A Large Aggregate of Men: Garro, Renan and the Failure of Alliance

I offer a new interpretation of Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963) by reading it as a political critique of the tense relations between class consciousness and national consolidation. To do so, I read her novel against the nation form as theorized by Ernest Renan in his speech, What is a Nation? (1882). I argue that Renan's insufficiently executed turn against race blunts the force of his argument regarding the nation form, a contradiction that Garro's novel highlights. Ultimately, Renan's theory of the nation is based on a kind of consensual alliance that Garro represents as a near impossibility.