Jorge Borges and Me

Apart from the previous authors that we’ve read concerning magical realism, I found Borges the most sincere and the best at being a well-rounded writer. His ability to tell a story without giving an impression of being pretentious or eager to manipulate says a lot to me. He leaves the option for the audience to read his stories as a piece of fiction, all the while his themes transcend and blend at the same time. His stories also contain a perfect glimpse of a moment or memory while capturing it within a single photograph. All of his abilities as a writer may not leave his short-stories as an easy read, but this is a benefit for the reader - there's always more beneath the surface with Borges, and he wants to manipulate you there.
At my first round of reading, I missed a lot. I was waiting for the normal set-up and then the jump to magical realism, but it never came. It wasn't until my second pass that I realized that Borges wants his audience to understand that magical realism doesn't need to be magical, that it can plain as day. I found this his way of just being oppositional towards other writers, but then again, he proved me wrong in his writing - without being boastful, too - know-it-all.
From his three stories ("Emma Zunz," "The Gospel According to Mark," and "The Garden of Forking Paths"), I found that he contended with the same themes, proving to me that he has a history involving these issues - very serious. I picked-up on that he has a BIG problem with ignorance and how it can transform into, well, pretty much anything. He says that this ignorance can manipulate idiots, misrepresent the real, contort imagination, and even destroy greatness - greatness? - yes - GREATNESS! There is no room to deny this, and if you still disagree after I explain from point-of-view, well, then, you're ignorant.
The real issue at hand here is knowing where to start - I don't know where to start with ignorance! It's so vast and so powerful, hell, I'm safe to say that it consumes everything! Since this is the case, I'll start with the logic of ignorance: to one side, there is another, and if you only see one side and not both, chances are your views will be greatly distorted. If you faithfully put your entirety into one selection, then you're going to  miss the general picture; this is with: politics, religion, morals, ethics, culture, race, sex, age, anything inside and outside of our world.
From his themes, the lesson-learned is that I have to make decisions based on my faith, on my understandings, and on my experience - not from others. I've also learned that I can respectfully read his stories as a piece of fiction without feeling manipulated, and I'm thankful to come across a writer who can do this. Overall, Borges' stories were fun to read, and I'll even try to find more literature of his - even if it requires more than one read.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Me

            Whether Gabriel Garcia Marquez realizes it or not – of course he does, though – hopefully – his themes transcend further than just their surface level. Undeniably, he talks of people and their ineptness, but he also writes of how it damages us, and most importantly, others. For me, though, his mystical and dreamy writing makes it difficult to understand his voice – it’s weak. He may not be a better writer than Cortazar, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad writer, either. I feel that if he did have one booming voice in his stories, his theme would be comparison: human’s clumsily ability to either pick the defined black or white side, while sometimes not being able to see both at the same time. The last proposition that I also agree with, is that everything exists inside the gray, and that we’re still searching for it, even though it was the first thing presented to us.

            With this, I believe humans live by definition and design. It helps us relate to people, objects, and even feelings. I know it seems impossible to imagine this concept, to basically live without language, but I’m not proposing this. I’m simply saying that whatever we are chasing our entire lives for, we’ve already reached it - life. Sadly, though, some of us are not aware of this. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that our desire to reach and understand exactitude masks our vision. I don’t enjoy his writing, but I couldn’t happen to agree more on this issue!

            We happen to see this type of bewilderment everyday, too! We see it on the news, in the theatres, on the streets, inside our house, and even my words are a result of it – I should stop here and end my paper, but let’s just keep to the issues at here. In Marquez’s stories, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” I see a group of people wishing, and ironically, imagining their world of definitions and design. Both stories uncomfortably wrestle the subject of how people imagine this assumed “perfection.”

            With my generation, it also thrives on this kaleidoscope of black and white, and what is perfect. We can easily label someone by their clothing, the food they eat, and the sentences they construct. For every group of people, there is a label attached to them, and with this systematic grouping, there are limits to these definitions - I could label someone, but that doesn’t mean I understand them. With this process of categorizing, it is putting ideas, people, and things inside a confined box, and whenever it extends outside these boundaries, we deny whatever we see because it doesn’t fit our normal definition.

            Just like Marquez, I don’t agree with this process. I don’t want to be limited by someone’s misinformed opinion of me, and I don’t want to deny the improbable. I rather accept it how it is and go along my way rather than weigh stones for the rest of my life. This is certainly the problem with my generation, and it’s also a problem among much more people – comparison, the illusion of perfection, and the inability to compare the black and sides without seeing the gray.

            Overall, there isn’t much to write about these Marquez’s stories. I didn’t feel anything except for the banal agreement over the themes that I had to pull-out. I felt that his stories where too whimsy and were lacking a forceful deepened theme. He was too simple and too nice with his approach, but due to our agreement, I shouldn’t be labeling him. The only thing I can offer is my own confusion.

Julio Cortázar's Stories and Me

            Sometimes, humans dream around life and imagine the fantastic since it’s difficult to pin-down existence. It makes some things taste sweeter and can weigh less on the soul than our iron-cold trials. For me, I love the beautiful, the ugly, the forgotten, the improbable, and the reverie of the too-good-to-be-true. This makes the bland, numbed-down, and the sometimes backward society seem savory, or at least, easier to digest. This is also the reason why I enjoy literature. Reading gives the chance for one to escape, and it’s even better when its purpose is to create the fantastic and leave the reader in one’s own world.

            To me, Julio Cortázar is a deadpan pioneer in this type of literature. He seems like a very serious man, a man who gives people a confounding interest, but what I believe the most, though, is that he is a man who dreams, a man who believes in the fantastic qualities of our puzzling life, and will stretch and contort his writing in order to show it. From his stories, I’ve gained a deep admiration of his style of writing, of him, and his profound ideas and thoughts. He’s the reader’s guide, a manipulator, the one who’s weaving the text, and the one who will open you up in order to find his hidden message. He is a man who seeks the subtleties of truth and isn’t afraid in illuminating it, and if you’ve missed it, maybe you weren’t meant to see it - I believe he would say something like that! Luckily, and no-doubt, purposely, I’ve found my experiences, myself, and others in his writing.

            Cortázar’s writing stirs something very dark inside me, though. They all have an intention to explore issues, morals, and reasoning that have been buried, covered, and suspiciously forgotten in society - I feel that this is very true! In “Our Demeanor at Wakes,” he talks of hypocrisy and how people attend funerals for the oddest reasons:

             “…if it is genuine, if the weeping is genuine because to weep is the only thing left to men and women

             to do…then we stay at home and escort them from afar…But if my cousin’s leisurely investigation 

            discloses the merest suspicion that they’ve set up the machinery of hypocrisy…then the family gets 

            into its best duds, waits until the wake is already under way, and goes to present itself, a few at a 

            time…” (Cortázar 928)

This reminds me of how my dispersed family comes together only when we celebrate, or in this case, play mournful. We put on our clothes that we’ve packed away only for these types of events and pretend like we’ve kept in-touch. We are too stubborn to accept that the only fact that we attend these events is that we’re considered family. This sounds horrible, and I understand this, but we have friends whom live across the world that we keep in-touch with and happen to care more for, and if they happen to leave us, we simply don’t travel since they are considered “friends” - we practice a strange amount of hypocrisies and illogical mourning if our second-cousin-twice-removed-from-our-half-family dies, though!

            With being a logical person, this doesn’t seem right to me. I’m old enough to understand that this is just a tradition and is pathetically expected. It’s even so encouraged and deemed correct that if you don’t show, then you’re kicked-off the family tree – I think I’m adopted since I can’t follow this train of thought! Cortázar points out how illogical and how paradoxed human’s thinking can absolve to when death occurs. I find this to be a very serious and taboo issue, and I even find it hard to accept his argument and not go-along with everyone else’s flawed thinking. In “Our Demeanor at Wakes,” Cortázar’s writing shows that he can be a very serious man, but I believe he’s more than just that.

            Like his stories, Cortázar can take many shapes, and I found that I can, too. He proved that I’m carrying dark thoughts and that I can be too logical at times, but in his story “Axolotl,” I found that he can be intriguingly deep, and from it, I found that I’m more of a fantasist than him: “No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood” (Cortázar 1804). These are his words, but I swear I’ve spoken them before. I’ve also looked into others and have found myself, too. I can’t describe these situations or the feelings that I felt at those times, but it could be compared to waking-up from a coma.

            My story isn’t special, and I don’t remember anything while I was underneath, but I do remember gaining consciousness for the first time after two days. It happened after I hit my head on a piece of wood that was waiting to be built upon a tree-house. I fell two stories and only remember waking-up around the hospital bed. Rather than waking-up to the hospital room, the room opened-up inside me like a conscious dream, and at the same time, I saw myself waking-up and struggling to move. These two images became one, and from there, I grew what others perceive as consciousness. I essentially didn’t feel anything and was aware of everything at one moment. In Cortázar’s story “Axolotl,” he gave me this impression – everything was said and done. I understand that it’s nearly impossible for others to perceive this type of event if it hasn’t happened to them, but it’s also hard to explain it, too. This is why I immensely enjoy his writing – he writes about the improbable!

            Cortázar’s stories are about the fantastic, the different, the beautiful, and the sometimes dark, but all at the same time, he develops important themes underneath. Yes, he can be too serious at times, but if he wasn’t, I don’t think people would take his literature serious. He has a technique that has captured my interest and will keep me reading his stories for some time.

Popol Vuh: the Dawn of Life: or the lack of Life

       After reading this selection out of Popol Vuh, I could picture this world in the midst of being created: a hanging teardrop of water waiting to be massed with land, animals, and humans, and then catching the god's realization that when everything was created and then boastly reflected upon, it was a complete wreck, a disaster, and nothing, nobody, functioned according to plan! Oh, and then the aftermath when the gods were done kicking themselves for screwing-up Earth: the smell of the salty ocean crashing from the sky and the look of complete fear and bewilderment in the human's eyes since they were rendered useless - "All of this a waste of time," mumbling the ones running away from aftermath. It all seemed useless and like an accident, like a child playing with figurines splattered with mud, grass stains, and the occasional unidentified scruff marks - probably from previous mistakes during playtime. These gods were angry and incredibly clumsy! They don't remind me of my god, in fact, they remind me of my childhood and the kindergarten's community sandbox with it's rubble inside. I found this selection out of Popol Vuh: the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life dark, childlike, accidental, and ironically, lacking any life.