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Article Excerpt
Events are related to other events not by causality, but by analogy and correspondence.
--Norman O. Brown, Love's Body 209.
In the 1950s and 60s Mexican cultural production shifted away from the nationalistic trends that dominated the first half of the century and towards what we now have come to call postmodernism. During those decades the younger generations of artists and writers--mentored by few outsider figures of the late '40s like Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo--struggled to open spaces within which they could display their new sensibilities and compete with the established, sanctioned, and subventioned forms of expression that had come to be accepted as national artistic forms. The visual artists carried out a well-documented campaign against the Mexicanist School as epitomized in the murals Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros (Conde, "La aparicion" and Un pintor, Romero Keith). The most significant grouping of painters came to be known as La Ruptura, an appropriate name in that it captured their gesture of breaking with the norm. (1) While heterogeneous in their styles, group members shared an orientation towards abstraction and away from nationalistic/populist iconography, as well as a view that art was exploration in search of meaning more than mimetic representation of objects of a priori signification. They dialogued with the international figures of high modernism, of course, but like young artists in other world capitols they felt part of the hip counterculture coming out of London and New York.
The literary scene produced similar agitation in some of the central cultural agencies in Mexico: the Coordinacion de Difusion Cultural (administrative office for all cultural activities of the massive National University) from where the group turned the Revista de la Universidad into a world-class journal; La Casa del Lago, the most dynamic performing arts center of the period was their creation, as was the project for literary and cultural recordings called Voz Viva de Mexico where they collaborated with another mentor figure, Juan Jose Arreola (Albarran). By the 1960s they controlled the most influential cultural magazines in the country. The axis mundi of their multi-facetted activities was the Revista Mexicana de Literatura in its three phases that spanned from the years 1955-65; editors included Emmanuel Carballo, Carlos Fuentes, Tomas Segovia, Antonio Alatorre, and Juan Garcia Ponce. As a platform it launched the careers of their Mexican peers and introduced to Mexico international figures such as Julio Cortazar, Hermann Broch, Herbert Marcuse, Denise Levertov, and Lezama Lima, and provided new translations of Mann, Musil, Pavese, Miller, Joyce, and Merleau Ponty, among others. The first monographic issue of a journal dedicated to Borges was their doing--as they had dedicated an issue of Revista de la Universidad to Malcolm Lowry (Nov. 1964). The journal's name underscored the group's attitude: location and staff made it Mexican; the subject matter, literature, was neither modified nor limited in any way. Understandably, observers have come to refer to these authors as the Generation of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura, following the Mexican tradition of associating generations with a journal. Recently, however, the name La Generacion de Medio Siglo has garnered more currency among Mexican critics, perhaps because these writers ran so many journals that they dominated the period (Pereira, "Juan" and "La Generacion"). (2)
Under either rubric, the group's major writers concerned themselves with the visual arts. They took up the Ruptura cause, reviewing their exhibits and defending them against attacks by the entrenched official critics and the likes of Siqueiros and his ilk. Ruptura painters in turn participated in literary endeavors like creating scenery for plays at the Casa del Lago and cover art for books--Vicente Rojo revolutionized Mexican graphic arts during the period (Rojo). The first book to present the painters of La Ruptura as a group, Nueve pintores mexicanos, was authored by the acknowledged leader of the Generacion de Medio Siglo, Juan Garcia Ponce (Carballo 7). Even after the Generation had lost editorial control of the Revista de la Universidad, its cover continued to be a catalogue of Mexican contemporary art, with the great majority of the issues dedicated to Ruptura artists or fellow travelers.
If one were to try to encapsulate succinctly the collaborative mood that permeated the plastic and literary renovation in the early 1960s in Mexico, the following statement aptly fits the bill. Written for the catalogue of Fernando Garcia Ponce's 1963 exhibit by Ramon Xirau--who as a director of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores was in a position to observe trends among Mexico's top young writers--the following passage not only dissolves the boundaries of the arts, but also questions the process of perception on which such categories are founded:
Las diferentes formas artisticas se aproximan cada vez mas a la lirica. ?Sera que la expresion de la intimidad es hoy, y necesariamente, mas melodica, menos hecha de conceptos y de palabras? Me parece probable y me parece tambien que esta musicalidad de la expresion poetica y artistica responde a la convivencia de una busqueda y una desconfianza: la busqueda del Sentido; la desconfianza en cuanto a la existencia del Sentido. Solemos vivir en un mundo de senales--primer paso de toda experiencia de lo sagrado--sin llegar a deteminar el origen de las senales que vemos. (Xirau 36) (Everyday the variety of artistic forms moves closer to the lyrical. Could it be that intimate expression today is, necessarily, more melodic, and less a matter of concepts and words? I think it is likely, and it seems to me as well that this musicality of poetic and artistic expression responds to the coexistence of a quest and a doubt: quest for Meaning; doubt as to the existence of Meaning. We customarily live in a world of symbols-first step in every experience of the sacred--yet incapable of determining the source of the symbols we see.)
Elsewhere I have pursued the ramifications of Xirau's statement (Bruce-Novoa). Here let it suffice to indicate how a major participant/observer in the artistic production of that moment took for granted the fusing of the arts in a common cultural pursuit, one that centered on the question of perception and the postmodern problematic of the loss of master narratives of signification.
It should surprise no one, then, that these young artists, swept up in the heady atmosphere of their success, would turn their efforts to that quintessential of modern cultural production, film. The opportunity came in 1964, when to revitalize the flagging film industry the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Cinematografica organized the First Experimental Film Competition (Garcia Riera). Contestants were for the most part creative people from other fields, among them a select representation of the young intellectuals so active in literature and painting. Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez--a Mexican resident and regular at the Ruptura activities--Ines Arredondo, Juan de la Cavada, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and Juan Garcia Ponce contributed texts and collaborated in their adaptation and production. Artists designed sets. Bit parts, cameos, and group scenes featured painters, writers, and their friends and lovers. The contest became yet another group activity, a sort of generational happening.
Tajimara As Text
In 1963 Garcia Ponce published La noche, his second collection of short stories. Of the three stories included, "Tajimara" attracted the most interest and admiration. Within a year of its Mexican publication, Denise Levertov's translation appeared in New Directions' annual anthology. A decade later Emir Rodriguez Monegal considered it the best of Garcia Ponce's production (unpublished commentary). Garcia Ponce himself favored it, choosing to record it for the Voz Viva collection and to adapt it into a screenplay for the 1964 competition.
In the story, Roberto, the narrator/protagonist, narrating everything in a tone of nostalgic recall, claims he wants to tell us the story of Julia and Carlos, brother and sister artists who have rented a house in the village of Tajimara so that they can pursue their painting careers. However, his own relationship with Cecilia has him obsessed. The narrative opens when the two of them are on their way to Tajimara. After several months of not coming to see him, Cecilia has asked Roberto to accompany her to Julia's engagement party, which will be Cecilia's as well, since she announces that she is going to marry her childhood sweetheart, Guillermo. Although she and Roberto have an intimate relationship, and he loves her, she prefers to marry Guillermo so she can, as she states it, get her revenge on him directly. From this point on the narrative moves back and forth among different periods in Roberto's life with Cecilia: their adolescence when he pursued her while she was already in love with Guillermo, then ten years later when he was working as a translator and they have their own love affair, and the night of the last party at Tajimara when Cecilia picks him up to accompany her, and finally Cecilia's wedding day. All of these periods are recalled from an undefined place and time after the wedding when they exist simultaneously in Roberto's memory.
The story Roberto wants to narrate, that of Julia and Carlos, occurs during his love affair with Cecilia. They appear because Roberto is forced to find another apartment when Cecilia destroys his roommate's belongings. She arranges for him to rent Julia and Carlos' place since they are moving to the country. The narrator recalls Carlos and Julia's relationship as a beautiful, ideal love affair lived in the intensity of their mutual pursuit of art and despite being brother and sister. It only ends when Julia gets...
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