Mystery Texts, Gaps in my Vast Fund of General Information, and the Case for Surrealism

This week’s “Mystery Text” in the Senior Symposium class was Julio Cortázar’s surreal short story, “Axolotl.” I love it. A man who discovers axolotls at the zoo in Paris swaps consciousness with one, and tells the process by which he finds himself trapped in the axolotl, as his former body walks away.

Students never guess the author—maybe once in twelve years, but not because they read it in our courses—just because they were cool and seeking out Latin American writers. And I give them credit if they guess Borges. He’s mid-20^th century Argentinian too, and he gets taught in our world lit classes. For these purposes, he’s close enough.

I have not studied either of them, though, really. I read one Borges story and one Cortázar story in a 20^th/21^st century fiction class in grad school that I took in the summer. I was a medievalist—what did I need the contemporary stuff for?

But over the years I have bought a dozen books by these two, and another half dozen by Alberto Manguel, another Argentinian (who read in the afternoons to Borges as a kid, when Borges was going blind). I don’t know if you can call a niche of literature wildly outside one’s specialty a hobby, but I do keep buying books.

So after ten years of using Cortázar as a Mystery Text (this is an exercise for our seniors that feels like a literature practical in the style of I. A. Richards, but with the twist of using what they deduce to assess our program’s effectiveness at teaching literary traditions) and giving a cheesy internet biography to help them contextualize Cortázar at the end of class, I found myself this time really responding to Cortázar the activist, Cortázar the anti-Peron exile, even Cortázar the Parisian ex-patriate.

I started looking for a biography in English.

Because I have plenty of time right now.

(This is false. I am right in the middle of winter quarter. I’m on a search committee and have been going in two extra days a week for three weeks meeting all the candidates for my search and another position. It’s midterms—exams are piling up, and so are Chaucer translations; my partner was out of town for four days; we’re getting a new roof. I don’t have time for extra, unrelated reading.) But I’m really ticked that I can’t find an English biography of a 20^th century Argentinian author.  

Someday I may stop being curious. Someday I may not chase down characters and authors and practice new skills and stand in awe at things I don’t understand. But today is not that day. Today I’m imagining the kind of man who could write the bizarre “The Night Face-Up” and the lyrical collection Save Twilight, who could leave his country forever on principle and live in another language and culture and hemisphere. What pushes us to explore the surreal faster than a frustrating reality? And how long will it take me to get up to reading speed in Spanish?

(Image pilfered from Wikipedia.)

The Music of a Language

I have the excellent good fortune to teach English in a department of English and Modern Languages.  This means the hall where we live is filled with people who are bilingual and multilingual. It means we have majors in Spanish as well as English, and minors, certificates, and courses in several other languages. It means I hear different languages daily, some of which I can pick out words and follow conversations, and some of which I know next to nothing and can only hear the music. This post is about why that is valuable.

Recently I had a discussion about the sounds of different languages.  You know the stereotypes—Romance languages sound lovely, but Germanic sound harsh, like you’re being yelled at. In fact, it was sparked by this meme:

In some ways that’s not wrong—languages that have a preponderance of words that end in vowels, like Italian or Spanish, sound like the words run together more fluidly, since the vowel of the last word joins to the consonant in the next word just like the syllables do in a single word. This makes the words flow together in a way that the consonant-heavy Germanic languages can’t achieve. In German or English, words more often end in consonants, which means you have to stop the flow of air more often. It sounds like you pause on purpose after each word so you can pronounce them all, and also to differentiate between words. It means you get more of a staccato, shotgun sound as you utter the sentence.

Compare, for instance, part of a line from Dante’s Purgatorio : “Lo sommo er’ alto che vincea la vista…” (Purg. 4.40)--where every word ends in a vowel except the one that’s been abbreviated for the sole purpose of keeping the musical vowel-consonant alteration--with a line from Rilke’s “Evening”: Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewӓnder,” where the only word that doesn’t end with consonants is an article (‘the’).  Americans tend to view the Italian as more musical and the German as more aggressive, just on the basis of whether there are more vowels or consonants.

 

Imagine our dismay, then, when we think about English—that glorious bastard tongue of “German spoken with a French accent,” as one of my French professors used to say.  Is it German?  Is it Romance? (English has a whole lot of Latin borrowing as well, and American English is busy borrowing from Spanish as we speak.) So which is it? Both?

The difference for me is not that one is more beautiful than another. (I have heard people be very seductive and debonair in German.) It’s more that they are both musical until we know what they say.  When we have no clue, we can focus on the sound—the lilt of Romance or the rhythm of Germanic. As Jorge Luis Borges says in his gorgeous essay on his blindness, when you don’t know a language, “each word [is] a kind of talisman that [you] unearth.” Each word rings with strangeness and music, and comes out more a chant than a sentence.

This is a reason to study another language. In addition to making you more cosmopolitan, introducing you to other cultures and gaining a better understanding of your own language’s grammar, you get to experience that music. You get to enjoy the process of turning that music in to meaning. Because that’s the problem with listening to a language you already know, particularly natively:  you are so busy making it mean something, you forget to listen to how beautifully it sings.