Fictions of Totality

Cover

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Title Page

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Copyright

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Contents

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

Introduction

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pp. 1-13

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Mexico experienced a sig�nificant political and economic transition, from a national-popular to a neoliberal state model. Broadly speaking�, the first model promoted the development of domestic industries and markets in order to achieve national...

1. The Revolution Will Be Novelized: Carlos Fuentes's La regi�n m�s transparente Constructs a Compensatory Totality

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pp. 15-47

The principal action of Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958) takes place between 1951 and 1954 in Mexico City. An anonymous omniscient narrator shifts constantly from one story to the next. As a result, the reader gradually becomes familiar with numerous...

2. Animating the Popular: Fernando del Paso's Jos� Trigo and the Ruins of Totalizing Thought

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pp. 49-79

José Trigo (1966), Fernando del Paso’s first novel, relates fictional accounts of three significant historical moments of post-Revolutionary Mexico: the Cristero Rebellion of 1926–29, the railroad workers’ movement of 1958–59, and, to a lesser but still important degree, the 1964...

3. The Stained Plaza: Mar�a Luisa Mendoza's Con �l, conmigo, con nosotros tres and the Origins of the Mestizo Nation

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pp. 81-115

María Luisa Mendoza’s first novel, Con Él, conmigo, con nosotros tres (1971), is one of the earliest literary interpretations of the Tlatelolco massacre. A fictionalized, multi-perspective, semi-autobiographical account subtitled “cronovela,”...

4. Totality in Post-Tlatelolco Mexico: Subjectivity and Interpellation in Jorge Aguilar Mora's Si muero lejos de ti

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pp. 117-149

Jorge Aguilar Mora’s second novel, Si muero lejos de ti (1979), tells a remarkable and strange story about violence and paintings set in Mexico City during the Student Movement of 1968 and the years following the Tlatelolco massacre. Its protagonist, Yoris, is a young...

5. The "Machine of Savage Stories": State, Fiction, and Totality in H�ctor Aguilar Cam�n's Morir en el golfo

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pp. 151-181

The unnamed narrator of Héctor Aguilar Camín’s first novel, Morir en el golfo (1986), is a journalist who finds himself wrapped up in the investigation of a series of what appear to be politically motivated murders. In March 1976 his erstwhile friend Francisco Rojano Gutiérrez...

Conclusion

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pp. 183-185

The totalizing novel is the product of a centralized society whose goal is coherent, self-contained autonomy. Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente represents this ideal in its exhaustive effort to contain all of Mexico’s history within its pages and to present itself...

Notes

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pp. 187-202

Works Cited

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pp. 203-216

Index [Includes About the Author and Back Cover]

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pp. 217-223