Today, The Grandma has been reading Death in spring, a masterpiece written byMercè Rodoreda, the Catalan writer, who was born on a day like today in 1902. She has chosen the English version introduced by ColmTóibin and published by Penguin EuropeanWriters.
Rodoreda said that les coses importants són les que no ho semblen (the important things are the ones that don’t seem like it), and The Grandma thinks that it is very important to remember, reread and pass on the literate legacy of one of the best writers in universal literature, who lived a turbulent life (Civil War and exile) and who wrote beautiful masterpieces that talk to us about Existentialism -life, pain, surviving, resilience, death...- and offer to us a particular hard vision about her life and her personal experiences.
Before reading Death in spring, The Grandma has been reading an article published by The Modern Novel, whose first English translation was done by Open Letter in 2009. Here you have it:
If you have read any other novels by Mercè Rodoreda, you will find that they tend to have a more urban setting. This one definitely does not. It is set in a remote village and narrated by a fourteen-year old boy. Nature, inevitably, plays a key role. While Nature is not generally horrifying, it is threatening and omnipresent.
The other aspect of this novel which is both threatening and omnipresent are the people or, more particularly, their behaviour, their customs and their rituals.
Our unnamed narrator seems to live a fairly solitary life. His mother is dead, and his father has remarried. His mother had a strange habit (many of the people in this book seem to have strange habits) of howling outside the window of newly-weds. Her mother had done the same. When his father remarried, the narrator claims to have heard his mother howling outside their window. His new stepmother is only sixteen years old and seems to do very little. She also has lost her mother –she hanged herself.
According to the blacksmith (who later claims to be the narrator’s biological father), when you are born in this village you get a ring, a plaque and a tree.However, it is not clear if this is generally known, at least by the young people, as the blacksmith tells him not to tell anyone. We do know that when the older people go to the forest they leave the children locked in the kitchen cupboard and some of them have almost suffocated.
Early on in the book, the narrator sees a man seemingly preparing a tree and then going into it. Only later does he tell us that this man is his father, and he is about to follow a death ritual, customary in this village. A crowd of people appear, and a strange ceremony takes place. A man, whom the narrator does not know, whispers to him that he enjoys watching people die.
After his father’s death, the narrator becomes closer to his stepmother, and they seem to do things together (though none of it seems to involve earning money or obtaining food). They travel in the area, visiting the cemetery and the cave we have seen at the beginning of the book, where the inhabitants obtaining a red powder which they use to colour the paint for painting their houses.
The strange ways of Nature are a large part of the fascination of this book. The village itself was born from the earth’s terrible unrest. The mountain was cleaved, and it collapsed into the river, scattering the water through the fields.The river flows under the village and the villagers are always concerned that it will undermine the village. Every year, some man has to swim (naked) under the village to see whether there is a blockage. Some come out unscathed, others are hurt, and some lose their face. They are known as the faceless and seem to be like untouchables. Later in the book there is a drought which also causes much concern.
The strange (to us) behaviour of the villagers also has its fascination, from their habit of eating pregnant mares at their funeral Festa to the feral children who run around naked and attack passers-by, including our narrator. They only punish thieves, and they punished them by taking away their humanity. There is one prisoner, and he is locked in a small cage just large enough for a person to sit in, but not lie down. He is fed but abused.
Time also seems irrelevant. The blacksmith creates a sundial, but A year later someone had stolen the pin, but no one cared; no one wanted time in their lives.However, his stepmother stands in the sun and her shadow moves. She comments Time is me -and you.
The village has a Senyor, a lord, who is crippled and dying, but he does not want to die in the conventional way, like the other villagers. However, the choice is not his, despite his position. The villagers are more afraid of the Caramens, a ghostly people who are like shadows and whom no-one has ever seen, but who attack the village.
This really is a thoroughly original work. Nature, the customs, rituals and behaviour of the villagers and their enemies are like nothing in the real world but are beautifully if often frighteningly portrayed. Rodoreda was somewhat obsessed with this book, and she clearly put a lot into it.
Rodoreda wrote this book at the same time as she was writing La plaça del Diamant (UK: The Pigeon Girl; US: The Time of the Doves). However, she never really finished it, and it was only published after her death. Given that at least part of its intent is to damn totalitarian rule, it is easy to see why it was not published in her lifetime. It definitely confirms her as one of the foremost Catalan and, indeed, Spanish writers.
I, sobretot, vull escriure, necessito escriure; res no m'ha fet tant de plaer d'ençà que sóc al món, com un llibre meu acabat d'editar i amb olor de tinta fresca.
And most of all, I want to write, I need to write; nothing has given me so much pleasure since I have been in the world, as a book of mine just edited and smelling of fresh ink.
Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She likes doing nothing but she must do activities to keep fit. The current situation is a little complicated and nobody knows anything about the closer future. It is not a good moment to make plans and this can implicate a deep existentialist crisis. To know more things about it, she has decided to read a little about Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and philologist whose work talk about Existentialism among other things who died on a day like today in 1900.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844-25 August 1900) was aGerman philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history.
He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24.
Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.
In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony.
Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master–slave morality; aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the death of God and the profound crisis of nihilism;notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; and characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power.
He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return.
In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural and moral contexts in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as philosopher ArthurSchopenhauer,composer Richard Wagner, and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Friedrich Nietzsche
After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche'smanuscripts.She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism.
Through her published editions, Nietzsche'sworkbecame associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available.
Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy -especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism- as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture.
Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the town of Röcken, now part of Lützen, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. He was named after King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche'sbirth, Nietzsche later dropped his middle name Wilhelm.
In 1854, he began to attend Domgymnasium in Naumburg. Because his father had worked for the state, as a pastor, the now-fatherless Nietzsche wasoffered a scholarship to study at the internationally recognized Schulpforta. Nietzsche received an important grounding in languages -Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French- so as to be able to read important primary sources.
After graduation in September 1864, Nietzsche began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn in the hope of becoming a minister. For a short time, he and Deussen became members of the BurschenschaftFrankonia.
Nietzsche subsequently concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig in 1865. There, he became close friends with his fellow student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.
Nietzsche received a remarkable offer, in 1869, to become professor ofclassical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his doctorate nor received a teaching certificate, habilitation. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Leipzig University in March 1869, again with Ritschl's support.
Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868 and later Wagner's wife, Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in Lucerne.
Friedrich Nietzsche with his mother
Living off his pension from Basel and aid from friends, Nietzsche travelled to find climates more conducive to his health and lived until 1889 in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria near St. Moritz in Switzerland and winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin and the French city of Nice.
In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis to view Europe from the outside but later abandoned that idea, probably for health reasons.
On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-repeated tale from shortly after his death states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it, then collapsed to the ground.
Nietzsche's mental illness was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing medical paradigm of the time.
General commentators and Nietzsche scholars, whether emphasizing his cultural background or his language, overwhelmingly label Nietzsche as a Germanphilosopher. Others do not assign him a national category.
Germany had not yet been unified into a nation-state, but Nietzsche was born a citizen of Prussia, which was then part of the German Confederation. His birthplace, Röcken, is in the modern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. When he accepted his post at Basel, Nietzsche applied for annulment of his Prussian citizenship. The official revocation of his citizenship came in a document dated 17 April 1869, and for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.
Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and provocative ideas, his philosophy generates passionate reactions. His works remain controversial, due to varying interpretations and misinterpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In Western philosophy, Nietzsche's writings have been described as a case of free revolutionary thought, that is, revolutionary in its structure and problems, although not tied to any revolutionary project. His writings have also been described as a revolutionary project in which his philosophy serves as the foundation of a European cultural rebirth.
Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth.
Nietzsche himself rejected the idea of objective reality, arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional, relative to various fluid perspectives or interests. This leads to constant reassessment of rules according to the circumstances of individual perspectives. This view has acquired the name perspectivism.
In Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims that a table of values hangs above every great person. He points out that what is common among different peoples is the act of esteeming, of creating values, even if the values are different from one people to the next.
Nietzsche asserts that what made people great was not the content of their beliefs, but the act of valuing. Thus the values a community strives to articulate are not as important as the collective will to see those values come to pass. The willing is more essential than the merit of the goal itself, according to Nietzsche.
A thousand goals have there been so far, says Zarathustra, for there are a thousand peoples. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. Humanity still has no goal. Hence, the title of the aphorism, OnThe Thousand And One Goals.
The idea that one value-system is no more worthy than the next, although it may not be directly ascribed to Nietzsche, has become a common premise in modern social science.
The statement God is dead, occurring in several of Nietzsche's works, notably in The Gay Science, has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, most commentators regard Nietzsche as an atheist; others, such as suggest that this statement reflects a more subtle understanding of divinity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively killed the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years.
The death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God, which justifies the evil in the world, and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote to a primal form of nihilism, the despair of meaninglessness.
As Heidegger put the problem, If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.
A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the will to power, der Wille zur Macht, which he maintained provides a basis for understanding human behavior -more so than competing explanations, such as the ones based on pressure for adaptation or survival.
As such, according to Nietzsche, the drive for conservation appears as the major motivator of human or animal behavior only in exceptions, as the general condition of life is not one of emergency, of struggle for existence. More often than not, self-conservation is but a consequence of a creature's will to exert its strength on the outside world.
Friedrich Nietzsche held a pessimistic view on modern society and culture. His views stand against the concept of popular culture. He believed the press and mass culture led to conformity and brought about mediocrity.
Nietzsche saw a lack of intellectual progress, leading to the decline ofthe human species.
According to Nietzsche, individuals needed to overcome this form of mass culture. He believed some people were able to become superior individuals through the use of will power. By rising above mass culture, society would produce higher, brighter and healthier human beings.
