Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXIV, Number 1, 2007

Agustn Yanezs Total Mexico and the Embodiment of the National Subject
MARK D. ANDERSON
University of North Texas

Many critics view the novela total as the most extensive Spanish-American expression of universal literary values. As often as not, these monumental novels are read unproblematically as objective, polyphonic encyclopedias of transnational Spanish-American and even universal Western culture. One commonly nds descriptions of Carlos Fuentes total novel Terra Nostra (1976), for example, as a summa of Spanish-American literature and culture.1 Even more discerning readings of these texts tend to emphasize universal or absolute values over local context.2 I would argue, however, that from its inception, the Spanish-American total novel undertakes the specically national political project of rewriting outmoded nineteenthcentury foundational ctions, replacing the allegory of the heterosexual criollo couple as the nucleus of the nation with a new focus on cultural, racial, and sexual plurality.3 In my reading, total novels primarily use the discourse of universality as a legitimizing strategy that validates the rescripting of the national subject in the contemporary, globalized world. In order to examine this idea, I return to what might be considered the rst total novel in Mexico, Agustn Yanezs Al lo del agua (1947). This novel develops a

1 See Jose Miguel Oviedos Fuentes: sinfona del Nuevo Mundo, Hispamerica, 6:16 (1977), 1932 (p. 19). 2 This is evident in statements regarding the same novel, such as Roberto Gonzalez Echevarras comment that Fuentes voluminous novel represents a considerable effort to achieve an absolute knowledge of Hispanic culture, from Terra Nostra: Theory and Practice, in his The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1988), 86 97 (p. 89). 3 Foundational ctions is used here with reference to Doris Sommers Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991). In the introduction to her work, Sommer suggests that some of the novels of the Latin-American boom rewrite their nineteenth-century precursors (27 29). ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/07/01/0079-21 # Bulletin of Spanish Studies. DOI 10.1080/14753820601140636

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discourse of universal essentialism that complements and legitimizes its authors national political project in post-Revolutionary Mexico. In Al lo del agua, Yanez establishes a series of parallels between a small village in the state of Jalisco and the nation on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. These correspondences rely on plays on specicity and ambiguity, allegory, and strategies of essentialization to create a microcosm that seemingly embodies the national essence of 1909 pre-Revolutionary Mexico. Yanez then uses this essentialized national psychology to justify the policies of the Revolutionary government, of which he formed part, during the moment in which the novel was published. At the same time, he constructs a political persona in essays, interviews, and speeches that proposes itself as the discursive embodiment of the Mexican national subject. In both his novel and his political discourse, he utilizes techniques of essentialism and embodiment to model a new, Revolutionary national subject. Furthermore, his national project becomes linked to Western culture through a discourse of universal humanism that assumes the existence of certain core absolute or essential values that are valid across the individual, local, national and global contexts. I propose that this process of embodiment and the representation of essential or absolute values becomes a central strategy in later total novels that search for ways to reduce totality to manageable proportions as well as to extend the authors subjectivity to encompass that of others in the quest to achieve polyphonic representation. My study begins by inserting Al lo del agua into the Spanish-American subgenre of the total novel. A discussion follows that outlines Yanezs fusion of politics and literary production into a single project, of which the goal was the development of a new national subject that would embody the core values of mexicanidad, or Mexican-ness, as well as what he perceived as universal human values. I then analyse some of the ways in which Al lo del agua extends its regional ethnography to symbolize the nation on the historical eve of the Revolution, showing how Al lo del aguas village functions as a national symbol of the need for Revolutionary change. The next section studies Yanezs programme of civic education, which directly ties together his novelistic production and his political project. Using Al lo del agua, I argue that literature in general and the total novel in particular formed part of his life-long pedagogical project to create a new national and humanist consciousness among young Mexicans. The nal section glosses Yanezs plan to write a series of novels modelled on Balzacs The Human Comedy that was designed to represent a total Mexico. Since many of these novels grew out of his personal experience, their use as blueprints for national con sciousness suggests Yanez himself as the embodiment of the national subject. He further develops this image of the personal embodiment of the national consciousness in his political discourse, proposing himself as the man of the people.

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The Total Novel in Mexico Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa were the rst to coin explicitly the term total novel in the 1960s; however, many of its devices were already in use in earlier Spanish-American ction.4 In fact, the total novel represents the continuation of a cultural ideal that owes much to the generations of intellectuals immediately preceding Fuentes and Vargas Llosa. Vasconcelos project of universalist cultural indoctrination in a national context during his tenure as the Minister of Public Education in 1920s Mexico comes immediately to mind, as does the regionally-located universalism of Reyes and Henrquez Urenas writing. Like the work of these authors, total novels embody a utopian proposition for both the conservation and transformation of local culture, incorporating simultaneously national and more general Western models. Building on the discourse of universal humanism, total novels become immense ctional encyclopedias of Western as well as national culture and history. At the same time, their engagement with national projects of cultural transformation leads them to propose new models for national consciousness, effectively rewriting the foundational ctions of nineteenth-century Spanish America for the political realities of the twentieth century. This dialectic between cultural universalism and local political transformation is particularly evident in the total novels appearance in Mexico, with reference to the political milieu following the Mexican Revolution. The advent of the total novel in Mexico supports Edward Mendelsons assertion that encyclopedic novels begin to appear in a national literature during a particular moment in nation building in which a nation desires to distance itself from its models and establish unique cultural values.5 Several voluminous precursors to the modern Mexican total novel were published during the late nineteenth century by authors such as Manuel Payno. However, Agustn Yanezs Al lo del agua is the rst novel that brings an openly totalizing approach to Mexican narrative, utilizing multiple points of view, simultaneity, abstraction, dialectics, and an encyclopedic range of references to achieve a more panoramic vision of Mexican society and culture. n Ya ezs novel appeared during a moment in Mexican history in which the PRM (the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana, which would later become the Partido Institucional Revolucionario or PRI) undertook a process of consolidation

4 Vargas Llosa rst proposes the total novel in his introduction to Joanet Martorells fteenth-century chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc (1969), which was reprinted in Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1991), while Fuentes further develops it in his La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Joaqun Mortiz, 1969). 5 See Edward Mendelsons introduction to Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 115 (p. 10). Mendelson delineates a theory of encyclopedic ction that is complementary to theories of the total novel developed by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes.

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and institutionalization of what were billed the values of the Revolution. This process of consolidation included a strong emphasis on the creation of a new national consciousness through cultural education, a programme in which n Ya ez participated both as a creator of culture and as a political ideologue. Al lo del agua works within this project, constructing a shared or collective memory of the time period immediately preceding the Mexican Revolution and n legitimizing the ideology of the ofcial party with which Ya ez was intimately associated. The novel emphasizes psychological rather than material causes of the Revolution, drawing attention away from agrarian reform and towards the creation of a new mexicanidad, or national essence, with the Revolution as one of its foundations.6 Although Al lo del agua is an intensely regional novel, it simultaneously creates a system of correspondences beyond its borders that allows for the magnication of scale from the local to the national. In this way, Al lo del agua suggests itself as a microcosm of the national.7 The conguration of the microcosm-macrocosm association hinges primarily on a dialectic tension between specicity, embedded in the novels ethnographic study of the region known as the Altos de Jalisco, and indeterminacy, which allows for multiple levels of reading. At the same time, Yanez creates in his political discourse the public persona of the man of the pueblo that congures him as the microcosmic embodiment of essential national values. In both his novel and his political project, microcosmic essentialism becomes a key strategy for the embodiment of the national subject. The Fusion of the Literary and the Political Subjects Alongside garish intellectual and literary gures such as Jose Vasconcelos and Jose Revueltas, Agustn Yanez tends to blend into the background of postRevolutionary politics and letters. Yet his life-long dedication to the creation
6 For a discussion of nationalistic essentialism in this novel based on the psychology of the national subject developed by humanists such as Paz and Ramos, see Danny Anderson, Reading, Social Control, and the Mexican Soul in Al lo del agua, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 11:1 (1995), 45 53. 7 The term microcosm is employed here with reference to its historical uses in Western philosophy, as delineated by George P. Conger in Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy (New York: Russel and Russel, 1967). Conger generalizes concepts of microcosms as theories in which portions of the world which vary in size exhibit similarities in structures and processes, indicating that one portion imitates another or others on a different scale (xiii). Angela B. Dellapaine in Releyendo Al lo del agua, Cuadernos Americanos, 201 (1975), 182 206 (pp. 186 87); Wilma Detjens in Whats in a Name? The Inuence of Home in the Naming of the Microcosms of Cien anos de soledad, Al lo del agua, and Pedro Paramo, Chasqui, 20:2 (1991), 54 63 (p. 54); Michael J. Doudoroff in Tensions and Triangles in Al lo del agua, Hispania (USA), 57:1 (1974), 112 (p. 11); and John J. Flasher in Mexico contemporaneo en las novelas de Agustn Yanez (Mexico City: Porrua, 1969), 39, allude to Al lo del aguas village as a microcosm; given the protracted history of the term and the complexity of the novel at hand, such an assertion requires further analysis.

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and diffusion of Mexican national culture left an indelible mark on the political and literary history of his country, a contribution that has been recognized n widely by the Mexican government and literary critics. Ya ez is often granted equal status with Mariano Azuela as the initiator of the modern novel in Mexico for his deployment of modernist literary strategies in Al lo del agua and later novels.8 Concomitant with his project of literary renovation, n Ya ez participated actively in the political project of the consolidation and institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution during the 1930s and 1940s.9 He occupied a great number of political and cultural posts from the 1930s until his death in 1980, among others, Director of the Radio Ofce of the Ministry of Public Education (19321934), Professor and Coordinator of Humanities of the UNAM (19421953, 19591962), Governor of Jalisco (19531959), Counsellor to the President (19591962), Minister of Public Education (19641970) n and Director of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (19731980).10 Ya ez belongs to the Latin-American tradition of politically engaged intellectuals, leaders such as Sarmiento and Romulo Gallegos who put their ideology into practice in the political arena as well as in the literary. His works of ction include Flor de juegos antiguos (1942), Pasion y convalescencia (1943), Archipielago de mujeres (1943), Al lo del agua (1947), La creacion (1950), Ojerosa y pintada (1960), La tierra prodiga (1960) and Las tierras acas (1964). As is evident from the juxtaposition of his literary and political chrono logies, Yanez penned many of his novels while he was in ofce. He wrote others in the lull between political positions and many of them relate directly to his political projects.11 In fact, the connection between literature and

8 The literary techniques employed in Al lo del agua, and particularly in the Acto preparatorio, have been located within the modern literary tradition, relating the novel to those of such authors as Dos Passos, Joyce and Faulkner, by critics and authors as varied as Rosario Casn tellanos in Al lo del agua de Agustn Ya ez: una trinidad femenina, Nivel, 99 (1971), 12 (p. 2); Gerald Martin in Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989), 138; Jose Luis Martnez in Iniciacion y obra: la signicacion de n Al lo del agua, in Agustn Ya ez, Al lo del agua, ed. and intro. Arturo Azuela (Nanterre: Signatarios Acuerdo Archivos ALLCA XX, Univ. de Paris X, 1996), 30725 (p. 321); Seymour n Menton in La obertura nacional: Asturias, Gallegos, Dos Passos, Ya ez, Fuentes y Sarduy, Revista Iberoamericana, 51:130131 (1985), 15166 (p. 158); Donald L. Shaw in Nueva narrativa tedra, 1992), 162; and Raymond Leslie Williams in The Twentiethhispanoamericana (Madrid: Ca Century Spanish American Novel (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2003), ix, among others. 9 John S. Brushwood notes the parallels between Yanezs creative work and political vocation in Agustn Yanez: Creativity and Civic Responsibility, Topic, 20 (1970), 44 52. However, he nds few direct connections between the two beyond the expression of feelings of civic responsibility in both Yanezs political essays and novels. I argue that Yanez creates a public persona that is meant to embody not only civic responsibility but the essence of the Mexican subject itself. 10 For a complete listing of the political ofces held by Yanez, see the on-line biography maintained by the Colegio Nacional (,www.colegionacional.org.mx/Yanez0.htm.). 11 Christopher Harris points out that Yanezs political career inuenced even the chrono logy in which he chose to publish certain manuscripts, in Agustn Yanezs International

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politics was quite tangible for Yanez: according to Rodric Camp, he was chosen as candidate for the governorship of Jalisco largely because of his speech writing abilities.12 The fusion of literature and politics in Yanezs career centred on the project of the construction of a new national subject that would embody the values of the Mexican Revolution. For Yanez, the relevance of literature to the construction of a national consciousness was undeniable. In his essay, El contenido social de la literatura iberoamericana (1944), he wrote, antes que producto cultural, mucho antes que fenomeno artstico, la literatura es instrumento de construccion americana.13 In another essay he seconds this point of view: Esta es la grave responsabilidad del artista: forja y orienta el espritu nacional y lo eleva a planos de universalidad en la medida de su poder creador.14 Yanez conceives of an active role for the writer in the creation of national consciousness as well as in the insertion of national culture into the pantheon of universal cultural values. He shares with Chakrabarty the concept of the universal as placeholder; through literature he proposes to elevate Mexican national consciousness to universal planes.15 In Yanezs discourse, the writers duties go far beyond being societys chronicler or scribe; rather, alongside the politician, the novelist becomes the sculptor of national destinies. In fact, Yanez envisioned a juxtaposition of these two careers: in a speech given while he was Governor of Jalisco, he stated that governing no deja de ser, en realidad, labor de novelista, de un novelista que conjuga la realidad con la imaginacion.16 Signicantly, the creative possibilities of literature lead Yanez to value it over other possible vehicles for national consciousness: la expresion literaria es instrumento insustituible para jar la realidad nacional, de modo superior a los caminos de la historia, de la sociologa, 17 de la geografa humana y economica, de la estadstica.
Image: Murders, Mysteries, and Critical Controversies, BHS (Liverpool), LXXXIII (1996), 277 87 (p. 285). 12 Rodric Camp, An Intellectual in Politics: The Case of Agustn Yanez, Mester, 12:1 2 (1983), 317 (p. 11). 13 Agustn Yanez, El contenido social de la literatura iberoamericana (special book issue of Jornadas, 14 [1944], 9). 14 Agustn Yanez, Conciencia de la revolucion (Mexico City: Justicia Social, 1964), 51 52. 15 Dipesh Chakrabarty theorizes that the universal [. . .] can only exist as a placeholder, its place always usurped by a historical particular seeking to present itself as the universal, in Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital, in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, (Durham: Duke U. P., 2002), 82 110 (p. 105). 16 Quoted in Antonio Gomez Robledo, Agustn Yanez: escritor y estadista, Nivel, 13 (1964), 4. 17 Quoted in Alfonso Rangel Guerra, Agustn Yanez (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, 1969), 9697.

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Even science is relegated to an inferior level in Yanezs discourse: la intuicion especcamente artstica tiene la virtud de calar los mas pro fundos estratos de la realidad, en anchura que quiza no pueda igualar nunca por s sola ninguna tecnica cientca.18 For Yanez, literature is better equipped than any other medium both for the excavation of the national essence, a subterranean stratus that lies far below the layers of reality that can be reached by scientic investigation, and for its simultaneous preservation from the assault of modern globalized culture through insertion into the canon of universality. Literatures supplementary, critical relationship with reality allows it to attain a deeper, more essential representation than those techniques designed for mere objective portrayal. And once this essential national vision is achieved, literature assumes a secondary function, undertaking la defensa de nuestra esencialidad frente a las exigencias de la modernidad en la esfera publicitaria, cuya caudalosa corriente debemos temperar, contener, all donde afecte nuestro ser en s, nuestra idiosincrasia.19 Literatures unique position in Western cultural history endows it with the ability to preserve the national essence by inserting it in the canon of world literature. Furthermore, the diffusion of national literature alongside the classics of world literature as part of Vasconcelos and the Revolutionary governments literacy campaign made it a perfect tool for drawing out this national essence in the individual and for establishing its canonicity in the context of Western culture. Literature thus becomes both a defensive and an offensive weapon in the Revolutionary battle to orient and forge the new national consciousness, taking on the double role of revealing the national essence and then protecting it intact from nefarious outside inuences by elevating it to universal status. Of Yanezs novels, Al lo del agua best exemplies this project, creating a preRevolution national subject that, although located in a regional context, extends itself through techniques of microcosm to become a national archetype for Revolutionary change at the same time that it embodies many of the values that Yanez and the Revolutionary government viewed as quintessential to the Mexican subject. Furthermore, the widespread proliferation of international criticism written on the novel attests to the effectiveness of Yanezs strategy to validate his vision of the national subject through insertion into the canon of Western culture.
18 Yanez, Contenido, 18. 19 Agustn Yanez, Discursos al servicio de la Educacion Publica: quinta serie correspon diente a 1969 (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacion Publica, 1969), 125.

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Al lo del aguas Essential Vision Al lo del agua is something of an anomaly in Mexican ction of the period. On the one hand, it is a profoundly regional novel with a wealth of details and descriptions relating specically to Jaliscan culture and social life. As Emmanuel Carballo states, detras de las partes que narran hechos religiosos, hay una paciente documentacion.20 A great deal of research and cultural documentation went into other areas of the novel as well, as the meticulous enumeration of details in the ethnographic descriptions of the village proves. On the other hand, the novel also inserts itself into the discourses of national essentialism and universalistic humanism that were prevalent in Mexican political philosophy during the 1940s. The imposing encyclopedia of ethnographic description in Al lo del agua is accentuated by the fact that the author published, nearly concomitantly, what might be best described as an ethnographic essay entitled Yahualica (1946), with many parallels to the descriptive sections of the novel. This essay, subtitled etopeya, makes explicit the authors interest in ethnography. Narrated in third person using a mixture of impersonal scientic language, lyricism and personal commentary, the work combines the tropes of mimesis, the rhetorical gures that persuade the reader of the objectivity of the authors representation of place, with what James Duncan calls tropes of physical presence.21 These are the rhetorical strategies that emphasize the authors presence in the text, based on the primacy of personal experience and eldwork in the anthropologic tradition. In this case, the inclusion of autobiographical material and family anecdotes, although often veiled as collective experience, promotes a sense of cultural intimacy that legitimates the texts claims of ethnographic accuracy. Signicantly, Yanez also explicitly links Yahualica to the Revolutionary governments political project. The rst page of the work advertises that la edicion de este libro conmemora la visita hecha a Yahualica por el senor vila presidente de la Republica, general de division, don Manuel A Camacho, con objeto de inaugurar las obras y las mejoras realizadas durante el periodo de su gobierno.22 mara de Diputados. It is no coincidence that the book was published by the Ca n Ya ezs personal history thus becomes enmeshed with that of the Revolutionary government, a pattern that repeats itself throughout his work.
20 Emmanuel Carballo, Al lo del agua, in Homenaje a Agustn Yanez: variaciones interpretativas en torno a su obra, ed. Helmy F. Giacoman (Madrid: Ibarra, 1973), 1362 (p. 25). 21 James Duncan, Sites of Representation: Place, Time, and the Discourse of the Other, in Place/Culture/Representation, ed. James Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993), 39 56 (p. 40). 22 Agustn Yanez, Yahualica: etopeya (Mexico City: Camara de Diputados, 1946), 1.

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A similar marriage of apparent objectivity, subjectivity, and Revolutionary politics characterizes Al lo del agua. However, there exists a fundamental difference between the two works that has to do with specicity. Yahualica, the hometown of Yanezs parents that he frequently visited as a child, is clearly the object of the eponymous study and has been identied by several critics familiar with Yanezs personal history as the model for Al lo del aguas pueblo.23 Yet while Yahualica makes its locality clear and presents its study within a regional context, the position and the name of the village in Al lo del agua are deliberately masked.24 The author takes specic steps to disassociate the village in the novel from Yahualica, such as including the latter in lists of surrounding towns.25 In this way, the villages context is deferred; it becomes open to abstraction, thus making it available to the national imaginary. Indeterminacy and abstraction also play a role in developing this switch in scale in the authors brief prologue to the novel: Al lo del agua es una expresion campesina que signica el momento de iniciarse la lluvia, yen sentido gurado, muy comunla inminencia o el principio de un suceso. Quienes preeran, pueden intitular este libro En un lugar del Arzobispado, ginas no El antiguo regimen o de cualquier otro modo semejante. Sus pa tienen argumento previo; se trata de vidascanicas las llama uno de los protagonistasque ruedan, que son dejadas rodar en estrecho lmite de tiempo y espacio, en un lugar del Arzobispado, cuyo nombre no importa recordar.26 The explication of the title given by the author is not gratuitous; it activates its readers to a more speculative readingwhat could that imminent suceso be?while simultaneously alerting them to the possibility of multiple layers of meaningthe sentidos gurados. The rst paragraph of the prologue, then, uses ambiguity with reference to plot. The second paragraph also employs a play on indeterminacy and specicity, now regarding time and place. As Francoise Perus has pointed out, el antiguo regimen evokes a
23 Among them, Ignacio Daz Ruiz in Al lo del agua en la historia personal de Agustn Yanez y el itinerario de su obra, included in Yanez, Al lo del agua, ed. Azuela, 27583, and Jose Luis Martnez in Iniciacion y obra: la signicacion de Al lo del agua, also in Azuelas edition of Al lo del agua, 307 25. 24 Stanley L. Robe observes that despite the correspondences between the two towns, Al lo del aguas pueblo is not named (Yanez y el regionalismo, Mester, 12:1 2 [1983], 5277 [p. 61]). 25 Such is the case in the following passage describing the preparations for Semana Santa, which besides local artisans require otros aleatorios que vienen de Cuquo, de Mexticacan, de Yahualica, de Nochistlan (Al lo del agua, 94). This and all subsequent quotations are taken from Agustn Yanez, Al lo del agua, ed. and preface Antonio Castro Leal (Mexico City: Porrua, 1973). 26 Yanez, Al lo, 2.

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political order that has been cancelled out, while the Arzobispado casts the focus onto the Catholic Churchs role in the geopolitical organization of the nation.27 The author has already drawn the readers attention to the importance of the title as a metaphor for future rupture; one can only assume that the novel takes place in a moment in Mexican history when this old regime dominated by the Church still maintains a tenuous control but is near to losing it. Yet Yanez names no names, preferring to maintain a certain level of abstraction. Likewise, while Arzobispado connotes a demarcation of territories at a regional level, without a qualifying place name the location remains in geographic limbo. An attentive reader could easily connect this cancelled political order, this antiguo regimen, with the suceso to come and arrive at the supposition that the Mexican Revolution is the matter at hand. A context, however insubstantial it may be, has been established at both the regional (Arzobispado) and the national (Mexican Revolution) levels. Yet ambiguity is still the dominant trope: o de cualquier otro modo semejante. Finally, the appropriation and modication of Cervantes renowned opening lines to Don Quixote, cuyo nombre no importa recordar, direct the reader towards the greater Western literary tradition of abstract representation. Remembering the name of the village is not important, because it could be any town, anywhere. The prologue, with its emphasis on indeterminacy and multiple levels of reading, prepares the reader for an allegorical reading of the text. This tension between particularity and indeterminacy allows a system of correspondences between different scales to develop. As the political and social structures and processes represented at the local level are extended through abstraction to the national level and beyond, Yanezs ethnography transforms itself into microcosmography. Not only are these structures and processes seen to repeat themselves at different levels, but some of them are given priority through reiteration in such a way that they acquire a centrality in the formulation of the national subject that transcends local culture. The microcosm-macrocosm relation is amplied through this process of epitomization, in which the specicity of the characteristics of the pueblo is subsumed into their essence, which, by denition, is also the essence of the whole, of the nation, or even humankind. In this sense, Julieta Campos identication of Yanezs style as a realismo de las esencias is quite accurate.28 The essence of the town is revealed to be psychological, motivated by desire. This Freudian interpretation of reality ultimately returns to Hegelian
27 Francoise Perus, La poetica narrativa de Agustn Yanez en Al lo del agua, in Yanez, Al lo del agua, ed. Azuela, 32768 (p. 327). 28 Julieta Campos, La imagen en el espejo (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1965), 144.

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phenomenology and dialectics, as Joseph Sommers has pointed out.29 The interplay between subjective views of reality creates a synthesis which the author solves for the reader in the form of an ongoing commentary on the nature of desire and its repression. To this end, Al lo del agua portrays individual subjectivities not as distinct personalities, but rather as parts of a synthesis, of what is presented as the villages essentialized collective consciousness.30 Yanez thus develops a collective psychological essence through exploring the tensions between individuals and individual-society. However, he links this essence to its historical moment and, as the novels title suggests, it is unstable. As Anderson points out, Yanezs political project requires the substitution of Al lo del aguas pre-Revolution essence, based on repression, with a new national essence grown out of the Revolution and its values.31 n Allegory is another way in which Ya ez develops a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship between the local, the national imaginary, and Western human ism. Both Oyarzun and Marquet associate the motif of parricide in Al lo del agua with the processes of the Revolution.32 Likewise, DLugo and Anderson relate allegories of reading in the novel with the activation of the extratextual reader.33 Through these multiple layers of symbolism, the scope of the novel is expanded to encompass the local, the national, and the abstract universal. Al lo del agua also establishes correspondences between the local and the national through the inclusion of themes and historic referents of national importance, events that through post-Revolution civic education became common markers of national identity. The Revolutionary government chose the events mentioned in the novel after the fact, with historical distance, as milestones for the denition of national identity. Many of these historical referents, such as the Guerra de los Pasteles (183839) and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), are moments that dene national identity through opposition to foreign intervention in Mexico; others relate directly to key moments in the formation of the Revolution such as the strike and subsequent massacre at Cananea, Sonora (1906). Key historical gures are also instrumental in evoking identication with the national. Only the carefully

29 Joseph Sommers, After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1968), 63. 30 Floyd Merrel, Structure and Restructuration in Al lo del agua, Chasqui, 17:1 (1988), 51 60 (p. 52). 31 Anderson, Reading, 48. 32 Kemy Oyarzun, Parricidio a la letra: Al lo del agua, Texto crtico, 12:34 35 (1986), 65 80 (p. 69); Antonio Marquet, Yanez y el Acto preparatorio, in Palabra crtica: estudios en homenaje a Jose Amescua, ed. Serafn Gonzalez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1997), 346 53 (pp. 34749). 33 Carol Clark DLugo, Al lo del agua: Addressing Readership in Mexican Fiction, Hispania (USA), 74:4 (1991), 860 67 (p. 860); Anderson, Reading, 63 69.

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chosen heroes of the Revolution are mentioned, those whose importance and motives were considered unquestionable, such as the Flores Magon brothers and Madero. The novel conveniently ends before controversial gures of the Revolution such as Villa and Calles appear. At the same time, Yanez uses the townspeoples stubborn opposition to change to justify the epistemological violence that the Revolution will inevitably wreak on their cloistered worldview. Signicantly, the sacred precursor of the Revolution, Benito Juarez, and his reforms are rejected and vilied in the village. The villages attitude demonstrates the extent to which the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century were unsuccessful and the magnitude of the opposition to them, an opposition so powerful that a Revolution is necessary to overcome it. More than an armed conict, this Revolution implies a change in consciousness, a transformation in the peoples way of thinking that is only possible through a massive programme of cultural indoctrination. Yanezs Programme of Civic Education Yanez was fully aware of the power of literature and mass media in general to create a common cultural background. In an article entitled Existe una cultura mexicana? (1951), he demonstrates awareness of nation and culture as social constructs: [La nacion] es la formacion de una conciencia general acerca de un sistema de bienes presentes y futuros en que se objetivan los juicios de valor, propios de la comunidad; es el hallazgo y la nueva busqueda de lo que se tiene por valioso para el grupo nacional, tanto como elaboracion vernacula, como adopcion de formas extranasextranjerasque sirven y enriquez can el sistema, porque corresponden a la realidad publica. [. . .] Las cul turas no son dadivas hechas a los pueblos, sino productos labrados por estos [. . .].34 These ideas are certainly not unique to Yanezs thought; rather they correspond to the ideology of the cultural movement promoted and nanced by the state under the leadership of Lazaro Cardenas, Manuel Avila Camacho and subsequent presidents. These administrations laboured actively to cultivate national unity through the creation of a shared cultural experience that would span regions regardless of geographical, ethnic, and ideological differences. Enveloping both popular and high culture, this vast programme of cultural outreach enlisted popular music, movies, radio, television and newspapers along with painting, literature and symphonic music to express and propagate what the ofcial party promoted as the values of the Revolution.
34 Agustn Yanez, Existe una cultura mexicana?, Mexico en la Cultura, 15 July 1951, 12 (p. 1).

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As the director of the Radio Ofce of the Ministry of Public Education from 1932 to 1934, Yanez was in charge of preparing programmes that would foment national consciousness.35 The government used radionovelas and popular music to create a series of national personalities that would serve as focal points for the project of national unity, becoming common points of reference and models of national pride for audiences separated geographi cally.36 Yanezs experience with radio as a medium for the diffusion of national consciousness also served him as a model for the Teleaulas, a programme of distance education that he founded as Minister of Public Education in 1968. In general, Yanezs tenure as Minister of Public Education was not characterized by great changes in policy. He continued the projects of literacy and the promotion of the ideals of the Revolution through various media, just as his predecessors had.37 The rhetoric Yanez used remained basically unchanged as well, as this speech from 1968, entitled Formacion cvica y educacion de adultos, shows: Rearmamos que la reforma educativa es parte de un vasto plan de reforma social, a partir de una remodelacion dinamica de la solidaridad, entendida como conciencia y practicada como habito de servicio de intereses colectivos, nacionales, vinculados con sentido humanista, en perspectiva universal, a las realidades y necesidades internacionales, regidas por la independencia y la justicia. Esto quiere decir: formacion cvica.38 In this speech, Yanez makes clear his belief that the national consciousness is related to the agency of autonomous local values in a universal humanist context. National values are only legitimate when they are universally recognized, that is to say, when they themselves become Chakrabartys universal placeholders. The emergent national consciousness is seen as the end result of an on-going process of Western humanist education and local civic service that work hand-in-hand to create social solidarity both within and beyond the borders of the nation. The same speech could easily have been given by Vasconcelos or Torres Bodet decades earlier, had it not been rendered ironic or even cynical by the 1968 massacre of students by government troops at Tlatelolco. By the 1960s the political climate had become increasingly unstable and many groups had lost faith in both the ability and the intentions of what was now the PRI to carry out the goals of the Revolution. Yanezs apparently blind
35 Clearly, to speak of national consciousness in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s is to speak of the institutionalization of the Revolution and the consolidation of the hegemony of the ofcial partythen the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana (PRM). 36 See Michael Nelson Miller, Red, White, and Green: The Maturing of Mexicanidad, 1940 1946 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1998), 1516. n 37 Mara de los Angeles Ya ez details several direct links between Yanez and his predeces sors in Agustn Yanez: ideas en poltica educativa, Mester, 12:12 (1983), 10116. 38 Yanez, Discursos, 25.

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support of the Revolutionary government and his public impassibility with regard to the massacre of students at Tlatelolco attracted ferocious criticism. In any case, the literate constituency inherited from Vasconcelos and his dis ciples, painstakingly constructed over thirty years, made possible Yanezs nationalistic project in the novelistic arena.39 The amplication of a reading public due to the literacy campaign made the novel much more viable as a means for the conveyance of ideology to the masses, for the formation of a national conscience.

Yanezs Novel as an Instrument of Civic Education In Al lo del agua, Yanez creates a national prehistory, a shared or collective memory of the way things were before the Revolution, based on this essentialist vision of national consciousness. The date of publication (1947) is important because it inserts the novel into the national project of legitimization and consolidation of the Revolution, a considerable part of which depended on civic education. Yanezs novel appeared when the rst generation of the children of the Revolutionthe rst group of citizens educated under Vasconcelos new systemwas maturing. This generation had no rst-hand experience of the way things were before the Revolution and tended to question the effectiveness of the present administration.40 Al lo del agua establishes a common historical consciousness for this generation of Mexicans who did not experience the Revolution and its changes in person, a commonality that attempts to mitigate the opposition to the ofcial partys totalitarian politics that began surfacing in the 1940s. Al lo del agua is a defensive book in that it protects a political project in its present through contrasting the conditions of relative freedom during its time with the repression of the past. The emphasis it places on pre-Revolution immobility, stagnation, and on the marginalization from participation in historical projects draws attention to the magnitude of the changes carried out by the Revolutionary government of which Yanez formed a part. Likewise, the intolerance and censorial control of the pre-Revolution pueblo in Al lo del agua contrast with the relatively tolerant cultural policies of post-Revolutionary governments.
39 For a history of the Revolutionary governments literacy programme and its relation to the diffusion of civic values, see Engracia Loyo, La lectura en Mexico, 19201940 and Valentina Torres Septien, La lectura, 19401960, both included in Historia de la lectura en Mexico (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1988), 24394 and 295 337, respectively. De los Angeles Yanez documents Agustn Yanezs continuation of this project, calling it a national crusade (Agustn Yanez: ideas en poltica educativa, 110). 40 Even some who had formerly been staunch supporters began to speak of a crisis in the values of the Revolution, such as Jesus Silva Herzog, who in the early forties questioned the direction Revolutionary politics were taking in La revolucion mexicana en crisis, Cuadernos Americanos, XI (1943), 32 55.

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The Revolution is indeed a presiding presence in the novel, as Sommers has said,41 but that presence is not the Madero rebellion of 1910 that makes a cameo appearance at the end of the novel; it is the institutionalized Revolu tion of which Yanez was an ideologue, the programme of incorporation of disparate regions and peoples into national life; it is the construction of national unity rather than the levelling forces of the armed Revolution. The text presupposes knowledge of the armed Revolution and its causes, but that knowledge is only a point of departure.42 The focus is on the present, seen through the lter of Yanezs construction of the past. Notably, Al lo del agua scarcely refers to the land problem, ostensibly the core issue of Revolution ideology. Likewise, the main group disenfranchised under Porrio Dazs liberal government, the indigenous, has no representation in the novel. Indeed, economic disparity in general is downplayed as a motive for rebellion in Al lo del agua. In this instance, as in others already mentioned, the importance of the Acto preparatorio cannot be underestimated. This very title, chosen over other possibilities such as Preface or Prologue, plainly delineates the role the opening section plays in predisposing the reader towards a particular interpretation of the greater text. For this reason, when the Acto preparatorio insists that los ricos miserables y estoicos, estoicos los pobres, igualan un parejo vivir,43 the text is conguring itself against a materialist reading of the social problems it will later present. As stoic as the villages inhabitants might be, there are grave differences in their economic situations: while peasant Leonardo Tovar cant nd money for the operation his wife desperately needs, Don Inocencio Rodrguez and his family seem to have no shortage of funds to make pleasure trips to the nations capital. Tovar deals with his poverty and his wifes eventual death with the same stoicism that Don Inocencio later displays when confronted with his daughters disgrace and demise at the hands of her lover. The novel minimizes material differences in favour of a psychological unity that becomes apparent in the way in which the characters respond to adversity. Indeed, the use of the adjective estoico for both the rich and the poor forms part of the collective psychological prole that has already begun to be developed, what is presented as the towns spiritual essence. This pattern of subordination of material issues to psychological essence characterizes much of the novel. Notably, the only extensive exposition of the material problems that lead to the Revolution is found in the second fragment of the chapter entitled Los nortenos. The nortenos are marginal gures

41 See Sommers, After the Storm, 37. 42 As Elaine Haddad points out, both the Madero rebellion and Damians crime are foreknown events, given away by textual clues before they happen and thus effectively suppressing the possibility of a dramatic climax. See La estructura de Al lo del agua, in Homenaje a Agustn Yanez, ed. Giacoman, 259 77 (p. 259). 43 Yanez, Al lo, 12.

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in the pueblo; therefore the anonymous voice that exposes the problems of social injustice to Padre Reyes cannot easily be read as a spokesperson for the town in general, even when anonymity has been used earlier in the novel to create a collective voice. Also, Damian Limon, the only norteno that gures prominently in the action, happens to be the son of relatively rich land owner and loan shark Don Timoteo Limon, and his impulsive behaviour has little to do with economic or class problems. Furthermore, the towns collective voice accuses the nortenos of spreading doubt and making the youth lose their love for the land because ya no se hallan a gusto en su tierra and acting in order to sembrar la duda and hacer que se pierda el amor a la tierra.44 The most active proponents of Revolution are thus disassociated from the land and guratively exiled from the village. The village considers their point of view to be exogenous and therefore invalid. In fact, the nortenos are seen as near foreigners; at one point they are accused of being agents of the gringos, who will soon come to robarse lo que nos queda de tierra, lo que no se pudieron robar la otra vez.45 The problem of the land becomes doubly subordinated, since the indigenous groups traditionally afliated with the land are absent from the novel and the only group that does promote Revolutionary reform, the nortenos, has been desterrado. With the land problem removed, the abuses of Porrio Dazs liberal government fade into the background, and the psychological repression of the Catholic Church takes centre stage. This is why the secular powers of the pueblo, Roman Capistran, and his successor, Heliodoro Fernandez, are portrayed as fairly innocuous despite their accumulation of ill gotten gains and manipulation of the justice system. In Yanezs homogenous universe of racial and economic parity, the prime motivators are desire and its repression, problems of social psychology that could be resolved without the drastic measures of the redistribution or restitution of land, a perennial thorn in the side of the Revolutionary government. Al lo del agua is not a novel that faithfully recreates its historical moment, as Sommers has pointed out.46 It is a supplement that replaces that moment in its readers minds, thereby creating a common historical consciousness. DLugo states correctly that the discourse of Al lo del agua works toward achieving a shift in readers expectations and consciousness by challenging conventions of narrativity.47 However, the novel is not deconstructive; it does not simply challenge the conventions of narrative, but also recongures them into a discourse compatible with its authors political project. The novels fragmented structure encourages the reader to participate in the creation of meaning, but that meaning is structured by the very
44 45 46 47 Yanez, Al lo, 151. Yanez, Al lo, 152. Sommers, After the Storm, 38. DLugo, Addressing, 863.

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elements that DLugo sees as the authors annoying intrusions and tooobvious guidelines.48 The authors brief prologue and the Acto preparatorio orient the reader towards a reading of Al lo del aguas village as a national prehistory that legitimizes the Revolutionary partys programme of national unity, in which Yanez played an important role.

Yanezs Total Mexico and the Individual Embodiment of National Consciousness The totalizing perspective that Yanez wrote into Al lo del agua anticipates a still more ambitious novelistic project. He describes this greater project in an interview with Adam Rodrguez, tying it into his goals for the construction of national consciousness: Mi idea es escribir distintas obras, cada una de las cuales vaya recogiendo un distinto angulo de la vida mexicanacomo en Al lo del agua, en que pinto un pueblo incomunicado, sin agua, sin sanidade integrar un ciclo que nos de una imagen total de Mexico: de su vida poltica, la artstica, la universitaria, la obrera, la cientca, etc. [. . .] En lugar de una obra con tinuada, una concatenacion de las obras en su conjunto: construir una gran serie de obras para retratar a Mexicoun gran muralsin que una obra dependa de la otra, sino independientes. Algo semejante a La comedia humana de Balzac.49 He elaborates further this grandiose plan in the prologue to his book of short stories, Los sentidos al aire (1964), which outlines a project under the heading El plan que peleamos, primer esbozo para un retrato de Mexico. The use of the phrase el plan que peleamos resonates on the national political level, since it evokes both the renowned manifestos of the Revolutionary caudillos, in which they declared the principles and demands for which they were ghting, and the plans for action and reform proposed by the Revolutionary government after the end of the armed conict. Yanez divides the plan into four categories: in Las edades y los tiempos, he places Flor de juegos antiguos, Archipielago de mujeres, La ladera dorada and Los sentidos al aire; in El pas diga, Las tierras acas, Cornelio Luna, comisario y la gente, La tierra pro ejidal, Al lo del agua, La culta sociedad and Ojerosa y pintada; in La historia y los tipos, Las vueltas del tiempo, Cronica de los das heroicos, La fortuna de los Ibarra Dieguez, Monico Delgadillo y sus amigos and La gloriosa; and in Los ocios y las ilusiones, La creacion, La torre, El taller de Sanroman, Claudia Capuleto and Tonantzintla.
48 DLugo, Addressing, 865. 49 Agustn Yanez, Hay epocas en que los poetas se fugan de la realidad (interview with Arturo Adam Rodrguez in Mexico en la Cultura, 30 June 1950, 3 and 7 [p. 3]).

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Clearly, this outline includes many works that never reached fruition. However, many of those that were eventually published reinforce tendencies seen in Al lo del agua. For example, in the section entitled El pas y la diga, and Las tierras acas are all set gente, Al lo del agua, La tierra pro in Jalisco. The only other novel listed in the section that Yanez published, Ojerosa y pintada, takes place in Mexico City. All of the novels that Yanez meant to represent rural Mexico and its inhabitants are limited to one geographic region, while he also epitomizes urban experience, reducing it to one novel. Yanezs Mexico, El pas y la gente, is effectively limited to the two places where he lived: the state of Jalisco and Mexico, D.F. Indeed, under more rigorous scrutiny of Yanezs plan, a pattern begins to emerge in which national consciousness is concatenated with his personal experience. In Las edades y los tiempos, proposed by the author as a compendium of la vida del nino mexicano y los estados de sensibilidad del adoles cente, two intensely autobiographical books are found, Flor de juegos antiguos and La ladera dorada, while the women of Archipielago de mujeres, drawn from the classics of world literature, reect Yanezs own readings as well as his adolescent fantasies. It is also telling that in the section La historia y los tipos appears an unwritten book entitled Monico Delgadillo y sus amigos. Yanezs full name was Agustn Monico Yanez Delgadillo; Monico Delgadillo was a pseudonym that he used in articles he published in Bandera de provincias, the literary review that he and his friends edited as students in Guadalajara. He inserts himself and his friends directly into a section dedicated to national history and archetypes. In this way, Yanez postulates himself as a national archetype; his explicit goal of creating national consciousness through narrative creation requires that his personal experiences become national, collective culture. Yanez, politician and novelist from the heart of the nation, sets himself up as the national model: he is the body politic. This project of embodiment becomes explicit in his political campaigns: an enormous photo of Yanez leaps from the cover of the 28 September 1958 issue of Mexico en la Cultura. As one turns the page, a second photo appears with the caption Agustn Yanez: nac del pueblo, pertenezco al pueblo. Nearly the entire number is dedicated to him; several articles and interviews accompany the photos mentioned above, lavishing praise on the author and politician. One of them is particularly careful to elaborate the link between Yanez and the pueblo: Yanez es un hombre del pueblo que transcurre por la ciudad en el camion o en el tranva, que participa en los problemas de los humildes y comparte sus gustos.50 A double discursive process becomes evident in which Yanez constructs a public persona that is representative of the whole and yet simultaneously proposed as a model for future change.
50 Henrique Gonzalez Casanova, Un hombre del pueblo, Mexico en la Cultura, 28 September 1958, pp. 1 2.

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Yanez, as the hombre del pueblo, embodies the essential characteristics of the entire population; he is the incarnation of those unique properties of mexicanidad that are traceable back to the conquest, the symbolic origin of the Mexican nation and its mestizo subject. Yet at the same time, according to the ofcial ideology, mexicanidad has been habitually subsumed to foreign models throughout Mexican history and it is only with the Revolution and the Revolutionary governments programme of civic education that it emerges as the true national essence. Naturally, it is Yanez and the other ideologues of the Revolution who are able to recognize this essence and are in a (political) position to bring it to fruition as a recognizable, autonomous contribution to universal Western culture. Yanez may have been a man of the pueblo, but it was not the pueblo that selected him as its representative. Huberto Batis describes the manner in which Yanez was elected governor of Jalisco: Yo viva a dos cuadras de un lugar que se llamaba Cafe Caliente, un restau rante en la calle de Libertad, cerca de Tolsaall dicen Tolsa, no Tolsa como aquy justo ah estaba Ruiz Cortines lanzando la candidatura de Rojas [Gonzalez, candidate for Governor of Jalisco and friend of Yanez]. Como intelectual amigo, Yanez estaba tambien ah; cuando Rojas se muere de pronto, de un ataque al corazon. Entre otros discursos, Agustn Yanez haba hablado del Agora, de la Polisesos terminos de gente culta, y Ruiz Cortines le dijo a sus acompanantes: traiganme a ese, y le propuso all mismo retomar la candidatura. De ser un profesor en Filosofa y Letras, paso a ser gobernante.51 The infamous PRI dedazo lurks between the lines: the president handpicks the candidate, the results of the election are a given, Yanez becomes governor. Apparently this procedure was accepted without question by the press if not by the populace in general: an anonymous article entitled Agustn Yanez: datos biogracos y curriculum vitae, published in the same issue of Mexico en la Cultura mentioned above, ends with este es el ciudadano al que el pueblo de Jalisco elegira como gobernador del Estado el proximo domingo 7 52 de diciembre. The use of the future tense would seem to be at odds with the democratic verb to which it is assigned. Yanezs unagging support of his partys ideologyespecially during the violent repression of the student protests in the massacre at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in 1968, while he was Minister of Public Educationattracted vitriolic accusations of complicity from intellectuals such as Monsivais and Raul Prieto. As the organizer of the rst-ever Cultural
51 Huberto Batis, Huberto Batis: no se leyo ni se lee a Agustn Yanez (interview with Alejandro Ortiz Gonzalez, El Nacional, 18 January 1995, 18A). 52 Agustn Yanez: datos bibliogracos y curriculum vitae, Mexico en la Cultura, 28 September 1958, p. 3.

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Olympics, a series of cultural events designed to complement the 1968 Olym pics in Mexico City, Yanez certainly had a stake in maintaining order and controlling the protests that attacked the Olympics as a drain of resources that could be better used for social reform. In a speech pronounced on Flag Day (24 February) 1969, Yanez attributes the political unrest to a lack of education in the area of civic virtue: se ha levantado la rebelda juvenil, que reclama nuevas formas de convivencia y de satisfactores; pero asimismo proviene de nula o inadecuada for macion cvica, que se revela en el afan destructivo sin el diseno del mundo, del orden jurdico, de las instituciones a construir [. . .].53 To renounce his Revolutionary project in that moment would have been to renounce a lifetime of work in civic education, a goal that Yanez saw as unnished. In public at least, he remained a staunch and optimistic supporter of the Revolutionary project and its institutions. Conclusion Many of the devices that Yanez used in Al lo del agua to develop the micro cosm-macrocosm correspondence reappear in later total novels such as Garca Marquezs Cien anos de soledad (1967), Fuentes Terra Nostra (1976) and Del Pasos Noticias del Imperio (1987), among others. This is not to say that the techniques originate solely with Yanez; on the contrary, these authors share the common inuence of European and North American modernists such as Dos Passos, Joyce and Faulkner. Nevertheless, Yanezs fusion of a discourse of cultural universalism with projects of local political transformation directed at the rewriting of the national subject inaugurates a powerful cultural mechanism that became commonplace in subsequent Spanish-American total novels. In many cases, these later total novelists renounced direct political afliations with government-sponsored programmes of cultural education in favour of more critical approaches, particularly during the 1960s when profoundly inuential events such as the Cuban Revolution and the massacre of students at Tlatelolco inspired reection on the state of government in Latin America. They did not, however, leave behind the project of re-scripting foundational ctions, replacing the hackneyed nineteenth-century allegory of the heterosexual criollo couple with an emphasis on racial, ethnic, and sexual plurality unied by shared essential national and human values. On the same note, not all total novelists share Yanezs personal feeling of national embodiment, but it is no coincidence that Carlos Fuentes sees himself as the synthetic end-product of Terra Nostras essentialized SpanishAmerican history or that Fernando Del Paso, author of panoramic novels such as Jose Trigo (1966), Palinuro de Mexico (1977) and Noticias del
53 Yanez, Discursos, 27.

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Imperio, has made known his view that ultimately we are all one.54 Yanezs work postulates that national essentialism is not at odds with universalism, but rather a means to it; these later authors take that lesson to heart, searching for universal representation within their own subjectivity. Clearly, this strategy has daunting implications for those, Mexicans or otherwise, who may not feel that they share these supposedly essential values, or for subaltern cultural groups whose subjectivities and voices may be smothered by the total novels essentialist representation, but these are matters to be considered in another place.

54 See Fuentes interview with Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, in which he states that Terra Nostra implica captar el universo, que es todo mi pasado, from Universos de la novela, in Carlos Fuentes: territorios del tiempo, antologa de entrevistas, ed. and intro. Jorge F. Hernandez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999), 14470 (p. 156), and Del Pasos afrmation to Ignacio Trejo Fuentes that, desde hace mucho tiempo pienso, junto con Borges, que todos somos uno, que yo soy todos, que todos soy yo, from El que despalinurice a Palinuro sera un buen despalinurizador: entrevista con Fernando del Paso, Semana de Bellas Artes, 23 July 1980, 611 (p. 7).