Carlos Fuentes is one of the major writers of this century in Latin America. Smitten by the modernity of Miguel de Cervantes and Jorge Luis Borges at an early age, he has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and those of other places in the world. His work includes more than a dozen novels, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater. Just as Cervantes’ father (a surgeon) took his son along on his travels throughout Castille during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, giving the boy an early introduction to the politics and cultures of sixteenth-century Spain, Fuentes’ father (a diplomat) took him along on his travels. Consequently, Fuentes received an early and broad education on the cultures and politics of the Americas. He has dedicated his lifetime to the further understanding, analysis, and explanation of these cultures and politics.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent several years teaching the writings of Fuentes and thinking about the possibility of writing this book. During that time, I offered three graduate seminars on the fiction of Fuentes and made several trips to Mexico to interview the author and carry out research there. I began writing the biographical chapter in 1989. The idea for the book in the present form, however, finally came together in July 1992 while I was engaged in a dialogue with Fuentes and Fuentes scholars in El Escorial, Spain.
A group of twenty writers and Fuentes scholars met that July to dedicate a week to discussions of Fuentes’ work, with the author himself joining in. After a presentation on Terra Nostra by the Mexican writer and scholar Dante Medina, Fuentes and our group became involved in a discussion on Latin American identity. The Mexican writer Héctor Aguilar Camín pointed out that the official histories of Mexico include pre-Columbian Indian civilizations, underscoring the contributions of the Toltecs, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, and other Native American groups to Mexican culture, but these Mexican histories have systematically excluded Spanish contributions to Mexico. Fuentes, Aguilar Camín, Dante Medina, and a group of other participants spent the remainder of the afternoon in the lobby and on the veranda of our hotel discussing exactly what Latin America is: Indian? Spanish? Criollo? Fuentes and Aguilar Camín were particularly insistent in recognizing Spain along with the other cultures that have contributed to the makeup of the Americas.
These questions have been debated in Latin America, of course, for more than a century. The career of Carlos Fuentes has consisted of a lengthy meditation on this question. As I watched Fuentes’ eyes light up over our discussion, I realized that, despite the age-old nature of this debate, the questions are as alive today as they were a century ago, when Domingo Faustino Sarmiento defined Latin American identity within the conceptual framework of the simple Manichaean dichotomy between civilization and barbarism.
The next afternoon, Fuentes, Aguilar Camín, the Argentine writers Héctor Libertella and Martín Caparrós, the Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sánchez, and I had lunch together. Fuentes sat at the head of the table and tended to lead the discussion. The conversation was classic Fuentes: He spent two hours exploring Latin American cultural and political reality, questioning this group of Latin American intellectuals about the recent politics and literature of each of their countries. He moved systematically from one country to another, inquiring and then probing more deeply. This was quintessential Fuentes—the man of the Americas—exploring his Americas once again, from a hotel located above the Spanish town of El Escorial.
By the end of that five-day symposium, the multiple directions that this book could have taken had been refined. The two areas of Fuentes’ writing and thought that most urgently required further consideration, I had been reminded, were the problems of Latin American culture and identity. From my reading and teaching of Fuentes, I had already recognized those as prominent issues, but the experience in El Escorial confirmed their importance for this book.
At the end of the week, Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo appeared on the scene and delivered a closing lecture on the Fuentes story “Las dos orillas,” which deals with the encounter between Europe and the Americas. Goytisolo stressed the importance of the Indian languages—Mayan, Aztec, etc.—in the new Spanish of the Americas. Fuentes, sitting next to Goytisolo during the lecture, spoke after his Spanish friend’s remarks, commenting on the cultural diversity of Spain—its Arabic and Jewish contributions.
The sixteenth-century palace and monastery called El Escorial, constructed by Philip II and located in the town of the same name, evokes many of these issues. El Escorial is also a central image in Terra Nostra and a cornerstone of the present study. I will attempt to demonstrate how El Escorial was a mirror image of Latin America during its foundational centuries. I will show how this palace also synthesizes, in its architecture and its contents, as well as its ideology and discourse, Hispanic culture in the time of Philip II. Consequently, topics concerning the relationship between El Escorial and Terra Nostra appear throughout this study. These two works—El Escorial and Terra Nostra—are the basic texts I use for an understanding of Hispanic culture and identity, although I include others. Fuentes himself has referred to parallels between El Escorial and Terra Nostra. In an interview published in 1978, he stated: “Terra Nostra is this: it is a second nature. In many senses: in the sense that the verbal literary construction is very similar to the material of the narrated construction of El Escorial …” (Coddou, 1978).
By the 1990s, Fuentes’ analysis of cultures of the Americas led him to coin the term “Indo-Afro-Ibero-America.” For Fuentes (as for many others), other more commonly used terms create several problems. The terms “Hispanic” and “Spanish” America exclude numerous portions of the cultures of the Americas—most obviously Brazil and the Portuguese language (which, interestingly enough, was Fuentes’ first spoken language). Fuentes has also pointed out that the term “Latin America” was invented by the French in the late nineteenth century in order to legitimize their growing colonial interests. Expanding rather than excluding (and also rejecting the colonial maneuvers of the French), Fuentes proposes the term “Indo-Afro-Ibero-America” for references to the region of the Americas traditionally called Latin America. Following Fuentes’ lead, I will use that term regularly in this study, falling back on “Latin American” and “the Americas” occasionally, but only for stylistic reasons (the main problem with the term “Indo-Afro-Ibero-America” is its stylistic clumsiness).
There is no extant book-length study on Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra, and the cultures of the Americas. Wendy Farris has published an introductory study of Fuentes’ fiction up to 1983, titled Carlos Fuentes (1983). This useful work contains a fourteen-page biographical sketch of Fuentes, the most lengthy yet published in English, and a seventeen-page analysis of Terra Nostra. Robert Brody and Charles Rossman have compiled a volume of thirteen critical studies on Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View (1982), which includes incisive articles by some of the most insightful Latin Americanists who have written on Fuentes, among them Jaime Alazraki, John S. Brushwood, Frank Dauster, Gloria Durán, Merlin Forster, Roberto González Echevarría, Lanin Gyurko, Luis Leal, Richard Reeve, and Margaret Sayers Peden. Ana María Hernández de López has edited La obra de Carlos Fuentes: Una visión múltiple (1988), a volume that includes articles by some of these and other Fuentes scholars. A very informative and insightful book on Terra Nostra is Realidad y ficción en Terra Nostra de Carlos Fuentes (1989), by Ingrid Simson. Other books on Fuentes’ fiction include The Archetypes of Carlos Fuentes (1980), by Gloria Durán, El mito en la obra narrativa de Carlos Fuentes (1987), by Francisco Javier Ordiz, La narrativa de Carlos Fuentes (1983), by Aida Elsa Ramírez Mattei, and Nostalgia del futuro en la obra de Carlos Fuentes (1974), by Liliana Befumo Boschi and Elsa Calabrese. The most incisive article-length studies on Terra Nostra have been published by Roberto González Echevarría, Djelal Kadir, Lucille Kerr, José Miguel Oviedo, and Catherine Swietliki.
I have divided this book into three parts. Part I, “An Intellectual Biography: The Journey to El Escorial and Terra Nostra,” is a biography of Fuentes from his birth in 1928 to 1993. In this part, I make occasional reference to issues developed in the following chapters: Fuentes’ individual works, the role of culture, the definitions and functions of history, and the formation of identity in Indo-Afro-Ibero-America. Part II, “Rereading Terra Nostra,” begins with an analysis of El Escorial and then continues with other texts that are important to an understanding of Terra Nostra, texts ranging from Don Quixote to essays by José Ortega y Gasset and Octavio Paz. I draw parallels between El Escorial and Terra Nostra. Part III, “Rereading Fuentes,” deals with Fuentes’ other fiction and its relationship to Terra Nostra. I have organized Part III along the lines of Fuentes’ own division of his total fiction into fourteen cycles that he has identified as “La Edad del Tiempo.” In Appendix I, I have included an interview with Fuentes on the concept of “La Edad del Tiempo.” Appendix II consists of the list of books in Fuentes’ original idea for “La Edad del Tiempo” as it was first published in 1987, followed by his 1993 and 1994 revisions.
This study was supported with funds provided by various committees at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a leave provided by its Committee on Research and Creative Work. I am indebted to the friends and family of Fuentes, who were most helpful to me in my preparation of this book, particularly the biographical chapter: his mother Berta Fuentes, his sister Berta Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, William Styron, José Donoso, Juan Goytisolo, Pierre Schori, Sergio Pitol, R. H. Moreno-Durán, Héctor Libertella, Federico Patán, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Víctor Flores Olea, Roberto Torretti, and José Campillo Sainz. I am also grateful to the colleagues and friends who read this manuscript in its different stages of development: John S. Brushwood, Howard Goldblatt, George McMurray, Warren Motte, and Donald Schmidt. I am particularly appreciative of the assistance provided by my wife, Pamela Williams, and by graduate assistants Michael Buzan, Tony Maul, and Jennifer Valko. Above all, I thank Carlos and Sylvia Fuentes, who were always gracious and helpful—from the beginning of this project in Mexico City in 1989 to its near-conclusion in El Escorial in 1992.