Bless Me, Ultima As an Educational Novel - Essay Example

Bless Me, Ultima As an Educational Novel 2008 What do critics mean calling Bless Me, Ultima an educational novel? It is the novel of coming-of-age, a bildungsroman, narrating of the trials faced by small Antonio Marez on his way to maturation. The novel begins with the arrival of Ultima, an old curandera, and ends with her death. Ultima becomes a mentor, leading Antonio through the tribulations of his childhood to the knowledge of adulthood. She teaches him lessons on his family heritage and religion, on culture and gender roles, on lifecycles and death. However, as you read the novel you realize that Anaya’s vision was not only to tell about Antonio’s life, but share his understanding of life with the reader. Ultima mentors not only Antonio, but the reader as well. As Juan Bruce-Novoa (1996) puts it: “More than simply relating an interesting story about a boy growing up in World War II New Mexico, the novel offers readers a useful response to their own time and place” (p.179). Bless Me Ultima is a didactic novel in a sense that it teaches the reader while narrating of the protagonist’s coming-of-age. First of all, Bless Me Ultima is a book “about learning to read” (Bruce Novoa, p.179). Under this, Bruce-Novoa understands the ability to interpret what you see from different perspectives, without sticking to one point of view. According to the scholar, the novel calls for reading that “goes beyond passive reception into a praxis, an application in one’s life of the lessons learned” (p.179). Ultima appears in the novel to guide both Antonio and the reader, making us see things with her eyes, but to interpret what we see “by recognizing attributes that the sign conveys ”, “to read, not just to see” (p.180). As Antonio describes his first meeting with Ultima, “Her eyes swept the surrounding hills and through them I saw for the first time the wild beauty of our hills and the magic of the green river” (BMU, p.10). Through Ultima’s eyes Antonio sees not just hills, but their “wild beauty”, as well as “the magic of the river.” Small Antonio fears of the llano. Now he gets the knowledge of the beauty of the earth his father loves. A grown-up Antonio recollects: “My nostrils quivered as I felt the song of the mockingbirds and the drone of the grasshoppers mingle with the pulse of the earth. The four directions of the Ilano met in me, and the white sun shone on my soul. The granules of sand at my feet and the sun and the sky above me seemed to dissolve into one strange, complete being” (BMU, p.10-11). This interpretation should provide Antonio with new understanding of things. Caught into the conflicts of dualities, Antonio believes that he has to choose one of the sides. Ultima teaches him to look beyond and integrate. As Anaya himself explained Ultima wants Antonio to see “the holistic nature of the universe, to see beyond the dualities that at first are very apparent to him and those people he comes in contact with”. Instead he must “incorporate those dualities into a vision that is whole and into a vision that is complete” (In Kenave 1998, p.40). This is the basic truth Anaya teaches us, the truth underlying all the lessons to be received by Antonio and the reader. The holistic vision is necessary to understand one’s familial heritage. Antonio is torn apart by the two clans of his family, the Lunas and the Marez. Both clans perceive him as their last chance to embody their dreams. The Lunas are farmers, tied to the earth, while the Marez are vangueros, living free in the llano. The Lunas want Antonio to become a priest like their grandpa, while the Marez hope that Antonio will be a vanguero. Antonio is to become neither, yet inheriting the feature of both clans. That is why Ultima takes his placenta away from the families. She knows that Antonio should obtain a holistic vision. She revels this idea in Antonio’s dreams, advising him to look not “to the quarreling families present at his birth, but to the moment in which his parents joined in love’s embrace to conceive him” (Bruce-Novoa, p.183). She teaches him that the water of the moon and the water of the sea is one, that they cannot exist without each other. “You have been seeing only parts, she finished, and not looking beyond into the great cycle that binds us all” (BMU, p.113). Antonio is to integrate the heritage of his parents, learning from it and acquiring strength. “Anaya’s position is that of adaptation,” – concludes Bruce-Novoa (p.185). – “Antonio learns not an old role – he will be neither cowboy nor farmer, nor "curandero" like Ultima – but a new one, that of writer.” The integrative approach helps Antonio to find his way about religion. Antonio’s life begins in the Catholic surrounding. He seems to be prepared for the role of a priest. Moreover, three times he has to take the role of a priest with dying people. However, Antonio’s experience during the confession ceremony he plays with his friends shows that he may be not suited for the position of a priest. People are simply not ready to accept the kind of a priest Antonio might become. After Lupito’s death, Antonio becomes preoccupied with the problems of sin and punishment, with the existence of the evil. The issue of sin disturbs Antonio in relation to his growing up, while his mother doesn’t want to let him go. She declares that becoming a man means “learning to sin” (BMU, p.118) and Antonio is afraid of the changes happening to him, while if he would look “too much like man” (p.138) God would be unable to forgive him. Ultima and Gabriel see the process of maturation as natural. Antonio understands that his brothers and parents have sins and that he is sinful either. On his journey to maturation, Antonio gets numerous evidences that Catholic Church is not always able to respond to the necessities of life. Antonio finds more comfort with the curanderismo, the myths of la llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe, and, finally, the brotherhood of the golden carp. The golden carp, “a miraculous thing” (p.244), provides Antonio with the feeling he was waiting from the Act of Communion (p.105). By the end of the book Antonio would say: “I doubted the God of my forefathers, the God of Lunas, and I knew I praised the beauty of the golden carp” (p.244). As a result, Antonio elaborates his own religion, integrating the legend of the golden carp and the cult of the Virgin. Anaya’s lessons on culture also support the integrative approach. Both Antonio and the reader integrate the elements of a new culture. The reader gets acquainted with the culture of the Chicanos, while Antonio paves his way in the Anglo world. Education provides him with a possibility to integrate the two cultures. Debra Black (2000), discussing the three ways of dealing with culture, states that while Antonio’s brothers wholly assimilated with the Anglo culture losing the roots in their own, Antonio manages to integrate the two influence, assimilating the Anglo culture to the same degree as he retains his ethnic identity (p.150). It is not easy for him to leave the isolation of his home, he has to adapt. On the first day at school, Antonio faces the cultural prejudices. He doesn’t speak English and feels very lonely. His lunch consisting of the traditional Chicano ingredients makes children laugh at him: “My mother had packed a small jar of hot beans and some good, green chile wrapped in tortillas. When the other children saw my lunch they laughed and pointed again. Even the high school girl laughed. They showed me their sandwiches which were made out of bread. Again I did not feel well” (BMU, p.54). However, his ability to adapt shows itself. Very quickly Antonio makes friends with other Latino boys, and by the end of the first day he learns how to write his name in English. His progress in learning is rapid, proving Ultima’s prediction that he is to become “a man of learning”. From the first grade he is transferred to the third at once. Education raises Antonio above his mother, and even father who never attended school, whose school and teacher was the llano (p.51). Antonio’s success at school suggests that he easily learns to live in two worlds. However, he does not desert his past, learning from Ultima and his father. Ultima teaches him “the names of plants and flowers, of trees and bushes, of birds and animals”, but the most important lessons of hers were those of the “beauty in the time of day and in the time of night” and “peace in the river and in the hills”(p.14). Gabriel serves as an example of male behavior. Antonio implements the method of integration in relation to genders. Ultima and Gabriel teach him to be a man. On the first day of school Ultima has to take him away from Maria: “’He will be all right. The sons must leave the sides of their mothers,’ she said almost sternly and pulled my mother gently” (BMU, p.53). Recollecting his first day at school Antonio writes: “I wished for my mother, but I put away the thought because I knew I was expected to become a man” (p.55). Growing up and becoming a man is closely linked with an ability to make independent decisions, as well as defend one’s beliefs. Ultima and Gabriel guide Antonio on this path, sending him to stay with his Lunas uncles. Gabriel says: “you will still be with the men, in the fields, and that is what matters” (p.235). Learning to be a man, Antonio does not reject his maternal past. Women teach him to forgive and love, to seek for harmony and good. As a result, Antonio follows his father’s advice as to every man being a part of his past. Instead of escaping his past Antonio reforms the old materials, making something new (p.236). Ultima and Gabriel teach Antonio and the reader to perceive changes as a natural flow of life. Death is only another stage of life. Violence is necessary to destroy the old and recreate new improved forms. “Most of the things we call evil are not evil at all; it is just that we don’t understand those things and so we call them evil. And we fear evil only because we do not understand it,” explains Gabriel (p. 236). “The tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart,” echoes Ultima (p.237). Both Antonio and the reader should learn to “take life’s experiences and build strength from them and not weakness” (p.248). Bless Me Ultima is an educational novel having its purpose to give lessons to its reader through the narration of the protagonist’s coming-of-age. Antonio and the reader get lessons on the role of family and religion, culture and gender, death and grief in the life of humans. The major lesson to be learnt is that one should be able to read between the lines and integrate various parts of experience producing new strengths from the old material. Works Cited: Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1999. Black, Debra B. Times of Conflict: Bless Me, Ultima as a Novel of Acculturation. Bilingual Review, Vol.25 (2), 2000, pp.146-59 Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Learning to Read (and/in) Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. In Teaching American Ethnic Literatures, ed. John R. Maitino and David R. Peck. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 179-91. Kenave, Bridget. The Fiction of Rudolfo Anaya: Bless Me, Ultima (1972). In Latino Literature in America: Literature as Windows in the World of Cultures. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London. 2003. Chapter 2, pp.33-45 Read More