Lesson
Plans
Lesson Plans
Course Documents Links
Home Page
Quick
Links
Library
Links
Citing
Sources
Signs Preceding the End of the World
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-questions-for-yuri-herrera/
Yuri Herrera: 2015
General
Questions | Group Questions
| Criticism | Pictures | Links
Country/Date
Written/Published
Terms to know
Orpheus: "In Greek mythology, the son of Calliope by Apollo, and the finest of all poets and musicians. Orpheus married Eurydice, who died after being bitten by a snake. He descended into the Underworld to rescue her and was allowed to regain her if he did not look back at her until they emerged into the sunlight. He could not resist, and Eurydice vanished forever" ("Orpheus")
“Orpheus.” World Encyclopedia, Philip’s. www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.ocean.edu:2048, Accessed 27 Apr. 2018.
Mictlan: "was the Aztec land of the dead. Many tests and trials confronted the dead soul on its way to this land, ruled by Mictlantecuhtli and his consort. When the god Quetzalcoatl descended to the underworld to take bones with which to create a new race of humans, he was chased by Mictlantecuhtli, and he dropped some of the bones, causing the new humans to be shorter or taller than others" (Leeming).
Leeming, David. “Mictlan.” The Oxford Companion to World Mythology, Oxford University Press, 2005. www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.ocean.edu:2048, accessed 27 April 2018.
Mictlantecuhtli: "The Aztec god of death, who ruled in the restful and silent kingdom of the dead, mictlan. When the Emperor Montezuma Xocoyotzin received intelligence of impending disaster, the sorcerers' view of inextinguishable fires, comets, and strange birds, he sent emissaries to Mictlantecuhtli laden with sumptuous gifts—the skins of flayed men. He yearned for the peace of mictlan, since he was gripped by uncertainty and apprehensive over the rumours of Quetzalcoatl's return" (Cotterell).
Death in Mesoamerican culture
The Divine Comedy
Correspondingly, however, chronological placement of the narrative from Good Friday through Easter Sunday, 1300, particularizes the experience even as it implies the death and rebirth that attends a critical stage of any person’s life. The poet tells his readers in the first line of the Inferno that he is midway through life, and indeed Dante would have been thirty-five years of age in 1300. Though he maintains present tense throughout the poem, he is, however, actually writing in the years that follow the events that he describes. This extraordinary method allows the Poet to place what amounts to prophetic utterance in the mouth of the Pilgrim. Dante thus maintains and further develops the thesis of The New Life, that the progress of the Pilgrim corresponds directly to the progress of the Poet. The literal journey that the Pilgrim undertakes toward the Beatific Vision succeeds only insofar as the Poet can transcend the finite barriers that signification imposes upon language.
If one understands the task of the poem in these terms, the exponential symbolism of The Divine Comedy becomes inescapably clear. Like every human being, Dante carries the intellectual burden of what has formed him. At midlife, this includes the historical influences of his time and the artistic influences of what he has read. His task is to use these to direct his life’s journey and, if he is able, to transcend them. His inspiration for doing this is the same feminine persona that appears in The New Life, though in The Divine Comedy Dante specifically identifies her as Beatrice. Her name implies the grace that she represents, and it is noteworthy that she intercedes with St. Lucy, patroness of the blind, and with the Blessed Virgin Mary to set the Pilgrim on the course toward Paradise. Beatrice thus represents efficient grace, Lucy illuminating grace, and Mary prevenient grace. Collectively, they oppose the three visions of sin (Leopard, Lion, and She-wolf) that obstruct the Pilgrim’s path. (Forman)
Forman, Robert J. "The Divine Comedy." Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Literary Reference Center, Revised Edition, January 2009, accessed 27 April 2018.
Questions to mull over as you interpret the story
- How does the novel play into stereotypes of Mexico and Mexicans? How does it refute them? Why have both?
- Why have stolen land as a plot device? How does it connect to broader historical realities in Mexican/American relations?
- Written by a man but told through a female perspective: does it work?
- Author's often frame their work around a narrative structure to give it shape. Here, consider Detective fiction: the
- American detective fiction that the genre has altered greatly from its earliest beginnings. The godlike male protagonist, who solved the puzzling crime with minimal violence and had little concern for the societal conditions of the time, became the tough, gun-wielding hard-boiled detective, who was actively commenting on the ills that surrounded him. Today, this same detective, now often female, solves crimes for friends and family and also addresses a wide variety of discriminatory practices. Detective fiction has moved from being a comforting diversion to telling us “something about the world we live in, and about the best way of living peacefully in it” (Symons, p. 23) (Hadley).
- How do you see the novel fulfilling this definition?
- Given the odd opening, what does it seem that Makina is literally walking out of? Why?
- How do the chapter titles reflect on the content in the chapters? Choose two and be prepared to discuss how they inform your reading.
- Many of the books we've read this semester have discussed language: consider Makina's musing once she's in America: "Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they’ll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest" (66). Now back up and reread from the beginning of this chapter (65). What is suggested here about words and how they control, change, and shape us? How is this passage an advertisement for bilingualism?
- At the end of the novel, how is Makina dead? How is she alive? Cultural background might help here: Mictecacihuatl, the wife ofMictlantecuhtli (defined above), "is known as the "Lady of the Dead", since it is believed that she was born, then sacrificed as an infant. Mictecacihuatl was represented with a defleshed body and with jaw agape to swallow the stars during the day" (“Mictecacihuatl"). Take a close look at the language in the last two paragraphs -- what seems to echo Mictecacihuatl?
Hadley, Mary. "Detective Fiction." The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, Oxford Reference 2005, accessed 27 Apr. 2018.
From an interview with 3:00AM Magazine.
3:AM: Part of the success of Signs is the portrayal of Makina as a reluctant migrant. This reluctance is in contrast to the media’s portrayal of the migrant, a depiction that you allude to in the novel: “We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either.” Makina is duty-bound — she wants to do what she needs in the USA then get out as soon as she can. She doesn’t want to go and she doesn’t want to be there. This is a crucial element of a complex conversation that is very often missing. Does literature have a responsibility to pick up the slack in these conversations?
YH: The way I understand literature, yes, that is one of the possibilities, one of the virtues of literature. I do not want to tell others what is their moral or social responsibility, but the way I see it, literature gives you the opportunity to intervene in the public sphere from a freer margin, one more difficult to tame. The influence that literature exerts is quite different from that of journalism, it takes more time, but it brings to the table other ways of understanding our common problems, other nuances and other affections.
3:AM: I want to ask about the act of having been translated. You write in Spanish, and have had your books subsequently translated into French and Italian, and now into English by Lisa Dillman. What changes with a switch between languages? I want to know what, with respect to your stories, is gained and what is lost.
YH: My books have been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian and Croatian too, and in each case it has been a different experience. I try not to put pressure on the translators, because I assume they know their readership much better than I ever will. What I strive for is to share what I think are some of the important words and images of the story and collaborate with them as much as they ask for. Translation is always a loss in the sense that the exact sense of the original version cannot be replicated. It’s like that Borges’ short story in which a map of the Empire keeps growing until it covers the Empire inch by inch. It is not possible to find the words that have the exact same meaning, but also it’s not possible to replicate the sound of the original, which is another source of meaning, another source of the affections that populate the text. But this loss should be seen as a possibility to create a new sensorial experience based on the original matrix. Because translation is treason only in the sense that every invention is betraying the original to keep existing in a different shape.
Foster, Tristan. "Eight Questions for Yuri Herrera." 3:AM Magazine, 6 July 2016, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-questions-for-yuri-herrera/. Accessed 22 April 2018.
AB: Layers?
YH: Layers. Part of the interest and pleasure of writing, and the difficulty of writing, is discovering and recreating all those layers.
It’s something that we can spend a lot of time talking about it, actually, this is the only novel where I actually did very specific research for the purpose of giving me a structure, and giving me particular symbols to use, and giving me certain features of several characters. But before telling you about this, I have to say that my purpose was to write a novel in which it was not necessary for the reader to know all these other things. All of these things that I am going to tell you, they were important to me, in terms of telling me an organic narrative, and helped me to establish certain connections between the characters, and certain symbols. But what I wanted to do was to write a story in which the reader could feel the density of that, but that they didn’t feel they needed footnotes, or wouldn’t need to go and look up these things. It’s not a re-creation of the myth; I’m using that myth as a found object. I take it, and I put it in this other context, in this other time, in this other situation, and let it do its thing. But I’m not trying to revive it.
Anyway, the thing is this: Among the Mexicas, what are commonly known as the Aztecs (actually, their name is Mexicas, that’s where the name “Mexico” comes from), there were different places where you go when you die. One of them is the place where the warriors go after they died, both the warriors and the women who died in labor (because that was considered as dying in the middle of a battle). Another one was a place for people that died by water, like drowning. But another place, the place where most people went after they died, was called “Mictlan.” There were two rulers, though that was really one ruler, because—with this people—all the gods were at the same time two gods, feminine and masculine. There would be a feminine and masculine part of the same god, for example, the two rulers as the two versions of the one god of the dead. In order to get there, you would have to go through nine underworlds. In each one of these underworlds, you would have to face a challenge. Nobody knows the exact meanings of these challenges, because this is a world that disappeared, that was destroyed by the Spaniards. We only have a general understanding, not very precise. But we do understand that with each underworld that you cross, you are getting rid of some part of you, some part that makes you a living human being. And when you get to the last underworld, there is only silence; no others and no sounds and no life. The first Spanish priests identified that point as hell, even though there was no such thing as “hell” among the Mexicas. That place is the place of re-creation. In this world, you didn’t die and disappear, and you weren’t reincarnated: You came to this place of silence to somehow be part of a re-creation.
I had known about this for a lot of years, and I had thought about it for a lot of years, and I had thought it could be the structure of a novel. When I was at Berkeley, I researched the sources that exist about this. There were not a lot. But I took certain symbols of the Mexica cultures, I took certain gods of the Mexica culture; in a very loose way, these correspond to the first guys that Makina visits at the beginning of the novel, who help her. And I took the names of these underworld as the titles of the chapters. But it was just something that I used; I wasn’t trying to tell you about the Mexica culture. I just used it, I took it, and then I did whatever I wanted with it.
On the word jarchar, translated as to verse:
Quotes
Chapter Titles
1 The Earth (9)
2 The Water Crossing (23)
3 The Place Where the Hills Meet (41)
4 The Obsidian Mound (53)
5 The Place Where the Wind Cuts Like a Knife (63)
6 The Place Where Flags Wave (71)
7 The Place Where People’s Hearts Are Eaten (83)
8 The Snake that Lies in Wait (95)
9 The Obsidian Place with No Windows or Holes for the Smoke (101)
Links
The Happiest Guy in the World. New York Times. Lance Oppenheim. May 1, 2018 Consider this after the quote about anglos at the check out.
© 2010 David Bordelon