Mireya Keller,

Gustav Mahler, and Eric Neumann:

Feminine Archetypes in En el tren de los muertos

Judy B. McInnis
University of Delaware

For Barbara Ware[1]

En el tren de los muertos received Honorable Mention in the Contest Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 1997; its author, Mireya Keller, has won numerous prizes, primarily for her short stories, in Chile and Argentina; she is also a prize-winning poet.[2] She was born in Santiago, has resided in several Latin American countries and in Rome. Since 1992, she has lived in Buenos Aires where, since 1996, she has worked with a group of four writers to produce the radio program “Contextos.” Her novel reveals her imaginative power and her mastery of a lyrical style that opens the suffocation of grief to chronicle its manifestations within the members of a large family. The death she depicts is perhaps the most poignant, the death of a child of about four or five years old, the youngest child of a family of five children, and one who was its pet, its most-loved and doted upon latecomer, born after the fourth child had already reached her mid teens. Death is always difficult to comprehend, never more so than when it strikes down a child.[3] Within the novel Keller contrasts the death of one of the grandmothers, a loss painful to assimilate but finally comprehensible because of her advanced age, with the death of the young child Esperanza. The loss of this child devastates the entire family, especially the mother, whose world is shattered by this evidence of Nature’s (and God’s) injustice.

My purpose as the first critic to undertake a thorough analysis of this novel is to comment generally upon its form and content, especially its socio-political level, then to demonstrate specifically how and why Keller incorporated the music and the person of Gustav Mahler into her novel. I shall concentrate upon how such incorporation affects the novel’s structure and why it is so useful to Keller in the development of her theme, the mother’s reconciliation with nature and the cycle of life and death. Further, I shall analyze both Keller’s and Mahler’s reliance on the feminine archetypes of Jungian psychology, as explicated by Eric Neumann. Finally, I shall turn to the novelist herself for an autobiographical commentary on the importance of Mahler and Jungian psychology to her novel.

Style, Plot, Characters and Theme

Keller incorporates elements of magic realism into her novel. Its narrator is Esperanza, the dead child, who enters into the minds of the other family members, but to the largest extent into those of her mother, María, and of her older sister, Marianela. Esperanza observes and reports on the family’s male members from a more external perspective; these members include her father José, and her older brothers, José, Juan, and Jorge. The central motif of the novel is the train of the dead, upon which María and Esperanza embark, to traverse a route across the Southern Cone. María comments that the route might just as well have been the North-South trajectory from the cordillera to the frozen ice caps of the Southern extremity, but she prefers the East-West route, for it begins and ends at the oceans: the West with its cliffs overlooking the cold Pacific and the East with its sands extending the golden tones of the pampas. The suggestion of the arbitrariness of the route universalizes the train, intimating that it runs anywhere in this world, where death everywhere exerts its dominion. At the same time the exact evocation of the geography of the region gives the novel its particularity.

Most of the dead who occupy the train are, like Esperanza, physically dead, though they may be vibrantly alive spiritually. One of the train’s occupants, María, exemplifies the opposite characteristics: she is physically alive but psychologically dead. Her depression ensuing from the death of her child has caused her to withdraw from the world of the living. Following the dictates of magic realism, Keller makes this withdrawal actual: the mother has abandoned her family—has disappeared into the country. The intensity of the mother’s anguish can be measured by the fact that she actually joins the daughter in death; she will not let go of this child. The father’s withdrawal from the family in Santiago remains within the bounds of ordinary reality; Keller depicts him retreating to the country ranch where he feverishly and obsessively renovates the house. He thrusts himself into an activity that he can control in stark contrast to his lack of control over his child’s fate. Keller again remains on the plane of ordinary reality in her portrayal of the children. They stay home, but each is isolated in his/her grief from the others. The two remaining grandmothers, the father’s mother with roots in the rainy rural South and the mother’s mother, an immigrant from Soviet terrorism, lose themselves in an orgy of cooking for the children. Their frenzied cooking affirms life and the survival of the body in their shared denial of the loss of Esperanza. Keller places Gustav Mahler in the role of guardian and guide of the dead; he offers María comfort and solace as he listens to her account of the events and emotions that forced her onto the train. His counsel enables María to surmount her grief (though never to forget it) and to rejoin the world of the living, once again assuming her role as mother of the family.

The choice of Esperanza as narrator reveals a basic ambivalence in the novel. The fact that the overriding consciousness is that of a dead child confirms Keller’s belief that the soul continues beyond death, a belief further emphasized by Gustav Mahler’s role. This conductor/composer lived from 1860 to 1911, but in the novel he continues in full consciousness with his body intact on the train of the dead. However, on the negative side of the ledger, the reader must confront the significance of Keller’s decision to name the dead child Esperanza. The death of this child symbolizes the death or the loss of hope in life and the bleakness of the human condition. The choice of the name underscores the novel’s political level.

Socio-political commentary

Like Juan Rulfo, Keller depicts the world of the dead and she uses her fiction to communicate a political as well as a personal vision. In both cases the writers depict the actual landscape of their regions. The bleak and barren landscape of Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo underscored his vision of the socio/political purgatory of his contemporary Mexico, as much a factor in the everyday reality of its living protagonists as in their shadowy existence in the afterlife. Keller, on the other hand, tenderly evokes the completely opposite, vibrant geography of the Southern Cone; she emphasizes its richness and promise. Through the stationary train windows she sees the lush greenery of the forests, the dizzying heights of the cordillera, the oceans of grasses of the pampas, and the sand of the beaches. Despite the evidence of nature’s eternal rebirth in the landscape, death strikes and kills the promise of the youngest generation of its human inhabitants. Alluding to the cruel dictatorships of Chile and Argentina during the eighties, Keller here protests their oppressive effect upon the people, who lost their vitality to become virtual robots without joy in the present or hope for the future. The nonsensical death of Esperanza reflects the nonsensical policies governing countries in the Southern Cone, policies which squander the countries’ riches or siphon them off to the upper class, while the masses live at the subsistence level. Yet, Keller’s political vision is not nearly so bleak as Rulfo’s. The mother in her work only wishes to be dead, but is actually alive and in the end reaffirms life. Rulfo’s mother figure dies at his novel’s beginning and his narrator gradually realizes that he too is dead. Keller describes the train’s passengers, emblematic of the people, as capable of exercising free will and changing their fate. They can descend from the train whenever they wish: the train’s cowed passengers, now lethargic and engrossed in their “nomundos,” could assume control of their destinies: “Encadenados a un asiento. Hartos. Pero cualquiera puede levantarse. Y buscar agua. Y dejar que amanezca. Y regar las ventanas en las que podrían volver a crecer flores y plantas. Solo que todos tenemos la voluntad aniquilada” (p. 34).

Before the death of Esperanza, María had reacted angrily to the fate of poor children, without food for body or soul, as ignorant of the imaginative world of fairytales as of middleclass comfort: “lo peor es que a nadie le importa, a todos les da lo mismo, a ustedes y a los que van muy tranquilos en sus autos y que ni los ven a los niños. Y yo pensaba que a los niños tampoco podía importarles, total si ni siquiera los conocían a los dos mentirosos y entonces no podían saber qué eran la verdad y la mentira” (p. 41). She dismisses the aunts’ easy explanations that the children must be drug addicts and hence themselves responsible for their miserable life of seeking sustenance in garbage cans. Nor will María cast blame on the mothers, whom the aunts accuse of promiscuous coupling, which results in unwanted children whom they cannot or will not support. María also objects to the culture of violence and death in the profitable industry of making and selling war toys for children (p. 183). Still her momentary resolution to do something about the situation dissolves into nothing. Her husband José is not afraid to face life and to impose himself upon it, bettering it for his family and society, but he too finds himself impotent before the death which claims poor children: “Cuántos niños que se iban en diarrea allá en su campo, en esa soledad sin médicos. También se morían en medio de las moscas en cualquier callampa de Santiago. Y desde las oficinas no se hacía nada” (p. 178). The daughter Marianela, lover of the sun, looks for a concrete field in which to realize her humanitarian impulses; at the end of the novel she is in training to become a pediatrician.

The death of the most imaginative grandmother, the one who lived to entertain the children with tales, celebrations and colorful costumes, reinforces the political message of the bleakness of the dictatorship years when artists and poets were suppressed and could not express themselves freely. The exotic grandmother clings to the ideal of a perfect society, which she describes as the arrival of the “Gran Sombrero”: “Y este mundo tan horrible con guerras y con miseria se acabaría, por completo, porque por fin los hombres habrían entendido el mensaje y solo habría música por todas partes y bailarían felices felices felices incansables por el resto de los días” (p. 102). She represents an enchantment signifying not escapism but a hopefulness, which, if allowed to die, divests life of its meaning. She is an advocate of the just use of words, so easily manipulated for good or ill. Like the Biblical prophets, she wishes to return them to their original sense.[4] The two grandmothers who survive are the rural grandmother, a timid, unsophisticated woman, and the foreign grandmother, even more timid and fearful from her early experience under a repressive government. The mother’s disappearance without a trace tangentially alludes to the “disappeared” political activists of the period. Occasionally Keller makes her political level explicit in comments by her characters. María protests middle-class indifference to poor children: “por lo tanto esos niños que se seguían yendo en diarrea allá en el pueblo de José, o los que se venían a la ciudad y dormían bajo los puentes en casuchas de cartón y latas, podían perfectamente desaparecer de un día para el otro del mapa que a los jefes los tenía sin cuidado, o lo más probable es que ni siquiera se darían cuenta” (pp. 96-97).

Gustav Mahler’s Impact Upon the Novel’s Theme, Structure, and Style

The primary thrust of the novel is to chronicle the loss of hope and its rebirth as the family members overcome their sorrow and celebrate the continued presence in their hearts and memories first and foremost of Esperanza and secondly of the exotic grandmother. María espouses a pantheistic philosophy that all is alive in nature: all that dies returns to the earth and is reborn; the spirits of the dead populate the world and keep watch over us. Hatred of the injustice of the Creator is transformed into love of the Creation and the hope of transformation and continuance. Marianela adopts her brother Jorge’s idea that the world consists of energy, no particle of which is ever lost, but is simply transformed into other manifestations. As her mother finds comfort in Gustav Mahler, Marianela finds hope in the poetry of Jaime Sabines, the Mexican poet famous for his celebration of the transformation of earth forms and the triumph of love.

By presenting him as a living character, Keller underscores the impact of Gustav Mahler’s life and music upon María. While his continued existence is beyond the reach of ordinary reality, such existence is true at least in the immortality of his music, which continues to affect all who hear it. Keller’s philosophy echoes that of Mahler, steeped in “Christian mysticism and pagan pantheism.”[5] As Jason Greshes points out “Mahler was known for the length, depth, and painful emotions of his works. He loved nature and life and, based on early childhood experiences, feared death (family deaths, a suicide, and a brutal rape he witnessed). This duality appeared in almost all his compositions, especially in the Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Deaths of Children”) which are actually about the loss of an innocent view of life.”[6] Mahler perceived this symphony as a premonition of the death of his elder daughter, María Anna, who died at the age of four of scarlet fever and diptheria.[7]

The genesis of Mahler’s composition, its origin in Rückert’s moving but technically inept poetry, provides additional insight into his ability to capture the emotion of grief in his work. From 1901 to 1904 Mahler adapted and set to music five poems from Friedrich Rückert’s collection of 425 poems, entitled the Kindertodtenlieder, first published in 1872.[8] The poems record Rückert’s grief and finally his acceptance of the deaths of two of his six children, both victims of scarlet fever. Theodor Reik[9] theorizes that Mahler’s exquisite orchestration of these songs, revelatory of his profound empathy for their theme, sprang from his unconscious memory of the deaths of his elder brother Isidor, as a child, and that of his younger brother Ernst at age fourteen. The poems awakened Mahler’s fear that his own two young daughters might suffer a like fate. That fear was tragically fulfilled with the death of his elder daughter, and his favorite, María Anna (Putzi). De la Grange best describes the haunting beauty of Mahler’s composition: “Admittedly there exists little music as subjective, as ‘lived’ as this, none in any case where suffering has more communicative force.”[10] Keller singles out Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as another work which deeply moved her during the writing of En el tren de los muertos. Mahler composed this symphony at the same time as the first three songs of the Kindertodtenlieder in the summer of 1901: the same themes dominate the two works.[11]

Keller seeks and succeeds in reproducing in words Mahler’s arduous transformation of irreconcilable grief to irrepressible joy in Nature’s creation. David B. Greene discusses the movement between anger and peace, and between the private and the public realms, in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Setting himself the often-posed question of whether Mahler prepares for the symphony’s joyful resolution, Greene affirms a positive answer by demonstrating the continuity of motifs between sections, a continuity also perceptible in Keller’s novel. Mahler does not pinpoint the moment of making the decision to embrace life, but instead the state of “having decided” at some previous unidentifiable moment. In the first movement anger and peace-questing converge upon the shout of joy as they also converge upon each other and both remain present in that shout: “The tonal structure of the symphony as a whole confirms and contributes to the image of temporality as a movement from expectation into recollection.”[12] The whole of Keller’s novel is also a recollection, all the events affecting the characters occurred before the novel’s beginning. The novel itself constitutes the coming to terms with events through the catalyst of Mahler’s words and the evocative remembrance of his music. Like Mahler, Keller places the death at the beginning of her composition and like him “intimates that recollection displaces concrete fulfillment because life is finite.”[13] Discussing the symphony’s affirmative conclusion, Greene notes that it “unflinchingly faces the reality of death” and reflects “human consciousness as it actually is.” Mahler follows not Kant but Heidegger in affirming that “by facing death one affirms that which is lost in death—one’s own-most self.”[14] By working through her grief over Esperanza’s death, María at the conclusion of Keller’s novel emerges with a deeper understanding of herself and her mission in life.

This is not the only work by Mahler relevant to Keller’s novel. In his letters Mahler regarded hatred as an evil sorcerer, whom one must escape by seeking comfort in the center of the earth—in the great earth mother. He celebrated the god Dionysus, the great Pan “Wie Ein Naturlaut” in the First Symphony[15] and in such compositions as Das Lied von der Erde, “Song of the Earth,” conceived as “the cradle-song of evolution sung to all life by Nature.”[16] In this composition the human voice is used throughout to communicate desperately repressed suffering. The First Symphony depicts the successful wandering of the hero in search of faith; the second the death and resurrection of the hero; the third the praise of universal love and wonders of nature, the fourth the joys of heavenly existence; the fifth the “child of fancy,” the sixth the tragedy of human existence; the seventh is a Song of Night, the eighth, the “Symphony of a Thousand,” evokes the whole universe resounding in tune in a vision of planets and suns moving in harmony. The Ninth (following Das Lief von der Erde) develops the theme of the “dance of life” and “culminates in a slow, stately song of optimism.”[17] His symphonies as a group reiterate the movement of the Fifth Symphony, the movement that Keller also develops through the medium of her poetic prose.

Keller not only reflected Mahler in the theme of her work but also in her technique. Mahler created orchestral music: “clear, complex, and full of musical imagery from the heavenly to the banal.”[18] He sought to recreate the complexity of sounds emanating from a country fair in his music: “In the confusion of these many tunes accidentally mingled, he claimed, lay the essence of true polyphony, which is an ensemble of independent voices, each singing in the manner best suited to it.”[19] Keller slips from one mind to another in her novel. Esperanza, as a spirit, can enter the minds of all her family members. María expresses her concerns in language quite different from that of Marianela, who in turn differs from her grandmothers, her father, and her brothers. In the medium of words, Keller evokes a polyphony of voices, yet the reader, recalling the appearances of various motifs, hears a harmony arising from them, a harmony heard linearly, rather than vertically, just as Mahler created a linear or horizontal rather than a vertical harmony. As no other previous composer, Mahler exploited the full range of the horn; Keller perhaps alludes to this in the depiction of Jorge as a musician who learns to draw powerful music from the trumpet.

In an interview Keller revealed to me the autobiographical basis of the novel. Like Mahler, she had experienced the death of a beloved child, the youngest of her four children. Following her loss, she attended a concert of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, “the child of fantasy” which moved her deeply as it evoked the memory of her lost child. Later she saw a film about Mahler’s life, which strengthened her bonds to the composer, who was also closely attuned to Nature. At the time of her loss, Keller determined to memorialize her child, but she could not bring herself to undertake this painful but transforming experience for several years. In Chapter 4 of the novel María recalls herself caught in the cycle of days, in circles of colors of sunrises, day, sunsets, and night. Through the train window she sees a landscape reminiscent of Mahler’s lakeside mountain retreat, the Villa Mahler at Maiernigg, and suddenly the composer materializes before her. In the stillness, she hears the eruption of Mahler’s music:

Solo. Indomable. Podían pasar días, a veces meses largos. Se respiraba una extraña calma. Nada se movía. Ni el cielo ni las aguas del lago. Pero Mahler se convulsionaba entero. Era pura violencia contenida. Se torturaba. Y se hundía. Más. Más. Hasta alcanzarse. Hasta dejar de ser un cuerpo. Por fin. Su música brotaba. A borbotones desordenados brotaba. Era el contrapunto de un alma desgarrada. Fuerte que suene fuerte: entran las tubas y los timbales. Ahora dulce: chelos y oboes. Aparecen los demonios: cornos y clarines. Huyen de los fagotes y los contrabajos. Alguien juega allá lejos entre las lomas: es una flauta. Se calla: un violín desesperado se le colgó del alma. Suenan campanas y triángulos: es la iglesia del pueblo que llama a domingo. Y como de milagro retumban trompetas platillos trombones. La sinfonía está completa y desborda las paredes de la cabaña. Risas y llantos trasmite el agua convulsionada del lago y se repiten por los montes y se los llevan los pájaros. Todo es una gran orquesta, una única orquesta que toca y toca mientras el tren y la cabaña con Mahler empiezan a esfumarse y yo por fin me duermo rodeada de mi pequeña vida cotidiana. Pero me duermo diferente. Con esa música guardada para siempre en mi almohada. (p. 29-30)

The music gives her goose bumps and awakens her to the fact that she is still alive; it disturbs the continual circle of her routine existence. Mahler’s music breaks into the circle of life and death, erupts upon the unconscious, and pushes the listener towards renewal and transformation.

Eric Neumann and the Novel’s Feminine Symbolism

Keller’s lyricism, her cadences, her use of poetic devices like alliteration, make her prose approach music; Mahler brought words into his songs and symphonies to underscore his music’s symbolism. I have mentioned above the novelist’s and the composer’s coalescence of theme, but it is precisely at the level of symbolism that the two artists most approach each other, specifically in the use of feminine symbolism. Following Jung, Eric Neumann articulated a theory of the archetypical feminine in The Great Mother (New York: Bollingen Foundation: Pantheon Books, 1955), translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. Neumann posits the existence in the unconscious of a feminine archetype that directs the individual’s conduct and acts upon his emotions, virtually seizing the individual who perceives and expresses the archetype through symbolic images, though he does so without conscious intent.[20] Both Mahler’s music and Keller’s novel illustrate this theory—in such exactness that it is almost uncanny that neither knew Neumann’s work. However, Keller did know Jung upon whom Neumann bases his theory. In my view, the coalescence of these works is an argument for the validity of Neumann’s theory. As Freud had early realized, artists more easily access the mythical and can interpret it for the rest of us.

The second half of Neumann’s study is an exegesis of the manifestations of images of the feminine throughout history—from cave drawings, to the statuary of Greece, India and Tibet, to medieval depictions of the Garden of Eden and the Virgin Mary. This archetype is linked with Nature (especially the Earth and Water), the unconscious, the instinctual, the intuitive, the Night, the Moon, Life and Death.[21] As Neumann points out, in primitive times the opposite characteristics of the archetype were not separated: the Great Mother concept emerged from the Maternal Uroboros and contained both the aspect of the “Terrible Mother” (seen in such figures as the Gorgon, Circe, the witch, etc.) and the “Good Mother” (evident in such constructions as Sophia and the Virgin Mary). In addition, Neumann theorizes, “this primordial archetype of the Feminine contains positive and negative male determinants aside from the predominant female elements.”[22] From the Great Mother emerged the Anima, or feminine aspect of the personality. Through projection “the elements of the opposite sex in the speaker’s own psyche, the anima in the man and the animus in the woman, are experienced as the reality of the opposite sex.”[23] Further, there is a tendency for the ego to return to its “original, unconscious state. This tendency is inversely proportional to the strength of the ego and consciousness;”[24] such strength is diminished in sickness, fatigue, psychological anguish. etc. Often consciousness is associated with the masculine, with the male hero who overcomes or destroys the monster, figuring the unconscious. Yet, it is precisely the unconscious that one must access to undergo transformation, to continue to develop psychically; for the feminine archetype is associated with both birth and death, both equally necessary in the order of nature. Neumann further points out that the feminine is always associated with the vessel or the container, e.g. the body, in a return to the relationship of mother and fetus. The Great Round—the World or Nature--contains all and ultimately repossesses everything; the child of consciousness is minuscule within her and experiences her as fate or destiny. Neumann also discusses the importance of menstruation and pregnancy as blood transformation mysteries in women, far more dramatic than the male’s emission of sperm. Functions of the feminine are “to nourish and protect, to keep warm and hold fast;” these functions can become oppressive if the holding fast prevails over the letting go of offspring. Attraction to the anima, to the feminine, compels transformation.

In Keller’s novel María incarnates the good mother aspect of the feminine. Although she recognizes this as an assumed role, it is one in which she submerges her individual personality. She is aware that from the role of the good mother she can easily descend into its opposite: the parasitic, demanding, life-draining evil mother. She is especially apprehensive about adopting this posture in relation to her daughter, who represents the independent life she might have had: “Pero sé que para vivir tuve que ser parásito, vampiro. Tuve que succionar a los demás. A José, a todos los hijos, pero especialmente a Marianela. Chupé de ella con desesperación esa sangrejoven que se encabritaba ante los desafíos, que tenía urgencias, que deseaba el contacto del mundo de verdad … Conseguí meterme en una nueva ficción . . . ahora era maríamadre, maríaesposa, maríacasa. Al menos yo estaba convencida de eso. Mi papel era perfecto…” (p. 111). Such roles offer hope and opportunities (p. 118). After the birth of Esperanza, María lost sight of life’s insecurity, of the fact that the earth is not stable but is constantly in movement, and each of us is subject to death.[25] Before the child’s death, her entire family shared José’s optimism and his belief in the necessity of growth: “Hay que crecer y construir, meter las manos en el barro, hasta el codo si es necesario. Así se le va ganando a la vida, no conozco otro modo, y con esas palabras del papá o con otras parecidas que él siempre decía no quedaba otra que seguir creciendo” (p. 145).

In her youth María experienced the attraction of the animus for intellectual development; as an adult, she retains a social consciousness more acute than that of her female relatives and is also more sensitive to intellectual and emotional developments—to philosophy, music, and literature. However, with marriage and the birth of her children, she gradually assumed the mantle of the Virgin Mary. The elemental archetype of the good mother became dominant and she regressed into what Neumann describes as primitive woman’s collective relation to the male.[26] She began to perceive José in Neumann’s words as “archetypal father who begets children, who provides security—preferably also in the economic sense—for herself and her brood, and lends her a social persona position in the community.”[27] Keller presents José in harmony with the archetypical concept of the male as breaker of the soil. Coming from farming stock in southern Chile, he confronts life with a practical attitude of accomplishing things, activity which he expresses in the language of breaking new ground: “hay que aprender a descifrar el lenguaje de la tierra que nos está esperando abierta y lista para germinar, y hay que entender el lenguaje de los pájaros, véanlos cómo se mueven tan libres entre los árboles y el aire. . . . No podía estar sin el contacto directo con la tierra y con el aire. Con cualquier tierra y cualquier aire” (p. 74). As María is associated with the relatively stationary earth and the cyclical movement of the ocean, José is defined as breaker of the earth and is associated with the air. He is identified with the forceful movement of the plow and the flight of birds, moving easily between earth and air.[28] Keller also ties him to science and reason; he is the declared enemy of fantasy and sees the death of the imaginative grandmother as an occasion for putting aside foolish dreams to embrace “El Orden, perfecto y exacto” in Marianela’s phrase (p. 151). He cannot prevent the other family members from recurring to their imagination, which gives them freedom. Marianela points out that the imagination brings immortality (p. 152); whether the grandmother inhabits hell or heaven is immaterial, for she continues to live in the minds and imaginations of each family member. Reason, María observes, may be defined as limitation (p. 157). However, she also recognizes that its loss signals a descent into chaos (p. 160). After Esperanza’s death José discovers that Reason con offer no consolation for his grief and solitude.

It may have been Maria’s capitulation of self in the retreat to the archetypical substratum that subverted her personal relationship with José and that prevented her from turning to him in her loss. Instead, she regresses even further back into the maternal uroborus and in essence loses touch with reality, drowning in the emotions triggered by loss of her child. It is only by finding a new and different embodiment of the animus in Gustav Mahler that she can again affirm masculine consciousness to perceive herself in a fuller relationship to the feminine, perceived as Nature which must encompass both life and death.[29] She can relate so well to Mahler precisely because he is a male figure in whom the anima figure is dominant; they can meet on the plane of a shared emotion, the loss of a child and, in Mahler’s case, of himself as well to death.[30] Neumann points out that the encounter with the terrible Mother may drive the ego toward masculinization and become the instrument of transformation. “For this constellation the myth of Perseus is typical: Perseus must kill the Terrible Mother before he can win Andromeda.”[31] María experiences the Terrible Mother both within and without: her child is consumed by the Earth, but Maria, herself, adopting aspects of the Terrible Mother, refuses to let the child go, clinging to her even after Death has taken her. Through her descent to the Underworld of her unconscious, which in her case is an ascent onto the Train of the Dead, she finally achieves an understanding of her situation and of life itself; she experiences a spiritual rebirth, and is able to return to life and her social responsibilities, once again assuming the mantle of the Good Mother.

Experiencing a matriarchal transformation mystery, María is cured in spirit. Neumann points out that the spirit is associated with the word: “in the form that leads from mouth to breath, and from breath to word, the logos,”[32] product of creative Nature.[33] He perceives the Dionysian mysteries, which—as we have seen--played such an important part in Mahler’s thought--as part of the vegetation mysteries associated with the feminine, like manticism and prophecy. Keller’s narrator, Esperanza, bears a triple affiliation with the unconscious. As female, she is naturally attuned to the “feminine” unconscious; as a child, she remains closer in psychic development to the unconscious for “masculine” separation of the intellect has not yet occurred,[34] as a “dead” character, she has experienced the entire cycle of life and death to emerge as pure spirit. In the first chapter Keller emphasizes the feminine allegiance with the unconscious and with artistic expression. Marianela suffers from nightmares; the mother’s absorption with memory and the recording of the family’s life experience prostrates her. The telling of the story scarcely concerns the male characters, engaged as they are with the here and now or with scientific evidence and experimentation. Keller also emphasizes breathing—the breath of life and the breath productive of the word. The mother breathes words quietly when she thinks no one hears her, but they do, and they remember her dictum that “las pérdidas jamás se olvidan.”[35] Keller speaks also of the danger and the pain of words; they must be wrest out of the person; they avenge themselves upon their speaker.[36] Finally, Esperanza remembers her mother’s injunction to “respirar bien hondo y listo” when she is afraid or has been injured. The child observes that her mother had forgotten her own advice when she suffered her depression: “El dolor se acababa. Después la mama se olvidó de respirar y hondo y listo” (p. 10).

Keller repeatedly links María to the earth and to water. The author depicts her softly crying and feeling the cold, which impels her to draw near the fireplace. This portrait recalls Neumann and behind him the Aristotelian biology which posited woman’s dominance by the elements of earth and water and her consequent lack of heat or fire. Keller also endows María with a love of the sea (p. 10, 14). When Esperanza died and the world, so carefully constructed by her family, fell apart, “se fue hasta el mar y ahí se subió al tren de los muertos” (p. 14). She returned to Valparaíso, even though she could have entered the train of the dead anywhere. When Esperanza enters her mother’s mind, she discovers the latter’s recollection of her first love, Daniel, with whom she walked on the beach of the Pacific Ocean and gloried in its waves: “Mira esas olas. Que tan tranquilo nos baña, humm, el Pacífico, humm, como para creérselo. ¿Nunca quisiste ser pez y meterte entre tamaña furia desatada? Así igualito como en las novelas. ¿Y por lo menos marinero? Podríamos subir a un barco, con velas, para que el viejito baluarte nos llevara hasta el fin del mundo, o aunque fuera hasta la línea del horizonte y ahí nos perderíamos misteriosamente, para siempre” (p. 16). The mother continued loving the sea and the wind, though she did not return to it until Esperanza’s death (p. 17).

From the first chapter to the last, Keller continues to link the mother with nature, with the imagination, and with dreams.[37] On the train the mother seeks to forget, to cease existing, and finds herself longing for water with which she could irrigate her plants and flowers; then her window onto life might again be filled with scents and life (p. 21). In Chapter 4 the mother gazes at the cordillera, tracing its peak with her finger on the window, personifying it as a grand dame with an aquiline nose. Once again she recalls the sea and identifies with it completely: “El mar, tan fuerte, tan viril, penetrando una y otra vez a la arena, sin cansancio, y ella toda húmeda, abierta, siempre esperándolo. El recoge y estira su sexo, a veces muy suave, a veces violento. Y ella acepta todo. Siempre dos en el juego” (p. 24). Here, the sea becomes masculine as she merges her memories of Daniel with the landscape of which they formed a part. Her memories of her family life entwine with memories of the landscape: “No está más el ocre ceniciento de mi tierra tan desnuda, seca. No está el blanconieve de los cerros que llenaban las ventanas de mi casa” (p. 24). Her “crazy geography” makes her think of Neruda and Isla Negra.

Keller also incorporates the transformation mysteries of menstruation, childbirth, and the female climeractic. Marianela protests the dramatic change from child to woman in the onset of menstruation, which signals eventual assumption of the woman’s burden of childbirth: “Y seguir al pie de la letra, brrr, el parirás con dolor y serás mujer con el dolor, o el sudor, qué sé yo, no me lo sé bien, de tu frente. Ah no. Y lo peor de todo es que esta porquería sí que me duele, y me va a seguir doliendo, sin escapatoria, todos los santísimos meses” (p. 65). She suffers from a recurring nightmare dominated by the symbolism of Nature as terrible mother, who threatens death. In her nightmare Marianela is attacked by giant butterflies, who taunt her with their big skull-like mouths: “Me quieren llevar. Son feas mamá. Cuando llegan la noche se me pone más oscura” (p. 88). In adolescence Marianela rejects her mother to identify with her father; she wants to make a place for herself in the world, to be in control of her world, not be confined to the home, always waiting. With the birth of her little sister, Marianela begins to understand the maternal instincts that have dominated her mother and the cycle of life and death: “Porque nacer es todo lo que te leí, pero mucho más. Es la vida y la muerte. Juntas. Mezcladas. Es toda la felicidad y el dolor del mundo. Resumiendo, es la terrible dualidad de este disparatado planeta” (p. 93). She describes the woman in terms that exactly recall Neumann’s concept of the feminine: “Mujer que es un gran receptáculo y después comienzo, que es un pozo profundo que un día explota y se derrama. . . . Claro que sí, eso somos las mujeres. Un refugio calentito y un enorme obsequio. Nos regalamos, nos abrimos enteras, Claudia, y damos vida para poder seguir viviendo…” (p. 94).

María also experiences a recurrent dream that gives the Andromeda myth, highlighted by Neumann, a new twist. She sees herself at sunset, sitting upon a rock, gently washed by waves. Keller literally paints this picture as she describes her heroine’s desire to capture it in the colors of the artist’s palette. Her identification with nature is absolute: “Y la naturaleza no se interrumpe, por supuesto. Es lindo sentirla. Vibra en toda la playa y también en cada célula de mi cuerpo” (p. 126). She descends from the rock to dance with joy before the sea. Then, suddenly, a storm arises and the sky darkens, and she finds herself clinging to the solitary rock. After many hours a woman appears bathed in sunlight; she is giving birth. Suddenly, a red dragon appears out of the sea and threatens to consume her child as soon as it emerges. A man with batlike wings appears and defeats the dragon, but instead of rescuing her, he (a personification of Fear) takes possession of her and converts her into a reptilian creature. The dream indicates Maria’s fear of childbirth and of death, as it also indicates, in contradistinction to the Andromeda and Perseus myth, that the conquest of her fear must come from within, from her own agency. In Esperanza’s death, María sees the confirmation of her dream (p. 172). She becomes aware of Nature’s cruel aspect in which earth and sea convulse in unpredictable earthquakes (p. 190). When Esperanza drowned in the pond behind her house, the family had no forewarning. Reason, Esperanza declares, exerted its dominion and Death entered the fairytale. María feels an immense guilt for not having foreseen the danger to her children; her world breaks into pieces and loses all meaning; she ascends the train of the dead. (p. 196) On the train her womb explodes, bathing her legs in a sickening, sticky bloodletting: “Sangre negra que evacua mi útero carcomido” (p. 197). Here, experiencing the climeractic, the great bloodletting which ends the cycle of menstruation. Maria’s identification with the Terrible Mother becomes complete. Having lost the ability to give birth, she fears that she has become a giver of death.

Keller recurs to the Biblical image of the dove (p. 200) that heralded the end of the Flood to Noah to describe the family’s acceptance of Esperanza’s death and their affirmation of her spiritual continuance in their memories. The sun bursts forth like a wild animal (p. 200) and the hope of the family is reborn; they can again embrace both Reason and Fantasy. María searches for a glass of water and begins to see life bloom again through the window of the train. She succeeds in opening that window to hear Mahler’s symphony, the symphony of life (p. 213). In the green of the lush countryside she sees a white flower blooming. Keller sustains a long, beautiful chapter in the description of María’s epiphany; she ends with the simple words, “Se acordó de respirar hondo y listo” (p. 235). On a moonlit night Marianela also experiences an epiphany. Roused by the smell of flowers, she envisions the dead grandmother, crowned and radiant in a sequined dress. She experiences the miracle of rebirth and turns away from weeping to breathe again.

Keller alludes to several other myths in the course of the novel. Recalling Phaeton and Icarus, Marianela observes that however small and insignificant we may be, we can fly like kites even though we must crash and be destroyed by the wind (p. 142). The myth of the frog-prince surfaces in the descriptions of Jorge’s numerous frogs, which invade the house. María ironically comments that not one is transformed into a prince. Yet, Keller proves her character wrong, for she does show such a transformation at the end of the novel. Marianela falls in love with a young man whom she had rejected as a homely boy. When she encounters him again in young adulthood, she discovers that they are soulmates. Together they devote themselves to the study of medicine.

In my interview of Mireya Keller, she indicated that although she knew Jung’s theory, she had never read Eric Neumann. Yet, as I have shown above, she exactly reproduces his theory of the feminine archetype. This is not surprising since, as both Jung and Neumann emphasize, the feminine archetype exists in the collective unconscious of humanity and in the subconscious of each individual. The fact that Keller did not know Neumann constitutes an empirical proof of his theory: working independently she designed a fiction that confirms his theory in almost every detail. The fact that she could do so constitutes a proof of her artistic genius for artists, as Neumann, Jung, and Freud demonstrate, have special access to the unconscious. Keller corroborates Neumann’s theory just as Neumann’s theory corroborates Keller’s psychology.

Keller’s Response

By way of conclusion, I give below the text of Keller’s answers to my questions, communicated via email. Her words merit publication because they give the background of the novel and its importance in her autobiography, both the personal and the artistic. Keller expresses a fear that her characters, if perceived as archetypical constructions, may seem flat and without particularity. Although I have emphasized the archetypical in this essay, I have also underscored the individuality of each of her characters and the immediate relevance of her work as social criticism. The archetypicality of Keller’s characters and plot does not detract from their particularity, but instead gives them depth.

Me has dado una gran alegría con tu carta, llegó justo en un momento muy particular y difícil en mi vida, mis tres hijos se acaban de terminar de ir por el mundo, el mayor ya hace cinco años que trabaja en Chile, mi hija se fue con una beca a Barcelona y el menor, la semana pasada a Oxford.Te cuento esto porque tiene mucho que ver con todas tus preguntas, en especial sobre “lo femenino” y la “madre”, que no me parecen para nada impertinentes, todo lo contrario, agradezco de verdad, la profundidad con la que has leído mi novela. Una vez escribí en la contratapa de mi primer libro, “El sol tenía escote en V”, libro de cuentos que publiqué en Chile gracias a mi primer premio literario, y te lo copio textual: “En éste mi primer libro, sé que empiezo un camino difícil. Siento que las revisiones deberían ser infinitas, porque tal vez sean infinitos los lazos entre la ficción y la realidad, entre el todo y los fragmentos. Pero como en los espacios pequeños o grandes que se crean, siempre rondan los fantasmas, necesitaba deshacerme de algunos de ellos y ustedes se transforman en mis imprescindibles cómplices anónimos. Y si en este empeño alguien camina mis mismas huellas, entonces además valió la pena y lo agradezco.” Bueno, lo que vino después fue exactamente eso, escribí, corregí y reescribí durante ocho años mi novela “En el tren de los muertos”, y tal como lo acabo de ver en una película muy hermosa: Lucía y el sexo, una película española que acaban de estrenar aquí, que es un momento o una novela en la vida de un escritor joven, en el que permanentemente se cruzan las fronteras entre ficción y realidad. Para mí es tal cual, y efectivamente, mi hija menor murió cuando estábamos en Chile, recién llegados, y en plena dictadura. Mientras permanecimos en Chile no pude escribir la novela, escribí otras cosas, pero lo tenía que hacer, y las permanentes y casi eternas revisiones se debieron a que nunca quise hacer una novela testimonial, necesitaba entregar lo mejor de mi literatura, necesitaba los entrecruces de imaginación y realidad, que como muy bien lo señales, creo que atraviesan no solo esta novela sino toda mi escritura. También es una novela simbólica, yo tal vez uso y abuso de esto, en mi última novela, Circo Máximo, inédita, también lo hago, por esto, otra de tus sagaces lecturas, también representa la muerte y el ahogo de los sueños, tanto personales como los de toda una sociedad. Y te escribo esto en momentos realmente agobiantes para los que vivimos en este país, porque se ha salido de la dictadura oficial, pero no de la dictadura de los que siempre manejaron las cosas, aun no podemos vivir una verdadera democracia.

En cuanto a lo de Mahler, sí, su música y su biografía están impregnadas de ese dolor que yo quería acusar en mi novela, no podía haber elegido a otro, además en esos días en Chile vi una película, muy hermosa, sobre su vida, como en parte lo cuento también en la novela, y al mismo tiempo asistí a una obra de teatro, muy polémica, muy política también, en la que toda la música era la Quinta Sinfonía de Mahler, me puso, como decimos aquí, “la carne de gallina”, entonces tenía que ser él, ningún otro. Pero mientras todo esto sucedía en Chile, solo pude escribir la novela cuando me fui, en Brasil, primero, donde vivimos por cuatro largos años, y después su corrección y reescritura, la hice aquí, en Buenos Aires.

En cuanto a la obra de Neumann, debo confesarte con bastante verguenza, que no la conozco, y sobre Jung, sí, por supuesto, pero no tuvo de ninguna manera esa influencia directa que sí tuvo Mahler. Está incorporado en mí, desde mis estudios en la universidad, en mi curso de Filosofía hice cinco años de psicología, lo vimos en profundidad, pero no lo consulté particularmente en este caso, sobre todo porque no pretendía que mi María fuese arquetípica, siempre espero que mis personajes tengan el suficiente vaivén, tanto en su interior como hacia afuera, para que no se me transformen en arquetípicos. Es decir, yo desciendo de dos pilares fundamentales que me marcaron a fuego: El Quijote, y Crimen y Castigo, que creo son dos ejemplos, tal vez podríamos decir hoy “arquetípicos” de cómo no trabajar con arquetipos. En fin, esto da para mucho, y por supuesto que me gustaría poder hablarlo contigo en directo.

I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to talk with Mireya Keller personally during her participation in the MACLAS 23rd meeting in Newark, Delaware. I eagerly await her next work and invite others to share the profound esthetic experience of her poetry and fiction.

Notes

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[1] I was inspired to read Eric Neumann on the occasion of studying Barbara Ware’s doctoral dissertation, Transforming the Gaze: Feminine Validation in Posmodernista Poetry, Temple University, 2002. Therein she reads the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, Delmira Agustini, and Juana de Ibarbourou in the light of Neumann’s theory.

[2] In September, 2000 Keller won a first place award for her poetry from the Asociación de Letras Femeninas Hispánicas, presented at its Toronto Congress at York University. In 1986 she received First Prize in the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos Bata: Biblioteca Nacional and second prize in the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos A. Pigafetta, organized by the University of Magallanes and the Sociedad de Escritores. She received honorable mention in the Concurso de Cuentos Avon: La mujer en las letras, Argentina, 1994; and for the novel, an honorable mention in the Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Secretaria de Cultura de la Nación Argentina, 1997. Her collections of short stories include: El sol tenía escote en V (Santiago: Ergo Sum, 1987); El ojo en la cerradura (Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor, 1996); Cuentos de mi país (Santiago: Departamento de Extensión Biblioteca Nacional, 1986); Cuando no se puede vivir del cuento (New York: Skidmore College, 1989); one of her stories is included in the anthology La otra palabra, edited by Angélica Gorodischer (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1998).

[3] In En el tren de los muertos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Lumen, 1998), 80, Mireya Keller has her character Marianela allude to Beth’s death in Little Women as being impossible to justify. Ironically, she must accept a death yet more poignant because her sister Esperanza dies at a younger age. Further references to Keller’s novel will be cited parenthetically in the text.

[4] “Es que cualquiera puede apropiarse de ellas y después las dice como se le da la gana. Ya lo hizo la Inquisición” (Keller, 108). See page 148 for the grandmother’s conception of the world as a great story that encompasses all the smaller stories of each individual.

[5] Gabriel Engel, Gustav Mahler: Song-Symphonist (New York: David Lewis, 1932), 123. Here Engel is speaking specifically of the Eighth Symphony, “herald of universal love and faith.”

[6] Jason Greshes Web Page on Gustav Mahler: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/mahler/

[7] See Henry Louis de la Grange, Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1995), III: 690.

[8] See Henry Louis de la Grange, II: 825-846.

[9] In The Haunting Melody (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1953), 315; summarized by Henry Louis de la Grange in Gustav Mahler (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1995), III: 690.

[10] De la Grange, II: 845.

[11] De la Grange I: 631-632.

[12] David B. Greene, Mahler: Consciousness and Temporality (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1984), 123.

[13] Greene, 128.

[14] Greene, 129.

[15] Gabriel Engel, Gustav Mahler: Song-Symphonist (New York: David Lewis, 1932), 73.

[16] Engel, Gustav Mahler: Song-Symphonist , 16.

[17] Engel, Gustav Mahler: Song-Symphonist, 121.

[18] Jason Greshes, Web Page cited in Note 6.

[19] Gabriel Engel, “Mahler’s Music Language,” in Chord and Discord, vol. 1, no. 1 (1932), p. 12.

[20] “When we say that the archetype and the symbol are spontaneous and independent of consciousness, we mean that the ego as the center of consciousness does not actively and knowingly participate in the genesis and emergence of the symbol or the archetype, or, in other words, that consciousness cannot ‘make’ a symbol or ‘choose’ to experience an archetype.” In Eric Neumann, The Great Mother (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1955), translated by Ralph Manheim, p. 10.

[21] Neumann, 43, observes that “in the fundamental symbolic equation of the feminine . . . woman = body = vessel = world.”

[22] Keller, 21.

[23] Keller, 24.

[24] Keller, 26.

[25] “Entonces las marías estaban convencidas de que esa era toda la felicidad del mundo ahí, justo en el hueco lleno de hollín, y que ardía y ardía entre las llamas sin acabar de consumirse, nunca. Todos calentitos en esa felicidad calentita. Las marías no podían pensar en nada más que en ese goce” (Keller, 21).

[26] “José siempre estuvo conmigo. Por supuesto. Y después todos los hijos. Mis carnes y mi alma fueron amoldándose a las formas del momento: sensual para la amante; recatada para la esposa; un formato sólido para la compañera; mangas arremangadas y delantal en la cintura para la cocinera; luces y espejos para la mujeradorno; y sobre todo, usé y abuse de la figura que más me gustaba, la gran mujermadre, la que tenía los pechos chorreando leche y las caderas anchas y la vagina abierta” (Keller, 157).

[27] Neumann, 36.

[28] In Aristotelian biology, man is dominated by the elements of air and fire.

[29] María describes humanity’s ability to invent and reinvent distractions that make death seem less imminent: “Ahí estamos. Siempre apurados inventando algo para volverla mansita” (Keller, 118-119). The “algo” includes all the manifestations that Freud described as the sublimation of civilized humanity: art, music, science, etc.

[30] Neumann perceives matriarchal consciousness as the highest phase of development; it “is the original form of consciousness, in which the independence of the ego system is not yet fully developed and still remains open toward the processes of the unconscious. The spontaneity of the unconscious and also the receptivity of consciousness are here greater than in the relation between the relatively detached patriarchal consciousness, typical for Western development, and the unconscious. The matriarchal consciousness is usually dominant in the woman, and has usually receded in the man, but it is very much at work in the creative individual who is oriented toward the spontaneity of the unconscious” ( 78-79).

[31] Neumann, 38.

[32] Neumann, 61.

[33] Neumann insists upon the primacy of the feminine: the Spiritual is born out of the feminine: “it is this vessel with its mysterious creative character that brings forth the male in itself and from out of itself. . . . The Great Vessel engenders its own seed in itself; it is parthogenetic and requires the man only as opener, plower, and spreader of the seed that originates in the female earth. But this seed is born of the earth; it is at once ear of grain and child, in Africa as in the Eleusinian mysteries” (62-63).

[34] This concept so well developed by the Romantic poets (i.e. Wordsworth’s “the child is father of the man”, Rousseau, etc.) is articulated by Keller at the end of Chapter 3: On the train of the dead: “No hay niños. Ellos no pueden pertenecer a este mundo muerto. Aún tienen la fantasía y los sueños. Todos fuimos niños” ( 22).

[35] Keller, 8.

[36] “También me da miedo, eso, contar. No sé bien cómo. Y ya habían tratado tantas veces de hacerlo. Nadie pudo. Era como si las palabras no quisieran quedarse, se les arrancaban, se tomaban venganza, sí venganza, decía la mamá con esa cara de irse a la cama” (Keller, 8).

[37] At the beginning of Chapter 3, Keller describes the mother’s withdrawal within herself, until she is so far removed that neither she nor her family can recognize her any longer: “Entonces, sin decir una palabra, se fue y en el mismo Valparaíso donde había sido Daniel con mar y con sueños se subió a este tren” (19).

References

Engel, Gabriel. Gustav Mahler: Song-Symphonist. New York: David Lewis, 1932.

----------. “Mahler’s Music Language.” In Chord and Discord, Vol 1, No. 1 (1932), pp. 12-14.

Grange, Henry Louis de la. Gustav Mahler. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1995. 3 volumes.

Greene, David B. Mahler: Consciousness and Temporality. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1984.

Greshes, Jason. Web Page: http://www.netaxs.com/~jgreshes/mahler/

Keller, Mireya. El ojo en la cerradura. Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor, 1996.

----------. El sol tenía escote en V. Santiago: Ergo Sum, 1987.

----------. En el tren de los muertos. Argentina: Editorial Lumen, 1998.

Neumann, Eric. The Great Mother. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York:

Bollingen Foundation, 1955.

Reid, Theodor. The Haunting Melody. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1953.

Ware, Barbara. Transforming the Gaze: Feminine Validation in Posmodernista Poetry. Temple University Dissertation, 2002.