THE ARGENTINE GOTHIC

“I have not seen anything pulled down so quick since I was in the Pampas and had a mare that I was fond of go to grass all in a night. One of those big bats that they call vampires had got at her in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay” says Quincey Morris, the well traveled American character in Dracula. At the end of the 19th century, when American and British visitors were frequent in Argentina’s flat Pampas, Bram Stoker, the talented and intuitive author of Dracula, couldn’t have found a better reference to vampirism than to evoke a land where blood and horror were and remained a major cultural motif, with fellow countrymen killing each other in cruel and permanent civil wars based on the terror inspired by the different. The founding scene of Argentine culture revolves around blood shed, murder and horror, and the permanent opposition of the always conflicting terms of civilization and barbarity has created in its literature a variety of Gothic: the Argentine Gothic.

After the Independence from Spain in 1816, the Argentine thought started its long cultural journey towards its literary shape. During the 19th century, poems and essays first and novels and short stories later, slowly built the Argentine literary house bringing to the world a whole new set of images and feelings, perceptions and ideas. In the 20th century, Argentina’s literature would be recognized as one of the most relevant in Spanish language. The Gothic movement, in its 18th, 19th and 20th century different versions, had in Argentina its own original expression. The influence of the Enlightenment was present in the first writers post Independence, who were nurtured with its values; Romanticism’s wave took its own local color in the Río de la Plata; and Surrealism made later its own way in the minds of writers who were ready, because of their distance from the great capitals of the world, to recreate the universe according to new laws. Since the beginning, the tension between the local barbarity and the aspiration to civilization created the intense emotional basement for an Argentine Gothic, in which the ghosts always come from the repressed, in an eternally split culture. As María Negroni notes: “Between ideology and crime, the Gothic prefers an epic of the intense which tends to rehabilitate the madness as the negative path, while it claims the unlikely as an antidote against all transcendence.”(Negroni, 21. Tr. DF).

The founding book of Argentine literature, Facundo by Sarmiento, has as a subtitle which tells all: Civilization or Barbarity. This essay, published in 1845, can be also read as a romantic novel on the life of Facundo Quiroga, a popular caudillo or strongman from La Rioja, a province in the Andean region. Sarmiento’s portrays Facundo and the life in the country as the perfect example of barbarity, the contrary of the civilization he promoted first as a writer, and later as a president. The barbaric countryside as opposed to the civilized city crosses the text, and Sarmiento takes pleasure in the accumulation of horror scenes, in which the permanent slaughtering constitutes the ongoing motif, whether it is about the deeds of Facundo, of Rosas, the powerful ruler in Buenos Aires, of his faithful guards, the mazorqueros, or Santo Pérez, another gaucho malo, bad gaucho, according to Sarmiento’s definition, who finally murdered Facundo. In the void of the Pampas, the Gothic castle is, at that mid nineteen century, still absent, and what Sarmiento perceives as barbarians is nothing else than the uninstructed local people, blend of Indians and Spaniards while the ghosts represent the absent civilized Europeans, who have deserted the colonial scene to maybe never come back. Sarmiento, a fervent admirer of the United States, will be later one of the promoters of the European “white” immigration in an effort to mate the barbaric half caste breed. Facundo is the first text to describe the horror for that barbaric half caste which actually is Argentine reality and to express the madness behind that horror: the permanent and unfulfilled longing for an impossible white and “clean” civilization. His colorful romantic style and his passionate attitude make of Sarmiento the double of Facundo: as savage as his character, when Governor of San Juan he will not hesitate to have another caudillo, his enemy, the Chacho Peñaloza, murdered and to have his head stuck on a spear, exhibited in the main square as an example of what enemies had to expect from him. Real life doubled the Gothic narrative, creating one particular effect of the uncanny in Argentine literature and history: how the barbaric repressed returns acted by the representatives of civilization. Facundo starts a lineage in which this particular trait of the Argentine cultural character becomes a preferred object of reflection.

Available contrasts to explore in the Argentine Gothic narratives can be between Indians and the colonial Spaniards; between Indians and criollos (that mix of Indians and Spaniards which gave the gauchos but also the first local elites); between Catholicism and the Masonic or Atheist Enlightenment; between British diplomats and cattle barons; between gauchos and the first porteña (of the port of Buenos Aires) aristocracy; between the porteña oligarchy and the peronists; between the military and the guerrilla. The list of opponents creating mutual fear could be continued till the present. Horror can alternate from the horror for the barbarians -Indians, gauchos, even Catholic Spaniards when seen from an enlightened point of view, peronists or military- to the reverse horror for a civilization perceived as strange, British and not Hispanic or Atheist and not Catholic, Communist or Liberal.


The particular brand of Argentine Gothic has changing ghosts depending on which is the ideology and the social belonging of the writer. Argentine history is a Gothic novel on its own right because of the degree of violent horror, from the massacres of the rebellious gauchos in the 19th century to the political massacres of the 70’s, just thirty years ago, and this horror is present in one way or another in its literature. If Facundo is the Rosetta stone which explains the basic and delivers the clues to understand the local Gothic, there are some outstanding texts which illustrate the horror, referring to different episodes of terror, evoking different ghosts, marking levels of transgression generally related to legitimating murder, and creating that particular passionate excess which characterizes Argentine history, always swinging from one extreme to the other.

Before Facundo, Esteban Echeverría delivered in 1838 his story The Slaughter House where the killing of cattle serves as a metaphor for the killing of opponents to the regime of Rosas. The detailed killing and splicing of a bull is followed by the equally detailed torture and murder of an unitario, the political opponent to the federales, or partisans of Rosas, who nevertheless called the unitarios “savages,” in one of those ironies present since the Argentine beginnings, when the definition of what was right depended on who held the weapon. The populace is represented as a grotesque group of meat addicts and fans of the murderers, while the red of the blood matches the red of Rosas’ federales ’ clothes, in a first image which, as a classic, will nurture the Argentine Gothic till the present. As Katy Wagner says:

What the image of blood loses in unlikelihood, it regains in 'significance of context'. The image of blood appears strikingly at critical points in the story, such as the dramatic death of the Unitarian, dying for his beliefs and instead of submission. Echeverria writes that 'a torrent of blood spurted, bubbling from the young man's mouth and nose, and flowed freely down the table' (Echeverria, 75-6). The development of the Unitarian's anger and spontaneous death marks itself in blood as well, as the 'veins on his neck and forehead jutted out black from his pale skin as if congested with blood' (Echeverria, 75). Here again, the image of blood strengthens the literary motif of the slaughter as it influences most visually many of the critical moments of the text.(Wagner)

One of the great novels of Rosas times, Amalia, by José Marmol, has for the first time an urban aristocratic setting and recreates the oppressive atmosphere in which the opponents to Rosas lived and the dangers and sufferings of their struggle to overthrow him. But Marmol’s affiliation as a Unitarian blinds him to see that Rosas was still a loved and popular dictator, and the Romantic story unfolds once again the tragedy of those who didn’t belong to the vast “barbaric” community. A house with secret rooms, shadows, political persecutions and double faced spies sets the original model for infinite Argentine novels dealing with the same problem of internal exile and alienation in a hostile, frankly aggressive, or directly criminal environment.

After the battle of Caseros in 1852, the reign of Rosas is over. A different breed of estancieros, ranchers, who like to call themselves civilized, is ready to make good businesses with Great Britain and to govern the country under the new laws of progress. It’s the time when estancias, ranchs, are converted in French palaces and Tudor castles which will be the new setting where the old ghosts, now under the form of the losing gauchos and the Indians massacred during the long military march to civilize the Patagonia, will provide new Gothic stories with the same actors changed. Martin Fierro by José Hernandez is the emblematic long poem quoted as the Argentine masterpiece, which relates the gaucho decline’s in what was the wild pampa in the beginnings of Argentine history. The pampa is now converted in the territory of the cattle barons suppliers of meat for the British Empire and in the realm of the military who draft the gauchos against their will to serve in the battle against Indians. Blood has in Martin Fierro the tint of a melancholy loss since all the barbaric seems doomed to be repressed, taking away at the same time genuine parts of Argentine culture. Freedom as it was known by the gaucho and before him, by the Indian, is lost and the horror lies now in the civilization to come. The powerful British Empire and its culture, so different from the Spanish, in the language and religion, become the new threat. From the point of view of the gaucho, the horror speaks English and is not a true Christian. Martin Fierro expresses the supreme transgression: the barbaric speaks by itself, in his own Argentine folk language, and explains its fear, not of a barbaric tyranny as in Echeverría’s Slaughter House, but of civilized tyranny.

These two opposite points of view, one with the urban civilized as a hero, representative of the “true” Argentine culture, and the other one with the barbaric gaucho as the admired paradigm of the Argentine character, will remain active during all the 20th century and can still be seen in the first years of the 21st century. They both describe different fears which will however develop in the same violent direction. The terror one will feel for the other, the need of suppressing who is seen as the enemy and the unwanted part of the nation, and the horror for a bloody past which will inevitably come back to both of them (because the Argentine history is one in which both Cain and Abel are murderers), appear once and again in the texts of the most famous Argentine writers.

At the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century a powerful elite will set the basis of modern Argentina. Well read and fond of good literature, Argentine authors, more oriented to the short story than to the novel, will be very sensitive to the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. There is more in that attraction than the admiration for a good writer: certainly the Gothic traits of their American colleague matched some of the Argentine. The European nostalgia as well as the American barbarism and grotesque, even if giving birth to different images and stories, belonged to both countries. The British influence in the Argentine elites opened them also to that new American Gothic in search of its own roots.

Among the great authors from that period, like Manuel Mujica Lainez, and Jorge Luis Borges who left masterpieces of Gothic literature, we have a myriad of secondary authors, some of them very famous, as Ernesto Sábato, who returned in their novels and short stories to the obsessive theme of the split Argentine personality, half barbaric, half civilized, and with the permanent tension of a repressed violence. From the literary excellence of the charming collection of short stories, Misteriosa Buenos Aires, mysterious Buenos Aires, by Mujica Láinez, with stories like El Hambre, the hunger, in which the Gothic is set in the 16th century at the time of Buenos Aires’ foundation and the barbaric, in the anthropophagic behavior of the Conquistadores, to the monumental work of Jorge Luis Borges, examples abound. In the well known story by Borges The Gospel According to Mark, we have all the elements of the Argentine Gothic in place: the estancia, or ranch, as the local setting; an urban pro British free thinker father who instructs his son with lessons of Spencer; an urban son, Baltasar Espinosa, a medical student, who visits his cousin in his estancia and who will finally become the victim of the Gutres, the local half caste foreman, his son and his daughter. Espinosa will end crucified by the Gutres, in a Gothic renewed symbol of the civilized insulted, tortured and executed by the barbarians, comparing Espinosa to Jesus and the Gutres to Romans, in an audacious twist linking the civilized to Jesus. This type of point of view, where the barbarians are not considered children of God but evil will be repeated in many works, and echoed in as many other works, where the Christ changes sides and becomes the protector of barbarians and the accuser of the civilized. In On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sábato will address this opposition in the mid 20th century, with the ascension of Peronism to power, seen by half the Argentines as the return of the barbarians and by the other half, as the occasion for a more democratic civilization including everyone. As Paul Gray remarks in Sábato’s novel:

Argentine life provides surface chaos. An attempt to overthrow Perón brings bombs raining down on a city plaza; Peronists retaliate by sacking and burning Roman Catholic churches. Beneath all this noise, the novel circles slowly around an internal mystery, announced at the outset: a woman named Alejandra murders a man named Fernando and then sets the scene of the crime on fire, immolating herself. The event draws attention because it involves members of a prominent, though sadly faded, old family. Particularly horrified is a dreamy, morose young man named Martín, who has had a tortured affair with Alejandra. Roughly the first half of the novel tells their story…..With its hints of incest and its portrait of a doomed family hagridden by history, Alejandra's tale is South American gothic at its most feverish. (Gray).

Peronism redefines Argentine life and the urban gothic recreates the old dilemmas: the barbarians are now part of the urban landscape, invading the literary scene. Julio Cortázar, the author of many collections of short stories, among them Bestiario, bestiary, is without any doubt the master of the urban Gothic in stories like Casa Tomada or Las Puertas del Cielo in which the peronist threat creates the new horror, undefined and unexpressed. The new barbarians are the dark workmen, those cabecitas negras, little black heads, who will be the support of Perón and Evita. Horror will have a new twist after Perón is overthrown in 1955, and the corpse of Evita, hidden, mutilated, and traveling later to be hidden again in Italy, will create a new literary motif to express the savage side of the supposedly civilized military. A great Argentine writer, Rodolfo Walsh, will write about the tragic hatred concentrated on Evita in his story, Esa Mujer, that woman, part of the collection Los Oficios Terrestres. Walsh was murdered later by the military, in his condition of a guerilla militant, during what was called the dirty war of the 70’s but which was only a chapter of a history made out of horror and blood, and of ritual sacrifice of despised parts of the nation.

During the 60’s, the films of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, based on his wife Beatriz Guido’s novels, explored the decadence of the old aristocratic families after the Peronist government opposed them. Films like La Caída, the fall, account for sexual dilemmas in old and quaint urban houses, with innocent heroines and sophisticated pervert stories of a pure Gothic breed. In those same years, a television actor and director, Narciso Ibañez Menta, made a great success on T.V. with his adaptations of stories like The Phantom of the Opera and many Poe’s stories, from The Tell-Tale Heart to The Cask of Amontillado. The city of Buenos Aires would stop and stay quiet as a small provincial town during the emission, showing to which extent the Gothic taste was embedded at that time in the Argentine psyche.

The Gothic trend is well and alive. While older authors like Cristina Bajo explore the more classical shapes of Gothic novels with great success, young authors like Pablo de Santis with his El Calígrafo de Voltaire, in which he returns to the 18th century to explore uncanny questions about writers “switching the Gothic from the Argentine space to the Enlightenment time”(Borrás), have made best sellers and earned important literary awards. Some other new writers join efforts to create horror and fantasy stories, like the authors in the group La Abadía de Carfax, the Carfax Abbey, lead by Marcelo Di Marco, a writer and teacher of writers, who is not scared of returning to Dracula as an inspiration for a new Argentine literature.(Sacerdote).

The Argentine Gothic has a literary story of its own, which joins other American Gothic literatures; the United States American, of course, with Master Poe at the top, and the less known Brazilian, Cuban and Caribbean Gothic, just to mention a few of them. The Argentine Gothic is not a favorite discussion theme among the critics maybe because, as Cristina Bajo says in that typical ingeniousness before a collective reflexion: “We, Argentines, have a Gothic but we cannot see it because we are criollos and not Europeans.”(Zeiger). As long as the old opposition of civilization of barbarity remains in place, the Gothic will be the genre and, above all, the style.

Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Gospel According To Mark. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales pp.478-
482. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Borrás, Jordi. "Entrevista a Pablo de Santis." El Broli Argentino. 30 Oct 2007
Cortázar, Julio. Bestiario. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1965.
Echeverría, Esteban. El Matadero. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena Argentina, 1962
Gray, Paul. "South American Gothic." Time 17 Aug 1984 .
Hernández, José. Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Alemar, 1974.
Mármol, José. Amalia. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1966.
Mujica Láinez, Manuel. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980.
Negroni, María. Museo Negro. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1999.
Sabato, Ernesto. Sobre Heroes y Tumbas. 4th. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1965.
Sacerdote, Karina. "La Abadía de Carfax: un nuevo movimiento literario." Revista Axolotl
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967.
Wagner, Katy. “The image of slaughter: a literary motif in Echeverria's The Slaughter House”
http//www.haverford.edu/span/spanish/Docs/
wagner240.html
Walsh, Rodolfo. Los Oficios Terrestres. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez Editor, 1965.
Zeiger, Claudio. "El Gótico Escondido." Página 12. 16 May 2004. 30 Oct 2007

THE AMERICAN ODYSSEY

At the beginning was the sea. Later, ships would come; three, if we count the caravels of the first American wanderer, Christopher Columbus, “High Admiral of the Sea, and perpetual Viceroy and Governor in all the islands and continents which I might discover and acquire.”(Columbus, Journal) or just one, that ship dreamt to carry a myth “That sail which leans on light,/ tired of islands,/ a shooner beating up the Caribbean/for home, could be Odysseus,/ home –bound on the Aegean” (Walcott, Sea Grapes,1-5). From the red-wine Mediterranean sea to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, the Ancient World literary legacy would take a new shape in the New World. The Americas rewrote its own Odyssey, and the myth of Ulysses as told by Homer, would be relived by historical, literary and every day heroes. All these new American characters seek for their way back home, even if the identity of that home is nothing else but the travel and the quest. America is both Ithaca and the journey, and we can consider this the first original trait of the reinterpretation of the Greek myth.

The Americas excel in colleges based in Athens’ ideals which came directly from Great Britain and the European university tradition, but Americans do not only relate to “The Odyssey” inspired by the reading of classics. From Columbus on, they grew as children of ships, of the sea wandering, and the astonished discovery of unknown territories. “In the meantime I strayed about among the groves, which present the most enchanting sight ever witnessed, a degree of verdure prevailing like that of May in Andalusia, the trees as different from those of our country as day is from night, and the same may be said of the fruit, the weeds, the stones and everything else” says Columbus who could see from day one the new land differences with Europe, both in its nature and its native people. Even if he thought he had reached Asia and ignored that he had in fact discovered a new continent, he was fascinated by the place: “I assure your Highnesses that these lands are the most fertile, temperate, level and beautiful countries in the world.”(Columbus) First Ulysses in what would become the matrix of the new world, Columbus wandered, confused and marveled, through the Caribbean and its islands: “Afterwards I shall set sail for another very large island which I believe to be Cipango, according to the indications I receive from the Indians on board.”(Columbus). The first chapter of the American Odyssey is the quid pro quo comedy, where Cipango-Japan will end as Cuba, and the first land to be trodden by an European foot, the Ysabela, named after the Queen of Spain, will become Quisqueya or, simply, America, as the rest of islands and the continent. The first four travels of Columbus will inaugurate an era of discoveries and, as the beginning of colonial times, the first psychological island of the American Ulysses.

“Ulysses is the man with thirst for eternity, always threatened by the two risks of the sea travel: destruction and backward movement. Beyond this, heaven or the land of the dead, Ithaca awaits and enlightenment, and the image of an universe not determined by the karma laws. The main mast in the ship expresses the cosmic axis planted in the center of the funeral vessel or transcendental vehicle” observes the Spanish writer Sánchez Dragó ( I, 88, Tr. DF). The American Ulysses is an European reborn in a new land, starting a new history of its own, and even as a colonial subject, in search of its own transcendence and its own place in the universal plan. The conquest began as a search for gold and spices, but the real American treasures would be of a different kind. “In fact, of the so many people who look for treasures, only children usually find them, and also some exceptional beings, doubled as men and gods, such as Parsifal, Ulysses, the Argonauts, and all those who know that each one’s truth lies in each other’s truth as long as we don’t ask them for it. An intuition all the poets had: not to find Rome in Rome but on the road, and understand what the Ithacas mean”(Sánchez Dragó, I, 190.Tr.DF): America was not meant to be the provider of wealth but wealth itself, as the founding stone of a new type of human society. Ithaca could certainly be seen as the cultural memory of Europe, the lost home, a place where every American would unconsciously long to return, but more than that, Ithaca would represent, in the American founding myth, the future home of the perfect society.

“Why did the Spaniards, the English, the French, the Germans, and the Russian come to the New World? To create a new society, when they could not tolerate the injustices and failures of Europe. The history of America is original and distinct; America is something different, and I want to live to one hundred to see how America is doing and where it is going” says the Colombian writer Germán Arciniegas, reminding the originality of America and the need of “the fulfillment of the American being, free from all inferiority complexes, free from the need to imitate European models, conscious of the complexity of his heritage.”(Ambrus). From the first settlers in America to the European colonies, part of the journey was accomplished, but the travel would still last for a while. As Sanchez Dragó points out: “To overcome difficulties, to get rid of karma, to resign to own personality (Ulysses chooses to be ‘Nobody’), to silence passion, to wander through a labyrinth till reaching its center, to die and to resurrect: all the parts of an initiation puzzle are there.”(I, 55-56. Tr.DF). To resign to the familiar European identity and find out what was to be an American came next. The wars for Independence may be seen as the war of Troy or as Calypso-Europe releasing the sailor, finally allowed to return home.

The American journey to its own identity is also a poetical search and as Harold Bloom points out: “There are no poems, only relations between poems.”(Farquhar). The American odyssey cannot then but mirror the Western literary pattern for all foundational travels. Bloom, as one of the most outstanding American critics perceived well the character of this literary identity search, never too far from all the Freudian battles between powerful fathers and sons struggling for being themselves. As Farquhar notes:
From Freud he (Bloom) borrowed the notion that the human quest for imaginative autonomy takes the form of struggling against his poetic influences: struggling, that is, to appropriate and warp, or ‘misread,’ his precursor’s work in such a way that, to a later reader, it would appear that the precursor had failed. It would seem that his poem was in some way asking to be corrected by the poem of the later poet, or as the though the precursor were the weak successor to the later poet and not the other way around.(Farquhar).
America would invest its own identity at some point of the voyage and surpass the given European culture. Literary independence is conquered in one of the stops of the trip, with Emerson as a version of a daring and smart Ulysses. “The strength of the strong poet, as Geoffrey Hartman said in an essay about Bloom, is chiefly cunning: more Jacob’s strength than Esau’s, more Odyssean than Achillean.”(Farquhar).

“The American writer has an exhilarating role” say Arciniegas, “He has to create a New World, a world that departs from the European one, and understand it is something different” (Ambrus) Borges would be inspired by the labyrinth, that older pattern lying below “The Odyssey”, and Pablo Neruda would live and write his best poems in an island, Isla Negra; Leopoldo Marechal would create his own Ulysses in “Adán BuenosAyres,” another novel where the journey happens inside the mythical city and Derek Walcott would recreate in his poem “Omeros” and in his stage version of “The Odyssey,” the Caribbean travel to the American self. However, the opposition between America and Europe still represents a relevant and unfinished discussion about cultural colonialism.
Walcott implies that colonialism and imperialism, as monsters, are present in every person’s house, because such monsters are created by those in the house. They do not invade a community; they are the product of a community. The postcolonial writer cannot simply ignore his past, including an education in British and European literature. He must confront his “monsters” –both native and foreign- and learn to live with them in harmony, not fight against them in anger. When the postcolonial can accept his own monsters, including the dark memories of a colonial past, he can accept his present hybridity. There is no perfect past to return to, no place without Walcottt’s metaphorical monsters. (Martyniuk)
As Martyniuk remarks, Walcott provides a way for postcolonial authors “to write as heroes and not victims.” (Martyniuk). Writers become not only the tellers of chapters of a common American odyssey, but Ulysses themselves, and their characters can even be domestic and modest Ulysses of a new democratic breed. As Walcott says: “The hero in my poem (Omeros) is a simple fisherman who doesn’t conquer anything and who works with his element the sea.”(Cabrera).American literature can be also read as a journey in discovery of a new style and if Hemingway will resort to the eternal sea to give another novel of the American trip in “The Old Man and the Sea” --maybe the story of a Ulysses grown old and facing his last battle against a monster-fish--, De Lillo, in our 21st Century will set the wanderings of a financial Ulysses across Manhattan neighborhoods. Margaret Atwood would join them and publish “The Penelopiad”, “a brilliantly funny and sardonic version of the Odysseus stories seen from Penelope’s angle and told through the incorporeal mouth of her shade in Hades with the benefit of 3,000 years of hindsight.”(Taplin)

The American journey is not yet finished. Americans reached the Moon and some will soon travel to Mars. For them, Ithaca is not just America but Earth, that big island in the sea of space. The Ulysses and Penelopes of the Americas, travelers of water and air, weavers of stories not yet lived, know that “First, there was the heaving oil,/ heavy as chaos;/ then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,/ the lantern of a caravel,/ and that was Genesis.” (Walcott, The Sea is History). The rest, is the eternal odyssey; again, and again.

Works Cited

Ambrus, Steven. "Germán Arciniegas: Guardian of Our Distinct History" Americas (English Edition) 49(May/Jun 1997):41.
Cabreras, Elena. "Derek Walcott: The Voice of the Caribbean." Americas (English edition) 59(May/Jun 2007): 38-46.
Columbus, Christopher. "Extracts from Journal." Medieval Sourcebook. 8 Jun 2007 .
Fajardo-Acosta, Fidel. "Omeros." World Literature. 8 Jun 2007 .
Homer, The Odyssey, The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd Edition by Sarah Lawall. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2002.
Mac Farquhar, Larissa. "The Prophet of Decline." The New Yorker Sep30, 2002: 86.
Martyniuk, Irene. "Playing With Europe." Callaloo 28(Winter 2005): 188-200.
Sánchez Dragó, Fernando. Gárgoris y Habidis. Una Historia Mágica de España. I & II. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1985.
Taplin, Oliver. "Homer's Wave Machine: It's Fast, furious ans fun. But it isn't really ‘The Odyssey’as Oliver Taplin Knows it.." The Guardian London.U.K.(May 20, 2006): 18.
Walcott,Derek."SeaGrapes".8Jun2007. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/

literature/laureates/1992/walcott-poetry-seagrapes.html.

Walcott,Derek."The Sea Is History" 8 Jun 2007.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sea-is-history/

GROTESQUE COUPLES: LOVE AND GRACE IN FLANNERY O'CONNOR

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” says Flannery O’Connor in “Mystery and Manners” (Galloway). Her grotesque couples, whether composed of possible lovers, mother and son, or mother and daughter, in “Good Country People,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything that Rises must Converge,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” represent the account of the battle in that territory and the tale of how grace finally opened a gate there where love was the great absent.

O’Connor’s characters seem to follow a pattern of grotesque exaggeration in women and a suspicious elusiveness in men which in their interaction give that unique literary quality in her stories: unstable comedy doomed to develop in tragedy. In “Good Country People” we can find many couples: Mrs. Hopewell, the ridiculous mother who manipulates to prevail and Mrs. Freeman, the nosey maid; Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy/Hulga, the arrogant Ph.D. in Philosophy; Mrs. Freeman and Joy as well as Mrs. Freeman and her own two daughters; Mrs. Hopewell and Manley Pointer, the fake Christian selling Bibles; and, finally, the central couple to them all, around which revolves the story, Joy/Hulga and Manley Porter. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” we assist to the same ballet of odd couples: the grandmother, another narcissistic and manipulative woman, and her silent and apparently submissive son Bailey; Bailey and his mute and indifferent wife who has a face ”as broad and innocent as a cabbage”; the two grand children, John Wesley and June Star, in charge to speak out all the truths the adults prefer to ignore, and opposing their grandmother; Pitty Sing, the cat, and The Misfit, as the two agents of fate; the two Misfit’s partners, Hiram and Bobby Lee; and the starring couple, the grandmother obliged to face The Misfit and her son Bailey through the shirt The Misfit is wearing after killing him, and ultimately, facing herself and what she has provoked. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge” a shameful Julian is confronted by his mother, a fat woman with high blood pressure, and they both couple in the bus with other passengers, the mother with her seat neighbor and Julian with a black passenger, while feelings of shame and racism intertwine in all these relationships until the again tragic end, with the death of the mother. In “The Life You Save May Be your Own” we have a couple composed by another powerful, dominant, proud and finally blind mother taking care of her deaf mute daughter, both living in a farm in the woods; another mysterious man, Mr. Shiftlet, arrives as an apparent savior, as in “Good Country People,” builds a relationship with the old mother till he gains her complete trust, marries the daughter, then leaves her and runs away with the family car, forming a last devilish couple with his desired object, the reason of all his manipulation on mother and daughter. These grotesque couples mean to convey a moral: the grotesque is nothing but an exaggeration of sinful traits; where sin reigns there is a need to identify it and to repent; repentance will come only with the help of grace. As Galloway notes: “Flannery O’Connor remained a devout Catholic throughout, and this fact, coupled with the constant awareness of her own impending death, both filtered through an acute literary sensibility, gives us valuable insight into just what went into those thirty –two stories and the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a force for good.”(Galloway)

It is very interesting to compare all the feminine characters in these stories. As many in other stories, they are dominant, maybe as Flannery O’Connor’s mother was dominant in her life. These usually extroverted and histrionic women express, if not exactly sin, at least a territory apt to attract actions from wicked men. We see then these women who seem very sure of themselves, mistresses in their own world, becoming the victims of con men or of a murderer, like the grandmother in the most terrible and achieved of O’Connor’s stories. In spite of these extremes or precisely because of them, “O’Connor is compassionate to her characters in that she gives them the opportunity of receiving grace, however devastating that might be to their fragile self-images, as well as their fragile mortal frames, for in O’Connor, grace often comes at the moment of grisly death.”(Galloway). Men are those who provide violence or the lies which allow them to have things their way. In this sense, violence is the gate by which grace can enter in the sinful lives of the victims: “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace,” says O’ Connor (Galloway). At the end of “Good Country People,” The Misfit makes a memorable comment about the grandmother: “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”(O’Connor) As Galloway has remarked, the grandmother has her last minute chance to understand what her life had been about: “O’Connor provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the characters that are allowed to live that there are the more to be pitied, for they are confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted lives, which they can no longer deny.”(Galloway). As a writer, O’Connor has the strength to become a puppeteer God. She holds firmly her characters by their threads while providing them with an extreme circumstance in which they can find the occasion to step on the side of love instead of remaining on the side of sin. In this sense, Flannery O’Connor demonstrates clearly that sin lives and grows in the absence of love, and that grace doesn’t mean anything else but a surrendering to love. The end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” leaves an unexpected lesson: “Indeed, the grandmother’s epiphany may be that goodness has been in her midst, within her reach. The good man was one of her babies, one of her children. The good man was Bailey.”(Nester).

In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor writes: ”There is a moment in every story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.” (Galloway). Galloway points out that most of Flannery’s short stories are constructed in such a way as to dramatize the sinfulness and the need for grace and that “As the idea of grace figures prominently in Catholicism, so it does in O’Connor.” Always sinners in need of grace, women and men are represented in very distinct ways: men can look like saviors but be in fact swindlers or con men; women, like Joy/Hulga, can look powerful and even smarter than the rest and become later crucified for what they couldn’t see or prevent. That South “hardly Christ-centered” but “most certain Christ- haunted” (O’Connor) is always present, forcing us to look for Christ in every character, man or woman, and if Lucynell also ends in her cross, The Misfit is seen by the grandmother as a son of God after he has killed the whole family. Like any outstanding writer, Flannery O’Connor engaged her own feelings in her work. Because of the insistence in showing men as deceitful and because O’Connor was a woman, we wonder as readers how her own love life was, as she was never married, and how she might have perceived and felt this theme of sin, love and grace in her personal life, which in many aspects seems to have been a source of inspiration for many of her stories.


That grace, which for O’ Connor always comes under a certain form of violence, may have been provided in her own life by lupus, the disease which finally killed her. “Lupus was in control of her fate. What kind of strange disease attacks itself, its own living cells? As an artist, she must have thought about this disease differently than her doctors. Violence on its own life giving system is not only frightening but it does not make sense”(McGovern) If lupus was for her the violence and the door to grace, the consequence was a life devoted to art. Mc Govern quotes a book from Josephine Hendin, “The World of Flannery O’Connor,” where she makes this comment on her visit to O’Connor’s last home, the farm Andalusia:
“Sitting on this porch, I felt for the first time that O’Connor’s disease did not radically change her life. Its horror was that it prevented her life from changing at all. The loneliness it dictated for her was too familiar to the ‘shy, glum girl’ whose feelings had been under control, who seemed so alone everywhere. Her illness seems only to have reinforced and cemented an isolation that always existed, a feeling of being ‘other’ that she could sometimes accept with wry good humor.” (McGovern).

Her disease never became part of her stories but frustrated love as in Joy/Hulga deceived by Manley Pointer or Lucynell abandoned by Mr. Shiftlet looks instead related to her personal life. Mark Bosco has closely studied Flannery O’Connor’s letters collected in “The Habit of Being” and he remarks that they offer “a sense of O’Connor’s personal development as an artist and offer insight into her personality. What they do not provide, however, is an account of romantic interest in her life. Many critics have assumed that her physical condition, compromised after the onset of lupus in her twenties, precluded her forming ---even hoping to form—deep attachments with men.” Some other critics, like Julie Buckner Armstrong, considered a possible repressed lesbianism but report also “the work of Sally Fitzgerald, who believed that the author was a lifelong victim of unrequited [heterosexual] love and provided as evidence a list of men she fell for who did not fall for her.”(Buckner Armstrong). The truth seems more on the side of unrequited love, as the one reported by Bosco, that Flannery had for Erik Langkjaer, a young Dane studying in Georgia, who slightly flirted with her while she had hopes that he would become a great love and a possible husband. Langkaer left America because he was homesick but also after “he realized that O’Connor had fallen mildly in love with him and that, although he liked and admired her, he was not simply in love with her.” (Bosco) Unrequited love offers always a grotesque side to exploit, made out of the blindness and arrogance of those who expect a love which will not be fulfilled. “Good Country People” could be Flannery’s sublimation of this frustrated love story and Bosco reports that in a later interview Langkjaer recognized the kiss scene in the story and Joy’s reaction, as the reaction Flannery had when he kissed her.

In January 9, 1955, in one of the letters she sent to an indifferent Langkjaer soon to be married to another woman, and in the hope of keeping the relationship alive, Flannery begs: “Write me an unintelligible post card please so I will have an excuse to write you a letter. My mother doesn’t think it is proper for me to send mail when I don’t receive it.” (Bosco). Her mother appears in this letter as one of her own powerful censoring grotesque characters and herself as a yet innocent maid who doesn’t want to know her lover doesn’t love her, another pattern for a future grotesque character at the time of realizing she was denying reality and lying to herself. Bosco points out that “At thirty she was still a young woman but chronically ill. Though she was not yet on crutches when she met Langkjaer, they became part of her life by the time she wrote her first letter to him.” Love failed, and lupus became grace. She had nine more full years to write, before dying.

Flannery O’Connor’s publisher, Robert Giroux, remembers what Thomas Merton, another great Catholic writer and philosopher, said after she died: “I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.” (Giroux, xv) A truth extracted from her own fall and dishonor, a craft profound enough to dig in her own experience of grotesque and humble to feed her characters. In her own words: “The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life” (O’Connor), that is to say, where sin meets grace.


Works Cited
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Bosco, Mark. "Consenting to Love: Autobiographical Roots of 'Good Country People'." The Southern Review Spring 2005: 283-297.
Buckner Armstrong, Julie. "Flannery O'Connor: A Life." Southern Quarterly Winter 2003: 156-159.
Folks, Jeffrey J. "Flannery O'Connor in Her Letters: 'A Refugee from Deep Thought'." Modern Age Spring 2005: 176-181.
Galloway, Patrick. "The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction." 19 Apr 2007 .
Giroux, Robert. Introduction to Flannery O'Connor The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971.
McGovern, Linda. "A Good Writer is Hard to Find: The Search for Flannery O'Connor."19Apr2007 .
Nester, Nancy L. "O'Connor's 'A good Man is Hard to Find'." The Explicator Winter 2006: 115-119.
O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace , 1976.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971.
O'Connor, Flannery. "The Columbia World of Quotations." 19 Apr 2007 .