Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State

Conclusion

183 Conclusion 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—and by extension the genre of the totalizing novel—as uniquely capable of transmitting that history , thereby setting the stage for a more promising future based on national self-knowledge and an epistemology that is able to produce that knowledge and reproduce itself. Yet the exclusive foundations of totalizing thought stubbornly make themselves known, at the limit of Fuentes’s novel in its construction of Gladys García as the subaltern, and at the impasse that the narrator of José Trigo reaches when he mourns the loss of the historical , and historiographical, space once embodied by the train yards of Nonalco-Tlatelolco. The ultimately self-destructive attempt to preserve itself that the national-popular state made in 1968 changed the literary as well as the political landscape. Any totalizing novel written afterward could not avoid addressing Tlatelolco, and Mendoza’s and Aguilar Mora’s novels are thus paradigmatic. Their representations of Tlatelolco are also explicit critiques of the way in which the political power of the state based itself on an exclusive claim to the authorized ability of constructing national history as a guiding force. Con Él and Si muero undermine the originary thinking that structures that claim and test the limits of totalizing thought by recognizing and struggling with its inevitably violent consequences. The parodied instances of totality in Morir en el golfo are a far cry from Ixca Cienfuegos’s triumphant transformation at the conclusion of La región. The national-popular dream as configured in the novel’s characterization of López Portillo’s petroleum 184 Conclusion policy and Pizarro’s parallel political economy is hence removed from any productive association with historical reality or means of imagining the nation and its trajectory. In July 2000, the PRI lost its first presidential election since its predecessor party was founded in 1929. The last three presidents who belonged to the party—de la Madrid, Salinas, and Ernesto Zedillo—promoted economic policies that intensified and expanded the neoliberal reforms introduced in the early 1980s. The most significant reform was the implementation of NAFTA on January 1, 1994. When the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN, made its explosive appearance on the same day, it began a strong, sustained challenge to both neoliberalism and traditional party-politics in Mexico. Though the Zapatistas flirted briefly with their own political party, the FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), they are now firmly anti-party, a position exemplified by Subcomandante Marcos’s “Otra campaña,” which he organized as the EZLN’s response to the bitterly contested 2006 presidential race. The Zapatista insurgency and the accession to power of Vicente Fox in December 2000 posed the two most significant challenges to the single-party system that structured Mexican politics for more than two-thirds of the twentieth century. The Zapatistas’ anti-party nationalism calls for inclusiveness but rejects ultimately exclusive governmental hierarchies. Fox’s positions on the economy were generally a continuation of the neoliberal policies of the national leaders who preceded him, but his election ended the automatic association between the state and the PRI. The economic transition that culminated in the dissolution of the national-popular state in the 1980s was paralleled by an equally significant political transition that reached its defining moment in 2000. Both transitions are characterized by decentralization , a process whose impact on Mexican cultural production has produced notable tendencies that differ significantly from the trajectory of the totalizing novel during the nationalpopular period. Two recent phenomena in Mexican literature help explain how decentralization frames the history of the totalizing novel. They are, first, the predominance of the chronicle, practiced most famously not only by Poniatowska and Monsiváis but also by Subcomandante Marcos; and, second, the most recent iden- 185 Conclusion tifiable generation of Mexican writers, known as “el Crack.” The chronicle’s open-ended style and its immediate timeliness work against the self-contained synthesis desired by totalizing thought and the totalizing novel. The chronicle is germane to a historical age that lacks a clear, grand narrative like those constructed and sustained by national-popular ideology and mid-century Mexicanism. The...