Affect in Three Colombian Novels
This page develops how novels Delirium (by Laura Restrepo), Reputations (by Juan Gabriel Vásquez), and La luz difícil (by Tomás González) develop affect. In Delirium we trace the communicability of madness and trauma. In La luz difícil we identified primary networks of solidarity and memory to overcome painful experiences. Finally, in Reputations we study how memory is prompted through interpersonal relations and how characters do or do not remember past events. Overall, these novels are all Colombian pieces that, as the manner in which conflict presents itself in fiction is less direct than non-fiction, contain a strong theme about how earlier occurrences in the lives of the characters affect their actions and thought processes as they move forward.
BY: Mayra Gurrola, Nicole Pfalz, and Megan Kallestad
La luz difícil by Tomás González (2011), portrays how the interplay between trauma, memory, and affect. This is not a violent story; but as David remembers his son's euthanasia, he is prompted to activate pain, solidarity as ways to address his loss. The losses experienced here are based on basic human vulnerability: accidents and old age. Memory, love, solidarity, respect, and pain, serve as modes of overcoming difficulties for each of the main characters. This visualization is the result of coding the main hardships experienced in the novel and what specific agenda did to cope with them. The data was uploaded to Palladio, which created this graph that highlights the ties to each mode through lines by agent, the frequency of each character’s overcoming a struggle, and the number of times each coping mechanism was used. Both measures of quantity are represented through each circle’s size, respective of the others. As can be seen in this visualization, David is significantly related to memory, solidarity, and pain, but also has ties to love and respect. This is likely due to the fact that his role as narrator gives the audience a more direct exposure to his difficulties and the ways by which he rises above them than the other agents within the novel.
In this visualization, we categorize how different characters in the novel Reputations remembers the past. We coded every instance in which a word associated with memory was used, the agent of that memory, and the specific thing remembered (or not remembered) was recorded. After sorting through the words and organizing them to represent whether or not something was remembered, they were put into Palladio in order to get an accurate representation of the types of memory associated with the characters in the novel. We can here see that the political parties and the country are exclusively mentioned in conjunction with a lack of memory, which is also true of Mallarino’s daughter Beatriz. The people of the country are connected to completely forgetting as well as memory, representative of the general state of memory. The White Queen, from Alice in Wonderland, is quoted quite often by Mallarino for having said that “It is a strange sort of memory that only works backwards”, something that resonates with the experience Mallarino is going through. Mallarino and Samanta are at the center, with the most mentions of their memories. Samanta connects more with forgetting and a lack of memory, however, while Mallarino is better associated with memory and with specific instances of forgetting. As a result of their centrality, we argue that, while Samanta remembers mostly by recognizing images, she is the vehicle for Mallarino’s memory.
This visualization focuses on how Agustinas’ Delirium has overlapped with others' in her life, especially her Grandfather Portulinus' own delirium. In my first entry, I put down Midas because throughout the book he is very aware of her mental instability but doesn't prioritize her compared to Aguilar. It's not difficult for him to just call her “crazy”. Comparing them both, Aguilar gives up his job for Agustina to be able to care for her. Aguilar loves Agustina and just wants to fix her but I saw throughout the book that he sometimes wanted not to be apart of the overall madness that was happening at home but we see that clash, when there's a bomb, dropped nearby and he thinks of Agustina personal madness being affected. It's like the actual violence and commotion that is happening during this time doesn't have the main focal point but it is the foundation of the individual's madness. Nicolas or Grandpa Portilinius’s personal insanity seems to be an old insanity that seeped into the next generations.