Parables of Reconciliation (Spirit of the Beehive)

 

 

 

Our imagination is populated by the characters found in fiction. We think in terms of characters, and plotlines, and the tropes that characterize our fiction. It is certainly the case that many of us see ourselves as characters, and we weave storylines that bear a strong similarity with we have seen and read.

Many times, the two meld together. There have been times when I find my life reliving a plotline I have encountered before, and I find myself temporarily wondering at the confluence of the two, eagerly awaiting what is to come next. It isn’t necessarily a case of déjà vu, which we have all felt, and refers to a feeling of already having had a certain experience (a temporary glitch in the virtual reality created by software, in accordance to the vastly stimulated film The Matrix), but instead of slowly seeing the pieces fall into place. It is like recognizing a pattern.

The retreat into fiction is a notable trope (formula element) in much of modern fiction. The retreat into a private fantasy realm is one that occurs frequently, and I used to associate it with some of my formative experiences as a child, when watching Japanese monster movies. It is, of course, an example of escapism, and I am endlessly fascinated by the idea that is constitutes a needed coping mechanism, a parable that allows us to confront and not escape from our problems.

These observations were brought to the fore after watching the 1973 Spanish film The Spirit of the Beehive. For a country that was still living in a culture of repression, thirty years after the end of the Civil War, it is natural to view it as a way that art has helped popular audiences cope with the aftermath of traumatic events.

 

Over half a million people died in this war that lasted from 1936 to 1939, and which, as has been emphasized over and over, was a prelude and preparation for World War II. It was a prolonged and gritty war, one that witnessed many episodes of heroism but also incredible savagery. It was a war that, in many ways, responded to longstanding conflicts that had never been truly resolved in Spain, and that harked back to the 19^th century and the advent of liberalism and the hopes that were frustrated by the returning king Fernando VII, a divisive and autocratic ruler who was out of step with the changes being seen in the rest of Europe.

There were international brigades who volunteered to fight against the Nationalists. It was a cause celebre, one that inspired socialists, anarchists, and those who believed in the coming worker’s utopia. It was also a war that was fought, according to the Nationalist forces, to preserve a union that was seen as coming apart, and the second Republic under Manuel Azaña took on a tragic air.

The film deals with the immediate aftermath of the war. It is the year 1940, and the country has been pacified. There is a spirit of crisis, and this reflects the reality in the country at this time, as the country struggled to recover from economic devastation that was further accentuated by the isolation into which the country was plunged. Franco kept Spain out of the European war, but Spain lived through terrible times, with food shortages and a country that was sputtering along economically, with little access to international capital that was desperately needed.

We are introduced to the magic of cinema, that of small-town itinerant peddlers who travel from time to time, screening films to audiences who are starved for entertainment. It must have been quite a spectacle, and it recalls a few of the stories I heard told by my parents, who grew up in rural Mexico in the 50s and 60s, and who also eagerly awaited the arrival of mobile cinema. The peddlers would arrive, and of course, word would spread quickly, and sheets would be procured for the evening function, and everyone would get their chairs ready to show up in someone’s corral. “¡Hay balazos!”, the word would ring out, for everyone loved movies with gunfights, and my parents told of taking chairs and enjoying these evening small-town spectacles, where audiences derived as much enjoyment from the running commentary they shared as from the movie itself.

The film, in this case, is the American classic with Boris Karloff, Frankenstein. We have an adaption of the Mary Shelley novel of the early 19^th century, a product of romanticism and one in which we have a much more frightening and articulate monster than that encountered in the film. The children are excited, and one imagines, it is a way not only to escape from the drudgery of the town, one that seems painted in black and white, but also, a way to give a name and form to projected desires. The monster is not what is seems, and the girls, especially the younger one, Ana, is much taken by the mystery of this relationship between monster and child.

We are referring, of course, to mysteries that haunt not only children but adults as well. These adults seem to have carved out a semblance of normalcy, and little mention is made of the tragic war and the suffering it produced. It is as if everyone is making an attempt to avoid the topic, almost as if people wish to erase this episode from their consciousness. Ana, though, is entranced by the spirit of the monster, and by the idea of reaching out and exploring what she seems to perceive as a state of affairs that somehow seems off kilter. What is beautiful is just as likely to kill as to nourish, as she learns from her trips with her grandfather (played by Fernando Fernán Gómez) to hunt for mushrooms.

There are invisible things out there, things that will come if you call out to them, as her older sister Isabel tells her in their earnest conversations at night. There are monsters and deadly things, the spirit of unresolved traumas, and ghosts that, one must say, are inevitably representations of wrongs that have not been addressed or acknowledged. There must be many ghosts populating Spain after the end of the Civil War, but Ana puts it into more familiar terms, and she seeks our private spaces, seeks to investigate and call forth these ghosts.

The mom is, evidently, yearning for contact from a lover, and her father seems, at times, strangely distant, seeking as he does to maintain his holdings, he being some sort of functionary who furthermore keeps bees at his estate. Sweetness laced with peril, of course, and he goes around in his own monster suit, his protective wear, which brings up other parallels with Frankenstein. One takes it that for him to have preserved as much of his estate as he did, he must evidently have fought on the side of the Nationalists. What manner of suffering did he occasion during the war?

Spirits are, indeed, called forth by the young child, and we see particularly in the arrival of the fugitive man to what seems to be an abandoned shed out in the middle of the fields. It is winter, and he jumps off a train, and takes shelter. Ana finds him, and not only is she not afraid, but she shares her food with him, then brings items from her father’s household (his coat, his watch) to give to him. What kind of danger does this man represent? Is he one of the last and forlorn holdouts from the Republican side? Is he just a common criminal on the run? What gives her the courage to approach and befriend him?

 

This is a divide that proves endlessly fascinating, for it speaks of parallels in which distance drives people to acts of violence and repression. The husband and wife are evidently estranged, and we see as well a society in which people are ill at ease, as if aware of the restraints and the repression that accompanies the Nationalist victory. In a film such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, we see a similar fable, in which a young child escapes into her own private realm to escape from the reality of a repressive father and family circumstances that seem perilous. She needs to deflect her worries by disguising them, something which the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has maintained is very much the determining factor behind the appeal of fairy tales.

These tales, it must be added, deal with acts of extreme violence. People are eaten, placed into ovens, consume poisoned fruit, are maimed, and suffer all form of physical punishment, in addition to the mental suffering that is provoked by the lack of attention and love. These are parables that seem instantly recognizable for most of us, because they capture the feeling of being unwanted, of lacking the security we all crave, but also, through their resolutions, promise a feeling of satisfaction that often proves to be elusive otherwise. We don’t all have fairy godmothers or magical talismans to save us when we need to confront the next big challenge.

 

This, then, brings to mind the perception of muted danger. It is evident not only in the gun that is carried by this mysterious man, but also, as mentioned before, in the watch that is stolen, and that ordinarily would have been considered an implement of power. The watch plays beautiful music when opened, and it somehow seems to have a healing power, for it entrances those who have it, and operates much as any other portal of escape. And, of course, we have the bees, busily producing their honey, but able to string savagely, and the mushrooms, the ones with the fanciful names, those that can kill if one isn’t careful just as effectively as any gun. (There is a scene in which the young girl Ana, after having run away, goes back to the mushroom patch, and would seem to be on the verge of consuming one of these deadly mushrooms.)

Conflicts, then, come to the form, for there is no retreat from the dangers of this or any other circumstance. It would seem that the film is, of course, a reflection on the dangers of repression, and an attempt to exorcise ghosts that continue to haunt our imagination. Frankenstein had a tender scene in the old film in which he meets the young girl by the side of a lake, and she shares with him a flower that entrances them both. Why he would kill the girl seems to be one of the unresolved mysterious of this and any such encounter, and what brings out the monstrous in us is just as much a matter of concern. The monster seems as much the victim as the criminal, and we will of course always harbor the impression of a childish entity, one who is unable to comprehend his own power, but who wishes, nonetheless, to be understood.

The young man who has taken refuge is discovered and killed, and the child runs away after an encounter with her father at the abandoned building where the young man had been hiding. Who was the real monster, in this episode? Why did the man have to be killed? Would we have seen a reenactment of the movie version of Frankenstein? She had given the man her apple, what gift would he have given her in return?

In the end, after a haunting sequence in which the monster visits the child who has run away to the countryside and is desperately being sought by her parents and the town authorities, we are left to wonder as much by this fascination with the monstrous quality in all of us. Where does it lurk, and what brings it forth? The child is traumatized, much as the entire country is traumatized, and her silence mirrors the inability of the town to talk and deal with the consequences of what is evidently a stifling spirit of repression. We have to remember that, in Spain, when this film was released (1973), we were nearing the end of the Franco dictatorship. Artists were addressing the question not only of what had taken place decades before, but also, of what came next.

It is, thus, logical that the movie would end with a child who is just as obsessed as she ever was with the haunting mysteries that confound her, mysteries that point to the way in which her society and her family itself has been damaged. She is probably as much of a ghost as any of the magical or fantastic creatures that consume her imagination, and she glides along, earnest and serious, and prepares to commune with other ghosts, calling out to the monster once again.

Maybe there is a way for Frankenstein never to have to kill the girl. Maybe justice means that they both have to be saved, rather than both of them dying. Otherwise, what hope does she have?

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013) 

La fiesta de balas (A review of Los de abajo)

 

La fiesta de balas

There is no such thing as objective history. It is an act of fiction, one in which the writer shapes and forms the material they have both gathered and received to formulate stories. As much as we may give credence to the persistent illusion otherwise, we have as much difficulty agreeing on what is happening now as we do with what happened in the past. Narrative shapes history, because narrative underlies the way in which we assign meaning.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 is one that has been mythologized extensively. It is certainly the case that it changed the country, but it may also be viewed as a narrative of emancipation. It was a long and chaotic process, with many forces put into contention, and with a whole cadre of heroes and villains. It also helped to shape the course of the subsequent 80 years of Mexican history, for it heralded a new ideology that, as in the title of the ruling country that held sway during that period, sought to “institutionalize” this revolution. As such, it is a foundational period, one that marked an end to the previous period.

Even we, children who were born and raised in the United States, but who have parents and grandparents who came from Mexico, have a vague sense, imparted to us by our parents as well as popular culture, of the processes and characters involved. I remember encountering my father when I was a child singing in the garage with other men, and even though they were born in the 40s, they still sang corridos that recounted the exploits of regional revolutionary figures, not just Pancho Villa, but of the leaders that sprang up almost everywhere in vast mestizo and Indian heartlands of Mexico. It may not have been entirely clear to us all, but we heard Pancho Villa, the centaur of the North, and Emiliano Zapata, the dour Indian peasant of the south, and of course, we heard of figures such as Francisco Madero, the martyr of the Revolution, and the dictator and tyrant, don Porfirio Díaz, who was overthrown. As young people who chafed against parental control as well as the discrimination we suffered as children in the school system here in the USA, many of us sympathized with the revolutionaries, those who came from marginalized sectors, those who looked like our peasant ancestors, who spoke a colloquial Spanish and who had famous phrases of liberation attributed to them, from “¡Tierra y Libertad!” to such a lapidary remark as that attributed to Zapata, “It is better to die on your feet than to continue living on your knees”. This was when we weren’t giving expression to our revolutionary impulses by listening to rock music, to Pink Floyd and Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, which scandalized our parents to no end.

But the Mexican revolution, as much as it has seeped into our consciousness, was a process that was multi-faceted, and that had several stages. It had its martyrs, foremost among them the afore-mentioned Francisco Madero, the rich hacienda owner from the north who was influenced by democratic ideals and who proved unable to govern once he toppled the dictatorship. This is no way detracts from the aura that accompanies him in the popular imagination, for his idealism was evident from the very beginning, in his championing of the need for land redistribution, and in his true underdog struggle to topple a long-standing tyrant and champion the ideal of a more representative government, one not beholden and serving the interests of elites who were arrayed into camarillas (factions). (It is always endlessly fascinating and ironic that Madero himself came from this elite class.) And we have our villains, in a process that saw much meddling from the outside, principally by the United States, who with the meddling of President Wilson and his representatives helped to support Huerta who had overthrown Madero and had him and his brother killed in a tragic episode known as the “decena trágica”.

This process was polarizing, and was reflected in literature as well as historiography. The official account that is promulgated by the ideologues of the new Mexican government was that it was a bloody but necessary process, even if it witness untold destruction and it resulted in the migration of millions of Mexicans to the United States. We have, thus, a celebratory if at times somber recounting of this episode, one which, in reality, is a sequence of episodes that have been stitched together so that we preserve in a way a triumphalist account that doesn’t end with the murder of Madero, but instead, with the practical and necessary triumph of leaders such as Carranza and Obregón who crafted the new state, and who provided the ideology that would hold sway and would be associated with notions of Mexican nationalism. It is portrayed, thus, as a fight for liberation and resistance, liberation from internal forces and the caudillismo represented by Díaz and Huerta, and resistance to external intervention on the part of the only real external foe that Mexico has had since its independence, the United States.

This polarizing quality is evident in the famous novel by Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo, which was published in 1915. The novel purports to present a different perspective, representing as it does a fictionalized account that of the popular classes who joined in the revolution. It is a novel that incorporates a skeptical narrator who comments on and criticizes the events and actions of the characters involved, and if anything, it recalls powerfully another model that was immensely influential in Latin America. It is, thus, the Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism of Mexico, a version of the famous book that was written by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento of Argentina and that chronicled the rise of the figure of the Latin American despot.

While the former work, published approximately 80 years earlier, was a hybrid work that was as much autobiography as cultural critique and an exercise in costumbrismo (the description of national types), we preserve from that work the enduring motif of a clash of civilizations, and of an imputed savagery of a public (the rural classes, the workers) who, in the polemical argument of Sarmiento, were thought to be unprepared to govern. This is an argument that is reproduced in an explicit way in Azuela’s novel, in the bitter reflections of the revolutionary Solís who, we may take, is a spokesperson for the author. This character, in an encounter with another elite turned revolutionary, Luis Cervantes (el curro), who describes the forces unleashed in the following way:

(quote)

Pero hecho, gestos y expresiones que agrupados en su lógica y natural expresión,   constituyen e integran una mueca pavorosa y grotesca a la vez de una raza…¡De una raza irredenta!..(…) Me preguntará que por qué sigo en entonces en la revolución. La revolución es el huracán, y el hombre que se entrega a ella no es ya el hombre, es la miserable hoja seca arrebatada por el vendaval… (p. 69)

(end quote)

It is a pessimistic and destructive judgment rendered, and in the same way that Sarmiento does, it dismisses the potential of an entire social class, by referring to arguments that were based as much on a pessimistic reading of Latin American history as on the notions of scientific racism that were so common during the 19th century.

We have, then, the spectacle of an “irredeemable” people, and this symbolism is mirrored throughout the narrative in items that seek to underscore this interpretation. We have, for example, symbols such as the rolling stone, one that, once unleashed, can’t be stopped, and the volcano that has erupted and can only be allowed to run its course, as well as the wind-up clock that is so prized by peasant general Demetrio, and suggests powerfully that these upheavals are cyclical. The view is very clear that what we have is a novel that alludes to these powerful arguments from the past, ones that project, it may be said, a perspective that was not truly shared by the popular classes who genuinely chafed under the conditions that held sway during this epoch leading up to the revolution.

The story is furthermore elaborated in the story of two characters, the general Demetrio Macías to whom I first alluded, and the figure of Luis Cervantes. We have characters who are involved in movements that may be visualized in terms of ascents as well as descents, where the poor peasant characters which to overturn the existing order and thus move up, and the elite or bourgeois groups (represented by Luis) seek to appropriate these energies by seeming to join the revolutionary struggle, but in reality, are waging their own rear-guard action to control and benefit from the revolution. As one of the most enigmatic characters in the novel, La Pintada, proclaims,

(quote)
¡Qué brutos! (…) ¿De dónde vienen? Llega uno a cualquier parte y no tiene más que escoger la casa que le cuadre y ésa agarra sin pedirle licencia a naiden. Entonces ¿pa quén jue la revolución? ¿Pa los catrines? Si ahora nosotros vamos a ser los meros catrines… (p. 86)
(end quote)

It is this vision of an overturning of the existing order that holds sway, and it constitutes a vicious indictment of the revolution.

We see this in the way the movement of the revolutionaries is tightly circumscribed by their circumstances. They don’t have any real understanding of the ideology of revolution, that which was formulated by celebrated figures who have entered into the hagiography of the revolution, figures such as Ricardo Flores Magón, an advisor to Francisco Madero. The novel emphasizes over and over that these are simple men, with a limited vocabulary that is furthermore laced with expletives and colorful metaphors, in which the characters lack any real ambition other than to lay hand on their next quota of “avances”, the spoils of war. The character of Luis Cervantes tries to impart some notion of the revolution as a fight against tyranny, but in the portrayal offered by this novel, the humble peasant soldiers are unable to fully understand or conceptualize the process in this way.

Thus, we have intersecting movements in which characters from a higher social sphere (the bourgeois Luis) formulate and help to channel the energies of the revolutionaries, and the revolutionary energies are in turn sidetracked and thwarted so that, in the end, it is principally a movement in which the lower classes eliminate themselves for the convenience of the elites. While the revolution seem to be on the ascent in the first part of the novel, which leads up to the famous assault and conquest of Zacatecas, we see a dissipation of these energies in the second part, as no program of justice is implemented by the conquering revolutionaries who prove, on the contrary, to be just as savage as the federales.

We have mirrors, then, that are at play in this novel. The first scene involves the arrival of the federales to the house of Demetrio Macías, and the killing of the dog (the popular classes are continually compared to starving dogs) and the attempted rape of his wife. Demetrio manages to overpower them by surprise, and in an act of restraint lets the federales flee while being urged all the while to kill them. But in the end, Demetrio becomes the same as those groups in power against whom he was struggling, and in a famous scene not only does he exact retribution on the old cacique who had persecuted him before (don Mónico), but in the end allows his men to kill and rape the poor, as happens in other notable scenes such as that where his men steal the food of the citizens of Guadalajara, or threaten to shoot the poor campesinos of the sierras who have hidden from his forces.

There are both external as well as external struggles, and it is clear that by the second half, Demetrio is losing both struggles. He has ascended to the position of general, but in an orgiastic scene in the restaurant, he finds himself joined by disreputable individuals who will compromise his position, and in the case of the güero Margarito, we see the ascent of the authentic psychopath.

This güero Margarito is a vicious character who, we may say, is consumed by a need for vengeance. If the revolution is compared to a destructive force, he is the embodiment of this violence, and he seems to be kept barely in restraint. His associate, La Pintada, is just as self-centered, and is just as bereft of any idealism. It is thus noteworthy that these characters find the appropriate moment in which to join forces with Demetrio, who accepts them out of necessity if not out of any genuine sympathy. Over and over, we see the violence perpetrated by Margarito, a violence that offends the sensibilities of the reader and that can only be likened to the hyper-violence of the savage rural classes in Esteban Echeverría’s classic story, El matadero. (A story in which the representative of high civilization, a man who is part of the Unitarians, is tortured and killed by a rabble that supports the caudillo.)

These episodes, as well as the increasingly skeptical tone and harsh language of the narrator, who criticizes these actions and denounces Margarito explicitly as “malign”, serve to forward the argument that the ideological foundation of the Mexican Revolution eluded the understanding of the common soldiers who were involved in the movement.  This foundation was present , and within the novel was expressed in the arguments forwarded by Luis, but it fell on deaf ears, and was supposedly not as powerful an incentive as that of the promise of “avances”, the spoils of conquest, or revenge, as in the case of Margarito who holds a grudge against the ruling and bourgeois classes. As Demetrio responds when he is asked by Luis to restrain his men who seem too eager to pillage the households they encounter, he justifies them by saying that it is their only reward for the risks they are undertaking, thus establishing the notion on the part of the skeptical narrator that these revolutionaries were devoid of any allegiance to a higher ideology of liberation.

It is the case that, in the end, we circle back to where we first started. The first battle that was won by Demetrio was an ambush of Federalist troops, and the final battle is also ambush, but one in which the revolutionaries are slaughtered by the Federalists. The revolution is going badly, and the wise buffoon, Valderrama, offers proclamations that indict the savagery of the revolutionaries as well as the course of a war that has left them incapable of feeling the suffering of the populace. Valderrama, the brilliant but instable drunk, seems to hold a more realistic notion of the revolution, in which it is not as much a jockeying of position by powerful men as, instead, a vital force:

(quote)

―¿Villa?...¿Obregón?...¿Carranza?...¡X… Y… Z…! ¿Qué se me da a mí?...¡Amo la revolución como amo el volcán que irrumpe! ¡Al volcán porque es volcán, a la revolución porque es revolución!... Pero las piedras que quedan arriba o abajo, después del cataclismo, ¿qué me importan a mí?... (p. 139)

(end quote)

And this formulation seems to prefigure what will happen, because it is an enduring symbol that has been repeated over and over in the novel. What we have is a movement in which social groups scramble to ascend as well as endeavor to avoid descent, in which eternal processes are once again on display, and in which sacrifices are made continually and with little reason. Demetrio has had his lover Camila, an innocent and initially unwilling peasant from the countryside, murdered by La Pintada, and his assistant, Luis Cervantes, has abandoned the group in order to exile himself in San Antonio, Texas, where he seeks to deploy the capital he has stolen in order to set himself up. Villa has lost the battle of Celaya, and now, the peasants and poor city dwellers deny him and his forces any hospitality, and instead chafe when asked to provide supplies to the revolutionaries. The end is still some distance away, but when Valderrama abandons his, after he (Demetrio) abandons his wife and child once again to continue to continue this marathon of suffering (the rolling stone that keeps rolling until stopped), we know that it can only end in one way.

And, thus, with no sense of idealism, and with a reluctance but as well a resigned determination to continue on his path, we see him lead his forces into an ambush, which will serve to bookend this novel and invest this narrative with the aura of an anti-revolutionary work, one that demystifies the revolution and portrays it in a grimmer light, one divested of the aura of idealism. There is no grand cause in play here, at least in the conception of the peasant revolutionaries, for whom such a conception is far too abstract to be understood, and we the readers have the sense that this process is one that is defined by futility, for the clock will surely be wound up again and we will start where we left off, with those who are “above” exploiting those who are “below”. Demetrio dies trying to defend his position as the bullets (further mortal rocks or lethal metal “pebbles” , i.e. gunshots) rain down upon him, and we have the sense of a promise unfulfilled.

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)