Pablo Neruda and Laura Esquivel: Using Literary Techniques to Portray Transcendence Essay Example

spiritual unification of Tita and Pedro, prove to the reader her admiration for the complexities of love. Pablo Neruda's poems show extensive use of natural imagery, as well as various magical elements to show the same admiration. One might say that his use of nature as a device to portray his love might be quite real, however his concomitant use of magic supports the idea of love as intangible.

Quotes such as: “I want to do with you / what spring does to the cherry trees” (“Every Day You Play” 35-36) relate this feeling of blooming and development to something very real: spring. However, as the poem proceeds, the author goes on to express that he “[goes] so far as to think you own the universe”, an obvious unreal statement, as no one can control the it. Similarly, Neruda pairs nature with magic in Every Day You Play to portray his longing, “while the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies/ I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth” (“Every Day You Play” 24-25).

Here the wind is personified as a sort of entity that is killing the things that rely on it to fly: butterflies, and the happiness felt by the protagonist is materialized as a force that hurts the woman's mouth. It feels as though Neruda exaggerates this feeling of pining into a violent act. This not only serves the purpose of beautiful imagery: a valley of fluttering butterflies, suddenly collapsing and the forceful bite of her lips, but of supporting the statement of love's intangibility as well.

We see this again in Here I Love You, when

he explains that “sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels/ that cross the sea toward no arrival” (Neruda, “Here I Love You”, 16-17). What Neruda is doing here is taking intangible things (wind, happiness, the action of a kiss) and using the natural imagery and magical undertone to make it more real for the reader, and subsequently for he/she to feel empathy towards the longing of the man in the poem, who is repetitively the protagonist. Laura Esquivel approaches her story Like Water for Chocolate very similarly.

By first observing the literary devices used in the novel, her use of magical realism is prominent, however natural imagery and setting is not upstaged by it. The story takes place on a family ranch in a secluded area of Mexico. The setting is raw: a farm, animals, the simple house. The most emphasized type of nature in the novel is food and the act of cooking. In fact, the book's true title is as follows: Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies. This shows that the two things, recipes and romance, are closely tied in the story.

At the start of Tita's story, she is playing with the “dazzling display made by dancing water drops dribbled on a red hot griddle. ” as she “was singing and waving her wet hands in time, showering drops of water down on the griddle so they would 'dance'”. Her sister Gertrudis joins her, and “[throws] herself into it with the enthusiasm she always showed where rhythm, movement or music were involved” (Esquivel, 8) The admiration of the water in

the quote shows how closely the feeling of joy and nature are for the girls: they are happy, singing, dancing, and the water mimics them.

As the story goes on however, Tita's life becomes more tangled, and the magical realism becomes more powerful. As Tita lays at night watching stars and thinking of Gertrudis, and Esquivel writes: Those huge stars have lasted for millions of years by taking care never to absorb any of the fiery rays lovers all over the world send up at them night after night. To avoid that, the star generates so much heat inside itself that it shatters the rays into a thousand pieces. Any look it receives is immediately repulsed, reflected back onto the earth, like a trick done with mirrors.

That is the reason the stars shine so brightly at night. Tita began to hope that if she could find the one star- among all the stars in the sky- that her sister was watching right this minute, it might reflect a little leftover heat onto her. (Esquivel, 60) Here Esquivel uses a strategy similar to that of Neruda's. She is personifying the stars by giving them a strategy to fend off the love radiating from longing lovers, and materializing the loving glances the humans give as rays that are eventually shattered by the star.

There is also an underlying idea of the human insecurity to let the powerful feeling of love take power of them: we are quick to repulse the love given off by others, in fear of experiencing a transcendent feeling and losing ourselves in it. Esquivel also pairs emotion with nature

in phrases such as: “one last chile in walnut sauce left on the platter after a fancy party couldn't feel any worse that she did. ” (Esquivel, pg. 57-58), to entice empathy on behalf of the reader, just as Neruda does.

When Gertrudis eats the “Quail in Rose Petal Sauce” the “scent given off by her body had traveled a long, long way. All the way to town... ” (Esquivel, 54) where the love of her life smells it, and rides his horse to her rescue. The act of the smell of roses traveling represents the internal presentiment of meeting the love of your life, and the future fulfillment of this love. Although both works use these types of unreal devices and surrealist phrases, the works focus on different stages of love.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair focuses on the longing of love and the reminiscent feelings when left. This is the mainspring of the author's focus on natural imagery, because the love is not reciprocated in the present, and is a matter of the past. The stories and feelings described in Neruda's poem are memories, and accounts of love, which are much less powerful than the present act of it. On the contrary, Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate is set in the present, and the interactions that take place between the characters are happening as they are told.

The feelings felt by the characters are then much more powerful, which pushes Esquivel to write with more magical realism, in order to get across the unparalleled feeling of love. In conclusion, Pablo Neruda and Laura Esquivel use these literary

devices to their advantage by creating supernatural events to communicate what is felt by one in love. In a way authors create characters such as Tita and the protagonist of Neruda's poems alongside magical elements to exhibit how a human being can experience the mystical power of love.