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William Laskowski
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Adams, Richard
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
Other major works
short fiction: The Unbroken Web: Stories and Fables, 1980 (also known as The Iron Wolf, and Other Stories); Tales from Watership Down, 1996.
nonfiction: Nature Through the Seasons, 1975 (with Max Hooper); Nature Day and Night, 1978 (with Hooper); Voyage Through the Antarctic, 1982 (with Ronald M.
Lockley); A Nature Diary, 1985; The Day Gone By, 1990 (autobiography).
children’s literature: The Tyger Voyage, 1976; The Adventures of and Brave
Deeds of the Ship’s Cat on the Spanish Maine: Together with the Most Lamentable Losse of the Alcestis and Triumphant Firing of the Port of Chagres, 1977; The Legend of Te Tuna, 1982; The Bureaucats, 1985.
edited texts: Sinister and Supernatural Stories, 1978; Occasional Poets: An Anthology, 1980.
Bibliography
Adams, Richard. The Day Gone By. London: Hutchinson, 1990. Provides information on Adams’s childhood, his service in World War II, and how he developed both a love of
nature and a skill for storytelling that would lead to his becoming a writer.
_______. “Richard Adams: Some Ingredients of Watership Down.” In The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, edited by Edward Blishen. Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1975. Adams is one of more than twenty authors who con-
tributed essays to this collection about why and how they write. His chapter focuses on
Watership Down.
Bridgman, Joan. “Richard Adams at Eighty.” Contemporary Review 277, no. 1615 (August, 2000): 108. Overview of Adams’s personal and professional life, placed within
the broader context of children’s literature published in the United Kingdom and fea-
turing an evaluation of Watership Down.
Harris-Fain, Darren. British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Since 1960. Vol. 261 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Group, 2002. A brief biography of Adams and analysis of his books, along with a list of his works and a bibliogra-
phy, are included in this standard reference book.
Kitchell, Kenneth F., Jr. “The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Ad-
ams’s Watership Down.” Classical and Modern Literature 7 (Fall, 1986): 13-30. Detailed analysis of Watership Down makes a convincing argument that the novel is a twentieth century epic that treats its rabbit protagonist as a classical hero.
Meyer, Charles. “The Power of Myth and Rabbit Survival in Richard Adams’ Watership
Down.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, no. 4 (1994): 139-150. Examines the novel’s treatment of reason and intuition and shows the connections between Watership Down and R. M. Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit.
Perrin, Noel. “An Animal Epic: Richard Adams, Watership Down.” In A Child’s Delight.
Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Collection of essays about
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Adams, Richard
thirty children’s books that Perrin describes as “neglected,” “ignored,” or “under-
appreciated” includes a brief discussion of Watership Down.
Watkins, Tony. “Reconstructing the Homeland: Loss and Hope in the English Land-
scape.” In Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature, edited by Maria Nikolajeva. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Assesses the treatment of the
landscape in several works of English children’s literature. Focuses on Kenneth
Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, comparing it with Watership Down and J. R. R.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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REINALDO ARENAS
Born: Holguín, Oriente, Cuba; July 16, 1943
Died: New York, New York; December 7, 1990
Principal long fiction
Celestino antes del alba, 1967 (revised as Cantando en el pozo, 1982; Singing from the Well, 1987; part 1 of The Pentagonía)
El mundo alucinante, 1969 ( Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Life and
Adventures of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier, 1971; also translated as The
Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, 1987)
El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas, 1975 (as Le Palais des très blanches mouffettes, 1980; The Palace of the White Skunks, 1990; part 2 of The Pentagonía)
La vieja Rosa, 1980 (novella; Old Rosa, 1989)
Otra vez el mar, 1982 ( Farewell to the Sea, 1986; part 3 of The Pentagonía) Arturo, la estrella más brillante, 1984 (novella; The Brightest Star, 1989) La loma del ángel, 1987 ( Graveyard of the Angels, 1987)
Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories, 1989 (includes the novella Old Rosa and the novella The Brightest Star)
El portero, 1989 ( The Doorman, 1991)
Viaje a La Habana, 1990
El asalto, 1991 ( The Assault, 1994; part 5 of The Pentagonía)
El color del verano, 1991 ( The Color of Summer: Or, The New Garden of
Earthly Delights, 2000; part 4 of The Pentagonía)
Other literary forms
In addition to novels, Reinaldo Arenas (ah-RAY-nahs) wrote several collections of
short stories, political essays, plays, poems, and an extensive autobiography, Antes que anochezca (1992; Before Night Falls, 1993). His short-story collections include Con los ojos cerrados (1972), Adiós a mamá: De La Habana a Nueva York (1995), and Mona, and Other Tales (2001). His poetry collections include El central (1981; El Central: A Cuban Sugar Mill, 1984) and Voluntad de vivir manifestándose (1989).
Achievements
Reinaldo Arenas’s first novel, Singing from the Well, was awarded first place by the Cuban Writers Union in 1965. Singing from the Well also was awarded a prestigious French literary award, the Prix Medici, in 1969. In the same year, Hallucinations received the award for Best Foreign Novel from Le Monde (France). In 1980, he was awarded the Cintas Foundation’s Fellow honor. This was followed by other fellow honors, including
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Arenas, Reinaldo
from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1982 and the Wilson Center Foundation in 1987. His
autobiography, Before Night Falls, was listed among the top ten books of the year by The New York Times in 1993. These literary awards were enhanced when the film based on his autobiography received both the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival (1999) and Movie of the Year award from the American Film Institute (2000).
Biography
Reinaldo Arenas was born on July 16, 1943, in Holguín, Oriente, Cuba. He was born
into a rural setting, and his family suffered extreme poverty. According to his autobiography and interviews, his childhood was one of hunger and neglect. While a youth in rural
Cuba under the harsh dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Arenas was marginally involved
in the building insurrection that would eventually topple the oppressive regime in 1959.
Several years after the Cuban Revolution, he moved to Havana (1961). He studied at the
Universidad de Havana but did not graduate. Arenas also worked for a while in the José
Martí National Library (1964).
In 1967, at the age of twenty-four, Arenas published his first novel, Singing from the Well. This work somewhat mirrored his childhood, presenting a young protagonist who suffers poverty—both physical and mental. It features a boy who must use independent
thought to survive an oppressive reality. Arenas’s literary works are not exemplary of the realism that the revolutionary authorities wanted to see published. His open advancement of independent thinking, coupled with his open homosexuality, soon led to his works being labeled antirevolutionary; they were then censored and banned in Cuba.
Nonetheless, Arenas secretly smuggled his writings out of Cuba. His work
s were pub-
lished in Europe and the United States, where they received critical acclaim but led to further reprisals from the Cuban revolutionary regime. His works were removed from the
lists of official Cuban literature and were confiscated throughout Cuba. Arenas was im-
prisoned several times for his defiant attitude. He was tortured in prison and forced to renounce his own works and his homosexuality. Although he was a nonperson in Cuba, he
was not allowed to emigrate. His life was reduced to one of minimal existence in Havana, seeking marginal employment to survive. Because of a bureaucratic mistake, he emigrated to the United States in the 1980 exodus known as the Mariel Boat Lift.
In the United States, Arenas was free to publish and criticize the regime of revolution-
ary leader Fidel Castro. He insisted that his criticism was not only of the Cuban situation but of all types of dogmatic ideologies as well. His literary forms expanded to include poetry, essays, short stories, and journalism. On December 7, 1990, shortly after writing his definitive autobiography, Arenas committed suicide in New York City. In his parting
words in a suicide letter, he made it clear that he was not leaving this world as a victim of the Cuban Revolution. To the contrary, he described his life as one of struggle and hope.
He expressed his desire that one day all Cubans would be free, stating eloquently that in his death, he already was.
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Arenas, Reinaldo
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
Analysis
Reinaldo Arenas uses the written word to criticize all forms of authoritarianism, espe-
cially that which impedes independent thought and action. His most fervent and defiant
works condemn the dictatorial regime of the post-Batista revolutionary junta in Cuba,
headed by Castro (during Arenas’s lifetime). However, he does not limit his criticism to Cuba. He once stated that both capitalism and communism severely limit freedom and expression, but in a capitalist society, one is free to complain openly; in a communist society, one must quietly accept repression. Many of Arenas’s works also condemn adult authority
over children. As in all authoritarian situations (political, societal, and familial), adult authority stifles the independence of children and adolescents. Arenas’s works also
contain much psychological and physical abuse.
Arenas presents the reader with a world where the protagonists must use their intellec-
tual skills to survive in a world that is not logical, or just. The reader is confronted with unreliable narrations, descriptions, and dialogue. Indeed, Arenas writes as if truth is only to be found between fantasies, lies, distortions, exaggerations, and hyperbole. His works are often confusing counterpoints within perceived truths. For Arenas, truth is not universal, so the reader of his work is forced to decide for himself or herself what truth is being presented. Arenas reveals a society of humans who struggle for self-expression and self-
esteem.
Arenas’s textual style varies. In some novels, he uses neither paragraphs nor chapters.
In others, he employs an inordinate amount of chapters and textual divisions. His lan-
guage is generally quite graphic, to the point of being repugnant to some readers. Arenas is not concerned with convincing his readership of the innocence of his characters. To the contrary, he presents their actions as forms of fantasy, and it is up to readers to accept or deny the “reality” of the characters’actions. Extraordinary events are mingled with deceptions, half-truths, distortions, and confusion. The fictional is not obvious and neither is the truth. Furthermore, although Arenas’s works are often fantastical and even magical, they are not examples of the Magical Realism employed by many Latin American writers.
Singing from the Well
Singing from the Well is the first novel in a five-book series that Arenas called pentagonía, or five agonies. Singing from the Well is the first and only novel by Arenas to be published in Cuba. (His later works were banned there as well.) Like many of his
works, there is no definite chronological order to the story, nor does it clearly delineate its characters. The only consistent linking of time and space is the dysfunctional relationship between the principal protagonist, a young boy growing up in rural poverty and confusion, and his mother. He is never named, unlike his imagined cousin, Celestino.
The world of the boy is a bizarre mixture of nightmare, punishment, and repression.
His mother disciplines him with an ox prod, his cousins conspire to kill their grandfather, and his grandmother burns his beloved crosses. To survive this world of cruel fantasies, 20
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Arenas, Reinaldo
the boy splits himself into another imaginary being: Celestino, his deceased cousin.
Celestino is a poet who carves his poems into trees and leaves.
The reader is never exposed to Celestino’s poetry directly. Nonetheless, it is obvious
that his poems are attempts to face the bleakness of his life. The wondrous world of nature that the boy and his imaginary cousin inhabit and narrate (through their poetry) is their imagined “real” world. The boy’s grandfather, who cannot decipher the strangely coded
texts that Celestino carves into trees and other plants, displays an ignorance and distrust that leads him to try to eliminate the texts by chopping them up with a hatchet. The word hacha, or hatchet, is used by Arenas more than hundred times over the course of one page of the novel.
Singing from the Well presents a poignant tale of imaginative self-expression. As with other novels by Arenas, the reader encounters a text full of dissonance and fantasy, and without normally accepted logic. The reader must determine the story’s merits and truths.
The Palace of the White Skunks
In The Palace of the White Skunks, the childlike Celestino is replaced by an older adolescent narrator, Fortunato. Although not overtly stated, Fortunato is a chronological extension of the young boy from Singing from the Well. It is also an analogical extension of the anti-Batista revolutionary epic of rural Cuba.
In this work, there is a definite historical setting and time period: the revolutionary rebels fighting against the Batista regime in the Sierra Maestra of Cuba. The novel again describes a dysfunctional family and society. Fortunato faces many real challenges that often overlap with fantasy. The events could be described as forms of magical absurdism:
Fortunato conversing with deceased characters, stabbing himself while continuing to am-
ble along, and ghosts and demonic ghouls dancing in the home. Here, also, Fortunato’s
life is a series of frustrations, deceptions, and rejections. Extreme poverty, problems with the revolutionary insurrection, distrust and insults from family members, and even the
sexual frustrations of others enter into impossible and improbable realities. The history presented is reliable, but the events and voices contained in the novel are inconsistent, conflicted, and confusing.
Arenas once again confronts the reader with surreal situations and characters that are
not logically reliable. The reader must attempt to sort out the myriad textual transgressions and diversions. Fortunato realizes that he must find a form of self-expression to survive the oppressive situation in which he finds himself. He does so by starting to write his responses to the forces that are limiting his independent choices in life. Fortunato steals paper from his grandfather and begins to secretly express his inner revulsion with the outer life that he is experiencing. The reader is not privy to the actual words of the adolescent.
However, it becomes clear that the writings represent a desperate defense mechanism. The text reveals a youth who is literally sweating-out a confrontation with an absurd reality that lurks in the background. He writes instead of sleeping or eating. As with other Arenas 21
Arenas, Reinaldo
Critical Survey of Long Fiction
novels,
the reader finds a protagonist who seeks to find an aesthetic and pure inner textual world that will address his need for self-expression.
Farewell to the Sea
In this novel, the reader finds an adult reincarnation of the central characters found in Singing from the Well and The Palace of the White Skunks. The main protagonist, Hector, lives in the institutionalized revolution of modern Cuba. He suffers for attempting to express independent thoughts and writings. In this work, Arenas confronts the Castro re-
gime openly, presenting a postrevolution Cuba as intolerable of dissent. Hector confronts this world with a desperate desire to express his independence. He is an unpublished author, but in this novel, the reader is allowed to view his writings and hear his cantos (songs).
This novel is divided into two parts that feature events that follow Hector and his wife’s return from the beach after six days of vacation from the totalitarian government in Havana. Part one consists of six chapters (one for each day at the beach) that straightforwardly reveal the unnamed wife’s descriptions of a life devoid of tolerance, of unfulfilled intellectual and sexual expression. Part two is narrated by Hector and has six components labeled cantos. They are a blend of prose and poetry, fantasy and fact (as perceived by Hector).
As the couple approaches the outskirts of Havana, the reader discovers that the wife is
actually a nonexistent creation of Hector. The car begins to accelerate, and the implied ending is that death by suicide is better than returning to a life of intolerance, oppression, and repression.
The reader is confronted by various analogies. The most obvious is the parallel of Hec-
tor’s life with that of the author. Furthermore, this work was clearly important for Arenas, as he rewrote it twice, each time after it had been confiscated by the Castro government.
Paul Siegrist
Other major works
short fiction: Con los ojos cerrados, 1972 (revised as Termina el desfile, 1981); Adiós a mamá: De La Habana a Nueva York, 1995; Mona, and Other Tales, 2001.