The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Where no page number is given for an English version throughout, the translation is mine. 2. Fuentes makes a strong case for including the Mexican-American War of 1846– 1848 as the negatively definitive moment in Mexican history, calling it the ‘‘Tremendous Texas Trauma’’ (Myself, 15). This list could be expanded to include more recent events: the failure of the 1960s student movement, ending in the bloody 1968 Massacre of Tlatelolco; the economic reforms of the last twenty-five years that have created a mass exodus to the United States; and the peasant revolts of the 1990s in Chiapas, whose leader, the semiotician-turned-subcomandante Marcos, has used the media to transform the resounding Zapatista military failure into a quasi-victory. In addition, the recent presidential victory of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) over the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is also proving to be short-lived. 3. For an interesting speculation about the relationship between modernity and failure by a major intellectual figure of the Mexican Left, see José Revueltas, ‘‘La lucha contra el fracaso’’ (159–162). 4. Anderson writes in the tradition of sociologically inclined critics like Walter Benjamin, Ian Watt, and Raymond Williams, linking the rise of print capitalism to the rise of the modern nation-state. He locates the origin of nationalism within the Industrial Revolution and argues that literacy and the wide dissemination of the ideas facilitated by mechanical reproduction built ‘‘imagined communities’’ of likeminded individuals who were held together by a common language as well as by the knowledge of simultaneous acts of reading (Imagined Communities, 35).The key element in the new nations’ sense of themselves lies in their citizens’ belief in the perpetuity of the collective act—if any one individual dies, the rest will continue reading in community, every day, ad infinitum. According to Anderson, the rise of the nineteenth-century novel is symptomatic of this sea-change from ‘‘messianic’’ to ‘‘empty’’ time (he coincidentally offers Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento as one of his test cases). The novel provides a ‘‘tour d’horizon’’ quite different from the ‘‘tour du monde’’ that previous literary forms like the epic or the Bible had provided (30). The novel instead offers a world where ‘‘the horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico . . . [It] conjures up a space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony’’ (30). The realist novel offers typification, the comfort of an itinerary , and an imposition of a manageable subjective scale (what Gérard Genette might call focalisation). It offers the notion that a single witness can see enough of the world to satisfy and engage an entire community but also the idea that a text can act metonymically, one for the whole, like the reader of the newspaper who con- fidently believes herself to be part of the imagined community of countless other readers. 5. Addressing the particularly difficult question of the place of Latin America within modernity, Néstor García Canclini sees a paradox: ‘‘Why will we worry about postmodernity when, on our continent, modern advances have advanced neither entirely nor to everyone?’’ (Culturas, 20); or, more bluntly, as Roger Bartra put it to Raymond L.Williams: ‘‘we here in Mexico keep struggling to reach modernity, and there you are in the United States worrying about postmodernity’’ (Postmodernidades, 42). Carlos Alonso has also written about this conflicted relationship in The Burden of Modernity. 6. This inward-looking essentialist discourse, which blends national pride with a self-critical stance, dominated the Mexican intellectual scene roughly from the 1920s on. It sought to distill ‘‘Mexicanness’’ or the ‘‘Mexican character’’ and became the core of the key cultural institutions and products of the period, informing the work of the Mexican muralists (Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros) and novelists like Agustín Yáñez and guiding state-sponsored interest in folk and indigenous culture, an interest which culminated in the creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Centro Indigenista. The reading list of ‘‘mexicanidad’’ is long and distinguished, often blurring the disciplinary lines between philosophy, literature , history, sociology, and what we now call cultural criticism (for more detailed studies, see Stabb, In Quest of Identity; and Schmidt, The Roots of Lo Mexicano). It has its classics, like Visión de An...