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Article Excerpt
Between 1979 and 1983, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramirez, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Joaquin Blanco all published fictions that struggle between representing Mexico City as they see it and imagining Mexico City as they want it to be: Aguilar Mora's massive exploration of masks and forgetfulness in Si muero lejos de ti (If I Die Far from You 1979); Ramirez's poetic fantasy of underclass revenge in Violacion en Polanco (Rape in Polcanco 1980); the bourgeois coming-of-age story "El dia de las madres" ("Mothers Day") from Fuentes's Agua quemada (Burnt Water 1981); and Blanco's depiction of urban gay life in Las puberes caneforas (The Flower Girls 1983). These authors critically explore the multiple forms of violence that support Mexico City's modern aspirations. However, they also impose upon the city a grid of violent personal fantasy, manifesting strikingly common patterns in their attempts to appropriate the city as a viable home for Mexican male authorship.
These literary texts employ many of the same representational strategies as internationally successful urban films produced some twenty years later like Amores perros (2000) and Y tu mama tambien (2001). Such films have achieved a great deal of commercial success and recognition for their realist depiction of violence and social conflict in contemporary Mexico City. They graphically show physical and / or psychological violence by including a number of documentary-style film techniques: showing the same scene from a variety of different camera angles; using anonymous voice-overs to "explain" historical events; making visual references to specific colonia in the city; placing clear temporal markers to establish historical context. The films' display of violence causes strong, immediate reactions in spectators by seeming to place us in the urban scene.
One might assume that the films portray urban violence more forcefully than the written texts. After all, they are produced much later, in an era of increased social conflict, and their overt manipulation of visual and sound effects provides viewers with a visceral sense of the chaotic, threatening city. This apparent access to the real city, however, is not the exclusive domain of film. The earlier short stories and novels I examine here also portray urban brutality through realist conventions, using techniques proper to literature: detailed description, chronological narrative segments, verbal references to specific colonias, temporal markers, and slang. In addition, these literary texts rely on their narrators' carefully limited gaze to situate, contextualize, and frame our view of city spaces. Thus, like the later films, they employ specific focalization strategies to achieve the cinematic effect of placing us in the supposedly real city.
While in this sense both groups of texts render Mexico City cinematographically, the stories they set in the city are markedly different. Curiously, the writers who attempted to show urban fragmentation and pain around 1980 designed plots that were far more violent than those of the graphic films twenty years later. In the films, the plots appear just as fragmented and disordered as the cityscape. In the same way that they visually resist readerly desire to connect disparate elements of Mexico City into one seamless image, the films also resist wing up loose ends of their plots into conventionally satisfying, totalizing conclusions. Maintaining this parallelism between city structure and story structure, the films offer plots fueled mostly by alienation and miscommunication rather than by physical violence. In contrast, vicious rapes and murders drive plot in the literary texts. The greater dependence on violence in the earlier works, I would like to argue, is motivated by a fundamental incommensurability between the city the authors were trying to describe and the urban authorial identity they wanted to embody. As the plots of their fictions reveal, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramirez, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Joaquin Blanco still saw themselves as privileged observers who should be able to consolidate urban fragmentation into cohesive stories. Their inability to do so led them to express extremely violent, masculinist fantasies of mastery as they plotted their narratives. Blending cinematic and psychoanalytic concepts, I suggest that these authors project such fantasies onto their depictions of Mexico City in an effort to restabilize their own identities as specifically male Mexican authors in control of their subject. Furthermore, the incongruity between their nostalgia for a lost sense of place and their attempt to portray a fragmented and incomprehensible Mexico City is particular to the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The late 1970s to the early 1980s mark a profound transformation in the possibilities of narrating the "massified city" that envelops the Distrito Federal. (2) In the period of the oil boom followed by economic crisis, the disjuncture between the promises of modernization and the reality of urban disaster became more pronounced. Nestor Garcia Canclini traces to 1980 the origins of the three main processes that motivate the restructuring of urban spaces up to the late 1990s: economic recession and the subsequent loss of hope for betterment among the city's inhabitants; the shrinking of industry along with the growth of informal and illegal economies; and an increase in citizen-on-citizen violence ("Las cuatro ciudades" 35). (3) Mong with critic/author Juan Villoro, Garcia Canclini also addresses the problems faced by writers in this period. He argues that Mexican authors can no longer present a coherent image of Mexico City after the beginning of the 1980s: "The narratives that once organized urban experience in the historical-territorial city fall apart when the megalopolis becomes inapprehensible" (23). It can be argued that, in contrast to this earlier moment of authorial crisis, toward the end of the 20th century the most innovative literary, anthropological, and cinematic representations of Mexico City not only accept but indeed are built upon the fractional nature of their subject; they have incorporated the city's atomization into sophisticated new methods for describing and analyzing it. Yet only by studying the extraordinary narratives published in the period between 1958 and the late 1990s-era of understanding Mexico City can we begin to discern the narrative significance of the intimate crisis of urban authorial subjectivity that first appears in the 1970s.
What happens when Mexican authors of the late 1970s and early 1980s still look to Mexico City for a syncretic sense of mexicanidad and belonging, but they confront an urban reality that exceeds their comprehension? This conflict produces texts with two intertwined narrative designs. The conscious, analytic level adopts a metaphorical approach to critiquing urban ills. This design allows the authors to refer to an imagined urban totality through symbolic condensation, obviating the need to represent all of its disparate elements. However, the second narrative design, which we might label the unconscious of these texts, disregards the impossibility of representing the real Mexico City. This textual level superimposes a purely imagined space over the space occupied by the real, incomprehensible city. Such an imagined space allows the authors to project fantasies of mastery onto the blank wall of the real that Mexico City has become for them in its unrepresentability. Fantasy attempts to simulate a city that the authoring subject can represent. After first exploring the metaphorical implications of each text, I will then turn to a psychoanalytic reading of the authorial desire reflected in their fantasy structures.
Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramirez, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Joaquin Blanco anticipate Garcia Canclini's sociological observation from the late 1990s that for each inhabitant, the "imagined city" consists of a collage of fragmented images both collective and individual. (4) All four of these post-boom authors reject the illusion of narrative's totalizing capacity by incorporating multiple discourses into their works. Aguilar Mora's novel, for example, includes narrative modes ranging from first person stream-of-consciousness, to third person realist description, to preterit accounts of sexual acts and fantasies, to present and future-tense prose poems. His text transgresses the boundaries between literary and quotidian documents; we read an airline dinner menu, letters exchanged between protagonists, notes left on doors, formulas for encoding and decoding systems, an autopsy report, the recorded speech of air traffic controllers, and transcripts of dreams.
While Aguilar Mora narrates events over a nine-year period, Ramirez's Violacion en Polanco focuses on the horrific events of just a single day. The novel's fragments (there are no chapter divisions) alternate between two settings: the interior of a run-down movie theater and inside a van that travels through Mexico City. The narrative segments set in the theater explain how the economically and sexually marginalized principal characters meet. The development of their social / sexual connections proceeds under the flickering lights of the screen that replays romantic films, mostly from France or the United States, with a few Mexican nationalist romances thrown in. Ramirez uses creative punctuation to produce the sensation of fluid dialogue, and he blends together characters' voices to confuse their identities. Mixing sound effects, poetry, quotes from historical figures such as Sahagun and Moctezuma, ballads heard on the radio, and sexual slang, the novel reflects a general loss of discursive and social boundaries that culminates in a ghastly murder.
Fuentes's "El dia de las madres" rejects unified discourse much more subtly. It opens the collection titled Agua quemada, in which four stories offer a variety of perspectives on life in Mexico City in the early 1960s. Fuentes employs multiple linguistic registers as a loose thread connects the characters from each story, whether through work relationships (Dona Manuelita of "Estos fueron los palacios" was the maid in General Vergara's house of "El dia de las madres"), through the changing occupants of buildings and neighborhoods in decline (the landlord of "Las mananitas" owns the building in Colonia Roma where the Vergara family used to live, and where Dona Manuelita and el Nino Luis now live), or through networks that link wealthy, corrupt businessmen to the impoverished, angry youths they hire as halcones (Bernabe of "El hijo de Andres Aparicio" grows up to work for rich patrons in El Pedregal, where the Vergara's now live). The fact that the stories were not written into one novel, even though they depend on an elaborate web of interconnections, emphasizes conflict during the turbulent economic and social changes in Mexico City from the Revolution to the late 1960s.
Blanco's Las puberes caneforas displays the limitations of urban representation more self-consciously than any of the other texts considered here. Its tripartite structure hinges on a novel imagined--but not written--by one of the characters, Guillermo. Although Blanco's novel is presented by a third-person omniscient narrator, each of the three sections is focalized through a specific character: Felipe's (Guillermo's young lover) experience of having been assaulted opens Chapter One; Guillermo's making up the novel about Felipe's experience constitutes Chapters Two through Eight; and the final scene shows La Gorda (Guillermo's best friend) being ordered...
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