Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ stories were a pleasure to read. “The Gospel According to Mark” is a fascinating story about a man who reads to an illiterate family. The family becomes fascinated with the story and wants it repeatedly read to them. After reading this story, I think that this family seems to believe that if they crucify Espinosa they will be saved, as they ask this question to him. They treat him very nicely and then want to kill him. I believe that these people almost want to believe that Espinosa is Jesus or a Jesus-like figure.  I believe that these people were desperately seeking someone to idolize and were seeking a religion. Because Espinosa was the first man to teach them this, they turned to him and wanted to act out the story for themselves.

                “The Garden of Forking Paths” was probably my least favorite stories even though it covers one of my favorite periods of history. I am not completely sure if I can decipher what the metaphor for this story is. Tsun reflects on his ancestor and how he decided against being governor of Yunnan to do two things instead. These two things, writing a novel and to make a labyrinth, may symbolize the two paths that seem to be referenced throughout the story. The story seems to make the point that there are two ways things can end. The character Albert allows Tsun to understand what these forking paths might mean. The sense of how time can reveal two paths in life, and how things are interconnected, is what seems to be happening in this story.

“Emma Zunz” is a story that, in my opinion, could still be released today and it would seem contemporary. I really enjoyed it. The entire premise of a psychological need to cover something up to make yourself feel better is so fascinating to me. Two years ago I read a book called Shutter Island and “Emma Zunz” reminded me of it in a way. People do things psychologically to themselves to make them feel better about what it is that they have done. Emma was a nice person so of course she could not just kill a man for no reason. She had to have a reason for murder to feel better about what she did. Personally I could never murder someone unless it was in pure self-defense and even then I would feel guilty about it. The question I think about most with this type of scenario is who should be held responsible. When someone kills themselves, if someone or something triggered that suicide, should the someone or something be the one ultimately responsible for the suicide or should the person committing suicide be the one to take the blame because they did pull the trigger even if they were provoked. On whom does the responsibility lie?

I am not even sure if Emma should have pursued her revenge on this man however I realize that she was angry and angry women have the capacity to do crazy things. I have done weird things to try and get revenge of some sort but I was a teenager and I realize now that it was an immature way to go about things. I think the rape set up was truly smart on her part and is proof that she would give up her own purity and innocence to avenge some guy who made her father kill himself. “Emma Zunz” stuck with me and made me think the most out of all of these stories. It is the type of story that I enjoy.

Reader Response of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” are good but strange. Marquez writes about a dead man being played with by children as if it is an everyday occurrence. Maybe he is talking about it so casually because children often do not understand the finality of death. They might have just thought of this washed up dead man as a giant doll to play with. “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” was written for Playboy magazine and the line in the story “Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination” makes it clear that he is talking about or perhaps comparing the dead man to the beautiful women that grace Playboy’s pages. The women in Playboy are supposed to be the most beautiful, perfect women you will ever see or could ever imagine. Marquez just happens to use a weird example to compare the two.

                The first time I read “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” I thought that the people in the story had offbeat ways of grieving. For some reason I immediately thought of a book I just read by Joan Didion titled The Year of Magical Thinking, where she chronicled the grief she had in the year after her husband died. She mentions that she could not throw away her husband’s shoes because he would need them if he came back. That of course would never happen but people grieve in different ways and the women making him clothing so he could go through dignity might have been a way for grief to be expressed or perhaps it was just to be like the people in ancient Egypt who were buried in pyramids and got all of the wonderful worldly possessions to help them in the afterlife. There is no wrong way to grieve so I see my original assessment of their grief being offbeat to be invalid. These people might have been celebrating his life instead of focusing on his death. Their grieving may have been different than how I grieve but not weird in general.

                “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” was a harder story for me to connect with. It reminded me of a circus act or something similar. A woman changing into a spider and paying admission prices to see her is not something that is in a normal story but magical realism is not normal. I have to also wonder if it is supposed to be reminiscent of a freak show because the miracles that the angel performed were not the typical kind that one would think of. The most disturbing one was the leper with sores sprouting sunflowers. The actual thought of that makes me cringe. The descriptions in this story are so vivid that it makes it seem like they could be real. For example the sunflower sprouting sores and the whistling in the heart of the angel. Hearts do not whistle but this story makes it seem as though they can. That is magical! This story also uses a good example that angels can come in many forms. Oftentimes I feel that people still think they know what an angel looks like. But an angel could be ugly, an animal, or just a person you might encounter in everyday life. The show Touched By An Angel was kind of like this. The angels just appeared whenever a person needed them but the only way one could know they were angel was by a glow of light around them. They just looked like normal people. Marquez makes this story an example that an angel could be a horribly ugly creature yet still be divine.

                Both of these stories are longwinded and at times exhausting to read. They almost require a second reading to fully grasp what is going on and to get all of the minute details down. Even after combing through both of these stories I am still not entirely sure I understand it all completely. My favorite was “The Most Beautiful Drowned Man In The World”. I just found it interesting how he makes it seem as if all of these people deal with finding drowned men on a regular basis and how this one in particular was so much better looking. Some people are more beautiful in life than others but I have a hard time imagining a beautiful dead person which is mostly because I do not like looking at the dead and prefer to remember people when they were alive. I think it is morbid to compare these dead drowned people and call some more beautiful. Maybe this drowned man had less time to decompose but there are other factors with that and I will stop before it gets disgusting. I really, thoroughly enjoyed both of these stories because they were just so out there but believable in their own way.

Reader Response of Julio Cortázar short stories

       Julio Cortázar and his short stories are an important part of magical realism. The three stories that I read were mind bending and often confusing on first read. The most confusing story out of the three though was “The Continuity of Parks”. It just seemed to weave back and forth between real and fiction. The most interesting story for me was “Axolotl” and the narrator’s seemingly profound love for the little creatures he is viewing.

                None of these stories truly relate completely to my own life. I would say that “Axolotl” does relate the most because I can understand completely where the narrator is coming from. I love animals and sometimes feel like I can understand them, which is probably just my own fantasy world going on, but it gives me comfort to think that I am comforting an animal. Unlike in “Axolotl” however, I do not see myself turning into an animal that I love. Also, as much as I would like to think that animals can think on the same level as humans, I know that in general they cannot. However, some of them are very intelligent creatures in their own right.

                The most drama-filled story that I read was “Our Demeanor at Wakes”. I find it fascinating the various ways that different cultures grieve. Some of it was a bit much though. I am still not sure if I completely understand if they were in competition for who could grieve in the most profound, over the top manner. I can relate to grieving for a stranger. I have cried at family funerals when I barely knew the person. I have cried when celebrities like Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson died and I have cried when tragic events have happened killing a lot of people. I did not know them but I still felt grief and I felt weird for crying for those people until I read this story and it made me feel much more normal. I truly feel that “Our Demeanor at Wakes” would make an excellent soap opera or Lifetime movie.

                Julio Cortázar writes stories that need to be read more than once and since they are short it is easy to do this. I was confused and trying to figure out where reality and fiction intertwined in “The Continuity of Parks” the most but it seemed to be this way for all three of the stories. These stories are personal in that some parts of them could really happen and they are distant because of the fantasy aspect. They are good and interesting stories and are also good introductory stories to magical realism and what it has to offer in the literary world.

Reader Response of the Popol Vuh

The Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh, is an interesting tale. It is a myth by the Mayan people of Central America. The Popol Vuh is similar to many other myths and stories about the creation of mankind, such as the Christian version. There are multiple gods in this version of the story.

The Popol Vuh relates with my own life in some ways. The Mayan people and this story or myth is interesting to me because eight and a half years ago I went to visit the Mayan ruins. This was on a cruise and only one day was spent at the ruins but along with the intense heat of the visit, the ruins are stuck in my mind. While I remember the guide explaining that the Mayan calendar ended on December 21, 2012 and my thirteen year old self thinking of only having ten years left to live being the clearest memory from this trip, I also remember seeing where sacrifices took place

The Popol Vuh agrees with some of my views of the world, such as the flood sequence. However, it disagrees with a lot of my views as well. Although I am a Christian, I do not believe that a sole God or multiple gods made humans out of dirt, dust, or mud. I believe that while some heavenly force contributed to the making of human beings, it was not the sole source of human creation. My basic belief is that the missing link between apes, monkeys, or whatever scientific relative is closest to us, is God. This creation myth of the Maya goes against and clashes with my own belief system on that topic. Something that I agree with is the belief that God or gods, in their story, making all of the little animals. I have a hard time believing that all of the animals just came from basically nothing and so I do think a higher power was involved in that.

How did you learn, and how much were your views and opinions challenged or changed by this text, if at all?

            I am not sure I learned anything new from this story. However, I will say that this is just another story that is similar to the Christian creation story. Hearing multiple stories with the same basic plot makes me wonder why there so many stories with the same basic premise of man being created from the earth and of the story of the flood. This causes me to question the validity of the stories which also makes me sad. After reading this myth though, I would say that I just have learned to accept what I believe as truth. The Bible is the basis for my belief system but the fact that there are so many similar stories to the stories in the Bible causes me to question sometimes, which I believe is a good thing.

            The Popol Vuh addresses many things that are important to me and that I care about. It addresses the birth of human beings, which is something that I have complex feelings on when thinking about it how a Christian is supposed to think about it. It also addresses animals, which I love, and their reactions to things…making animals come against what they perceived as mistreatment by their humans. Overall, I would say that this was an interesting read. It is not something that I would go out of my way to read but it is always interesting to read how different religions and cultures believe human beings came into existence. From that what I find most interesting is how each of these stories are often very similar with the same basic plot points. It was not a boring story but because the wording is different than what I normally read it was harder to understand at times. It is a story that should be commended for lasting longer than the people who created it.