Mexican Literature
Professor Williams was trained in Mexican literature in graduate school by
the eminent scholar of Mexican literature, Professor John S. Brushwood, author of
Mexico in Its Novel. After graduate school, in addition to ongoing research on
Colombian literature, Williams's early publications included analyses of
fictions of Mexican writers Carlos Fuentes, Gustavo Sainz,and Jos¨¦ Agust¨ªn.
His later work on Mexican literature has focused on the fiction of writers such
as Elena Poniatowska, Carmen Boullosa, Luis Arturo Ramos and Ignacio Solares,
seen within the context of international postmodernism. He recently completed a
collaborative project, La novella posmoderna en M¨¦xico, with Professor Blanca
Rodr¨ªguez of the University of Morelos, with the support of a grant from UC
Mexus.
Below is a recent article on Fuentes, published in the professional journal Hispania in 2002:
Fuentes the Modern; Fuentes the Postmodern
Raymond L. Williams University
of California/Riverside
Abstract: Since the mid-1980s, numerous discussions have
taken place througilq!lt the Hispanic world concerning postmodernism, partly as
an outgrowth of similar discussions since the 1960s in the United States and
Europe. Increasingly, Hispanists have joined in the process of
"postmodernizing" literature written in a multiplicity of modes,
including what many scholars would consider either traditional or modem.
Book-length studies have appeared on topics such as "Vargas Llosa among
the postmoderns" and "Fuentes the postmodern" as part of this
"postmodemizing" process. Simultaneously, other critical studies on
the writings of Carlos Fuentes have identified him as a modem writer. Fuentes
should be seen as a "Modernist" novelist (in the Anglo-American use
of the term "Modernist") who has also published a few novels with
postmodern tendencies. His commitment to Modernist aesthetics can be traced
back to the 1950s-the period of his early fiction and his work as co- editor of
the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. His vast fictional project, which he
identifies as "La Edad del Tiempo," is the grand narrative of the
Modernist writer par excellence. Fuentes is seen as a "bridge" or
transitional figure between the modem and the postmodern, terms which should
not be considered oppositional.
Key Words: Fuentes (Carlos), La muerte de Artemio Cruz,
Terra Nostra, Modernism, Postmodernism, Modernist aesthetics, Postmodern novel,
innovation, history, anti-totalization, grand narrative, Latin American novel
Smitten by the modernity of Faulkner, Borges, Dos Passos
and Kafka at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has held a lifetime commitment to
Modernist literary practices.! At the same time, he has been a well-known
admirer of the more Postmodern gestures of writers such as Calvino and Sarduy.
Consequently, he is a complex and difficult subject to defme-or even
discuss-within the context oftoday's ongoing debates concerning Modem and
Postmodern literatures.
Having published his fIrst volume of fiction in 1954 and
continuing an active program of literary creation well into the twenty-fIrst
century, Fuentes's fiction spans almost fifty years. As an adolescent, he
witnessed the development of what many called "the Mexican Miracle,"
what others have identified as Mexico's modernization, and what, in contrast,
others have insisted on describing as Mexico's "failed" capitalist
enterprise and equally failed economic modernization. Later in his career, this
Mexican writer has lived in a variety of international urban settings that some
considered "Postmodern" cultural settings, and he has also witnessed
the plethora of debates about the place of Postmodernism and Postmodern culture
in Latin America? Paradoxically, Fuentes himself has been identified as a
"Modem" or "Modernist" writer by many scholars, and
"Postmodern" by others.3 Both concepts are so laden with nuances and
debates that it has been difficult to sift through and understand the terms
themselves, much less their potential use with respect to any contemporary
writer. In this brief essay, I will attempt to make sense of some of these
apparent contradictions, as well as to clarify Fuentes's relative
"place" in these discussions of the Modem and the Postmodern. I will
argue that Fuentes is fundamentally a writer of Modernist impulses who has
published a significant set of novels of a predominantly Modernist mode; at the
same time, he is the author of other novels that can be identified as
Postmodern fiction.
Fuentes-the- Modern
Fuentes belongs to that
generation of Latin American writers fully committed to modernizing Latin
American literature. In their youth during the 1950s, this ~eneration of
writers viewed their respective national novel as excessively bogged down in
the traditional strategies and approaches of the realist-naturalist fiction
inherited from the nineteenth century. Indeed, Vargas Llosa's famous indictment
ofth~ canonical writers of the 1920s as "primitive" set the tone, in
the 1960s, for an entire generation. In Fuentes's case, he was co-director of
the Revista Mexicana de . Literatura
that had
as its stated objective to modernize Mexican letters. Rooted firmly in the
Modernist writings of the West, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez have
written and spoken extensively of their debts to such major Modernist writers
as Faulkner, Kafka, Dos .
Passos, and
Joyce. .
Fuentes and Emmanuel
Carballo co-founded the Revista Mexicana de Literatura in 1955 in order
to promote Mexican literature while maintaining an awareness of writing in
other countries, above all, the writing of Modernists in Europe and the United
States.4 In his work on this journal, Fuentes put into practice one of the
important lessons he had learned from Alfonso Reyes: "La literatura
mexicana sera buena porque es literatura, no porque es mexicana." Adhering
to this explicitly universal and implicitly Modernist message inherited from
Reyes, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura served the cosmopolitan function
of magazines that appeared throughout Latin America in the 1950s. This
magazine, and others like it, such as Mito in Colombia, brought modem
European and North American cultural practices to Latin America, from the T.S.
Eliot generation to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Revista Mexicana
de Literatura offered a combination of Modernist aesthetics and social
commitment; Sartre was extraordinarily influential in Mexico and the remainder
of the Americas in the 1950s, and his idea of the engage writer soon
became virtually canonical for Latin American novelists. Consequently, the
Modernist writings of Fuentes and his generation share this important
difference from much Mqdernist writing in Europe and the United States, where
Modernism is frequently associated with distance from political commitment.5
Some of the writers whose
names graced the pages of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura included
Juan Rulfo, Leonora Carrington, and Mariano Picon Salas. In accordance with the
cosmopolitan interests that Octavio Paz and his cohorts had established in
their magazine, El hijo prodigo, the Revista Mexicana de Literatura attempted
to universaljze the Mexican literary vision. In this case,
"universalization" also meant modernization; the readings that
Fuentes undertook of the Western Modernists had their impact as Fuentes
popularized many forms of modem literature in Mexico. Evidence of this in his
work on La region mas trans parente was the publication of
"Fragmento de una novela" in 1956 (Fuentes 1956,581-89).
With respect to
modernization and innovation, Fuentes's volume of stories, Los dias
enmascarados had appeared in 1954; it represented a substantial innovative
note in Mexican fiction, even though Juan Jose Arreola, Agustin Yanez, and
Julio Tom had already begun to explore some of the possibilities of the
fantastic in the late 1 940s and early 1950s. Mexican fiction in the 1950s was
still predominantly rural and quite traditional, even though literary
historians can point to selected cases of (relatively ignored) Modernist novels
ranging from 1920s avant-garde fiction-such as that of Jaime Torres Bodet-to
Agustin Yanez's Alfilo del agua, published in 1947. Nevertheless, Alfilo
del agua was not widely read in Mexico in the early 1950s (cf. Pitol
interview with Williams).
With the rise of Fuentes and his journal in the 1950s, the
group of writers and artists known in Mexico as the generation of "Medio
Siglo" began establishing themselves in Mexico as a cultural force. The
fiction writers of this generation were Sergio Pitol, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio
Galindo, Juan Garcia Ponce, Rosario Castellanos, Ines Arredondo, and Josefma
Vicens, among others. They have all become recognized modem writers in Mexico
whose fiction can be easily associated with the aesthetics of Modernism. This
iconoclastic group was anxious for radical change in the Mexican cultural scene
when a fictional revolution appeared in the form of Fuentes's novel, La
region mas trans parente. By the mid-1950s, this generation of writers had
fully discovered their modernity, as Fuentes has explained: "For my
generation in Mexico, the problem did not consist in discovering our modernity
but in discovering our tradition" (Myself
and others 23)
What were the typical characteristics of Modernist
aesthetics in fiction? The commonly accepted tenets of Modernist fiction, as
developed by writers such as Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner and others,
involved formal innovation, such as fragmentation, the use of multiple points
of view, the use of neologisms, and the like.6 This was the work of Fuentes in La
region mas trans parente. Much nineteenth-century fiction of the
Realist-Naturalist mode operated on the basis of strict causality: the world of
cause and effect was a fundamental assumption of these writers, and the
Modernists questioned this assumption in some cases, undermined it in others.
Fuentes's inversion of causes and effects in the historical chain ,of events in
La region mas trans parente and La muerte de Artemio Cruz are
among his most typical Modernist strategies in these early novels. Modernist
novelists were also engaged in a virtually incessant search for order within an
apparently chaotic world. The Anglo-American Modernist project also became
associated with a subjectivist relativism (Conner 107). Consequently, Modernism
had increasingly less to do with the world of ideas or substances that may be
objectively known within themselves than with the fictionalization and
understanding of the world that can be known and experienced through individual
consciousness (ibid). This world of individual consciousness, of course,
is the world of the character Artemio Cruz; the reader gets to know Mexico as
this individual knew and experienced it.
The novels of Fuentes
that are most closely aligned with Modernist fictional practices are La
region mas trans parente (1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962),
and Zona sagrada (1967). The novels Terra Nostra (1975), La
cabeza de la hidra (1978), La campana (1990), El naranjo (1993)
and Los anos con Laura Diaz can also easily be associated with Modernist
fiction. In these noveis, Fuentes fully exploits the technical devices
pioneered by European and American Modernis.~ to explore the past and present
of modem Mexico. In La region mas trans parente, he uses the multiple
points of view and collage of this work's most important predecessor, Dos
Passos's Modernist classic Manhattan Transfer. The structure and
narrators of the fiction of Faulkner and Butor are evident in La muerte de
Artemio Cruz. In both of these early novels, Fuentes-the-Modernist moves
the reader from a fictional world of apparent fragmented chaos to one of order
and harmony. Zona sagrada, a work written under the influence of film,
uses many of the same narrative strategies. For an authority on Modernist and
Postmodern fictional practices in the West in general, Brian McHale, novels
such as Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Zona sagrada represent
variants of the Modernist interior-monologue novel that focuses on a grid that
each mind imposes on the outside world, or through which it assimilates the
outside world (as set forth in the flfSt chapter of Postmodernist Fiction).
The early Fuentes, like his Modernist predecessors, was
still searching for truths and still producing the totalizing grand narrative
(Williams, The Postmodern Novel... Chapter 1). For Fuentes and his
generation of fiction writers, the novels of the 1960s Boom represented the
culmination of a Modernist project that still privileged issues of truth.
Novels such as Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad (1967), Vargas
Llosa' s La casa verde (1966), and Fuentes's La muerte de Artemio
Cruz were among the last significant confrontations with truth in Latin
American fiction-before the skepticism of the Postmodern, the postboom and the
postdictatoriaI. entered the scene} At the same time that the possibilities for
universal truth claims were questioned in these novels, there was a general
sense among many Latin American novelists of the 1960s that they were among the
most resonant voices of the few in such closed societies who could speak for
historical truth.
Terra Nostra, La campana,
La cabeza de la hidra, El naranjo and Los anos con Laura Diaz (1999)
represent a continuation, to different degrees, of Fuentes's Modernist project.
Now writing in a Western culture of the 1970s and 1980s increasingly aware of
the end of modernity, he tempered the ambitiously Modernist and totalizing
impulses of his earlier work with Postmodern considerations and attitudes.
Nevertheless, to some extent, Terra Nostra, La campana, and El
naranjo can be read as historical and truth-seeking works still written
under the influence of his earlier Modernist interior-monologue novels. In
addition, La campana, La cabeza
de la hidra, and El
naranjo all reach denouements more typical of Modem ambiguity than of Post
modem indeterminacy. Paradoxically, La cabeza de la hidra can also be
associated with the Postmodern in a minor way: the characterization of the
protagonist involves his complete effacement of authority (cf. Villalobos,
405).
Van Delden has argued convincingly that
Fuentes's concern for the past makes Fuentes a . Modernist writer (Carlos Fuentes: Mexico and
Modernity). Fuentes's totalizing master narratives are guided by an
interest in multiplicity and relativism, two concerns that easily associate
Fuentes with Modernism. Novels such as La muerte de A rtem io Cruz, Terra
Nostra, and . Los anos con Laura Diaz are Fuentes's attempts at
recuperating history and keeping it alive. As Van Delden argues with respect to
Terra Nostra (and it could be argued with respect to all of Fuentes's
historical novels), Fuentes undertakes the task of rewriting the past not to
prove the fictional quality of historical reconstructions (as many theorists of
the Postmodern would have it), but as a means of reconstructing the past as
part of a present that still lives this past (cf. Villalobos).
Fuentes's mark as a Modernist novelist of the twentieth
century will quite likely be his early contributions-the already-canonical
works La region mas trans parente and La muerte de Artemio Cruz. As
a Modernist, Fuentes was an innovator and aesthetic leader in Mexico and
throughout Latin America. The legacy of their Modernist classics will probably
be the legacy of all the writers of the Boom.8 Of course, these Modernists,
like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, have suffered harsh
critiques, even from some of their former supporters. Benjamin, an admirer of
some Modem writers, lamented after World War I the devaluation of
"experience" in the Modem novel ("The Storyteller,"
83-110). Frank Kermode criticizes the Modernists' "elitist" need for
order and its revolutionary formal innovations. David Daiches, one of the early
champions of the Modernist novel, later questioned its anarchistic urge to
destroy existing systems and its reactionary political vision of an ideal order
(Daiches 197).
Referring to
Anglo-American Modernists (and probably not Fuentes), Jameson argues boldly in The
Political Unconscious that Modernism is an ideological expression of capitalism
(The Political Unconscious 236). An analogy for Jameson's polemical
statement is that Modernism is the truth of capitalism. It would be difficult
to argue successfully, however, that a novel so overtly critical of capitalism
as La muerte de Artemio Cruz (dedicated, in fact, to Marxist economist
C. Wright Mills) can be viewed simply as a product of capitalism that engages
in strategies of containment to deny the truth of history. This novel, to the
contrary, is a strong critique of Mexico's institutionalization of modem
capitalism.
For Fuentes, history goes
far beyond Postmodern interests in reducing historiography to just another
text. A commitment to an understanding of history and culture are essential to
most of Fuentes's writing, including his texts with Postmodern tendencies.
History and culture undergird the concept of identity in much of Fuentes's
fiction. For this writer, writing implies an in-depth engagement with history,
culture and identity. The foundations of Latin American history are to be found
primarily in Terra Nostra, but are then elaborated in La campana and
El naranjo.
Fuentes's early novels-La
region mas trans parente, Aura, La muerte de Artemio Cruz- coincide with
some ofOctavio paz's formulations on Mexican identity to be found in Ellaberinto
de la soledad. Echoing the earlier writings of Samuel Ramos and Alfonso
Reyes, Paz had traced Mexican identity back to the key moment when Cortes, by
fathering the first Mexican mestizo with La Malinche, created the first Mexican
of Spanish and Native American identity. Similarly, Fuentes returned to the
pre-Hispanic past in his early fiction. By the mid-1960s, Fuentes's ideas on
identity had evolved beyond the concepts of Paz in the 1950s. In Zona
sagrada, Cambio de piel, Cumpleanos, and Terra Nostra, his
trans-historical vision is more universal and less focused on the Aztec past as
the primary means of understanding the present. Now Fuentes begins including
Europe as part of a historical vision beyond the Mexican pre-Hispanic and
Colonial past; he also begins questioning the very concept of historical space.
In these works of the late 1960s and 1970s, his vision is as universal as he
and his generation of intellechIals had desired back in the 1950s when they
published the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. With these
"universal" interests, it is also the vision of an ambitious
Modernist now well advanced in his vast, totalizing Modernist enterprise.
In summary,
"Fuentes-the-Modern" is the author of several now-classic Modernist
novels that were paradigmatic works for the modernization of Latin American
fiction in the twentieth century.
Recognition of his central role as a Modernist writer means understanding some
of the major contributions of Latin American writing of the century. Indeed, his
legacy for the century could well be his role as the author of the Modernist
classic La muerte de Artemio Cruz. More recently, Los aiios con Laura
Diaz, similar in many ways to La muerte de Artemio Cruz (such as in
its broad, historical vision of twentieth-century Mexico), is te~gmony to the
strength and durability of the Modernist legacy of Fuentes and the Latin
American writer in the twentieth century.
Fu entes-the- Postmodern
Umberto Eco claims that
the Postrnodern is born at the moment when we discover that the world has no
fixed center. This moment occurred in Latin American literature with the rise
of Borges in the 1940s; he became a key figure for some European theorists of
the Postrnodern and even more for young Latin American Postrnodern novelists of
the 1970s and 1980s. The discourse and concepts ofPostrnodernism-lo indeterminado,
la problematizacion del centro, la marginalidad, la discontinuidad la
simulacion, and the like have been circulating in Latin America since the
late 1970s. Perhaps the name that North and South share the most with respect
to Postmodernism, however, is Borges. The same Borges cited by Barthes,
Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard also established the foundation for a Latin
American Postrnodern fiction with his stories of Ficciones (cf.
Williams, The Postmodern Novel... Chapter 1).
After'Borges, the most notable contribution to the later
publication of a Latin American Postmodern fiction was Cortazar's Rayuela (1963).
Cortazar's novel itself is not really a Postrnodern work, but its Morelli
chapters at the end were a radical proposal for Postmodern fiction (cf.
Williams, The Modern... Chapter 9). In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
the Postmodern novel began to appear in Latin America, frequently inspired by
either Borges or Cortazar, and it was constituted by such experimental fictions
as Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres (1967), Nestor
Sanchez's Siberia Blues (1967), and Manuel Puig's La traicion de Rita
Hayworth (1968). Another key novel for the formation of a Latin American
Postmodern fiction was Severo Sarduy's Cobra (1972), a hermetic text,
yet widely read among the writers of the Postrnodern generation of Diamela
Eltit and Ricardo Piglia.
What is Postrnodern fiction? Given the lack of consensus
concerning its possible definition, it is more appropriate to speak of its
tendencies. Writing about contemporary fiction in general, Linda Hutcheon has
been interested in the contradictions of Postrnodernism and, more specifically,
the unresolved contradictions ofPostrnodern culture. Citing Larry McCaffery,
she also refers to Postrnodern literature as literature that is metafictionally
self-reflective and yet speaks to us powerfully about real political and
historical realities (A Poetics of Postmodernism 36). For Hutcheon, key
concepts for Postrnodernism are paradox, contradiction, and a movement toward
anti-totalization. The concepts of the multiple, the provisional and the
different are also important for Hutcheon.
Hutcheon proposes that the term Postrnodernism in fiction be
reserved for "historiographic metafiction" (49). This Postrnodern
fiction, as she describes it, often enacts the problematic nature of writing
history to narrativization, raising questions about the cognitive status of
historical knowledge. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim,
both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by
discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, which derive their major
claims to truth from that identity (93). Historiographic metafiction, such as
Fuentes's Terra Nostra, suggests that truth and falsity may not be the
most appropriate terms. Rather, we should be speaking of truths in the plural.
McHale offers several
useful distinctions for an understanding of Post modern fiction. On the one hand, he associates an emphasis on the
epistemological with Modernist writing and emphasis on the ontological with the
Postmodern (cf. Chapter 1). The Postmodern text with emphasis on the
ontological can ask or imply the question, "What is this world?" In Moriras
lejos (1967), Mexican Jose Emilio Pacheco shares the ontological concerns
of the Postmodern when he blurs the boundaries between the ancient and modern
worlds, as well as between the fascist operations of the Nazis and the
"democratic" operations of more supposedly democratic states, such as
modern Mexico. On the other hand, McHale speaks of the double coding that is
typical ofPostmodern
culture.
.
As a continuation of the Modernist tradition rather tluln in
opposition to it, Postmodern fiction shares some Modernist impulses. This is
certainly the case in Fuentes's predominantly Postmodern novels Cambia de
piel (1967), Cumpleaiios (1969), Terra Nostra (already
described with strong Modernist impulses, too), Unafamilia lejana (1981),
Gringo Viejo (1985), Cristobal Nonato (1987) and Instinto de
Inez (2001). Cambia de pielwas one of his early experiments with
characters of multiple (rather than just double) identity, as well as with
characters and space in constant transformation. When it is revealed at the end
of this novel that the text of Cambia de piel has been produced by the
mad inmate of an insane asylum, it is evident that the fiction of Fuentes has
moved from concerns over the epistemological in La muerte de Artemio Cruz to
the ontological, a change that McHale identifies as a shift toward the
Postmodern.
Cumpleaiios is Fuentes's most radical
experiment with space, an experiment continued with Terra Nostra and
later novels. If innovation with time was an outstanding characteristic of
Fuentes's Modernist texts (La region, La muerte de Artemio Cruz), in his
Postmodern works, particularly Cumpleaiios and Terra Nostra, an
important innovation is with space (Williams, The Writings of Carlos Fuentes
Part III). As Helmuth has pointed out, Fuentes's use of indeterminacy,
hi~tory and characterization all associate Cumpleaiios with the
Postmodern (25).
Una familia lejana,
Gringo viejo, Cristobal Nonato, and Instinto de Inez continue the
Postmodern strategies and motifs of Cambia de piel, Cumpleaiios, and Terra
Nostra. Characters of multiple and transforming identities are evident in
these four texts, and Fuentes not only employs, but also flaunts the umesolved
contradictions that are Postmodern gestures. As frequently happens in
Postmodern novels, the reality of texts, of fiction, or of storytelling
predominates over empirical reality and often subverts it. These are fictional
worlds that inevitably revert to language as their principal subject. A
noteworthy sub-theme of this interest is found in Instintode Inez, for
here Fuentes deals with the origins of language and music, exploring the
primordial relationships between these two forms of human communication.
The Postmodern elements
are so evident in Terra Nostra that McHale has described it as one of
the "paradigmatic texts of postmodernist writing, literally an anthology
of postmodernist themes and devices" (Chapter 1). Trans-historical
operations in Terra Nostra allow Fuentes to include fictional and
historical centuries from different centuries, from the medieval period to the
twentieth century. Terra Nostra is Fuentes's major rereading of Latin
American culture and history. In addition, it is one of Latin America's major
projects of the Postmodern on identity, knowledge, and the novel itself. Vargas
Llosa had asked the historical question, "At what moment did Peru mess
up?" and, in attempting to respond to this question, wrote the lengthy
historical and political novel, Conversacion en La Catedral (1969). Near
the end of Terra Nostra, Fuentes poses a similar question, but in
broader terms: "At what moment did Spanish America mess up?" In
addition to the particulars of Latin American history, Fuentes is concerned
with how history, culture, and identity are constructed and then understood. As
a reader of Ortega y Gasset and Foucault, Fuentes has understood history not as
a compilation of immutable truths, but as a living world in transformation.
Fuentes's awareness of
historical discourse and, above all, his questioning of the very assumptions of
Western historiography, align Terra Nostra with the Postmodern described
by Hutcheon. In this sense, Terra Nostra is more deeply historical and
political than many Modernist novels, including such overtly historical and
political Latin American novels as Garcia Marquez's Cien aiios de soledad, Vargas
Llosa's Conversacion en LaCatedral, and Fuentes's own La muerte de
Artemio Cruz.
As a Postmodern text., Terra Nostra is
Fuentes's rewriting of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical architecture
of EI Escorial. For Jencks, one common Postmodern architectural design is the
skyscraper with perfectly Modem lines, but with classical Greek columns in open
.
opposition
to the Modem design.9 In this Postmodern construct, no harmonic resolution of
these blatantly contradictory lines is designed or desired. They remain in
unresolved (Postmodern) contradiction. The palace and other aspects of Terra
Nostra function in this fashion. In his use of . a '\painting from
Orvieto" (amoral by Luca Signorelli actually located in Orvieto, Italy),
Fuentes appropriates this erotic mural from Orvieto and places it into EI
Senor's severe and austere palace. Just as the Postmodern architect leaves the
Greek columns on the modem building with no resolution, Fuentes leaves the Signorelli
mural in the palace in open contradiction-with no visible resolution.
In a similar manner, Fuentes appropriates the well-known
novelistic ruse of the manuscript in the lost bottle and uses it
anachronistically in a novel published in 1975. In the process, Fuentes
juxtaposes his typically Modem novelistic strategies with the anachronistically
traditional. The result is comparable, once again, to the Postmodern
architectural image of the Modem skyscraper with its Greek columns.
The double coding of the
Postmodern is evident in Terra Nostra in a variety of ways. One notable
case involves the use of characters of Spanish Golden Age literature who appear
as characters in Terra Nostra: they are and they are not Golden Age
characters. The double voice of Fuentes's pastiche is more subtle when the
narrator intercalates the phrase "polvo enamorado" in the novel, thus
evoking simultaneously the double voice of Fuentes, author of the text we are
reading, and of Quevedo, author of the original sonnet that ends with the same
words. Consequeptly, these words are and are not those of Quevedo, according to
the rules of double coding. Similarly, the reader of Terra Nostra hears
the double voice of Fuentes and Garcia Marquez when the omniscient narrator
uses the phrase "muchos alios despues. . ." twice (near the middle
and near the end of the novel). This phrase is followed by a clause in the
conditional tense, exactly as it appears in Cien alios de soledad.
Fuentes's tendency to use double coding is also evident in
the characters of several of his novels. Some of these characters are at the
same time specific historical characters while they also are not these
historical characters. In some of these cases, such as the authority figures in
Terra Nostra, they are and are not several historical Spanish kings and
queens. Most of the novel's major figures, in addition, have double codes
rather than any fixed, singular identity. These multiple identities in constant
transformation, which question the very concept of psychic unity and the
individual subject, align Terra Nostra (and several other novels with
similar characters) with the Postmodern.
Terra Nostra can be read as a Postmodern architectural
construct imposed on a Medieval, Renaissance, and Neoclassical architectural
model. This construct rediscovers the heterogeneity of Latin American culture
and the heterogeneity ofPostmodern culture in the Americas. Fuentes's palace is
one of several unresolved contradictions. Representation in Terra Nostra takes
as its point of departure (and then exploits) the representation of Don
Quijote and the fiction of Borges. The complex Terra Nostra, consequently,
is neither just the Modernist work positing truth nor the totally enigmatic and
mysterious Postmodern work with no meaning at all.
Fuentes's usage of mirrors and doubles also evokes the
Postmodern. He employs mirrors, doubles, and a multiplicity of images of each
to question representation. In his book, Cervantes or the Critique of
Reading, Fuentes himself points out that the painting Las meninas by
Velazquez involves an interplay in which representation is represented at every
point. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes problematizes representation similarly,
for the omnipresent mirrors and doubles seemingly represent representation at
every point in the novel (Williams, The Writings... Part II).
Fuentes's Postmodern
fiction, despite its unresolved contradictions and metafictional qualities, is
deeply historical and political. His Postmodern work is a "transhistorical
carnival" (as McHale calls it) in which characters interact in their
projected fictional worlds and a supposed
empirical reality. At
the same time, Fuentes engages in multiple intertextual boundary violations,
including fictional characters from other novels in his texts. Consequently,
the reader of Fuentes' s Postmodern fiction experiences an even more complex
confrontation with history than in his overtly historical and political
Modernist texts, La region mas trans parente, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, and
Los alios con Laura Diaz. Novels such as Terra Nostra and La
cabeza de la .
hidra are easily associated
with both Modernist and Postmodern stratagems.
Conclusion
The ambiguity and perhaps confusion over the modem and postmodern Fuentes-as well as the "modern-and-postmodern Vargas Llosa"-are understandable.io Both writers engage in practices that align them with both the Modernist mode of fiction writing and certain other tendencies more typically associated with Postmodern fiction. Consequently, it is understandable that entire books have been written about the "Postmodern" Fuentes and the "Postmodern Vargas Llosa." Both writers lend themselves to such alignments, and both writers have published novels since the 1970s that readers can easily identify with Postmodern fiction. But these alignments are not representative of the total fiction of either writer, and one-sided arguments for a Postmodern Fuentes, a Postmodern Vargas Llosa, and the like, are often weakened by the almost casual acceptance of Postmodern theory as set forth by a limited number of theorists.!!
The potential for confusion is enormous when one takes into
account that novels such as Fuentes's Terra Nostra and La cabeza de
la hidra, as well as Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia and l,Quien malo
a Palomino Molero? share characteristics typical of both Modernist and
Postmodern fiction. In many ways, then, the generation of the Boom is really
the bridge generation, so to speak, between their Modernist predecessors
(Asturias, Yatlez, Carpentier, et al) and their Postmodern followers of the
generation of Ricardo Piglia and Diamela Eltit. Stated in another way, Fuentes
should be seen not as a Modernist unrelated to Postmodern culture, nor as the
strictly Postmodern writer that he is not; rather, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa
should be read as authors of transitional texts that bridge the gap in the
discussions of Modernist "versus" Postmodern literature.
Fuentes and his generation have made a significant
contribution to the modernization of the Latin American novel that was
originally-in the late 1950s and early 1 960s-associated closely with Modernist
aesthetics. Fuentes and some of his cohort do indeed deal with language,
history, and identity in ways that are of interest to Postmodern theory. In the
end, however, the grand narrative that frequently synthesizes these Postmodern
interests afflrIns the Modernist enterprise that the total work of Fuentes, his
"La Edad del Tiempo," represents. Indeed, the very conceptualization
of his total fiction as a master narrative titled "La Edad del
Tiempo" is an indicator that Fuentes himself sees his project as the grand
narrative of the Modernist writer.i2
It can easily be argued
that the fourteen cycles of"La Edad del Tiempo" represent one of the
most significant bodies of literature to have been created by a single writer
over the past century . A vast body of work in time and space, it is set in the
entire Hispanic world, from Spain to the Americas, from Argentina to the
borders between Mexico and the United States, and it represents a rewriting of
history from Roman times to the present. This enormous, ambitious project is
the result of the aspirations of a Modernist writer who decided at a very young
age that his task was to modernize Hispanic fiction and to rewrite the history
of the Americas. His production to date, which includes over twenty books of
fiction and numerous volumes of essays, is testimony to the success of his
exceptionally ambitious Modernist, historical enterprise.
Notes
'I use the term "Modernist" here in accordance
with the Anglo-American usage of the term referring to Modernism. This term is
not to be confused with Spanish-American modemismo, an entirely
different literary movement. Just in terms of basic chronology, Modernism
referred originally to Anglo-American literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and modemismo
to Spanish American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In this