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

Notes

Notes 187 Chapter One The Revolution Will Be Novelized: Carlos Fuentes’s La región más transparente Constructs a Compensatory Totality 1. See Boldy for an exceptional close reading of the novel’s opening pages, especially notable for its discussion of the philosophical and literary influences on Fuentes’s work and the themes that occur in these pages that prefigure career-long preoccupations (16–29). 2. Rosario Castellanos casts Cienfuegos in the role of “inquisidor universal,” the character who compares all others’ actions with “las necesidades nacionales y con las exigencias históricas” (“Juventud” 178). Van Delden provides the most detailed analysis of Cienfuegos in the chapter dedicated to La región in his outstanding volume on Fuentes’s career. For useful discussions of Cienfuegos, see also Boldy (16–18), Foster (35–36, 41), Franco (“La región” 65–71), Goldenberg (15), Leal (216), ManzoRobledo (7–8), and Sánchez (167–68). 3. Zamacona has been analyzed by many critics of La región, who accurately compare his ideas to those of either Octavio Paz (see Sommers 137–52), Carlos Fuentes (see Sánchez 172–76, 211–24; and Goldenberg 22–33), or both (see Van Delden 31). See also Boldy (40). 4. Mexicanism refers, in general, to the effort to discover and define unique, authentically Mexican traits that define the national community. Schmidt notes that the term lo mexicano, or “the properly Mexican,” was already in common use by the first decade of the twentieth century (39). See Gyurko for a discussion of Mexicanism’s influence on the Mexican novel (243–44). Ochoa argues that La región parodies Mexicanism (196n6). While Manuel Zamacona, the character most explicitly aligned with Mexicanism, indeed dies an absurd death that challenges and even mocks his Mexicanist pieties, the novel’s conclusion, I argue, represents an earnest mobilization of central ideas of Mexicanist thought. 5. Moreiras acknowledges that the term narrative fissure comes from the work of Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1034–69. 6. For examples of this interpretation of the Revolution, see Paz (Laberinto 294), and Fuentes (Tiempo 11). Amidst a number of very positive reviews, an early negative review of La región went so far as to accuse Fuentes of plagiarizing Paz. See Reeve (14–15). For studies of the Mexicanist influence on La región, see Boldy (2–3, 9, 12–15), Labastida (14–15), and Sánchez (199–207). 7. I refer to the post-Revolutionary state in the past tense because it is a political system whose validity was bankrupt by the 1980s, when the nationalist ideologues of the PRI were vanishing as they yielded to the party’s neoliberal technocrats, who began to gain power following the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–76). I discuss this in greater 188 Notes to Pages 22–25 detail in chapter 5. See also: Aguilar Camín, “Sólo cenizas”; Aguilar Camín, Después del milagro; and Álvarez, La crisis global. 8. In his “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” (1977/1988), Philip Abrams warns social scientists against treating the state as an object of study because such an approach reinforces the idea that the state is coherent and autonomous, an illusion that helps legitimize the state’s authority , coercion, and domination. I am referring here to Laclau’s notion of “communitarian fullness,” which refers to a non-existent, ideal state of community whose attainability becomes the battleground of political forms competing for hegemony. See Laclau’s Emancipation(s). 9. In “La encrucijada” (1994), Lorenzo Meyer details how this period witnessed accelerated processes of urbanization, industrialization, and political centralization. See also Alan Knight, “The Peculiarities of Mexican History” (1992). 10. Teleological and centralized representational structures include intense and varied—and often state-sponsored—cultural production, such as the work produced by the Escuela mexicana de pintores [Mexican School of Painters] and Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology. 11. National unity became one of the Mexican state’s ideological hallmarks during the height of national-populism. It is often noted that one of the important rhetorical shifts that took place when Ávila Camacho succeeded Cárdenas is that references to socialism and to class conflict disappeared from official discourse, replaced by persistent calls to national unity. A telling example of this shift is the change in mottos of the increasingly powerful Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) that took effect when C...