Spanish American literature … is both a return and a search for tradition. In searching for it, it invents it. But invention and discovery are not terms that best describe its purest creations. A desire for incarnation, a literature of foundations.
—OCTAVIO PAZ
Terra Nostra and El Escorial are central to an understanding of Fuentes. Nevertheless, the importance of Fuentes as a major writer of the century rests not in this one work only but in the entirety of his oeuvre. Terra Nostra contributes to the significance of his total work, and vice versa. Terra Nostra elucidates much of his other fiction, while an awareness of his other works affects the reading of Terra Nostra. Fuentes’ other fiction and this mutual interaction are the subject of Part III. Terra Nostra is a major foundational work in the history of Latin American literature; Fuentes’ total work should be seen, to cite Paz, as a “literature of foundations.”
In rereading Fuentes in light of El Escorial and Terra Nostra, it is evident that many of the concerns, issues, and themes of Terra Nostra can be found early in his work. The beginnings of Terra Nostra can be located in the story “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes” (from Los días enmascarados), Aura, and Holy Place. Works written after Terra Nostra, such as Distant Relations, Christopher Unborn, and The Orange Tree, further elaborate many of the topics of Terra Nostra.
Since the mid-1980s, Fuentes himself has conceptualized his total fiction in fourteen cycles titled “La Edad del Tiempo,” which consists of twenty-eight volumes of fiction, eighteen of which he had published by the end of 1993.1 Few other modern writers have constructed such a broad master scheme of their work, although Jean Paul Sartre, an extremely influential figure for Fuentes’ generation of Latin American writers, had conceived Les chemins de la Liberté, and Fuentes has mentioned others.2 “La Edad del Tiempo” has a circular structure, with the foundational text, Terra Nostra, near the beginning of the cycle and The Orange Tree at the end; this last book in the cycle also probes into the historical origins of Hispanic culture and politics, as does The Campaign. Fuentes presents himself as Fuentes-historian, for the fourteen cycles appear, generally speaking, in historical chronological order. (The work also negates history, however, opening and closing with a set of books that seek atemporality in a variety of ways.) This is the history about which one of the sons of Hernán Cortés, Martín, says in The Orange Tree: “The true history, not the dusty archives, will tell it all one day. The living history of memory and desire … which always takes place right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow” (62). According to Fuentes’ own explanation, “La Edad del Tiempo” is a lengthy reflection on time.3 He views his total work as an ongoing consideration of a series of temporal issues, such as how we situate ourselves in time, why some time seems so short, why some time seems so long, and numerous others matters related to time.4
(1) El Mal del Tiempo
The four works that Fuentes has described as “El Mal del Tiempo,” which open the cycle, deal with the problem of time itself. They play with the past, the present, and the future in such a way that, in the end, any sense of Western linear time is blurred. In different ways, they undermine and destroy time. According to Fuentes, in El Mal del Tiempo “I want to announce that my concept of time is linear. It is at times circular, at times of eternal returns, at times spirals like those in Joyce.”5 If it were not for the obvious importance of this announcement, this first cycle of four books could have been called “Distant Relations” just as well.
This first cycle precedes and negates Western historiography. The protagonist in Aura, Felipe Montero, is a historian who responds to a newspaper advertisement for a young historian to complete the papers of a deceased general. In these four books of fiction—Aura, Birthday, Distant Relations, and Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins—linear time is negated by patently enigmatic human relations that are privileged over time. They are all books of “distant relations” that blur many of the traditional human relations created by space and time. Consequently, they are not only enigmatic, they are also self-consciously ambiguous works that desire to create, above all, even more enigmas. Fuentes uses a variety of settings in these four works, but the old Mexico City of the palaces appears frequently—evoking the central architectural image of his work, El Escorial.
After the story “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes,” roots of Terra Nostra are to be found in Aura and Birthday; Aura contains some of the most clearly delineated beginnings. The transformation of one character into another from another century is one of the most direct links between the two novels; the rewriting of history is another. With Aura, Fuentes begins his attack on time, initiated with the use of a second-person tú combined with an enigmatic future tense that both negates and destroys time.6
The basic framework of Aura has numerous parallels with Terra Nostra. The protagonist enters the enclosed space of a building (an old Colonial home in the centro of Mexico City) to engage in this historical project, an act that prefigures the entrance into El Escorial in Terra Nostra to carry out a different type of historical project. When the nineteenth-century general Llorente is fused with the twentieth-century Felipe Montero, it is the beginning of a much more elaborate parallel process of doubling, and later multiple doubling, in Terra Nostra.
Other minor details appear in Aura that lay groundwork for Terra Nostra. Montero walks up exactly twenty-two stairs into the home, just as El Señor carefully counts the thirty-three steps in El Palacio. Montero notices paintings of Jesus, Mary, and other religious figures on the walls of the home, and they almost—but not quite—come to life, as in Terra Nostra. For example, in one exotic scene in which Montero and Aura dance, she directs a mirada at the figure of Christ, again, as if he were a live character: “dirige miradas furtivas al Cristo de madera” (Aura, 48).
The young historian of Aura reveals the desires of Fuentes-the-historian in Terra Nostra, mentioning his wish to write an opus magnus similar, perhaps, to Terra Nostra: “A work that synthesizes all the different chronicles, makes them intelligible, finds correspondences between all the enterprises and adventures of the Golden Age, among the human prototypes and the fact of the Rennaissance” (Aura, 33). Taking into account all these elements to be more fully developed in Terra Nostra, the sixty-two page Aura functions as a small-scale synecdoche for Terra Nostra.
In Birthday, Fuentes develops some of the experiments of Aura in a more radical way. Some of the concepts suggested as themes and possibilities in Fuentes’ other fiction are put in practice in this book, his most hermetic and experimental novel. Set in London, the story deals with a multiple set of identities: George, his son Georgie, his wife, characters named Nuncia and Nino, and the thirteenth-century Averroist philosopher Siger of Brabant. Their constantly transforming identities and distant relations associate and overlap in the most enigmatic fashion of any of Fuentes’ novels until Terra Nostra. As one informed critic explained about Birthday: “The book is a complex meditation on the nature of time and the continuity of mind through time, and probably other things as well.”7
The most important of these “other things” is space, a factor that is signaled initially by George’s profession of architect. The point of departure is a room that George and his wife occupy with their son, Georgie, but this novel lacks a space to be identified as a center, and space is experienced as an element of the novel in continual transformation. In Birthday, Fuentes effects with space what Juan Rulfo had done with time in Pedro Páramo and Julio Cortázar had done with character in 62: A Model Kit: radical innovation. Birthday is a lengthy meditation on space; experience is not separated into the worlds of inside and outside.
Birthday was written during the initial stages of the conception and writing of Terra Nostra, and the two novels share a common conception of space and other elements. The descriptions of hermetically closed spaces occasionally evoke the equally hermetic space of El Escorial, and the Diocletian Palace of Spalato and other palaces that served as precedents of El Escorial are described in the text (in the context of Siger of Brabant). The architectural constructs in Birthday, like those of El Palacio in Terra Nostra, are severe. George’s house is even compared to such palaces: “I have compared this house to a Yugoslav city and a Mediterranean palace” (B, 29).
The conceptualization of architecture and space are the most important connections with Terra Nostra. The synthesis of the thirteenth-century Siger of Brabant and the twentieth-century George is also a notable precedent to the maneuvers of Terra Nostra. Birthday is even more experimental with space than Terra Nostra is; only in the former are there concepts such as “la casa está siendo” (B, 65). In the second half of the novel the figure of Siger of Brabant raises theological questions that are precedents for some of the anguishing of Felipe II (El Señor) in Terra Nostra. Siger of Brabant’s affirmations, however, are the opposite of El Señor’s: “The world is eternal, since there was no creation; the truth is double, since it can be multiple; the soul is not immortal, but the common intellect of the human species is unique” (B, 98). He insists on multiplicity, the same multiplicity that undergirds Terra Nostra. (The náufrago of Terra Nostra also appears in Birthday.)
Distant Relations expands and develops several of the problems found in Aura. The complex plot tells of a Heredia family in Mexico attempting to find its connections with Heredias in France. One of Fuentes’ most accomplished novels, Distant Relations deals with the Latin American cultural heritage from France, as Terra Nostra had done with Spain. Nevertheless, Distant Relations suggests much about Fuentes as writer and his interests in literature, for this is the book that promotes the idea that living, in the end, is predicated on the act of telling a story. It suggests that in a work of art “the solution of its enigma creates a new enigma” (DR, 200). This book also fictionalizes a concept of culture in which nothing exists in an isolated way. Consequently, culture is recognized not only in a multicultural world but also in a culturally interdependent one, even though relations may be, at a first glance, distant ones.
Written after Terra Nostra, Distant Relations can be read as an extension of the former in the sense that it continues Fuentes’ lengthy meditation on European-Mexican relations. Near the end, it is revealed that the person listening to the Compte de Branly is a man named Fuentes who, instead of returning to his native Mexico from Buenos Aires in 1945, remained in the Río del Plata until 1955, when he went to France. This is an option for another Fuentes, one more of numerous alternatives in a fictional world of continual and multiple alternatives. As in Terra Nostra, the New World is conceived as a lost opportunity to create a universal culture, as Branly explains to Fuentes: “You, who come from there, should understand when I tell you that the New World was the last opportunity for European universalism” (DR, 124). Above all, Distant Relations is a complex elaboration of two concepts from Terra Nostra: that the self and the other are inextricably bound in distant relations and that human existence depends on the act of storytelling.
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins also deals with distant relations, now elaborated in five stories located in a variety of settings ranging from the heart of the old historical center of Mexico City—the center of the formerly grandiose palaces—to Savannah, Georgia. Like El Señor in El Escorial, some of the characters in this volume have a very particular and personal sense of their morada (abode) as an architecture of their respective desires. Not since Terra Nostra, in fact, had architecture been so important. In the last story, “Reasonable People,” architecture is a central element, and it plays a role in all of these stories. Like Terra Nostra, these are also stories that return inevitably to enigmatic origins, enigmatic deaths.
In the first story, “Constancia,” the protagonist Whitby Hull refers to his hogar (home) as a morada (abode), thus recalling the description of El Escorial, according to Felipe II, as a morada de Dios (home of God). Hull is a physician from the South who meets a beautiful young woman from Seville, Constancia, in Spain, marries her, and brings her back to Savannah. His neighbor, an eccentric Russian actor exile named Polotnikov, had known the young woman in Spain, and had fathered a child by her, a fact that Hull realizes after forty years of marriage—when he is sixty-nine years old and she is sixty-one.
Hull fancies himself a very logical and rational man, and he searches desperately for a full understanding of the increasingly incredible situation, which reaches its emotional zenith when he discovers the corpse of his wife’s son in the coffin of Polotnikov. Near the end, Hull makes the same discovery that the reader makes with all four books of El Mal del Tiempo: “The enigma reveals another enigma” (Constancia, 47).
In “Constancia,” human relations and time assume a meaning different from that in the other fiction in this first cycle. “Distant relations,” in this case, has multiple meanings. The relationship between Hull and Constancia seems to have been always psychologically distant. The intimate relationship between Polotnikov and Constancia, on the other hand, is distant in time.
In “Reasonable People,” distant relations are also an important factor in the story’s development. On the one hand, a group of students and their mentor, an architecture professor named Santiago Ferguson, form one set of special relations. On the other, the relationship between these youths and Ferguson’s daughter, Catarina, is characterized by its paradoxically distant intimacy. Here, Fuentes’ subversion of time is similar to the procedure in Aura. The narrator (one of the youths) explains time as follows: “We are formed not merely by our ancestors but by our contemporaries, especially our teachers” (Constancia, 263).
A significant constant in these stories is the desire to return to origins, and this is a motivating force in the life of Ferguson. Ferguson wishes to be buried within the architectural construct of an English church: “I like the religious secret of my old islands. I would like to be buried in an English cathedral. I would go back there in rebellion, in affirmation of the sacred, the incomprehensible” (Constancia, 264). He had once gone back to find his family origins, traveling to Scotland, where he had “encountered the past” (Constancia, 282). When he dies, the two characters do indeed accompany him to his última morada (last abode) in England, thus repeating language of El Escorial as a morada de Dios (God’s abode). The narrator describes the monasteries of Canterbury and Chichester as “hulls of stone” (Constancia, 330), a description that could have been used for El Escorial. According to this narrator, “Ferguson had become architecture” (Constancia, 333).
Like the story “Constancia,” “Reasonable People” deals with numerous conflicts between rational and irrational understandings of the world. The two brothers who follow Santiago Ferguson’s life are caught between their experience of the miraculous or the sacred, and the rational. As modern-day students of architecture, they project an external image as gente de razón (reasonable people), but their most profound experiences deal with the miraculous.
“La Desdichada” is a nostalgic piece set in the old part of Mexico City and, once again, its palaces, but now in the 1930s. The two main characters, Toño and Bernardo, are students who came from the provinces to Mexico City, where they share an apartment among the palaces. Their relationship is superb until Toño buys a mannequin from a store, which they call “La Desdichada.” In the lively imaginations of these future writers, “La Desdichada,” like the figures of saints and dolls that they see, takes on a real life. Her presence is so real in the apartment, in fact, that it creates distance in their relationship, eventually causing them to part ways.
The two remaining stories, “Viva mi fama” and “The Prisoner of Las Lomas,” present the engimas and several of the issues already observed in Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins. The architecture of the characters’ homes is particularly important in “The Prisoner of Las Lomas”; painting surfaces once again in “Viva mi fama,” a story in which Goya appears as a twentieth-century character, after his physical death centuries before. “Viva mi fama” deals with a humble Spaniard, his relationship with his wife, his career as a torero and, ultimately, his death. “The Prisoner of Las Lomas” is an enigmatic story about an enigmatic death. All five of these stories, in fact, have death as a constant backdrop, an unexpected presence among all these distant relations.
This first cycle of Fuentes’ fiction indeed could well have been called “Distant Relations,” and it contains some of his most accomplished work. He cultivates a variety of enigmas and includes in this cycle his most enigmatic fictional experiment of all, Birthday.
(2) Terra Nostra (Tiempo de Fundaciones)
Terra Nostra is the foundational novel for the total cycle of “La Edad del Tiempo,” which also closes with another foundational text, The Orange Tree. With Terra Nostra, time is set in motion in Fuentes’ cycle, beginning with the Western and Native American roots of the Americas. Fuentes himself has spoken of his intention to surpass all conventional understandings of time.8 As discussed in Part II, Terra Nostra both incorporates and negates Western linear time as well as Aztec circular time. It is Fuentes’ most elaborate and complex version of the distant relations theme.
With his rewriting of El Escorial, Fuentes fictionalizes the foundations of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American culture, using as its central metaphor the architecture of El Escorial. This architecture serves as a mirror image of the numerous palaces that Fuentes fictionalizes in his work set in Mexico City: the palaces in Aura, Hydra Head, Burnt Water, and Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins.
(3) El Tiempo Romántico
El Tiempo Romántico consists of three novels, one of which Fuentes has written and two more that he has conceived. With The Campaign, Fuentes continues from the foundation in Terra Nostra to the independence period of the early nineteenth century. It relates the story of Balthasar Bustos, a Latin American child of the Enlightenment who is obsessed with a woman and who joins the revolutionary forces that forged independence in the early nineteenth century. The novel follows this independence movement in the Río del Plata, in the region of today’s Bolivia, in Chile, in Peru, up the west coast of South America to Colombia and Venezuela, and ends in Veracruz, Mexico. It is Fuentes’ only novel set in Latin American nations other than Mexico, but it is one of several works with characters in search of origins and truth. In the case of The Campaign, truth is to be found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, for the young revolutionaries are guided by the ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot. The central conflict of the novel is posited between the culture of the Enlightenment and the culture of the Catholic Church.
In The Campaign history is moved not by the forces of economics or by individual psychology but by ideas. More than in any of Fuentes’ novels since Where the Air Is Clear, characters in The Campaign tend to represent ideas. The character Dorrego is associated with the ideas of Voltaire, Bustos with those of Rousseau, and Varela (the narrator) with those of Diderot. Similarly, a wise old figure named Simón Rodríguez states: “I am the idea of light before light was ever seen” (Campaign, 86). Balthasar tends to conceive of history as a set of ideas and other factors, too: “He accepted the fact that history, the conglomeration of ideas, facts, and desires which he fought for or against, came to be only in the company of others, in something shared with others” (Campaign, 43). Near the end of the novel, the characters themselves come to recognize that they are products of the written word: “The written is the real and we are its authors” (Campaign, 215).
Like Terra Nostra and The Orange Tree, The Campaign is a foundational text. Unlike these two, which review the foundations in Spain and from Spain before, during, and after the Conquest, The Campaign looks at the ideological roots of the new republics in the Americas at the moment of the independence movements. These are the foundations of European reason and rationality that produced the liberal constitutions of the Latin American states in the early nineteenth century. They are also the roots of the nation-state that appear, in The Campaign, more as self-contradictory and questionable ideological constructs than as nations in the European sense. They appear in this novel as nations in search of a discourse. As in Terra Nostra, the Americas are conceived as the mirror image of Spain: “Spain was reiterated in its colonies” (Campaign, 71).
This cycle contains, in addition, two novels yet to be written, La novia muerta and El baile del Centenario. According to Fuentes, La novia muerta takes place in Paris in the nineteenth century, the main characters being from Latin America’s oligarchy: “The characters from The Campaign, from Chile, Mexico, and Argentina, now have aged and are living in Paris, as the nineteenth-century Latin American oligarchy wished to live. This is a family that asks the painter Courbet to paint their portrait, and it is his resistance to painting a bourgeois work for a rich Mexican family when he was accustomed to painting cows.”9 El baile del Centenario is a novel of the porfiriato, the late-nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico: “It occurs during the centennial independence celebrations of Mexico, with Porfirio Díaz, with military parades, an army that looks Prussian, with German helmets and uniforms. Worldwide delegations praising the labor of Díaz and the peace and prosperity that he brought to Mexico, a letter from Tolstoy praising Díaz the peace maker, and two months later the country was in flames.”10
(4) El Tiempo Revolucionario
Fuentes fictionalizes the time of the Mexican Revolution with two novels. Old Gringo continues the historical chronology, entering into the period of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. It is the story of two Americans in Mexico, Ambrose Bierce and Harriet Winslow, and it is classic Fuentes with his best storytelling. Here Fuentes uses language and the gaze (mirada) as well as he ever has. Much of the novel consists of the actions and adventures already associated with the Mexican Revolution, those of the sort Mariano Azuela had related in his classic novel of the revolution, The Underdogs (1915). One of the early scenes of the novel, in fact, evokes an early scene in The Underdogs, when the old gringo crosses the Rio Grande and looks back at a burning bridge: “As soon as he crossed the Río Grande, he heard the explosion and turned to see the bridge in flames” (OG, 10). (In The Underdogs, the protagonist Demetrio Macías looks back at his burning home in a key early passage.) Fuentes also follows Azuela’s model in characterizing the men of the revolution using animal imagery.
In the fiction of Fuentes, individuals always live in relationship to others, and their actions affect others. In Old Gringo, the destinies of the three main characters are fully dependent upon others. As is especially evident in Hydra Head, they do not act as individuals with a particular identity, but they play roles that are the fulfillment of an identity: Harriet Winslow always takes the role of the American woman who is the daughter of an American; the old gringo assumes the role of the American dreamer and writer; Tomás Arroyo plays the role of the proto-Mexican in the Mexican Revolution. They can play other roles, too, in the movement of constant substitutions. The most intense of these games of substitutions is a scene in which Harriet dances with Arroyo thinking of her father, while Arroyo dances with her imagining his mother.
Like Terra Nostra, Old Gringo is really a novel about language and writing. The old gringo carries Don Quixote along with him to Mexico, claiming that he wants to read it before dying. But all the characters are obsessed with texts, with dreaming, and with stories. Throughout this novel, reality is portrayed not as it is observed in the empirical world around the characters but as it is conceived within the bounds of their language, their imaginations, and their stories. As in Distant Relations, in Old Gringo the power of storytelling predominates over empirical reality.
Old Gringo, like Terra Nostra, is a novel about frontiers, difference, and the other. Once the two Americans cross the Rio Grande, these issues are evoked, generated as much by the history of the relations between the two nations as by the actions of the characters. Harriet and Arroyo are fully aware of the baggage they carry as an American woman and a Mexican man in the discourse each represents on the other side of the border. Harriet also understands that the psychological frontiers are as real as the physical border: “And the frontier in here?” (OG, 5). Arroyo responds: “The frontier of our differences with others” (OG, 5).
Written after Terra Nostra, Old Gringo is a work that continues the interest in frontiers that Fuentes evidenced in Terra Nostra. In the latter work, it was the cultural frontier between Spain and the Americas; in Old Gringo, it is the frontier between Mexico and the United States. In this novel, the border is a source of language, a discourse of clichés and misunderstanding.
Fuentes’ fourth cycle contains one more novel yet to be written, Emiliano en Chinameca, which will also be set in the period of the Mexican Revolution and will describe the final days in the life of agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata.
(5) Where the Air Is Clear
Fuentes began his first novel by establishing a distinction between “novel” and “history” that he never again delineated so clearly and definitively in a book of fiction: a page appears at the beginning with a chronological outline of the novela and another with the events of Mexican historia. (After Where the Air Is Clear, “novel” and “history” become self-consciously problematized, and the author does not again establish such clear dichotomies.) After this six-page chronological overview, Fuentes offers a four-page guide to all of the eighty-three characters, with brief, one-line descriptions of the role of each. They are classified, to a large extent, by social class. After Where the Air Is Clear, many of Fuentes’ characters have unfixed identities in a process of transformation; the fixed characterizations delineated at the beginning of Where the Air Is Clear are not feasible.
Where the Air Is Clear deals with the modern Mexico of the 1940s and 1950s and the issue of identity. The modernity of Mexico is, in itself, fictionalized within a context of rapid capitalization and promotion of industrial and technological “progress.” This progress is fictionalized in a context of the successes and failures of individuals, with their respective ascents and descents in Mexican society. Identity, in fact, is frequently conceptualized in this novel in opposition to progress: the modern Mexican is portrayed as an uprooted individual who has lost any sense of past and identity. The modern Mexican is also the citizen of the novel’s setting in Mexico City: a culturally complex and historically bound urban area.
Where the Air Is Clear appeared at a time when identity was a major issue for Mexican intellectuals, especially since the publication of the essays of Samuel Ramos and Alfonso Reyes in the 1930s and Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950. Where the Air Is Clear is closely associated with the ideas of Ramos and Paz, who had described the Mexican as a hermetic being, hidden behind masks, with an identity difficult to discover. Along these same lines, the character Rodrigo Pola writes: “I, carried along by my personality dialectic, no longer know my true face” (Where, 190). Near the end of the novel, Pola’s final meditations on Mexico emphasize the mask of the modern Mexican’s identity:
… names dripping like drops of your unique mascara, that of your anonymity, face flesh hiding fleshed faces, the thousand faces, one mask Acamapichtli, Cortés, Sor Juana, Itzcóatl, Juárez, Tezozómoc, Gante, Ilhuicamina, Madero, Felipe Angeles, Morones, Cárdenas, Calles … (Where, 363)
Where the Air Is Clear conceives of the Mexican and Mexican concerns primarily in the context of the present and past of Mexico City, with little allusion to Spain and the issues of Terra Nostra. Writer Manuel Zamacona, however, does make a reference to Spain that asks one of the questions implied by Terra Nostra: “What closed the door to European participation on a nation that today lives shut off from all expressions of intelligence?” (Where, 44). And Where the Air Is Clear, like much of Fuentes’ early writing, presents characters and a nation in the situation of choosing between options of historical import. Consequently, the Mexico of the 1950s is seen at the same crucial juncture as the Spain of the late sixteenth century: “We stand at the crossroad. Which, of all the roads, shall we choose?” (Where, 49). In addition, continual questioning of origins is, in effect, an important precedent, leading to the writing of Terra Nostra a decade later.
(6) The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Death of Artemio Cruz, one of Fuentes’ major novels, as well as his first contribution to the Boom, is his critique of the modern state developed in Mexico. He continues his project of simultaneously constructing historical times and destroying the subjective time of the individual. An omniscient (extradiegetic-heterodiegetic) narrator constructs historical time in the twelve narrative segments that take place in years identified from 1889 to 1955. This partially historical novel of twentieth-century Mexico loses any sense of chronological histoire through the use of various strategies. On the one hand, these historical sections do not appear in chronological order; on the other, the sections narrated by “yo” (I) and “tú” (you) create a variety of atemporal effects. When the “tú” narrator states, “lo que pasará ayer” (that which will happen yesterday), the temporal oxymoron has the effect of destroying Western concepts of linear time; the important changes in this novel are temporal by nature.
In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Fuentes once again fictionalizes several of the ideas about Mexican identity—ideas with roots in Reyes and Ramos of the 1940s—that he and Paz had been popularizing since the publication of Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950. Consequently, several passages of The Death of Artemio Cruz portray the Mexican as the heir of Malinche, the hijo de la chingada, the gran chingón. Such ideas, clearly paraphrased from The Labyrinth of Solitude, are a relatively minor sidelight to the totality of the novel. The most significant identity for protagonist Cruz is that of survivor: his only consistent and certain affirmation on his deathbed is “yo sobreviví” (I survived).
Some of the issues and themes of Terra Nostra are more fully developed in The Death of Artemio Cruz than they had been in Where the Air Is Clear or The Good Conscience. As in The Good Conscience, the matter of individual choice is extremely important in The Death of Artemio Cruz. The protagonist’s failure as a human being is portrayed as the culmination of a series of poor moral decisions, just as one of Spain’s historical problems lies, according to Fuentes, in her decision to isolate herself from the Europe of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Seeds of Terra Nostra are to be found in certain passages of The Death of Artemio Cruz, in which the circumstance of Mexico is linked to its past with Spain:
You will walk toward the facade, early Baroque, Spanish but rich in vine columns and aquiline-nosed keystones: the facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New, which did not begin here but on the other side of the ocean: the New World arrived when they arrived; facade of austere walls to protect their avaricious, sensual, happy hearts. (AC, 31)
This particular passage is a key referent to Terra Nostra, for it represents an early stage of the development of ideas for the latter novel. Other aspects of The Death of Artemio Cruz point more indirectly to the future creation of Terra Nostra. The fragmentation of the character of Cruz into three is Fuentes’ most elaborate subversion of individual identity in his fiction to date, thus laying groundwork for a much more elaborate and complex fragmentation of the individual subject in Terra Nostra. In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Fuentes also begins to question the Western Manichaean bipolar systems of thought.
(7) Los Años con Laura Díaz
Fuentes’ plan for this novel, according to the novelist himself, is “in a certain way it is a companion novel to The Death of Artemio Cruz. The characters are from the same period, but the story is told about a woman, a point of view very different from that of Artemio Cruz as a man. It has a little of my own family story, the story of a family in Veracruz.”11
Fuentes identifies The Good Conscience and Holy Place as “two educations” and, indeed, they are Bildungsromans, albeit very different types. In both works the protagonist passes through a rite de passage. In The Good Conscience, it is the young Jaime Ceballos who suffers the experience of growing up in the traditional and provincial society of Guanajuato. This novel is dedicated to Luis Buñuel, the person who had insisted that Fuentes visit El Escorial. The Good Conscience and El Escorial share with Terra Nostra a concentration upon a closed, hermetic space within a closed and hermetic society. The narrator states: “There was faith in the city of noble stone that Saturday” (GC, 41), thus evoking images of the palace of El Escorial.
The Good Conscience focuses on the Ceballos family, which is depicted by Fuentes-the-historian as the history of Guanajuato, with a strong sense of the development of a new oligarchy after the Mexican Revolution. The young protagonist faces the same decisions concerning religious faith and a life of rigidity under the restrictions of the Catholic Church that El Señor faces in Terra Nostra. A character named Jaime Ceballos suffers the “upset spirit” of El Señor in Terra Nostra: “On the one hand the complex theorems of love and sin, man’s fall and salvation; on the other life’s vulgar plain reality: to fornicate, to conform to class and breeding, to die” (GC, 142).
The protagonist of Holy Place, Guillermo Nervo, is older than most fictional characters of the Bildungsroman: he is the twenty-nine-year-old son of a celebrity actress who frequently overshadows him, causing an identity crisis. The only significant action of Holy Place, however, is the act of transformation. As Guillermo observes at one point, “Nothing unfolds, all is transfigured” (HP, 55). Consequently, this protagonist’s identity is never fully established, as he is reduced to little more than a series of meaningless gestures.
Published in 1967, Holy Place is closer to Terra Nostra, containing numerous direct connections to it. Like Terra Nostra, it has a three-part structure. The chapters within these three parts move from Mexico to Europe and back, as portions of material do in Terra Nostra. Near the beginning of the novel, Guillermo ends a chapter with the words “This is my story,” thus prefiguring Celestina’s opening in Terra Nostra, “Este es mi cuento,” followed by the same words as reflected in a mirror. Fuentes continues the practice, already begun in Aura, of creating characters who are in a state of ongoing transformation. As a modern-day Ulysses, Guillermo prefigures Polo Febo as well as all the Polo Febo figures in Terra Nostra. From Aura to Holy Place, the concept of character in the fiction of Fuentes questions any idea of fixed identity or psychological unity, a concept fully exploited in Terra Nostra.
Painting figures prominently in Holy Place, as do references to a triptych (of Leonora Carrington) that is comparable to the triptych (of El jardín de las delicias) in Terra Nostra. In Holy Place, Fuentes begins to experiment with the mutual interaction between characters in a novel and the paintings around them. The protagonist of Holy Place goes to Orvieto, Italy, the site of the painting from Orvieto in Terra Nostra, and the Italian painter of the murals in the Chapel of Orvieto, Signorelli, is also mentioned (as he is subsequently in A Change of Skin).
(9) Los Días Enmascarados
According to Octavio Paz, the “masked days,” or what Fuentes calls “Days in which it’s better to stay home,” were special in Aztec civilization.12 For Paz, the title of Fuentes’ first volume of short stories “alludes to the final days of the Aztec calendar, the nemontatani. In the spirit of Fuentes, without doubt, the term also has a meaning of questioning … what is behind the masks?”13 The idea of “the masked days” appears throughout Fuentes’ fiction, from his first book of short stories, through Terra Nostra, and in his later novel The Orange Tree. The cycle that Fuentes identifies as Los Días Enmascarados contains four volumes of short fiction—some of his very best writing: Los días enmascarados, Cantar de ciego, Burnt Water, and one more volume to be written, La frontera de cristal.
The book titled Los días enmascarados consists of six stories written with the aesthetic agenda of Borges and Arreola: now, everything is seemingly possible in fiction. In “Chac Mool,” the statue of an Aztec god comes to life to dominate a human being; in “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes” a historian finds himself transformed into Maximilian (in the method of Aura); in “Por boca de los dioses,” another Aztec god takes control of a human being. In these stories, Fuentes does indeed stop time for the sacred days, undermining the rationale behind many traditional understandings of time and space, as well as human interaction within the traditional human boundaries of time and space. History begins to live in the present and future, as it will on a much larger scale in his later fiction.
Cantar de ciegos contains seven stories that are more explicitly cosmopolitan than Los días enmascarados, more subtle in their human relationships, and equally effective in subverting any established sense of order. Los días enmascarados engages in the fantastic with a strong sense of the Aztec past; Cantar de ciegos does not involve a definition of Mexican identity by means of the past. Rather, each story of Cantar de ciegos takes place in contemporary Mexico. The characters of “Las dos Elenas,” for example, are self-consciously modern, and the distant historical past is not an issue. The issue is the relationship among the three individuals—a young married couple and their mother/mother-in-law. The surprise ending reveals a relationship between the husband and his mother-in-law.
Burnt Water represents Fuentes’ return to Mexico after having published a series of books situated outside of Mexico. It also represents a return to his historical thinking about Mexico. The stories of Cantar de ciegos could have taken place anywhere (and were not historical). A Change of Skin enters into European history, Birthday is set in London (and totally devoid of Mexican referents), and Terra Nostra, of course, is set primarily in Spain. Fuentes’ next work, Hydra Head, is set in contemporary Mexico, thus making the “narrative quartet” titled Burnt Water his first historically driven book set in Mexico since The Death of Artemio Cruz. And like The Death of Artemio Cruz, it deals with that generation of Mexicans who came to power during the Mexican Revolution. Burnt Water consists of four narratives that can be read separately but that fit together tightly as characters and situations overlap in each of the stories. The colloquial and personal tone of the language makes it a very Mexican book.
The central figure of Burnt Water is Vicente Vergara, a patriarch who was a captain during the revolution and who lives out his old age in the fancy Pedregal neighborhood of modern Mexico City. He is present as a key figure or important implicit referent in each of the stories. In the first, “Mother’s Day,” Vergara is the grandfather of the narrator, Plutarco, who adores this last family hero. A dominant and violent figure representing the best and the worst of the old order of the porfiriato, Vergara engages in the same irrational and inhumane violence in modern Mexico as he had during the revolution. Like many characters in Burnt Water, he lives intensely in the past, negating the present and thus differentiating himself from many of Fuentes’ major characters, who often live the past and the future in the present. In this book, the past refers to the glory days of the revolution and the 1920s.
The physical space of Burnt Water is also from the past, the same space as Aura: the old Colonial and nineteenth-century buildings of the central downtown area of Mexico City. Vergara lives there until he moves to the Pedregal, as does Manuelita, Vergara’s maid and the protagonist of the second narrative, “These Were Palaces.” The decrepit and poverty-stricken Manuelita lives in an imaginary world of modern Mexico, the imagined past grandeur of the aristocracy who inhabited the “palaces” of old Mexico City.
The success of the stories in Burnt Water lies not in their nostalgic references to the past but in their multiple enigmas. Vergara and Manuelita are enigmatic characters, as are Federico Silva and Bernabé of the last two stories. Silva is a property owner in the old part of the city (of Vergara and Manuelita) and Bernabé is a modern-day product of the Mexican Revolution—first a window washer, then a thug. When Bernabé becomes involved in organized violence at the end, his boss observes (citing the protagonist of The Underdogs), “Look at that rock, how it keeps rolling” (BW, 230).
La frontera de cristal, the last volume of the Los Días Enmascarados cycle, will consist of seven stories, all dealing with border themes, such as Mexicans in the United States and individuals of other nationalities who have crossed other national boundaries.
These stories of the cycle Los Días Enmascarados have numerous connections with Terra Nostra, which mentions “los días enmascarados” near the beginning of Part II (TN, 403). Of the stories in Los días enmascarados, “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes” contains the earliest identifiable roots of Terra Nostra in Fuentes’ fiction. It represents an early effort to transform characters, to be “transhistorical”—blending characters from different time periods into one, and to create a sense of atemporality.
Cantar de ciegos and Burnt Water have less in common with Terra Nostra. The former, however, was a step toward the more universal interests in Terra Nostra. Most of the stories in Cantar de ciegos could take place anywhere, and in this sense move beyond the question “What is Mexico?” As one critic has pointed out, now Fuentes turns to the question “Who are the Mexicans?”14 Burnt Water appeared after Terra Nostra, reaffirming the fact that Fuentes’ narrative always returns to its central referent: Mexico and its past.
(10) El Tiempo Político
This tenth cycle consists of one published novel, Hydra Head, and two forthcoming works, El sillón del águila and El camino a Texas. They represent yet another concept of time—“political time.” In the first volume of this cycle, Hydra Head, political time is fundamentally the linear time of the spy thriller. In reality, the numerous elements of the spy thriller or detective fiction—including the fast-moving plot—are the trappings of this pastiche of mystery novels and spy films. The protagonist, Félix Maldonado, an overly punctual bureaucrat, becomes unwillingly involved in a plot to assassinate the president of Mexico as well as a plot of international intrigue concerning Mexico’s oil reserves. A double of him is killed, and he has plastic surgery and assumes a new identity, now calling himself Diego Velázquez. He owns a reproduction of Las Meninas because he and his wife had noticed physical similarities between him and Velázquez.
As one critic has aptly pointed out, Hydra Head is actually a novel of pseudo-detection.15 The protagonist plays the role of detective and does eventually discover that the murderers of the woman of his amorous obsessions—Sara Klein—had been killed by his own wife, Ruth. In the process of this discovery, as well as the process of his transformation into his new identity as Diego Velázquez, however, Felix seems to be living out the lives of a series of film characters, from Humphrey Bogart to James Bond. Consequently, the reader experiences a humorous distance from the events at hand and observes with intellectual aloofness the fact that the characters are caught in enigmatic relationships of power.16
As in Terra Nostra, Fuentes is interested in the multiple and transforming aspects of character that result, in much of his fiction, in doubles and multiples of characters. Hydra Head is entirely predicated on the double Felix Maldonado/Diego Velázquez. In the end, Felix fully assumes his new identity. But Felix has other doubles, including Theseus, Trevor, Hamlet, the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland, Humphrey Bogart, even Woody Allen. In a novel of numerous and ongoing substitutions, it is notable that Felix is a substitute for Velázquez just as his painting is a substitute for Las Meninas.
The most significant affinity with Terra Nostra, however, is found in the function of painting.17 As in Terra Nostra, the paintings that occupy the space on the walls in the novel play an active role in the plot rather than the traditional passive role of scenery or setting. Paintings of Ricardo Martínez and John Everett Millais, consequently, have as active a function in this novel as the paintings of Signorelli and Bosch do in Terra Nostra. The most important painting is Las Meninas, by Velázquez, the same painting that is so important for Foucault, and for Fuentes in Terra Nostra. Felix and his wife, during a visit to El Prado, find similarities between the self-portrait of Velázquez and Felix, purchase a reproduction, and place it prominently in their home, where Felix sees it regularly. After Felix assumes his new identity, he feels increasingly at home in his new role, and eventually he becomes Diego Velázquez.
Among his observations on Las Meninas in Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault notes that “representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”18 Fully aware of certain limits of the novel as compared to the visual arts, Fuentes incorporates painting and film to suggest the nature of literature.19 By incorporating Las Meninas into the novel, Fuentes creates a mise en abyme that emphasizes the fictional nature of the characters. Just as in Don Quixote and Terra Nostra, the characters never strive for “reality”; rather, they constantly reveal their fictionality, repeating lines from Shakespeare and from films, as well as acting in situations that recall Shakespeare and films.
As in Terra Nostra, in Hydra Head Fuentes fictionalizes a world in constant transformation. Relationships and alliances transform as quickly as identities. As the narrator states, “Any day, the alliances can change radically” (HH, 284).
As a postmodern work published in post–Terra Nostra Mexico, Hydra Head assumes a comic attitude toward some of the topics discussed intensely in Mexico with the rise of Paz and Fuentes in the 1950s. Since the publication of Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in 1950, identity has been a central theme of Mexican literary discourse. In Hydra Head, Fuentes finally assumes a playful distance from this topic, using it for satirical ends. He satirizes the president of Mexico by portraying him as a character similar to the hapless Felix: “The President suffered the same malady as Felix Maldonado. He had no face. He was nothing but a name, a title” (HH, 57). The narrator also makes a reference that can be read as a satire of the numerous writings of Paz on Mexican identity, referring to the National Palace as “the fixed center of a country fascinated with its own navel” (HH, 190).
(11) A Change of Skin
Fuentes had suggested the idea for the title of A Change of Skin near the middle of Where the Air Is Clear. The character Rodrigo Pola thinks “they needed changes of seasons and skin to know themselves, and also others” (Where, 260). A Change of Skin, like the works of the first cycle, negates linear time and, in addition, looks to the future. Following the model of Borges in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Fuentes creates a labyrinth of time comparable to the infinite novel left by Ts’ui Pen in the Borges story. The basic referents in A Change of Skin are Palm Sunday, April 11, 1965, and the town of Cholula in Mexico. The four main characters—Javier, Elizabeth, Franz, and Isabel—make a car trip to Cholula, the site of one of Mexico’s most renowned pyramids. But the novel moves back into different historical times, including the Spain of the Inquisition, German concentration camps, Hiroshima, and Vietnam. Fuentes’ own experience in the United States in the 1930s and in Argentina in the 1940s results in characters acting in New York in the 1930s and in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. An opening section of the novel moves back and forth, from one paragraph to the next, between the twentieth-century travel of the four main characters and the sixteenth-century conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. The past, the present, and the future exist here and now. As Fuentes himself has suggested in an interview about this book, “There is no historical progress … only a repetition of a series of ceremonial acts.”20 In this lengthy and complex novel, Fuentes pursues another time and another world.21
Published in 1967 with Holy Place, A Change of Skin is a transitional work read in the context of Terra Nostra. It is the Fuentes novel before Terra Nostra that most clearly incorporates an Aztec view of cyclical time. The Aztecs had accepted the inevitability of change, but they believed that every fifty-two years a cycle was closed and the past had to be “cancelled, denied, destroyed or covered like the seven successive pyramids at the ceremonial center of Cholula.”22 A Change of Skin is clearly centered on this cyclical view of time (represented by the seven pyramids): Mexico has kept the original conception of sacrifice as necessary to maintain the order of the cosmos.23 Continuing his search for the eternal moment suggested in some of his previous work (and later elaborated in Terra Nostra), Fuentes strives for the experience of creative re-creation, as represented in the poems Death without End, by José Gorostiza, and Sunstone, by Octavio Paz, where, as one critic has observed, “Western linear discourse struggles with the spirit of Indian cyclical time in order to reestablish reality on a new foundation.”24 Terra Nostra ends in apocalypse; A Change of Skin ends with Javier in a state of (postmodern) exhaustion.
There are numerous other allusions of lesser importance in A Change of Skin that connect it to Terra Nostra. Like Terra Nostra, it has a framing story: in Terra Nostra it is the frame of Polo Febo in Paris; in A Change of Skin it is the frame of an external narrator who is named. In Terra Nostra, numerous characters perceive reality and themselves through mirrors; in A Change of Skin the four main characters are in the constant presence of a mirror in the car in which they travel. In Terra Nostra characters move in and out of the light and shadows of the Palacio; in A Change of Skin they move in and out of the same light and shadows when they explore the pyramid of Cholula. Terra Nostra has Polo Febo and other transfigurations of Polo Febo (such as the peregrino) functioning as Ulysses figures; in A Change of Skin Javier becomes, in one part of the novel, a Ulysses (and Polo Febo) figure.
(12) Christopher Unborn
Fuentes conceived the entire idea of his “La Edad del Tiempo” when he was writing Christopher Unborn. He was a visiting professor on the faculty of Dartmouth College, the same campus on which Diego Rivera had resided while painting his celebrated mural. During that time, while writing this novel about the present and future of Mexico, Fuentes began thinking about the temporal implications of his total work, thus arriving at the global plan of “La Edad del Tiempo.”
One of Fuentes’ most innovative fictions, Christopher Unborn is also one of his lengthy, ambitious, and totalizing books, with most obvious parentage in A Change of Skin and Terra Nostra. Here, a return to origins takes on a different meaning, for the narrator, Cristóbal, narrates on January 6, 1992, from the womb of his mother, Angeles, who has conceived him in 1992 in Acapulco (also identified as Kafkapulco). As in the story “Apollo and the Whores,” in The Orange Tree, Fuentes imagines a Mexico of the future, a post-postmodern Mexico that has trivialized not only its national myths and its institutions but also its very identity.
Christopher Unborn is Fuentes’ most irreverent fictional critique of the modern state of Mexico; the questioning of the nation’s modernization to be found in Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz culminates, in Christopher Unborn, in images of a nation lost in the garbage and defecation that are the products of its own development. The suave patria of the (nationalistic) early-twentieth-century poet Ramón López Velarde is now a mutilated land where the “external debt” has become an “eternal debt,” where the jungle has been destroyed and the nation is covered with cement highways and excrement. Mexico has reached a state of total exhaustion. The Mexico of Where the Air Is Clear in which Federico Robles was a businessman on the move is now the Mexico of his son, Robles Chacón, a minister in this fragile and tired state, “cursing right and left about the language of economists” (CU, 27). In this post-postmodern world of no truths, “The only truth … is that that the vast majority of the people … are screwed” (CU, 28). It is the nation where “nothing works but everything survives” (CU, 52). Perhaps the most devastating critique, however, is the fact that Cristóbal, narrating from the womb, has no past at all, a postmodern condition unlike the Mexican characters of Fuentes’ early fiction.
Christopher Unborn is a 563-page dialogue with López Velarde, written in a language as provisional and disposed to substitutions as the post-postmodern Mexico of an imagined future with an “Avenida Warehz,” a “Colonia Whatamock,” and “Jardines Flotantes de Suchamilkshake.” The suave patria of 1992 is where “shit meets shit” (CU, 204).
As in A Change of Skin, Holy Place, and Terra Nostra, in Christopher Unborn Fuentes plays, above all, with language. This is a novel of postmodern play, a world of seemingly infinite substitutions. Humorous associations, such as the following, are common: “Your cherry jubilee in my hungry mouth, your scherezada from tampique with its chilis and little beans which I’m digging up with my longer finger, your cunt, your raccunto, your ass chérie, your cherry ass, Chere Sade, flagellated by my furious whip …” (CU, 7). It is one of Fuentes’ most self-conscious metafictions, which plays off his own words and other institutionalized languages in Mexico, both literary and political. In this sense, Christopher Unborn is the Bakhtinian text par excellence: a text of heteroglossia with competing languages at play. The narrator’s father articulates this Bakhtinian situation in a statement to his wife: “Adored Angeles: please realize that we live in an arena where all languages fight it out” (CU, 17).
The characters in Christopher Unborn seem to be lost in time and space, possessing no past. This ahistoricism, however, does not represent the situation of Fuentes in Christopher Unborn. To the contrary, he is well aware of the past, parodying and subverting Mexican writers, such as the traditionalists Ramón López Velarde and Mariano Azuela, as well as some of the writers present in much of his work—Cervantes, Erasmus, and Gogol.
The naming of Cervantes and Erasmus also evokes Terra Nostra, and Christopher Unborn has numerous connections with Fuentes’ fictional centerpiece. Like Terra Nostra, with the pilgrim who travels across the oceans, it plays off Homer’s Odyssey. The narrator mentions Homer, for example, in the following context: “Homer, oh mere, oh mer, oh madre, oh merde origin of the Gods: Thalassa, Thalassa” (CU, 12).
(13) El Tiempo Actual
This thirteenth cycle consists of three works, two of which have yet to be published. They were originally titled Crónica del guerrillero y el asesino, Crónica de una actriz renuente, and Crónica de una víctima de nuestro tiempo, but their titles in 1994 became Diana, o la cazadora solitaria; Aquiles, o el guerrillero y el asesino; and Prometeo, o el precio de la libertad. They are contemporary fictitious chronicles. Diana, o la cazadora solitaria is considerably autobiographical, dealing with an affair Fuentes had with an American actress in the 1960s.
(14) The Orange Tree
In The Orange Tree Fuentes, like García Márquez, uses an image as his point of departure.25 In this novel, the central image is the naranjo, or orange tree, which provides the unity to the volume. Although not a common image in Fuentes’ fiction, the orange had appeared in Hydra Head as a Spanish image when the narrator describes Felix in the context of a Velázquez painting: “But Felix’s face did not have the smile of Velázquez, the satisfaction of those lips that had just tasted plums and oranges” (Orange, 35). The orange also appears prominently in Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins.26 The final work in the cycle of “La Edad del Tiempo,” this book can be read as a five-chapter novel or a volume of five short stories. The image of the orange tree and the consistency of themes, however, invite the reader to consider it a novel.
The first of these stories (or Chapter 1 of the novel) is narrated by the historical character Jerónimo de Aguilar, a historical character: he was a Spaniard who was shipwrecked on the Yucatán Peninsula and then began living with the Maya inhabitants there.27 Like the narrator in Pedro Páramo, Aguilar narrates from the tomb. The story is divided into ten sections, beginning with the tenth and ending with the first; each highlights, above all, what Aguilar sees as a witness of the encounter between two worlds. In the story, he describes himself as the translator between Cortés and Chief Guatemuz, but he says that he purposely distorted and invented in his act of translation. He describes such historical events as the arrival of the Spaniards in the splendid Aztec city of Tenochtitlán on November 3, 1520, and the encounter with Moctezuma, as well as the encounter in Cholula. This narrator presents himself, indirectly, as a writer figure, always emphasizing that as translator, he is a man of language or “the master of language” (Orange, 32). In his role as translator, he learns of the power of language. After the misunderstandings and the destruction involved with the encounter, in fact, the only thing that remains is language: “the words remained.” As a foundational text, then, The Orange Tree emphasizes the origins of the cultures of the Americas in language. At the end of this first chapter (or story), only language remains in Spain, too, for the Aztecs go to Spain and conquer it.
The second story, “The Sons of the Conquistador,” continues the foundational narration with the story of two sons of Cortés with identical names—Martín. Identified in the text as Martín 1 and Martín 2, they alternate as the narrators of the story. Once adults and “the real owners of New Spain,” they play the role of their father, just as the different kings of Spain in Terra Nostra played their roles as the rulers of Spain. In the struggle for establishing authority in Mexico, these sons seem to claim their authority as the heirs of Cortés: “That there is no higher authority in New Spain than I myself ?” (Orange, 77). In reality, Martín 1 is the recognized heir (the white or criollo son) and Martín 2 is the mestizo son of Malinche. “The Sons of the Conquistador” is fundamentally the mestizaje part of the foundational story, for their identity is understood as mestizos, as sons of Cortés and Malinche. Martín 2 clearly has a sense of his identity when he states to his brother: “You’re a son of a bitch. You’re my brother. You’re the fucking son of La Chingada” (Orange, 89). Despite their realization of their own identity as criollo and mestizo, they cannot even imagine the concept of a new nation. The story ends with Martín 2 observing, “I don’t understand how a nation is born” (Orange, 100).
In the third story, “The Two Numantias,” the roots of Spanish history and culture are observed from the opposite side of the mirror—not from Mexico but from the Roman Empire during the conquest of Spain. Seen by the Romans, the other in Spain represents the savage and the uncivilized that, centuries later, the Spaniards used to define the Native Americans they discovered in Mexico. A Roman narrator opens the story by stating: “They, the Spaniards, are a coarse, savage, and barbarous people whom we Romans lead, whether they like it or not, toward civilization” (Orange, 101). “The Two Numantias” relates the story of Roman armies conquering the walled city of Numancia, which becomes Spain and which mirrors Roman civilization back upon itself. A Roman narrator realizes at one point that he came to Numancia not to conquer it but to duplicate it (Orange, 129).
The entertaining fourth story, “Apollo and the Whores,” initially seems to be an anomaly to the volume, for it is a narrative set in contemporary Mexico and relates the last hours in the life of Vince Valera, a fifty-five-year-old American B-movie actor who goes on vacation to Acapulco. He rents a boat and takes a group of young Mexican prostitutes for an afternoon of sexual play at sea but suffers a heart attack while engaged in sex with the first of these eighteen-year-olds. The only connection to the other stories, until the last one in the volume, is the sprouting of an orange tree, at the end of the story, next to Valera’s tomb. The boat he rents is called The Two Américas, the title of the next story.
In the fifth and last story of the volume, “The Two Américas,” Christopher Columbus narrates his diary, in which he explains the original importance of the orange. Columbus has loved oranges since his childhood because they remind him of sucking at his mother’s breast. They also seem as perfect as the sun to him and, as an adult, he receives great sensual pleasure from oranges, the pleasures of “wet nurses, breasts, the sphere, the world, the egg” (Orange, 219). This Columbus is also a Sephardic Jew who lives long enough into the twentieth century to witness the selling of the Americas to Japanese and other multinational companies, becoming “Paradise Inc.” In the end, the only survivors of the paradisiacal multinational company are the orange tree, the wolf, and Columbus himself. The ultimate mirror effect appears in the story’s last lines, in which he promises to return to Europe to plant the seeds of an orange tree.
The image of the orange tree, which recurs throughout the book, is the image of Spain. As Jerónimo de Aguilar explains, “Could any image verify a Spaniard’s identity better than the sight of a man eating an orange?” (Orange, 37). The orange and the orange tree appear throughout the volume and provide a thread of continuity among the five stories. In “The Numantias,” the seeds of this strange, oriental fruit—naranja—are brought to Rome by a Greek and planted in the Roman’s patio. The orange tree grows in the center of the image of the circle, the circle of the patio and the circle of time that is the conceptual framework of this volume of stories. Aguilar planted the seeds of the first inherently Spanish image in the Americas. When Martín, the son of Cortés, goes to Spain to be with his decrepit and dying father, Cortés smells of defecation and oranges: “The stench of my father’s shit could not, however, wipe out the fresh scent of an orange tree that grew to the height of his window and which, during those months, bloomed splendidly” (Orange, 52–53). The son also relates that Cortés, when he arrived at Yucatán, was amazed to find the orange trees that Jerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero had planted: “He remembered that when he reached Yucatán, he was astonished to see an orange tree whose seeds had been brought there by the two disloyal castaways, Aguilar and Guerrero” (Orange, 63–64). Cortés was so impressed with the seeds from Yucatán that he planted them in Acapulco, thus expanding the mirror image of Spain throughout Mexico.
In July 1992, Fuentes returned to El Escorial and wrote a portion of The Orange Tree. It was a return to his origins—for Fuentes and for his lifetime writing project. The circles of time in Terra Nostra also reappear in The Orange Tree. Like the pilgrim in Terra Nostra, Jerónimo de Aguilar can claim “I knew both shores” (Orange, 22). And like generations of Latin Americans, particularly the early generations that came most recently from Spain, Aguilar found himself “divided between Spain and the New World” (Orange, 22). This first story can be read as a continuation of Terra Nostra: in this novel the Americas are portrayed as a mirror image of Spain and vice versa; in this story, Mexico conquers Spain in a mirror image of the Conquest. All that remains on both shores—Spain and the Americas—is language, in both Terra Nostra and The Orange Tree. The second story continues the foundational history, relating the dilemmas of being the sons of Cortés, the first generation of children of Spaniards born in Mexico as the first mestizos. “The Two Numantias” functions as a mirror image of Part II of Terra Nostra, which tells a story of Spaniards conquering the other in the Americas; “The Two Numantias” mirrors the conquest story by writing of the conquest of Spain as the other by the Romans. The inhabitants of Numancia become the other dreamed of by the dominant power, just as the other of Spain dreamed in Part II of Terra Nostra. The Columbus of The Orange Tree has parents who originate from the same Jewish neighborhood as “The Toledo Jewry” of Part III of Terra Nostra. Terra Nostra had conceptualized Latin America as a mirror image of Spain and vice versa; this mirror imagery continues in The Orange Tree, when Columbus returns to Europe to plant the seeds of an orange tree.
Narrating and Seeing
Cervantes had imagined a world of multiple points of view, and that is one of the main reasons for Fuentes’ lifetime fascination with Don Quixote. Similarly, exactly who narrates and who sees and the location of these narrators and seers are important to the reader’s experience in Terra Nostra. The complex narrative situation in Terra Nostra had precedents, of course, in Fuentes’ fiction. Reality tends to be enigmatic in all his fiction, and the presence of multiple narrators and seers contributes to the enigmas.
From Where the Air Is Clear through Birthday, Fuentes had explored in numerous experiments the possibilities and potentialities of multiple narrators and seers. In Where the Air Is Clear, he was already using first-, second-, and third-person narrations to fictionalize modern Mexico City and the problems of identity for the modern Mexican. The use of these three points of view was more systematically and fully developed in The Death of Artemio Cruz, with a regular rotation of the first, second, and third persons that provides varying insights into the psychic and spiritual makeup of the protagonist, as well as his past. The multiple points of view in The Death of Artemio Cruz are also one of the vehicles for destroying linear time. Similarly, the “tú” (“you”) of Aura, used in the future, subverts the rationality of Western linear time.
A Change of Skin and Birthday were radical experiments with point of view quite close to the effects in Terra Nostra, for beyond the modernist interests in “multiple points of view,” Fuentes questions the very being of the narrator. In A Change of Skin and Birthday the identity and location of narrators and seers move beyond the sphere of epistemology to ontology: the issues are not knowing but being. Distant Relations continues the questioning of identity by means of the act of narration, for in this novel, affirmation of self is found by the very act of telling a story.
The gaze (mirada) in Fuentes’ fiction, as has been noted, had close ties to the work of Paz, who uses mirada imagery to suggest a special union between male and female in some situations and a union between generic man and the universe in other cases.28 The mirada appears with this and a variety of other functions from the early stories of Los días enmascarados to those of The Orange Tree. In “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes,” the narrator/protagonist’s turning point occurs when he realizes that the mysterious old woman in the house has no eyes. In Aura, the protagonist is fascinated with Aura’s green eyes, and there is always a special level of communication effected through the miradas exchanged between the protagonist and Aura. The point of departure and circumstance of Artemio Cruz revolve around his looking, associating, and remembering on his deathbed. In Holy Place, the protagonist’s identity and relationship with his mother are defined, to a large extent, by how she sees him, by the circumstances in which they see or don’t see each other, and by Claudia’s ability to be seen and not be seen. The four main characters in A Change of Skin engage in an ongoing communication on the basis of miradas, and the miradas have several specific functions in the text. On the one hand, the mirada is often used to communicate the distant relations that the characters suffer, despite their physical proximity. Their observing through a mirror, as they often do while riding in the car, underlines this distance, with the physical object of the car’s mirror intervening between the characters. On the other hand, as in Aura, the enigmatic qualities of the characters seem to be hidden behind their equally enigmatic miradas. Isabel’s green eyes, like those of Aura, are particularly visible and enigmatic in A Change of Skin. In accordance with Paz’s idea of the Mexican who hides behind his mask, several characters in this novel hide behind their masks, revealing only an ever-changing mirada. Consequently, the mirada of the other, as well as a mirror, can be momentarily revealing or momentarily trivial, depending on the situation, in A Change of Skin.
The mirada is a powerful, defining element in Birthday and Terra Nostra, and a factor in Hydra Head and Distant Relations. In Birthday, the subtle human relationships are such that to see without being seen is an exercise of power, and miradas can deny identity. As has been discussed already, the mirada opens new possibilities for some characters in Terra Nostra, and it has important functions at the end of each of the novel’s three parts. The mirada is less significant in Hydra Head and Distant Relations than in most of Fuentes’ fiction. Nevertheless, the relationship between the protagonist and his wife in Hydra Head is characterized by communication via the mirada. In Distant Relations, the act of narrating is more important than the act of seeing or observing, although conversations are sometimes accompanied by a suggestive mirada.
Old Gringo is one of Fuentes’ most visually rich books and one of his novels that most elaborately and self-consciously uses the mirada. From the beginning of the work, the old gringo, repeating the first significant act of his predecessor Demetrio Macías of The Underdogs, looks back over the Rio Grande to observe a burning bridge. In both novels, the symbolic value of the burning is evoked by the very act of observing it with such intensity and care. In the mind of the old gringo, the mirada is an act of imagination and memory. He understands and interprets the world around him, to a large extent, on the basis of what he literally sees visually. As used by the other characters, the ubiquitous mirada fulfills many of the functions of Fuentes’ previous fiction. After one verbal exchange between characters, for example, the narrator states: “His look [mirada] was more eloquent than his words” (OG, 14). Indeed, the characters strive to understand the other as much by visual as by verbal means. As in Distant Relations, reality is ultimately defined as story, but in Old Gringo the process of communication in a world of stories is effected largely by the mirada.
Fuentes also uses the device of the mirada in The Campaign and The Orange Tree. The Campaign is a novel more of history and ideas than of human relationships and miradas, and the latter are only minimally present in his work. The protagonist does become aware, nevertheless, of the presence of the mirada as a “zone of heat in the bodies around him” (Campaign, 85). In a key passage in the novel, Balthasar reflects upon his new identity among gauchos, and he uses the mirada to judge himself. He asks himself: “How could his eyes change?” (Campaign, 111). The Orange Tree is a much more visual novel than The Campaign, and the mirada serves different functions throughout the work. As in previous works, the mirada is used for moments of illumination on the part of individual characters, to suggest nonverbal communication among characters, and as an expression of desire.
The mirada of Fuentes’ fiction is an intermediary mode of communication, unlike direct statements by characters and narrators. It functions as an image or action that frequently carries a special meaning determined by the particular context of each mirada.
Fuentes: The Modern and the Postmodern
Fuentes was smitten by the modernity of Cervantes, Dos Passos, Borges, Kafka, and Faulkner at a young age, and soon by the postmodernity of Joyce, Borges, and Cortázar as well. The transitional work in his oeuvre, embodying the modern and the postmodern, was Terra Nostra. Following the impulses of the moderns, Fuentes has published such powerfully modernist works as Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz, Holy Place, Terra Nostra, Hydra Head, The Campaign, and The Orange Tree. His predominantly postmodern fiction is A Change of Skin, Birthday, Terra Nostra, Distant Relations, Old Gringo, and Christopher Unborn.
The most powerful of Fuentes’ modernist works are Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Holy Place. In these three novels, Fuentes fully exploits the technical devices pioneered by First World modernists to explore the past and present of modern Mexico. In Where the Air Is Clear, he uses the multiple points of view and collage of this work’s most important predecessor, Manhattan Transfer. The structure and narrators of the fiction of Faulkner and Butor are evident in The Death of Artemio Cruz. In both novels, Fuentes-the-modernist moves from a fictional world of an apparent fragmented chaos to one of order and harmony. Holy Place, a work written under the influence of film, uses many of the same narrative strategies. For McHale, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Holy Place represent variants of the modernist interior-monologue novel that focuses on a grid that each mind imposes on the outside world, or through which it assimilates the outside world.29 This early Fuentes, like his modernist predecessors, was still searching for truths and still producing the totalizing grand narrative.30
Terra Nostra, The Campaign, Hydra Head, and The Orange Tree represent a continuation, to different degrees, of Fuentes’ modernist project. Now that he is writing in a Western culture increasingly aware of the end of modernity, he has tempered the modernist and totalizing impulses in these four novels by the postmodern. Nevertheless, Terra Nostra, The Campaign, and The Orange Tree are historical and truth-seeking works still written under the influence of his earlier modernist interior-monologue novels. The Campaign, Hydra Head, and The Orange Tree all reach denouements more typical of modern ambiguity than of postmodern indeterminacy.
As a product of modernism rather than an opposition to it, postmodern fiction shares some modernist impulses; this is the case in Fuentes’ predominantly postmodern novels A Change of Skin, Birthday, Terra Nostra, Distant Relations, Old Gringo, and Christopher Unborn. A Change of Skin was one of his early experiments with characters of multiple (rather than just double) identity, as well as with characters and space in constant transformation. When it is revealed at the end that the text of A Change of Skin has been produced by the mad inmate of an insane asylum, it is apparent that Fuentes’ fiction has moved from concerns over the epistemological to the ontological, a sign of the postmodern.31 Birthday is his most radical experiment with space, an experiment continued with Terra Nostra and later novels. If innovation with time was predominant in Fuentes’ modern texts (Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz), in his postmodern works, particularly Birthday and Terra Nostra, the predominant innovation is with space.32 The postmodern elements of Terra Nostra are so evident that McHale has identified it, along with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, as one of the “paradigmatic texts of postmodernist writing, literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices.”33
Distant Relations, Old Gringo, and Christopher Unborn continue the postmodern themes and strategies of A Change of Skin, Birthday, and Terra Nostra. Characters of multiple and transforming identities are evident in these three texts, and Fuentes flaunts the unresolved contradictions that are a sign of the postmodern. As frequently happens in postmodern texts, the reality of texts, of fiction, or of storytelling predominates over empirical reality and often subverts it. These are fictional worlds that inevitably revert to language as their principal subject.
Fuentes’ postmodern fiction, despite its unresolved contradictions and metafictional qualities, is deeply historical and political. His postmodern work is a “transhistorical carnaval” (as McHale calls it) in which characters in their projected worlds and empirical reality interact.34 Simultaneously, Fuentes engages in multiple intertextual boundary violation, including fictional characters from other novels in his texts. Consequently, the reader of Fuentes’ postmodern fiction experiences an even more complex confrontation with history than in his overtly historical and political modern texts, Where the Air Is Clear and The Death of Artemio Cruz.
History, Culture, Identity
History and culture undergird the concept of identity in most of Fuentes’ fiction. For Fuentes, writing implies an engagement with history, culture, and identity. The foundations of Latin American history and culture are found primarily in Terra Nostra, but then they are elaborated in the foundational texts The Campaign and The Orange Tree.
Fuentes’ early fiction—Los días enmasacarados, Where the Air Is Clear, Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz—coincides with Paz’s formulations on Mexican identity. Paz traces Mexican identity back to the key moment when Cortés, by fathering the first Mexican with La Malinche, created the first Mexican of Spanish and Indian identity. Since that moment, according to Paz, the Mexican woman is la chingada, the proto-male is el chingón, and Mexicans have lived behind the mask of an identity difficult to penetrate or define. Such questioning of Mexican identity had been discussed among Mexican intellectuals since the 1940s, in the writings of Samuel Ramos, Alfonso Reyes, and José Vasconcelos. Fuentes returned to the Aztec past and La Malinche in his early fiction.
In the late 1960s, Fuentes’ understanding of identity began to evolve beyond the predominant ideas of Paz in the 1950s. In Holy Place, A Change of Skin, Birthday, and Terra Nostra, his transhistorical vision is more universal and less focused on the Aztec past as the primary means of understanding the present. Now Fuentes begins including Europe as part of a historical vision beyond the Mexican Colonial past; he also begins questioning the very concept of fictional space. The multiple identities of his characters undermine any concept of the unified subject, thus rejecting Paz’s formula for Mexican identity. History, culture, and identity in Terra Nostra are concepts that also reject the 1950s versions of both Paz and Fuentes. Now Fuentes fictionalizes history and culture as the foundations for not just Mexican identity but Latin American identity as well. In these works of the late 1960s and 1970s, his vision is, in effect, as universal as he and his generation of intellectuals had desired back in the 1950s when they published the Revista Mexicana de Literatura.
With Hydra Head and Old Gringo, Fuentes looks back at the Paz vision of Mexican identity as a cliché. The very idea of the mask and identity are material for satire in several passages of Hydra Head, thus mocking the ideas of Paz at the distance of more than three decades. In Old Gringo, the actions of both the Mexican and the American characters are more the manifestations of national clichés than the expression of individual identities. In this post–Terra Nostra work, as in Terra Nostra itself, Fuentes questions cultural essence and history as truth.
Conclusion
The fourteen cycles of “La Edad del Tiempo” represent one of the most significant bodies of literature to have been created and projected by a Latin American writer since the beginnings of Indo-Afro-Ibero-American culture. A vast body of work in time and space, it is set in all of the Hispanic world, from Spain to the Americas, from Argentina to the borders between Mexico and the United States, and it represents a rewriting of history from Roman times to the present. In his total work, of course, Fuentes explores many of the issues synthesized in Terra Nostra.
Fuentes’ fiction in general, like Terra Nostra, exhibits a constant belief in the power of imagination as a value in itself. Liberation always returns, sooner or later, to imagination. After imagination, Fuentes privileges the power of ideas over other forces, such as the economic or the sexual.
Much of Fuentes’ fiction explores the spaces and the times of change. He is interested in those forces that transform individuals, cultures, and societies. Many of his novels are located precisely in the space of change; for example, The Campaign is located temporally at that key moment of transformation from colony to republic, Terra Nostra during the conquest and colonization, Christopher Unborn during the post-modernization of NAFTA.
El Escorial is the central architectural image of the Hispanic culture transferred to the Americas in the sixteenth century. But palaces have been a central body of space in Fuentes’ fiction throughout his writing career. The mirror image of El Escorial in much of Fuentes’ fiction is, in fact, the image of the multiple palaces of the Colonial period that have still survived in the ancient downtown area called the centro histórico.
A constant pattern in Fuentes’ fiction is that of a character trapped within the confines of an architectural construct, desiring or needing to escape. Such is the basic circumstance, in different ways, of the protagonists of “Chac Mool,” “Tlactocatzine, del Jardín de Flandes,” The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Birthday, Terra Nostra, and Christopher Unborn. In some of Fuentes’ fiction, characters find the enclosed space sacred, as is the case of the protagonists of Holy Place and Terra Nostra. The exact definition of this enclosed space—as a punishing hell or as a sacred utopian enclosure—returns the reader to the conflict between the rational and the irrational or between the scientific and the sacred in the fiction of Fuentes.
