The Writings Of Carlos Fuentes

Asumma of three decades of Carlos Fuentes’ writing career, Terra Nostra was born in the mid-sixties, even though references in his previous work, from as early as Los días enmascarados and Where the Air Is Clear, allude to some of the concerns of Terra Nostra.¹ This novel represents the culmination of his modern project, begun with Los días enmascarados and offering his exhaustive readings of the culture and history of the Americas. At the same time, Terra Nostra is a postmodern exercise, for this novel holds relationships with both modern and postmodern writing. Above all, Terra Nostra bears an intimate relationship to the cultural and political object that served as its catalyst—El Escorial. Fuentes rewrites the medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassic architecture of El Escorial in Terra Nostra, in addition to fictionalizing a series of cultural and political issues related to the Spain of El Escorial.

Fuentes states at the beginning of his essay on Cervantes, Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura, that the relationship between Spain and the Americas has been ambiguous at best and antagonistic at worst. Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ most elaborate and complex treatment of the interaction among the cultures of Spain and the cultures of the Americas. Here he considers the historical origins of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American culture, looking back to Greco-Roman culture and to the cultural and religious practices of the Middle Ages. Rethinking Spain’s historical legacy of domination and rule during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Fuentes inquires what Spain’s other options might have been, had she pursued different political and cultural alternatives. His concerns include the Spanish Crown’s decision to isolate Spain and its colonies from cultural difference and from the other political entities of Europe. Following the model of Borges (who also imagined the future), near the end of the novel Fuentes imagines a future without the expulsion of the Arabs and Jews in 1492, a future without the politics of the Spanish Inquisition, and the like.

El Escorial is a complex architectural construct, replete with elaborate religious, political, and military imagery. Its medieval and Renaissance architectural motifs were most consistently neoclassical; its architectural plan was based on the medieval monastery and hospital, most prominently, monasteries in Tarragona, Yuste, and Granada.2 El Escorial is a multicultural object that embodies and reflects the heterogeneous cultural forces in play in sixteenth-century Spain, from traditional Arabic to traditional Roman, from sixteenth-century Italian to sixteenth-century Flemish. A wide array of other cultural traditions, such as those from Castille, are also evident. Philip II claimed to have built El Escorial in order to provide a monastery for monks to pray for the salvation of the kings and for the benefits the royalty received. According to Charles V, El Escorial was to be “a dwelling place for God.” The setting was ostensibly a monastery, and El Escorial did indeed serve this function, but it was much more: a royal palace, a military fortress, a government center, a medieval city, a university, and a library. In imagery and function, El Escorial was a synthesis of Hispanic culture of the sixteenth century, the same contradictory and heterogeneous Hispanic culture exported to the Spanish colonies for more than three centuries.

In addition to monasteries, several medieval villas and palaces project visual images similar to that of El Escorial. Notable precedents to El Escorial were the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the Monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, and the Diocletian Palace in Spalato.³

The historical setting for Terra Nostra and the construction of El Escorial encompassed the sixteenth-century Spain of Philip II (king 1556–1598), the Inquisition, the European Renaissance, the Reformation, and the conquest of the Americas. When Charles V abdicated as king of Spain in January 1556, transferring his possessions and powers to his son Philip II, the Iberian Peninsula still was not referred to as “Spain,” because it was a conglomeration of heretofore relatively autonomous economic and political entities that had alliances with the Spanish Crown. (It was not until the 1590s that the Castilians began to use the term “Spanish Empire.”)

The important European cultural and political events corresponding to Philip II’s reign were the invention of the printing press, Martin Luther’s rebellion and the Reformation, the writings of Erasmus, and the Spanish Inquisition. Well known to Fuentes, Erasmus was an influential thinker whose In Praise of Folly circulated widely in Europe during the sixteenth century. Fuentes points out that Erasmus promoted a new culture of humanism: now everything had several meanings. According to Fuentes, neither reason nor faith exhausted reality (BM, 174). Charles V had demonstrated relatively little interest in the Inquisition, officially launched in 1478, although he did use it to arrest the growth of Illuminism in the 1520s and Erasmianism in the 1530s.4

The eldest son of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, Philip II was born in 1527. Educated in his youth by Martínez Siliceo and Bartolomé de Carranza, he was particularly attracted to mathematics and architecture but had little ability in foreign languages. His limitations in foreign languages were perhaps one reason why he preferred to enclose himself in Spain, never traveling outside his homeland after 1559. He also liked painting, acquiring works by Bosch, Brueghel, Titian, and other masters for display in El Escorial. Philip II had four wives: María of Portugal, who died giving birth to a son (who also died before becoming king); Mary Tudor, who died childless; Elizabeth of Valois, who bore him two daughters; and Anne of Austria, who gave birth to Don Philip.

When Philip II assumed power in 1556, his state faced the serious financial crisis that characterized the remainder of the century. He also encountered the threat of numerous religious groups whose members held beliefs that differed from those of orthodox Catholicism. Charles V had been monitoring the Jews and Moors, and he actively countered the challenge posed by the Erasmians and the Lutherans. Philip’s religious position was forthright, for he stated irrevocably: “I do not propose nor desire to be the ruler of heretics.”⁵ Consequently, the Inquisition harassed mystics and humanists; even the mystic poet Fray Luis de León was imprisoned in 1572 for five years.

Philip II exhibited little tolerance for those he perceived as different—the other. His government attempted to exclude all groups that did not conform to his universal design. As one scholar has indicated: “Most men believed God held a design for the universe, and Spaniards were certain they were appointed by their superior culture, language, faith, and wealth to fulfill it.”6 Philip II also believed in limpieza de sangre (clean blood), and his government made rigorous inquiries into the ethnic backgrounds of many groups. He controlled the circulation of books with great care, systematically censoring any text that might contain even the slightest heretical reference. Philip II’s third inquisitor-general, Gaspar de Quiroga, prohibited the circulation of 33,000 books, mostly foreign classical texts, including the work of writers as canonical today as Rabelais, Machiavelli, and Dante.

One of the most notable characteristics of the dominant ideology was the contradiction between the professed superiority of things Spanish—its culture, its language, its faith—and the fact that the Spanish Empire was in fact held together loosely by patently multicultural groups that consisted of Europeans and inhabitants of the Americas. The Arabs and Jews had exercised enormous influence in Spain in the centuries leading up to Philip’s reign. Numerous other cultural groups also had a significant preserve in Spain. As one scholar of the period has pointed out, “Phillip’s monarquía was farflung and basically indefensible, only held together by the collective will of Genovese merchants, Flemish bankers, Italian and German soldiers, Portuguese and Italian sailors, American miners, and Spanish officials.”⁷ Consequently, the very concept of a pure, well-defined, and homogeneous “Spanish” culture was most questionable in sixteenth-century Spain.

Philip II built El Escorial as an imposing medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassical monument with a basic structure typical of medieval monasteries and hospitals. The edifice itself consists of a 101-by-261-meter granite rectangular building constructed in the shape of a grill, located 1,000 meters above sea level in the foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains. The walls rise six stories on the exterior, with towers at each of the four corners reaching above these walls; the towers have spires bearing crosses at the top. A basilica near the center of the structure also towers high above the walls. The enormous dimensions and complexity of the building can be appreciated by taking into account its 2,600 windows (including 296 exterior windows), 1,200 doors, 459 towers, 88 fountains, 86 staircases, 16 patios, 15 cloisters, and 9 towers.

In the mid-sixteenth century, Philip II began contemplating the construction of such an edifice. In 1558 he initiated the search for a site, declaring, “It should be a healthy place, with good air and water, isolated in the country; a place for contemplation, and distant from Madrid, but not too far away.”8 In 1562 he located the site, and the construction began soon thereafter. El Escorial’s architectural precedents were the Monasterio de San Isidro de León, from the twelfth century, the Monasterio de Poblet in Tarragona, the Monasterio Jerónimo de Yuste (where Charles V retired and was buried in 1558), the Hospital de Granada (the west half of El Escorial is a near replica of this edifice), and the Hospital de Santa Cruz de Toledo. Certain areas of the Alcázar in Toledo, designed by Francisco de Villalpando, also served as models for El Escorial.

The architectural concept for El Escorial developed over the years, and the present configuration includes many constructions built after the original plans were conceived, well into the eighteenth century. The main designers of El Escorial, however, were two of the most renowned architects in Spain during the sixteenth century: Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera.

Juan Bautista de Toledo, who had worked under Michelangelo in the Vatican, drew the plans for the main body of El Escorial and most of the related designs. His “universal design,” as he and his contemporaries identified his plan, actually referred to the “universal” because Bautista drew from architecture of both Italy and Spain. The cross-shaped floor plans in El Escorial imitated fifteenth-century Italian and Spanish hospitals, as well as medieval monasteries.

Juan de Herrera worked as an assistant to Juan Bautista de Toledo. A reader and follower of the celebrated sixteenth-century humanists, Herrera served in the army of Charles V before assisting Juan Bautista in the designing of El Escorial. Herrera worked with Bautista until the latter’s death in 1567; then he was responsible for the completion of the complex, including several parts that had not yet been designed by his master. He was interested in the work of the Italian architect Vitruvio and influenced by the Italian Renaissance masters. According to Kubler, Herrera had been contracted as “an outsider who would be a humanist and theorist of the fine art of architecture, rather than a builder from the ranks of artisans and contractors.”⁹

The models for El Escorial included medieval monasteries, and El Escorial has indeed functioned as a monastery. The monastery area was almost complete by 1571; in 1572 work began on the king’s area. The basilica was begun in 1574, and the last stone was placed in the basilica in 1584 but was not consecrated until 1594. Philip II resided in El Escorial most spring and summer months, beginning in 1576.

Representation in El Escorial was a form of imitation and repetition. Michel Foucault has pointed out that until the end of the sixteenth century (precisely when El Escorial was being built), resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. During that period, painting imitated space and was posited as a form of repetition, be it the theater of life or the mirror of nature.10 Perched comfortably on the Guadarrama Mountains, El Escorial imitated nature and the heavens, as represented in the Bible and other religious writings. El Escorial’s forms of imitation—architectural topoi of the period—repeated themselves throughout the building. The walls, the towers, the doors, and the windows, among numerous other forms, appear and reappear, in different sizes, throughout El Escorial.

Foucault also notes that in the sixteenth century, rhetorical strategies such as convenientia, acumultio, and sympathy told how the world had to fold upon itself, duplicate itself, reflect itself, or form a chain with itself so that things could resemble one another.11 As each wall or corner of El Escorial duplicates another, the building folds upon itself in the fashion typical of the sixteenth-century world. One of the paintings there, San Jerónimo y San Agustín, by Alonso Sánchez Coello (1531–1588), illustrates well the tendency of El Escorial to reflect itself. In this painting, a godlike Saint Augustine holds in his right hand a building with the architectural lines of El Escorial. This mini-Escorial duplicates the building in which the observer stands while observing this replica of civitas Dei.

Images of Philip II and the religious order of San Jerónimo monks were also reproduced on the walls of El Escorial. Portraits of Philip II, such as the one by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1551–1608), adorn these walls. These paintings of Philip II and other Spanish monarchs turn the politics of El Escorial upon themselves in constant repetition. The San Jerónimo monks saw themselves duplicated daily in the numerous paintings of their martyr San Jerónimo suffering.

Seen from the outside, this “great lyrical stone” (as El Escorial was once described by Miguel de Unamuno) projects multiple and duplicating images of a military fortress: the massive granite walls, with towers in each of the four corners of the rectangular building, mirror the imposing military fortresses constructed in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the fortress of San Felipe in Cartagena de las Indias in Colombia, the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, Mexico, the fortress of Azare on the coast of Venezuela, and the equally grandiose and architecturally similar fortresses that protected Havana in Cuba, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.¹² In the case of Cartagena de las Indias, the combination of the San Felipe military fortress, the walls that surround the city with its towers (architecturally identical to the towers of El Escorial), and the Basilica of San Pedro Claver (located inside the walled city of Cartagena de las Indias) produces architectural structures and spaces quite similar to the exterior imagery of El Escorial. A comparison between El Escorial and San Felipe is not gratuitous, for the Colombian historian Eduardo Lemaitre has documented the orders that Philip II gave for the construction of a “fortaleza grandiosa” when San Felipe was built:

Seen from the outside, El Escorial is stark in its uniformity and lack of ornamentation. Juan Bautista had not originally planned for such extreme uniformity. According to his plan, the western part of the building was to have one floor less than the finished product does, and towers in the centers of the northern and southern facades were to provide it with much more height. When Philip decided to double the number of monks in the monastery (from fifty to one hundred), the entire building was raised to four floors. The extreme uniformity of El Escorial, then, was shaped according to the desires of Philip II.

The space from the main entrance, passing through the doorway and entering the Patio de los Reyes, brings to bear issues of exclusion and inclusion. The very presence of this massive main entrance as a barrier to the basilica located beyond the Patio de los Reyes communicates exclusion: the general populace did not have ready access to the space of the Catholic mass hidden beyond these imposing doors. Upon entering the Patio de los Reyes, the observer’s glance is directed upward, following the lines of the six Greek columns that undergird the statues of the six kings of Judea: Josafat, Ezequias, David, Salomon, Josias, and Manasés. The presence of these biblical kings produces yet another confluence between the religious and the political and serves to legitimate the presence of Philip II in the divine order of El Escorial. The general populace, in order to pass through the doors to the basilica from the Patio de los Reyes, needed the assistance of the hierarchy, for the heavy metal doors had to be opened in advance; an individual from the outside would not be able to open them. These barred doors, in fact, give the structure the physical appearance of a prison with bars, producing a sense of exclusion of the general populace rather than inclusion: access is possible only after passing under the statues of the six kings of Judea and through the imposing door entrance. Thus, the implicit message of these large, heavy, metal doors was that access to the church and God was possible only through the divine intervention of the king of Spain.

The confluence of religious and political imagery is particularly acute in the basilica. Philip II designed the basilica and his bedroom to assure direct visual access to the basilica’s altar. The king could therefore observe the priest and the entire mass from his privileged position of voyeur, lying comfortably on his bed. He could also observe the figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints occupying their appropriate spaces (all gold-gilded statues), as well as his own figure. This remarkable juxtaposition of religious and political imagery in the same sacred space reproduces the above-mentioned political strategies with respect to the murals, while revealing the political unconscious of the “dwelling place for God.”15

Several of the murals also reveal a confluence of the religious and the political, yet another sign that El Escorial was much more ideologically complex than is signaled by its explicit function as “a dwelling place for God.” In the Gallery of Battles, a lengthy mural, painted in bright colors, is testimony to the irrefutable political function of El Escorial. Titled The Battle of Higuerela (the victory of Juan II of Castille over the Granadinos in 1431), the mural lauds the military accomplishments of the Spanish Crown and also celebrates the triumph of Hispanic over Arabic values. Mural painters Fabrizio Zastello, Onazio Cambiasso, and Lazzaro Tavarone portrayed distinguished-looking, white-bearded Spaniards of imposing physical appearance beneath their armor, battling dark-faced and menacing Arabs wearing turbans. Philip II’s strategy was to associate himself (and his campaign for European hegemony) with the campaigns of the Spanish Christian monarchs of the Middle Ages. He made this connection in the Gallery of Battles by depicting two of his campaigns, the Battle of San Quintín and the clashes with the English in the Azores, on the walls facing The Battle of Higuerela.

The politics of another mural, The Story of the Redemption, which tells the Jesus narrative, are equally indicative. In the last section of the mural, Jesus is killed not by Romans but by Arabs, an anachronism of several centuries that served the political strategies of the Spanish Crown. The ideology of these two murals justified Unamuno’s observation that “there should not be any Spaniard—with an historical awareness of his Spanishness—who does not visit it some time in his life, just as the pious Moslems visit their Mecca.”¹⁶

From the sixteenth-century chronicler of El Escorial, Fray José de la Sigüenza, to the twentieth-century philosophers Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, no one has questioned the españolidad of this cultural object identified as El Escorial. Nevertheless, this Spanish “dwelling place for God” was actually a multicultural object influenced by Arabic and other traditions and containing a diverse collection of some four thousand Arabic manuscripts along with other heterodox texts. With respect to its cultural politics, then, El Escorial contains numerous internal contradictions.

The political contradictions of Philip II’s regime are fully evident in the ideology and discourse of El Escorial. Both the contents and the functions of the edifice point to a dominant regime that contradicted its own official ideology. For example, this regime banned most foreign classics. Nevertheless, the library of El Escorial contained more than 40,000 volumes, including a large number of Latin and Greek manuscripts, as well as other texts that, strictly speaking, should have been considered heterodox. (The finely elaborated Doric bookcases in the library were designed by Juan de Herrera and built by José Flecha.) With respect to the library collection, Philip II himself promoted the cultural contradictions inherent in his Escorial: “He is known to have acquired more than 200 books on magic, kept a horoscope prepared by Mathias Hacus, received frequent advice from astrologers, ordered all extant works by medieval Marjocan philosopher Ramón Lull to be brought to the Escorial, and patronised alchemists like Diego de Santiago.”17 Lull, in turn, was a poet whose writing was a palimpsest of Arabic tradition. The multicultural forces in sixteenth-century Spain and Europe were too strong for even Philip II to suppress, although his official political objectives were to do so. The contradictions inherent in El Escorial and the cultural possibilities of which Philip II was obviously aware but refused to recognize are one important subject of Terra Nostra. El Escorial is a patently multicultural object that was denied its multiethnic makeup by Philip II; similarly, he and his heirs denied the multicultural composition of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American society.

In addition to containing elements of the medieval, the Renaissance, and the neoclassical, the architecture of El Escorial shares with the postmodern the unresolved ambiguity created by the juxtaposition of different styles.¹⁸ (An attempt to describe El Escorial as postmodern, nevertheless, would be an anachronistic and questionable exercise.) It does share with the postmodern juxtapositions that create contradictions, one of the most visible and obvious being the neoclassical Greek columns at the entrance and the austere and massive walls surrounding them. These juxtapositions and unresolved contradictions, as well as the architectural complexity of El Escorial, all contribute to an understanding of Fuentes’ choice of this edifice as the setting for Terra Nostra.

Representation in El Escorial, then, consists of imitation, repetition, and duplication—the typical sixteenth-century pattern. Fuentes uses the pattern in El Escorial as a point of departure in Terra Nostra. As a microcosm of sixteenth-century Spanish society, its duplicating patterns provided the assurance that everything will find its mirror and its macrocosmic justification on another, larger scale. This use of the microcosm, according to Foucault, was also typical of the sixteenth century.¹⁹ Despite the rigidity of Philip and El Escorial, this edifice is a patently multicultural object. Its political, military, and religious functions are evidenced in its architecture. This center of sixteenth-century political, military, and ecclesiastical power serves as a foundation for Fuentes, the place from which he narrates Terra Nostra.

Cervantes or the Critique of Reading is Fuentes’ 110-page essay on Don Quixote and the Spanish literary and political context around the creation of this Spanish classic; it was written during the year he was completing Terra Nostra. Fuentes himself has explained how Terra Nostra and this essay on Cervantes are related: “In a certain way, the present essay is a branch of the novel that has occupied me for the past six years, Terra Nostra. The three dates that constitute the temporal references of the novel help establish the temporal frame of Cervantes and Don Quixote: 1492, 1521, and 1598.”20 According to Fuentes, although the central issue of this essay is Cervantes and his work, it is also a review of diverse aspects of life in Spain during the period from 1499 to 1598, which covers the main construction of El Escorial or, literarily, from the publication of La Celestina in 1499 to that of Don Quixote in 1605. In his essay, Fuentes presents his vision of a multicultural Spain, inhabited by Jews, Moors, and Spaniards in medieval and Renaissance times. Drawing upon the work of Américo Castro, José Ortega y Gasset, and other scholars, Fuentes is particularly concerned with understanding how, beneath the veneer of orthodoxy, Spain was a vibrant world of heterodoxy, even during the Middle Ages. (This is the contradictory orthodoxy and heterodoxy observed in my previous reading of El Escorial.) At one point, Fuentes even confesses his (politically incorrect) admiration for medieval cultural achievements: “Perhaps I should clarify at this point that I do not possess the progressive arrogance necessary to negate the magnificent cultural flourishing that took place in Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries” (Cervantes, 20–21). Fuentes’ admiration for the Middle Ages, however, should not be associated with the orthodox, Catholic world of papal hierarchy. Rather, through readings of the scholarly writings of Américo Castro and other primary texts, Fuentes exalts the Arabic erotic literature of the Middle Ages and the Spanish literature that draws on these rich non-Hispanic traditions, such as The Book of Good Love and La Celestina.

When Fuentes wrote Cervantes or the Critique of Reading in the 1970s, the term “multiculturalism” had not yet been popularized, nor does he use that term. In referring to Américo Castro’s observations on the cultural complexity of medieval Spain, Fuentes speaks of “cultural complex”—an early expression of his later vision of multiculturalism.

In his book on Cervantes, Fuentes also sets forth his vision of the novel, a concept that can be seen, in retrospect, as a Bakhtinian and Foucauldian concept of the genre. Although Fuentes was not yet citing Bakhtin in the mid-1970s, his regular insistence on the multiple languages of the novel relates directly to the concept of heteroglossia—or “other languages”—promoted by Bakhtin. (Later, in the 1980s, Fuentes began citing Bakhtin directly.) Using some ideas from Les mots et les choses, Fuentes states in Cervantes or the Critique of Reading: “And it is in the Medieval period in which an order is inscribed in which words and things only do coincide, but all reading is, in the end, the reading of the divine word” (Cervantes, 18). Here Fuentes paraphrases Foucault’s idea that in the medieval world, words and things coincided, and then he adds his own observation: All reading in the medieval period is of the divine word. An understanding of this medieval conception of the word and of reading is important for an understanding of Cervantes because he lived and wrote during the Counter-Reformation—with all the rigidity and orthodoxy of the medieval period and none of its merits. (Built during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, El Escorial attempts to exude the same rigidity and orthodoxy.)

In Cervantes or the Critique of Reading, Fuentes also proposes that Cervantes creates a new role for the reader—the writer who reads himself while he is reading the novel. This special awareness of a new role for the reader also reverts to Ortega y Gasset, who had made a similar point in Historia como sistema, speaking of a reader who has the choice of making himself or not making himself in the act of reading. Ortega states: “Man is the novelist of himself, original or plagiarist.”21 Numerous basic ideas in Fuentes’ book on Cervantes as well as Terra Nostra, in fact, directly evoke Ortega y Gasset’s return to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain in Historia como sistema. Fuentes, like Ortega y Gasset, envisions sixteenth-century Spain as a nation in wrenching inquietud and crisis. Ortega y Gasset also questioned the modern faith in science and reason. Like Fuentes, this Spanish philosopher saw pure reason in crisis. Ortega y Gasset set forth an idea fundamental for Fuentes when he stated in Historia como sistema: “Let us happily and courageously renounce the comfort to presume that thought is real and logical.” For Fuentes, too, the West’s faith in exclusively scientific thought needs to be questioned. Since the 1960s, Fuentes has spoken of the tendency in the West to conceive of reality and thought in terms of Manichaean polarities. Ortega y Gasset’s interest in the reader, as well as his conception of man, are quite similar to Fuentes’ reader and man as described in Cervantes and Terra Nostra. Ortega y Gasset states: “Man gradually accumulates his being—the past: he makes a being in the dialectical process of his experiences.”²² The idea that man is his past is fundamental to Fuentes’ conception of the characters in Terra Nostra, for several of them seem to be the reincarnation, of sorts, of characters already seen in the novel. This is the case, for example, of the numerous characters that appear with six toes and a cross on their backs. Ortega y Gasset also states: “I am the past,” exactly as the characters function in Terra Nostra.

The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (1992) is a more recent book-length consideration of the relationship between Spain and the New World, and thus a reconsideration of central issues in Terra Nostra. Fuentes’ Spain—like Philip II’s El Escorial—is multicultural: Fuentes emphasizes how Christian, Arab, Jewish, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Gothic, and Gypsy roots can all be found in the Iberian Peninsula. With these multiple cultures already intact in Spain, and the sixteenth-century encounter with Arawaks, Aztecs, Quechuas, and other groups indigenous to the Americas, Philip II of Spain faced what Fuentes describes as “the challenge of the Other” (BM, 34). The courts of Charles V and Philip II faced this challenge at a time when the European spirit of the Renaissance was alive, a spirit fomented by the writers Juan Ruiz, Fernando de Rojas, Erasmus, and the Italian Marsilio Ficino, who affirmed that “all is possible.” Despite occasional incursions of the Renaissance spirit into Spain, it remained hidden in the “night of El Escorial,” according to Fuentes, rather than reappearing in the sunlight of the Enlightenment (BM, 216). In this way, El Escorial became for Fuentes a key metaphor for the directions that Spain took in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, directions that prevented the spirit of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment from flourishing in the Americas.

What future does Fuentes find for the Americas led by a medieval Spain enclosed in “the night of El Escorial?” From its rich multicultural traditions, Spain has left a cultural heritage that Fuentes believes offers hope for both the present and the future of the Americas. Echoing Ortega y Gasset once again, a consistent note in The Buried Mirror is Fuentes’ return to cultural heritage and cultural values as important resources. As he states in his introduction: “A rediscovery of cultural values can give us, with luck and effort, the necessary vision of cultural, economic and political convergences. Perhaps this is our mission in the coming century” (Buried Mirror, 10). This firm belief in cultural values is Fuentes’ rewriting of Ortega y Gasset and Alfonso Reyes. The different political and cultural alternatives present for Spain and Hispanic culture are issues that Fuentes explores in Terra Nostra.

In Les Mots et les Choses (a book that Fuentes discovered when he was in the early stages of Terra Nostra), Foucault not only has a chapter on Don Quixote with a discussion of Las Meninas and Borges but he also uses some language that could well have its origins in Ortega y Gasset too. In speaking of beliefs, for example, Ortega y Gasset stated: “This means that, among other things, they possess an architecture and act in architecture.”²⁴

Ortega y Gasset’s emphasis on “things,” “architecture,” and “hierarchy” as seen here all becomes the critical language later, of course, of Foucault. In his Historia como sistema, Ortega y Gasset also speaks of “orders,” making this book a forerunner of Les Mots et les Choses. Thus Fuentes had the precedent of Foucauldian concepts in Ortega y Gasset, as well as Les Mots et les Choses, when he began Terra Nostra in 1967. In the context of Fuentes, the important commonality between Foucault and Ortega y Gasset was a new sense of history and, more specifically, a sense that human history is not a matter of immutable truths but of human constructs in constant transformation. Ortega y Gasset had asserted in the 1940s, “Life is a job,” believing that the individual makes his or her own reality through a series of acts. Foucault believed modern historians were responsible for having changed the old idea of a fixed and immutable history, a belief conveyed by his statement that “historians see the emergence, as though before their very eyes, of an opposition between those who believe in the immobility of nature—in the manner of Tournefort and, above all, Linnaens—and those who, with Bonnet, Renost de Maillet, and Diderot, already have a presentiment of life’s creative powers, of its inexhaustible power of transformation, of its plasticity, and of that movement by means of which no one is master.”25 This philosopher’s sense of transforming history is a basic concept of Terra Nostra.

In the bibliography of his book on Cervantes, Fuentes includes three of Américo Castro’s studies: El pensamiento de Cervantes, España en su historia, and La realidad histórica de España. As Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out, an ideological underpinning of Fuentes’ construct on Hispanic culture and history is Américo Castro’s theory of Spanish history. Castro had promulgated the idea that the historical conflicts among Jews, Arabs, and Christians resulted in a fragmented Hispanic culture in which the Catholic victors violently suppressed the Jews and the Arabs. According to Castro, the fragmentation of the cultures of Spain is replicated in the fragmentation of cultures in Latin America. According to González Echevarría, Fuentes blends these ideas of Castro with others of Foucault in order to render Castro’s fragmentation as Foucault’s separation of words and things.²⁶

In his book on Cervantes, Fuentes refers to Castro as the scholar who proposed that “the most original and universal part of the Hispanic genius has its origins in the forms of life constructed during the 900 years of the Christian-Islamic-Jewish blending” (Cervantes, 4). Thus, González Echevarría is correct in tracing Fuentes’ concept of Hispanic culture back to Américo Castro. The roots of Fuentes’ multiculturalism are also to be found in Castro. In citing Castro’s España en su historia, Fuentes notes that the Spanish thinker described the history of Spain as “the history of an insecurity.” Spain’s historical insecurity emerges as yet another concern of Terra Nostra when, for example, Fuentes proposes historical alternatives that Spain lacked the courage to pursue.

Fuentes was unquestionably marked by The Labyrinth of Solitude, as were many writers of his generation, and Paz’s mark is obvious in Los días enmascarados and Where the Air Is Clear. Moreover, many of the lifetime concerns of Paz and Fuentes are thematic material of Terra Nostra. The latter work, however, carries these issues in a conceptual framework so far beyond The Labyrinth of Solitude that González Echevarría is exaggerating Paz’s importance on Fuentes during the 1970s. It is also questionable that Fuentes suggests the “acceptance” of “the dark, violent and retrograde Spain.” Rather, Fuentes depicts a heterogeneous and multicultural Spain of the Middle Ages that was denied by Philip II and other Spanish kings.

The intertextual relationship between Terra Nostra and certain well-known canonical texts functions in a variety of ways.28 Texts of Juan Ruiz, Fernando de Rojas, Tirso de Molina, Cervantes, and Joyce appear in Terra Nostra not as influences or sources in the traditional sense but rather, as the term “intertextuality” was originally proposed by Kristeva and later developed by Culler, as part of a sign system.²⁹ Juan Ruiz’s The Book of Good Love (1330) is one of the texts that most subtly and indirectly appears in Terra Nostra, in contrast to El burlador de Sevilla, La Celestina, and Don Quixote, which have major characters in the novel. The Book of Good Love, a song to the pleasures of the body, is absorbed and transformed in Terra Nostra as the literary presence of the Califato de Córdoba. The acts of transgressive eroticism that take place inside the walls of Fuentes’ El Escorial—called El Palacio—are transformations from The Book of Good Love, which, in turn, was a product stemming from Arabic culture. The Andalusian poet Ibn Haz’s El collar de la paloma, written in 1022, was an erotic autobiography assimilated into The Book of Good Love, according to María Rosa Lida and Américo Castro (Cervantes, 43). The Arabic spaces and Arabic culture in Terra Nostra frequently represent a momentary sexual liberation within a Catholic and Hispanic ambience of repression. In the narrative segment titled “El primer niño” (TN, 522–524), for example, Felipe, Celestina, and Ludovico, who had suffered the oppression and persecution of El Señor earlier in the novel, engage in an unorthodox (and liberating) ménage a trois. Using an Arabic reference, the narrator states: “The castle was the place where everything they had dreamed was becoming reality” (TN, 515).

The character Celestina, from La Celestina (1499), by Fernando de Rojas, is a major presence in Terra Nostra, appearing throughout the novel. Rojas, a descendant of converted Jews, wrote La Celestina as a humanistic alternative to the growing orthodoxy of Spain. It is a story of characters like some of those in Terra Nostra: an old go-between, her female pupils, two young lovers, and their servants. In La Celestina, according to Fuentes, “the exemplary voices and virtues of medieval morality are defeated by money, passion, sex interest” (BM, 84).

In Terra Nostra, Celestina appears as the old go-between and the experienced woman who believes in love. She enters the novel in the first section, as one of two mysterious signees of a letter that Polo Febo finds on July 14, 1999. After that, she appears in Spain, initially as a campesina who marries the blacksmith Jerónimo and is raped by El Señor (TN, 110–113) while the young Felipe watches, and later she escapes with Felipe. Then she is raped by two old men in the forest. Saved by Felipe again, she engages in lengthy conversations about dreams of utopia with her newfound friends Felipe, Ludovico, and Pedro. Each speaks of dreams of ideal worlds where rebellions against repression are successful, where there is no death, and where people live in love and harmony. La Celestina bears a child and makes a pact with the devil, who promises her the wisdom she cannot attain in one lifetime. When she is in El Palacio, she frequently appears dressed as a page. After her absence from Part II in the New World, Celestina appears once again with Felipe, Ludovico, and others in Part III. As in La Celestina, in Part I she actively promotes sexual liberation and moves on the margins of society, often in the spaces of heterodoxy. Children claiming to have been born of Celestina appear throughout Part III. Near the end of the novel (“The Rebellion,” 628–651), Celestina kisses Ludovico and promises to meet him in Paris on July 14, 1999. Her reappearance at the end of the novel, where she makes love with Polo Febo, suggests the attainment of that instant of eternal time that Fuentes and Paz have long desired in their texts.

In comparison to Celestina and Don Juan, Don Quixote is a relatively minor character in Terra Nostra. He first appears in the narrative segment titled “The Knight of Sad Countenance” (TN, 530–531), which combines elements from the first and second parts of Don Quixote. Fuentes’ Don Quixote appears to be insane because of his role as his immoral other—Don Juan. The double figure Don Quixote/Don Juan fails as Don Quixote, kills Dulcinea’s father, and then acquires the identity of Don Quixote. More important than the presence of the protagonist of Don Quixote is Fuentes’ use of Cervantes’ narrative strategies, such as the story within the story, as well as what Fuentes himself has defined as Cervantine “modern” attitudes.

The intertextual relationships with Borges are important to much of Fuentes’ work, including Terra Nostra. One of the most important Borges pieces for the Fuentes of Terra Nostra and the Foucault of Les Mots et les Choses was the Borges story that subverted the landmarks of Foucault’s thought and the West’s age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This Borges fiction refers to a Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that animals are divided into a series of unorthodox categories, such as “belonging to the Emperor,” “embalmed,” “tame,” “sucking pigs,” “fabulous,” and the like.30 Borges’ innovative subversion of traditional taxonomies and proposal of another system of thought laid the groundwork for much Latin American fiction of Fuentes’ generation, much of Fuentes’ own writing, and The Order of Things. Terra Nostra, as a historical project, is an invention of new historical taxonomies for the history of Spain and the Americas.

Borges’ Ficciones is also basic to Terra Nostra, particularly his story “Pierre Ménard, Author of Don Quixote.” Fuentes makes numerous allusions to Borges in his novel, but two of the most pervasive Borgesian ideas in Terra Nostra are the concept of all books as one book and the death of the author. In “Pierre Ménard,” Borges suggests the former by proposing the idea of the “total book,” which contains all books. And Terra Nostra is seemingly one of these exemplary texts, containing the canonical books of the West, as well as numerous esoteric and forgotten texts. In “Magias parciales del Quijote,” Borges suggests on the one hand that fiction writing is the rewriting of other texts; on the other hand he suggests that fictitious characters can be real readers of a text and, in turn, that real readers can be fictitious.

Fuentes rewrites Borges’ “Pierre Ménard,” in Terra Nostra. This Borges story begins with a list of Ménard’s works, a list of esoteric non sequiturs that recalls the bibliography of Terra Nostra in Cervantes or the Critique of Reading. Ménard’s sources include “one of those parasitic books which places Christ on a Boulevard, Hamlet on the Cannebiere and Don Quijote on Wall Street.”31 This type of anachronistic spatial displacement is precisely the exercise of Fuentes in Terra Nostra: he has Agrippa and Celestina in the twentieth century and Polo Febo and Ulysses in the sixteenth. Ménard was also interested in “Paudet’s famous plan: to unite in one figure, Tartarin, the Ingenious Gentleman and his square.” This is also Fuentes’ procedure, as he fuses Don Quijote and Don Juan into one character, and Philip II, Charles V, Charles IV, Charles II, and Francisco Franco into the character of El Señor. Several others, such as La Señora, Guzmán, and Julián, are a synthesis of several historical figures.³² In the end, the narrator of “Pierre Ménard” views Don Quijote as a “kind of palimpsest,” just as Terra Nostra is a kind of palimpsest with traces of writing of, above all, Cervantes and Borges—the two writers with characters least visible in Terra Nostra, although, in the end, Pierre Ménard does make a brief appearance.

Terra Nostra alludes to numerous other literary characters. Les misérables is evoked by Jean Valjean, and lines from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Primero sueño” appear in the text, as do passages from the Bible and the Kaballah.33 The character Violetta Gautier in Terra Nostra is a combination of Marguerite Gautier of Alexander Dumas’ La dame aux camélias and Violetta Valéry from Verdi’s La Traviata. In the narrative segment “The Chronicler” (TN, 233–248), Fuentes incorporates intertextually the opening lines of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. From Ezra Pound’s poem “Cino” comes a passage in Terra Nostra as well as the name of Polo Febo, who originates as Pollo Phoibee in “Cino.”

With respect to the intertextuality in Terra Nostra, it is helpful to remember that Pierre Ménard wished to “produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.”³⁴ Terra Nostra is not only a rewriting of the history of Spain but it is also an irreverent rewriting of many canonical texts of Hispanic and Western literary tradition.

Terra Nostra consists of 114 narrative segments divided formally into three parts.35 Part I, titled “The Old World,” is the longest (341 pages in Spanish; 338 pages in English). Part II, “The New World,” is the shortest (139 pages in Spanish; 137 pages in English). Part III is titled “The Next World” and is of moderate length (286 pages in Spanish; 289 pages in English). In Part I, “The Old World,” an anecdote with some similarity to the history of the sixteenth-century Spain of Philip II is narrated, a story of rigid Catholic orthodoxy and political repression. The character of El Señor (always capitalized) represents a synthesis of the historical figures of Charles V and Philip II. Similarly, the character of La Señora has some qualities of Juana La Loca and other Spanish queens. In Part II, a character from the first part, Pedro, travels to the New World with a young pilgrim who remains unnamed. They arrive at a land similar to the Mexico and the Tenochtitlán where Hernán Cortés arrived, where the Indians speak of Quetzalcoatl, and where there is a god named Espejo Humeante as well as other figures that the reader associates with the Mexican Valle de Anáhuac of the sixteenth century. Part III returns to a Spain of basically the sixteenth century, but with many entirely heterodox cultural and political elements.

The structure of Terra Nostra, which follows the fundamental architectural scheme of El Escorial, is considerably more complex than the outline above might suggest. In the first place, the novel begins and ends with the character of Polo Febo in Paris in the year 1999. Febo helps his ninety-one-year-old concierge to give birth to a child with a cross on his back, then observes great chaos on the streets of Paris, sees masses of women giving birth to babies on these same streets, and finally meets with a woman with tattooed lips who throws a bottle into the boiling Seine River, into which Polo Febo falls. Many of the incredible characters and events of these twenty-two initial pages, whose motives seem illogical or incomprehensible on a first reading, appear and reappear in the seven hundred pages that follow. The temporal changes and the constant transformation of the identity of the characters subvert any sense of linearity that the initial description might have suggested.

Parallels between the basic structure of Terra Nostra and the basic architectural scheme of El Escorial are evident in the novel’s three parts. El Escorial also consists of three parts, with the basilica in the center as one part, another part north of the basilica, and a third part south of the basilica. If we read the architectural plan of El Escorial from left to right, as we read books, the first and third parts of El Escorial, like the first and third parts of Terra Nostra, occupy the most space. Part I of El Escorial consists of the casa real and the colegio. Part II in the sequence consists of the basilica, and Part III contains the monastery. The structural complexity of El Escorial, like that of Terra Nostra, surpasses these initial descriptions. In addition to the multiple patios, rooms, stairways, doors, and towers, El Escorial was in a state of transformation throughout the reign of Philip II, in accordance with the plans and the adjustments to them over the three-decade period.

The constant transformations of characters in Terra Nostra—some of which involve three or four manifestations of the same basic character—has several equivalents in El Escorial. As mentioned above, the architecture of El Escorial underwent a process of constant transformation over the approximately three decades of its construction, including the later period when Philip II lived there at the same time that the construction of other parts continued. The biblical stories that cover the walls of El Escorial in the form of murals also underwent ongoing transformation, in both form and content. The form or style of these paintings changed in accordance with the historical period of their conception, depicting saints and other biblical figures as two-dimensional or three-dimensional, dark- or light-skinned, and the like, depending on the artistic mores and political needs of the moment. Consequently, the observer of El Escorial sees many saints called San Lorenzo and San Mauricio—all repeating different variants—just as the reader of Terra Nostra encounters numerous characters identified as El Señor, La Señora, and the like.

A diachronic parallel is the space of El Escorial and Terra Nostra. Philip II and Fuentes conceived of their architectural models with multiple interior spaces of varying sizes, with a variety of accesses to the exterior space. The large spaces of El Escorial, such as the patio between the main entrance and the basilica, the basilica itself, and the large areas where paintings are on display, have as their equivalent the lengthy chapters of Terra Nostra. More precisely, the large spaces for paintings in El Escorial are the equivalent of the lengthy chapters in Terra Nostra on the painting from Orvieto (TN, 83–109). The small spaces of El Escorial, such as the Patio of the Masks and other small interior spaces, have parallels in Terra Nostra in the brief and spatially enclosed chapters such as “There Is a Clock That Does Not Strike” (TN, 99–102) and “The Heir” (TN, 107–108). The self-enclosed El Escorial has, at several turns, access to outside space in the form of its numerous patios, its even more numerous windows, and its gardens. Consequently, the experience of space in El Escorial is often conveyed by abrupt change: from darkness to light, from an enclosed, hermetic interior space to a bright, open, exterior space. In Terra Nostra, the experience of space is parallel: the reader moves from narrative segment to narrative segment, from the small spaces of brief fragments to the larger spaces of lengthy ones, from the enclosed spaces of the tombs and small rooms to the open spaces of the forests of Spain and the jungles of the Americas.

The relationship between the spaces of El Escorial and the spaces (narrative segments) of Terra Nostra, respectively, function on the basis of metonymy rather than that of metaphor, that is, association rather than analogy. In El Escorial, the predominant images are the massive exterior walls, the four towers, the main entrance, and the basilica. Inside El Escorial, one encounters smaller walls, images of smaller reproductions of the towers, smaller entrances into rooms, and smaller images from the basilica. Each of these smaller structures and images functions as a synecdoche for the larger structure and images, thus making the experience of El Escorial, for the observer, one of continuous synecdoche. The structure of Terra Nostra also functions on the basis of metonymy rather than metaphor, in terms of both the relationships among the individual narrative segments and the relationships among the three parts. The individual narrative segments sometimes connect as a linear story in sequences of approximately two to ten narrative segments; other segments that do not form part of a linear narrative associate with each other metonymically. Many of these brief segments, like the small reproductions of itself within El Escorial, function as synecdoches for the larger story. The brief narration of El Señor’s rape of Celestina (“Jus primae noctis,” TN, 110–111) operates as a synecdoche for his larger rape of Spain and, in turn, for his rape of the colonies of the Americas.

The Theater of Memory (TN, 552–563) is the novel’s second important synecdoche of itself. In this narrative segment, Ludovico visits the Venetian Valerio Camillo, who has built and operates a “theater of memory,” with a historical precedent from the Middle Ages. As has been pointed out, Terra Nostra is structured around three worlds, just as Camillo’s Theater of Memory represents three worlds: “These columns represent the seven Sephirot of the supracelestial world, which are the seven measures of the plots of the celestial and lower worlds and which contain all the possible ideas of all three worlds” (TN, 558). A parallel to Fuentes’ rewriting of unorthodox, heretical, and esoteric religious practices is Camillo’s eclectic and unorthodox integration of diverse religious practices. Camillo places in this theater Greek divinities such as Diana, Mercury, Venus, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and he also cites the Zohar: “Three bodies and one eye; one body and three souls” (TN, 565). In addition, Camillo paraphrases Hermes Trismegistus: “Hermes Trismegistus has written wisely that he who knows how to join himself to this diversity of the unique will also be divine and will know all past, present, and future, and all the things that heaven and earth contain” (TN, 559). Camillo’s explanation of Hermes’ writings parallels Fuentes’ writing in Terra Nostra, which emphasizes diversity and synthesizes the past, present, and future into one. Other allusions in the narrative section “Theater of Memory” suggest that Camillo’s Theater of Memory is a synecdoche for Terra Nostra: Camillo refers to his theater as a “paper fortress” (TN, 559) and proposes memory as “total knowledge of a total past” (TN, 563). Obviously, Terra Nostra itself is not only a fortress of paper but also a manifestation of Fuentes’ belief in memory as an important vehicle for understanding the past. With the inclusion of the Theater of Memory, Fuentes paraphrases Foucault’s observation that, until the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. Painting imitated space and was posited as a form of repetition, be it the theater of life or the mirror of nature.36 Here, a theater of life (life as mind and memory) is a mirror of both nature and Terra Nostra itself.

The third important object that functions as a synecdoche of Terra Nostra in Terra Nostra is the painting of Orvieto.37 It is a magical work painted by Julián that rewrites the Jesus narrative. Orvieto’s painting first appears near the beginning of the novel in the section “All My Sins” (TN, 89–104); the narrative of the painting is intercalated between a dialogue between El Señor and Guzmán and a narrative about the construction of El Palacio. At the beginning, the painting is described as a typical biblical narrative, telling the story of Jesus. Later in Part I, the cuadro appears again, but it comes to life when El Señor prays to the Jesus in the picture (“Brief Life, Eternal Glory, Unchanging World,” TN, 148–157). Suddenly El Señor notices the movement of the nude male bodies in the pictures, with erect penises covered with blood and semen. El Señor prays more fervently, seethes with wrath, and lashes at the painting with a whip. Then Jesus begins moving his lips and delivers a speech questioning whether or not he is the Son of God. Later in Part I, in “The First Testament,” El Señor has another equally devastating encounter with the painting when several characters in the painting speak, including Jesus, undermining the belief of El Señor and Guzmán in Christian doctrine as narrated in the Bible. In Part III, there are brief allusions to the painting, now rejected by El Señor (TN, 493), even though he prays before it (TN, 590). Don Juan looks at the painting (“Second Day,” TN, 593–597) and sees himself in the figure of Jesus. Later (“Fifth Day,” TN, 608–612), El Señor speaks to the painting and demands that the Jesus figure speak the truth, but he receives no response.

This painting from Orvieto functions as a synecdoche of Terra Nostra in several ways. On the one hand, the painting subverts the orthodox biblical narrative of El Señor just as Terra Nostra questions the institutional Catholic narrative of Hispanic political and cultural practices in the sixteenth century. It also intertwines the religious and the sexual in reproduction of the imagery of El Escorial and much of the broader narrative of Terra Nostra beyond the passages dealing with Orvieto’s painting.

Both El Escorial and Terra Nostra aspire to be an “arquitectura universal.” For El Escorial, the “universal” architecture is implied by the basic design based on other “universal” (i.e., European) models. The medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassical lines were the “universals” of the sixteenth century. Philip II also assured the universality of the architectural design by contracting two architects with a broad humanistic education; Bautista de Toledo and Herrera were charged with creating a “universal design.” For Terra Nostra, Fuentes turned to canonical and equally “universal” sources: the classics of Spanish literature, as well as classic histories of the West.

El Escorial and Terra Nostra both employ Old World and New World architecture. The Old World architecture of El Escorial is visible in its European design and motifs. The tripartite architectural plan of Terra Nostra, as well as its use of some classic narrative ruses, forms part of the Old World architecture of the novel. The sources for El Escorial and Terra Nostra, however, are New World: the gold from the Americas serves as the financial source for the construction of El Escorial; New World pre-Columbian history and culture and New World writer Fuentes serve as the ultimate source of Terra Nostra.

El Escorial and Terra Nostra share an architecture of desire. In El Escorial, it is the desire for utopia, which pervades its architectural design, from the basilica spires reaching toward the heavens to the internal spaces that strive to reproduce the heavens. In the structure’s interior plan, the architecture expresses the desire of the voyeur for the other and the desire of the narcissist for the self in the basilica, desires that Philip II made no attempt to hide.38 The voyeurism and narcissism of the architecture are only the most extreme examples of the utopian desires that permeate El Escorial. The ultimate utopia of El Escorial, however, is the trope of this edifice as microcosm, as universe. The original intentions of Philip II emphasized the creation of a setting isolated from the external world. The architectural object of El Escorial, like several of its predecessors, was conceived as orbus mundi—an architectural utopia designed to protect its inhabitants from the empirical world outside.

An architecture of desire also operates in Terra Nostra: the lengthy three-part novel provides for Fuentes’ expression of desire. In this sense, Part III stands out; here Fuentes elaborates the heretical and esoteric texts that Philip II had repressed and that cultural and political practices following Philip II’s regime had continued to repress for centuries. Fuentes seemingly accepts no spatial or temporal limits in Terra Nostra, for in this grand narrative he freely articulates the utopian desires that have undergirded much of his modernist writing. Fuentes’ architecture of desire, unlike that of Philip II, however, is one of inclusion rather than exclusion: while the outer limits of El Escorial serve to limit and exclude, the outer limits of Terra Nostra expand to include. And although both employ an architecture of desire, the architectural designs of El Escorial and Terra Nostra reveal two entirely different concepts of utopia: the utopia of Philip II is a specific and limited place, whereas the utopia of Fuentes is, indeed, “nowhere” (the meaning of the Greek “utopia”).

Finally, the tripartite structures of Terra Nostra and El Escorial emphasize the number three. Fuentes presents the three Sephirot in “The Sephirot” (TN, 523), an explanation of reality according to the Sephirot of the Kaballah. These three Sephirot were also the original letters of the Hebrew alphabet. According to the narrator, the number three represents unity: “From this trinity are born all other things, manifesting themselves progressively in love, justice, beauty, triumph, glory, generation and power” (TN, 523). In the New World, the Aztecs operate according to a principle of dualism. Nevertheless, the old man with memories prefers the number three, affirming the existence of three gods united in one action. In addition, Terra Nostra abounds in threes: there are three bottles, three primary geographical locations (Rome, Spain, Mexico), and, according to one critic, the three cosmic eras of the Kaballah are reflected in the three parts of the novel.39

Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ rewriting of “the night of El Escorial,” his major and culminating rereading of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American culture and history, and, in addition, his major work on identity, knowledge, and the novel itself. Fuentes has been concerned with the culture, history, and identity of the Americas since his youth. Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and A Change of Skin were major projects regarding these issues. Mario Vargas Llosa had asked the historical question “At what moment did Peru fuck up?” and, in an attempt to respond to this question, wrote a lengthy historical and political novel, Conversation in the Cathedral. Near the end of Terra Nostra, Fuentes poses a similar question, with a character wondering “at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up” (TN, 761). In addition to the particulars of Latin American history, Fuentes is concerned with how history, culture, and identity are constructed and then understood. As an observer of El Escorial and as a reader of Ortega y Gasset and Foucault, Fuentes had concluded well before writing Terra Nostra that history should be understood not as the compilation of immutable truths but as a living world in transformation.

In two seminal essays on Terra Nostra, González Echevarría and Kerr have set forth readings of the novel that question Fuentes’ proposals on Latin American culture and history; these essays deal primarily with authority and power in this novel. For González Echevarría, Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ attempt to write what Alejo Carpentier had identified as the novel of cultural knowledge. Carpentier, in turn, had been influenced by many of the same essayists, dedicated to the study of history and culture, whose works Fuentes also read: Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Alfonso Reyes, José Carlos Mariátegui, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Lezama Lima, and Octavio Paz. More specifically, González Echevarría views Fuentes’ double project of Terra Nostra and Cervantes or the Critique of Reading as a synthesis of Castro, Foucault, Cervantes, and Lukacs: “A synthesis (or reduction) of the implicit argument of Fuentes’ essay would run as follows: the caste struggle (Castro) resulted in a fracture, a separation between words and things (Foucault), that produced the modern novel (Cervantes), which is the product of fragmented societies (Lukacs).”40 According to this critic, Fuentes presents himself as the possessor of “an ultimate truth.”⁴¹ Finally, González Echevarría concludes that in Terra Nostra, as in a host of other Latin American novels of the 1970s, the novel of cultural knowledge is abandoned in favor of fiction in the vein of Severo Sarduy and Manuel Puig.⁴² González Echevarría simplifies and reduces Terra Nostra with his reading, for Terra Nostra, as will be shown, is both modern and postmodern, both a novel of cultural knowledge and a fiction in the mode of Sarduy and Puig.

Kerr concurs with González Echevarría in his assessment of Terra Nostra as an archaelogy of knowledge in the Hispanic world, with its beginnings in Rome and continuation through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the end, however, she portrays Terra Nostra as an enigmatic text: “Fuentes’ novel, an enigmatic text that develops around a variety of mysteries and mystery texts, aims to consider the enigmatic quality of the monarchy’s enduring hegemony, which the empirical author regards as ‘based on death … on nada.”’⁴³ Kerr’s incisive reading contributes to our understanding of Fuentes’ novel. Nevertheless, she misrepresents much of the work by failing to move beyond the enigma and mystery that form the basis of much fiction, including Terra Nostra.

With his rewriting of El Escorial, begun at the same time he was discovering Foucault, Fuentes started to explore history conceptualized beyond the terms that he, Vargas Llosa, and a host of other Latin American writers had been using in their historical inquiry into Indo-Afro-Ibero-America. The historical questions of Terra Nostra certainly concern issues well beyond those found in Latin American empirical experience. Foucault has pointed to a number of major functions of history in Western culture, such as: memory, myth, transmission of the word and of example, vehicle of tradition, critical awareness of the present, decipherment of humanity’s destiny, anticipation of the future, or promise of return.⁴⁴ These functions provide Fuentes with material at the same time that he critiques the traditional roles of empirical history.

Fuentes’ earlier understanding of history came not from Foucault but from several other scholars and historians, including R. G. Collingwood, who, in The Idea of History (1946), analyzes the concept of history from the Greek historian Herodotus to Descartes, Hegel, Toynbee, Dilthey, and Spengler.45 Collingwood’s historical thinking, read in the context of Fuentes’ early contact with Américo Castro and Ortega y Gasset and his later contact with Foucault, has contributed to Fuentes’ own thinking. Collingwood studies the steps and stages that brought the modern European idea of history into existence. Fuentes’ historical vision in Terra Nostra is as vast and ample as Collingwood’s, for he too returns to Greco-Roman history; Fuentes’ central focus, however, is the history of medieval and sixteenth-century Spain and its role in the formation of the cultures of the Americas.

The conceptualization of history in classical Greco-Roman cultures, as manifested by Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus, as well as later Christian ideas of history, have direct parallels in the medieval and sixteenth-century Spain of Terra Nostra. The development of Greek and Roman concepts of history, respectively, as described by Collingwood, evokes the historical thinking novelized by Fuentes in Terra Nostra. When Herodotus converted Greek theocratic history and legend-writing into a history of events generated by human beings with reasons for acting as they did, this first “scientific” historian of the West (according to Collingwood) was laying the groundwork for Fuentes’ historical project. The Greeks tended to regard society as being in perpetual change and the course of history as flexible, as opposed to the inhabitants of medieval Europe (and medieval Spain), who hoped to retain its chief features unchanged. In Greece after Herodotus, as in the Spain of Philip II, the search for unchangeable and eternal objects of knowledge stifled historical consciousness. Following the model of Herodotus, Fuentes fictionalizes a Spanish king in Terra Nostra who is obsessed with an unchangeable world and eternal objects.

An important change signaled by Greco-Roman historiography was the view of humans as the agents of history. In some cases, the individual was the agent; in others a collective body functioned in this role. In Terra Nostra, human entities similar to individuals are the agents of history, but the fragmentation of individual identity undermines any traditional conceptualization of history as generated by “great men.” In Terra Nostra, the multiple characters of the king figure make the history of Spain and the Americas a phenomenon generated from a central space of power—El Escorial—but not controlled consistently by any one human figure. At the same time that history is motivated by these fragmented human forces, it is also moved by forces of chance and coincidence beyond human control. When Pedro and the young boy arrive, disoriented, in the New World, no human force has defined their presence there.

Medieval and Christian historiography, which was of considerable interest to Fuentes when he wrote Terra Nostra, consisted of the task of discovering and expounding the objectives of a divine plan. Christian historiography was dedicated to a universal history, ascribing events not to the wisdom of human agents but to the workings of Providence. The parallel to this universal impulse was the insistence on a “universal design” for El Escorial. Medieval historians, according to Collingwood, “looked forward to the end of history as something foreordained by God.”46 Fuentes appropriates medieval historiography in Terra Nostra by creating an apocalyptic end of history in Paris in the year 1999.

The various Western conceptions of history in the different periods since the Renaissance are part of Fuentes’ historical perspective. In Terra Nostra, the author recovers the Renaissance idea that history becomes the chronicle of human passions. The passions of El Señor, La Señora, the youths, and others break the strictures of the Spanish medieval Catholic tradition, suggesting that the events in these characters’ lives, as well as the events in Spanish history, are defined by human passion more than by divine Providence. In the Americas as well, human passion occasionally decides the direction of history: the Butterfly woman in Part II affects the direction of history as much as the political events of official history do. The critical spirit of Descartes is represented in Terra Nostra by the questioning of authorized history, by the reinventing of the Spanish royalty, and by the evoking of the heretical texts that had been excluded and forgotten. The innovations of Giambattista Vico regarded the historical process as one whereby human beings build up systems of language, customs, law, and government. An important forerunner to Ortega y Gasset and Foucault for Fuentes, Vico laid the groundwork for Fuentes’ history and critique of Hispanic culture: Fuentes understands Hispanic history not as “history” exclusively but as language, identity, and culture.

Fuentes had read Hegel, as Kadir has pointed out, and thus was aware of Hegel’s new kind of history, the philosophy of history.47 For Hegel, the new history was not merely to be ascertained as so much fact but to be understood by apprehending the reasons for things happening as they did. Collingwood points to four distinctive features of Hegel’s view of history.⁴⁸ First, Hegel refused to approach history by way of nature, insisting that nature and history were entirely different. Second, all history was the history of thought, according to Hegel. Third, the force that is the mainspring of the historical process is reason. Finally, since all history of thought exhibits the self-development of reason, the historical process is a logical process. Kadir argues convincingly that Fuentes’ project in Terra Nostra is like Hegel’s, but his view of history is different.⁴⁹ Kadir characterizes Terra Nostra as an “ambivalent and equivocal dialogue with the Hegelian project.”⁵⁰

The concept of history that Fuentes writes against in Terra Nostra has its roots in nineteenth-century ideas of history that were still predominant ideological constructs in Mexico and much of Latin America in the twentieth century. The Romantic conception of history as progress, promoted by numerous Mexican institutions, including the PRI, and which Fuentes critiqued initially in Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz, is subverted in Terra Nostra by the novel’s structure. Kant, who had inherited from the Enlightenment the belief in a wholly irrational past and a wholly rational future, saw man as a rational being and history as a progressive advance toward rationality. In Terra Nostra (and essays written in the 1970s), Fuentes reverses the tradition of the Enlightenment and Kant: he fictionalizes a more rational medieval past than orthodox Christianity and an irrational future represented by a boiling Seine River, multiple births on the streets of Paris, and other equally irrational events that occur in a future beyond the year 1975, when Terra Nostra was published.

The history of Terra Nostra also reveals traces of a pre-Hispanic understanding of history and time. Western history, as written since the Bible, has traditionally been linear; pre-Hispanic history of indigenous cultures, as symbolized by the Aztec Sun Dial, is cyclical.51 The ancient ritual calendar in Mesoamerica, or tonalphohualli, was the basis for all other calendar computations.⁵² For the Maya, Aztec, and other indigenous civilizations, history was expected to repeat itself—in the case of the Maya, in cycles of 260 years. The reader’s experience of history and time in Terra Nostra is comparable to one scholar’s description of the Mayan concept of history:

One of Fuentes’ predominant and most consistent ideas of history in Terra Nostra is history as mirror. Throughout the novel, historical characters and events resemble or are identical to other characters and events. Moreover, the history that precedes the twentieth century mirrors that of previous centuries; the history of the New World mirrors that of the Old World. The mirror effect begins at the end of the novel’s first narrative segment with the words of Celestina: “Yrots ym si siht” (TN, 31). This phrase communicates a sense that the entire story is, enigmatically, a mirror of another story. As Julián explains to the Cronista in Part III, “True history is circular and eternal” (TN, 652).

In Part II of the novel, an explanation of the enigmatic mirrored story is offered. Here events and characters in the New World of Part II frequently reflect scenes of the Escorial and the Europe of Part I. It is suggested, for example, that the New World is a mirror of El Palacio when the New World is described as an exact replica of the world of El Escorial: “Endless exchanges of looks, objects, existences, memories, with the proposition of placating a predicted fury” (TN, 396).

In Part III, both the old Spain of El Escorial and history appear as mirror: Spanish society of the sixteenth century repeats Aztec society in the Americas; sixteenth-century Spanish cultural, political, and religious history appears as a mirror of earlier periods of European history, beginning with the Romans. In Part III, for example, the narrator states: “He asked Felipe to return to the origins of all things, two brothers, Abel and Cain, Osiris and Set, Plumed Serpent and Smoking Mirror, rival brothers” (TN, 594). In a manuscript written by a Stoic, read by El Señor, the Stoic states: “Rome is the world,” thus paraphrasing Philip II’s belief that Spain was the world and that, following that logic, so too was El Escorial. Similarly, toward the end of the novel, Felipe looks in a mirror near the end of the novel and sees “the mirror of the world” (TN, 755). Continuing with imagery established as far back as The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra uses the mirror as a metaphor of deceit and fragmentation.54

Fuentes, like Paz, has been engaged in comparisons between European and pre-Hispanic ideas of history and time since the 1950s. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, a considerable tension was created by the rivalry between linear and cyclical concepts of time, a conflict that essentially conveys the clash between European and pre-Hispanic notions of time.⁵⁵ In his earlier works, agreeing with Paz, Fuentes fictionalized Mexican history as it can be understood between Cortés and Doña Marina, or La Malinche. This vision of history was evident in The Death of Artemio Cruz.⁵⁶ In Terra Nostra, however, history is far more complex, with competing views of European history present and the historical roots of Latin American culture and identity predating the Spanish conquest of Mexico explored. In Paz, as in some of the earlier writing of Fuentes, humans were not makers of history but were in history.⁵⁷ Sommers has pointed out that in The Death of Artemio Cruz “history is not just a tapestry against which personal drama is enacted, it also is the field of force, restricting individual movement and freedom of choice.”⁵⁸ In Terra Nostra, some human agents are not the makers of history, yet others are. History restricts individuals, but it also offers an ample field of choice. In this sense, in Terra Nostra Fuentes goes beyond Paz, thus making González Echevarría’s reading of Fuentes’ treatment of history in Terra Nostra limited and reductive.

The only hope for renovation in the work of Fuentes, according to Raymond D. Souza, lies in the future, when the weight of history has been alleviated. For this critic, “La muerte de Artemio Cruz es una notable expresión del ansia de libertad del pasado.”59 This desire for freedom from the past is a constant expressed in Fuentes’ early fiction; it is also a desire that accompanies competing and conflictive ideas of history in Terra Nostra. Consequently, the ultimate place of history in Terra Nostra is the future: Paris in 1999. The future is implicit, however, at all historical moments in the novel, for acts in Rome, in the Middle Ages, and in the sixteenth century frequently have a future referent. Thus the Polo Febo of the late twentieth century is associated with the Agrippa of Roman times, just as Agrippa is logically associated with Febo at both the beginning and the end of the novel.

Fuentes’ history emphasizes transformation rather than the potentially static nature of things. In Terra Nostra, change and modernity operate in opposition to the static Palacio. The very concepts of history, time, and space suffer constant transformation in Terra Nostra, in contrast to the rigidity of El Señor and the permanence of his edifice.

The competing notions of linear versus cyclical history and change versus permanence do find a single solution in Terra Nostra. Characters can await those rare instants that stop time momentarily. In Terra Nostra, these special moments are associated with love and knowledge.⁶⁰ The Señora (mother) expresses such an idea: “Do you know that there are moments that cannot be measured? Moments when everything becomes one: the satisfaction of a fulfilled desire along with its remorse, the simultaneous desire and fear of what was, and the simultaneous terror and longing for what will be” (TN, 70). Celestina lives similar moments. This special moment in time for Fuentes has been associated with Paz.⁶¹ In reality, however, Fuentes and Paz express apparently similar ideas from opposite poles: Fuentes’ special moment is a conjunction of all time (more similar to Borges); Paz’s special moment in “Piedra de sol” is a “tiempo total donde no pasa nada” (a total time in which nothing happens). Fuentes’ own explanation of time in Terra Nostra, articulated after the publication of the novel, explains his sense of this special time:

A complex and significant issue in Terra Nostra, history surpasses the admittedly provocative interpretation of Paz concerning the history of Mexico since the Conquest, as well as many of his own ideas about history as formulated in Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Aura. Despite the numerous enigmas of Terra Nostra, it does indeed convey meaning: Terra Nostra suggests that history is mirror, that the future represents a liberation, and that Indo-Afro-Ibero-American history is the key to understanding, confronting, and living its culture and identity. Fuentes uses both traditional European linear ideas of time and history and cyclical concepts of time from the Mesoamerican indigenous cultures, from the Greeks, from Vico, and from Nietzsche.

History and culture undergird the concept of identity in Terra Nostra. The project of cultural definition, as Carlos Alonso has eloquently argued, has a lengthy history in Latin American cultural discourse, which “can be accurately depicted as a succession of statements of cultural crisis.”63 In his study of autochthonous cultural expression in Latin America, Alonso argues that “the essence of Latin American cultural production is the ever-renewed affirmation of having lost or abandoned such an essence.”⁶⁴ In addition, the perennial sense of cultural crisis is characterized by “an inability to experience historical flux except in a mode of crisis.”⁶⁵

Fuentes has been well aware, of course, of the cultural discourse involved in the search for identity; it is a discourse well developed in Mexico by Samuel Ramos, Reyes, Paz, and a host of others. In his essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana, Fuentes was sharply critical of the criollista project of defining an autochthonous cultural expression in the 1920s.66 In Terra Nostra, Fuentes surpasses the standard statements about Latin America’s having lost or abandoned its cultural essence. Fuentes also escapes the “perennial sense of cultural crisis” fomented by his predecessors, including Paz, for Terra Nostra is a foundational text that turns not to any present crisis but rather to a broad historical understanding of Latin American cultural identity. Latin American cultural discourse has argued that (a) autochthonous cultural expression is to be found in the Latin American indigenous past, (b) a repressive Spanish culture dominated and destroyed much of this culture, and (c) the essence of Latin American cultural identity today stems from mestizaje, or the mixture of Old World and New Cultures.⁶⁷ Fuentes goes far beyond these simplistic schemes, which date from the 1920s but were still in vogue decades later, by evoking the multicultural and medieval and Renaissance cultures that he sees as the foundations of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American culture and by tracing connections between the ancient cultures of Rome and the Aztecs and contemporary Hispanic cultures too.

Fuentes subverts the very idea of cultural “essence” in Terra Nostra. In their search for cultural essence, literary nationalists tended to ignore or reject European literature in favor of more autochthonous forms of expression, which they considered the “essence” of their culture. With the advent of Borges and the modern Latin American novel of the 1940s, the cosmopolitan European and North American forms seemed to predominate, especially for the intellectuals of Fuentes’ generation and those younger than he. In Terra Nostra, however, an attempt to formulate any concept of cultural essence is useless: the constant transformations of characters (from one culture to another) as well as the displacements in time and space undermine any sense of essence.

Fuentes also differs from the Latin American cultural discourse that has tended to experience cultural flux in a mode of crisis. In Terra Nostra, history is indeed in the same kind of flux that has characterized the empirical history of Latin America. History is not experienced, however, as being in a mode of crisis. As a series of repetitions, history in Terra Nostra is part of a cyclical and dialectical movement producing ever more diverse syntheses. Seen in this way, Latin American cultural identity does not suffer constant crisis but grows in a cyclical mode.

Alonso has pointed out that the problem of establishing cultural identity in Latin America has been a problem of rhetoric.68 He suggests that the crisis in Latin American thought over the past century originated in the impossibility of reconciling the rhetoric that gave legitimacy to the emancipation movement with the historical development that ensued from that movement. Acutely aware of this gap between rhetoric and social reality, Fuentes has been a critic of political language and the attempts of authoritarian governments, such as that of Mexico, to establish monologic, dominant political discourses. Terra Nostra is his text of heteroglossia, of the multiple languages that challenge the static Spanish of sixteenth-century Spain as well as that of twentieth-century Mexico. Liberty in Terra Nostra comes not from the rhetoric of emancipation but from a consciousness of this rhetorical tradition, an awareness of its historical roots, and an understanding of its place in history. Fuentes questions cultural identity based on the specificity and singularity of autochthonous cultural characteristics and values.

History, culture, and identity are closely related concepts in Terra Nostra. Both traditional linear (biblical) history and cyclical (Greek, Aztec, Nietzchean) concepts of history are explored and, ultimately, negated in Terra Nostra. With the critique and subversion of the well-known concepts of historiography, Fuentes questions both traditional Latin American ideas about cultural essence and any possibility of history as truth.⁶⁹ By returning to El Escorial as source and foundation, he uses a historical monument that also has existed for five centuries of Western history. He employs the strategies of imitation, repetition, and duplication that characterize the architecture of El Escorial to subvert these classic rhetorical strategies of representation.

In 1916, Ortega y Gasset sat in El Escorial and wrote several volumes of essays under the title El espectador. In the preface to the book, he located himself in this “rigorous empire of stone and geometry”: “Desde El Escorial, rigoroso imperio de la piedra y la geometría, donde he sentado mi alma, veo en primer término el curvo brazo ciclópeo que extiende hacia Madrid la sierra del Guadarrama.”⁷⁰ In making this statement from El Escorial, Ortega y Gasset evokes some of the central questions of narrating and seeing that Fuentes brought to bear six decades later in Terra Nostra. Ortega y Gasset makes a specific point of his exact location, his act of narrating, and his act of seeing. For Fuentes, the identity and position of the narrator and the location of this narrator in time and space have always been self-consciously fundamental issues. Indeed, his allegiance to Cervantes is based on the fact that the author of Don Quixote “essentially imagined the world of multiple points of view.”⁷¹

In Terra Nostra, who narrates and who sees and the location of these narrators and seers are all essential to the reader’s experience of the novel. The narrative situation is complex and ambiguous. The work opens with a narrator outside the story, an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who tells the story of Polo Febo in Paris. At the end of this lengthy section, Celestina seems to take over the narration, making her the intradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator of the remainder of the novel, narrative segments 2 to 143, until the final narrative segment, 144, which returns to the original situation of Polo Febo in Paris. Juan Goytisolo and other capable readers have assumed that Celestina narrates segments 2 to 143 because the narrator ends the initial narrative segment as follows: “This is my story. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen. Netsil. Netsil. Yrots ym raeh ot uoy tnaw I. Yrots ym si siht” (TN, 31). (Fuentes had already used the phrase “This is my story” in Holy Place.) Later in the novel, however, Fuentes subverts the reader’s sense of reading Celestina’s narration when it becomes evident that the narrative segments 2 to 136 are narrated by Julián. After the Cronista hears segments 2 to 136 from Julián, this Cronista relates segments 137 to 143: “Founded upon these principles, reader, I wrote both this chronicle faithful to the last years of his reign, and the life of Don Felipe, El Señor. Thus I fulfilled the fearful charge of the one who had until now narrated this story, Brother Julián” (TN, 669). Consequently, the Cronista writes narrative segments 2 to 143, of which 2 to 136 are related by Julián.

A series of narrators besides the Cronista intervene briefly in segments 2 to 143.72 The Señor and Celestina narrate segments 12 to 33 together; the Señor has Guzmán write the story while, at the same time but in a different place, Celestina tells the same story to the pilgrim. Segments 84 to 126 are related alternatively by Ludovico and Celestina.⁷³ In the segment titled “The Duel” (TN, 526–528), the monja narrates to Celestina, Celestina narrates it to El Señor and Julián, who, in turn, tells it to the Cronista, the Cervantes figure. Similarly, the “Manuscript of a Stoic” (TN, 676–700) is narrated by Teodoro and written by the Cronista. Teodoro’s narration alternates between first person (intradiegetic-homodiegetic) and third person (extradiegetic-heterodiegetic):

The last narrative segment of the novel, “The Last City” (TN, 760–778), is related by a first-person (intradiegetic-homodiegetic) narrator who narrates using a “you” (tú in Spanish) that was not present in the opening narrative fragment of the novel. Here, Polo Febo narrates and seemingly addresses himself in the form of tú.74

These varying points of view achieve multiple effects. Above all, the reader is invited to conclude, as Kerr does, that all reality is simply enigmatic. The narrative situation encourages such relativism because it is not possible to attain definitive answers about who narrates. On the other hand, issues of history, culture, and identity, as they have been discussed, can be clarified.

Exactly who narrates and from where is an enigmatic question in many passages of Terra Nostra.75 Equally important is the question of who sees, for Terra Nostra is, to a considerable extent, a novel in which the act of seeing is significant. As Levine has indicated, the concept of the mirada has close philosophical ties to Paz, who uses mirada imagery in his poetry to suggest a special union between male and female in some cases and, in other situations, a union between generic man and the universe.⁷⁶ Levine notes: “In the writings of both authors [Paz and Fuentes] this imagery involves the physical act of looking, meeting the eyes of another human being, seeing self as the other, and finally feeling that self is the same as the other while still retaining its own essence.”⁷⁷ In Terra Nostra, looking outward opens new possibilities for some characters. Not only is the act of seeing important in this novel but the narrator’s words often evoke what the characters and the reader see simultaneously. The reader, looking through the eyes of the characters, is sometimes an accomplice in the characters’ voyeurism. At other moments in the novel, as in Paz, the mirada functions as an act of unity. Similarly, the mirada can signal a character seeing himself as “other” in a transformational process.⁷⁸ An indication of the importance of the act of seeing in Terra Nostra is suggested in the novel’s opening scene, with the bulging eyes of Notre Dame gargoyles peering out on the scene. Throughout this first narrative segment of the novel, the reader’s framework is visual, following what Polo Febo sees.

The mirada, significantly enough, serves an important function at the end of each of the three sections of Terra Nostra. Part I ends with the narrative segment titled “Gazes” (TN, 340–354), in which several characters are gathered in the chapel with Felipe, awaiting the arrival of Celestina and Polo. The narrator transcribes much of what the characters observe during this scene, above all, Orvieto’s painting. Much of this segment consists of the thoughts of the painter Julián as he observes the painting. He questions, for example, why the other observers do not see the “new space” he has made in the painting, “no longer the space of oneness, the invisible and invariable space of the revelation, but the many and different places of a constantly maintained and renewed creation” (TN, 335). It is by means of the gaze, then, that one of the novel’s most consistent themes of multiplicity is communicated. Painting functions as a type of mirror that reflects back what the observer sees in the gaze: “I paint so that I may see, I see so that I may paint, I gaze at what I paint and what I paint, when painted, gazes at me and finally gazes at you who gaze at me when you gaze upon my paintings” (TN, 335). Throughout this lengthy series of gazes, Madre Milagros, Don Juan, El Comendador, the Dama Loca, and Felipe take turns at being the focalizer engaged in the gaze (mirada). Finally, at the end of Part II, the reader becomes the spectator of all these characters, and the scene ends with the reader as observer/voyeur.

In the final narrative segment in Part II, “Night of the Return” (TN, 478–485), the mirada is prominent from the beginning, when the Peregrino sees the star Venus through the clouds: “I saw shining, reborn, distant, but at the level of my gaze” (TN, 478). He meets young people, and their respective miradas signify a type of communion: “new glances for the first time new, theirs and mine” (TN, 479). A change in human nature is evident in the young people’s new way of looking.79 When the Peregrino embarks on his return to Spain, his boat enters a vortex, he sees Venus once again, and he falls into a chaos, losing sense of time and place. He looks into a hand mirror and sees “Venus, Hesperia, Spain, identical stars, dawn and dusk, mysterious” (TN, 494). With this observation, the Peregrino sets forth, by means of the mirada, one of the fundamental theses of the novel: Spain is a mirror of the New World, and the New World is a mirror of Spain.

In the last narrative segment of Part III, “The Last City” (TN, 704–778), the mirada is extremely important once again. In this segment, Polo and Celestina are united by the mutual mirada, as well as physically. Polo becomes one with Celestina and states: “You speak, I love you, I love myself, your voice and the girl’s speak at the same time, they are a single voice” (TN, 778).

In Terra Nostra, as in El Escorial, the act of seeing is fundamental. Surrounded by a visual world of architecture and painting, the characters in Terra Nostra are constantly reaching their understanding of the words by means of what they see. More important, these characters function as focalizers so that the reader’s experience of the fictional world is predominantly that of seeing. Consequently, architecture and painting are more than just a backdrop in the setting of Terra Nostra; they are an integral part of the novel’s texture, experience, and themes.

“L’histoire est un discours á la troisiíme personne,” De Certeau has pointed out.⁸⁰ Little of Terra Nostra is written in the historian’s third person, thus distinguishing this novel, once again, from any pretense of making historical discourse. In fact, the identity of exactly who is narrating is so problematic that the important issue is not the identity of the multiple speakers in the text but rather the place from which Terra Nostra is narrated: El Escorial.

Fuentes’ search for the modern has involved both his training in the historical roots of the modern in the West and his own fictional contributions to the modern culture of the Americas. His mentors defined their idea of modernity and encouraged Fuentes and his generation of Medio Siglo to modernize Mexico in every possible way. For Ortega y Gasset, always influential for Fuentes, the Modern Age began with Descartes.81 This affirmation was important for Fuentes in several ways. Fuentes had referred to Descartes throughout his career, before Terra Nostra. Following Ortega y Gasset’s model, Fuentes has defined the pioneer modern minds in a wide range of intellectual and artistic endeavors. These early moderns, for Fuentes, were such figures as Cervantes, Fernando de Rojas, and Petrarch for literature, and Diego Velázquez and Luca Signorelli in art. Their names appear frequently in Fuentes’ writings, often in reference to their respective roles, according to Fuentes, as the pioneer moderns.⁸²

Fuentes was formed intellectually in the context of the modern and of being modern: the generation of intellectuals associated with the Revista Mexicana de Literatura desired, above all, to be the modern writers of Mexico. As a writer who grew intellectually out of a context of the modern and who held as one of his original goals as a writer to bring the modern novel to Mexico, Fuentes demonstrates many of his still fundamentally modern impulses in Terra Nostra. Above all, it is an ambitious grand narrative, a totalizing and utopian project that aligns itself with the modernity of Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and A Change of Skin. In addition, Fuentes inherited from the modernists—Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, others—many of the technical devices he employed for his own modern project. In Where the Air Is Clear, Fuentes uses the multiple points of view and collage of Manhattan Transfer. And in The Death of Artemio Cruz, he employs the structure and narrators of Faulkner and Michel Butor. Fuentes’ other debts to the European and North American modernist writers are numerous; one cannot dispute his place as one of the major contributors to the modern novel in Indo-Afro-Ibero-America, beginning with Where the Air Is Clear and culminating in Terra Nostra.

Literary modernity has its historical origins, for Fuentes, in Cervantes, Fernando de Rojas, Velázquez, Signorelli, Petrarch, and Erasmus, who represent a variety of different modern interests. Fuentes points out, as has been noted, that Cervantes “essentially imagined the world of multiple points of view” (BM, 177). In his essay on Cervantes, Fuentes identifies Don Quixote as the first modern novel. Foucault had already spoken of the modernity of Don Quixote:

Fuentes’ reading of Cervantes’ modernity differs fundamentally from Foucault’s: for Fuentes, the modernity of Don Quixote is found in its ambiguity and, above all, its self-conscious reading of itself. Fuentes’ idea of self-conscious reading does find its roots in Foucault’s observation about language breaking off its prior kinship with things and entering into a separate state as only literature. Nevertheless, Fuentes also speaks of the modernity in Cervantes’ rupture with the medieval epic and his negation of previous forms that required order and normativity.

In reading La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, Fuentes finds another angle on modernity. This book embodies the modern, according to Fuentes, because it was the first work to offer a reflection on the interior, psychological motives behind human actions. Such ideas appear later, in different forms, in Cervantes and Shakespeare. Everything and everyone, in Fuentes’ view, moves in the modern city imagined by Fernando de Rojas.

Velázquez and Erasmus are moderns because of their multiple points of view and ambiguity. With regard to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Fuentes points out that “we are free to see the painting … in multiple ways” (BM, 181). Speaking of Cervantes and Velázquez, Fuentes asserts: “But these two, working from within a closed society, were able to redefine reality in terms of the imagination. What we imagine is both possible and real” (BM, 182). For Fuentes, In Praise of Folly was an important forerunner to Don Quixote, arguing that both faith and reason had to become relative, not absolute, terms. Erasmus pleaded for the new culture of humanism that Cervantes novelizes.

Terra Nostra appears to be that totalizing grand narrative, comparable in many ways to historical projects such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Conversation in the Cathedral. Indeed, Fuentes’ lengthy meditation on history, his use of multiple points of view, and an apparently fragmented structure all give Terra Nostra the appearance, on a first reading, of an ambitious and totalizing modernist project. Consequently, it is understandable that González Echevarría reads Terra Nostra, implicitly, as a modern text; this critic makes references to the novel’s fragmentation and sees Terra Nostra as a source of “truth.” 84

Although Terra Nostra has some modernist, totalizing impulses, it is closer to that recent variant of modernist fiction identified by some critics as the postmodern. As a postmodern text, Terra Nostra articulates the twelfth-century proclamation “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Attributed to Isan i-Sabbah in the year 1164, this quotation is particularly appropriate because Fuentes, too, frequently returns to the Middle Ages in his act of recovering history and knowledge. A polemical term and concept, postmodernism became popularized in the United States in the 1960s. Seminal articles by Leslie Fiedler, John Barth, and others laid the groundwork for future discussions by such scholars as Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson, and Linda Hutcheon on the postmodern novel. In the 1980s, issues related to postmodernism entered prominently into the critical discourse of Latin American literature.⁸⁵

Concepts commonly used in the context of First World postmodernism have been discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentering, indeterminacy, and antitotalization.⁸⁶ As Hutcheon points out, the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism is contradictory, for it installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges. Postmodernism works to subvert dominant discourses. Hassan was instrumental in developing a critical language and concepts for postmodernism, creating parallel columns that place characteristics of modernism and postmodernism side by side.⁸⁷ As Hutcheon points out, however, such “either/or” thinking suggests a resolution of what should be seen as unresolved contradictions within postmodernism.⁸⁸

Hutcheon has demonstrated that postmodern fiction should not be reduced to ahistorical and self-indulgent metafiction.⁸⁹ On the contrary, much postmodern fiction, such as Terra Nostra, can be strongly historical and political. Fuentes’ awareness of historical discourse and, above all, his questioning of the very assumptions of Western historiography align Terra Nostra with the postmodern as described by Hutcheon. In this sense, Terra Nostra is more deeply historical and political than many modernist novels, including such overtly historical and political Latin American novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Conversation in the Cathedral.

As a postmodern text, Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ rewriting of the medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassical architecture of El Escorial. Hutcheon, in her analysis of the postmodern, places emphasis on the unresolved contradictions of postmodern culture, a concept that Jencks also elaborates in his discussion of postmodern architecture.90 For Jencks, one common postmodern architectural design is the skyscraper of perfectly modern lines, but with classical Greek columns in open opposition to the modern design. In this postmodern construct, no harmonic resolution of these blatantly contradictory lines is designed or desired. They remain in unresolved (postmodern) contradiction. El Palacio in Terra Nostra and other aspects of Terra Nostra function in this fashion. In his use of the cuadro de Orvieto (a mural by Signorelli actually located in Orvieto, Italy), Fuentes appropriates this erotic mural from Orvieto and puts it into El Señor’s severe and austere Palacio. Just as the postmodern architect leaves the Greek columns on the modern building with no resolution, Fuentes leaves the Signorelli mural in the Palacio in open contradiction—with no visible resolution.⁹¹

In similar fashion, Fuentes appropriates the well-known novelistic ruse of the manuscript in the lost bottle and uses it anachronistically for a novel published in 1975. In the process, he juxtaposes his typically modern novelistic strategies with the anachronistically traditional. The result is comparable to the postmodern architectural image of the modern skyscraper with its Greek columns. The manuscript in the bottle is also an example of the typically postmodern procedure, according to Jameson, of pastiche rather than parody. This pastiche is repetition without the humor of parody or, as Jameson calls it, parody in blank.⁹²

The double coding of the postmodern, as described by Mc-Hale, is also an important function in Terra Nostra. The music of “The Commitments,” an imitation of Wilson Picket and Detroit soul music sung by whites in Ireland, as well as the rancheras of Peruvian Tania Libertad, who imitates the rancheras of Mexican José Alfredo Jiménez, are examples of the postmodern phenomenon of double voice. When the Commitments and Tania Libertad sing, we hear their voices at the same time that we are hearing the voices of Picket and Jiménez. Unlike parody, however, the Commitments and Tania Libertad are not by any means humorous. This double coding is parody in blank, or pastiche. The double coding in Terra Nostra is present in some overt cases, such as in La Celestina and El burlador de Sevilla, works with characters who are also characters in Terra Nostra. The double voice of Fuentes’ pastiche is more subtle when the narrator intercalates the phrase polvo enamorado in the novel, thus evoking the simultaneous double voice of Fuentes, author of the novel we are reading, and Quevedo, author of the sonnet that ends with the words polvo enamorado. Similarly, the reader of Terra Nostra hears the double voice of Fuentes and García Márquez when the extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator uses the phrase “many years later” twice (near the middle and near the end of the novel). This phrase is followed by a clause in the conditional, exactly as any reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately recognizes. González Echevarría also points out the traces of Góngora’s Soledades.93

Fuentes’ tendency toward double coding is evident in his characters as well. Many of them are specific historical figures while they also are not these historical figures. In most cases, such as those of the authority figures, they are and are not several historical Spanish kings and queens. Most of the novel’s major figures, in addition, have double-coded identities rather than any fixed, singular identity. These multiple identities in constant transformation, which question the very concept of psychic unity and the individual subject, align Terra Nostra with the postmodern.

Fuentes’ postmodern Terra Nostra follows the model of what he mentions in Terra Nostra as the “Arabic novel” or “Hadithnovella” (TN, 658). Later, a narrator who describes himself as the Chronicler mentions being in the final part of “this Hadith” precisely when the reader is in the final part of Terra Nostra. The hero of this Arabic novel, according to the narrator, would be the first novelistic hero to know he was being read: “This hero of mockery and hoax, born of reading, would be the first hero, furthermore, to know he was read” (TN, 669). This Arabic genre implies a liberated and transgressively erotic novel, too, for the Arabic is associated with liberation and the erotic. Just as Terra Nostra is associated with the Arabic novel, associations are also made between El Escorial and La Alhambra. This new form represents an innovative postmodern fiction in which the protagonist is aware of his status as a character being read, and it is a work of liberation and eroticism. It is also a work that has as intertexts the Arabic works A Thousand and One Nights and El collar de la paloma.

A third corollary is another concept proposed by Foucault that carries the condition of reciprocity to yet another level. Foucault states that in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the laws of discourse having been detached from representation, the being of language itself became, as it were, fragmented; but these laws became inevitable when, with Nietzsche and Stéphane Mallarmé, “thought was brought back, and violently so, towards language itself, towards its unique and difficult being.”94 Foucault has noted that since Mallarmé, literature has become progressively more differentiated from the discourse of ideas. During this same period, it could be argued, literature has become progressively more postmodern, until it has nothing to do but curve back in a perpetual return upon itself. When fiction becomes markedly postmodern, as is the work of Severo Sarduy, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and the later work of Fuentes, including Terra Nostra, it has nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being, to paraphrase Foucault.⁹⁵ Akey to the Velazquian Principle in Terra Nostra is thought brought back to language.

The fourth corollary to the Velazquian Principle concerns the reciprocity involved in critical seeing, a parallel to the critical writing and critical seeing, and a parallel to the critical writing and critical reading proposed by Fuentes himself in Cervantes or the Critique of Reading. Foucault states:

the previously existing law of that interplay in the painting Las meninas, in which representation is represented at every point: the painter, the palette, the broad dark surface of the canvas with its back to us, the paintings hanging on the wall, the spectators watching who are framed, in turn, by those who are watching them; and lastly, in the center, in the very heart of representation, nearest to what is essential, the mirror, showing us what is represented, but as a reflection so distant, so deeply buried in an unreal space, so foreign to all the gazes being directed elsewhere, that it is no more than the frailest duplication of representation.⁹⁶

The Velazquian Principle in Terra Nostra, a condition of pure reciprocity, is manifested in various ways, ranging from the novel’s broadest structures and issues to its imagery and minute details. The ideology of this novel should be understood as a manifestation of this condition of reciprocity, for it defines the novel’s sense of history.

Terra Nostra is a transitional text that is both modern and postmodern. Just as El Escorial embodies the medieval, the Renaissance, and the neoclassical, with inherent contradictions similar to postmodern unresolved contradictions, Terra Nostra embodies the modern and some postmodern unresolved contradictions. In this novel Fuentes appropriates a medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassical architecture and modernizes it via the postmodern. In Terra Nostra, postmodern architecture is imposed on a neoclassical model of the empirical world of sixteenth-century Spain. The narrator of “Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote” states: “There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or noun—in the history of philosophy.”97 Such is the ultimate destiny of the apparent truths of Terra Nostra, a fundamentally Borgesian and postmodern text that has Pierre Ménard as a character. Terra Nostra is not the ultimate repository of truth that González Echevarría attempts to make it. Rather, it is a Borgesian and postmodern text that questions, undermines, and subverts Western historical truth. The ultimate destiny of Terra Nostra is not philosophical or historical truth but an awareness of the paragraphs or nouns that construct social systems and legitimate truths. The narrator in “Pierre Ménard” suggests this postmodern attitude toward truth: “History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Ménard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place.”⁹⁸ In this sense, Terra Nostra and postmodern fiction are deeply historical and political—as returns to origins of historical thinking rather than history and truth. Fuentes takes to its ultimate consequences De Certeau’s proposition that “l’écriture de histoire est l’étude de l’écriture comme practique historique.”⁹⁹ Borges, De Certeau, and Fuentes share the postmodern assumption that historical discourse is, in the end, another discourse.

The Spain of Terra Nostra was the nation that lived what Fuentes calls “the night of El Escorial,” and El Escorial was the predominant architectural image of the Spanish Empire and Hispanic culture in the sixteenth century. The military exterior, the confluence of the political, the military and the religious in the interior, and the art painted and placed on the walls of El Escorial all had manifestations in Indo-Afro-Ibero-America. Fuentes uses this edifice not only to critique this imagery but also to explore the origins of Hispanic culture and identity.

With El Escorial as its point of departure, Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ modern masterpiece and postmodern tour de force on difference and the other. He explores cultural, religious, and political difference, searching for the historical roots of the historical Spanish intolerance of difference, exploring first in sixteenth-century Spain, then in medieval Spain, then in the cultural roots of Spain and, finally, in a prediscursive logos.¹⁰⁰ For Fuentes, the multiple images of El Escorial are also the images of the Colonial foundations of Latin American culture. They are the images of cultural, religious, and political exclusion, and of eliminating difference.

Fuentes’ understanding of culture clearly has its roots in the writings of Américo Castro, José Ortega y Gasset, and Octavio Paz. From Castro, Fuentes appropriated and reworked the idea of a potentially multicultural Spain that was suppressed by the Catholic monarchs. Ortega y Gasset’s concepts of the individual, the individual in the flow of history, and the role of culture all affected Fuentes, and the Mexican writer synthesized these ideas in the simultaneous double project of Terra Nostra and Cervantes or the Critique of Reading. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz had brought to the forefront Mexico’s historically ambiguous relationship with Spain, which Fuentes dealt with first in his early works and then more elaborately in Terra Nostra.

As a modern masterpiece, Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ most lengthy expression of the grand narrative, his discourse from his days of adolescence in Chile when he and Roberto Torretti conceived of the grand narrative for a novel and the grand narrative for the international political scenario. Since then, Fuentes has clearly been concerned with the big scheme rather than with exclusively local or regional issues—always the grand narrative rather than the small narrative.101

Terra Nostra is Fuentes’ postmodern architectural construct imposed on a medieval, Renaissance, and neoclassical architectural model. His construct rediscovers the heterogeneity of Latin American culture and the heterogeneity of postmodern culture in the Americas. Fuentes’ Palacio is one of unresolved contradictions. Representation in Terra Nostra is not just imitation and repetition, as in El Escorial. Rather, representation in Terra Nostra takes El Escorial as its point of departure and then exploits the representation of Don Quixote and the fiction of Borges. Terra Nostra is neither just the modern work positing truth (as suggested by González Echevarría) nor the totally enigmatic and mysterious work with no meaning (as suggested by Kerr).

The problem for Fuentes’ generation of Latin American intellectuals consisted not in discovering their modernity but in discovering their tradition, as Fuentes has explained; Terra Nostra is an exhaustive search for the origins of that tradition and an inevitable statement about its modernity. Paul De Man identifies modernity as the desire to eradicate the past by affirming the preeminence of the present moment and the desire to participate in it, an impulse evident in the writings of both Paz and Fuentes.102 According to Paz, Spain had no Enlightenment and no Modern Age, and Latin America’s experience of modernity essentially paralleled that of Spain.¹⁰³ Alonso tends to see Latin American modernity as rhetorical—an appropriation of modern discourses and gestures.¹⁰⁴ He also argues that Latin American modernity must be understood as a cultural activity possessing meaning unto itself.¹⁰⁵ Fuentes’ dual project of Terra Nostra and Cervantes or the Critique of Reading tacitly agrees with Paz’s assertion about Spain’s lack of an Enlightenment and modernity. Fuentes, however, recognizes a pre-Enlightenment culture in Spain that offered cultural alternatives as potentially liberating as those of the Enlightenment. In addition, Fuentes self-consciously appropriates discourses of a later modernity, questioning the very Western dichotomy of the modern versus the traditional or the modern versus the Rennaissance.

Fuentes had been concerned about identity since the 1940s, when he and Sergio Pitol sat in the study of their mentor Alfonso Reyes, and when the writings of Paz’s predecessor, Samuel Ramos, were in fashion. Then there was the canonical book on Mexican identity—Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude. Fuentes’ Where the Air Is Clear was an initial narrative response to Paz’s essay. With his discovery of El Escorial and Foucault in 1967, and with his rereading of Américo Castro and Ortega y Gasset, Fuentes initiated a search for Mexican and Latin American identity, turning directly to the roots of Hispanic culture in medieval and Renaissance Spain. With Terra Nostra, Fuentes discovered both his tradition and his identity as a Mexican and as a man of the Americas.

“Faire l’histoire, c’est un practique,” De Certeau has asserted.106 This statement echoes Foucault and synthesizes Fuentes’ operations in Terra Nostra as he makes history both linear and cyclical. He also makes static history as well as transformative history, and he makes history as a series of mirrors reflecting forward and back in time and space. Fuentes’ making of history makes everything from an architectural object to historiography, in the end, the same—discourse. De Certeau also points out that historiography began in the sixteenth century with “l’écriture conquérante”: “Aprés un moment de stupeur sur ce seuil marqué d’une colonnade d’arbres, le conquérant va écrire le corps de l’autre et y tracer sa propre histoire. Il va en faire le corps historié—le blason—de ses travaux et de ses fantasmes. Ce sera l’Amérique ‘latine.’”¹⁰⁷ Four centuries later, Terra Nostra is one response—another mirror image—to this sixteenth-century historiography.

El Escorial and Terra Nostra function internally on the basis of metonymic associations, while both works function as metaphors for Hispanic culture. El Escorial is a metaphor for Spain as a Colonial power and “a dwelling place for God.” Terra Nostra is a metaphor for the monumental grand narrative of the Boom—indeed, one of the most lengthy, complex, and elaborate novels ever to be published in Latin America. As such, it is one more text of the curse of heterodoxy, taking its place after the Kaballah, the Zohar, the Sephirot, and the like. Thus, Terra Nostra finds its place among the most important Latin American novels—as an Arabic novel.

After the image of El Escorial, the central image of Terra Nostra is that of the mirror. The mirror provides much of the unity to this diffuse novel; the mirror ties together one understanding of history (history as mirror), the Velazquian Principle operating in the book, and its postmodern effects. The mirror also highlights the constant examination of the self and the other in Hispanic culture: the Spanish kings versus the other, El Escorial versus the other, the self and the other as reflected in the gaze (mirada), language itself and its multiple others throughout the ages.