The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

6. Guillermo G

CHAPTER 6 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Bordering on Madness and Performing Liminality For our final consideration we come to the border, both literal and metaphorical. For this I invoke the story of one of the most memorable border figures in Hispanic literature, Miguel de Cervantes’s licenciado Vidriera. He is found in the Novelas ejemplares (1613), in an odd little short story about a ‘‘wise’’ madman who has come to believe that he is made of glass and because of this odd delusion becomes marginalized and is made a spectacle. He uses the limelight, however, to begin issuing outrageous and often offensive pronouncements—all to the growing delight of the crowd. The voice of this ranting holy fool, whose delusion of transparency gives him license to criticize, reverberates throughout Hispanic culture. We hear his echoes in Lizardi, in José Rodó’s Ariel (1900), and in Vasconcelos’s bizarre, séance-like pronouncement from the wilderness. More recently, reinvigorated by postmodernity’s penchant for ironic dissociation, the voice of the mad licenciado has resonated again: a recent ‘‘Vidriera’’ madman is the Zapatista guerrilla leader subcomandante Marcos, who during the Chiapas uprisings of the 1990s broadcast his witty, disembodied, and self-ironic communiqués from the jungle over the Internet. Yet another contemporary, self-reflexive ‘‘Vidriera’’ madman is the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a man who describes himself as a ‘‘Mexican in the process of Chicanoization’’ (New World Border, 102). This chapter examines the work of Gómez-Peña through the filter of the licenciado Vidriera’s peculiar madness. The licenciado is a very specific kind of holy fool. Many other famous fools—William Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear, François Rabelais ’s Panurge, even Cervantes’s own Sancho Panza—use their position as mad oracle to offer witty, topical wisdom, the significance of which seems either lost or immaterial to the fool himself but is received by his hearers with wonder.Vidriera, in contrast, seems to be keenly aware of the nature of his folly; and in a way his supposed wisdom offers to society a parody of the insights that it expects to receive from its mad- men. Gómez-Peña, like Vidriera, is a master rhetorician who appears to offer pointed social and political criticism but who also critiques the privilege of offering advice: by calling attention to the spectacle of wisdom , he at once exploits and questions the place of wisdom itself. At first blush, the story of the licenciado Vidriera would seem to belong to the picaresque genre. It begins on the banks of the River Tormes, at the same place where the Lazarillo begins, and also starts with a rootless young boy who is taken and apprenticed by strangers. But here we run into a departure from the genre: the strangers in this case happen to be students, so it appears that Tomás’s new occupation will be the life of the mind.The students take him with them into their quarters at the university, and Tomás indeed excels at book learning; as he says, it is a way to make headway in life, since he has heard that men can become bishops through learning. This becomes one of the central themes of the story: an awareness of the privileging power of knowledge. Tomas’s initial apprenticeship in the scholarly life colors the rest of what would normally be, according to picaresque conventions, a succession of apprenticeships in other pursuits. Tomás is given the opportunity to move onto other pursuits when an officer going abroad offers to take him along on his military expedition. Tomás wishes to go, for, as the narrator states, ‘‘las luengas peregrinaciones hacen a alos hombres discretos’’ [long pilgrimages increase men’s knowledge and discretion ] (Novelas, 2:107). But he agrees to go only if he can remain an aloof scholar, saying that ‘‘no se había de sentar debajo de bandera’’ [he would bow to no flag] except the flag of learning. This wish for a cerebral , bookish stance almost makes him disappear from the narrative. As Ruth El-Saffar notes, we barely see or hear the main character in this section, and the narrative flattens into a panoramic Guide bleu of Italy, listing wines, places to visit, and sights to see in an engaging if impersonal style (From Novel to Romance, 54).The main character, in his goal...