Saturday, November 12, 2011

Brossa's pastoral

Pastoral

Ninguno, porque a los que no mató
huyeron.

Un pastor le pegó un tiro a un árbol
lleno de pájaros y mató a unos cuantos.
¿Cuántos quedaron?

No son flores lo que faltan,
ni abundancia de árboles,
ni fuente para sazonar
árboles y flores.

Violently funny.

Joan Ramón Resina on Maragall

Two excellent characterizations of Maragall's work.


The poet perceives the majesty of the sacred in the “living word,” which is language so close to nature that it is just at the point of blending into the landscape or perhaps emerges from it (199).

“A subtle movement of the air,” says Maragall, “places before you the immense variety of the world and arouses in you a strong sense of the infinite unknown" (200).


Thursday, November 3, 2011

A literary angle

I really enjoyed reading Annabel Martín's "Critical Basque Studies" about a month ago and its equally interesting now.  In particular, I like her suggestion, following Adrienne Rich, that literature slows down the intelligible world and brings us metaphorically to the unintelligible or invisible.

In the case of literature, this would entail a writer's unique struggle with language to name the unknown, with the writer's attempt to give form through metaphor to the unintelligible, with being truthful to the complexity of reality, with learning how to suspend a "netted bridge over a gorge."  (177)

The literary attitude calms down its objects of inquiry, categories that no longer merely consist of books but a plethora of cultural objects.  Martín is shy to utterly shun literature in the face of cooler, shiner texts.  Yet she does not discount the importance of other mediums (nor do I).  Instead, she looks back to the literary as a way to again urge for engaged questioning in the public sphere.  This has everything to do with my work on causality between Merleau-Ponty and Lezama Lima, which attempts to evaluate their forms of phenomenology in relationship to object-oriented thinking (including poetics and ontology).  The category of the unintelligible might be extended to consider the invisible, the unthinkable and the horrific, to name a few.  Literature gives a space to engage the gaps and holes in human thinking, not necessarily to provide neat answers but to unravel their yarns in messy situations.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

"Hay que humanizarse o perecer"

Humanize or perish, Goytisolo's youthful response to Ortega y Gasset's deshumanización del arte.  Yet this return to realism did not entail a collapse back into the gigantic tomes of Galdós or Balzac, but a new attention to what could be experienced through sensory perception.  I find this interesting because of the major chasm constructed between the author's realist work and his experimental work, beginning with the Álvaro Mendiola trilogy.  I am not, of course, prone to draw too many comparison between various markers on Goytisolo's trajectory, but one must always wonder how it might even be considered a trajectory -- if that is the proper word.

"The landscape set burning"

Atxaga's Obabakoak is obsessed with its own backdrop.  I found this fragment lurking in my notes this evening:

Naturally my friend didn't know who I meant and so I settled down to the eleventh memory of the night--too many perhaps for one journey, too many, even, for one book.  But that night my memory was like dry tender which the heat generated by the landscape set burning.  (203)

This passage was epiphanic for me this summer.  Tonight I remember why.