The Novels of Fernando del Paso


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                                              Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
                                            Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
                                            Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
                                            Florida International University, Miami
                                               Florida State University, Tallahassee
                                             University of Central Florida, Orlando
                                                 University of Florida, Gainesville
                                           University of North Florida, Jacksonville
                                               University of South Florida, Tampa
                                               University of West Florida, Pensacola










The Novels of Fernando del Paso





Robin W. Fiddian





















University Press of Florida
Gainesville - Tallahassee - Tampa - Boca Raton
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Copyright 2ooo by Robin W. Fiddian
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fiddian, Robin W.
The novels of Fernando del Paso / Robin W. Fiddian.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8130-1806-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
i. Paso, Fernando del, 193 5-Fictional works. I. Title.
PQ7z98.z6.A76 Z65 2000
863'.64-dc21 00-0325 86

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Contents


Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations: Reading the Novels
   of Fernando del Paso Intertextually 9

 z. Josd Trigo: A Novel of Hybridity and Regeneration 29

 3. Palinuro de Mdxico: The Body, the Nation,
   and the Book of the World 72

 4. Noticias del Imperio and the New Historical Novel io5

 5. Linda 67: The Homeland Strikes Back 141

 Conclusion 155

Notes 157

Bibliography 163

Index 179










Acknowledgments


I am grateful to Fernando del Paso and the staff of the Agencia Literaria
Carmen Balcells (Barcelona) for their kindness in allowing me to repro-
duce a range of material from his novels. I also wish to thank Susan Fer-
nandez and her colleagues at the University Press of Florida for the speedy
and professional handling of my manuscript.
   Several other institutions and individuals have assisted with the present
project. I wish to acknowledge the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Lan-
guages, the Hayter Committee, and the Interfaculty Committee for Latin
American Studies -all at Oxford University-for awarding me a series of
travel and research grants that enabled me to produce a final text between
1994 and 1999; some years earlier, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne
supported the project at an initial stage and is entitled to a proportional
share of the credit.
   John Wainwright of the Hispanic section of the Taylor Library at Ox-
ford University gave me unfailing support throughout the time of writing;
Ian Michael, aka David Serafin, shared with me his encyclopedic knowl-
edge of la novela negra; Robert Young and Christina Howells, both of
Wadham College, Oxford, were a constant source of encouragement and
intellectual stimulus, as were Donald Shaw of University of Virginia, Clive
Griffin of Trinity College, Oxford, and Sir Peter Russell of Belsyre Court,
Oxford. I am especially grateful to Enrico Mario Santi for his continuing
friendship and endless supply of materials and information; to Rebecca
Biron of University of Miami for alerting me to the presentation of the
Empress Carlota in El eterno femenino by Rosario Castellanos; and to
Blanca Merino Juti, Jane Garnett, Alfonso Gonzilez, John King, and Ilan
Stavans for providing me with various types of material, including biblio-
graphical references.
   In other latitudes, Ren6 Aviles Fabila, Juan Jose Barrientos, Alberto
Blanco, Elizabeth Corral Pena, Hugo Iriarte, Hector Manjarrez, Carlos
Monsiviis, Miguel Rodriguez Lozano, Alberto Ruy Sinchez, and Ignacio
Solares all showed interest in the project and gave it their unfailing sup-
port. Special thanks go to Fernando del Paso and his wife, Socorro, in
recognition of the unlimited friendship and hospitality that they have





VIII I Acknowledgments

heaped on me since we first met in 1980; to Prof. Enrique Pupo Walker, for
several years of encouragement with this project; and to Dr. Leopoldo
Zea, who generously interrupted a busy schedule to grant me a lengthy
interview in his offices in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
on 9 March 1998. Finally, Maria Donapetry contributed massively to the
completion of this book through her patience and companionship in loca-
tions in and around Los Angeles, Oxford, Gijon, and Vivero.

Note on Translation
All translations from Spanish into English are by the author.







Introduction


Fernando del Paso (Mexico City 1935) is the author of four highly ac-
claimed novels that exemplify many of the major trends in Mexican and
Spanish American fiction of the last four decades of the twentieth century.
His first literary endeavor was a volume of poetry, Sonetos de lo diario,
published in 1958. In April 1959 he began work on Jose Trigo, an ambi-
tious novel that took seven years to complete. Upon its publication in
1966, Josd Trigo won the prestigious Xavier Villaurutia Prize, awarded
annually to the work deemed to have made the most significant contribu-
tion to Mexican literature of the year.
   The success of Jose Trigo was surpassed in 1977 by the reception given
to Palinuro de Mdxico, an extravagant novel that won numerous national
and international prizes and consolidated del Paso's reputation in literary
circles throughout Spanish America and elsewhere. A decade later,
Noticias del Imperio (1987) met with a level of commercial and critical
acclaim that astonished even the author's most fervent admirers: treating
a historical subject-the tragic failure of the Habsburgs, Maximilian and
Carlota, to establish a viable empire in Mexico in the mid-18 6os -
Noticias del Imperio received the plaudits of critics and popular audiences
alike. Del Paso's fourth novel, Linda 67: Historia de un crimen, appeared
in 1995. Regarded by its author as a divertissement, it represented a depar-
ture from his normal style of writing, as he ventured into the territory of
crime fiction.
   The immediate frame of reference of del Paso's fictional output is the
Mexican narrative tradition since 1940. Through a series of connections
that will be documented fully in the chapters that follow, the four novels
of Fernando del Paso reflect different moods and literary imperatives as
they draw on, and modify, the literary models successively available to
Mexican fiction writers over the past sixty years. It is customary, in histo-
ries of Mexican literature, to account for the period 1940 to the present by
decades and to signal watersheds around the end of the 1950s and in 1968
before charting further developments in the 1980s and 1990s. Making all
due allowances for possible mismatches between the historical and liter-
ary processes, the scheme of description by decade can provide some prac-
tical assistance in mapping the place of the novels of Fernando del Paso
within the broad context of contemporary Mexican narrative.




2 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   In rough outline, Mexican narrative of the 1940s comprised a number
of types and trends that were first defined and then invariably broken by
one or more texts that have come to be seen as landmarks. Principal
among the dominant types were (i) the novel of the Mexican Revolution,
now nearing the end of its productive life; (ii) the subcategory of the
novela cristera, promoted by such writers as Jose Guadalupe de Anda; (iii)
novels about the Mexican railroad, written in a costumbrista idiom; and
(iv) a proletarian literature concerned with social and political issues. The
single most important exponent of this latter category of writing was Jose
Revueltas (1914-1976), whose influence on Mexican literature and poli-
tics would continue to the end of the twentieth century. A prolific and
polemical figure, Revueltas produced one book in particular that broke
the ideological and aesthetic mold of Mexican fiction of the 1940s. El luto
humano (1943) paints an uncompromising, highly textured picture of
human suffering in postrevolutionary Mexico, borrowing narrative de-
vices from the works of William Faulkner and adapting them to a Mexican
setting in an exemplary way.
   Another milestone in Mexican fiction of the 1940s was Al fibo del agua
(1947) by Agustin Yinez (1904-80). Set in an imaginary location in the
province of Jalisco on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, the novel ex-
plores the troubled responses of members of a rural community to an
imminent political schism. The representation of characters' inner lives is
achieved through the use of interior monologue; narrative fragmentation
in the style of Joyce, Faulkner, and Dos Passos provides further evidence of
the abandonment of the conventions of Balzacian realism, which had pre-
vailed in Mexican fiction before the iconoclasm of El luto humano and Al
fibo del agua.
   The next significant staging posts in the nation's narrative evolution
were El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Paramo (1955), both by Juan
Rulfo (1918-1986), and La region mds trans parente (1958), which was
the debut novel of Carlos Fuentes (1928). Rulfo's two books delved into
the collective imagination of the Mexican people, offering glimpses of the
complex motivations of a national character driven by atavistic instincts
and anxieties. Oedipal conflict and impotence in the face of authority are
constituent features of a mind-set haunted as much by the types of pre-
Columbian culture as by those of the Catholic Church; the inward turn
of Rulfo's narratives exemplifies again the all-pervasive influence of
Faulkner, first absorbed, as we have seen, by Revueltas in the early 1940s.
   La regidn mds transparente brought about a major sea change in the
style and subject matter of Mexican fiction. Conceived by its precocious





Introduction | 3


author as a vast frieze of the social conditions obtaining in Mexico City in
the mid-1950s, La region mds transparente renders the dynamic conflict
between different forces-social, political, psychological, and cultural-
in the life of the capital and inaugurates a type of novel that will mush-
room over the following decade. In the process, the modernist paradigm of
Ulysses is incorporated definitively into Mexican fiction, bringing with it
all of the linguistic and technical innovations of Joyce's seminal text.
   After the publication of La regidn mds transparente, there was a veri-
table explosion of creativity in Mexican fiction. Revueltas wrote Los
errores (1964) and Yinez produced La tierra prodiga (1960) and Las
tierras flacas (1962). They were accompanied fitfully in their efforts by
Juan Jos6 Arreola (1918), who in 1961 brought out Confabulario total (a
revised collection of short stories first published in 1952) and the only
novel in a distinctive and varied output, La feria (1963). The hallmarks of
Arreola's work include humor, fantasy, and a strong intertextual impulse
that manifests itself in forms of parody, transposition, and carnivalesque
writing.
   Arreola offered tremendous support to younger writers in literary
workshops in Mexico City. Salvador Elizondo (1932), Jose Agustin
(1944), and Fernando del Paso were three such writers who benefited
from Arreola's teachings and who made their narrative debuts in the
1960s. In the case of del Paso, Arreola exercised a literary influence that is
plain to see in the pages of Jose Trigo, interwoven with those of Revueltas,
Yinez, Rulfo, the precocious example of Carlos Fuentes, and the various
styles and currents of writing exemplified in their work. All told, Josd
Trigo impressed most literary commentators as a comprehensive summa
of Mexican fiction, replete with echoes of the novel on proletarian sub-
jects, the novela cristera, the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Rulfo and Arreola,
the iconoclasm of La regidn mds transparente, and numerous other liter-
ary models and precursors.
   A significant phenomenon in Mexican fiction of the mid to late 1960s
was la Onda (The Wave), epitomized in the works of Gustavo Sainz
(1940), Jose Agustin, and Parmenides Garcia Saldana (1944-1982).
Gazapo (1965), De perfil (1966), and Pasto verde (1968) are typical nar-
ratives about urban adolescents who rebel against the social, moral, and
linguistic norms of their middle-class milieu. Inspired by the waves of
youthful protest and counterculture that were breaking on the interna-
tional scene, these Mexican novels of the 1960s express their repudiation
of decorum in a language that incorporates blasphemy, obscenity, the
albur (offensive sexist wordplay), and other forms of linguistic barbarism.





4 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


The liberation of language from the constraints of good taste and literary
decorum, along with an attitude of total frankness toward the body and
adolescent sexuality, are aspects of Onda writing that are found elsewhere
in Mexican fiction of the time-in the work of Hector Manjarrez (1945),
for instance. As far as the work of del Paso is concerned, linguistic play
and the reevaluation of the body and sexuality are more prominent in
Palinuro de Mdxico than in Jose Trigo, where, as we shall see, they are
grounded in an outlook different from that of la Onda. All things consid-
ered, the first two novels of Fernando del Paso have slightly more in com-
mon with an alternative current of Mexican writing of the 1960s known
as Escritura (writing), which is represented habitually as Other to la Onda
and perceived as being focused not on social and moral issues but on
aesthetic questions concerning language, narrative, and representation.
Exemplified in Farabeuf (1965) by Salvador Elizondo, Escritura accords
with a view of the novel as an antirepresentational form and self-con-
scious verbal artifact-properties that can be detected in Josd Trigo and
Palinuro de Mdxico but that constitute only a partial definition of those
two novels.
   At the same time as it represents a continuation of certain aspects of
Mexican fiction of the 1960s, Palinuro de Mdxico also typifies a set of
social and literary concerns that are very much of the 1970s. With respect
to literary paradigms, what was known as the "total novel" would reach
its apex in Terra nostra (1975) by Carlos Fuentes and Palinuro de Mdxico.
Derived from sources including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and, in the
Hispanic field, Addn Buenosayres (1948) by Leopoldo Marechal and
Rayuela (1963) by Julio Cortizar, the total novel had flourished in Mexico
in the 1960s and would maintain its relative strength well into the follow-
ing decade. The moral and philosophical example of Cortizar also pros-
pered in Mexican fiction of the 1970s, in the works of writers such as
Hector Manjarrez and Jorge Aguilar Mora (1946), as well as that of Fer-
nando del Paso.
   The bloody repression of a peaceful pro-democracy rally in Mexico
City in October 1968 shocked the nation and had a decisive impact on the
political and cultural life of Mexico. Although the political legacy of 1968
is still a matter of debate, the cultural legacy began to crystallize in various
forms immediately and throughout the 1970s. In the field of prose narra-
tive, the literary chronicle proved to be a most effective form for dealing
with the traumatic events of the time. Carlos Monsiviis (1938) and Elena
Poniatowska (1933) produced the first testimonial accounts, Dias de
guardar (1970) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), in step with Luis




Introduction | 5


Gonzilez del Alba (1947), author of Los dias y los anos (also of 1971). A
testimonial tendency continues to be evident eight years later in
Manifestacidn de silencios (1979), the third novel by Arturo Azuela
(1938). The events of 1968 received a more elaborate and imaginative
treatment in Compadre Lobo (1977) by Gustavo Sainz and Si muero lejos
de ti (1979) by Jorge Aguilar Mora -texts that can be considered compan-
ion volumes to Palinuro de Mdxico in their use of a nonrealist idiom to
represent elements of tragedy and the absurd in the experience of the
Mexican people at a watershed in the nation's history.
   On the twin basis of its continuing adherence to the conventions of the
total novel and its engagement with the tragedy of 1968, Palinuro de
Mdxico stands out as representative of the main lines of Mexican fiction
during the 1970s. The relationship of del Paso's next novel to the domi-
nant narrative paradigm of the 1980s is equally close, inasmuch as
Noticias del Imperio (1987) exemplifies a type of fiction that is cultivated
not only in Mexico but throughout Spanish America over that time.
Alongside crime fiction, testimonio narrative, and women's writing, all of
which thrive in Spanish American literature of the 1980s, the "new his-
torical novel" of Spanish America is arguably the most substantial cultural
achievement of the decade. While Los perros del paraiso (1983) by Abel
Posse (Argentina, 1936) and El general en su laberinto (1989) by Gabriel
Garcia Mirquez (Colombia, 1928) are outstanding examples of the type
in the field of continental writing, Mexican literature of the period boasts
a plethora of impressive titles including La campana (1990) by Carlos
Fuentes, Madero, el otro (1989) by Ignacio Solares (1945), and Noticias
del Imperio. In point of fact, Fuentes, Solares, and del Paso were tapping
a rich national vein of historical writing that had produced Los
reldmpagos de agosto (1965) and Los pasos de Ldpez (1982) by the hu-
morous writer Jorge Ibargiengoitia (1928-1983) and that would con-
tinue into the 1990s when Angeles Mastretta (1949) published Mal de
amores (1996) and was awarded the prestigious Premio R6mulo Gallegos
of 1997. The humorous, often irreverent treatment of historical sources,
combined with a revisionist attitude toward relations between the Euro-
pean powers and their former colonial possessions, are two features of
Noticias del Imperio that represent a challenge to traditional historical
discourse; polyphony, parody, and pastiche further distinguish del Paso's
novel from a traditional type of historical fiction, contributing to the pro-
file of a brilliant piece of creative writing that is now universally acknowl-
edged as the leading example of the Spanish American new historical
novel of the 1980s.





6 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   Mexican literature of the 1990s does not lend itself yet to the kind of
discriminating analysis that literary historians have been able to conduct
in connection with the production of earlier decades. Given a lack of criti-
cal perspective and appropriate analytical tools, those who would attempt
to survey a field of such vast proportions and shifting outlines must for the
time being fall back on standard strategies, of which differentiation by
generation is as useful as any other. With the aid of this well-worn tool, it
is possible to distinguish as many as four generations of writers of fiction
in Mexican literature of the 1990s, beginning with those authors who are
long-standing members of the literary academy-authors such as Carlos
Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Gustavo Sainz, and Fernando del Paso. A
second generation includes Ignacio Solares, Hector Manjarrez, and Maria
Luisa Puga (11944); their literary debuts occurred later than those of the
previous generation, and their reputations also took longer to establish. A
third generation includes Carmen Boullosa (1954) and Juan Villoro
(1956). Finally, a younger generation is made up of writers born after
1960.
   In an attempt to categorize the dominant types of writing that consti-
tute Mexican fiction of the 1990s, a prolific number of labels could be
used, including the urban novel, rural and regional novels, women's fic-
tion of several hues, gay fiction, fiction in a humorous idiom, and fiction
in the fantastic mode. Particularly relevant to a study of the novels of
Fernando del Paso is the type of the novela negra, which enjoyed great
popularity in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s. In writing Linda 67:
Historia de un crimen (1995), del Paso was trying his hand at a genre that
was already an integral part of the national literary tradition and that an
author some fifteen years his junior had been cultivating and promoting
with considerable success throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By the time
del Paso began work on Linda 67, Paco Ignacio Taibo II(1949) had pro-
duced a number of detective novels that had secured him both a popular
and a critical following in many parts of the Spanish- and English-speak-
ing worlds. Taibo's readers were enthralled by the effortless style of a
series of narratives featuring a highly individual Mexican detective, Hec-
tor Belascoarin Shayne, and by the humorous and often satirical perspec-
tives that Taibo brought to bear on contemporary Mexican institutions
and mores. On a superficial reading, del Paso's experiment with the con-
ventions of the novela negra in Linda 67 cannot compare with Taibo's
mastery of the genre. However, it is important to note differences in con-
ception between Linda 67 and Taibo's well-wrought novels: crucially,
Linda 67 is set, for the most part, outside Mexico, with a resulting redirec-





Introduction | 7


tion of the focus of the narrative away from crime and corruption in
Mexico and onto an alternative canvas. Set principally in and around San
Francisco, with a brief excursion to Switzerland and another to Cuer-
navaca over an idyllic but ephemeral weekend, the plot of Linda 67 serves
largely as a vehicle for exploring the deeply ingrained sickness that the
novel detects in the body politic of the United States. A Mexican dimen-
sion to the fiction is embodied in the character of Olivia, who is the beau-
tiful and morally irreproachable girlfriend of the main protagonist, Dave
Sorensen. Modeled on Rosario in Los pasos perdidos (1953) by Alejo
Carpentier (1904-1980), Olivia helps to transform Linda 67 from an imi-
tation novela negra into a skillful late twentieth-century allegory of civili-
zation and barbarism in which the former is identified with Mexico and
the latter with the United States.
   This summary description of Linda 67 and its divergent relation to one
of the dominant trends in Mexican fiction of the 1990s serves to highlight
the dialectic of sameness and difference that links the novels of Fernando
del Paso to the Mexican narrative tradition of the past sixty years. The
references made earlier to Jose Revueltas, Carlos Fuentes, and Ignacio
Solares prefigure an essential part of the agenda of the present study,
which will explore connections between the novels of Fernando del Paso
and a variety of Mexican texts. Other references, to authors such as Alejo
Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Mirquez, indicate a wider range of interest
that encompasses the narrative traditions of continental Latin America
and will at times extend even further to take in landmarks of the literary
traditions of countries as varied as the United States, England, Ireland,
France, and Spain. In view of the multiple contexts and perspectives that
can legitimately be applied to the novels of Fernando del Paso, it is perhaps
helpful to provide some words of clarification concerning the protocols
governing the comparative method adopted in this study and its ground-
ing in theories of intertextuality.
   Intertextual approaches to the novels of Fernando del Paso have be-
come a standard feature of the critical tradition, from the early essays of
Ramon Xirau (1967) and Jesus Flores Sevilla (1970) to a recent article by
Jose T. Espinosa-Jdcome (1997). In this book I elaborate on those ap-
proaches, which I have sought to promote since 1981 when I published
the first of a number of essays devoted to del Paso's novels. In the chap-
ters that follow, I analyze relations between each of his four novels and
a set of cultural contexts and narrative traditions that I consider relevant
to the construction and categorization of Josd Trigo, Palinuro de Mdxico,
Noticias del Imperio, and Linda 67. Those contexts and traditions are





8 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


identified and distinguished by the labels "national," "regional," "conti-
nental," and "universal" -terms which are utilized here in wholly con-
ventional senses as exemplified in the discursive writings of Jorge Luis
Borges, Leopoldo Zea, and others including Fernando del Paso himself,
and sanctioned, in the realm of the academy, in a substantial body of
scholarship ranging from the essays of Angel Rama on transculturation to
others by Lois Parkinson Zamora, Gustavo Perez Firmat, Amaryll Cha-
nady, Arnold Penuel, and Maarten van Delden. As a general procedure, I
invoke the contexts and traditions just mentioned when they promise to
heighten appreciation of a text under consideration, when I believe that a
reading of a text by del Paso will benefit from the stratagem of relating it
to other texts and cultural contexts, through a comparative method that
seeks either to highlight properties shared by a number of narratives, or
actively to differentiate one text or set of texts from another on the basis
of a discernible pattern of distinctive features.
   Angel Rama's seminal theory of narrative transculturation lends an
important cultural dimension to my investigation of the novels of Fer-
nando del Paso and their relation to the European and North American
literary avant-garde. Following Rama and others including Manuel Pedro
Gonzilez and Morton Levitt, I identify James Joyce, William Faulkner,
and Aldous Huxley with the international currents of modernism, and
posit an aesthetic and, specifically, a paradigm of novel writing that exer-
cise a determining influence on Mexican fiction from Revueltas to del
Paso. Throughout this study I consider the manifestations of a modernist
paradigm in del Paso's narratives from Josd Trigo on and plot their evolu-
tion from the late 1950s to the mid-19 8os and beyond, when the modern-
ist project in the cultures of Mexico and other parts of Spanish America is
forced to confront the challenges and ruptures of the postmodern. The
history of assimilation and adaptation of the literary forms of modernism,
of which del Paso's work is a signal example, has salutary implications for
the integrity and creativity of Latin American culture, which I address
below. In the final analysis, a concern with narrative form, intertextuality,
and the cultural parameters of writing is what defines my study, the ulti-
mate goal of which is to provide a readership based in Latin American
studies, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies, with a newly
drawn profile of the novels of Fernando del Paso and their place in the
narrative traditions of Mexico, Spanish America, and a broader interna-
tional field of writing.














Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations


Reading the Novels of Fernando del Paso Intertextually


   Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
   absorption and transformation of another. The notion of inter-
   textuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is
   read as at least double.
   Julia Kristeva, "Word, Dialogue, and Novel"


   Cultural and literary traditions (including the most ancient ones)
   are preserved and continue to live, not in the subjective memory
   of the individual, nor in some collective "psyche," but in the ob-
   jective forms of culture itself (including linguistic and discursive
   forms); in this sense, they are intersubjective and interindividual,
   and therefore social; that is their mode of intervention in literary
   works-the individual memory of creative individuals almost
   does not come into play.
   Mikhail Bakhtin, "Concluding Remarks"


The contradictions and variations in the definitions cited above are both
an indication of the quite legitimate and fundamental differences of opin-
ion that can exist between two equally authoritative and influential expo-
nents of theories of intertextuality, and a reminder of the continuing fluid-
ity of the concept and its applications, about which Graham Pechey
remarked: "The urgent task of Bakhtin's readers is [. . .] to push his con-
cepts still further on in their journey, putting them to still more demanding
tests" (57). In Latin American literary studies, Bakhtinian and Kristevan
models of intertextuality have been in circulation for some time, alternat-
ing with those of Borges, Harold Bloom, and Michael Riffaterre -to name
only the most prominent figures in a long established and still expanding
field of intellectual inquiry. Work carried out by Lois Parkinson Zamora
on Cortizar and Vargas Llosa (1982; revised in 1997), by Gustavo Perez
Firmat on Cuban literature (1989), by Arnold Penuel on Garcia Mirquez
(1994), and by Bernard McGuirk on a selection of topics in Latin Ameri-





1o I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


can literature (1997) illustrates the successful application of theories of
intertextual relations to a variety of literary materials and casts Pechey's
clarion call into a perspective of near-obsolescence as far as the study of
Latin American literature is concerned.
   Given the history of colonial and neocolonial relations between the
countries of Latin America and the metropolitan powers that have sought
to influence their development, it is perhaps inevitable that intertextual
studies of Latin American literature should choose to privilege cultural
considerations over more narrowly defined aesthetic concerns. For the
author of one such study, "It is evident [. . .] that intertextuality brings a
broad cultural approach to the study of a text, postulating that any text is
a reflection of one or more cultural traditions" (Penuel x). In an early
instance of this mode of criticism, Lois Parkinson Zamora, writing on
European intertextuality in Conversacidn en la catedral by Mario Vargas
Llosa and 62 Modelo para armar by Julio Cortizar, addresses the issue of
the relation between Latin American writers and a hegemonic European
literary culture that provides imitable models at the same time that it sets
a gold standard against which non-European achievements have tended to
be measured. Allowing for the possibility of a reciprocal "infusion of en-
ergy" by Vargas Llosa and Cortizar into a canonical tradition exemplified
by Cervantes, Fielding, Flaubert, Unamuno, James Joyce, and others,
Parkinson Zamora still characterizes that narrative tradition as "vener-
able," in a concluding sentence that seems curiously devoid of irony and
whose wider political implications are subjected to some eye-catching
strategies of formal containment: They are bracketed, first, inside a tex-
tual parenthesis that nevertheless advocates "the central importance of the
comparative consideration of contemporary Latin American texts" (34)
and then displaced onto an endnote reproducing a statement by Julio
Ortega, who more than a decade earlier had ascribed Cortizar and
Fuentes to the category of "Latin American narrators of the highest uni-
versal standing" and identified a certain "impulse toward integration" in
Latin American writing, which in Ortega's view represented "the Latin
American response to a dialogue whose aesthetic and philosophical terms
[.. .] had been formulated in multiple instances of division [en multiples
escisiones]" (La contemplacidn y la fiesta 8). Echoing Borges in his classic
essay "El escritor argentino y la tradicion," Alfonso Reyes ("Notas sobre
la inteligencia americana"), and Octavio Paz (Posdata), and anticipating
Angel Rama (Transculturacidn narrativa 39), Ortega championed Latin
America's active involvement in the give-and-take of global cultural ex-
change and spoke tellingly from the margins of Parkinson Zamora's text





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations I11


to defend the sovereign value of Latin American cultural discourse and to
assert its equal status vis-a-vis the cultural production of other areas of the
world.
   A study in which the politics of cultural interaction occupies center
stage is Gustavo Perez Firmat's major essay, The Cuban Condition: Trans-
lation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature. Published seven years
after Parkinson Zamora's pioneering article, Perez Firmat's study com-
bines an intertextual focus with an explicit political agenda valid for Cuba
and Latin America as a whole. According to Perez Firmat, the "fundamen-
tal interest [of The Cuban Condition] lies in the complicated intercourse
between New World and Old World Culture, and, more particularly, in
how Cuban texts rewrite some of the masterworks of the Spanish and
European literary tradition" (14). Postulating a mismatch, at the moment
of encounter, between a local "American" sensibility and exogenous
forms of expression, Perez Firmat traces the emergence in Cuba of a liter-
ary vernacular which, at the levels of idiom, rhetoric, and structural as-
pects of narrative, effects a continuous "antiauthoritarian, anticolonial
gesture" whose business is the promotion of cultural autonomy and the
assertion of difference (26-27). Redolent, once more, of Borges's valoriza-
tion of the periphery as the site of subversion, this reading of cultural
interaction in Cuba reiterates the connection between the textual and the
political in terms that hold for the cultures and peoples of Latin America
in general.
   With regard to Mexico, the issues under discussion here figure promi-
nently in the work of intellectuals such as Jose Vasconcelos, Alfonso Caso,
Alfonso Reyes, and especially Leopoldo Zea. Through his various activi-
ties as editor (most famously of Cuadernos americanos, which he founded
in 1942), scholar, and teacher, Zea strove to account for the history of
Mexican and Latin American philosophical ideas and to elucidate the
conditions of their specificity vis-a-vis the dominant traditions of Europe
and the United States. For more than half a century, Zea persistently re-
worked a number of essential themes while evolving in directions that
kept him in touch with the major political and intellectual developments
of his times.
   The main lines of Zea's thinking are laid down in two early essays,
"North America in the Spanish American Consciousness" (1947) and
"Philosophy as Commitment" (1948). The first of these essays commemo-
rates the centenary of the war between Mexico and the United States and
surveys the attitudes to their northern neighbor of several generations of
Spanish American intellectuals of the modern period. Concentrating, first,





z I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


on the nineteenth century, the essay registers the widespread call for a
"mental emancipation" to match the political freedoms gained in the ini-
tial phase of independence from Spain. With thinkers such as Esteban
Echeverria, Juan Bautista Alberdi, and Jose Maria Luis Mora in mind, Zea
comments: "In spite of having secured political emancipation from
[Spain], they know that this does not go far enough, and that they must
tear Spain out from their entrails. Political emancipation must be followed
by another kind of emancipation, which they will term 'emancipation of
the mind"' (reproduced in Zea, La filosofia como compromiso y otros
ensayos 57). Moving ahead to the twentieth century, Zea then praises
Enrique Rod6 and Antonio Caso for their "stance of promoting Spanish
American interests," and identifies two strands in their attitude toward
the United States. On the one hand, they and other intellectuals like them
found much to admire in the democratic traditions of the United States; on
the other, they were united in their abhorrence of "the North America of
territorial ambitions [and] 'Manifest Destiny,' of acts of racial discrimina-
tion and imperialist practices" (8z). Compared with the former, the politi-
cal and cultural institutions of Spanish America left much to be desired;
with the latter, they gave cause for satisfaction, even pride.
   Some of the implications of Zea's historical analysis for the Spanish
American intelligentsia of the day are spelled out in "Philosophy as Com-
mitment." Taking for granted a connection (reminiscent of Sartre) be-
tween philosophy and ethics, this pithy and combative essay asks, "What
obligations are incumbent on us Spanish Americans? What situation must
we answer to? What commitments must we undertake in our philoso-
phy?" It calls for "a mode of philosophizing that is aware of our situa-
tion," that is, a way of thinking appropriate to the circumstances of Span-
ish American societies and the intelligentsias that serve them (31). In
fundamental terms, this urgent, "circumstantialist" approach is at odds
with the discourse of universalism: "We might be told: philosophy is uni-
versal and philosophers can only address universal and eternal issues." To
which Zea retorts, "To answer in those terms is not to answer at all. [. ..]
It is, quite simply, a subterfuge, an easy way of avoiding one's responsibili-
ties" (32). Rejecting such strategies of evasion, Zea envisages a future
close to hand involving the construction of new types of community
founded on solidarity between colonial peoples and their united opposi-
tion to imperialist nations-a global scenario in which the peoples of
Spanish America will, he anticipates, occupy "a very prominent place"
(36).
   Together and in their essential respects, these two early essays spell out




Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations|13


a program promoting the political and cultural integrity of Spanish
America. Consistent with the anti-imperialist ideology of a Pablo Neruda
or a Gabriel Garcia Mirquez of the time, the ideas expressed in them will
surface again and again in later writings by Zea-through the 1970s,
when he publishes a collection of essays under the title "Dependence and
Liberation in Latin American Culture," into the 1980s, when he publishes
Discourse from the Site of Marginalization and Barbarism (1988), and
thereafter to the century's end. Reviewing the content of the first of these
volumes, we find an anti-imperialist message and defense of the specificity
of the Latin American experience in "From the History of Ideas to the
Philosophy of Latin American History" (originally of 1973); a statement
of the continuing need for a "fight for the psychological or cultural libera-
tion" of the peoples of Latin America, in "Latin American Philosophy as
Philosophy of Liberation" (Dependencia y liberacidn 3z); a renewed call
for solidarity with other "dependent, colonized peoples" in "From the
History of Ideas to the Philosophy of Latin American History" (z6); and
a high-minded invitation to "participate in the making of a broader, more
humane world, beyond the limits of the one we inherited and which is
considered by its architects to be in crisis. A world designed for another
kind of human being," in "Colonization and Decolonization of Latin
American Culture" (originally of 1970) (Dependencia y liberacidn 56).
   In addition to these obvious continuities with Zea's earlier writings, the
essays in Dependence and Liberation in Latin American Culture also con-
tain elements that are novel and indicative of major developments in the
author's political thinking. Signaled most readily at the level of terminol-
ogy, the changes in question can all be subsumed under the concepts of
decolonization and postcolonial awareness. In no particular order of im-
portance or hierarchy, aspects of this revised outlook include the idea of
the Third World-Zea mentions parts of Africa and Asia-with which
Latin America is encouraged to adopt a common perspective; the sense of
being poised at a crossroads in world history, and of the benefits of partici-
pating in large-scale processes of decolonization; a rejection of depen-
dence theory and its replacement by the philosophy of liberation ex-
pounded by the likes of Enrique Dussel and Augusto Salazar Bondy; and
identification with other thinkers of the moment, of whom the most sig-
nificant, by any criteria, are Frantz Fanon, Aim6 Cesaire, and Leopold
Sedar Senghor. Looking beyond the -by no means narrow-frame of ref-
erence of Latin American affairs, of which he was as cogent an interpreter
as any other Latin American intellectual of the second half of the twentieth
century, Zea chose to relate the subcontinent's current situation and tra-





14 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


jectory to contemporary trends in world history, within which, he implied,
the ultimate significance of contemporary Latin American experience
could best be gauged.
   One of the most noteworthy features of the essays of Dependence and
Liberation in Latin American Culture is the intermingling of references to
local thinkers such as Salazar Bondy and the three intellectuals named
above. Of the triad, Frantz Fanon is the most widely mentioned, appear-
ing in three of the six essays that make up the volume. More tellingly: at
the midpoint of "Latin American Philosophy as Philosophy of Libera-
tion," Zea pointedly invokes "Frantz Fanon, a fellow Latin American" in
a review of contemporary continental thinking on the subjects of libera-
tion and decolonization of the mind. Paying tribute to Salazar Bondy's
contribution to liberation philosophy, Zea glosses his thoughts with a
two-part quotation from Fanon: "Decolonization is quite simply the re-
placing of a certain 'species' of men by another 'species' of men [. . .]; for
Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, we must turn over a new leaf, we
must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man" (Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth 27, 25 5), going on to cite and summarize Fanon
profusely yet again in the penultimate and closing paragraphs of the essay
(Dependencia y liberacidn 41). There, Zea praises the integrity of Fanon's
position and his commitment to mankind, noting, "For that reason,
Fanon, writing not as a black man, a Latin American or a person of Afri-
can origins but as a concrete human being endowed with the concreteness
that is a feature of all human beings, remarks, 'If we want humanity to
advance a step farther, if we want to raise it to a higher level than that
which Europe has imposed on it, then we must invent, and we must make
discoveries"' (47). Throughout the essay, what is significant is the re-
peated gesture of identification with an individual whom Zea clearly re-
gards as a front-line representative of a current of thinking that is of
unquestionable relevance to the situation of postcolonial societies every-
where, whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or other parts of the world.
   "Negritude and Indigenism" is the title of a lecture that Zea delivered
to the Ndgritude et Amdrique Latine colloquium held at the University of
Dakar, Seneghal, in January 1974. Indebted to the work of Aim6 Cesaire
and Leopold Sedar Senghor, it provides further evidence of the expanded
parameters of Zea's view of the world while it illustrates his use of mate-
rial drawn from diverse sources to illuminate the situation of the peoples
of Latin America - specifically, the indigenous populations of Mexico and
the Andean region. Zea's acquaintance with the work of Cesaire stems in
part from the interviews that he had read in a number of Casa de las




Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations |1z5


Amdricas published in the summer of 1968, where the Haitian intellectual
had discussed issues of race, colonialism, culture, and revolution. By the
time he composed "Negritude and Indigenism," Zea had absorbed the
ideology of Cesaire and his fellow intellectual, the Senegalese Sedar
Senghor, and was able to apply their analysis of racialist oppression in
French and British colonial territories to areas of Latin America.
   As his starting point, Zea states, "Negritude and indigenism are ideo-
logical concepts which originate in a situation that is common to the
peoples of black Africa and Afro-America on the one hand, and Latin
America or Indo-America on the other: the situation of dependency. In
both cases, [the concepts] express recognition of a situation of marginality
and subordination that has to change" (Dependencia y liberacidn 57).
Acknowledging the very different circumstances in which the two con-
cepts arose and developed, Zea nevertheless sees them as addressing simi-
lar questions to do with ethnicity, culture, and subalternity, and he reas-
sesses Latin American indigenismo in the light of postcolonialism's
unmasking of white mythologies and other categories of western thought
and power. In the course of his argument, Zea cites Aim6 Cesaire and his
recuperation of oppressed colonial subjects epitomized by "the black man
[who] was a man like any other and who had accomplished things worthy
of consideration within the frame of universal creation, to which we
wished to continue to give recognition" (Cesaire, in Aratin and Depestre
135). Next mentioned is the resoundingly titled Libertd I: Ndgritude et
Humanisme by Sedar Senghor, in the context of a discussion envisaging
new forms of "cultural mixing" in which the goal of each community or
tradition would be "to assimilate, without being assimilated" (Depen-
dencia y liberacidn 73). Finally, Zea rounds off his argument with one
more quote from Fanon, anchoring his study ever more firmly in the dis-
course of postcolonialism which, without being named as such, is the
matrix surrounding "Negritude and Indigenism" along with the other
essays dating from the early 1970s under consideration here.
   Moving ahead in time, Discourse from the Site of Marginalization and
Barbarism (1988) and Philosophizing at the Level of Mankind (11993)
demonstrate the principal continuities and developments in Zea's thinking
near the century's end. In some of its ten chapters, Discourse reformulates
concerns already documented in earlier work by Zea; in others, it engages
with issues that are the focus of intense contemporary debate (see, e.g.,
Mignolo). Thus, at the same time as it repeats the analysis of the history of
Latin American thought worked out in "North America in the Spanish
American Consciousness" (1947), it gives an even higher profile than be-





16 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


fore to issues of colonialism and decolonization, discussing relations be-
tween Latin America and Europe from a perspective of reversal that privi-
leges the discourse of the barbarous Other who occupies the margins, over
the claims to represent civilization made by those who inhabit the center.
Upsetting traditional assumptions about relations between the local and
the universal, Zea articulates a range of positions representing national,
continental, and global interests and provides a sharpened perspective on
political and cultural issues of Latin America. Indeed, the multiple facets
of Zea's intellectual profile constitute a paradigm, or type, against which
other intellectuals might be measured, including the literary author who is
the primary focus of this study, Fernando del Paso.

Americanismo and Postcolonialism, Humanism, and Universalism:
The Discursive Affiliations of Fernando del Paso

   No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman,
   or Muslim, or American are not more than starting points, which
   if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly
   left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and
   identities on a global scale.
   Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Known as one of his country's most prestigious novelists and retired dip-
lomats, del Paso is also a painter, poet, dramatist, and essayist who has
inserted himself into the discursive framework outlined above through
numerous polemical and artistic means. Whether as a journalist, polemi-
cist, or obliging subject of press interviews that became ever more frequent
as his creative star ascended, del Paso has made a regular stream of public
declarations that over the years have built up a clearly defined artistic and
political profile. In general outline, the statements concerned reveal a pat-
tern of evolution away from an initially apolitical stance toward increas-
ing involvement in political issues of the day and a more vigorous expres-
sion of political views, which have invariably been bound up with
questions of cultural identity.
   The earliest recorded interview with del Paso dates from the summer of
1966 and captures the excitement surrounding the publication of Jose
Trigo. Offering a highly informative summary of features of the novel, the
text of the interview is remarkable for the absence of any mention of social
or political matters. Indeed, concerning the storyline of Jose Trigo and its
re-creation of incidents from the Mexican railway workers' strike of 1959,
del Paso insists, "It was not my intention that it should have any specific





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations|17


social content." Instead, he emphasizes the linguistic and mythological
dimensions of Josd Trigo and offers a formulation of his aesthetic creed:
"My position on art is a mystical one." More specifically, del Paso ac-
knowledges the example of Poe, expresses a belief in the permanence of
"beautiful objects," and aligns himself with a Symbolist aesthetic that
stretches as far as T. S. Eliot and James George Frazer and is not generally
noted for the closeness of its attention to the accidents of history (Carvajal
iii).
   A decade later, all of this has changed. Speaking in 1978 in the wake of
the publication and tumultuous reception of his second novel, Palinuro de
Mdxico, del Paso radiates political conviction: "I don't believe that any-
body, at the present time, can be apolitical. [. . .] Politics is related to
concrete circumstances which impinge on us in the street, on television, in
the newspapers." He continues, "To be apolitical is tantamount to closing
your eyes to reality. And to do that is to take up a political position: it
means you become an accomplice of dictatorships, oligarchies, and the
multinationals, [an accomplice] of the people who assassinated Ch6 Gue-
vara, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and sprayed napalm on Vietnam.
And of those who wounded a student in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City"
(Parra 69). Remarkable in part for its rhetoric of restraint, the statement
lists many of the classic bogeymen of the political Left of the 1960s and
1970s and identifies the major determinants of del Paso's political outlook
after 1968.
   An important aspect of the author's evolved self-image at this time is
the view of himself as a continental writer who shares many of the aims
and concerns of other Latin American intellectuals. Answering a question
fed him by two journalists from Madrid about his relationship to the
writers of the boom, del Paso replied: "I am connected to them by some-
thing more than geographical and historical coincidence, and my books,
[...] whether I like it or not, form part of the intellectual consciousness of
Latin America" (Sinchez Bardon and Javier Goni 49). As he subsequently
explained elsewhere, this sense of a common identity grew out of a collec-
tive response to historical conditions in Latin America and the world be-
yond: "I believe that we all belong to a current of sorts that is of consider-
able importance and in which most of us have become keenly aware of our
history-the history of Latin America, including our present-day position
in the world. [I also believe that] in one way or another we express that
awareness in our respective work" (Ruffinelli, "Fernando del Paso: la
novela como exorcismo" 199). Inseparable, no doubt, from the overall
climate of responsibility and enthusiasm generated by the successes of




18 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Latin American writing from the mid-196os on, the outlook described by
del Paso responds at the deepest level to events in the political sphere, from
the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, through U.S. military interven-
tion in Southeast Asia and the international student protests of 1968
(whose impact on del Paso is attested to in several interviews),1 to numer-
ous other conflicts and flashpoints in Latin America and the world at
large.
   It is at this moment in del Paso's career that his ideological profile
begins to overlap quite clearly with that of Leopoldo Zea as outlined
above. Two statements, recorded in 1980 and 1983, respectively, reveal
the extent of the alignment. The first appears in the context of a discussion
about del Paso's experience of life in London, where he resided from 1971
to 1985. In a lengthy conversation, the author of Palinuro de Mdxico lays
claim to an anti-imperialist position that, he says, "would have reaffirmed
itself in a different way if I had not lived in London for all these years."
Commenting on the attitudes that he had observed among the British and
continental Europeans, del Paso remarked: "The imperialist history of the
European powers, their contempt for what we today call the Third World,
is still reflected in the behavior and attitudes that persist at both the na-
tional and the continental levels; it is found among those who believe
themselves to be free of the old prejudices, and even in those who fight for
our causes" (Trejo Fuentes io).
   The second statement sketches a portrait of del Paso in the following
unequivocal terms: "Without question I am a Mexican and a Latin Ameri-
can, one who has been caught in the cross fire and has the mind-set of a
colonized country. That is the way I am and that is the role that I have
assumed" (Echegoyen, "Nuevas conversaciones con Fernando del Paso"
32). As a declaration of identity and ethical purpose, this forthright state-
ment could serve equally well to describe Leopoldo Zea, whose views are
further reflected in incidental details of del Paso's experience such as his
acceptance of nomination to the jury of the Casa de Las Americas literary
prize for 1983 in Havana, and his authorship of a polemical article in
1980 on the continuing colonial plight of the New Hebrides-two ideo-
logically significant gestures that place him in the same camp, if not in the
same generation, as Zea (who was born twenty-three years before del
Paso, in 1912).
   In the overall trajectory of del Paso's career, the single most significant
event is unquestionably the award in 1982 of the prestigious R6mulo
Gallegos Prize, for Palinuro de Mdxico. At the award ceremony in Caracas
in August of that year, del Paso delivered a formal address combining





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations | 19


evocative autobiographical reflections with a resounding declaration of
fundamental principles and beliefs. Reproduced subsequently in the pages
of Casa de las Amdricas, "Mi patria chica, mi patria grande" furnishes a
definitive statement of the author's political views, refashioned in the cru-
cible of recent political events that had taken place in the United Kingdom
and the south Atlantic in the spring of 1982. From his vantage point in
London where he was working for the World Service of the British Broad-
casting Corporation, del Paso was witness to the reactions of the British
people and their government to the Argentine occupation of the Falkland
Islands/Islas Malvinas. At that critical moment in world history, he also
shared in the collective unease and indignation of a large community of
Latin Americans based in London, who saw in the British military re-
sponse an unwelcome replay of scenarios of nineteenth-century imperial-
ist aggression. Admitting to a lifelong feeling that Latin Americans "be-
long to a kind of extensive, common homeland," del Paso told his
audience in Caracas, "This kind of supranationality was strengthened
more than ever at the point when the arrogance, the overreaching pride of
some of those foreigners who do not belong to that common homeland,
exacerbated, in me and in my friends, all that is Latin American about us"
("Mi patria chica" 159-60).
   A fierce denunciation of imperialism and an accompanying proclama-
tion of "a Latin American continental vocation" are, perhaps, not wholly
unexpected ingredients of a public address written in the wake of the
Falklands War and intended for a Latin American audience. Yet such
views and proclamations echo precisely the fundamentals of del Paso's
political philosophy expressed elsewhere, and chime in perfectly with his
thoughts on the other subjects treated in "Mi patria chica, mi patria
grande" -subjects ranging from geopolitics, patriotic sentiment, and na-
tionalism to linguistic exile and cultural themes. The bearing of historical
and political questions on the construction of del Paso's novels is some-
thing that I explore in greater detail in later chapters; at this point, I turn
my attention to themes of culture - identity, heritage, affiliation - in order
to fill out the literary-cum-political profile of Fernando del Paso being
drawn here.
   A strong affiliation with the cultural traditions of Latin America is
evident in the foregoing analysis and is reiterated by del Paso in several
interviews from the mid-197os on. In a typical account of his literary
apprenticeship, del Paso cites Latin American authors (Carpentier, Cor-
tizar, Uslar Pietri, Roa Bastos, Lezama Lima, Neruda) who influenced his
development and comments, "It was with them, with the authors of Latin





zo I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


America, that I learned to write" ("Mi patria chica" 115 8). On the face of
it, such statements are unexceptional -a logical consequence of the
author's life and education in Mexico City in the 1940s and early 195os.
Yet they often carry within them the implication of a binary relationship
between self and other, between Latin American and non-Latin American
points of reference, which is crucial to the present inquiry. The interplay
between the local and the universal is seen in the continuation of del Paso's
account of his literary apprenticeship, quoted from above. Arbitrarily
cutting short the roll call of famous Latin American authors to whom he
acknowledges a debt, del Paso remarks, "Suffice it to say that they all
taught me, not only to write, but also what to write about and for what
purpose." He adds "And this is not to say that I do not recognize the
instructive examples and the influence of the grand masters of world lit-
erature: because it was through those Latin Americans that, to a large
extent, I acquired them" (1 58). In this two-part declaration, the second,
qualifying sentence is noteworthy, above all, for its problematization of
the categories of "Latin American" and "non-Latin American." Couched
in the terms of a rhetorical denial, the sentence simultaneously asserts and
negates difference between those two categories; what is more, it effec-
tively enacts the proposition that it is in the process of advancing, by
exemplifying from the author's own life the mechanisms of mediation
through which material originating in non-Latin American sources enters
the mainstream of Latin American cultural discourse, where it circulates
freely thereafter. According to del Paso, the canonical authors of world
literature became known to him largely through the mediation of other
Latin American writers -writers such as Borges, Asturias, and Marechal,
who, as I shall attempt to show below, served as vehicles for the transmis-
sion, to del Paso and other writers of his generation, of the influence of
James Joyce (in particular) and, through him, of the examples of Homer,
Dante, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Swift, and a voluminous et caetera.
   Del Paso's relationship to what he terms "universal culture" and his
view of the relation between it and Latin American culture are subjects
that merit close attention. He has acknowledged the roots of his work
most immediately in Symbolism (Poe), surrealism (Breton, Magritte), and
modernism (Joyce) and, from a longer perspective, in a millenial tradition
of (largely western) art and science, narrative, and philosophy. On the
other hand, he has acknowledged a strong affiliation to a broad Latin
American tradition including Bolivar, Borges, Reyes, Neruda, Rulfo, Paz,
and others, whose work has debated the question of American identity
vis-a-vis European culture vigorously and insistently.





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations | 21


   Fernando del Paso's most important statements in this regard have re-
volved around the crucial event of his move to England in 1971. At a
certain moment in the biographical narrative of "Mi patria chica, mi
patria grande," del Paso recalls, "I went to live in London in order to
confirm and reaffirm the western, European, and Judeo-Christian compo-
nents of my culture, my way of life, my traditions, both past and present"
(15 6). In an earlier account of his motives for moving to Europe, he had
remarked: "I wanted to see the old cities, walk through their streets to the
point of exhaustion, visit museums and monuments, and to try to recover
that part of the history of Europe which also belongs to us" (Trejo Fuentes
io). Speaking in terms of reaffirmation and recovery, about a project in-
tended and willed, del Paso lays claim here to the entire cultural heritage
of the Old World, as well as to a selective identification with the history of
Europe. A rhetorical question communicates vividly the right of access to
the storehouse of western culture: "Surely Homer and Thomas Aquinas,
Haydn and Botticelli belong to us to the same extent that they belong to
Europe?" ("Mi patria chica" 156).
   This attitude was given its most controversial formulation in a public
address at the Sorbonne in Paris in the spring of 1991. The occasion was
a celebration, sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture, of the achieve-
ments of contemporary Mexican literature. At the time, del Paso was
Mexico's consul general in France, recently promoted from the position of
cultural attache there, and it fell to him to reply to the speech of welcome
delivered by the rector of the Sorbonne. Beginning in a conventional vein,
del Paso thanked the French authorities for their hospitality and acknowl-
edged the existence of historic ties between France and Mexico. He then
turned to the topic of cultural identity and introduced a mildly discordant
note, querying some widely held perceptions of the literature of Latin
America: "Our literature is not that far removed from European literature
and thought. But neither is it as exotic as some might imagine, or as the
inventors of the myth of the so-called boom of Latin American literature
would have wished." With the part-French, part-Mexican audience now
hanging on his every word, del Paso delivered the main thrust of his argu-
ment as follows:

   Through religion and language, which were the two most powerful
   weapons in the conquest of the Latin American continent, the Span-
   iards made us a party to western culture. Put another way, the pro-
   cesses of mestizaje and transculturation, which began five hundred
   years ago and continue today, have resulted in the peoples of Latin





22 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   America acquiring co-ownership of all the values of western history
   and the Judeo-Christian cultural tradition. This means that Shake-
   speare, Ucello, Bergson, and Mahler, to mention just a few names,
   belong to us just as much as they belong to the peoples of Europe.
   (Excerpts 46)

On behalf of the peoples of Mexico and Latin America, del Paso restates
the proposition of equal ownership of cultural goods, shrewdly citing the
name of Bergson as a token of the French intellectual tradition alongside
famous representatives of English, Italian, and German culture.
   The reference to Bergson adds a certain edge to the critique of Euro-
centrism that is implied in the Sorbonne speech and ushers in the most
controversial section of the address. Centering on a text by the doyen of
Mexican letters, Octavio Paz (who did not attend the proceedings), the
material concerned shows del Paso taking issue, first and to a modest
extent, with the organizers of the Paris event and, for the most part, with
a paragraph from the prologue to Paz's essay of 1970, Posdata, reprinted,
without the author's permission, as a preface to the program of the week-
long event:

   I disagree with the text that has been chosen [for this occasion], and
   especially with a paragraph that says: "Inhabitants of the periphery,
   living on the outskirts of history, we Latin Americans are the unin-
   vited guests who came into the West via the tradesmen's entrance,
   the intruders who arrive at the spectacle of modernity at the moment
   when the lights are about to go out." (Paz, Posdata 13)

Without a break, del Paso continued:

   I, who as a child was nurtured on Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas,
   Walter Scott, and who subsequently fed my sentimental education
   with Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, and William Faulkner, do
   not feel at all like a "man of the periphery," "an inhabitant of the
   outskirts of history," or an "uninvited guest." I have not gained
   access to the culture of the West by the tradesmen's entrance, nor do
   I feel at all that I am an intruder there. (Excerpts 46)

Predictably, these remarks drew a sharp reply from Paz, to which del Paso
responded, the whole exchange being published in the pages of the weekly
journal Proceso in April 1991. From my position on the sidelines, and at
a temporal remove of several years, I am not going to attempt to adjudi-
cate between the two parties involved in the dispute. For the purposes of




Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations | 23


this study I simply note the robust spirit of del Paso's remarks and the
firmness of his conviction concerning his personal relation to western cul-
ture.
   It is significant that the categories of the West and Judeo-Christian
civilization overlap, in del Paso's thinking, with that of the universal. The
conception of the universal that informs del Paso's work is both a personal
one and the offshoot of a Latin American branch of political thought
stemming from Bello and Bolivar and flowering much later in the work of
Reyes, Zea, and others. Del Paso's personal conception is encapsulated in
the following: "We are members of a single race of equals whose home-
land is the world and whose common language is hope" ("Mi patria
chica" 115 4) and "[We are] beings who have the capacity to think and who
are universal" (155). A further statement, "All men are brothers of ours,
and all their noble causes, too" (1154-5 5), shows the humanist and idealist
cast of del Paso's worldview, converging, once again, in key respects with
the outlook of Leopoldo Zea, who near the close of "Colonization and
Decolonization of Latin American Culture" had looked forward to the
emergence of "a more fully developed human subject": "one who will
express himself through all the forms of culture at his disposal," and who
will be capable of representing "all men, of the past and of the present,
along with those who have yet to be" (Dependencia y liberacidn 55).
   From a continental perspective, the towering figure of Alfonso Reyes
stands as a synecdoche of a long-running inquiry into relations between
the national and the universal in Latin America. In a lecture entitled
"Notas sobre la inteligencia americana," which he delivered to an interna-
tional audience in Buenos Aires in 1936, Reyes spoke for all the peoples of
Latin America when he demanded international recognition of "the right
to citizenship of the world, which we have already acquired" [el derecho
a la ciudadania universal que ya hemos conquistado] (15). Through his
calculated choice of words, Reyes asserted the right of all Latin Americans
to enjoy the political fruits of a modern-day conquest, which they had at
long last undertaken as subjects and not experienced merely as spectators
and objects. Declaring their "citizenship of the world" a fait accompli, he
blazed a trail for later thinkers who would press the same claim and, in del
Paso's case, take absolutely for granted a personal place in the universal
order of culture.
   In light of the above, it is clear that del Paso does not share the suspicion
of universalist concepts harbored by some postcolonial intellectuals (for
example, Ngugi wa Thiong'o) who have regarded the rhetoric of univer-
salism as nothing more than an instrument for the propagation and per-





24 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


petuation of western hegemony (Ngugi 1986). Del Paso views the univer-
sal as part of a continuum beginning with the local and the regional and
opening out onto wider horizons that either connect with, or actually
constitute, the universal. Maintaining that "We proceed thus, from the
lesser order to the greater" ("Mi patria chica" 155), he envisages staged
access to the universal through the local, the regional, and the continental,
and thereby plays out the scenario outlined by Leopoldo Zea in his con-
ception of the evolution of Latin American ideas. Writing in the early
1970s, Zea bore witness to the following:
   A realization of the manner in which our peoples, the peoples of
   Latin America, have received and assimilated the expressions of
   other cultures. The way in which these peoples, in spite of every-
   thing, have appropriated values which were once used to justify acts
   of domination and relations of dependency, and have adapted them
   to their innermost personality. A realization which has gradually
   permitted us to make those values the expression of our own person-
   ality and indispensable complements of it. This history has also
   made us conscious of the universal dimension of our personality
   without this affecting our material specificity as human beings,
   which is equal to that of the architects, past and present, of the
   multiple creations of what is called universal culture. (Dependencia
   y liberaci6n 31)

Rendering vividly the situation of colonial and postcolonial societies the
world over, these words illuminate the study of the works of Fernando del
Paso, which give sustained literary form to the political and ideological
convictions rehearsed in this section.

Text, Intertext, and Narrative Transcultu ration
in the Work of Fernando del Paso

Literary texts and literary culture were probably not foremost in Leopoldo
Zea's mind when he made the declaration reproduced above, but they are,
without question, sites of some of the most compelling operations of the
phenomenon to which he was referring in all but name, which is the phe-
nomenon of transculturation. Observations on the "assimilation of the
expressions of other cultures," "adapting the values of others to one's own
personality," and the relationship between local and universal categories
are essential to Latin American theories of transculturation as analyzed by
Silvia Spitta in an authoritative and invaluable study. Between Two Wa-





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations | 25


ters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (1995) deals with the
subject of transculturation from two complementary angles. The first of
these traces the historical parameters of colonialism and neocolonialism,
which have framed the societies and cultures of Latin America since the
Conquest, while the second examines some specific narrative instances of
transculturation that have taken place in the fields of painting and fiction
over the past five hundred years. Each of these angles offers something of
value to the present study of the work of Fernando del Paso.
   In the opening pages of her book, Spitta acknowledges Cuban anthro-
pologist Fernando Ortiz as the originator of a general theory of trans-
culturation to which significant refinements were added in the work of the
Peruvian Jose Maria Arguedas. Privileging "the Arguedian understanding
of the intercultural dynamics that have arisen because of the Conquest,"
Spitta recalls the distinction drawn by Arguedas between acculturation
and transculturation and offers the following summary: "On one side is
acculturation, the sheer and irredeemable loss of one's culture, language,
history, tradition-even the body and its rhythms; on the other side is
transculturation, the overcoming of loss by giving new shape to one's life
and culture after the catastrophes of Conquest, colonization, and modern-
ization" (1-2). She concludes, "Transculturation can thus be understood
as the complex process of adjustment and re-creation-cultural, literary,
linguistic, and personal-that allow for new, vital, and viable configura-
tions to arise out of the clash of cultures and the violence of colonial and
neo-colonial appropriations" (z).
   Spitta's account and definition of the concept of transculturation re-
sembles Fernando del Paso's 1991 address at the Sorbonne. There, the
Mexican novelist likewise traced the phenomena of mestizaje and trans-
culturation in Latin America back to the moment of Conquest and de-
picted them as the prime determinants of Latin American cultural experi-
ence right up to the present day. In conjunction with other material that
will be cited in due course, del Paso's familiarity with the basic principles
of the subject of transculturation authorizes an approach to his novels as
instances of "the two-way, multi-leveled cultural interchanges, borrow-
ings, displacements, and re-creations characteristic of both Latin Ameri-
can and European literatures, languages, and cultures" (Spitta 14-115). In
the specific case of Jose Trigo, European symbols interact with others from
a Mesoamerican tradition and result in a subversive resemanticization of
metropolitan values, similar to the operations Spitta observes in a range of
early colonial texts (Spitta chapters 2-4). In Palinuro de Mdxico, a minor
fictional character is recuperated from the margins of the western canon





z6 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


(Virgil's Aeneid) and assimilated to a novelistic project that redefines him
as a contemporary Mexican hero. Noticias del Imperio, through the nar-
rative of the emperor Maximilian and the native Indian president Benito
Juarez, thematizes military and ideological conflict between Europe and
the Americas, and explores the political and moral consequences of a mis-
guided imperial adventure on Mexican soil. And Linda 67 exposes flaws
in contemporary North American society through a polarized contrast
with Mexican values that builds on Alejo Carpentier's earlier critical
meditations on relations between Spanish America, the United States, and
Europe. In the detailed design of their plots, therefore, del Paso's novels
dramatize scenarios of conflict that are invested with varying degrees of
political significance and intent.
   Besides articulating a general historical explanation of intercultural
encounter, the theory of transculturation offers a model for the study of
processes of narrative transculturation in particular. This element of
transculturation theory is also applicable to the novels of Fernando del
Paso, which provide fascinating examples of the phenomenon. Spitta's
recuperation of the seminal work of Angel Rama is especially helpful in
this connection, inasmuch as it sets out the agenda for any serious inquiry
into narrative transculturation. Such an inquiry must concern itself with
(1) the relationship between foreign models and local narrative traditions,
(z) the negotiation of the modernizing impulses of the European novel,
and (3) processes of cultural mediation and assimilation which Rama,
using a spatial metaphor and focusing exclusively on mid-twentieth-cen-
tury examples, located at one of two poles of Spanish American writing:
the transculturating pole represented, in his scheme, by authors such as
Arguedas, Asturias, Garcia Mirquez, Rulfo, and Roa Bastos, and the cos-
mopolitan pole represented by authors such as Borges, Cortizar, and
(quite problematically) Fuentes.
   The polarized conception underpinning Rama's theory of narrative
transculturation in Latin America is arguably both a strength and a weak-
ness, as my bracketed comment on the identification of Fuentes with the
cosmopolitan pole is meant to indicate. For, if there is a persuasive coher-
ence to Rama's canon of "transculturadores" who, in Spitta's words,
"take on the task of mediating between the different fields of tension cre-
ated by the diverse cultures, languages, and worlds that coexist in different
relations of power in their countries" (9), the attribution of the author of
"Chac Mool," La regidn mds transparente, Terra nostra, and other fic-
tions to a completely opposite pole is, at least to my mind, counterin-
tuitive. This objection is, in fact, anticipated by Rama, who concedes the





Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations | 27


possibility of certain authors' occupying a point of intersection between
the two arcs that divide the field of Latin American culture according to
his scheme ("La tecnificacion narrativa" 70-71). This capacity for self-
adjustment in Rama's theory opens the way to accommodating writers
like Fuentes and del Paso at just that point of intersection.
   In broad outline, Rama's theory of narrative transculturation concen-
trates on the impact, on Latin American fiction of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, of modernizing impulses deriving from the European avant-garde
and its North American offshoots. In that context, the greatest influence
was exerted by the modernist novels of such writers as Kafka, Joyce,
Woolf, and Musil and, from North America, Faulkner and Dos Passos.
Notwithstanding the prominence given to named authors in his survey,
Transculturacidn narrativa en Amdrica Latina, Rama's account of the field
of Latin American literature rests at bottom on culturalist foundations
that privilege the cultural system, heritage, and community over the cre-
ative capacities of individuals: hence the dynamic role assigned in his dis-
course to literary "tendencies," "models," "structures," and "systems"-
terms which appear under the nomenclature of "literary paradigms" in
my study and reinforce the intertextual approach that I take to the novels
of Fernando del Paso. The incorporation of a modernist paradigm of nar-
rative fiction, exemplified quintessentially in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,
is crucial to the design of Josd Trigo. Elaborating on a process that was
already well advanced in Mexican fiction, the most significant aspect of
del Paso's novel was its interweaving of "foreign" modernist strands with
native Indian cultural material, giving rise to a hybrid text whose trans-
culturated nature, passed over by virtually all of the novel's commenta-
tors,2 is one of the main focuses of my study. After Josd Trigo, Palinuro de
Mdxico repeats the Joycean formula to produce what may be considered
the most accomplished Mexican rewriting of Ulysses of all time. In del
Paso's prize-winning novel of 1977, a template derived from the universal
narrative tradition is made to conform to local conditions as part of a
project that openly interpellates universal culture and inscribes itself
within global parameters. Through a two-way process that involves the
Mexicanizing of Mediterranean source material and the bold assumption
of membership of universal culture, Palinuro de Mdxico places itself firmly
at the cosmopolitan pole of Latin American writing according to Rama's
scheme. A decade or so later, Noticias del Imperio models itself on the type
of historical novel cultivated, in its classic nineteenth-century form, by
European writers such as Scott and Stendhal. However, Noticias del Impe-
rio sets out very self-consciously to subject the inherited paradigm to radi-





z8 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


cal modification. Mixing the dogma of Lukics with the metaphysics of
Borges, and generally contesting interpretations of Mexican history that
have been written from external, imperialistic perspectives, Noticias del
Imperio promotes and exemplifies a new Latin American historical novel
pulsating with political assertiveness and conviction. In terms of narrative
style, Noticias del Imperio exploits the modernist paradigm once more but
subverts its totalizing pretensions in a postmodernist spirit that infuses
several other Spanish American texts of the time. Finally, Linda 67 experi-
ments with the borrowed form of the crime novel as practiced by Euro-
pean and North American writers from Georges Simenon to Patricia
Highsmith. Largely ignoring the national and continental Latin American
branches of that tradition, del Paso uses the novela negra to paint a depre-
cating picture of life in the United States and to refute conventional views
of Mexico as a site of backwardness and barbarism.
   In the light of this summary, del Paso's work evidences a constant nego-
tiation between different narrative paradigms and traditions, each with
their own ideological inflections and baggage. His work further mediates
between cultural fields ranging from the national through the regional and
continental to the universal. Overall, these fields operate as arenas for the
staging and, in some cases, for the symbolic resolution of conflicts that
have both their origins and, arguably, their final explanation in the colo-
nial, neocolonial, and postcolonial histories of Latin America. The highly
elaborate novels of Fernando del Paso offer a singular opportunity for the
study of multiple connections between texts, intertexts, and the broader
historical and political contexts of writing in Latin America throughout
the final third of the twentieth century.









2


Jos6 Trigo

A Novel of Hybridity and Regeneration


   Christianity, in its warm, blood-thirsty sense of sacrifice and
   ritual, becomes a natural and novel prolongation of native
   religion. The aspects of charity, love, and turning the other
   cheek are rejected, however. And everything in Mexico boils
   down to this: It is necessary to kill a human being so that oth-
   ers may believe in him.
   Carlos Fuentes, Los dias enmascarados

Del Paso's debut novel has its immediate origins in a specific combination
of personal, social, and literary circumstances. Written between April
1959 and July 1966, it was the tangible result of seven years of creative
activity that del Paso carried out with the aid of a fellowship awarded by
the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in his native Mexico City.1 For those
living in Mexico at the time, the late 1950s were characterized by rapid
social change and a considerable degree of labor unrest.2 The epitome of
the latter was the railway workers' strike of 1959, which pitted a band of
workers, with labor leader Demetrio Vallejo at their head, against the
government of President Adolfo L6pez Mateos aided and abetted by the
charros -pro-government union officials -who orchestrated a "dirty
tricks" campaign to discredit the strike movement.3 "The turbulent con-
flict of the railways" (54) lies behind the narrative of Jose Trigo, where
it is transposed to a time frame beginning on 13 January and ending on zo
December 1960. Basing his plot "partly on what happened around De-
metrio Vallejo, and partly on events from the 1940s, when the charro
movement was born" (Carvajal iii), del Paso uses the figure of Vallejo as a
model for Luciano, the main protagonist of Jose Trigo. Luciano is an
elected representative of the railway workers of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco who
campaigns vigorously for strike action and rejects government-sponsored
moves to impose on the workers a settlement that would be to their disad-
vantage. He is opposed by a local charrista sympathizer, Manuel Angel,
who contrives to undermine the strike through acts of bullying, sabotage,
and dishonesty. Manuel Angel attempts to bribe Luciano but is rebuffed;





30 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


in a later encounter he stabs his rival to death, thus depriving the move-
ment of direction and leadership.
   Luciano and Manuel Angel stand at the center of a network of narrative
relationships that include their families and the local community of
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and stretch beyond the boundaries of Mexico City
to encompass the nation as a whole. Among a plethora of secondary char-
acters, the most important are madrecita Buenaventura and her husband,
Todolosantos, of whom Luciano was "coincidentally both son and grand-
son" (1137), and Jos6 Trigo -a fantasmal being whose story is tied up with
that of Luciano and Manuel Angel and who represents an enigma to be
elucidated in the course of the narrative. Within the temporal frame of Jose
Trigo, a crucial point of reference is the historic Cristero rebellion of
1926-29 in which Luciano's family fought on the side of the defeated
Catholic rebels. Further back in time, the narrative recalls the inaugura-
tion of the first section of the Mexican railway system in 1185o and evokes
aspects of life in the capital city in the colonial era; it also mentions in a
chronological note the founding of Tlatelolco by the Aztecs in 1337.
   This summary of a large amount of the narrative content of Jose Trigo
bears witness to a powerful centrifugal impulse at work in del Paso's
novel; at the same time, it affords an insight into the almost limitless am-
bition that fires del Paso's artistic enterprise. Taking his immediate inspi-
ration from sociopolitical events of the time, del Paso creates a novel of
immense and far-reaching proportions, whose principal characteristics
include (i) a highly elaborate formal design, which many critics have lik-
ened to a pyramid; (ii) a chorus of narrative voices, led by a first-person
narrator who comes in search of information about Jose Trigo and is met
by a group of interlocutors peddling unreliable memories, gossip, and
half-truths; (iii) a showcase of styles, modes, and discourses, including the
ode and the elegy, drama and the epic, historical discourse, scatology,
parody of the official discourses of church and state, and pastiche of vari-
ous literary styles; (iv) an exuberant display of verbal mastery and inven-
tiveness that is grounded in encyclopedic knowledge of several lexical
fields and enlivened by a playful attitude to the physical properties of
words and their arrangement on the page; (v) a repertoire of cultural and
psychoanalytical themes, of which family relations and Oedipal conflict
are the most extensively deployed; and (vi) a mythical framework that
matches each of the characters and main events in the plot of Jose Trigo
with antecedents in pre-Columbian mythology.
   As a system of formal and linguistic procedures, del Paso's novel corre-
sponds to a modernist paradigm derived from authors such as James





                                                         Josd Trigo | 31z

Joyce, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, who together exerted a
crucial, modernizing influence on Mexican fiction from the 1940s on. El
luto humano (1943), Alfilo del agua (1947), and Pedro Paramo (195 5) are
the most significant staging posts in a process of technical experimenta-
tion, which was well established in Mexican fiction midway through the
century and which peaked with the historic publication of La regidn mas
transparente in 1958. The impact of Fuentes's debut novel on the contem-
porary literary scene cannot be overestimated: Reviled by a handful of
detractors and enthused over by many more admirers, La region mas
transparente polarized literary debate in Mexico in the late 1950s and
early 1960s and affected all those who were involved in writing fiction.
   Testimony to the force of that novel's impact can be found in essays by
Jose Donoso (1972), Gustavo Sainz, and, most pertinent to the present
study, by Fernando del Paso in a retrospective declaration made in the
mid-199os. In a 1996 interview with Ilin Stavans, del Paso recollected:

   Where the Air Is Clear was a revelation to me. It was a novel that
   revolutionized Mexican fiction in that it stationed itself in a deci-
   sively urban atmosphere-its protagonist [. . .] is Mexico City. It
   influenced me in its attitude and openness to other styles. [Fuentes
   and I] were at the time reading the same set of authors: Flaubert,
   whose approach to the novel we admired, as well as Joyce; and in
   more technical terms, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf,
   and Faulkner. Without them we wouldn't be who we are today.
   (129-30)

Two main points emerge from this passage: first, the author's acknowledg-
ment of the decisive influence on him of La regidn mas transparente, and
second, the mention of a wider community of literary authors and proce-
dures that del Paso claims enabled him, as they did Fuentes, to evolve as a
writer of fiction.
   Evidence of the influence of La regidn mas transparente on Jose Trigo
resides most conclusively in the texts themselves. Under comparative scru-
tiny, the pair reveal a set of likenesses that identify La region mas trans-
parente quite clearly as a template for Josd Trigo. To start with, both books
are novels of the city that double as novels of the nation. Through a nar-
rative perspective that pretends to be all-embracing, La region mas trans-
parente constructs a vast frieze of life in Mexico City, reproducing "the
unstable pastiche" of different milieux and social classes (5 2) and focusing
in particular on "the fact, so obvious yet so rarely reflected in Mexican
fiction, of the emergence for the first time ever in the history of the nation,





32 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


of a middle class and an upper bourgeoisie" (Garcia Gutierrez, La regidn
mds transparente 21). Resolutely contemporary in its orientation, La
regidn mds transparente considers the minutiae of life in the Mexican
capital in precise historical terms, locating the action in the period 1946 to
1952 when major social and economic changes were wrought by the ad-
ministration of President Miguel Alemin. At the same time, the temporal
perspective of Fuentes's novel fans out to include the period of the Mexi-
can Revolution and, at a further remove, the pre-Hispanic era of Mexican
history; through the medium of a narrative consciousness that spans sev-
eral centuries, the novel offers a "compendium and review of the history
[of the nation]" (Garcia Gutierrez 19).
   More restricted in its sociological focus, Josd Trigo concentrates narra-
tive attention on a small proletarian community living in a disused railway
yard in Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. Differences of scale notwithstanding, this
setting stems directly from the final scene of La regidn mds transparente
where the roving eye of Fuentes's narrative comes to rest on the figure of
the prostitute, Gladys Garcia, as she stands on the Nonoalco Bridge, look-
ing down on the city below: "Gladys Garcia stops on the Nonoalco
bridge. [...] She lights up the last cigarette of the night and allows the ash
to fall onto the laminated roofs, and takes in the panorama of the city at
daybreak" (459-60). In a very literal sense, Fernando del Paso's novel
starts up, in 1959, from the very point where Carlos Fuentes had left off,
one year earlier, at the end of La region mds transparente.
   A key feature of the Fuentes novel is its incorporation of a mythical
perspective on reality, which is provided by the indigenous character, Ixca
Cienfuegos. A ubiquitous presence in the social world of the mimesis, Ixca
effectively determines the shape of the narrative of La regidn mas
transparente inasmuch as it is his voice which opens and closes the novel
and his vision and values which acquire prominence at strategic points in
the narrative. At the thematic level, he and his mother, Teodula Moc-
tezuma, embody certain "elements - cruel and vital - of that stony, eternal
Mexico" which Carlos Fuentes suggests lie submerged beneath the surface
of everyday social reality in postrevolutionary Mexico (Garcia Gutierrez
21). At the same time, Ixca represents the racial and cultural diversity of a
nation whose identity derives in large part from the historical fact of
mestizaje: in Fuentes's hands, he exemplifies the amalgam of two
worldviews-the Christian and the native Indian-which have contrib-
uted to the definition of Mexican cultural identity.
   Josd Trigo reproduces the mythical perspective of its forerunner in the
overall scope and some of the details of its design. Thus, Luciano evokes





                                                         Josd Trigo | 33

the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, while his opponent, Manuel Angel, is por-
trayed throughout as a modern-day Tezcatlipoca. The eponymous Jose
Trigo, while lacking a concrete referent, seems to embody, like Ixca
Cienfuegos before him, the transcendental spirit of the race, and mad-
recita Buenaventura, described as a centenarian "expert in enchantments
and sorcery" (5 35), shares some features with Te6dula Moctezuma, ex-
cepting her benevolent and charitable nature, which constitutes a major
contrast with the bloodthirsty and destructive character of Te6dula. In
addition to their structural function in the narrative of Jose Trigo, the
mythological framework and perspective of the novel permit a more sys-
tematic exploration of the phenomenon of cultural mestizaje dealt with in
the earlier novel by Carlos Fuentes.
   In the context of the modern renovation of Mexican narrative, La
regidn mds transparente attempted a radical experiment with forms and
procedures of composition which, while not completely new to Mexican
fiction, had not previously been foregrounded to the extent demonstrated
in La regidn mds transparente. The book's conspicuous technical virtuos-
ity provoked great controversy and met with the disapproval of some
commentators. Manuel Pedro Gonzilez, for one, accused Carlos Fuentes
of pursuing gratuitous technical aims and dismissed La region mds
transparente and La muerte de Artemio Cruz, along with Rayuela by Julio
Cortizar and La ciudad y los perros by Mario Vargas Llosa, as "the four
most scandalously applauded novels" in Spanish American writing of the
early 196os (38). However, it is clear in retrospect that what Georgina
Garcia Gutierrez calls "the avant-garde impulse of Fuentes" was an essen-
tial part of a bold, iconoclastic project that resisted containment within
the conventional bounds of prose fiction (16). Fuentes's disregard for ac-
cepted norms of narrative economy and proportion carries over into the
verbal texture of La regidn mds transparente, which offers a copybook
example of the Bakhtinian categories of carnivalesque and multivocal
writing.4 The dynamics of Fuentes's prose are typified in passages where
the author cultivates an encyclopedic style built around extravagance and
excess.
   Josd Trigo shares the extravagant technical ambitions of La regidn mas
transparente. The multiplicity and complexity of its narrative structures,
the contrivance of its form, and the seemingly boundless variety of its
rhetorical and stylistic repertoire are a mirror image of the operations of
Fuentes's text, and they bear out the contemporary evaluation of Jose
Trigo as "the most ambitious novel to have been written in Mexico since
Carlos Fuentes published La region mds transparente" (Xirau 24). Xirau's





34 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


opinion can legitimately be read as a comment on the formal similarities
between the two texts in question. Yet a bedazzlement by form should not
obscure the fundamental point at issue, which is the affiliation of both
texts to a common paradigm deriving from European and North Ameri-
can modernism, a paradigm whose full incorporation into the Mexican
narrative tradition is linked unquestionably to the social dynamics of the
age. Urban expansion, industrial growth, and further differentiation be-
tween the social classes were visible indices of a modernity in the making
in Mexico in the 195os and 1960s. In other latitudes, those conditions had
developed some decades earlier and had been reflected in a modernist
aesthetic that produced works such as Ulysses and Manhattan Transfer. In
Mexico, the modernizing idiom of La region mds transparente was a
timely response to the conditions and imperatives of social change, shortly
to be echoed in the multifarious accents of Jose Trigo.
   Evaluating the temporal and causal relation between the two texts, it is
possible to view La regidn mds transparente as a trailblazing precursor of
del Paso's debut novel; alternatively, we may look on the two works as
complementary symptoms of a widespread desire to find adequate forms
of fictional expression for the evolved realities of Mexican life around the
midpoint of the twentieth century. This consideration highlights the fun-
damental question of the intertextual nature of literary production. To
credit Carlos Fuentes with authorship of a text that answered the needs of
the moment, as far as certain strata of urban Mexican society were con-
cerned, with singular timeliness is fair. To privilege him as the sovereign
creator of a text that single-handedly revolutionized Mexican fiction is to
overlook his debts to previous writing and to overstate his importance in
the evolution of a literary tradition. Fuentes's debts are legion, not only to
James Joyce, about whom he would write at length in Cervantes o la
critica de la lectura (1976), but also to a number of traditions of which a
single example would be the long line of Mexican writing about the
nation's capital, which stretches from the chronicles and tableaux of life in
Tenochtitlan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as portrayed by
Hernin Cortes, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and Bernardo Balbuena, to es-
says, written in Fuentes's lifetime, by Alfonso Reyes and Salvador Novo,
and an experimental novel, La lucidrnaga, by Mariano Azuela.5 Seen from
this angle, Fuentes and his debut novel are not so much individual land-
marks on a map of literary achievement as part of a densely populated
nucleus-links in a genealogical chain that transmits formal and other
features of the literary tradition to later writers and texts, including, of





                                                          Josd Trigo | 35

course, Fernando del Paso. Del Paso's frank acknowledgment of writers
such as Poe, Flaubert, Joyce, and Borges, and his openness to influence by
these and countless other figures belonging to the Mexican and non-Mexi-
can literary traditions, invites an approach to his work through compara-
tive literature. Furthermore, if we grant precedence to texts over authors
and envisage the literary process as, to some degree, a history of forms and
paradigms which coalesce in individual texts, then his work offers an ex-
traordinary opportunity for systematic analysis in the light of current
theories of intertextuality.
   As remarked in the Introduction, a primitive notion of intertextuality
informed the initial critical response to del Paso's novel, with commenta-
tors such as Ramon Xirau and Dagoberto Orrantia pointing out connec-
tions between Josd Trigo and Ulysses and emphasizing links between del
Paso's novel and the Mexican narrative tradition, of which it represented
an impressive summa in their eyes. What was missing in the early assess-
ments and would remain underdeveloped in later studies by Lilvia Soto,
Ines Sienz, and others, was both a systematic theorization of the phenom-
enon of literary intertextuality and any awareness of the problematical
implications of that phenomenon for the cultural and political profile of a
body of work marked so distinctly with the badge of heterogeneity. For, as
suggested in my account of the thinking of Gustavo Perez Firmat, Leo-
poldo Zea, Silvia Spitta, and other theorists of postcolonial culture of
Latin America, the integration, within the textual fabric of a novel like
Josd Trigo, of material drawn from multiple sources has decisive conse-
quences for the identity and symbolic value of that text, which requires a
corresponding plurality of frames of interpretation to account for its se-
mantic and cultural density.
   My reading of Josd Trigo focuses on the construction of a cultural iden-
tity that has its most immediate relevance in the Mexican context but also
reaches beyond the boundaries of that nation into the cultural landscapes
of Mesoamerica and Latin America as a whole. The connections between
Josd Trigo and a number of narrative traditions are essential to the profile
of del Paso's text, and they will be discussed at length in a later section of
this chapter. First, it is necessary to examine the anatomy of Jose Trigo
more closely, concentrating on three of its features which historically have
been the object of repeated analysis and often heated debate. Since the
mid-19 6os, critical attention has centered on the triad of myth, structure,
and language in Josd Trigo, perpetuating a broadly structuralist approach
to the analysis of narrative that dominated the academy throughout the





36 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


1960s and lasted into the 1970s.6 Such a triad remains particularly well
suited to a novel that is structured around pairs of characters, doubles,
oppositions, symmetries, and the like; a timely reformulation of its basic
terms demonstrates its continuing usefulness as a methodological tool for
elucidating the formal and conceptual design of Josd Trigo.

Hybridity, the Metropolitan Standard, and the Myth of Resurrection

The presence of a clearly outlined mythical discourse in Josd Trigo has
been a leitmotif of the criticism of the novel for the last three decades (e.g.,
Flores Sevilla and Soto). Miguel G. Rodriguez Lozano has tried to play
down the importance of this element in the novel's design. Yet the system
of mythical correspondences and allusions remains a dominant feature of
Josd Trigo, which must be addressed in any examination of the text.
   Historically, the critical tradition has documented the pervasive pres-
ence of pre-Columbian mythology in del Paso's novel where it underpins
the entire narrative and provides a comprehensive exegetical key. What
has not been sufficiently acknowledged is the presence of a set of Christian
references, alongside the code of Aztec mythology, resulting in a text of
cultural hybridity. A review of the mythological referents of the two main
characters in the story illustrates the workings of hybridity in del Paso's
novel and reveals some of the implications of a strategy of double-coding
for the projection of a cultural identity. Some specific observations on the
myth of resurrection provide an additional signpost for interpreting the
humanist message of Jose Trigo.
   Starting with Luciano, his character is made up of many archetypal
features. As he washes in the garden outside his boxcar in the second
chapter of the novel, we are reminded of the ritual behavior of classical
heroes; the liquid reflection of Luciano's face "as big as the world" (29)
suggests a figure who is larger than life. A retrospective section of the
narrative then recalls how the adolescent Luciano had lived "with com-
passion and truth tied around his neck, written in his heart and attached
to his fingers" (143), before he matured into a self-effacing and circum-
spect adult who shows courage in the defense of lofty principles. When he
disappears in mysterious circumstances, "Luciano the agreeable, the ar-
chetypal, Luciano the only-begotten" (384) is acknowledged as "a symbol
and corner-stone of the workers' movement" (404), and he is sorely
missed. In death, the figurative dismemberment of his corpse ("Everybody
received a piece of Luciano. They all shared Luciano amongst them-
selves," 509) completes the process of his ennoblement: conforming to





                                                          Josd Trigo |137

mythical accounts of the fate of religious and culture heroes like the Egyp-
tian god Osiris, it effectively sanctifies him.7
   Consistent with this pattern of characterization, Luciano is assimilated
to the type of Quetzalcoatl, the ancient Mexican "god of self-sacrifice and
penance, of books, the calendar and the arts, the symbol of abnegation
and culture" (Soustelle 171). That relation emerges unambiguously in the
central section of the narrative, the "Parte Intermedia," which recounts a
fantastic flight "through the thirteen heavens of the celestial world [and]
the nine infernal regions of the underworld" (253) of Aztec cosmology.8
Led by Nance Buenaventura, who assumes the form of a mockingbird
(sinsonte/cenzontle), the narrator beholds a vision of Nonoalco-Tlatel-
olco sub specie aeternitatis, during which the fictional protagonists of Jose
Trigo appear to him in mythical guises. In this vivid tableau, Luciano is
distinguished by insignia associated with Quetzalcoatl: he wears "a belt of
stars" and holds "a reed scepter" (254); a "small jewel [emblematic] of the
wind" is emblazoned on his chest (25 5), and a quincunx adorns his fore-
head (260), as in Diego Rivera's famous representation of the god in his
painting The Legend of Quetzalcdatl, housed in the National Palace in
Mexico City.
   Numerous analogies with the experience of Quetzalcoatl are incorpo-
rated into the narrative of Jose Trigo. In one incident, Luciano gets up
from a stone on which he had been sitting and leaves behind "the impres-
sion of his buttocks" (327). The detail would appear to be trivial, but in
fact it can be traced back to a poetic tradition of Nahuatl literature
devoted to Quetzalcoatl. An anthology prepared by Angel Maria Garibay
records the following story:
   And finally he came to another place and sat down on a stone and
   rested his hands on it. And there where he placed his hand was left an
   impression as though in soft clay. And likewise the outline of his
   buttocks remained in the stone on which he was seated. (32)

When Luciano subsequently pays a visit to the fairground, his itinerary is
pictured as "a symbolic trajectory from the highest level to the lowest of
the underworld" (3o50) in the unwelcome company of an albino half
brother who drowns in a cauldron and acts as a replica of Xolotl, who
accompanied Quetzalcoatl to the underworld. Finally, the mystery sur-
rounding Luciano's ultimate fate recalls that of the god after his expulsion
from the religious city of Tula: some people believe that Luciano "headed
northwards, in the direction of the Mar Amarillo, which is where he dis-
appeared," while "There are those who are of the opinion that he went





38 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


east" (367). The myth of Quetzalcoatl thus determines much of the overall
shape of Luciano's life story in Josd Trigo, as it had that of Lorenzo in La
muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) by Carlos Fuentes.
   Manuel Angel's character and conduct also have their roots in Aztec
mythology. Devious and hypocritical, hateful and prone to violence,
Manuel Angel appears in the guise of Tezcatlipoca, "the protean god of
the night, of war and of youth" (Soustelle zo). Tezcatlipoca, whose name
signifies "smoking mirror,"9 was typically shown carrying four arrows
and a shield in one hand and a mirror in the other; the narrator of Jose
Trigo sees "Manuel Angel little huntsman, smoking mirror" in the vision
inspired by Nance Buenaventura, and thereby confirms his identity as an
avatar of the Aztec god. The image of Manuel Angel playing a "flute made
from a deer's horn," which he then breaks on the steps of a temple (z58),
has equally precise connotations. As George Vaillant observes, Tezcatli-
poca was honored in a holy ceremony involving that very sequence of
actions:
   The ceremony in honor of the god Tezcatlipoca was strikingly dra-
   matic. [. . .] The handsomest and bravest prisoner of war was se-
   lected a year before his execution. Priests taught him the manners of
   a ruler, and, as he walked about, playing divine melodies upon his
   flute, he received the homage due to Tezcatlipoca himself. A month
   before the day of sacrifice four lovely girls [.. .] became his compan-
   ions and attended to his every want. On the day of his death he took
   leave of his weeping consorts to lead a procession in his honor,
   marked by jubilation and feasting. Then he bade farewell to the
   glittering cortege and left for a small temple, accompanied by the
   eight priests who had attended him up the steps of the temple, and he
   followed, breaking at each step a flute which he had played in the
   happy hours of his incarnation. At the top of the platform the priests
   turned him over the sacrificial block and wrenched out his heart.
   (197)
In Josd Trigo an element of this ritual appears in debased form in a narra-
tive episode set in a brothel that is frequented "religiously" by Manuel
Angel and his cronies:
   Now, framed by a hyaline brilliance, [Manuel Angel] was sur-
   rounded by four women. Concerted resplendence of damsels: he
   [had] picked up four red hearts. Fulana, Mengana, Zutana y Putana.
   [...] One of them was putting a carnation in his buttonhole. Another





                                                         Josd Trigo | 39

   was sociable enough to offer him a cigarette. [.. .] Yet another, with
   a certain indifference, was removing cuticle with "Cutex" acetone.
   What a popular copulator [popular copulachero] was Manuel An-
   gel. (210)

A final detail in the mythical depiction of Manuel Angel is the "assassin's
dagger" (327) with which he stabs Luciano. In the context of Aztec my-
thology, this weapon identifies Manuel Angel with Itzalcoliuhqui, a surro-
gate of Tezcatlipoca, whose name signifies "curved obsidian knife" (Vail-
lant 181).
   Luciano and Manuel Angel, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca - these
characters form antagonistic pairs who are locked in a conflict made all
the more dramatic in the case of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca by the fact
that the two gods were brothers and sibling rivals. In Josd Trigo, Manuel
Angel and Luciano are not related by blood, but when, after years of
friendship, they clash over the right to occupy a boxcar and "become
irreconcilable enemies" (370), their enmity matches that of the god-twins.
An extract from the "Intermediate Part" illustrates their antagonism,
drawing on a crucial episode of the Quetzalcoatl myth-the hero's decep-
tion by Tezcatlipoca-and featuring the distinctive motif of a mirror
which is fabled to have induced shame in Quetzalcoatl:
   The man with the mirror [.. .] was telling the one with the starry eye
   in the crown of his head: look at yourself in this mirror. And he was
   inviting him to drink, and was intoxicating him. These two were
   none other than Manuel Angel and Luciano. (257-58)1

Luciano's death at the hands of his rival is also represented in mythical
terms. The narrator rebukes Manuel Angel, "Ah, night wind, shaveling,
enemy: [...] What did you do to your precious twin?" (258), and Nance
Buenaventura predicts, "The youthful god, the little huntsman, will mur-
der his precious twin" (263-64).
   The symbolic depiction of Luciano and Manuel Angel's "age-old an-
tagonism" (489) is not limited to the terms of Aztec mythology. It is also
rendered through the Christian code. In general outline, Luciano corre-
sponds to the type of Jesus Christ and Manuel Angel to that of Satan.
Luciano's experience recalls that of Christ in a number of respects. On a
personal level, his love for Maria Patrocinio and the decision to rescue her
from a career in prostitution evoke Christ's rehabilitation of Mary Mag-
dalen. In his public life, Luciano enjoys the exalted status of "Messiah of
the tracks" (348), but he is nevertheless betrayed, as was Christ by Judas





40 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Iscariot: Nance Buenaventura foresees his end, "taking for granted that
the young man would be tempted by the owner of the precious stone of
bribery and betrayed by the false witness who was destined to die with his
mouth full of gravel" (141). The sequence recounting Luciano's walk in
the yard-"a freshly fertilized garden, with a sort of pond covered in
slime" where he "pushed a crucified shirt to one side" (175) - adumbrates
his death and mysterious resurrection "to the astonishment and delight of
the railway workers who were attached to his branch" (404). Narrated in
the mode of magical realism, the resurrection episode carries strong can-
nibalistic overtones reminiscent both of an Aztec rite in honor of Xipe
Totec, in which "the god's flesh was eaten by the faithful" (Soustelle 98),
and of the Christian Eucharist.
   Manuel Angel's principal Christian referent is Satan, an equivalence
conveyed by conventional Christian symbolism of the snake and darkness.
Eduviges had seen "the shadow of the man slithering [culebreando] through
the grass" (75) when Manuel Angel first seduced her; in the narrative
present "the ignoble one, violator of women, who was always delighted to
dishonor" (489) is compared to the Prince of Darkness: "It was Manuel
Angel, arrogant, princely [.. .] and eaten away by envy" (327).
   The casting of Luciano and Manuel Angel in these archetypal molds is
generally consistent with the polarized value system of western Christian-
ity. Acting out the roles of a virtuous Messiah figure and a satanic force of
evil, the two men perpetuate an antagonism of recognizable biblical ori-
gins that gives expression to a wholly conventional view of morality. Fer-
nando del Paso nevertheless takes great care to avoid an excessively crude,
unnuanced antithesis that would reduce his characters to one-dimension-
ality and he endows them instead with a moral and psychological com-
plexity that confounds the "stupid, dried up dichotomies [of] the Chris-
tian dialectic" -that philosophical and ethical system repudiated by Julio
Cortizar in Rayuela (27, 616) and analyzed by Ixca Cienfuegos and
Rodrigo Pola in a central section of La regidn mds transparente (249-58).
As a result, the symbolic portraits of Luciano and Manuel Angel become
complicated and enriched to a point where they can no longer be accom-
modated within established schemes of Christian thought and morality.
   Elaborating on the descriptions of Luciano and Manuel Angel just
given, we have to acknowledge that Luciano is essentially a flawed hero.
In chapter 7 of part 1, he succumbs to sexual temptation, defying the
dictates of his conscience as he commits adultery with Rosita, a waitress
employed at the pointedly named Eden Oyster Bar. In the corresponding
chapter of part z, he is shown to be avaricious as he muses, in a moment's





                                                         Josd Trigo| 41

distraction from the main business of a political meeting that he is attend-
ing, "The only thing worthwhile is to swim in wool [lana, meaning
"money" in Mexican slang], without being fleeced. Good business deals
to provide a rich source of income, and you can forget everything else"
(343). He also entertains feelings of hatred and jealousy, admitting on a
visit to the fairground where his rival had consummated an idyllic love
affair with Genoveva, "Oh, how much he would have liked to have been
in Manuel Angel's skin" (353)-
   For his part, Manuel Angel, though reviled as "a mean son of a bitch
[and] a traitor," is nevertheless partially redeemed by his love for Geno-
veva. Described as "a really genuine love," his devotion compensates for
the earlier abuse of Eduviges, "who was never anything more than a lover
whom he did not particularly love." "It has to be faced," the narrator
admits, "the same Manuel Angel who up to that point had worshipped
only himself really fell for Genoveva" (363).
   For the critic Nora Dottori, such complexities in the two men's makeup
are evidence of the author's intention to achieve a verisimile character
portrayal through the allocation of a balanced set of positive and negative
traits (291-93). The text, however, provides an alternative explanation
more in keeping with the thematics of our inquiry. That explanation cen-
ters on the religious and philosophical doctrine of Manichaeanism, which
posits that co-eternal principles of good and evil embodied in God and
Satan dispute control of the world. At the fairground Luciano wonders,
"Does the Devil really exist?" and formulates the response, "Yes, by
aseity, just as God does. And we are all made in his likeness and image"
(363). This proposition, which is consistent with Eduviges's view of Jose
Trigo as one who "could be two people at the same time, of whom one
could drag the other along or simply kill off the goodness and prudence in
him" (z6), has surprising consequences for the symbolic projections of
both Luciano and Manuel Angel.
   Contrary to normal expectations, Luciano, who, as we have just seen,
displays some traits of Jesus Christ, is also cast in the mold of Lucifer, the
Bringer of Light. This duality may surprise some orthodox readers, yet it
is entirely congruous with the principles of Manichaeanism rehearsed
above, according to which even a virtuous and godlike individual may be
host to diabolical qualities and tendencies. Luciano's name is an important
indicator in this respect, bringing together concepts of light and anality -
luz y ano -which the western mind has traditionally associated with the
Devil. "The star of Luciano" is identified variously with "the evening
star" (263) and "the morning star" (366) and thus connotes Venus, the





42 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


celestial star which the pre-Columbian mind equated with Quetzalcoatl.
In a figurative sense, Luciano demonstrates a remarkable facility for "en-
lightening" his audience when he addresses a political rally of disaffected
railway workers. Yet, for all its rhetorical magnificence, his address con-
sists of "a torrent of words [and] hot air" (346) which he releases at the
end of a day spent combatting the afflictions of diarrhea and flatulence. In
Josd Trigo the scenes of Luciano on the lavatory, redolent of the "Calypso"
episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, point humorously to the anal and dia-
bolical basis of his character. We read how that morning, "[He had] had
another bowel movement: the fourth in under twelve hours. That damned
diarrhea. [...] Off to the bathroom again" (304-5).
   At certain moments of the narrative Luciano displays attitudes and
behavior that verge unquestionably on the satanic. A thirst for absolute
power inspires the thought, "Ah, when I become leader of the entire Union
organization, and not just a local branch," and prompts the narrator to
conclude that Luciano is guilty of "Megalomania" (327). Also, in his
sexual desire for Genoveva, he aspires to "dethrone" Manuel Angel (364),
just as Satan had sought to dislodge God from His heavenly throne.
   Looked at from these various angles, Fernando del Paso's symbolic
portrait of Luciano fuses images of Christ and Satan/Lucifer in an intrigu-
ing coincidentia oppositorum that is sustained throughout the bulk of the
narrative. Ultimately, the conflict between positive and negative values
resolves itself in favor of the former: we sense the narrator's unconditional
authority behind the description of Luciano as "the devil's own skin, but
as we've said often enough: a model of integrity and the art of public
speaking" (489). However, that resolution cannot detract from the origi-
nality of a characterization that involves two conflicting archetypal refer-
ents.
   Nuances of character also produce a more complex symbolic portrayal
of Manuel Angel. His first Christian name echoes that of Emmanuel,
which was the name of Jesus Christ, and is combined with an assertion of
angelic status in his second name. While the latter is consistent with
Manuel Angel's primary role as Fallen Angel, the former asserts a likeness
with Christ, in a further instance of coincidentia oppositorum, which con-
tradicts monologic assumptions to do with character and morality.
   In the light of this analysis, the symbolic identities of Luciano and
Manuel Angel are both more varied and more complex in their interac-
tions than has been acknowledged heretofore. Our findings can be sum-
marized in the form of two paradigms:





                                                         Josd Trigo |143

     Luciano               Manuel Angel
     Jesus Christ          Satan
     Lucifer               Emmanuel
     Quetzalcoatl          Tezcatlipoca
     -Venus

According to this diagram, Fernando del Paso superimposes on an Aztec
base Christian types representing antagonistic values. Christ vs. Satan,
Lucifer vs. Emmanuel, and Quetzalcoatl vs. Tezcatlipoca add up to a set of
horizontal oppositions that reflect the values of the two dominant cultural
traditions of Mexico since the Conquest. In addition, each paradigm also
houses vertical oppositions, which we have explained up until now in the
terms of Manichaeanism. Having established this much, it is important to
note a congruity between Manichean philosophy and the Aztec concep-
tion of god-heroes. As the researches of Eva Hunt and others have shown,
the gods of Mesoamerica, unlike the figureheads of monotheistic Chris-
tianity, were enigmatic and ambivalent: "None of the deities were without
ambivalent images, none of them were pure metaphors for good or bad,
wholly beneficial or destructive" (Hunt 170). The oppositions that are
contained in the vertical paradigms listed above thus find a rationale from
within the domestic American cultural tradition, and bear witness to the
thoroughgoing transculturation of Christianity on American soil.
   The intertwined Aztec and Christian registers of del Paso's novel iden-
tify Josd Trigo as a hybrid text of considerable sophistication. In part, the
narrative of Luciano, Manuel Angel, Nance Buenaventura, and the re-
maining characters mirrors an extratextual syncretism that is a fact of
Mexican life. At the same time, it speaks to and promotes an ideology of
syncretism that has a long pedigree in the Mexican intellectual tradition
and has often been brandished as an affirmation of Mexican difference
vis-a-vis other nations and cultures-in the work of Vasconcelos, Reyes,
and others. In this respect, the treatment in Jose Trigo of Roman Catholi-
cism, its themes and images, and, above all, its ethical schemes implies a
devastating critique of the metropolitan standard. An entire history of
spiritual colonization is repudiated in del Paso's description of his charac-
ters "struggling under the weight of four centuries of Catholicism" (Car-
vajal iii). Read politically, the unorthodox contexts and combinations of
Catholic motifs in the narrative of Jose Trigo are motivated, at least in
part, by a rejection of the values of Rome, depicted in the character of
Todolosantos as patriarchal, authoritarian, intolerant, and unforgiving.





44 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


In the final analysis, the Christian references in Jose Trigo merge into a
structure of religious beliefs representing a strategic accommodation with
the types of pre-Columbian mythology that have resisted obliteration by
the paradigms of Catholic culture.
   Within the hybrid world of Josd Trigo there is one element that pos-
sesses particular importance: the myth of resurrection. Integral to the be-
lief systems of both the Old and the New Worlds, the myth of resurrection
pervades the narrative of Jose Trigo at the levels of theme, structure, and
language, and it all but determines the reader's response. An arresting
image of death and resurrection appears in the narrator's vision as he flies
through the heavens: "Mockingbird said to me: This is the resurrection,
this is the god of fire: old Todolosantos bursting into flame, the killing of
the birds" (254). The scene refers to the Aztec god Xiuhtecuhtli, and at the
same time it conjures up the image of Quetzalcoatl, who with his colorful
plumage is a further instance of the type. According to mythical narra-
tives, Quetzalcoatl destroyed himself by fire and descended to the under-
world, from which he returned some days later in the form of Venus, the
morning star. The story is recorded in the Cddice de Cuauhtitlan and
reproduced in Angel Garibay's anthology of Aztec poetry:
   And it is recounted that in the year 1 Reed [Quetzalc6atl] reached
   the sea shore, on the edge of the great ocean. He got to his feet there
   and burst into tears. He took hold of his personal objects and put
   them on in turn: his costume of quetzal feathers and mask of tur-
   quoise stones. As soon as he was properly attired, he set fire to him-
   self. And he was consumed in the flames. And legend has it that
   when he started to burn and his ashes rose into the air, all the birds
   of beautiful plumage that fly across the sky came to see him and
   watched him intently. And when the ashes ceased to burn,
   Quetzalc6atl's heart rose up on high. Whence he has taken the name
   "Lord of the Dawn." And it is recounted further that he was not seen
   for four days, because he had descended to the realm of the dead,
   and in that region he acquired a set of small spears and after the
   eighth day he began to shine as a grand star. And it is said that he
   began to reign from that precise moment. (34)

To the native populations of Central America, these mythical events were
evidence of Quetzalc6atl's resurrection and accession to immortality:
Having entered the realm of the dead, the god suffers a miraculous trans-
formation and becomes part of the natural order, which is governed by
cyclical processes of life, death, and renewal. As Jacques Soustelle explains





                                                          Josd Trigo | 45

in her reconstruction of the Indian worldview, Venus, who is Quetzal-
coatl's astral equivalent, "is born in the east; then she disappears, and she
is seen again as the evening star in the west. She has therefore traversed the
world as a shuttle traverses the cloth: she is the symbol of death and re-
birth" (105).
   In del Paso's novel the promise of resurrection and renewal of vital
potential is embodied, primarily, not in Luciano-the character modeled
most closely on Quetzalcoatl - but in Jose Trigo, who in some respects is
his double. As we have seen, Luciano fights for a noble cause but dies
without having fully achieved his goals; it is therefore important that his
positive lead be taken up by another character in whom the reader may be
able to recognize similar traits and experiences. Notwithstanding some
fundamental differences in their characters -Jose Trigo is cowardly,
Luciano initially courageous-there are a number of coincidences be-
tween the two men's experiences. Both are hounded by Manuel Angel,
both disappear mysteriously from the railway camp, and both are associ-
ated with the light of stars.
   Jos6 Trigo's association with the stars invests him with other, related
meanings. At the beginning of the novel, in the "madcap month" of Feb-
ruary, the narrator seeks him out on an "interlunar night with stars clus-
tering in the sky" and remarks, "As they revolved in their vaults, I imag-
ined I saw Jose Trigo's eyes" (18). Near the end of the book, the narrator
envisages a repetition of the search for his elusive quarry and conjures up
the nocturnal scene of "the blessed whereabouts of Jose Trigo," using the
optative mood:

   May it be a dusty night. [. . .] May the night breathe in the dust
   through the stigmas of its skin and sprinkle stars across the entire
   firmament. May the seafarers' stars sail across an ocean as dark and
   shiny as a black beetle's elytron. May Castor and Pollux, Sirius and
   Aldebarin form clusters in the sky above the encampments, scintil-
   late, and remain silent. (524)

The twin stars Castor and Pollux are particularly important here, for they
may be considered symbolic counterparts of Luciano and Jose Trigo and
images of a shared immortality. In Greek mythology Castor and Pollux
were twin sons of Zeus who were inseparable companions until Castor
was killed by a wild boar in a hunting accident. Pollux lamented his
brother's death so poignantly that Zeus allowed him to share with Castor
the privilege of immortality. Thus, in one version of the myth, the Dios-
curi-as they were known-continued to live on alternate days, while in





46 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


another they assumed a place among the stars in the constellation Gemini,
where they became tutelary divinities of sailors." In the penultimate chap-
ter of del Paso's novel, it is the second tradition that underpins the refer-
ence to Castor and Pollux, prompting us to consider Jose Trigo an avatar
of Pollux and a symbol of immortality.
   As Luciano's double, or figurative twin, Jose Trigo may reasonably be
expected to conform in some respects to the type of Jesus Christ and,
perhaps, to reenact paradigmatic events from Christ's life. In general
terms, "Jose Trigo, the most unfortunate of men" (29) is an archetypal
figure of human suffering and, like Jesus, an outsider who satisfies a com-
munal need for a scapegoat. More specifically, he is reputed to be almost
as old as Christ at the time of his betrayal and crucifixion: "Some say that
he was 32 years old." Madrecita Buenaventura contests this precise esti-
mate of Jose Trigo's age, arguing, "You could just as well say that he was
32 as that he was 40" (20). But her objection does not diminish the coded
significance of a number which we may assume was chosen deliberately
for the purposes of characterization. A reference to "the calvary of Jose
Trigo" (15 2) strengthens the analogy with Christ and is illustrated in a
scene where Jose Trigo passes through the Campamento Oeste shoulder-
ing an empty coffin; the narrator's apostrophe, "You good scarecrow,
carrying your own death around on your shoulders" (246), evokes clearly
Christ's procession along the Via crucis.
   Taken in conjunction with the identities of Pollux and Quetzalcoatl,
these reflections of Jesus Christ build up a composite picture of an arche-
typal Everyman, an elusive hero with "a thousand faces" (514) who em-
bodies, among other things, the promise of resurrection and regeneration.
In this respect it is important to note Jose Trigo's association in name and
appearance with the wheat crop that is cultivated throughout Central
America. Described as "a stealthy man who was tall and slim ["espigado"
< "espiga"= ear of wheat] with light brown hair [Cabello trigueno]"
(492), he personifies cyclical processes of growth and renewal and fits into
a structure of beliefs that assert the natural continuity of life and its tran-
scendence of death. The renewed fertility of old land that has been cleared,
burned, and sown with fresh seed in the Mesoamerican maize cycle is a
potent illustration of this principle, which madrecita Buenaventura ex-
plains to the narrator with engaging simplicity: "Fire is excrement, Buena-
ventura told me, and fire is the cypress tree, and the cypress tree is death,
return, and the flowers that come to life" (261). Coincidentally, Christian-
ity affirms a similar belief, in terms that are directly applicable to Jose
Trigo: "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth





                                                          Josd Trigo |147

alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12.24). By virtue of
these associations, Jose Trigo represents the potential for renewal that is
attributed only ambiguously to the dead Luciano, and he embodies an
essentially humanist conception of suffering and its transcendence through
love, solidarity, and sacrifice.
   This positive spiritual dimension of the narrative sets Jose Trigo apart
from other Mexican novels of city life written around the midpoint of the
twentieth century. Certainly, there is no such promise of growth and re-
newal in La regidn mds transparente. There, while the themes of death and
resurrection are mentioned repeatedly, any positive prospects for the af-
fairs of men and women are consistently denied (viz. Ixca's fixation on
"the man who died in vain," p. 458). Indeed, Fuentes invokes the image of
ashes-intimately connected, in pre-Columbian mythology, with re-
birth-only to emphasize their failure to generate new life: "Our world
has died for ever," Ixca assures Teodula. "It would make no difference if
the ashes of your sons and of Celedonio were cast over the ground without
a single tear being shed on them, without any hope of their having pro-
vided us with sustenance" (331). Holding this passage up against the story
of a secondary character, Bernab6 Perez, who honored the memory of his
dead father by casting to the winds "floral seeds" of which, according to
the narrator of Jose Trigo, "many already sprouted" (378), we see how
Fernando del Paso, using almost identical raw materials to Carlos Fuentes,
nevertheless conveys a radically different vision of life and death in his
novel of qualified hope and regeneration.

Symbolic Form,Totalization, and "Saying It with Flowers"

The concepts of resurrection and regeneration that I have privileged in my
interpretation of del Paso's novel are mirrored comprehensively in the
formal arrangement of Josd Trigo. The novel comprises eighteen chapters
divided into two parts ("The West" and "The East"), plus a section en-
titled "The Bridge (An Intermediate Part)" located at the geometrical cen-
ter of the book. The numbering of chapters in ascending order in part 1
and in descending order in part z has been interpreted almost universally
as signifying a pyramidal form, with the "Intermediate Part" representing
a flat plane atop the structure of Jose Trigo (Martinez, "Nuevas letras";
Mata, Un ocdano de narraciones). Against that critical consensus, the text
sanctions an alternative reading which accords even more closely with the
pre-Columbian world picture that informs the novel. Without denying the
suggestiveness of the image of the text as pyramid, I find it much more





48 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


productive to view the formal design of Josd Trigo as a set of wheels within
wheels, revolving around the hub of "The Bridge," which offers both a
mythical key to the exegesis of the story and a microcosm of the surround-
ing bounded whole.
   A key episode in Josd Trigo is Luciano's visit to a fairground in chapter
7 of part z. There, he relives the scene of his rival, Manuel Angel's amo-
rous success with Genoveva, in an earlier ride on a Ferris wheel. At a
psychological level, the "wheel of fortune" functions as a catalyst of
Luciano's jealousy; at a symbolic level, it stands as a mise-en-abime of the
text: just as the novel comprises eighteen chapters, so the wheel has eigh-
teen seats (cabriolks) of which any nine, when the machine is in motion,
describe an ascending arc while the others trace a downward path. Fur-
thermore, the wheel displays at its hub "a representation of itself in min-
iature" (359), which mimics exactly the position of the "Intermediate
Part" in Josd Trigo.
   The image of the Ferris wheel has many layers of symbolic significance
in the novel, stemming from the cosmological value of the number eigh-
teen. As anthropologists have long been aware, this was the number of
months attributed to a year in the Aztec calendar. By virtue of this detail,
Josd Trigo becomes a model of temporal progression and, in addition, an
image of the sun as, according to ancient belief, it revolved around the
earth. Luciano in fact envisions the Ferris wheel as a "circle of fire" (3 53)
and thereby establishes a three-way analogy whose terms are the text, the
wheel, and the sun. The narrative of Jose Trigo, which traces a path from
West to East, may be seen to match the movements of the sun and other
celestial bodies, as pictured by ancient Mexican cosmology. "The Mexi-
cans," we are told, "thought of the world as a kind of Maltese cross, the
east uppermost, the north on the right, the west below and the south to the
left" (Soustelle 1ii); accordingly, on its daily course, a body like the sun or
Venus would rise, traverse the skies, and then return to the underworld,
following a circular trajectory of rise and fall. Fernando del Paso evokes
that cosmological model quite clearly in his description of Manuel Angel
and Genoveva's ride on the Ferris wheel. Wandering through the fair-
ground, Luciano imagines

   the two of them up there on the wheel of fortune, Manuel Angel and
   Genoveva, and the wood and tinplate seat swaying in the air to the
   sound of a romantic waltz, in a ternary rhythm, it kept on going up
   and down, and below them everything was like a glass cabinet full of
   phosphorescent objects, and it thus reached the highest point, higher





                                                          Josd Trigo |149

   than the Bridge, where, from an Olympian position, they could
   make out on either side the two encampments and, looking north-
   wards and southwards, the silken garment of the mighty, cosmopoli-
   tan city, splashed with lights, and the skyscrapers: extravagant light-
   houses that stood out in the distance. (3 53)

The two characters' movement through cosmic space effectively glosses
the physical layout of Jose Trigo, with its clearly signposted correspon-
dences in the physical environment and geographical setting of Mexico
City. (A feature of the first edition of the novel was the reproduction, on
the inner cover, of a section of a street map of the capital, with the area of
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco highlighted in a rectangular box.)
   Delving further into pre-Columbian cosmology, we discover that the
ancient Mexicans ascribed particular and distinct qualities to each of the
four quarters of the world: "fertility and abundance to the east, barren
aridity to the north, falling-off, old age and death to the west (setting sun),
and a neutral character to the south" (Soustelle 111). In keeping with this
scheme, Fernando del Paso's novel, which plots a progression from west to
east, juxtaposes the signs of death and fertility in what may be seen as a
dynamic relationship of succession and renewal. The point is illustrated in
an observation about the significance of plant life in the ancient Mexican
worldview, which, given the novel's preoccupation with cereals (trigo and
espigas) and flowers ("flowers which come to life," 261), is wholly perti-
nent:

   Maize and the garden plants are born in the occident, in the western
   garden of Tamoanchan where the earth goddesses live, the sources of
   life. Then they undertake a long journey under the ground (that of
   germination), praying the gods of rain to guide them on their road;
   at last they come up in the east, the country of the rising sun and of
   youth and plenty. (Soustelle 1o5)

In this tableau we find compelling evidence of the presence, at the struc-
tural level of del Paso's novel, of that essential concern with natural regen-
eration that I have interpreted as the thematic crux of Jose Trigo.
   The structural profile that emerges from the present analysis of Jose
Trigo combines dynamism, manifest in the relation between the novel's
two main parts, with poise, reflected in the "Intermediate Part." The sec-
tion entitled "The Bridge" mirrors the Olympian viewpoint attained by
Manuel Angel and Genoveva at the highest point of their ride on the Ferris
wheel, and holds a number of key antinomies in arrested suspense.





50 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Through the visions of the first-person narrator and Nance Buenaventura,
"The Bridge" effects a poetic coincidentia oppositorum that fuses cyclical
and linear time and accommodates both positive and negative interpreta-
tions of human endeavor. The view of life that crystallizes in that section
is ambivalent and enigmatic, and it is summed up in the narrator's rhetori-
cal question, "What has the chaff to do with the wheat?" (265). Defeat
and loss, hope and transcendence are all implied in the narrator's gnomic
reference, which seems to offer an imminent explanation of the stories of
Luciano, Jose Trigo, and all the other characters of del Paso's archetypal
narrative.
   The transcendental vision communicated in the "Intermediate Part" of
Josd Trigo offers a distillation of the narrative that includes all of its ele-
ments in a grand totalizing gesture. Critical appreciation of del Paso's
work has been marked from the beginning by an interest in the pretensions
and strategies that characterize his novels. The author himself observed in
1978: "I have never tried to say all about everything, just all about some-
thing, about a microcosm, a small world endowed with its own dimen-
sions and its own rules of play" (Sinchez Bardon and Goni 49). In Josd
Trigo, the "Intermediate Part" is the first instance, in del Paso's novelistic
production, of "those narrative frames or containment strategies that," in
the words of Fredric Jameson concerning the modernist novel, "seek to
endow their objects of representation with formal unity." Jameson's adap-
tation of a Hegelian and Lukicsian conception of totality to the analysis of
narrative is faithfully reflected in the microcosmic conception of Jose Trigo,
whose organic form and mythopoeic synthesis identify it as typical of the
tradition of high modernism (Jameson, Political Unconscious 52-56).
   The totalizing strategies of Jose Trigo are numerous and include the
cultivation of an encyclopedic range of reference, the saturation of narra-
tive procedures, and a verbal proliferation that stretches the very limits of
the linguistic system. A brief examination of the two chapters 8 may serve
a useful purpose in highlighting the principal mechanisms that serve to
create an illusion of totality in the pages of Jose Trigo. Needless to say, it
is this effect of totalization, and not totalization itself, which distinguishes
del Paso's prose from more conventional styles of writing.
   Designated an "Oda o corrido, valona, tonada, inventario, romanza,
aria," chapter 8 of part 1 sets out to explore the vastly varied and appar-
ently unpromising subject of Mexican railways. The narrative begins by
distinguishing between types of passengers - suicides, newlyweds, cattle
thieves, etc. -who travel by train, for whatever purpose: "On a journey.
On an outing to the country. On business. On summer vacation. On a trip





                                                         Josd Trigo| 51

heading in a certain direction. On an excursion with friends" (223-24). In
increasingly complex patterns of sound and sense it accounts for the his-
torical, social, political, and environmental impact of steam locomotion
throughout Mexico, accommodating a potentially limitless range of in-
quiry within certain flexible poetic schemes, of which the anaphoric list is
the most commonly used. The typology of passengers in the opening para-
graph, for example, comprises no fewer than twenty-seven items relating
to professional or civil status, juxtaposed in a deliberately incongruous
manner so as to strengthen the narrator's claim to represent "all those
men and women of every race [my emphasis], black or white, huicholes,
babispes, chochopopolocas, tarahumaras, acafes. Who are travelers"
(223). Strongly reminiscent of Ixca Cienfuegos's all-encompassing vision
of Mexico at the conclusion of La regidn mds transparente, this and other
lists in Josd Trigo function by reproducing on the syntagmatic plane of the
narrative a whole range of paradigmatic possibilities that do not appear to
have been subjected to any process of selection. Consequently, to the
extent that it eschews that normal requirement of literary decorum, del
Paso's text conforms to Roman Jakobson's classic definition of poetic
writing as the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection (the paradigmatic axis of language) onto the axis of combination
(the syntagmatic axis of language) (Jakobson 3 58).
   Many of the effects of the writing in the chapter under review derive
from the prevalence of the figures of synecdoche and metonymy, which
correspond to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language, respec-
tively. At a certain point in the narrative, the concept of "the whistle of a
locomotive" is introduced, and this generates several pages of associations
in keeping with the proposition that

   The whistle of a train is the train itself [synecdoche].
   And, it is everything being carried on the train.
   And, it is all the places that are known to the train.
   And everything that has to do with the train [metonymy]. (23o)

These claims acquire substance straightaway as the narrative apostro-
phizes, "You, woods of Guerrero, swamps of Tabasco, valleys of Puebla,"
and twenty-seven other landmarks of Mexico which together add up to a
microcosm of the nation (239). An imaginative reading of the passage
persuades the reader that s/he has completed a fictional journey to the four
corners of Mexico, transported by a powerful narrative vehicle.
   Turning to chapter 8 of part z, we observe a renewed reliance on the
figures of metaphor and synecdoche, along with numerous instances of





52 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


paradigmatic overspill. The chapter is constructed on the image of "the
river of time and the torrent of the centuries" (302), and it begins, "On the
river of time and the torrent of the centuries sails a temple, as magnificent
as a triumphal carriage" (281). The temple thus evoked refers to a famous
landmark in Mexico City and stands synecdochically for a whole area
whose history it condenses; the "triumphal carriage" is one of several
alternative representations of the "temple-ship-aerostat-horse of fire"
(283) and the paradigmatic vehicle, "infinite in its forms, as in its materi-
als," "in which there travel all the centuries and beastly creatures, the
wonders and spectacles, the monsters, stories and legends which have
passed through the district of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, the land of Jose
Trigo" (281-82).
   Together, temple and chariot serve as devices for narrating "the
preposterous chronicle of Santiago Tlatelolco" (287). This is a literary
document, modeled on famous texts by Hernin Cortes, Alfonso Reyes,
Salvador Novo, and -once more -Carlos Fuentes in La regidn mas trans-
parente, which purports to record "everything that has happened in these
parts in every century of their existence." The chronicle is entrusted to a
pseudo-omniscient narrator who surveys the life of the capital city from
pre-Columbian times through the colonial period down to the modern
age, and seeks to evoke "the diversity, the abundance, the infinite number
of things" captured at a representative moment of the capital's six-hun-
dred-year history (297). A richly detailed description of the marketplace in
colonial times is the centerpiece of his narrative. Cast in the form of a
"farragosa recopilacion" (301), which is reminiscent of the "chaffering
allincluding most farraginous chronicle" composed by James Joyce in the
"Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses (345), it comprises an inventory of
human types, foodstuffs, and miscellaneous objects that would have filled
the "great market of America" (287) at any time in the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The following extract (quoted in Spanish so as to
preserve all the flavors of the original) describes multiple kinds of organic
waste that would have congested the marketplace at the time:

   Tambien percebes, almejas y palinuros muertos, entre altibajos de
   mareas con toda la basura y el desperdicio coetineos del mundo:
   setas septicas, cinturas escapulares de palomas, cartilaginosas aletas
   de elasmobranquios, quelas de crusticeos, girbulas, carniza, vainas
   de habichuelas, trozos de bramante, ternillas, ganiles, rodelas de bu-
   tifarras, collejas que ensalobran, encarronan las aguas para siempre
   jamis. (300-301)





                                                           Josd Trigo | 53

The passage is typical of del Paso's totalizing style and is remarkable on
two counts: first, in respect to subject matter, it illustrates as if by design
Severo Sarduy's conception of baroque space as "the space of superabun-
dance and wastefulness" (18 1); second, as a formal enumeration of types
of organic trash, it provides a very literal example of paradigmatic over-
spill onto the syntagmatic plane, or flow, of narration.
   Perhaps not surprisingly, the strain of absorbing such an excessive
amount of "waste" material causes the hitherto free-flowing narrative
briefly to lose momentum and the narrator to reflect, "But the word be-
comes exhausted, giving way to stagnation, passivity, stillness." The ques-
tion is now posed, "Just how long can the elegiac out-size chronicle of
Tlatelolco, the detailed records and the farraginous inventory continue,
without their remaining permanently incomplete?" (301). For a few sec-
onds, the very legitimacy of the totalizing project hangs in the balance, as
its paradoxical foundations are exposed to the objections of reason: no
matter how exhaustive the inventory, some aspect of the phenomenal
world will always elude representation, so demonstrating the futility, al-
ready acknowledged by Borges in "El Aleph" and elsewhere, of all at-
tempts at the total description of "an infinite whole" (Borges 62).12 Yet the
totalizing impulse is not ultimately subject to rational constraints, being
by definition an instinctive force and part of a general impulse toward
artistic creation that seeks to give verbal expression to a maremagnum of
thoughts, memories, perceptions, and other data that "flood" the con-
sciousness of an author like del Paso; as long as that consciousness re-
mains active, the totalizing impulse will continue unabated. So it is that
the narrative insists on making one last effort, in a richly complex Spanish
prose style:

   un esfuerzo mis [.. .], un 6ltimo bogar por el cauce absorto de los
   siglos, por las olas de vertebras mordientes, agua eficaz, remos los
   juncos nupciales, arpa e6lica la lluvia tanida por los cierzos, ho-
   jarasca cordial las hojas desprendidas de lunarios y almanaques,
   fuego esteril la soflama que ilumina historia y leyenda. (301)

It matters little that the final flourish covers only a page or two: what is
important is the irrepressible vigor with which the narrative reaffirms its
totalizing pretensions before the chapter comes to an end.
   Baroque excess is one of a number of styles employed in the construc-
tion of "a world of words," which by the author's own account "ranges
from simplicity-a relative simplicity, that is-to the most esoteric ba-
roque discourse" (Carvajal ii-iii). True to this description, the narrative





54 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


project of Josd Trigo entails an almost infinite variety of linguistic prac-
tices, governed by a poetics that has its origins, principally, in a combina-
tion of Symbolism and Mexican literary tradition. Along with madrecita
Buenaventura, the presiding narrator is responsible for the regime of lan-
guage that configures the world of Josd Trigo. That regime is fundamen-
tally poetic, in the sense of Roman Jakobson's definition of "the set to-
wards the message" (356). For, if many of the narrator's words have a
common referential value sanctioned by usage, it is also the case that the
objects and experiences which they evoke "are to be regarded as never
having happened" (18). Madrecita Buenaventura's style further exempli-
fies the semiotic and poetic processes of the narrative, as conveyed in the
following quotation, which I again preserve in the original Spanish:

   Manzanas incircuncisas, rosario, jaula, zancos: con 6stas y otras pa-
   labras que sac6 de su ba6l mundo, comenz6 la madrecita Buena-
   ventura la historia siempre trunca o aun no comenzada, y siempre
   detenida en los momentos en que la realidad y el sueno se con-
   fundian: realidad de su mundo llanero y bajuno de atorrantes y
   descamisados, y sueno de mi mundo de piedras manantias que
   brillan al sol de la manana cuando Jose Trigo, largo o languruto,
   desgarbado o desgarbilado, camina por las vias. (19)

Reading this passage, our attention centers immediately on the image of
the "ba61 mundo," which connotes a secret store of words accessible to
the mythopoeic imagination. Once articulated by the centenarian madre-
cita, the words constitute a mode of narration that dissolves the bound-
aries between the external world of phenomena and the private realm of
dreams, a process exemplified in the opening lines of the passage where
five such words are cast in relief. At subsequent points in the narrative, the
reader will discover their central role in the verbal economy of the novel:
"manzanas incircuncisas" reappear in the story of Guadalupe and Dul-
cenombre (153); a rosary (rosario) figures in that of Eduviges (79); Atan-
asio "es paseado en una jaula" (406); and stilts (zancos) are mentioned in
relation to an incident involving Jose Trigo and Buenaventura. Yet the
phrase manzanas incircuncisas and the words rosario, jaula, and zancos
are not perceived immediately as signposts of important themes in the
narrative; rather, they are experienced as discrete and poetically arresting
images with an imprecise but nonetheless powerful semantic charge.
   Talking in 1966 to Juan Carvajal about his philosophy of composition,
Fernando del Paso placed great emphasis on "the power of words," con-
sciously echoing the title of an essay by Edgar Allan Poe that, among other





                                                          Josd Trigo | 55

things, celebrates "the physical power of words" demonstrated in the
artist's capacity for "speaking a wild star into birth" (Poe 192-93). Poe's
concerns in that essay anticipate to a large degree those of del Paso in Josd
Trigo and point to a common grounding in symbolist aesthetics: readers of
Josd Trigo are encouraged to dwell on the suggestive force and multiple
associations of words, starting with those "discrete words" (palabras
sueltas) (32) -generally nouns and noun phrases -that periodically inter-
rupt the flow of the narrative. True to the principles of Symbolism, their
enunciation enacts the creation of a fictional world: "Say to me things
such as: 'carajo,' 'huev6n,' 'ojos,' 'olvido,' 'visperas,"' claims the narrator,
"and I shall speak my world into existence with them" (2z).
   Of the various items which go to make up the verbal microcosm of Jose
Trigo, place-names are a particularly fertile source of poetic and thematic
effects. A place-name may be highlighted for purely aesthetic reasons: this
is the case with the names of Binbaletas, Centauro, and "the station of La
Polka, Alacranes and Anzaldias," rural locations which the narrator
mentions in his lyrical ode to Mexico for the sufficient reason that they
have "the most beautiful names in the world" (23 5). In other instances,
place-names are cited for their wealth of cultural associations. Thus, the
"hibridos apelativos" of ancient districts in Mexico City- "el sitio verde
de Nuestra Senora de Belkn Tlaxoxiuhco, el lugar de la orilla de la muralla
de Santa Ana Atenantitech" (28 5)-bear eloquent witness to the nation's
history of cultural syncretism, while the names Crisantema, Naranjo,
Fresno, and Laurel are exact toponymic references to streets in Nonoalco
and trouvailles that enhance "the magic of the book" by evoking a univer-
sal order of myth identical to that surveyed by Sir James George Frazer in
his monumental study, The Golden Bough. As Fernando del Paso ex-
plained,

   The main street of the encampments is Chrysanthemum, which
   means "flower of gold," and is essentially a golden bough which
   joins Ash, Orange, Cypress, and the other perpendicular streets like
   mistletoe, in the process binding together the legends of the world.
   (Carvajal iii)

The floral aliases of a character like Maria Patrocinio - Flor de mi vida
(flower of my life), Azucena (madonna lily), Pensamiento (pansy), and
Lirio del Valle (lily of the valley) - similarly combine universal resonances
with highly specific local associations to do with poetry, the natural order,
and renewal. Connections between flowers and poetry are documented in
Nahuatl verse by Alfonso Reyes, who detected a veritable obsession with





56 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


flowers (and to a lesser extent, stars) throughout pre-Columbian Mexican
writing ("Vision de Anihuac"). In a diachronic perspective, the narrator
of Josd Trigo conforms to the type of the poet with "flowers on his lips"
and gives renewed expression to a conception of language and poetry that
has its roots in the cosmology of the ancient Mexican peoples (Leon-
Portilla 27-28), replicating at yet further levels the myth of cyclical growth
and regeneration around which Jose Trigo is structured and conceived.

Intertextual Relations, Cultural Contexts, and the Narrative Tradition

As accounted for above, Josd Trigo is a text that grows out of centuries of
Mexican writing enriched by North American and European Symbolism
and brought up to date in the modernist experiments of Carlos Fuentes.
Overall, Fernando del Paso recapitulates the anthropological, historical,
and literary production of several centuries, in a project that exceeds by
far the bounds of normal academic coverage. Restricting our attention to
Mexican narrative of the postrevolutionary period, we need to place fur-
ther limits around a field that includes Mariano Azuela, Jose Guadalupe
de Anda, J. Manguia Torres, Jose Revueltas, Agustin Yinez, Juan Jose
Arreola, and Juan Rulfo, all of whose work is anthologized to some extent
in the summa of Mexican literature that is Jose Trigo.13 For reasons of
economy, I propose to concentrate on relations between Josd Trigo and a
small selection of works by Jose Revueltas and Agustin Yinez, which
provide a sharpened focus on the issues of aesthetics and culture articu-
lated in Josd Trigo.
   With regard to Yinez, the texts that offer the most tangible points of
contact with Jose Trigo are La tierra prddiga (1960) and Las tierras flacas
(1962). These two works represent the culmination of Yinez's tireless
pursuit of innovation in narrative form and technique initiated in Al fibo
del agua (1947). In them, narrative discontinuity and the schematic alter-
nation of narrative with dialogue and/or interior monologue anticipate
the architecture of several chapters of Jose Trigo; more specifically, in Las
tierras flacas the performance of a "choir" of discordant voices that argue,
interrupt, and cut one another off foreshadows the contrapuntal tech-
nique and theatrical form of presentation of the two chapters 3 of del
Paso's novel. Additionally, Yinez's prose style reverberates in many fea-
tures of the writing of Jose Trigo. Las tierras flacas affirms the magical
power of isolated words and some proper names, in terms identical to
those used in certain chapters of Jose Trigo and elsewhere in the author's
glosses on his novel. Las tierras flacas also emphasizes its own verbal





                                                          Josd Trigo |157

status and advertises itself as a "world of stories" destined to be "trans-
formed into legend" by the poetic procedures of narrative (Yinez 302). In
particular, Yinez's novel presents an abundance of totalizing procedures
that, viewed comparatively, are the forerunners of the baroque manner
soon to be cultivated in Josd Trigo. Among many possible examples, the
"extensive lists of valuable and intriguing objects" that are recited in the
opening lines of the "Quinta estancia" of Las tierras flacas illustrate a
totalizing intent bound up, as it will be in Josd Trigo, with the recupera-
tion, through memory, of "stories and countenances that have fallen into
total oblivion" (293).
   In respect to narrative design, Las tierras flacas stands in a complex and
ultimately revealing relation to Josd Trigo. At the same time, Yinez's text
both overlaps with, and diverges from, an earlier narrative model, El luto
humano by Jose Revueltas, which is nearer to possessing the status of a
master text after which Jose Trigo is fashioned. Given this plurality of
intertextual relations, our comparison of the narrative profile of the works
concerned must be three-sided and ready to acknowledge the greater im-
portance of El luto humano as a precursor of del Paso's novel.
   At the simplest level of narrative content, Jose Trigo and El luto
humano share an almost identical storyline set in postrevolutionary
Mexico and dealing with a conflict between organized labor and a reac-
tionary government that employs agents provocateurs to intimidate a dis-
affected workforce whose ringleader is abducted and eventually mur-
dered. A retrospective narrative interest in the barbaric Cristero conflict
and its psychological legacy is also common to both works, as is a
dramatis personae that includes two male protagonists cast in the roles of
hero and villain, and a mismatched elderly couple: a vindictive, reaction-
ary husband and a long-suffering spouse who seeks consolation in the
arms of a younger man. The women concerned, Buenaventura and
Cecilia, resemble each other further in being the bearers of ancestral
memories, which they preserve inside the "nostalgic womb" of a bawl (El
luto humano 67). These coincidences in the narratives of Jose Trigo and El
luto humano are bolstered by a common thematic interest in human suf-
fering, political injustice, betrayal, and solidarity.
   Narrative coincidences between Josd Trigo and Las tierras flacas are
less numerous than those just listed, but no less exact. Yinez, for example,
emphasizes the relationships of conflict between Jacob Gallo and his fa-
ther, Epifanio Trujillo, and between the same character and his half-broth-
ers, Jesusito and Felipe, thereby duplicating the antagonisms, clearly de-
fined in Josd Trigo, between Luciano and the abusive Todolosantos, and





58 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Luciano and Manuel Angel. What is more, in both Jose Trigo and Las
tierras flacas these dominant configurations of character articulate ex-
treme positions in a conflict between good and evil that centers on issues
of social and political justice. With regard to the women characters, madre
Matiana in Las tierras flacas is a double of madrecita Buenaventura in Josd
Trigo: introduced early on as a "miracle-worker [.. .] healer, counselor,
provider of consolation, midwife and officiator at burials" (90), she em-
bodies the traditional folk wisdom, mythical beliefs, and ritual practices of
her community, which assigns to her a set of functions almost identical to
those performed by madrecita Buenaventura.
   Of particular relevance to our study is the casting of characters in all
three novels in the mold of Christian archetypes endowed with sharply
defined moral significance. In El luto humano the murderous Adin, "son
of God, father of Abel, father of Cain" (23), clashes with Natividad, "a
son of the masses" (287), who is identified with Jesus Christ. Adin, per-
sonified in a string of paradoxes as "impotence full of energy, warm indif-
ference [and] active apathy" (30), already bears responsibility for the
deaths of Guadalupe, Valentin, and Gabriel. When offered the assignment
of killing Natividad, he accepts with perverse relish: "Upon discovering
that there was a means to that end, which entailed a clinical and treacher-
ous lying in wait for his victim, [Adin's soul] was filled with an encourag-
ing tranquility full of affirmation" (18o). Mean, hateful, and lacking any
redeeming virtue, his character clearly anticipates that of Manuel Angel in
Josd Trigo, just as his relationship with Natividad prefigures that between
the treacherous Manuel Angel and Luciano.
   In the elaborate conceptual scheme of Revueltas's novel, Adin is both
a type (a villain like Cain or Tezcatlipoca) and a symbol (of the evil inher-
ent in mankind). His antagonist, Natividad, also displays archetypal char-
acteristics which, in his case, are those of the virtuous hero. Natividad is
characterized by a "frank, broad, magnificent smile" (176) signaling a
strong and generous disposition that he places at the service of others:
"Natividad longed to transform the earth and he envisaged a new and free
man living on a new and free earth" (298). Like Luciano in del Paso's
novel, he devotes his life to the labor movement, interpreting the popular
will "as if he were powerful and many, constituted by hundreds of men
and women and houses and wills" (247). Again like Luciano, he is be-
trayed and dies in circumstances that reenact Christ's Passion: "Natividad
will die transfixed, crucified" (260). Steeped in archetypal resonances, his
death causes widespread grief, but this is tempered with faith in Nati-





                                                         Josd Trigo |159

vidad's survival in the afterlife, where his followers believe he will be sus-
tained by "a new and secret bread, nutritious, immortal, immortalizing":
   The masses shared out the bread of History and Natividad fed on
   that bread. How could he ever die? As in the ancient Egyptian rites,
   the masses gave an item of food, a loaf of daily bread, to the living
   dead. (287)

   In Las tierras flacas, Miguel Arcingel wears the same mantle of exem-
plary virtue as Natividad, and while he certainly is not a member of the
proletariat, he enjoys the popularity reserved for heroes. Through his vari-
ous names-"Jacob Gallo," "Miguel," "the fantastic sobriquet of Arch-
angel" (77), and the nickname "el Rey de Oros," meaning the King of
Oros, a suit of cards (z115) -he is associated in a wholly conventional way
with "representations of heavenly wars involving invincible lieutenants
and just causes" (77) and also with the biblical "struggle of Saint Michael
against Lucifer" (218), which he enacts annually with other parishioners
in a tableau performed at Christmas on his father's estate. In a comple-
mentary role he is also presented, obliquely, as a Messiah figure. However,
he does not die like Luciano and Natividad, and ultimately he belongs to
a category of archetypal heroes different from theirs. He is, nevertheless,
imaged in the popular mind as "Miguel Arcingel, risen from the dead"
(154) and thereby recovers some measure of likeness with Luciano and
Natividad and their primary archetypal referent, Jesus Christ.
   With this last remark, a gap may be seen opening up between Jose Trigo
and El luto humano and, on the other hand, Las tierras flacas, a gap which
becomes wider when we consider the range of cultural references and
symbols that underpin each text. Expanding on our analysis of El luto
humano, we note how throughout the narrative, Christian motifs such as
the Crucifixion and the theme of immortality interweave with mythical
motifs derived from other sources. In the following quotation, Natividad's
death is pictured as a descent into the underworld, reminiscent of pre-
Columbian accounts of the death of Quetzalcoatl:
   Natividad went down into the grave, as if a raging fire had been
   buried. The earth received him to combine his flames with the inner
   fire that she keeps blazing permanently in her heart. (287)

Other references in the novel to "pre-Cortesian animals" (22), "formless
gods" (z8), and the exodus of "the first tribe" (83) contribute further to
the evocation of an ancient order of Mexican history whose legacy, repre-





6o I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


sented as a "dark unconscious atavism" (225), Revueltas explores in the
pages of El luto humano, thus creating a monument to cultural mestizaje
that squarely anticipates Fernando del Paso's depiction of Mexican reali-
ties in Josd Trigo.
   In Las tierras flacas, Yinez likewise evokes an atavistic order in the
polyfaceted figure of Matiana. A literary relative of Teodula Moctezuma
in La regidn mds transparente, madre Matiana symbolizes the continuing
presence of pre-Columbian customs in modern Mexico. Yet there is no
recourse to Aztec mythology in the elaboration of the storyline of Las
tierras flacas: Christian mythology alone determines the shape of the nar-
rative, thereby setting it apart from Jose Trigo and El luto humano, which
share a well-defined hybrid character, part Christian, part Aztec. In this
respect, Josd Trigo displays greater narrative complexity than Las tierras
flacas and a denser figurative texture rooted in the peculiar cultural syn-
cretism of Mexico.
   These comparisons with two precursor texts add weight to the conclu-
sion of Aralia L6pez Gonzilez regarding the place of Jose Trigo in the
Mexican narrative tradition: "It is the product of a long process of devel-
opment in [national] prose fiction and one of its high points." In effect, del
Paso's debut novel elaborates on the canonical achievements of Revueltas
and Yinez, and on those of Rulfo, Arreola, and a budding Fuentes, too,
bringing what I here call the "novel of hybridity" to a qualitative and
historic climax. According to L6pez Gonzilez, "As the culmination of a
process, [Josd Trigo] belongs to the period which stretches from 1940 to
1970," paving the way for other types of fiction that will dominate the
Mexican literary scene after 1968 (140).
   Beyond national boundaries, Josd Trigo carves out a place for itself in a
continental narrative tradition that extends through Central America, to
the River Plate and Paraguay. An affinity with the "transculturating pole"
of Spanish American writing is revealed through a comparison of Jose
Trigo with Hijo de hombre by Augusto Roa Bastos and two novels by
Miguel Angel Asturias that are generally regarded as showpieces of narra-
tive transculturation in the Americas at large. Hijo de hombre (1960) was
published just one year after del Paso had begun work on Josd Trigo. In
broad outline, Roa's novel tells a powerful story of suffering and redemp-
tion against the background of the Chaco War between Paraguay and
Bolivia (1932-35) and an earlier peasant uprising of 1912-13. This dual
temporal scheme projects a view of Paraguayan history as a repetitive
process "oscillating tirelessly between rebellion and oppression" (229).
Straightaway, we note a very precise similarity with Jose Trigo: del Paso's





                                                          Josd Trigo | 61

novel also incorporates a dual temporal perspective, focusing on two
moments of contemporary Mexican history-the Cristero War and the
railway strikes of 1959-which likewise configure a recurrent pattern of
rebellion and defeat.
   Regarding the political philosophies that are expressed in the two
works, Roa's solidarity with the oppressed masses of Paraguay and his
concern for "this American people, which has been the object of so much
calumny" (229) come across more forcefully, perhaps, than the messages
implicit in Josd Trigo, and are in fact more redolent of Jose Revueltas than
of Fernando del Paso. Hijo de hombre and Josd Trigo nevertheless coincide
very closely at the level of a moral and spiritual outlook that affirms the
value of human life, measured partly in terms of a capacity for suffering
and sacrifice. Both novels feature protagonists who embody an ideal code
of dignified altruism and self-sacrifice on behalf of a class or group that is
unjustly excluded from the political process. The characters concerned,
Luciano and Cristobal, pledge themselves to the collective struggle for
greater freedom and improved living standards, goals for which they are
ready to lay down their lives. As they pit their strength against the superior
might of the state, they seem destined to share the fate of "innumerable
and anonymous victims" (23) whose bravery and bloodshed are ignored
in official historiography. Yet they and other unpretentious heroes like
them live on in the popular imagination, which preserves the story of their
exemplary exploits in legend and myth.
   In Josd Trigo the death of a character does not signify ultimate dissolu-
tion, nor does it in Hijo de hombre, where Macario expresses the convic-
tion that "Man has two births. One on being born [into this life], the other
at death.... He dies but remains alive in others, if he has behaved properly
towards his fellow human beings" (33). This belief is borne out by the
figurative rebirth and regeneration of many of the characters of Hijo de
hombre. Casiano Jara is an example: officially thought to have been killed
in an explosion at Sapukai station in March 1913, he reappears two years
later, "revived and back from the dead," out of the obscurity of his make-
shift home-a railway carriage transported over "the parched and
cracked plain" (108-9), which is reminiscent of the furgdn occupied by
Luciano and Maria Patrocinio in Josd Trigo. Casiano's son, Cristobal, also
exemplifies the promise of rebirth in two distinct ways. First, he actively
rehabilitates the prostitute, Maria Encarnacion, who under his tutelage
experiences an "inconceivable regeneration" (175). And second, he is
popularly believed to be immortal, despite having perished on a wartime
mission that involved carrying precious supplies of water to troops cut off





6z I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


behind enemy lines. Ironically, the only survivor Cristobal could help on
reaching his goal was Miguel Vera, an enemy of the proletarian cause, but
this does not detract from the value of his mission: a narrator assures us
that "Cristobal's lorry did not drive through death to save the life of a
traitor. Engulfed in flames, it still keeps on rolling at night, across the
desert, following the trails, carrying water to slake the survivors' thirst"
(223). The dignity of Crist6bal's mission thus remains intact, along with
the integrity of the themes of revival and regeneration in Hijo de hombre.
   Significantly, Roa Bastos inscribes these themes within a symbolic
framework of mythical references, many of which derive from Christian-
ity. A number of critics have examined Roa's use of Christian imagery in
the novel, among them David Foster and Donald Shaw, who together have
shown how Roa inverts conventional forms in order to convey a secular
and humanistic outlook on life (Foster 38-64; Shaw, "Inverted Christian
Imagery and Symbolism"). The presentation of Cristobal Jara illustrates
the author's practice in this regard. As his Christian name suggests,
Crist6bal has the unequivocal status of a Christ figure. However, like
Johnny Carter in "El perseguidor" by Julio Cortizar (see Fiddian, "Reli-
gious Symbolism"), he does not conform to conventional images of Jesus;
instead, Roa portrays him as "the son of Man and not the son of God"
(Shaw 77), a strategy signposted in the reversal, in his full name, of the
initials "J. C.," which are shorthand for "Jesus Christ."
   From Roa's presentation of Cristobal, Shaw infers a profound disen-
chantment with orthodox Christian values and interprets the inverted
Christian imagery of Hijo de hombre as a "technique" for diagnosing
"modern spiritual despair" (73, 81). This means that, for Shaw, the pat-
terns of imagery that structure Roa's text are devoid of local cultural sig-
nificance. Indeed, Shaw insists that the function of inverted Christian im-
agery throughout modern Spanish American fiction is "to lift the novel in
which it appears out of mere referentiality into a more universal rel-
evance" (74). Other commentators such as Carlos Battilana interpret
Roa's novel differently, as an encoding of historical and cultural condi-
tions in Paraguay. In my reading of Hijo de hombre I opt for this line of
approach rather than Shaw's, and I would contend that Roa's portrayal of
Crist6bal has less to do with alleged universalist aspirations than with a
desire to render as faithfully as possible striking peculiarities of the
worldview of the itapenos, whose culture and history are the real subjects
of the novel. Here, the word culture is meant to connote secular myths and
traditions, on the one hand, and a set of religious beliefs and practices, on
the other, including a liturgy- "The itapenos had their own liturgy, a tra-





                                                           Josd Trigo |163

dition born out of certain events which, though relatively recent, had al-
ready acquired the status of legend" -and rites like the lowering of the
figure of Christ from the cross on Good Friday: "a harsh, defiant, primi-
tive rite, fermented in a spirit of blasphemous rebellion" which, Roa's
narrator observes, "has earned the itapenos the reputation of fanatics and
heretics" (13). Investigating the origins of the heretical rite of "el Cristo
del cerrito," we find that they are something of a mystery to the narrator,
who locates them, rather condescendingly, beyond the "simple under-
standing" of the itapeios. Yet his unconscious prejudice and mystification
cannot obscure a basic truth, which is that "that strange belief [.. .] which
essentially entailed a reversal [inversion] of conventional faith, a perma-
nent outbreak of insurrection" (13) originates in the spiritual lives of the
itapenos themselves: it is they who first developed it and they who pre-
serve it in the fictional present. As far as the role of Roa Bastos is con-
cerned, he simply fashions a novel reflecting their beliefs and mediating
their cultural assumptions. But that is the limit of his creative involvement:
authorship of the community's rites and customs, including their contro-
versial "inversion de la fe," rests ultimately with the native itapenos.
   Roa sharpens the local focus of his narrative by providing a historical
perspective on the cultural traditions of Sapukai and Itap6 post-16oo. He
records the subordination of the two communities to the authority "of a
viceroy far away in Lima" (12), and he discusses at some length the colo-
nizing role of the Jesuit missionaries:
   Three centuries earlier the Jesuits ran estates whose sphere of admin-
   istrative influence stretched as far as the hill of Paraguari. [T]here the
   Fathers had left intact the legend of the appearance of Saint Tome,
   superimposing it skilfully and delicately, as was their custom, on the
   local Indian myth of Zum, which had sprung up in the same place
   in times when the sun was still a lesser deity than the moon. The
   Indians acted as if they were believers [in the Christian saint]. But
   that was no longer of any importance now. (45)

This account of Jesuit guile and Indian resistance gives a penetrating in-
sight into the connection between historical experience in Paraguay and
the formation of a cultural identity based on a fusion between western
(predominantly Christian) values and myths and the local cultural heri-
tage of the Guarani Indians.
   I have already commented on the role of Christian references in Hijo de
hombre. What we must now acknowledge is their coexistence with
Guarani motifs, beginning in the preface where a quotation from the Book





64 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


of Ezekiel in the Bible stands alongside one from the Himno de los muertos
de los Guaranies. Crucially, the preface establishes no visible hierarchy of
importance between the two sources, and invites the reader to adopt a
bifocal view of the subject matter of the book, which subsequently refines
and extends ideas contained in both quotations. So, while the words of
Ezekiel prefigure essential themes and elements of the storyline, the
Himno de los muertos echoes in an estribillo sung by Maria Rosa as she
accompanies the statue of "el Cristo del cerrito" into the church at Itap6:
   In a broken, feeble voice, she began to sing that incomprehensible
   refrain from the Hymn of the Dead. Every so often she would stop
   and start again, through clenched teeth. Finally the ancestral song
   went silent on her lips. (z6)

What is particularly noteworthy from the point of view of our study is the
fact that the Guarani hymn which Maria Rosa and her fellow itapenos
ritually intone articulates a message of resurrection and regeneration. The
excerpt that is reproduced in the preface envisages the reincarnation of
spirits and lost voices: "It behooves me to make the voice flow through the
bones again.... And I will make speech become flesh again," at the same
time as it heralds the dawning of a new age "[a]fter this time is lost and a
new time dawns" (9). Viewed in isolation, the excerpt tellingly sums up
the Guarani attitude to death and renewal; taken in conjunction with the
Christian view of life after death, it is a striking illustration of the cultural
syncretism of Roa's native Paraguay.
   These observations permit an overall assessment of the relationship
between Hijo de hombre and Josd Trigo. Not only do the two novels share
a cyclical view of history, a belief in regeneration, and specific kinds of
archetypal imagery. They also have a common foundation in a dual cul-
tural paradigm that is typical of American syncretism. A further compari-
son of Josd Trigo with two novels by Miguel Angel Asturias reinforces this
view of the affiliation of Jose Trigo with a continental tradition of narra-
tive, whose cultural assumptions and forms of expression it reproduces
with remarkable fidelity.
   Hombres de maiz (1949) and Mulata de tal (1963) offer the greatest
scope for consideration here. To begin with language, Hombres and
Mulata are works of incomparable linguistic brilliance that illustrate their
author's conception of the novel as "a verbal enterprise" (hazana ver-
bal).14 Mulata unfolds a dazzling display of puns, associations, and playful
distortions of the sound and form of words, features which translate di-
rectly into the linguistic extravagance of Jose Trigo. In addition to this





                                                         Josi Trigo |165

material resemblance at the level of parole, the two texts share a common
poetics of language based on a belief in "the element of mystery that is
enclosed in words" (Mulata 227), which is an Asturian equivalent of the
symbolist-derived mystique of language that informs Jose Trigo.
   The use of mythical elements to organize the narratives of both
Hombres and Mulata generates numerous coincidences with Jose Trigo.
Some of these are limited to a single detail of characterization, as in the
attribution of an identical archetypal referent to two characters in the
authors' works. We might compare, for example, the description of Yumi
as "the Infernal Christian Prince" in Mulata (275) with del Paso's charac-
terization of Manuel Angel as a satanic prince in the fairground episode of
Josd Trigo. Other coincidences involve a more complex arrangement of
narrative themes, characters, and motifs, like those found in Hombres de
maiz. Hombres de maiz displays the following parallels with Jose Trigo: It
reenacts ancient myths of death and rebirth in a narrative that gives
prominence to two male protagonists (Gaspar Il6m and Nicho Aquino)
cast in the role of the mythical god, Quetzalcoatl; it features secondary
characters with referents in ancient Mesoamerican mythology, for ex-
ample, la Piojosa, who, like madrecita Buenaventura in Josd Trigo, is an
avatar of the Aztec goddess, Tlazolteotl; it explores themes of fertility and
renewal, and incorporates imagery related to the local cult and cultivation
of maize.15
   Together, Hombres de maiz and Josd Trigo offer complementary repre-
sentations of native America. Translating the rural dramas of Asturias
(and Roa Bastos, Rulfo, and Revueltas) into a largely urban setting, Josd
Trigo remains rooted in the cultural matrix out of which Hombres de maiz
and other narratives reviewed in this section emerged. No less committed
to technical experimentation than the novelists who went before him, del
Paso may be judged to have chosen the option, when producing Josd Trigo,
of "a transculturating modernization" available, according to Angel Rama,
to the writers of Latin America after the rise of modernism ("La tecnif-
icacion narrativa" 69-71).
   The relationship beween the literary cultures of Latin America and
those of Europe and North America is fundamental to the scheme pro-
posed by Rama and to the postcolonial preoccupations of a younger gen-
eration of critics as well. The universalist cast of Fernando del Paso's
thinking about culture and politics calls for some consideration of the
relation between Josd Trigo and a vast network of international forerun-
ners and counterparts, whom the author has acknowledged on various
occasions as his "literary forefathers." In an early roll call of literary men-





66 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


tors, del Paso cited Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Rabelais, Pavese, Faulkner,
Pessoa, and Broch before adding "one name, the one that cannot be over-
looked, the greatest: James Joyce, my teacher par excellence [mi maestro
por excelencia]" (Carvajal iii). Some observations on Joyce provide a final
perspective on the cultural status of Jose Trigo, a text which sustains rig-
orous comparison with either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Given the im-
possibility of accounting for all of del Paso's literary debts, these two
pathbreaking novels by Joyce must stand as a serviceable synecdoche of a
millenarian western tradition that is held conventionally to culminate in
Anglo-American modernism and postmodernism. Their dual status as
syntheses of the canon (from Homer through Dante, Shakespeare and
Sterne, to Wilde) and as compendia of a history of political dissidence,
cultural peripherality, and moral and religious heterodoxy (see Fiddian,
"James Joyce and Spanish-American Fiction") further bolsters their claim
to be read as parts standing for the whole of western literature.
   Formal links between del Paso's and Joyce's work were first docu-
mented by Ramon Xirau (1967), Aida Nadi Gambetta Cruk (1974), and
Dagoberto Orrantia (1975). In relation to Ulysses, the greatest area of
overlap is the mythical design and archetypal projection of the narrative
material of Josd Trigo. In a particularly close set of correspondences, char-
acters in both Ulysses and Josd Trigo reenact a classic Oedipal drama that
pits son against father in an atmosphere of varying degrees of hostility:
Luciano defies Todolosantos, Guadalupe fears Nicanor, and Stephen
Dedalus resents his father, Simon, and is obsessed with "the Father and the
Son idea" (Joyce 16). Consistent with the archetypal basis of their experi-
ence, characters share an intuitive sense of being caught up in patterns of
repetition that operate beyond the normal parameters of human under-
standing. Thus, as they yield to an incestuous longing for each other,
Guadalupe and Dulcenombre feel instinctively that they have "already
lived those moments in some former time" (1156). They thereby bring to
the fore themes of reincarnation and ancestral memory that also appear in
a conversation between Molly and Leopold Bloom in an early chapter of
Joyce's novel: Asked to explain the concept of "metempsychosis," Joyce's
common hero remarks by way of illustration, "Some say they remember
their past lives" (53). Along with a battery of allusions to a wide range of
myths and legends-Christian, pagan, Hellenic, Amerindian-these ar-
chetypal themes are evidence of a common conceptual design in Josd Trigo
and Ulysses.
   A no less interesting and substantial set of correspondences can be pos-
ited between Josd Trigo and Finnegans Wake. And here it must be stated





                                                         Josd Trigo |167

right away that I am not claiming any wholesale resemblance between the
two books. As early as 1966, Fernando del Paso discounted that proposi-
tion when he declared that "Finnegans Wake is an unrepeatable experi-
ment": a unique achievement ("It has value because there is no other work
like it") which no other writer could hope to emulate (Carvajal iii). More
modestly, I merely assert the existence of a number of points of coinci-
dence that have relevance to a discussion of the issues of cultural identity
and affiliation under the spotlight in this study.
   The most palpable coincidences between Josd Trigo and Finnegans
Wake are located in the areas of (i) a common thematic preoccupation
with Oedipal conflict, incest, and guilt, (ii) the archetypal projection of
some of the characters in sharply defined relationships of antagonism, and
(iii) the presence of certain predominantly Christian motifs, the most im-
portant being the myth of resurrection, which acts as a vehicle for mediat-
ing a positive view of the place of humankind in the cosmos. Having
remarked already on the place in Joyce's work of themes relating to the
Oedipal complex, we can dispense with any further comment on that topic
and pass immediately to a consideration of the two other areas indicated
above. The first area involves the modeling of characters on archetypal
antecedents who represent an essential and irreducible form of conflict. In
Josd Trigo, Luciano and Manuel Angel exemplify such a pairing, their
relationship being defined alternately as a form of sibling rivalry (Quet-
zalc6atl vs. Tezcatlipoca) and a confrontation between evenly balanced
powers of good and evil (Christ and the Archangels vs. Lucifer). In sum-
mary, Finnegans Wake tells the story of a nuclear family composed of
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) -who, like Luciano, is distin-
guished by a "Christlikeness" (33)-his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle
(ALP), their daughter, Issy, and the multifaceted siblings, Shaun and Shem
(491). Described as "heavenlaid" twins (177), Shaun and Shem are com-
pared on occasions to the archetypal pair, Castor and Pollux, and, more
frequently, to the biblical types of Cain and Abel and Michael and Lucifer.
"The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies" (219-59) exemplifies this
allegorizing method, portraying Shem and Shaun, respectively, as Nick/
Nekulon/Lignifer and Mick/Makal in order to convey recognizable
themes of duality, conflict, and complementarity.
   Other analogies derive from the animating presence in Finnegans Wake
of certain Christian themes and motifs including those of Eden ("a prefall
paradise," p. 30) and the Fall itself as "retaled in bed and later on life
down through all Christian minstrelsy" (3). These related myths coalesce
in the collective story of the Earwicker family and, most pointedly, in the





68 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


biography of Anna Livia Plurabelle, whose sexual initiation "in county
Wickenlow, garden of Erin" is recounted in the famous section beginning
"0 tell me all about Anna Livia!" (196 ff.). In that section, a group of
gossips wage a whispering campaign against ALP, accusing her of all sorts
of sexual misdemeanors. Yet Anna Livia cannot be dismissed as a figure of
wanton sexual indulgence, for she is also an agent of cleansing and puri-
fication who has the power to bring about "the regeneration of all men by
affusion of water" (6o6). In so much, she fulfills a symbolic function iden-
tical to that which is attributed to madrecita Buenaventura in the imagi-
nary world of Josd Trigo.
   The promise of spiritual regeneration represented by Anna Livia brings
us close to the notional center of Finnegans Wake, where the essential
message of the text effectively resides. That message is generous and hu-
mane and implies an optimistic belief in the constant renewal of vital
potential and the ultimate triumph of life over death. At its simplest and
most direct, the message takes the form of a rallying call which H. C.
Earwicker addresses to the whole-old world:

   Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection!
   Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. 0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally!
   Phlenxty, 0 rally! (593)

With these words, Earwicker invites all-comers to celebrate the dawning
of a new day and affirms the moral and poetic truth of the doctrine of
resurrection which is the cornerstone of Joyce's metaphysics in Finnegans
Wake. Throughout the novel, the motifs of daybreak and awakening are
associated with the themes of regeneration and resurrection and provide a
rhetorical accompaniment to the narration at moments of particular in-
tensity: for example, at the end of I.iii, when the narrator imagines the
return of a mythic hero who will "wake from earthsleep" (74); the conclu-
sion of III.ii, which anticipates a time when "The silent cock shall crow at
last. The west shall shake the east awake" (473); and in the vision of Tim
Finnegan's return from the dead, "renanescent; fincarnate; [. . .] awike in
wave risurging into chrest" (596).
   From a formal perspective, it is interesting to note the consistency of
Joyce's figurative language and the uniform burden of meaning that it
discharges at climactic moments of the narrative. From a comparative
perspective, our attention is caught by the extent to which Finnegans
Wake resembles Josd Trigo, both in the joint respects of theme and tone
and in that of imagery. The motif of the sun's passage along an east-west
axis; the image of the phoenix in Joyce's homage to Dublin's "sphoenix





                                                          Josd Trigo |169

spark" (473); the reference to Christ/Chrest as a type of resurrection-
these items constitute the fine detail of a substantial likeness between two
works that are united by a common set of concerns grounded in the same
humanistic outlook and articulated in a similar, mixed cultural register.
   The global diffusion of Roman Catholicism and Christian mythology
goes a long way toward explaining the affinities that exist between Fin-
negans Wake and Josd Trigo. It is, perhaps, ultimately not surprising that
a mid-twentieth-century narrative compendium of the cultural paradigms
of Mexico should echo some of the basic concerns of an earlier landmark
novel steeped, like the rest of Joyce's work, in the Catholic-agrarian heri-
tage of Ireland-a country to which del Paso's observations concerning
Mexico's history of spiritual colonization could be applied with some jus-
tification. No less pervasive an influence, or code, is the tradition of west-
ern humanism and its basis in universalist assumptions that have been
embraced not only by James Joyce and Fernando del Paso but also by
Leopoldo Zea, Frantz Fanon, and others. The categorical assertion, made
by the narrator of Jose Trigo, that "What matters is the story of mankind"
(1 1) articulates an ethical position to which del Paso, Zea, and Fanon each
subscribed in the 1960s and 1970s and, in the cases of del Paso and Zea,
up through the 1990s.16
   As an inheritor of Borges's decentered model of cultural relations be-
tween different regions of the world, del Paso could rightfully claim for
Josd Trigo the same inherent cultural value as Finnegans Wake. For one
reason or another, this is something he has never actually done. Yet, if the
above comparison is accurate, Josd Trigo, depicting the human condition
in terms often identical to those used in Finnegans Wake, displays a seman-
tic density that entitles it to be considered as no more and no less "univer-
sal" than Joyce's novel. Indeed, Josd Trigo can be viewed as exemplifying
a genuinely Latin American universal that fuses the local and the continen-
tal with a more generalized message about humankind, Nature, the politi-
cal order, and transcendence. In my analysis of relations between Josd
Trigo and at least one canonical text from each of the Mexican, Latin
American, and European narrative traditions, I have sought to validate all
three projections of del Paso's multilayered text.
   In his acknowledgment of the "unrepeatable experiment" of Finnegans
Wake, del Paso could not overlook the unique linguistic and intertextual
achievement represented by Joyce's novel-to-end-all-novels. Notwith-
standing his denial of the iterability of Finnegans Wake, the experimental
flair of Joyce's writing inevitably carries over into the prose style of Jose
Trigo. As we saw earlier, del Paso exploits the linguistic system of his





70 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


native Spanish relentlessly and to the point of exhaustion. A favorite strat-
egy involves reproducing the entire contents of a paradigm, for example,
the names of animals and insects (147-48), trees and flowers (375), the
days of the week and months of the year (387), the letters of the alphabet
(142 and 398), and the cardinal numbers (140). Not only is this a strategy
already favored by Joyce in and after Ulysses, but many of the paradigms
are exactly the same as those that are called into play in Finnegans Wake,
including the days of the week (301), the cardinal numbers (589), the
"allaphbed," and parts of speech. Jose Trigo also experiments with vari-
ous modes of discourse, showing a particular penchant for parody and a
pastiche of models ranging from the inflated style and archaic lexicon of
Catholic sermons composed by a "verbose and soporific priest" of the
Cristeros (413), to the rhetoric and invective of a crudely politicized press
(149, 371), and the popular slang and wordplay of a cabaret compere who
entertains an unruly audience with a string of puns (retruecanos) (334)
and double entendres (albures calambureros) (337). From a higher regis-
ter, del Paso reworks an equally wide range of models that, in addition to
those already surveyed, include the virtuoso rhetorical exercises of Juan
Jose Arreola in "palimpsestuous" texts such as Confabulario and La
feria17 and the unique narrative style of Juan Rulfo. The re-creation, in the
stories of El llano en llamas, of a peasant mind-set and of conventions of
popular speech and storytelling is the starting point for a "Rulfian pas-
tiche" wrought, with conscious artistry, in chapter 4 of part 1 of Jose Trigo
(Carvajal iii).18
   The profusion of intertextuality and pastiche in Jose Trigo is reminis-
cent of Joyce's practice in both Ulysses and the Wake and follows the
totalizing programs of those two quintessentially modernist works. At the
same time, those features of the writing of Jose Trigo suggest a link with
postmodernism as theorized by Ihab Hassan, FredricJameson, and others.
Blanca Merino Juti, in an unpublished doctoral thesis of 1994, considered
Josd Trigo a postmodern novel. It goes without saying that such a reading
is fundamentally at odds with the picture of Jose Trigo that I have built up
in the preceding pages. I believe that the combination, in del Paso's novel,
of an overarching figurative design, a humanist message and master code,
and a totalizing aesthetic that seeks to reconcile opposing interpretations
of fictionalized experience conforms to a modernist practice of narrative.
Yet Merino Juti's reading opens up alternative possibilities of classifica-
tion that are not to be dismissed out of hand. If pastiche, a dissenting
historiography, and self-referentiality are typical of a postmodern aes-
thetic as characterized by Hal Foster, Julio Ortega, and Ricardo Gutierrez





                                                         Josd Trigo |171

Mouat, then the picture of Jose Trigo elaborated above might be adjusted
to accommodate a certain number of postmodern features within a domi-
nant modernist frame. This makes for a more complex understanding of
Josd Trigo, as a text informed by two competing artistic paradigms. In the
context of del Paso's work as a whole, the tension between modernism and
postmodernism, resolved in Josd Trigo in favor of the former, foreshadows
further relationships that I will trace in subsequent chapters, along with
the processes of interaction between texts of different origins and cultural
affiliations.










3


Palinuro de M6xico

The Body, the Nation, and the Book of the World


   I went to live in London in order to confirm and reaffirm the
   western, European, and Judeo-Christian components of my cul-
   ture, my way of life, my traditions, both past and present.
   Fernando del Paso, "Mi patria chica, mi patria grande"


   Palinurus: your blank and maritime
   face offers images of sleeplessness
   to the calm of night. Naked and prostrate,
   you will repeat your death perpetually in the sand.
   Silvina Ocampo, "Palinuro insomne"



Begun as early as 1967, but composed for the most part between 1971 and
1975 (Ruffinelli, "Entrevista" 46), Palinuro de Mdxico repeats the para-
digm of Josd Trigo, but with a difference. Like Josd Trigo, Palinuro de
Mdxico is a book of Joycean pedigree and proportions, modeled in this
instance on the example of Ulysses, and comprising an extravagant, mul-
tifaceted narrative infused, in Jorge Campos's words, with an "ambition
of totality" (iii). Del Paso's declaration that "I wanted to write a good
book, a book full of life, an extensive poem about love and death, about
the human body" (Sinchez Bardon and Goni 49) gives an indication of the
ethical pretensions and thematic scope of the novel, which encompasses
philosophical, medical, sexual, political, psychological, historical, and lit-
erary concerns.
   As a means of dealing with this vast agenda, Palinuro de Mdxico utilizes
a multiplicity of narrative modes including the satirical, the dramatic, the
epic and mock epic, the burlesque, the picaresque, and the pornographic.
In respect of form, the material of the narrative is mediated through a





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 73

complicated structure of voices that compete and intertwine, sometimes
merging imperceptibly, sometimes doubling up in unexpected reversals.
There are four principal narrative voices in the book: those of Palinuro
and Palinuro desdoblado observing and addressing himself at various re-
moves; that of Cousin Walter, articulated in chapters 9, 12, and 22; and
the voice of abuelo Francisco, apparently speaking from the afterlife, in
chapters zi and z5.
   As part of its program of prolixity, the novel exhibits an obtrusive
intertextuality, with quotations, imitations, and reformulations of work
by writers as varied as William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Car-
roll, Frangois Rabelais, Francisco de Quevedo, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio
Paz, Virgil, Cyril Connolly, Henry Miller, and sundry surrealists. Literally,
Palinuro de Mdxico is all of the following: a tale of two cities (in this
instance, of the capitals of Mexico and England), a book of the nation, and
a concerted dialogue with world literature. Quite consciously, Palinuro de
Mdxico sets out to summarize the entire western tradition, which it claims
unproblematically as its own heritage. With a confidence bordering on
hubris, the text stakes out for itself a place in canonical territory alongside
some of the most famous landmarks in the history of western culture.
   Notwithstanding its tendency toward extravagance, the centrifugal
impulse of del Paso's narrative is kept in check by an overarching view of
the human condition which, in summary form, acknowledges the physical
vulnerability and limitations of the human subject yet expounds a message
of affirmation of life, including a spiritual belief in rebirth and immortal-
ity. Embodied at the narrative level in a design that incorporates arche-
typal motifs common to such works as Ulysses and Rayuela as well as del
Paso's own Josd Trigo, that affirmative vision pervades the entire novel,
constituting the crucial factor of differentiation between Palinuro de
Mdxico and del Paso's earlier novel, where the myth of resurrection was
articulated in several instances yet contradicted by the historical and ideo-
logical messages encoded in the narrative. With greater internal consis-
tency, Palinuro de Mdxico matches the blueprint of the book that Pali-
nuro's Cousin Walter would wish to write: "as sickly, fragile and defective
as the human organism yet at the same time, if this were possible (although
it is clearly impossible), just as complicated and magnificent" and "a
Dionysian book which might affirm life triumphantly in all its darkness
and horror" (499-500). In its range of tones, del Paso's novel veers ac-
cordingly between extremes of somber realism and pathos, on the one
hand, and joyful celebration and affirmation, on the other.





74 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Narrative Strands and Themes: Eros,Thanatos, and the Novel of '68

   Every work of fiction aspires to the condition of totality, to be a
   self-contained universe, to take control of its own time.
   Carlos Fuentes, Casa de guardar


   The novel of '68 . . . has perhaps still not crystallized
   as a literary type.
   Jos6 Luis Martinez and Christopher Dominguez Michael,
   La literatura mexicana del siglo XX

The expansive vision of Palinuro de Mdxico is conveyed to the reader
through a number of interwoven narrative strands that embody aspects of
the character of Palinuro and the principal spheres of his existence. There
are five such strands, or codes, each one providing a vehicle for the treat-
ment of certain thematic concerns and an occasion for the utilization of a
specific narrative mode and method.
   The first strand of the narrative provides information about the charac-
ter of Palinuro and the personality traits that are attributed to him. Over
a number of chapters it builds up an identikit picture of a twenty-year-old
medical student from Mexico City whose interests include medicine, sex,
literature, art, music, and politics. A cultured young man, Palinuro also
possesses a lively sense of fun and mischief that can manifest itself in
riotous forms of behavior. At the same time, he is characterized by a cer-
tain innocence and naivete; the description of Palinuro as "above all, a
dreamer" (253) refers to a deeply embedded character trait, also connot-
ing political idealism and a commitment to social justice.
   Through such descriptions and successive accounts of his involvement
in narrative incident, Palinuro is endowed with the inner personality and
external behavioral identity of a homo fictus (Forster 78-79), who is
much more clearly defined than the spectral and elusive Jose Trigo of del
Paso's earlier novel. The youthful Palinuro nevertheless lacks precise
physical features, even of the spectral sort attributed to Artemio Cruz in
the well-known novel by Carlos Fuentes. And like the other characters in
Palinuro de Mdxico, he is a contradictory and plural being irreducible to a
stable ego. When Walter reasons, "Though we are not one, neither are we
two, but ten, or a thousand, who knows how many, and between the lot of
us we do not make up that one which we are not" (179), he articulates a
theme, drawn from the Borgesian repertoire, that is central to the novel
and that calls into question conventional ideas about individual personal-
ity and, with them, the notion of literary character. No longer conceivable





                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 75

in terms of discreteness and unity, "character" in Palinuro de Mdxico im-
plies double, multiple, and contradictory personalities, as it does in a wide
range of twentieth-century fiction including Joyce's Ulysses, Cumpleanos
and Cambio de piel by Carlos Fuentes, and Lapsus by Hector Manjarrez.
   Any specificity that might be read into Palinuro's character is further
attenuated by the workings of allegory. As "Palinuro of Mexico" he is a
metonym for the life of the nation: "And just as in ancient times there was
a Rufus of Ephesus and a Xenocrates of Aphrodisias," he proclaims, "so
will I one day become so famous that future generations will link my name
with my country of origin and call me 'Palinuro de Mexico"' (96-97).
More precisely, Palinuro stands for Mexican youth at a conjunctural mo-
ment in the nation's history. In a 1978 interview with Ildefonso Alvarez,
del Paso remarked, "Palinuro is a character of our times. [.. .] Palinuro is
a student who dies during the student riots of 1968 in Mexico City"
(Alvarez 15). However, in the ellipsis sandwiched between these two state-
ments, the author refers to Palinuro as "a character who perhaps can be
found not only in Mexico but in many other countries," thereby confer-
ring on him the status of an Everyman figure who transcends specifics
both of place-as indicated in the remarks to Ildefonso Alvarez-and
time-as the text itself makes clear in the comment that "Palinuro lived
simultaneously in several periods" (55z). In the overall framework of
Palinuro de Mdxico, this transcendent function is inseparable from a wider
pattern of myth and archetype that holds the protean material of narrative
together. It thus illustrates both the element of complexity inherent in
Palinuro's character and the versatility of his role in the narrative economy
of del Paso's novel.
   The second strand of narrative material in Palinuro de Mdxico is con-
cerned with Palinuro's family background and his relations with members
of his family. The first two chapters of the novel summarize the history of
Palinuro's family over at least four generations, evoking the charmed at-
mosphere of the Porfirian mansion in Mexico City where Palinuro was
born and raised with his cousin, Estefania, his parents, Clementina and
Eduardo, an assortment of aunts and uncles, the most eccentric being
Aunt Luisa, and his maternal grandparents, Altagracia and Francisco.
Depicted as a microcosm of harmony and prosperity, the home is the
perfect setting for a family romance where Palinuro would typically be
mesmerized by his Uncle Esteban's "conversations about the marvels and
horrors of the art of Hippocrates and Avicena" (18) and listen spellbound
to stories told by "the greatest and most memorable of grandfathers" (34).
   Of all Palinuro's immediate family ties, the one that has the most pro-





76 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


found effect on his character and development is his relationship with his
mother, and it is this relationship which receives the most intense and
detailed attention in the narrative. In chapter 17 we read how Palinuro's
early childhood was a time of emotional security and wholeness, recalled,
in adulthood, as an illud tempore:
   On those nights or only on that single night when his mother came
   into his room and said Mamma wants to know if her little boy
   cleaned his teeth properly, and he surrendered to her his breath
   smelling of warm mint; Mamma wants to know if her little boy
   washed his hair properly, and she buried her face in his hair; Mamma
   wants to know if her little boy washed his thighs properly, and she
   sunk her face into his flesh as in a mound of perfumed sand and the
   two of them fell asleep, making a kind of love for which they as yet
   had no name. (z85-86)

Like the mother in Freud's "Third Essay on Sexuality" (1905), Clementina
regards her son Palinuro "with feelings that are derived from her own
sexual life; she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats
him as a substitute for a complete sexual object" (Freud 145). For Pali-
nuro, the attachment is also a source of gratification and a vehicle for
"teaching the child to love," also in keeping with the Freudian scenario
(Freud 146).
   The knowledge Palinuro acquires in his childhood years about his par-
ents' sexuality causes him distress and confusion. He graphically repre-
sents his mother as "a vulva with two legs" and his father as "a penis with
two hands" (370). His imagination stirred by primal phantasies, he can-
not help but visualize sex between his parents as naked aggression, and
taking sides with his mother, he becomes locked into an Oedipal conflict
that is still unresolved when he reaches puberty. At that stage of his devel-
opment, Palinuro's feelings toward Clementina become consciously
sexual and erotic, bearing out his Cousin Walter's description of puberty
as a period when "everything around you: your mother, words, foodstuffs,
become tinged with sexuality and your genital tubercule which started to
grow in length from the first weeks after your conception [. . .] continues
to grow in length, confirming that you are a male" (274). In a tangible
illustration of that phallocentricity, Palinuro masturbates "with mami
Clementina's hand cream" (1137), demonstrating the "incestuous fixation
of his libido," which he must repudiate, according to Freud (151), if he is
to effect the passage from boy to man. In the event, the death of his mother
prevents Palinuro from immediately resolving his Oedipus complex and





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 77

burdens him with a guilt complex that casts a shadow over his relations
with women; he eventually attains release from its restrictions only
through the mediation of Estefania.
   In its depiction of Palinuro's relationship with his mother, del Paso's
narrative thus traces an evolution away from complete symbiosis with
mamd Clementina to a prolonged state of acute Oedipal anxiety. The lyri-
cal and, at times, elegiacal treatment of precious years spent in the protec-
tive embrace of the family gives way to a scenario of adolescent trauma
and frustrated potential that compares with the blight inflicted by mother-
son relations as described in the work of other Mexican writers of the mid-
twentieth century, especially in Pedro Pdramo by Juan Rulfo and Cumple-
anos and Zona sagrada by Carlos Fuentes. Relevant points of comparison
in the broader frame of Spanish American prose fiction include Juan
Carlos Onetti's Los adioses-mentioned by del Paso apropos the theme of
incest in conversation with Ignacio Trejo Fuentes - and Garcia Mirquez's
Cien anos de soledad, which offers both a deterrent evocation of the
charm and destructiveness of incest and an exploration of the family ro-
mance similar to the perspective offered in Palinuro de Mdxico.
   Within Palinuro de Mdxico there is an alternative treatment of the
theme of incest, found in the strand of the narrative that explores Pali-
nuro's relationship with Estefania. Partly by virtue of sidestepping the
Oedipal trap and partly because it subsumes Palinuro and Estefania's
sexual activities under a wider exploration of eroticism, this strand of the
narrative succeeds in portraying one of those "incestuous bonds" which,
according to del Paso, "could be wonderful if our society had not made
them into something horrific" (Trejo Fuentes 9). In a utopian discourse
that has its immediate origins in Marcuse and other icons of 1960s and
1970s counterculture and, further back, in the heterodox program of sur-
realism, del Paso asserts the marvelous beauty, the life-enhancing powers,
and the liberating potential of erotic love, even within the bounds of the
family.1
   Dealt with in approximately a third of the novel's twenty-five chapters,
Palinuro's relationship with Estefania provides the context for an intense
and playful treatment of the erotic, regarded by del Paso as inseparable
from monogamous, romantic love. The conventional cast of the author's
attitude on this point is made clear in an interview with Ignacio Trejo
Fuentes, when del Paso insisted he believed that "love only exists within a
relationship of a certain permanence and depth, a love that should be
inseparable from eroticism." An accompanying statement that "As far as
I'm concerned, the overriding significance and the importance of love and





78 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


eroticism are enormous" (Trejo Fuentes 8) reaffirms that point of prin-
ciple and paves the way for an uninhibited celebration of the body's erotic
potential and for the enumeration, on repeated occasions, of an almost
infinite catalog of forms of lovemaking bound up with a range of emo-
tions.
   A noteworthy example of erotic writing is found in chapter 4 of Pali-
nuro de Mdxico, which, in the author's own approving words, "oozes love
and eroticism, physical passion," and "immense affection" (Trejo Fuentes
8). The chapter unfolds along two dominant axes: the articulation - affec-
tionate, empassioned, contradictory-of Palinuro's feelings for Estefania;
and the description, given directly by Palinuro in a series of observations,
enumerations, and recollections, of his cousin's character and physical
attributes. While the first of these two axes comprises a mixed register in
which conventional terms of amorous idolatry such as "pure," "angelic,"
and "goddess" give way to epithets expressive of a lesser enthrallment
such as "damnable," "whore," "hypocrite," and "perfidious," the second
evolves through a systematic account of the properties of parts of Este-
fania's body into a detailed anthology of orifices exploited scandalously
for sexual ends. As Palinuro explains, this

   is not just talk for talk's sake, since the love that Estefania and I had
   for each other, and not only because we loved each other but because
   we loved our love, led us into all possible encounters: naked, sweat-
   ing, with blood open to the fluttering of wings, and for the short
   duration between going to the cinema and the hours that Estefania
   spent adorning her breasts while on high the moon swelled in envy
   like a Dutch sponge, we explored all the orifices born of heaven,
   both to Estefania and to her cousin, the moon. (76)

The subsequent list of openings and surfaces that Palinuro either pen-
etrates or bathes in semen functions accordingly as a figure of the lovers'
erotic imagination and sexual prowess. But, more significantly and con-
troversially, the writing of this part of the chapter gestures toward puritan-
ism and pornography in ways that are quite deliberate and ultimately
parodic in intent.
   At the level of authorial intention, the emphasis placed in Palinuro de
Mdxico on the body and its various functions, and, as part of that agenda,
the untrammelled expression of the erotic dimension of the characters'
lives, are meant to challenge the historically embedded puritanism of west-
ern societies, particularly the tradition of Christian denial of, and con-





                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 79

tempt for, the body. The medical officer who escorts Palinuro around a
hospital and announces forthrightly that "Saint Augustine perverted the
thought of mankind for over a thousand years, you know: we wish to free
it of original sin" (403), speaks for a multitude of dissenting figures, rang-
ing-within the twentieth-century literary canon-from James Joyce (in
texts such as Ulysses and the letters to Nora Barnacle), and several surreal-
ists including Georges Bataille, to Octavio Paz and Julio Cortizar (in
Rayuela, Libro de Manuel, and other works). These and several other
authors line up behind Fernando del Paso in support of his repudiation of
philosophical and religious doctrines that would impoverish the physical
and erotic dimensions of human (predominantly male) experience.
   At its most extreme, del Paso's opposition to conventional standards of
moral (and literary) propriety takes the form of a deliberate cultivation of
obscenity. As acknowledged by the author himself, "Palinuro de Mdxico
contains some chapters that are frankly obscene, where it could be said
that I had recourse to a technique of 'commotion"' (Trejo Fuentes 8).
Valid as a gloss on sections of the narrative that deal with bodily matters
in general, del Paso's statement also applies to those sections which repre-
sent most precisely the sexual/erotic dimensions of the characters' lives.
However, the self-styled obscenity of parts of Palinuro de Mdxico has se-
rious implications, particularly in regard to an assessment of the relation
of those parts of the novel to pornography. Speaking some time after the
publication of his novel and expanding on a quotation already cited, del
Paso maintained, "The chapter titled 'Unas palabras sobre Estefania'
oozes love and eroticism, physical passion, an immense affection, and, it
goes without saying, irony, because I had in mind to make a caricature of
pornography-and therefore a criticism" (Trejo Fuentes 8). Yet, if we
posit momentarily a functional similarity between the arts of parody and
caricature, arguments about the resistance of pornography to parody
place a question mark over the aims and actual results of del Paso's
project.
   According to Susan Sontag, "Pornography isn't a form that can parody
itself. It is the nature of the pornographic imagination to prefer ready-
made conventions of character, setting, and action. Pornography is a the-
atre of types, never of individuals. A parody of pornography, so far as it
has any real competence, always remains pornography" (5 1). On this
view, an exercise in the imitation of pornography of the sort conducted by
del Paso in parts of Palinuro de Mdxico is contaminated at source. The
accounts of Palinuro and Estefania's lovemaking would match exactly the
conventions of pornography as described by Annette Kuhn:





8o I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   Pornography speak[s] both to and from a masculine position, [...]
   usually privileging the male organ over the female and equating it
   with ejaculation. [. ..]
     [Pornography insists on] the moment of penetration in male-fe-
   male intercourse. [. .]
     Pornography is preoccupied with what it regards as the signifiers
   of sexual difference and sexuality: genitals, breasts, buttocks. (zo,
   35, 37)

More controversially, those accounts would reproduce the offensive as-
sumptions on which the practice of pornography rests.
   Against such a view, and seen from a perspective that assumes good
faith on del Paso's part, the instances of erotic writing under consideration
would belong to another order of literature altogether, setting themselves
apart from conventional pornography in at least the following respects:
the images conveyed of Palinuro and Estefania's physical exertions are
exaggerated, often to the point of absurdity, and, in any case, range far
beyond the standard repertoire of physical acts and positions depicted in
works of pornography; the presentation of the protagonists is playful, not
mechanistic, and the tone of the writing is often humorous and very differ-
ent from the "affectless" tone of pornography documented by Sontag in
her enumeration of the features of pornographic writing (55). Signifi-
cantly, the chapters of Palinuro de Mdxico that represent the protagonists'
sexual acts do so from a perspective that incorporates the point of view of
Estefania, even though her voice is subsumed under a first-person plural
form articulated by Palinuro. And, finally, the criticism, made by Angela
Carter about pornography, that its "principal and most humanly signifi-
cant function is that of arousing sexual excitement" (1z2) does not apply to
Palinuro de Mdxico, where the chapters featuring erotic subject matter
fulfill a variety of functions, both in the context of the narrative as a whole
and as self-contained exercises in imitation.
   Assessing the results of del Paso's critically motivated caricature of
pornography, the evidence suggests a high degree of consistency between
the author's intentions and the range of meanings that can be read into his
text. But what is also demonstrated is the vulnerability of the position of
any male author who intervenes in the arena of sexual politics, where the
intentions behind a literary work are especially likely to conflict with the
expectations of readers who are highly sensitized to the implications of a
subject as controversial as pornography. Issues of pornography aside, the
treatment of themes of love and eroticism in the strand of the narrative





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 81

under review advances a cause-that of reclaiming the body from the
discourses of repression-already pursued, in Mexican writing, by Oc-
tavio Paz in Conjunciones y disyunciones (1969) and, in a very different
idiom, by Gustavo Sainz in Gazapo (1965). Where del Paso breaks new
ground is in the elaboration of a utopian scenario of incest, independent of
the regime of Oedipal prohibitions that has exercised so profound an in-
fluence on the organization of western societies and the theoretical appa-
ratuses that have served to legitimate them.
   Turning to the fourth strand of the narrative of Palinuro de Mdxico, we
find an emphasis initially on themes relating to the motif of the double,
dramatized in the relationship between Palinuro and Walter. The charac-
ter known synonymously as "Walter the learned, Walter the knowledge-
able" (171), "Walter who had read everything" (159), and, more dis-
paragingly, "Walter the know-all" (167) is also the focal point for the
discussion of a vast repertoire of other themes from the areas of philoso-
phy, medicine, and culture.
   Partly an ironic cipher of the author, partly a complex example of more
or less objectionable forms of dilettantism and pedantry, Walter stands out
as a tragicomic figure of hyperbole and contradictoriness ("I am a knot of
contradictions," he admits to Palinuro, p. 517) who is a direct literary
descendant of another Walter-the temperamental father of Tristram
Shandy in Lawrence Sterne's famous novel of 1759-67. In the context of
Palinuro's family, Walter is bound to Palinuro in a relationship that is
effectively fraternal and, figuratively, that of twins: as he puts it, "More
than cousins, Palinuro, we are fraternal twins" (501). Harking back to
Josd Trigo and exploiting the same archetypal motif as Carlos Fuentes in
Terra nostra, Walter compares himself and Palinuro to the Dioscuri: "We
shall take turns to talk and shine, like Castor and Pollux" (5z), repeating
the assertion on a later occasion: "If it's true that you swallow your words
and I spit them out, that's because we are condemned to shine alternately,
like Castor and Pollux" (501).
   As symbolic twins and "cuates" (a term deriving from the name
Quetzalcoatl and denoting an indivisible bond of male friendship), the
two men provide a sharply defined illustration of the category of the
double. Recalling once again the networking of characters in Jose Trigo
(cf. the relationship between Luciano and el albino) and the light-hearted
twinning of Huberto Haltter and Humberto Heggo in Lapsus (1971) by
Hector Manjarrez (a Mexican author ten years younger than Fernando del
Paso), Palinuro and Walter coexist as partners whose experiences criss-
cross and double up like reflections in a mirror. In chapter 3, Walter per-





82 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


forms the narrative function of an exact double of Palinuro: identifiable,
in an anonymous first-person narration, by a reference to a "diamond
patterned vest" that he borrows from Palinuro and by certain peculiarities
of thought and speech, Walter is nonetheless turned inside out by his nor-
mally diffident cousin, who on this occasion displays the qualities of
assuredness and articulacy that are normally Walter's trademark.
   More generally, the cousins' lives are governed by a principle of
complementarity that decrees Walter should act and appear as Palinuro's
"other." Within this subcategory of the double, Walter functions as an
alter ego who compensates for the opportunities and achievements that
Palinuro is denied "by an irony of fate" that placed "more money, more
books and more opportunities within his [i.e., Walter's] grasp" (169). To
his moral credit, Walter appreciates the good fortune that made it possible
for him to live (as did the author) for several years in England, where he
never forgot Palinuro and would often "speak to [him] out loud" from
famous landmarks in London (488). In doing so, he performs roles of
complementarity and compensation that carry strong echoes of Oliveira
and Traveler in Julio Cortizar's Rayuela. The question that Walter-a
genuine Traveler, who has chosen a life of exile in Europe - retrospectively
asks, "Where were you at that moment, cousin? Where were you as I
walked past the National Gallery in London?" (498), echoes precisely
those themes of the double and simultaneous experience that characterize
Cortizar's version of the semimystical theory of the figura, reprised from,
among other sources, Jorge Luis Borges.
   Despite his tangled connections with Palinuro, Walter evinces sufficient
intellectual personality and fullness of self to be considered a fictional
entity distinct from Palinuro. He is, in fact, older than his cousin, more
cosmopolitan than the naive and idealistic student who is just twenty
years old. What sets Walter apart from Palinuro, as it does from all the
main characters in the novel, is his particular outlook on life, summed up
in the phrase "tragicomic sense of life" (486). True to the spirit of contra-
dictoriness that he embodies, Walter combines two extreme and equally
plausible points of view on the human condition and the world. The first
is a pained awareness of "the poverty and fragility of human life" (16o):
concepts documented in a vast catalog of diseases, barbarous medical acts,
and forms of physical suffering that are at one and the same time expres-
sions of Walter's "liking for the sad and the cruel" (1159) and stark evi-
dence of "our human wretchedness" (18z). Notwithstanding its basis in
real experience, that awareness is assimilated to a philosophical and ethi-
cal conviction that "At the end of the day, the world [.. .] is not such a bad





                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 83

place" (183). Associated with attitudes of optimism and good humor, this
second pole of Walter's outlook is synonymous with a sense of wonder at
the undeniable marvels and mysteries of life.
   Of the various themes that concern Walter, those of the body and of
language and consciousness are especially indicative of his philosophical
cast of mind. Already discussed in connection with Palinuro and Este-
fania's shared eroticism, the theme of the body as considered by Walter
intersects with thoughts, inter alia, about "ownership of our bodily or-
gans" (269), the problematical integrity of the body, and its vulnerability
(su integridad amenazada) at every instant of a person's life (272). With
quasi-religious fervor Walter defends "the sacred symmetry" of the body
(504) against accidents, disease, and political assaults including torture
and mutilation, and he celebrates the splendor of "the marvellous form of
Man, writ large" (516). Through the deliberate use of capital letters,
Walter promotes the view of the body as a microcosm of creation and
"copy of the universe" (516), thus affiliating himself with a tradition of
thinkers from Paracelsus to Scotus Erigena, Swedenborg, and Bohme who
consistently posited "strange links between the highest and the lowest, the
celestial and the terrestrial" (171). This mystical notion, entertained by
Borges in "Los teologos" and other writings, places the highest conceiv-
able value on the human form and opens out sublime perspectives on its
powers of transcendence - a theme that acquires its ultimate significance
in Palinuro de Mdxico at the level of archetypal design, as discussed below.
   Walter's ideas on language and consciousness express equally affirma-
tive sentiments, despite their origins in the nominalist tradition of essen-
tially skeptical philosophers like Hobbes and Fritz Mauthner. Echoing
that tradition Walter insists, first, on the equivalence of language and
memory and, second, on the ties of memory to imagination. Then he un-
derlines the crucial significance of language in our construction as human
beings engaged in and with the world. Language, Walter argues, provides
the most conclusive proof that human beings are more than physical sys-
tems:
   I mean, matter pure and simple we are not. [.. .] And do you know
   why? Because we are made of words and so are things; because we
   are but memory, and things exist and acquire the status of truth
   when they allow themselves, tamely, to be clothed in the fabric of the
   world of words. (183)

In the terms of this argument, language constitutes consciousness and
endows the world of objects with authentic and "truthful" existence,





84 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


thereby demonstrating humankind's capacity for entering into a construc-
tive, creative relationship with the circumstantial world.
   Walter's own flexible and dynamic use of language is but one instance
of this capacity and a trait that Palinuro is proud to "inherit" from him in
particular (539). The examples that the text immediately provides of
Palinuro's verbal skills are examples not of empty rhetoric but of rhetoric
used to promote personal and collective causes involving issues of solidar-
ity-with protesting students, for example-and social and political jus-
tice in a country where the rich and powerful effectively monopolize re-
sources and the state has no compunction about authorizing the armed
forces to repress popular demonstrations with tanks, machetes, and rifle
butts, as happened in Mexico City in the summer of 1968. In this context,
words relate conscientiously to a world of referents and events that have
compelling and immediate significance for the fictional characters of the
narrative. Temporarily overriding questions of its relation to memory,
consciousness, and play, language addresses a number of urgent political
issues in which all the parties involved in the novel's circuit of communi-
cation-author, narrators, characters, and readers-have a stake.
   The political dimension of the fictional world portrayed in del Paso's
novel is delineated most fully in the fifth strand of the narrative, which
traces Palinuro's exploits with friends and fellow students, including his
involvement in the public disturbances that hit Mexico City in 1968.
Turning yet again on the body, this strand combines a scabrous treatment
of base physiological functions, reminiscent of the carnivalesque scatol-
ogy of Rabelais and Quevedo, with a grisly attention to details of torture
and other forms of physical abuse whose closest analogue in Mexican
fiction is Salvador Elizondo's Farabeuf (1965). The shift from the Rabelai-
sian to the Elizondan perspective is a most effective vehicle for addressing
the contemporary political situation and for denouncing the violent re-
pression of the student movement by the Mexican military and police
acting on the orders of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz between July and
October 1968.
   A climate of political unrest and general expectation is registered as
early as chapter 5 with the mention by Palinuro of students who "take to
the streets to demand an end to poverty, ignorance, and hunger" and his
question-cum-invitation to an alter ego, "Will you come and protest with
me?" (95). Later, a third of chapter 23 is given over to a tirade against
political stagnation, institutional corruption, and police brutality, with
Palinuro adopting a rhetoric of denunciation and misplaced confidence, as
in the following excerpt:





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 8 5

   They are afraid of us, [. ..] they are afraid that we might fuck up their
   Olympics, they accuse the ill-intentioned agents of exoticism of try-
   ing to strip Mexico of its prestige before the attentive eyes and ears
   of the world, and meanwhile, I have seen them, I have seen how they
   manhandled the students and put hoods over their heads and then
   the soldiers delivered eloquent blows with rifle butts to their ribs and
   shouted the order to get ready, take aim and fire the salute to the
   Motherland, because anything is possible in a state of peace. (542)

Ironically, the testimony given by Palinuro turns out to be a prefiguration
of his own death from injuries received in a violent confrontation with
troops in the Z6calo of Mexico City on the night of 27-28 August 1968.
That particular tragedy, recounted in chapter 24 of Palinuro de Mdxico,
provides a dramatic climax to the narrative and constitutes a uniquely
powerful and imaginative contribution to Mexican literature on the theme
of Tlatelolco.2
   Entitled "Palinuro on the stairs, or the art of comedy," chapter 24 is
unique in casting the events of Tlatelolco and the sacrifice of Mexican
youth that occurred there in the dramatic form of the commedia dell'arte.
Expanding on Hector Manjarrez's momentary reference to the commedia
dell'arte near the end of chapter z of Lapsus, Fernando del Paso elaborates
a full-scale dramatic narrative that combines historical reality and fantasy,
archetype and allegory, in a contrived mosaic of modes and dramatic lev-
els that is explained at the beginning of the performance, in italics:

   (Reality is at one remove, toward the rear of the stage. Reality is
   Palinuro, who started out dragging himself through Charon's Cave,
   and never got to his feet again. Reality is Palinuro beaten up, on the
   dirty stairway. It is the bureaucrat, the concierge, the drunken doctor,
   the mailman, the police officer, Estefania, and me. This reality is
   played out in the center of the stage. Dreams, memories, illusions,
   lies, harmful desires and imaginings, together with the characters
   from La Commedia dell'Arte: Harlequin, Scaramouch, Pierrot, Col-
   ombine, Pantalone, etc.: these all make up a fantasy. The fantasy,
   which freezes reality, re-creates it, treats it comically and with pa-
   thos, and either imitates it or prefigures it, occurs only in space and
   not in time. The place allocated to it is the front of the stage.) (548)

In this two-dimensional space, Palinuro appears both as himself and as
Harlequin; Estefania doubles as Colombine, Walter assumes the character
of Pierrot, and a phalanx of protesting students appear simply as "Student





86 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Number One," "Student Number Two," etc. Their principal antagonists
are Capitano Maldito and Pantalone, representing the Mexican police and
military, who intervene directly in the "simple" storyline of "Palinuro on
the stairs . . . Palinuro knocked down by a tank: that's all there is to it!
Simple as that!" (551).
   At the beginning of the first act, an authorial voice identifies "the date
on which events took place" as "Wednesday z8 August," adding disin-
genuously, "The year [.. .] could have been any year belonging to a famil-
iar past or an invisible future. Let us say-but this is just a manner of
speaking-that it is 1968" (55z). Thereafter, a plethora of place-names,
proper names, incidents, and slogans all specific to the Mexican situation
provide constant reminders of the play's historical frame of reference, at
the same time that they confirm its fidelity to the events and chronology of
the student movement as reflected in chronicles such as Dias de guardar by
Carlos Monsiviis (1970) and the remarkable 1971 volume compiled by
Elena Poniatowska under the title "La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios
de historia oral."3
   A particularly famous episode, the Silent Protest (la Manifestacion
Silenciosa) of 13 September 1968, is the model for an "Interlude" sand-
wiched between acts 3 and 4 of "Palinuro on the stairs, or the art of
comedy." Documented in vivid detail by Monsiviis (25 8-75), this episode
links up with other fictional versions of the Silent Protest in works by
Arturo Azuela (Manifestacidn de silencio, 1979), Jorge Aguilar Mora (the
central chapters of Si muero lejos de ti, 1979), and Marco Antonio Cam-
pos (Que la carne es hierba, 1982). In general terms, Azuela, Aguilar
Mora, and Campos adopt an approach that is close to a documentary of
lived experience. However, such an approach and aesthetic bear little simi-
larity to the method adopted by del Paso. His "Interlude" transcends the
mode of documentary writing, first, through its witty imitation of the
commedia dell'arte and, second, through its theatrical use of the visual
media of mime, pantomime, and cartoon, which paradoxically attain un-
expectedly high levels of verisimilitude in the representation of conflict
and repression, even as they render strange those same experiences:

   HARLEQUIN PRODUCES ANOTHER BANNER
     "Soldier, don't shoot: You too are of the People!"
   (Nevertheless, a sign pops out of the barrel of Pantalone's rifle say-
   ing, "Bang!" Harlequin takes out another banner.)
   HARLEQUIN'S BANNER
     "Ouch!"





                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 87

   (He falls down without making a sound. Columbine goes over to
   Harlequin, strokes his hair, and takes out yet another banner.)
   COLUMBINE'S BANNER
     "Farewell!"
   DOTTORE TAKES OUT A BANNER
   "Sit tibi terra levis . . . which is to say, may the earth rest lightly on
   you."
   (Capitano Maldito and Pantalone lay into Columbine, Pierrot, and
   Scaramouch with their rifles, their drums, their trumpets, and their
   fists. Banners of different shapes, sizes, and colors fly through the air,
   reading, "Wham!" "Smash!" "Bam!" "Crash!" "Take that!" and
   others: "Ooh!" "Ah!" "Ouch!" (6o5)

In this passage, techniques of defamiliarization and a language of quota-
tion and onomatopeia achieve a degree of graphic representation equal to
that of the most conscientious of documentaries.
   Other features of the expressive system of "Palinuro on the stairs, or the
art of comedy" include popular fantasias and allegory, which create effects
of satire and pathos. An example of a fantasia is the patchwork interlude,
in that part of the play entitled "The Second Floor," in which Capitano
Maldito, sleepwalking and wielding a cudgel, beats the stuffing out of a
Harlequin figure that is suspended from the ceiling "dressed up as a fat
pinata" (571-72). Here, traditions of puppetry, the commedia dell'arte,
and Mexican popular culture combine to convey a scenario of violence
that is made all the more menacing by a reference, carried over from a
preceding part of the chapter, to the Big Bad Wolf of the children's song
"Jugando al escondite."
   The most obvious allegories in the play are the figures of Death and the
madre-Patria. The first of these presides over the action of "Palinuro on
the stairs," where it appears in an almost infinite number of guises: as a
rag-and-bone woman, as the author, and satirically as "Death-His-Most-
Serene-Highness-Mr.-President," who is presented as possessing a mon-
strous ego ("Yo, el Senor Presidente"), soaking up the adulation of fawn-
ing subordinates, and giving the order to shoot Mexican students on "the
night of a certain Tuesday, 30 July" (581-8 3). In the context of Mexican
writing of the period, the cutting edge of del Paso's satire in this section is
matched most closely by Ren6 Aviles Fabila in El gran solitario del
palacio -a novel with which it shares both a sharpness of tone and a very
precise set of targets that include the personality and institutional figure of
President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, the complicity of groveling aides (depicted





88 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


most contemptuously in the opening lines of chapter 6 of El gran solitario
del palacio), and the worn-out rhetoric of the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional, exemplified in "the oratory of the President, sublime on all
counts," which in Aviles Fabila's version of events is dependent on elec-
tronic prompts, grotesque histrionics, and subliminal threats for its im-
pact on a shamefully passive audience (Aviles Fabila 48). Notwithstanding
the fact that it is constructed on a smaller scale than El gran solitario del
palacio, Fernando del Paso's satire of President Diaz Ordaz in "Palinuro
on the stairs, or the art of comedy" scores as many points per page as
Aviles Fabila in his novel, and it fully exploits the presentation of the
president as the personification of death and corruption.4
   Compared with the figure of Death, "The voice of the motherland, our
poor, unfortunate motherland!" (617) is a less original but no less elo-
quent allegorical cipher. Identified at the level of plot with one of Pali-
nuro's neighbors ("the woman who lives in number fifteen"), the voice
speaks for all those mothers who lost a son or daughter in the indiscrimi-
nate repression of the Mexican student movement of 1968. Through her
plaintive cry, "Oh, my children, oh, my children!" (617) she clearly evokes
the widely represented Mexican type of La Llorona-featured in a popu-
lar film of that title made in 1933, for example, and subsequently granted
a double mention in Noticias del imperio (175, 551). In the contemporary
sphere, the voice of the wailing woman chimes in with that of another
mother, mentioned in Que la carne es hierba by Marco Antonio Campos,
"who had gone onto a balcony to say that her son had been killed" (8o).
Acting as part of a chorus, it laments the wasted lives and crushed dreams
of Mexican youth whose collective idealism and sacrifice are personified
in characters like Palinuro and, from Que la carne es hierba, Fernando -
a victim, at nineteen, of the state's intolerance of a younger generation's
"rare and beautiful dream" (72). Also found in other Mexican writing of
the moment (most powerfully in Poniatowska 164), this elegiac mood is
particularly strong in Palinuro de Mdxico and Que la carne es hierba,
where it signals a common sensibility and shared perspective on suffering
that are grounded in humanism.
   Human sentiment and values inevitably provide the driving force be-
hind the political chapters of del Paso's novel, where they take the form of
an ethical imperative to bear witness to intolerance and repression and to
keep alive the memory of injustice: "It's simply a matter of not forgetting,"
Palinuro bluntly tells an interlocutor, agreeing with Pablo of Que la carne
es hierba that the tragedy of 1968 "must not be forgotten" (Campos oi).
This injunction is similar to the declaration made by Felipe, the writer in





                                                    Palinuro de Mexico | 89

El gran solitario del palacio: "It's a matter of denouncing and making a
protest: some of us choose not to remain silent in the face of repression"
( 118). Valid for the entire body of writing known as "Tlatelolco litera-
ture," Felipe's declaration serves especially well as a motto for del Paso's
satirical project in "Palinuro on the stairs, or the art of comedy." Beyond
the limits of that chapter, the mood of levity and satire couples with a
range of humanist concerns voiced elsewhere by Elena Poniatowska,
Marco Antonio Campos, and Rosario Castellanos, and produces a tonal
amalgam that ultimately distinguishes Palinuro de Mdxico from all other
major works of Mexican literature of the time.


The Nation and Beyond:Archetypes, Intertexts,
and the "Mexican ization" of Ulysses

   In general terms [and in contrast to the United States of
   America], the mind-set of this America of ours seems to find in
   European culture an attitude to all that is human which is more
   universal, more basic, and more akin to our own sensibility. [...]
   The American mind is called on to perform the noblest function
   of complementarity: that of establishing syntheses.
   Alfonso Reyes, "Notas sobre la inteligencia americana"

Taken en bloc, the main strands of the narrative of Palinuro de Mdxico
address themes and issues whose cultural referents belong to a variety of
spheres ranging from the local and the national (for example, the immedi-
ate political realities of 1968 in Mexico City) to the universal (for ex-
ample, matters to do with Oedipal anxiety, the body, and the double). The
generic variety of the writing (satirical, picaresque, parodic, etc.) further
emphasizes the many sides of del Paso's text, the surface texture of which
displays little apparent uniformity or unity. The multiple modes and agen-
das of Palinuro de Mdxico nevertheless achieve a perceptible resolution at
the level of narrative structure, where they fit into an orchestrated design
whose principal characteristics are repetition and symmetry, and a system-
atic exploitation of archetype and myth that grounds the text firmly in the
realm of the universal.
   The division of the text into two main parts translates its overt preoc-
cupation with doubleness into formal terms and allows for patterns of
repetition as shown in the incorporation of references to an autopsy or to
a narrative voyage in both halves of the novel, and the allocation, in each
part, of a complete chapter to Walter and a section of another to the
members of Palinuro's larger family; in most cases, the reprise that acti-





90 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


vates a repetition allows for an expanded treatment of a character or
theme already mentioned in the first part of the novel. While the design of
Palinuro de Mdxico is admittedly not as symmetrical as that of Jose Trigo,
it exhibits a similar degree of deliberate contrivance and consistency with
the principal thematic concerns explored in the book.
   The attention given in the opening pages of part z of Palinuro de
Mdxico to the themes of death and rebirth offers a reflection in miniature
of a wider structure of archetypal themes and motifs that holds the entire
narrative of Palinuro de Mdxico together. In its recounting of Palinuro's
life and death, the narrative reproduces a standard pattern of human ex-
perience comprising initiation and loss of innocence, degradation and iso-
lation, death and apotheosis, rebirth and resurrection. In summary out-
line, Palinuro-lover, medical student, and political agitator-is initiated
into the major biological and sexual mysteries of life; he becomes es-
tranged from his closest friends and dies heroically in a confrontation with
security forces in the Z6calo of Mexico City in October 1968. The chapter
entitled "Palinuro on the stairs, or the art of comedy" relates with consid-
erable pathos the agony and death of Palinuro and concludes by celebrat-
ing his apotheosis "in the burning dawn of the world" (62z). That poi-
gnant episode, reminiscent of Jose Clemente Orozco's painting The Man
of Fire, would seem to complete the narration of the trajectory of Pali-
nuro's experience, the historia of his life having come literally to a dead
end. However, there remains the final chapter, where Palinuro's grandfa-
ther, Francisco, exhorts him in the closing pages: "Come and see how my
Homeric breast is full of love for you. [. . .] Come and see yourself being
born" (646). Through this apostrophe at the end of the relato, the narra-
tive of Palinuro de Mdxico anticipates Palinuro's acceding to a second
birth and thereby promises him a resurrection that had been denied his
literary antecedent and namesake, Palinurus, in books 5 and 6 of Virgil's
Aeneid.
   At the same time as it rounds off Palinuro's archetypal trajectory,
abuelo Francisco's Homeric exhortation evokes a general matrix of classi-
cal European literature and mythology that provides a source for numer-
ous details of narrative incident and motif in del Paso's novel. The chapter
that relates "Palinuro's Travels around the Advertising Agencies and
Other Imaginary Islands" carries echoes of the heroic peripluses of Virgil's
Aeneas and Homer's Ulysses, complete with references to "trials, tests,
interrogations and examinations that awaited [Palinuro] in life" (zo).
The topos of the descent to the underworld is featured in that section of





                                                 Palinuro de Mexico | 9'

chapter II which recounts Palinuro's voyage to THE ISLAND OF SPON-
SORED ADVERTISEMENTS. There, in a biting satire of consumerism, Fer-
nando del Paso describes how Palinuro descends to "the hell of torments
suffered by all those who in life had appeared in commercial advertise-
ments declaring I Use Such-and-Such a Product, I Prefer This Other One,
I Consume Another.... And he saw there ... how all those who had ever
recommended a type of food or drink were force-fed through a funnel
with those very same products until they burst" (213-14). The same motif
of the voyage of discovery underlies Palinuro's tour of a hospital in chap-
ter 18, where he witnesses monstrous suffering, and it is also the subtext
of a visit to some underground burial chambers in chapter 23. In the
second of these "adventures," Palinuro is chosen as "the hero whose as-
signment it was to crawl at midnight through the tunnel ... that linked an
empty tomb with a section of the old communal grave of the Panteon de
Dolores" (544-45). The final paragraph of the chapter establishes a par-
allel between Palinuro's underground adventure and the journey of Quet-
zalc6atl "through Mictlin, the land of the dead" (548), as well as evoking
the Virgilian source for this topos, in the Aeneid.
   Other episodes in Palinuro de Mdxico correspond to the ancient rites of
Bacchus, Priapus, and Dionysus. In his role as Palinuro's double, Walter
recalls a visit to a cantina, telling his story with humorous hyperbole that
debases the mythical referent but does not weaken the analogy as such:
   Oh, Estefania, what a bender we went on that afternoon when I
   walked through the boiling springs of mythology in the warmth of
   a ritual of alcoholic consumption . . . Pepes's cantina was like a
   temple. (64)

In addition, chapter zo recounts an outrageous prank that Palinuro carries
out in the company of his fellow medical students, Molkas and Fabricio.
Baptized "La Priapiada," the operation involves the theft of some male
genitalia from a morgue and their indecent exposure to shocked female
customers at a department store; this juvenile episode is followed by a
contest at la Espanola cantina to discover which of the patrons boasts the
biggest penis, in a second lighthearted homage to Priapus.
   Two motifs in particular acquire their fullest significance in the light of
references to classical western literature and mythology. The first of these
is the motif of the unquiet grave and the treatment of "the souls of the
unburied" (1 6z) by the guardian of the morgue known to Palinuro and his
fellow medical students by the nickname "Charon." Already assimilated





92 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


into contemporary Latin American fiction through the medium of Gabriel
Garcia Mirquez in La hojarasca, the motif of the unquiet grave derives
most notably from Sophocles' trilogy about Antigone and her brother,
Polynices, whose corpse was condemned to remain outside the walls of
Thebes "unburied and denied the tribute of tears" (Garcia Mirquez quot-
ing from Antigone in the epigraph to La hojarasca 7). A second route of
transmission is from books 5 and 6 of the Aeneid, where the character
Palinurus is also denied a decent burial. Identified in part as a dreamer
who allowed himself to be beguiled by sleep at the helm of Aeneas's ship,
Palinurus is encoded no less precisely as an archetype of the anguish pro-
voked by a higher authority's refusal to grant a decent burial. This was
certainly the construction put on him by Cyril Connolly, who depicted
Virgil's Palinurus in The Unquiet Grave as "an archetype of frustration"
(3), in the process providing Fernando del Paso with a richly detailed
blueprint for the delineation of the character of Palinuro and the outline of
his experience in the narrative of Palinuro de Mdxico.5
   The other motif that reveals its most pointed significance within the
broader context of mythological reference in the novel is the comparison
of Palinuro and Walter to Castor and Pollux, the sons of Zeus. In Greek
mythology, Castor and Pollux achieved a unique kind of immortality
whereby each spent alternate days on Olympus and in Hades. In Palinuro
de Mdxico, besides illustrating the category of twins, Castor and Pollux
function, as they had in Josd Trigo, primarily as types of immortality and,
by implication, as symbols of resurrection who confirm the promise of
rebirth held out to Palinuro at the novel's close.
   The structural and thematic coherence of Palinuro de Mdxico, together
with its mythical and archetypal scaffolding, narrative exuberance, and
message of life sacrificed and then restored, endow del Paso's novel with a
composite profile redolent of other texts, both European and American, of
which the most canonic and relevant examples are James Joyce's Ulysses,
Cortizar's Rayuela, and, occupying a position of intermediary between
those two texts, Addn Buenosayres by Leopoldo Marechal. It is my con-
tention that Palinuro de Mdxico (11977) stands in a relation of direct de-
scent from Ulysses (1922), with which it shares numerous features of note;
the relation is also mediated via Marechal's novel (which was published in
1948) and via Rayuela (1963), both of which can be regarded as source
texts of Palinuro de Mdxico. A checklist of the major properties of Joyce's
master text indicates the extent of similarity between the members of this
family of texts, at the same time as it confirms Ulysses as the prototype of
the class:





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 93

   1. Ulysses narrates the secular Odyssey of twentieth- century urban
   man.
   z. It projects contemporary events against a backdrop of mythic and
   Shakespearean parallels.
   3. It cultivates a tone that is mock epic and parodic.
   4. While stressing the debasement of traditional standards of hero-
   ism, it seeks to redefine heroic values and behavior in the contempo-
   rary world.
   5. The narrative of Ulysses traces a search for psychological and/or
   spiritual wholeness, and it concludes with a message of affirmation.
   6. It incorporates elements of family romance.
   7. Among its repertoire of themes are sexual and bodily experience,
   issues of nationalism and colonialism, history, culture, and morality.
   8. Ulysses is a laboratory for experimentation with innovative tech-
   niques of narration and structure, and a showcase for the display of
   an almost infinite variety of styles and registers.
   9. Ulysses aspires to represent a total reality.

   This is a paradigm that holds, with local variations, for each of the
Spanish American novels under consideration. The example, and indeed
the influence, of Ulysses is perceptible, first, in Addn Buenosayres, which
matches the above typology on all nine counts. A battery of themes, nar-
rative situations, episodes, and specific narrative devices identify Mar-
echal's novel quite clearly with Joyce's, as has been noted in a number of
comparative studies (de Sola, Gordon, Fiddian). Differences between the
texts are also substantial, although they have often been overstated.
Marechal himself went to considerable lengths to distance his novel from
Ulysses, arguing that the only points of convergence between the two
books were at the levels of narrative technique and derivation from "the
same Homeric source" (Marechal, Las claves zo); more crucially, he in-
sisted that Addn Buenosayres possesses a spiritual dimension entirely ab-
sent from Joyce's novel. While no one would contest the centrality in Addn
Buenosayres of religious (specifically, Roman Catholic) and spiritual con-
cerns expressed in the course of Adin's nocturnal wanderings and in the
pages of his "Cuaderno de Tapas Azules," their denial in Ulysses betrays
both a blindness to the moral vision enshrined in Joyce's novel-which
promotes values of love, charity, and compassion ultimately indistinguish-
able from "the sweet laws of compassion" subsequently invoked by Adin
(853)-and a willful misprision of a precursor text that is symptomatic of
psychological and cultural tensions present in some areas of Latin Amen-





94 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


can literature after Joyce. Given the perceptible differences in tone and
structure between Addn Buenosayres and Ulysses (differences accentuated
all the more by Marechal's free acknowledgment of the importance of
Dante and Quevedo to his literary project), it would surely have been
sufficient for Marechal forthrightly to state that his borrowings from
Ulysses had been limited to an amount of narrative raw material which he
then assimilated to a vision and sensibility that were all his own. Yet
Marechal felt the need to deny the contribution of James Joyce to the
making of Addn Buenosayres and in so doing provided a copybook ex-
ample of the anxiety of influence analyzed by Harold Bloom in a pivotal
study of intertextual relations (Bloom 1973).
   A possible reason behind Marechal's disavowal of the incontestable
may have been his discomfort with Joyce's rebellious political attitudes
and heterodox religious views, which would have been difficult to recon-
cile with his own ex-Peronist's reactionary instincts. Another reason is the
perception of Joyce as a synecdoche and symbol of a European aesthetic
that was felt in some quarters of Latin America around the midpoint of the
twentieth century to be extrinsic and even alien to Latin American culture.
Marechal wrote his defense of Addn Buenosayres in the mid-196os, when
the influence of James Joyce on Spanish American literature was both
active (as demonstrated in the work of Salvador Elizondo and Carlos
Fuentes) and a matter of often heated debate. The essay "Las claves de
addn buenosayres," in which Marechal argued the independence of his
novel vis-a-vis Ulysses, was the centerpiece of a publication that also con-
tained contributions by Julio Cortizar and Graciela de Sola and, signifi-
cantly, an essay by Adolfo Prieto that took issue with an interpretation of
Addn Buenosayres published by No6 Jitrik in 1955. Recapitulating the
main points of Jitrik's argument, Prieto wrote:
   Jitrik assumes that the lesson of modernity implicit in the adoption
   of Joyce as a starting point is compromised in Addn Buenosayres as
   a result of Marechal's prejudices and personal weakness. According
   to this view, the author's prejudices were threefold: Catholicism,
   nationalism, and the highly subjective delineation of the characters
   and "key" episodes [in the narrative of Addn Buenosayres]. (33)

Prieto went on to defend Marechal against such attacks, claiming that he
had no need whatsoever to learn the "lesson of modernity" that was im-
plicit in Joyce's work and pointing to names within the Spanish literary
tradition-Quevedo, Gracian-that could just as readily be regarded as
influences and precursors of Marechal. Prieto's position raises all sorts of




                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 9 5

issues to do with cultural exchange. My point in reproducing his views
here is to document the connection, made in cultural debate at the time,
between Joyce and a definition of modernity felt to be impertinent to Latin
American culture and, in the opinion of hardline skeptics such as Manuel
Pedro Gonzilez, likely to be a hindrance to its progress.
   What is pointedly missing in Prieto's essay, and in Marechal's own de-
fense of his novel, is a full-scale celebration of the achievement represented
by Addn Buenosayres. While the novel demonstrates a spirited appropria-
tion of Homeric and biblical materials and their assimilation to an Argen-
tinian narrative project unified by Catholic beliefs and enlivened by the
spirits of comedy and satire, the role of Ulysses as mediator and example
seems to have inhibited a more wholesome acknowledgment of Mare-
chal's creative achievement. Certainly, the impression derived from a read-
ing of his and Prieto's essays is of two authors who are on the back foot
and unable, for whatever reason, to argue the dialectics of cultural appro-
priation with greater confidence and equanimity. Yet implicit in their
stance and in Marechal's novel itself is a statement of differentiation from
a donor culture that had provided material for adaptation in a non-Euro-
pean context. Through its negotiation of the influence of Ulysses and its
domestication of Greek and Christian myths, Addn Buenosayres points to
ways that an American text might absorb European source material and
refashion it in line with the demands of a local sensibility. Notwithstand-
ing the defensive position adopted by one of Marechal's principal apolo-
gists and by Marechal himself in a satellite text, his novel anticipates more
confident practices of absorption and transformation that will be found
in the work of later authors such as Fernando del Paso in Palinuro de
Mexico.
   In point of fact, Addn Buenosayres bequeaths a considerable legacy to
del Paso, both through the medium of the Joycean paradigm and through
the more direct channel of del Paso's firsthand acquaintance with Mare-
chal's work. The nine categories listed previously form the bulk of that
legacy, the only substantial point of divergence being the comparative
weakness of the message of affirmation articulated in Addn Buenosayres,
in relation to category five. At the level of detail, references in Addn Bue-
nosayres to police torture (5z6), Castor and Pollux (197-98), and the
dissection room (28 8); a satire of consumerism and sundry human vices in
the "infernal descent" of chapter 7; and themes of memory and the grave
(58z) and the regenerative cycles of nature (632), constitute a fictional
world that is the province of both Addn Buenosayres and Palinuro de
Mdxico. Two further details cement the relation between the two novels:





96 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


the name and associations of Adin's beloved uncle, Francisco-clearly a
prototype of Palinuro's grandfather of the same name-and Marechal's
own invocation of the myth of Palinurus in the narrative reference to "that
ocean over the sound of which you may have discerned the ancient voices
of Jason or Ulysses, and on the bed of which, strewn with corals and
sponges, there lies to this day the skull of Palinurus-he who fell asleep
one night beneath the stars" (575).
   Moving on to Rayuela, we encounter a text affiliated with several cul-
tural and aesthetic traditions and one that has assimilated the lessons of
Ulysses into a densely woven fabric from which it is not always easy to
tease out individual threads. No less problematically, Rayuela is a su-
premely ironic text that resists univocal interpretation and constantly dis-
mantles its own structures of meaning, seeking to generate a provisional
sense that is fluid, open, and figural. Confronted with this model of elu-
siveness, existing comparisons of Rayuela and Ulysses have been under-
standably cautious and circumspect in acknowledging fundamental differ-
ences in the conception and circumstances of production of two works
separated by several decades of change. Nevertheless, Lida Aronne Ames-
toy's view of Ulysses and Rayuela as books that "epitomize two successive
stages in the Odyssey of the twentieth century" (31) still holds, bolstered
by the explicit mention of Ulysses in a passage where Morelli, the author's
alter ego, traces the roots of the comic novel back to Ulysses (Rayuela
454).
   Of the nine properties of the Joycean novel identified in our typology,
the sixth is lacking in Rayuela while the rest of points 1-7 are integrated
firmly into its structure. Horacio Oliveira's grappling with the inauthen-
ticity and spiritual emptiness of his life, first in Paris, then in Buenos Aires,
is presented as the periplus of a "Hodious Hodysseus" (Hodioso Hodiseo)
(450) who also refers to himself mockingly as a "Prodigal Son" (449).
Returning to a girlfriend in Buenos Aires who is an ironic counterpart of
Penelope in the myth of Ulysses, Horacio-Odysseus subsequently assumes
the role of Orpheus (238 and 372) when he goes down into the morgue of
a madhouse with Talita, his best friend's partner. Constantly subverted by
irony and ridicule, the mythical pattern that subtends Horacio's experi-
ence eventually culminates in Oliveira's quite genuine reconciliation with
Traveler and Talita at the end of chapter 56. Visualized as the crossing of
"a bridge from one man to another" (3113), the reconciliation exemplifies
the abandonment of worn-out modes of behavior and the embracing of a
new humanist ethic based on a revised definition of love, solidarity, and





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico | 97

the very Joycean virtue of caritas, embodied most wholesomely in Rayuela
by la maga whom Oliveira thinks of as "a good Samaritan" (238).6
   The spiritual search that configures the narrative of Rayuela is bound
up with a commitment to collective renewal mirrored in Oliveira's belief
that "the problem of reality has to be viewed in collective terms, not
merely as the salvation of a chosen few" (507). This, in turn, is inseparable
from a sense, also strong in Joyce, of the interrelatedness of human affairs,
manifested in patterns of symmetry, repetition, and coincidence that ap-
proximate to the status of figures and are invested with the power of
transcendence. Elaborated most fully in Morelli's notebooks, the concept
of the figura links Rayuela with a number of authors and texts, ranging
from Ulysses to Borges and Fernando del Paso in Palinuro de Mdxico.
   As well as matching the Ulyssean blueprint on all but one of points 1-
7, Rayuela follows the example of Joyce's systematic experimentation
with nonrealist techniques of narration and narrative structure; Cortizar's
practice in this regard is consistent with his assessment of "the symphonic
enterprise of Ulysses, a sort of technical showcase [from which] there
derive, either by direct influence or by coincidence, the most significant
branches [of nonrealist fiction in the twentieth century]" ("Situacion de la
novela" 23 3). Cortizar's fascination with problems of language, his paro-
dying of a range of styles and registers, and his generally playful treatment
of language are also part of the Joycean heritage, further enriched, in
Rayuela, by techniques borrowed from surrealist writing and poetics.
   Finally, the aspiration of Rayuela to represent a totality through an
"accumulation of fragments capable of suddenly crystallizing in a total
reality [.. .] which an alert eye would be able to look at through a micro-
scope, there to perceive a large-scale polychrome rose, and to read it like
a figure, an imago mundi which existed outside the microscope in the form
of a living room decorated a la Provencale, or as a gathering of aunts
having tea with Bagley biscuits" (533) identifies Cortizar with a family of
modern authors, exemplified by Joyce and Borges and including Spanish
American writers of the 1960s and 1970s such as Carlos Fuentes, Mario
Vargas Llosa, and Fernando del Paso, who were all promoters and practi-
tioners of the "total novel." Though differing in their understanding of
this multifaceted concept, the last three authors mentioned share a com-
mon debt to James Joyce and a view acknowledging his immense contribu-
tion to the phenomenon of the "total novel."7
   The connections thus documented between Ulysses and Rayuela help
to explain the continuing impact of Joyce on a younger generation of





98 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Spanish American authors including Fernando del Paso and his compatri-
ots Gustavo Sainz (in a novel like Obsesivos dias circulares, 1969) and
Jorge Aguilar Mora (in Si muero lejos de ti, 1979). Through Rayuela,
Palinuro de Mdxico receives a mediated version of the Joycean paradigm,
as well as a specific set of preoccupations and narrative materials that are
absorbed directly into the body of del Paso's novel. The most essential
elements of the Joycean paradigm that are relayed via Rayuela are the
mythical structure of the periplus, the quest for renewal represented as a
resurrection, reflections on death involving references to the mythological
figure of Charon (Rayuela 493, 503), and the impulse toward the repre-
sentation of a total reality. More directly, Palinuro de Mdxico echoes Ray-
uela's questioning of the major tenets of western religious and philosophi-
cal orthodoxy and repeats many of its linguistic subversions in a spirit
akin to Cortizar's repudiation of the Diccionario de la Real Academia
Espanola as "undeniably a necropolis" (Rayuela 279).
   A crucial connection between the two books derives from the inclusion,
in both Rayuela and Palinuro de Mdxico, of a narrative sequence set in a
hospital or mental asylum that stands as an allegory of the state and/or the
human condition. In Rayuela, Horacio goes to work in a mental institu-
tion in Buenos Aires where distinctions between madness and sanity, and
between the world of the asylum and the exterior world of sociopolitical
contingency, operate only imperfectly. In an equivalent chapter of
Palinuro de Mdxico, Doctor Palinuro is shown around the wards of a
"residence for the sick" by a man who identifies himself at the outset as the
"deputy medical director of the hospital" (379) and then confesses at the
end of the tour, "I too am a patient. . . . The illness from which I suffer is
an illness of the mind, doctor" (427). At the chapter's close, Doctor
Palinuro's guide confirms that the hospital is "a symbolic and conse-
quently wretched copy of life" (426), with no dividing line between the
wards and the world at large. Conceived in part as a Swiftian satire, the
chapter also taps the spirit of Rayuela, including the irony of the mention,
in fragment 53 of Cortizar's novel, of political instability and undercur-
rents of violence in Argentinian society in the late 1950s. Just as del Paso,
in the pertinent chapters of Palinuro de Mdxico, implicitly denounces the
moral and political sickness affecting Mexican society around 1968, so
Cortizar, in the relevant fragments of his novel, views the involvement of
the military in Argentinian public life a decade or so earlier as nothing
short of political madness.
   The complicated set of intertextual parallels and affinities detailed here
should suffice to demonstrate the links between Palinuro de Mdxico and a




                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 99

narrative tradition deriving ultimately from James Joyce's Ulysses. Mak-
ing all reasonable allowances for other influences including those of sur-
realism (transmitted through the works of Miguel Angel Asturias and
Octavio Paz, as well as via Cortizar), Sterne, Swift, Lewis Carroll, and
Borges, the relation with Joyce emerges as the dominant genealogical fea-
ture of Palinuro de Mdxico. In del Paso's novel, the Joycean paradigm gives
birth to a strongly affirmative text that combines the experimentalism of
earlier Mexican "Ulysseses" such as Al fibo del agua (1947) and La regi6n
mds transparente (1958), with the moral outlook of Joyce's novel, and acts
as a springboard for the assimilation of Palinuro de Mdxico to an undiffer-
entiated community of world literature. For that is the ultimate goal and
frame of reference of the novel, as becomes clear in the expansive closing
pages where Palinuro's grandfather calls on him to summon innumerable
authors and characters of world literature to witness the glorious event of
Palinuro's second birth:

   Inform Flash Gordon.
   Tell Domingo Gonsales to come back from the moon.
   And Multipliandre to come back from the future.
   Inform the time traveler of H. G. Wells.
   Tell Saint-Menoux and Hector Servadac.
   Ask Remedios la Bella to descend wrapped in a moon beam.
   Tell Lieutenant Gulliver Jones to come back from Mars on his
   flying carpet.
   Tell Cyrano de Bergerac to bring you a jar in which to store
   Mamma's tears.
   And inform the spirit of Faust as it traverses dimensions of space
   (647).

The infinite spatial and temporal perspective envisioned by Grandfather
Francisco is a fitting climax to a chapter that pretends to encompass "All
the roses, all the animals, all the town squares, all the planets, all the
characters on earth" (622), and bespeaks a total assuredness about the
right of Palinuro de Mdxico to membership in a universal culture.8
   It is instructive to compare abuelo Francisco's untroubled assumption
about the relationship between the local and the universal with the atti-
tude of the eponymous narrator of Addn Buenosayres on the subject of the
imitation of foreign models in Argentine literature. The subject features in
the account of Adin's descent to the multitiered hell of Cacodelphia, spe-
cifically in that section where Adin stumbles across his literary friend,





100 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Pereda, emprisoned in a "false Parnassus" (890), and defends him against
a female tormentor, whom he addresses in the following terms:
   Has it not been claimed that an onerous spirit of imitation of foreign
   models has been weighing down on our national literature? Don't
   deny it: that claim has been made! And when a man such as Pereda
   takes it upon himself to defend the right of criollo culture to accede
   to the universal realm of art, he is subjected to levels of ridicule and
   abuse that are tantamount to suffering the discomforts of hell. Well,
   Madame, I take my hat off to our champion. (892)

Essentially, Adin defends Pereda as the champion of local culture (lo cri-
ollo) who has refused the influence of foreign models and deserves praise
for that; Adin also claims that the local has every right to ascend to the
level of universal art, and he laments that Pereda should be consigned to
hell for his attempts to scale the heights of universal culture. For the pur-
poses of this analysis, what is most interesting about Adin's attitude is (i)
its defensive character and foundation in a protectionist mentality, and (ii)
its assumption of a hierarchical and quite artificial opposition between the
local and the universal. Within a couple of decades, these assumptions
would be challenged in Spanish American culture by writers such as
Garcia Mirquez, who in 1950 openly advocated the incorporation of
external, modernizing influences into Spanish American fiction (" Prob-
lemas de la novela?" 269), and Octavio Paz, who in the same year fa-
mously declared that Latin Americans were "for the first time in [their]
history, the contemporaries of all men" (Paz, El laberinto 340). What is
more, under closer scrutiny the prejudices of Adin/Marechal are seen to
be nothing other than the symptoms of a negative ideology. When he
comes to write Palinuro de Mdxico in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Fernando del Paso will show that he has clearly transcended Marechal's
anxieties concerning influence by foreign models; he will also show that,
as far as he is concerned, the local/universal opposition is an outmoded
construct that has no useful role to play in debates about culture in Latin
America.
   The carnivalesque litany of names and titles reeled off at the close of
Palinuro de Mdxico is one instance of del Paso's dismantling of the local/
universal opposition. At a more pervasive level, that dismantling is illus-
trated in the appropriation of the myth of Palinurus for political and
ideological purposes that prioritize national imperatives and concerns.
Palinuro de Mdxico takes a minor figure from Virgil who is an icon of
distraction and frustration, and expands his semantic range by transform-





                                                   Palinuro de Mexico |101

ing him into a symbol of political victimization in contemporary Mexico.
Palinuro's additional status as, firstly, a type of lost innocence and by the
end of the novel, of the promise of rebirth further enhances his profile and
permits him to exercise a stronger appeal than Virgil's Palinurus. Del
Paso's Palinuro also outstrips the range of significance and archetypal
resonances of Adin in Addn Buenosayres where the protagonist of
Marechal's novel - charged with representing, by synecdoche, important
spiritual, psychological, and artistic currents in 1930s Argentina-is in-
vested with considerably less local specificity than Palinuro of Mexico,
with the result that he radiates little of the transcendent power of del
Paso's protagonist. Measured against Marechal's novel, Palinuro de
Mdxico shows signs of a greater assertiveness and maturity of attitude
symptomatic, in part, of the political and cultural environment of Latin
America from the 1960s on. On a more personal level, and in psychoana-
lytical terms, del Paso's free acknowledgment of a multiplicity of "literary
father-figures" (Carvajal iii) sets him off as an Oedipus without a complex
who is equally at home with authors of European origins-Virgil,
Rabelais, Joyce-as with the representatives of a particular American tra-
dition-Borges, Paz, Cortizar. Inscribing himself in a community of au-
thorial relations that is supranational and all-inclusive, he personifies free-
dom from the anxieties of influence and their associated structures of
paternalism and dependency.9

Modernism/Postmodernism: Between Paradigms and Politics

   From dependent and imitative, always behind the latest interna-
   tional slogan of the new, Latin America now becomes the precur-
   sor of the postmodernist simulacrum in the simulations and dis-
   simulations already contained in the colonial signature that
   feigned obedience to the European code, while diverting its icons
   toward alternative messages.
   Nelly Richards, "Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist Decentering"

On the subject of its relation to the cultural movements of modernism and
postmodernism, Palinuro de Mdxico shares the dual affiliation of Ulysses,
Rayuela, and other precursor texts that straddle those two movements.
Until the mid-198os, it was customary to view Ulysses as an archetypal
product of high modernism (Bradbury and McFarlane; Levitt; and Mc-
Hale); since then, refinements in the conceptual models used to charac-
terize postmodernism have produced a more nuanced picture of Joyce's
novel and its position in literary history. In a lucid analysis, Brian McHale





102 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


argues the presence of both modernist and postmodernist elements in
Ulysses. Elaborating on existing critical opinion, McHale formulates the
view of Joyce's novel as "double, two differentiable texts placed side by
side," in which a modernist "norm" established in the first half of Ulysses
is then exceeded and parodied in the second; these strategies of excess and
parody constitute the principal postmodernist element of Joyce's novel,
further exemplified in the succession of "disparate discourse worlds" that
make up the narrative of the second half of Ulysses (McHale 42-58).
   The critical consensus about Rayuela has undergone a similar evolu-
tion, with the orthodoxy of a neohumanist approach exemplified by Gra-
ciela de Sola and Lida Aronne Amestoy giving way to the deconstruc-
tionist and postmodernist assessments of critics such as Julio Ortega,
Jaime Alazraki, Dominic Moran, and Neil Larsen. Writing in 1988, Or-
tega represented Cortizar as an author who had moved beyond the epis-
temological and ethical paradigms of both modernism and surrealism
to recuperate the iconoclastic potential of an earlier avant-garde whose
most radical possibilities had been suppressed and excluded from the
modernizing projects of both movements. Referring to Rayuela, Ortega
observed, "This novel is not just concerned with reforging a critical com-
munity with the reader" -as modernist writing had sought to do- "but
also with the necessity of transcending the modernist autonomies of the
work of art and the corresponding role of the artist as officiating priest,
solitary demiurge of his work but likewise guardian of public speech"
(198-99). In more precise detail, the use of collage and the transgression
of boundaries between disciplines or discourses (for example, literary/
journalistic) figure among a repertoire of features of the text of Rayuela
that match Ortega's model of postmodernism -a model put together with
elements taken from a range of sources including Hutcheon and, most
pertinently, Hal Foster.
   Subsequently, Jaime Alazraki investigated the subject of "La post-
modernidad de Julio Cortizar." Discriminating among the critical posi-
tions of Douwe W. Fokkema, Hans Bertens, and Linda Hutcheon, Alaz-
raki aligned himself with Hutcheon (who had already claimed the
Argentine author for postmodernism in two influential books of 1988 and
1989), and reaffirmed Cortizar's postmodernity on the grounds of (i) his
cultivation of textual self-reflexiveness "as a means of sharpening and
problematizing the perception of history," (ii) the transgression, in Cor-
tizar's work, of "generic boundaries" (essentially, the blurring of the con-
ventional division between the critical and the creative), and (iii) the pres-
ence, in some of Cortizar's writings, of a "process of assimilation and





                                                  Palinuro de Mexico | 103

transformation of popular forms [implying] a critique of the art of the
academy" (Alazraki 361, 363).
   More recently, Dominic Moran and Neil Larsen have expressed dis-
senting views on the usefulness of relating Cortizar's work to postmod-
ernism. In a brilliant doctoral thesis completed in 1997, Moran applied
Heideggerian and Derridean modes of analysis to a vast corpus of Cor-
tizar's fictional production and emphasized the indeterminacy of texts
such as Rayuela along with their problematic relation to western meta-
physics. Around the same time, Neil Larsen reconsidered Rayuela from
the point of view of a reader possessing a "spontaneous and intuitive sense
of the postmodern" and concluded by dismissing the novel as nothing less
than a "relic" (58-59). Notwithstanding the rational skepticism of the
first commentator and the provocative iconoclasm of the second, I believe
that the attribution of Cortizar's work to the category of postmodernism
is a valuable refinement to our understanding of the place accorded to
novels such as Rayuela and Libro de Manuel in literary history. Yet it is
important to stress that such an identification in no way renders obsolete
or untenable the attribution of a text like Rayuela to modernism: features
including the visionary dimension of that novel, its impulse toward total-
ization, and its incorporation of a residual humanist ethic anchor Rayuela
incontestably in the modernist domain and provide a clear illustration of
the ambivalence of Cortizar's novel, which combines aspects of a modern-
ist outlook and design with a postmodernist poetics.
   A similar diagnosis applies to Palinuro de Mdxico. Like Ulysses and
Rayuela before it, Palinuro de Mdxico is assimilable to modernism on the
basis of its unreconstructed humanist message, its universalist aspirations,
and the totalizing sweep of its narrative arrangement, which is typical of
"the resolving urge of modernism" (Hutcheon, Politics 99). On the other
hand, del Paso's novel displays postmodernist traits of stylistic and modal
plurality, narrative indeterminacy, and a multifarious intertextuality that
avails itself of "established reputations" (prestigios ajenos) in order to
render "a homage to literature through the medium of literature itself"
(Trejo Fuentes 7). The refusal of Palinuro de Mdxico to resolve its consti-
tutive dualities marks it out as a work of transition in the evolution of
Spanish American fiction from a modernist paradigm, which flourishes in
the 1960s and persists well into the mid-1970s (Terra nostra appears in
1975), to a more fully developed strain of postmodernist writing that
subsequently comes to predominate in the 1980s and 1990s.
   A final consideration regarding Palinuro de Mdxico stems from the
connection between the category of the postmodern and that of the





104 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


postcolonial. While certainly not synonymous, the postmodern and the
postcolonial are homologous, laying claim to common areas of interest as
indicated by Elleke Boehmer: "In short, postcolonial and postmodern
critical approaches cross in their concern with marginality, ambiguity, dis-
integrating binaries, and all things parodied, piebald, dual, mimicked,
borrowed, and second-hand" (244). The decentering processes that are
fundamental to postmodernism also characterize postcolonial discourse,
which critiques the authority of a center traditionally invested with power
in order to promote the interests of "marginal" cultures and their tradi-
tions (see Richards). In Palinuro de Mdxico, the exploitation of the classi-
cal myth of Palinurus and its incorporation into a local narrative of politi-
cal protest situate the text squarely within the category of the postcolonial.
While not representing any radical subversion of the western canon, the
adaptation of the myth of Palinurus in del Paso's novel involves the recu-
peration of a relatively minor figure from classical Roman literature and
the full realization of its potential in a contemporary Mexican setting. As
already noted, the considerable complexity and the monumental scale of
the elaboration of this raw material in Palinuro de Mdxico are indicative of
an attitude of untroubled confidence regarding the European tradition, an
attitude which del Paso could discern in the work of any number of con-
temporary Spanish American writers from Octavio Paz, Augusto Roa
Bastos, and Julio Cortizar to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Mirquez,
and younger writers of subsequent generations. Striking up a confident
postcolonial attitude in Palinuro de Mdxico, del Paso will develop its
decentering perspectives, along with those of postmodernism, to an un-
precedented degree in his next novel, Noticias del Imperio (1987).










4


Noticias delImperio and the New Historical Novel

   The past is not over and done with; the past must be reinvented
   at every turn to prevent it from becoming fossilized in our hands.
   Carlos Fuentes, Valiente mundo nuevo


   Was I such an extraordinary human being that nobody was able
   to understand or forgive me? Where is my beauty, my youth? Are
   not sixty years spent in darkness, in death, wearing this night-
   marish crown, sufficient for me to be granted a pardon?
   Empress Carlota, in Rodolfo Usigli's Corona de sombra




Noticias del Imperio is a landmark text in del Paso's literary production.
Written over a decade during which the Mexican press followed its
progress continuously, the novel received immediate critical acclaim on
publication in 1987, accompanied by an unprecedented level of commer-
cial success.1 In terms of its constituent literary features, Noticias del Im-
perio displays numerous continuities with del Paso's two earlier novels:
formally, it is as ambitious and elaborate as either Jose Trigo or Palinuro de
Mdxico; the multiple styles and voices that sound throughout Noticias
carry strong echoes of the discursive variety of Josd Trigo, which had com-
prised a Bakhtinian plurality of modes and registers, including parody and
pastiche; like the preceding texts, Noticias gives prominence to certain
archetypal motifs; a profuse and highly conspicuous intertextuality is an-
other mark of continuity, featuring a particularly intense dialogue with
James Joyce and surrealism; a poetics of resuscitation, or recovery through
the word, identifies Noticias as a narrative in the mold of both Jose Trigo
and Palinuro de Mdxico; no less significantly, the presence of a totalizing
consciousness refers back to preceding novels by the author, as does the
articulation of an attitude of moral concern vis-a-vis the subject of Noti-
cias. Yet, for all these points of contact with the earlier novels, Noticias
diverges radically from both Jose Trigo and Palinuro de Mdxico. It aligns





io6 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


itself with certain principles of deconstruction and a postcolonial view of
relations between the nations of Europe and their former colonies, and it
incorporates a postmodern aesthetic and epistemology that together inter-
rogate categories such as those of History and the Subject-categories
essential to the ideology of humanism which had underpinned the narra-
tives of Josd Trigo and Palinuro de Mdxico. In its attitudes, specifically, to
history and to the representation of historical events in works of fiction,
Noticias displays many of the characteristics of the mode of writing com-
monly labeled "postmodern historiographic metafiction." In these re-
spects, and in its thoroughgoing critique of discourses of power and hier-
archy, Noticias emerges as a classic text of the 1980s which contests the
cultural paradigms that had long held sway throughout Mexico, Latin
America, and the West generally.
   Given the dramatic swerve away from many of the assumptions on
which the two previous novels by del Paso had rested, this chapter will
concentrate on those aspects of Noticias del Imperio which constitute the
most significant shifts of emphasis and innovation in the aesthetic and
ideological construction of the text. A brief survey of the narrative content
of Noticias prepares the ground, in section ii, for a detailed examination of
the many-sided critique of imperialism that is conducted in the text. In
section iii, attention shifts from the theme of history to the theory and
practice of historiography that underpins Noticias; issues treated include
the inscription of the referent, the function of archetypes, the challenge to
totalizing models of consciousness, and the place of morality in the narra-
tive representation of history. In a final section, I compare Noticias with
other Mexican and Latin American novels on historical subjects, identify-
ing features that are common to a number of works and, through a differ-
ential lens, highlighting aspects of Noticias that may be considered distinc-
tive; an approach through intertextuality helps to define the place that del
Paso's third novel occupies in a number of literary contexts ranging from
contemporary continental writing to the author's fictional production as a
whole.

Noticias del Imperio and the Narrative of Empire

   If there is a history bathed in blood, outrages and injustices,
   that is the history of Europe.
   Gabriel Garcia Mirquez, El general en su laberinto
The subject of Noticias del Imperio is the short-lived empire of Archduke
Maximilian of Austria and Princess Charlotte of Belgium, who between





Noticias del Imperio  107


1864 and 1867 reigned as emperor and empress of Mexico. From a per-
spective beginning in the 183os and concluding in 1927, the narrative also
traces the evolution of the entire political order of Europe both at home
and overseas in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In terms of formal
organization, the text of Noticias comprises twelve monologues of Prin-
cess Carlota that make up the odd-numbered chapters, alternating with
eleven chapters, each of which is subdivided into three sections containing
material presented by a coordinating narrator; that material provides ob-
servations on historical events viewed from a number of perspectives; the
coordinating narrator stands outside the realm of the mimesis occupied by
the characters of the novel and makes various kinds of diegetic utterances
which, as well as passing judgment on individuals and events, also fore-
ground the discursive conventions of narration and historiography.
   The binary pattern that governs the organization of the novel's twenty-
three chapters throws certain contrasts into relief. Of these, the dominant
opposition is between the Americas and Europe, with France and Mexico
offering a particularly pointed contrastive pairing; divergent perspectives
on political issues are conveyed sharply through the novel's binary struc-
ture. The ternary pattern that is common to all of the even-numbered
chapters also brings out certain contrasts of theme and ideology, and it is
mirrored at the macro level in the attention that the narrative devotes to
three principal players in the story of Mexico's brief empire. Thus, the
monologues of Carlota present the reader with a reconstruction of events
from a perspective of all-embracing madness, whose temporal point of
reference is the year 1927, when Carlota finally died after enduring sixty
years of mental estrangement and physical reclusion in the castle of Bou-
chout in Belgium. The circumstances under which Maximilian of Austria
accepted the Mexican throne, his installation, early policy initiatives, the
decline in his political fortunes, and his death by firing squad on El Cerro
de las Campanas, Queretaro, on 19 June 1 867 are related in the even-
numbered chapters, through a variety of narrative forms (ranging from
monologue and dialogue to the imitation of court tittle-tattle) and several
narrators (e.g., a typesetter, a street vendor, and an anonymous soldier).
These chapters, which are in the hands of the coordinating narrator, fol-
low a chronological progression that is consistent with narrative modes of
history.
   The life and political career of a third protagonist, Benito Judrez, is also
dealt with in the even-numbered chapters, through the medium of dia-
logue and in the author-narrator's discourse, which culminates in an imag-
inative re-creation of the scene of Juirez's agony and death on 18 July





io8 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


1872. The place of this event in the narrative scheme of Noticias under-
scores the equality of status conferred on the three main protagonists in
Fernando del Paso's fictional history of Mexican affairs between 1861 and
1872: occupying the opening ten pages of the final even-numbered chap-
ter, the narration of Juirez's death is placed alongside a slightly longer
section-entitled "El dltimo de los mexicanos" -which is devoted to Car-
lota, and then matched by a ten-page section in honor of Maximilian that
seeks to perform an act of reparation via an ingeniously conceived "Cer-
emonial para el fusilamiento de un Emperador" (etiquette for the shooting
of an emperor). The climactic gathering together of the three characters at
this point indicates the importance of their interrelationships within the
narrative design and overall structure of meaning elaborated in Noticias.
   The triple focus on Carlota, Maximilian, and Benito Juirez lends par-
ticular acumen and depth to the novel's explorations of four themes: the
experience of empire, the concept of history, the critique of ideologies
connected with the foregoing, and ethical issues left unresolved in the
Mexican conscience after the deaths of Maximilian and Carlota. The first
of these areas seems almost too obvious to require comment. Yet the pre-
ponderance in the critical bibliography devoted to Noticias of studies
whose main interest is in metafictional and poetic dimensions of the text
(see, e.g., Menton 81-94; Gonzilez, "Noticias del Imperio y la historio-
grafia postmodernista") has resulted in the comparative neglect of the
theme of empire in del Paso's novel, overlooking what from the perspec-
tive of literary history is one of the most important aspects of Noticias vis-
a-vis Spanish American novels of preceding decades, namely, its restora-
tion of an ultimate referent: the historic empire of Maximilian. Sent by
Napoleon III, French, Belgian, and Austrian troops arrived in Mexico in
118 62, spent several years fighting against Republicans loyal to the consti-
tutional president of Mexico, Benito Juirez, and eventually abandoned
the emperor to his fate in Queretaro before returning to Europe in 1867.2
   A precise focus on imperialism is established in Noticias in Carlota's
opening monologue:
   I am Maria Carlota of Belgium, empress of Mexico and America. I
   am Maria Carlota Amelia, cousin of the queen of England, Grand
   Master of the Cross of Saint Charles and Vicereine of the provinces
   of Lombardoveneto, which were taken under the wing of the two-
   headed eagle of the House of Habsburg through the mercy and clem-
   ency of Austria. I am Maria Carlota Amelia Victoria, the daughter of
   Leopold, the prince of Saxe-Coburg and king of Belgium. [.. .] I





Noticias del Imperio |109


   am Maria Carlota Amelia Victoria Clementina Leopoldina, the
   niece of Prince Joinville and the cousin of the count of Paris, sister of
   the duke of Brabant who was king of Belgium and conqueror of the
   Congo. (13)

In these lines, the incremental list of titles and family relationships serves
most visibly to confer status and identity on Princess Carlota. At the same
time, by asserting her connection with the most powerful royal families
and imperial dynasties of Europe, it also presents Carlota as a synecdoche
of them and invites the reader to construe her as a symbol of European
imperialism.
   Mention of the conquest of the Congo at the end of the quotation
draws attention to the most violent actions and consequences of empire,
which are expanded on in the following chapter where a narrator who
possesses almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of European colo-
nialism cites "the military alliances, the imperialist expeditions, and the
colonial wars" exported by Napoleon III to areas of North Africa, Indo-
china, Russia, and Syria (40), and anticipates the account, in a later chap-
ter, of "unspeakable atrocities" (63 3) committed by Leopold II in the colo-
nizing of the Congo and the plundering of its rich rubber reserves. Mindful
of the suffering of "millions of human beings whose tragedy goes unac-
knowledged because it cannot be quantified" (635) and whose plight re-
calls that of "the wretched of the earth" championed by Frantz Fanon in
a seminal text of 1961,3 the author-narrator acknowledges the effects of
imperialism on subjugated peoples in general and establishes the global
coordinates within which the imperial adventure of Maximilian and Car-
lota was framed.
   Significantly, a substantial part of the second chapter of Noticias is
devoted to an imaginative re-creation of powermongering in mid-nine-
teenth-century Europe. Del Paso shows a particular interest in exploring
the mind-set of the political classes of the time: the assumptions, interpre-
tive schemes, and ethnocentric prejudices that lay behind the overt prac-
tices of colonialism and empire radiating from power centers such as Lon-
don, Paris, and Vienna. The foundation stone of the worldview of those
classes was the absolute conviction of their role as bearers of the values of
civilization, including "the principles of morality and justice" (595) pro-
claimed by Napoleon III at the inauguration of the Universal Exhibition of
1867 in Paris. A corollary of that exalted self-image was a haughty con-
tempt for "those poor countries in Spanish America [and elsewhere] that
live in a permanent state of revolution" (49) and whose perceived back-





110 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


wardness and instability rendered them vulnerable to military invasion
and colonial occupation.
   At an abstract level, the assimilation of non-European territories to
the European order is guaranteed by the mental operation (itself the effect
of ideology) that domesticates the Other by means of comparisons with
the already familiar. Examples of this hermeneutical operation abound in
the three-part correspondence - which is entirely fictional - between two
French brothers, Alphonse and Jean Pierre, over the time that the latter
spends with the French troops in Mexico. A privileged vehicle for the
transmission of news from the empire, the letters sent home by Jean Pierre
convey information to his civilian brother about the conduct and social
customs of the occupying forces, among whom it becomes fashionable to
compare Mexican cities with those of Europe. According to Jean Pierre,
"It is widely held that Xochimilco is the Venice of America, San Angel the
Aztec Compiegne, Cuernavaca the Fontainebleau of Mexico, the city of
Leon the Manchester of the New World, [.. .] the Castle of Chapultepec
the Schbnbrunn of Anahuac," etc. (402-3). A particularly interesting
comparison is that made by a European powermonger at a fancy-dress
ball held in the Tuilleries before Maximilian and Carlota depart for
Mexico. Wearing the attire of a Venetian nobleman and addressing a guest
disguised as a Roman senator (who is ultimately revealed to be Prince
Richard Metternich), the character remarks, "We'll transform Mexico
into a new Liberia" (51)-a statement which effectively condemns
Mexico to a double alienation, forcing it into a category of territories
whose erstwhile identities have been erased and overwritten with a name
coined by a foreign power.
   In this conscientious depiction of the ideological, linguistic, psychologi-
cal, and political workings of empire, the presentation of Maximilian is a
major concern. The novel acknowledges the political considerations that
persuaded Maximilian to overcome initial reservations and to go ahead
and accept the title and role of emperor of Mexico. It also takes account of
psychological and ideological factors that may have influenced Maxi-
milian, and it delves into the complex and contradictory character of a
historical figure who could be considered the victim of circumstances that
he was ultimately unable to control and who, on the other hand, was
undeniably the architect of his own tragic destiny. As the narrator ex-
plains, Maximilian had always dreamed "of one day becoming an em-
peror on a grand scale: another Rudolph II, who surrounded himself with
dwarves, painters, and silver-nosed astronomers; another Maximilian I,





Noticias del Imperio    I I I


paragon of nobility, patron of the arts, a man of the Renaissance; [. ..]
finally, another Charles V of Germany and I of Spain who, after he had
governed half the globe, retired to a monastery where he could build
clocks, eat ostrich eggs and contemplate his own burial casket" (198).
   Benito Judrez's 1861 decision to suspend payments of the interest on
Mexico's foreign debt gave Napoleon III an excuse to send an occupa-
tional force to Mexico. It also gave Maximilian the opportunity to make
his private dream come true. Once in Mexico, Maximilian would be able
to devote himself to the affairs of state and embark on a civilizing mission
involving economic projects (for example, the development of the cotton
and sugar industries) and the fine arts, thereby demonstrating the pro-
foundly humanitarian orientation of his imperial regime. For, as the sec-
tion entitled "El Emperador en Miravalle" informs us, such was the con-
ception that Maximilian had of his role and of that of the administration
around him. However, it is not difficult for readers today to see the extent
to which Maximilian was acting out the combined programs of two ide-
ologies that were prevalent in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth
century: the ideology of liberal humanism, with its commitment to
progress, education, sensibility, and the like (see Davies), and that of en-
lightened despotism, founded on a philosophy of paternalistic control.
Underpinning both of these is a philosophy of history that the narrative of
Noticias del Imperio identifies with European imperialism of the nine-
teenth century and traces to the work of Fichte and Hegel, among others.4
   That attribution takes place in the second section of chapter 6, during
a conversation between Benito Judrez and his secretary about the ideology
of the Habsburg dynasty:

   The Germans are a people fed on dangerous theories of racial supe-
   riority and mastery of the world. Have you read Fichte, Senor
   Secretario? A great philosopher, certainly, but one who instilled in
   the minds of German autocrats the idea that, following Bonaparte's
   betrayal of the ideals of the French Revolution, the Germans were
   better equipped than the French to lead humanity to the fulfillment
   of those ideals. The absurdity of this is clear from the fact that
   shortly after Fichte, Hegel deified the State, but really only succeeded
   in deifying tyranny.... What I ask myself is: how can a person like
   the Archduke, who you claim is essentially "liberal," reconcile the
   idea of the State as a social contract based on popular consensus,
   with the mystical conception of the State? It would seem impossible,





S112 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   don't you think? And yet it is possible, and I'll tell you why: because
   people like that are capable of betraying everything for the sake of
   ambition, and that includes betraying themselves. (157)

Beginning as a generalized discourse on the subject of the Habsburg Em-
pire (115 6), the passage evolves into a series of criticisms of individual
members of the dynasty and makes no exception of Maximilian in its
blanket denunciation of the tainted practitioners of theories of world
mastery.
   The main obstacle to Napoleon III and Maximilian's political designs
on Mexico was Benito Judrez, who is called upon in the novel to commu-
nicate a set of pungent observations about empire, relations between the
Americas and Europe, and the subject of history. More precisely, Benito
Judrez embodies anti-imperialist and anti-Eurocentric attitudes that are
consistent with the postcolonial thinking of a later age and formally iden-
tical to views expressed by Fernando del Paso while he was writing his
novel.
   The essence of President Judrez's political stance is distilled in conversa-
tions that he has with his private secretary. In the following excerpt, the
two men discuss Maximilian's ambition to found an empire stretching
from Mexico to El Cabo de Hornos:

   "Just imagine, the immodesty of it: What Bolivar could not achieve,
   an Austrian has the temerity to set as his goal."
     "Quite so, Senor Presidente. ..."
     "But that attitude merely reflects the eternal arrogance of the Eu-
   ropeans. The idea that the people of Japheth are destined to govern
   the world, 'to share out the islands of nations,' as it says in Genesis,
   if I remember correctly.5 Since time immemorial, they have claimed
   the right to draw and redraw the political map of the continents ...
   including their own. The right to divide the world up among them-
   selves: take the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Treaty of Utrecht, and so
   on. Have you, Senor Secretario, ever stopped to think why the Near
   East came to be called 'near' and the Far East 'far'?"
     "Because they are near and far, Don Benito. . ."
     "Near and far in relation to where? Well, in relation to Paris,
   Madrid, London, and Vienna. The point is that they are neither near
   nor far in relation to themselves. Do you understand what I am
   saying? History has been measured with one yardstick: the rod of
   iron with which the European has subjugated other nations...."
     "You are right, Don Benito." (327)





Noticias del Imperio   13


The passage denounces a secular attitude of arrogance toward non-Euro-
pean peoples and exposes the geopolitical pretensions of generations of
architects of European foreign policy. In respect of the latter, Benito
Juirez's thoughts duplicate those of Fernando del Paso in the course of
the speech that he delivered in Caracas on accepting the Premio R6mulo
Gallegos for 1982. Referring to the arbitrary process whereby "the conti-
nent of Latin America [. . .] has often disappeared from view over long
periods, and reappeared only when the greed or animosity of a European
country has been awakened," and with the military and naval conflict
between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Islas Malvinas in
mind, del Paso commented:

   One of its reappearances on the map occurred just a few weeks ago,
   with the outbreak of the war of the end of the world. The end of the
   world is exactly that: its end, not its beginning, because, just as man
   is the measure of all things, so for many centuries European man
   wielded the rod of iron with which he measured the history and
   geography of our planet. That is how he came to discover America,
   without giving any thought to the fact that America had been discov-
   ered originally by the Americans. That is how he gave the "Far" East
   its name: on the grounds that it is far from Europe, from the Merid-
   ian of Greenwich, and from the metre rule made of platinum which
   [...] is preserved in the [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers]
   in Paris. ("Mi patria chica" 159)

   In a broader context, the fictional Juirez's remarks also chime in with
the pronouncements of two influential critics of imperialism, Antonio
Gramsci and Gabriel Garcia Mirquez. Gramsci discusses western naming
of the East in Prison Notebooks: "Obviously East and West are arbitrary
and conventional, that is historical, constructions, since outside of real
history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time. ...
Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also perhaps for the Ameri-
can from California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through En-
glish political culture, may then call Egypt the Near East" (447). The link
with Garcia Mirquez revolves around a shared image and argument in the
Colombian author's speech on accepting the 1982 Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture in Stockholm in December 1983. On that occasion, Garcia Mirquez
took advantage of a unique opportunity to plead the cause of the peoples
of Latin America before a captive European audience. Emphasizing the
magnitude and number of difficulties faced by his fellow Latin Americans,
the author of Cien anos de soledad commented:





114 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   If these difficulties hold us back, [.. .] it is not hard to appreciate that
   the mental talents of this side of the world, in ecstatic contemplation
   of their own cultures, have found themselves without a valid means of
   interpreting us. It is understandable that they should insist on measur-
   ing us with the same yardstick that they apply to themselves, without
   recalling that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the
   search for one's own identity is as arduous and as bloody for us as it
   was for them. To interpret our reality with the aid of schemas that are
   alien to us only has the effect of making us even more unknown, even
   less free, even more solitary. (La soledad de Amdrica latina 8-9)

Masterful in its initial irony, the excerpt exploits the paradigmatic image
of the yardstick to argue a geopolitical thesis identical to that formulated
by Fernando del Paso in the fictional dialogue of Benito Juirez and his
secretary and in the text of "Mi patria chica, mi patria grande."
   The theme of relations between Europe and America receives consider-
able attention in that section of the narrative which introduces Benito
Juirez to the reader. Treated under several aspects, the Europe/America
theme establishes further links with the work of other intellectuals from
Marti through Carpentier, of whom the most important in this connection
is the veteran Mexican essayist Leopoldo Zea. As early as chapter z, the
narrator-author of Noticias del Imperio uses Juirez and Napoleon III,
known as "Mostach6," as contrasting terms in a study of political per-
sonalities, ideologies, and reputations. In alternating paragraphs, Benito
Juirez's humble origins and early commitment to liberalism are con-
trasted with Mostach6's aristocratic connections and his youthful creden-
tials as "a kind of socialist a la Saint-Simon" (3 1). Adopting a more explic-
itly judgmental tone, the narrative then records the most controversial
steps taken during Juirez's tenure of the presidency to reduce the power of
the Catholic Church and liberalize religion in Mexico:

   As a consequence of his audacity, Juirez came to be considered by
   Mexican and European conservatives and, needless to say, by the
   Vatican and Pope Pius IX-who would eventually establish the
   dogma of Papal Infallibility-as a sort of Antichrist. And because he
   was not white and of European stock, because he did not match the
   archetype of the fair-skinned Aryan who represented the highest
   form of humankind according to Count Gobineau in his "Essay on
   the Inequality of Human Races" published in Paris in 18,54, and,
   finally, because he was not even a half-caste mestizo, Juirez, the





Noticias del Imperio |"n15


   shifty Indian, was viewed by the monarchs and champions of the
   Old World as completely incapable of governing a country which
   seemed inherently ungovernable anyway. (32)

On this account, an Old World cocktail of racist prejudice and ethnocen-
tric arrogance was simply waiting to be stirred up by the zapoteca-speak-
ing, dark-skinned Benito Judrez, provoking a flurry of accusations which,
viewed objectively, were disproportionate to any harm done to European
interests in Mexico and which hypocritically ignored the far more sub-
stantial political failings of Louis Napoleon, including his abuses of the
political system and people of France after 1851.
   The contrasting perceptions of the "instability," "degeneracy," "cor-
ruption," and "weakness" of the Mexican people (33), on the one hand,
and the values of French "order" and "civilization" (42), on the other,
evoke the standard nineteenth-century opposition, which dominated both
European "Orientalist" and Spanish American thinking of the time, be-
tween civilizacidn and barbarie. Happily, at various levels of Fernando del
Paso's narrative, that opposition is reversed and shown ultimately to rest
on a prior assumption of European superiority. One of the most loaded
binaries in western thought is thus dismantled, as part of a critical project
that coincidentally overlaps with that of Leopoldo Zea in Discurso desde
la marginacidn y la barbarie (Discourse from the site of marginalization
and barbarism).
   The backbone of Zea's 1988 book is a critique and history of British,
Russian, and Spanish imperialism, including chapters on the philosophi-
cal (largely Hegelian) underpinnings of Eurocentrism, and the clashes be-
tween native and Hispanic civilizations in Spanish America. Essentially,
Zea sets out to argue the relativity of the terms bdrbaro and barbarie and
to assert the rights of people living on the margins against the claims to
hegemony of those grounded in the center. Of particular interest to this
study are some brief remarks made by Zea in a section subtitled "La
barbarie europea y America," about the French invasion of Mexico and
the contemporary reaction of Gabino Barreda, author of an "Oracion
civica" delivered in Guanajuato on 16 September 1867. On that historic
occasion, Barreda told his audience: "In this conflict between European
backwardness and American civilization, in the head-on clash between the
principles of monarchy and republicanism, in the final struggle of fanati-
cism against emancipation, Mexican republicans were ranged alone
against the entire world." Barreda further depicted "the aggression of the
Europe of Napoleon III" as "the very negation of the civilized values now





z 16 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


embodied in America." Over a hundred years later, Zea depicted that
episode of Mexican history in similar terms, as a popular rejection of "the
aggressive civilization of Europe" (Discurso 55-56).
   Zea's and Barreda's appropriation of the term civilizacidn for America
and the attribution of backwardness and barbarie to a European power
are open to several interpretations, which are largely dependent on histori-
cal point of view. From the perspective of the moment of its enunciation,
Barreda's reversal is a fascinating instance of a rhetorical "fighting back"
on behalf of a people who had gained their independence from Spain some
fifty years earlier and who now saw their national territory, already
eroded by North American expansionism, invaded by a no less alien impe-
rial power. From the perspective of Zea's and del Paso's later re-creation of
the Mexican experience of occupation, Barreda's rhetorical turning-of-
the-tables anticipates postcolonial strategies of contestation and decoloni-
zation of the mind, which Zea had advocated several decades before the
composition of his and del Paso's texts in such essays as "North America
in the Spanish American Consciousness" (1947) and "Colonization and
Decolonization of Latin American Culture" (1970). There are, admit-
tedly, grounds for arguing that the continuing deployment of the terms
civilizacidn and barbarie in an adversarial relationship preserves intact a
hierarchical code that deserves to be completely dismantled. Against that
view, and at least as far as the novel by del Paso is concerned, the reversal
of the assumptions on which the "civilizacion-barbarie" opposition was
originally constructed serves to lay bare the fundamental asymmetry of a
scheme that was heavily distorted by ethnocentric prejudice, and it does so
in a way that is entirely consistent with the anti-imperialist thesis put
forward in the pages of Noticias del Imperio.
   Turning back to Benito Juirez, it is evident that his characterization is
enhanced by contrasts with a number of historical figures, including the
emperor Maximilian and former Mexican president L6pez de Santa Anna,
besides Napoleon III. Juirez's rejection of pomp, his reverence for the law,
and his professed "respect and admiration for life" (328) contribute to the
portrait of a man of strong moral principles who believed in absolute
values and felt a peculiar, almost reverential sense of responsibility before
history. A crucial document in this last regard is the letter that Juirez sent
to Maximilian on the emperor's arrival in Mexico City. As the narrator
informs us:
   The letter had been written in the city of Monterrey, and in one of its
   final paragraphs it contained the following: "Sire, men are free to
   trample on the rights of others, seize their property, take the lives of





Noticias del Imperio | 117


   those who defend their nationality, and depict their virtues as crimi-
   nal and one's own vices as positively virtuous; but there is one thing
   which cannot be touched by human perversity, and that is the ter-
   rible judgment of History. She will pass judgment on us all." (261)

The letter expresses the view of history as the ultimate arbiter of the mo-
rality of human conduct. Taking the place of divine authority, history
becomes the agent of ultimate judgments - a Transcendental Signified
whose universal status is signaled by the initial capital H in the president's
script. Awe of "the terrible judgment of History" inspires Benito Juirez up
to the moment of his death and sticks in the mind as a powerful and
defining feature of his characterization.
   The view of history as external agent is also articulated by Carlota in
the closing paragraphs of her first monologue, where she holds history to
be responsible for her husband's death: "History, which left you stretched
out and bleeding to death on the Cerro de las Campanas with your waist-
coat on fire and left you hanging by your feet from the dome of the Chapel
of San Andres" (27). Carlota's recriminations against history thus con-
ceived are but a small element in her overall characterization, which in-
volves a broader and more complex identification with history and em-
pire, as well as a critique of the related notion of the sovereign subject.
   The character of Carlota in Noticias del Imperio is a creative amalgam
of a precise historical referent and a fictional consciousness described vari-
ously as "poetic" (Ines Sienz 172), "oracular" (Roberto Gonzilez Eche-
varria 183), "omnipotent" (Vicente Quirarte 141), and "hallucinatory"
(Claude Fell, "Historia y ficcion" 85). Sometimes lucid, sometimes mad,
Carlota's mental state crystallizes in a discourse of contradiction and de-
sire reminiscent of Breton, Joyce (cf. Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans
Wake), and Carlos Fuentes (cf. la Dama Loca of Terra nostra). As far as
ideological implications are concerned, Carlota's madness places a ques-
tion mark over the category of the sovereign subject, which she literally
personifies. Throughout her monologue she insists on her status as prin-
cess and empress. Her dominant position in the structure of the narrative,
and her insistent use of the first-person form of the verb, are the outward
signs of a subjectivity that is self-assured and in command. Yet the contra-
dictions and instability that typify Carlota's discourse point directly to a
rift in her consciousness and, beyond that, to fissures in the ideology of the
subject.
   The statement "History and I, Maximilian, who are both alive and
mad" (27) confirms this view, while adding further dimensions to
Carlota's character. Essentially, the pattern and duration of the empress's





z 18 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


life make her a metonym of the experience of a hundred years: "I am [...]
the widow of a century that died of old age, the widow of an empire that
was left orphaned" (410). By virtue of her fabulous memory and obsessive
recall, Carlota embodies "the living memory of a century, frozen in an
instant" (3 6z), and she seeks tirelessly to re-create and make sense of
events that occurred between approximately 1840 and 1927. In the con-
text of del Paso's fiction, Carlota is the latest instance of a totalizing con-
sciousness that had presided over the narratives of both Jose Trigo and
Palinuro de Mdxico. There is, however, a significant difference between
Carlota's narration and the totalizing operations of earlier works. In Jose
Trigo and Palinuro de Mdxico, the panoramic vision of narrators and
characters such as abuelo Francisco had sought to encompass a field of
cultural landmarks that were devoid of explicit political meaning, whereas
in Noticias Carlota's consciousness is identified precisely with the political
and territorial ambitions of empire and the mind-set of imperialism.
Through the inherent extravagance and mobility of her range of reference,
Carlota offers a hyperbolic and parodic representation of the Hegelian
view of European expansion already discussed in relation to Emperor
Maximilian, investing her with a key role in the novel's repudiation of the
ideology of empire.
   Two quotations from Carlota's concluding monologue illustrate force-
fully the political connotations of her character. In the first quotation,
Carlota expresses the desire to be Mexican and insists on presenting her-
self as "Mama Carlota, mother of all Indians and of all mestizos, mother
of all the whites and cambujos, of all the blacks and saltapatrases. I am
Mami Carlota, mother of Cuauhtemoc and La Malinche, of Manuel Hi-
dalgo and Benito Juirez, of Sor Juana and Emiliano Zapata. Because I am
as Mexican [.. .] as them all" (664). The passage begins as a fantasy, with
Carlota casting herself in the image of the archetypal Mother of the Na-
tion. She claims to offer a racial synthesis of the Mexican people, and then
names a string of national celebrities, all of whom she assimilates to her
archetypal persona. On a personal and psychological level, Carlota's fan-
tasy undoubtedly expresses a desire for children and family of her own, in
a vein of feeling with which the reader can readily empathize. At the same
time, on a more controversial political level her words bespeak the attitude
of indiscriminate possession and control of a sovereign toward the sub-
jects of her realm: through the workings of her imagination Carlota seeks
to subsume all mexicanos under a single totalizing principle analogous to
the Hegelian paradigm of all-inclusive consciousness. The negative impli-
cations of this characterization are reinforced in the conclusion to her





Noticias del Imperio  I n9


discourse, where Carlota boldly lays claim to Mexican nationality. Given
her European stock and upbringing, Carlota's self-identification as Mexi-
can is both logically preposterous and, from an ideological perspective, as
reprehensible as European imitations of Mexican custom and dress dis-
missed earlier by Benito Judrez as pretentious and "absurd" (3118).6
   The second quotation takes the form of a list of territories that Carlota
promises to Maximilian. Ranging over the entire geography and history of
Latin America, the list is a striking hyperbole of imperial possession:
   I am going to give you Mexico. I am going to give you America. I am
   going to give you the Pico de Orizaba so that you can see Hernan
   Cortes arriving, from its peak. I am going to let you have Florida, so
   that you may go there with Ponce de Leon in search of the fount of
   eternal youth and so that you may drink of its waters and remain
   thirty-five years of age forever. I am going to let you have the Ama-
   zon so that you may sail up it with Orellana and the tyrant, Aguirre.
   I am going to give you Patagonia, Maximilian, so that you may see
   Ferdinand Magellan sailing past. (665)

Here, tenderness blends with extravagance in a discourse that figures the
voracious territorial appetite of imperialism. In addition, there is unde-
niable hubris in the assumption that so many American landmarks are
Carlota's to give away-a point also established earlier by Benito Judrez
in a rhetorical question to his secretary: "How can it be that a foreign
usurper can handle an asset belonging to the nation and give it away to
another foreigner?" (319).
   Carlota symbolizes both the excesses and the deficiencies of the ideol-
ogy of empire whose agency she shared with Maximilian during their time
in Mexico. On a wider view, that ideology is synonymous with the "con-
cept of history and of the future of mankind" mentioned in a much-quoted
passage from Noticias del Imperio: "Not only does Carlota survive Maxi-
milian, Judrez, Napoleon, Eugenia [de Montijo], and all the rest, but she
also outlives an entire age, an entire concept of history and of the future of
mankind and the picture that man had of himself and of the Universe"
(630). Attesting to a paradigm shift that was complete by the time of
Carlota's death in 1927, the narrator-author of Noticias underlines the
centrality of imperialist ideology in the European mind-set of the nine-
teenth century and provides the crowning confirmation of the role of Car-
lota as both emblem of empire and vehicle of the narrative demystification
of the assumptions of European (and, subsequently, North American)
imperialism in the postcolonial world.





2o I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Noticias del Imperio and the Making of History

   The habitually insoluble quandary of the historian [is this]: how
   to live in two worlds at once; how to take the broken, mutilated
   remains of something or someone from the "enemy lines" of the
   documented past and restore it to life or give it a decent inter-
   ment in our own time and place.
   Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)

The systematic interrogation of the nineteenth-century paradigm of his-
tory and the human subject referred to in the last section extends to other
areas of Noticias del Imperio, including most crucially the activity of
making -or writing -history. Along with a handful of other Latin Ameri-
can texts of its kind and time, Noticias participates in the widespread
critical reassessment, begun in Europe and taken up by North American
scholars in the 1970s, of the concepts and categories of history, represen-
tation, narrative, and historiography. Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur,
Frangois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White are just a few of
the most prominent figures in this area of study, which has been mapped
comprehensively by Robert Young in an authoritative critical account,
White Mythologies (1990). Reflecting, and reflecting on, the main cur-
rents of the "history debate," Noticias implicitly and expressly poses es-
sential questions concerning the nature and representation of historical
experience, and provides answers that are largely consonant with post-
structuralist and postmodernist thinking.
   At the base of del Paso's conceptual inquiry is the fundamental distinc-
tion between history as a field of experience and "sequence of raw empiri-
cal realities" (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 92) and history as
a discursive system of knowledge and representation, otherwise termed
"historiography." With reference to the first of these categories, and in
answer to the question "Whose history?" the narrative of Noticias ac-
knowledges and accommodates a broad spectrum of subjects of history,
including not only celebrated personalities like Maximilian, Richard Met-
ternich, and the empress Eugenia de Montijo, but also an innumerable
cast of common folk represented, in the novel, by figures such as a blind
street vendor who vividly registers the presence of French troops on Mexi-
can soil through the heightened senses of hearing, touch, and smell; a
priest who is compromised by the confession and seduced by the charms
of a Mexican woman who uses her position as a French officer's lover to
acquire military intelligence; and a member of the firing squad that shot
the emperor Maximilian, who is haunted by the idea that his may have





Noticias del Imperio | 111


been one of the rifles loaded with live ammunition on the morning of the
execution. In spite of their anonymity, these characters are often individu-
ated as fully as their more famous counterparts, and they illustrate the
abandonment, advocated by Michel Foucault and others, of "unitary,
closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally
known it," in favor of a postmodern historiography containing "histories
(in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and
colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much
sung few" (Hutcheon, A Politics of Postmodernism 66).
   In its representation of the historical field - broadly speaking, relations
between Europe and Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century -and the his-
torical process-the rise and fall of the empire of Maximilian and
Carlota - the narrative of Noticias acknowledges the determining influ-
ence on events of political decisions originating in Europe and recognizes
the role of accidents, oversights, mistakes, and the unforeseeable in shap-
ing the course of history. A matter of repeated interest is the implication of
written discourse in the historical process. Referring to the complex nego-
tiations that preceded Maximilian's acceptance of the Mexican crown, the
narrator remarks, "In 1186z and 1863 and at the beginning of 1864, doz-
ens, indeed hundreds of letters criss-crossed Europe and traveled back and
forth to America. [Some] were transported normally, by mule, stage coach
and in the ships of the 'Royal Mail Steam Packet Company,' while others
went by special delivery. [S]ome were straightforward, others misleading
and written in a secret code[;] they were concise or interminably long and
full of optimism, and were carried by private or royal messengers" (193).
A similar sense of the historical field being swamped by written documents
is conveyed by Carlota who, in a two-page listing of types of writing
connected with Maximilian's political career, remarks in exasperation that
enough material was produced to "carpet the road from Vienna to Quer6-
taro" (609). Taken together with the aphorism, delivered in a tone of
mock seriousness by a typesetter, that "Through these twenty-eight letters
whole empires and reputations are created and then destroyed" (330),
Carlota's hyperbole adds flesh to her earlier vision, redolent of Bakhtin, of
the world as a carnivalesque "fiesta delirante" ( 115) in which is acted out
"the madness of history" (638).
   With regard to the text's conception of history as a discursive system,
the author-narrator states his-and the text's-position in principle near
the end of the book. The context in which this occurs is the final section of
direct commentary, in the first person, on the life, death, and ultimate
place in history of the emperor Maximilian and his wife. Aware that the




122 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


narrative situation is ripe, and indeed that it calls for a conclusive judg-
ment in the form of "one final page" about the empire and the emperor
and empress of Mexico, the narrator admits that such a page,
   which ideally would contain that "Judgment of History" -in capi-
   tals-about which Benito Judrez spoke, would never get written,
   and not only because the madness of history did not come to an end
   with Carlota, but also because, in the absence of a "Universal His-
   tory" based on truth (which is logically impossible and, in the final
   analysis, undesirable), there exist many histories which are both
   particular in scope and subject to change, depending on the tempo-
   ral and spatial perspectives from which they are "written." (638)

So, at the end of the narrative investigation of the story of Maximilian and
Carlota, the only conclusion available to the narrator is, paradoxically,
that the story of Maximilian and Carlota admits of no conclusion: the
most that can be asserted about it is that it remains open to continuing
interpretation and, in some particularly intractable areas, locked into a
chain of unending speculation.
   Essentially, the narrator's position involves the rejection of a view of
historiography that belonged to the nineteenth century, founded on the
notions of objective truth and a "Universal History." Exponents of that
view of history sought to integrate the disparate data of the historical field
in a coherent narrative form for which they made claims of objective
truthfulness and which they invested with the formal properties of unifor-
mity and closure (see White, Metahistory 88-92 and White, Content of
the Form chapter z). "Universal History" is identified in an early chapter
of Noticias with the novels of Walter Scott and the work of Maximilian's
"dear friend and tutor," Cesar Cant6 (195), author of a monumental
Storia universale published, in thirty-two volumes, in Turin between 1836
and 1847. In dismissing the orthodoxy of Scott and Cant6, the author-
narrator of Noticias rejects a paradigm of historical knowledge and rep-
resentation that is outmoded, and replaces it with a view of multiple
(hi)stories: "histories which are both particular in scope and subject to
change, depending on the temporal and spatial perspectives from which
they are 'written"' (638). This relativistic view is typical of the post-
modern era, which is characterized by a "questioning of the universal and
totalizing in the name of the local and particular" and by a recognition
that "Any certainties we do have are [...] 'positional,' that is, derived from
complex networks of local and contingent conditions" (Hutcheon, Poetics





Noticias del Imperio 123


12). The conception of history as a discursive system that is able to provide
only approximate and provisional versions of historical experience aligns
del Paso's text quite clearly with postmodernist and poststructuralist posi-
tions.
   The word written (escritas) in the above quotation calls attention, with
a degree of self-consciousness that is also typically postmodern, to the
discursive status of historiography. In part an ironic reflection on the po-
sition of a narrator who is himself engaged in the activity of writing (a)
history, the quotation marks signal above all else the constructedness, and
reliance on convention, of all forms of historiography. Embracing this as
a fundamental point of principle, Noticias emphasizes the precariousness
of the writing of history and explores some of the problematical implica-
tions that follow from that initial premise. Foremost among these is the
verbal and textual condition of all elaborated histories. While in no way
denying the primary reality of lived, empirical history, the narrative of
Noticias conceives of that reality as a material that is destined to become
discourse, either oral or written. The inclusion of both oral and written
(hi)stories in the text of Noticias; the image of propaganda posters super-
imposed on one another, as in a palimpsest, on the walls of public places
in Mexican towns and cities; the saturation of the text with vocabulary
belonging to the field of verbal communication ("noticias," "informe,"
"resumen," "historia," etc.); and the conscientious critiquing of the tex-
tual tradition concerned with the story of Maximilian and Carlota, are all
graphic illustrations of the permeability of lived and recorded history, and
reminders of "not only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the
past, but also both the value and the limitation of the inescapably discur-
sive form of that knowledge" (Hutcheon, Poetics 127).
   A no less radical implication of the theory of historiography put across
in Noticias is the denial of the privileged status of history as a site of the
truth. According to the author-narrator of del Paso's novel, the pursuit of
a single authoritative truth about a historical character, incident, period,
and so forth inevitably runs up against the insoluble contradictions and
patchiness of the historical field. As the author-narrator remarks about his
own investigations, "Some of the things which history tells us happened to
Maximilian and Carlota can be corroborated; others cannot" (264). Fur-
ther barriers preventing access to a (notional) truth about the past derive
from inconsistencies and disagreements in the textual field. Whether it is
made up of totally divergent interpretations, or of variations in successive
accounts by the same author (namely, the case of E. C. Corti, discussed by




124 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


Juan Bruce-Novoa 429-3 1), the field of textual data stubbornly resists
attempts at homogenization and remains receptive instead to the free play
of new and always provisional accounts of historical experience.
   The view of historiography adopted in Noticias del Imperio assumes a
freedom to invent, which places history on the same footing as fiction. The
conventional distinction handed down from Aristotle between historical
narratives and fictional narratives collapses in the face of Carlota's invita-
tion to her dead husband, "Let's reinvent history all over again" (76), and
the fears attributed to Benito Judrez of the "harm [that] would be inflicted
on him by the words [.. .] made up by the people whose job it would be to
discomfit him by telling the story of his life" (624). At a more immediate
level, the license to invent is exploited, consciously and overtly, by the
author-narrator of Noticias, who intervenes in the textual carnival of
writing about the emperor and empress to make his own, ironically know-
ing, contributions to historiography on the subject.
   Finally, the theory of history-writing subscribed to in the novel ac-
knowledges the vulnerability of textual histories to ideological prejudice.
A striking example of the manipulation of the data of history is the board
game, "invented by Mr John Wallis, of 'The History and Chronology of
the Universe"' (446), which the author-narrator imagines having been
played on a single occasion in the imperial palace by Louis Napoleon, his
wife, Eugenia, and the infant prince, Luld. In a vividly depicted drawing
room scene, the narrator explains why the game should have failed to find
favor with the emperor:
   Lul6 had enjoyed himself tremendously, but Louis Napoleon took
   against it because it presented the history of mankind from an En-
   glish point of view: starting with Adam and Eve, certainly, but end-
   ing with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the middle of the board
   where they were crowned as angels and decked with laurel leaves.
   (446)
It comes as no surprise to the reader that Louis Napoleon should wish to
replace Wallis's Anglocentric strain of Christian universalism with an al-
ternative white mythology culminating in his own apotheosis:
   No, he would commission a game that would begin, certainly, with
   Adam and Eve who were part of the universal heritage, but which
   would end with him, Louis Napoleon, and Eugenia and the little
   prince, crowned in glory. And it would have to include all the impor-





Noticias del Imperio 125


   tant dates of French history, especially those of his own dynasty: 118
   Brumaire, Austerlitz ... (446-47)

   Not far removed from the educational games of Wallis and others,7
European-authored histories of Maximilian and Carlota's reign display
equally virulent ethnocentric prejudice against a people presided over by
Benito Judrez, whom they accused of judging and executing the emperor
Maximilian in barbaric disregard for the proprieties of law and the decen-
cies of civilized society. Echoing President Juirez's own documented stric-
tures concerning the racism and arrogance of European observers, the
author-narrator's views on the distortion of history reinforce the postco-
lonial orientation of Noticias and clear the way for the writing of a correc-
tive counterhistory more in tune with the attitudes and experience of the
Mexican people.
   In practice, many of the insights into the nature and workings of histo-
riography detailed here are incorporated into the textual fabric of Noticias
through an array of formal and narrative procedures that contribute sig-
nificantly to the novel's aesthetic definition. With respect to the forms of
narrative representation generally available, according to Hayden White,
to the historian and, by implication, to the writer of historical fiction
(White, Content of the Form 42-47), Noticias employs (1) the chronicle
(in sections of chapters 6 and 18), (2) direct discourse as commentary, and
(3) historical narrative in the third person, interwoven with (4) the eccen-
tric discourse of Carlota, which destabilizes and ultimately undermines
truth claims made at other levels of del Paso's multilayered narrative. The
indeterminacy that results from this formal melange is reinforced by a
secondary cast of narrators whose accounts and opinions are invariably
contradictory, provisional, and incomplete: the cast includes narrators
who profess to have no interest in the truth, correct themselves on impor-
tant points of information, and admit to being understandably prejudiced
against the French and Austrian invaders.
   With regard to plot, the narrative structure of Noticias conforms most
closely to the tragic mode of emplotment discussed by Hayden White in
Metahistory. Borrowing from genre criticism in aesthetics and literary
studies, White distinguishes among types of dramatic action and identifies
as characteristic of tragedy a spectacle or process comprising conflict
(agon), the frustration of aspiration and intent, and a final resolution; the
specific nature of the resolution, and the fact that it is approached "from
the standpoint of the agent who sees deployed before him a world which





iz6 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


is at once a means and an impediment to the realization of his purpose"
(95), determine the tragic character of an action, which White defines
dialectically, in opposition to the reconciliations typical of comedy:
   The reconciliations which occur at the end of Comedy are reconcili-
   ations of men with men, of men with their world and their society;
   the condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and
   healthier as a result of the conflict among seemingly inalterably op-
   posed elements in the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the
   long run, harmonizable with one another, unified, at one with them-
   selves and the others. The reconciliations that occur at the end of
   Tragedy are much more somber; they are more in the nature of res-
   ignations of men to the conditions under which they must labor in
   the world. These conditions, in turn, are asserted to be inalterable
   and eternal, and the implication is that man cannot change them but
   must work within them. They set the limits on what may be aspired
   to and what may be legitimately aimed at in the quest for security
   and sanity in the world. (9)

In broad outline, the story of Maximilian, and parts of that of Benito
Juirez, match the blueprint of tragic emplotment described here. During
his first year in Mexico (summarized in chapter io of the novel), Maxi-
milian's fortunes follow an upward curve; from that point on, a process of
deterioration sets in which sees him becoming more and more isolated and
then sliding to an inexorable military and political defeat. The overall
trajectory of Maximilian's experience thus closely resembles White's "pat-
tern of Tragic rise and fall" (i z6), and it stems furthermore from a flaw in
the emperor's character that does not prevent him from experiencing a
partial anagnorisis in the final days of his life.
   The tragic basis of Maximilian's frustrated quest for personal and po-
litical fulfillment is corroborated in the text and further reinforced by
diegetic comparisons with the martyrdom of Jesus Christ. In one of her
apostrophes to her dead husband, Carlota expressly laments "your trag-
edy" (77); elsewhere, the author-narrator announces, "This book is based
[.. .] on the tragic fate of the ephemeral emperor and empress of Mexico,"
and she uses phrases such as "the tragedy of Queretaro" (584) and "the
tragedy of the Cerro de las Campanas" (587) to refer to Maximilian's
emprisonment and execution at Queretaro.8 Comparisons of Maximilian
with Jesus Christ evoke a complementary scenario of archetypal suffering.
The first instance of this occurs in Carlota's opening monologue where she
complains that upon their arrival in Mexico, she and Maximilian "were





Noticias del Imperio | 127


given a crown of thorns and shadows." A few sentences later she goes on
to recall the dashing figure of Maximilian in a painting at the age of thirty-
five, "resembling a Christ who was forever youthful and forever hand-
some" (zi). The comparison appears in its fullest form in chapter zo, in
the song invented by del Paso to suggest the persistence of Maximilian's
death in popular memory. In the "Corrido del tiro de gracia" (Corrido
about the coup de grace), an anonymous voice reconstructs the scene of
Maximilian's execution on El Cerro de las Campanas:
   Como Cristo en el Calvario
   parecia el Emperador.
   Judrez fue el Poncio Pilatos,
   y L6pez lo traicion6
   (The Emperor looked like
   Christ on Calvary Hill.
   Juarez acted as Pontius Pilate,
   and Lopez betrayed him) (576)

The Christ-motif is then repeated three times in the paragraphs of prose
that alternate with the stanzas of the corrido, forcefully emphasizing the
image of Maximilian as a martyred Christ.
   In the context of del Paso's evolving narrative production, this body of
material would appear to place Maximilian squarely alongside Luciano -
the charismatic representative of the railway workers who is betrayed and
murdered in the storyline of Jose Trigo - and Palinuro - another tragic
victim of archetypal violence and injustice. However, in Noticias del Impe-
rio del Paso reveals the comparison of Maximilian to Christ to be an
imaginative construct. In the pages that follow the "Corrido del tiro de
gracia," he remarks:
   At that time, as at many others, it was not uncommon to liken a
   martyr's suffering to Calvary. If the man who could have been
   Maximilian's father, the Duke of Reichstadt, who died in his bed,
   was described by Catule Mendes as "the little Jesus of the Tuilleries
   who became the Christ of Schbnbrunn," it is easy to understand the
   impact on people's imagination of the shooting of a European prince
   before whose portrait the Mexican Indians used to make the sign of
   the cross. (586)

The author-narrator's commentary functions quite clearly as a demysti-
fication,9 and in so much is entirely consistent with the ironic, postmodern
epistemology of Noticias. It points toward the constructedness of all cul-





iz8 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


tural phenomena and in the process undermines any attempt at providing
a totalizing explanation for the narrative of Maximilian and Carlota's
lives. Notwithstanding the presumption, made by Hayden White in his
commentary on Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of history, that the "symbolic
content of narrative history, the content of its form, is the tragic vision
itself" (White, Content of the Form 1181), the unmasking of the Christ
analogy as a popular fabrication detracts from the hypothesis of a tragic
principle governing the narrative content of Noticias. Viewed in the
round, the stories of Maximilian and Carlota are no more reducible to a
single tragic paradigm than the varied conceptions of history represented
in the novel are susceptible to resolution in the madhouse of Carlota's
mind. This may explain the inclusion in the text of an alternative charac-
terization of the life stories of both Maximilian and Carlota as grotesque
melodramas (5 61, 638) palliated, in places, by fantasies of family romance
(490-91).
   The presence of deconstructionist and self-referential strategies in the
historiographical project of Noticias helps to explain the novel's ready
admission to the high-profile category of postmodern historiographic
metafiction. Stella Clark and Alfonso Gonzilez argue that view of Noti-
cias in terms that I find broadly acceptable. However, the novel's deep-
seated resistance to forms and ideologies of totalization rests uneasily with
too hard and fast a categorization of it as a postmodern historiographic
metafiction. Indeed, closer inspection of the ideological and aesthetic con-
struction of del Paso's text reveals a clearly defined stratum of non-post-
modern elements that are in fact consistent with some of the assumptions
of nineteenth-century historiography as described by Hayden White, and
grounded in the same humanist ethics that we have uncovered in the two
preceding novels by del Paso. This residue of humanist and modernist
elements opens up a fissure in the apparently uniform texture of the novel
and ultimately constitutes a major ground for distinguishing Noticias
from the countless other postmodern historiographic metafictions pro-
duced by Latin American authors in the last quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury.
   A step-by-step review of the motive forces behind the writing of
Noticias helps to isolate those characteristics that are specific to del Paso's
project. In schematic terms, the narrative of Maximilian and Carlota (not
forgetting Benito Judrez, Col. Miguel L6pez, and other Mexican protago-
nists) is motivated, first, by political and ideological considerations of the
kind already alluded to in preceding pages. At bottom, the aim of the
author of Noticias is to contest white mythologies that misrepresent the





Noticias del Imperio |29


history of Mexico and to replace them with counternarratives that are self-
conscious, keenly argued, and free of the animus and arrogance of con-
temporary European historiography. Second, in addition to the political
impulse of postcolonial discourse, the narrative of Noticias responds to an
aesthetic impulse that emphasizes the "grandeur" (638) and "magnifi-
cence" (644) of Carlota's extraordinary life, evoking a range and intensity
of experience that flatly contradict the empress's disavowal of "the trivial
story of my madness and loneliness" (492). Last, and definitely not least,
the narrative plays host to a moral impulse that turns on issues of con-
science, guilt, and reparation. On the fourth page of the novel, Carlota
informs her dead husband of her daily efforts to "put my house and my
conscience in order" (16), and she assures him of her personal forgiveness,
in a stream of utterances that culminate in the following: "And just as I
forgive you everything that you did to me, so I forgive all our enemies and
I forgive Mexico" (16). Carlota subsequently qualifies that generosity of
spirit and shows a more subtle and critical awareness of the various fac-
tors and parties involved in the imperial adventure of 1864-67. Detailing
some of the positive aspects of Maximilian's character and conduct, she
exclaims, "Oh, Maximilian: sometimes I think I'll never forgive the people
of Mexico" (6o6). But the memory of some of his personal faults and more
conspicuous military and political failures leads her to the view that "You
were a traitor to your new Fatherland. And for that reason, Mexico will
never forgive you." She also anticipates that his defeat in "the Battle of
Mexico" is something for which "you will never be forgiven by your Aus-
trian compatriots" (607).
   The welter of recriminations that are articulated here form part of a
wider and more complex field of feeling that includes rancor (acknowl-
edged by Carlota in chapter 17), remorse (as suffered by Benito Judrez on
his deathbed), and a generalized guilt that permeates the cast of the narra-
tive. Carlota admits to being embarrassed by the amount of "Mexican
blood [that] had been spilt on our account" (55o) and complains about
the number of Mexican dead who weigh on her conscience (5 51z). The
soldier in the firing squad responsible for executing Maximilian hopes to
God that he was given blank ammunition, "so that I should not have to
spend the rest of my days feeling guilty about having killed the Son of God,
Maximilian" (578). Yet so pervasive is his malaise that he suspects that "If
by a miracle my memory were to go blank, I am certain that my bad
conscience would make me invent everything all over again" (575). Most
crucial of all, the author-narrator detects a collective guilt in the Mexican
psyche over the way that the nation treated Maximilian and Carlota, and





130 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


he proposes an act of reparation which might assuage his and the nation's
conscience as well as belatedly do justice to the emperor and empress.
   The author-narrator spells out his view of the situation in the middle
section of chapter 22, entitled "The Last of the Mexicans." At this point,
the narrative of the historical process-the historia of Noticias del Impe-
rio-has advanced as far as Maximilian's execution and Carlota's descent
into madness, while the discursive account-the discurso-is poised to
assess "the political and ethical responsibility of [the emperor and his
wife]" (64 1). The author-narrator opens his account by surveying the as-
sessments offered by other Mexican writers, among whom the most sig-
nificant is Rodolfo Usigli in Corona de sombra (1943). Reviewing some of
the assertions made in the prologue to that play, the author-narrator cites
Usigli's opinion that "The blood of Maximilian and the insanity of Car-
lota deserve better from Mexico," and he concurs with him:

   And this would appear to be the case, that that death and that insan-
   ity, because they are magnificent, deserve better from Mexico, from
   the makers and writers of its history and its literature; more than
   anything else, they deserve to be considered as the mitigating factors
   of greatest importance by any author who ventures, and is obliged,
   to form a personal assessment concerning the characters in the trag-
   edy. (642)

The emphasis in this passage is on the writer's obligation to give Maxi-
milian and Carlota their due, through equitable consideration of the be-
havior of each of them in the larger tragedy of Mexican involvement in the
Habsburg Empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Attenuating factors such
as Carlota's mental instability and the dignity displayed by Maximilian
when facing the firing squad should, in the author-narrator's view, be
accommodated in any final judgment.
   Taking a further cue from the prologue to Corona de sombra, the au-
thor-narrator agrees with Usigli that "History tells us that only Mexico
has the right to kill its dead, and that they belong forever to Mexico," and
then elaborates:

   The problem is not that we have killed Maximilian in Mexico, nor
   that in Mexico we may perhaps have driven Carlota mad: the prob-
   lem is that we did not actually bury either of them in Mexico. Which
   is to say [.. .] that neither of them, neither Maximilian nor Carlota,
   was committed to this soil which has been fertilized by the remains
   of all our heroes and all our traitors, in equal measures. (643)





Noticias del Imperio |131


In a nutshell, the author-narrator's thinking boils down to the proposition
that two outsiders who came to grief in Mexico should be integrated fully
into the national pantheon of heroes and villains. He stresses the benefits
of accepting Maximilian and Carlota as Mexican, "if not Mexican by
birth, then Mexican by death," and in a sentence that carries distinct ech-
oes of both Palinuro de Mdxico and The Unquiet Grave, he proposes that
"maybe that's the way we should proceed, so that they may terrify us no
longer: the souls of the unburied always protest about the fact of having
been abandoned" (643). After a short parenthesis, he pleads with his com-
patriots to show "a little goodwill" and to assist in the imaginative recu-
peration of two lost souls who, in the words of Usigli, "deserve better from
the imagination of Mexico and its people" (644).
   The author-narrator's exposition is couched for the most part in terms
of equity and desserts, needs and benefits, with recourse to emotive lan-
guage limited to the references to "terror" and "abandonment." Overall,
his discourse evokes a wholesome scenario of reparation that holds out
the prospect of a just and fair settlement for Maximilian and Carlota, and
the restitution of equilibrium to the secretly troubled national psyche. The
means to the projected end-namely, the general exercise of goodwill (un
poco de voluntad) -may be substantially different from the path envis-
aged by Carlota in an earlier chapter, but the motivation is ultimately the
same: "We need to forget what they did to us. They, the people of Mexico,
need to forget what we did to them" (492-93).
   Given the restrained tone of the narrative in the middle section of "The
Last of the Mexicans," the reader is taken somewhat by surprise when, at
the beginning of the penultimate paragraph, the author-narrator suddenly
exchanges the indicative for the optative mood and embarks on a flight of
wishful thinking:
   Ah, if only we could invent for Carlota a madness that would be
   never-ending and magnificent. [.. .] If only we could translate imagi-
   nation into the mad woman of the house, the mad woman of the
   castle, the mad woman of Bouchout and release her, insane and un-
   fettered, insane and with wings, to fly freely over the world and over
   history, truth and tenderness, eternity and sleep, hatred and untruth,
   love and agony. (644-45)

Introduced by the mildly exclamatory "Ah," the two sentences contained
in this quotation express the author-narrator's fundamental sympathy to-
ward "the mad woman of Bouchout" and his desire to effect an imagina-
tive compensation for the suffering endured by "poor Carlota."





132 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


   The concluding paragraph of the section under review sums up the
author-narrator's feelings about Maximilian, who it now becomes clear is
the referent of "The Last of the Mexicans." Matching symmetrically the
consideration just shown to Carlota, the paragraph begins simply and
directly: "If only it were possible, too, for us to invent a death for Maxi-
milian that would be more poetic and more imperial." It continues in a
familiar vein, "If we were just a little more compassionate toward the
Emperor and resolved not to let him die that way, abandoned on a hill
covered in dust and nopals, on a grey and barren hill with stones all
around." The desire to invent and the invitation to show compassion are
identical to the thoughts and sentiments expressed in connection with
Carlota. However, the material that follows projects the narrative toward
a very different horizon, where documented history is no longer merely a
pretext for imaginative re-creation (as it is throughout Carlota's mono-
logue) but a starting point for a complete and deliberate rewriting of re-
corded history.
   The author-narrator's revisionary thoughts evolve in two stages. He
first elaborates on his evocation of the circumstances of Maximilian's ex-
ecution and requests an unprecedented degree of identification from his
readers:

   If we were to kill him, instead, in the most beautiful and majestic
   square in Mexico. . . if we took his place for just one moment and
   put ourselves in his shoes and got inside his body and his head.

Having set the imaginary scene, the author-narrator then muses,

   And, fully aware that we are a Prince and a Sovereign who has al-
   ways shown good humor and courage and never lacked a certain
   style and flair, who has always loved formality and ostentatiousness,
   pomp and circumstance, and all kinds of spectacle, if only we could
   write, in Maximilian's own hand and for the guidance of any future
   monarchs who may lose their lives at the hands of their subjects, [. .
   .] an Etiquette for the Shooting of an Emperor. (645)

Combining serious intent with humor and satire, the conclusion to "The
Last of the Mexicans" envisages a full-blown alternative account of Maxi-
milian's death: a mortigraphy (to adopt a neologism coined by Julio Or-
tega in his brilliant 1992 study of El general en su laberinto), which re-
places the conventional truths of recorded history with a spectacle of
pomp and make-believe. What is more, the stuff of the author-narrator's
fantasy materializes immediately in the third and final section of chapter





Noticias del Imperio | 13 3


22, which conveys the novel's final assessment of Maximilian. The last
words of Noticias del Imperio may be reserved literally for Carlota in her
concluding monologue, but as far as the author-narrator is concerned, his
involvement in the narrative ends with the witty and poignant "Etiquette
for the Shooting of an Emperor."
   As a means of narrative closure, the ten-page "Etiquette" is noteworthy
for several reasons. It is formally appropriate because by this stage of
narrative proceedings the author-narrator has unburdened himself of his
hostility toward the institutions and ideologies of empire and can now
express regret, exclusive of sentimentality, over the fate of Maximilian.
Beyond that, it carves out a well-defined position for the author-narrator
in the debate, begun by previous commentators including Juan A. Mateos
(in El Cerro de las Campanas) and Rodolofo Usigli, concerning "the po-
litical and ethical responsibility of Maximilian and Carlota" (641). And,
most interestingly in the context of this study, the alternative mortigraphy
for Maximilian satisfies a moral imperative that Hayden White identifies
with all narrative history. On the specific subject of narrative closure,
White writes in Content of the Form: "The demand for closure in the
historical story is a demand [. . .] for moral meaning, a demand that se-
quences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements in a
moral drama." He asks, "Has any historical narrative ever been written
that was not informed not only by moral awareness but specifically by the
moral authority of the narrator?" (zi). Noticias bears out these authori-
tative observations. Not only is it a text informed by "a moralizing im-
pulse." It also assumes the form of a "moral drama," exploring discur-
sively the often disturbing implications of its subject, before offering a
narrative resolution to the moral dilemma of a nation.
   Hayden White's insights into the narrative representation of historical
issues allow the formulation of a final verdict on Noticias. They provide
confirmation, first, of the humanist ethics which, along with a post-
colonial sensibility, inform del Paso's narrative treatment of the tragic
episode of Maximilian and Carlota's imperial venture. Second, White's
insights help to define a non-postmodernist stratum in the construction of
the text, which is at odds with the dominant postmodernist design of
Noticias. Ten years after the composition of Palinuro de Mdxico, Noticias
again negotiates the competing demands of literary modernism and post-
modernism, this time tipping the balance more toward the latter than the
former. The internal tug-of-war between conflicting paradigms of thought
and feeling constitutes the specificity of Fernando del Paso's third novel;
from an extrinsic point of view, it also serves to distinguish Noticias from




134 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


other Mexican and Spanish American novels routinely ascribed to the
category of postmodern historiographic metafiction.

Contemporary Intertextual Relations

The overt dialogue conducted in the pages of Noticias del Imperio with a
multitude of historical and literary antecedents is the most conspicuous
sign of an ambitious and systematic intertextuality that scholars from
Juan Jose Barrientos to Ines Sienz have recognized as an important area of
study. Detailed comparison with a handful of novels composed and pub-
lished at more or less the same time as Noticias promises to shed more
light on the relationship of del Paso's novel to a contemporary field of
writing on historical subjects in Spanish America. The texts that offer
the most substantial grounds for comparison are Terra nostra and La
campaia by Carlos Fuentes, El general en su laberinto by Gabriel Garcia
Mirquez, and Madero, el otro by Ignacio Solares.
   In Terra nostra (1975) are to be found important prefigurations of the
central thematic patterns of Noticias. The figure of El Senor is a composite
entity representing the Habsburg dynasty whose pernicious influence is as
dominant a concern in Fuentes's novel as it is in that of del Paso. Terra
nostra may dwell, as Noticias does not, on the genetic burden of a "mul-
titude of murderous, cruel, incestuous, mad ghosts, mortally infected by
syphilis and likely to bleed to death from a simple scratch" (213) and hold
King Philip II (as the principal referent of El Senor) responsible for the
suppression of a tradition of cultural pluralism that had flourished in
some regions of medieval Spain. But both novels expose the Habsburg
obsession with centralized power and deplore the marginalization and
exploitation of overseas territories under Habsburg control (whether
these be Mexico or the Congo). Making allowances for differences of kind
in the imaginative treatment of political themes in Terra nostra and No-
ticias, the two texts present a common attitude vis-a-vis the abuses that
have been perpetrated by the imperial powers of "The Old World."
   Another substantial coincidence centers on the presence, in both nov-
els, of an elderly female character who embodies the discourse of unrea-
son. In Terra nostra, La Viajera is an archetypal mad wife and mother
modeled on Princess Juana la loca. The metonymic relationship of la Via-
jera to the Habsburg dynasty, her nomadism, and her final incarceration
and lament for the loss of a prince clearly anticipate the portrayal of
Carlota in Noticias:





Noticias del Imperio | 13 5


   I see myself, I dream myself, I touch myself. [.. .] I wander from one
   castle, one century, and one crypt to another, mother of all kings,
   wife of them all, surviving every one of them, until finally I am
   locked away in a castle surrounded by rainfall and misty pastures,
   crying for someone who has died in a sunny clime, another prince of
   our degenerate line. (Terra nostra 8o)

Beyond her attachment to a specific referent, la Viajera represents the
most celebrated mothers, wives, and widows of Spanish and Spanish
American history, whose suffering she perpetuates:

   I shall be what I was, Blanca, Leonor and Urraca, I shall be what I
   am, Joan, I shall be what I shall be, Isabel, Mariana and Carlota,
   forever close to the burial tombs of kings, forever a widow and dis-
   consolate. (613)

In her boundless grief and multiple identifications across time and space,
La Viaj era looks ahead to the extravagant narrative style and pathetic
desolation of Carlota in Noticias, as well as back to Fuentes's less exten-
sive treatment of the figure of the mad woman in the castle in "Tlacto-
catzine, del jardin de Flandes," first published in Los dias enmascarados
(1954).
   As the examples of El Senor and La Viajera show, Terra nostra draws on
an almost infinite array of historical data, which it then subjects to a
process of carnivalization. The creation of composite figures out of several
historical referents, and the translation from one ontological realm to
another of Cervantes, la Celestina, Don Juan, and others, exemplify an
aesthetic of carnivalization that permeates the narrative of Terra nostra
and is not reproduced in Noticias. Also missing from del Paso's novel are
writing in the fantastic mode, which Carlos Fuentes had cultivated in both
Terra nostra and "Tlactocatzine, del jardin de Flandes"; an apocalyptic
scenario, such as that of Polo Febo in Paris; a sustained narrative sequence
made up of material drawn from pre-Columbian mythology; and a variety
of other cultural materials ranging from religious heterodoxies and liter-
ary archetypes to Renaissance painting and aesthetics - all of which are
specific to the diegesis of Terra nostra.
   In respect of narrative architecture, Terra nostra differs substantially
from Noticias, whose mode of construction bears a somewhat closer re-
semblance to Fuentes's later novel, La campaia (1990). Basically mono-
linear, the narrative of La campana follows the political and personal





136 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


evolution of a fictional character, Baltasar Bustos, who from 18Io to 1182
plays an active role in the fight of the Spanish American republics for
independence. The story of "Balta" is embedded in a field of historical
data that is as tightly packed as that re-created in Noticias; tracing Balta's
passage from youthful idealism to a more sober maturity, it conforms to
the pattern of the Bildungsroman, which also subtends the narrative de-
voted to Maximilian in approximately half of the chapters of del Paso's
novel.
   Yet fundamental differences in the nature of the stories of Maximilian
and Balta limit the extent of any likeness between the two. Quite apart
from the lack of a historical referent for Balta, his story belongs for the
most part to the category of Romance, shading ultimately into Satire
through a mechanism that is explained by Hayden White in a discussion
about the limited compatibility of certain modes of emplotment. Insisting
that the "notion of a Romantic Satire represents a contradiction in terms,"
White contends, "I can legitimately imagine a Satirical Romance, but
what I would mean by that term would be a form of representation in-
tended to expose, from an Ironic standpoint, the fatuity of a Romantic
conception of the world" (Metahistory 9-10). Such an exposure takes place
in La campana's final chapters when, upon reaching Mexico, Balta unex-
pectedly comes face to face with Ofelia, whom he had idealized through-
out as a latter-day Dulcinea but who is now unmasked as a mother and
covert political agent. Through this twist in its tail, Balta's story slots into
a generic classification that is at odds with the tragic structure of Maxi-
milian's life as represented in Noticias. What is more, the ironic perspec-
tive that the narrative offers on Balta at the close of La campana reinforces
other features of Fuentes's novel, including an unrestrained intertextu-
ality, several kinds of parody, and forms of literary play correctly ascribed
by Seymour Menton to a postmodern aesthetic that is more consistent and
uniform than anything found in Noticias (163-85). In a telling contrast,
the consistency of the postmodern aesthetic of La campana throws into
further relief the conflict between competing paradigms that characterizes
Noticias.
   More substantial parallels with Noticias are found in El general en su
laberinto by Gabriel Garcia Mirquez, beginning with a common founda-
tion in tragedy. The mortigraphy of Bolivar in El general (1989) duplicates
that of Maximilian in the earlier Noticias (1987) and follows a similar
process of dissolution in the personal and political spheres of a historical
individual's life. The dual interest in the declining health and fortunes of
Bolivar and Maximilian, on the one hand, and the corruption of the politi-




Noticias del Imperio |1z37


cal systems that each sought idealistically to promote, on the other, evokes
a sense of inevitable failure and pathos that is common to the two novels,
being particularly marked in the concluding sections of each.
   Without underestimating the specificities and obvious differences be-
tween the lives, personalities, and political creeds of Bolivar and Maxi-
milian, it is also legitimate to register the use, made toward the end of the
1980s, of each of their stories to articulate an anti-imperialist philosophy
around considerations of ethics and geopolitics, and to effect a revisionist
reading of two front-line figures in the history of nineteenth-century Span-
ish America. In El general, the figure of Bolivar provides Garcia Mirquez
with an ideal vehicle for championing, yet again, the independence and
integrity of Spanish America vis-a-vis external sources of authority and
control. El Libertador's testy conversation with the opinionated French
opportunist, Diocles Atlantique, near the center point of the novel (1z28-
3 2) spells out an authorial creed publicized on countless occasions and
already glossed above in the section devoted to postcolonial themes in
Garcia Mirquez and del Paso's work.
   With regard to the revision of history, El general seeks to demystify the
subject of Bolivar and to fill a gap in the historiography of a period of
Bolivar's life that, according to Garcia Mirquez, is least documented
(271). One significant point of convergence with Noticias del Imperio is
the denunciation of inaccuracies, and indeed falsehoods, in the pictorial
representation of Bolivar (see p. 186 of the Garcia Mirquez text), which
echoes an identical observation about the distortion of history in paintings
representing the execution of Maximilian (see p. 587 of Noticias). An-
other is the frank admission of reliance on what Garcia Mirquez terms "a
torrent of documentary evidence that is contradictory and often dubious"
(272), in the pursuit of an elusive historical truth that might be compatible
with the requirements of fiction. To a certain extent, this coincidence,
which is, in any case, a trademark of every historical novel, marks a site of
difference between Noticias and El general. For, while in the former, con-
tradictory source material is cited continuously in the body of the text and
assessed in terms of its contribution to an ongoing historiographical in-
quiry, in the latter it forms part of the paratextual apparatus of El general,
with a consequent diminution of the metafictional dimension of the Mir-
quez text compared with the intertextual and metafictional carnival of
Noticias.10 Yet, all things considered, this differential reading of El general
probably diverges only in emphasis from that of Rafael E. Correa, for
whom "Garcia Mirquez's narrative style draws attention to the self-refer-
ential dimension [of El general], consciously articulating the principle of





138 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


the impossibility of one History, one View, one Truth" (336). Where
Correa perceives in El general symptoms of full-blown historiographic
metafiction and a postmodernist rejection of a single authoritative histori-
cal truth, I detect a more elaborate metafictional structure in Noticias and
emphasize a range of commonality between two new historical novels of
Spanish America in which a humanist sensibility coexists with a post-
modernist skepticism vis-a-vis the representation of history, and a shared
mode of emplotment generates two narratives that are very similar in
shape and tone."
   Another example of a tragic narrative is Madero, el otro (1989) by
Ignacio Solares, which offers the fullest and most wide-ranging parallel
with Noticias of those traced here. Narrated from a position of transcen-
dence and judgment that recalls the "t6" sections of La muerte de Artemio
Cruz, the novel plots the rise to the Mexican presidency of Francisco I.
Madero and his vertiginous descent into political calamity and death. A
combination of good moral intentions and political naivete proves as fatal
to Madero as it had to the equally ill-starred Maximilian of the earlier
novel, and results in a similar characterization of part tragic hero, part
misguided fool. The terms of the conflict embodied in Madero-forever
oscillating between pragmatism and other-worldliness - and the inevita-
bility of a tragic outcome both at the personal level and in the public
affairs of the nation, are spelled out at the beginning of Madero by a
narrator who calls the dead president to book:

   Do you remember when you wrote (or was it something they [the
   spirits] dictated to you?): "This world is nothing but the hazy blue-
   print of another world to come"? You were so caught up in that
   other world that you forgot about this one with its fragile founda-
   tions, its constraints, its stratagems, and its chicanery. Perhaps it is
   true that your feelings, your religious nature, your dreams allied you
   with the makers of the antidotes, rather than with those who pro-
   duce the poisons. But it is no less true that by the end, there was no
   going back: your sacrifice alone would counteract the poison that
   was now spreading through everything, and if Huerta didn't kill you
   then Zapata or Carranza would, or, if you held out long enough,
   then you would die at the hands of Obregon and, if that were to
   happen, what picture would you leave behind of your sorry revolu-
   tion? (16)

Reminiscent of the criticisms of Maximilian voiced by Carlota in sections
of Noticias del Imperio, this and other passages in Solares's novel make no





Noticias del Imperio |1z39


allowances for Madero's reputation as a decent, even saintly man as they
subject him to cross-examination and rebuke.
   Depiction as a sacrificial Christ figure is a key element in Madero's
characterization and one that compares closely with the portrayal of
Maximilian in Noticias. A sense of being destined to fulfill a messianic role
culminating in inevitable martyrdom inspires Solares's Madero and is re-
flected in the diegetic presentation of the president throughout the narra-
tive. Perhaps less ironic and self-aware than del Paso's handling of the
motif, the Christological symbolism of Madero illustrates a common in-
terest in the popular imaging of victim figures (including those who style
themselves as such) in the terms of a dominant cultural archetype.
   An aspect of the Christ analogy that possesses particular significance
is the motif of shouldering a burden of guilt like Christ on the road to
Golgotha. Already present in the first narrative segment of Madero (8-9),
this motif fills out Madero's psychological profile and, beyond that, acts as
a pointer to the ethical impulse behind Solares's investigation of the role
and legacy of Madero in twentieth-century Mexican history. For, as in del
Paso's history of Maximilian, Solares's narrative combines detailed char-
acter study of a historical individual with an examination of the collective
conscience of a society troubled by its involvement in a tragic sequence of
events. The reproduction, in the penultimate segment of Madero, of a
speech delivered by Francisco Villa at Madero's grave acknowledging "the
negative assistance or the culpability of his friends, none of whom is com-
pletely innocent" (245), highlights the book's concern with themes of
morality and underlines its potential function as a vehicle for easing the
guilt-stricken conscience of a community.
   One final overlap between Madero, el otro and Noticias resides in the
two books' express adherence to the formula-attributed to Borges-of
"the subordination of historical exactitude to what is symbolically true"
(Noticias 641; Madero 248). Like del Paso before him, Solares seeks to
solve problems arising from "contradictions contained in the historical
documentation" (249) by conjuring up an air of authenticity around
events and, where necessary, resorting to legerdemain: a touch of inven-
tion here, a doctored attribution there, and the resulting version of events
may turn out to be more verisimilar than a factually accurate account. As
the author explains in a "Note" that reads like an epilogue to Madero,
"After all, it is the halo surrounding events, more than the events them-
selves, that really matters" (250). This doctrine of creative freedom marks
the closeness of the relationship between Solares's novel and that of del
Paso. Indeed, from a comparative perspective, Noticias reveals itself quite





140 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso

emphatically to be a precursor text of Madero and a paradigm for writing
on historical subjects in Mexican fiction and elsewhere.12 On a general
level, the multiple connections of Noticias with a range of texts considered
here bears witness both to the complex operations of intertextuality and
to the singularity of del Paso's novel in the contexts of national and con-
tinental Spanish American fiction written during the final quarter of the
twentieth century.










5


Linda 67

The Homeland Strikes Back

   Postmodernism ought never to be viewed as a homogeneous
   phenomenon, but rather as one in which political contestation
   is central.
   Cornel West



Linda 67 is a unique event in del Paso's narrative production. A crime
novel set, for the most part, in the United States, it breaks with the mod-
ernist paradigm of both Jose Trigo and Palinuro de Mexico and also with
the mixed aesthetic of Noticias del Imperio. The modal variety cultivated
with virtuoso flamboyance in the three preceding novels is replaced in
Linda 67 by a strict adherence to the conventions of a single genre. The
grand proportions and totalizing parameters of Josd Trigo, Palinuro de
Mdxico, and Noticias del Imperio are scaled down to fewer than four
hundred pages, two-thirds the average length of the earlier novels. The
high-minded humanist message of each of the three forerunners is also
watered down in Linda 67, where it acquires the flimsy consistency of a
murderer's trite realization of his own betrayal of the values of love,
friendship, and freedom. In addition, the privileged, all-embracing mind
frames of madrecita Buenaventura, Grandfather Francisco, and Carlota
are recast, for the duration of a single chapter, in the stream of conscious-
ness, overflowing with insults, threats, and obscenities, of a vulgar social
pariah who intervenes in the plot as the protagonist's blackmailer and
nemesis.
   These and other differences notwithstanding, there are a number of
continuities with the previous works, ranging from the satire of consum-
erism, the nostalgic re-creation of a relationship of maternal and filial
devotion, and some highly charged erotic writing, all of which are reprised
from Palinuro de Mexico, to the display of encyclopedic knowledge (most
notably, about the cities of San Francisco and Berne) and exhaustive lists





142 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


(of consumer goods and details of interior decor, among other things)
which are typical of del Paso's prose style in general. In particular, the
author draws heavily on his lifetime experiences in milieux such as the
world of advertising, the diplomatic service, and numerous cities in Eu-
rope and the Americas -including Paris, where he underwent heart sur-
gery in 1990-to fashion a novel that in certain respects is a roman-a- clef.
   At the center of the thematic design of Linda 67 are the themes of
nationality and personal identity and a critique of North American social
mores. Built in part around a contrast with the values and attitudes of
Mexican society, that critique articulates a thesis reminiscent of Los pasos
perdidos by Carpentier -an author much admired by Fernando del Paso.1
The echoes of Carpentier in turn illustrate a wider strategy of textual
recycling of material derived from multiple sources; quotations from
popular as well as highbrow culture combine with an interest in the me-
chanics of playacting and performance to produce what is arguably the
most conspicuously intertextual and postmodernist novel in del Paso's
output.

"What's in a Name?" Linda 67, the Plot, the Characters,
and the Subject of Nationality

Dave Sorensen works as an executive for an advertising agency in San
Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Linda. She is the only daughter of
Samuel Lagrange, a millionaire from Texas, who refuses to accept
Sorensen as his son-in-law. Disillusioned with their marriage, Linda has
filed for divorce. Dave has a Mexican lover, an air hostess by the name of
Olivia. Full of hatred for Linda, by whom he feels belittled and cheated,
Dave conceives a plan to murder her and collect a ransom of $115 million.
He carries out the murder on the night of Friday, 14 April 1995. However,
he is seen pushing his wife's blue Daimler, registration "Linda 67" in com-
memoration of the year of her birth, over a cliff, where it sinks beneath the
water with Linda's unconscious body trapped inside. The witness, an ag-
ing hippie who fought in Vietnam, threatens to tell the police all he knows
unless Dave secures the ransom and passes it on to him. Dave follows the
blackmailer's instructions and, in the process of handing over the money,
receives a beating that lands him in hospital.
   Neither the detective in charge of the case nor Linda's father believes
in Dave's innocence. While Inspector Galvez pursues his investigations,
Samuel Lagrange masterminds a ruse involving an invitation to Dave to
travel to Berne where he is offered a lucrative job promoting a new Swiss





Linda 67 |1'43


watch. The offer, of course, is phony and sets Dave up as the recipient of
the sum of $115 million, which is transferred into an account that he has
opened, in his own name, in San Francisco. When Linda's body and car are
discovered, Galvez can proceed to pin the murder on Dave: he has a body,
a motive, and a suspect in possession of a sum of money identical to the
ransom. In addition, there is the original set of ignition keys to Linda's
Daimler, which, by an oversight, Dave had returned to one of the pockets
of the jacket he wore on the night of the murder. Incriminated by his
possession of them, Dave is remanded to a prison cell, where he repeatedly
counts his losses and contemplates the choice that he will shortly have to
make, between going to the electric chair or being given a lethal injection.
   On this summary, Linda 67 conforms to the type of the crime novel in
many essential respects. The plot of Linda 67 is built around a murder that
is planned and executed with meticulous care; the reader has access to the
criminal's mind and is presented, furthermore, with the details of a grue-
some murder. In Dave Sorensen, del Paso creates an interesting criminal
who pits his wits against a skilled detective and is ultimately incriminated
by one telling piece of evidence. Inspector Galvez is a methodical detective
whose character combines certain foibles (including an addiction to sugar)
with a veneer of worldliness and sophistication: his knowledge of fine arts
puts him in the same class as Tom Ripley, the detective in the series created
by Patricia Highsmith, and Inspector Morse, the culture-snob created by
Colin Dexter. This spotlight on the detective is sharpened by a reference to
Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock that Galvez makes in the course of
a conversation with Sargeant Kirby, whom he playfully styles as Watson to
his own Bay Area Holmes (345). However, it cannot be denied that Galvez
radiates none of the aura of archetype surrounding Holmes, Ripley, or
Hector Belascoarin Shayne, the protagonist of a series of novels by del
Paso's contemporary on the Mexican literary scene, Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Galvez fulfils the narrative requirements of his role but lacks the trade-
mark quirkiness of the more celebrated examples of his kind. Where he
makes an important contribution to Linda 67 is in connection with the
themes of nationality and personal identity, which are underscored in his
very first appearance in the narrative.
   Galvez only appears in twelve of the twenty-seven chapters of Linda
67. When he arrives in the second chapter of the second part of the book,
Dave Sorensen remarks, "I assume you speak Spanish." Galvez replies,
"No, my family first arrived here more than a hundred years ago. I am a
North American citizen through and through" (zo). Galvez's retort chal-
lenges conventional assumptions linking names to nationality and citizen-





144 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


ship. For Sorensen, the name Galvez automatically implies the categories
of "Hispanic" and "Spanish-speaking," with further inferences of low
socioeconomic status generally granted to Hispanics in the United States
over the last 1 5o years. For Galvez, the connotations of his name are
eclipsed, along with any feeling of loyalty to the Spanish language, by the
benefits of U.S. citizenship and by his sense of belonging to the greater
sociopolitical entity that is the United States of America.
   While at one level Galvez's opening exchange with Sorensen serves
merely to reiterate the standard ideological perception of the United States
as a melting pot/patchwork quilt/site of assimilation of peoples of differ-
ent linguistic and ethnic origins, at another level it points up a noteworthy
feature of Linda 67, which is the surface inconsistency between the names
and identities of its leading players. Besides Inspector Galvez, Linda La-
grange combines a French-sounding surname with a Christian name origi-
nating in the Spanish language, which, while matching its bearer's physical
appearance, is at odds with her reluctance to engage fully with things
Mexican, as is signaled by her failure ever to get close to, let alone cross,
the United States-Mexican border, on her regular weekend drives with
Dave "Down Mexico Way" (33, 66). It is a function of the novel's moral
economy that Linda should represent the archetypal gringa - a term Dave,
in fact, uses to describe her to her face (24); in that context, her surname
reveals its minimally coded significance as a transposition of all but one of
the letters of the phrase "la gringa" > "la grange."
   The conversation in which Dave and Linda trade names is reported in
chapter z of Linda 67, where it forms part of a more extended narrative
inquiry into the history of the Sorensen family after 1 8oo. That is the date
of birth, in Denmark, of Dave's great-great-grandfather, Isaias, who
would emigrate to Mexico in the 184os and found a family business based
on the cultivation of coffee, in Coatepec in the state of Veracruz. Thereaf-
ter, the family tree extended through another Isaias to his sons, David
Isaias and Salomon, and on to David "Papa" Sorensen, Dave's father.
Contrary to Linda's impertinent and openly racist comment about their
names, none of Dave's forefathers had any connection with Judaism:
"They observed a Protestant tradition; [Dave's] great-great-grandmother
was a devoted reader of the Holy Bible and her favorite prophet was
Isaiah. It goes without saying that the Sorensens of Mexico were Catholic,
from the moment of great-great-grandfather Isaias's conversion." This
line of argument allows Dave to contradict Linda, insisting "So, that
makes me Mexican, just as you are a gringa [. . .] in spite of the fact that
your surname is French" (24). However, she had already called into ques-





Linda 67 |1145


tion his professions of Mexican identity ("You, Mexican? With that Dan-
ish surname, that blond hair and those green eyes: Come on.. ."), and the
narrative now confirms that "Dave knew very well that the only Mexican
thing about him was his second surname, Armendiriz, which had be-
longed to his mother" (24). Observing that the circumstances of his birth
(in London) and successive periods of residence with his parents in Ot-
tawa, Paris, and San Francisco entitled him to neither English, Canadian,
French, nor American nationality, the narrative concludes, "To be Mexi-
can was the only alternative available to him, but that was something that
didn't quite fit, and was alien to him" (25). For all his fascination and
affinity with Mexico-its food, landscape, history, architecture, and so
on -Dave remains an outsider to the nation, stuck in the role of "a curious
tourist, enchanted by what he saw, but with no feeling that any of it be-
longed to him" (z6).
   This characterization depicts Dave as a man without a "patria chica,"
in the terms of del Paso's R6mulo Gallegos Prize acceptance speech of
1982. Furthermore, it identifies him as a paradigm of modern American
and western mankind: the inheritor of both Northern Protestant and
Hispano-Catholic traditions in the Americas, and a transnational who is
equally at home, both literally and figuratively, in San Francisco and Cuer-
navaca, and yet condemned to feel ddracind wherever he goes. Admittedly,
his cosmopolitan background and sophisticated manners open up real
professional and social opportunities for him in the United States and,
briefly, Switzerland, but he remains, ultimately, an outsider in both of
those countries and in the continents of which they form part.

Consumerism, the Malvinas, and the State of the American Nation

At the same time as they point up themes of nationality and cultural dis-
affiliation, Dave Sorensen's profile and life serve as vehicles for a sustained
critique of consumerism, imperialism, and relations between Mexico and
the United States. This dimension of Linda 67 merits separate treatment,
in a section devoted to these three, sometimes converging focuses of nar-
rative concern.
   Minutely detailed and artfully slanted toward satire, the depiction of
the world of advertising in Linda 67 owes much to del Paso's early adult
experience of that profession (to which he had already held up a distorting
mirror in Palinuro de Mdxico) and to an acute sense of the many ills caused
by consumerism in modern-day western society. The decision to situate
the characters of Linda 67 within the milieu of advertising and associated





146 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


circles of affluence provides ample opportunity to portray the material-
ism, opportunism, and cynicism that motivate the consumer industry at its
worst. An early image of Dave Sorensen reviewing the contents of his
wardrobe sets the tone for much of what is to follow. Filling the fourth
paragraph of the novel, it conveys his enthrallment with the idea of posses-
sion (the narrative registers the fact that Dave owns no fewer than 140
neckties) and his susceptibility to extreme forms of narcissism comparable
to that portrayed quite brilliantly on the screen by Richard Gere, in his
role as a lavishly provided, obsessively self-regarding American gigolo in
Paul Schrader's film of 1979.
   At the agency where he works with Bob Morrison and other employees,
Dave Sorensen is doubly immersed in consumerism, first, as a connoisseur
of goods and market operations that it is his job to research thoroughly,
and then, as the inventor of brand names and slogans used in the promo-
tion of new products. In the narrative of Linda 67, Sorensen plays a key
role in the development of a new line of cosmetics aimed at Hispanic
women living in California and Texas, but also targeted at the American
female population in general. Named "Olivia" after Dave's Mexican girl-
friend, the product, along with the steamy television commercial designed
to promote it, appeals to and reinforces an ideology of surface appear-
ances that holds beauty to be skin deep. Susceptible audiences are hooked
by the manipulative strategies of an industry which plays on their sexual
desires through the means of a slogan that promises personal renewal and
unprecedented erotic fulfilment: "Olivia, a different way of being . . . a
different way of loving" (253). The visual narrative of the commercial
simulates a sexual encounter, filmed in black and white, between a man
"whose skin is white," and "a woman with light brown skin" whose
crimson nail varnish, in the "Olivia" range, is the only splash of colour in
the thirty-second long advertisement. Issues of color and social integration
are hinted at in this scenario, which ignores black America but suggests
the possibility of advancement for Hispanic women who "sink their
claws" into the male representatives of white American society (252). A
spoof of countless commercials that are shown every day on television
stations throughout the industrialized world, this one expresses its
author's profound disquiet about consumerism, advertising, and the stul-
tification of audiences in an era of mass media visual communication.
   Del Paso's anti-imperialist convictions are also aired in Linda 67 in
terms that hark back both to the previous novel, Noticias del Imperio, and
to the text of "Mi patria chica, mi patria grande." Chapter 5 evokes
Dave's childhood friendship with Chuck O'Brien, the son of the Irish





Linda 67 |1147


ambassador in Paris, and registers the telling, if unsurprising, observation
that Ambassador O'Brien "would never have thought of enrolling his son
at the Colegio Britinico," so great was his hatred of the English: "The
mere idea that his son could be taken for a subject of Her Royal Highness
or that he should acquire even a trace of the pretentious, arrogant accent
of the inhabitants of Mayfair or the graduates of Eton College was abso-
lutely intolerable to him" (56). Bearing in mind del Paso's admiration of
James Joyce, it is not difficult to detect here an echo of Joyce's hostility to
Anglo-Saxon imperial rule, as expressed in the pages of Ulysses and else-
where, or to infer sympathy with Irish animosity toward English attitudes.
   Del Paso's years of residence in London afforded him the dubious privi-
lege of witnessing the British government's conduct, in the spring of 1982,
of a latter-day act of imperialist aggression overseas: the war against Ar-
gentine forces contesting possession of the Falkland Islands/Malvinas in
the south Atlantic. The Malvinas episode is mentioned three times in
Linda 67, as a temporal marker of Dave's youth and as a memory that
invades his stream of consciousness as he wanders through the streets of
San Francisco a few hours after murdering Linda. In that setting, he re-
members his father's and others' indignation at the English sinking of the
Belgrano battleship and their "cries of jubilation when, the following day,
the Argentinians sank the Sheffield" (194). Evoking two of the most dra-
matic episodes of the conflict, the narrative furnishes a Spanish American
perspective of events that is intended to counter Anglocentric versions of
the Falklands War. Significantly, the text is not interested in warmonger-
ing. Rather, it laments a collective descent into irrationality ("Everybody
had lost their reason," p. 194) on both sides of the conflict, and depicts the
war as a historical nightmare which is still capable of haunting Dave, in
the course of a drunken periplus, more than a decade after the event.
   The connections established in the imperialist mind-set between geo-
politics, race, and civilized values are clearly alluded to in Linda 67. A
confrontation between Dave Sorensen and playboy Jimmy Harris over the
latter's affair with Linda gives rise to the archetypal claim of the superior-
ity of Anglo attitudes over Latin immaturity and hot-headedness: "I never
imagined you'd react this way," Harris tells Dave. "Of course, that's very
Latin. What else could be expected from a Mexican? We Anglos are more
civilized, you know. I'm not afraid of a scandal, Dave, and I think that's all
there is to say" (161). Arrogant and racist, Harris's words require no
elaboration: readers know exactly how to respond to the novel's revisiting
of ideological territory last explored in Noticias del Imperio and, contem-
poraneously, in Discurso desde la marginaci6n y la barbarie-the 1988





148 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


essay by Leopoldo Zea which, together with del Paso's work, gave a
pointed reformulation to the civilizacidn/barbarie topos at a key moment
in Latin American intellectual history.
   Racist attitudes and stereotypes circulate freely around Jimmy Harris
and form part of a larger critique of social behavior in the United States.
Taking northern California as its primary setting, Linda 67 exploits a
series of references and metonymies to present a picture of the nation as a
whole. Expanding on the repertoire of unflattering characteristics already
noted, the novel portrays the United States as, essentially, a contemporary
dystopia. Violence, urban poverty, and social deprivation are just three of
the nation's social ills, festering in a climate of perversions and distorted
appetites that lead Dave's friend, Chuck, to conclude, "The USA was be-
coming a country of monsters. Of every race and age: anglos, mulatos,
chicanos, men and women, adolescents, who weighed 1z2o, 1150, 200 ki-
los" (42). This symbolic depiction of a bloated body politic is reinforced
by a reference to AIDS (94) and by the evocation of a pervasive nausea that
reaches fever pitch when Dave vomits during his periplus through the
streets of San Francisco.
   Beyond the physical symptoms of distemper, the novel uncovers deep-
seated flaws in the moral and psychological constitution of the nation.
Repeatedly and with clinical intent, it recalls a number of horrible causes
cdlebres that have etched themselves into the popular consciousness of the
American people. They include the Oklahoma bombings carried out by
Timothy McVeigh in April 1995; the trial of O. J. Simpson for the murder
of Nicole Brown, which is mentioned three times in the narrative; a mul-
tiple murder committed in Novato, California, by a man from Laos "who
pumped more than forty bullets into the bodies of his ex-girlfriend, her
father and son in the town of Novato" ( 136); and, perhaps most disturb-
ing of all, the case of a mother from South Carolina "who had plunged her
car with her two small kids inside into the depths of John D. Long lake"
(ioo). Considered "a horrendous crime" by Dave (ioo), the actions of
Susan Smith haunt the narrative of Linda 67, which returns to them on no
fewer than four occasions. For the blackmailer who saw action in Viet-
nam, they exemplify a perversion of natural instinct (he calls Susan Smith
"la desnaturalizada," p. z58); diegetically, her actions are figured as a
descent into dark and unfathomable depths; overall, they and the other
criminal incidents that are reprised from contemporary U.S. news are or-
chestrated to indicate profound tears in the moral and mental fabric of the
nation.





Linda 67 |1149


   A contrast with Mexico illuminates the severity of this dystopian vision
of life in the United States. Against the hell of San Francisco (as perceived
by Dave when he is drunk, in chapter 115), Cuernavaca is pictured as Para-
dise. An early section of the narrative tells of Papi Sorensen's acquisition
of a plot of land on which to build his family a home, and describes the
setting thus:
   The fertility of the soil in Cuernavaca made it possible for the newly
   planted garden quickly to become a paradise. The flamboyanes grew
   in their new setting and were soon covered in orange flowers the
   color of fire. The bougainvilleas spread all over the walls, and every
   day they carpeted the grass and the watery surface of the swimming
   pool with red, purple, and white petals. Other climbing plants pro-
   duced flowers that were sky-blue, shaped like bells. (30)

In its variety and profusion, the plant life thus described is a colorful
illustration of the tropical fecundity that Julio Ortega, after Sarduy, has
theorized as a trope of American writing (Ortega, "Para una teoria del
texto latinoamericano"). In context, the passage of description functions
additionally to promote "natural" values over and against the prolifera-
tion of material wealth in North American society.
   The one-sidedness of the contrast drawn in Linda 67 is plain to see,
despite Olivia's reminder that Mexico is a country where corruption is
endemic (149), kidnappings occur routinely (1z2), and the Indians of
Chiapas remain mobilized against the forces of the state (136). Objective
standards hardly apply at all in the ideologized atmosphere of the novel,
which displays the hallmarks of contrivance associated with a thesis-
novel. One such feature is the black-and-white characterization of Linda
and Olivia. In line with its somber vision of life in the United States, Linda
67 projects the nation's negativity onto Linda Lagrange, while investing
Olivia with a positive set of characteristics and associations.
   Linda is presented from the start as the personification of American
materialism, the heiress to a millionaire's fortune amassed from the sale of
plastics. Over the course of her relationship with Dave, she develops an
obsession with domestic cleanliness and personal hygiene that signifies her
total alienation from nature. The cans of air freshener that she instructs
her domestics to use around the house produce "crude imitations of natu-
ral aromas" (54); her obsession with "taking a bath, not only before but
also after making love, and with covering her body in soap repeatedly each
time she had a bath" (1o2) is registered with narrative disapproval. In




150 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


another sphere, Linda personifies the culture of denial, which, among
other things, prohibits smoking and the consumption of meat and is sus-
picious of any foodstuffs that might be high in cholesterol (76).
   For her part, Olivia represents the strict antithesis of Linda's moral and
instinctual sterility. As detailed in chapters 12 and 23, she displays sincer-
ity, loyalty, scruples, and an attitude of trust in her relationship with Dave,
who is privileged to have access to her sexual intimacy. The narrative
records Olivia's coyness at undressing in the light, her delicate speech and
gestures during lovemaking, and her perfect attunement to her own and
Dave's erotic desires. Time after time, all of this is contrasted with the
mechanical regime and vulgarity of sex with Linda, who insists on Dave's
taking a shower, brushing his teeth, applying deodorant to his armpits,
and putting on a condom before making love to her (1154). A significant
detail in the presentation of Olivia is the likening of her sex to Paradise in
the lush humidity of the garden at Cuernavaca; rooted in an archetypal
store of celebratory images, Olivia thereby functions as a metonym of
Mexico and, beyond that, of tropical America as a whole.
   Together, Linda and Olivia help to flesh out the depiction of the United
States and Mexico that is found in Linda 67. Patently, they belong to the
realm not of verisimilitude but of stereotype, as exemplified in the novels
of, say, D. H. Lawrence and any number of classic Hollywood films that
revolved around the pairing of a "good girl" with a "bad girl." In the
Spanish American literary tradition, Linda and Olivia descend most di-
rectly from Mouche and Rosario in Los pasos perdidos by Alejo Car-
pentier, which bears an unmistakeable family resemblance to the narrative
of Linda 67.

Intertextual Recycling, the NoirAesthetic,
and the Author as Parasite and Nemesis

Los pasos perdidos lies barely concealed beneath the surface of Linda 67,
like one of the constituent layers of a palimpsest. The narrative of Linda
67 effectively refashions Carpentier's exploration of authentic American
identity and the disorientation of twentieth-century western man, through
the vehicle of a male protagonist who lacks a specific national identity and
is burdened by the trappings of "civilized" life. Seen through the prism of
Los pasos perdidos, Dave Sorensen can be likened both to Soren Kier-
kegaard and to another Danish writer, Villy Sorensen, who was the author
of modernist short stories and philosophical works influenced by German
Existentialism; less obviously versed in philosophical themes than his





Linda 67 |1151


Carpenterian predecessor, Dave Sorensen nevertheless replicates some of
his Sartrean concerns, and confronts a similar ethical dilemma that is
embodied in two female characters: Linda/Mouche, representing artifice,
theatricality, and perverted instinct, and Olivia/Rosario, representing an
idealized prelapsarian state of nature grounded in the terra firma of
America.
   On top of these coincidences of narrative detail, Linda 67 replicates the
schematic design and rhetorical overload of Los pasos perdidos. The alle-
gorical structure and elaborate system of references to landmarks of west-
ern culture that obtrude like scaffolding around the narrative of Los pasos
perdidos have their equivalents, in Linda 67, in a conspicuous and highly
self-conscious practice of intertextual reference and pastiche. Los pasos
perdidos certainly occupies a privileged position in the textual world of
Linda 67, but it shares that space with countless other precursors ranging
from the familiar lyrics of popular music (for example, "Down Mexico
Way" sung by Patsy Cline, which provides the title for chapter 3), to the
titles of "serious" works of literature (chapter z takes the heading of "Bajo
el Volcin" from the novel by Malcolm Lowry), and famous scenes and
characters in film (for example, the Eddie Murphy character in Coming to
America, mentioned on p. 271). In particular, Linda 67 cites well-known
authors and works of crime and detective fiction, including Conan Doyle,
Rex Stout, Patricia Highsmith, Dashiell Hammett and the writing of The
Maltese Falcon, and the composite model of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo
Bioy Casares, which inspires Samuel Lagrange's intricate and "providen-
tial" plot to entrap Sorensen (364).
   The frank and often ironic tone of many of the references to detective
fiction indicates a clear wish to write a pastiche of that mode, which com-
prises a finite stock of narrative formulae reworked constantly in litera-
ture and film.2 This helps to explain some of the cliches that pepper the
prose of Linda 67 and the staginess and predictability of much of the
action. (The sequence which narrates Dave and Olivia's idyllic weekend
in Cuernavaca is paradigmatic in this respect.) Along with the overt in-
tertextuality of Linda 67, the unmistakeable familiarity of its narrative
schema and character types aligns it quite clearly with the aesthetic of
postmodernism, as described by Fredric Jameson ("Postmodernism") and
Jean Franco ("Pastiche"), among others.
   For the majority of its commentators, the art of postmodern pastiche
has the potential for conveying criticism of the social and political status
quo. That potential is evidenced in the use that Linda 67 makes of a type
of crime fiction that combines psychological analysis with features of noir





152 | The Novels of Fernando del Paso


fiction (and film) that are applicable to contemporary urban life generally.
Notwithstanding the existence of a vibrant tradition of noir fiction in
Mexico and other parts of Spanish America,3 Linda 67 turns to North
American examples such as Dashiell Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, to
elaborate a dystopian vision of the darker sides of life in the United States.
   Of all the novels written by Highsmith, Those Who Walk Away (1967)
offers the closest fit with the narrative of Linda 67. Set in Venice, it con-
jures up an asphyxiating world of guilt, suspicion, bitterness, and vio-
lence, at the center of which are Ray Garrett and his vengeful father-in-
law, Ed Coleman. Coleman hates Garrett because he failed to prevent his
young wife, Peggy, from committing suicide. As in Linda 67, therefore, an
older man holds his son-in-law responsible for the death of his only child.
The extent of Coleman's loss is expressed in the following pathos-laden
paragraph:
   He might, of course, marry and have another child-a son or an-
   other daughter, it didn't matter. Coleman admitted that he was as
   paternal as any mother was ever maternal. But a daughter, for in-
   stance, would never be another Peggy. And there simply wasn't time
   any longer to watch her grow up. No, never, never would there be
   anything for him like Peggy. (1o1)

For his part, Garrett carries a burden of guilt that makes him exceptionally
vulnerable to Coleman's repeated assaults; a very different character from
Dave Sorensen except when Sorensen is drunk, he feels a strange and
constant need to explain himself to Coleman, until Coleman makes a sec-
ond attempt on his life. Throughout the narrative, Garrett is the quarry of
Coleman, in much the same way that Dave is tracked, and then cunningly
tricked by old man Lagrange in the second part of Linda 67. Two psycho-
logical crutches support Garrett through his ordeal: a chamber maid
named Elisabetta who works near the pension where he goes into tempo-
rary hiding, and the memory of his father. Elisabetta provides consolation
for the grief caused by Peggy's death, while the memory of his father and
certain childhood recollections to do with the family home are important
points of reference for the adult Ray Garrett. Both elements reappear in
Linda 67, where they help to define the situation and psychology of Dave
Sorensen.
   A more precise debt to noir traditions is the figure of the Vietnam vet-
eran who highjacks Dave's plan for extracting a ransom from Linda's
millionaire father. A familiar type from countless North American films





Linda 67 |1'53


and literary narratives of the last thirty years, the Vietnam vet typically
carries the scars of his country's ill-judged and poorly rewarded involve-
ment in Southeast Asia on his body (which is the case of the Tom Cruise
character, Ron Kovic, in Born on the Fourth of July, 1990) or in his psyche
(see the characters of Travis Bickle and Megs Megessey played by Robert
de Niro in Taxi Driver, 1976, and Jacknife, 1989). Like his eponymous
French counterpart in Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (1970), he embodies
a capacity for murderous violence, unleashed by war, that he simply can-
not control.
   The Vietnam veteran of Linda 67 is an example of the social sickness
and maladjustment of his type. "Alcoholic and addicted to drugs" (z56),
he had found a job in a hospital from which he would eventually be fired
"for lack of hygiene" (365), and he now lives as a social pariah and out-
law. (He mentions a history of difficulties with the police.) His claim that
"I used to swim amongst the crocodiles in the rivers of the Vietcong" (259)
conveys a cunning and predatory nature that manifests itself in the action
of Linda 67. The menace and brutality that he inflicts on Dave Sorensen,
and the string of obscenities that he mouths at both Dave and Samuel
Lagrange, complete the profile of a familiar type used in Linda 67 to give
the lie to utopian views of the United States as a nation representing the
acme of civilization.
   As well as reinforcing the text's dystopian vision of U.S. society, the
character of the Vietnam veteran reflects ironically on the role of the au-
thor in and of Linda 67. Quite outrageously, he compares himself with the
writer, whom he claims to outstrip in the inventiveness of his imagination,
proudly boasting, "I have an imagination that you'd love to have your-
self" (255). A facility for telling lies recalls the association of Carlota with
the (re)generative powers of fiction in Noticias del Imperio, and culmi-
nates in the bragging pretense of "I, who am a poet and a novelist" (z65),
which rebounds on the (implied and real) author in several ways. First, the
foul-mouthed degenerate who claims artistic status personifies the ambi-
ence and focus of noir writing, which is concerned with plumbing the
depths of criminal instinct and disturbed psychological states.4 In respect
of his dark imagination and skill in plotting, the Vietnam veteran is more
than the equal of the author of Linda 67. Second, the veteran's opportu-
nistic blackmailing of Dave Sorensen for his own effortless gain is a para-
sitical ploy that mirrors the modus operandi of the literary author who
feeds off other writers' clever schemes and material. Imitation of heteroge-
neous styles and experimentation with a genre like the novela negra add





154 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


up to a strategy of mimicry and pastiche in which the figure of the author
is consigned to the rank of a technician of textual rearrangement and a
(mere) agent of intertextuality.
   The veteran's role as nemesis to Dave Sorensen adds a final ironic detail
to the allegory of authorship that is outlined in Linda 67. At a structural
level of analysis, the veteran fulfills the needs of the plot by satisfying
the requirement that Dave Sorensen should not ultimately profit from his
immoral actions. Through sustained verbal and physical abuse, the former
soldier metes out a punishment that helps to placate the reader who is
appalled by murder, deceit, and immorality. Yet this too involves the
veteran's subordination to a narrative formula, ultimately confirming his
and the novel's character as derivative, parodic, and lacking the moral
depth that had made an earlier text such as Palinuro de Mdxico devas-
tatingly effective as political satire and truly poignant as a lament for lost
youth. Instead, the veteran of Linda 67 makes sense, partly as an emblem
of the sociopathology of the nation and, more comprehensively, as an
allegory of the intertextual impulse that feeds Fernando del Paso's fic-
tional writings from Josd Trigo through to Linda 67, where it attains an
unprecedented level of prominence and reflexivity.










Conclusion


   Any text is an intertext; other texts are present in it, at varying
   levels, in more or less recognisable forms: the texts of the previ-
   ous and surrounding culture. Any text is a new tissue of past ci-
   tations. Bits of codes, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of
   social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed
   within it.
   Roland Barthes, "Theory of the Text"



The above quotation from a seminal essay by Barthes will inevitably reso-
nate with the reader of Linda 67: Historia de un crimen, offering a ratio-
nale for the presence in del Paso's text of a heterogeneous body of material
ranging from snippets of music, newspaper headlines, and titles of well-
known literary works, to standard narrative formulae and preexisting
generic templates adapted from works by Alejo Carpentier and Patricia
Highsmith, among others. If a promiscuous intertextuality is symptomatic
of postmodernism, then Linda 67 can be assigned without further ado to
that aesthetic category, in line and along with the epigraph from "Theory
of the Text" that heads these concluding remarks.
   In relation to del Paso's fictional output as a whole, Linda 67 accom-
modates the same intertextual impulse that we have seen at work in Jose
Trigo, Palinuro de Mdxico, and Noticias del Imperio. What is noteworthy
about Linda 67 is the intense redoubling of that energy, resulting in a text
that is arguably the most self-consciously intertextual of del Paso's novels
and the most exclusively postmodern. In retrospect, the four novels from
Josd Trigo to Linda 67 trace a meandering line of development from a
modernist paradigm of narrative to a postmodern paradigm and outlook.
At the start of the process, Jose Trigo and Palinuro de Mdxico exemplify a
fundamentally modernist aesthetic organized around the concept of total-
ization and grounded in a vision of the world that is expansive and anthro-
pocentric. In Noticias del Imperio, that vision gives way to a postmodern
mind-set and the adoption of some of the essential categories and proce-
dures of postmodern historiographic metafiction. However, as I was keen
to argue in earlier chapters of this study, the impulse toward the
postmodern in Palinuro de Mexico and Noticias del Imperio is held in





156 I The Novels of Fernando del Paso


check by a continuing allegiance to the moral and aesthetic tenets of mod-
ernism. Only in Linda 67 does the postmodern paradigm emerge as domi-
nant, to the exclusion of its modernist alternative.
   The trajectory outlined here runs pari passu with an evolving cultural
and ideological agenda in del Paso's narrative. The word culture, as used
(rather imprecisely) by Barthes in the quotation above, implies a context,
or store, of signifying practices that acquire considerable clarity of defini-
tion in a study of the intertextual relations of the novels of Fernando del
Paso. National, regional, continental, and intercontinental traditions pro-
vide the stimuli for a set of four novels that represent so many instances of
cultural interaction. In the case of Jose Trigo, a metropolitan religious
code undergoes a process of transculturation through interaction with
local paradigms, the issue of which is a culturally hybrid text comparable
with others from the narrative traditions of Mexico, Guatemala, and
Paraguay. In Palinuro de Mdxico, the anxiety of influence suffered by
Marechal in the creation of Addn Buenosayres gives way to an assurance
of equal worth vis-a-vis the western canon, and eventuates in the most
accomplished American version of Ulysses. After Palinuro de Mdxico,
Noticias del Imperio takes European historiography and historical narra-
tive as its starting point and exposes their failings in a spirit of postcolonial
contestation. Finally, Linda 67 cannibalizes the noir aesthetic of North
American film and fiction and turns the weapons of a revised ideology of
civilization and barbarism back against their source.
   In the final analysis, ideological and aesthetic motivations coincide at
every stage of del Paso's narrative trajectory. Together, Jose Trigo, Palinuro
de Mdxico, Noticias del Imperio, and Linda 67 intervene individually and
serially in the political and cultural contexts of Mexican and American
writing, reinterpreting, redeploying, and ultimately reinventing forms of
narrative that have constituted the main lines of the western literary tradi-
tion of the twentieth century.











Notes





I. Paradigms, Contexts, and Affiliations: Reading the Novels
of Fernando del Paso Intertextually
   i. See, for example, Alvarez, "Fernando del Paso, de Jose Trigo a Palinuro de
Mexico," 15.
   z. One obstacle to the recognition of the hybridity of a text such as Jose Trigo
was an attitude of hostility and prejudice against "imported models" felt, in some
circles, to be detrimental to the new novel of Spanish America. The greatest skeptic
in this regard was Manuel Pedro Gonzilez, who railed against the influence of
James Joyce on Latin American fiction of the time in Coloquio sobre la novela
hispanoamericana, 63, and elsewhere.

2.Jose Trigo: A Novel of Hybridity and Regeneration
   i. Crucial to the progress of del Paso's literary apprenticeship was the support
he received at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores from Juan Rulfo and Juan Jose
Arreola, as reported in Carvajal, "Revelaciones y anticipaciones de Fernando del
Paso y Miguel Angel Asturias," iii.
   2. A vivid evocation of the period is provided by Carlos Fuentes in the essays
"Radiografia de una decada, 1953-1963" and "La muerte de Ruben Jaramillo,"
in Tiempo mexicano, 56-92, 109-22.
   3. On the phenomenon of the railway workers' strike, see Antonio Alonso, El
movimiento ferrocarrilero en Mexico, 1958/1959. A brief discussion of the role of
Vallejo can be found in Donald Hodges and Daniel Ross Gandy, Mexico, 1910-
1976: Reform or Revolution? 107.
   4. Bakhtinian readings of Fuentes's work abound. Examples include Wendy
Faris, Carlos Fuentes, and the text of an interview conducted by Julio Ortega,
"Carlos Fuentes: para recuperar la tradicion de la Mancha."
   5. Alvaro Enrique situates Fuentes's novel within the tradition of writing about
Mexico City, in "Nueva visita a La regidn mas transparente."
   6. A classic instance of the structuralist analysis of narrative in Latin American
literature is found in Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana.
   7. On the link between dismemberment and saintly status, see Joseph Camp-
bell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 16-17, 24 5-46.
   8. Benjamin Keen discusses structural aspects of the pre-Columbian picture of
the universe in The Aztec Image in Western Thought, 32.
   9. Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana 48:1045.





158 | Notes to Pages 39-85


   io. The incident of Quetzalcoatl and the mirror is referred to in some detail by
Carlos Fuentes in "From Quetzalcoatl to Pepsic6atl," Tiempo mexicano, 17-42.
   I I. The story of Castor and Pollux is told in New Larousse Encyclopedia of
Mythology, 190, and invoked by Carlos Fuentes throughout Terra nostra.
   12. Compare Borges's insight on this point with Fredric Jameson's common-
sense proposition that "Totality is not available for representation, any more than
it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth": Jameson, The Political Uncon-
scious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 55.
   13. The notion that Jose Trigo represents a summa of Mexican writing is a
critical commonplace articulated as early as 1967 by Ramon Xirau, "Jose Agustin,
Navarrete, del Paso," 25, and subsequently restated in 1972 by Luis Leal in "La
nueva narrativa mexicana," 92.
   14. Quoted by Donald Shaw in Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 163.
   15. In my reading of Hombres de maiz I have found much useful material in
Ren6 Prieto, Miguel Angel Asturias's Archaeology of Return and in the detailed
introduction to the edition of Hombres prepared by Gerald Martin and published
by Fondo de Cultura Economica.
   16. Homi Bhabha comments on Fanon's "deep hunger for humanism" in "Re-
membering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition," izo. Zea's inclina-
tion toward humanist principles is documented at length in chapter i of this book.
   17. The term palimpsestuous was coined by Gerard Genette in his landmark
book Palimpsestes as a notation for extreme practices of intertextual inbreeding.
By way of examples from the Arreola canon, "Prosodia" in Con fabulario rewrites
the Quijote and Garci Sinchez de Badajoz, while La feria recycles chronicles, legal
submissions, and other material from the colonial heritage of Mexican history and
literature. It comes as no surprise that del Paso, in a schematic account of his
Mexican precursors, should characterize Arreola as rhetorical brilliance (la
retorica), vis-a-vis Rulfo who, he said, "es la sabiduria" (Carvajal, "Revelaciones
y anticipaciones de Fernando del Paso y Miguel Angel Asturias," iii).
   18. In conversation with Luis Sanchez Bordon and Javier Goni, Fernando del
Paso confirmed his admiration and affection for Juan Rulfo, whom he credited
with being the author of "the most important book that has been written in
Mexico" (Sinchez Bordon and Goni, "Fernando del Paso: 'Uno escribe cuando
camina, cuando lee, cuando suena,"' 49).

3. Palinuro de Mexico: The Body, the Nation, and the Book of the World
   i. The erotic dimension of the novel is explored extensively by Claude Fell in
"Sexo y lenguaje en Palinuro de Mexico, de Fernando del Paso."
   z. Two informative surveys of literary reactions to Tlatelolco are Dolly J.
Young, "Mexican Literary Reactions to Tlatelolco 1968," and Jose Luis Martinez
and Christopher Dominguez Michael, "La saga literaria de 1968," in La literatura
mexicana del siglo XX, 222-29. The thirtieth anniversary of the Tlatelolco massa-





Notes to Pages 86-io8 | 159


cre saw the publication of numerous historical studies; Sergio Aguayo Quezada,
1968: Los archivos de la violencia is particularly worthy of note.
   3. A quarter century after the publication of La noche de Tlatelolco, Martinez
and Dominguez Michael evaluated Poniatowska's testimony quite rightly as "a
morally irreproachable book," in La literatura mexicana del siglo XX, 223.
   4. Aviles Fabila has provided a fascinating account of the process of production
of El gran solitario del palacio in his autobiographical memoirs, Recordanzas,
126-29.
   5. The epigraph that I have lifted from a poem by Silvina Ocampo is just one of
many instances of the Palinurus myth found in Spanish American (largely Argen-
tine) writing. Before del Paso, Virgil's tragic hero is refracted through Marechal as
well as through the Ocampo poem, and through Cortizar and his commentators
as well. Cortizar reviewed Ricardo Baeza's translation of Connolly's essay in the
pages of Sur in February 1950, and he mentions The Unquiet Grave again in La
vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos, 1:13. In the secondary literature, Graciela de Sola
attests to Cortizar's sympathy for the figure of Palinurus, in Julio Cortazar y el
hombre nuevo, 146.
   6. Cortizar's search for a new humanist ethic is glossed in the following state-
ment of 1963: "Everything that I have written is driven by a particular aim, which
is to define a new metaphysics and a new ethics" (cited by Laszlo Scholz, El arte
postica de Julio Cortazar, 36).
   7. For a range of comments on the total novel, see Carlos Fuentes, La nueva
novela hispanoamericana, 30-48, Mario Vargas Llosa, La orgia perpetua, and
Fernando del Paso, in Fiddian, "James Joyce y Fernando del Paso."
   8. Ethel Krauze captures the novel's spirit of engagement with universal culture
when she observes that through del Paso's narrative, "Mexico assumes its rightful
place on the planet, and achieves universality," in "Garibay, del Paso, Ibargien-
goitia," 61.
   9. I take the happy phrase "Oedipus without a complex" from Enrico Mario
Santi, who applies it to Jose Cemi in a reading of Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima.
See "Escindalos de Paradiso," in Santi's Por una politeratura: Literatura hispano-
americana e imaginaci6n politica, 196.

4. Noticias delImperio and the New Historical Novel
   1. Work in progress was documented most informatively in interviews with the
author such as those conducted by Maruja Echegoyen, "Nuevas conversaciones
con Fernando del Paso," and Juan Jose Barrientos, "La locura de Carlota: novela
e historia." For a sample of critical opinion at the time of publication, see Fabienne
Bradu, "Noticias del Imperio de Fernando del Paso," in Vuelta, as well as views
published in the cultural supplements of Excelsior (29 January 1988), Unomasuno
(6 February 1988), and Novedades (7 February 1988).
   z. Readings that give prominence to considerations of history and ideology in





16o I Notes to Pages 109-140


the novel include Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Noticias del Imperio: la historia apasio-
nada," and Claude Fell, "Historia y ficcion en Noticias del Imperio de Fernando
del Paso."
   3. I draw attention again to the role played by Leopoldo Zea in the absorption
of Fanon's work into the Spanish American intellectual mainstream. As noted in
an earlier chapter, Zea hailed Fanon as a fellow Latin American and cited him a
number of times in Dependencia y liberaci6n en la cultura latinoamericana.
   4. The "Addresses to the German Nation" ("Reden an die deutsche Nation")
that Johann Gottlieb Fichte delivered 1807-8 are undoubtedly foremost in the
author's mind as he criticizes German imperialism through the mouthpiece of
Juirez.
   5. In truth, Juirez's reference to the Scriptures is a loose translation and para-
phrase of Genesis 10:1-32.
   6. Del Paso nevertheless claims Carlota for the Mexican people in an open
letter, dated 27 September 1993, to the king of Belgium. Complaining about offi-
cial Belgian interference with the text of an article that he had earlier submitted to
the organizing committee of Europalia, del Paso told King Albert, "The fact is that
Carlota is more closely related to the history of Mexico than she ever was or could
be to the history of Belgium. Or let us just say that Princess Charlotte belongs to
you and Carlota to us" ("Carta de Fernando del Paso al Rey de Blgica," 49).
   7. The boardgames of Wallis and others like him belong to the same political
category as the "Great Game" of British imperial intelligence in India, referred to
by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, 56.
   8. In characterizing Maximilian and Carlota's Mexican venture as "tragic," del
Paso also echoes the terminology of his sources, including Edward Crankshaw,
who describes Maximilian's reign as "the ghastliest tragi-comedy" (Fall of the
House of Habsburg, 247).
   9. My view of Noticias del Imperio as a demystifying text differs from that of
Fabienne Bradu, who maintains that "Fernando del Paso persigue en Maximiliano
una doble creacion mitica: la que la Historia [sic] le encargo representar [.. .] y la
que Carlota pretende hacer sobrevivir en su incansable memoria" ("Noticias del
Imperio de Fernando del Paso," 49).
   10. Carlos J. Alonso argues a much closer affiliation of El general en su laber-
into with postmodernism in "The Mourning After: Garcia Mirquez, Fuentes, and
the Meaning of Postmodernism in Spanish America."
   I I. Certain aspects of the relation between Noticias del Imperio and El general
en su laberinto are discussed by Gustavo Pellon, who accords del Paso's novel
pride of place in the genre of the New Historical Novel of Latin America. See "The
Spanish American Novel: Recent Developments, 1975-1990," 287-94.
   12. Alfonso Gonzilez relates Noticias del Imperio to other Mexican novels on
historical subjects including Madero, el otro and Los pasos de Ldpez by Jorge
Ibargiengoitia, in Euphoria and Crisis: Essays on the Contemporary Mexican
Novel.





                                                   Notes to Pages 142-153 |1161

5.Linda 67:The Homeland Strikes Back
   i. Del Paso acknowledges his interest in Carpentier in the course of an inter-
view conducted by Javier Aranda Luna, "Poesia de la ciencia, narrativa de la
historia," z8.
   z. The formulaic basis of the detective story or crime novel is the subject of
Tzvetan Todorov, "The Typology of Detective Fiction," and of countless other
classic studies of the genre.
   3. Amelia S. Simpson surveys the genre in the River Plate, Brazil, Mexico, and
Cuba in Detective Fiction from Latin America. For an up-to-date analysis of the
Mexican tradition, see Ilan Stavans, Antiheroes: Mexico y su novela policial. On
parodic transgression in the work of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and others, see Elzbieta
Sklodowska, La parodia en la nueva novela hispanoamericana, esp. 127-33.
   4. On the novela negra proper, see, in addition to Stavans, Ian Michael, "From
Scarlet Study to Novela Negra." For an account of the noir aesthetic in film, see
Ian Cameron, ed., The Movie Book of Film Noir, and Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of
Noir.












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Index


Addn Buenosayres (Marechal), 4, 9, 96-
   101, 156; and Palinuro de Mexico, 95-
   96, 99-101
Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 4, 98; Si muero lejos
   de ti, 5, 86
Agustin, Jose: De perfil, 3
Alazraki, Jaime, 102
Al filo del agua (Yfiez), 2, 31, 56, 99
Arguedas, Jose Maria, 25, z6
Aronne Amestoy, Lida, 96, 102
Arreola, 56, 6o, 158n.17; Confabulario, 3,
   70; La feria, 3, 70
Asturias, Miguel Angel, 2o, z6, 6o;
   Hombres de maiz, 64-65; Mulata de tal,
   64-65
Aviles Fabila, Ren6, 159n.4; El gran
   solitario del palacio, 87-89
Azuela, Arturo: Manifestacidn de silencios,
   5, 86
Azuela, Mariano, 56; La lucidrnaga, 34

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 121
Barreda, Gabino: Oracidn civica, 115-16
Barrientos, Juan Jose, 134, 159n.I
Barthes, Roland, 120, 155, 15 6
Battilana, Carlos, 6z
Bergson, Henri, 22
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 14
Bloom, Harold, 9, 94
Boehmer, Elleke, 104
Bolivar, Simon, 20, 136-37
Borges, Jorge Luis, 8, 20, 73, 101, 139; ac-
   knowledged by del Paso as an influence,
   35; author of decentered model of global
   cultural relations, 69; and Bioy Casares,
   151; El escritor argentino y la tradicidn,
   1o; and the figura, 8z, 97: identified with


  the cosmopolitan pole of the field of
  Latin American culture, z6; Los tedlogos,
  83; and theories of intertextuality, 9; and
  totalization, 15 8n. 12; valorization of the
  periphery, I1
Born on the Fourth of July (Stone), 153
Boullosa, Carmen, 6

Campos, Marco Antonio, 8 8-89; Que la
   carne es hierba, 86, 88
Cantd, Cesar, 122
Carpentier, Alejo: acknowledged by del Paso
   as an influence, 19, 142, 161n.1; the
   America/Europe dichotomy in, I14; Los
   pasos perdidos, 7, 142, 15o; model for
   Linda 67, 7, z6, 150, 155
Carroll, Lewis, 73
Carter, Angela, 8o
Caso, Antonio, II, 12
Castellanos, Rosario, 89
Castor and Pollux, 45-46, 67, 81, 92, 95,
   158n.11
Cesaire, Aim6, 13, 14-15
Chabrol, Claude: Le Boucher, 153
Cien anos de soledad (Garcia Mirquez), 77,
   113
colonialism, 15, 16, 109
Coming to America (Landis), 151
Confabulario (Arreola), 3, 70
Connolly, Cyril, 73; The Unquiet Grave, 92,
   131, 159n.5
Corona de sombra (Usigli), 105, 130
Cortizar, Julio, 9, 94; acknowledged by del
   Paso as an influence, 19; identified with
   the cosmopolitan pole of the field of
   Latin American culture, z6; and the rejec-
   tion of the Christian dialectic, 4o;






18o | Index


Cortizar, Julio - continued
   relation to postmodernism, 102-3;
   reviewer of Spanish translation of The
   Unquiet Grave, 159n.5; and the theory
   of the figura, 8z
-works: "El perseguidor," 6z; Libro de
  Manuel, 103; Rayuela, 4, 33, 40, 79,
  101-3; 62 modelo para armar, 10
Corti, Egon Caesar, 123-24

decolonization, 13, 16; of the mind, 14, 116
del Paso, Fernando, 1-8, 16-24; and
  Arreola, 3, 157n.1, 158n.17; commit-
  ment to the Third World, 18; and crime
  fiction, 6; and Fuentes, 31; and Joyce, 66;
  and Latin America, 17-24; opposition to
  imperialism, 18; polemic with Paz, 22;
  and transculturation, 21-22, 25, 27. See
  also Josi Trigo; Linda 67: Historia de un
  crimen; "Mi patria chica, mi patria
  grande"; Noticias del Imperio; Palinuro
  de Mixico
de Sola, Graciela, 94, 102
Dias de guardar (Monsiviis), 4, 86
Diaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 84, 87-8 8
Dos Passos, John, 2, 27, 31
Dottori, Nora, 41
Dussel, Enrique, 13

"El Aleph" (Borges), 53
El general en su laberinto (Garcia Mirquez),
   5, 106, 13z; and Noticias del imperio,
   134, 136-38
El gran solitario del palacio (Aviles Fabila),
   87-89
Elizondo, Salvador, 3, 94; Farabeuf, 4, 84
El laberinto de la soledad (Paz), 1oo
El luto humano (Revueltas), 2, 31; and Josi
   Trigo, 57-60
"Escritura," 4

Fanon, Frantz, 13, 69, 109, 158n.16; Black
   Skin, White Masks, 14; cited by Zea, 14,
   15, 16on.3
Farabeuf (Elizondo), 4, 84
Faulkner, William, z, 8, 22, 27, 31, 66
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 111, 16on.4


Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 4, 117; and Jose
   Trigo, 27, 66-70
Flores Sevilla, Jesds, 7, 36
Foster, David William, 62
Foster, Hal, ioz
Foucault, Michel, 121
Franco, Jean, 151
Frazer, James George, 17; The Golden
   Bough, 55
Freud, Sigmund, 76
Fuentes, Carlos, 2, 3, 7, 104; and Cortizar,
   10, 97; identified with the cosmopolitan
   pole of the field of Latin American cul-
   ture, 26-27; and James Joyce, 34, 94;
   modernist experiments of, 56
-works: Cambio de piel, 75; Cervantes o la
   critica de la lectura, 34; "Chac Mool,"
   26; Cumpleanos, 75, 77; La campana, 5;
   La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 3 3, 3 8, 74;
   La regidn mds transparente, 2-3, 26, 31-
   34, 47; "Los dias enmascarados," 29;
   Terra nostra, 4, 26, 81, 103, 117, 134-
   35; "Tlactocatzine, jardin de Flandes,"
   135; Valiente mundo nuevo, 105; Zona
   sagrada, 77

Garcia Mirquez, Gabriel, 7, 13, 104;
   identified with the transculturating pole
   of the field of Latin American culture,
   26; Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
   113-14
-works: Cien anos de soledad, 77, 113; El
  general en su laberinto, 5, 1o6, 113, 132,
  134, 136-3 8; La hojarasca, 92; La
  soledad de America latina, 114;
  " Problemas de la novela?," 100
Garcia Saldaia, Parmenides: Pasto verde, 3
Garibay, Angel Maria, 37, 44
Gazapo (Sainz), 3, 81
Gonzalez, Manuel Pedro, 33, 95, 157n.2
Gonzilez del Alba, Luis, 4-5
Gonzilez Echevarria, Roberto, 117
Gramsci, Antonio: Prison Notebooks, 113
Guadalupe de Anda, Jose, 2, 56

Hammett, Dashiell, 151, 152
Hegel, Friedrich, I1






Index I181


Highsmith, Patricia, 28, 143, 151, 155;
   Those that Walk Away, 152
Hombres de maiz (Asturias), 64-65; and
  Josd Trigo, 65
humanism, 16, 6z, 69, 103, 1o6, III
Hunt, Eva, 43
Hutcheon, Linda, 102, 103, 120-21,
   122-23
Huxley, Aldous, 8

Ibargiengoitia, Jorge, 5, 16on.12
imperialism, III, 119; denounced by del
   Paso, 18-19, 1o6; personified by Carlota
   in Noticias del Imperio, io8, 118

Jacknife (Jones), 153
Jakobson, Roman, 51, 54
Jameson, Fredric, 50, 70, 120, 151, 158n.iz
Jitrik, No6, 94
Jose Trigo, 1, 29-71; divergent from
   Palinuro de Mexico, 4, 9o; and El luto
   humano, 57-60; and Finnegans Wake,
   66-70; first authorial pronouncements
   about, 16-17; and Hijo de hombre, 6o-
   64; and Hombres de maiz, 64-65; im-
   print of Manicheanism in, 41-43; influ-
   ence of Arreola on, 3; and La regidn mds
   transparente, 31-35, 47, 51, 52; and Las
   tierras flacas, 56-6o; networking of char-
   acters in, 81; and the paradigm of the
   modernist novel, 8, 27, 30, 50, 141; as
   precursor of Noticias del Imperio, 1o5-6;
   as a summa of Mexican fiction, 3, 35; to-
   talizing strategies in, 50-53;
   transculturation in, 25, 27, 156; and
   Ulysses, 27, 35, 52, 66
Joyce, James, 10, 20, 35, 79, 1o; architect
   of the "total novel," 97; debt of Fuentes
   to, 34; dialogue of Noticias del Imperio
   with, 1o5; identified with international
   currents of modernism, 8, 27, 30-31; in-
   fluence of, denied by Marechal, 94;
   moral outlook of, 99; narrative style of,
   2. See also Finnegans Wake; Joycean
   paradigm; Ulysses
Joycean paradigm, 92-93, 9 5-99
Juirez, Benito, 26, 119, 124, 126, 128;


   characterization of, 111-17; life and po-
   litical career of, 107-8; as object of deni-
   gration, 125

Kafka, Franz, 27
Kierkegaard, Soren, i5o
Kristeva, Julia, 9,
Kuhn, Annette, 79-80

La campana (Fuentes), 134, 13 5-36
La feria (Arreola), 3, 70
La noche de Tlatelolco (Poniatowska), 4, 86
Lapsus (Manjarrez), 75, 81, 85
La regidn mds transparente (Fuentes), 26,
   40, 47, 99; influence on Josd Trigo, 3'-
   35; as landmark text, 2-3, 33
Larsen, Neil, 102, 103
Las claves de "Addn Buenosayres"
   (Marechal), 93-94
Las tierras flacas (Yaiez), 3; compared with
  Josi Trigo, 56-6o
La tierra prddiga (Yfiez), 3
Le Boucher (Chabrol), 153
Lezama Lima, Jose, 19
Libro de Manuel (Cortizar), 79
Linda 67: Historia de un crimen, 1, 141-54;
   allegory of authorship in, 153-54; cri-
   tique of consumerism in, 145-46; critique
   of imperialism in, 14 5-48; and Josd
   Trigo, 141, 154, 155-56; and Los pasos
   perdidos, 7, 142, 150-51; narrative sum-
   mary of, 6-7; and noir traditions, 152-
   53; and Noticias del Imperio, 141, 147,
   153, 15 5-56; and the novela negra, 6-7,
   28, 143, 151-52; and Palinuro de
   Mexico, 141-42, 154, 155-56; portrayal
   of the United States in, 7, 26, 148-50,
   153; and postmodernism, 155; themes of
   nationality and personal identity in, 142-
   45; and Those Who Walk Away, 152
Lopez Gonzalez, Aralia, 6o
Los adioses (Onetti), 77
Los pasos perdidos, 7, 142, 150-51

Madero, el otro (Solares), 5, 134, 138-39
Mal de amores (Mastretta), 5
Manjarrez, Hector, 4, 6, 85; Lapsus, 75, 81






18z | Index


Marcuse, Herbert, 77
Marechal, Leopoldo, 4, 20, 92, 93-96, 156;
   acknowledgment of debt to Dante and
   Quevedo, 94; Addn Buenosayres, 4, 9,
   96-101; and the anxiety of influence, 94-
   95; and Palinuro de Mexico, 9 5-96, 99-
   101
Marti, Jose, 114
Martinez, Jose Luis, 74, 158n.2, 159n.3
Mastretta, Angeles: Mal de amores, 5
Mauthner, Fritz, 83
Maximilian I (Emperor), IIo-II
Maximilian III (Emperor), 26, 1o8, 110-12,
   126-27, 129-30
McHale, Brian, 101-2
Merino Juti, Blanca, 70
mestizaje, 21, 25, 32-33, 6o
Miller, Henry, 73
"Mi patria chica, mi patria grande," 19-21,
   23-24, 72, 113-14, 145, 146
modernism, 8, 20, 65, 71, 101-3, 133
modernist paradigm of narrative, 8, 70-71,
   102, 155
Monsiviis, Carlos, 86; Dias de guardar, 4
Moran, Dominic, 102, 103

Napoleon III (Emperor), 1o8, III, 116,
   119, 124; contrasted with Benito Juirez,
   114; political failings of, I15; as wager of
   colonial wars, 109
Neruda, Pablo, 13, 19, 20
"new historical novel," 5
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 23
Noticias del Imperio, 5, 7, 88, 105-40;
   Christian imagery in, 126-28, 139; cri-
   tique of imperialism in, 108-19; and El
   general en su laberinto, 134, 136-3 8; and
   Josd Trigo, 1o5-6, 118, 127; and La
   campana, 135-36; and Madero, el otro,
   134, 13 8-40; and Palinuro de Mexico,
   Io5-6, 118, 127, 131; and the paradigm
   of the historical novel, 27-28; the
   postcolonial orientation of, 104, 125,
   133; relation to postmodern historiogra-
   phy, 1o6, 120-23; residue of humanist
   and modernist elements in, 128-34; and
   Terra nostra, 117, 134-3 5; and


   "Tlactocatzine, del jardin de Flandes,"
   135; and "Universal History," 122; and
   Usigli, 130-3 I, 133
"novela negra," 6, 153, 161n.4
Novo, Salvador, 34, 52

Ocampo, Silvina, 72, 159n.5
"Onda," la, 3-4
Onetti, Juan Carlos: Los adioses, 77
Orozco, Jose Clemente: The Man of Fire, 90
Ortega, Julio, 10-11, 70, 102, 132, 149
Ortiz, Fernando, 25

Palinuro de Mexico, 4, 5, 7, 18, 25-26, 72-
   104; and Addn Buenosayres, 92, 9 5-96;
   and the Aeneid, 90-92; caricature of por-
   nography in, 78-81; and the Commedia
   dell' Arte, 85-87; family relations in, 75-
   77; and humanism, 88-89; incest in, 77,
   81; and modernism, 103, 141, 155-56;
   and the myth of Palinurus, 90-92, 100-
   101, 104; the postcolonial connection,
   104; postmodernist elements of, 103; and
   Que la carne es hierba, 88; and Rayuela,
   73, 82, 92, 97, 98; relation to
   "Escritura," 3; relation to "la Onda," 3;
   and Ulysses, 27, 73, 75, 92-93, 97-98,
   99, 101, 103; view of the human condi-
   tion, 73, 82-83
Parkinson Zamora, Lois, 8, 9, 10
Paz, Octavio, 20, 73, 79, 101, 104; polemic
  with del Paso, 2I-22
-works: Conjunciones y disjunciones, 81;
  El laberinto de la soledad, 100; Posdata,
  I0
Pechey, Graham, 9, 10
Pedro Pdramo (Rulfo), 2, 77
Peiuel, Arnold, 9, 10,
Perez Firmat, Gustavo, 8, 9, 11, 35,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 20, 35, 54-55
Poniatowska, Elena, 4, 6, 86, 88, 89; La
  noche de Tlatelolco, 4, 86
Posse, Abel: Los perros del paraiso, 5
postcolonialism, 15; relation of Del Paso to,
   112, 137
postcolonial societies, 24; empathy of
  Leopoldo Zea with, 14






Index |183


postmodern historiographic metafiction,
   io6,1z8,134,138,155
postmodernism, 71, 101-4, 120-23, 127-
   z8, 133, 141, 151, 155
Prieto, Adolfo, 94, 95
Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), 113
Puga, Maria Luisa, 6

Que la carne es hierba (Campos), 86, 88
Quetzalcoatl, 37-39, 42-46, 59, 65, 67, 81,
  91, 158n.1o
Quevedo, Francisco de, 73, 84, 94

Rabelais, Frangois, 73, 84
Rama, Angel, 8, 10, 26-27, 65
Rayuela (Cortizar), 4, 33, 40, 79; and mod-
  ernism, 103; and Palinuro de Mexico, 73,
  82, 9z; as postmodernist text, 102-3; and
  Ulysses, 92, 96-97
resurrection, myth of, 44-47, 64, 67, 68-
   69, 73
Revueltas, Jose, 7, 6o, 61, 65; El luto
   humano, 2, 57-58; Los errores, 3
Reyes, Alfonso, 11, 34, 43, 52, 55-56;
   "Notas sobre la inteligencia americana,"
   10, 23, 89; "Vision de Anihuac," 56
Richards, Nelly, 101, 104
Riffaterre, Michael, 9
Rivera, Diego: The Legend of Quetzalcdatl,
   37
Roa Bastos, Augusto, 19, 26, 104; Hijo de
   hombre, 60-64
Rod6, Jose Enrique, 12
Rodriguez Lozano, Miguel G., 36
Rulfo, Juan, 3, 20, 56, 6o; El liano en lla-
   mas, 2, 70; identified with the
   transculturating pole of the field of Latin
   American culture, 26; Pedro Pdramo, 2,
   77; relations with del Paso, 157n.I,
   158nn.17, 18; subject of a pastiche in
   Josd Trigo, 70

Sienz, Ines, 117, 134
Said, Edward, 16, 16on.7
Sainz, Gustavo, 6, 31
-works: Compadre Lobo, 5; Gazapo, 3,
   81; Obsesivos dias circulares, 98


Salazar Bondy, Augusto, 13, 14,
Sarduy, Severo, 53, 149
Schama, Simon, 12o
Schrader, Paul, 146
Scott, Walter, 122
Sedar Senghor, Leopold, 13, 14-15
Shaw, Donald Leslie, 6z
Si muero lejos de ti (Aguilar Mora), 5, 86, 98
Solares, Ignacio, 6, 7; Madero, el otro, 5,
   134, 138-39
Sontag, Susan, 79
Sophocles, 92
Soustelle, Jacques, 37, 38, 40, 44-45, 48, 49
Spitta, Silvia, 24-26, 35
Sterne, Lawrence, 66
surrealism, 20, 77
Swift, Jonathan, 73
Symbolism, 20, 54-55, 56
syncretism, 43, 54, 6o, 64

Taibo II, Paco Ignacio, 6, 143, 161n.3
Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 153
Terra nostra (Fuentes), 4, 26, 81; and mod-
   ernist paradigm of narrative, 103; and
   Noticias del Imperio, 117, 134-35
Tezcatlipoca, 33, 38-39, 58, 67
The Golden Bough (Frazer), 55
The Unquiet Grave (Connolly), 92, 131,
   159n.5
Those Who Walk Away (Highsmith), 152
"Tlactocatzine, del jardin de Flandes"
   (Fuentes), 135
"Tlatelolco literature," 85-89
totalizing consciousness, 50, 105, io6, 118
"total novel," 4, 50, 97
transculturation, 8, 21, 24-27, 43, 156

Ulysses, 4, 42, 79, 147; and Addn
   Buenosayres, 93-95; and Josd Trigo, 66,
   7o; major properties of, 92-93;
   Mexicanization of, 27, 99; and Palinuro
   de Mdxico, 72, 92, 98-99, 156; and
   postmodernism, 1o2; as quintessential
   example of the modernist paradigm of
   narrative, 3, 27, 34, 101; and Rayuela,
   92, 9 6-97, 102. See also Joycean
   paradigm






184 | Index


Usigli, Rodolfo: Corona de sombra, 105,
   130-31
Uslar Pietri, Arturo, i9

Vaillant, George C., 38, 39
Valiente mundo nuevo (Fuentes), 105
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 9, 10
Vasconcelos, Jose, I I, 43
Villoro, Juan, 6
Virgil, z6, 73, 90, 92, 100-101

West, Cornel, 141
White, Hayden, izo, 122, 125-26, 128,
   133, 136
White Mythologies (Young), 12o

Yaiez, Agustin: Al filo del agua, 2; Las
   tierras flacas, 3, 5 6-60; La tierra prddiga,
   3, 56
Young, Robert, 12o


Zea, Leopoldo, 8, I1-16, 69, 114; and
   Csaire, 14-15; and humanism, 23;
   postcolonial awareness of, 13-14; pro-
   moter of Fanon, 14, 158n.16, 16on.3;
   and Sedar Senghor, 15
-works: "Colonization and Decolonization
  of Latin American Culture," 13, 23, 116;
  Dependence and Liberation in Latin
  American Culture, 13, 14, 24; Discourse
  from the Site of Marginalization and Bar-
  barism, 13, 15-16, 115-16, 147-48;
  "From the History of Ideas to the Phi-
  losophy of Latin American History," 13;
  "Latin American Philosophy as Philoso-
  phy of Liberation," 13, 14; "Negritude
  and Indigenism," 14-15; "North
  America in the Spanish American Con-
  sciousness," II-12, 15, 116; Philosophiz-
  ing at the Level of Mankind, 15; "Phi-
  losophy as Commitment," 11, 12







Robin Fiddian is University Reader in Spanish and Fellow of Wadham
College, Oxford. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on
topics in Spanish literature and film. In the field of Latin American litera-
ture, he has published Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1995) and more than a
dozen articles on authors such as Julio Cortizar, Gabriel Garcia Mirquez,
Carlos Fuentes, and Fernando del Paso. A forthcoming volume entitled
Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Luso-
phone Africa includes a substantial essay on the Mexican thinker and
author Leopoldo Zea.