PART I
1. Carlos Fuentes, “How I Started to Write,” in Carlos Fuentes, Myself and Others, p. 83. Further quotations are from this same edition.
2. Personal interview with Berta Fuentes (Carlos Fuentes’ mother), Mexico City, December 1989.
3. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, Mexico City, August 1989.
5. Personal interview with Roberto Torretti, San Juan, Puerto Rico, July 27, 1991.
7. Roberto Torretti’s books include Manuel Kant: Estudio sobre los fundamentos de la filosofía crítica (Santiago: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1967); Philosophy of Geometry from Riemann to Poincaré (Dordreth: D. Reidel Publishing, 1978); Relativity and Geometry (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983); Creative Understanding: Philosophical Reflections on Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
8. John Reese Stevenson, The Chilean Popular Front, p. 72.
9. Personal interview with Berta Fuentes (Carlos Fuentes’ sister), Mexico City, July 10, 1991.
10. John S. Brushwood, Narrative Innovation and Political Change in Mexico, pp. 31–46.
11. Personal interview with Berta Fuentes (sister), Mexico City, July 10, 1991.
12. Personal interview with José Campillo Sainz, Mexico City, July 12, 1991.
13. Carlos Fuentes, lecture, Coloquio de Invierno, Mexico City, February 10, 1992.
14. Personal interview with Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Mexico City, September 22, 1991.
15. Personal interview with Sergio Pitol, Mexico City, July 14, 1991.
16. Personal interview with José Campillo Sainz, Mexico City, July 12, 1991.
18. Personal interview with Víctor Flores Olea, Mexico City, July 15, 1991.
19. Personal interview with Berta Fuentes (sister), July 10, 1991.
20. Ibid. Berta Fuentes showed me a family album with Carlos Fuentes’ picture during this period.
21. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, London, July 15, 1992.
23. David G. La France, “Mexico Since Cárdenas,” p. 213.
24. Novedades, December 5, 1954, no. 298, p. 2.
25. Fuentes purposely did not receive his law degree, even though he completed his coursework, in order to avoid holding the title of Licenciado.
26. Brushwood, Narrative Innovation and Political Change, p. 49.
27. Revista Mexicana de Literatura, no. 6 (July–August 1956): 581–589.
28. Personal interview with Sergio Pitol, Mexico City, July 14, 1991.
30. La France, “Mexico Since Cárdenas,” p. 213.
31. José Donoso, Historia personal del “boom.”
32. Roderic A. Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico, p. 141.
33. Personal interview with Pierre Schori, Boulder, Colorado, December 6, 1993. The Swedish political scholar and politician, who has followed Fuentes’ politics since the late 1960s, describes Fuentes’ current political stances as those of a “radical democrat.”
35. Personal interview with Gabriel García Márquez, Mexico City, February 11, 1992.
37. In Aura, at least two beginnings of Terra Nostra are evident: (1) the transformation of characters and (2) the particular use of history in which historical characters are duplicated in later generations.
38. John S. Brushwood coined the term “small-screen fiction” in The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey, pp. 267–286.
39. In a letter from John S. Brushwood to me dated November 8, 1993, Brushwood states: “You didn’t necessarily have to be a celebrity to be invited to Fuentes’ Sunday gatherings. My student Frobén Lozada called Fuentes and was invited to one of them.”
40. Personal interview with Gabriel García Márquez, Mexico City, February 11, 1992.
41. Personal interview with William Styron, Mexico City, February 11, 1992.
43. Wendy Farris, Carlos Fuentes, p. 138.
44. Juan Goytisolo, Realms of Strife, p. 64.
45. Despite Fuentes’ criticism of some aspects of the Cuban regime, he maintained his friendship with Julio Cortázar until the Argentine’s death in 1984, and he is still a very close personal friend of Gabriel García Márquez, as both Fuentes and García Márquez have confirmed with me in personal interviews.
46. Farris, Carlos Fuentes, p. 79.
47. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, London, July 15, 1992.
48. Personal interview with William Styron, Mexico City, February 11, 1992.
49. Jonathan Tittler, “Interview: Carlos Fuentes,” p. 54.
50. For a list of the books in each of the three versions of “La Edad del Tiempo,” see Appendix II.
51. Enrique Krauze’s critique of Fuentes appeared as “The Guerrilla Dandy,” in The New Republic, June 27, 1988, pp. 28–38.
52. The conflicts between Paz and Fuentes took the form of polemics between intellectuals affiliated with Paz’s magazine Vuelta and Héctor Aguilar Camín’s magazine Nexos. In February 1992, articles supporting or attacking these groups appeared in the daily press. In the months of March, April, and May, Vuelta published a series of articles criticizing the “Coloquio de Invierno” in general and Carlos Fuentes personally.
53. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, Santa Monica, California, April 23, 1994.
PART II
1. Both Los días enmascarados and Where the Air Is Clear deal with issues to be developed later in Terra Nostra. Fuentes’ early considerations of time and history appear in the story “Tlactocatzine, del jardín de Flandes.” I discuss the relationship of both these books to Terra Nostra in Part III.
2. George Kubler discusses the relationship between the architecture of El Escorial and the monasteries in Tarragona, Yuste, and Granada in Building the Escorial.
3. The Diocletian Palace in Spalato is mentioned in Terra Nostra, pp. 552–553.
4. Geoffrey Woodward provides background to this Erasmianism in Spain in Philip II, pp. 2, 5, 48, 53, 117.
8. M. López Serrano, El Escorial, p. 12.
9. See Kubler, Building the Escorial, for background on Herrera.
10. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, p. 17.
12. Miguel de Unamuno refers to El Escorial as “la gran piedra lírica,” in Andanzas y visiones españolas, p. 83.
13. Eduardo Lemaitre, Cartagena Colonial, p. 12.
15. Fredric Jameson sets forth the concept of the “political unconscious” in Chapter 1 of The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act.
16. Miguel de Unamuno, Andanzas y visiones españolas, p. 83.
17. Woodward, Philip II, p. 5.
18. See Charles Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism?
19. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 30.
20. Carlos Fuentes, Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura, first page.
21. José Ortega y Gasset, Historia como sistema, p. 39.
25. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 126–127.
26. Roberto González Echevarría’s basic argument concerning Terra Nostra is as follows: Fuentes simplifies and plagiarizes Castro, Foucault, Cervantes, and Lukacs in his attempt to portray Latin American culture. González Echevarría also reads Terra Nostra as a repetition of the themes set forth by Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad. With respect to Hispanic culture, González Echevarría reads Terra Nostra as an effort to reach back to the original words found in a prediscursive logos that retains the keys to a homogeneous Hispanic culture. In Part II and Part III, I attempt to demonstrate the intertextuality of Terra Nostra, as well as the differences between the ideas of Paz in El laberinto de la soledad and those of Fuentes in his double project of Terra Nostra and Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura. See Roberto González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra: Theory and Practice.”
27. González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra,” p. 135.
28. I use the term “intertextuality” here and throughout the remainder of Part II not in the interest of discussing any writers’ possible influence upon Fuentes, nor in tracing literary “sources,” but as a sign system.
29. I use the term “intertextuality” as originally proposed by Julia Kristeva and later developed by Jonathan Culler, as a sign system. In this usage, as explained by Gerald Prince, the term designates the relations between any text and the sum of knowledge, the potentially infinite network of codes and signifying practices that allows it to have meaning. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature; Jonathan Culler, “Presuppositions and Intertextuality,” in Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction; Gerald Prince, Dictionary of Narratology, p. 46. In addition, see Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: La Littérature au second degré; Laurent Jenny, “The Strategy of Form”; Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Apuntes para un modelo de la intertextualidad en literatura”; Jean Ricardou, Pour une theorie du nouveau roman; Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry; Michael Riffaterre, Text Production; and Meir Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation Land.”
30. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xv.
31. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, p. 48.
32. Ingrid Simson, Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes, pp. 226–231.
34. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote,” in Borges, Ficciones.
35. Zona sagrada, published in 1967, had the three-part division of Terra Nostra.
36. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 17.
37. The original painting described in Terra Nostra as the cuadro traído de Orvieto is located in a chapel in Orvieto, Italy.
38. For a psychoanalytic study of Terra Nostra, see Marc Nacht, “Coeur blanc de l’inacces.”
39. Catherine Swietlicki discusses the Kaballa’s three cosmic eras and the three parts of Terra Nostra in “Terra Nostra: Carlos Fuentes’ Kaballistic World.”
40. See González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra,” p. 137.
41. In his critique of Fuentes’ historical vision, Roberto González Echevarría reads Fuentes as a modern writer, seemingly ignoring that Terra Nostra is, in the end, a fiction and not a text usually considered part of the discipline of history.
42. González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra,” p. 143.
43. Lucille Kerr, “On Shifting Ground: Authoring Mystery and Mastery in Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra,” in Lucille Kerr, Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America, p. 67.
44. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 367.
45. The English edition of R. G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History appeared in 1946. The Mexican edition appeared in 1952, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica.
46. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 46.
47. See Djelal Kadir, “Quest’s Impossible Self-Seeking,” in Djelal Kadir, Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance.
48. Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp. 114–117.
49. Kadir, “Quest’s Impossible Self-Seeking.”
50. Kadir, Questing Fictions, p. 123.
51. Fuentes, Paz, and numerous others have written on the Aztec concept of time. See, in particular, Fuentes’ Tiempo mexicano and Paz’s “La máscara y la transparencia.”
52. Alfonso Caso, The Aztecs: People of the Sun, p. 66.
53. J. Eric S. Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, p. 166.
54. Raymond D. Souza, La historia en la novela hispanoamericana, p. 115.
57. Joseph Sommers, After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel, p. 160.
59. Souza, La historia, p. 128.
60. Simson, Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes, p. 199.
61. Ibid. Simson quotes Paz’s “piedra de sol” as “tiempo total donde no pasa nada” [total time where nothing happens].
62. Marcelo Coddou, “Terra Nostra o la crítica de los cielos,” p. 9.
63. Carlos Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony, p. 13.
66. Carlos Fuentes had called these “autochthonous” writers “primitivos.” See La nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, pp. 9–14.
67. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel, p. 17.
69. Since Fuentes questions these concepts of time and truth, Roberto González Echevarría misreads Fuentes when he states that Fuentes claims to be “the ultimate source of truth.” See González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra.”
70. José Ortega y Gasset, Obras completas, p. 19.
71. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror, p. 177.
72. Simson offers explanations for the Cronista’s interventions. See Simson, Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes, pp. 44–53.
73. Narrative segments 84, 86–89, 91, 93, 95, 100, and 102–125 are narrated by Ludovico; narrative segments 90, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, and 126 are narrated by Celestina; 85 and 92 seem to be narrated by both.
74. Fuentes uses the “tú” for the náufrago. See Terra Nostra, pp. 63–69 (Mexican edition in Spanish).
75. Lucille Kerr has discussed the enigma of the manuscript in the bottle as follows: “The manuscript sealed in a bottle is a familiar device of mystery fiction and has a double function. It is both a mystery and a solution; it both suggests and solves a problem.” See Kerr, Reclaiming the Author, p. 79.
76. See Susan F. Levine, “Heresy and Hope in the Works of Carlos Fuentes,” Chapter 3.
80. Michel De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, p. 60.
81. Ortega y Gasset, Historia como sistema, p. 8.
82. Fuentes also mentions Signorelli on several occasions in Zona sagrada.
83. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 48–49.
84. González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra.”
85. The issue of postmodernism in Latin America has been most widely discussed in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. The enormous volume of articles and books published in Latin America precludes any complete bibliography in the context of this study on Fuentes, but representative publications include Nicolás Casullo, ed., El debate modernidad postmodernidad; Nuevo Texto Crítico. Modernidad y posmodernidad en América Latina (1); Josep Pico, ed., Modernidad y postmodernidad; George Yúdice, “¿Puede hablarse de postmodernidad en América Latina?”
86. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 3.
87. See Ihab Hassan’s parallel columns in The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, pp. 91–92.
88. Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 49.
89. Linda Hutcheon has argued convincingly in favor of the political content in postmodern cultural production in The Politics of Postmodernism.
90. See Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism, and Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism?
91. In reality, Signorelli is never named per se in Terra Nostra. In an essay that appeared soon after the publication of Terra Nostra (later republished in his book Disidencias), Juan Goytisolo identified the painting from Orvieto as Signorelli’s. In my own personal interview with Fuentes in March 1993 in Denver, he confirmed that the painter for him is, indeed, Signorelli.
92. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Chapter 1, pp. 1–54.
93. González Echevarría, “Terra Nostra,” p. 139.
94. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 306.
97. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, p. 53.
99. De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, p. 4.
100. Roberto González Echevarría has suggested that Fuentes returns to a prediscursive logos in Terra Nostra. See “Terra Nostra.”
101. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard has coined the terms “grand narrative” and “small narrative” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
102. Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 148.
103. Octavio Paz, Children of Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde.
104. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel. See especially Chapter 1.
106. De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, chap. 1.
PART III
1. The books that Fuentes proposes to write for “La Edad del Tiempo” but that he had not yet published by early 1994 are La novia muerta; El baile del Centenario; Emiliano en Chinameca; La frontera de cristal; El sillón del águila; El camino a Texas; Aquiles, o el guerrillero y el asesino; Prometeo, o el precio de la libertad. Diana, o la cazadora solitaria appeared in 1994 after the completion of this manuscript.
2. In addition to Sartre, other writers with cycles whom Fuentes has mentioned in our interviews are Balzac, Roger Martin Du Gard, and Anthony Powell.
3. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, Appendix I.
6. Richard Reeve has discussed the development of the tú in Fuentes’ early fiction. See Richard Reeve, “Carlos Fuentes y el desarrollo del narrador en segunda persona: un ensayo exploratorio.”
7. Frank Dauster, “The Wounded Vision: Aura, Zona sagrada, and Cumpleaños.”
8. For Fuentes’ discussion of time, see Marcelo Coddou’s interview, “Terra Nostra, o la crítica de los cielos,” and my interview in Appendix I.
9. Personal interview with Carlos Fuentes, Appendix I.
13. Paz, “La máscara y la transparencia,” p. 7.
14. Richard Reeve, “El mundo mosaico del mexicano moderno: Cantar de ciegos, de Carlos Fuentes.”
15. Mary E. Davis, “On Becoming Velázquez: Carlos Fuentes’ The Hydra Head,” p. 149.
17. Emma Kafalenos has discussed the paintings in Hydra Head in “The Grace and Disgrace of Literature: Carlos Fuentes’ Hydra Head.”
18. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 16.
19. See Kafalenos, “The Grace and Disgrace of Literature.”
20. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Carlos Fuentes,” p. 23.
21. Julio Ortega, La contemplación y la fiesta, pp. 80–81.
22. Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 27.
23. Malva E. Filer, “A Change of Skin and the Shaping of a Mexican Time,” pp. 122–123.
25. Gabriel García Márquez has discussed the fact that his fiction always uses an image as the point of departure. See “The Visual Arts, the Poetization of Space, and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel García Márquez.”
26. The orange and orange tree are not common in Fuentes’ fiction. He mentions an orange in Zona sagrada as an insignificant object that Guillermo notices. See Zona sagrada, p. 4.
27. Jerónimo de Aguilar was mentioned fifty-eight times in Verdadera historia de la conquista de la Nueva España, by Bernal Díaz del Castillo.
28. See Levine, “Heresy and Hope in the Works of Carlos Fuentes,” Chapter 3.
29. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 15.
30. I have discussed the issue of truth in modern and postmodern fiction in Latin America in “The Discourse of Truth and Latin American Postmodernism.” An expanded version of this piece appeared as “Western Truth Claims in the Context of the Modern and Postmodern Latin American Novel,” in Readerly/Writerly Texts.
31. For a discussion of the ontological and the epistemological as part of contemporary fiction, see McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, Chapter 1, pp. 3–40.
32. David Harvey discusses the space of postmodern fiction in The Condition of Postmodernity, Chapter 3, pp. 39–65.
33. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 16.