Jaime Torres Bodet's Primero de enero : The anti-novel of the Mexican Revolution

Among Mexican novelists of the 1920s and 1930s, Jaime Torres Bodet stands out as a figure driven by what Octavio Paz has called "the will to be modern." During the 1920s and 1930s, he—along with other members of the Contemporáneos group—produced a series of novels experimenting with the modern techniques of narration that had been developed by Marcel Proust and James Joyce. These two decades saw the production of some of the most radical experiments with narrative form in Mexico, a modernist corpus that includes five novels by Torres Bodet—Margarita de niebla (1926), La educación sentimental (1929), Estrella de día (1931), Proserpina rescatada (1931), and Primero de enero (1935)—as well as Xavier Villaurrutia's Dama de corazones (1928) and Gilberto Owen's Novela como nube (1928). In Idle Fictions, Gustavo Pérez Firmat has studied how these texts exploded the conventions of narrative form by doing away with recognizable plots, characters, and novelistic structure.

Out of this corpus of Mexican modernist novels, there is one that has not yet been studied: Primero de enero, Torres Bodet's last novel, and a work that marks the end of the period of experimentation with narrative form among Mexican writers. I will show that this is an extremely important work, for it foregrounds Torres Bodet's dialogue with two modernist writers—James Joyce and Marcel Proust—as well as his position vis-à-vis the impassioned debates that marked Mexican letters in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. As I will argue, this novel can be read as Torres Bodet's critique of the writer who dominated the Mexican literary scene in the post-revolutionary period—Mariano Azuela. Primero de enero, I will demonstrate, is the anti-novel of the Mexican Revolution.

My analysis will highlight Torres Bodet's fascination with the relation between technology and narrative techniques: Primero de enero creates a narrative space inhabited by the technological artifacts of the modern era: cameras, adding machines, dictaphones, typewriters, and other versions of writing machines. By combining the use of experimental narrative techniques and the representation of technological artifacts, the novelist sought to rejuvenate Mexican narrative in the post-revolutionary period. Primero de enero represents Torres Bodet's most radical effort at producing a thoroughly modern novel. More than any of the writer's other writings, this work addresses the complex relationship between the representation of technology and the technologization of narrative—a double movement through which Torres Bodet distances himself and his fiction from the post-revolutionary injunction to write nationalist novels.

Primero de enero

Primero de enero frustrates the reader's expectations for a recognizable plot. Almost nothing happens in the novel, which recounts twelve hours in the life of Gonzalo Castillo, the director of the "Sociedad General de Comercio y Exportación," a powerful trade organization that controls much of his city's commercial activity. The narrative opens with Gonzalo waking up at 5:15 am on New Year's Day. Overcome by a sense of purposelessness, he walks to his office even though the entire building is closed for the holiday. After shuffling through some papers and deciding to quit his job, he strolls throughout the city streets, where he bemusedly contemplates the towering billboards advertising products controlled by his office. He continues strolling until he arrives at a city park, where a guard arrests him for entering the premises without an admission ticket. As he waits to be booked, Gonzalo becomes intrigued by Felipe Robles, a young photographer who has taken the picture of every criminal who has ever passed though the police station, including the infamous Fernando Snickers, the assassin of President Lindarte.

Noticing Gonzalo's fascination with the story of the killer, the photographer offers to introduce him to Snicker's daughter, whom he knows. After the police chief recognizes him...