Jiménez, "El otoñado"

A work ("The autumnal") by this Spanish poet.  You can read the original here.

I am by nature thus complete,
In afternoon's full, ripest gold, 
As gusts rub leaves of erstwhile green.  
Remote and tasty fruit so sweet,
Earth, water, air, and fire I hold  
As I contain the infinite. 

‘Tis light I ooze, I gild the dark place cold;
Scent I transmit: and shadows reek of God;
Sound I effuse: deep music travels broad;
I filter taste: the clump consumes my soul,
As I enjoy the touch of solitude.  

Supreme of treasures, roundly dense
As a clean iris, I observe
From actions’ center.  All this I am.
The all which is oblivion’s brim;
The all sufficing yet still served  
By what remains ambition hence.  

A Christmas Tale

Unhappy families (or the hideously modern coinage, dysfunctional) have permeated world literature ever since a very famous novel made them its point de départ. After Tolstoy's titular adulteress, it has been customary to underscore why people do not love each other rather than why they do; why their pain, often caused by mistrust or a misunderstanding, is what ultimately measures them in a cruel world; and why we should be thankful for our own small comforts because most of humanity is wounded beyond repair. Now I do not for a second believe the nonsense about unhappy families and their infinite variety; such an observation can only come from the mind of someone unsure of his own peacefulness – and Tolstoy's violent conversion shortly thereafter attests to his mounting doubts. What I do believe is that although love may assume myriad forms, it remains our only weapon against otherwise omnipotent time. A watchword captioning the movements of this film.

We begin at a graveyard and in eulogy, even if it has been forty years since Joseph Vuillard, beloved eldest son of Abel (the late Jean-Paul Roussillon) and Junon (Catherine Deneuve), succumbed to leukemia. This tragedy – Joseph was barely school-aged – has become the event that always repeats itself, the only event that really exists in the history of this family. The parents' relationship to one another, as well as to their three surviving children, Elisabeth (Anne Consigny), Henri (Mathieu Amalric), and Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), will forever be defined by Joseph's brief life, for it is because of him that they all have elected to suffer. The immediate reason involves the circumstances of Joseph's demise: in need of a bone marrow donor, the Vuillards conceive Henri then discover the newborn is not a genetic match (what is now termed, quite dreadfully, a "savior sibling") for Joseph, who soon dies. Junon spitefully spurns the unwitting Henri for his failure; Abel attempts to compensate by stubbornly rescuing Henri from every sort of trouble, be it financial, drug or alcohol-related, or romantic; and Elisabeth, who may have been passed over as a donor because of her gender, begins to harbor resentment for Henri that expands into loathing and melancholy ("Why am I always sad?"). The conventional explanation for such feelings is a defense of her mother, to whom she feels very close even if the sentiment seems unrequited. But about halfway through the film, another possibility surfaces which, while ghastly, gains in likelihood as we learn more about the Vuillards, whom Ivan's wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) deems quite "extraordinary" even if they "like to pass themselves off as ordinary." And that possibility comes in the neurotic and piteous shape of Elisabeth's troubled teenage son, Paul (Émile Berling).

Paul's secret may not strike the first-time viewer as obvious, but a review of A Christmas Tale paves the path of dark suggestion. As our film opens, Junon has just been diagnosed with the same ailment that killed Joseph, satisfying Abel's lifelong curiosity as to how his son could have inherited such pestilence. She, too, will require a bone marrow transplant to survive, and in an unusual digression, the family gathers around a blackboard while Paul's habitually indisposed father Claude (Hippolyte Girardot) calculates her risk and reward for getting or rejecting treatment or a transplant. Each family member takes a test to determine his suitability as a donor, and Paul turns out to be, along with one other member we need not mention, the closest match. Elisabeth demurs in her parental consent, ostensibly owing to Paul's worsening mental health (in an early flashback, he is seen brandishing a knife before his parents), yet somehow we sense there are other considerations. So when the family assembles in full force for the first time in six years out of allegiance to Junon, who is merrily indifferent to such symbolic displays, we begin to ponder a battery of questions that apparently no one wants to answer. Why did Elisabeth six years ago make the condition of settling Henri's debts his "banishment" from the household? Why is Henri accused of writing wicked and compromising letters (one of which is read to us, although it is hardly offensive) and why does he deny doing so? What does Paul see out of the corner of his eye one evil evening? Why does Ivan take to Paul so quickly? Why does Henri tell Claude, "you don't count," provoking the latter to beat him senseless? And, most importantly perhaps, what is the letter that Elisabeth gives Henri as a Christmas gift, a letter addressed to her but one he immediately recognizes and hides? There is also that unnerving grin Paul offers the camera one time when no one is looking – its implication chills the spine – that seems counterpoised by a sincere, almost desperate prayer during Midnight Mass. So sincere and desperate, in fact, that one could be persuaded he was – and we have said far too much already.

A Christmas Tale has nonplussed a number of viewers who foolishly expected loose ends to be compressed into a beautiful bow, but such is not the style of Desplechin. That the Vuillards are cultured – Abel extemporizes a translation aloud from a famous, if second-rate German work to console Elisabeth, who is herself a well-known playwright, and Henri plays the piano effortlessly, with his delirium tremens a minor obstacle – should not diminish our impression of them as indifferent to their good fortune. The only thing they ever wanted was for Joseph to live; Joseph, who has "transformed" Abel "into a son" and himself into the deceased and worshipped ancestor. Desplechin tries to distract less patient viewers with two silly love affairs: the first involves Henri and a Jewish woman called Faunia, who appears at one point to divine the family's secret and accept it ("You're wasting your time with him," says Abel of Henri, to which she confidently counters, "I'm not so sure about that"). The other, far more ridiculous romance has Sylvia coming to a startling (for her) conclusion about the Vuillards' antisocial cousin Simon, who paints professionally, "washes dishes every weekend" at his cousins' spacious mansion in Roubaix, and tipples himself into a sullen stupor. This whole subplot, by far the film's weakest link, gains in significance if one deems Simon as much of an outsider as Sylvia: neither one is truly privy to the inner sanctum of the Vuillards' soul, which is labyrinthine if not indefinitely complex. Which is why Elisabeth's crumbling psyche is brimming with material for her pieces, why Ivan's small sons also write plays (and stage a gory mélange of several fairy tales), and why Junon possesses the first name of a Roman deity as well as that goddess's demeanor. And that is also perhaps why Paul's last name is Dedalus.

De las alegorías a las novelas

An essay ("From allegories to novels") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

For all of us, an allegory is an aesthetic error. (I  had initially planned to write, "is nothing if not an aesthetic error," until I realized that my thought comprised an allegory.) As far as I know, the genre of allegory has been analyzed by Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 50), by De Quincey (Writings, XI, 198), by Francesco De Sanctís (Storia della letteratura italiana, VII), by Croce (Estetica, 39) and by Chesterton (G. F. Watts, 83); in this essay I will limit myself to the latter two. Croce denies allegory's art; Chesterton vindicates it. I suspect Croce is correct; yet I would like to know how a form which seems to us so unjustifiable could have found so much favor. 

Croce's words are transparent enough that it suffices merely to repeat them: "If a symbol is imagined to be inseparable from artistic intuition, it must be a synonym of that same intuition, which is always of an ideal character. If, however, a symbol is imagined to be separable – if it can represent both the symbol and what is symbolized – it devolves into an intellectual error. The supposed symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept: it is an allegory, it is knowledge, or it is art which replicates knowledge. Yet we must be fair with the allegorical and admit that in certain cases it is quite innocuous. Some morality may be derived from Jerusalem Delivered; from Adonis by Marino, a decadent poet, we may come to understand that immeasurable pleasure may end in pain; and before a statue a sculptor may place a plaque stating that this work embodies Clemency or Goodness. These are allegories appended to a finished work, and they do it no harm. They are expressions intrinsically added to other expressions. To Tasso's Jerusalem, an appended page of prose proffers some of the poet's other thoughts; a verse or a stanza added to Adonis contains what the poet wishes us to understand; and by the statue we find inscribed the word clemency or goodness." On page 222 of his book Poetry (Barí, 1946), Croce's tone is far more hostile: "An allegory is not a direct means of intellectual expression, but rather a coincidence of writing and cryptography."  

Croce does not admit of any difference between content and form. The former is the latter, and the latter the former. To him, an allegory seems monstrous because it aspires to two contents in a single form: the immediate or literal (Dante, guided by Vergil, finds Beatrice), and the figurative (guided by reason, a man finally finds faith). Croce deems this manner of writing rife with laborious enigmas.  

To champion the allegorical, Chesterton begins by refuting that language exhausts the expression of reality:

[Man] knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world, and doing strange and terrible service in it, crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can, every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

With language now declared insufficient, there is room for other means of expression; allegory may be one of these means, like architecture or music. Formed out of words, it is not a language of language, a sign of other signs of brave virtue and secret illuminations which indicate this word. A sign more precise than a monosyllable, richer and more apt.    

I do not know for sure which of the eminent debaters is right; what I do know is that allegorical art once seemed charming (the labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, extant in two hundred manuscripts, comprising twenty-four thousand verses) and now seems intolerable. In addition to being intolerable, we find it stupid and frivolous. Neither Dante, who recreated the history of his passion in La Vita nuova, nor Boethius the Roman, composing in a tower in Pavia, in the shadow of his executioner's sword, his Consolation of Philosophy, would have understood this sentiment. How then is one to explain this discord without resorting to a begging of the question about fluctuating tastes? 

Coleridge observes that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter suspect that ideas are realities; the former, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing if not a system of arbitrary signs; for the latter, it is a map to the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian may be an error or a fiction of our imperfect knowledge. Through every latitude and era, these two immortal antagonists have changed dialects and number: the first may be Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, or Francis Bailey; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, or William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone hailed Aristotle as the master of human reason (Convivio, IV, 2), yet the nominalists were Aristotle, and the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes believed that the only medieval debate of any philosophical value was that between nominalism and realism. A bold judgment, if one that enhances the importance of this vivid controversy more than some maxim by Porphyry, put forth and commented on by Boethius, provoked at the beginning of the ninth century, which Anselm and Roscellinus reaffirmed at the end of the eleventh, and which William of Occam revived in the fourteenth. 

As one might suspect, all these years multiplied towards infinity the number of intermediary positions and distinctions. Nevertheless, one should assert that for realism the primordial element was the universal (Plato would say it was ideas and forms; we would say abstract concepts), and for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a vain museum of distractions and verbal games; it is far more likely that these two theses correspond to the two ways in which to sense reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: "Ultrarealism took into account the initial adhesions. The eleventh-century chronicler Hériman of Tournai referred to those who taught dialectics in re as antiqui doctores; Abelard spoke of this as ancient doctrine (antigua doctrina), and until the end of the twelfth century, labeled his adversaries as moderni." A thesis now inconceivable appeared evident in the ninth century and persisted in some form until the fourteenth. Nominalism, before the novelty of very few, now included everyone; its victory was so vast and fundamental that its number was useless. No one declared himself to be a nominalist because there was no one who was anything else. We must try to understand, nonetheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the most important thing was not men but humanity; not individuals, but the species; not the species, but the genus; not the genera, but God.  

In my understanding, it was from such concepts (the clearest manifestation of which is perhaps Eriguena's four divisions of nature) that allegorical literature emerged. It is the tale of abstractions, like the novel is the story of individuals; the abstractions are simply personified. For that reason, in every allegory there is something novelistic. The individuals whom novelists put forth aspire to generic roles (Dupin is reason; Don Segundo Sombra is the gaucho); in novels there is an allegorical element. 

The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individuals, from realism to nominalism, took several centuries, but I venture to suggest an ideal date. That day in 1382 on which Geoffrey Chaucer, who perhaps did not believe himself to be a nominalist, wanted to translate into English that verse of Boccacio's, "E con gli occulti ferri i Tradimenti" ("and treacheries with hidden irons"), and repeated it in this way: "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke." The original was in the seventh book of the Teseida; Chaucer's version in The Knightes Tale.

Hölderlin, "An die Hoffnung"

A work ("To hope") by this German poet.  You can read the original here.

O beautiful, O meekly bustling hope!  
You nobly do not scorn the grievers' home; 
And, gladly serving, wait as mortals roam  
Amidst this life through heaven's telescope.  

Where are you, then?  Lived I've short days, and yet 
My evening breath's gone cold.  Like shadows I
Am silent, songless: so does heart's regret 
Aslumber in my quaking bosom lie.  

In greenest vale, where freshest spring's soft spray
Roars daily down from mountain peaks, where blooms 
Most dulcet timelessness on autumn day, 
This silence, O most beautiful, exhumes  

My urge to seek you out; if midnight then 
Were flooding copses with some unseen life 
And o'er me ever-frozen flowers bend, 
Ashine swim blooming stars with lights so rife.  

O, daughter of the ether, come out now 
Your father's garden, spirit of the earth. 
If you cannot, with fear you should me girth, 
Yet scare my heart with other fears somehow.

A la deriva

A short story ("Adrift") by this Uruguayan writer.  You can read the original here.

The man trod on something off-white, immediately felt a bite on his foot, and leapt forward.  Upon turning and swearing, he espied a lancehead – what the locals call a yaracacusú – coiled upon itself in anticipation of another attack.  Taking a quick glance at his foot, where two drops of blood were swelling troublesomely, the man removed the machete from his belt.  The viper saw the threat and sank its head deeper into the center of its coil; but the machete crashed down upon its spine, dislocating its vertebrae.  He bent over closer to the bite marks, wiped away the drops of blood, and thought about matters for a moment.  An acute pain had emerged from those two purple dots and begun to invade his entire foot.  In haste he bound his ankle with a handkerchief and followed the path back to his ranch.  The pain in his foot was increasing, along with a sensation of tense swelling, and suddenly the man spotted two or three shiny stitches irradiating like lightning from the wound to the middle of the calf.  He could move his leg only with difficulty; his throat was afflicted with metallic dryness then insatiable thirst, and he swore anew under his breath.

Having arrived finally at the ranch, he threw himself atop his mill-wheel.  Now the two purple points were vanishing into the monstrous lump the whole foot had become.  There his skin appeared thinner, tenser, and about to crack  He wanted to call out to his wife, and his voice broke into a hoarse scratch.  Thirst was devouring him.   

"Dorothea!" he managed to rattle.  "Bring me a beer!"

His wife came running with a full glass, which the man drank in three gulps.  But he did not taste a thing.

"I asked you for beer, not water!"  he roared again.  "Bring me a beer!"

"But it is beer, Paulino," protested the woman, quite scared.

"No, you brought me water!  I want beer, I tell you!"

The woman ran off one more time and returned with a demijohn.  The man had another glass, then two more, but he felt nothing in his throat.

"Alright, this here is getting very bad," he muttered, looking at his livid foot which already boasted the shine and luster of gangrene.  Atop the handkerchief's heaping ligature, flesh was oozing out like some monstrous pudding. 

Shooting pains were followed by further lightning stitches which now reached his inner thigh.  At the same time, the atrocious dryness in his throat, which breathing only seemed to heat up and exacerbate, was growing.  When he tried to stand up he vomited instantly, forcing him to remain for half a minute with his forehead pressed against the wheel's spoke.  But the man did not want to die, so he went down to the shore and got in his canoe.  He sat down at the stern and began to paddle towards the center of the Paraná river.  Here the river's current, which in the vicinity of the Iguazu river ran for six miles, would take him to Tacurú-Pucú in under five hours.  With somber energy the man was able to reach the middle of the river.  Yet here his benumbed hands dropped the paddle into the canoe, and he vomited yet again – this time, blood – then directed his gaze to the sun disappearing behind the mountain.

His whole leg, halfway to his thigh, was a hardened and deformed block bursting through his clothes.  The man cut off the ligature and opened up the pants with his knife: his lower abdomen was incredibly painful, bloated with large livid marks.  The man now believed he would never make it to Tacurú-Pucú by himself.  So he decided to ask his friend Alves for help, even if a falling out had kept them apart for a long while. 

The river's current now carried him to the Brazilian coast; the man was able to dock the canoe with ease.  He dragged himself up the slope, but after twenty meters he lay there stretched out on his stomach, exhausted.

"Alves!"  he cried with whatever force he could muster; but for a response he listened in vain.

"My dear Alves!  Do not deny me this favor!"  he screamed again, lifting his head from the ground.  In the silence of the forest not a single murmur could be heard.  The man still had the fortitude to return to his canoe, and the current, catching him once more, quickly carried him adrift.

Here the Paraná ran deep into an enormous river basin whose walls, higher than a hundred meters, gloomily canalized the river.  The black woods ascended from the shores lined with blocks of basalt, which were also black.  Behind there, on the sides, lay the eternal lugubrious wall at whose bottom the eddied river hastened into the incessant bubbling of murky waters.  So aggressive was this landscape, where reigned but the silence of death.  Nevertheless at dusk, its somber beauty and calm assumed a unique majesty.

The sun had already set when the man, half-prone at the bottom of the boat, experienced violent shivers.  Then all of a sudden, to his astonishment, he sluggishly lifted up his head and straightened it.  And he felt better.  His leg hardly hurt any more; his thirst had diminished; and his breast, now free, opened up in slow inhalation.

The venom was beginning to leave his body, he had no doubts.  He was almost alright, yet he still did not have the strength to move his hand, and reckoned that he would be fully recovered come the morning.  He also calculated that he would be in Tacurú-Pucú in three hours.

His well-being increased and with it a somnolence replete with memories.  He did not feel anything in either his leg or his stomach.  Might his friend Gaona still be living in Tacurú-Pucú?  Perhaps he could also see his former employer, Mr. Dougald, as well as the recipient of his work.  Would he arrive soon?  The sky, to the west, would now open up into a screen of gold, the river likewise having changed color.  From the already-darkened Paraguayan coast the mountain let the twilght's freshness cascade over the river with emanations of orange blossoms and wild honey.  Very high up, a pair of macaws silently crossed the sky in the direction of Paraguay.  

Down here upon the river of gold the canoe was drifting rapidly, at times spinning around before a bubbling whirlpool.  The man in that canoe kept feeling better and better, and in the meantime thought about the exact amount of time that had passed since he had last seen his former employer, Dougald.  Had it been three years?  Perhaps not, not that long.  Two years and nine months?  Perhaps.  Eight and a half months?  That's how long it had been, he was certain. 

Suddenly he felt frozen up to his chest.  What could this be?  And yet his breathing ... He had made the acquaintance of Lorenzo Cubilla, the recipient of those wood products of Mr. Dougald's, in Puerto Esperanza one year on Good Friday.  Was it a Friday?  Yes, or was it a Thursday?  

The man slowly stretched out his fingers.

"It was a Thursday ..."

And he stopped breathing.