Latin American perspectives; Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Latin American perspectives a program of comment and analysis about current Latin American problems and their historical setting. The commentator for these programs is Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. Here now is Dr. Gardner. What did it matter to me that I am a professor of the philosophy department. Of what importance to me was the whole series of petty conquests and great failures that constitute my life's outward appearance. I am a Brazilian of voter. I have been facts unaided. I am the author of a work on bezels integrals a member of the engineering club a property owner poet and now a victim of cancer. In these words you have met the leading character one Jose Maria in the latest work brought into the English from the pen of Gustavo Cor Sol course Salo is a prominent Brazilian

Catholic intellectual much of whose writing has been influenced by the European poet real king. In this work which is entitled Who. If I cry out we follow the career of Jose Marti on in the last three months of his life after Indeed the death warrant has been pronounced upon him three months to live. Oh say Marie I'm a versatile thoughtful engineer in late middle life and now a victim of leukemia has received from his doctor the death sentence. Despite Jose Mario's ability and his philosophical bent his life has been a frustrating non fulfilment of his early hopes. Gustavo Of course I was unusual novel. Who if I cry out is the diary of this reflective man facing the

prospect of imminent death and trying to find the meaning of life and of death while evaluating his own existence seeking to answer the question Who am I. What is man. Oh say Mario formulates a resume of human actions and reactions. Always conscious of the tragic isolation of the human personality and the poignancy of living with a sense of the precariousness of the human situation he considers God love and death. As he searches for an absolute and he tries to fathom public abstracts time the essence of the feminine and of the masculine companionship the hollowness of Christmas and other holidays. The origins of tragedy the nature of happiness. Social theories change and deterioration of human awareness and then always the anguish of loneliness. Even in the midst

of these profuse recollections of a dying man. Corso uses his narrative art to keep the reader identified with the patient to tell by flashbacks the story of the man of his friends and family and to create several kinds of suspense. The suspense related to the failure of Jose Mario's marriage to the outcome of numerous episodes in the forward moving narrative to how death itself will come. The novelist makes real for the reader both Jose Maria's passionate search for an answer to the question why and the events of his past and his rapidly diminishing present. Indeed this is a passionate statement of the experiences that have molded a man. Because in this work by the Brazilian philosopher novelist We have much that relates to the marital

to the personal to the general to the Abyss is that man finds himself on in an episode with a street walker an episode flying a kite walking in a garden meeting a girl at a coffee bar. We have in this the pattern of an entire lifetime of thought and experience compressed as it were within the last 90 days of the dying man's diary a diary presumably kept between a November 11th and a February 23rd. One great moment in the writing and I would like to introduce you to the style of course fall comes when he deals with a servant and a problem that his cook adds he writes. She will go to the carnival. It is indispensable that she go indispensable that she spend these days in that suffocating costume and that despite the fact that she is no longer a young girl that she subject her corpulence to forced

marches and drills that would knock out a Marine. Oh yes she will go she must go. She cannot fail to go. Now I do not believe that it is simply the attraction of a rest from work. Time off as she says that prompts the sensible John Deere to exchange her casserole for a tambourine during a period of three days. Her motives are more profound in the first place. We must consider her justifiable feeling that she has a right to the exuberance for which she can find neither opportunity nor spectators in the repressive atmosphere of her kitchen. There is something of the poet and of the madcap and clown in a solo. Now dressed as a Cossack young Darrow will realize those three universal callings which will not fail to have an appreciable result. The principal motive however is I believe of another order like all of us.

John dear I has to find some outward support in order to be freed from her metaphysical anguish. She has to flee from nothingness. She has to feel that she is alive. And for this there is nothing better than to become a part of collectivity part of a conjunction that props us up part of a group that increases the density of our being. It's in this matter then you sense that the novelist relates the specific instances within the life of his leading character and yet relates it to universal issues and problems of mankind. The great trouble of course continues of our time is the sense of being cast out not feeling within oneself and existence or activity of his being his own man with a desperate urgency far beyond the exigencies of his

nature. And the result of all this is a society in panic that puts all its stakes on strident clamor and blatant show. A society of terrified men that trample upon the poor the lonely and the sick in their wild frenzy to attain a platform in the public square from which they can beckon to one another with feverish and meaningless signs. Gustavo Corso published by the University of Texas press has written a volume which is at once Brazilian and universal. A second author to whom I would refer you today is a Mexican named Juan who will follow this book also published by the University of Texas Pan American series is entitled the burning plane. The characters in these 15 starkly powerful stories by

one rule fall from the idiot boy trying to kill frogs to the revolutionary fighting on the Great Plains are moved by fear greed hate lust and revenge in a primitive and fatalistic world they live in an almost mute despair broken by moments of wild rage. Our macabre humor. A major figure in the history of post revolutionary literature in Mexico. One rule thrown out of the state of police go has received international acclaim for his brilliant short novel. Pedro which was published in one thousand fifty five. The present collection of 15 stories however represents him in the form of transition that Mexican fiction has known from direct statements of nationalism and social protest to a concentration of cosmopolitanism. His writings are not strictly in the revolutionary tradition

nor are they in that more cosmopolitan setting that is presently the vogue in Mexican literature. Indeed a great deal of the rural setting of that state of police go from which the author hails is evident in his writing. In the burning plane he tells of single moments in the lives of the inhabitants of a harsh an isolated area of Mexico revealing glimpses into their attitudes and thoughts through illuminating shifts and points of view and time sequence and through the essence of their characteristic language. Indeed he is a very rich one. When it comes to handling conversation these stories of a rural people caught in the play of natural forces are not however simply an interior examination of the phenomena of their world. They're written for the larger purpose of showing the actions of man in broad terms of reality. I would indeed like to give you a brief glimpse of the style of Rufo writing

where in we have him dealing with the people and the plane. We started walking again. We stopped to watch it rain. It didn't rain. Now we start walking again. It occurs to me that we've walked more than the ground we've covered that occurs to me. If it had rain perhaps other things it would have occurred to me anyway. I know that ever since I was a boy I've never seen it rain out on the plain what you would really call rain. No the plane is no good for anything. There are no rabbits or birds. There is nothing except a few scrawny wee Saatchi trees and a patch or two of grass with the blades curled up. If it weren't for them there wouldn't be anything. And here we are the four of us on foot. Before we used to ride on horseback and carry a rifle slung over our shoulder. Now we don't even carry the rifle. I've always thought that taking our rifles was a good thing. Around these parts is dangerous to go around armed. You can get killed without warning

if you're seen with a 30 30 strapped on. But horses are another matter. If we come on horses we would already be tasting the Green River water and walking our full stomachs around the streets of the town to settle our dinner. We'd already have done that. If we still had those horses but they took the horses away with the rifles. I turned in every direction and look at the plane. So much land all for nothing. Here I slide when they don't find anything to hang on to. Just a few lizards stick their heads out of their holes and as soon as they feel the roasting sun quickly hide themselves again in the small shade of a rock. But when we have worked here what can we do to keep cool from the sun. Because they gave us this crust of rocky ground for planting. They told us from the town up to here belongs to you. We asked the plain yes the plain or the big

plain we opened our mouth said we didn't want the plain that we wanted what was by the river from the river up to where through the meadows the trees called Kasserine as are in the past years in the good land not just tops cowhide. They call them plain. You sense. That even the landscape can be a character with Rule 4. Indeed as strongly so as is often the case with Thomas Hardy. In the short stories overall full of Mexico and in the novel of course all of Brazil the Pan American series off the University of Texas press is bringing to an American audience an appreciation of contemporary Latin American literature. This was Latin American perspectives with Dr. C. Harvey Gardner research professor of history at Southern Illinois University. Join us for our next program when Dr. Gardner will examine another aspect of life in Latin America

Latin American perspectives is produced and recorded by station WSI you FM at Southern Illinois University and is distributed by the national educational radio network.