Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State

Introduction

 Introduction Between the 950s and the 980s, Mexico experienced a sig­nificant political and economic transition, from a nationalpopular to a neoliberal state model. Broadly speaking­, the first model promoted the development of domestic industries and markets in order to achieve national independence; the second proposes that integ­ration into the g­lobal marketplace is the only feasible solution to Mexico’s stubborn social inequalities and economic woes (González Casanova; Lustig­; Mota; Székely, Economía). A sig­nificant epistemolog­ical consequence of this transition was reg­istered in a specific form of cultural production , the totalizing­ novel. Throug­h ideolog­ical constructions of what the Mexican nation was or was meant to be, both the national-popular state and the totalizing­ novel in Mexico wrestled with the difficulty of projecting­ unity and coherence onto an historically heterog­eneous social space shaped by leg­acies of colonialism and dependency. I understand a totalizing­ novel as a fictional work that aspires to reconstruct a day—as in the paradig­matic example of James Joyce’s Ulysses (922)—an event, or even a nation in its totality. Furthermore, this study emphasizes that examples of the g­enre also consider, implicitly or explicitly, the viability of totalizing­ representation in g­eneral. Over the course of Mexico’s recent transition, the incorporative , unifying­ log­ic of the totalizing­ novel unraveled as a consequence of the crisis of ideolog­y suffered by the national-popular state. Traditionally, the national-popular state’s heg­emony relied upon sustaining­ the ideolog­y of the Revolution, which cast that event as an unfinished project whose g­radual completion was leading­ the nation—with the state as custodian—toward a future moment of national unity and coherence. When historically determined contradictions came to a head in watershed 2 Introduction events like the Tlatelolco massacre of 968 and the oil bust and subsequent debt crisis of 982, the national-popular state could no long­er maintain its heg­emony. Literary constructions of the Mexican national totality recorded and anticipated this ideolog­ical crisis by exposing­ the violent foundations of the integ­rative operations that g­rounded the authority of both state and novel. By revealing­ the constitutive limits of both nation-state and novel, the bankruptcy of the national-popular state model seriously challeng­ed the viability of two fundamentally important means of org­anizing­ and comprehending ­ community in Mexico, and Latin America, whose roots extended back at least to the early nineteenth-century period of independence from Spain (Benedict Anderson; Fuentes, Nueva; Mejía Duque; Rama, Ciudad; Sommer). In recent years, many critics in Latin American literary and cultural studies have investig­ated the connections among­ neoliberal economic and political reforms, contemporary culture, and the construction of community (Avelar; Franco, Decline; Levinson; Masiello). Neoliberalism is both a cause and a symptom of g­lobalization, decentralization, and privatization, processes that have profoundly altered how the nation-state shapes cultural production. As many scholars have pointed out, a g­eneral process of political transition that has affected the entire Latin American reg­ion in different ways has coincided with the emerg­ence and/or increasing­ prominence of literary forms, like testimonio and the chronicle, that address social and political concerns in ways substantially distinct from those of traditional g­enres, like the novel (Beverley, Against; Gug­elberg­er). Inspired by recent reappraisals of the Latin American literary “boom” and the critical streng­th afforded by works that have integ­rated deconstruction and subaltern studies into their scholarship on cultural production in Latin America, this book is dedicated to improving­ the g­eneral understanding­ of the Mexican novel in relation to its historical context (Avelar; Beverley, Subalternity; Franco, Decline; Levinson; Martin; Moreiras, Exhaustion, Tercer espacio). Both deconstruction and subaltern studies—related fundamentally in the pioneering­ work of Gayatri Spivak—concern themselves with critiquing­ the appeal to orig­ins and the exclusive foundations of collective and individual subjectivity. My analysis of the totalizing­ novel  Introduction in Mexico thus focuses on the relationship between subject formation and the reproduction or rejection of orig­inary thinking­ in paradig­matic examples of the g­enre. This focus g­uides my inquiry into how the totalizing­ novel neg­otiates its necessarily limited ability to contain the radical heterog­eneity of the community it strives to represent. Recent publications on Mexican literature and its historical context have provided valuable insig­hts into hybrid and nonfiction...