In the following essay, Herz considers Arreola's influence on Mexican writers José Agustín, René Avilés Fabila, and Hugo Hiriart.
A la virtud presente, mester de clerecía, y a la belleza toda, mester de juglaría.
El tiempo es poco y pasa, y a la receta mía sigamos con mesteres, ésas son de arreolería.
Jorge Arturo Ojeda, Mester
In 1963, Luis Leal proclaimed that "el desarrollo del cuento mexicano contemporáneo puede dividirse en dos etapas: antes y después de Arreola y Rulfo."1 Many aspiring, young writers, including José Agustín, Homero Aridjis, René Avilés Fabila, Gerardo de la Torre, Hugo Hiriart, Jorge Arturo Ojeda and Juan Tovar, made their publishing debut in Mester: Revista del taller literario de Juan José Arreola (1964-66). During the '60s, several literary novices composed eulogies to Arreola's tutelage and Ojeda even declared that "toda una época en México se llamará discípula de"2 Arreola. Almost a decade after the 61 publication of Confabulario, Ross Larson offered the following critical delineation of Arreola's pioneering role in the Mexican literary scene:
La famosa polémica ... que surgió de la indignación y ultraje en torno a la publicación de sus primeras obras [se le ha tenido por un bufón interesado tan sólo en la novedad y en divertir o escandalizar al lector] falsificó la posición de Arreola pero sí sirvió para vitalizar las letras mexicanas durante todo un docenio. Los 'arreolistas' proclamaron la supremacia del arte--una facultad esencialmente intuitiva--por encima de toda consideración política o nacional. Su mentor enseñó el respeto por los valores estéticos y demostró cómo la literatura podía elevarse de lo meramente regional y circumstancial. Aun hoy--como editor de revistas, coordinador cultural, profesor y escritor--Juan José Arreola contin£a ejerciendo gran influencia sobre los jóvenes, los creadores de la literatura mexicana del futuro.3
The concept of Arreola's aestheticism and the concomitant proposition that his legacy is anonymous with the resurgence of artistic (cosmopolitan, intellectual, pure or fantastic) fiction, out of favor since the Contemporáneos, have wide acceptance in the critical community, especially in Mexico. This paper, however, disputes the premise that Arreola "devuelve su prestigio a la literatura literaria."4 It redefines Arreola's "aestheticism" and assesses his relationship to the literary context of the '60s and '70s by focusing on his and three "disciples" treatment of the most relevant subject matter--the artist, artistry and the classics. Despite his formalist emphasis, Arreola is not an aesthete but rather an iconoclast whose witty transgressions of the literary tradition fomented skepticism about the artistic canon, craft and craftsman. Irreverence concerning creators, the classics and creativity foreshadows the cult of the parodic and of the demiurgic in Mexican literature of the '60s and '70s. This study contends that Arreola's jestful mockery of writers, writing and specific literary words helps set the stage for the upsurgence of the noncanonical and the experimental in Mexican letters. While playfulness, wit and irony appear in the first publications of Agustín (1944), Avilés (1940) and Hiriart (1942), their mature works advance literary antisolemnity and heterodoxy. This article essays, finally, how artistic icononoclasm within the Mester generation relates to other countercultural challenges to literary conventions and to the generalized criticism of the Mexican system during the '60s and '70s.
Not surprisingly, selections found in the issues of Mester approximate Arreola's sardonic modes and tone. The title, Confabulario, heralds a collection of fables ("El amante," "El prodigioso miligramo," "Parábola del trueque," "En verdad os digo") and is compilation of compositions from the late '40s and the '50s marked the reappearance of the animal story but transformed by satirical ingenuity. Avilés made his literary premiere with "Fábula del pato inconforme" and "Fábula del perico parlante," metaphorical tales of man's spiritual and intellectual follies. Agustín's earliest text, "Cuidado con el lobo," writes the legend of Francis of Assisi. Seeing divine benevolence everywhere, the lover of nature awakens the proverbial sleeping lion who, after devouring a lost sheep, returns meekly to drowse at the emaciated Saint's feet. Arreola's penchant for caricature of real and apocryphal intellectuals (Nabónides, Wolfgang Kohler, Giovanni Papini, Sinesio de Rodas) finds a counterpart in the verbal aggressions of Agustín's "Los negocios del señor Gilberto," a high burlesque sketch of the Mexican cultural vanguard. More in line with Arreola's whimsical fascination with the esoteric and his low burlesque of chivalry ("La canción de Peronelle"), Hiriart's "Las razones de Pedro Abelardo" modernizes the ancient logician, teacher and tragic lover of Héloise. Hiriart's Abelardo suffers impotence rather than castration; his pupil remains impervious to his romantic advances, based on pedantic reasoning which later produces "prodigious" books of logic. Imaginative twists of the learned tradition and mischievous intertextual borrowings ("El lay de Aristóteles," "De L'Osservatore," "El ajolote," "Homenaje a Otto Weininger") have established Arreola's reputation for tour de force. Likewise, irreverence as subject and as procedure recurs throughout Mester. The rats of Agustín's "Súplica" are purists who devour the works of Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, Bocaccio or Tasso while they eschew the writings of Ionesco and Beckett. Until evolution erases the bias, the narrator, with tongue-in-cheek, proposes keeping the classics on high shelves--under lock and key. Avilés updates and concretizes myth in order to unmask today's malevolent prosaism. In "Minotauro," the cosmic Beast, managed by a bullfighting firm, decimates the matador ranks. "Mitología publicitaria" reviews three highly successful commercial campaigns for a fashionable, Dantesque cabaret whose patrons engage in self-flagellation, for a swim club whose Sirens draw the clientele away from other establishments, and for a dietary supplement which Harpies advertise on television as the eradicator of overpopulation for its stimulation of cannibalism once food becomes scarce. Agustín's, Avilés's and Hiriart's blame-by-praise, contextual incongruity and mock-documentary style are clear manifestations of the younger writers' early affinity with Arreola's satirical tactics, especially in ingenious reworkings of legends and references.
Arreola's bookish proclivity has received wide recognition. Ojeda, Mester collaborator cum literary critic, describes how Arreola forges "literatura con la literatura ... con el empleo de incrustaciones, resellos y amonedamientos ... como una reverencia a la tradición y la memoria."5 Rather than celebrating, however, Arreola deflates the cults of aesthetics, artifice and artisan. The recurrence of three salient modes (caricature of artists, satirical ars poetica, and parody or travesty) demonstrate that in their post-Mester production Agustin, Aviles and Hiriart share Arreola's renovative "flippancy" concerning their craft.
Confabulario contains several bathic homages to European Masters (d'Orléans, Villon, Góngora Da Vinci). "Allons voir si la rose ..." exemplifies the series of burlesque biographic sketches. Ronsard's renowned carpe diem lyric (Mignonne, allons voir si la rose") is turned against the poet; by reductio ad absurdum, Arreola converts Ronsard's botancial metaphors into a prosaic reality: "Ronsard asoló los jardines de Francia en segunda mitad del dieciséis, desflorando de mignonnes y mignonnettes las riveras del Loi y del Cher. ... Fue en realidad el mejor coleccionista de rosas vivas, el minucioso herb lario ambulante de los senderos campestres, el cambalachero retórico que daba sonetos madrigales por virgos en flor."6 By taking as fact other licentious verses supposedly based on Ronsard's personal conquests, Arreola knocks the great artist from his pedestal uniquely stressing the lustful human personality behind the craftsman.
Avilés and Hiriart take literalism and the critique one step further in their apocryphal biographic notes on sculptors who invert the process of immortalizing man in rock giving human form to the inanimate. Peter Stone of Avilés's apocalypse, "Las gorgona el vanguardismo en el arte," invents an atomic chisel and founds a new school which practices the petrification of models. After speculating whether Cellini based his Perseus on the terror he felt upon contemplating his victim's severed head or, vice versa, if Italian purposefully cut off another's head in search of perfectionism and artistic fidel Hiriart transcribes two versions of "la historia del prodigioso escultor Ryunosuke Gum llamado el Tamarindo."7 The tragic variant, that Gumba's daughter sacrificed hers palely competes with the satanic explanation that Gumba "mismo arrastró a su la sollozante hasta los horribles calderos y, para lograr la aleación perfecta que, como se sabe precisa devorar una doncella, arrojó a la muchacha al metal líquido." Hiriart conclusion that the spectacle of Gumba's statue is terrifying; by implication, art itself frightens him because it is both marvelous and monstrous.
"Quién soy, dónde estoy, qué me dieron," the first selection of Agustín's La mirada en el centro (1977), turns out to be a reprinting of his 1966 autobiography (José Agustín). With tongue-in-cheek, Agustín thus makes his inflated, conversational, adolescent memoir equivalent to fiction. But, he places as much significance on baseball and other trivial experiences as on his "career" in the arts. Moreover, there are numerous self-facetious remarks about his drawings ("idioteces") and writings ("engendros," "textículo"). One even finds a comically ambivalent anecdote about Agustín's first encounters with Arreola: "En esos días mi hermana Hilda me dijo fíjate que tengo un maestro en la Escuela de Teatro que es escritor, ¿vamos a verlo? Fuimos. ... Regresé después, solo, con dos cuentos y dijo que aguantaban, pero todavía no sé si esos cuentos aguantaban porque mi hermana aguantaba o si en verdad aguantaban por sí mismos."8 By representing himself as half buffoon/half enfant terrible, Agustín takes to their ultimate consequences his contemporaries' caricatures of imaginary "creators" and Arreola's deflating "life histories" of real writers.
Sardonic representations of creativity often accompany the belittling of the artist as devil or mere mortal for the "full knowledge of the tricks of any trade is only possible for those who are in the trade themselves, and since writers are more voluble than other men it follows that the trade which has been most fully satirized is that of writing."9 Arreola purposefully opens the original, shorter version of Confabulario (1952) with "Parturient montes," a modern version of Horace's famous maxim on the boastful artist whose volcanic rumblings produce a ludicrous mouse. In Arreola's gloss, the narrator, "con una voz falseada por la emoción, trepando en un banquillo de agente de tránsito" (67), retells the ancient tale for a menacing crowd. But, recreation becomes dramatization when not the mountains but the narrator, surrendering to authenticity, gives birth. As the incredulous spectators disperse, the I confesses that he is "dispuesto a ceder la criatura al primero que me la pida" (69). The mouse thus goes to an admiring female passer-by who wishes to take it home as a surprise for her cat. While "Parturient montes" has been read as a skeptical epigraph for the following inspired stories which will be read but not comprehended,10 it takes jabs not only at the audience but also at the writer, including Arreola, and at his creative offspring.
Avilés also questions vaulted artistic inspiration. His "El vampiro literario" equates "creativeness" with predation: "Ya en la biblioteca, el monstruo infernal prendió la pequeña lámpara del escritorio y sin mayores trámites tomó libros de Cervantes, Shakespeare, Poe, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Hemingway ... y se dispuso a beberles la sangre para escribir su novela."11 In "El hombre seleccionado" divine influence permits a mediocre painter to produce live rather than lifelike works. Nonetheless, lacking genius or talent, he mass produces still lifes which create havoc since "cuando llovía mucho, el agua se escurría del cuadro estropeando la pared y la alfombra ... invariablemente sus pescados, sus frutas, sus quesos, se pudrían despidiendo pésimos olores" (33). A mock-elegy, "Las musas," completes "El hombre seleccionado." While apparently lamenting the disappearance of the deities and in illo tempore when the only poetic task was the simple conjuring up of the goddesses, Avilés renders the inevitable, down-to-earth maxim for aspiring artists: work plus more work, discipline and rigor.
While Avilés debunks mimesis of reality or of the Masters, Hiriart composes a series of humorous critiques and ars poetica which trifle with modern experimentation and elitism. Three musings represent mock-reviews of new arte menor genres which ridicule literary conventions as well as the inventive gamesmanship and deception entailed in literariness. "Nuevos elementos de literatura telefónica" analyzes half-heard conversations and coded messages in which "la intensidad poética y la extravagancia en la erudición pueden llegar a límites de delirio difíciles de alcanzar" (78). "Servidumbre y grandeza del instructivo" concludes that "del género de los instructivos los más deslumbrantes son los deliberadamente contradictorios y confusos porque son los más puros, son los de mayor claridad literaria. Ahora que los espíritus que saben abandonarse a la metafísica prefieren los portentosos instructivos para leer instructivos de difícil lectura ... cabe esperar que prospere entre nosotros el cultivo de esta literatura ... que tan prudentes e imprudentes disfrutes nos puede proporcionar" (85). Likewise, "El arte de la dedicatoria" catalogues an almost ad infinitum variety of dedications ("conflictivas," "eruditas," "comprometedoras," "misteriosas," "excluyentes," "de puro amor," "contundentes," "multitudianarias," "con reconocimiento de culpa," "para vejar," "misantrópicas," "misóginas," "abstractas," "disyuntivas," "zoológicas") which herald the death of texts: "Podemos pensar que el futuro es promisorio y nos sonríe: el día llegará en que 'el mínimo homenaje' o el clásico 'a mis padres' impliquen un tratado exhaustivo y vasto, y entonces ya no tendremos ni libros ni tratados, con lo que saldremos ganando en más de renglón, sino sólo amplias y extendidas dedicatorias" (183-84).
Agustín often engages in jestful ars poetica in praxis since he interrupts his fiction with comments on the work as it is being written. "Cuál es la onda" exemplifies his impish aesthetics. Typographic peculiarities draw attention to the text as a written script while the versification of descriptive prose and dialogue visually jar the reader. Asides fly in the face of literary norms, especially the principle of dramatic illusion. The autonomous world of fiction is ruptured by remarks to the readers which often denigrate them:
(Las cursivas indican énfasis; no es mero capricho, estúpidos.)12
Agustín's conversational style and scatological puns challenge normal literary sensitivity:
Te amo y te extraño, clamó él.
Te ramo y te empaño, corrigió ella.
Te ano y te extriño, te mamo y te encaño, te tramo y te
engaño, quieres más, ahí van.
(70)
One response to the question posed in the title is the story's saucy enshrinement of the "unaesthetic."
The play on words in the title of his collected short prose reveals Arreola's own seriocomic intention of challenging the canons of literature. Confabular means, of course, to do something illegal or contrary to the law. While the invented title indicates Arreola's capacity for linguistic innovation, it also implies his tampering with sacrosanct fictional norms. In a series of synthetic parodies which simplify the "Great Books," Arreola formally imitates and plays practical jokes on several sacred cows of the humanistic tradition. Nonetheless, the stylistic frauds often contain inverted distortions of the mimicked texts' content and thus provide serious speculation on aesthetic values and on the relationship between art and the world. Via title and first sentence, ("En un lugar solitario cuyo nombre no viene al caso hubo un hombre que se pasó la vida eludiendo a la mujer concreta" [37]), "Teoría de Dulcinea" evidences its reduction of the various conflicts of Cervantes's masterpiece to one. Arreola condenses the novel to less than a page and limits its plot and gallery of characters to a solitary antithesis of flesh and blood versus "un pomposo engendro de fantasía" (37) which the protagonist pursues in his readings. Thus, fiction becomes sublimation but equated to evasion of reality or personal fulfillment. Death follows the failure of "la búsqueda infructuosa" (37). Similar to Cervantes's original purpose of satirizing books of chivalry, Arreola's parody of El Quijote debunks the heroic underpinnings of the literary tradition as delusion and deception.
Inferno V also parodies the epic mode through synthesis and manipulation:
En las altas horas de la noche, desperté de pronto a la orilla de un abismo anormal. Al borde de mi cama, una falla geológica cortada en piedra sombría se desplomó en semicírculos, desdibujada por un tenue vapor nauseabundo y un revuelo de aves oscuras. De pie sobre su cornisa de escorias, casi suspendido en el vértigo, un personaje irrisorio y coronado de laurel me tendió la mano invitándome a bajar.Yo rehusé amablemente, invadido por el terror nocturno, diciendo que todas las expediciones hombre adentro acaban siempre en superficial y vana palabrería.Preferí encender la luz y me dejé caer otra vez en la profunda monotonía de los tercetos, allí donde una voz que habla y llora al mismo tiempo, me repite que no hay mayor dolor que acordarse del tiempo feliz en la miseria. (29)
Arreola's prosaic gloss of the lyrical vision of the Divine Commedy translates inspiration into actual occurrences while it contrasts the fictional world of the poem with reality. One reading of Inferno V identifies the I with Dante. The Italian poet's figurative references to sleeping, dreaming and awakening become physical activities for Arreola's Dante, the man. Confronted with the opportunity to experience his own allegory, Dante refuses and returns to the laborious task of poetic composition. Thus, as in "Teoría de Dulcinea," literary creativity equals escapism. Another interpretation of Inferno V affords an equally skeptical view of art in relationship to life. The narrator, having fallen asleep while reading the Divine Commedy, awakens to or dreams a duplication of Dante's vision. Invited to live the spiritual voyage into the depth of being, the narrator declines, preferring to read fiction about human experience rather than engage in it. In essence, Arreola's renditions of Dante's and Cervantes's masterpieces disclose the Mexican's doubts about literature because of its artificiality and idealism.
Rather than concentrating on individual "Great Books," Hiriart and Avilés offer humorous travesties of the masterworks of Western Civilization. Hiriart's "Los signos caligráficos" transcribes Chinese assessments and misreadings of the classics:
En un libro se habla de un delincuente a quien devoran el hígado unos pájaros (llamados endecasílabos), pero el hígado se regenera y así todos pueden seguir apreciando las artes del suplicio. ... Otro cuento, también triste y confuso, es el de un noble criador de caballos llamado Odiseo que tiene un caballo enorme como un palacio. Este caballo por amor a su amo se traga sin masticar a muchos soldados. ... Se conservan crónicas de los domadores más diestros y asombrosos, los que hacían hablar a la zorra, la tortuga, el león y los sapos (algunos improvisaban en verso). Carecen de interés los diálogos de estos animales, pero es notable la paciencia de domadores como Esopo. ... Es costumbre, también, entre esta gente, registrar minusciosamente conversaciones famosas (menos interesantes aún que las de los animales). (70-73)
By envisioning the humanistic sources of Western Culture, rather than the Oriental, as inscrutable and by divesting works of metaphor and mystery, "Los signos caligráficos" dethrones literary idols and throws doubt on Western literature as the preserve of universal human essence, greatness and meaning.
Avilé's "Menús literarios" envisions the restaurant-library or alimenteca offering "dietas literarias adecuadamente balanceadas."13 The ludicrous mixing of culinary and literary realms and the play on the proverb, "no sólo del pan vive el hombre," culminates in literature's metamorphosis into food. A librarian recites today's special:
'Para abrir el apetito, un aperitivo hamsuniano: Hambre. Luego un coctel de frutas a escoger, entre La cosecha de frutos de Tagore o Los frutos de oro de la Sarraute. Un entremés hecho con páginas selectas de Los alimentos terrestres de Gide. Ensalada de rabanadas bibliográficas. Novela al gusto. Sopa efectivamente de letras, pero tomadas de las obras siempre alimenticias de Faulkner. La salsa picante es Tomato Miller, traída desde los Trópicos y el Pan, también de Hamsun, siempre está doradito. De plato principal, nada más suculento que trozos de la Comedia Humana. Como postre: El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan. Y: Charlas de café. Todo escrupulosamente sazonado con poemas de Mallarmé y gotas de añejo Chateaubriand'. (32)
While "Menús literarios" satirizes reductionism it also represents a very literal spoof on good taste and on contemporary literary giants.
In "Las máscaras (farsa en un acto no muy extenso)," Avilés caricatures the Mexican artistic triumvirate (Paz, Fuentes, Cuevas) in the fictional troika (Guerra, Berriozábal, Culeid). Like Agustín whose "Cuál es la onda" loosely takes on the metaphysical, metafictional and linguistic preoccupations of Rayuela, the classic for the younger generation, Avilés travesties the major motifs of Fuentes's fiction. He parodies especially the epoch-making La región más transparente through a run-on, hyperbolic résumé offered by Berriozábal himself of his new novel:
'El personaje principal, Quetzalcoatl-De Gaulle, vive simultaneamente dos planos en el subconsciente totalizador: el pasado, en el Gran Tenochtitlan, de donde sale y se pierde no sin dejar antes una leyenda, y el presente, cuando un francés llega a Nueva Utopía para la construcción del Metro y el hallazgo de unas ruinas prehispánicas al cavar los túneles lo enfrenta a su verdadera-y-doble personalidad: los recuerdos afluyen con brutalidad y los brincos de Nueva Utopía a Francia, de la Independencia a la Revolución Francesa, de Juárez a Napoleón III, de la Comuna a la Revolución de 1910 lo confunden y en él choca un conflicto de raza, de culturas, de épocas de idiomas. Al final, transtornado, hablando una mezcla de francés-español-náhuatl, camina por varias páginas de sostenida habilidad idiomática y se suicida con el gas de su encendedor.'14
By mocking works by literary stars of the Boom, Avilés and Agustín indirectly attack the inflated hubris of artists and the pompous pretentions to greatness of their artistic inventions.
By the mid-'60s, however, travesties of the national literary canon begin to flourish in Mexico as a means of satirizing official history, political rhetoric and Mexican culture. Arreola's La feria (1963) mimics the provincial novel and debunks the myth of Modern Mexico. Jorge Ibargüengoitia's spoof of la novela de la Revolución mexicana, Los relámpagos de agosto (1964), deflates the romance of the epic struggle. Ibargüengoitia will later take on la novela histórica and the heroes of Independence in his last novel, Los pasos de López (1981). In a more global, absolute fashion and in anticipation of the student protest movement of 1968, la onda desecrates all norms (social, political, moral, linguistic, cultural) of national identity. Commenting on Agustín, Jorge Ruffinelli suggests how transgressions of literature form part of la onda's confrontational posture:
El ejemplo más curioso lo confiere la literatura, y es un caso de autofagia ya que la literatura se ataca a sí misma, o por lo menos ataca algunos de sus hábitos metatextuales. En La tumba la reverencia ante un hombre como Hegel o Kafka se trueca por una suerte de alusión familiarizadora y de falsa confianza: Kafka es transformado en 'Herr Kafka' o en 'Paco Kafka', Hegel en 'Herr Hegel', y el narrador, acusado injustamente por su maestro de haber plagiado a Anton Chejov en un trabajo escrito, comienza a ser llamado 'Chejovín', 'Chejovito'. Estas transformaciones satirizantes buscan des-sacralizar ese ámbito de la cultura llamado 'Bellas Letras', o simplemente Cultura con mayúsculas, y en tal sentido las alusiones en la literatura de José Agustín (predominantemente en los dos primeros libros) son innumerables.15
La onda's flaunting of nonstandard devices, exemplified by its use of urban, colloquial speech and the beat/rhythm of rock and roll, as well as its novel, strident subject matter concerning hip Mexican adolescents, drugs and sexual experimentation represent a calculated, flippant affront to the fictional canon as one other element of lo mexicano disparaged by onderos.
Antiauthoritarianism is also an obvious underpinning of caricatures which defrock the artist and jestful ars poetica which deconsecrate artistry. Besides subversiveness, the parodic desacralization of ancient and modern, including national, classics suggests, perhaps more clearly that the other two modes, another underlying principle. As countertexts, parodies also cultivate inventiveness since they are sophisticated linguistic and conceptual manipulations of preexistent works. Such imaginative distortions reach culmination in the literary hoax. Arreola himself executes artistic pranks in texts pretending to have authentic sources which turn out to be nonexistent ("Sinesio de Rodas," "In memoriam," "El himen en México") and in numerous compositions masquerading as nonfictions ("Topos," "Flash," "Anuncio," "Baby H. P.," "Alarma para el año 2000," "Informe de Liberia"). These latter, formal jokes are not innocent fun, however, because they expose the universal trend toward dehumanization in twentieth-century technological culture. Ingenious literary tricks which impishly disclose human, societal or national failings have gained currency in recent Mexican letters. Agustín's burlesque of the artist's autobiography ("Quién soy, dónde estoy, qué me dieron") and Avilés's mock-bestiary ("Zoológico fantástico" [1969]) as well as his pseudo-utopia on political repression in a thinly-disguised Mexico, Nueva Utopía (y los guerrilleros) (1973), attest to the vitality of the formal hoax as satirical tool. Moreover, "novels" by generational cuates, who had no direct connection to Mester, are extended artistic gags which camouflage their serious intent of dissecting national reality. For example, Gustavo Sainz's La princesa del Palacio de Hierro (1974) and Federico Arana's Las jiras (1973) parade as artless oral histories by slangy, inane narrators (a model turned housewife and an ex-rocanrolero). Although they lack any direct evaluative comments, both narratives encourage readers to develop they own reflections on the illiteracy, amorality and alienation of modern Mexican culture.
On one of its many levels, Hiriart's Cuadernos de Gofa (1981) represents the ultimate verbal ruse--a compilation of apocryphal texts about an extinct, fabricated civilization. J. Ann Duncan calls Cuadernos de Gofa the "joyous apotheosis" of the parodic text which, through the reworking of multiple forms of writing (the epic, the detective story, the nouveau roman, acounts of archeological digs, the encyclopedia), invents an autonomous, fantasy world and a new genre that even deflates itself.16 Duncan summarizes that "the mimetic approach in Cuadernos de Gofa does not ... have realism as its model but fiction, so that the author transcends mimesis in the creation of an alternate reality, a world where fantasy is so rational and logic so fantastical that the dichotomy is resolved in the unquestionable (sur)reality of the experience."17
Indulgence of the demiurgic creative impulse becomes one of the dominant trends in Mexico in the '70s when metafictions proliferate. Like Cuadernos de Gofa, fiction-in-the-making mirrors the world of literature and enthrones inventiveness through an exploration of artistic technique and process. In "The Critique of the Pyramid and Mexican Narrative after 1968," Jean Franco suggests that such literariness represents a response to national trauma in its attempt "to maintain a Utopian space for creative energy."18 Metafiction's self-reflexivity and aestheticism have an unexpected similarity to la onda's antiliterary posture. Through iconoclasm in subject and procedure, each pursues sincerity and authenticity in art as well as in life.19 Moreover, in the '70s many Mexican works imaginatively combine relevancy and metafiction, iconoclasm and formalism. The narrator of Avilés's exposé on State repression during the 1968 protest movement, El gran solitario del Palacio (1971), is composing the text itself; he remains a frustrated writer seeking elusive truth through language made unreliable by official history which competes with and cancels out eyewitness accounts of the terror. Avilés's Tantadel (1975) concerns the self-destructive hermeticism, the neurotic power drive and the deceptive nature of Mexican machismo plus the paradoxical exposure to communication and truth entailed in the writing as well as in the reading of a lie (fiction). The "sociopathic" speaker, who drives away his lover (Tantadel) by his persistent lying, also doubles as honest author of the truthful account of the broken romance, composed for Tantadel. The narrative ends with a verbatim transcription of its introduction as Tantadel supposedly reads the novel. But, the last reading session turns out to be only another figment of the speaker-author's imagination. The final literary trick played on the real reader demonstrates the pervasive, antisocial deceptiveness of machismo but affirms the genuineness and creativity of aesthetic experience despite its basis in falsehood.
Agustín's El rey se acerca a su templo (1978) transcribes the hallucinations and mutterings of a Mexico City drug addict and the accounts of sexual nirvana told by a bourgeois urbanite. But, the novel blends coarse representationalism with ostentatious experimentalism for it is a mirror artefact. The two novelettes, with separate pagination but with identical covers, title pages and epigraphs, are printed as upside down versions of one another. Typographic and spatial oddities (exaggerated hyphens, abnormal indentions, pages divided into columns) disrupt the narration, calling attention to it as a crafted work. Authorial comments on the text's language are addressed directly to the real reader yet the latter has absolute freedom in choosing which novelette to read first. Thus, Agustín undermines fictional conventions while he furthers artistry and redefines mimesis of reality.
Arreola's relationship to the gamesmanship, irony and innovation of Mexican fiction after the early '60s, especially vis-á-vis la onda, has received little systematic scholarly attention in part because literary criticism takes itself too seriously to assess puckishness adequately, partly because short prose fiction is often viewed as a genre totally separate from the novel. On the other hand, considered the premier exponent of the formalist short story because of his refined style and taste for the esoteric, Arreola has been loosely associated with la escritura, too often viewed by critics as the rhetorical exercise of a baroque, escapist mentality. No attempt is made in this paper to suggest that Agustín, Avilés and Hiriart are servile disciples of Arreola nor that all of recent Mexican narrative derives from Confabulario. Julio Torri long ago condemned "este devaneo de querer concordarlo todo a través del tiempo y del espacio [que] prevalece en la crítica literaria del día, en cuyo reino todo es influencia."20 Arreola's ingenious, formal subversions of the artistic tradition did, however, mark the successful insertion of ironic poetic license and of fictional insurgency into Mexican letters. In a major portion of their essentially iconoclastic work, Agustín, Avilés and Hiriart, along with other writers, have continued the assault on literary canons in order to preserve creativity and to comment critically on Mexico's reality.
Notes
1Luis Leal, "La literatura mexicana en el siglo XX-II (1940-1963)," Panorama das literaturas das Americas, IV (Angola: Ediçao do município de Nova Lisboa, 1963), p. 2037.
2Jorge Arturo Ojeda, Documentos sentimentales 1963-1974 (México: Ediciones Mester, 1974), p. 163.
3Ross Larson, "La visión realista de Juan José Arreola," Cuadernos americanos, XXIX, 4 (julio-agosto 1970), p. 232.
4José Luis Martínez, "Nuevas letras, nueva sensibilidad," La crítica de la novela mexicana contemporánea, ed. Aurora M. Ocampo (México: UNAM, 1981), p. 193.
5Jorge Arturo Ojeda, ed, Antologia de Juan José Arreola (México: Ediciones Oasis, 1969), p. 12.
6Juan José Arreola, Confabulario, 4a ed. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), p. 30. All citations from fictional works will be from the edition first cited in the notes.
7Hugo Hiriart, "Variaciones sobre el Gattamelata," Disertación sobre las telarañas y otros escritos (México: Martín Casillas Editores, 1980), p. 51.
8José Agustín, La mirada en el centro, (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1977), p. 47.
9C. E. Vulliamy, The Anatomy of Satire (London: Michael Joseph, Ltd., 1950), p. 309.
10Seymour Menton, "Juan José Arreola and the Twentieth Century Short Story," Hispania, 42 (1959), p. 306.
11René Avilés Fabila, Fantasías en earrusel, (México: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1978), p. 36.
12José Agustín, Inventando que sueño, 3a ed. (México. Joaquín Mortiz, 1975), p. 64.
13René Avilés Fabila, Hacia el fin del mundo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económiea, 1969), p. 31.
14René Avilés Fabila, Nueva Utopía (y los guerrilleros) (México: Ediciones "El Caballito," 1973), p. 153.
15Jorge Ruffinelli, "Código y lenguaje en José Agustín," La palabra y el hombre, 13 (1975), p. 61.
16J. Ann Duncan, Voices, Visions, and a New Reality: Mexican Fiction Since 1970 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), pp. 210-217. She also enumerates specific works and authors parodied by Hiriart.
17Duncan, p. 211.
18Jean Franco, "The Critique of the Pyramid and Mexican Narrative after 1968," Latin American Fiction Today: A Symposium, ed. Rose S. Minc (Takoma Park, Maryland: Ediciones Hispamérica, 1979), p. 51.
19Duncan, p. 225, contends that the inclusion of "humor in serious works is related to the modern tendency to explode myths, to reveal realities stripped of appearances, and is hence closely linked with both the political attitudes of these writers and the wish to discard the myth of versimilitude [sic] in literature and to examine the illusion openly." Duncan also discusses how recent parodic and innovative texts relate to the desire for truthfulness.
20Julio Torri, Tres libros (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1964), p. 21.
Source Citation: Herz, Theda M. "Artistic Iconoclasm in Mexico: Countertexts of Arreola, Agustín, Avilés and Hiriart." Chasqui. 18.1 (May 1989): 17-25. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 147. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. 17-25. Literature Resource Center. Gale. New York Public Library. 2 Jan. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=nypl>.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100037332
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