NOTES
NOTES CHAPTER 1: TRACES OF THEORY, TROPES OF MODERNITY 1. As he writes of the current state of the humanities and the university in crisis, Dominick LaCapra turns, perhaps not unexpectedly, to the trope of ruin and the works of Habermas and Benjamin as referential of the ruin in more positive terms than negative. In a detailed footnote LaCapra mentions that this metaphor does not belong only to those philosphers mentioned but also to Adolph Hitler and Albert Speer, whose turn toward monumental relic contradicts the absence of nostalgia in Benjamin’s view of the ruin. The Third Reich gives a “ruin value” to the architectural feats (LaCapra 202) that Benjamin disputes. We might in a future study examine the links between dictatorial figures and the architectural ruin that survives their reigns. 2. In his book on modern Mexico, Rubén Gallo designates five fronts on the battleground of the early postrevolutionary nation of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera, the typewriter, the radio, cement architecture, and the public stadium. Although, as I write, his book has not yet been published, we appear to coincide somewhat in the deployment of these ‘tropic’ items in that I have chosen to approach García Ponce and the second half of the century from the perspectives of three of these, namely the photograph, the architectural structure, and the sports stadium. Gallo is to be admired for his exploration of cultural practices and modes of representation that indicate a break with the past. I hope to signal the shadowing of “the break and the period” in written and visual texts of this later era. 3. In the sixteenth-century text Crónica Mexicáyotl, the cronista Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc emphasizes the eight cultural and linguistic groups that merge in the valley of Mexico to form what will become Tenochtitlán. But his contemporary, the indigenous historian Domingo Francisco de San Antón Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, builds into the alternative version of events contained in his narrative not merely the patronymics of the founding of the city but the first acts of construction. In La fundación de México [The Founding of Mexico] he describes the procuring 䊏 193 䊏 of food from the lagoons as a communal activity, followed by the physical founding of a place. He writes: “E inmediatamente fueron a vender y a comprar , regresaron luego y tomaron piedra y madera, aquélla pequeñita y ésta delgadita; y al punto cimentaron con ellas, al borde de la cueva; pusieron así la raíz del poblado aquel: la casa y templo de Huitzilopochtli” [And immediately they went out to sell and to buy, then they returned and took up stone and wood, the first very small and the second very thin; and at that moment they built a foundation with them outside the cave; they gave root that way to that settlement: the house and temple of Huitzilopochtli] (18). It is obvious that, for this chronicler at least, the material building of a community is an early sign of an imagined collectivity that shares structures of belief (the temple) and of exchange (buying and selling). Unless otherwise indicated all translations from Spanish are my own. CHAPTER 2: THE STORYTELLER’S RUINS 1. Writing on politics and aesthetics in the Latin American novel, critic Raymond Williams notes that, in the case of Mexico, Carlos Fuentes, Juan García Ponce, Fernando del Paso, and others of that generation “were the producers of the grand narrative, memorable characters, and [that] their interests were fundamentally epistemological” (41). I tend to disagree with this statement to the extent that García Ponce’s texts, while interested in history, are not historicist. If the “grand narratives” survive, they do not look like they did before. Perhaps Williams and I would agree to call this writer a modernist (Williams goes on to say he is not postmodern) for two reasons: one, there are still semblances of plot and character, if fragmented; two, he is the epitome of modern aesthetics in Habermas’s terms of unfinished projects. The grand narratives do not spin into nothingness, but they do not correspond to the official projects of celebratory nationhood either. 2. In her useful overview of the Mexican novel between 1968 and 1988, Cynthia Steele dedicates one entire section of her book to a category designated as “The Novel of Tlatelolco” and to the narratives and documents produced as a result of the events of 1968. By extension, Vittoria Borsò refers to the...
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