Reinaldo Arenas, Singing from the Well. Andrew Hurley, translator. Penguin, 1967/1988.
I’m used to thinking of Arenas as a political novelist, whose Kafkaesque and surreal works were a thorn in Castro’s side and exposed the punishing, authoritarian nature of the government. In the introduction to Singing from the Well, Thomas Colchie details a two part history for Arenas: first, the sad history of artistic persecution and jailing Arenas suffered at the hands of the Cuban government as it shut down artistic freedom and persecuted homosexuals; second, the neglect Arenas suffered after he emigrated to the United States, contracted AIDS, and committed suicide. The story seems similar to another Cuban writer, Guillermo Rosales and his novel, The Halfway House. This is Arenas’ first novel, and was very much celebrated before Arenas attracted Castro’s ire and mistreatment.
I read this novel twice, first on a eight hour train trip and second on my return home. It is a surreal novel with a fragmented narrative, and the distractions of travel made maintaining the concentration I needed to make sense of the book difficult.This is also a rural novel. The setting is not specified, but I assume it’s Cuba, although the lack of specificity lends it a sense of universality. The narrator is an unnamed young boy, living with his mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and cousin, Celestino; he may be a much older character by the end of the novel. His narrative can be very fragmented, made up of very short observations and reactions to what is happening around him; this style befits a young narrator, who has a short attention span and is easily attracted and distracted by various stimuli (family, animals, nature, ghosts). At other points in the novel, he tells longer, more coherent stories, using longer paragraphs. Later, he writes as a playwright, using character dialogue and italicized stage directions. The narrative becomes less personal and more distanced and authorial, which perhaps indicates that he is older(?).
The novel splits into three parts–First Ending, Second Ending, Final Ending–which are more recursive rather marking distinct story lines or themes. I’m unsure how the three parts are meant to organize the overall narrative. Besides the larger three part division, there are also occasional hand-written (cursive) pages, whose typeface is much larger than that in the rest of the book; the writing on these pages consists of short phrases from that narrator’s family or short quotations from a famous author, like Rimbaud, or work, like MacBeth. These pages do not function as chapter breaks, creating distinct narrative chunks, because more often than not the narrative bridges the handwritten pages. Instead, they seems to function as occasional interrupters, or as a chorus offering commentary and pulling me out of the narrative for a moment to shape my reading of it.
Once I understood how the narrative was structured, I could better understand what Arenas was doing with it. This is a rural novel–realistic–but it is also surreal and fantastic. Dreams and the supernatural are as much a part of the novel as the hard scrabble realities of living an impoverished rural life where too often one cannot find enough to eat. Throughout, the narrator does not distinguish between the real, surreal, and supernatural, and through his eyes the three realms intermingle. Initially I tried to keep them separate as distinct narrative lines, distinct kinds of perception, but I couldn’t and stopped. There really was little use in asking What is real? What is a dream? and What is fantastic?, because they were all a fluid part of the narrator’s perceptions and understanding.
The narrator tells the story of his family. The story begins with his mother running out of the house ready to throw herself into the well; the narrator runs after her to prevent her suicide, but she is not there. The tension and conflict of the household and the threat of suicide remain constant motifs throughout the book. The mother was abandoned by her husband, the narrator’s father, who returned her to her parents, maligning her before disappearing. This is a family that is deeply unhappy and dysfunctional. The grandparents are violent and abusive. The grandfather has a hatchet with which he threatens everyone, and he is always willing to act violently, like forcing his wife’s hands into a pot of boiling water, to insure his dominance. He is the patriarch, and everyone hates him for it. Even though it puts the family at risk for starvation, the grandmother destroys a planting of corn to spite him. The narrator wants to kill his grandfather, and he conspires with the ghosts of his dead cousins on the roof of the house. There are also dead aunts, witches, and elves that populate the house and the surrounding land. The spirit world is as present as the real, and they are linked by the violence that is at the core of this family’s life, a violence born of the grandfather’s need to dominate. The cousin, Celestino, is taken in, because his mother, one of the narrator’s aunts, dies.
Celestino is a poet. He is obsessed with writing poetry, and once he covers all the available paper in the house with poems he begins to carve poetry into the trunks of trees, which becomes a massive project to write a massive poem. The family is ashamed of Celestino’s literacy and his literary talent, because it is not an appropriate male behavior, like dominating others and dominating the land. The grandfather is so angry that he chops down all the trees on which Celestino has written, but Celestino is so driven by his poetry that he continues to carve verses into trees, which then his grandfather chops down until there are almost no trees left. The family’s violent dysfunction impacts the land which sustains them, making survival difficult at best. Amidst all this violence, the narrator and Celestino develop a close and loving bond. It is the only close and loving bond in the book, and it provides them a shield of mutual self-protection against all the hatred and violence directed at them. Their relationship, that between the storyteller and the poet, is the only uplifting relationship in the book. Besides the bond of language, the boys escape to the woods and river to enjoy nature and experience freedom, outside the degrading reality of the family and farm. But the domineering grandfather and the rest of the living dysfunctional family cannot let the boys inhabit such a liberated, peaceful space, and so harry them. Arenas offers little sense in the novel that there is a world outside the house, the farm, the village, and surrounding nature. It’s a closed system that traps everything and everyone: living beings, ghosts of the dead, supernatural beings (witches, elves). Even in the narrator’s dreams, when he dreams that his mother is a frog or fish for example, he cannot escape the violence or dysfunction. The only compensation is story and poetry, and they are always under threat.
And then there is death, for everyone–almost everyone?--dies in this book, and then magically comes back to life, only to die again, including the grandfather. Early on, Celestino escapes to the woods and returns with an awl sticking out of his chest, a sure sign that he is going to die, but he doesn’t. Later, the grandfather kills him with the hatchet; he dies but is mysteriously resurrected. This happens with the grandmother, mother, and narrator, too. Near the end, though, the narrator begins to transition to becoming part of the crew of dead cousins, but the dead are as stuck here as the living. Reminds me of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, where the dead cannot migrate beyond the graveyard because the town cacique, the eponymous Pedro Páramo, has corrupted the local priest who can no longer administer last rights.
The stories are recursive, theme and variation, escape and return, to try again and again. At the end, the narrator sleepwalks to the well, teetering on the edge, waiting for his mother to save him, but they–the witches? the elves? the dead cousins?--tell him that she didn’t get there in time, although he thinks that she got there too soon, and jumped into the well before him(?). So the narrator has entered the realm of the dead, yet if he did commit suicide, like his mother, there is still no escape from this hermetic world.
This may be a creative rendition of Pre-Castro rural Cuba, a place that was an inexorable trap for its inhabitants, ruled by men who have nothing but violence to share. At this point, though, I can’t help but see it as a precursor to the entrapment Arenas felt under Castro and later in the US.