The first time I studied abroad in France, I was a 20 year old bright-eyed, bushy-tailed undergrad who had never traveled abroad before, and who was unversed in French culture and its roots in Catholicism. I think it’s safe to say that even though fewer and fewer French people consider themselves “practicing Catholics,” Catholicism permeates many different aspects of French life. Not knowing this, I didn’t understand Toussaint, or why every night on the evening news the weatherman told us what saint we would be celebrating tomorrow. And you can imagine my surprise when an older, wiser graduate student explained that the couple we saw canoodling in the Montparnasse cemetery was probably on a date! “Oh, yeah,” she coolly remarked, “I had a French boyfriend once who loved to take me to the cemetery on dates. It’s like a park.” What I thought of as morbid was simply the French embrace of death during life.
I thought of this as I read Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and its mixture of life and death. Juan Preciado, the protagonist, sets out to explore the lives in his past only after the death of his mother. Even after he dies in the suffocating Comala, his soul lives to uncover the life of his dead father. Often, we, the readers, don’t know if characters are dead or alive and we see live characters converse with dead ones, and dead characters pray for live ones. Although the story is hard to follow given its lack of chronology (its almost like Rulfo wrote the story and then put it in a blender), characters that seemingly appear out of nowhere, and its surrealist qualities, its easy to see that the characters, like my canoodling couple on a date in the cemetery, are at ease with the idea of death; it is simply woven into life.
Often, when something is opaque or unfamiliar, I try to make sense of it by comparing and contrasting it to something else. Although Beckett’s Waiting for Godot probably can’t be considered less obscure than his play Endgame, I found myself comparing the two, maybe simply because I’ve read Waiting for Godot several times. In Endgame, we immediately see the pairing of the characters, Hamm and Clov and Nagg and Nell, just as Waiting for Godot pairs Vladimir and Estragon and Pozzo and Lucky. In both plays, we also see how characters are co-dependent. Hamm could not survive without Clov in a practical sense since he is both blind and immobile, and both characters depend on each other since being with someone, anyone is better than facing the world alone. Likewise, Vladimir and Estragon are co-dependant to the point that they are interchangeable in Waiting for Godot.
The repetitiveness of both plays is also apparent, seen in Godot through the repetition of the acts and when Vladimir constantly asks to leave, followed by Estragon saying they have to wait for Godot. In Endgame, Hamm repeatedly knocks on the wall and is insists on returning to the middle of the room after his ride. Endgame also suggests the repetitiveness of the hell that is life, with the blurred line between the beginning and the end. Despite the similarities between the two plays, I found Endgame to be darker than Godot. The idea that Godot (God?) may come seems a twinge more optimistic than the apocalyptic attitudes in Endgame.
But in the end, I found myself comparing the relationship between Clov and Hamm, a father and son in a sense, with the relationship I saw as a little girl between my grandmother and Granny, my great-grandmother. Granny was always very independent, until she suffered a stroke at the age of 93. Like Clov and Hamm, both disabled to different extents, both Grandmama and Granny were elderly at the time of Granny’s stroke. As Clov became Hamm’s servant, it also seems like Grandmama became Granny’s servant in a sense, always at her beck and call. Granny was never the same after her stroke. The vibrant woman I once knew who cooked lavish meals for 20, worked in her garden, and made quilts had faded into a difficult woman who, confined to her little house, was simply waiting around to die, like Hamm. Remarkably, regardless of how mean Granny was, Grandmama kept taking care of her. Looking back, I can see how much my grandmother aged after she started taking care of Granny. However, while Clov took care of Hamm out of a sense of obligation, fear of being alone, and facing the world on his own, I know that Grandmama took care of Granny for two very different reasons: respect and love.
I love teaching and being a student myself. I love learning something new “just because,” and attempting to share my passion for language (and life) with others. I seem to have lost sight of this lately, though, because my schedule is INSANE. I think my current situation might be why the modernismo movement and the works of Darío and Martí were so striking to me. Due to my lack of time and abundance of obligations, I feel like my day to day activities are becoming utilitarian, instead of being a celebration of the things I love. I, like the modernismos, want to reject this utilitarianism!!! I want to focus on art and soul and spirit! Sometimes, I too wish I could freeze time! At this point in my life, I, like the modernismos, feel like I am trying to define myself.
For me, one of the most powerful lines of Darío’s poem Niagara was the first two words: Stop passenger! Encapsulate into these two words are the notions of speed, lack of control, and the idea that we are travelers merely passing through this life who should take advantage of the world around us, sentiments I often feel in my everyday life. So thank you, Darío and modernismos, for helping me regain perspective.
According to René Wellek in the article Realism in Literature, the literary creed of realism stipulates that “art should give a truthful representation of the real world: it should therefore study contemporary life and manners by observing meticulously and analyzing carefully. It should do so dispassionately, impersonally, objectively” (52).
Having read this before I read the Sentimental Education, I was surprised to find numerous instances in the novel in which the author, through the voice of Fréderic does not provide a dispassionate, impersonal, or objective description of the city of
Paris. Throughout the novel, Fréderic’s painstaking observations are often influenced by his feelings at the time, disqualifying them as unbiased or impartial. For example, at the beginning of the novel, when Fréderic has returned to Paris for law school, he is dejected and unhappy due to his inability to see Mme. Arnoux. Inasmuch, his descriptions of
Paris and her streets reflect this: he notices yellow reflections in the mud and shadows on the sidewalks while the fog enveloped him, and the gloominess of the city “fell indefinitely in his heart” (42).
The doom-and-gloom vision of Paris is again offered by Fréderic when he hears Mr. Arnoux is out of town and goes to visit Mrs. Arnoux only to find out that the opposite was true: Arnoux greets him at the house as Mrs. Arnoux is in Chartres. For months after this visit, he wallows in self-pity, and his impression of Paris suffers: he describes the Seine and its quays as gray and black and the walls of the schools in the Latin Quarter are described as “more morose than ever” (84). Even the people of the city do not escape his scathing eye when they are described as base, foolish, and idiotic.
However, when things were going well with Mme. Arnoux—or when Fréderic was simply near her—he describes the city from a completely different perspective. For example in the beginning of Part 2, when Fréderic returns to Paris and sees Mme. Arnoux, he describes the city as exuding freshness. He savors the “good air of Paris which seems to emanate romance and intelligence” (122).
It would be difficult to argue that Flaubert’s L’education sentimentale is not an astute example of realism—it provides an incredible portrait of Paris in the 1840s. I am certainly not trying to do that. The fluctuating manner in which Paris is described in this novel, however, shows yet again that no novel can meet all the requirements for a certain genre. Literature, thankfully, is not that black and white.
