.

Perceptions of rain as reflective of perceptions of goodness or evil of the act.

Marxist doctrines:  (1)  Rich and powerful few live by labors of many; (2) Rift in social scale; (3)  Rights granted to all do not do away with injustices; (4)  the more productive the system, the harder it is to make it work.

Dual layers of meaning in language.

Apathy of bishop.

Science vs. Religion.

Echoes of images (slaughter of rabbits; slaughter of Santiago – buzzards; autopsy – )

Sacrilege

Racial and class tension

***

1)     Examine Garcia-Marquez use of cinematic techniques, the baroque, and the mythical in Chronicle.

2)     Explore the novel's kinship to fairytales and myths.

3)     The nature of time and memory -- thematics of history -- are important currents in 20th century fiction.  Explore Chronicle's fit in this paradigm.

4)     Garcia-Marquez' novels are concerned with the nature and narration of the past.  Explore Chronicle's fit in this paradigm.

5)     Magical realism engages in erasing and redrawing the lines between fiction and historic event for political purposes.  Explore Chronicle's fit in this paradigm.

6)     Strong biblical metaphors and references are a reflection of the author's cultural framework and of a prehistoric or pre-industrial innocence.  Explore Chronicle in light of this proposition.

7)     Explore how Garcia-Marquez' magical realism emerges from history, politics, religion, and social structure.

8)     Many of Garcia-Marquez' novels are concerned with the nature of time and memory and the narration of the past.  In fact, one of the most written-about characteristics of G-M's works is their historical perspective:  their use of a curved time model created by the mixture of primitive (circular) and biblical (linear) temporal patterns; mythic history that coexists with documented history; and their sweeping narrative perspective.  Explore how these attributes apply to Chronicle.  Be sure to incorporate extensive concrete examples from the novel.

9)     In literature, a motif might appear in the form of recurrent images, words, objects, phrases, or actions; it might serve to unify the work, or it might serve to deliver a subscript to accompany the central fabula (plot/story skeleton).  Explore G-M’s use of birds as a motif in Chronicle.  Be sure that you propose a purpose for the bird motif, and be sure that you assemble extensive evidence

10) Many contemporary Latin American novelists entwine patterns of verisimilar and non-verisimilar incidences to address the abuses of contemporary political and social institutions.  Explore this dimension of Chronicle.  Be sure to identify extensive examples of the technique, and be sure to make connections between the novel and its political and social context.

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1. Coetzee titled his novel after Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”.  Read the poem and argue its connection to the novel. 

2. The Magistrate obsesses about his sexual eccentricities, but it is part of the book’s theme of humanity. 

3. Critic Tony Morphet says, “Gordimer …write[s] with the authority of history because history was to be the force that would deliver freedom – to herself …For Coetzee … there is no ‘history,’ only ‘histories’ – endless stories moving in multiple directions and presenting themselves to him as a writer – and they can offer no deliverance.” 

4. Coetzee’s use of language is … very lean, and sparse with words.  Critic James Wood says, “But there is a point beyond which pressurized shorthand is no longer an enrichment but an impoverishment, and an unnatural containment.”  Wood continues, “Coetzee’s books eschew loosened abundance for impacted allegory.”  He describes Coetzee’s novels as intelligently starved – feeding on exclusion.  Wood says that Coetzee’s readers always feel a zeal of omission and, further, that what Coetzee’s novels keep out may well be as important as what they keep in. 

5. Coetzee’s prose is able to register physical pain, and the wrack of moral confusion. 

6. The main character in … Waiting for the Barbarians is a magistrate in an outpost at the edge of an empire.  He is aware of the dangers of passing judgment on the barbarians:  while his fellow settlers blame them for lying drunk in the gutter, the magistrate finds fault with the settlers for selling them the liquor.  Yet for all of his sensitivity he fails to understand the barbarian girl he adopts out of a mixture of compassion and lust.  

7. Coetzee’s narrator, never identified by name, is the magistrate of an imperial settlement in “an indeterminate time and place.  Three existential puzzles attend his twilight years as a civil servant on the frontier of the Empire.  The first is what to do with the knowledge he acquires by observing too closely the methods of the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard, which, allegedly under threat from barbarians, has emergency powers he must acknowledge if not respect.  The second is how to understand his own relationship both to the military authority that has supplanted his own and to the Empire behind it.  The third puzzle is how to animate – and authenticate – an admittedly antiquarian love of history:  how to tell a true story of place and time.  He clearly recognizes the heart of darkness as “the submerged mind of Empire.”  When he attempts to write, he finds himself, paradoxically, to be an historian of the idyll, a prelapsarian paradise.  He can only write, nostalgically, of the general desire to maintain the charm of the frontier oasis at any cost, “Had we only known what.”  But in fact the cost is constantly before him:  it is imperial vigilance manifested in the creation and objectification of an enemy, the taking of prisoners, and the excavation of “truth” through torture.  When the Magistrate himself becomes a victim of the Third Bureau, he is denied justice under law.  He is compelled to a meditative interrogation of his own:  By what rites can a torturer recover his humanity?  What is truth?  What is justice? 

8. Of Joll, the Magistrate observes, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.  Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.” 

9. Extensive reading of Coetzee’s works reveals a recurring pattern:  the downward spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters.  His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity. 

10. Coetzee has made use of Hegel’s conception of the master/slave or lord/bondsman relationship as mutually damaging, but also as an inverse dependency which in some measure authenticates the bondsman rather than the lord. 

11. Waiting for the Barbarians appears as a moral parable, the story of a man of conscience standing up to the horrors of imperialism, which, he discovers, are to be found within himself as well as without.  

12. Though he tries to consider himself as separate from the others in his community, the Magistrate’s grammar belies his real sense of his belonging to the collective. This self-inclusive syntax is Coetzee’s first hint that the Magistrate has unconsciously established a “you/we” divide between the political body represented by Colonel Joll and the little civilization created from the inside and the periphery of the Outpost. 

13. Because Colonel Joll’s presence jostles the uneasy truce between the natives and settlers that has been fostered during the Magistrate’s rule, the Magistrate is compelled to open his eyes to face his own culpability as an agent of that political entity. 

14. In Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak wrote, "The personal life is dead – history has killed it.”  In Coetzee’s Disgrace, Lucy, after being raped, says to her father, “But why did they hate me so?  I had never set eyes on them.”  Her father replies, “It was history speaking through them.  A history of wrong.  Think of it that way, if it helps.  It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t.”  Is it true that in the face of irresistible historical change – the collapse of corrupt order – the claims of the individual are necessarily of secondary importance, even irrelevant?
    

15. Despite the gritty subject matter, Waiting for the Barbarians is a story first and foremost about love and unspoken forgiveness. 

16. How does Coetzee show compassion to his victims and villains alike?

17. Examine and commentate about Coetzee’s conflation of sex and violence. 

18. When they encounter the barbarian riders and the girl is offered to them, the magistrate tells her to “Tell them the truth.  What else is there to tell?”  Here there is a subtle conflation of Joll and the Magistrate.  Both implored her to tell the truth.  And in both cases, the proof of the truth is in the physical marks on her body.  As torturer, Joll needed to inflict the marks to prove he’d succeeded, and the Magistrate, as storyteller complicit in the appropriation of her torture, needs only to offer those same marks as proof of her story’s truth.  It is at this point that a real transition occurs within the novel.  As the magistrate hands over the girl, she ceases to be objectified.

1. Note and annotate evidence in the novel related to each of the following concepts:
• Social Satire
• Cautionary Tale
• Abnormal Psychology
• Cultural Anthropology (Look at the actual full title.)
• Realism
• Tragedy or Melodrama
2. Note and annotate occurrences of the following motifs.  How does each motif develop the novel's ideas?
• Death and Sickness
• Eating
• Travel and Escape
• Literature and Music
• Costume and Clothing
• Religion
• Windows
• Language
• Science
• Appearance and Reality
• Role of Women
• Class System
3. What purpose is served by Chapter 1? 
   
4. How does Chapter 2 operate narratively?  (The Aristotelian model requires:  Exposition, Initial Incident, Conflicts that generate Rising Action, Climax - the point beyond which the outcome is inevitable, Falling Action or Resolution, and Denouement.)  Explain your response.
5. Locate evidence that indicates stagnation in Emma's life at the Rouault farm.
6. What is Flaubert's tone with regard to the death of Charles' first wife?  Locate evidence to support your claim.
7. In Chapter 4, locate evidence of Emma's discomfort with her own social class?  Locate evidence of general tensions between social classes.
8. When Emma enters her new house, in Chapter 5, Flaubert writes, "The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when [Charles] saw patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in the consulting room and recounting their whole histories."  Describe the syntax of this sentence and explore its narrative contribution.
9. In Chapter 6, Flaubert writes about what attracted Emma to religion:"Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries.  She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day.  She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill."  How does this passage explain what attracted Emma to marriage and what will not attract her to marriage? 
   
10. What narrative purpose is served by Chapter 8?  Explain with full text support.
11. This chapter ends Part I of the novel.  Keeping in mind that the novel was first published serially, examine the narrative impact of Part I's closing events.
12. Look at the development of Emma's character in Part II.  Outline changes and their precipitators in this section.  Pay attention to both internal and external influences on Emma's decisions.  Describe the narrative progression.
13. In Part III, we see Emma's search become almost frenetic.  She virtually throws caution to the wind as she moves inexorably toward the point of no return.  What are the dynamics here?  What does Emma seek?  What realization or recognition causes her to seek her own death?
14. What is the greatest irony of Emma's death-bed scene?
15. Note that Emma appears neither in the beginning nor in the ending of this novel.  Because we know that Flaubert was an extremely careful constructor of his works, we know that Emma's absence is meaningful.  What are your thoughts about what Flaubert's reasoning might have been?
16. In the novel, the carnal and the spiritual are linked.  Locate evidence of this link in the scene with Emma and the Priest, in the taxi scene, and in the death scene.
17. How do the notions of restriction, constriction, and circularity work in this novel?
18. Flaubert's use of free indirect discourse allows him to be both inside and outside the character.  Locate several examples.
19. Is Emma a transgressor or a noble victim?  Explain

• Class sits in concentric circles: group members form the inside circle and non-members form the outside circle.
• Group conducts a full discussion of the assigned topic(s): making assertions; citing evidence; giving commentation; synthesizing to closure.
• Non-group members listen and note.  You may get points for raising cogent points or questions at the end of the discussion.
• Time limits are imposed.
  
• Teacher scores general quality of discussion and individual contributions.

• First, Welles used objects to suggest enormous proportions relevant to the basis of Kane’s life. These include the shots of Xanadu at the opening, Thatcher’s statue and library, Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” the letters of the Inquirer building by the windows, the large poster of Kane at the rally, Kane’s typing of the word “weak” in Leland’s review, Susan’s unflattering review scattered on the floor (reminiscent of Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” which Leland sends him in that same scene), the area shot of Xanadu (showing the staircase, statues, fireplace), the long series of arches in the house, and the mass of “junk” (including the Rosebud sleigh) covering the floor. Welles uses objects to suggest symbolism with a shocking effect—the bright light burning out to signify the virtual end of Susan’s unproductive singing career, and the screaming bird to emphasize the shock sustained by Kane when he realizes that Susan had actually left him.
• In his deployment of lighting, he again uses two types to heighten the dramatic effect. I would call one the “quick cut” of lights used in the beginning at Xanadu when Kane dies, the light from the projector going out after the newsreel, the flash of lightning over the “El Rancho” nightclub, the harsh opening of stage lights at Susan’s debut, and the quick change from dark to light and back to dark again as Kane walks through the arches at Xanadu. The second type consists of diverse angle lighting, including the light beams coming through the openings in the projection room, the ghoulish effect caused by the low lighting of the nightclub, the skylights in the Thatcher Library (almost producing a spotlight effect), the gaslights shining up and out, the side lighting in the Inquirer office after the election casting long shadows, the light from the bay window which divides Susan’s face while on her recovery bed, and the selective top lighting which gave a “museum” effect to Xanadu when Thompson was talking to the butler.
• Welles showed a fondness for deep shadows and silhouettes. As for deep shadows, we find examples with Kane just before he dies, the projection-room sequence, Kane’s long shadow when searching for the drunk Leland, Kane’s foreboding shadow over Susan after the show, the “rooster” Kane projects on the wall, and Kane’s shadow as he walks down the stairs in Xanadu. Silhouettes consisted of Kane dead on his bed, the men filing past the screen, and Kane’s top hat in front of Leland’s office door (which followed through very nicely from one end of the office to the other). What I term as “selective shadowing” refers to the times when those talking are in shadows or darkness. This allows for quick repetition of lives or concentration on one character. (Welles further diversifies this technique by putting the person being discussed in the shadow.) The best examples of this: the projection room (and the same people at the end in Xanadu), Kane’s “Declaration” from the darkness, the rally where only Leland can be distinguished in the crowd, Kane and Gettys (Ray Collins) in alternate shadows arguing in Susan’s apartment, and (quite exclusively) Kane sitting in the box at the opera with his wildly shifting eyes the only things visible on an otherwise (shadow-) masked face.
• His scenes using mirrors and reflections were subdued but complementary. Mirrors are used twice; first in Susan’s apartment (nicely complementing the framed pictures), and second the multi-imaged Kane, his newly smashed life passing down the corridor in silence. Reflections are noted with Bernstein’s (Everett Sloane) image on the desk top and the dancing Kane in the office window.
• With his training in radio, Welles had no trouble producing dramatic backgrounds and quick cuts with his sound editing. The booming of the newsreel jolts one from the sedate (deathbed) to a fabricated image of Kane (amplified by the demonstrator in the newsreel with the bullhorn); the crack of thunder which leads to the low-keyed nightclub music; the echoes within the library and hollow sound of the closing vault and door; Kane’s party, with the singing and the marching band (showing a noticeable drum beat, comparable to that of the blues singer at the picnic); Kane’s booming voice at the rally; the door closing from Susan’s flat, which cuts off Kane’s voice and substitutes traffic (quite a demeaning transition); Kane’s singular clapping during the opera; and the rapping of the typewriter, the wrecking of Susan’s room (especially glass objects), and the butler’s voice echoing through the now empty Xanadu.
• Depth was much easier to obtain with the full ceilings used to give reinforcement to any implications of size or scope which Welles wished to make. The very low angle shot of Kane after dropping the paperweight and the nurse’s elongated shadows make the room appear extra large (this scene seemed to have been shot through a concave lens apparatus of some sort); the long tracking shot over the rooftops down into the “El Rancho” nightclub (similarly used at the end with the long shot of Kane’s “junk” ending with “Rosebud”); the construction of the Inquirer building, with its poles, beams, guard rails, and lights, which was geometrically perfect; Leland at the hospital (soft focus giving a feeling of deterioration); Gettys surveying the campaign from far above (even dwarfing Kane’s poster); Gettys walking down the stairway (using the spiral construction to complement the reverse cutting); after Susan’s suicide attempt; glass and poison (large) in half-light of foreground, Susan in shadows of the middle ground, Kane silhouetted by the doorway in the background; and Susan’s walk through the multiple archways at Xanadu. Each time Welles used deep focus (seven times, I believe; the nightclub, library, boarding house, Kane’s party, Kane typing, singing lesson, and the aging Kane at Xanadu). He not only allows the audience selection of attention; he goes further to work in framing, lighting, shadows, and silhouettes.

Albert Camus – Banquet Speech

original version here

Albert Camus' speech of thanks at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957

(Translation)

In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me, my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I. But I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?

I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order to regain peace I have had, in short, to come to terms with a too generous fortune. And since I cannot live up to it by merely resting on my achievement, I have found nothing to support me but what has supported me through all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and of the role of the writer. Let me only tell you, in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as simply as I can, what this idea is.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

By the same token, the writer's role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.

None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment - and a commitment not only to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons - these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think that we should understand - without ceasing to fight it - the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.

At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer's craft, I should have put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who after all this can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virture? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults, it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft. It is helping me still to support unquestioningly all those silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world only through memory of the return of brief and free happiness.

Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits and debts as well as to my difficult creed, I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon the extent and the generosity of the honour you have just bestowed upon me, freer also to tell you that I would receive it as an homage rendered to all those who, sharing in the same fight, have not received any privilege, but have on the contrary known misery and persecution. It remains for me to thank you from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude, the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.

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Gabriel García Márquez – Nobel Lecture

Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1982

The Solitude of Latin America

Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine navigator who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote, upon his passage through our southern lands of America, a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy. In it he recorded that he had seen hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel's body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impassioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.

This short and fascinating book, which even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels, is by no means the most staggering account of our reality in that age. The Chronicles of the Indies left us countless others. Eldorado, our so avidly sought and illusory land, appeared on numerous maps for many a long year, shifting its place and form to suit the fantasy of cartographers. In his search for the fountain of eternal youth, the mythical Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored the north of Mexico for eight years, in a deluded expedition whose members devoured each other and only five of whom returned, of the six hundred who had undertaken it. One of the many unfathomed mysteries of that age is that of the eleven thousand mules, each loaded with one hundred pounds of gold, that left Cuzco one day to pay the ransom of Atahualpa and never reached their destination. Subsequently, in colonial times, hens were sold in Cartagena de Indias, that had been raised on alluvial land and whose gizzards contained tiny lumps of gold. One founder's lust for gold beset us until recently. As late as the last century, a German mission appointed to study the construction of an interoceanic railroad across the Isthmus of Panama concluded that the project was feasible on one condition: that the rails not be made of iron, which was scarce in the region, but of gold.

Our independence from Spanish domination did not put us beyond the reach of madness. General Antonio López de Santana, three times dictator of Mexico, held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War. General Gabriel García Moreno ruled Ecuador for sixteen years as an absolute monarch; at his wake, the corpse was seated on the presidential chair, decked out in full-dress uniform and a protective layer of medals. General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the theosophical despot of El Salvador who had thirty thousand peasants slaughtered in a savage massacre, invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. The statue to General Francisco Moraz´n erected in the main square of Tegucigalpa is actually one of Marshal Ney, purchased at a Paris warehouse of second-hand sculptures.

Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend. We have not had a moment's rest. A promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another great-hearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one - more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years.

One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality - that is, ten per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every twenty minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway.

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

I do not mean to embody the illusions of Tonio Kröger, whose dreams of uniting a chaste north to a passionate south were exalted here, fifty-three years ago, by Thomas Mann. But I do believe that those clear-sighted Europeans who struggle, here as well, for a more just and humane homeland, could help us far better if they reconsidered their way of seeing us. Solidarity with our dreams will not make us feel less alone, as long as it is not translated into concrete acts of legitimate support for all the peoples that assume the illusion of having a life of their own in the distribution of the world.

Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death. An advantage that grows and quickens: every year, there are seventy-four million more births than deaths, a sufficient number of new lives to multiply, each year, the population of New York sevenfold. Most of these births occur in the countries of least resources - including, of course, those of Latin America. Conversely, the most prosperous countries have succeeded in accumulating powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.

On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

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Octavio Paz – Nobel Lecture

Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1990

In Search of the Present

I begin with two words that all men have uttered since the dawn of humanity: thank you. The word gratitude has equivalents in every language and in each tongue the range of meanings is abundant. In the Romance languages this breadth spans the spiritual and the physical, from the divine grace conceded to men to save them from error and death, to the bodily grace of the dancing girl or the feline leaping through the undergrowth. Grace means pardon, forgiveness, favour, benefice, inspiration; it is a form of address, a pleasing style of speaking or painting, a gesture expressing politeness, and, in short, an act that reveals spiritual goodness. Grace is gratuitous; it is a gift. The person who receives it, the favoured one, is grateful for it; if he is not base, he expresses gratitude. That is what I am doing at this very moment with these weightless words. I hope my emotion compensates their weightlessness. If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement. And also an indefinable mixture of fear, respect and surprise at finding myself here before you, in this place which is the home of both Swedish learning and world literature.

Languages are vast realities that transcend those political and historical entities we call nations. The European languages we speak in the Americas illustrate this. The special position of our literatures when compared to those of England, Spain, Portugal and France depends precisely on this fundamental fact: they are literatures written in transplanted tongues. Languages are born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply.

In spite of these oscillations the link has never been broken. My classics are those of my language and I consider myself to be a descendant of Lope and Quevedo, as any Spanish writer would ... yet I am not a Spaniard. I think that most writers of Spanish America, as well as those from the United States, Brazil and Canada, would say the same as regards the English, Portuguese and French traditions. To understand more clearly the special position of writers in the Americas, we should think of the dialogue maintained by Japanese, Chinese or Arabic writers with the different literatures of Europe. It is a dialogue that cuts across multiple languages and civilizations. Our dialogue, on the other hand, takes place within the same language. We are Europeans yet we are not Europeans. What are we then? It is diffcult to define what we are, but our works speak for us.

In the field of literature, the great novelty of the present century has been the appearance of the American literatures. The first to appear was that of the English-speaking part and then, in the second half of the 20th Century, that of Latin America in its two great branches: Spanish America and Brazil. Although they are very different, these three literatures have one common feature: the conflict, which is more ideological than literary, between the cosmopolitan and nativist tendencies, between Europeanism and Americanism. What is the legacy of this dispute? The polemics have disappeared; what remain are the works. Apart from this general resemblance, the differences between the three literatures are multiple and profound. One of them belongs more to history than to literature: the development of Anglo-American literature coincides with the rise of the United States as a world power whereas the rise of our literature coincides with the political and social misfortunes and upheavals of our nations. This proves once more the limitations of social and historical determinism: the decline of empires and social disturbances sometimes coincide with moments of artistic and literary splendour. Li-Po and Tu Fu witnessed the fall of the Tang dynasty; Velázquez painted for Felipe IV; Seneca and Lucan were contemporaries and also victims of Nero. Other differences are of a literary nature and apply more to particular works than to the character of each literature. But can we say that literatures have a character? Do they possess a set of shared features that distinguish them from other literatures? I doubt it. A literature is not defined by some fanciful, intangible character; it is a society of unique works united by relations of opposition and affinity.

The first basic difference between Latin-American and Anglo-American literature lies in the diversity of their origins. Both begin as projections of Europe. The projection of an island in the case of North America; that of a peninsula in our case. Two regions that are geographically, historically and culturally eccentric. The origins of North America are in England and the Reformation; ours are in Spain, Portugal and the Counter-Reformation. For the case of Spanish America I should briefly mention what distinguishes Spain from other European countries, giving it a particularly original historical identity. Spain is no less eccentric than England but its eccentricity is of a different kind. The eccentricity of the English is insular and is characterized by isolation: an eccentricity that excludes. Hispanic eccentricity is peninsular and consists of the coexistence of different civilizations and different pasts: an inclusive eccentricity. In what would later be Catholic Spain, the Visigoths professed the heresy of Arianism, and we could also speak about the centuries of domination by Arabic civilization, the influence of Jewish thought, the Reconquest, and other characteristic features.

Hispanic eccentricity is reproduced and multiplied in America, especially in those countries such as Mexico and Peru, where ancient and splendid civilizations had existed. In Mexico, the Spaniards encountered history as well as geography. That history is still alive: it is a present rather than a past. The temples and gods of pre-Columbian Mexico are a pile of ruins, but the spirit that breathed life into that world has not disappeared; it speaks to us in the hermetic language of myth, legend, forms of social coexistence, popular art, customs. Being a Mexican writer means listening to the voice of that present, that presence. Listening to it, speaking with it, deciphering it: expressing it ... After this brief digression we may be able to perceive the peculiar relation that simultaneously binds us to and separates us from the European tradition.

This consciousness of being separate is a constant feature of our spiritual history. Separation is sometimes experienced as a wound that marks an internal division, an anguished awareness that invites self-examination; at other times it appears as a challenge, a spur that incites us to action, to go forth and encounter others and the outside world. It is true that the feeling of separation is universal and not peculiar to Spanish Americans. It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the Whole we fall into an alien land. This experience becomes a wound that never heals. It is the unfathomable depth of every man; all our ventures and exploits, all our acts and dreams, are bridges designed to overcome the separation and reunite us with the world and our fellow-beings. Each man's life and the collective history of mankind can thus be seen as attempts to reconstruct the original situation. An unfinished and endless cure for our divided condition. But it is not my intention to provide yet another description of this feeling. I am simply stressing the fact that for us this existential condition expresses itself in historical terms. It thus becomes an awareness of our history. How and when does this feeling appear and how is it transformed into consciousness? The reply to this double-edged question can be given in the form of a theory or a personal testimony. I prefer the latter: there are many theories and none is entirely convincing.

The feeling of separation is bound up with the oldest and vaguest of my memories: the first cry, the first scare. Like every child I built emotional bridges in the imagination to link me to the world and to other people. I lived in a town on the outskirts of Mexico City, in an old dilapidated house that had a jungle-like garden and a great room full of books. First games and first lessons. The garden soon became the centre of my world; the library, an enchanted cave. I used to read and play with my cousins and schoolmates. There was a fig tree, temple of vegetation, four pine trees, three ash trees, a nightshade, a pomegranate tree, wild grass and prickly plants that produced purple grazes. Adobe walls. Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.

When was the spell broken? Gradually rather than suddenly. It is hard to accept being betrayed by a friend, deceived by the woman we love, or that the idea of freedom is the mask of a tyrant. What we call "finding out" is a slow and tricky process because we ourselves are the accomplices of our errors and deceptions. Nevertheless, I can remember fairly clearly an incident that was the first sign, although it was quickly forgotten. I must have been about six when one of my cousins who was a little older showed me a North American magazine with a photograph of soldiers marching along a huge avenue, probably in New York. "They've returned from the war" she said. This handful of words disturbed me, as if they foreshadowed the end of the world or the Second Coming of Christ. I vaguely knew that somewhere far away a war had ended a few years earlier and that the soldiers were marching to celebrate their victory. For me, that war had taken place in another time, not here and now. The photo refuted me. I felt literally dislodged from the present.

From that moment time began to fracture more and more. And there was a plurality of spaces. The experience repeated itself more and more frequently. Any piece of news, a harmless phrase, the headline in a newspaper: everything proved the outside world's existence and my own unreality. I felt that the world was splitting and that I did not inhabit the present. My present was disintegrating: real time was somewhere else. My time, the time of the garden, the fig tree, the games with friends, the drowsiness among the plants at three in the afternoon under the sun, a fig torn open (black and red like a live coal but one that is sweet and fresh): this was a fictitious time. In spite of what my senses told me, the time from over there, belonging to the others, was the real one, the time of the real present. I accepted the inevitable: I became an adult. That was how my expulsion from the present began.

It may seem paradoxical to say that we have been expelled from the present, but it is a feeling we have all had at some moment. Some of us experienced it first as a condemnation, later transformed into consciousness and action. The search for the present is neither the pursuit of an earthly paradise nor that of a timeless eternity: it is the search for a real reality. For us, as Spanish Americans, the real present was not in our own countries: it was the time lived by others, by the English, the French and the Germans. It was the time of New York, Paris, London. We had to go and look for it and bring it back home. These years were also the years of my discovery of literature. I began writing poems. I did not know what made me write them: I was moved by an inner need that is difficult to define. Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

What is modernity? First of all it is an ambiguous term: there are as many types of modernity as there are societies. Each has its own. The word's meaning is uncertain and arbitrary, like the name of the period that precedes it, the Middle Ages. If we are modern when compared to medieval times, are we perhaps the Middle Ages of a future modernity? Is a name that changes with time a real name? Modernity is a word in search of its meaning. Is it an idea, a mirage or a moment of history? Are we the children of modernity or its creators? Nobody knows for sure. It doesn't matter much: we follow it, we pursue it. For me at that time modernity was fused with the present or rather produced it: the present was its last supreme flower. My case is neither unique nor exceptional: from the Symbolist period, all modern poets have chased after that magnetic and elusive figure tha