Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature

Jacob L. Bender

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030509385
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030509392
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters—where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds—the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. L. BenderModern Death in Irish and Latin American Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50939-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jacob L. Bender¹

(1)

Middlesex County College, Edison, NJ, USA

Jacob L. Bender

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

At the Book Fair

In November 2007, the Guadalajara, Mexico, Feria Internacional del Libro briefly surpassed the Frankfurter Buchmesse in Frankfurt, Germany, as the world’s largest book fair. At the time, I was a young journalist interning for a small, English-language newspaper that served Jalisco’s Anglo-expat community (largely US retirees taking advantage of the local exchange rate, who in their Autumn years still stubbornly insisted upon a printed paper delivered to their doorstep). My British editor dispatched me to the Book Fair to check out the ground floor, write up the events, and maybe see if I couldn’t spot rumored Fair-patron Gabriel García Márquez (I didn’t). After weaving my way through that massive and Borgesian labyrinth of books, I elected on a whim to sit in on a panel of contemporary Irish authors.

Swiftly, I observed both the presenters and the audience wax rhapsodic together over the San Patricio Battalion, that legendary cadre of 200-odd Irish enlistees during the Mexican-American War who, in defiance of their maltreatment by US nativists and feeling common cause with their fellow Catholics against Anglo-Protestant imperialism, famously defected from the United States Army to fight for Mexico. Although they served with distinction—and even put up some of the stiffest resistance of the war, according to no less than Ulysses S. Grant—they were in the end still forced to surrender during the fateful Battle of Churubusco (though even then, not till long after their ammunition ran out). Their tragic arc reached its inevitable conclusion when the majority of the Battalion was rounded up and hung for high treason in Mexico City in September 1847, in one of the largest mass-executions in US military history—martyrs, according to the Mexican history books, in the cause of anti-imperialism. They are on occasion mentioned in the same breath as the Niños Héroes, those famed six Mexican military cadets who preferred death to surrender after Churubusco; according to legend, one cadet leapt from the citadel of Chapultepec Castle wrapped in the Mexican flag, in order to deny the Americans the honor of capturing it—and did so on September 13, in full view of the last of the San Patricios to be hung, who purportedly cheered the Mexican flag with their last breath. James Joyce once wrote that “All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream” (Ulysses 16), and the relations between Mexico and Ireland have likewise been correspondingly warm since the end of the US–Mexican War.

Ever since that Book Fair, I have learned to pay far closer attention to the interrelations between Ireland and Latin America more broadly. Unsurprisingly, I was far from the first to notice them.

Blood Relations

In 1872, the New York Herald, in an attempt to strike lightning twice after the success of their Dr. Livingstone search-and-find story, sought an interview with the Cuban revolutionary Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a leading figure in the Ten Years War—the then-most recent revolt against the Spanish Crown. He was at the time hidden deep within the Oriente Province of Cuba, a region renowned and romanticized as a wild place beyond the jurisdiction of state authority and its discontents. The Herald first sent reporter A. Boyd Henderson with explicit instructions to interview both Céspedes and his co-revolutionary Ignacio Agramonte. Henderson found the latter but faked an interview with the former, which fabrication was quickly uncovered to the embarrassment of the Herald. In an effort to repair their reputation, the Herald next sent an Irish journalist to finish the job—that is, they sent a man from beyond the pale to find a man from beyond another pale.

The Herald apparently made the right choice. O’Kelly not only tracked down and interviewed the elusive Céspedes, but his Cuban adventures became the stuff of legend, replete with thrilling adventures, wartime intrigues, and daring escapes from Spanish authorities. He published his exploits in the popular 1874 travelogue The Mambi-Land, a book that, though now largely forgotten in the English-speaking world, needs no introduction in Cuba, where it is still “frequently translated, reprinted, and quoted from” (Hulme 65). Peter Hulme in Cuba’s Wild East argues that O’Kelly succeeded where Henderson failed precisely because he was an Irishman, one whose “lifelong commitment was to Irish independence” (47), and who therefore approached the Cuban rebels as “a movement analogous to contemporaneous Irish Fenians” (52), fellow allies and compatriots in the causes of anti-colonialism and national independence. Such in any case were the reasons why Céspedes apparently consented to the interview with O’Kelly:

In a letter to his wife 20 March 1873, Céspedes reported: “O’Kelly lends himself to serve the interests of Cuba. I’ve formulated a plan to make the most of the Irish element. It is to help achieve…the recognition of our belligerence by the United States. The Republic of Cuba, once definitively established and recognized by other nations, will supply [Ireland] with 20,000 rifles and a steamship.” (Hulme 58)

That is, Céspedes did not merely agree to meet with O’Kelly to express solidarity, but to negotiate an arms deal. He likely already felt a strong kinship with Ireland because of the long-standing Irish presence within Cuba itself. Indeed, “one Spanish writer, visiting Cuba in 1839, noted that the ten most distinguished families on the island included the O’Farrills and the O’Reillys. Leopoldo O’Donnell had been Captain-General from 1843 to 1848” (Hulme 51). Some of the premier Cuban families of Céspedes’ time were Irish. Granted, many were members of the hated Plantocracy—but then, so was Céspedes when he freed his slaves, raised the grito, and declared independence from Spain. The Irish were his people, in other words. That is, for Céspedes the Irish were not just “analogous”, not just politically simpatico, but blood relations.

As numerous historians on both sides of the Atlantic have chronicled, moments like these are but the tip of the ice-burg in the massively complex history of Irish/Latin American relations, which stretches from the borders of Mexico, across the Caribbean, and throughout South America from the Isthmus of Panama to Tierra de Fuego. The time would fail us to recount the immensity of the Irish diaspora across the Americas: from the Irish indentured servants sent to work the plantations of the early Anglo-Caribbean (and who helped organize some of the earliest recorded slave revolts alongside their African brethren), to the Irish colonizers who became plantation owners themselves across the Spanish-Caribbean, Mexico, and North and South America (the O’Haras of Gone With The Wind being but the most popular exemplar of the same); of how one such Irish member of the plantocracy, Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme, broke ranks to become the Father of Chilean independence, all while propounding such “radical” reforms as the abolition of title and the establishment of democracy; or of how numerous Irish veterans of the Napoleonic wars leant their skills and their swords to the South American wars of independence, serving as aides-de-camp to the Liberators Simon Bolívar and José de San Martín themselves. And lest we forget, the potato—that last bulwark of the Irish peasantry against starvation at the hands of the Anglo-settler class—originates in the South American Andes. “What is more Irish than the potato, more Italian than the tomato, more Indian (or Thai) than the chili pepper?” (Friedman 170) asks Susan Friedman sardonically in Planetary Modernisms. Like the rest of the globe, Ireland and Latin America have been entangled together since the dawn of European colonialism.

Up until now, most Irish/Latinx comparatist studies of have focused largely on diaspora, immigration, agriculture, and military history; they have “firmly established Irish discourse within the global field as a corrective to the usual Anglo-American cultural and critical alliance” (28), as Maria McGarrity argues in Washed by the Gulf Stream. Yet perhaps the most vivid expression today of this rich Trans-Atlantic relationship is, at present, the least studied: their shared approaches towards the dead. The most visible manifestation of the same is of course Celtic Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead: two mid-Autumn festivals of the dead that touch temporally around Catholic All Souls Day and spatially around the US/Mexican borderlands. But these are but the tip of the ice-burg as well, for once one begins down this rabbit hole, one begins to uncover just how expansive this deathly affinity is across all the nations of Latin America and Ireland. Indeed, these nations have not had the luxury of ignoring the dead; inasmuch as they both remain in the sphere of influence of massive Anglo-centric world powers that dwarf their economies and populations, they have needed all the allies they can get. As such, they have openly approached and courted the dead on far friendlier—and urgent—terms than their Anglo-centric counterparts. Indeed, before proceeding further, it may be useful to detail just what I am contrasting Ireland and Latin America against.

Death in English

Across the vast majority of English and Anglo-American literature, apparitions of the dead have largely been classified as strange, hostile, and above all unwelcome. Hamlet and Horatio can scarcely believe their own eyes—or even each other—when the ghost of King Hamlet first appears, as the Prince exclaims in terror, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (Hamlet I.iv). Similarly, Ebenezer Scrooge memorably refuses to credit the apparition of Jacob Marley at first, attributing him merely to his indigestion with a glib, “There’s more gravy than the grave about you” (Dickens 27)—that is, before the shrieking phantasm brings him to his knees. For that matter, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features an undead vampire appearing before a cascade of rationale, scientific Englishmen who are all marked by their repeated failure to comprehend this supernatural horror until it is almost too late. Likewise, the entire oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft is defined by the complete incapacity of the rationale Anglo-Protestant mind to encounter supernatural horror without going utterly mad. Even the benign ghosts of English letters are evaded: The phantom-protagonist of Margaret Oliphant’s 1884 Old Lady Mary for example returns to this mortal realm in order to reveal a missing will and correct an injustice; but is frustrated to find her ghostly presence ignored at every turn, save only in whispered village folklore. But then, the ghosts have always struggled for recognition in the Anglosphere: indeed, popular horror novelist and New England native Stephen King has had to caution other aspiring horror writers that 90 percent of everything one writes must feel ordinary, so that when the ghosts finally appear, they feel real—as though such a literary effect were a great difficulty and arduous to accomplish, especially with an English-speaking audience. For these same reasons, the dead in the popular Harry Potter novels by the Englishwoman J.K. Rowling are also incredibly difficult to communicate with and nigh-impossible to access—the one barrier that even their wizards’ mightiest magic cannot transgress.

All across the Anglosphere, there is this implicit understanding that the dead must always be alien and impossible, horrible and terrifying, the sole province of literary thrill-seekers—that, or they must be denied existence entirely. Hence, the ghost-nun that haunts Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic novel Villette must ultimately be revealed to have a perfectly mundane explanation in the end (it was but a disguise worn by someone’s paramour secreting away on a rendezvous); as does the Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, which turns out to be but the story of a late-night prank at poor Ichabod Crane’s expense. Critical readings of Edgar Allen Poe (as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) invariably focus upon the unreliability of the narrator, of the mere psychological horror at play here; the possibility of a straight supernatural reading is excoriated at almost every critical turn. Likewise, the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century notoriously promulgated an entire reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw wherein the ghosts are not only nonexistent, but solely a hallucination in the fevered imagination of the governess, who became the very type or an “unreliable narrator” (but then, how could she be reliable, if she has claimed to see ghosts?). Like an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, the ghosts must always be unmasked as but a scam-artist scaring away patrons for the insurance money—and the fact that the motivation for the hoax in those old Hannah-Barbara cartoons was almost invariably economic in nature is indicative of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic Halloween on the Borderlands
• 3. Graveyard Communities: The Speech of the Dead in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille
• 4. “For You Galaxies Will Burn and Stars Will Flame”: The Speech of the Dying in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies and Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz
• 5. “Upon All the Living and the Dead”: James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Their Infinite Ghosts
• 6. Interlude: “There’ll Be Scary Ghost Stories”—English Ghosts of Christmas Past
• 7. The Swift and the Dead: Gulliver’s Séance in W.B. Yeats’s “The Words Upon the Window-pane,” Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive, and Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth
• 8. Under My Vodou: Haiti, Revolution, and Zombie Transformation as Liberation in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World and Brian Moore’s No Other Life
• 9. A Terrible Beauty Is Born: William Butler Yeats, Julia de Burgos, and Romantic Resurrection
• 10. Revenants of the Dispossessed: A Momentary Conclusion
• Back Matter