coldhearted scientist وداد

Perhaps where I differ from Doris Sommer on the 19th century novel is that she sees the racial and cultural issues it engages as through the post-Vasconcelos, post-Freyre, official mestizaje offered as a solution to the question of social cohesio, and does not realize it. Or that she buys in too easily to the idea of mestizaje as harmony and blending, as the basis of the nation and a happy medium, so to speak, among races, which is not how it had operated historically.

Where she sees conciliation and blending, I see violence and rupture and fractured subjectivity. She sees things working themselves out through love, and I see these large families more like Darwinian survival zones. She is interested in the memories that were created, and I in those strategically forgotten. I am interested in Sanjinés and Lund and must download Scrivener to this machine and learn it.

I am having some trouble paying attention to Marthe Robert due to boredom with psychoanalysis. But the novel is a search for origins, récherche du temps perdu. A search to recapture what was lost: this fits María. And it is the backward, excavational move that interests me, because in this journey to the source we find the wreckage of what is later glossed over.

Axé.