Mexico's Ruins: Juan Garcia Ponce and the Writing of Modernity

Preface

Preface In the following text, I shall examine a trilogy of García Ponce’s novels, several collections of essays on art and literature, and a number of short stories, in the context of a modernizing Mexican State and questions of citizenry. I shall focus on cultural issues related to modernity, relations between the Americas and Europe, aesthetics and narrative structures, the role of the storyteller , and inter-artistic influences and their often ambiguous results. I begin with a chapter on theory, addressing in particular concepts of philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, as well as the notions of the ruin developed by anthropologist Quetzil Castañeda. I will explore here as well some of the central tropes of modernity, including the modern itself as a trope and the allegory of the ruin whose material existence is tinged and tangled with those bits that have fallen or disappeared on the road to modernity, much like the statue of salt subsumed under official monuments which constantly call the attention of García Ponce and his narrators. I shall follow these theoretical issues and initiatives with a more focused and textual consideration of the telling of these stories and how (or if) they are to be told. Who gets to tell what, and in what form, will constitute chapters 2 through 7, ending with a return visit to the theories deployed throughout. García Ponce suggestively revisits the literary text as others return to pay homage to the Ángel de la Independencia or to other equally ‘ruinous’ monuments. He wonders aloud whether literature is a means to an end or an end in itself. The conclusion leads readers to the vision of continuity and rupture we will find in both his own writings and in the theoretical propositions of Jameson, Habermas, and Benjamin regarding the ongoing project of modernity. In “Los medios del fin” [the means to an end], from Desconsideraciones, he writes that las obras nos dicen, en el mejor de los casos; pero su acción no termina en el momento de decir ni su realidad se cierra con este acto. Como los monumentos públicos, a los que la costumbre ha hecho invisibles 䊏 vii 䊏 una vez pasada la sorpresa que nos produjo encontrar donde antes no solíamos ver más que un espacio vacío a un militar montado a caballo y con la espada desenvainada, a un pensativo político de cráneo abultado y con las manos en la espalda o a una atractiva mujer desnuda transformada en alegoría de la virtud, los libros, las obras, siguen diciendo en silencio. [Works speak to us, in the best of cases, but their action does not end in the moment of speech nor does their reality end with this act. Like the public monuments, which the daily custom of seeing has made invisible to us once we have recovered from the initial surprise of finding, where only empty space was before, a military figure on horseback with sword in hand; a pensive politician with a large head and hands clasped behind his back; or an attractive nude woman representing the quality of virtue, books, written works, keep on speaking to us in silence.] “Los medios del fin” (2001 73–74) How the production of new texts represents allegories of these monumental structures—of literature or the arts in general—is the subject of our discussion . What might García Ponce do, in the space of the Jamesonian period and the rupture, with all of those texts that continue to “speak to us in silence”? My text explores the layers of meaning as sediments or traces of cultural concerns in Crónica de la intervención [Chronicle of an Intervention], De ánima [On the Spirit, the Soul], and Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia [Inmaculada or the Pleasures of Innocence] with an eye toward other narrations and other representations from the works of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Robert Musil, José Luis Cuevas, Manuel Felgúerez, the painter Balthus, Pierre Klossowski , Georges Bataille, Heimito von Doderer, Margo Glantz and a cacophony of other voices amid the din of Mexican modernity. After taking into consideration the constitutive elements of García Ponce’s tripartite set of storytelling panels and the triptych formed by the three novels, I expand the discussion to include both his last published novel entitled Pasado presente [Present Past] (1993) as the capstone of his narrative construction and Personas , lugares y anexas [People, Places...