This week you're taking a look at some short fiction from the 20th century: Joyce's “The Dead,” Kawabata's “The Moon on the Water,” and Márquez's “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
Joyce. Your book's headnote has some good information for you, but if you're interested, the James Joyce Centre has a nice brief biography of the writer and some other good links: http://www.jamesjoyce.ie/detail.asp?ID=19. I'm not particularly fascinated by Joyce, and while he's a good read, he's a bit easier than the other two this week.
Kawabata. I've often found it useful to read the text of Nobel laureates' lectures - there's some valuable insight into their thinking about their own work there, as well as their take on history. In his 1968 Nobel lecture, speaking of calligraphy, Kawabata says
I myself have two specimens of Ikkyu's calligraphy. One of them is a single line: "It is easy to enter the world of the Buddha, it is hard to enter the world of the devil." Much drawn to these words, I frequently make use of them when asked for a specimen of my own calligraphy. They can be read in any number of ways, as difficult as one chooses, but in that world of the devil added to the world of the Buddha, Ikkyu of Zen comes home to me with great immediacy. The fact that for an artist, seeking truth, good, and beauty, the fear and petition even as a prayer in those words about the world of the devil – – – the fact that it should be there apparent on the surface, hidden behind, perhaps speaks with the inevitability of fate. (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/kawabata-lecture-e.html)
Kawabata's fiction exemplifies that quality: the message is at once clear and veiled, as simple or as complex as we choose is to be. In fact, Gwenn Boardman Petersen, in The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, notes that an "understanding of its imagery can suggest the depths of meaning in some longer and more complex stories. Even the title is so richly allusive that a whole volume of annotations would scarcely do justice to all its possibilities" (129). The connections you can choose to make are only limited by the time you have to make them (and your understanding of Japanese culture and history).
Márquez. In his 1982 Nobel lecture, Gabriel García Márquez sorts out some of the history of Latin America and the attention that Latin American literature began to receive after Pablo Neruda's 1971 recognition. While the 20th century poetry and prose from Latin America is often understood relatively superficially - as if we're guarding a suspicion that life in the southern hemisphere is somehow less serious, as if Carmen Miranda will suddenly burst into song - it was, in reality, borne of unspeakable, unfathomable strife, including five wars, seventeen military coups, ethnocide, 20 million infant deaths, and enough armed conflict in teeny, tiny Central America that "If [it] had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of one million six hundred thousand violent deaths in four years" (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html).
It's unlikely that we'll be able to understand where much of the literature from this time and these places is coming from; our politically stable history and wealth, which gives us access to things like health care and public education, obscure our view. We tend to focus on the brilliant bits, the humor, the fantastic elements, the crazy names and relationships, and we miss the embedded message; however, Latin American literature, especially fiction, is attractive because it shines through that pain, getting at something more universal - the slow and steady path we take toward progress, however we define it at the moment. Márquez frames the understanding and misunderstanding of his work and the work of his contemporaries within that progress:
I dare to think that it is this outsized reality [of history], and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.
And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html)Work toward seeing the lives of the characters within the story as believable - it's a fantastic story, and it speaks to this idea about progress.