... Y por esto no sería una buena etimóloga.

El otro día me preguntaron a qué nos referíamos exactamente los estudiantes (en el sentido más amplio del término) de disciplinas humanísticas cuando las rebautizábamos como "ciencias sociales". Supongo, (contesté tras pensarlo detenidamente un tiempo), que queremos dar un barniz científico a lo que hacemos. El método científico es simple (tan simple que resulta estético en su simplicidad), e incontestable. Si antes del siglo XIX la ciencia se asociaba a gabinetes oscuros donde alquimistas estrafalarios trasteaban con émbolos y recipientes barrigudos, mientras que la universidad se reservaba a quienes querían consagrar su vida a la teología o filosofía, con el advenimiento del método científico la situación da un vuelco radical e irreversible. No me malinterpretéis. No es que la filosofía haya perdido desde entonces su valor intrínseco, aunque sucesivas reformas educativas se empeñen en lo contrario, sino que los hombres y mujeres (siento el duplicativo) se dieron cuenta de que, en lugar de proponer un complejo y sesudo modelo de pensamiento que abarcase y diese sentido a la realidad, podían tomar esa realidad y diseccionarla hasta volverla comprensible en términos físicos: en biología, esto nos ha llevado a descifrar y manejar ADN; en física, a investigar qué ocurre exactamente a nivel subatómico, lo que, paradójicamente, ha abierto las puertas a la comprensión del universo.

Cualquier intento de aplicar el método científico de forma más o menos estricta a la literatura ha resultado infructuoso. Si os interesa, unos académicos rusos lo intentaron en las primeras décadas del siglo XX, tratando de reducir la complejidad de la narración a una serie de bloques formales. ¿Una lección rápida de formalismo ruso? Tomad un cuento tradicional, donde A es el protagonista. A se enfrenta al antagonista, B, y a lo largo de la acción recibe ayuda por parte de varios auxiliares, pongamos C, D y E. En muchos cuentos tradicionales se incluye un objeto mágico (x) y A debe completar una serie de acciones (1, 2, 3). De modo que, de acuerdo con los formalistas rusos, un cuento tradicional podría reducirse a una estructura básica: A: (1,2,3 (x) /C, D ,E) - B. Esta estructura sería extrapolable a todos los cuentos tradicionales, con pequeñas variaciones (el artículo en Wikipedia sobre Vladimir Propp -en inglés-, es mucho más exhaustivo y serio, pero os dará una idea más aproximada de lo que pretendía explicar). Por supuesto, como muchos otros movimientos de crítica literaria, aunque supuso una revolución en su momento, no llegó a cuajar. Y los intentos por someter la literatura al método científico se han sucedido, pese a lo cual me temo que, sin restarle mérito a ninguno de ellos ya que todos aportan visiones interesantes sobre la producción e interpretación de textos literarios, ninguno lo ha conseguido de forma totalmente satisfactoria.

Método científico 1, literatura 0. Pero las lenguas, amigos, son otra cosa. Las lenguas evolucionan siguiendo patrones comunes: son prácticamente un organismo vivo. Tomad la fonética, por ejemplo. ¿Registro de datos físicos, fríos y objetivos? Sí. ¿Posibilidad de formular hipótesis y demostrar su validez? Claro que sí. Y sin embargo, de entre todas las disciplinas que abarca la lingüística, y si tuviera que dedicarme a una profesionalmente (en un mundo hipotético en que realmente me pudiese ganar la vida con ello), yo me quedaría con la geología de las lenguas: la etimología. Cada vez que encuentro una conexión remota entre dos palabras de distintas lenguas, una pequeña parte de mí da un saltito de alegría: obnoxious, en inglés, es prima en tercer grado del adjetivo gallego noxento (y en el Bierzo, cuando algo te da noxo, es que te provoca cierta repugnancia). El puente entre ellas lo tiende el término latino nocere ("dañar"), que a su vez se remontaría a la raíz proto-indoeuropea (!!!!) nek- ("muerte"). Os juro que se me ha hecho literalmente la boca agua (I am a freak, I know). Por desgracia, sé que nunca llegaría a ser una buena etimóloga. ¿Por qué?, ¡Si acabas de escribir que te apasiona! (pensaréis). La primera razón es que soy obsesiva y hay DEMASIADOS misterios etimológicos que son prácticamente imposibles de resolver (preguntadle a la vecina de Barrillos). La segunda razón es que la etimología creativa (o etimología aparente) es mi debilidad. Una etimóloga seria se entera de que Isidoro de Sevilla pensaba que cadáver era un acrónimo de la frase latina cara dada verum, i.e., "carne dada a los gusanos" y, aunque reconocería su inventiva, lo despacharía con desprecio. Yo vislumbro un alma gemela. Y la tercera razón es que mi imaginación corre más rápido que mi capacidad de razonamiento. Antes de leer a Flannery O'Connor, ya sentía cierto afecto por ella. ¿Por qué? Porque Flannery me sonaba a postre y a franela. Aún después de leer sus obras y descubrir que la mujer escribía sobre cuestiones raciales y violencia extrema en historias pobladas por personajes grotescos, asociales y marginados por una sociedad hostil (¡leedla, es genial!), siempre que me topo con su nombre me imagino tomándome un flan con una bata calentita de franela. O la palabra inglesa panache; tuve que encontrármela varias veces en diferentes textos para asimilar que no se trataba de un plato francés tipo empanada de hojaldre, sino de un sustantivo que hace referencia a una actitud exuberante y/o arriesgada: In the face of war, the general acted with panache.

... Y (creo que lo he dejado meridianamente claro), por esto no sería una buena etimóloga.

N: A lo largo de la (larga) redacción de esta entrada, he descubierto que Cacabelos proviene del latín caccabelus, diminutivo de caccabus ("olla, puchero"), lo cual os autoriza a llamarme garbancita* (si os da por ahí).

* También podríais llamarme patatita, repollito, morcillita y demás diminutivos de elementos del cocido tradicional.
(Por favor, no me llaméis morcillita. Mi autoestima nunca se recuperaría).

http://www.canedo.eu/canedo/apellidoca.html

A scary realization

... That you're just a tiny satellite orbiting other people's planets.

This is a quote by J.C. Oates (as I remember it, which means it's probably half made up).

 As a few of you know, I lived four years in a students' hall in León while I was doing my first degree. Most of the experience, as a few of you know, I loathed: I didn't like to share so much room for so much time with people who(m) I don't give a damn for. I put on about seven kilos during my first year due to the fatty food... OK, due PARTLY to the fatty food. I was at the end of my tether by the middle of the fourth year, wishing a slow and painful death not to one, but several boys in my corridor. Overall, you can tell I didn't exactly enjoy the experience.
Despite the BITTERsweet memories (ah, the memories), I will always be grateful for the few friends I made there. Of approximately 250-300 people (it's far from accurate... If someone wants to do the maths, please do), I talked more than five times with about 30, and almost eight years later, I'm still friends with... Three. An engineer and two scientists (biologists), for which I am also grateful because, how would I have met scientists and/or technical experts if not showing my lack of social abilities in front of other 120 human beings in a dinner hall and a TV room? They were great, and they still are, and no matter how life (mis)treat us, it is comforting to know they are there (and I hope they know I am here).
Tearful confessions made, it was thanks to the biologists that I finally understood the evolution theory. Haha, you will think, that's so easy it is embarrasing you didn't understand it! Fine. Laugh if you must. I used to believe that evolutionary movements in the history of species were governed by a general impulse towards improvement. "No, no, no, NO", my exquisitely patient friends would say. "No impulse towards anything. Just change, and random". "But if not for the best, how and why do animals evolve?". "What you just said, that's intelligent design speaking; you think that there must be a force behind evolution, somehow guiding it towards the best... Maybe God. But animals don't change for the best, or governed by a superior being or force. They (we) just do." I understood what they were trying to tell me - I mean, I understood how they used verbs and clauses, and their connotations (I am a linguist, after all), but I didn't grasp the implications of the theory.
 Oh well. One sunny afternoon I was in my parents' orchard, just hanging around. I was feeling guilty because everybody was working but me, so my father gave me a plastic bag and a pair of gloves. "You can pick up the beetles on the potato leaves". The beetles are black and white, and easy to spot, so easy in fact that the task soon became boring and my mind, as usual, drifted away. "You poor little buggers, being black and white over a sea of green. Picking you up must be a piece of pie for your natural predators, as it is for me now. It's unlucky, if only you were green...Wait. Crazy diving into the gene pool, suppose one of you were born green. Your chances to survive would grow exponentially and you would be able to impregnate a lot of females (yuck, yuck, pregnant beetles...). Most of your descendants would be black and white, but at least some of them would be green like you... And that would give them advantage over their black and white brothers and sisters". With a slightly embarrased smile on my face, I realized. Finally.
 (Guys, feel free to correct me if needed. As always).

The Other James

It never ceases to amaze me how many times we depend on sheer luck. In WWI, a young German soldier left a trench seconds before it was blown away by enemy fire. Just a few more seconds lingering, and Chancellor Hitler would have never been (I must admit that this could well be a myth, since similar stories are told about Franco during the Spanish-Moroccan conflict of 1911-27). Luck, fortune, fate... Call it what you please, it is unsettling how importat a role it often plays. Taking it to the extreme, what if you struggle to excel in a field where you share a name with someone brilliant by all accounts? Every time your name is mentioned, the first thought of all present will be for the other. You will always remain as "the less famous X" or, even worse, "Oh, that X". M. R. James was roughly a contemporary of Henry James, the Nobel Prize; he was "Oh, that James". He never achieved such a recognisition but, truth be told, I suspect he never truly wished to. M. R. had other sources of self-assurance; he was a scholar in Cambridge, a antiquary who enjoyed his job, and, above all, he was an English gentleman as English gentlemen wished themselves to be - meaning he probably never allowed himself to feel anything as demeaning as jealousy. M. R. "Oh, that James" went on writing little, deliciously creepy terror stories. Yes, his short stories always follow the same pattern and, after a while, they become repetitive, but the same can be said of other writers writing at the same time who become deservedly famous: Arthur C. Doyle and Agatha Christie. You do not read them in hopes that the originality of their plots will take you by surprise: you read them because they are reassuring in their familiarity, and because you know you're in for a treat and little else. No earth-shattering self-discoveries through the experience of literature here.
 Despite his monotonous plots, M.R. James devised some strategies that have become classic in the horror genre. First, the complicity between writer and reader without the character involved being wholly conscious of what's going on. The main character, staying with some old friends, trips over a huge form while going downstairs in the middle of the night. He is half-asleep and thinks it must be the kitchen cat (but we know it isn't). You have bought a cheap engraving of a manor house. Your friend comments that the sinister hooded figure in the background is remarkable. Although you hadn't seen the figure when you bought the engraving, you tell yourself it must have always been there (but you're wrong). Cheap it is, easy it is, but it works.
 A second reason why everyone (that is, everyone interested in the Gothic genre) should give James a chance is the amazingly modern treatment of time and space in some of his tales. It is not that ghosts do not seem to be affected by the physical laws (that has always been their premise): James literally achieves to recreate vertigo, with his characters, and vicariously the reader, experiencing the unexplainable: alone in his library at night, and observing the map of the perturbing maze in his garden, a little black point catches the attention of a man - he intensely stares at it until the point becomes a hole, so deep it makes black look pale, and feels he is falling through it to meet what lies on the bottom (while a part of his mind is perfectly conscious of him being at his library having a look at a map). So (splendidly) scary.
 The other James, maybe. But what a James.

Hunting

(For the next few weeks, I will be writing only in English. A professor I had told me - about a zillion years ago- that writing was the second skill you lose more easily if you don't practice: she was right. So hey, if you are going to read the whole entry, feel free to comment AND correct any mistake you find - I will be grateful. And sore).

Nowadays our identities are incredibly complex: we are defined by our gender, our work, our sexual option(s), the place we were born, the political party we support, the authors we read, the TV series we follow... The list could go on and on ad infinitum. And many of these items change from (little) time to (little) time. In the Neolithic Age, your options were much fewer: you were male or female, young or old, a hunter or a gatherer. Generally, you were an experienced old/ promising young male hunter, or a young female gatherer/ wise old female gatherer. Life was so simple back then (also brutally short, of course). Hunting must have been an often frustrating, life-threatening task. Imagine facing a mammooth/sabre-tooth tiger with a six-feet wooden spear with a sharp stone attached to it, while your mates nod encouragingly behind the rocks. But something of what has reached us tells us about the beauty, the seriousness and the spirituality which surrounded the experience. You cannot have a look at the animals in the cave paintings without feeling there was respect and even some kind of link between the hunters and their prey.

In a family of hunters and specialized gatherers (committed gardeners), I belong to gatherers. I know it is hard to say (if I really had to, would I kill something to eat it?*), but in these modern and comfortable (and totally unfair to the question) circumstances, I am a gatherer. I will never be able to understand how someone can find killing another creature exhilarating and enjoyable. Sympathizers of hunters out there (should there be any), just three words: sublimation of instinct. Absolutely beaten by Oedipus's complex in popular knowledge terms, Freud's other theoretical construct is used to refer to the means culture offers to human beings in order to deal with instict. This instict, otherwise focused, could lead to potentially disruptive or dangerous behaviour. Competitiveness, will to win, "in-your-face"attitude could end in physical confrontation. When sublimated, it is called sport. Talking about potentially disruptive or dangerous behaviour, now think about who has kept on hunting, together with heavy drinking -and abusing more sophisticated substances-, and of course, having sex to non-reproductive ends. Hunting, drinking and sex have been the pastimes of the males of the higher classes since the very beginning. When sublimated, it is called "looking for porn while having a beer". Just a thought.


* Does earthworms and insects count? Not that I am a vegetarian, but I am really slow.