Amalia, Some Final Thoughts

“There was a fire lighted in the fireplace, and the blue glow given off by a thick log burning in it was reflected, as on the glass surface of a mirror, by the steel plates at the back of the fireplace, thereby constituting the one source of bright light in the room.

The gold incense burners on the corner shelves gave off the subtle scent of the pellets from Chile slowly burning in them; and the goldfinches, hopping about in the gilded wire cages keeping them prisoner, were pouring forth that vibrant and capricious music with which those tenors of Nature’s grand opera show off the lung power of their tiny, sensitive bodies.” (147)

“Gliding like a shadow over the bathroom carpet, placed more pellets in the incense burners, waved her little hands alongside the goldfinches’ cages, and drew a green satin screen over the opening of the fireplace. The light was completely dimmed then; the birds trilled even more happily, and a soft, perfumed atmosphere once again enveloped Amalia.” (148)

I love the descriptions of Amalia’s home in José Mármol’s novel because they represent that dream of what a home could be, a kind of small, private paradise that I like to imagine and dream about. But I actually meant to start differently, to talk a little bit about an important element of geographical storytelling in Amalia, which is what brought me to Part Two, Chapter 1 “Amalia Sáenz de Olabarrieta” where I quickly became caught up in the lush description of the private sanctuary of Amalia’s bathroom.

The second part of the novel opens with a description of Amalia’s home region/province of Tucumán:

“ ‘Tucumán is the garden of the universe as far as the grandeur and sublimity of its nature are concerned,’ Captain Andrews wrote in his Travels to South America, published in London in 1827; and the metaphor of this traveler, apparently so exaggerated, was not all that far from the truth.” (145)

The foundational romances (romances fundacionales) are a genre that was written across Latin America in the mid-nineteenth century at the same time that many of the nations we recognize today were just being established and these novels played a role in imagining the nation, the subject of Dr. Doris Sommer’s 1991 monograph Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Amalia is one of Sommer’s subjects in a text that examines these narratives as metaphors for nation-building and the constitution of the national population. Sommer argues that in this paradigm the romance between Amalia, the beautiful young widow from Tucumán and Eduardo the porteño (a word used to describe the people born and raised in the port city of Buenos Aires) grandson of a national hero represents the desired unification of the Argentine provinces with the capital city of Buenos Aires. How Buenos Aires and the rest of the nation would come together was a cause of concern not only for Mármol, but for his contemporary and fellow letrado Domingo F. Sarmiento, who, in his canonical book Facundo, states that Buenos Aires has been guilty of a strongly hold on trade and withholding resources from the rest of the nation.

“All the delights of grace, of luxuriance, and of poetry that tropical nature can conjoin, on earth and in the air, are to be found together there, as though the province of Tucumán were the chosen mansion of the geniuses of that deserved and wild land that stretches from the Strait of Magellan to Bolivia, and from the Andes to Uruguay.

Gentle, perfumed, fertile, brimming over with the many charms and opulent splendors of light, of birds, and of flowers, Nature there attunes the poetic spirits of its creatures to the impressions and perspectives to which they awaken and live out their lives.” (145)

The possible union of Amalia and Eduardo stands in for the unification of the nation which, if you are interested in theories of the dual rise of nations and the novel genre check out Sommer’s book for Latin American novels and Benedict Anderson’s seminal book Imagined Communities, which is available through OverDrive in ebook, may be available at your local library, and is also quite affordably available in both physical and ebook forms (especially if you wait for a Verso semi-annual sale).

“And it was amid that garden of birds and flowers, of light and of panoramic views that Amalia, the generous widow of Barracas, a young woman whom the reader met in the beginning chapters of this story, was born, as a lily or a rose is born, abounding in beauty, freshness, and fragrance.” (146)

Amalia is full of these lush descriptions of the land of new nation. Fertility, freshness, and purity are descriptions that abound in terms of describing the land, which is then juxtaposed with the violence and corruption of the Rosas administration at once drawing attention to the dual possibility of the land and the limitation of that potential under the leadership of the time. It is not the place, but a corrupt leader, Mármol is arguing in his novel, that limits the possibilities of an otherwise pure and promising geography.

“Amalia breathed in, down to the most sensitive depths of her soul, all the poetic perfume that is diffused in the air of the region of her birth.” (146)

Questions to ask as you read any novel, but especially Amalia might be what social types appear in the novel and what message is Mármol sending about the society as a whole? In any novel what values do two lovers represent, what kind of social gap does the desired union either resolve or fail to resolve? (and of course here you can apply this question as you read Amalia). How is the setting itself characterized? Is it a place of progress? Of decadence and decay? Of corruption? Is it old, is it new, and does the season the novel is set in make a difference? In short, how does a novel construct its message, what types of descriptions does it use to capture your imagination while also shaping your understanding of the subject? Basically, how can we be critical and analytical of the narratives we take in? That Mármol’s work is a deeply political piece written by a future senator and director of the National Library makes the political stakes of this novel quite clear. Finally, what is the national imaginary of the novel?

If you enjoyed this blog post remember to hit the like button and consider leaving a comment letting me know why you like this particular piece of content so I can better gauge what you’re looking for. Have a question to add to my list? Leave that in the comments too.

All of the excerpts for this post come from the kindle edition of Amalia published by the Library of Latin America. The kindle edition is in English, but if you do decide to buy the novel make sure to double check and see that the edition you are buying has been translated, there are a lot of Spanish editions out there and it is easy to end up with the Spanish if you don’t double check the language (on Amazon they always state the language somewhere in their description of the project). I’m not sure about the easy and affordable availability of a print English version.

This particular edition has a lovely introduction written by Doris Sommer if you want to combine reading her work with reading the novel, and stay tuned next week for when I write about when I think the right time to read an introduction is (note, it’s not before you read the novel so if you buy Amalia start on page 1 of the novel!)