Tag: children

Symbols and Meaning, or Saturn, Lead, and Limes oh my

Saturn is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Kronos, the father of the Olympian gods.  According to myths, Kronos/Saturn heard a prophesy that one of his children was going to overthrow him so he took up the nasty habit of eating his offspring.  Needless to say, his wife, Rhea, was not too pleased with this behavior so one day she decided to hide her newborn instead of giving it over to Saturn to eat.  The son she saved, Zeus in the Greek, Jupiter in the Roman, grows up and rebels against his father, eventually freeing his siblings from his father’s stomach.  This myth bears similarities to the rebellion acted out by the characters in the book against the author.  The myth also transforms the relationship between creator and created to that of father and children.  I also think that its interesting that the author chooses Saturn, the second biggest planet in our solar system, to represent himself.  One might interpret this identification as a way of compensating for his diminutive stature which he seems very self-conscious of.

When I read that the people of Monte were using lead to shield themselves from Saturn (this was before it became clear that Saturn stood for the author), I thought of the Roman empire which used lead to make pipes.  This form of manufacturing lead to a lot of sickness, and I think some have argued, contributed to the fall of the empire.  This association with decay and ruin leaches over into the ideas of psychological repression, marking it as an unhealthy activity.  The definition for lead in J.C. Cooper’s An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols further ties the metal with the book.

“In Alchemy lead is the heavy ‘sick’ condition of the metal or of human existence or the soul; it is the base metal, density, the opaque bodily consciousness, unregenerate man, subject of the work of transforming and transmuting.  The metal of Saturn” (96).

Like the lead, I think the limes that Little Merced eats are another example of repression and its destructive power.  She keeps her lime consumption a secret from her father and it eventually makes her sick.  Federico’s fear of confronting the loss of his wife drives him to seek refuge under a poisonous umbrella.  One might take this a step further and argue that Federico’s unwillingness to share his feelings and secrets with his daughter sets a bad example for her (she probably knows something’s wrong; there has to be a reason why the mother left) and his secrets end up hurting her.  If we consider Rachel Adams’s thesis from last week, that there is some kind of shift between Cold War lit and post Cold-War lit, I would say that the reactions of Federico and the EMF, their desire to cut themselves off from another entity are reminiscent of a Cold War mentality of paranoia and polarization.  They don’t hide behind an Iron Curtain, but they do hide behind a lead one.  It is when the truth comes out, words are exchanged, that people break away from repetitive and stagnant positions and seem to recover.  This also relates to trauma theory in that the people who can rewrite painful experiences and somehow integrate them into their metanarrative (as Salvador Plascenia is clearly doing) are able to recover.

One final thought on limes- limes are a sour fruit, not a sweet one, hence not usually associated with enjoyment.  Little Merced’s constant consumption of limes seems semi-masochist and parallel to the self-pitying and rumination on lost love that permeates the novel.   

 

 

limes- caustic, secret, eating, damaging

Baby Nostradamus and the Mechanical Tortoise

I thought I would touch on something that hasn’t been talked about yet–the two characters whose words can’t be read.  I am fascinated as to why Plascencia would include big blocks of black texts or binary codes in the novel.  While the latter may actually translate into words or images, the black boxes are destined to go untranslated.  Certainly this makes the novel look and feel postmodern to the reader.  (However, I would argue that it still is postmodern even without these characters.)

I initially wrote off Baby Nostradamus as a (humorous) allusion to the prophetic 16th century seer and nothing more–a gimmick of sorts that Plascencia used to be provocative in style, but maybe not in meaning.  Baby N. first appears on the bus with his mother. Little Merced makes an inquiry about him and his mother says, “At first I thought that he was brain dead; the doctors said that he was as dumb as a turnip” (23).  On the same page, the solid black box appears under Baby N’s name. As a reader, I zipped passed each of these boxes assuming the baby had no thoughts.   However, it wasn’t until chapter 23  that my reading of Baby Nostradamus changed.  In this chapter, Baby N’s thoughts are written as he instructs Little Merced in how to conceal her thoughts.  Ironically, even as he instructing her ,it is not done through spoken words, but “through telepathic lessons” (159).  The reader sees Little Merced trying to use the concealment technique to varying degrees of success throughout the rest of the novel.  Her examples are normally partially obscured by a circle, such as on page 209.  

Now the black boxes have changed for me.  It didn’t mean Baby N. didn’t have any thoughts, but rather it was that he was concealing his thoughts from Saturn/ Plascencia and the reader.  I wonder if Plascencia wrote out the passages from Baby N while writing the book and then concealed them later on?  It would make for a good creative writing exercise. Yet, the concealment strategy is destroyed on page 218 when there is an image of Saturn superimposed over the top of the black box.  Is it a mistake on his part?  Does he mean to conceal his thoughts about Saturn?  Or is initially making the “mistake” Little Merced did when she is learning how to conceal her thoughts and ends up highlighting them instead.   I keep returning to the question: what is his role in the novel?  Is he more than just a soothsayer?  At times he is humorous, foreseeing the last lines of the novel on page 166.  But at other times Baby N. feels like a convenient way for Plascencia to incorporate the non-traditional structure.  

I don’t have as much to say about the mechanical tortoises. Since the author never translates their “words” for the reader, they go largely misunderstood. With that said, on page 156, the escaped mechanical tortoise’s purpose is brought to light–when we discover that he is working against the desire of the mechanics and bringing Tijuana and LA closer together by moving the earth.  Saturn goes on to say, “This is what machines did–they bridged the distance between cities” (156). A nice summary of the role of technology in the 21st century.  

Alana mentioned Plascencia’s choice of Saturn, and I wonder if it has anything to do about the myth of Saturn eating his children so that they wouldn’t overthrow him.  Seems to fit with Saturn’s/Plascencia’s fears about the characters taking over the story.  I too wonder if there are further connections in Latin American culture.