Mexico's Ruins: Juan García Ponce and the Writing of Modernity (review)

When the central writer of the most important cultural movement in Mexico's transition into post-modernity is almost unknown in the United States, even among academics in the field, a book that addresses that ignorance is welcome. Juan García Ponce (1932-2003), a prolific author in multiple creative genres as well as criticism of both the verbal and visual arts, was the driving force behind the generation of writers referred to under varying nomenclatures—Medio Siglo, Revista Mexicana de Literatura 2nd Period, La Casa del Lago, or Ruptura. Along with the visual artists associated with them, they changed the face of Mexican cultural production in the 1950s and 1960s. In Mexico García Ponce is recognized as a major player in the process of extricating both literature and the visual arts from the morass of thematic clichés and exhausted stylistics in which the post-revolutionary School of Mexican Art was mired by the mid-century. As Rodríguez-Hernández's subtitle announces, he intends to explicate García Ponce's role in the creation of Mexico's modernity.

The author proposes to read García Ponce's texts as examples of a process of simultaneous creativity and destruction that produce, not only something new, but the "new" itself, the "modern" in dialectical tension with monuments from previous high points of cultural innovation. He focuses, however, almost exclusively on García Ponce's last period, analyzing three out of his last four novels and even utilizing a late memoir to contextualize the author's life and career. There are moments of insight—particularly when the critic struggles with the author's paradoxical treatment of innocence or engages his intricate intertextual web—but the text too often strays from García Ponce's work into protracted discussions of how whatever issue in question has been dealt with by others, and here Walter Benjamin is his favorite, receiving a good percentage of space that might have been better utilized to trace the origins of García Ponce's obsessions in his own works, in the critics and writers he himself referenced, or in the work of his generation with whom he was in such intimate dialogue.

For instance, while the close relationship between written and visual texts is stressed, no use is made of theoretical writings by the painter Manuel Felguérez that directly address the utilization of image and form repetition, texts that might have facilitated a different insight into the doubling of a character in Crónica de la intervención or the significance of "always the same and always different," a favorite García Ponce phrase—to speak nothing of the visual record of Vicente Rojo that speaks directly to the same issue. In addition, it would seem the author either has not thoroughly read García Ponce's vast bibliography or chosen to ignore works that would have answered some of his questions through intratextuality instead of misleading intertextual references. To state that García Ponce never directly addressed the sacredness of the literary text is to not understand García Ponce's blurring of the traditional boundaries between the visual and the verbal, and to ignore perhaps the cornerstone essay in his aesthetics, "El arte y lo sagrado"—absent from the bibliography—in which what starts out as a discussion of the visual arts modulates into a discussion of the sacred in writing, from Friedrich Hölderlin to Maurice Blanchot, summarizing his own concept of the creation of the sacred by literary texts. Absent as well is most of the relevant critical bibliography on García Ponce. True, as the author states, relatively little has been done on the novels he studies, but to ignore the wealth of writing on the rest of his production is to fail to utilize materials that would have assisted greatly...