La excentricidad del texto: El carácter poético del Nuevo catecismo para indios remisos (review)

In the wake of Carlos Monsiváis’s death in 2010, critics can expect a wave of new publications on his work. The edited volume on his Nuevo catecismo para indios remisos, begun before Monsiváis’s death and in collaboration with him, is one such text. Refreshingly, it signals an important gap in critical studies of the Mexican cronista: “de todos los Monsiváis posibles, el menos conocido y menos frecuentado es el escritor de ficción . . . la crítica literaria . . . menciona el Nuevo catecismo para indios remisos como uno de sus libros importantes, pero lo ha dejado prácticamente intocado” (14). The stated goal of the volume is to remedy this problem by compiling critical essays on the collection, interviews with Monsiváis, and four of the fifty-one short texts from the book in question. The volume includes analyses by several of the best-known academic critics of Monsiváis’s works, among them Margo Glantz, Jean Franco, Linda Egan, and Sara Poot Herrera. It also includes writings by Monsiváis’s cultural contemporaries, such as Sergio Pitol, Rafael Barajas “El Fisgón,” Juan Gelman, and Adolfo Castañón. Together, the essays in La excentricidad del texto contextualize the Nuevo catecismo with respect to Monsiváis’s other works, examine his fictional writing style (comparing him, for instance, to Borges and Kafka), and emphasize the religious influences on his postmodern approach to culture and society in his fiction as well as in his crónicas.

There have been four different editions of the Nuevo catecismo para indios remisos since 1982, one each by Siglo XXI and Lecturas Mexicanas, and two by Ediciones Era, one in 1996 and the other in 2001. Each edition incorporates, to greater or lesser degree, the engravings by Francisco Toledo; each successive edition also includes more of Monsiváis’s short stories than the last. As the four selected texts chosen to be included in Serur’s volume clearly demonstrate, these fictions are parodies of the fables, hagiography, and tales of miracles that undergirded the Roman Catholic inscription of indigenous peoples into the faith during the Virreinato. Yet by parodying the Church’s rhetorical structures of power in the past, consistent with Monsiváis’s other texts, they implicitly comment on contemporary Mexican society as well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, given the NCIR’s postmodern mix of colonial fable and present-day politics, the problem most critics in this edited volume confront is how to distinguish the fictional aspects of the collection from Monsiváis’s crónicas. Carmen Galindo, for instance, writes that the NCIR “es y no es una excepción en el conjunto de la obra de Carlos Monsiváis. No lo es, porque tanto sus crónicas como sus críticas tienen como finalidad primordial ser literatura, y lo es, porque es la única de sus obras que pertenece a un género literario con todas las de la ley, el cuento” (68). This sort of ambivalence about the place of the Nuevo catecismo within Monsiváis’s larger ouevre is evident in the essayists’ descriptions of the collection: they by turns call it a “texto híbrido,” “un calepino cripto-multilingüe,” and an “obra satírica de doble filo” (Castañón 31); “un homenaje consciente a[l traductor de la Biblia al español] Casiodoro de Reina y a su lenguaje” (Pitol 55); and an example of “el irreverente barroco de un reformista protestante” (Galindo 69).

For many of the essayists, in particular Castañón, Pitol, and Serur, this aesthetic hybridity does not reside solely in the realm of fiction, but instead is bound up with Monsiváis’s biography. A quote from Monsiváis’s 1967 Autobiografía, included in Emmanuel Carballo’s Nuevos escritores mexicanos del siglo XX presentados por sí mismos, in which he talks about the influence of Protestantism on him and his family, is used...