"He was as beautiful and wicked as Satan"

To begin with, Asturias's The President, is a breath of fresh air coming out of Facundo. While Asturias's work is definitely written in a unique style, it is far more familiar than Facundo in that it is readily identifiable as a novel. There is an over-arching plot; a cast of characters who feel less like historical caricatures and more like they could be real, living, breathing people; and a writing style that flows (even in the mind of the mad) in sequence from one thing or even to the next. As I said though, it is unique and somewhat out of the ordinary. In many novels, the titular character is usually introduced (at least from my experience) directly to the audience or at least makes an appearance very early on in the story. However, if we take the President to be the main character, then he isn't physically introduced until the story is well underway. In fact, going through the book was like walking up a pyramid in that the first characters we encounter are from the lowest rung of society: the beggars (the Zany, Mosquito, etc...); and then through the Zany we are introduced to the next level: the woodcutter; and from the woodcutter we meet Angel Face, the favourite, and soon after when we meet the doctor, and it is through Angel Face that we meet the illustrious and infamous President. While we do not "meet" the President until this point, his presence and will are constant factors throughout the story that are largely responsible for shaping the other characters' fate. So even though he's hardly seen by us, Asturias ensures that he is always in our minds.

So far, I have found Angel Face to be the most intriguing character. He always leaves me a little bit puzzled as to what his true character is. Is he an Angel or a Devil? Like the title of this post says, "he was as beautiful and wicked as Satan" (a phrase that Asturias seems to repeat almost every time that Angel Face makes an appearance), reminds me very much of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray whose beauty was not a reflection of his soul's state. On the one side our first meeting of Angel Face is of him helping the woodcutter bring the Zany to the hospital, however, at the same time, he is the President's favourite, and the President hasn't exactly shown himself to be a kind and merciful figure, so what has Angel Face done to become his favourite? He seemed willing enough to lie to General Eusebio Canales in order to have him killed for a crime that he knows the General never committed, and yet he shows genuine concern over the well-fare of his daughter, Camila. In chapter 21: Vicious Circle, Angel Face has a tortuous internal struggle with regards to who he is and why he is doing what he's doing. I love a character with internal conflict as they are bound to change and evolve (or devolve) throughout the course of the novel, making much more interesting reading than characters who are static.

Facundo: The End

Like many of the other bloggers out there from Span312, I have to admit that I felt as though I were in some kind of battle with Sarmiento's tome. While I found many parts very interesting to read, and can appreciate the way that the author chooses to portray the dichotomy of barbarism and civilization (I can see now how it moves from "or" to "and," for example), there were many parts in it where I struggled to move on, or where I was constantly asking myself, "Why is he telling me all this?" However, what always kept me going is that just when I felt that I should throw the book at the nearest person on the bus, Sarmiento always inserted a passage that grabbed my attention. The best example I can think of is at the end of Chapter 7: Social Life (1825). Ending with political talk about Unitarists and Federalists in Buenos Aires, Chapter 8: Tests of Strength really caught me. Sarmiento's descriptions of Colonel Lamadrid and his battle with Facundo, was amazing. I even found myself becoming upset when it appeared that he had been defeated in battle, and then relieved, in the next paragraph when it is revealed that the colonel is alive and had escaped with the words: "I will not surrender!"

Even though Sarmiento reveals in the next paragraph that he did indeed surrender, it was still quite moving.

On page 159, the author introduces an interesting idea (at least for me): "...why shouldn't a man without brakes to control his passions do good?" Sarmiento, I believe, had been before operating on the principle that human beings are inherently wicked, and that they need the power of God or of civilization in order to be able to lift themselves up. However, this passage questions that. Simply because someone succumbs to their base instincts, why does every action that they commit have to be evil? Sarmiento says that this not always the case, that there is always some light in the darkness. But I believe, from all the other statements in his book, that Sarmiento means us to take this as an exception to the general rule; for more often than not, barbarism will lead humanity down an evil path.

First Half of Sarmiento's "Facundo"

The first thing that struck me about "Facundo" was Sarmiento’s writing style. Highly descriptive, it flows very well sending the images of the Pampas and La Rioja so clearly into my mind, that I felt that I had been there myself. Perhaps my favourite description is in chapter five: “Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga.” In the opening pages to this chapter, Sarmiento details the tale of a man, a gaucho, being pursued across the desert by a tiger (I must admit that I was confused about what lions and tigers were doing in Argentina, until Sarmiento explained that the colonists gave pumas and jaguars these names in emulation of familiar animals), and he writes, “The tiger’s roar…causes an involuntary shaking of the nerves, as if the flesh all by itself were trembling at the announcement of death” (p. 92). Later, we learn that this man is Facundo himself, who ironically goes on to be called The Tiger of the Plains.

As Sarmiento tries to draw a line and a contrast between the civilized, European influenced city of Buenos Aires and the barbaric rural life that lies outside of it, it is very obvious what side he is on. However, because of hindsight bias it was fairly easy to dismiss his assertions about the superiority of Europe, although I could see how, when it was written it was a very powerful and moving piece of literature. Likewise, it did take me a while to look past Sarmiento’s ethnocentrism and sometimes racist words, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was written in 1845 and that the mindset of that period and in that place was drastically different from the city of Vancouver in 2008.

I also thought that Sarmiento’s description of singular events in Facundo’s past did a very good job of turning the reader against Facundo. And at the same time that Sarmiento describes these scenes in which Facundo has a man suffer two hundred lashes of a whip for a seemingly trivial action, or when he makes all the cultured men of the city practice army drills all night he is very careful about drawing comparisons with Rosas (or even simply bringing up his name at the right time), causing his readers to associate Rosas with the atrocities that Facundo was capable of.

Test!

First blog post...