The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - B. Traven - TRUE ENDING
I sort of trudged through the last third of this book, which is unfortunate, because I ran into some of the best parts towards the end because the end does have some of the best parts. My predictions were mostly right - the story is pure Midas-ian. I kept rerferring to Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser while talking about this (and may have on my last post) but it's fair. This book is that simple premise that greed is bad and will ruin you.
As simple critique of capital that it may be, the book for me focuses and gives some good notions that the white men pursuing their treasures in the book were always doomed to their own bitterness/penchant for violence. As whiteness itself has made its marker by being. Joaquin in the last section is a favorite character, so hats off to his extreme authority. Aguila Bravo, quoted at the top, a great character before. In the middle of all this, Doña María (white Spaniard who runs the mine of her husband after his murder for being a slaver/conquistador of sorts) also has a great scene where she tells a bunch of men to fuck their mother and whips them. The weird censorship of the English cuss "fuck" is not held back in the same way for the Spanish, "chingue."
Whiteness constantly becomes a force in the book to take advantage of indigenous people through, and Traven has a weird position where he sort of puts pure monetary greed in the position of white people, and greed from indigenous peoples is more like...property. It's hard to summarize without example, but is the other reason for the abstracted quote up top. Bravo in that section is giving away his hidden-away mine to a man in exchange for him "healing" his son's blindness (an act that is a mirror of Howard's false medicine man-ing at the end of the book) and talks about how the gold wouldn't be anything like his land or loved ones or food etc. The book also makes a big message after the three thieves chop Dobbs' head off (I squealed a bit, scene was fucking gnarly and great) of the bandits not knowing or caring about the gold dust and throwing it into the wind. Howard laughs about it at least. The bandits are more concerned instead with making money and stripping the clothes of him. And that's their downfall, not the gold. I can't tell what it's trying to say about indigenous folk and their needs in relation to the government because our point of view is mostly overtaken by the perceptions of the main cast, but I don't think it goes as far to say that the existing post/pro colonial systems are actively trying genocide out on its peoples. Rather, they're just...bad things. Specificity is important.
The book's really racist - or its characters are racist - and even though they get sort of a payback at them, it doesn't allow a lot of voice to its nonwhite characters on their revenges against the colonizing folk there. That seems to be the fault of the novelist and his place and consideration but I can't force a book to do what I want it to, rather just accept what it does. There are not comparisons made to what "the little feller[s]" do when it comes to larger system of power and violence, just the big guys and the cheats to become big; the message that one should attend more "Bolshevik Sunday school" (239) classes in order to actually see a purpose in life is at least clear.
The book is worth reading for its story sections more than anything else. Lacaud and Howard's voices are the two characters I think that give those moments more character than simple reiteration of a sequence of events. The whole book may not be, but I really do wonder how the movie is going to do the scene where Dobbs is racked with guilt after...doing...something. Anyway.
"Why should he, the little feller, the ordinary citizen, be honest if the big ones knew no scruples and no honesty, either in their business or in the affairs of the nation. And these great robbers sitting in easy chairs before huge mahogany tables, and those highwaymen speaking from the platforms of the conventions of the ruling parties, were the same people who in success stories and in the papers were praised as valuable citizens, the builders of the nation, the staunch upholders of our civilization and of our culture. What were decency and honesty after all? Everybody around him had a different opinion of what they meant." (238(
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