Two books that are on my mind today are "Pedro Paramo" by Juan Rulfo and "The Hour of the Star" by Clarice Lispector and I suppose what underlies this act of pulling them out of the book pile and focussing on them both has something to do with poverty and the exalted language that death provides as a platform for those who were unfortunate in their lifetimes and vocalized in death. Each of these books is an attempt at vocalizing the importance of the rejected members of society through the enactment and reinforcement of the power of death. Death gives even the most under acknowledged members of society a platform of reverence to start from. This status of tragedy forms the basis of the impact of each of these novels.
They each share the figure of the helpless female as the focal point that drives the ultimate tragedy of each narrative. In "The Hour of the Star" it is Macabea, a young, frail, unselfconscious character who floats through her simple life into an absurd death of a car accident. In "Pedro Paramo" it is the young Susana who the terrible Pedro Paramo loves and who forms the eye of the storm of violence in the town of Media Luna with her death. These deaths form an important signal of surrender and they give voice to an important shift of power, a transfer from violence and disparity to remorse.
In Helene Cixous' book, "Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing" she provides important insights about the role of death as a factor of productive writing in the chapter, The School of the Dead. She discusses the close connection between Clarice Lispector's own impending death, and her characterization of Macabea's. In fact, at some point the biographical influx in the text seems to haunt the text as a hovering story that has more validity than the fiction. Suspicions about real emotion and real tragedy in the speculative realm of fiction can be batted off of biography because biography provides a promise of validity, while as fiction escapes that promise. The biography represents the material reality of a living author and it gives a sense of rationality to the otherwise slippery text that fiction embodies. Fiction is a series of unanswered questions, and it behaves as an impetus to engage our intuitive reasoning. The strange lingering material facts about both Clarice Lispector and Juan Rulfo's lives comprise a sense of authorial disappearance. Rulfo was a tire salesman and he only wrote two books, but these two books form pillars in the canon of Latin American Literature. Lispector died of cancer after writing the book in which her author reveals the conscious decision to kill off Macabea in "The Hour of the Star". Both authors were effective producers of fate, rather than fated subjects due to their writing.
The notable artifice of the death is worth mentioning in both of the texts. Juan Rulfo's text, "Pedro Paramo" hosts a series of voices at various stages of life, afterlife, and the in between spaces that speak in a timeless simultaneity that splays itself over the course of the pages of the book. As mentioned earlier, the fictionalized author in "The Hour of the Star" whose interjections form a series of meditations on the spiritual functions of death and give the reader insight into the decision making process about the characters in the text form the bulk of the material while the descriptive aspect of the world of Macabea is relatively scarce. The world of the text is the process of the dictation, in that case.
The ability of an author to write beyond death through artifice is of explicit interest of mine and is something that is encountered in the texts of Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson as well. It has been suggested that Edgar Allen Poe expressed the sardonic nature of death as a powerful facet of humanity and that in his works, he fetishized dead females by presenting them as the ultimate form of beauty. The figure of the helpless female in an ultimately brutal world due to the unlimited power of treacherous men becomes a fated martyr in many of his works. The difference between simple martyrdom comes when writers developed the response of giving these females or other martyred figures voice from beyond the grave. Emily Dickinson extended the voice of her poetry up to the moment of death and then passing through, often to a realm of unanticipated immortality. This exposure of the unspeakable, something so grave, is an assertion of hope and possibly of power for the sake of the anonymous lost figures of the world who are victimized and extracted from their ways of life by force. Women are often seen in opposition to force, but they also combine to form the measure of its extremity. The extent by which women are effectively silenced is a sign of a world closed down by the threat of violence. The extent by which women may be able to express sexuality is a sign of acceptance, but the sign of equality, for me, is the extent by which women are enlisted into the sphere of intellectual influence. Thus, the women figures of Monique Wittig call out to me, those of Anais Nin, the women of Lydia Davis, of Jane Bowles, of Eudora Welty, of Agatha Christie, of Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and I'm sure there are others waiting for me. I'm still searching for these women authors and characters.
Today the books on my shelf look like tombstones, and I feel a connection with the deaths of the authors who wrote them along with their words that have been cast in stone. It is not unlike a cemetery in my room today and it reminds me of the close ties between religion and text. Writers often come to a point of understanding that transcendence of reality will not come through prayer or ephemeral music, but through documentation, and each of the books that are filled with words present a form of transcendence, both social and spiritual. And yet, there are limits to the efficacy of these dead books, too. These days, writing is practically a conversation. Writing has become more alive with the rate and flow of the stream of writing on the internet, but that is another topic altogether.
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