After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon by Pedro García-Caro (review)

Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon are, in at least one important respect, strikingly different authors. Whereas Pynchon is notorious for his aversion to publicity, Fuentes spent his entire career diligently courting the public eye. While Fuentes seemed ubiquitous—giving interviews, lecturing on college campuses, writing newspaper articles, and rubbing shoulders with cultural and political celebrities—Pynchon has remained all but invisible, giving his audience virtually nothing beyond his literary work. One might say that Pynchon represents an extreme version of the American author’s social and cultural marginality, whereas Fuentes was a perfect embodiment of the politically engaged Latin American intellectual.

Looking beyond the different images that these authors projected, Pedro García-Caro argues that the works of Fuentes and Pynchon have important thematic elements in common. Both the Mexican and the American author wrote what García-Caro calls “postnational satire,” works that denounce and seek to undermine the political artifacts known as “nations,” as well as the ideology of nationalism that sustains them. To make his case, the author discusses four novels by Fuentes—La región más transparente (1958), La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Cambio de piel (1967), and La campaña (1990)—and three by Pynchon—V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1967), and Mason & Dixon (1997). As one can see, the book’s emphasis is firmly on the earlier periods of these authors’ careers. García-Caro develops his argument in a vigorous and engaging, but also one-sided, manner. The thesis he puts forward about Fuentes and Pynchon seems confining for such complex and capacious writers. It works better for Pynchon than for Fuentes, whose views on the nation García-Caro simplifies and distorts.

According to García-Caro, Fuentes and Pynchon attack nations and nationalism for being false, homogenizing, and repressive constructs. In his first two major novels, La región and Artemio Cruz, Fuentes satirizes Mexican post-revolutionary nationalist ideology and the governing class that promotes it, showing how the nationalist image of consensus serves to cover up the fact that Mexico’s elites were in this period selling out to US economic interests. In Cambio de piel, Fuentes continues his assault on the myths and symbols of Mexican nationhood, while simultaneously adopting a universalizing perspective, in which the violence of Mexican history is seen as part of a phenomenon occurring at different times and in different places. La campaña is read as a diagnosis of the failure of the Spanish American wars of independence, a failure that resulted from the misguided adoption of French Enlightenment ideas.

García-Caro reads V. as an attack on US imperialism, focusing on its grounding in the aggressive nationalist ideology that took center stage in the United States during the Cold War. The Crying of Lot 49 illustrates, through the limited consciousness of its protagonist, Californian housewife Oedipa Maas, the deadening trap of post-war American nationalist ideology. And Mason & Dixon focuses on the cruelty and violence of the colonialist enterprise that subtended the creation of the United States.

García-Caro’s readings are consistently thought-provoking and set in a broad historical context. Especially suggestive is his notion that both Fuentes and Pynchon ought to be read against the background of the rise of the New Left, although his discussion of the topic remains sketchy. He doesn’t explain, for example, how the New Left was different from the old left. Overall, García-Caro makes a persuasive case for the idea that these two authors can be profitably studied together.

Nevertheless, After the Nation inspires serious reservations. In the first place, one observes a certain conceptual drift in García-Caro’s thinking. The ostensible target of Fuentes’s and Pynchon’s satire is the nation, but García-Caro spends a great deal of time discussing topics such as the Enlightenment, modernity...