Ángeles Mastretta: Textual Multiplicity (review)

Within the academic field, the frequently inverted relationship between a book's market success and its purported literary value offers critics—like Jane Elizabeth Lavery—the opportunity to reconsider authors works that, within certain circles, have been written off as "light" or "easy literature"—such as those by Mexican author Ángeles Mastretta (Puebla, 1949). The publication of the monographic study Ángeles Mastretta: Textual Multiplicity is Lavery's endeavor to "demonstrate the rich complexity and range of Mastretta's narratives" which are "underpinned by serious intent, fulfilling social and documentary functions" (4). In five of the six chapters that comprise this investigation, Lavery focuses primarily on Mastretta's major novels, Arráncame la vida (1985) and Mal de amores (1996), seeking to read them in the intersection of a "multiplicity" of historic, cultural and literary contexts: the Mexican revolutionary novel, testimonial narrative, new historical fiction, the folletín, farce, melodrama, myth, magical realism, carnival, post-Boom narrative, postmodernist writing, feminism and eroticism. In the final two chapters, the last dedicated to the author's lesser-known works, greater emphasis is given to the textual "body" of Mastretta's styles and techniques.

The first chapter, Lavery's initial set of "Contexts," summarizes the major historical events and socio-political atmosphere in Mexico from the Revolution to the mid 1960s, illustrating the chronology with intelligent examples from Mastretta's texts, and then traces a brief genealogy of literary "fathers" and "mothers" of the Mexican revolutionary novel. She concludes that within this literary vein, Mastretta's texts are of the most radical rewritings of a traditionally masculine articulation of history by introducing the "private life" of the (post-)Revolution through the "awakening" and transformation of women. This argument is enhanced in the following chapters through the close and comparative analysis of Catalina Guzmán and Emilia Suárez, the respective protagonists of Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, who embody the "evolution" of Mastretta's feminist perspective . Lavery's insightful reading does not gloss over the inherent contradictions that provide the depth and meat of these characters, but dwells on their ambiguities which, in turn, reflect the author's own: Is Mastretta a radical feminist? Does her writing of the female body draw on a male gaze or offer a woman's perspective of sexuality? Is her vision limited to the privileged of Mexico's elite? Does she propose a transformative model of female agency for negotiating Mexican modernity, or does she yearn for the stasis of a utopian past? Lavery's ability to convincingly answer affirmatively and negatively these and other questions is, in this reader's opinion, the book's greatest strength. Mastretta's prose is shown to be continually dancing back and forth between seemingly antithetical categories. Unfortunately, instead of rejecting the validity of these facile binary oppositions, some phrases in Lavery's own discourse such as "Emilia possess an almost male logical mind" (99), reaffirm these divisions.

In demonstrating Mastretta's ambiguous social and political positioning, Lavery holds up the texts she studies against numerous literary subgenres as sounding boards—with uneven results. For example, her comparison of Arráncame la vida with the testimonial novel, and in particular Elena Poniatowska's Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969), brings to light journalistic and oral qualities common to both works. Mastretta's novel, however, is not based on testimony, and her protagonist-narrator is of the author's invention; an extended reading vis-à-vis Seymour Menton's sometimes arbitrary but useful theorization of the "New Historical Novel," or Carlos Fuentes's almost parallel work, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), would perhaps be more fruitful. Nevertheless, Lavery's multiple cross-genre assessments make manifest the heterogeneous textual fabric of Mastretta's prose, a prose whose mixed registers and discourses, use of pastiche, parody, popular and high culture lead the critic to classify it as "postmodern" and "post-Boom."

It is in the employment of these and other labels that Lavery's project at times is problematic. In order to reevaluate Mastretta's texts in relationship with...