Exico's Uins: Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández

Mexico’s
Ruins
JUAN GARCÍA PONCE
AND THE WRITING
OF MODERNITY
Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández
MEXICO’S RUINS
SUNY series in Latin American and
Iberian Thought and Culture
Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors
MEXICO’S RUINS
Juan García Ponce and the

Writing of Modernity
State University of New York Press

Cover photo: Claudia Schaefer
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© 2007 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Rodríguez-Hernández, Raúl.
Mexico’s ruins : Juan García Ponce and the writing of modernity / Raúl
Rodríguez-Hernández.
p. cm. — (Suny series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6943-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7914-6943-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. García Ponce, Juan—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and
society—Mexico. 3. Politics and society—Mexico. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ7298.17.A7Z86 2007
868'.6409—dc22
2006002190
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
ONE Traces of Theory, Tropes of Modernity 1
TWO The Storyteller’s Ruins 27
THREE Monuments and Relics, I 53
FOUR Monuments and Relics, II 75
FIVE De Ánima, de Corpore: The Ruins of the

Bourgeois World 105
SIX Modernity, Contingency, Compensation 143
SEVEN A Brief Return to the Ruin 179
Appendix 185
Notes 193
Works Cited 199
Index 211
䊏v䊏
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Preface
In the following text, I shall examine a trilogy of García Ponce’s novels, sev-
eral collections of essays on art and literature, and a number of short stories,
in the context of a modernizing Mexican State and questions of citizenry. I
shall focus on cultural issues related to modernity, relations between the
Americas and Europe, aesthetics and narrative structures, the role of the sto-
ryteller, and inter-artistic influences and their often ambiguous results. I begin
with a chapter on theory, addressing in particular concepts of philosophers
Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, as well as the notions
of the ruin developed by anthropologist Quetzil Castañeda. I will explore here
as well some of the central tropes of modernity, including the modern itself as
a trope and the allegory of the ruin whose material existence is tinged and tan-
gled with those bits that have fallen or disappeared on the road to modernity,
much like the statue of salt subsumed under official monuments which con-
stantly call the attention of García Ponce and his narrators. I shall follow these
theoretical issues and initiatives with a more focused and textual consideration
of the telling of these stories and how (or if) they are to be told. Who gets to
tell what, and in what form, will constitute chapters 2 through 7, ending with
a return visit to the theories deployed throughout. García Ponce suggestively
revisits the literary text as others return to pay homage to the Ángel de la In-
dependencia or to other equally ‘ruinous’ monuments. He wonders aloud
whether literature is a means to an end or an end in itself. The conclusion
leads readers to the vision of continuity and rupture we will find in both his
own writings and in the theoretical propositions of Jameson, Habermas, and
Benjamin regarding the ongoing project of modernity. In “Los medios del
fin” [the means to an end], from Desconsideraciones, he writes that
las obras nos dicen, en el mejor de los casos; pero su acción no termina
en el momento de decir ni su realidad se cierra con este acto. Como
los monumentos públicos, a los que la costumbre ha hecho invisibles
䊏 vii 䊏
viii 䊏 PREFACE
una vez pasada la sorpresa que nos produjo encontrar donde antes no
solíamos ver más que un espacio vacío a un militar montado a caballo
y con la espada desenvainada, a un pensativo político de cráneo abul-
tado y con las manos en la espalda o a una atractiva mujer desnuda
transformada en alegoría de la virtud, los libros, las obras, siguen di-
ciendo en silencio. [Works speak to us, in the best of cases, but their
action does not end in the moment of speech nor does their reality
end with this act. Like the public monuments, which the daily custom
of seeing has made invisible to us once we have recovered from the
initial surprise of finding, where only empty space was before, a mil-
itary figure on horseback with sword in hand; a pensive politician
with a large head and hands clasped behind his back; or an attractive
nude woman representing the quality of virtue, books, written works,
keep on speaking to us in silence.] “Los medios del fin” (2001 73–74)
How the production of new texts represents allegories of these monumental
structures—of literature or the arts in general—is the subject of our discus-
sion. What might García Ponce do, in the space of the Jamesonian period and
the rupture, with all of those texts that continue to “speak to us in silence”?
My text explores the layers of meaning as sediments or traces of cultural
concerns in Crónica de la intervención [Chronicle of an Intervention], De ánima
[On the Spirit, the Soul], and Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia [Inmacu-
lada or the Pleasures of Innocence] with an eye toward other narrations and
other representations from the works of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Robert
Musil, José Luis Cuevas, Manuel Felgúerez, the painter Balthus, Pierre Klos-
sowski, Georges Bataille, Heimito von Doderer, Margo Glantz and a cacoph-
ony of other voices amid the din of Mexican modernity. After taking into
consideration the constitutive elements of García Ponce’s tripartite set of sto-
rytelling panels and the triptych formed by the three novels, I expand the dis-
cussion to include both his last published novel entitled Pasado presente
[Present Past] (1993) as the capstone of his narrative construction and Per-
sonas, lugares y anexas [People, Places, and Surroundings or the Spaces In Be-
tween] (1996) as his last text which continues to speak to readers even from
the depths of silence.
R.R.-H.
Rochester, New York
April 2006
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to a number of individuals and institutions who have con-

tributed to the writing of this book. I would especially like to thank Debra
Castillo, Walter Cohen, Jonathan Culler, Peter Hohendahl, and Geoffrey
Waite, all from Cornell University, for their encouragement, support, and
patience from the outset. They were the first readers of the very first drafts
of this project, and patience was certainly the order of the day to get
through it all. Their suggestions have proved invaluable, and I shall always
recall my Cornell days with fondness and intellectual delight.
I am also indebted to The College of the University of Rochester,
whose junior leave policy gave me the chance to finally complete what I
had been working on for a while, and whose financial support allowed me
to acquire some of the scholarly material not available outside of Mexico.
In addition, the generous travel funds provided by Thomas DiPiero, then
Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, helped me
open doors in Mexico to access archives and interview writers, all of which
has enhanced any reading I could have otherwise done of García Ponce’s
texts. I am appreciative of Tom’s continued support and of his open-door
office policy for junior faculty. This access to departmental support on a
daily basis has meant more than he might realize.
The constructive comments of the two anonymous readers at the
State University of New York Press were most helpful to me as I reread the
manuscript to prepare it for final submission. I greatly appreciate the time
and care they gave to reviewing my work, and their suggestions for mak-
ing it better. I also thank the editors of this series for their generous support
of this project and for adding my book to such an excellent group of vol-
umes. Special thanks to Claudia Schaefer for being there and for the tech-
nical expertise on computers she doesn’t think she has.
To my parents in Mexico, Luis Rodríguez-Murueta and María Hernán-
dez de Rodríguez, I send my gratitude for helping me keep my priorities
䊏 ix 䊏
x䊏 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
straight, “al mantener mis pies pegados a la tierra.” Finally, I am appreciative

of the friendship and support of my in-laws in the United States: thanks to
Helen and Cal Schaefer. Sadly, Cal did not live long enough to see this project
come to fruition, but he shall always remain in my heart as “my good friend.”
Finally, I am grateful to John Benicewicz of the Permissions Depart-
ment of Art Resource in New York and to Eliana Glicklich of the Artists
Rights Society of New York for all their help with obtaining permissions to
reproduce the two Balthus paintings included in Chapter 6. They have
been wonderful resources for my sometimes naive inquiries, and have been
a big help in moving this process along. I also thank the Museum of Mod-
ern Art in New York and Art Resource for granting me these permissions.
CHAPTER ONE
Traces of Theory, Tropes of Modernity
P
erhaps it goes without saying that in order for ruins to exist, some-
thing whole must have preceded them. Nations and communities
are built; they neither appear out of thin air nor disappear without
a trace. They rest on principles as much as they do on the columns of their
architectural creations; they are constructed on and through foundational
documents; they are framed in legal and moral terms; they arise bit by bit
as their founding generations erect the walls and portals that enclose or
keep out. Even vestiges of those communities wiped out by natural disas-
ters survive as traces amid the ash and sediment of volcanic rubble, buried
under the silt of ocean deposits, or in the piles of debris remaining after
great winds have blown through. Throughout the course of history these
aspects of the social and the cultural lives of nations and their citizens leave
behind remnants of all sorts.
Anthropologist Quetzil E. Castañeda proposes that cultural identi-
ties, in his case specifically referring to the Maya culture of Mexico’s Yu-
catán peninsula, are invented and reinvented continually “through certain
textual guises, forms, and tropes” (Museum 1). So we might conclude that
besides the physical rubble, or perhaps even as a reading of its multiple
strata, narratives themselves remain that rise as monuments or cultural
markers to societies and their projects. While Castañeda posits his argu-
ment on the commercial guidebook as a prime mediating force in the pro-
duction of utopian landscapes of “truth” (Museum 3) for tourists, I am
concerned with the genealogy of the connections between the ruin as trope
and its previous existence as the remnants of a purportedly resplendent past
in which (one is told) all contemporaries have a stake. Such a connection, if
not a “historical continuity”(Casanova 241) in the sense that some such as
Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes have proposed, just might assist in articu-
lating the problematic that most defines post-revolutionary Mexico:
modernity. In particular, I call upon the models put forward by Walter
䊏1䊏
2䊏 MEXICO’S RUINS
Benjamin for the development of an urban social critique to illuminate my

discussion of the writings of Juan García Ponce and their context as com-
ponents of what David Harvey calls the “creative destruction” (1) of Euro-
pean modernity and what Sibylle Fischer recasts as the “brutal modernity”
(23) of transatlantic societies. The threefold Benjaminian models consist of
the archaeological, the memorial, and the dialectical (Gilloch, Myth 13).
The first involves the recovery and preservation of the traces from the past.
The second privileges the forces of memory over the tug of amnesia. The
third, and the most useful for us here, concerns “the momentary mutual
recognition and illumination of past and present” (Gilloch, Myth 13)
through an encounter with evocatory images.1
While I do not propose to graft these categories in situ onto Mexican
culture, they nevertheless provide a pathway into the oppositional chal-
lenges to what are constituted as the myths of the modern. Eschewing the
lure of some general notion of modernity as either radical break on the one
hand or new inscription of the past on the other, I instead suggest, with
Fredric Jameson, that what we will examine is “a dialectic of the break and
the period” (23). The trope of construction and ruin, therefore, signals this
dialectic in as much as new constructions are undertaken all the time, many
of which fall under the rubric of modernity’s supposed innovations, the
shadows and vestiges of previous, simultaneous, or even nightmarish oth-
erness still haunt those configurations. Anthony Giddens refers to this in-
ternal set of contradictions as “the darker side of modernity,” which is
frequently seen as outweighed by its “opportunity side” (7). Without an ab-
solute historical (and historiographic) beginning and lacking a moment of
definitive rupture, under this schema Mexico’s modernity becomes a sig-
nificantly more difficult concept to quantify as it emerges as a more chal-
lenging notion to narrate. If, as Jameson submits, “tropes are themselves
the signs and symptoms of a hidden or buried narrative” (40), then moder-
nity needs to be considered less a singular conceptual category than chang-
ing narratives grounded in specific spaces and moments.
Illuminating the impressive task of uniting Brazil as a modern entity,
Todd A. Diacon uses the trope of the telegraph wire as “stringing together a
nation” (3). In addition to the power of the centralized federal government,
the extension of health care to even the most remote territory, and the early
twentieth-century universal conscription law, only the lines of the telegraph
wires could establish contact and connectedness across Brazil’s vast geogra-
phies. Thus it is that Brazil is invented and reinvented, as Castañeda proposes,
through the electrified lines laid out under the authority of engineer Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon. This trope reveals the loneliness of the frontier life
for those engineers and telegraph workers who settle an unknown geography
TRACES OF THEORY, TROPES OF MODERNITY 䊏3
which then becomes interconnected in the lightning flash of the telegraph

spark. The intersection of open spaces and closed communication fires up en-
counters across the board, from politics to public works, from family struc-
tures to religious communities. The “Modern Brazil” of his title does not
appear at some absolute date or time, springing out of the vast expanses of os
sertões as wires are stretched across previously open spaces, but as an alterna-
tion of events and encounters among political structures, medical initiatives,
civic rituals, military interventions, international expeditions, industrial in-
vestments, and advances in communications. Singing telegraph wires are the
tropic manifestation (or the Jamesonian symptom) of a narrative of “creative
destruction” that ends with the linkage of Brazilian states unified by certain
ideologies of modernization.
If for the case of Brazil the hope of the “wired nation” (Diacon 16)
trope serves best to address the modernizing forces at work, for Mexico the
ruin solidifies and transforms sometimes ambiguous social experience into a
tangible material form.2 The language of construction resounds throughout
the historical and literary texts issuing forth from Benedict Anderson’s imag-
ined communities as cultures rise and fall, as they erect monuments to their
greatest ideals and seek to prevail over rivals. References to the fashioning of
buildings themselves and to the elucidation of cultural goals through them
abound among the records taken from the stone bases of the pyramids and
the stelae of Bonampak, from the ball courts of Chichén Itzá and the zóca-
los of Spanish settlements; they continue to appear in modern times among
the architects of the political and cultural revolution that began in Mexico in
1910. In a larger sense there is little difference, really, between the organiz-
ing precepts of the builders of Teotihuacán or the designers of the modern
nation. Each sets out a blueprint to serve as the ideal model for conduct and
for belonging to a collectivity. Each envisions what society’s members must
aspire to and makes it visible—in word or image—to all, to either live up to
or fail to attain. Whether among the monumental tombs and mausoleums
Anderson refers to (9), in the crónicas of the conquest that detail the mythi-
cal founding of Tenochtitlán,3 in the blocks of stone that enclose the sacred
spaces of Teotihuacán, or in the philosophical treatises on nationhood
penned by Samuel Ramos we find the accumulated acts of construction of
the nation followed by their remnants.
Taking as a point of departure the double strands of national narrative
the historian Arthur Schmidt attributes to the last six decades of the twenti-
eth century, Mexico may be said to have had two conflicting outlooks—
“revolution to evolution” and “revolution to demolition” (25). The first
would unify the nation under the myth of an ongoing revolution into whose
vessel all historical events would fit. The second is, of course, the narrative of
rupture we have mentioned which mobilizes citizens on the road of moder-

nity from the Reforma onward. Most engaging is the notion of “demolition,”
both as the implied razing of the past and as that “creative destruction”
through which we might cast modernity. Demolition produces ruins of the
cultural as well as of the cement kind. If we turn to Octavio Paz at this junc-
ture, he seems to agree on a very material level of cultural constructs. In
“América Latina y la democracia” [Latin America and Democracy], he writes
that “[l]a arquitectura es el espejo de las sociedades. Pero es un espejo que nos
presenta imágenes enigmáticas que debemos descifrar” [Architecture is the
mirror of societies. But it is a mirror that presents us with enigmatic images
which we have to decipher] (165). Leaving aside the similarity between Paz’s
mirror image and Carlos Fuentes’s use of the “buried mirror” of the Con-
quest, visible supports of modernist ideologies appear to converge on the fa-
cades of the emergent nations as they choose dwellings, offices, stadiums, and
arenas to stand in for their power behind the scenes.
When Ramos addresses the “abandono de la cultura en México”
[abandonment of culture in Mexico] (83) in 1934, after the implementation
of the educational reforms suggested under Minister of Education José
Vasconcelos, he cites a lack of interest in advanced studies and a corre-
sponding loss of respect for intellectual activity as results of this populariz-
ing process in which quantity substituted for quality. The verb he employs
to mark this cultural turn—to him, for the worse—is that interest in higher
education and the life of the mind “ha decaído” [has declined] (83). Such a
crumbling and, in the end, fall indicate that a collective cultural edifice had
been erected to the ideals of the Revolution but that, over time, those same
utopian endeavors had fallen short. The inevitable outcome is “de-
caimiento” or a collapse into decay, ruin, and loss. The radical impulse to
counteract reforms that seem to have run their course comes through in
the language of this philosophical essay on the state of Mexican culture as
Ramos studies the need to construct a new subject confident of the social
and cultural edifice in which he or she lives. The question lies in just how
this might come about and what to do with the material of the demolished
structures. Evolutionary theory requires its preservation; demolition theory
constructs the garbage dumps of cities and ideas.
These philosophical constructions are at once “marvelous and horri-
ble,” in the words of Octavio Paz when he writes of the forces contained in
pre-Columbian sculptural images that apply to theoretical systems as well. He
clarifies that “[h]orror . . . is fear and repulsion, but it is also respect and ven-
eration for the unknown or the sublime. Horror is not terror; it is fascination,
bewitchment” (“Will for Form” 5). A fascination with the evocatory powers of
the artifact (a previous construct in ruin) establishes a link to Benjamin’s third
category of the dialectical model of critique, proceeding beyond forgetting

and mere nostalgia into the realm of analysis. “Bewitchment” with the monu-
ments to a society’s glories is the first model of experience; when only the
traces of those luminous times remain, another sort of fascinating circum-
stance occurs, equal in power but different in form. This is the encounter with
the ruin in Benjaminian terms, what Castañeda calls “a dialogical process of
reflective intercalation” (Museum 17) effected by the questioning subject.
Holding together contradictory elements, what Jameson sums up as “belong-
ing and innovation” (57), the ruin would then place questioning individuals on
double ground, tangibly forcing an encounter with a force field of associations
which had previously been relegated to the more facile continuity/rupture,
evolution/demolition opposites. Both “marvelous and horrible,” modernity
brings entire systems into contention. As Jameson invites readers to think of
this flash point, he reiterates that “the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one
way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative par-
adigms . . . the affirmation of the ‘modernity’ of this or that generally involves
a rewriting of the narratives of modernity itself which are already in place and
have become conventional wisdom” (35–36). So Castañeda’s “dialogical
process of reflective intercalation” is nothing more than the restatement of the
idea that there is no singular modernity (as Jameson’s title echoes), let us say a
European version versus an American one, but a constant, reiterated, and
challenged confrontation of ideologies. Harvie Ferguson elaborates, “Moder-
nity calls into existence, as well as a new social world, new forms of knowledge
and self-understanding” (189). As Jürgen Habermas famously states, moder-
nity is a project never completed (3).
Among the “splendors” (according to Paz) of the unfinished edifice of
what has emerged as modern Mexico, we find temples as well as promises
(the imminent return of the god Quetzalcoatl, for instance, or the capital-
ist dream of Carlos Salinas de Gortari), ethnic mestizaje as well as social rev-
olution, invasion as well as innovation, creation as well as destruction. As
Carlos Fuentes concludes, the “unfinished business” of contemporary
Mexican culture rests on the “concrete problem” embodied in a very mate-
rial structure, which can be used as a metaphor for the “bewitching” en-
counter described above. He writes, “There is a very tall hotel in Mexico
City that has never been finished. Year after year builders add to its height,
but one can always look right through its hive of gaping stones. When, if
ever, will it receive its hypothetical guests?” (Buried Mirror 316). The
empty shell of the hotel-in-progress (even if later completed) is a visible
sign of two simultaneous processes linked to two temporal moments. The
first is the utopian urge of progress and modernization, symbolized by the
upward surge of construction (reflected in official government discourse as
much as it is for Fuentes in sweeping architectural design). Curiously, Paz

mirrors this same notion of “upward thrust” and “vertical movement”
[“Will for Form” 15–16] in construction in his evaluation of the condensa-
tion of time-space symbolism in the architecture of the pyramid. A similar
verticality is at the core of Fuentes’s gaze upon the changing skylines of the
metropolis of Mexico City as it expands and contracts with post-revolu-
tionary design. Calling it “the Cinderella city” during the 1960s (“New
Wave” 126), Fuentes anchors the development of the Mexican nation of
modern times in the surge of economic and architectural development after
the Revolution. The falling away of the previous “mythical facade” (“New
Wave” 128), however, gives way to the ambiguous constructions meant for
incipient tourism and international display. The second process involves
the paradoxical concept of construction-as-ruin since the wearing down of
the girders and scaffolding witnesses the element of time passing, the con-
stant threat of entropy overtaking the forces of construction. The “hive of
gaping stones” simultaneously suggests a drive toward completion and an
accompanying deterioration, for the structure of the hive is both presence
and absence, both stones and spaces. The “hypothetical guests” can only be
intuited, of course, in the interstices, but they form as central an aspect of
this project in their imagined arrival as do the floors and rooms of the
building they will (some day) occupy.
I suggest that the project of modernity might be considered through
this double visual image: a thrust toward the future but a wrenching toward
decay, a “creative destruction” not devoid of brutality in the form of politi-
cal institutions which “operat[e] like a modernizing, rationalizing machine
that k[eeps] turning in disregard of human needs” (Fischer 23). The PRI
(Partido Revolucionario Institucional) [Institutional Revolutionary Party]
created an efficient metro system, luxurious embassies, government offices
on a scale that is able to deal with daily concerns, and even the tourist mecca
teasingly called the Zona Rosa, but what of the killing of students and work-
ers in 1968, what of the buildings devastated by the 1985 earthquake that
never were rebuilt, what of the murder of presidential candidate Luis Don-
aldo Colosio or the lack of housing or potable water for citizens, to say
nothing of the indigenous uprising in Chiapas? The brutality factor could
be analyzed as that which is deemed necessary to keep the machine of
modernity in motion without the intrusion of technological glitches or dis-
sident opinion. The ruin is not an either/or proposition; it is both construc-
tion and destruction. Castañeda finds this very same promising dilemma in
the etymology of the word ruin: “derived from Latin ruina, a falling down,
from ruere, to rush, and origo, to rise—[ruins] entail movements in opposing
directions: a ‘falling down’ and a ‘rising up’“ (“Aura” 452). We cannot lose
sight of the paradox of a city in the throes of ‘progress’ and modernization

evincing not only an image of rising vertically but of static verticality in its
standing in place. The ruins of the modern are not stone but steel; they rust
and do not crumble. Yet the same impulses that apply to the reading of the
ruin of antiquity are found in the paralyzed structure of the real and
metaphorical hotel. Will the building progress or decaer [decline, fall] as
Mexican culture did in the eyes of Ramos? The two tendencies do not can-
cel one another, but like the “dialectic of the break and the period,” coexist
within an ambiguity worthy of critical examination.
Ruins are the result of wear, time’s passage, dilapidation, conquest,
replacement, erosion, abandonment, transformation, or a combination of
these factors. If we speak of ruins in literal terms, we might conjure up
fallen statues, crumbling buildings, remnants of walls or pillars, columns in
decay, arches precariously suspended overhead, rusty bridges long con-
demned to traffic, dusty highways leading to nowhere, or overgrown ar-
chaeological sites in the middle of the jungle. In a more symbolic form,
however, we could evoke complex images of aged human beings whose life
stories are written on their very skin, fragments of cultural detritus col-
lected on library shelves or in museum cases, worn out discourses, or the
ghostly shadows of previous glories embodied in aesthetic or linguistic
turns of phrase. I propose to examine both material vestiges of construction
and deconstruction, and imagined ruinations. In these two strands—the
imagined and the ‘real’—the reader might find narratives of the rise of
modern Mexico and see how they intertwine and collide to produce coun-
ternarratives, where one might imagine a revelation among the ruins. The
writings of Juan García Ponce are the cornerstone of my project, for
among his lengthy and monolithic texts many of these contrary impulses
are brought to light. Let us now frame his literary works in a general cul-
tural edifice of both mortar and image.
From the longer historical perspective, Mexico was invaded in the
sixteenth century by Spanish conquerors who arrived at a period of ‘ruin’ in
the Aztec empire, since by that time it had declined in both royal lineage
and imperial splendor into a killing machine demanding economic and
blood sacrifice to perpetuate its hegemony. Ceremonial buildings and com-
plexes were at their peak, but the underlying narratives of social cohesion
revealed weakened structures of community. As the writer Elena Garro
portrays in her short story “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas” [Blame it on
the Tlaxcalans], the Tlaxcalans were just one of the conquered peoples who
assisted the incoming European soldiers in the hopes of escaping the yoke
of Aztec domination. The process of disintegration of the grand empire
and its grand narratives left the geography and culture(s) in ruins, ripe for
European imperialism and its own narrations of mastery. Yet even this
process produces new forms of narration and constant readjustment. The
remains of this early period lie buried under layers of silt and debris that at-
test to past history, weather patterns, volcanic eruptions, broken dreams,
and collective sympathies. But they also lie beneath newer constructions:
what better way to offer evidence of entropy and decline, vanquishment
and death, than to build atop the old? One system replaces the other, but
the facade gives evidence of (false) continuity. The ruins of the old are also
part of the glorious ‘new,’ for the same stones used in worship of native
deities become the foundations for the syncretic institutions of an idealized
mestizaje. Like the descent into the Templo Mayor in the very center of the
modern Mexican capital or the secret side doors to the Great Pyramid of
Cholula, which sits buried under the church of Nuestro Santuario de los
Remedios, entrances and exits to the discourses of the past can be ‘discov-
ered’ and ‘rediscovered’ through the archaeology of cultural debris. It
would be difficult to avoid seeing the enormous mound of earth on which
the sanctuary sits, or the handrail to the stairway leading down into the in-
ternal excavation, but the path to its heart lies hidden to the eye at first
glance. The physical remains of two cultures lie one atop the other as a
“palimpsest that operates like a ‘text,’ in the sense that Derrida has defined
it: a text is a giant machine for reading and writing other texts” (Castañeda,
Museum 98). It is hardly an unproblematic construction, yet it “bewitches”
the observer in its very problematizing of cultural discourses and counter-
discourses and in its potential as a site for self-fashioning amid contradic-
tion. One is left to wonder whether this giant interpretative machine
functions along the lines of the brutal “modernizing, rationalizing
machine” or if the capacity to rewrite and innovate can win.
Octavio Paz projects a reading of the ruin as text in his collection of
essays entitled Vislumbres de la India: un diálogo con la condición humana
[Glimpses of India: A Dialogue with the Human Condition]. The title it-
self gives the reader a hint that for this particular observer walls, palaces,
towers, and frescoes all provide a glimpse of something more than mortar
and stone. As official ambassador and then as private traveler, Paz experi-
enced an obvious fascination with traces of the subcontinent’s past, which
he then paralleled with Mexico’s own. The ornamental arches, nooks,
niches, corridors, terraces, and gardens he saw upon disembarking from his
ocean liner “son los corredores de un sueño fastuoso, siniestro e in-
acabable” [are the corridors of a magnificent dream, sinister and endless]
(Vislumbres 13). Both glorious dream and endless demonic nightmare, the
colonial architecture of India astonished Paz into a “repentina fascinación”
[sudden fascination] (Vislumbres 16) with the myriad of historical times and
feelings it seems to evoke. The light shining through the crevices reveals
hidden forces at work and secret ideas underlying the construction. In the
mausoleums of vast cemeteries, he contemplated what Anderson proposes
as imagined communities in their own right: “el universo reducido a sus
elementos geométricos esenciales. . . . Abolición del tiempo convertido en
espacio y el espacio en un conjunto de formas simultáneamente sólidas y
ligeras, creadoras de otro espacio hecho, por decirlo así, de aire. Edificios
que han durado siglos y que parecen un parpadeo de fantasía” (the universe
reduced to its essential geometric elements. . . . The abolishing of time
converted into space, and space in a conjunction of forms at once solid and
light, the creators of another space made, as it were, of air. Buildings that
have lasted centuries and that seem only a single fantastic blink {of an eye}]
(Vislumbres 23). Air and stone combine to conjure up collective dreams of
past, present, and future, dreams that seem solid but melt into nothingness.
Even as communities go the way of the ruin, they can be reimagined as
solidly and inclusively utopian collectivities or, alternately, as vast social
projects gone awry. The language of the stones, also reflected in Paz’s po-
etry collection Piedra de sol [Sun Stone], provides the ruins with voices
which he then deciphered for us. These voices seem to call him back to
India time and again after his service as a diplomat ended in 1968, and he
rewrote himself time and again onto the exterior faces of the stones.
If the arrival of European culture and its hegemonic imposition over
former empires did not encounter material ruins per se but ebullient cities,
although the decline of the imperial monarch was evidence of other decay
related to the social and religious structures, this event produced a scenario
for the ruin to become a tourist splendor of modern times. While few
Spaniards would gaze upon indigenous edifices as remnants of better times,
nineteenth and twentieth century archaeologists would find in them what
Laura U. Marks terms “[f]etishes and fossils . . . as two kinds of objects that
condense cryptic histories within themselves. Both gather their peculiar
power by virtue of a prior contact with some originary object . . . Fetishes
and fossils translate experience through space and time in a material
medium” (224). Like a fossil compressed into layers of earth, the “fascinat-
ing” ruins and traces of original Mesoamerican cultures survive compressed
into the “cryptic” monoliths and temples of their modern cities. The fos-
sil’s remains are pertinent as relics of meaning, for they have to be un-
earthed or cleaved from rocks in a secret, primordial landscape. The
“cryptic” nature of the language of the stones (à la Paz in his privileged role
as translator) is doubled by the similarly enigmatic message of the fossil. In
each instance we require an interpreter, but in each we may write our own
version as well. All of these form palimpsestic layers of discursive debris.
10 䊏 MEXICO’S RUINS
The identification of Mexico as a site of ruinous fascination has been

and continues to be a commonplace of guidebooks and travelers alike.
From the popular Frommer to Fodor, from Lonely Planet to the more eru-
dite Knopf Guides, we find a celebration of the ruin as a carved-in-stone
identifying symbol of the nation owing to its mysterious, powerful, and
“originary” link to the past. As a palimpsest, in Castañeda’s terms once
again, we see traces of prior cultures inscribed on the surfaces of these
stones, but we also contribute to their meanings by writing ourselves onto
them and by producing new communities of readers around them. This
discursive practice produces a sense of the subject as it recalls—in Ben-
jamin’s spark of memory recovery—others who then are either wiped away
to produce a clean slate or phantasmatically written into contemporary
narratives of individual and nation. In his meditation on ruins as mainstays
of modern culture, museum director Christopher Woodward argues that
“[w]hen we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To states-
men, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of
mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents
the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or ar-
chitect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the pur-
pose of their art. . . . Each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces
from his or her own imagination and a ruin therefore appears different to
everyone” (2–3, 15). Such a conquering of the forces of amnesia, as Ben-
jamin refers to them, calls on the imaginary to furnish meaning—or not—
for what is present before our eyes. At this moment, then, either a tabula
rasa comes into being (in the schema of the modernist rupture), or a
promising constellation of meanings is evoked. Rather than a true empti-
ness, nevertheless, even the blank slate remains as a material surface on
which shadowy traces might eventually be deciphered. Then, conjecture on
the violence exerted to prevent readers from this text can also be brought
into view.
Nineteenth-century travelers and adventurers rediscovered the world
of Mesoamerican ruins and continued to inscribe on their words, drawings,
and watercolors the “missing pieces” of cultural narrative of which Wood-
ward writes. Classical nudes appear in Jean-Frédéric Waldeck’s paintings of
Maya sites, idealizing human and architectural forms into a harmonious
whole. Europe and America are clearly integrated into some ‘natural’
scheme. In his artistic works the romantic myth of the noble savage acquires
visible form and imbues indigenous feminine form with the whiteness and
roundness of Rubenesque figures. Explorers appear in top hats and cutaway
jackets, indicating with their walking canes the crumbling lintels and door-
ways of Mexican and Guatemalan archaeological sites. No beads of sweat
TRACES OF THEORY, TROPES OF MODERNITY 䊏 11
evident anywhere, these metropolitan travelers stroll the ruins amid jungle
foliage and hard-working natives. Daily life is indeed represented on the
canvases and watercolor papers, but archaeological ruins are the mere back-
drops for such activity. Ruins frame work, but they do not belong to its
world; they are solid evidence of the vestiges of something else. In 1841,
John Lloyd Stephens (United States ambassador to Central America and
budding journal writer) and Frederick Catherwood (the illustrator) pro-
duced two volumes entitled Incidents of Travel in Yucatán that pursue a simi-
lar enchantment with ruins as auratic signs. Both wonderment and loss, they
indicate for two modern Europeans something genuine and legible missing
in their own culture. Stephens writes that his contemplation of such scenes
“inspired in me a state of excitement more acute than any I had experienced
among the ruins of the Old World” (qtd. in Route of the Mayas 131). Their
celebration of this moment in detailed words and images captures the spark
of revelation for both men. Stephens writes that his journey is one of fasci-
nation akin to Paz’s: “In a few years, even these [ruins of Labná] will be
gone; and as it has been denied that such things ever were, doubts may again
arise whether they have indeed existed” (30–31). The old stones of the New
World are the key to these explorers’ enchantment with the hidden ruins
which they offer to preserve in journal and sketchbook lest they disappear
into the jungles or be relegated to the domain of the mirage. While the
Spanish feel no urge to do the same with the buildings they find upon arrival
in a wondrous new world already imagined as utopia, for these represent be-
liefs and systems contrary to Christianity, romantic era wanderers read other
stories into these edifices. But neither roots out contradiction between the
imaginary and the real; a singular thread of discourse winds its way across
stones and rubble to join all together.
After the pathways of the romantics began to recede and become
overgrown as elaborate and aesthetic ruins in progress, another era of ro-
mantic-like fervor accompanied the early twentieth century as Mexico pre-
pared to fight one of the bloodiest revolutions in history. Fellow travelers
such as John Reed, Tina Modotti, and a bit later, Katherine Anne Porter,
and a host of documentary news reporters invaded the country to experience
for themselves the destruction of an old order and the construction of a new
one on its ruins. Most often thought of as a modernist writer, Porter criss-
crossed the border between her native Texas and Mexico in search of an ide-
alized society she thought would provide her with space to develop her
intellectual career as much as it would allow her to find herself. As Thomas
F. Walsh sums up the complex and frequently ambiguous relationship be-
tween Porter and her utopian vision, “[a]lthough Mexico failed her as the
Promised Land she vainly sought, it released her creative energy” (xiii).
Mexico, her Mexico at least, was a catalyst for writing, the source of an
effervescent feeling of personal potential, and the space to recover some
genuine spark of individual freedom she found stifled in the patriarchal so-
ciety of Texas. Several decades after Porter left what she called her adopted
land of Mexico, she wrote of an intimate relationship with that culture, al-
beit a romanticized vision of that relationship. At once a source of pride and
an enigma, Mexico to her is “this sphinx of countries which for every frag-
ment of authentic history yields two riddles” (Givner 22). The contradic-
tions of everyday life and the underlying patriarchy which so reminded her
of Texas are subsumed under the feminine figure of the sphinx whose inte-
rior is the darkness that must be deciphered. Both the sphinx and Mexico do
not reveal their secrets easily, even after prolonged contact with so-called
native informants and with the culture itself. This is an attempt to embody
the mysterious and the impenetrable—Mexican society—and like the mon-
ument itself provides us with a riddle and a ruin at the same time.
Reed’s cinematic version of events in Insurgent Mexico, and the diaries
that inform it, reflect no less fervor than the journals of Stephens and
Catherwood. Half a century later, Reed’s wife, Alma, wrote a piece for Ven-
ture magazine in which she found in a modernizing Mexico the insistent
vestiges of that romantic ruin on whose foundations the new nation will
miraculously rise. To the U.S. market Alma Reed promises that “[t]he
American visitor to Mexico will almost inevitably return home addicted to
archeology. Even if he has managed to resist its lure elsewhere in the world,
he is likely to succumb in this country, where the ruined indigenous cities
are so spectacular . . . A chance visit to one of the many astonishing arche-
ological sites . . . , a chat with an informed guide, is all it takes to produce a
sense of involvement in the fate of the peoples who first civilized our con-
tinent and who left such enduring relics of their mysterious lives” (156).
Such an uncanny experience unlocks some sort of lost connection to a com-
munal past now shared by the traveler confronted by the ruins of his own
(forgotten) past. The “unknown and the sublime” of Paz’s evocation of the
ruin, his sense of combined horror and wonder, echo the Freudian notion
of the uncanny. Articulating the process of psychoanalysis as an entry into
the “strata of mental life” (193), Freud relates the uncanny experience of a
subject to an unexpected encounter with “what is frightening . . . what
arouses dread and horror . . . what excites fear, in general. . . . the uncanny
is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and
long familiar” (193, 195). The “excitation” of fear, horror, and amazement,
for both Paz and Stephens, might be contained in this sense of the uncanny,
for the ruin conjures up something in those mental “strata” long repressed
but still visible in the glimpse of a momentary trace. Benjamin does not
write of the uncanny, yet he might see this same instant as the spark of an
epiphany upon reentering an originary aura of an object in decay.
The consumption of geographies—Oaxaca, Chichén Itzá, Teoti-
huacán, Monte Albán, Mitla, Cancún, Cozumel, among so many officially-
targeted places—as a strategy of knowledge has generated both a lucrative
tourist industry and a self-satisfying act. As Castañeda writes, these pre-
served sites and the “truths” (Museum 4) they reveal about a culture are, like
the Americas for Europeans, there for the discovery or “the rediscovery [as]
an individualizing experience of identity with civilization in opposition to
cultural other(s)” (Museum 3). Ruins confirm presuppositions, present the
jaded with “an adventure,” and “pose a significant challenge to visit,” but
their value lies not in themselves but rather in the persistence of the visitor
to reach the destination (Coe 1). As Andrew Coe, son of the renowned
Mesoamerican archaeologist Michael D. Coe, states in the preface to his
recent volume for travelers, “there are other satisfactions. Once I began
traveling to Mexico on my own, it became increasingly apparent to me that
the ancient wonders of Mesoamerica are not simply the ruins of dead civi-
lizations, but living works of art” (1). These statements would conform well
to Benjamin’s first and second dicta on the resurrection of the past, evoking
personal and cultural memories against the ravages of amnesia. The ar-
chaeological model concerns itself with “the salvation and preservation of
the objects and traces of the past that modern society threatens to destroy”
(Gilloch, Myth 13); this is the preserved site in and of itself, guarded and
set aside from the hustle and bustle of ‘progress’ and assured of being
unchanged despite all the aspects of modernization around it.
The second dictum admonishes those who would forget the past.
This is also assured for the traveler through the establishment of official
INAH sites (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) [National In-
stitute of Anthropology and History]. Both produce the concept of the ruin
as a physical place, as a “wondrous” portal to the past, and as “art.” It is the
dialectical aspect of Benjamin’s proposal that is not implemented in either,
for a “momentary illumination” can only be garnered by that spark which
Benjamin associates with the re-creation of an aura. The aura, for our pur-
poses, is the paradox of Fuentes’s example which makes us stop in our
tracks and contemplate actively, not passively, the ongoing construction of
an edifice. The ruin can lull us to contemplation, mesmerizing us, or it can
shake us into activity and critique as Benjamin so desires. Even before writ-
ing his monumental (and unfinished) work Passages, Benjamin haunts
crumbling city streets (for instance the district of Marseilles known to night
dwellers as “Les bricks”) and the arcades of Paris, not to fall under their
spell but to happen on a chance encounter with the spirits of the ruin in
order to resuscitate his own past. Like the rubble from the shellfish and
oyster stalls of that Mediterranean port city, Benjamin uses mineral images
to portray what is left of past activity embedded in the city’s alleys. Fossils
of previous events litter its streets. For him, they are containers of “shell
limestone” and the “mineral hereafter of sea shells” (“Marseilles” 134) ris-
ing in monumental display along the trajectory of his walks. Peter Demetz
calls these nocturnal descents into the promising urban ruins the scenarios
of Benjamin’s “sensibilities” (x) since they have the potential to elicit so
much from him.
Benjamin’s concept of structure as architectural metaphor extends the
idea of cultural ruin to an entire project, that of modernity, and to the arti-
facts produced within the specific time and place under consideration here.
The discussion on the problematics of contemporary debates regarding the
modern either as a “spent epoch” or as an “unrealized . . . potential” (d’En-
trèves 1) will be extended throughout the chapters of this book. The
“achievements and pathologies of modernity” (d’Entrèves 1), its splendors
and horrors in the eyes of Paz and Fuentes, and its creative potential
through confrontation, will serve our argument related to the language,
contents, narrative structure, and aesthetics of García Ponce’s texts. In these
texts, modern times are neither glorified nor entombed as cemeteries of a
dead past. Instead, cultural construction and demolition coexist as equal
forces, creating something different out of fragmentation and destruction.
In his collection of essays entitled Desconsideraciones, García Ponce advances
the idea that a library shelf may hold the clue to this type of dynamic rela-
tionship between past and present, between insider and outcast, and be-
tween the world and the text. As he casts his gaze over his personal
collection of reading matter, the narrator of “De la ausencia” [On Absence]
sees not only titles and spines of books but empty places previously occupied
by something. Neither a “spent epoch” nor an “unrealized potential,” the
missing books are the objects of contemplation and study, holding a rela-
tionship even in absence. The narrator thinks to himself: “Todos estos de-
talles crean un desequilibrio espiritual que determina nuestra relación con el
mundo y se refleja en otras pequeñas acciones. Nuestra biblioteca está en
continuo movimiento o, como diría Heráclito, en perpetua fluidez. . . . El
agujero que dejan los libros prestados nos obsesiona y disminuye la realidad
de todos los demás anulando su importancia. Sólo queremos saber cuál es
ese libro que tan obviamente falta, que tal vez nunca recuperaremos y quizá
nos era indispensable. Así el vacío, la nada, se hace mucho más real que la re-
alidad” [All these details create a spiritual imbalance which determines our
relationship with the world and which is reflected in other small actions.
Our library is in constant movement or, as Heraclitus would say, in perpet-
ual fluidity. . . . The void that loaned books leave obsesses us and diminishes
the reality of all the rest [of the books], annulling their importance. We only
want to know which is the book that is obviously absent, that maybe we will
never get back, and that perhaps was indispensable to us. In this way empti-
ness, nothingness, becomes even more real than reality] (“De la ausencia”
2001 14). The metaphor of the library shelf and its holdings, then, can even
be a stand-in for the suggestive absences and no-longer-real presences of
one’s surroundings. Books before our eyes disappear into the search for the
ones we can no longer see. Like the layers of silt and debris underlying mod-
ern structures, the laws of the collection of books, the desire to fill shelves,
and the texts as representations of ourselves all underpin that fluidity of
identity we are considering under the aegis of the modern. What better to
evoke the modern sense of confrontation than the dilemma of what to do
about the visible absences: What are the books (ideas) that are no longer
there? Where did they go? What of the faded covers of the books now ex-
posed to sunlight for the first time?
Obviously for the narrator, missing tomes become even more promi-
nent now that they are no longer among their cohorts; both are set into
question by this new relationship. If one creates a library only for it to be
‘destroyed’—perhaps even ‘demolished’—by loaning out material, then
what of the tradition of collection to begin with? Any owner of such a col-
lection, therefore, will be a part of the process of making and remaking it,
of reviewing its contents and its spaces, of providing new volumes to take
the place of the old or, conversely, embarking on a quest to replace the
missing with equal volumes. One constructs a library as one constructs an
edifice (of cement, of ideas); as Heraclitus is quoted as remarking: this is
another venue of fludity and change, of “creative destruction” in the acqui-
sition and dispossession of texts. As García Ponce’s essay ends, the narra-
tor remarks on the ultimate question of this situation: is an absence empty
or filled with something? He notes, ¿Debe dejar de existir el cuadro [o el
libro] una vez que nos ha revelado la pared? Hecho el descubrimiento, ¿no
sentimos que queremos tener a uno y otra? Y del mismo modo: ¿esa ausen-
cia llena de presencia . . . no es el motor de una nostalgia irresistible que
clama por su presencia? ¿Cuál de las dos cosas debemos elegir?” [Should a
painting {or a book} cease to exist once it has revealed the wall {on which it
was hanging} to us? Upon such an uncovering, don’t we feel that we want
to have one just as much as the other? And in the same sense, isn’t the ab-
sence full of presence . . . the mechanism of an irresistible nostalgia that
cries out to be present?] (“De la ausencia” 2001 16). The elements of this
essay are reflective of the dilemmas of the provisional relationships of
modernity: presence of the past in its absent shadows (the faded outlines of
missing books on the wall behind the stacks and related books flanking the
empty spaces), the meaning of the wall or even its potential for an aesthetic
of the void, the choice to fill the spaces or not, and, in the end, the in-
eluctable feeling of nostalgia that demands to take over the situation.
In the context of the ruin as text, we have seen that the traveler or ob-
server writes upon the surface of a constantly revised stone (or other mater-
ial), thereby creating the palimpsestic text. Instead of a whole, the ruin
comprises a collection in which the “fragment” (Hanssen 69) is “superior to
the harmonies of antiquity” (Benjamin qtd. in Hanssen 70). The “exuberant
subjection” (Benjamin qtd. in Hanssen 70) of multiple elements as remain-
ders across the face of the ruin creates a new text, just as in modern times “the
work of art [is] a remnant, relic, or ruin left in the wake of the demise of
transcendent meaning” (Hanssen 3). The text might be there materially but
deciphering it may prove a more difficult challenge. Such a secularization—
reflecting the Enlightenment’s faith in science and reason—exemplifies for
Benjamin “the predicament of modernity” (Hanssen 4).
Now in the text as ruin, I propose that modernity’s successes and fail-
ures are part of the formal properties of the written text itself, encompass-
ing both structure and content. All of the components of “creativity” and
“destruction” contribute to the composition of the ‘new’ through language,
storytelling, and the final product which, paradoxically, is also a part of the
great fluid library of Heraclitus. The structures of ruin and allegory, for
Benjamin, share a certain power of revelation, despite the “demise of tran-
scendence,” for they hint at that previous link now defunct which still man-
ages to survive as a glimmer [vislumbre] amid the cultural rubble. “[T]he
fabricated nature of the artwork . . . , [and] its character as an artifact”
(Hanssen 70) manifest and expose modernity as a construction built of cul-
tural ruin predicated on the fossilized fragments of the past. (This is the
narrative of historical coherence reduced to the detritus of the fragment.)
Of Benjamin’s notion regarding this, Gilloch writes, “The modern [in its
constructs and artifacts] reveals itself as ruin. This notion of ruination is
rooted in a recognition of the importance of an object’s ‘afterlife’“ (Myth
14). The afterlife of both physical ruin and allegorical ruin is inscribed, as
the palimpsest mentioned by Castañeda, on building, geography and, now,
on discourse. For Benjamin, in an instant the “arcane secret [a work] was
believed to hold” can thus be destroyed, and “art’s links to the divine place
(topos) on which the temple or shrine were formerly built” (Hanssen 78)
broken if the trance of archaeological resuscitation is sundered. The cul-
tural present is thus a ruin in itself for it problemizes the link to history and
to the past (the third model in Benjamin’s schema), the perfect analogy of
Jamesonian punctuation and rupture all in one space. What Jürgen Haber-
mas famously and polemically calls the “unfinished project of modernity”

(3) duplicates this concept as much as it points to Fuentes’s unfinished
tower in Mexico City. Both soaring (modern) project and vestigial (incom-
plete) structure, the tower stands as a monument to itself and to the work
of erecting it, but it is also composed of fragments and stands in for the
projects of the past as allegory. So modernity as ruin contains “the highly
suggestive fragment, the chip” (Benjamin qtd. in Bolz and van Reijen 33)
from which life continues to flow.
The two-directional pull of allegory, its reading either as a “subver-
sion of the unifying grasp of systematic philosophy or as a remnant wait-
ing to be redeemed” (Hanssen 83), advances interesting and innovative
possibilities for reading García Ponce’s texts within this model of moder-
nity’s project as it is articulated in the second half of twentieth-century
Mexico. A singular reading of the modern toward which, as Jameson puts
it, “the so-called underdeveloped countries might want to look forward”
as if there were “the illusion that the West has something no one else
possesses . . . but which they ought to desire for themselves” (8) is not pro-
posed. Instead, how Mexican visions of tradition and modernity clash in the
space of the text may construct a new set of questions regarding this writer,
his generation, and the responses of the subsequent five or six decades. The
pull of the frequently articulated need for subversion or alternatives and
the equal regard for the role of the ‘new’ meets up with the enchantment of
the remnant across the pages of his novels, essays, plays, and art reviews.
Benjamin’s redemption comes to us disguised as ceremony, but even in
what appear to be secular works the writer presents us with allegories re-
lated to some lost, sacred sense of the past somehow surviving amid today’s
world without anomalies. The very ambiguities produced by the collision
of these fragments is what Benjamin celebrates in allegory’s “excess of sig-
nification” (Hanssen 83). The result proves to be an expected clarity that
becomes muddled, but muddled in a positive sense, for this is how Gid-
dens’s “darker side” of modernity illuminates the “opportunity side” to pro-
duce questions about false security and hidden dangers, great risks amid the
blind trust of a project (Giddens 7). What by now most Mexicans join other
cultures in regarding as “a fraught and dangerous world” (Giddens 10) rests
on a number of assumptions which need to be clarified (or revealed
through allegory) as myths, especially in light of the everyday violence
which has escalated in order to keep stories of progress alive. There is pos-
sibly no better rhetorical figure than allegory with all of its convolutions
and excesses to approach García Ponce’s style and themes and to reveal the
obscure recesses of Mexican modernity. The density, accumulated layers,
and language and images that fold back on themselves and constitute his
texts are nothing if not baroque allegories of the contradictions of the mod-
ern in this particular version. These complex tropes and contradictory fig-
ures are the sites of further critique and investigation.
The sexenio [six-year term] of each Mexican president creates the
scaffolding for the construction and implementation of promises made
during each electoral campaign by both party and nominee. From the
1920s to the crisis of 1968, the Mexican State seemed to define its role in
the modernization of the country as the promoter of a cultural production
parallel to material urban development. On the constantly evolving land-
scape of urban Mexico, each president has inaugurated monuments in the
form of public works visible to natives and tourists alike. What Claudio
Lomnitz calls “the factory of Mexico’s ruins” (212), this emphasis on struc-
tures includes the substantial contribution of the federal government to the
arts, sciences, and public image of modernization across those decades.
Lomnitz writes of the “personal signatures” of these government sponsors
as the motivations for their construction, but the same monuments become
new ruins in their own right. In keeping with our previous consideration of
the ruin as physical construction and as allegorical trope, Lomnitz concurs
with the assessment of this double model. He observes that “[a]lthough the
discussion of modernist ruins usually brings to mind housing projects, hos-
pitals, bridges, and basketball courts, Mexico’s cultural world is also littered
with these ruins” (214). We could find ruins not only at sites such as Monte
Albán, but also at archaeological parks, the UNAM (Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México), and the Mayan Riviera.These ruins help in the pro-
motion of tourism by attracting dollars and euros. If Octavio Paz grants a
“bewitching” quality to earlier monuments, postrevolutionary Mexican
writers and artists find themselves within the spaces of even more fascina-
tions and contradictions.
On the one hand, commitment to continuing the goals of the popular
Revolution (without interruption, as evolutionary) finds its voice in Agustín
Yáñez, Jaime Torres Bodet, and muralists such as Diego Rivera, José
Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. On the other, those intel-
lectuals who reject the official monumentalizing forces of the State-led con-
struction of modernity emerge as significant counterpoints to the products
of the culture “factory,” contributing to the “demolition” of the historio-
graphic connection but extending a new vision of a modern nation. One of
the pivotal figures taking a critical public stance toward this hegemonic ide-
ology, Juan Vicente Melo, clearly states the motivation of the second group
of intellectuals: “Esta generación ha alcanzado una visión crítica, un deseo
de rigor, una voluntad de claridad, una necesaria revisión de valores que nos
han permitido una firme actitud ante la literatura, las otras artes y los demás
autores. Cada uno de los miembros de esa supuesta generación [la denomi-
nada ‘de medio siglo’] . . . ha alcanzado . . . responsabilidad y compromiso
con el arte. No es raro que todos nosotros, poetas, novelistas, ensayistas,
campistas, nos preocupemos por la crítica de una manera que, desde hace al-
gunos años, no existía en México” [This generation has grasped a critical
vision, a desire for rigor, a will to clarity, a necessary revision of values that
has permitted us a steadfast attitude toward literature, the arts, and other
authors. Each of the members of that supposed generation {the one called
the Generation of the Mid-Century} . . . has reached . . . responsibility and
commitment to art. It isn’t strange that all of us, poets, novelists, essayists,
improvisational performers, are preoccupied with criticism in a way that, a
few years ago, did not exist in Mexico] (Melo qtd. in Pereira, Generación
128–9). This commitment to something ‘new,’ something that comes about
as a result of a rejection of the official policies of modernization (as under-
stood by the ruling party and its governmental organizations), is the focal
point of a collection of intellectuals who find among the ruins symptoms of
sclerosis and decay. Instead of pure joyous celebration, which the State
sponsors on an almost daily basis in the arts and sports, this generation
seems to obey Benjamin’s mandate for a dialectical rereading of the ruins.
Composed of writers of the likes of Juan Vicente Melo, Inés Arredondo,
Sergio Pitol, Salvador Elizondo, Sergio Fernández, Elena Poniatowska, Vi-
cente Leñero, Carlos Fuentes, and Juan García Ponce, the generación de
medio siglo in Mexico is generally characterized by a dedication to several of
the fundamental features related to the concepts of history and aesthetics we
have been discussing so far. The first shared characteristic is a preoccupation
with the future of the postrevolutionary nation as it begins to traverse the un-
certain and slippery terrain of modernity with the concomitant question of
what to do with the traces and vestiges of a supposedly collective past, and
whether they were or are valid for the rest of the century. As ruins are left to
fall into ruin, what of culture should be saved and what might be cast aside,
what defines the moment in terms of economics, politics, and society, and how
does this dialogue with the past? At the forefront of intellectual debates and
their edification through literary texts are concerns over the remnants of ear-
lier European cultures, the value of indigenous heritage, and the increasing in-
fluence of U.S. culture as the new empire replacing Spain in the Americas.
Should the nation and its inhabitants look inward or outward to provide
sources for new “splendors” (Paz) for a new nation? Jameson’s notion of the
modern being a “rewriting” (35) of other stories joins the debate over the
mechanisms of social institutions such as monetary funds, the media, banking,
the flow of cash and of information and, of course, the institutionalization of
capital. The circulation of notions of modernity, ideas and images, and money
occurs as older faith (if any) takes on the risks of the new economics and as the
security promised by the State to its citizens begins to be conceived by at least
some of them as danger. One might look to the Olympic Games and subse-
quent political repression of 1968, to the government’s inadequate response to
the victims of the 1985 earthquake, to the stolen presidential election of 1988,
or to the defeat of the seventy-year reign of the PRI in 2000. Are these in-
stances of what Schmidt calls “nation building” or “nation destroying” (31)? Is
this the triumph of modernity (if we consider it as a singular goal)? Or are
these moments punctuated by both endings and beginnings, by the Marxian
seeds of a culture’s own destruction sowing themselves in different ways?
Is reconciliation at all possible, between the global and the domestic, the na-
tive and the foreign, or what critic Maarten van Delden refers to in the works
of Carlos Fuentes as “the ongoing tension . . . between nationalism and
cosmopolitanism . . . [f]or each pole of the opposition simultaneously reflects
and resists certain key traits of the modern era” (9)? The “reflection” and “re-
sistance” within the same text or image or ideology present once again the
Jamesonian dialectic of periods and renegotiations.
Melo and the others created their own cultural outlets in opposition to
the purportedly splendorous Mexican diorama of the sacrosanct values and
achievements of the Revolution. In this sense, even the image of the Revo-
lution, and perhaps especially so, becomes a ruin for it is always pronounced
as unfinished and each building, statue, column, and amphitheater erected
forms part of the monumental project. Modernity and the Revolution go
hand-in-hand in this official scenario for both, if we again follow Habermas,
are works in progress and goals yet to be met. This is the evolutionary stan-
dard across which periodically the nation is asked to stand back and take
stock of things before moving on. But, for others, the myth and the “mys-
tique” (Poniatowska, Foreword xi) of the popular uprising earlier in the cen-
tury against social injustices and the culture of poverty meets the new myth
of the modern in a less synchronized form and less coherent continuity.
Some of the conduits of cultural difference for intellectuals such as these in-
clude the creation of literary supplements to newpapers of mass distribution;
the introduction of writers’ workshops in public universities; the translation
of modern authors from Europe and the United States; the discussion of
philosophical thought from sources such as Herbert Marcuse, Georges
Bataille, and Theodor Adorno; and the opening of avant-garde film cycles
with the participation of both European and American directors, including
Spaniard-in-exile Luis Buñuel. All of these cultural structures give voice to
a stake in the crucial debates surrounding modernity and its implementa-
tion, either in an official sense of “opportunity” or as a darker and more
troubling yet equally creative challenge. They do not merely critique the
legitimacy of the enterprise of the State, with all of its ceremony and ruinous
display, but they also address the issues central to modernity’s debates, which
Lomnitz concludes to be “[t]he central axis of cultural modernity—which is
a productive relationship between science, art, and the constant improve-
ment of the quality of life (‘progress’)” (214). Just how might such a produc-
tive relationship be articulated, especially in terms of economics and
culture? How might the promissory tone of emancipation and enlighten-
ment through ‘progress’ be achieved and what might it take to get there?
Who benefits and who sacrifices for the good of all? Gilbert M. Joseph,
Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov address the grand narrative about the
postrevolutionary era as an evocative tripartite mural composed, beginning
on the left-hand side, of President Manuel Ávila Camacho spouting off on
the end of earlier anticlericalism, a middle panel filled with the blood of sac-
rificed students in 1968, and on the right the implementation of neoliberal-
ism under Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Salinas (3). How does the narrative
pass from a national economy to a national collapse and how does one tell
the story of the parts in-between? We shall address a variety of García
Ponce’s texts from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century with
these inquiries in mind, carefully looking at the related concepts of “eman-
cipation” and “enlightenment,” and watching out for living remnants of
previous tales as well as new roles for the storyteller.
Addressing forms that range from clothing styles to automobile mod-
els, García Ponce writes of the difficult yet provocative relationship between
“lo viejo y lo nuevo” [the old and the new] in an essay of the same title. He
writes, “Estamos en continuo movimiento. Lo de ayer se aleja y se queda
atrás, perdido para siempre, con una rapidez alucinante. En medio del vér-
tigo, viviendo dentro del espíritu de la época, uno no tiene tiempo ni
siquiera para volverse y contemplar sus propias estatuas de sal. Estas caen al
vacío, destruidas antes de alcanzar forma. Y sin embargo, en medio de la in-
interrumpida desaparición de lo nuevo, persiste la nostalgia hacia aquello
que, por su misma lejanía, aún podemos recordar como viejo. Apresado en
los cambios incesantes, lo nuevo no llega a ser; en cambio, tenemos lo que
fue” [We are continually on the move. What happened yesterday fades away
and remains behind, lost forever, with hallucinatory rapidness. Amid the
vertigo, living in the spirit of the time, one doesn’t even have the chance to
look back and contemplate his or her own statues of salt. These fall into
oblivion, destroyed before they can take shape. And nevertheless, in the
middle of the uninterrupted disappearance of the new, a nostalgia exists to-
ward what, owing to its real remoteness, we can still recall as old. Trapped
among endless changes, the new never comes into being; instead, we have
what used to be] (“Lo viejo y lo nuevo” 2001 19). Caught by the past, one is
inexorably pulled toward the future like the image of Walter Benjamin’s
Angel of History. Despite the urgent desire to move on, something like un-
wanted nostalgia will not let the spectator be free. The contradictory statues
of salt that spring fully formed in the dreaming mind of the individual never
come to fruition but never fade away either. Time passes—from Ávila Ca-
macho to Salinas, let’s say—but “living in the spirit of the time” each round
requires one’s complete attention to the horizon of the ‘new,’ or vertigo will
spin us out of control. Jameson reminds us that there is a “distinction be-
tween novus and modernus, between new and modern. Can we sort this out by
observing that everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new
is not necessarily modern? This is, to me, to differentiate between a personal
and a collective (or historical) chronology; between the events of individual
experience and the implicit or explicit recognition of moments in which a
whole collective temporality is tangibly modified” (18). The dialectic be-
tween “living in the spirit of the time” and taking stock of one’s own “stat-
ues of salt” enters into Jameson’s description of the “personal” intersecting
with the “collective” and, often, not having the chance to sort out the rela-
tionship(s) between the two. Less a question of the new intruding into the
recollection of the old, the disjunction between the two is much more a sig-
nal of the modern dilemma than its prescribed outline. Just how García
Ponce’s narratives will tell this story is the subject of this book.
If we return to the question of the narratives of history, on the one
hand, the emergence in Mexico of the Onda [Wave; Being on the Right
Wavelength; Being Hip] during the mid-1960s reflects the transcultural in-
fluences of popular U.S. music, spoken language, youth fashion, commer-
cial cinema, fast food, and slick media. A change from previous cultural
influences, what Carlos Monsiváis terms a move toward “otras vivencias
culturales” [other cultural lifestyles, other ways of living] (Monsiváis, “Cul-
tura” 1500), this movement provides the narration of the new and the old
with new language, new ideals, new rhythms, and a new economic turn
from “la Cultura Universal . . . [al] bienestar de la sociedad de consumo”
[Universal Culture . . . to the good life of consumer society] (Monsiváis,
“Cultura” 1500). Such cultural artifacts are, then, new to whom: To the so-
ciety at large as a “vivencia cultural” or to the individuals composing the
youth movement? Are these, as Monsiváis sees them, part of a desire to be
avant-garde (1500) or do they evoke the dangers and the fears of modernity
by dragging with them the baggage of the dark side as well as the side of
economic opportunity as Giddens has claimed? On the feet of many young
people, the native-made sandals known as huaraches made of old tire treads
(the ruins of a previous cultural heritage and a modern mode of transport)
become a statement of international modernity for some, while they also
signal a reconsideration of the old, the past, and the national. The official
discourses that recover folklore as the cornerstone of the nation are sub-
verted through consumption into so-called avant-garde indigenous looks
(Zolov 257). So the reading of a pair of rudimentary sandals might feed
into our idea of allegory and the trope of the modern as well if we find in
them a relic of the past cast into the role of the present by both the State
and the so-called counterculture group.
Unlike the youthful writers of the Onda who look northward for
totemic forms of transnational movements and groups which can be ap-
propriated for other uses and other places, García Ponce does not find the
only signposts for alternative nation-building there. Rather, he picks up the
dilemma of the two-in-one, the period and the continuation of the modern,
in his vision of Mexico’s present. In the same essay “Lo viejo y lo nuevo” he
examines the aesthetic of uncontrolled urban development in Mexico City
and finds two ruins coexisting: “Lo viejo reaparece contaminado por lo
nuevo, intentando ser nuevo, y esto mediante la inmediata aceptación,
como elemento integral, de uno de los rasgos más característicos de nues-
tra época: lo gratuito” [The old resurfaces contaminated by the new, try-
ing to be new, and this is done by means of the immediate acceptance, as if
it were an integral element, of one of the defining attributes of our time:
superfluousness] (“Lo viejo y lo nuevo” 2001 22). The gratuitous appear-
ance of old and new pretending to be innovative, whether on the facade of
a building or on the feet of an adolescent, does more than create an avant-
garde aesthetic; it points out incongruities but it also calls the attention of
all spectators to the consumption of the image. The first Spanish meaning
of the word gratuito is “free,” but the cost of exhibiting these images and
ideologies is much more financially oriented than ‘without cost’ would lead
us to believe. In cultural terms, nothing is free. Inhabiting that very prob-
lematic space where modernity pitches its most fervid battles for cultural
and economic control, García Ponce fills a Mexico City of the imaginary
with phantasmagoric signs of past and present in constant collision. In that
nightmarish space of opportunity (for some) and danger (for others) he
finds remnants of European discourses and American narratives left over
from previous encounters hiding behind facades of new nationalist rhetoric
and new youth culture. The boulevards of that megacity, its sports com-
plexes and tourist Zona Rosa, its television studios and discotecas, all appear
in dream form on the pages of his novels. From their whirlwinds emerge
characters on ritual display caught up in the pageantry of modernity and,
more often than not, trapped by it. If the modern is the moment, then
more are asphyxiated by it than those who found the air to be clear in 1959
with the representation of the same city by Carlos Fuentes. The ceremonial
centers of Teotihuacán might be emptied of practitioners, but new sites

abound infused with remnants of other societies and other cultures obey-
ing their own new rites. These spaces and their architecture are the monu-
ments to many of the hopes of the twentieth century; these are a
combination of the mundane and the uncanny which allegorically open up
the cityscape into its contradictory fragments. Mexico City is the stage on
which the allegorical story of the new Mexico will take place and García
Ponce turns to for it most of his fictional settings. Even if characters return
to the provinces, drawn by the survival of old myths, they inevitably must
repay the sins of these departures and live once again in the city.
We might now view this as the second shared characteristic between
García Ponce and other writers of the generación de medio siglo: a vision
of the metropolis as the privileged space of modernity, whether seen as
“pathology” (d’Entrèves 1) or as celebration or, sometimes, as both simul-
taneously. While not all of his narratives are set completely in this venue,
Mexico’s capital forms the crucible for the working through if not the
working out of modernity’s deep-seated tensions. If Benjamin considers the
French poet Charles Baudelaire the figure that gives “voice to the shock
and intoxication of modernity in Paris; . . . as the lyric poet of the metrop-
olis . . . who [sought] to give voice to its paradoxes and illusions, who par-
ticipate[d] in, while yet still retaining the capacity to give form to, the
fragmented, fleeting, experiences of the modern” (Gilloch, Myth 134), then
we may now look to García Ponce as the Benjaminian or Baudelairean
‘poet’ of the Distrito Federal. Just as in the nineteenth century Parisians
dreamed of themselves as inhabiting the great new imperial capital of the
modern world, and just as they saw something of the hero of that world
every time they looked in the mirror, so Mexico City is transformed in the
twentieth century into modernity’s ruins filled with both the mundane and
the uncanny, with loss and expectation.
Populated with ghosts, disembodied voices, and crumbling architec-
ture, García Ponce’s narrators’ Mexico cannot be placed on a map. This is
not the Mexico of the tourist guidebook, but it certainly contains the re-
mote echoes of the Romantic wanderer, the archaeological explorer, and
the utopian dreamer. It also functions as an allegory of the entire nation-
building process, and is composed of problematic and intersecting rela-
tionships among many disparate elements. The city provides for García
Ponce a kaleidoscopic background for his novels, essays, plays, and short
stories between the 1960s and December 2003 (the time of his death). The
characters in his fiction wander through urban spaces, landscapes of mem-
ory, literary spaces (in their homage to other authors and other fiction), and
spaces of the psyche in search of some sense of subjectivity and roots amid
the ruins of change and innovation. If they live during a time of feeling the
pull of the modern, then they fall into García Ponce’s critical space of en-
counter between the new and the modern, the individual and the collective,
the period and the rupture. These figures embody not cold, distant, remote
observers but are, like Baudelaire before them, fiery, tortured, exuberant,
and even celebratory—souls seeking bodies that will not fail them in their
desire to experience all of the anomalies of modern life. Like the coexis-
tence of the BMW and the Volkswagen on the streets of the capital, the
bathing costume and the briefest bikini on the beaches of Acapulco, the an-
tiguas casonas [old mansions] and skyscrapers on the Paseo de la Reforma,
the human body and its constructs are the only set on which this challenge
can play out. Set against the excesses of urban allegories, García Ponce’s
characters are both subjected to the rituals of modernity and are subjects of
the same. As such, they are the true heroes of the modern age in that, like
Benjamin, they fall into the purview of critique and not of nostalgia. Ben-
jamin writes of such individual subjects that these survivors are “the true
subject[s] of modernity . . . [for] it takes a heroic constitution to live the
modern” (qtd. in Osborne 81). Given the fact that there is no return, what
remains, if anything, is individual redemption among the ruins. As García
Ponce sees it, the risk and the danger of this newness is that entropy comes
quickly, the “modernos edificios . . . se hacen viejos de inmediato, ame-
nazando con convertirse en ruinas” [modern buildings . . . age immediately,
threatening to become ruins {almost as soon as they are built}] “Lo viejo y
lo nuevo” 2001 22). He cites Walter Benjamin’s desperate attempt to “sal-
var lo muerto, trayendo lo viejo a la vida otra vez, con la esperanza de que
mediante esta operación se conservara su esencia humana” [salvage what
has died, bringing it back to life again, in the hope that through this oper-
ation its human essence might be preserved] (“Lo viejo y lo nuevo” 2001
20–21) not as a temptation but as a danger. If individual as well as collective
life is characterized by constant change, then there is not a permanent
essence to resurrect. Yet the hope of finding oneself amid the ruins may be
the true object of this operation.
Let us focus for a moment on the figure of the Ángel de la Independen-
cia [Angel of Independence] at the heart of Mexico City as an icon of Mexico’s
path toward modernity and, as an allegorical figure, a ruin of that very move-
ment toward some general vision of ‘progress.’ Situated near the crossroads of
two symbolic boulevards—Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Insurgentes—
and overlooking the Zona Rosa, this androgynous gilded figure looks out over
the vast extension of the urban landscape and has been a mute witness to
earthquakes, floods, strikes, demonstrations, political repression, monumen-
tal traffic jams, and raucous celebrations of soccer victories. It has been an
eyewitness to the spectacle of modernity played out at its feet and to the phan-
tasmagoria of daily violence which accompanies the spectacular. This angelic
form echoes Benjamin’s Angel of History in that it sits astride the allegorical
ruins of past and present, from its perch on the column, casting its gaze out-
ward and upward toward what used to be, but which has been covered over
with the veneer of utopian dreams. Far more than the statue of salt alluded to
by García Ponce, the angel is solid and, except for brief falls from its pedestal
owing to the trembling of the earth, fairly permanent on the horizon.
So often referred to as an angelic figure, this metaphorically fallen
angel (perhaps even demonic, for it has been cast into the thick polluted at-
mosphere of the largest city on earth) can be anthropomorphized as Ben-
jamin has done to Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. The painted image
Benjamin examines turns our gaze to this statue as a witness to history. Seen
as decay that is constructive, the producer of debris that marks a simultane-
ous building up, the origins of the pile on which the angel sits: “The An-
gelus stares open-mouthed at the pile of rubble that human beings have left
behind them in history” (Bolz and van Reijen 42). Astounded at the enor-
mity of the ruins, perplexed by the whirlwind that drives it forward, the
angel remains at the crossroads, agape yet seemingly powerless to respond.
If the angel is mute, however, García Ponce breathes life and voice back into
this allegorical monument to independence, aesthetics, and maybe even
progress amid the melee of the modern. It is imbued with a narrative voice
not bereft of paradox, criticism, and irony. The observer’s gaze is swept up-
ward by the force of the floating angel’s golden brilliance atop the pillar; the
city’s gaze is oriented in the same direction if we consider the pull of
‘progress’ and modernity in terms of lofty, celestial goals. But again we find
the duality of the image, for if one looks skyward, one is propelled loftily
forward even as the second allure is a downward fascination (à la Paz) with
the earthly, flesh and blood, bricks and mortar, and steel girders of moder-
nity’s constructions. As the Zona Rosa has fallen into decay, now deemed by
jaded inhabitants the Zona Negra [Black Zone] for all the political corrup-
tion that has led to its demise, and the drugs and crime associated with its
geography, the angel can now turn 180 degrees in search of miracles. On the
opposite side of the avenue from the previously Pink Zone, just across from
the crumbling movie theaters, condemned nightclubs, questionable bars,
and cheaply decorated Pizza Hut storefronts, lie the new Bolsa de Valores
[Stock Exchange], banking centers, mercantile headquarters, and glass sky-
scrapers erected as signs of twenty-first century Mexico. The State never
ceases to dream, even as the city collects the remnants and fragments of for-
mer fantasies-turned-nightmares on its public face.
CHAPTER TWO
The Storyteller’s Ruins
I
n David Scott’s examination of “political presents and . . . reconstructed
pasts and anticipated futures” (1) in the nations of the Caribbean basin,
he points out the urgent need to avoid viewing modernity as a single
point or goal in the future, as “the larger developmentalist narrative of
modernity” (113). In contrast, he underlines the fact that a more culturalist
reading of modernity is a “kind of acculturation story, the story of innova-
tion within adaptation” (113), leading to multiple visions of the modern and
alternative views of how (or why) to strive for such objectives. As one might
surmise, this movement would involve the construction or “invention” (113)
of alternatives to dominant systems. Such a view implies a reconception of
modernity in opposition to another image. The implication is that there are
two differing strands of narrative involved. As Jameson sees this, it is instead
a symptom of a “political discursive struggle” (9) over the implementation of
a free-market system of economics or the reliance on some sense of ‘native’
alternative. As he concludes, “adversaries of the free market . . . can only be
classed in the negative or privative category of the unmodern, the tradition-
alist” (10). Rather than invent new terms for the internal elements of the
polemic of modernity, let us instead open up the term to all of the periods
and breaks of the dialectic in the Mexican context. Not a conscious decision
but an ideological remnant, what story to tell and how to tell it come into
focus within the larger arena of incipient capitalism and social change. One
cannot ignore the conditions in which Mexicans will make their lives in
order to find the variables between action and restraint, between choices
and limits.
Between 1932 and 2003, the duration of García Ponce’s life, seven
decades of “electoral enthusiasm . . . and sincere disillusionment” (Gut-
mann, Meanings 164) occurred, public politics and private desires collided,
the concept of legitimacy was on trial at every turn, the rituals of democ-
racy played out or were thwarted, myths rose and fell, popular culture vied
䊏 27 䊏
for power with elite culture, regionalism and the urban center continually
clashed, screen actresses became elected congressional delegates, the
Olympics came and went, immigration rates rose to record levels, tourism
peaked and waned, privatization took over real estate, politicians and their
friends became richer, the model of ejido agriculture all but disappeared (ex-
cept at limited and publicly-televised moments), women banged on empty
casseroles in the streets, the PRI was defeated at the polls to make way for
the PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional) [National Action Party] as an open-
ing to the new, Marcos and the Zapatistas emerged from the jungles of
Chiapas to resuscitate the utopia of a long-dead revolutionary leader, and
the social project of the Revolution survived in discourse if not always in
practice. As practiced by the undefeated ruling party for seven decades,
politics as an industry in and of itself began to be challenged by what Jame-
son has been sustaining all along: capital. The narratives of authority and of
authoritarianism met the narratives of neoliberalism and of the liberation
of the free market. The tilt toward determinacy regarded as a fixed part of
the former—State, local, familial rule—met up with the more indetermi-
nate, reaching a crisis in 1968 and again in 1988. Schmidt refers to this dis-
equilibrium as “a less than almighty state” (37), but for our intents and
purposes it can also signal the break and period of the modern.
If we were to map out García Ponce’s early life according to his own
words we would encounter a “porosity” (Gilloch, Myth 66) between mem-
ory and event reminiscent of Benjamin’s writings on his own relationship
with the city of Berlin. Rather than walls—the backyard “bardas” (García
Ponce, “Mi última casa” 43) of piled up stones dividing the family property
in Yucatán from the next family’s plot of land—separating the two spheres,
memory and desire intersect in the story line to produce dual narratives as
‘city-like.’ The dense networks of streets and alleyways are like the knotted,
intertwined threads of memory which feed into the written text. “The open
spaces . . . are like the voids and blanks of forgotten things. Lost times are
the overlooked places” (Gilloch, Myth 67). The work of remembrance is,
like modernity, dialectical. Places and events do not inhabit separate
spheres, but rather coexist in the recollections of the narrator, frequently
casting the irrecoverable moment in time as a space instead. Throughout
García Ponce’s narratives, half-preserved and half-forgotten, half-lived and
half-invented episodes dot the landscapes and surround the characters, one
of which he himself often becomes. Benjamin begins and ends in the city,
yet García Ponce’s version of the city is informed by stories woven from
earlier personal history in the provinces and coexisting with issues con-
fronting all of Mexico. His early days in Yucatán cannot be recovered in a
more literal sense, much as Mexico cannot really propose in any viable way
THE STORYTELLER’S RUINS 䊏 29
a return to some traditional past, some moment before conquest, some red-
letter day when the Revolution was ‘won.’ All of these are cast into narra-
tive structures of gain and loss, evoking euphoria and misery in the very act
of narration.
Allegorical in form, and often fragmentary, the narrative structures of
his fiction, essays, and short stories are more urban labyrinth than open
field, a combination of archaeological strata, involuntary memory, and
cityscape. Just when a storytelling voice seems to be stringing together a
chronological sequence, or so one might hope, readers are presented with
rupture and discontinuity. Allegory functions to produce this, to throw the
sight of the unexpected into the eyes of readers, to interrupt the flow of dis-
course, to uncover the bizarre amid modern amnesia. In the face of the
struggles between a vision of the nation as uninterrupted tradition and the
nation as innovative, modern, and cosmopolitan, perhaps it is to be ex-
pected that narratives such as these reflect those same problematic encoun-
ters. At these intersecting places, the whole of “truth” (Castañeda, Museum
3) meets the ruins of critique, and Benjamin’s model of dialectical archae-
ology (the excavation of sediments of the historical and the personal) kicks
in. If the project of the State is to solidify the supposedly singular social and
economic structures of modernity inside the facade of national history,
then one would have to rummage around the ruins of culture to unearth
the contradictions artificially binding them together.
In the ceremonies evoking his childhood memories, García Ponce ex-
plicitly clarifies that what he revisits are remote instants and fragmentary
sites. When he recounts life before the D.F., he says that it is “la experien-
cia que hubiera deseado tener, la experiencia que imaginé” [the experience
I would have liked to have, the experience that I imagined] (Ruffinelli 24),
not a solid and complete life story. A parallel to an “idealized monument
to the image of [a nation’s] dreams” (Bruce-Novoa xii) could not be further
from his imaginary recollections. A monumental structure cannot be built
to last from the bits and decaying remnants of a past history, since the
monolithic story on which it might stand does not hold. From his experi-
ences as a Boy Scout on an expedition to the ruins of Uxmal, Chichén Itzá,
and other tourist sites of the peninsula, García Ponce eschews narratives
of glorious structures in decay and heroic acts of surviving the insects of the
jungle to focus on his grandmother’s burning of ticks, on the sounds of na-
ture before tourism arrived, and on the deeply fascinating but equally ter-
rifying waters of the sacrificial cenotes. As he writes, that “más que cualquier
ruina” [more than any ruin] (“Infancia” 21), his experiences of the land-
scape take precedence. He recounts what we might consider a momentary
break and period of modernity seen both through the eyes of the adult in
the city and those of the child in the provinces. The Ferrocarriles de
Yucatán [Yucatán railway] is a perfect example of the economic and social
ferment in Mexico’s encounter with modernity. As he retells his own child-
hood, this innovation in transportation is narrated in two ways. The first is
through the youthful game of placing bottlecaps on the rails to be crushed,
forming thin disks of metal. The boys then made holes in the centers,
strung the disks on string and swung them at one another in mock battles.
Dividing the world into friends and enemies, they sought to vanquish
through pain: “se trataba de cortar el hilo al contrario, con lo cual el disco
podía cortar al enemigo” [the goal was to cut the string of the enemy, so
that the {freed} disk could cut him {to bits}] (22). The fact that this so-called
game was prohibited by all of the families involved only made it more at-
tractive to the boys. Forbidden games lead to hidden ones, and readers may
not be totally surprised to find that “lo practicábamos religiosamente” [we
practiced {them} religiously] (22). While the nation appeared to be absent,
it was merely hiding behind the innocence of these adolescents in all of the
‘freedom’ and glory allowed by their class.
The second aspect of the railroad system is the narrator’s deployment
of its use as a symbol of the modern against the highways of the 1990s that
run parallel to its now-abandoned tracks. Immediately following the look
back at the innocent games of the bottlecaps, the narrator turns to his trav-
els on the railroad to and from Mérida and his attendance at a Marist
school. The trip to Campeche lasted seven hours and, even though it began
a two-month summer vacation from classes, it was filled with other types of
emotions that included the walk to the station and the sight of the steam
emanating from the locomotive. He reviews in detail the route of the train
and the final destination: home. His recollections of this modern system—
modern for the times, at least—include the Poeta del Crucero [Poet of the
Crossroads], who composed verses and limericks for the students who
passed through, the food sellers on each town’s platform, the soot that filled
the passengers’ eyes, and the now-disappeared orchards and henequén plan-
tations. If he does conclude that “todo es inolvidable” [everything {about it}
is unforgettable] (23), and if much of what is in his story no longer exists,
then his journey is truly a modern one of periods and breaks for it recon-
nects with a story whose thread has long ago run out but which lives on in
his memory.
As his memories come to a provisional close, the narrator breaks off to
turn, in the subsequent piece, to “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” [Other Voices,
Other Places]. But García Ponce has already experienced another period
and break: an encounter between his parents over his father’s infidelity led
to an imposed reconciliation mediated by the Marist fathers and mandating

the move of the entire clan to Mexico City. The rupture had little to do with
economics as far as the family was concerned, or with the federal politics of
land reclamation, yet it led to a different narrative perspective from the van-
tage point of the urban space in which new social and economic stories were
already being configured. At the age of twelve, García Ponce was absorbed
into the burgeoning metropolis and found that this was “mi destino” [my
destiny] (24), moving from the known to the unknown (as Mexico moved
from the past to the future), leaving behind recognizable faces and places to
resurrect their vestiges in his recollections in the big city.
At mid-century, the urban intellectuals of García Ponce’s generation
confronted a world filled with what Juan Bruce-Novoa calls the “solidified,
if not ossified” (x) postrevolutionary aesthetic traditions of the Mexican
State. Paradoxically allowing for the inclusion of numerous voices, even as
it promoted a single narrative line around which a national image might be
constructed based primarily on past glories and splendors, the State created
a “mystique” (Poniatowska, Foreword xi) about itself that is reflected in the
public works of art it subsidized and promoted. As Joseph, Rubenstein, and
Zolov write, “[t]here is a historical narrative about Mexico after the Revo-
lution that everyone knows” (3). It takes shape in murals, buildings, and
frescoes, in sculptural traditions of the Mexican School, whose vision of na-
tionalism petrified images for all to see. But for those in dissent, those “who
desired new answers for the future” (Bruce-Novoa xii), those children of
wealth and privilege who felt constrained by the single narrative thread of
this univocal history being monumentalized in stone and stucco, that type
of seamless storytelling was a thing of the past. But even as they mourned
its passing, the overwhelming desire to narrate haunted the pages of their
texts. Caught on the horns of a dilemma, these young writers and artists
looked toward a variety of sources and inspirations both inside and outside
the borders of the nation.
In a changing Europe, Benjamin has seen the role of the storyteller in
similar terms, “since the capacity to remember one’s tale and the ability to
narrate it unproblematically have vanished in the modern epoch” (Gilloch,
Myth 69). For him, the aura of the storyteller is broken by the advent of
modernity when the narrative glow no longer possesses the teller, the lis-
tener, and the contents, when “the gentle flame of his story” (“Storyteller”
109) flickers and sputters instead of burning on. So while García Ponce finds
in fiction that both teller and narrative are cultural ruins at this point, that
by having been usurped and cast into the official role of nation-building they
have lost their auratic energy, he does see in poetry, in the cronistas of the
nineteenth century, and in historians, especially humanists such as Alfonso

Reyes and Octavio Paz, a place to “ganar el tiempo perdido sumergiéndose
en esas realidades” [recover the time lost by submerging oneself in those
realities] (“Autobiografía” 504). The “time lost” in prose fiction is recovered,
in a Proustian way as the quote suggests, through the potentials of a new po-
etics and/or a new sense of historiography. Storytelling is the site of the “ris-
ing up” of the new State but, for the opposition, it may entail a “falling
down” (Castañeda, “Aura” 452) into a degraded form from which it may
once again arise, but now with an aesthetically different and critical role than
before. (One might find an echo of the notion of ruin here.) No longer “be-
witching” in fascination, as Paz sees in the splendors of the pre-Columbian
ruins, the duality of the image brings forth the “exaltación y desamparo”
[exaltation and abandonment] (“Autobiografía” 503–4) García Ponce revis-
its in his essays on his early days. As previously stated, allegory offers one way
of exploding the singularity of modernity’s narrative into the breaks and
periods of involuntary memory.
Born in Mérida, Yucatán in 1932, García Ponce spent most of his
childhood in that city, enjoying all the comforts that his connection to the
Barbachano family could offer. A mestizo son of a Spanish father and a Mex-
ican mother, whose privileged family lineage was referred to by inhabitants
of the region as “la casta maldita” [the accursed caste] (“Autobiografía” 506),
he grew up within the walls of a hacienda that protected him from the rest
of society’s evils and whose enclosed spaces were filled with photos and me-
mentos of an illustrious past. The same walls that were built to keep the
family line together functioned to keep out all sorts of social, economic, and
political influences. Any intrusion into that separate space was considered an
invasion by external forces. So President Lázaro Cárdenas’s expropriation of
private property during the 1930s, in an effort to bring land and wealth into
a more egalitarian structure as dictated by the tenets of revolutionary dis-
course, reduced the family’s holdings to a few buildings.
As García Ponce ‘remembers’ those moments, “los hacendados sólo se
quedaron con el casco y las máquinas”[the landed property owners were left
only with the shell and the machinery] (“Infancia”16), effectively enclosing
the storyteller within personal ruins. What once was an elegant country es-
tate turned into crumbling debris, the facade marking its former luxury. I
place the word ‘remembers’ in quotes since, as Benjamin reminds us, narrat-
ing no longer adheres to chronology, linearity, or progress, but rather to the
labyrinth, the spiral, and circularity. Around the memories of those ruinous
past glories, García Ponce constructs new tales in which his own life is just a
fragment among so many others, “a life, incidentally, that comprises not only
his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the story-
teller knows from hearsay is added to his own” (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 108).
The fact that he calls his home a “casco” or shell of something formerly
whole, implies from the outset that García Ponce writes from the inside of
the ruin which both inspires and “horrifies” (Paz, once again). His characters
often gaze through windows toward an outside world that seems to mark
time in a different way, as if in imminent collision with the spaces of the in-
terior. The collection of short stories entitled Cinco mujeres [Five Women] is
filled with such references, and the opening pages of Personas, lugares y anexas
contains a sketch by García Ponce that portrays a tiny writing desk, sheaves
of paper, and an inkwell facing his grandmother’s window, filled with plants,
through which the onlooker is positioned to gaze alongside the writer (12).
In his texts there is a constant and convoluted interplay between pres-
ence and absence, between the material and the phantasmatic, between the
recollection of the past and the mystery of the future. If Carlos Fuentes’s
metaphorical image of Mexico City is summed up in the halfway hotel, the
structure rising and falling on the urban skyline, then García Ponce’s fa-
milial abode is even more unsettling. Lapsing into decay, it is a visible sym-
bol of another time and another story, one which is rapidly changing under
the impetus of the State. On the other hand, the construction phase of the
building reverts to the imaginary alone for there will be no more additions
or innovations to the hacienda; it is at a mournful standstill. Only in the
narrative mind of García Ponce can it be evoked as a remnant worthy of re-
covery: the scars on his body provide the starting point for such stories for
they bring back bits and pieces of the house’s structure where he has suf-
fered some physical or mental trauma—a stairway here, a banister there, a
front door, a balcony, a bedroom, a hallway. But at some point stories fade
into remoteness and decay; they cannot be followed to their beginnings or
to their endings; they are Benjaminian sparks which then flame out. García
Ponce writes of such recollections:
Ahí todo se borra. Otra imagen u otro recuerdo: Jorge,

mi primo, juega fútbol con sus amigos . . . mientras [mi hermano]
Fernando y yo los contemplamos . . . Nadie nos invita a jugar. . . .
Sentimientos de envidia y de inutilidad de la riqueza.
La Villa Aurora está en un barrio apartado, entonces. Tiene un
amplio jardín, patios interminables. . . . En ella estamos retratados
sentados en los escalones. . . . Otra imagen: una fotografía de mi
abuelo junto a una palmera real rodeado por la vasta familia. . . .
Y luego, como en los sueños y en las películas, todo se borra en una
súbita disolvencia con respecto a la Villa Aurora.
[That’s where everything gets blurry. Another image or another

memory: Jorge, my cousin, playing soccer with his friends . . . while
{my brother} Fernando and I watch them . . . No one invites us to
play. . . . Feelings of jealousy and of the uselessness of being rich.
Villa Aurora is in a separate neighborhood then. It has a large
garden, endless backyard. . . . In the photograph we appear seated on
the stairs. . . . Another image: a photo of my grandfather next to a
royal palm, surrounded by his vast family. . . . And then, like in
dreams or in movies, everything fades away in a sudden dissolve as far
as Villa Aurora goes.] (“Infancia” 15)
Figures inhabit an architecture of dreams and memories in his story, frag-

ments like ghosts that peer out of fading facades. They seem to be material
and ethereal at the same time, their faces distinguishable yet elusive. Like
the past, the narrator comes and goes, consuming “the wick of his life”
(Benjamin, “Storyteller” 108) in the telling of his tale. He attempts to
evoke an aura of authenticity in a story that is unsustainable in a traditional
sense of beginning-middle-ending. It starts in mid-feeling (“sentimientos
de envidia”) and it ends in the erasure of the image in the fadeout. The ‘re-
ality’ of his grandfather is evident to him in the quantity of progeny sur-
rounding him, yet he too goes the way of the Villa Real. Both dreams and
movies are composed of fleeting chiaroscuros destined to evaporate into
thin air as one awakens or as the lights go on in the theater. Time, wear,
erosion, transformation, and all other factors that produce the ruin are at
work here.
Once displaced to the metropolis in 1945, García Ponce and his family
could conjure up the walls and buildings of their homestead, and their nar-
rative past, only through photographs and by retreating inside the subcon-
scious. Benjamin explores the “scars” on his own unconscious mind from
events and disruptions like García Ponce’s (Gilloch, Myth 69), relegating
them to the imagined space enclosed on one side by the forces of conscious-
ness and, on the other, by “the fragmentary, disparate data of the memoire in-
volontaire . . . , the principal traces of a person’s past to survive the rigors of
the modern epoch and the demise of conscious recollection” (Gilloch, Myth
69). Caught in the middle, García Ponce’s narrators are spurred by sounds,
smells, and sights of the city to stir up flashes and traces of the past from the
depths of the rubble. Their version of the world never ceases to be a melan-
cholic one built on the faded and cracking images that live amid glorious fes-
tivities of the ‘new.’ There is very little sense of continuity in these texts;
instead, there is a continual punctuation of them by staccato endings and
beginnings. Where might it all lead? That too is an unknown.
In his autobiographical writings, García Ponce claims to have found

pleasure in reading as an escape from the everyday life of his neighbors and
of the factory workers on his father’s henequén estate. The pleasures of such
activities are in some ways the allegories of a class system in ruin, a class
structure that forms one of the building blocks of the edifice of his own (and
Mexico’s) past in transition to a future of capitalist fantasies. Tarzan and
Jane, the archetype of tales of ‘civilization and barbarism,’ formed a center-
piece of García Ponce’s youthful readings. Perhaps reading about the ‘sal-
vation’ of European culture from the clutches of the natives and the
happy-ever-after myth were precursors of García Ponce’s later preference
for things European over artifacts and products of indigenous Mexico, as
they also may be indicators of a felicitous harmony missed in national pro-
jects when they exclude such ‘outside’ influences. Can there be a happy end-
ing if a nation resides only amid its own unpoetic ruins? Or is there poetry
to be found in some different sense than a Romantic escape (either Ben-
jaminian nostalgia or archaeological visitation)? In some cases, both cultural
traditions—the high and the low—are the objects of his parody and of the
allegorical encounters among cultural breaks embodied in the texts.
At the age of twenty, García Ponce embarked on a journey of explo-
ration that built on his earlier interests and that filled the void—another casco
or shell like the architectural one left in the wake of Cárdenas’s policies—left
by the departure from Yucatán with new discoveries which informed all of his
subsequent texts and invoked the “porosity” between event and narrator that
Benjamin explored in Berlin. In what García Ponce frequently calls the great-
est mistake of his father’s life, he was sent on a mission of self-discovery from
which he refused to return for an entire year. His fascination with the cultures
and literary works of the European continent was so complete that he post-
poned reintegration into his family and national scene for over a year. Upon
his return home much later than expected, he unearthed the ruins of his
grandmother’s library of European classics as the visible site of broken con-
nections between Mexico and the Old World. Fragments of the cultural
past represented by these works called up a sort of “involuntary recollection”
(a Proustian yarn in which remembering and forgetting were woven into the
same memoire involontaire) of missing pieces from his own past as told by other
storytellers. He picked up the numerous volumes and picked up their tales
as well. Embedding them in Mexican society once again, García Ponce expe-
rienced something akin to the shock of the urban setting described by Ben-
jamin, an experience of discontinuity that both attracted and repelled him
for the trauma and “horrors” (Paz) it evoked. Already melancholic the first
time around, with his appropriation of them the stories acquired an additional
tinge of loss even as they function as narrative monuments to those moments

and memories.
His relationship with the burgeoning city was one of potential dia-
logue; as the voices in the library spoke into his ear, he heard other voices
around him that contradicted and challenged any singular telling of a tale.
None of them was adequate for the storyteller, since even the cultural build-
ing stones in clear view are like ruins “which stand on the site of an old story”
(Benjamin, “Storyteller” 108). If we consider Benjamin’s schema of “mutual
recognition and illumination” (Gilloch, Myth 13), however, the idea of self-
recognition is now made problematic. Instead of finding himself in the cul-
tural sediment of the nation, García Ponce began to look around and see
nothing but piles of debris. If “[t]he task of the archaeologist is to dig beneath
the surface of the modern city and the modern sensibility it engenders, to un-
earth the evidence of past life and the shocks that have become lodged in the
depths of the unconscious” (Gilloch, Myth 70), then our storyteller retrieved
only chips and shards that piled up at his feet. Rather than facilitate encoun-
ters with others, García Ponce’s narrators are imbued with an experience of
place, with “the sites of our encounters with others and ourselves” (Benjamin
qtd. in Gilloch, Myth 67). The architecture of the city, its half-built high-rises
and planned communities such as Ciudad Satélite [Satellite City], are offi-
cially touted as monuments to a forward-looking State, but felt by narrators
as localities for jarring the memory into storytelling. The narrative voices of
his urban fiction thus form part of the strata of the process of coming-into-
being of Mexico City in its modern guise and are, conversely, what Laura U.
Marks calls the “indexical traces” (227) of the generations inhabiting it. Each
layer of the city, each rereading of a work of fiction from the family library,
sets off “chains of associations” (Marks 227) for García Ponce’s narrators. His
texts are structured around repeated episodes of incursions into spaces that
“disinter” (Gilloch, Myth 70) events and experiences buried inside the per-
sonal and the collective history of the adult. An archaeologist of sorts, Ben-
jamin delves into Berlin’s hidden layers; García Ponce digs up the labyrinth
only to find that there are more questions to what he unearths than answers.
Like the very streets of Mexico City, the lives of his characters are continu-
ally en obras [under construction].
As a vocation, literary studies were not part and parcel of the profes-
sional goals for someone of García Ponce’s social and economic status; read-
ing was a pastime but not an occupation. But it became not merely an
occupation but a preoccupation for García Ponce as he rescued the frag-
ments of European culture cast aside by nation builders as constructive
elements for his vision of the so-called new Mexico, adding them to the mix
that began to settle as contradictions and anomalies came to the surface.

As Monsiváis writes of this generation of intellectuals in Mexico, “[f]rente
a la Historia, la alternativa es otra suprema totalizadora entidad, la Cultura”
[when faced with {the narrative of } History, the alternative is another
supremely totalizing entity, Culture] (“Cultura” 1497). Monsiváis points
out very clearly the switch in register from an official narrative of nation-
building stories linked together across a historical continuity and seen in har-
mony all the way to the horizon of the future, to another all-encompassing
master narrative of Culture. Contrary to European intellectuals of the mo-
ment who witness the decay of old empires in the Old World as loss, García
Ponce uncovers in a ‘lost’ European past residues of cultural energy for
the future alongside the contemporary immersion in popular Mexican and
U.S. cultural artifacts. His ruins, then, are composed equally of provincial
haciendas as monuments to institutionalized power, a traditional class struc-
ture, old money, and an Old World epic while he finds around him new dis-
courses of political power, State centralization, rapid urbanization, economic
projects, cultural contamination by U.S. enterprises such as Sears Roebuck,
the invasion of Hollywood spectacles into Mexican theaters, and the rise
of movies starring the character Cantinflas. A break in chronological narra-
tive structure reflects these profound and conflicting cultural encounters, as
does the use of allegorical characters and situations. García Ponce tells his
readers that this change is, for him, a personal one; Jameson would defend its
ideological base.
[n]o sé si en este aspecto puedo hablar en nombre de mi generación

o sólo a título personal, pero en mi caso, el paso de la costumbre de
gozar de la literatura a la necesidad de estudiarla, el descubrimiento,
obvio y sin embargo desconcertante, de que si iba a escribir escribiría
en México y sobre lo que yo conocía y deseaba expresar, llegó unido
al reconocimiento de una profunda ruptura. El escenario, por ejem-
plo, de las novelas que admiraba se extendía desde San Petersburgo
hasta Nueva York, pero jamás tocaba México.
[I don’t know if in this regard I can speak on behalf of my entire gen-
eration or just for myself, but in my case, the step from the habit of
enjoying literature to the need to study it, and the discovery, obvious
yet disconcerting, of the fact that if I was going to write I would do so
in Mexico and I would write about what I knew and what I wanted to
express, came in tandem with the recognition of a profound break.
The settings, for example, of the novels that I admired, ranged from
Saint Petersburg to New York, but they never had anything to do
with Mexico.] (“Autobiografía” 503)
In the transition from pleasure to “necessity,” from storytelling as enjoy-

ment to storytelling as challenge, the rules regarding the literary text de-
mand that readers delve among the residues contained within and not
merely glance at it for enjoyment, edification, or national glorification. The
sense of “discovery” that to write in Mexico would imply discomfort and
agitation—the combination of “exaltación y desamparo”—cohabits with
the narrator’s recognition that a chasm between his own desire and the na-
tional political culture has yawned. In spite of the fact that some critics have
seen mass culture in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s as a “bridge between the tra-
ditional and the modern, between lo mexicano and the American Dream”
(Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov 11), there is no such facile connection for
García Ponce between inside and outside the nation, between what is na-
tive and what is ‘other,’ between discourses of the past and new media cul-
ture; nor does he represent official discourses on either side of the
“American Dream.” The metaphor of the bridge would not seem to work
for either Benjamin or García Ponce; the fluidity of its construction—
perhaps akin to Fuentes’s high-rise—and the reading of its destination do
not hold for all those who tell the story. There is no such dream in easy
terms: like the figure of the ruin, the dream can be a fascinating hallucina-
tion. In addition, the definition of “lo mexicano” is ambiguous in any case. If
the definition lies in that old storytelling tradition, it has certainly fallen
into decay for narrators seeking other tales and finding greater ironies. De-
spite the confession that it would be indiscreet for him to enter into any
details regarding his parents’ move to Mexico City in 1945, García Ponce
concludes that “[m]i relación con la ciudad de México, más allá de la histo-
ria, es estrictamente personal” [my relationship with Mexico City, beyond
history, is strictly personal] (“Otras voces” 26). There are no bridges to
anywhere but inside the ruinous labyrinths of the narrators themselves, and
they as frequently lead from past to present as they do from material city to
internal images.
As links between the bourgeois culture of Mexico and the aesthetic
traditions of the Old World were not suppressed but celebrated by writers
such as García Ponce, the intellectuals’ place of birth becomes mere coin-
cidence. Destinies and fortunes for writers or artists are bound to other
places and other cultures, not those found right outside their doorways as
if in isolation from the rest of the world. Personal histories, family sagas,
and the quest for the modern all belong to a vision greater in time and
space than their immediate surroundings. Octavio Paz has pointed out as
much in his essay “Will for Form.” Of Mexican history and culture he
writes, “Two civilizations have lived and fought not only across its territory
but in the soul of every Mexican. One is native to these lands; the other
originated outside but is now so deeply rooted that it is a part of the Mexi-
can peoples’ very being” (3). It is that second, insider-yet-outsider, cultural
model which appealed, and continues to appeal, to a large number of artists
and writers who envision their aesthetics in broader, more international
cultural terms and who find the function of the text to contain more cri-
tique than nostalgia, celebratory enhancement of history, or mere archaeo-
logical remembrance. This contestatory cultural exchange based on raising
the ruin as monument to more than an insular past is what Carlos Fuentes
terms the “hidden history” of Latin America or its “unfinished business”
(Buried Mirror 311). Fuentes adds to the layers of inquiry related to the his-
torical rise and fall of Mexican cultures by questioning whether the politi-
cal, cultural, social, or economic factors of this nation can be united to
“finish” the business of Mexico’s modernity, or whether this is an impossi-
ble task doomed to failure. García Ponce, while in the throes of feeling
both “exaltado and desamparado,” comes down on the side of construction
marginally winning over destruction. Perhaps one way of dealing with de-
samparo [the feeling that one has been cast adrift] is exaltación [being excited
or fired up] at the loss and not merely numbed.
After 1950, the social realism of the old masters of the Mexican
School of both literature and the plastic arts was subject to widespread at-
tack by new generations of artists who questioned their filter of a historical
vision.1 Their “zeal for Modernity,” as Monsiváis terms it (79), was to force
a revision of the encounter between the oldest and the newest traditions, to
question the immediacy and inevitability between historical past and cul-
tural present. The other Mexican painting, in particular that done by
Rufino Tamayo, was to become one of the sources of inspiration for intel-
lectuals who seek aperture and not closure. Although he belongs to the
same generation as the “Three Masters” (Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera),
Tamayo’s identification as an aesthetic “synthetist” (Lucie-Smith 112) and
eclectic stylist distance him from the immediate (monolithic) national con-
text. The polemic between generations extended to a particularly acerbic
verbal attack by José Luis Cuevas against Siqueiros, and the young painter’s
admonition to the rest of his cohorts to look beyond the cortina de nopal
[cactus curtain] to renew and revolutionize the national aesthetic. In an era
of muralism and stardom, Fuentes writes of art in Mexico as having
always been allied to mythology. Whether creating a stone pedestal for

the worship of the earth goddess Coatlicue, a gilded temple honoring
Guadalupe, a novel defending the underdog or a mural recalling the
heroic past, the Mexican artist has seldom been able to act outside the
demands of the all-encompassing myth. The artist in Mexico after the
Revolution identified with a rediscovery of the lost myths and, up till
the fifties, saw his duty as a patriotic guardian of local traditions and the
national character. (“New Wave” 128).
As the State continued to produce the urgent need for recognition of the
nation, and as it continued to invest in public monuments, “[m]yth was
resurrected with a vengeance.” As it fell into decline, however, more and
more violent actions were needed to keep it alive in the public eye.
Fuentes clarifies that the nationalistic movement was “only a stage in
Mexico’s cultural development” but in an attempt at self-perpetuation it
became “repetitive, chauvinist, picturesque, and finally degenerated into
self-caricature” (“New Wave” 128). What from the vantage point of the
late 1960s he sees as the New Wave is akin to what we have been calling
García Ponce’s contestatory vision. Fuentes cites the artist Cuevas yet
again about what is to be found among the riches of the cultural ruins be-
hind the murals: “Death, prostitution, sickness are part of the Mexican
tradition, so my paintings are sad. But I do not have to live in sadness, only
be its spectator” (“New Wave 131). I do not intend to imbue García
Ponce’s texts with a sadness that is not there, much as I would not include
them among the traditions of nostalgia that Benjamin overcomes with
critical vision. Nevertheless, Cuevas’s tinging of “tradition” with darkness
instead of bright lights revokes the celebratory tone of State modernity
and puts in its place a need for more of the resourcefulness of desamparo
than of exaltación. The “spectator of sadness” is the vision of the melan-
cholic and, more importantly perhaps, of the modern.
An art exhibit entitled Confrontation of 1966 exemplifies this en-
gagement in that it pits the works of the Mexican School of previous
decades against the alternatives proposed to be explored by the painters
Cuevas, Manuel Felgúerez, Vicente Rojo, Fernando García Ponce (Juan’s
younger brother), and others, whose paintings embody the spirit of the
modern in the arts and whose aesthetics address a market of international
tastes. Art critic Marta Traba, for whom the promotion of this generation
is a touchstone of her career, describes them: “No longer content with pas-
sive storytelling, they gave standing to more indirect and symbolic modes
of expression, advancing to the limits of art without specific meaning” (84).
Aside from the hint that nonrepresentational art would be some step be-
yond the social realism of previous decades, Traba offers a clue to the con-
sideration of the generación de medio siglo as an avant-garde unbound
from traditional realist or mimetic representation. In literature, we might
think of what we have examined as a new role of the storyteller and a new
form for the tale.
Their challenge to and transgression of the norms of social realism and
the mural panels of the story of the nation’s emergence into modern times is
posited in radical changes to literature as well. The possibility for this con-
frontational climate in Mexico is distinguished by art critic Edward Lucie-
Smith as owing to, somewhat paradoxically, a cultural environment open to
discussion. Until the tremendous collapse of the civilized facade of the na-
tional edifice in 1968, “[t]he best publicized debate about the future of the vi-
sual arts took place in Mexico, for two reasons. One was that the régime had
remained stable, and open expression of dissent was possible, no matter how
much heat it generated. The other was that Mexico was the home of Mural-
ism, and there was thus something tangible against which to react” (112). So
it is that Muralism, the movement institutionalized by the postrevolutionary
State, served as the rallying point for an oppositional aesthetic. It did not dis-
appear but, like the structural ruins before it, was built upon and refurbished.
Like the ruins of ancient Rome, whose limestone blocks were recycled into
newer structures, and like the pyramid of Cholula, which provided stones for
subsequent Christian temples, Muralism furnished the raw materials for
other artworks. The same can be said for the Novel of the Revolution and
the narratives which follow and respond to it. The populist clichés that form
the underlying structures of those novels are the targets for writers such as
Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes who begin to demythify the icons of the Rev-
olution with the icons of Modernity. Social realism is confronted with psy-
chological dimensions of characters, and chronological stories of triumph
come face-to-face with stream-of-consciousness narratives and the suggestive
and allegorical “porosity” of the city. These reactions were spurred on by the
desarrollista [developmental] impulse of the presidency of Miguel Alemán
(1946–52) which opened up once and for all a dialogue with aspects of mod-
ern culture inside the borders of the Mexican nation. Such a policy of em-
bedding an image of modernity in the shapes and forms of ‘development’ is
found in Alemán’s promise to every citizen: “Un Cadillac para cada mexi-
cano” [A Cadillac for every Mexican] (Gutmann, Meanings 178). The equiv-
alent of President Harry S. Truman’s patriotic pledge of “two cars in every
garage” (never mind the chicken in every pot), this statement binds economic
progress with cultural acquisition. Moreover, the objects to be acquired rep-
resent the pinnacle of economic success in postwar United States. How does
this jibe with postrevolutionary Mexican politics? On the one hand, it con-
flates culture and economics; on the other, it does away with what Monsiváis
has called the discourse of History. It does not take much analysis to see the
period and break of this moment.
As critic Armando Pereira summarizes, Mexico City in the 1950s bus-

tled with change and ‘progress’: “[La ciudad] estaba estrenando su mod-
ernidad: cafés, teatros, cines, librerías, restaurantes, los cuales eran un punto
de encuentro obligado para todo aquel que demoraba sus ocios nocturnos
por las calles iluminadas y bulliciosas del centro” [{The city} was debuting its
modernity: cafes, theaters, movie houses, bookstores, restaurants, all of
which were an obligatory point of meeting for all those who spent time dur-
ing the leisure hours of the night along the bright, noisy streets of down-
town] (“Sobre” 6). Pereira’s words suggest the imagined communities of the
flâneurs of Paris and Berlin, those individuals wandering the urban labyrinth
in search of evocatory images and personal stimulation of lost recollections.
As Benjamin writes of the flâneur’s environment, “[t]he street becomes a
dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses
as a citizen is in his four walls. To him, the shiny, enamelled signs of busi-
nesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois
in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks;
news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from
which he looks down on his household after his work is done” (Charles
Baudelaire 37). The challenging and varied strata of street life are the iconic
symbols of a Mexican modern, and nightlife provides García Ponce’s char-
acters with spaces for encounters. The clubs, tertulias, literary circles, and
round tables that exist in abundance give rise to an effervescent intellectual
community that is woven into the mental images that García Ponce and his
narrators carry with them from childhood and from literary readings. The
Centro Mexicano de Escritores [Mexican Writers’ Center] gave financial
and collegial support to many of the generación de medio siglo, although
García Ponce, perhaps unsurprisingly, rejected the fellowship it offered him.
The lack of surprise follows the writer’s critique of all such institutionalized
aesthetics in favor of a personal one, even if this proposition itself is evi-
dently problematic. The Revista de la Universidad [University Journal] of the
UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), as well as the Revista
Mexicana de Literatura [Mexican Journal of Literature], offered young writ-
ers an open forum for new ideas; each was headed at one time or another by
García Ponce. In his promotion of fellow dissidents, a group was created
that was seen by some critics as a mafia literaria, a pejorative assessment of
their tastes for the foreign and their propensity toward a closed community
that resembled a private club. The contradictions of a rejection of one
forum for another are evident. What the so-called mafia managed to ac-
complish, among numerous other innovative projects during the decades of
the fifties and the sixties, was the translation of works by writers from the
United States and Europe whose works had been unavailable in Spanish
until then. In the face of a celebration of the popular by some, others un-
earthed storytelling traditions from other cultures as raw material for new
compositions. García Ponce translated the works of Herbert Marcuse and
Cesare Pavèse for this project.
Mexican literary critic Margo Glantz coins the terms Onda [New
Wave] and Escritura [Écriture; Pure Writing] to distinguish two of the im-
portant directions taken by the generations of writers in Mexico, first dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s, then into the 1970s. In a now-classic 1971 essay
on the multitude of aesthetic tendencies layered among the cultural folds of
the era, Glantz studies Gustavo Sáinz and José Agustín as examples of the
Onda. In novels such as Gazapo [Young Rabbit or a Misprint] and De perfil,
[In Profile], she roots out a series of characteristics that create a profile of
these texts as sites of rebellion against inherited social values. They include
“el imperialismo del yo” [the imperialism of the self, the focus on the I]
(91), a new sexual morality (95), the acquisition of a critical political con-
sciousness and, above all, the rescue of the language of the streets as the ex-
pression of a new subculture. Popular speech, rock and roll, the Spanglish
of border cities, and the slang of an incipient drug culture are the resources
to demythify what is deemed the dead world of ‘literary’ language along
with the stories it has to tell. As a reaction to what is considered stultified
language, or a nationalistic idiom aimed to codify values and mores into a
timeless vernacular (as in the novel of the Revolution, or in the writings of
Rulfo, Yáñez, etc.), writers of the Onda infuse the written text with testi-
monies to the orality of the moment.
The Onda aims for the ears of the reader to produce an imagined
auditory experience as it recovers the speech of the rapid-fire slang of the
streets; it is an experience written on the page but oriented toward perfor-
mance through its phonetics. But on the other side of the coin, Escritura
writers shift the focus to the page itself as a canvas on which to renovate
language and storytelling in other ways. Rather than the solid, immovable
surface of the epic mural, the page holds open a space for experiments in
narrative structure and deconstruction. Language is not merely a vehicle
for communication but an end in itself as it loops around and piles mean-
ing upon meaning in a baroque manner. Such a concept of narrative as the
terrain of linguistic innovation using, of course, the ruins of other texts,
and not as the mass communication of slang subcultures, tackles the vision
of the Onda head on. Glantz concludes that this aspect of Escritura de-
notes the confrontational mode of that movement lacking in the Onda.
She writes that this negates the potential power of the Onda, in that “la
negaría en la medida en que el lenguaje de la Onda es el instrumento para
observar un mundo y no la materia misma de su narrativa. Onda signifi-
caría en última instancia otro realismo, un testimonio, no una impu-

gnación, aunque algunas novelas o narraciones de la Onda empiecen a
cuestionar su testimonio” [it would negate that movement in as much as
the language of the Onda is the instrument for observing a world and not
the very substance of its narrative. In the end, the Onda would mean an-
other realism, a testimony, not a challenge, although some of the novels
and narratives of the Onda might begin to question its testimony] (108).
Another level of realism atop the social realism of previous decades would,
for her, not imply a challenge to the accurate or ‘realistic’ portrayal of his-
torical events. The palimpsestic text would be insufficient for critique and
would leave behind vestiges more of accord than of disharmony, as if one
layer were connected to another in some logical or reciprocal progression.
Benjamin’s revelatory spark or flash of recognition on the photographic
plate of the unconscious (“Berlin Chronicle” 56) is thus forged into a
whole rather than a collection of superimposed sedimentary fragments. In
the end, the potential power of deflecting and reorienting representation
that language might hold has to be unleashed through other, more disrup-
tive means. Benjamin’s calling on allegory as excess to “spell an end to all
systematic and universalistic conceptions of history” (Hanssen 68) directs
us toward the linguistic and cultural structures exploded in all directions
by García Ponce as he digs among inherited tropes for new, and often
frustrating, combinations.
The Escritura cult of the text includes the presence of “an imagina-
tive, symbolic reality,” a disinterest in linearity or chronology as formal el-
ements, a hybridity or crossover of genres, and the “replacement of the
omniscient narrator by multiple or ambiguous narrators” (Duncan 9). The
written word dominates the text as both tool and subject, message and mes-
senger, in a ritualistically repeated evocation of a world grounded in and on
the page. Mimetic realism has no place. Language is used to theatrically or
pictorially cast tones of light and darkness, replay stage entrances and exits,
exhibit a certain static quality of images (as archetypes), or reproduce the
slow pan of the cinematic camera in order to give the reader/viewer access
to a interior panorama. The role of the writer, then, is as a “facilitator”
(Duncan 26) to visually expose the contradictions inherent in linguistic
representation. Situating the act of writing outside obvious connections
with social reality, García Ponce challenges the reader to forge links to the
cultural ruins in and with which the text is produced; he will not provide
them himself. Threatening to explode in many directions at once, the lin-
guistic sign sprouts more like telltale shoots from shrubbery than from lin-
ear root. As García Ponce makes clear:
El terreno de la novela es ese terreno de la libertad absoluta en el que

ninguna regla social, ningún mandato moral, ningún principio de
ninguna especie detienen el curso de la narración . . . [Los] dos ele-
mentos fundamentales [para realizar la tarea de imaginar o inventar
posibles imágenes del ser humano] son el cuerpo y el lenguaje. El
cuerpo porque es el único garante legítimo de la realidad del indi-
viduo en un mundo dentro del que todo sentido de la realidad, toda
posibilidad de coherencia, se ha ausentado. El lenguaje porque sólo él
puede establecer la comunicación entre la vida del cuerpo y la con-
ciencia de esa vida, porque nacido del cuerpo le permite contemplarse
a sí mismo.
[The terrain of the novel is that of absolute freedom in which no
social rule, no moral mandate, no principle of any kind deters the
course of narration . . . {The} two fundamental elements {to carry out
the task of imagining or inventing possible images of human beings}
are the body and language. The body because it is the only legitimate
garantor of the individual’s own reality in a world in which all sense
of reality, all possible coherence, has disappeared. Language because
it is the only means for establishing communications between the
life of the body and the individual’s consciousness of that life,
because, born of the body, it permits that body to contemplate itself.]
(“¿Qué pasa?” 147, 153).
While the concept of “absolute freedom” is more relative than absolute if

we consider the text as part of its social context whether the writer denies it
or not, the flow of the narrative to do and undo stories appears to reflect
once again the building that is under constant construction in Carlos
Fuentes’s essay. Language is the construction material of the edifice of the
text, as it enters and exits the body that produces it. In the process, the
human body itself comes into being as an edifice as well, as a construction
of language as much as the written text is. Each facet of this movement
from inside to outside, each step of this transformation calls on previous
residues of linguistic acts to forge new topographies mirrored in the final
product. García Ponce’s words offer evidence of the “porosity” we have ex-
plored in Benjamin’s cityscapes and their wanderers, a sense that between
the body as text and the word as text there are infinite, pervasive, and secret
connections. By “communication” García Ponce implies less the funda-
mental nature of language than its latent or concealed power of revealing
secrets from the personal life and experiences of the narrator. Such a re-
duction to communication would devalue the potential potency of lan-
guage, especially in its use of metaphor and allegory. This is a fundamental
proposition of Benjamin’s view of what constitutes a “sacred” text, and not

necessarily only the sacred Scriptures. Any and all texts may contain “the
magic formula” (Rosen 153) for the reader, they may be taken as sites for
“contemplation, for meditation, incantation, for a form of understanding
that evades intention, author’s as well as reader’s” (Rosen 154). To distin-
guish only its communicative ability is to impoverish language; it is capable
of much more. Although García Ponce does not directly write of the sa-
credness of the literary text, the rituals and ceremonies of his storytellers
perform powerful acts of narration that make the reader take them as
incantations and not just words.
What Glantz refers to as the “Byzantine” style (106) of his texts sets
García Ponce’s characters among the complex and convoluted linguistic
ruins of cross-continental and cross-cultural narratives; they appear and
disappear from view, they dissolve into obscure borders or outside the
frame. Their language seems to weigh on the page for its honeycomb of re-
lationships and secret dialogues that come forth from the recollections of
the narrators. Sentences and phrases run on with little or no interruption
to their train of thought or observation, indicative of their link to involun-
tary memory and not conscious crafting. Readers encounter characters and
scenarios in excess. In the multiple and repeated reiterations of the same
scenes from different perspectives, language acquires the sound and phras-
ing of incantation and not the quick burst of communication of the Onda’s
everyday colloquial slang that evaporates into the stories of the streets.
While Duncan has found a certain similarity between Fernando del Paso’s
novels and Diego Rivera’s frescoes in their dual allusions to Mexican soci-
ety and politics, as well as in their incorporation of pre-Columbian mythol-
ogy into a totalizing scenario of historical events, García Ponce’s novels
evoke instead a static quality of isolated ahistorical phenomena even when
the setting appears at first glance to be recognizable to the reader. Even in
the vast historical genealogies of Crónica de la intervención [Chronicle of an
Intervention], the one novel with more than just passing reference to a his-
torical epoch, there are only tableaux of congealed images, not lucid and
systematic pieces of a coherent panoramic puzzle. Posed or frozen mo-
ments have been extricated from larger contexts and imbued with symbolic
meanings. The only key to these has to be excavated from among the ca-
cophony of all the narrative voices. And even then, the “key” is only sug-
gested in scattered and disconnected form; the shifting scenes, panels, or
moments in the labyrinth must be articulated by each reader. In this man-
ner, Duncan’s notion of “hybridity” or “ambiguity” emerges as the blend-
ing of visual images and linguistic signs. And Monsiváis’s vision of the
demise of History’s discourse is sustained.
Even though they share the same avenues and boulevards filled with
buffeting crowds, swift pace, intrusive commerce, and ubiquitous bill-
boards, the Onderos and the Escritura writers do not equally share the
modernizing experience. The transformation of the city is, for the first
group, an integration into the ‘greater modernity’ of America and a chance
to show off membership in consumer society in the “contact zones”
(Joseph, Rubenstein, and Zolov 16) of, for instance, the Colonia Roma, the
Zona Rosa, and the Zócalo. For the second group, the city is a “mnemonic
device” (Gilloch, Myth 173) for recalling half-forgotten moments and half-
ruined relationships. Neither Benjamin nor García Ponce pauses to lament
the changes in the city, but both find in its fleeting moments of contact, not
leisurely repose, but opportunities that respond to personal sentiments of
loss and gain, of darkness and light. The calmness of previous storytelling
narratives makes way for metropolitan magic and the “deceptive facades” of
architecture and urban life. Characters read circumstances provisionally,
they do not attempt to solidify what they see into a whole. The city be-
comes for Benjamin and for García Ponce alike “a theatre, a labyrinth, a
prison, a monument, a ruin” (Gilloch, Myth 170). Stories play out, they
fade away, and they reappear in other guises across novels; they are not rel-
egated to one text and they do not seem to end when the printed page does.
This is not to affirm some sort of disintegration of the avant-garde while
tradition remains unblemished and in absolute power. Instead, it is my con-
tention that the social, aesthetic, and political terrains of the 1950s and
decades after are unstable and fluid. Otherwise, the cultural production of
the Onderos as much as that of the Escritura writers would have long since
disappeared into the commercial sediment of the PRI or elsewhere in offi-
cial rhetoric. Benjamin’s desire for critical engagement and not archaeo-
logical visitation or nostalgic reconstruction has many facets in the
formative decades of Mexican modernity. The organizing motifs of the
State allowed for the coexistence of dialogue, at least for the moment.
Funds and resources from previous investment in the countryside were re-
allocated after the Revolution brought all of these contentious forces to-
gether in the capital city. Without an overarching meaning to it all,
however, Mexico City turns into an allegory of the nation’s greatest tri-
umphs and failures.
Over the course of the five decades between the 1950s and his death
at the end of 2003, García Ponce increasingly burned the wick of his sto-
rytelling at both ends. Like Benjamin’s Janus-faced Angel of History who
looks backward as he is catapulted by the forces of modernity into an un-
known future, his narrators glance outward as they increasingly become
aware of their inner turmoils. Both facets of their story are joined through
the subjective consciousness of the characters who, rather than situate

themselves within some external linear narrative, create labyrinthine dia-
logues with it. Daniel Goldin remarks of this dual process that such char-
acters “[prefieren] internarse en los oscuros meandros de su propia
conciencia, siempre acechada por la fuerza del inconsciente, e indagar en
las innumerables posibilidades de las relaciones intersubjetivas” [{prefer} to
penetrate the dark labyrinths of their own consciousness, always threatened
by the {obscure} forces of the unconscious, and to inquire into the count-
less possibilities of intersubjective relations] (7). The dark recesses or se-
crets of the individual, and of the imagined reactions by others, turn into
obsessions and neurotic fascinations (with all that ‘fascination’ implies for
Paz.) These repetitive returns and compulsive reiterations are the para-
digms of “una visión cada vez más íntima” [more and more of an intimate
vision] (Sefchovich 179) that signal the return of the private and the re-
pressed regions of human activity to the space of literary representation.
The mimetic goals of social realism should not be applied to these experi-
ences on the page for they lie at the core of baroque excesses. What has
been taken for either hidden or “repressed,” a marker of social control or
normativeness, is the site at which García Ponce concentrates his some-
times surprising and unexpected excavations. What is revealed about the
recondite forces of behavior contributes to a series of allegorical encoun-
ters and gestures as both the result of the social construction of identity and
the potential for turning it against the society responsible for its formation.
The watershed year of 1968 is a particularly profound moment of po-
litical rupture that brought to a head an already long-eroded confidence in
the State’s projects for the nation. While journalists such as Elena Ponia-
towska and Carlos Monsiváis,2 and filmmakers like Jorge Fons, and others,
have documented the violence of the decade of the 1960s as part of a vaster
panorama of political and social upheaval, García Ponce manifests the
schism in a different emotional and aesthetic form. The internalization of
layers of innocence and disingenuousness cohabit in his narratives from the
sixties and beyond, turning the crisis in society into a storytelling impetus.
The cliché of crisis in Mexican society, rather than forming an overt refer-
ence to massacres and student repression, is for him another type of re-
pression from whose depths images might be culled. On a psychological
level, violence plays out in the encounters between fascination and horror
with what one ultimately chooses to do and what might impel an individual
to act in certain ways. This is reflected in ruined relationships, and in rela-
tionships in ruins; in decaying settings for societies in transition; in an im-
petus for control through the exercise of violence (where other types of
control have been lost); and in the ambiguous forces that alternately push
and pull a (male) character to compensate for patriarchy’s loss with narra-
tives of constraint and excess. The preference for European novelistic ac-
counts of family epics, empires in ascent, and the virtues of the head of the
household are understandable in this context, for the ‘awakening’ of narra-
tors at the sight of blood running in the streets of the city needs to impel
them elsewhere for storytelling if the documentary impulse is insufficient
or co-opted. There are so many versions of State-sponsored violence that
the psychological ramifications become a venue of alternative expression
and are shocking in their own right.
At a decisive moment in modern Mexican history, President Gustavo
Díaz Ordaz (1964–70) returned to the discourse of the Revolution as a jus-
tification for the State’s suppression of worker-student political coalitions,
and he appealed to the utopian legacy of that time as his basis for taking ac-
tion. But it was the brutality of his repression of the middle class urban pro-
fessionals that signaled an end to the so-called miracle of modernization.
The often awkward, but essentially continuous, combination of political
stability and economic growth achieved by Mexico between the 1940s and
the 1960s inclined many in Latin America to point to the nation as a model
of development. But the crisis of legitimacy in the government when faced
with popular protests changed this optimistic view. It revealed the au-
thoritarianism hidden underneath the layers of modernization as the tactic
necessary for the national project. The silencing of opposition was institu-
tionalized, and fissures appeared in the so-called miraculous transformation
to modernity. The youth of the country defied this authority in its tradi-
tional forms—these have not changed with the ‘miracle’—and proposed to
look at history in other ways. The administration of Luis Echevarría that
followed (1970–76) proposed a democratic opening of the Revolution’s
legacy, not with the intent of questioning its foundations but of updating
the forms of its implementation. This built a new facade on the edifice of
the modern, but did not answer the questions left over from the previous
decade.3 José López Portillo (1976–82) inherited the same preoccupations
about the conflictive relationship between the hopes of the past (solidified
or “ossified”) and the realities of the present. To these was added the com-
plication of the discovery of vast oil reserves on Mexican territory. A new
optimism was born of these factors, but it still left open doubts about the
road to yet another ‘new’ Mexico. When called upon to give a balance
sheet of his administration, of its accomplishments and failures, López Por-
tillo used the term “chiaroscuro” (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 213) to de-
scribe the ambiguous nature of those years. He saw the assets and liabilities
of his term in office as either spots of light (which we might see as moder-
nity), or as shadowy areas (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 213–14) akin to the
obscure forces of ‘horror’ that Paz finds accompany an almost uncanny

fascination with the new.
In this manner we come full circle to Fuentes’s cityscape of ruin, with
the persistent construction and reassemblage of scaffolding and girders, the
rusting of projects, and the gaze directed toward the open horizon as both
a place on the globe and a social goal. The edifices of the State include not
only those made of cement and rebar, but the human bodies that build
them and that find their own stories amid their walls. How these construc-
tions are made viable to live in, how one finds a voice to represent experi-
ence, how the body is viewed “variously as a machine, a prison cell, a glory,
or a plague, a beauty or a beast” (Krell 4) are part and parcel of the ruins of
this particular modernity. Plans and elevations aside, spaces of the city ac-
quire an uncanniness of the ruin (Krell 7) that García Ponce mines in his
quest for bringing back the aura of the storyteller. When even the ruinous
vestige is no longer invoked as unfamiliar (unheimlich), wonderment and
pleasure have been absorbed into a totalizing official discourse of forget-
fulness. Beyond the mere pleasure principles of Freud and (later) Marcuse,
“such a turn [toward homeless bodies and inhuman constructions such as
Tlatelolco] invariably takes us [elsewhere]: it implies a loss of mastery, a
failure of control, and an openness to the uncanny” (Krell 7). The uncanny
sparks recognition like the streets of Berlin do for Benjamin. The body of
the narrators is political by implication, but it is also part of Cartesian
geometry, and most of all for García Ponce, is a lived body. The living body
perceives its surroundings, engages in activities and projects (as does the
social body of the State) but, as Krell reminds us, “it [is] also a prime in-
stance of extravagant expenditure, . . . in the ecstasies of orgasm and sacri-
fice. If the hyper-Nietzschean thought of Georges Bataille is ‘against
architecture,’ it is so only in order that we learn to spell it new as archetic-
ture” (7). In brief, this play on words reorients the idea of construction (ar-
chitecture) from the technical (Krell calls it the tec-), the building, toward
the hidden sources of design and construction (the tic-). This is what he
means by ecstatic, and it is what we have been calling the excessive, the
baroque, and the fascinating.
To bring forth the shift from rigidity and the ruin as construct to
multiplicity, fragmentation, and the ruin as a constellation of possibilities,
we return one last time to Benjamin. As his narrator converts time into
space (Sontag, “Sign of Saturn” 389), as he strolls amid the ruins of Berlin,
as he projects his awareness of facades and portals onto their very stones, he
“merges his life into a setting” (Sontag, “Sign of Saturn” 390). The fusion
of body and city, the ‘tic-’ of an ecstatic moment, creates the basis for a dif-
ferent storytelling. García Ponce’s characters penetrate their surroundings
as they themselves have contributed to the formation of part of the (cul-

tural) architecture they inhabit. These are not facile relationships, nor ones
that are static; on the contrary, only the formal elements of ritual, cere-
mony, and compulsive repetition adequately address them for the telling of
the tale outside the artificial boundaries of containment (mimesis, realism,
celebration, documentary). Sontag concludes that “Benjamin’s recurrent
themes are, characteristically, means of spatializing the world: for example,
his notion of ideas and experiences as ruins. To understand something is to
understand its topography, to know how to chart it. And to know how to
get lost” (“Sign of Saturn” 390). The spatial is the projection of the forces
of building up and knocking down on the cultural monuments one finds
strolling around the city (the double drives of construction and destruc-
tion), or for that matter around the photographs of the family in its mil-
lenarian hacienda. Equally so, the meandering through linguistic and
aesthetic monuments to a certain turn of narrative creates a notion of spa-
tiality as time settles into layers. Knowing the streets perhaps produces the
Onda or documentary texts; but it also sparks the getting lost in the re-
cesses of the mind that García Ponce revisits and refuses to erase. Among
the last few short prose pieces of his collection of essays entitled Personas,
lugares y anexas is one entitled “Celebración familiar” [Family Celebration].
Focused on the recollection of an event which included the entire extended
family, this piece evokes every attendee as it simultaneously laments the
passing of each one. It ends with a last mental glance at what could be
called the fading photograph of the celebration. While the original mo-
ment indeed sparks the memory and the writing of the text—as the city
streets do for subconscious labyrinths—what remains of the day is a garden
filled with people now deceased who live on in the ruins of memory. The
narrator’s last words are: “En estas páginas están todos vivos en el jardín y
poco a poco las sombras caen sobre nosotros”[In these pages everyone is
alive in the garden and little by little the shadows fall over us] (141). There
is no real photograph of the event; the image is an internal recollected one.
The shadows are indicative of time’s passage, for such a darkness cannot fall
across the frozen image of a photo. One can only chart the ruins of the past
by means of such evocations, and one can only make them live over and
over by ritualized encounters.
CHAPTER THREE
Monuments and Relics, I
MELANCHOLIC COLLECTIONS
The collection of drafts, notes, and sketches Benjamin worked on at the
same time he was planning his monumental work on the Arcades Project
carries the title of “Convolutes” or sheaves of writings dedicated to a wide
variety of topics. Composed of short essays and prose fragments oriented
around multiple motifs and themes, and presented from various and distinct
points of view, these writings are structured as a montage (Eiland and
McLaughlin xi). Items such as the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, urban Paris,
painting, spectacle, beauty and the transient, and modern manners in gen-
eral are the centers of his constellations which spin out in multiple direc-
tions with only the writer’s observations at the gravitational center to hold
them. As the translators of his Arcades Project into English conclude, “the
montage form—with its philosophical play of distances, transitions, and in-
tersections, its perpetually shifting contexts and ironic juxtapositions—had
become a favorite device in [his] later investigations . . . this ostensible
patchwork as, de facto, a determinate literary form, one that has effectively
constructed itself (that is, fragmented itself) . . . would [surely produce] sig-
nificant repercussions for the direction and tempo of its reading, to say the
least. The transcendence of the conventional book form would go together,
in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism—grounded, as
this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality”
(xi). Intersecting at different angles, and then splitting apart into constella-
tions of meanings and experiences, these “convoluted” texts could be re-
ferred to as “blinks” of an eye (Eiland and McLaughlin xi) or fragments and
discontinuous pieces of thought, rather than a cogently presented linear ar-
gument. Like Benjamin’s own apprehension of the city in all of its excessive
modernity, the entries in these notebooks and sketches—much like the Ar-
cades Project that is, finally, left behind—respond to a way of perception
and a counternarrative structure.
䊏 53 䊏
If such texts can be seen from the point of view of the visual arts—
as blinks in our eyewitnessing of events, and far from historiography in its
traditional form—they may also be superposable and fragmentary fossils of
cultural perception. Remnants of daily life as lived by the taker of notes
therefore acquire an “afterlife” (Eiland and McLaughlin xii) long after the
gaze of the spectator has moved on. They are not articulated around formal
relations of literary narration nor coherent epic stories. Rather, the frame-
work of the montage, much as it did for Sergei Eisenstein and other film-
makers of the early twentieth century, split historical chronologies wide
open. For Benjamin at least, this allowed for the infiltration or “vislumbre”
(Paz) of secret, powerful, hidden, and forgotten moments and affinities to
seep through into discourse.
Given the innumerable different angles from which each splintered
nucleus or “convolute” is approached and addressed, these notes are perfect
examples of the Benjaminian concept of the baroque allegory as “a struc-
turing of the antithetical feeling for life” (Bolz and van Reijen 33). Depict-
ing much more than what is seen at face value, allegory is the container of
antithesis, the holder of the ruin. Gilloch writes of the power of allegorical
figures for Benjamin as they reveal “the apparent or surface meaning [as] a
veneer which conceals . . . . One narrative appears disguised as another; it
is a palimpsest” (Myth 135). Meaning is elusive, but the profane world of
the everyday comes to mean anything and everything, not merely the quo-
tidian details one finds on the surface of places and events. The tension that
holds together the subjects and the forms of the “convolutes” is cited by
Benjamin as the force of the melancholic gaze. The capacity of the melan-
cholic vision to produce art (vision, genius) is its contradictoriness and its
richness; it is “the precondition for brilliant breakthroughs of petrified sys-
tems of order” (Bolz and van Reijen 33). While the object, scene, or mem-
ory remains behind, petrified in the allegorical fragment on the page, dead
in some way to the forces of history, it can now paradoxically evoke mean-
ings in multiple directions since it has been wrenched from its limiting con-
text. And here we have come full circle to our trope of the ruin, for “[t]he
allegorical, melancholy gaze must reduce the world to rubble” (Bolz and
van Reijen 33) to build it up in innovative form from the shards of the past.
One particular nucleus for these fragmentary texts is the allegorization of
the bourgeois world as an image filled with degraded ruins from which new
visions and readings may spin off. This is part of the architecture of the tril-
ogy of works written by García Ponce between 1982 and 1989, although
Benjamin’s desire to redeem society from such decadence is not exactly du-
plicated by the Mexican writer. The urban archaeologist with a twist, Gar-
MONUMENTS AND RELICS, I 䊏 55
cía Ponce digs around amid the rubble, not always with the intent to move
beyond, but to redeem in an alternative sense even if it is only through
phantasmagoric revelation. What survives is the evocation, the movement,
if not always the redemptive end.
The first in this trilogy, the novel Crónica de la intervención [Chronicle
of an Intervention] (1982) is the centerpiece of a series of panels around
which stories are articulated in shifting and ‘convoluted’ scenarios. The
three texts—Crónica, De ánima (1984), and Inmaculada o los placeres de la in-
ocencia [Inmaculada or the Pleasures of Innocence] (1989)—while intercon-
nected, function as the remains of unstable, allegorical tales whose details
and perspectives frequently contradict one another. In this way, the three
pieces suggest the “indirect and symbolic modes of expression”(84) we have
seen Traba indicate in the response of artists and intellectuals as they dis-
tance themselves from the realist narratives of previous decades. They also
reaffirm a certain aspect of the personal, “private” (Rama 180) vision of lan-
guage and art that responds to quirks and angles of perception, not to
tenets of composition or limits of being embedded in coherent and logi-
cally fluid structures. We might recall García Ponce’s own words as he re-
flects on the task of writing against social rules and moral mandates: “El
terreno de la novela es ese terreno de la libertad absoluta” (“¿Qué pasa?”
147). The freedom to compose from the elements of social decomposition
and the liberty to reconsider the novel itself as a ‘convoluted’ form, and not
the chronological, organic edifice of former times, are the impulses for his
fictions. In the three novels, the “afterlife” of images, characters, relation-
ships, and the cultural constructions themselves cuts across artificial divi-
sions as it provokes and challenges the reader to encounter bodies and
linguistic signs as if for the first time. Allegories of the social and the cul-
tural rework the ruins into new structures.
Reminiscent of the sketches of Benjamin’s notebooks in relation to
the tremendous Arcades Project, Crónica indicates a shift away from the
shorter narratives of earlier years even as it retakes some of their preoccu-
pations and twists them into more complex passages and rituals. Critic
Juan Pellicer uncovers in this text the fragments of all that has come be-
fore in the life and artistic production of the writer. He sums up: “En ella
[la novela] cabe toda su obra en el sentido de que consuma la recreación de
todo un mundo de relaciones y correspondencias que el autor había em-
prendido desde su infancia. Aquí se representa aquel desdoblamiento que
propició su primera lectura; se acaba de crear un mundo donde la realidad
y su imagen, la vida y el arte, se vuelven irónicamente intercambiables.
Aquí también se usan prácticamente todos los mecanismos narrativos que
se encuentran en las otras novelas y cuentos” [All of his work fits in it {the
novel} in the sense that it is the consummate recreation of an entire world
of relations and correspondences that the author had begun since child-
hood. Represented here is that doubling begun with his first readings;
{here} the last touches are put on a world in which reality and its image,
life and art, become ironically interchangeable. Here as well practically all
of the literary devices found in the other novels and stories are used] (38).
There is little reason that irony should be found in the substitution of art
for life, or image for reality, since García Ponce’s own words reflect the
building blocks of narrative as the human body and the language it pro-
duces (and which, in turn, produces it). His reference to these sites as “le-
gitimate guarantees” of an evacuation of the rules of realism from the text
would favor the idea of art or representation as the only communicative
action. There are no other tools to forge the rubble of the material world
into allegorical fragments than these two sources. And, we must remem-
ber, mere “communication” does not fulfill the desires of the Escritura
narrator. Something more must be conjured up out of the depths of the
subconscious and of the social imaginary.
In Crónica one of the first ways in which we recognize that we are fac-
ing an encounter with the allegories of cultural ruins that inform and em-
body contradiction is the word “chronicle,” used as a relic of epic tales,
from the times of the Conquest to the modern European tomes by Heim-
ito von Doderer (The Demons) and Robert Musil (The Man Without Quali-
ties). In his allegories of a Viennese bourgeoisie on the brink of disaster as
World War I approaches, Musil uses the convolute of decay and ruin as the
centerpiece for a narrative fraught with impending doom. Not focused on
historical event in the sense of outside narrative, the writer instead turns
the tale inward and truly convolutes and twists it into an internal (and in-
fernal) dialogue. In his review of a recent biography of Musil, Stefan Jons-
son remarks on this turn away from historiographic prose: “His narratives
spiral downward from the daylight world of bourgeois conventions into the
night of madness, the negativity of disorder, criminality and war . . . Crimes
without identifiable perpetrators, events without visible cause, historical
shifts without agency—Musil’s works are inquiries into the multiple deter-
mination of human action and social change” (“Citizen” 131). The down-
ward spin into the maelstrom of darkness and so-called values gone awry
parallels García Ponce’s narrators’ descent into the “casco” or shell of Mex-
ican society, finding themselves surrounded on all sides by madness instead
of reason, disorder in place of coherence, and violence rather than rational
discourse. Not content to offer the reader just one aspect of these scenar-
ios, however, García Ponce makes all of these contradictory forces coexist.
The liberation of crime from the criminal, of events from history, propels
the reader into that “free terrain.” The ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Em-
pire are the free-falling whirlwind into which the “man without qualities”
of Musil’s novel of the same name is drawn, just as García Ponce thrusts the
reader into the jaws of Mexican modernity. In Crónica a similar sense of
foreboding and melancholia is recreated through the evocation of the at-
mosphere of the days preceding the social and political disasters of 1968 in
Mexico. If the Angel of History faces the collapse of the empire created by
Austria-Hungary in the first instance, in the second it is gathered up in the
storm produced by the fall of the PRI’s national project into a bloodbath
perpetrated on its own citizens.
Another vestige of imperial fantasy gone astray and old regimes in
decay feeding into the convoluted labyrinth of Crónica comes from the cul-
tural vestiges of Europe as well. García Ponce has written an extensive
essay on Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons in which
he emphasizes the embedding of the personal within the historical as an
“exceptional” quality of Old World work, one which the Mexican novelist
aspires to emulate. This “exceptional trait” appears as part of the subtitle of
García Ponce’s essay in which he writes:
Heimito von Doderer no trata de escribir una novela histórica; sin

embargo, su gran novela hace historia en el campo del arte y en el de
la historia a secas mediante el recurso de darle más importancia al arte
de novelar, a sucesos particulares, seres y acciones, que a la historia en
sí misma con excepción del hecho histórico central. Así, por ejemplo,
aunque la acción las incluye en el largo tiempo que abarca, no se
narra nada concreto de las dos guerras mundiales más que un en-
cuentro de caballería entre cosacos y austriacos al principio de la
primera y este combate es descrito, en un restorán especialista en
guisados de ganso en un pueblo cercano a Viena, por un antiguo sar-
gento a dos obreros que lo escuchan fascinados.
[Heimito von Doderer does not try to write a historical novel; never-
theless, his great novel makes history in the fields of art and history
per se by means of the technique of giving more importance to the art
of storytelling, to specific events, people and actions, than to history
itself except for the historical event that forms the core. So, for exam-
ple, although included in the long historical trajectory covered by the
text, nothing concrete about the two world wars is narrated save an
encounter on horseback between Cossacks and Austrians at the be-
ginning of the first, and this combat is described, in a restaurant near
Vienna specializing in dishes made with goose, by a former sergeant to
two workmen that are fascinated by his tale.] (Ante los demonios 10).
The ‘long view’ of history recedes into the background of von Doderer’s
narrative and the core (like a relic of former events and relationships) be-
comes the intimate, personal story that takes up fragments at will, includ-
ing dinner conversations and regional menus. Like Benjamin’s allegorical
montage of cultural debris, von Doderer’s narrators find a fascination with
the afterlife of momentary encounters and chips of experience. To cover a
historical period of a nation such as Mexico, then, García Ponce does as
von Doderer has written, moving back and forth through decades and cen-
turies, finding multiple ramifications of purportedly singular historical
events, and using many voices to tell the story. Narrators look outward at
events, then inward to capture their effects on individuals in a tapestry
of narrative fragments that cannot reproduce a solid result since the project
that gives rise to them—the incorporation of the Mexican nation into
the international economy of modernity and its products—does not itself
get resolved.
In The Demons, von Doderer’s central historical event is the burning
of Vienna’s Palace of Justice on July 15, 1927. The remains of historical dis-
course in Crónica are the moment of repression of the student movement in
Mexico City two weeks before the inauguration of the Olympic Games in
October 1968. In the first case, flames consume “Justice” and, in the sec-
ond, bullets silence dissent. This suggestion of the realm of the public
sphere intrudes on, but never replaces, the convoluted strands and layers of
personal stories woven in and around the text. As critic Gonzalo Martré
proposes, Crónica and other novels related to the events of that year “se im-
pregnan intensamente de la atmósfera del 68 por lo que permiten que el
movimiento flote en ellas con su presencia distante o con la repercusión del
recuerdo” [are intensely saturated with the atmosphere of 68 which allows the
movement to float in them with a distant presence or with the repercussion
of memory] (36). Albeit never mentioned by name, the circumstances and
participants in the narrative are clearly recognizable as part of Mexico’s
modern history, with shifting pairs of couples from various social classes
representative of those social and economic origins. Any identification be-
yond a first name or as a member of a particular fictional family dissolves
into the phantasmagoria of the nightmare that functions as an allegory of
contradictions: modernity and repression, youth and tradition, language
and silence. Thus reoriented, the characters’ behavior is conditioned by
and responds to the historical events which surround them, adding levels of
depth and complexity to their thoughts and acts, as well as implying con-
nections between the microcosm of individual history and the macrocosm
of the history of the nation, without spelling out the way in which this may
come about. What Benjamin contemplates as the veneer of the modern is
thus stripped away to bring to light the paradoxes underlying layer after
layer of social pretense and ruin. Faith in modernity as the power to subju-
gate nature and culture to human mastery breaks down into debris and rub-
ble when “wielded by a callous, indifferent humankind in its arrogant
domination” (Gilloch, Myth 90). Reason, science, art, and technology at
the service of modern society disintegrate into forces of violence and death
seen in the blinks of the eyes of the narrators. Underneath the facade lie the
crumbling shards of cultural promises and the dying embers of bourgeois
dreams. The construction of the State’s centralized and monumental edi-
fice is built squarely on the sacrifice of its future intellectual pillars.
The fluid narratives of García Ponce’s novel contain numerous ver-
sions of private tales that belong to characters who are forced to become
active participants in the struggles against the official policies of the Mexi-
can government, for their lives are disrupted and convoluted by their plans
for the nation. The personal and the political seemingly merge into one
chronicle, calling on the account from the perspective of the individual
rather than the official, supposedly collective, version of the story. The On-
deros might look to the street interview or the documentary (or docu-
drama) to find a genre appropriate for the contents of the text. For García
Ponce, Escritura at this juncture sends us instead inside the skin of the
characters and the recesses of their psyches.
THE MOVABLE BODY OF THE TRIPTYCH
An integral part of a narrative triptych of which De ánima and Inmaculada o

los placeres de la inocencia form the complementary panels, Crónica therefore
posits a movable story whose pieces are not solidified into the gesso of a
mural. Rivera, Orozco, or Siqueiros demonstrate on walls, palaces, and
government buildings that the story of the emergence of modern Mexico
from the conflicted rubble of its past could be fixed on a surface for all to
see and recognize. One supposes that this means one is recognizable within
the story these murals have to tell: each member of the nation can see Za-
pata, scenes of the Revolution, popular movements, or workers brigades as
part of their own coming-into-being. But for García Ponce and the gen-
eración de medio siglo, this story is not so easy to tell, and its images have
afterlives that the founders and promoters of the nation might never envi-
sion (or might repress). What does each inhabitant of the megalopolis live
on a daily basis that connects to the murals? Together, the three comple-
mentary components (the three novels) suggest a geometric construction
capable of being disarticulated and rearticulated according to a personal
reading of the image. Rather than the pieces fitting neatly together under
the “will for form” that Paz uses to entitle his essay on Mexican art, the
form itself embodies the message of disruption. That is to say, the tensions
holding reasonable discourses together are evoked as the palimpsestic sur-
faces on which constantly new creations can form and seep through. The
mystery that surfaces from these three texts embodies García Ponce’s pro-
legomena about the fate of the act of writing—a vision of the breaking of
the limits of the text, the act of écriture itself as a form of transgression,
writing (and deciphering or reading) as a revelatory process.
Besides the appropriation of the narrative fragments of European cri-
sis and decay, another aspect of revelation in an allegorical order of the
texts, one also controversial and challenging, is García Ponce’s exposure of
those closed systems of social thought which attempt to define and entrap
the declared ‘moral truth’ about sexual identity. Ambiguous and unstable,
voices and actions emanate from the lived and sexually charged bodies of
characters to add to the montage of the novels. It seems appropriate, then,
that this writer chose the triptych as the preferred form of representation
of such shifting and mobile stories. The tripartite or multifaceted retablo
storytelling panels (ruins of a popular folkloric tradition elevated to the
structure of the narrative text) are repositioned and transposed, opened and
shut, hidden or displayed, according to the needs of the storyteller. They
are deployed as prompters for the articulation of a narrative line adapted to
each retelling and to each audience, one may assume, depending on the
tales being told and on the spark that ignites the act of retelling. The after-
life of an image might at one point come to life and at another might be
hidden in the depths of the closed panel. Not dead, but only dormant, such
images can revive at any time and provoke the germination of another
story. Proust’s involuntary memory, or Freud’s recollection of concealed
strata of repressed memories come to mind as we approach García Ponce’s
texts to sift through their porous contents. So one should not be expecting
to find the realism of a testimonial novel (à la Elena Poniatowska, for ex-
ample) among these pages. But as the urban center—the site of all modern
strife—is conjured up in bits and pieces, like Benjamin’s Paris of the nine-
teenth century, “the home of the mundane and the routine . . . [becomes]
the site of the extraordinary and the macabre” (Gilloch, Myth 148). Mexico
City for García Ponce’s characters holds all the fascination and horror that
Paz finds in the early explorers’ chronicles and that Stephens and Cather-
wood come across in Sayil or Kabah or Uxmal. The monuments of antiq-
uity along the crushed stone roads of Yucatán hold, for the romantic
voyagers, secret stories and hidden narratives in their earthen material. At
first just a path that disappears into the horizon, the sacbé [white gravel
pathway] acquires a dual significance for the cultures that would be van-
quished by the Spaniards. Legends regarding the couriers that traverse the
trails from gulf to central plateau, carrying messages from chiefs to other
chiefs, are signs written on the bark of trees but also signs of impending
doom and dark, ruinous events to come (Stephens 2:77). So the avenues of
Mexico’s capital city carry traffic and commuters, but they also carry hid-
den meanings and secret relationships within the minds of those whose
bodies form the masses of the cityscape.
Although Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the word “assemblage” (in
A Thousand Plateaus) covers the explosive images of composing and decom-
posing implied here, their reference is not immediately connected to the
aesthetics of painting, but rather to the idea of constellations and groupings
in the constant “becoming” and shifting of human identity. Benjamin uses
the “convolute,” Eisenstein the montage, Adorno the constellation, and
Deleuze and Guattari add to the allegories of structuring and restructuring.
Their notion of the arranging of actors on a theatrical or film set, the or-
dering and reordering of the composition of a text (or scene or recollec-
tion) in a perpetual state of passing from one layout to another is
reminiscent of Crónica and of the collection of panels to which it belongs
(Deleuze and Guattari 306). The concept of “assemblage,” then, might
well be used to describe how the triptych is put together around a series of
images or themes, how the pieces or elements therein may be moved to re-
constitute other versions of stories, and how the contents and appearances
of the images vary with each new position. The mural is a whole; the trip-
tych is a Benjaminian monad or plethora of transient ruins and, best of all,
it “is never what it appears to be” (Gilloch, Myth 170).
An artistic tradition originating in late medieval European religious
cultures, especially those of Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries, the retablo
presents an ornamental and elaborate view of the world stylized to the point
of repetition. Placed above and behind the altar, these vertical panels consist
of an assemblage of scenes focused around a principal figure such as the Vir-
gin Mary, a particular saint, or the passion of Christ. They narrate fragments
or episodes, in a more or less formalized manner, related to the life of the
character or personage in the center of the body of the retablo and can be re-
arranged at will by the storyteller. Framing elements such as wooden strips,
gold leaf, and sequencing (the articulation of a narrative, then an effigy, an-
other narrative, and another effigy) maintain the gaze of the observer within
the general space of the retablo. Fixed within some sort of material borders
or edges, the retablo or triptych is nevertheless convoluted since it spins out
in the multiple directions of individual storytellers. Judith Sobré has noted,
in a commentary that corresponds interestingly to the allegorical layering of
García Ponce’s texts, that the individual paintings within these works “can be
broken down into two components, narrative and symbolic” (167), with cer-
tain figures depicted as having attributes which distinguish them easily at first
glance but which set in motion varying tales about them. The narrative ele-
ments flank the allegorical, grasping at the afterlife of the image which be-
comes the raw material for the construction of endless new fragmentary
episodes. Shifting juxtapositions and startling contrasts bring into focus ob-
jects and interpretations perhaps unseen and unexpected until the shifts
occur. What Benjamin sees as the “actualizing” (Eiland and McLaughlin xii)
of images, of ephemera, embeds faces and things in momentary positions just
to be lost again when the perspective of perception changes. Nothing sur-
vives intact because even the concept of permanence that “intact” suggests is
not viable for the ephemeral ruin. (Pieces of a construct might remain, but
not the entire edifice or cultural reading of the tale.)
Following the structure of the retablo as a palimpsestic surface with
relics of previous stories peeking through the veneer, one might well con-
sider the collection of fragmentary incidents composing Crónica in terms of
the events of recent history as the underlying yet ghostly frame within
which allegorical figures appear and reappear. They are distinguishable to
a reader familiar with the traces or vestiges of similar characters across
the three texts of the triptych: from Crónica to De ánima to Inmaculada.
While it is the case that retablo figures have often served “as earthly mani-
festations of the miraculous and the divine” (Rountree 2) for believers who
use them to represent a relationship with a divinity, in the narratives of
García Ponce such a tradition becomes personalized as the ceremonial
reenactment or “assemblage” of episodes related to lost human relations.
The stability of a recognizable narrative—humans and divinities, for
instance—disappears into an absence. The worship of the erotic encounter
as the moment of greatest revelation produces the central image of
“woman” in the flesh as the object of veneration, as a lived body capable of
evoking hidden images from the past for the (mostly male) narrators. The
categories of divine or sublime, and material or human, conflate on her
body. The imagery of the retablo might invoke the traditional use of pic-
torial means to convey a message to an audience unable to read the story
in written form; but in the case of García Ponce the words themselves func-
tion on a different level for an audience whose previous exposure to lin-
guistic portraits sparks new meaning in these images. The suggestion of a
popular form (the retablo) transposed into an intellectual text breaks apart
the singularity of each and proposes an allegorical reading of both image
and text itself. Far from univocal historical discourse, Crónica explodes into
different directions as it picks up discarded objects from the landscape of
the city to rework them in new, intuitive relationships at the will of the nar-
rator. What is revealed is less about the circumstances (history) than about
the narrator himself (as a story of subjectivity).
One of the principal sources of García Ponce’s use of women as the
centrally-placed and interchangeable figures in a trilogy of works is the
comparable series of novels by Klossowski, Roberte Ce Soir [Roberte This
Evening] (1953), The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959), and Le Souf-
fleur [The Spirit] (1960). Although these novels were originally published
separately at intervals of several years, together they form a collective opus
entitled Les Lois de l’hospitalité [The Laws of Hospitality]. Republished later
as three-works-in-one, the first novel is recast in this complete edition as
the center of the triptych, given the fact that the character Roberte occu-
pies the primary space in each of the three narratives; she is the central
figure of his panels. In the case of García Ponce’s trilogy, it is the novel
De ánima which functions as the center, occupying the middle space of the
three works. Although the female characters may vary in name from one
novel to another, from María Inés to Mariana to Paloma to Inmaculada,
they all share certain characteristics and these, in turn, stimulate the re-
sponse of recognition in the reader and the spark of intuition in the narra-
tors. As the nucleus of numerous convolutes, they are fundamental catalysts
in the male characters’ search for themselves, by awakening fascinating and
uncanny episodes lost among the ruins of the psyche.
In this aspect, García Ponce’s narrators embody one of the core con-
tradictions of modernity itself: the containment of identity on the surface
of the body. Tamar Garb writes of the gendered body of the modern in
these terms: “Modernity produced its own image of the body. According to
the dictates of science and philosophy, modern men and women were ex-
pected to look [certain ways according to] a preordained set of distinctions
that were rooted in biology, decreed by nature and endorsed by the com-
plex organization of sexual and social behaviour which characterized mod-
ern society. . . . Appearances testified to the maintenance of a social order”
(11). Therefore, any rupture in the perception of such lived bodies would
construct a new edifice atop the ruins of the old. In the predominance of
the male gaze, even if interrupted and fragmented as events intrude on it,
García Ponce’s narratives project fantasies of masculinity on bodies that,
outside the text at least, are in the midst of radical change. Modernity’s
struggles for control over the human body, whether in discourses on biol-
ogy or societal norms, underlie and sometimes overlay the masculinist dis-
courses’ endeavor to prevail despite the counterforces of rebellion. That
women might attain some form of freedom from social restrictions and
speak for themselves is neither part of the discourse of modernity allowed
to flourish here, nor is it part of male fantasies. Rather, women are no
longer a Freudian enigma but a key to unleashing the secrets harbored in-
side men. Elena Poniatowska describes the implied author “Juan’s” (Gar-
cía Ponce’s) representation of this dilemma of the modern: “Juan es la
mirada más joven, la más libre que le sea a uno posible conocer. Las mu-
jeres fueron su coto de caza, su propiedad privada, su posesión, su campo de
batalla, porque las batallas de amor son de exclusividad y Juan siempre an-
duvo de pleito” [Juan’s gaze is the youngest, the most liberated that one
may find. Women were his hunting grounds, his private property, his pos-
session, his battlefield, because love’s battles are unique and Juan was al-
ways looking for a fight] (“Jardín” 3a). Let us make certain that we agree we
are referring to “Juan” as a character and not as an author here, and as the
dynamic behind the creation of so many conflicted narrative voices. Polit-
ical battlegrounds cede to those of eroticism in his triptych.
Women as the battleground of modernity is a trope of the Surrealists
(Dalí, Magritte, and Picasso come to mind) and not just of a singular Mex-
ican writer of the second half of the twentieth century. Threatened by the
forces of modernization, first in Europe and then in the Americas, mas-
culinity sought refuge and pitched its most fervent opposition in and across
human flesh. In officially sanctioned murals after the Revolution, women
are shown as soldaderas, commanders, cooks, teachers, mothers, and even
politicians but their portraits end there. Even if they belong to a revolu-
tionary aesthetic, these images cloak women in conformity and recogniz-
able social forms. Now, when they populate the fantasies of those who gaze
on them, when they conform to expectation that has become part of the in-
ternal structures of masculinist discourse, this turns the battles from the
field to the mind. It does not mean in any sense that they are over and done
with; it does imply that all of the contradictions of convention are erected
in the mind’s eye as ruins of exterior forces. The Revolution is over but the
struggles rage on. If they were resolved in some way by García Ponce’s nar-
rative voices, then modernity would be complete. But this is not possible.
Ending this essay with the statement that his last “woman” was death,
Poniatowska’s words reveal how the contradictions permeating Mexican
culture over the last half century continue to survive amid the cultural de-
bris. Garb concludes her introduction with an affirmation of the potential
power of the modern: “It is the capacity of the imaged bodies of modernity
to articulate dominant social relations while managing sometimes, to ex-
pose or erode them” (14). If “exposure” comes about through the texts of
the Onderos, can the forces of “erosion” be a way to refer to what is re-
vealed in Escritura? I wish to underscore the word “sometimes” in Garb’s
quote, for it is not a rule of thumb that the modern comes down on the side
of alterity or that erosion is the result. Poniatowska herself, with a substan-
tial number of documentary texts as evidence of her desire to unearth the

ravages of modern times, is a good example of this dilemma. Her article
commemorating García Ponce’s winning of the Premio de Literatura Lati-
noamericana y del Caribe in 2001 ends with these comments: “Y nosotras,
las mujeres de México, a las que a veces nos duele hasta el aire, necesitamos
decirle como [Manuel] Acuña el de Rosario que lo adoramos, lo queremos
con todo el corazón y que nuestra primera y última ilusión es besarlo como
las locas que somos y seremos hasta nuestro último suspiro” [And we, the
women of Mexico, who sometimes suffer with every breath, we need to tell
him {Juan} like {Manuel} Acuña does in his poem {Nocturno a} ‘Rosario’
that we adore him, that we love him with all our heart and that our first and
last illusion is to cover him with kisses as the madwomen that we are and
we will be until we draw our last breath] (“Jardín” 3a). Granted, these
words are pronounced on the occasion of awarding a prize to a man rele-
gated to a wheelchair, ravaged by illness and facing imminent death. On the
other hand, however, the hyperbole of the statement addresses in baroque
fashion an allegory of the vision of women that covers the pages of García
Ponce’s novels and stories. The contradictions of social and erotic battles
have not ceased despite all of the splendorous monuments to modernity
built across the nation over the past fifty years.
In the introduction to De ánima, García Ponce acknowledges the in-
fluences of Klossowski and Jun’ichiroTanizaki on his aesthetics, as he has
noted elsewhere in the cases of Pavese, Musil, and von Doderer. If we re-
turn to the “transcendence of the conventional book form” in Benjamin’s
convolutes, with discontinuity as the motivating force of composition, Gar-
cía Ponce’s praise of the hybridity of Tanizaki’s and Klossowski’s texts is
quite reminiscent of such principles. Sheaves of fragments, collections of
diaries, and remnants of events all get grouped together artfully and artifi-
cially among the pages of the text. García Ponce writes that the borrowings
are both personally pleasurable and aesthetically useful.
He pedido prestada para escribir esta novela [De ánima] la óptica que
utilizaron Pierre Klossowski en La revocación del Edicto de Nantes, [y]
Junichiro Tanizaki en La llave. Independientemente del placer que
me produjo intentar repetir una forma que me seduce, el uso del di-
ario intercalado de una figura masculina y otra femenina, que dan su
diferente visión de sucesos idénticos o muy semejantes, me era indis-
pensable para contar la acción que los hace existir de una manera que
mostrara su verdadero sentido.
[To write this novel I have borrowed the optics {lens} used by Pierre
Klossowski in The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, {and} Junichiro
Tanizaki in The Key. Aside from the pleasure it gave me to try to re-
peat a form which {personally} seduces me, the use of the intercalated
diary by a masculine figure and a feminine one, each of which gives a
different vision of identical or very similar events, was indispensable
to me in order to narrate the action which makes them exist in a way
that might reveal their true meaning.] (9)
Aside from the suggestion of what Rama has already referred to as the pri-
vate or “intimista” (180) aspect of García Ponce’s texts—what the author
calls here the narrative form which seduces him on a more personal level,
a seduction reminiscent of what has been eliminated from the social
realm—his reference to the contrastive gender-related visions of events as
well as the need to find an appropriate vehicle for the revelation of some
“true” or hidden meaning offer the first step in the articulation of allegori-
cal narrative. We find here, then, a hint of the porosity between society and
individual subject that characterizes all three novels.
Since the three pieces of a triptych, or the multiple panels of the
retablo, face outward side-by-side in a pattern of images, one may observe
an intertextual dynamic among them with regard to the representation of
and reflection on the women whose tales are told in what Rama has called
García Ponce’s “relatos visuales” [visual stories] (180). Once again, as is true
in the case of previous texts, it is the female characters which connect and
convolute the tales joined together in this narrative. And it is also true that
the retablo tradition has not died but has survived and flourished in the
popular devotional images of contemporary Mexico. In this form of repre-
sentation, while the painter of the piece may not be known, his or her rela-
tionship to the subject matter portrayed is certainly clear since he has left
behind traces of his interpretation of figures and events. Let us recall Jon-
sson’s assessment of Musil’s narratives and their representation of “crimes
without identifiable perpetrators and events without visible cause” as we
ponder the retablo’s afterlife. The crimes and events exist; their authors
have vanished. So it is with the stories of Crónica: historical events and
criminal acts, intense emotions and complex relationships have come and
gone, leaving behind monuments of a sort. As Castañeda reminds us about
Maya ruins as runes, “the artifacts are mute when narrated into visibility,
but not silent” (1996 156). The ventriloquizing voices of Crónica decipher
meanings and invite the reader to inscribe others onto the interfaced layers
of the narratives. Though not the tourist guidebooks substantiating the fa-
bles of archaeological sites, García Ponce’s texts do offer reinventions of
cultural monuments as ceaselessly repeated moments of revelation. The
Onderos make the stones of the streets speak; García Ponce and the
Escritura writers give voice to the sedimentary levels of the unconscious.
To discuss these and other aspects of Crónica within the ruins of
modernity, we must excavate the thirty chapters the text contains to unpack
their obsessive return to numerous variations on the same story. Akin to the
narrative scenes of the retablo and its complex strata of discourses, recol-
lections, struggles, conversations, and reinventions, this text emphasizes
ritualized connections between the act of storytelling and the interrelated
pieces of the puzzle made up of equal parts erotic life and faintly-traced his-
torical milieu. Repetition, mirrored scenes, and a constant return to the
same temporal moment over and over, eliminating historical discourse, are
the structural elements on which the novel is based. Among these shifting
sands, the reader is cast into a world in which it is difficult if not impossible
to find a solid place to stand. As Krell puts it, “[w]e no longer dream of
structures of thought and knowledge in the way Kant dreamed of them,
searching madly for (and failing to find) the bedrock on which to construct
a Tribunal of Pure Reason” (92). Glimpses (Paz’s “vislumbres” once again),
snippets, chips, and the odd narrative phrase are to be found, but attempts
to reconstruct a cultural dwelling will depend on the reader and on what
each portion of the narrative summons up.
Of the relatively few critics who have written at any length on this
work, several have noted the role of doubles and repetition that might sug-
gest some sort of structural circularity or doubling.1 To take this general
observation one step further, I propose to call the relationship of the first
chapter of the novel entitled “Con Esteban” [With Esteban] to the last—
whose title is exactly the same—a mirroring. The opening line of the novel,
part of an interior monologue of the character Esteban as he remembers an
intense physical and spiritual experience with the now-dead Mariana, a fig-
ure of the past in ruin herself now, appears again incorporated into the
closing pages as an attempt to return to the same intimate moment. Yet
these are not merely stagnant doubled episodes but narrative walls that
loosely contain the interior spaces wedged between them, with Esteban and
Mariana suffering tremendous losses along the way. Pellicer summarizes
the beginning, saying that with the first few words “el lector queda instal-
ado, por decirlo así, en la mente del protagonista Esteban. Se trata de la
evocación de un evento y de la impresión que éste produjo en [él]” [the
reader settles into, as it were, the mind of the protagonist Esteban. What
we find is the evocation of an event and the impression it left in {him}]
(110). In between what intervenes are all of the tragic social and political
events of 1968 in Mexico. When we are narratively placed “con Esteban”
the first time, he is a different character from the Esteban we find at the
end or, if we read his episode as a convolute, his recollection of the event
just shifts and never finds an absolute version; the same is true for his friend
Mariana whom he recalls in both fragments. Layered in between the nar-
rative beginning and ending, the reader finds a chorus of voices which con-
tribute charged particles to the complexity of the overall narrative puzzle
and create shadows around the characters, almost like the framing panels of
a retablo. These choral groups include reiterated appearances by six voices,
including Anselmo; María Inés; Fray Alberto; doctor Raygadas, an omni-
scient narrator, a nameless, bodiless spirit which inhabits a space outside
the everyday historical world of the characters; and Mariana and Esteban
themselves. The polyphonic fragments also consist of the confessions, di-
aries, letters, and dialogues of numerous other characters, and the clinical
reports of psychologists and psychiatrists about the mental state of Mari-
ana, María Inés, and other characters. These narrative modules affirm the
stories circulating around the allegorical characters whose lives return in
obsessive repetition, the medical establishment, the church, a man, a
woman, and several anonymous citizens make up the social allegory that
confronts the forces of evil embodied in the State’s repressive organisms.
The remembrance of Mariana’s words, “Quiero que me cojan todo el día y
toda la noche” [I want to be fucked night and day] (Crónica 9, 1099), returns
as an echo within Esteban’s unspoken thoughts, setting up a face-to-face
encounter between the beginning and the ending of the narrative around
the afterlife of their relationship. If the physical relationship is not longer
feasible for she is dead, then the words remain as a melancholy lament that
marks the loss.
Significantly, it is to Mariana’s words and not his own that he jour-
neys back after his nightmarish experience in Tlatelolco where she loses
her life. Mariana is converted into an iconic ruin beyond her material self,
much like the evocative religious figures of the triptych. She now repre-
sents an almost uncanny link to past events since her ghostly image haunts
the psychological landscapes of those who survive, unsure as to why the fate
of one is not that of the other. Directly, the external circumstances have
taken their toll on Mariana’s life since they have ended it. There is no doubt
that her physical life has been terminated abruptly in the streets of the city,
but she lives on as an after-image. Indirectly, Mariana has had just as great
an impact on Esteban’s psyche as the events around both of them and it is
through her that he attempts to sort out their significance for himself. As a
melancholic storyteller, he desperately looks for a way to reconstruct what
has been lost, as Hanssen notes of Benjamin’s turn to minerals and stones,
by “turn[ing] his gaze toward earth, . . . [toward] the coldness of stone, mat-
ter, or inert mass . . . the melancholic remain[s] bound to abject matter”

(160). In order to find what he seeks in Mariana—the dead, the relic, the
remnant, the afterlife of matter and debris—as a Benjaminian storyteller,
Esteban (and us, “with him”) must rummage among the rubble into which
all is degraded. Mariana is resuscitated in his mind expressing her personal
desire for liberation, but the events occurring around her (really, around
them) reflect just the opposite: they unveil the brutal repression of a soci-
ety in the throes of confronting recycled myths of national identity and
subsequently being denied the freedom to do so. Both Mariana and Mexico
suffer the consequences of such a desire: the “quiero” [wish] expressed in
both episodes of the novel echoes longingly throughout the pages. By the
end, it is merely a vestige of a desire, a wish unfulfilled, an enigma left in
the subjunctive and unresolved.
Therefore, we might suggest that circularity may not be the best de-
scription of the textual structure. Instead, the concept of a ruin displayed in
the grotesque reflections of a distorted mirror might serve us better (pace
Valle-Inclán and his esperpento). As characters seek to find their own images
within the rubble of the narratives of modern culture, but are confronted
with the disruptive forces of allegory and not realism (mimesis), even the
concept of recognition and the figure of the self are dismantled. For Ben-
jamin, allegorical readings of images and constellations of them “expos[e] a
fissure between nature and signification” (Hanssen 68), thus canceling out
the circularity since representation no longer reflects but spins outward
into new layers and even greater piles of debris. Decay, decomposition, and
dissolution come between a character and his or her image. The allegorical
structure of the baroque is exuberant and fascinating, not harmonic or cir-
cular in the sense that it merely reproduces some previous thing. Esteban
or Mariana, even as they long for endurance and recognition, become reit-
erated others. Although one might posit the end of meaning in a dead Mar-
iana, for García Ponce’s narrative voices she forms a powerful Benjaminian
ruin to which they might return obsessively, perhaps as compensation for
an impossible social return to innocence.
The title of the novel Crónica indicates an important discrepancy be-
tween the multiplicity of images revisited in the text itself and the insinua-
tion of a purely linear structure by those for whom perhaps there never was
an “intervention.” The suggestion of an official version of events, ones with
putatively logical precedents and consequences, is interrupted by the “in-
tervención” of the private, intimista accounts of García Ponce’s characters
into the official narrative stream of the history of the 1960s. The opposite
is true as well since this is the first time García Ponce anchors his charac-
ters in the mire of history and in its power to scar those caught up by the
intrusive forces of politics. Previous tales have been constructed around a

time without event, whereas Crónica embeds characters in the afterlife of
historical event. The ultimate product, both in its formal structure and nar-
rative content, is a textual discrediting of a singular, linear version of events
in favor of constant intrusion and, in the words of Gliemmo, “la repre-
sentación de un mundo a dos” [the representation of a world split in two]
(17). In other words, the personal and the political disrupt or interrupt at
any time into the realm of the other. As one is built up, the other comes to
destroy and rebuild from the ruins, which then produce fossilized vestiges
of previous fragments. Fuentes’s allegory of the construction of a high-rise
as an indication of the nation’s modernity offers us a parallel once again in
that each part of the world split in two is really a fragment of a process and
not a product. Political life and psychological life contain remnants and
survivals from which the storyteller may glean material for new construc-
tions. Simultaneously thrown backward and forward, human beings are the
stuff of new orders and of vestiges of the old. Fields of ruins do not only in-
habit the outside world, they are scattered across the inner world as well.
In Crónica, what might be traditionally divided as intimate stories and
political events are both articulated around several axes of synchronic and
diachronic meaning. These axes include challenges to ideas and traditions
of conservative provincial life when bourgeois families emigrate to urban
centers and refuse to cede their old myths to the promissory discourses of
modernity. They also center on the frictions which evolve among the
members of three generations when power struggles ensue over political
and social ideologies as well as over the preservation of a certain economic
status. A third axis is oriented around issues of class divisions between the
wealthy Gonzaga clan and their hired servants. These issues are not always
presented as conflicts per se but also take the form of the adoration and ob-
session of the ‘have-nots’ with the supposed aesthetic perfection of the
upper classes, in particular the fetishizing of María Inés’s body by the fam-
ily chauffeur Evodio Martínez. This obsession leads him to kill the husband
of his object of desire, although the novel never makes it completely clear
whether the murder is done in the name of the lower classes, in the name
of a jealous suitor who can never have María Inés for himself, as an act of
madness, or perhaps as all three. In any case, the class conflicts supposedly
resolved by the triumph of the Revolution survive in the ruins of familial
relationships and the declaredly untouchable body of the bourgeoisie. On
the other hand, the bourgeois family, as might be expected in light of the
traditional conflicted relationship between rich and poor in Mexico, retains
an image of the working class as a horde of elementary beings on the mar-
gins of humanity holding fast to their bodily needs and appetites. María
Inés is the sublime body of fantasy; lower-class women are portrayed as an-
imal bodies surviving on instinct. It is telling that in this novel the only
cases of incest, the ultimate taboo of any modern society, are committed by
brothers and sisters among the servants of the Gonzaga household.2 The
reason? Even among the ruins, inside the shells of expropriated haciendas
and overgrown plantations, beauty still attracts beauty, at least in the fan-
tasies of characters whose world is on the verge of losing its mythmaking
powers. (Let us recall Fuentes’s 1967 essay on the rise of The New Wave
and the increasing violence needed during the 1960s to perpetuate that
mythmaking function in the future vision of the nation.)
The structure of Crónica presents the reader with the narrative repre-
sentation of two vertical panels which depict the complex and unstable re-
lations between the wealthy in their provincial glory and their subsequent
life in the city, and the poor in the same two settings. No class occupies its
own panel separate and isolated from the other, but instead crosses over
onto both sides, the point of articulation of their identities being their
shared geographical space rather than just class as such. In city or in coun-
tryside, class divisions subsist even as discourses of modernity promote de-
mocracy and change, progress, education, and prosperity. Class is the more
permanent function of social identity for characters despite geographical
change or narrative panel position. García Ponce’s reminiscences triggered
by his family photographs hint at this debris of the past. Even as his narra-
tors lose prestige and privilege in the construction of a future Mexico, the
photographic images both reassure them of their origins and hint at having
to mourn being cast out of traditional social prominence. His lament over
being excluded from soccer games carries a critique of modern society in
which wealth is of little value (when others are rising in social class). What
to do with these changing relationships is a dilemma inside and among
many of the characters of Crónica.
In Crónica, the underclasses carry with them the primitiveness of the
land and their relationship to it into the urban setting, as if they were con-
demned from birth to the violent ‘nature’ they exhibit in their actions. One
explicit example is to be found in the story of Ramiro Morales, formerly a
pig farmer and avid hunter whose expertise in slaughtering the animals for
market is put to use when he becomes a soldier in the Mexican army and is
ordered to massacre students in the streets of Mexico City in October
1968. His so-called blood lust is transferred from swine to human beings as
naturally as he moves his family from the provinces to the capital in search
of a better job. The essential excesses of his actions in the fields, the streets,
and the bedroom (he is the incestuous partner of one of the servants in the
Gonzaga house) are encapsulated in the following passage from Chapter 28
“Dificultades imprevistas” [Unforeseen Difficulties], which charts the re-

actions of the government soldiers to their encounter with the demonstrat-
ing students. The State’s confidence in its own modernizing mission
produces a blindness with regard to what its citizens might be thinking
about such changes, and with respect to the extremes it requires of them.
The narrator recounts the tragic event of the invasion of the UNAM and
one soldier’s emotions in one unified episode.
Ramiro, que durmió durante todo el largo trayecto desde el cuartel

hasta la Universidad y podía confesarse a sí mismo que luego había
pasado algunos momentos divertidos amenazando estudiantes, per-
siguiéndolos y golpeándolos si tenía oportunidad con la culata de su
fusil y ametralladora, se sentía ahora de nuevo un tanto aburrido . . . ,
paseaba con su metralleta al hombro por los corredores de una de las
Facultades . . . , sin perder al mismo tiempo la remota esperanza de
encontrar algún estudiante rezagado y gozar con su posible temor y
su sorpresa en el instante en que lo apuntara con su metralleta.
[Ramiro, who slept during the entire long stretch from the barracks
to the university and could tell himself honestly that he had later
spent some enjoyable moments threatening students, running after
them, and beating them when he had the chance with the handle of
his rifle and machine gun, now felt a little bored once again . . . ,
walked up and down the halls of one of the schools with his weapon
on his shoulder . . . , at the same time without losing the remote glim-
mer of hope of finding some student left behind and of delighting in
the possible fear and surprise created at the moment when he aimed
his gun at him.] (996–997)
The physical and mental sensations he experiences are the links between
before and after, the glue between the provinces and the city, with the ruins
of one life put at the service of something else. The voice of Ramiro him-
self holds the two pieces together, much as the intimate feelings of his own
power and control over the external historical events (being part of them as
if he were an agent in their plotting which as a soldier, of course, he is not)
link the two fragmentary narratives. While surrounding, threatening, and
sacrificing the ‘enemy,’ he feels the same as when he used to close the cor-
ral gate on the piglets in order to use his knife on them, slit their throats,
and send them off to market to be sold (1021). Even as the federal govern-
ment works to keep classes in separate spheres of the city, encounters such
as these are frequent and unavoidable. They reveal the hidden relics of the
past that refuse to disappear behind the facade of modern buildings, televi-
sion studios, tourist hotels, and centers of higher learning. Class warfare,
racism, and a patriarchal State battle it out on the streets of the city as a
monument to the future. Rubenstein addresses this clash between monu-
ments to the past and to what is to come.
In choosing where to dig and place electric lines, which streets to

pave, where to build new government office buildings, how to site
new avenues and highways, and especially where to construct the
huge, modern, new campus of the National Autonomous University,
the government supported and encouraged an enormous change in
the organization of the capital city. Mexico City’s commercial and
artistic hub moved rapidly southward, aided by all the new infra-
structure the government provided, and leaving the center of the city
to a combination of historical monuments and poor people’s housing.
The government left the central barrios to molder, neglected, while
it rapidly met the needs of the richer and better-connected citizens
who had settled themselves up just to the south. Those left behind
understood this process well, as newspapers and magazines depicted
the elites’ daring adaptations of the antique structures of Coyoacán
and the sleek modernity of the new colony called Narvarte. (223)
This transformation of the metropolis is merely the setting for the emo-
tional and psychic crises and transformations of the characters of Crónica.
Set amid the crumbling ruins of the city’s center, visible just outside the glit-
tering splendors of the Zona Rosa, they come and go from daily activities
and return to their own familiar spaces.3 The campus of the UNAM, first a
showplace for the democratization of education, becomes a battleground
between the classes artificially separated by State decree, but meeting on the
same grounds to protest. From the construction of a museum of sorts to en-
lightenment and modernity, complete with the artistic recollection of the
past in the mosaic walls of the campus library’s murals, the university’s af-
terlife is that of decay and ruination. The site of promise and of loss, the
UNAM struggles along with over 300,000 students, constantly reiterating
its mission even as educational goals fall by the wayside. Perhaps the “inter-
vention” of the title of the novel can be extended to include an intrusion on
the city’s landscapes aside from the military intervention into the students’
protests. In what Pellicer calls “un país marcado por las contradicciones” [a
nation marked by contradictions] (167), he finds the same space of cultural
debris as in that of a “país ficticio” (an imagined and imaginary nation) (168)
and a ruin from the past that refuses to decay into nothingness once and for
all. García Ponce’s narrator remarks on the same ironic juxtaposition: “En el
subsuelo subsiste el pasado indígena y en el subsuelo, con cada vez mayor
certeza y siempre bajo otro nombre, deben realizarse todas las operaciones
públicas” [In the subsoil the indigenous past subsists and in the subsoil, with
increasing certainty and always called by another name, all of the public
works have to take place] (318). One cannot speak of bedrock in the case of
Mexico City, for its underground is lake bed and not granite, allowing a slow
descent over decades. But the subsoil is an allegory here for the rootedness
of monuments to historical moments and social projects. The indigenous
past cannot literally always be there visibly, but it certainly can be resur-
rected and rebuilt in archaeological sites dedicated to the preservation of
some modern (if uncanny) memory of it. The indigenous subsoil, then,
brings forth an allegorical figure upon which each observer may write a
story and on which the tropes of the battle for the nation play out. As far as
modern constructs go, Fuentes’s take on their scaffolding as the sites of
modernity’s struggles includes public works (as spectacles of progress) as
well as private reconstructions.
CHAPTER FOUR
Monuments and Relics, II
LET THE GAMES BEGIN: PUBLIC SPECTACLE AND VISUALIZING THE RUIN
In his essay “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” [Other Voices, Other Places],
García Ponce revisits the terrain of his youth, on the level of both physical
uprooting and psychic disturbance, in an effort to narrate the periods and
breaks in his own life which have left remnants of images in his memories.
He begins with the early days of provincial life, those of his grandparents
before electricity arrives in Yucatán, and moves through his travels, his ed-
ucation, and the upheaval of the family’s move to Mexico City. Perhaps
signaling even more than he consciously acknowledges, his narrator fills
paragraphs with phrases related to a single general question: “¿Qué futuro
nos esperaba?” [What future awaited us?] (27). Although he refers essen-
tially to a particular change of address and a specific point of arrival (that
“siniestra ciudad” [sinister city] which will overwhelm his senses for a long
period of time), readers may also see this as a more open doubt regarding
the individual as well as the national days ahead. The narrator recalls what
is being abandoned: “Atrás quedaba Mérida, mis familiares, sus vastas
casas con pobladas huertas, sus calles conocidas, su segura civilización”
[Mérida was being left behind, along with my relatives, the enormous
houses and dense orchards, the familiar streets, the security of {a known}
civilization] (27), while what lies ahead is mysterious, dark, unfamiliar, and
above all, small.
The paradox of the sentiment of smallness evoked by the soon-to-be
colossal city cannot go unnoticed; it would appear to be the result of the
weight of the past resting on, and even obliterating, the lightness of the fu-
ture. His memories of arrival disappear and fade away, with the new geog-
raphy overpowering the concept of time and abolishing all notions of
objectivity and observation. In a combined moment of “descontrol” [lack of
control] (28), “nostalgia” (36), and “melancolía” (37) the narrator ends the
essay with a paragraph dominated by exclamation points. What he finds he
䊏 75 䊏
needs to exalt in this way is the feeling of “Cuántos cambios!” [How many
changes!]. (37). The short passage is similar to what Benjamin’s under-
standing of the French capital is in the decade of the 1920s. In his study of
the urban arcades, Benajmin moves from cityscape to dreamworld, from
material architectural structures to “thought-images” (Gilloch, Walter Ben-
jamin 91). The alterations refer as much to the change from rural to city
life as they do to how the metropolis looks different every morning under
the aegis of a government building itself a future. While García Ponce’s
narrator laments the fading of his family’s faces in the memory portraits he
desperately tries to sustain, he evokes a different feeling toward the new
people and places he lives among now. These include, of course, neighbors
and classmates and novias, but they also include the face of politics. It is no-
table that even as President Miguel Alemán supported the construction of
civil institutions, and with them the construction of edifices to house them,
García Ponce recalls a more personal aspect of this historical moment. As a
student in the Instituto México, a Marist school for boys, García Ponce
witnessed an annual soccer game with a rival school, the Colegio México,
noting that these were both male only, and that no private schools for girls
existed within a wide radius of his institution while there was a sister school
of the other. His conclusion is a “thought-image” of presidential politics,
related to the fact that Alemán’s son studied at the Colegio México, and
that he was privileged as no others were. Internalized and recalled much
later, the comparison becomes a personal recollection of the city: “Ahí es-
tudiaba, lo digo como prueba de que nuestros políticos siempre fueron
mentirosos sobre su fe en las instituciones civiles, el hijo del presidente
Alemán, Miguelito. Quizá como hijo del presidente él tenía todas las novias
que quisiera; yo sólo puedo afirmar que mi primer amor en México estudi-
aba en el Colegio Oxford y no me hizo caso nunca” [Miguelito, the son of
President Alemán, studied there. I say this as proof that our politicians
were always untruthful about their faith in civil institutions. Maybe as the
son of the president, he had all the girfriends he wanted; I can only affirm
that my first love in Mexico {City} studied at the Colegio Oxford and never
ever paid attention to me] (32–33). An invisible young man in a bustling
metropolis will necessarily have to cast his eyes upon people and events
around him as if from a dreamworld from the very beginning.
Memories of provincial life for the wealthy are reduced to recollec-
tions once their ranches, plantations, and haciendas have been left behind
for the resources and glitter of the metropolis. All of this transformation
takes place in the modernizing schema of the social and economic struc-
tures of the Mexican nation, commencing in the 1950s and continuing
through the 1960s and after. Both young and old in the Gonzaga family in
MONUMENTS AND RELICS, II 䊏 77
Crónica idealize the mythified past as a space of genuine family relations

(ones now lost and only evoked in memory), a close attachment to long-
held family values and lands, and the traditional practices of religious piety
in accordance with the tenets of the conservative church.1 Of course, this
recollection becomes problematic when the family enters the (allegorical)
gates of Mexico City. If the chauffeur Evodio Martínez and his friend
Ramiro, the farmer-turned-soldier, are figures emblematic of the lower
classes, the high social strata filled with so-called wealth and sophistication
are personified by Esteban and his cousin-by-marriage, José Ignacio Gon-
zaga. Very early in the novel the reader is made aware, through narrative
comments and asides and the characters’ own monologues, that the rela-
tionship between the two men—Esteban, the artist and reclusive photog-
rapher more interested in aesthetic matters than economic success, and
José Ignacio, a secure and respectable businessman in the Mexican com-
munity—is not distant and remote but runs deeper than what is seen at first
glance. In point of fact and kinship, these distant cousins have in common
the figure of Tía Eugenia, a Gonzaga on her mother’s side whose deceased
husband was part of Esteban’s family as well. Later on, we discover that
their female counterparts—José Ignacio’s wife and Esteban’s lover Mari-
ana—are interconnected besides, and that their stories parallel one another
until a singular (but provocative) moment of intersection occurs. In the pri-
vate chapel of the Gonzaga family, during the First Communion of José
Ignacio’s two children, Esteban is witness to a moment of confusion as well
as of revelation. Invited to be the official photographer of this critical ritual
moment in the life of the family, Esteban captures through his camera lens
the figure of a woman standing next to his cousin. The woman appears to
be not a double of Mariana, but Mariana herself. The eye of the camera is
in the process of creating a monument to the family’s future but, at the
same time, apprehends the afterlife of an image of the past. From this point
on, Esteban’s perception of the identity of these two women blurs: Is it one
woman who projects an aura (shades of Carlos Fuentes’s novella Aura) and
thereby creates a Gothic mystery? Are there two women so similar that
they confirm a female archetype by their mere existence? Since Esteban
does not yet have the power to unravel this dilemma, nor have access to
both women in the same place at the same time, he is left with only the
traces of their appearance. These residues are the pictures he snaps at the
communion, the artistic representation of their physical and material exis-
tence, a bit of the debris of outside life reconstructed and fixed on paper.
It is José Ignacio Gonzaga’s wealth that establishes a bridge between
the upper classes in the countryside and the modern world of industrial
tycoons and State power visibly concentrated in the city. His is the sort of
wealth that belongs to the so-called respectable traditional rural families and
which, according to official government ideology, is the prime mover capa-
ble of shifting the country toward modernity. An essence of ‘good taste’ is
the signature of the everyday life of José Ignacio and his exemplary family.
As the narrator concludes in a moment of revelation for the character Evo-
dio, who is in search of a job: “En él estaba de pronto toda una realidad” [All
of a sudden he {Evodio} saw in him {his future employer} an entirely new
world] (71). José Ignacio acquires the status of a revelatory figure here since
he is not merely a man standing before Evodio but the ‘convolution’ of an
entire narrative history that extends in two directions, toward both the past
and the future. The expectations for this new world of opportunity hold true
not only for the individual in search of employment but for the nation as a
whole. This extended family, whether in their haciendas in the country or
their urban mansions flourishing in the suburbs, is presented as the ‘natural’
inheritor and receptacle of ‘good taste’ and genuine values, much as Ramiro
appears condemned to the cycle of violence and brutality connected with his
poverty in some ‘natural’ way. The Gonzaga mansion in a secluded area of
the urban metropolis—colonies such as Narvarte or Coyoacán mentioned
before—becomes the utopia of harmonious space eventually disrupted by
the arrival of the irrational forces and barbarians such as Evodio and the rest
of the servants with what is considered their inherently grotesque behavior
and attitudes. Their rudeness, lack of formal education, insatiable sexual ap-
petites, and general lack of ‘good taste’ intervene in the bourgeois family
chronicle in crisis—another level to the suggestive phrase “crónica de la in-
tervención”—and put an end to its story with the murder of José Ignacio.
Not as facile a tale as it appears, this allegory of a national tragedy has many
convolutions before it reaches this end.
As an eminent and worldly industrialist, José Ignacio becomes more
powerful, and his reputation inside the nation’s elite is enhanced when rep-
resentatives of the federal government formally invite him and his close as-
sociates to join the commission in charge of coordinating what in official
code is known as the “Gran Proyecto” [Great Project] (329). This commis-
sion has been formed and appointed, it seems, to plan, promote, and control
from its inception the international spectacle referred to (euphemistically) as
the “Festival Mundial de la Juventud” [World Festival of Youth] (329), oth-
erwise revealed in the narrative to be the Olympic Games of 1968 held in
Mexico City and its immediate environs. The campus of the UNAM, that
monument to Mexico’s world-class status and to the demolition required in
order for it to be completed, is one of the central venues for these games.
Postponed until October owing to social unrest that, paradoxically, takes the
government by surprise (we need only recall the chapter entitled “Dificul-
tades imprevistas” [Unforeseen or Unexpected Difficulties], these public

ceremonies are dedicated to the visible representation of modern Mexico on
display for all to see. Streets, facades, sports stadiums, elaborate housing,
and a city decked out in ostentatious display, all reflect the official code of
conduct for foreign eyes to witness. To comply with the government’s
wishes, José Ignacio eagerly accepts the official request and organizes his en-
tire personal administrative team around the project. Therefore, his private
family life (and fortune, it goes without saying) and his public service to the
nation are intertwined through this group of appointees who create a tight,
closed network of intrigue, hysteria, and opportunities flowing around and
through him. Such a network is reminiscent of the structure of the novel it-
self as it weaves together a number of narratives from different perspectives
around the figures of the Gonzaga clan, Mariana, Esteban, and others. It
also provides an allegory of the process of modernization. The result is a
collection of fragments in a landscape of ruin in those two senses set out by
Castañeda: construction and destruction.
Throughout the chapters of the novel dedicated to the preparations
for the Festival, one cannot fail to perceive in the contradictions between of-
ficial language and the narrator’s voice a sense of the spectacular and the car-
nivalesque in the words of the State and its pet project. To create an aura of
good taste, a patina of national cultural values, spectacles for the masses are
fabricated by the committee with the help of Esteban’s photographs, which
are appropriated and given captions to promote the required spirit of the
unified nation. In the words of a foreign representative of the committee
(whose incomplete linguistic command of Spanish is reproduced in the
text), “tenemos la obligación de crear un imagen {sic} de algo que no existe
todavía” [we have the obligation to create an image of something that
doesn’t {even} exist yet] (331). (Why an English-speaking member of the
committee would be consulted to begin with signals one of the ironic rem-
nants of cultural traditions that look northward for advice and validation.)
This “something” which will be created through the deformation of the
glossy images captured on film by Esteban for José Ignacio and his col-
leagues to use as propaganda is a ruin of the future, a vestige of the moment
that will be mechanically and, for them, unproblematically produced and re-
produced. How images are read, their potential for appropriation by any
number of individual and social forces, and their subjective freezing of mo-
ments of historical reality all come into focus in the center panel of our tri-
partite narrative with the photographs of Esteban. In other words, the entry
of the nation into modernity is represented here as a masquerade, a failed
project from the very beginning due to the endemic social problems that
cannot be resolved and the so-called atavistic tendencies of the country’s
population. The photographic images can be used to promote a future

“something” as long as they are interpreted in a self-fulfilling way, as long as
they fulfill their official function. Both José Ignacio and Evodio are tied to
their roots, even after their feet leave the soil of their native lands. Each of
their narrative panels shows the story behind the facade, the players without
their masks, the tenuousness of the thin veneer of ‘good taste’ and modern,
democratic culture promoted in literary and visual images to lure outsiders
to the spectacular Festival. The mixture of national monuments isolated in
time and space by Esteban’s camera and the promotion of youth and health
in the bodies of the athletes set to compete, looks inward (to the nation) and
outward (to the international community of ‘like’ cultures) to produce the
perfect recipe for modernity, or so the public is told in the chronicle of the
Festival’s proposed activities through posters, flyers, newspaper articles, and
political speeches.
If García Ponce clearly attributes to the family saga of early twentieth
century Europe one of the models underlying the construction of Crónica,
the politics and aesthetics of representation suggested by the episodes deal-
ing with Esteban and photography eerily evoke the Nazi propaganda films
of the 1930s. Perhaps the most famous of them, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph
des Willens [Triumph of the Will] (1934), relies on ritualized expression and
grandiose panoramic gestures to overwhelm the spectator and, one sup-
poses, bring him or her into the ideological fold of fascism. As Kaes writes
of this film, “In Triumph of the Will (generally regarded as the archetypal
fascist film) cameras are constantly in motion, circling and moving, creat-
ing a compelling energy in the highly composed spaces around formations
of masses of people, animating even buildings and monuments. . . . Images
such as these have become part of the public memory in Germany” (5; em-
phasis added). As buildings and monuments are reanimated through the
manipulation of the photographer, and as the camera lens ceases to be in-
vested with that traditional objective function attributed to it before
modernity’s critical eye intervened, private memories fade and crumble
into debris as “public memory” erects a monument to a singular version of
events.2 This goal of giving life to spectacular national monuments as visi-
ble evidence of the narrative of modernity corresponds to what Esteban’s
camera is to do for the Festival. When he is sent out by the Organizing
Committee into the streets of the unnamed metropolis to take pictures of
architectural wonders, statues, and vistas (with and without human figures),
the result is the animation of these landscapes as participants in the larger
history of the nation.
While documentary film is the medium used to promulgate the ide-
alized images of Hitler’s rise to power, the photograph is the vehicle of
choice in García Ponce’s depiction of the government’s approach to the

Olympic Games as lived by his narrators. The use of a medium which,
since its invention, has been granted an inherent truth value as a mecha-
nism of technology capable of offering unmediated and therefore authen-
tic documentation of events, immediately calls into question the concept of
authenticity itself. With the intervention of the photographer’s gaze, the
artifact created, whether photograph, film, painting, or written text, is
made relative to a moment and a use value. There follows the concept of
the leader, in this case Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, as a human
being whose countenance, rhetoric, and gestures are reduced and stylized
into a grotesque monument as well. The process of creating the photo-
graphic image allegorizes the revelation of the Project’s leader as a figure
highlighted in the depths of chiaroscuro. As such, he is touted as part of the
ideal landscape of the moment of triumph captured in the scenes of the
Olympic Village as yet another part of the nation’s inexorable historical ad-
vancement toward modernity’s arches. In other words, in the brochure
photo, the president becomes an authentic monument in the vast panorama
of historical markers among which he appears. He promotes all of the cer-
emony of the moment, but he also casts a shadow on the success of the Pro-
ject by enforcing its goals through repression and violence.
What Kaes calls an “arsenal” of images (17) addresses the paradoxical
fate of two communities in Crónica. The first group is the national audi-
ence, one part of which is composed of the already-converted (bourgeoisie)
and the other made up of those who see this type of media propaganda as
just another skirmish in the long ideological battle with the manipulative
State. The second group is the community of international spectators
which has to be convinced that the forces of law and order have everything
under control so that the Festival can go on as planned, the games being
the crowning achievement in a long history of public accomplishments.
The glossy photographs are used to tell the official story, as opposed to the
narrative crónica, by weaving convolutions around what the eye focuses on
as a series of images belonging to one single national narrative. In this way,
the photos are similar to the panels of the retablo. They might stand alone,
but they acquire added significance when articulated around a central tale
to which each contributes and from which each takes new life. And cap-
tions are added to the photographs by the State in case the viewer does not
interpret the images ‘correctly.’ So the visual image is charged with a Ben-
jaminian spark of storytelling, now envisioned especially as the catalyst of
discrepancy and contradiction.
The bureaucratization of the arts, as well as their use to legitimate the
State’s vision of historical events, is at the heart of García Ponce’s novel.
The myth-making capability of the photographic (or cinematic) image is

what is employed by the committee to “create what doesn’t yet exist”: the
idealized, imagined future nation. (But one might well ask what the model
of that vision is. Is modernity a copy of an ‘original’ akin to the mechani-
cally reproduced photograph, or is there a Mexican modernity responding
to more than emulation?) For the purpose of such imagining, the present is
not enough; vast expanses and layers of cultural ruins must be recycled.
Remnants of other times and other spaces must instead be shown as part
of an ongoing process, tied to the past and to the future through—in the
best of circumstances—a particular figure or event that then becomes a
stand-in for that myth. In Riefenstahl’s Germany of the 1930s, the events
are in part the spectacle of the Congress and its rallying behind Hitler. But
her later works, “Festival of the People” and “Festival of Beauty” (1938)
which together form the film Olympia, insinuate even closer ties to the cel-
ebratory preparations in which Esteban is involved. Rather than a sports
documentary on the XI Olympiad in Berlin, as she had been requested to
do, Riefenstahl directs a two-part work reflecting what Ott calls the “epic
nature of the games” (166). They condense all temporal narration into an
excessive, larger-than-life presentation on stage. Focus and technique take
the place of storyline in these films; lenses, editing, and lighting effects
contribute to the montage of events portrayed. When Ott refers to the
opening shots of the first part of Riefenstahl’s film as “unfolding like a mas-
sive tapestry” (172), one gets the same idea as the plan of the committee in
Crónica. A “tapestry” or montage of monuments is collected in a single
brochure, linking elements of past and present to suggest the future out-
come: a “triumph of the will” of one beautiful and homogeneous nation
coming together to celebrate the Festival. The ironic twist of García
Ponce’s text is that it uses the genre of the novel to break open the narrative
and permeate the cracks in the image of the “triumph.” The Festival of
Youth will provide the battleground on which “youth” in and of itself be-
comes the body of the enemy for the State.
In Chapter 11, panoramically entitled “Grandes perspectivas” [Grand
Perspectives] and ironically suggestive of the idea of great expectations for
the nation as well, the narrator recounts the cultural and historical origins
of such a climactic moment in order to reveal its place within a continuum
of masquerades by so-called barbarians. This narrative is a bitter portrayal
of the nation’s colonial past replete with class struggles, conflicts between
indigenous peoples and European invaders, and the criollos’ wars among
themselves. At no point does the nation seem to be able to come to terms
with its internal problems; different historical eras appear and disappear
like a succession of apparitions which leave behind nothing but empty
monuments and vast panoramas of devastation and decay. Governments

come and go, each leaving the legacy of a cultural icon in public recogni-
tion of its six-year term, but these images stand in the place of real social or
economic achievements. Through Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Octavio
Paz, and through María Félix and Elena Poniatowska, the State has pro-
claimed Mexico as belonging to feminism, to intellectual history, to a
world-class cinematic tradition, and to transparent politics (by recognizing
a documentary writer and journalist). Yet the gestures correspond more to
a recovery of the past for political reasons and to a nostalgia for belonging
in general that comes and goes from public view with each successive pres-
idential term.
Such markers of historical moments are the very same subjects of Es-
teban’s photographs, captured for yet another appropriation and circula-
tion of cultural images for questionably honorable official ends. The
triumphant moment of the Olympic Games, a tremendous governmental
investment to create an image of progress and modernity, is commemo-
rated in stamps, brochures, and other consumer-oriented paraphernalia.
How the notion of progress becomes one of consumption and the market-
place is an ellision that fills the novel. Yet, as Crónica reveals through the
voices of the multiple narrators, these mass-produced “monuments” to a
single moment are really allegorical references to endemic political vio-
lence which periodically tears the nation apart instead of moving it in a
communal and positive direction. In spite of a strong desire to institution-
alize what are seen as revolutionary changes fought for and won at various
critical times in the history of the nation, it is made evident in the narra-
tive that “jamás nada duradero se ha realizado” [nothing lasting has ever
been accomplished] (318), in the words of the principal narrator. Seen from
this perspective, this nation appears devoid of a genuine spirit (à la Nietz-
sche), a nation which continues ‘progressing’ almost despite itself just be-
cause there is a sense of inertia carried forward by the rhetorics of
modernity. It is caught up in a kind of blind and unconscious force, one
which continues to “avanza[r] siempre hacia adelante” [always move for-
ward] (318). Taking this vision of culture presented in Crónica as a
panorama of history as nightmare—as a coalescing of fascination and hor-
ror—seems to point toward what Horkheimer and Adorno argue in Dialec-
tic of Enlightenment to be a modern version of sacrifice necessary for the
nation to achieve the touted “modernity” (55). Alongside the ritualistic
games of the Olympiad, that sacrifice occurs in the Plaza de las Tres Cul-
turas of Tlatelolco. Another site of ruin, this public housing project is con-
structed and dedicated to masses of middle-class workers in the city. Yet it
also has in its subsoil a Franciscan church whose steps are barely visible and
an Aztec pyramid peeking out amid the high-rises. It has a duplication of

the pyramid form in its modern architecture, with the three-sided figure
rising into the skyline housing El Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores [The
Ministry of Foreign Relations]. There is little doubt that this is the site of
Adorno and Horkheimer’s sacrifices to modernity since what is erected on
the dual ruins of conquest and conversion becomes the altar to so much
more bloodshed in 1968.
The layered structure of the narrative fragments opens fissures to re-
veal other relics incorporated into tales of Mexican modernity. In “Grandes
perspectivas,” the mention of the royal House of Hapsburg, its interven-
tion into the politics of “the country” (which here remains unnamed), and
the execution of its emperor in front of a firing squad sent by the president
of a liberal government (318), recalls the emperor Maximilian and his later
removal by the forces of Benito Juárez. Later on in the novel, one of the
floating narrative voices reveals that the scene described above is actually
taken from a series of paintings by Édouard Manet and not from a direct
source of historical narrative itself. In other words, the reader does not wit-
ness the encounter between Juárez and Maximilian as a fictionalized ver-
sion of a chronicled historical event, but as a narrative “assemblage” of the
dramatized figures evoked by a French painter. Although the titles of the
paintings are not specified in this novel, from the descriptions they corre-
spond to The Execution of Maximilian Versions I, II, and III. In a sarcastic
reference to the relationship between a country’s tragic history and the out-
side witnesses to it (or precipitators of it), we read in Crónica that “El suceso
[la ejecución] inspiró incluso a grandes artistas extranjeros” [The event {the
execution} even inspired great foreign artists] (318). What does violence
“inspire” among the citizens of the nation?
The news of the execution, which reached Europe by telegraph, led
the French artist to sketch the composition on three very large canvases as
a major contribution to the Paris Salon. While there was on display in the
1867 Salon an oversized painting celebrating the French victory at Puebla
in 1863, Manet’s rapid response to the news of the execution was to ready
three canvases dedicated to what Wilson-Bareau says is an event “greeted
with universal horror and condemnation” (38). However, the universality
of this reaction might very well be placed in question as far as García
Ponce’s presentation is concerned. And we already suspect that horror is al-
ways accompanied by fascination as well, as Paz reiterates.
Manet’s three versions of the same scene, a triptych in its own right,
painted over the years 1867 to 1869, belong to what are referred to as his
history paintings. In each of the subsequent visions of this execution,
Manet “[picked] his way through often conflicting evidence in order to
sharpen the impact and meaning of his image[s]” (Wilson-Bareau 61). Fo-
cusing in on the aspects most pertinent to his overall project, Manet’s ver-
sions of events scavenge among the debris of historiography to choose what
most evokes his personal confrontation with the “horror” of the event. (As
an artist, but also as part of French society, he is doubly marked in this re-
spect.) The process of focusing in on emotions, details, and sentiments of
nationalism or power does not necessarily nor logically lead to the same
conclusion for all involved. An examination of this process leads Neil
Larsen to conclude that “[i]n Mexico the event itself retains a strongly sym-
bolic cultural and political connotation, but outside Mexico one might al-
most speak of the event of Manet’s painting as having displaced and
supplanted the spectacle of the execution proper” (32). So we might con-
clude that Maximilian’s execution becomes an allegory of the nation and
not a monumental representation. Larsen goes on to discuss what he calls
the modernist interpretation done of this painting by Georges Bataille in
conjunction with the same historical theme of execution as represented by
Goya in his painting Las ejecuciones del tres de mayo [The Executions of May
Third]. Bataille’s conclusion that, contrary to Goya’s version, Manet’s work
functions “[t]o suppress and destroy the subject [of history]” (Larsen 33) is
of obvious interest to the reader of García Ponce, for the tragedy of the loss
of the subject of (Mexican) history—what is left in the fragments of narra-
tive voice—is the centerpiece of Crónica. Art supplants life (history) in the
European reception of Manet’s version of this scene. In the particular case
of García Ponce, this event appears as just one in a series of national frac-
tures and failures which point up the image of tragic masquerade as the key
to the personal histories belonging to the storytellers. The Manet paintings
are monuments to such moments of tragedy, but they do not take the place
of the historical events that inspire them as interpreted by those who live
among the ruins of the society in question.
A curious point of intersection exists, however, between the painter of
the execution scene and the narrator of the same events later on in Crónica.
Manet, the very figure of the flâneur in Paris and always the painter of images
of modern urban life, nevertheless included political allegories in his works.
In one specific instance, Wilson-Bareau refers to an early lithograph by
Manet that shows a large crowd gathered to celebrate the launching of a bal-
loon owned by Emperor Napoleon III, a figure of modernity and progress
at the time. The print is an ironic comment on the celebration of the em-
peror’s official birthday in 1862 as a masquerade of national pride and unity
while concealing the defeats suffered in Mexico that same year. As the bal-
loon rises, the attempts to expand empire collapse. The same may be con-
cluded about the scenes evoked in Crónica, since the State’s proclamations of
unanimous support of the Olympic Games hide the violent scenes of repres-
sion needed to give the public appearance of peace, progress, and modernity.
The manner found by García Ponce to represent this obscure and concealed
political dimension of his narrative is allegory; the same is true for Manet.
Hanssen examines Benjamin’s emphasis on “the dialectical potential of alle-
gory” (67), the representation of which we find in both Manet and García
Ponce. We might conclude therefore that allegory’s opening up onto “a land-
scape of death and devastation” (Hanssen 68) functions to pry open the dis-
courses and monuments of modernity for the eyes of the narrator (and the
reader, by implication). Neither canvas nor bound volume can contain the
excesses of allegory or its possible convolution of the storyteller and his tale.
A second case of intersection in the novel is the spectral figure of Gus-
tavo Díaz Ordaz, president of Mexico during the decade of the 1960s, whose
government is responsible for the massacre at Tlatelolco. His semblance ap-
pears in the novel tagged with the epithet “la calavera sonriente” [the laugh-
ing skull] (1023), both a caricature of his physical appearance and a covert
reference to his intimate connection to the forces of death. As an allegorical
figure, he ties the narrative to those landscapes mentioned above since
“death” is responsible for the “devastation” one must excavate from allegory.
The epithet is a coded reference to Díaz Ordaz, which appears in newspa-
pers and other publications of the time. Such a figure, once again extracted
from a specific historical moment but reiterated in a kaleidoscope of narra-
tive fragments, becomes a specular marker of tragedy. The student killings
ordered by the government, and the media silence afterward, almost fade
into the background as the “laughing skull” takes center stage and moves its
jaws. The drama of the moment is distilled into the reduced gestures of this
figure as mask and as performance. Describing the representation of people
and conflicts in baroque theater, Benjamin looks toward the prince as the
greatest figure of a tension between hope and despair. Of the melancholic
prince he finds, as Bolz and van Reijen remark, “The prince is seemingly the
most powerful but at the moment when he is expected to make a decision he
reveals himself as being absolutely powerless. An unbridgeable chasm opens
up between ruling power and the capacity to rule. The absolutist prince, who
carries cruelty against his opponents to extremes, knows that he himself will
fall victim to their cruelty in the end” (32). Although Benjamin uses Golden
Age theater of Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca and German
baroque theater as his sources, it is not difficult to extend these words to
Díaz Ordaz as the allegorical prince of the PRI [Partido Revolucionario In-
stitucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party] that has given the death
blow to revolutionary hopes by institutionalizing them into official policy.
The power of the prince lasts only as long as his constituents agree to over-
look what is happening in favor of the masks of modernity. But when that
“unbridgeable chasm” widens, the only way to cross it is through violence
and death (after all, he is the living death figure). The absolutism of the
prince and his cohorts (now in the Mexican State and not on the Spanish
throne) can rule only through extremes if the revolutionary promises of
democracy have all but disappeared. The image of revolution itself in this
context becomes the greatest tragic figure because its promises (equality,
freedom, democracy) and its failures (force and irrationality) are two halves
of the allegorical image that open up to reveal nothing but contradictions
that destroy in order to survive.
The allegory of the figure of the caudillo, [the leader or the dictator,
in modern times] has a long history in literature from Spain and Latin
America. One cannot help but be reminded, for instance, of Ramón María
del Valle-Inclán’s classic representation of the Latin American dictator in
his novel Tirano Banderas [The Tyrant Banderas]. This work, one of the au-
thor’s esperpentos from the late 1920s, takes place in an imaginary Latin
American nation whose characteristics are an emblematic compendium of
the languages, politics, and history of a great number of countries in Latin
America. The figure of the dictator Santos Banderas, otherwise known as
the tyrant, uses planted informants to uncover traitors among his citizens.
When a demonstration occurs and these informants incite a riot, the re-
sulting jailings and political repression are traces remaining in the scenes
evoked by García Ponce; they are as psychologically devastating in Crónica
as they are in Tirano Banderas. Of the image of the dictator, Smith writes
“Santos Banderas . . . is at the very center of this novel, affecting in arbi-
trary fashion the lives of everyone in the country he dominates. He is not
an extrovert, sybaritic dictator with a love of fast living; instead, he is as-
cetic, choosing to reside in a former monastery, prudish, pedantic, and
mentally unstable” (130–131). The same traits are condensed into the fig-
ure of Díaz Ordaz, the “smiling cadaver,” who ends up spending his days
closed up in the National Palace in Mexico City after the 1968 debacle. A
common popular reference to him in this situation is “el solitario de Pala-
cio,” the solitary man in the palace. Far from a self-indulgent tyrant, the
presidential image is one of auesterity, abstinence, severity, and denial. The
masses do not have to take revenge on the tyrant as Benjamin suggests will
inevitably occur in tragic drama; he perpetrates the victimization on him-
self by withdrawing into a self-destructive death-in-life.
The first book of Valle-Inclán’s novel is entitled “Ikon of the Tyrant,”
a reference to descriptions equating Santos Banderas with wooden-like hu-
manoid figures. In some passages he is described as a mummy, and his head
is reduced to the form of a skull without human flesh. García Ponce uses
synecdoche to reduce the Mexican president to a puppet or a fleshless

human skull, exaggerating the prominence of Díaz Ordaz’s teeth and
glasses to create a monstrous allegory of evil. Both writers embody the fas-
cinating and horrific notion of death in these figures. García Ponce’s inten-
tion seems to be similar to that of Valle-Inclán: to open up grotesque and
phantasmagoric spaces that have pervaded the psyche of the nation’s in-
habitants and to allow the allegory to reveal all of the traumatic cultural de-
bris therein. In the words of Jérez Ferrán, “la visión de la historia . . . que se
proyecta en el esperpento [es] un reflejo . . . grotesco y distorsionado” [the vi-
sion of history . . . projected by the esperpento is a . . . grotesque and dis-
torted reflection {of events}] (116). García Ponce likewise “projects” a
semblance of crumbling and ruinous politics onto the countenance of the
mask of death: the nation smiles as its foundations crumble. René Avilés
Fabila, author of the novel El gran solitario de Palacio [The Great Solitary
Figure in the Palace], which is based on what he calls an allegory of the
grotesque figure of Díaz Ordaz, confesses that among the books he read in
preparation for the writing of his novel is Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas.
The earliest of the narratives about Latin American dictators he finds (fol-
lowed later by El señor presidente [Mr. President] by Miguel Angel Asturias,
Yo el supremo [I, The Supreme] by Augusto Roa Bastos, El recurso del método
[Explosion in the Cathedral] by Alejo Carpentier, and El otoño del patriarca
[Autumn of the Patriarch] by Gabriel García Márquez), Santos Banderas is,
chronologically, the lowest stratum of these images to be recalled and re-
suscitated, perhaps obsessively, as Avilés Fabia prepares his own text. Avilés
Fabila says of the character embedded in his novel that he does not intend
him to stand alone as a monument to some sort of sporadic interruption of
violence into the harmonious passage of history. Instead, he finds a pattern
established that has created resounding echoes in the minds of citizens
whose lives have been brutally affected. Subjects of this violent nation suf-
fer not only physical scars and lesions, but psychological wounds as well.
And rather than a ‘reasonable’ or logical progression from past to present,
history is distorted by them into a compulsive series of violent acts under-
lying the official discourse of a collective modernity. Avilés Fabila writes:
Yo concebí el libro como un amplio mural. No se trataba solamente

de hacer una crónica novelada del 68 ni un testimonio, mi intención
era repasar los cincuenta o sesenta años de Revolución y ver en qué
había terminado: en una lamentable parodia. Y algo más: equiparar
todos los gobiernos ‘revolucionarios’ con las tiranías latinoameri-
canas. Crear a un dictador eterno al que cada seis años lo transforma-
ban dándole una nueva apariencia y un programa distinto.
[I conceived the book as a broad mural. I didn’t just want to write a

novelized chronicle of 68, nor a testimonial; my intention was to go
back over the fifty or sixty years since the Revolution to see what it
had turned out to be: a lamentable parody. And something else: I
wanted to compare all of the ‘revolutionary’ governments with Latin
American tyrannies. I wanted to create an eternal dictator who, every
six years, was transformed {on the surface} by giving him a new ap-
pearance and a different program.] (101)
The evocation of the Mexican sexenio, the farcical election and re-election
of interchangeable members of the PRI at the reins of the power of the
State, is the scenario for the ‘democratic’ choice of the dictator as the vehi-
cle of the nation’s imagined future. (In other words, the tragic drama that
Benjamin watches on stage is performed every six years in Mexican politics.)
The parallels among the texts of Valle-Inclán, Avilés Fabila, and García
Ponce would appear evident in the constellation of their narratives around
the axis of a grotesque authoritarian figure whose grimaces celebrate decay
(in the shape of national projects). Despite the allusion to the figure of the
tyrant engraved on the mural of Latin American history, we might take it up
as just the starting point for psychological repercussions within the charac-
ters created by García Ponce. Like Avilés Fabila, his intention is not to give
testimony to some historical event or situation. García Ponce plumbs the
sedimentary backwaters left by seemingly eternal dictatorships not only to
unearth the fossils of damage and ruin produced by them, but also to find
what his own family epic has lost over the intervening years.
DUST, LINT, DARKNESS: MODERN CREATION AND ITS REMAINS
Benjamin’s Trauerspiel [The Origins of German Tragic Drama] oscillates

between a sublime, winged (perhaps even angelic) side to melancholy and
the earthbound, telluric, tectonic part of the mixture inherited from antiq-
uity but filtered through the thinking of the humanists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The “dialectical nature of melancholia” (Hanssen
159) fascinates him, as the dialectics of allegory have done so before. Cast
for him as competing spheres of animality and spirituality, “the Trauerspiel
study wavered between a benign and base version” (Hanssen 160) of the
coldness and the flaming genius contained within a single figure. The
predicament of melancholy varies in his writings from an early turn toward
the medieval to, as the part most applicable to our discussion, a later posi-
tive spin on the melancholic “through . . . an immersion into the matter of
objects [that] could salvage the potential of things” (Hanssen 162). Such
objects—stones, minerals, earthly material—enclose contradictory forces

in their very substance (as petrified by the passage of time and the pressure
of geology). The image of the semi-precious stone embedded within the
barren, cold exterior rock (Hanssen 162) might serve us to describe and ex-
amine the representation of the contradictory impulses of modernity
equally embedded in García Ponce’s novel, in the houses, stones, gates, and
walls of Mexican architectural ruins. The gaze of the melancholic narrator,
for Benjamin, is the only way into that rock; turning it into ruin is the first
step in its critique.
Turning their gaze on the intelligentsia such as Esteban, Anselmo,
and Fray Alberto, but on those who belong to the working classes as well,
the narrators of Crónica perform a splintering of the rock to reveal its core
as well as the outer layers that have been chiseled away. Taking the nation
as an archaeological ruin of sorts, to pry the innermost (secret) angelic di-
mension from its mineral enclosure implies going back and forth from ex-
ternal objects and events to internal phantoms. Both the inhabitants of
industrial zones on the outskirts of the modernizing, spectacular metropo-
lis, and the wealthy families that remain in seclusion behind the protective
walls of their estates are targets of the excavators’ tools. One way in which
the angelic and the demonic, the mineral and the precious, are represented
by García Ponce’s narrators is in the dialectical interplay between light and
dark, hidden and exposed, glimmering (“vislumbrante”) and abject. Much
of this is architectural in nature, and some is specifically projected on the
architecture of the body.
The luminosity and obscurity of chiaroscuro effects used to portray
the mansion of the Gonzaga family aestheticizes their remoteness and
withdrawal into a series of tableaux, while the residents of the sordid inte-
rior of the Martínez home—with its permanent smells of beer and ciga-
rettes—are depicted as dark figures in a thick atmosphere. This obscure
enclosure houses the lives of human beings, but it also is an allegorical fig-
ure of the ruins of modernity. Industrialization produces luminescence and,
as by-products, rubbish, refuse, litter, dregs. If we cannot directly call the
human inhabitants dregs, we can see them living among the residues of the
promises of the modern nation as an allegory for the darkest aspects of that
very project. In this makeshift abode, human beings are reduced to the level
of dust and lint, the fibrous material that remains behind as the most visi-
ble trace of the process of production of rags and stuffing for a variety of
uses. The Martínez family members are covered with lint; it fills their eyes
and ears and thickens the air so as to impede breathing. They will never be
able to afford the cotton cloth that results from these processes, but they
are condemned to live among its ruins. There is no status lower on the so-
cial scale than to inhabit the kingdom of lint. This abject situation condi-
tions their perception of everyday life, the aspect most central to the narra-
tors. Benjamin’s Paris as represented in the Arcades Project focuses on the
telluric aspects of the metropolis, focusing specifically on the fog and the
rain clouds overhead and the intrinsic connection between weather and
melancholic boredom. Moving on, however, he observes that the rain falls
as dust, settling atop the arcades (monuments to the economic and cultural
forces of modernity) and this dust is, of course, one of the allegorical fig-
ures he deploys to be able to write on the city. This dust, in turn, infiltrates
every corner of buildings and rooms to accumulate underneath beds and
chairs, settle on plush and contaminate with debris even the most luxurious
new upholstered furniture of the bourgeoisie. No one escapes the sediment
of industrial production and economic ‘progress.’ As silt on the external
surface of objects, dust also permeates history and the psyche of the inhab-
itants of the city. He goes so far as to say it becomes (allegorically) “soaked
in blood” (Arcades Project 104) during times of absolutism and repression.
Dust stands in for progress as it does for decay; it is like the double pull of
the ruin, both upward toward the heavens of progress and downward to-
ward material destruction. Dust and lint are residues, but they have an af-
terlife of their own.
In contrast, most of the intellectual discussions and commentaries in
the Gonzaga household take place in their private library, paneled with rich
woods and decorated with replicas of famous paintings. What dust is to the
underclasses, artwork is for the bourgeoisie: ever-present and ubiquitous.
While they discuss the country’s past and its uncertain future (in their minds)
in the midst of such luxury, their alienation is presented as nothing more than
a tasteful subject of discussion, a topos shared by those whose daily lives ap-
pear to suffer no obvious ill effects in spite of such laments. Words cover the
surfaces of the private library, not dust. The angst created by historical events
among the intellectual figures in the novel, as reflected in the discussions tak-
ing place in such ritual gatherings, appears among the poor and unsophisti-
cated as strong feelings of violence and rage leading to supposedly irrational
acts. Such acts often take the form of violence against one’s own, as in the
murder of Evodio’s brother by another member of the working class, or in
the battering of women by their spouses. One particular facet of these senti-
ments of anger and violence on the part of the working poor is Evodio’s in-
creasing paranoia. He is haunted by the sounds of sirens, as if to signal a crisis
or an emergency nearby. These noises in his head are a prelude to a series of
events that will indeed be critical to the nation. His hallucinations and bouts
of erotic fantasy, as well as visions and dreams of incest, play an increasingly
important role in foretelling something catastrophic in both the novelistic
plot and the historical schema haunting it. In the descriptions of these char-
acters’ reactions to their exclusion from the trajectory of history, and their
imagination of scenarios of their own devising, it is not difficult to recognize
the sense of schism that pervades modern Mexican society. While the ambu-
lance wails inside Evodio’s head, it also fills the streets of the capital in Octo-
ber 1968 and again in June 1971 when then-president Echevarría sent the
paramilitary forces into the streets to crack down once again on protesting
students and teachers.
Darkness permeates the modernity of the novel, allowing for shad-
ows to fill the sunny tourist landscapes of progress and wealth. Julia Kris-
teva addresses the roots of the dilemma of a melancholic vision as the
“Threshold of the Visible and the Invisible” (Powers 151). What she terms
“a hidden Apollo” casts a light on the crucial experience of emerging from
paralyzing darkness into “a sun that remains black, to be sure, but is never-
theless the sun, source of dazzling light” (Powers 151). The divide straddled
by the melancholic would separate “appearance and disappearance, abol-
ishment and song, nonmeaning and signs” (Powers 151). She offers up this
allegorical reading of the struggle against darkness for the intellectual as a
destructive-productive ambiguity. Taking her cue for the term “black sun”
from the poem “El Desdichado” (The Disinherited) by Gérard de Nerval,
Kristeva theorizes about the work’s hero in terms of the darkness and the
saturnine qualities of the poetic voice of this character. Writing of him as
“[a] dispossessed prince, the glorious subject of a destroyed past, El Des-
dichado belongs to a history, but to a depreciated history. His past without
future is not a historical past—it is merely a memory all the more present as
it has no future” (Powers 150). This image echoes the paralyzing nostalgia
seen by Benjamin as something to be overcome by the critic of modernity.
A bleak sense of loss pervades this poem, the first-person lament of the dis-
inherited prince who lives under the dark star of melancholia.
The prince is more than faintly reminiscent of García Ponce’s char-
acter Esteban in Crónica. Esteban, whose voice we hear narrating numerous
parts of the novel, is a similarly allegorical figure of the disinherited. As a
dissident intellectual in Mexico during the 1960s, and as a representative of
the younger generation of thinkers that has hopes for a bright national
future, Esteban is witness to a double sense of destruction. Already critical
of many of the events of the past—a history as “depreciated” as that repre-
sented by Nerval—he is exposed to a second moment of loss, a second
cancellation of the future. The memory of the brutality of 1968 is over-
shadowed only by the official discourses that alter, deny, or glorify (through
political manipulation) what transpired in October of that year. Since not
even the past was glorious, but already degraded, for Esteban, the present
merely compounds the blackness of the sun that envelops him. Present
after present disintegrates into destruction and dispossession, a historical
time cut adrift.
Owing to Esteban’s overwhelming feeling of melancholy present in the
novel from first page to last, we may conclude that the social body in which
he must survive is inhabited by the cadavers of the Plaza de Tlatelolco. These
corpses include those claimed by relatives and buried in cemeteries, those de-
nied by the government and never recovered, and the walking dead. Mariana
dies, but Esteban does not; he thus forms part of the collective abject body
of society that must go on. Esteban’s liminal condition, his tenuous existence
on the border between life and death, signals a collapse of order and identity
in Mexican society. The abject cannot be expelled from the individual or the
collectivity; its presence is a constant reminder of what the social body might
want to jettison from its midst but which it is incapable of making disappear.
According to Kristeva, the abject “disturbs identity” (Black Sun 4) for the very
reason that it cannot, despite all pretense, be made to go away. In Tlatelolco,
the forces of government repression make an attempt to discard the abject,
the dissident, the monstrous. Onto the face of youth is cast all that must
disappear from view. The irony of the abject, in Kristeva’s view, is that it is
“in-between, . . . ambiguous, . . . composite” (Black Sun 9). It never ceases to
exist completely; it haunts society as a melancholic ghost. The official version
of events may claim that a unified, modern Mexico emerged from the
Olympics at the end of 1968, but the abject social body continues to reappear
when least expected. For Freud, of course, this is the return of the repressed.
Two literary antecedents of these aspects of Crónica, whose reflections
of the narrator’s excavation of the ruins of Mexican culture and their influ-
ence on the individual are components of the novel as well, can be traced to
a collection of essays entitled Desconsideraciones [Anti-considerations] (1968)
and the novel La invitación [The Invitation] (1972). In both the work of fic-
tion and the volume of essays, García Ponce delves into what Goldin has
defined as his “crítica social” [social criticism] which at the same time the
critic refuses to categorize as “un arte comprometido” [a committed art] (9)
on the order of the documentary evidence of the Onderos. The linguistic
mimesis of the Onda borders more on a traditional sense of realism than on
an alternative sense of aesthetic critique. Desconsideraciones is an anthology
of essays written at different historical moments in response to particular
issues and, as its title in Spanish suggests, “desconsiderar” implies a critical
attitude toward social values. If “considerar” refers to the act of looking at
events with a sympathetic eye, “desconsiderar” tells us that the eye of the
critic in these essays is jaundiced, judgmental, and interested more in
anomaly and contradiction than in the archaeology of the moment.
The positions expounded here are reminiscent of Friedrich Nietz-

sche’s book of essays published under the title Untimely Meditations (written
between 1873 and 1876 at Basle). In fact, Desconsideraciones opens with an
epigraph taken from Nietzsche’s text. This epigraph suggests some conflu-
ence or convolution of ideas between García Ponce and the European
philosopher’s radical critical position toward those who do not see, or do
not care to admit, the extremely difficult and tortuous path of any nation
toward modernity. If in Nietzsche’s writings the “real enemies of such
a culture [of intellectual and artistic life] are those who believe that the val-
ues to be striven for in the modern world are ‘progress’—meaning
improvements in material conditions—and the ‘democratic’ rule of medi-
ocrity through the placatory politics of socialism” (Stern ix), the same holds
true for García Ponce’s remarks. The Mexican writer cites a fragment of
Nietzsche’s thoughts to preface his acerbic and melancholic commentaries
on the mediocrity of the society around him and on what we might term its
ruins: “trato de interpretar como un mal, una enfermedad y un vicio, algo
de lo que nuestra época está orgullosa” [I try to interpret as an evil, a dis-
ease, and a vice, something of which our era is extremely proud] (8). That
“something” is the facile assumption of modernity as an easy cure for social
ills or as an “ossified” mural of the past. Likewise, in Desconsideraciones, the
reality (as the space where human beings are exposed to direct experiences)
created by modernity and progress is fundamentally and paradoxically hos-
tile to humankind and, even more specifically, to that activity of humans
known as art. Thus, in this scheme, art and culture might be taken as
shields against the distorting powers of hegemonic reality, and perhaps as
surfaces upon which are inscribed their aporias. (Realism is one of the ene-
mies in this aesthetic battle, as we have already seen in the Onda.)
In his essays, García Ponce reveals an almost obsessive attitude to-
ward the space of the city and its inhabitants, one reminiscent of the Ben-
jaminian essays of “Berlin Chronicle” or “One-Way Street.” As Rama
reiterates throughout his essay, “[s]u mundo es el de la ciudad” [his world is
that of the city] (188). After all, it is in the plazas and across the boulevards
of the metropolis that Mexicans are sacrificed over and again to the goal of
modernity. With the hint of a myopic gaze that zeroes in on every detail
and aspect of the landscape, he is able to merge the narration of his own life
(an autobiographical aspect of the narrative is implied) with the general
sense of the setting he is describing. Similar to Benjamin’s experience in the
cities of Europe such as Berlin and Paris, García Ponce’s Mexico becomes
the locus of a topography to be explored to unearth its secrets. Mexico, the
colonial as well as the modern, is a place brooding with mysteries that can
be revealed only to the careful observer who has an unhurried quality.
Modern life requires haste, but the Benjaminian observer demands obses-
sive return and contemplation. Observations about topics great and small
join the musings of the author regarding the curiosities of his surroundings.
The subjects of García Ponce’s essays vary from what seem to be the most
trivial aspects of everyday life to greater philosophical issues regarding art
and culture, much as Benjamin’s convolutes reflect the same vast panorama.
For example, García Ponce’s essay whose subject is the size and shape of
books (“El tamaño de los libros”) appears hand in hand with an essay on the
value and future of the cinema as an industry. (Benjamin’s famous essay on
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” comes to mind
as a corollary, as do his other pieces on the potentially liberating and awak-
ening effects of cinema.) Another piece in García Ponce’s collection, enti-
tled “Transfiguración y muerte de la imagen” [Transfiguration and Death
of the Image], turns to one of the themes most repeated in his writings.
That is to say, he addresses the relationship between form and content of a
work of art, and the loss of a connection between the work itself and “esa
realidad que el arte suscita” [that reality provoked by art] (2001 86). His
greatest preoccupation is the element of constant flux or change which,
rather than opening up new manners of expression, turns a work of art in-
ward: “no conduce, sino que se cierra sobre su propia realidad, convirtién-
dose en un hecho cumplido” [[it] does not lead us outward, but instead
turns back on itself, on its own reality, becoming a fait accompli] (2001 85).
In the face of such a promising, as much as threatening, instability, the role
of the individual observer is intensified even more.
Out of the essays in Desconsideraciones, the one that best depicts the fas-
cinating (Paz) and simultaneously nightmarish aspects of Mexico City is the
first. With the title “De la ausencia” [On Absence], this text paints an image of
the city as a site of metamorphosis and transition where the old colonial and
traditional landscapes are disappearing overnight as a result of voracious, un-
controlled development. In other words, visible testaments to modernity are
encroaching on the landscape of the ruins of tradition to contribute their own
debris. García Ponce ponders the process he witnesses around him as both
construction and destruction: “Los edificios coloniales se transforman en am-
plias avenidas, las fuentes retroceden para dejar el paso a caminos periféricos”
[Colonial buildings are transformed into spacious avenues; fountains give way
to superhighways] (84). For the unwary inhabitants, this process leaves behind
an unrecognizable space akin to a maze of cement in which, almost like magic,
the streets either completely disappear or change their names and directions
overnight. The same fate of the streets is shared by the buildings that are left
as testimonies to a so-called glorious past, monuments to great historical mo-
ments preserved in what at the time seemed to be permanent structures. With
a tone of sarcasm, García Ponce tells the story of a simple man who becomes
totally disoriented because an old building, a landmark that helped him find
his bus stop, has vanished in a matter of hours. The man, mesmerized by the
lack of the solid structure he always counted on, is presented as having lost his
sense of what is real. His reaction is an allegory of the gains and sacrifices of
the processes of modernization.
El señor que regresa a su casa, distraído, confiado en la costumbre,

encuentra de pronto que su camión ha llegado a la terminal sin pasar
frente al edificio que siempre le sirvió de referencia para advertir su
parada. Fue derribado mientras él trabajaba metódicamente en su
oficina y ahora es un nido de ratas.
[The gentleman who returns home, distracted, trusting of his rou-
tines, suddenly finds that his bus has arrived at the end of the line
without passing by the building that always was his landmark for get-
ting off. It {the building} was demolished while he was working me-
thodically in his office and where the buiding used to stand is now a
nest of rats.] (9)
Thus, progress and the visible signs of modernity leave behind piles of de-
bris that psychologically affect the city’s residents and disconcert them.
The effects are as violent on the human psyche as if they were blows to the
body from a police baton or from a water canon. The “distraction” of rou-
tine, a favorite of Benjamin when he writes of the effects of boredom on
modern culture, produces an optics that does not always perceive change
until it hits home. No one notices the rubble of the demolished building
until it has been passed by, until the entire route has been traversed. The
street that has lost buildings looks, to García Ponce, like a grotesque mouth
that has lost its teeth due to the ravages of time and decay. The sentimen-
tal value attached to parks, fountains, and monuments now becomes part of
a bygone era in the subconscious of the inhabitants; they erect mental im-
ages to compensate for the missing architecture. García Ponce finds his
surroundings threatening—”Decididamente, México es, también, una ciu-
dad peligrosa” [Even Mexico is, {like other cities}, a dangerous place]
(14)—but not for the crime or violence committed in it; instead, he sees the
ravages of time and modernization as the enemy that leaves traces of the
past in its wake even as new constructs have yet to begin. But the battles
with this opposition are the dialectical encounters with the ruin that Ben-
jamin proposes as the result of a narrator’s melancholic vision.
Two specific spaces García Ponce mines as sites of ruin are his per-
sonal library and the empty museums from whose walls an exhibit has been
removed. At one point of the essay “De la ausencia” [On Absence] the nar-
rator stares fixedly at the faded paint on the wall where a work of art no
longer hangs. He begins to ask himself questions about philosophical con-
cepts of absence and presence: “¿Debe dejar de existir el cuadro una vez
que nos ha revelado la pared?” [Should a painting stop existing once it re-
veals the wall {behind it} to us?” (13). Does the essence of the painting lie
in the canvas itself, or does it leave something behind where it once was
hanging? Is there a ruin to be found in the faded spot on the wall, in the
dark outline left behind? The narrator finds the concept of absence to re-
veal as much to him as the object when it is present. The same effect occurs
with demolished walls and buildings; the sites where they stood are phan-
tasmatic monuments to the absences of what used to fill those spaces in
other ways and for other reasons. The disappearance or removal of the
concrete object does not imply a denial of meaning, even if hidden to the
naked eye, of what remains. One is reminded in this essay of the lifeless
shapes of cadavers painted by Mexican painter José Luis Cuevas as his
homage to life. The absence of visible signs of life in them, lying in the
morgue, only reinforces for the artist an obsession with looking at a world
that has vanished and left a place for another world to emerge. In the truly
problematic spaces of these encounters (those of vanishing and emergence)
we find the melancholia of Benjamin and García Ponce who mourn the lost
object and their own loss of connection to it (or mastery over it).
The representation of a phantasmagoric reality in Desconsideraciones
finds its counterpart in fiction in the novel La invitación (1972). This work,
published just four years after the violent events of 1968, dramatizes the
psychological tensions and fears of different social groups caused by an un-
declared state of siege that disrupts their everyday life and activities. (The
idea that a state of siege might be undeclared is as contradictory a linguis-
tic event as can be imagined.) These groups include students, professionals,
businesspeople, and homemakers alike; the novel cuts across the entire
strata of modern society. In a tone reminiscent of Kafka’s novels—The Trial
would serve as a good example—García Ponce’s narrative depicts the
streets and public spaces of a nameless city as the scenario in which an ex-
cess of power runs wild. Benjamin’s absolute prince has his ruined land-
scape on which to play out his acts of revenge. Ordinary citizens experience
this situation as a nightmare. And the official representatives of law and
order, the police, instead of forming a buffer zone between the groups in
conflict, take sides. The stage for this encounter is the city of the essays al-
ready mentioned, an urban landscape under the spell of modernization and
change as proclaimed by the State. It becomes a site no longer recognized
as human or friendly by its inhabitants. The excesses of blood and violence
in the streets create an atmosphere in which the characters are no longer

able to distinguish between reality and nightmare, between the material
presence of others and their ghosts, between the familiar and the uncanny.
In this sense, La invitación may be considered a dystopian allegory.
García Ponce’s narrators do not acknowledge any connection between so-
called real events or landmarks in the social history of Mexico and what
goes on around them, but we have seen how this prying of the images from
their archaeological shell has functioned in Crónica to create a dialogue be-
tween inside and outside. In the same sense as the allegorical setting of
Ariel Dorfman’s novel Viudas [Widows]—that is, modern Greece under
dictatorships but by inference the Southern Cone during the dirty war—La
invitación functions on several planes of aesthetic reality. As a forerunner
of Crónica, this short novel presents a historical and political allegory of
persons and events that will be developed to a greater extent in the subse-
quent two-volume novel. And, like Crónica, it slides seamlessly from inter-
nal compulsions to external repressions.
To loosen any grip on referentiality that could lead the reader to a
mimetic representation of the Tlatelolco massacre, the narrative voice that
tells the story, as well as the main, Kafkaesque character “R.,” appear to
emerge from a shadowy dream, a claustrophobic space, in which one is
never certain if the story being told is part of waking or sleeping reality.
Benjamin’s convolutes come to mind as the figures to describe this spinning
out of narratives from small, scintillating nuclei of recollections thrust out
of oblivion by sparks of recognition. This effect is augmented by the pro-
tagonist, later on a victim of the repressive reality that has seemed to be a
dream, who has been ill and bedridden for a long time. In the care of his
family, his confinement to a space inside makes his perception of the out-
side cloudy at best. The fact that almost the entire first half of the novel, es-
pecially the first chapter, is told through the distorted lens of a sick person,
someone removed in space and time from events, contributes to the expe-
rience of nightmare presented here. His altered state is rendered as a lack
of time and sequence, as bouts of feverish narration and fevered thoughts,
and as the collapse of reasoned argument. The world seems to revolve
around the daily needs of a sick person, an individual self inhabiting the
ruins of a healthy body, and whatever penetrates his room from the outside
becomes disconnected from its original circumstances. The relationship
between an internal narrative voice (“R.”) and external narration produces
a doubling of fragmented tales. The ‘doubles’ function in the sense of alle-
gory that Benjamin finds so promising: not a symbolic stand-in but an
explosion into two.
Lights, sounds, and all activity flow together in a montage of experi-

ences on the surface of the body of the non-participant “R.” The human
architecture which has fallen prey to disease is incapable of mastering—or
explaining, therefore—the everyday aspects of life. Even the identification
of the character is reduced to a single letter of the alphabet, since he is so
removed from a concrete form and from being an actor on the stage of his-
tory. His identity is as fragile as the prolonged survival of a sick body, or the
preservation of an individual by means of one lone letter. The narrator re-
veals this fluid situation and the implied “loss of mastery and failure of con-
trol” (Krell 7) that we have seen as an opening up into the uncanny as a
fruitful and perhaps even familiar narrative space. The technical (the
human body) takes a turn toward not solid structure (given R.’s illness) but
toward the ruin.
R. había estado enfermo una larga temporada. Perdido en su cuerpo

debilitado, sin ningún contacto con el mundo exterior, del que ese
cuerpo fue alejándose, retrayéndose en su desprendida inmovilidad de
todo lo que lo rodeaba . . . . haciéndolo casi inexistente, ajeno a sus
propias sensaciones, dejándolo solo . . . . [E]l tiempo dejó de transcur-
rir durante esa época.
[R. had been ill a long time. Lost in his weakened body, with no contact
at all with the outside world, {a world} from which that body moved
further and further away, withdrawing into its detached immobility
from everything around it . . . making the body almost non-existent,
alien to its own sensations, leaving it alone and isolated . . . . Time
stood still during that period.] (9)
From the fragment quoted above, it is easy to conclude that a radical split
has occurred between R.’s mental abilities of reasoning and the physicality
of his body exposed to outside reality. Under the conditions of stress and
restricted access to the world he suffers, R.’s material body becomes devoid
of a wholeness of body and mind. He has been artificially transformed into
a vestige of himself, a visible signature of modernity: division. While R.’s
physical body loses itself amid a sea of pain and suffering, his mind exhibits
a disembodiment from all physicality. This split becomes more acute if one
considers that the signals and stimuli from physical reality are not
processed by R.’s body/mind into a coherent whole. In other words, this
split introduces another set of conditions with epistemological implica-
tions. If the voice of the narrator of historical events emanates from a sick
body, the version of what happens is tinged with his painful condition and
the distance suffered by that same narrator. So represented, history and its
chronological sequences or structure turn into nightmarish fantasy from
the dark side of human life as perceived by an outcast from it. The double
sense of loss—of a healthy body, of a coherent narrator—folds back onto it-
self. In a visual display, this narrative would concentrate on the blackness of
the chiaroscuro, and not on the activity taking place in the light. Like lint,
the body seized by disease—especially paralysis—is debris from something
previous. It can neither go forward or return (to wholeness).
The sense of loss in R.’s perception of reality—and his own place in
it—creates an allegory for the nation that inhabits a diseased (decaying) so-
cial body. The moment of loss for R. is the instant he is taken ill; the time
of crisis for others is the social confrontation in the streets of the megacity.
R. is withdrawn from the events outside his window; his family fiercely de-
sires to withdraw itself from the events which have interrrupted their banal,
bourgeois existence. In both instances, this moment of rupture also reveals
something about the lives they have led until then, and about the violence
under the surface always ready to reach a boiling point when the conditions
in society are at a critical stage. This may be seen in the displeasure of R.’s
relatives when confronted with the disturbances around them.
—¡Qué odio la policía!—dijo el cuñado de R.

—Los estudiantes los han obligado a mostrarse—
comentó la hermana.
—Claro. Y la policía es el gobierno—dijo el
cuñado y se volvió hacia R.—Será mejor que
no vayamos a tomar café. Esta ciudad se ha hecho
inhabitable.
[“Oh what a drag, the police again!” R.’s brother-
in-law remarked.
“The students have made them come out [of
hiding] again,” commented R.’s sister.
“Sure. And the police are the government,”
the brother-in-law retorted as he turned toward R.
“Maybe it’s better if we don’t go for coffee.
This town has become unlivable.”] (105)
The student demonstrations have not only interfered with the leisure ac-
tivities of the privileged family with time to spare, but they have also re-
vealed what everyone ‘knows’ without saying. When the police appear in
the streets to break up the demonstrators, their actions are both literal and
figurative. They use violence on the bodies of the students, and they repre-
sent the power of the State in its death throes. Benjamin’s princely allegory
casts the isolation of the failed ruler onto the living bodies in the streets.
R. is both paralyzed witness and sacrificial victim, for his impotence is both
physical and social. When R.’s relative says that “the police are the govern-
ment,” this is a political reading of the scenario being played out (really,
like the baroque theater, performed) on the streets of the city. If such con-
frontations did not occur, perhaps the image of the police as agents of
something more ominous would take place elsewhere. The police are the
actors on the stage of a social nightmare, and the protesters are their shad-
owy victims. The entire scenario breaks open the ruins of the metropolis as
a peaceful place to dwell into the substrata of horror that underlies and
consumes it.
Even R., never a political activist, is caught up in the vortex of vio-
lence. When he recovers from his illness and is able to rejoin the ranks of
the ‘living,’ R. inexplicably becomes a member of the student brigades that
paint graffiti on the walls of the city during the night. Swept up by the en-
thusiasm of the brigades, he is identified as one of the enemies of the State
by the forces of law and order he has perceived from his sickbed but never
completely understands. (We know that there is no complete understand-
ing of any discourse in this text; everything is a constellation of discourses
and experienced meanings.) He turns into an enemy just for being there,
not for any explicit commitment beyond the few words he manages to utter
before he is gunned down: “Soy amigo. Quiero ayudarlos” [I’m just a friend
{of theirs}. I want to help them] (191). R. forms part of the historical mo-
ment by accident, by circumstance, not by his membership in any organi-
zation or adherence to any credo. History, therefore, has lost its coherence
in this narrative and ends up as the fragmented images present in the mind
of R. before he loses consciousness and dies.
In a kind of epiphany, in his last moments of consciousness, the char-
acter returns in his mind to the innocent days of his childhood, fragments
suspended in time. Time is perceived in slow motion, as an internal flow,
not as a series of logical events. R. seems to take forever to fall to the
ground after being wounded. This action ends in a closed circle, a dark
space which opens up to receive him: “la oscuridad, el gran círculo silen-
cioso, azul oscuro” [the darkness, the great silent circle, dark blue] (194).
Not even his friend Beatrice, the imagined or real object of his obsessive af-
fection, can save R. from his demise. These are the death throes of the tale
and its teller; this is the sacrifice demanded by the State. History and R.’s
own story stop at the moment he loses consciousness. Neither can exist
without the storyteller. But whether he is gunned down by the forces in
control (of the narrative of history) or whether he kills himself and puts an
end to his own narration is left as an ambiguous event. The last act on the
last page of the novel is when a police officer puts a gun in the hand of the
moribund victim, implying for future reference of those who find and iden-
tify the body that his death has been the result of a suicide. As an allegory,
we are made to ask whether the nation has been a victim of assassination
or whether it has put an end to its own misery.
This scene from La invitación will directly inform García Ponce’s im-
ages of history in Crónica. By the time we reach his most recent novel
Pasado presente (1993), historical phenomena again surface as debris or tel-
luric detritus, like the ruins left after each of the earthquakes that has
shaken Mexico City. Again, we find that history is measured by destruction,
by what it leaves as remnant and ruin, rather than by chronological time,
rational statements, or touted monuments. The spiraling structure of
Crónica reveals the narrators’ paralysis akin to the motionless body of the
witness R. in La invitación. In Pasado presente, however, the narrator willfully
removes himself from the currents of history, committing the intellectual
suicide that was, in its first incarnation at the end of Desconsideraciones, a
staged act. In an essay entitled “El escritor como ausente” [The Writer as
an Absence], written the same year as La invitación but published in 1974,
García Ponce remarks that his childhood was characterized by “la más ab-
soluta indiferencia política” [the most absolute political indifference] (329),
the names of politicians or the occurrence of catastrophic world events just
a distant echo in the ears of children of his social class. A taste for certain
colors relates to party banners and flags, but he reaffirms nothing more ide-
ological than that in the family saga. Of course, these are the stories told by
a bourgeoisie to uphold things as they are and not to offer the opportunity
to others for alternate visions. As he enters adolescence, he finds both for-
mal intellectual studies and the official rhetoric of the government causes
for “náusea” (329) and abomination. A professional school degree leading
to a career, and the government’s use of language to justify populist projects
both careen him toward the same one-way street: a loss of class distinctions
in the institutionalization of the Revolution. That is to say, much like the
expropriation of land by President Cárdenas, the need to earn a living and
to listen to the extolling of the virtues of the lower classes goes against all
that the bourgoisie traditionally upholds. With the explosion out of
nowhere on October 2, 1968, García Ponce finds himself, alongside so
many others, suddenly carried along by the events he had for so long had
nothing to do with. In the ruins of post-1968, the evocation of “momentos
maravillosos” [marvelous moments] (331) is justified in itself despite his
own doubts about sustaining a political position. Pellicer sums up the re-
sulting space for intellectuals as García Ponce sees it:
Advirtió entonces que de nada sirvieron sus artículos, su participación

en demostraciones públicas y su firma de documentos colectivos de
protesta: las cosas siguieron igual o peor. Reconoció que ese vacío
desde donde él se hallaba escribiendo era el espacio de la imaginación
que ésta puebla con sus obras. Según él, la imaginación excluye al
artista de la vida cotidiana, de la vida política, de la vida ‘real.’ Es el
espacio de los sueños, de las manías, de las obsesiones patológicas, es
el campo de la anormalidad y, finalmente, de la ficción. Pero se trata
de una exclusión voluntaria pues si bien es cierto que en las modernas
sociedades autoritarias se somete a los disidentes a tratamiento
siquiátrico, en las permisivas se abre el vacío.
[{He} came to the conclusion that his articles, his participation in
public demonstrations, and his signing collective documents of
protest were worthless: things stayed the same or worse. He realized
that the empty space from which he found himself writing was the
space of the imagination that populated his works with imaginary be-
ings. In his view, imagination removes the artist from everyday life,
from political life, from ‘real’ life. {The imaginary space of the artist}
is that of dreams, of manias, of pathological obsessions{; it is} the ter-
ritory of abnormality and, finally, of fiction. But this is a voluntary ex-
clusion for if in modern authoritarian societies dissidents are
subjected to psychiatric treatment, in permissive {open, democratic}
ones an empty space opens up.] (Pellicer 47).
The “vacío” that García Ponce chooses to inhabit is not such a bad place, as
he says, since it allows for what Krell has said is the opening up of interior-
ity into the unlimited terrain of the psyche. Crónica’s narrative voices and
scattered characters certainly populate the field of dreams and nightmares
that are awakened by a reclusion from the realm of the overtly political into
the realm of open spaces (either psychiatric or democratic ones). As Pellicer
indicates, and we have seen, manias, obsessions, repetition compulsion, ab-
normality, and fiction all flourish in this supposedly empty space. And, in
Benjaminian fashion, they all circle around the ruins of politics (that have
purportedly been abandoned) in mournful allegories. The site from which
García Ponce situates his narratives is the place of melancholic vision, the
space from which competing meanings are produced and the veneer of that
“nauseating” official political rhetoric can be stripped away. It does not dis-
appear, however, but remains as a ruin inhabited by the pathological, obses-
sive, abnormal, fictitious characters of the literary text. Such landscapes of
the imagination are populated with the corpses and cadavers of real events
(those of 1968 and 1971), now the ghostly, phantasmagoric dwellers of an
internal topography as contradictory as the metropolitan landscapes outside.

García Ponce recalls the famous phrase of Karl Marx on the first version of
historical events as tragedy and their repetition as farce (from the Eigh-
teeneth Brumaire), yet he finds in the human remains left behind by the two
violent decades something more than farce (“Escritor” 330). The victims
cannot be left behind as debris but rather must be incorporated into the ec-
static expenditure of human bodies amid the rubble. Just as Mariana is a re-
animated corpse in Crónica, Mexico must be resurrected from death at the
hands of State ideologies so it may continue to form part of the imaginary of
‘others.’ The crossing and recrossing of the flesh of human bodies shifts us
into the second and third panels of the triptych as we enter into the writerly
space (that paradoxical emptiness) of García Ponce’s next two novels, De
ánima (1984) and Inmaculada (1989).
CHAPTER FIVE
De Ánima, de Corpore
The Ruins of the Bourgeois World
I
n his study of Austrian writer Robert Musil, Stefan Jonsson explores an
essay in which the central focus is the image of the door. Seen as a por-
tal that faces both past and present, this vestige of the house assumes
great importance for the writer. As Jonsson sees it, the door “loses its func-
tion in modernity. It belongs to an earlier stage of social development . . .
The door is here described as an instrument of knowledge” (Subject 60).
Swinging in two directions, as it were, the motif of the entrance to and exit
from the human dwelling is, like the Benjaminian convolute, a privileged
site of revelation. One can peer into the home, and one can peek out on the
social world; one can enter the stratified remains of the psyche and one can
delve amid the stones of the city. Aside from the sheer architectural refer-
ence, however, something else is at work here. Jonsson writes of modern
times that “new ways of building produce new bodies, new modes of per-
ception, and new ways of relating to others” (Subject 61). No longer is it so
facile a process to judge a house by its portal, or to define human subjec-
tivity by the appearance of a nation’s citizens; other forces lurk embedded
in social institutions and in the deeper recesses of the imagination. What
was once a craft—the singular fabrication of a door or, to extend the con-
cept, the assignment of an individual to a role—becomes a process of me-
chanical reproduction and assembly-line construction. So the door is a ruin
of a relationship between worker and craft, as well as between individual
and community. And so, as Castañeda sees it, such architectural ruins be-
come runes or visible traces of stories that reveal earlier tales and previous
storytellers; they also set up, as Susan Buck-Morss says of Benjamin in the
title of her masterwork on the Arcades Project, a “dialectics of seeing.”
The chasm or gap between the inside and the outside, separated by
the door and its frame in our trope, reflects as well the discrete categories
into which modernity separates science, art, abstract thought, technology,
䊏 105 䊏
and reason. As Krell moves from the spaces of material architecture into
the realm of the human body, he points out that “[i]n Western experience
these separate realities—art, science, worship—remain huddled in their
separate spheres, in isolated and isolating architectures. They never cross
the fluid, mucous boundary of the sexual” (169). The dissociation of tech-
nology and rapture, of science and art, of the social body and the physical
body, of economics and expenditure is revoked (as Klossowski perhaps pro-
poses in his title The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes) for Krell (via Georges
Bataille) through a turn toward a new porosity and permeability of these
constructs. In the space where the door used to be we find crossings and re-
crossings (Krell 170), flesh as speaking stone (Paz), openings and not clos-
ings, and “fascination” (Krell 170, but also Paz). While for Maurice
Merleau-Ponty these permeable structures induce light into the picture,
for Bataille they revel in darkness. For our own use of chiaroscuro, both
function as the ruins of modernity’s project. The building up (light) is al-
ways predicated on the horror of darkness (decay, debris, entropy) that ac-
companies and haunts all great dreams. The surfaces of architectural bodies
and those of the architecture of the human body articulate and disarticulate
possibilities, “sedimenting . . . experience” (Krell 171).
Neither the impervious door of previous times nor the membrane of
modernity keeps things apart in a universe imagined by Merleau-Ponty,
Bataille, or García Ponce. The ruins assembled and disassembled in the
Mexican writer’s texts are indeed objects of fascination rather than narra-
tives of domination; they collide and disperse much like the convolutes that
spin outward from Benjamin’s narrative fragments. The fissures produced
by the construction of the modern nation across the face of the capital city
also appear on the skin of its inhabitants. Through such fissures erupt “mis
más bajos instintos sexuales”(54) [my basest sexual instincts] as García
Ponce writes in his essay “Mi primera casa en México,” despite the best ef-
forts to erect the “propicias bardas” [legal divisions of land] (54) in an effort
to separate family from family and house from street. Through them also
pass back and forth the political ecstasies of characters bound through their
bodies into narratives of the nation. Politics enter through the portal, as do
fantasies and fears. Doorways are expanded to permit the passage of cars
(an emblem of the modern), and women are the portals to a “deslum-
bramiento” (“María Luisas” 156) that has little or nothing to do with the
use of reason by the Enlightenment.
The second novel in García Ponce’s trilogy of moveable panels narrates
this permeability between the surfaces of social constructs and the so-called
limits of the body through the medium of the diary. Writing is the new ‘door’
that opens the connections between subject and nation, between art and reli-
DE ÁNIMA, DE CORPORE 䊏 107
gion, and between gnosis and ecstasy. Therefore, Rama’s category of an “arte
intimista” no longer serves to describe the processes of experience or of poet-
ics since what is intimate is also outside. Or, conversely, what is outside the
body is there only until it permeates the surface. The same way that Octavio
Paz catches a “glimpse” of the hidden stories of Indian history and its con-
structs, García Ponce looks for such glimmers in the recesses of the “lived
body” (Krell 7), a body reduced not to technology or science but to a celebra-
tory space. Neither monument nor prison, the human body is a hieroglyphic
or ruin of writing which must be discovered and revealed by the storyteller.
The body is recollection and it is forgetting; it is layers of experience (like
those plumbed by the archaeologist); it is contradiction and critique. In this
last case, the body is a prime instance of a constellation of evocations and
holds on its surfaces and performative acts the influence of its cultural context.
Postrevolutionary Mexican society faced, among other issues and
agendas, the role of women in the ‘new’ nation. Markers of morality and
gendered hierarchies—the woman as mother, as subordinate partner, as an
economically invisible subject—remain in place for certain classes while
there are changes in men’s behavior and social roles in others. The stan-
dards of morality after the Revolution found both the point and the break:
they continued to be higher for women than for men, and they could now
be used to justify (as well as be justified by) the new national project itself.
As Schmidt writes, “[t]he aftermath of the Mexican revolution offered a
setting in which machismo was elevated into ‘a definitive and defining
characteristic of what it meant to be a Mexican,’ a distorting process in
which the mass media, consumer society, and intellectuals all participated”
(49). The embedding of critic Carlos Monsiváis’s words from Mexican Post-
cards points out one of the important forces which remain showcased in the
national media, yet consumer culture offers a challenge of its own besides.
For workers, there are other attributes connected to job performance that
relegate machista attitudes to the world outside the factory, for instance, if
one wishes to preserve employment. Union activities would take prece-
dence over such gendered behavior and could unite men in other ways. In
addition, as Schmidt clarifies, “an analysis of post-1940 Mexico needs to
employ a distinction between agency understood as cultural creativity and
agency understood as resistance” (50). While he refers to the rise of popu-
lar culture as a possible alternative view to gender prescriptions, we might
also turn to the idea of cultural agency as practiced by intellectuals as well.
Everyday lives are one arena of practice, but a whole, complex set of other
forms address this aspect of modernity’s battles in other inventive ways.
Settled ideas about masculinity and femininity, especially the concept
of machismo so prevalent in late-twentieth-century debates on gender, may
be seen in many ways as “pure theater, a recently invented social fiction, a

twentieth-century myth” (Rubenstein 226). Rather than suggesting that this
exaggerated and prescribed behavior does not exist per se, Rubenstein posits
it as an aspect of some sort of national modernity to be assumed by all those
who wish to be included in this mythical project. On another front, anthro-
pologist Matthew Gutmann adds a decisive element to this equation, as
Rubenstein indicates: “Gutmann found recently that members of Mexico
City’s elite ascribe the characteristics of machismo to men of the working
class, and vice versa: the word always describes somebody else” (226). Now
this study was conducted at the end of the decade of the 1990s, but we might
wish to extend its viability into other times. Even as State authority suffers
crisis after crisis, and even as points and breaks appear with increasing ra-
pidity, one element seemingly constant in modernity’s debates is gender. As-
cribing machismo to other people and other social classes means that the
hyperbolic, even baroque, behavior, the violence, and the excesses attributed
to this uncontrolled person occur elsewhere and not in the speaker. The
mythical figures of machismo, Pancho Villa, for instance, can be picked up
and sanitized as it were for State use, but those characteristics seen as myth-
ical by Monsiváis and the rest are more difficult to clean up and rehabilitate
in the guise of men and women’s daily lives. After the Revolution, patriotismo
could find a home in this larger-than-life, monumental figure, but it also
met its public match in politicians such as Manuel Ávila Camacho whose
persona—described by Rubenstein as “countermacho . . . , self-
contained, somewhat prudish, . . . the good Catholic, the compromiser”
(226)—could offer an alternative image for the national hero. Ávila Cama-
cho’s presidency (1940–46) offered the best of both worlds for public con-
sumption: the break with the past and the end of the Revolution, alongside
a legitimacy as inheritor of the energies of that period (a period, but a link).
As fighters, men can be excessive and need to be; as politicians, they must
learn self-control. The future of material wealth rests on the counterimage
and not the violent one, at least for leadership. Moreover, the image of mas-
culinity underwent constant and radical changes across the twentieth cen-
tury, influenced by international media and by the necessity to create a
modern look for the nation for export.
Any discussion of Mexican cultural politics also must include, of
course, women as the flip side to masculinity’s play for modernity. As a
process, and not as a definitive answer to this evolving issue, gendered in-
equalities and negotiations surfaceed after the revolutionary period and
continue to be confronted in many venues. For intellectuals, the debate has
revolved around women of a certain class: the liberation of bourgeois
women. Popular engagement with political forces, and popular politics of
all kinds aside, it is the cultural agenda of intellectuals that has driven the
image of the so-called liberated woman forward. Does this imply an imme-
diate connection to real-life politics? Or, as Gutmann has it, perhaps in-
stead “[t]alk about gender and democracy does not necessarily lead to a
modernizing quest in which the position of women is used as a simple test
of social progress” (Romance 166). Or might we even urge ourselves to ask
whether women, politics, and modernity coexist, or could coexist, in the
same breath in the characters presented by writers such as García Ponce.
As inheritors of the debate, the generación de medio siglo came up with
different responses to this dilemma. As sites of the reproduction of social
production, the home and the family may continue the discourse of the na-
tion being housed and promoted from within institutions and structures,
but they also may explode the spaces of the private into a question mark
rather than an affirmation. The diary would then reflect the character
Paloma’s deepest thoughts, but it could also serve as the swinging door to
the alternation of the period and the break from Jameson’s dialectical vision
of the modern.
Having essentially required Mexicans to choose between a masculine
and a feminine identity, then, the discourses of the postrevolutionary State
set up for many an impossible scenario for action. If consumer society
clothes those oppositional identities in specific dress, hairstyle, and media
look, what of the bodies underneath it all? The political imagination could
go only so far in allowing for difference, and so we may be led to search for
the very skin hidden by performance and clothing to find the anomalies of
modernity protected and hidden by these garments for more facile con-
sumption. The connection between such publicized images and the forma-
tion of the modern State has been theorized by Francine Masiello as
follows: “The accoutrements of gender—cosmetics, dress, and pose—
are treated as commodities to be bought and sold in the image-making ser-
vice of the nation. In effect, from the time of the nineteenth-century inde-
pendence wars through the recent transition to democracy, patterns of
dress and sexuality have formed part and parcel of the Latin American po-
litical imagination. . . . Fashion thus strengthened the projects of the mod-
ern state; it also endorsed a mode of citizenship related to sales and
commerce” (220). This emphasis on the visual makes snap judgments re-
garding identity artificially easy, and it casts a burden on the material sub-
ject to clothe itself in something recognizable. Now that can be as much a
reference to dress and makeup as it is to gender or political affiliation or
age. What is revealed by such clothed bodies speaks out loud, but the voice
underneath might need to articulate itself in a more literary or at least tex-
tual form. Here is where the genre of the diary or the confession might
enter our discussion, where the notion of women’s writing, their secrets,
and an identity clothed by the nation, but not necessarily limited by, it
might come to bear, and where the idea that other nations and other
modernities might surface.
Laura Mulvey writes of the cinematic representation of different so-
cieties’ fantasies projected onto the silver screen, but her theorizing of mas-
culinity and femininity and her problematizing of the consumption of their
visual images can serve us well in other contexts besides. After twenty-five
years of reconsideration of the gendered spectatorial position of her earlier
essays later collected in Visual and Other Pleasures, she returns to a new eco-
nomics of the visual and of its fetishes in her 1996 volume entitled Fetishism
and Curiosity. The association between the modern body and the fetish is
projected across the arc—or swinging door if we return to Jonsson’s
image—of the media screen which calls citizens to the movie theater as it si-
multaneously enters the home. Over-invested images, those exaggerated
and valued and codified by State institutions, displace political and eco-
nomic and other types of social crises onto the bodies and figures which
have historically been least able to refuse them. The role of fetish object,
cast on women and on the feminine, can be sustained as long as she does not
refuse it or, as Mulvey puts it, there does not occur a “psychic process of dis-
avowal from a male point of view” (Fetishism xii). Readers, cinema specta-
tors, and other participants in the consumption of media and other images
must decipher things politically, refusing their ritualized abjection as Kris-
teva would have it, even if no political solution is found in the end. The
anomalies, contradictions, excesses, and paradoxical successes can then all be
addressed in such texts as “the concealed ideological narratives at work in all
seemingly non-narrative concepts” (Jameson 6). De ánima may appeal to the
curiosity of readers, but there are gendered curiosities as well as those which
attract and repel. As Mulvey reflects on her theories of cinematic analysis,
she concludes that “My approach to cinema is directed at its ‘curious’
nature, not at its ‘realist’ nature. Rather than its ability to reflect the world,
I am interested in its ability to materialise both fantasy and the fantastic.
The cinema is, therefore, phantasmagoria, illusion, and a symptom of the
social unconscious” (Fetishism xiv). And so we return to Jameson’s concept of
the trope as symptom of hidden or buried narratives, of larger agendas, and
even of competing ideologies. As one provisional response to those critics
who find in García Ponce’s text De ánima a singular reading of the feminine
or a singular defense of masculine desire, we might want to interpose Mul-
vey’s more complex and suggestive rereading of the fetish. While finding
fetishism “one of the most semiotic of perversions, . . . not want[ing] its
forms to be overlooked but to be gloried in . . .” she adds a most important
other dimension to her argument. Like modernity, the fetish is not a singu-
larity but a ruse: “to distract the eye and the mind from something that
needs to be covered up. And this is also its weakness. The more the fetish
exhibits itself, the more the presence of a traumatic past event is signified”
(Fetishism xiv). As it reveals the hidden narratives of the bodies clothed for
easy consumption, the fetish acknowledges its own concealment and poten-
tially even the processes that have led to this mask.
Paloma and Gilberto perform a masquerade of sorts for readers who
must be asked, as Mulvey insists, to read them politically even when poli-
tics per se do not seem to appear on the agenda. The exhibitionism of
women, prevalent in García Ponce’s trilogy and not denied by Mulvey as a
“perversion,” might then not merely “glory in” the woman as fetish but
hint at its distracting function, not necessarily for Gilberto or for a male
reader, but for a nation that has asked its citizens to make judgments with-
out uncovering those stubbornly hidden narratives that Jameson and Mul-
vey warn us of. Instead of a defense of sexual promiscuity and display as the
public “semiotics” of modernity, perhaps this suggests a demand for sifting
through layers of “weaknesses,” as Mulvey proposes. Fetishes would then
become metaphors—dare I say allegories—for other social events and
“traumas.” The role of the spectator requires a change from passive voyeur
(still a possibility if chosen, however) to decipherer of politics and of the
fetish as a distorted symptom of the weaknesses, or the periods and
breaks—of the modern. In his search to break down the opposition of the
terms “masculine” and “feminine,” Ignacio Corona finds in García Ponce a
rich locus for such questioning. He writes: “este autor es uno de los es-
critores mexicanos que más ha profundizado en la representación literaria
del origen, búsqueda y manifestación diversa del deseo sexual . . . Su obra
ejemplifica . . . el impacto del pensamiento europeo sobre la narrativa mex-
icana con respecto a la exploración del comportamiento humano” [this au-
thor is one of the Mexican writers who has most delved into the literary
representation of the origins, search for, and diverse manifestations of sex-
ual desire . . . His works exemplify . . . the impact that European thought
has had on Mexican narrative as far as an exploration of human conduct is
concerned] (136). With Mulvey, one might wish to use the plural of “de-
sires,” as Jameson has done with the term modernity, and add the narrative
of hidden ideologies to the narrative of visible textual writing on the sur-
face. If we start here as our point of departure, though, Corona opens the
door to an examination of sexuality itself as fetish and the exploration of
“eros [como] la experiencia última de la libertad humana” [eros {as} the ul-
timate experience of human freedom] (141) and not as a prescribed set of
actions or appearances set up to bolster the projects of the State. In this
scenario, the voyeur and/or the active participants Gilberto and Paloma
would all contribute to exposing the situations on which other construc-
tions of sexuality are built. The added attribute of the visual upon which
voyeurism is based, needless to say, creates a counterpoint to the unseen
and the masked lurking beneath the surface of dress codes, conduct, and
the look identified as the ‘new.’ The “distractions” of prescribed plea-
sures—“‘[v]er’ se traduce como revelación y como gozo” [‘seeing’ is trans-
lated as revelation and as pleasure, enjoyment] (Corona 143)—can be
turned as well into the attractions of looking at oneself as a consumer in the
economy of pleasure. If we keep sight of Jameson’s hypothesis that moder-
nity contains the seeds of its own destruction, its own internal period and
break dialectic, then the revelation of the fetishizing and empowerment of
sight could and should lead to something ‘other.’ Let us consider, there-
fore, the primacy of sight as part of the trope of the modern which García
Ponce will have turn its eye on itself.
If we return to Habermas’s notion of modernity as “the consciousness
of an epoch . . . as the result of a transition from the old to the new” (3), as
an exaltation of the present, as the cultural concomitant to social modern-
ization, then its ruins lie both in the structures and in the bodies that build
them. Cultural norms and ideals intervene, of course, in the construction of
monuments; so when things fall apart, the relics they leave in their wake are
fragments of the stories told that have reached some aporia. The bodies dis-
ciplined to carry out the projects of modernity have visible scars (as Ben-
jamin sees them on the city) from the processes of containing ideals in some
material shape. As Habermas writes of the incomplete project of modernity
(in Europe), aesthetic experimentation alone, such as in the case of the Sur-
realists, does not carry with it an emancipatory effect. Instead, with the ru-
ination of the cultural containers, “the contents get dispersed” (11). So in
the particular case of García Ponce, the debris of European culture and the
ruins of Mexican national culture come together to form a swirling collec-
tion of fragments from which one might be forced to recollect the antithet-
ical aspects of modernity as seen in twentieth-century Mexico. The
emancipation of the expression of sexuality, for instance, is more a ritualized
element of modernization than a structural change. It is one molecule of the
“cultural dispersal” that Habermas finds in the Surrealist project. Like emi-
gration to the city, like the adoration of the media, the body becomes part of
the national economy that is evoked for public needs. For García Ponce’s
characters, like Bataille’s and Klossowski’s characters before them, the body
is the site of struggle between finding a home in the economy of the State
and enjoying the liberating experiences of expenditure. There is no working
out of the paradoxes between the two; rather, there is a constant play among
the remnants of one (the State) and the ideals of the other (the libido). In the
end, the container (modernity) loses its coherence and the dispersal of de-
bris leaves behind a constellation of fragments and residues.
The resulting text is a palimpsest whose layers are constantly show-
ing through without memorializing any aspect, privileging one or another,
or finding a coherent relationship among them. The third Benjaminian
proposition for the development of an urban critique, once again, is a mo-
mentary flash of recognition and not a permanent integration. There is no
erasure of previous cultural writings, but a constant superimposition of nar-
ratives and a problematizing of the link between present and past. Between
the presence of the physical bodies with which these narratives are con-
structed, and the grafting on of ‘foreign bodies’ from other discourses,
body and soul (spirit), corpore and anima, flow across the spaces of the nar-
rative. García Ponce’s works are ecstatically palimpsestic and “totally
plural, in the sense that [they refuse] to imprison [their readers] within con-
ventions or compel any particular interpretation” (Fowler 181). This plu-
rality is articulated in De ánima (1984) through its plot and structure, and
through its recreation of obsessions and fascinations culled from previous
texts by García Ponce and by other writers.
As the reader is drawn into the narrative structure of diary writings,
and into the shifting perspectives of the narrative voices, especially in their
ritual reenactment of bodily experiences, the aforementioned struggles
come to the surface. At first glance the archetypal encounter between mas-
tery and innocence, between master and dominated, between loss and ob-
session occurs when Gilberto and Paloma meet, but there is more than a
facile dichotomy created. Many critics of García Ponce’s works—among
them Salvador Elizondo, José Emilio Pacheco, Ethel Krauze, Octavio Paz,
and Angel Rama—agree that the word innocence appears with great fre-
quency in nearly all of his novels. The concept takes on a different guise in
these contexts, however, no longer fitting into the connotations more com-
monly associated with the word. In De ánima and other novels, innocence
refers more often, and perhaps predictably so, to situations of expenditure
and plaisir disguised as innocence, or to innocence used to reach the object
of desire, than to a literally innocent site of interpretation. All sense of pu-
rity is removed from the so-called innocent character and instead she (for
they are always women) is made the locus of revelation for the male char-
acter and, in the end, for herself. As Octavio Paz indicates regarding such
a reconsideration of this traditional idea of incorruption in the works of
García Ponce, and in the concomitant control or mastery over experience,
“innocence . . . is invariably allied to those passions that we call evil or per-
verse: cruelty, rage, lust, the deliriums of the exasperated imagination, and
finally the entire range of pleasures that we condemn severely and yet at
the same time find fascinating” (Introduction xv). This brings us full circle to
the remnants of the pre-Columbian past that Paz finds both fascinating and
horrifying, for they ignite a spark of recollection yet blur the boundaries set
up by modernity between moral categories. In addition, the sublimation of
political passion—especially after 1968—can resurface as erotic passion.
If we take into consideration that, as Matthew C. Gutmann concludes,
“a large number of people in Mexico lost their political innocence” (Mean-
ings 61) after October 2, 1968, then an enchantment with the notion of in-
nocence itself has been ruptured. As the “fiesta desarrollista” [celebratory
development] (Monsiváis, qtd. in Sefchovich 184) of the decade of the six-
ties comes to a close with the violent events of 1968, and the sexenio of Luis
Echevarría looks to bring the alienated bourgeoisie back into the fold
of State projects, the political and moral lines in the body politic become
increasingly blurred. Sefchovich calls the bleak moments following the
so-called glories of the 1960s “la hora de la pesadumbre” [the hour of sor-
row and mourning] (183). A time of chiaroscuro on the public stage as much
as it is behind closed doors, García Ponce’s “arte intimista” of this era carries
in it the seeds of political contradiction even as it explores the expenditure
of the body. The ingenuous, the guiltless, and the blameless in politics turn
into a rhetorical stance of political parties, much as the childlike, guileless,
and unblemished Paloma is only the reflection of a discourse about her. The
two sets of diary entries, one by Gilberto and one by Paloma, address this
structurally in the novel for they visit and revisit the same scenarios just to
find themselves reconstructing their own stories among the ruins of their
relationship. Two years together produces evidence of a relationship built up
and then left to decay. This is true in particular for Gilberto for he turns
to the fragments of his diary to attempt to reconstruct a life about to end.
Diagnosed with a terminal illness, the only vestiges left to him are the writ-
ten words about his previous life, the bits and pieces of experiences as
retold by the storyteller himself, but at a distance in his own texts.
The double-edged sword of the simultaneous condemnation of and
fascination with plaisir cuts across the entire range of García Ponce’s ‘in-
nocently’ constructed texts. While presented with the raptures of inno-
cence, the reader is also conscious of the shadow of what has been termed
the perverse (taboo pleasures) that haunts all acts of the bourgeois charac-
ters. The dual axes of innocence/perversion continually intersect in De
ánima without the moral sanction that traditional society would encode on
them. They are, then, freed from categorization to coexist as driving forces
underlying bodily experiences even as the social community struggles to as-
similate new (modern) codes of conduct and behavior. Even the title’s pre-
sumed ‘innocent’ look—its suggestion of the soul or the animus—is con-

tradicted by the immediate predominance of what is de corpore, things of the
body rather than of the disconnected spirit. In fact, the ánima, as Ann and
Barry Ulanov write, “can be read as the breath of life or the creature en-
dowed with it” (9). So De ánima is a textual, corporeal edifice, a body of
words, whose every aspect takes on life thanks to the density and insistence
of the voyeur’s gaze, whose indiscretion or attraction puts into motion the
mechanisms of repeated ceremonies focused on the human body. This
voyeur might be the reader, the narrator, or the participants themselves in
the textual/sexual ceremonies. De ánima is a text in which transgression and
glory, satisfaction and death, are entwined in the dialogues between and
among the bodies. The dialogic aspect of Benjamin’s critique of urban cul-
ture comes to life through them from the ruins of the political and the per-
sonal structures embodied in the narrative. This novel, akin to the
description of the character Paloma’s sensuous body, is like skin “that is im-
possible not to touch, visible at all moments in that perpetual contradiction
and affirmation of itself” (De ánima 187). Just as Paloma is the sum of her
past and present experiences, just as she is a collection and recollection of
herself with others, so the novel is a palimpsest of narratives on the body.
De ánima displays a strong emphasis on the visual, establishing a link be-
tween film and prose, and between voyeur and reader of the layers of this
sexual/textual surface or ‘skin.’ Like the subsuelo [geographic subsoil] on
which the foundations of the modern metropolis are laid and anchored,
human flesh is a layered set of remains. Among the scars on its surface, as
well as amid the mental images retained, one might find vestiges of social
ideals and prohibitions. Human bodies are, like the Ángel de la Indepen-
dencia, monuments to successes and to failures that may remain aloft, or
fall with the natural disasters that beset the city.
In terms of what Patrizia Calefato terms the body as “a mobile
edifice . . . [that] registers the ambiguities of desire” (223) we move away
from the icon of the feminine as permanence and immobility to the alle-
gory of the body as the shifting terrain of ruined desires and nascent
fantasies. The ‘innocent’ gaze is deployed to penetrate the dense and dis-
concerting spaces of fascination that the secret dialogues between bodies
and subterranean currents of fantasy proffer. Of course, desires and fasci-
nations are fed from external sources and then become internalized into
fragments and images that often seem uncanny until they find a space
to inhabit from which they no longer disturb the discoverer. I orient
my study in particular toward the crossovers among De ánima, Pierre
Klossowski’s The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959), and Jun’ichiro
Tanizaki’s The Key (1960), the last two providing García Ponce with
pre-texts for his novel. While Klossowski’s work lends him the structure
of the diary, the remains of Tanizaki’s novel fill García Ponce’s prose with
a charged erotic language that is the key to the subterranean fantasies
embedded in the characters’ psyches. All three texts, in addition, are tales
spun around multiple visions of a central core, the format of the diary or
day-to-day record of individual experience, interpretation, and remem-
brance (akin to Benjamin’s recollections). Each text should not be read as
a guidebook to García Ponce’s narrative but instead as part of the field of
cultural debris from which characters, relationships, and social ideals
have been recovered. Like the pyramids and the Christian churches, the
structures underlie one another but are actually recycled bits that are
patched together to form new structures. We should not conclude, there-
fore, that García Ponce merely wishes to reconstruct an era or a society
for that would respond only to some nostalgic impulse. What he takes are
the fragments of stories that are removed from their contexts and placed
in what he calls the “free” spaces of literary creation.
Like De ánima, The Key is composed of two alternating fictional di-
aries.1 One belongs to a middle-aged university professor who, in order to
explore his own sexuality, provokes situations in which his wife of many
years will (possibly) act on her own repressed desires toward another,
younger, man. Kimura, a friend of the couple’s daughter, is a student at the
university as well as her possible future husband. He is charged with es-
corting the two women around the city, at the request of the professor. To
document their activities in his absence, Kimura is given a Polaroid camera.
At first, the game appears (paradoxically) innocent enough and the pictures
taken represent enjoyable scenes of the three in public. But we have already
adjudicated neither moral superiority nor condemnation to acts of inno-
cence or guilt. Rather, they assume a guise of ambiguity much as the polit-
ical culture of the Mexican nation does after the close of the 1960s. They
are also a possible projection of the professor’s own crisis at midlife. The af-
terlife of the image of innocence taken from The Key is complicated further
by the multiple voices and the loss of faith in the purity of language in De
ánima. As everything else, the power of linguistic signs to represent cate-
gories such as innocence becomes a function relative to the power of the
speaker/writer or to the problematic relationship between that source and
the words set in new contexts.
It is not long before the photographs in Tanizaki’s novel begin to re-
flect a more intimate relationship between Kimura and Ikuko (the
mother/wife). The catalyst of this intimacy, as we read in his diary, is the
professor. Yet the relationship between the older woman and younger man
progresses, perhaps even beyond the original intentions of the provocateur.
While he has induced them to experiment desire, he has also presented it

within certain limits from the outset. In the first entry of his diary, written
on New Year’s Day, the professor expresses both his interest in keeping a
personal record of their own relationship as well as his pursuit—at the level
of fantasy and imagination in the beginning—of challenging what he calls
Ikuko’s “old-fashioned Kyoto upbringing . . . with a good deal of antiquated
morality” (3). It is this attitude of tradition which forms the target of his ex-
periment, although where it might lead could even be the destruction of
the social mores out to the test. And the twist is that he is unaware, or at
least unsure, of her knowledge about the whole scheme. Morality is the so-
cial monument whose shadow haunts both texts.
The title of the story, The Key, is an icon of the furtive relationship
between the couple regarding what they reveal to themselves in their di-
aries. Each supposes these records to be both secret and accessible to the
other. “The key” is what locks the diaries away from prying eyes; yet it is
also the object left out in the open on purpose to provoke the desires of the
other into investigating what is contained therein. The key is literally an in-
strument to open the diaries, but it figuratively gives access to erotic spaces
besides. What is traditionally considered private writing is paradoxically
made the object of shared interest; like Musil’s door, the key gives entrance
to secret realms. It is not merely a key but an allegorical figure that might
suggest decipherment by multiple readers. As they write their thoughts
down on paper, both characters seem to be aware that they are manipulat-
ing the reader with the very lines they are composing. The role of the
imagination becomes increasingly important in the representation of real-
ity; the same holds true for the pictures recorded by the lens of the cam-
era. Both words and photos are read by the individual in different ways
according to predispositions, expectations, desires, and perhaps even un-
expected recollections.
The professor’s and his wife’s recorded versions of events, similar to
those of Paloma and Gilberto, anticipate actual or imagined physical plea-
sures. After retrieving his intoxicated wife from Kimura’s home one evening,
the professor writes, for example, “I came up to my study, and have quickly
jotted down all of the night’s events—all that has happened so far, that is. In
the midst of writing, I have savored the thought of the pleasures which are
to follow” (79). The anticipatory aspect of desire is what functions most
clearly here, as it does with García Ponce’s Paloma and Gilberto. But in
both instances, it is also the tale retold that stimulates fantasy even more:
Paloma’s remembrances of her relationship with her uncle, and Ikuko’s often
feeble or foggy memories of her encounters with Kimura. Imagination is the
‘key’ to both stories, what García Ponce touts as the terrain of “freedom”
when faced with the so-called immovable monuments of social norms. The
last entries of both diaries, Ikuko’s and her husband’s, contradict the appear-
ance of innocence given at the outset on New Year’s Day. By June, when the
professor has recently died of a stroke following his acting on his own desire
for Ikuko, the reader discovers that each of them has been leading the other
on. Each has known all along that the other has had access to his or her pri-
vate thoughts. Yet this in itself is ironic, since each has also revealed the
temptations of the voyeur in the writings. Both the professor and Ikuko have
made the private format of the diary a public spectacle instead; the privacy is
merely a masquerade. While the Olympic Games as spectacle are the relics
of the modern project in Crónica, De ánima provides us with another ‘fasci-
nating’ spectacle in the performances of the characters built from The Key.
What is conjured up by their two-faced game of innocence and experience
is reminiscent of the debris piling up at the feet of the Angel of History who
is its witness. Words pile up in the diaries of The Key and of De ánima, yet ac-
tions cannot be contained by them in some complete and finished form.
The ruins of modernity pile up as well, the remnants of intellectual projects
and dreams, yet to hold them back and restrain them is impossible. At the
end of each novel, the instigator of the experiment dies and the couple is no
longer. All of the characters are pushed inexorably toward the future. The
collision of two forces, tradition and modernity (the so-called freedom of
the subject), reduces the experiment to rubble, yet it presents the possibility
of a melancholic reading to force the contradictions on which it is predi-
cated to spring forth.
The second characteristic shared by the narratives of García Ponce
and Tanizaki is the consciousness of time embodied in the relationships
between these women and their lovers. The concept of an irrevocable
time, one objectively measured by all sorts of technological instruments,
appears to be of little importance here yet it forms a haunting strata of
culture ticking away in the distance. Anderson writes of a community
imagined through the print media, one in which a reader of the daily
newspaper can find a sense of correspondence by imagining all those read-
ing at the same moment. Perhaps the same simultaneity draws together
characters belonging to a political community (which they are forced to
suppress in favor of another type of experience of individuality) in com-
munion through the literary imaginations. This is far from their ground-
ing in the “primordial, timeless cultures” (Gutmann, Meanings 221) often
associated with archaeological tourist sites, but rather is the imagining of
Paloma and Gilberto and the professor and Ikuko within a shifting terrain
of literary and cultural influences that are not directly political. Roger
Bartra ponders the question “Is there an age-old continuity in Latin
American culture?” He is led to respond, “No! . . . All signs of life in pre-

Hispanic societies were eradicated. Today Latin America is irrevocably an
extension of the West” (qtd. in Gutmann, Meanings 221). While it is im-
possible to conclude that Tanizaki is a model from the West, despite his
adoption and adaptation of Western narrative models to Eastern uses, we
need to embed García Ponce’s narratives within both Eastern and Western
traditions of literary monuments to cultural moments. Being “part of the
West” would then indicate a greater imagined community of modernity
and a greater set of contradictions on which to draw. Mexico and Japan
might share some of these crossovers from tradition to modernization
alongside astonishing contradictions and survivals.
The temporal advancement from an initial impetus (otherwise called
progress) inevitably brings disillusionment in this narrative, as it did in
Crónica with the erosion of dreams into nightmarish scenarios. What mat-
ters to the characters of Tanizaki and García Ponce is a cyclical time, one of
renewal and regeneration, repetition and obsession, that competes with lin-
ear time. This sense of time is not passage and wearing down, but ritual in-
vocation through the erotic exercises that plunge characters into situations
previously redemptive and now in a ‘ruined’ state. Ikuko, Paloma, and
others all serve the male characters as ‘keys’ to perpetually renewable en-
ergy that is posited in that allegorical sense we have cited from Benjamin.
Pulling in two directions, both as destroyer of systematic thought and as
moment of redemption, women as allegory are, without a doubt, the per-
fect embodiment of the baroque excesses to which Benjamin also makes
reference. Never contained simply within their skin, they take over, pro-
voke, and otherwise exemplify the excesses of signification that our model
has proffered as challenging rather than limiting. This situation becomes,
as David Pollack has written, “a quandary of self” (67) in the male charac-
ter’s obsession with the woman, yet his dependence on her for these rituals.
Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the tales is that many of the male charac-
ters, Gilberto and the professor included, die before their stories have been
told to completion. Then it is left up to Paloma and Ikuko to reflect on the
entire narrative up to that point, at least as far as some vague and incom-
plete totality is concerned. The women have the last word, and they assume
the storyteller’s role. Tanizaki’s “fetishization and demonization” (Pollack
69) extend to De ánima as well. Paloma as the embodiment of the sublime
and the infernal is both innocent and perverse, both the source of sexual
power and the explosive site of the unattainable. In spite of all their discus-
sions about “possession,” Gilberto and the uncle will never, in the words
of Paloma herself, “possess” her. Ikuko and Paloma are undeniably com-
plex; their erotic rituals are maintained beyond the irrevocable time of the
lives and deaths of Gilberto and the professor, and they function as more
than a literal voice of the feminine.
The novel De ánima represents the confluence of two diaries, two
bodies of writing, belonging to Paloma and her most recent lover,
Gilberto. Together, the diaries as recordings of past physical and mental ex-
periences first converge and then diverge in order to offer the reader (who
is challenged with trying to ‘make sense’) a constellation of images or rep-
resentations of the same events. Seen from two very different and distinct
perspectives—the intellectual, quasi-philosophical eye of Gilberto, who is
obsessed with transforming erotic feelings into aesthetic categories and, in
diametric opposition, the supposedly uncontaminated eye of Paloma—the
contents of the diaries cover a time span of almost two years. Both diaries
and characters are interrupted only by the sudden death of Gilberto as the
result of the rupture of an aneurysm. Both texts construct a space of writ-
ing and intimacy in which the characters invent and fantasize about them-
selves in the open time of the present while remembering (making and
remaking, reliving one more time, reinterpreting in different contexts, ‘re-
calling’ in the spark of the Benjaminian moment) the diverse sexual en-
counters they have experienced.
The reader of De ánima adds to the pleasures of the text by casting
yet a third perspective on the episodes and by picking a path amid the re-
covery of the ruins of the narrations of Paloma and Gilberto. Octavio Paz
puts this crucial role into perspective when he insists that
the reader [is] turned into an onlooker [who] contemplates, or more

exactly watches the action. In certain cases, . . . one does not have the
impression that one is present at a performance in a theater but,
rather, that one is peeping through a keyhole: the ‘tableaux vivants’ of
pornography transformed into a ritual of signs that come together
and separate to form, literally, figures of a language irreducible to
words. Bodies link together like signs, form sentences, and say (Intro-
duction xvi-xvii)
Paz’s remarks are quite appropriate to our discussion since they underscore
the action of the indiscreet eye granted access through the peephole, be-
hind the artfully closed doors of narratives and the closed, exclusionary cat-
egories of the modern. Obviously, the indiscretion of the eye watching
through the framed space of the peephole is not unseemly in the context
of this narrative. Rather, it recalls the previous sense of an innocence that
implies otherness and that imbues the imagination with innumerable pos-
sibilities and not merely static dichotomies of good and evil, past and pre-
sent. The expansion of the Janus-faced Angel of History or the two-voiced
diary into a multiplicity of readers rummaging around the fragments of sto-

ries allows for allegory to play out into hitherto unexplored, but maybe
strangely familiar, spaces. How could one imagine that Paloma might par-
ticipate willingly in such ceremonies? By assuming that she is guileless and
naive, we cast her into the stricture of traditional limits. But by finding
clues to other stories within her, perhaps as limitless as the number of read-
ers, or the number of experiences she faces, she is given the chance to piece
together remnants long forgotten and “bewitch” us—and Gilberto—not
just with the expected but with the sublime (Paz). The notion of splendors
rarely includes surprises, one imagines, but rather expected glories, re-
peated rituals, and reinforced celebrations. Here, nevertheless, the splen-
dors of Paloma are her ability to evoke fascination and horror, to encounter
in all of the dilemmas of modern life not dead ruins but living relics. This
includes her willful acceptance of the human body as an edifice with mov-
able surfaces and, like the skyline of the metropolis in which she lives, a
constant building up and tearing down of walls and boundaries. The bar-
das that García Ponce recalls in his essays of Personas, lugares y anexas are
what Paloma finds to be shifting panels of a living retablo.
Perhaps without Pierre Klossowski’s novels Roberte Ce Soir (1954) and
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959) it would not be possible to think
about the layered composition of De ánima, a novel which reconstructs and
then dismantles the characters and structures of Klossowski’s texts. García
Ponce has both acknowledged his spiritual debt to Klossowski’s thought—
as seen in the extensive list of his works dedicated to the ever-present sub-
ject of crossovers among what are so often the discreet units of theology,
pornography, and the concept of the sign that also coexist in Klossowski’s
literary volumes—and deliberately pursues Klossowski’s ideas as repre-
sented by the two novels cited above. Klossowski’s writings form part of
that “dialogical process of reflective intercalation” (Museum 17) Castañeda
discusses as he describes the “oscillation” between the ‘real’ world of ob-
jects and relations and the imagined world of the text. Even as García
Ponce reinforces his refusal of the overtly political, Castañeda suggests
once again that cultural discourse is forever open to all of its components
because “all cultures are imaginary machines: real representations of iden-
tities, communities, and belongings forged in contestations of power” (Mu-
seum 17). The power of discourse, as an antidote to political impotence or
disinterest, is the “machinery” that allegorizes social relations into imagi-
nary worlds. As his characters find their bourgeois, patriarchal, provincial
universes on the verge of collapse and unrecognizability, they reproduce
ceremonies of mourning and loss over and over, even as they cannot find
plaisir amid the glories of the modern.
It would be as mistaken to take the works of Pierre Klossowski as the

representative of a ‘real’ France during his lifetime, as it would be to con-
sider García Ponce as a univocal image of ‘the real’ Mexico. Each one’s
imagined understanding of experience is embedded in his characters and
their compulsive returns to issues and images, such as relations of power
and functions of community. In pondering cultural and philosophical issues
from within a general Latin American context, Mexican philosopher
Leopoldo Zea emphasizes the urgent need for internal dialogue within and
among the “contestations of power” of social as well as psychological struc-
tures and their constructs. Zea writes that “Latin America is the daughter
of European culture; it is the product of one of its major crises. . . . whether
we want it or not, we are the children of European culture. From Europe
we have received our cultural framework, what could be called our struc-
ture: language, religion, customs, in a word, our conception of life and
world is European. To become disengaged from it would be to become dis-
engaged from the heart of our personality” (361, 363). The profiles of Gar-
cía Ponce’s characters, then, would have some similar roots and stories as
those of Klossowski, Musil, and von Doderer for their commonly shared
palimpsestic surfaces on which stories are superimposed. If the sagas of em-
pires and their demise create “men without qualities” (to paraphrase
Musil’s title) the first time around, then the characters of García Ponce are
traces of an erasure long in the making.
Topographies of the mind form the interconnections of cultures be-
tween Klossowski and García Ponce. Although approximately twenty-five
years and two very different contexts (Europe, Mexico) separate their
works, they share a desire to create and recreate allegorical characters, ones
imbued with almost divine characteristics, who function as the axis of each
of their erotic universes. In the case of both writers, this allegory explodes
outward from the material (textual, of course) body of a woman: for Klos-
sowski, it is Roberte; for García Ponce, Paloma. As he has written of the ar-
chitectural constructs of his childhood and adolescence before, García
Ponce finds in enclosures a strange and inviting openness he seems to see
reflected in the human body. If as a child he is lured to look over the barda
and salivate over the games in progress on the other side, ones from which
he laments his exclusion, then now in De ánima characters are tantalized by
fascinations with other exclusions and other secret games. Among these are
challenges of knowledge and innocence provoked by the appearance of a
body close at hand yet fundamentally inaccessible.
Klossowski, like Tanizaki, provides the key to what this allure of the
woman might hide. Benjamin writes of the dialectical images provoked by,
for instance, the parting glance at a railway station before vehicles and pas-
sengers disappear into the distance. For García Ponce, before Gilberto dis-
appears (he dies) and before Paloma becomes a movie star (essentially dis-
appearing as a ‘real’ person to become an actress playing many roles),
parting glances in allegorical form appear on the pages of the diaries. Thus
writing holds special privilege as an object of “awe and wonder” (Gilloch,
Myth 130), revealing characters and situations only to leave them unre-
solved. Opening the cover of the diary is like opening the door in Musil’s
novel; these spaces are both sacred and profane, both private and public,
the sites of the ruins of cultural discourses and composed of remnants
themselves. García Ponce is specific about Klossowski’s Roberte as such a
“holy site” (Gilloch, Myth 130) amid the facades of so many texts produced
in modern times.
Para mí, unas de las preguntas capitales de las obras de Klossowski es

una pregunta sobre la identidad personal y sobre la necesidad de un
signo único. En su caso ese signo, que vale por todos los significados
y ocupa el centro del mundo, es un nombre arbitrariamente elegido,
se llama Roberte. Y Roberte es un personaje, o sea una imagen, que el
arte hace aparecer.
[For me, one of the most fundamental questions in the works of Klos-
sowski is one of personal identity and of the need for a single, unique
sign. In his case, that sign, which stands for all signifieds {meanings}
and which holds a place at the center of the world, is named Roberte.
And Roberte is a character, that is to say an image, which art makes
appear.] (García Ponce qtd. in Ruffinelli 29)
His reference to a singular and “unique” sign to hold all of the explosive
energy of Roberte (or, for that matter, Paloma) is a fundamental paradox in
García Ponce’s theorizing. In his search for some sort of personal identity
impervious to the ravages of time and the destruction of signs, he reads a
“center” on the allegory that cannot hold. The excess of allegory, its
spilling beyond its artificial container (language, sign), its combining of
sacred and secular attributes such as the redemption of other characters
through communion with the flesh (à la Bataille) might well create sites of
“expectation” (Gilloch, Myth 131) but not, as a necessity, “centers.” The
mourning over such a loss can only find its expression, then, in “what art
makes appear.” If we wish to consider Roberte, Ikuko, Paloma, and others
as obsessively repeated “monuments” (Gilloch, Myth 131) to unreal and by
now uncanny expectations, then we may begin to find their fascination and
their horror. His narrators repeatedly and insistently conjure up figures and
spaces that are akin to Benjamin’s “dream architecture” (Gilloch, Myth
131), housing a phantasmagoria of possibilities not unlike modernity’s own

promises and perhaps comparable to Krell’s movable and disjointed “ar-
cheticture.” The melancholic gaze of Gilberto or of other narrators is
bound up in this, and even overwhelmed by it as he focuses incessantly on
Paloma. He does not survive to reach the final, mournful conclusion (that
the desire for the center lives on in art alone) but he also needs Paloma to
close the door behind him by filling in the final pages in his place.
Gilberto’s persistent return to “borrow” the body of Paloma for the exteri-
orizing projection of his own ghosts, to the “contradicción inherente a mi
deseo” [contradiction inherent in my desire] (175–6), makes her into the
sign of what is impossible since she can never contain all that he can imag-
ine. While he ponders such a situation, and even as he continues writing
about it, Gilberto waits in expectation for something about himself to be
revealed through her: “Repito a Paloma, vuelvo a Paloma, encuentro y
transformo a Paloma” [I repeat {keep reproducing} Paloma, I go back to
Paloma, I run into and transform Paloma] (176). She is not a monument
like those made of stone or bronze, then; she, like the characters of Crónica
and Inmaculada, performs the function that Laura U. Marks attributes to
“fossils or fetishes” (224). She is a material medium in which originary ex-
periences (ones charged with special meaning) are condensed into cryptic
histories that can be conjured up in melancholic and obsessive readings.
Marks refers to primordial landscapes; Paloma is imbued with the same
sense of enchantment and spark of redemption for Gilberto who finds her
too much to contain in one singular episode and too little for what he
imagines he can do through her compliance to his wishes.
Klossowski’s figure-sign of Roberte fosters a double reading through-
out her diaries: Roberte is the embodiment of Octave’s fantasies and, at the
same time, the source of his frustrations. The character Octave, a well-
known professor of Scholasticism, wants to discover the other side of
Roberte, the dark side, and the secret dimensions of this other Roberte that
might call up his own unrecognized and repressed desires. These secret, in-
timate dimensions can be made to interface with the ‘known:’ “obligan a
Roberte a ceder a sus propios deseos y actualizar a la otra Roberte” [force
Roberte to give in to her own sexual impulses {desires} and actualize the
other Roberte] (García Ponce, Teología 27). In other words, Octave is calling
upon that allegorical doorway between inside and outside, between cultural
vestige and ‘real’ society, between imagined and lived experience, to bridge
the distance that separates or divides his wife from the other side of herself.
The dimension of privacy or secrecy in modern life, those fantasies kept
out of circulation from the economies of goods, surfaces here to take its
place among the products of culture.
Roberte’s husband Octave conceives of a ritualistic erotic game that

allows every male guest of the family to become Roberte’s lover for one
particular night. “Rules of the game, referred to in the text as the “Rules of
Hospitality,” are simple and easy to follow for the participants.2 Each guest
room has a list of regulations posted conveniently and accessibly just above
the bed. They indicate that during the time frame allotted to the game, in
which the guest has agreed to take part voluntarily, neither emotional
sentiment nor moral values should be invoked in this temporary relation-
ship. But the contrary is true, in fact: these rules open up a new dimension,
for the reader as well as the participant, and must be kept apart from sur-
rounding circumstances and codes of morality. Such games “enable the
prostituted spouse to provide the husband with a multiplication of views
and references, thus deepening the experience and knowledge of the wife
seen through the eyes and caressed with the hands of many others” (Weiss,
Aesthetics 33). At the same time, self-knowledge, arising from new chains of
associations and recollections, is produced. Feelings of fidelity, infidelity,
betrayal, jealousy, and so on are banned from the text as vestiges of the
world outside the ritual, even though we know that this outside is always
lurking at the surface of the inside, ready to cross over and back. The sex-
ual relations between Roberte and her guests are solely for the purpose of
Octave’s plans; yet they are a vehicle through which she might render visi-
ble her own ghosts, phantoms, thoughts, and repressed desires. This might
be called a freeing of her secret self, or even a contamination of innocence
by knowledge.
The game, however, presents another dimension not noticed by
Octave at first. Through ritualistic acts and simulacra or performances,
Roberte manages to discover to her own satisfaction another set of expe-
riences belonging to herself alone. While staged at the service of Octave,
the game is instrumental in establishing Roberte’s own knowledge as well.
This outcome is not the one posited by Octave, and it does not appear to
be of fundamental interest to him. Yet the reader may be encouraged by
such counternarratives. Once again in her room, after an intense day of
hard work in the Censorship Council headquarters where she has the task
of editing her husband’s writings, Roberte is able to explore herself in dif-
ferent ways. Exposing her nude body to the mirror on the wall, she pro-
ceeds through a series of narcissistic poses, all the while enjoying the
spectacle of her own appearance. She delights in finding a multitude of an-
gles from which to spy on the reactions of her own body as it changes and
adapts to every move she commands it to make. Once divested of the tai-
lored suit that acts as a straitjacket to any expression of personal feelings or
emotion, while simultaneously laboring at the censorship of the feelings
and language of others, Roberte is freed to explore new surfaces and di-
mensions of herself. Overcoming the gap between social readings of the
body and interiorized judgments, Roberte produces a reconnection be-
tween inner and outer life that Octave himself cannot make. Despite his
apparent power over her—and his rhetorics of power over all situations in
which she participates—he is, in the end, uncertain. He must satisfy him-
self that he has not lost anything by constantly reiterating her obedience
to his will in a sort of repetition compulsion of unresolved struggles.
We as readers and observers are witness to Roberte as she leaves one
set of circumstances behind and delves into her own fantasies: “Roberte da
libre salida al deseo a través de sus pensamientos, al tiempo que se deja
fascinar en el espejo por su cuerpo” [Roberte gives free reign to desire
through the vehicle of her thoughts, at the same time that she gives herself
over to a fascination with her own body in the mirror] (García Ponce,
Teología 26). Recalling that fascination is something overwhelming and at
the same time charged with the horror of the unknown (the flip side of
what Paz calls the “sublime”), these scenes can be read as remnants of pre-
vious sensations resuscitated through a visual encounter with the surfaces
on which they have been played out. Several of the possibilities of who
Roberte might be are dredged up, and Roberte, the severe aunt of nephew
Antoine, gives life to the other Roberte, who is the embodiment of a free
spirit. Her room becomes the site for rich imaginings in which her erotic
fantasies are stirred and possessed by the characters she has read about dur-
ing her workday. While Octave requires Roberte to respond to his imag-
ined scenarios, Roberte incarnates what she reads on her own flesh. This
inspiration comes from an internal response to that “cultural machinery”
Castañeda finds in all textual representations of culture. For Roberte, there
is an excess to be played out on her own skin, a circularity of erotics in
which “la imaginación sale del cuerpo y se encuentra en el cuerpo al
poseerlo, obligándolo a ceder ante ella” [the imagination leaves the body
and finds itself in that body upon possessing it, obliging the body to cede to
the desires of the imagination] (García Ponce, Teología 26). We must not
lose sight of the fact that Roberte is incited to fantasy by the act of read-
ing, by the very signs of language that our diary writers will leave behind in
De ánima, as Inmaculada is incited by the books in her employer’s library
(and as García Ponce finds in his grandmother’s library in Mérida).
What appears to be a displacement of Roberte is instead the acquisi-
tion or revelation of other dimensions whose residues form the sediment of
who Roberte is at the moment and who she might turn out to be at any
time. Octave and his prohibitions (the “Rules of Hospitality”) are strangely
unidimensional, therefore, since he is reduced to a voyeur of his own cre-
ation and condemned to keep offering Roberte to his guests. Appearances

to the contrary, the tables are turned and the character Roberte as allegory
is enriched by the experiences that look as though only Octave will benefit
from. Roberte has become the embodiment of a monomania for her hus-
band; Octave yearns to capture a totality of the fragments of his own iden-
tity by means of joining together the moments perceived through his acts
of voyeurism. Roberte represents the search for the utopia of a unified sub-
ject for Octave, yet in the ritualized process she learns about herself much
more than he ever will. What the reader is left with at the end of the story
of Roberte and Octave is a thick, heavy, disarticulated, and fragmented
diary whose confessions originate in the depths of obsession but spiral out-
ward into unexpected dimensions. As a ruin, the diary lives up to Fuentes’s
image of the half-completed, half-dreamed allegorical artifice to be inhab-
ited in the future by some unnamed and imagined guests. It is never a fin-
ished project and, as such, never ceases to produce new imagined scenarios
and dramas. The architecture cannot speak once and for all; only the act of
storytelling remains to revive the mourning of unfulfilled expectations.
Like Klossowski’s novels, the text of De ánima is also the product of an
obsession with knowledge. Like the cityscape which Benjamin ardently
hopes will reveal its secrets from behind the attractive facades of modernity,
Paloma both resists and promises. She is a labyrinth to be plumbed yet si-
multaneously an impossible collection of fragments that form an antidote to
systematic thought. Both she and her diary are mere pieces of stories, ag-
gregates of experiences, which cannot be transmitted in the traditional
economy of everyday language. Instead, she is constructed and recon-
structed from gestures, silences, and glances which offer the melancholic
Gilberto a series of entryways into her psyche. Paloma becomes a palimpsest
on which she and others can inscribe an intensity lost amid what Benjamin
calls the “atrophied experience of modernity” (Gilloch, Myth 173). The
fleeting glance, the chance word, might evoke a recollection of something
hidden away from the drive for progress and innovation. The allegory of rit-
ual, the appeal to a timeless time, allows for a site of rupture in the forward-
looking discourses of politics and economics that rule in the ‘real’ world.
Can any tradition survive intact, uncontaminated by these forces?
Each of the erotic games in De ánima is sutured onto the body of the
text as a building block of the narrative, but the tenor of each diary
changes dramatically in response to its author’s perception. All is contin-
gent on that momentary spark of relationship between individual and ex-
perience. This is due to different reasons or hidden motivations on the
part of each character, but also on the intensity of the “tictonic” (Krell 7)
or openness to the entrance of the uncanny into the territory of reason.
For Gilberto, as a professional writer, writing represents a ritualistic act of

reinscribing the female body into a recognizable discourse. He affirms
that the constantly renewed contact between the “pura superficie” [pure
surfaces] of their bodies creates both constant discovery and everlasting
insatiability: “no hay saciedad posible” [there is no absolute satisfaction
possible] (46). He finds this to be true “por lo que descubro en su cuerpo,
en la capacidad de ese cuerpo que parece encontrar su placer en el que da”
[because of what I discover in her body, in the capacity of that body that
seems to find its {own} pleasure in the pleasure it gives {others}] (46). The
paradox of a lack, the inability to conclude the search for “saciedad,” dri-
ves the ceremony into an unresolvable obsession.
Whatever is uncovered is never enough, but the hint of a redemption
still lying amid the debris keeps them coming back in expectation and frus-
tration (as a strangely positive motivating force). In Gilberto’s diaries one
can find the reenactment of the Klossowskian principle of the full commu-
nicability of the body expressed in opposition to the constraints imposed on
it by any linguistic system; the spaces of their encounters are filled with the
ruins we can mine for traces of those promising confrontations. The alle-
gory of the body is again the site of antisystematic thought. As Weiss points
out in his discussion of the repetition and codification of world, body, and
language, “one is taught to express oneself in stereotypes, and then belie and
obfuscate the multiplicity of the libido, of the body” (Aesthetics 36). To put
this another way, Gilberto’s writings are desperate attempts to recover that
“multiplicity” as if it had disappeared naturally and not by ideological impo-
sition of morality and virtue. At a loss, Gilberto turns to the reinvention of
a language of desire which he feels he has lost but which Paloma has yet to
acquire. (Let us recall the distinction between Onda and Escritura here in the
satisfaction with linguistic communication for the first and the need for
something indescribable and evocative in the second). This is put into con-
crete form when he speaks (or writes) of Paloma and the act of writing itself:
“Desnudándola es siempre encontrarla de nuevo por primera vez” [Un-
dressing her is always finding her once again for the first time] (52); the ele-
ments of discovery and innocence are always there in both instances—in the
physical encounter and in the linguistic representation of it. The erotic en-
counter with the observed body is echoed in the writer’s engagement with
the evocative powers of language; both create a spark but both fail to live up
to what he wishes them to be. Instead of the narrative and corporal comple-
tion of a story, the reader finds a montage of silences and voices, of dreams
and desires, of Gilberto’s absences and Paloma’s presence. Gilberto’s privi-
leged gaze sparks a moment of personal epiphany: “sólo por Paloma puedo
decir que conozco, al fin, el sentido de la contemplación dentro de la vida y
en la realidad contingente” [only through Paloma can I say that I have come
to know, at long last, the meaning of contemplation in life and in contingent
reality] (182). The accidental or aleatory interpretation of experiences—the
“contingency” of the quote—indicates that this is not a static model but one
that will possibly never be repeated despite an obsessive urge to do so. He
cannot guarantee what will happen in any circumstance, despite his desire to
“know” why. Elsewhere in the novel, Gilberto believes he has reached the
secret passage connecting the erotic with the power of artistic creation, all
by means of Paloma once again: “En Paloma puedo contemplar lo que du-
rante tanto tiempo he buscado . . . Yo conozco esa mirada. Se ve así cuando
se quiere hacer una obra. Pero ella no va a permitir esa reducción. Su propia
persona es la obra” [In Paloma I can contemplate what I have sought for
such a long time . . . . I know that look. One gets that look when one wants
to begin the creation of a work. But she isn’t going to permit a reduction to
that aspect alone. She herself is the work of art] (183–184; emphasis added).
Paloma is the repository of both sensuality and innocence, of all of the di-
chotomies rolled into one. The work of art is a mirror, then, of a process and
not a finished product. The “look” that appears on the face of the artist is
merely the externalization of an uncommunicable experience equal to the
enigmatic representation of Paloma.
The gaze, what García Ponce refers to as “la mirada profunda,” does
not stop with the mere act of looking per se. Throughout the story of
Paloma and Gilberto, the woman’s body is infinitely recreated in the eyes
of others. From the novel that Gilberto has just published, a work inspired
by Paloma’s sexual experiences, a series of illustrations are created by a
friend of the couple, images strikingly similar to those depicted in Klos-
sowski’s works. This friend is a man who has incidentally also had erotic en-
counters with Paloma, and who makes the claim that only through the
physical possession of Paloma’s body can he capture the essence of his sub-
ject in pictorial form. (We are already aware that she is less essence than al-
legory.) From the illustrated novel, the next step is a movie version of her
story, a concept planned and plotted by Gilberto but discovered by Paloma
only when as she reads his diary after his death. Unbeknownst to her, he
has taken on the role of storyteller in her place. There she finds the script-
in-progress, one written without her knowledge or direct input, but rather
culled from his perceptions and impressions of her. As an homage to the
memory of Gilberto, Paloma toys with the idea of playing herself in such a
screen version of their lives; as such, she would come close to becoming a
simulacrum of herself through the visions of another. It is not far-fetched
to think of a script for modernity in similar terms. Whose version of the
modern plays out on the stages of any community is a question of the
State’s understanding of the project, or need for it. There are no absolute
tales here but implicit questions of autochthony and authenticity.
In the end, Paloma’s body is reproduced in a variety of media, from
narrative to illustration to screenplay, each of which reflects an intimate vi-
sion of her but also one of its creator. But the use of the concept of simu-
lacra in this text confronts what Klossowski proposes as ritual with what
Baudrillard presents in his discussion of the same. In Klossowski’s philoso-
phy simulacra refer to a repetition of shadowy figures behind which there
is always an ontological representation: “the simulacrum in its imitative
sense is the actualization of something in itself incommunicable and un-
representable: properly speaking, it is the phantasm in its obsessional con-
straint” (Klossowski qtd. in Weiss, Perverse Desire 122). However, for
Baudrillard simulacra imply surface alone. One is an empty sign, the other
is filled (albeit with secrecy and mystery). Baudrillard writes: “the eupho-
ria of simulation [is] free from the anguish of the referential” (qtd. in Weiss,
Perverse Desire 124). Any future repetitions of Paloma’s photographs and
films may be perceived as a phantasmagoric ceremony of attempting to
represent the unrepresentable, of a desperate search to connect the phan-
tasmagoric with some referent (for instance, patriarchy’s control over the
feminine, now convoluted and contaminated with Paloma’s own desires).
The “anguish of the referential” is what García Ponce has supposedly ex-
iled from the reign of the aesthetic even as it haunts its surfaces and depths.
As a text anchored solidly in both verbal and visual schemas of repre-
sentation, De ánima confronts the reader with that give-and-take of power
and powerlessness adjudicated to the female form by many of the members
of the Surrealist movement, and by the photographer Man Ray in particu-
lar. Both container of emancipatory myths and agent of their dispersal,
women’s bodies are sites of ruinous encounters that reproduce aporias for
those who hold them in their gaze. In what the Surrealists see as the mar-
velous realm of the infinite reproducibility of the female form, the Surreal-
ist aesthetic strives for the glorious depiction of an image of the ego and
libido released from the hold of the subconscious. In the case of García
Ponce, however, the duplication and reduplication of Paloma’s body rep-
resents two facets of the same concept. First, the allegorical dispersal of im-
ages in García Ponce’s text serves and fulfills Paloma’s own narcissistic
desire to be seen: “si Gilberto quiere exhibirme, lo ha logrado; pero si lo ha
logrado es porque hay algo que me hace olvidar el hecho de que me estoy
exhibiendo” [if Gilberto wants to put me on display, he has indeed achieved
that; but if he has achieved that it is because there is something that makes
me forget the fact that I am displaying myself] (222). Paloma assumes an
innocence that is pure simulacra. She has been made to confront her own
image in its appropriation by others, much as Zea finds Latin America has
had to do in the eyes of Europe and, subsequently, the United States. As
the “daughter” of Europe, as the almost-Surreal image of a dreamed
promised land of utopian proportions, Latin American culture is exhibited
and visualized by all but herself until she takes stock of this. Can she—
America or Paloma—come to find herself amid what everyone else sees in
her? These are the questions posed through the allegorical exhibition of
her material form. (This is not the first time that the continent has been
imagined as woman, of course.) Can Mexico become modern without
being reduced to a simulacrum of something else (whether “shadowy on-
tology” or merely surface)? Perhaps modernity can only appear as ruin.
Secondly, this scenario is not just the locus for the representation of
“women possessed by the demons [of the flesh], but also (and perhaps
above all) of men possessed by the phantoms and images of the women
they love, desire, or imagine. The Surrealist image [and, in this case,
Paloma’s] is not simply that of the body deformed by desire; it is also the
sign of desire informed by the body” (Weiss, Aesthetics 94). In this more op-
timistic vein, imagination (desire) is therefore fueled by what it has before
it, but it also projects images back on real (material) bodies of experience
and on what has come before. Imagined and imaginary fulfillment, on the
part of Mexican society as well as Gilberto, play out across the topogra-
phies on display. Animated by their observers, and those who believe they
are in control of placing them in public view, Paloma (and, through her
form, Latin American cultures) magnifies the cracks in the strata of cultural
inheritance and national identity. Of the greatest myths underlying the
State’s vision of culture, as we have seen, is that of linearity and continuity.
When Zea writes of Latin America acknowledging her autochthonous cul-
tures, he uses a concept that we might apply to Paloma as well. Becoming
conscious of one’s own objectification, one can demand (or at least imply)
some sort of reciprocal contribution even as one is still under scrutiny. Zea
refers to being a “collaborator” (363) as Paloma comes of age (that is to say,
realizes from her encounters with Gilberto that she has been part of some-
thing that he has orchestrated). It seems impossible to require of Paloma
some linear narrative voice under these circumstances; it would also be a
paradox when the only way to tell her story is through a montage of frag-
mentary experiences.
What García Ponce constructs, then, is a house of mirrors in which
Paloma’s desire, wrapped in the erotic edifice of her flesh, is provoked and
reproduced incessantly from differing angles and perspectives. It is possi-
ble that the mechanical reproduction of desire—in the written text, in the
photographs of her, on movie posters—hinges on the idea that the act of
creation is a spectacle that is public in nature, or at least in the best of all

possible worlds should be so, and that, as he writes in the introductory
notes to Klossowski’s The Baphomet, “language [whether written, photo-
graphic, or cinematic] allows the creation of a series of images that can be
achieved by listening to that language . . . Anything can happen if language
is capable of making it visible and, indeed, anything will happen until a
new gnosis is created, a new form of knowledge that is in fact spectacle and
as such offers itself to us” (García Ponce, Introduction xvii). Language and
text, Paloma and her body: both are sources of potential knowledge.
Paloma as such a spectacle, and therefore possibly new gnosis, is cele-
brated insistently in the novel through specularity. Her image is multiplied
on a variety of different surfaces, for the consumption of those whose gaze
is trained on them and for her own recognition. She is also problematized
as a mysterious conduit through which we might get access to privileged
“knowledge” that may not even be formulated into words. Beyond lan-
guage, the power of erotics brings lost human traces back to the surface.
The gnosis pursued by García Ponce’s characters, by Gilberto in par-
ticular, leads them to metaphysical inquiries about the nature of the work
of art and its relation to everyday life situations, with special emphasis on the
written artifact subsequently produced. But this metaphysical search dis-
tances itself from traditional speculations proposed by the idealist thinkers
of Western philosophy.3 Instead, it converges with Bataille’s philosophy of
the erotic universe of the écriture corporelle at the critical point where the ob-
sessions that affect the human mind become forces to be embraced as life-
affirming. Rather than repress them into hidden and mysterious sources of
the creative process or scars on the psyche, García Ponce writes them visi-
bly on the surfaces of Paloma, Inmaculada, and other characters. When dis-
cussing Bataille’s concept of the “Pineal Eye” as a hidden organ through
which to perceive traces of an “erotic universe,” Stoekl observes that “the
answer here is that at the end of reason, at the end of the Cartesian pineal
gland (the supposed seat of consciousness) there is only orgasm and a simul-
taneous fall, a simultaneous death. Death and perversion do not take place
in splendid isolation; instead, they are at the endpoint of the human” (xii).
Modernity would keep these categories of rationality and excess discrete, yet
they intersect in De ánima and Inmaculada in an attempt to reanimate a so-
cial vision of limits rather than ecstasies. If modernity demands separation
(Habermas), then the rise and fall of “orgasm and death” as allegories of
anti-modernity pervade García Ponce’s texts.
In De ánima one can witness the transcription into language of what
are often termed perverse actions such as sodomy, homosexuality, sado-
masochistic rituals, and exhibitionism. But it is not just any language.
Rather, it is a type of signs endowed with a powerful force that Bataille de-
fines as the power of transgression, even if, as the transgressive visual lan-
guage of the Surrealists, it ends up being contained within aesthetics. The
dispersal of erotics into the greater cultural discourse implies both integra-
tion (into the structures of power) and a confrontational display of differ-
ence which might continue to play out against and in the face of the
permitted or the sacrosanct. Neither wins out in the texts of García Ponce
but instead coexist on the cultural ruins of discourses of modern sexuality.
Within the transgressive act, the process of writing “is a consecration un-
done: a transubstantiation ritualized in reverse where real presence
[Paloma’s physical body] becomes again a recumbent body [Paloma’s frozen
image] and finds itself led back to silence in an act of vomiting” (Foucault
xxxvi). Transgression, it must be remembered, is composed of both a chal-
lenging of limits and the shadow of the presence of those limits; it is an act
of freezing the image or representation in a ritual that is a constant re-
minder (or echo) of the real material body which, as Calefato reiterates, is
always a movable edifice. A recovery of the materiality of the human body
defies its reduction to social norms, economics, or as an object (victim) of
repression and elimination by the State.
The characteristics which signal and identify Paloma’s behavior ever
since her early youth, when an effusion of sexual acts leads her to become
the lover of her uncle, not only “engage” her with social norms but “disen-
gage” her from being a passive object. Zea’s language of engagement and
disengagement may contribute to our understanding of her relationship
both to her surroundings and to herself. As he writes, “We can no more
deny that [European] culture than we can deny our parents. And just as we
have a personality that makes us distinct from our parents without having to
deny them, we should also be able to have a cultural personality without
having to deny the culture of which we are children” (363). As part of an
imagined community, of a social family, Paloma is on display for so many
eyes and subject to so many discourses, yet she reveals more about them and
about herself in the process of watching them watch her than one might find
in a more directly analytical text. Discourses of the erotic carry within them,
like America bears the seeds of Europe, an articulation of pleasurable ex-
penditure and taboo. A moment first judged negatively by Paloma, her in-
cestuous encounter with her uncle turns into something more when
reencountered in the text of the diary. First a material act, then a written
story, the incest winds up as tale retold out loud to Gilberto and somehow
redeemed once it has become linguistic representation. Rereading the event
and its participants, she emphasizes her complicity in this erotic pact with
her unnamed uncle (94) and comes to a more positive, if not downright
ecstatic, conclusion. This is not mere performance, however. Even before

her initial recounting of this story to Gilberto, she concludes that it repre-
sents an act that she strongly desires to retell him, just as she speculated ear-
lier that, likewise, “no hubiera sido difícil confesarle [al tío mismo] lo que
pasó cuando, en su casa ya, le conté [a Gilberto] que mi tío había sido mi
primer amante” [it would not have been difficult to confess to him {the
uncle} what happened when, in Gilberto’s house now, I told him {Gilberto}
that my uncle had been my first lover] (95). The language of confession is,
then, the language of desire; it reflects a personal need to recall an act of pas-
sion through the imagination, and a need to permit Gilberto to imagine his
own version of events taken from hearing her story. The twice-told tale, the
first time to Gilberto and later in her imagination to her uncle, is continu-
ally retold throughout her diary. The first transgression of her incestuous
relationship breaks the rules of a generally recognized social taboo across
Western society that forbids the sexual relations among close members of
the same family or group, a phenomenon discussed by both Freud in Totem
and Taboo and Bataille in Erotism. The subsequent recreations (simulacra) of
transgression with close friends and acquaintances reinforce an emancipa-
tory act of revelation through language, both a simulacrum that reveals an
originary story and one that (with Baudrillard) recreates the surface image.
What might be read as so-called perversion in Paloma points toward
other realms of erotic experience (the exploration of what earlier was re-
ferred to as her innocence). For this character, the intimate physical contact
with her uncle appears to be devoid of any guilt or frustration, much as the
“Rules of Hospitality” forbid such vestiges of traditional morality. On the
contrary, Paloma understands this potentially problematic action not as a
sexual act aimed at human reproduction, nor as proper social behavior, but
instead within the general category of ubiquitous erotic activity that con-
firms her presence. This activity, explains Bataille, “unlike simple sexual ac-
tivity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction
and the desire for children” (Erotism 11). Throughout her life, Paloma’s
body becomes the necessary referent (and domicile) for her discovery of that
fundamental quest delineated by Bataille. The search turns inward as the
constraints of the social norm close in on the door to her corporeal edifice.
In one of the earliest entries in her diary, we observe Paloma’s awareness of
this tempting encounter.
Siento mi cuerpo igual que lo sentía cuando después repasaba una y

otra vez con mi tío cómo había empezado todo entre nosotros. No
puedo reprocharle nada porque sólo le agradezco que me hiciera de-
scubrirlo fuera de cualquier regla.
[I feel my body just as I did when I went over again and again with my
uncle how everything between us had begun. I can’t reproach him for
anything because I can only be grateful to him for making me dis-
cover it {my body} outside any rules.] (29)
It is questionable whether there is a space “outside any rules” of society, of

course, but Paloma is enticed to think so perhaps as any citizen might be
tempted to imagine a world beyond the ‘real’ one surrounding us. She
seems to be under the spell of societal norms—by thanking her uncle for
his ‘gift’ to her—even as she formulates the idea that this relationship will
somehow free her. Perhaps this is the “fascination and horror” to which
Paz refers, the enticement of experiencing what may end up provoking
moral censure. The same paradox of the Surrealists—that aesthetic exper-
imentation frees the social body—is written on Paloma and her story for
she uses the language of taboo to express her liberation. (Her liberation to
become the erotic partner of her uncle might conjure up other notions,
nevertheless.) But she turns the issue of any possible guilt into a rhetorical
question for her own subsequent consideration: “¿Culpable de tener
diecisiete años y ser tan bella, de conocer mi desnudez y saber buscar mi
propio placer?” [Guilty of being seventeen and being so beautiful, of know-
ing my own nudity and being able to seek my own pleasure?] (29). The im-
plied answers are evident—that adolescents have no guilt, that she is just
playing her role, that women are disposed and predisposed to find them-
selves through the guidance of an older man.
The story is not new for we find it in Klossowski, in Tanizaki, and in
so many other places across modern cultures. But its reiteration by García
Ponce’s characters is evidence of its relegation to ruin by the time we reach
the 1980s. The sexual relations with her uncle do not fade into memory or
even the bliss of forgetfulness but instead reappear in Paloma’s life in two
forms. The first is as a primal memory that reignites the feelings of plea-
sure once again each time she reads her own diary (the language rekindles
the experience in the flesh even as the wick of the storyteller burns down
with the passing years of her life). Then, there are the infrequent but per-
sistent encounters with her uncle, episodes that survive intact despite her
marriage (and later divorce) and a long series of occasional lovers, includ-
ing Gilberto in the present. If Paloma is the vehicle for men to reach out
for redemption, they are no less for her. The double helix of this structure
creates a constant reengagement with the contradictions that keep the
taboo alive in the collective cultural memory. Perhaps in one of the in-
stances or another the uncanny tale will finally burst into pieces and fly off
into so many directions that there will never be enough to rearticulate
again. In the meantime, Paloma will turn into Inmaculada in the third
panel of the triptych in yet another twist on the allegories of (cultural)
repression, desire, emulation, and the anguish of time lost.
For Paloma, a return to her native place, to her parents’ home in the
Mexican provinces, is a willful return to an original place and time in which
some spark might incite a revelation. It is a full circle back to the source or
sacred place where sexual energy purportedly runs freely, unrestricted by
social taboos, and where she consequently renews her incestuous relation-
ship with her uncle. Following the Sadeian philosophy in which incest and
prostitution form the two fundamental pillars of transgression, García
Ponce presents her acts of incest as a pure form of human activity, one still
uncontaminated by cultural taboos and therefore of the greatest innocence.
But the reader is aware that innocence carries within it the opposite:
knowledge (not perversion nor taboo but consciousness), and that “immac-
ulate” purity is already a social construction.
La tentación al incesto es considerada así como una inclinación nat-

ural originalmente, producto de la sexualidad pura, indiferenciada,
que no reconoce limitaciones hasta que éstas le son impuestas al hom-
bre por una fuerza exterior y con la ayuda de la violencia, para que
empiece a gozar, gracias a ellas, de los beneficios de la civilización y el
progreso, y de la maldición de la moral.
[The temptation of incest is considered something like a natural in-
clination originally, a product of pure, undifferentiated sexuality, one
which recognizes no limits until they are imposed on man(kind) by an
exterior force and with the help of violence, so that he may begin to
enjoy, thanks to these limits, the benefits of civilization and progress,
and the curse of morality.] (García Ponce, 151)
Freud’s notion of unrestricted sexuality is evident in the first part of this state-
ment, but there is more of a connection back to our discussion of modernity
explicit in the last part. “Differentiation” of what is permitted and what is not
comes into being with the moral categories of the modern. The “exterior
force” of violence noted in the last lines sounds much like the echoes of the
State in the background of Crónica as the immigrants to the capital make
their way through the labyrinth of the city’s streets. Coming from the
provinces, one must move into the spaces of both domestic and cultural
structures if one wishes to belong to what the myth of the city promises. The
“progress” and “civilized” society of Mexico City demand morality. The door
to the city is, like Pandora’s box, a portal to good and evil which are, one is
told, easily distinguished. Paloma is placed in the position of seeing this evi-
dence but finding that it recalls, in a Benjaminian sense, something long sup-
pressed in her and in a society that is emerging. We might find, of course,
that the need for the uncle to bring it out is perplexing and troublesome
rather than natural. If the family epic is being replaced by the story of the na-
tion, then those vestiges (or ruins) of the past must be embodied in lost and
unrecoverable family relations as a transgression of modernity.
Paloma’s family home becomes a reservoir for her anxieties and
mixed feelings about pleasure and about herself. But in the end, each time
she sets foot in the family’s hacienda she reenacts the so-called ancient rit-
ual, one apparently forgotten (or repressed) but nevertheless still present
deep inside her psyche. Her journey back is a return to bodily pleasure and
that alone, the joy of the physical body. Her inner feelings and experiences
remain separated, far away from the physical act being consummated. She
writes in her diary that
lo que es seguro mientras hacíamos el amor y en todo momento yo fui

yo misma. Era yo la que gozaba . . . Después, en la cama, a mi lado, mi
tío volvió a ser el intruso que había sido cuando lo vi entrar al cuarto.
“¿Qué ganaste?” le pregunté. “Te he tenido como antes. Lo sabes tan
bien como yo. No necesitamos ni siquiera hablar de eso. Lo hemos
sentido los dos,” contestó. “No niego que lo he sentido; pero no me has
tenido en ningún momento” le dije.
[what is certain is that while we were making love and at every mo-
ment I was myself. It was I who enjoyed the pleasure . . . Later, in bed, at
my side, my uncle once again became the intruder he had been when
I saw him enter the room. “What did you get out of this?” I asked
him. “I have possessed you like before. You know as well as I do. We don’t
even have to talk about that. Both of us felt it,” he answered. “I don’t
deny that I felt it; but you never possessed me, not even for a moment,”
I told him.] (92; emphasis added)
The lack of the need to put things into words—“We don’t even have to talk
about that”—or perhaps the fear of doing so since that would transcend the
singular time of the event, signals a crucial element in the retelling of this
story. Whose words are they? The uncle tells her what she does not need to
say, but he cannot feel or tell what she finds in this experience. As a strange
(uncanny?) possession alongside her own body, this language belongs to her
alone. She constantly stresses the fact that “yo fui yo misma,” [I was always
myself] and not the object of the other (the uncle) in her recounting of those
moments. From adolescence through the last entries in her diary when she
has become a movie star, a woman representing herself in a variety of
versions on stage and screen, Paloma’s behavior regarding her frustrated

marriage and subsequent lovers shows an unmistakable tendency toward
what Bataille calls a festive praise of baseness, eroticism, and perversion.4 Al-
though it might appear contradictory, this is a celebration of innocence.
Paloma reaffirms this quest for knowledge in one of her entries in the diary:
Sola conmigo misma, prefiero repasar una y otra vez mis sensa-
ciones, siempre las mismas y siempre diferentes. Saber que puedo sen-
tir que estoy enamorada como suponía que lo estaba de mi tío, porque
alguien—cualquiera—me lleva al reconocimiento de este cuerpo
que ahora solamente espera. Las mujeres no somos más que nuestro
cuerpo. En él empezamos y en él terminamos, él provoca y guarda
nuestros sentimientos.
[Alone with myself, I prefer to examine my sensations over and over,

always the same and always different. To know that I can feel that I am
in love, as I supposed I was with my uncle, because someone—anyone—
helps me reach an understanding {acknowledgment} of this body that
now only waits. We women are nothing more than our body. In it {the
body} we begin and end, it stimulates and stores our sentiments.]
(30–31; emphasis added)
The recollection of sentiment supercedes the actions themselves, accord-

ing language greater potential power over the representation of an event
that is “always the same and always different.” Appearing among the pages
of a diary that then forms part of a novel, this recognition empowers both
writers. The same thing holds true for the empowerment of the woman,
for even if it sounds like she is reduced to “nothing more than” physicality,
we already are aware that this physical site is not, as some might have it, just
a “house of the soul” (Krell 4) but a shifting architecture of mastery and
loss. Studied more closely, this crossing over of boundaries shows signs of
the Dionysiac frenzy expounded by Nietzsche in The Will to Power. His de-
scription of the intensity of this eroticism coincides with Paloma’s reaffir-
mation of her acts as intensely frenzied moments.
The states in which we infuse a transfiguration and fullness into

things and poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness and
joy in life: sexuality; intoxication; feasting; spring; victory over an
enemy; mockery; bravado; cruelty; the ecstasy of religious feeling.
Three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication, cruelty—all belonging
to the oldest festal joys of mankind, all also preponderate in the early
‘artist.’ (Nietzsche 421)
Nietzsche pulls into the mix the very two same ingredients we have estab-
lished as the significant layers of engagement for character and for writer:
language and representation (“poetizing” about events), and the admixture
of sexuality, violence, and joy in the psyche. Paloma’s joyous free spirit amid
the ruins of Mexico’s bourgeoisie, with an unrestricted expenditure of li-
bidinal energy, appears repeatedly in the entries in her diary. Her sexual en-
counters with various lovers are almost like a frenetic struggle between two
planets as their orbits intersect. In these encounters, a release of energy is
created by two bodies, provoking an eclipse that, in the words of Bataille, is
the point of impact or “blind moment [a black spot in the erotic universe]
when eroticism attains its ultimate intensity” (Erotism 40). Such a con-
frontation occurs, for instance, when the bodies of Paloma and film direc-
tor Mario Guerra rejoice in the “absoluta alegría” [absolute pleasure] (189)
of their act of self-definition and absolution. They become figures of in-
nocence imbued with knowledge through erotic intensity (thereby creating
an intersection of gnosis and eros). Just maybe the real innocent, however,
is the narrator who imagines such a delirious and ecstatic moment free
from all bonds and ties.
In the dyad established between Paloma and each of her lovers-
in-turn—the uncle, the husband Armando, Gilberto, for instance—the triad
of elements which composes the “festal joy” proposed by Nietzsche resur-
faces incessantly. This creates a convoluted territory in open defiance of a
society conditioned by the arresting and harnessing of both libidinal expen-
diture and economic consumption for the benefit of society. Both produc-
tion and reproduction serve the ends of the State. In the words of Roland
Barthes, expenditure is a force or strength which cohabits with economics in
the nucleus of modern society and which presents two simultaneous ten-
dencies. Barthes clarifies the duality as follows: “On the one hand, a bour-
geois economy of repletion; on the other, [the transgressive force of passion
in] a perverse economy of dispersion, of waste, of frenzy” (Barthes 84–86).
If all energy is not placed at the service of the project of modernity, then
these characters perform a spectacular display of the ruins on which the
modern is built (the sacrifices of personal joy, and of “festive” display.)
Like Klossowski’s and Bataille’s heroines Roberte and Madame Ed-
warda,5 Paloma is engaged in an exaltation of the libido along the lines of
their intoxicated and obsessive quest to combat the stultifying world of rea-
son and bourgeois social order. The satiation and abundance of bourgeois
society is counteracted by the obsession with what Bataille calls “the notion
of expenditure” (116). About halfway through the text, Paloma states “Si
hay alguna institución especialmente ridícula, esa es el matrimonio. Hay
que ser siempre amantes y vivir en la irregularidad” [If there is one espe-
cially ridicuous institution it is that of marriage. You must always be lovers
and live outside the norm] (139). Her so-called perverse gestures and ac-
tions already described obey a situational logic. These are the physical signs
of a struggle, a refusal to be appropriated by the universal domain of the
bourgeois world and its morality, that instead substitutes in its place the de-
cision to assert the self: “Cuando pienso en cualquiera de los amantes que
tuve al llegar de San Luis, no estoy pensando en verdad en ellos sino en lo
que fueron para mí y no los busco a ellos, sino a mí misma” [When I think
about any one of the lovers that I had after I arrived from San Luis, I am
not really thinking about them but about what they were for me, and I am
not looking for them but for myself] (72). The figures of these lovers do
not exist in and of themselves, but only in her perception of them as vehi-
cles for her own self-realization. Only under these circumstances can one
attempt to understand and contextualize Paloma’s behavior, since it other-
wise might be read as degenerating into facile prostitution if viewed ac-
cording to traditional rules of bourgeois conduct. Paloma thus represents,
for the storyteller, a contradiction at the heart of the tale he wishes to tell.
She is not quite the embodiment of what he wishes to retain despite so
many social changes, but he has found no alternative.
Seen from this perspective, Gilberto’s monomania regarding Paloma’s
body can be taken as an allegory. For him, the textual geography of her de-
sires can be comprehended only through the act of Bataillean expenditure.6
But this dispersion, when “continuously affirmed, without limit, . . . [gives
rise to] . . . that brilliant and rare thing which is called exuberance and which
is equal to Beauty . . . , the exuberance of the child whose narcissistic scope
and multiple pleasure nothing (as yet) constrains” (Barthes, A Lover’s Dis-
course 85). This opens up social restraints and limits, thereby allowing some
internal force to run free in opposition to the constraints of modern culture.
The “exuberant beauty” of Paloma assumes a new form in Gilberto’s writ-
ing. Exuberance—the amorous exuberance of Barthes; the festal and intox-
icating joy of Nietzsche; the uninhibited expenditure of Bataille—in
De ánima is the affirmation of life within death, the positive act stemming
from a melancholia of vision that resuscitates a fear of extinction, blindness,
and cosmic absence. It is a material reaffirmation of the individual subject.
As Zea sees it, this does not resolve issues posed by the contradictions of cul-
ture but rather recalls the inescapable problems of expressing them. Like
Paloma’s material human body, and Bataille’s and Nietzsche’s celebration of
such, experience and its articulation do not have to be at odds. When Zea
considers the task of the philosopher in Latin America, he concludes that
“[he] does not have to give up being a philosopher to face the many prob-
lems of a reality different from theory” (370). What modernity might wish
to inscribe on Paloma, or Europe desires to erect in the Americas, are part
of the monuments that a writer must evoke around the edifices of real, lived
bodies. Certainly, Paloma is only a character. But she herself represents a
ruined form of such an encounter. She is neither “pathological” (Bataille,
Visions 116) nor relegated to social “violence” as a result of erotic pleasure;
her survival more or less intact goes against the expected consequences of
her actions.
When everything in the diaries has been written, when all imaginable
physical and erotic experiences have been performed, there survives the idea
that the act of writing itself provides an amorous feeling and that writing is
an act of construction and destruction. At the end of the novel, the reader
discovers that all of the erotic games, all the simulacra and performances, all
the acts of voyeurism, are powerful efforts to defeat death and disembodi-
ment, while at the same time reaffirming life through ecstatic pain and aes-
thetic creation. Like Octave in Klossowski’s tale, Gilberto is dying. In his
attempt to stave off that menacing specter and continue on, Gilberto finds
that he actually assumes the persona of pain for at least through it the body
feels something other than paralysis or anesthesia. The two become fused
into one living, suffering body: “Son [los dolores] una constante compañía
que llega a pertenecerme. Cuando descubro su alejamiento, de pronto, en
cualquier momento, siento como si me hubiera abandonado una parte de mi
propia persona. . . . La enfermedad. No tiene lugar en la memoria. Es una
pura sensación. Llega hasta nosotros y de inmediato se convierte en parte de
nosotros” [They {the pains} are constant companions that end up belonging
to me. When I discover they have gone away, suddenly, at any given time, I
feel as if a part of my own being had abandoned me. . . . Illness. It has no
place in memory. It is pure sensation. It comes to us and suddenly becomes
part of us] (224). Pain and passion inhabit the same physical space of the
human body; they are not rationalized away as modern science might have
it, nor are they intellectualized through language, but are experienced and
narrated as facets of material life in modern times.
At the end of García Ponce’s novel, Paloma as the excessive spirit of
experience is the one who performs an act of closure on Gilberto’s diary.
The three texts, the two diaries, and the entire novel end with her last entry
after his death. She concludes the narrative by stating that “ahora yo es-
cribo en tu cuaderno la que también será la última anotación del mío” [now
I write in your notebook the last entry, which is also the last entry of my
own diary] (232). With this act, with these words of finality and closure, the
final copula beyond death has been achieved in the written body of the text.
Yet reading and rereading live on, potentially ecstatic experiences provoked
by the ruins (death) of the diarists themselves.
Through his textual confrontation of cultural remnants, whether
from the erotic narratives of Tanizaki or the transgressions of so-called civ-
ilized sexuality by the incestuous relationships taken from Klossowski, Gar-
cía Ponce has created in De ánima a clear example of what Fuentes has
described as an attempt to “fill in” the cultural voids of his own tradition
(MacAdam 14), given up as sacrifices to the discourse of the modern na-
tion. Or, better still, we might take them as floors of that building-in-
progress on the promissory horizon of modernity. The hidden or dark eros
of Paloma’s psyche fills in what the light areas of the cultural chiaroscuro
omit or repress; they also recall an unfamiliar Europe slighted by national-
ist tradition. García Ponce’s characters and their tales are not copies of
originals, either lost or on display in cultural museums, but innovative and
evocative works in their own right, not to be measured against the aesthet-
ics of Asian or European cultures, but instead as monuments to the sacrifi-
cial acts required by modern times. To reduce his novels to pornography, as
some critics have done, is to relegate them to a realm of unidimensional
reading. Beyond marginality or titillation, appropriate for the most popu-
lar of cultural artifacts, they would have no “afterlife.” In fact, they would
fulfill the most perfunctory of roles in an economy of consumption which
his characters constantly and consistently reject.
CHAPTER SIX
Modernity, Contingency, Compensation
I
n Consequences of Enlightenment Anthony Cascardi reexamines the rela-
tionship of the work of art to the society that produces it under the
aegis of contemporary theory’s indebtedness to notions inherited from
the Enlightenment. In particular, he addresses the difficulties and chal-
lenges of modernity understood “in the manner of Baudelaire, as having a
fundamentally aesthetic and non-transcendent basis. Modernity names the
epoch of the ‘transitory’ and the ‘fugitive’ (Baudelaire), of ‘revolutions,
contestations, assassinations, explosions, and impatiences’ (Barthes). It is
the space of the politics of antagonism, of the unsuturable whole, of a fun-
damental contingency” (220). He goes on to clarify that, in this sense, “the
‘modern’ does not stand opposed to ‘ancient’” (220), but instead signals a
rupture in the perception of the temporal, what we have seen in Habermas
as an “exaltation of the present” and a consciousness of nothing beyond or
behind the surface (including any measure of the historical). One is
tempted to conjure up Benjamin’s Angel of History as our witness to the
pile of rubble gathering at that point where the debris of the transitory and
the fugitive accumulates: the “unsuturable” present. This image of “unsu-
turability” and rupture has pervaded our discussion so far, be it in the aes-
thetics of the textual body (Benjamin’s convolutions and fragments) or in
the echoes of voices and stories intermingling among sirens, noises, and
other disembodied sounds of alarm. In addition, when we find no “opposi-
tional” configuration between ancient and modern, we articulate yet an-
other juxtaposition of remnants, neither break nor new beginning but an
overwhelming consciousness of time (as Habermas has stated). The
lengthy nature of his works of fiction attests to García Ponce’s measure of
time as ‘accumulation,’ not a coherent narrative reflective of, say, a national
story on the order of the traditional nineteenth-century novel.
By focusing on his later essays in Camera Lucida, Cascardi places Roland
Barthes in line with Baudelaire through a consideration of the photographic
䊏 143 䊏
image as an emblematic site of the modern. For Barthes the photo is both ob-
ject and loss, a piece of paper that ages and fades as does the scene it repro-
duces; neither original nor copy remain but as remnants if at all. Not a
transcendent “communion with the dead” (Cascardi 220), Barthes finds in
photography the ruin as Benjamin encounters it in the mineral images of
Marseilles and the stones of the city streets and alleys of the French capital.
The seemingly fixed image, for Barthes, becomes enigmatic for it encom-
passes both moving and static notions of time.
It flourishes a moment, then ages. . . . Attacked by light, by humidity,

it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it
away. Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for
life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should
be itself immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mor-
tal) photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of
‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument. A
paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But
History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure
intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the photo-
graph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today,
prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive
duration, affectively or symbolically. (Camera 93–94)
Barthes’s investment of the photograph with the loss of permanence, the

absence of the past, the image to be discarded as it fades and decays, imbues
it with all of the attributes of the ruin. If what has been officially pro-
claimed as “History” or the official story (of a person, of a nation, of a com-
munity) becomes in modernity “revolutions, contestations, assassinations,
explosions” (Barthes, Camera 94), then can the Monument exist? How
might a State, proclaiming itself modern at all costs, erect Monuments to
its own contingency?
The gap between the perception of continuity (of History, of the na-
tion) and sheer singularity or particularity evokes the space in which Gar-
cía Ponce and his generation found themselves after 1968 and into the
difficult political climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Theirs is the point of in-
tersection of two losses: the original object and the one that has kept it alive
(even though now materially ceased and deceased) for a fleeting moment.
When both the portrayed and the portrayal—the event or scene or person-
age, and the photo itself (that is the “fugitive testimony,” the aesthetic rep-
resentation)—fade away, modernity has drawn its finest dilemma.
Contemplation of the ruins of this double ‘disaster’ can only lead to nostal-
gia (aesthetically pointless, as Benjamin has shown) or mourning. This
MODERNITY, CONTINGENCY, COMPENSATION 䊏 145
sense of mourning is doubly dark: it elicits a melancholic vision of the indi-

vidual’s loss of the past and of a preservation of the images of that past
through any means. So both story and teller converge in a space of absence.
Immutability and eternity are things now lost as well, disappeared along
with some sort of permanent rules that art need follow. In modern times,
art is instead “performance and practice” (Cascardi 247), not codification
into theory. One could hardly create a Monument from “performance,”
given its emphasis on the moment, but one might truly mourn it by ritually
reproducing an allegorical encounter with absence. That absence, that
black hole as it were, is the storyteller’s monument to the ruin. In philo-
sophical terms, Cascardi finds that Nietzsche and Kant “are equally drawn
to a romantic hope in the power of human passion to fill the world with a
purposiveness it has lost and to the modernist awareness that the world is
ultimately no more determinate than our passionate investments in it”
(265). Modernity turns our focus from an innate meaning of things to total
contingency based on human intervention.
This innocent hope, joined with the irony of a desperate desire for
awareness, is where we encounter García Ponce’s engagement with moder-
nity and its darkest effects. He sets up this confrontation in the very title of
the novel Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia [Inmaculada or the Plea-
sures of Innocence] wherein absoluteness (immaculateness, innocence)
meets pleasures (affect, the body) on the grounds of the cultural and aes-
thetic ruin. In his characters’ “salvific relation with an object irrevocably
lost” (Avelar 3), the writer posits two immediate scenarios of mourning: the
return of a woman to a relationship long broken asunder to find few if any
traces of herself in it (except in the reiterative and ceremonial sense of a re-
covery of the dead), and the return to a place that can no longer be re-
claimed. Inmaculada has lost both a material place (her ancestral home) to
fugitive time and a notion of herself as part of a “whole” schema into which
she might “suture” her life and experiences. Each has gone the way of the
Barthesian photographic image. The compensation or substitution for such
a loss is, for Inmaculada, something that (like the fragmented sense of His-
tory) is neverending and never settled. The debt with her lost past is, as
Idelber Avelar writes, “never simply completed. It is in this sense, then, that
one speaks of the interminability of mourning work: mourning necessarily
poses itself an unrealizable task. Unlike the replacement of old by new
commodities, the substitution proper to the work of mourning always in-
cludes the persistence of an unmourned, unresolved, remainder” (5). The
temporal measure of mourning is, thus, immeasurable and stagnant, but
monumental is its overwhelming observance of rites that conjure up what
cannot really appear or be resolved. The “remainder” of the provincial
bourgeoisie is evident in the traces left in Inmaculada’s name and in her im-
possible task of returning to the lost past. The same holds true for the act
of telling her story and finding a resolution.
In his groundbreaking study of postdictatorial Latin American cul-
tures, Avelar calls upon Benjamin’s concepts of allegory and mourning to
elucidate the relationship between before (State dictatorships) and after
(market dictatorships), but also between the just-before and the ruins that
come after the fall. He recounts that, for Benjamin, “[i]n much Baroque
drama the final condensation of meaning around a corpse imposes upon
the audience a pressing consciousness of its own transitoriness and mortal-
ity” (Avelar 3). The “corpse” might be an allegorical figure for society, for
its cultural products in decay, or for the human body without history. Ave-
lar continues his argument with the assertion that “[t]he mournful subject
who confronts the loss of a loved being displays a special sensibility toward
objects, articles of clothing, former possessions, anything that might trig-
ger the memory of the one who died” (3–4). Yet, as Cascardi finds in
Baudelaire and Barthes, when those same objects afford no end to mourn-
ing, such a rescue cannot occur. Affect is left without object; melancholy
condenses into the eyes of one who has lost even the object of his gaze in
the yellowed, crumbling photographic paper. The corpse is our allegory of
the ruin we have been exploring; it is the leftovers of life or the afterlife of
the human body. And, as Habermas proposes and Avelar emphasizes, alle-
gory is imbued with an extremely acute sense of time: time that fades, is
discarded, comes back to haunt. Avelar writes that “the allegorical tempo-
rality of mourning clings to the past in order to save it, even as it attempts
ultimately to produce an active forgetting of it” (4). Caught between the
salvation of the past (left only in the problematic remnants of darkened and
shadowy memory) and a contradictory desire for modernity, narrators reit-
erate, obsess, return in circularity, but do not resolve. So García Ponce’s
narratives wind around stories and ghostly images, but they are circular,
spiraling around but never reaching an ending or an answer (either by ab-
solute recovery or by permanent loss). Thus it is that the triptych’s panels
can be repositioned time and again, but their images never quite satisfy the
redemptive searcher.
García Ponce revisits the times of his grandparents in an essay enti-
tled “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” [Other Voices, other Environments] and
enumerates all of the lacks characterizing them. ‘Time,’ as he obliquely
refers to it, appears as if it were suspended, neither retrievable nor ab-
solutely disappeared. It rushes toward him, the paralyzed observer of a
scene, only to rush away into nothingness.1 While he cites sunrise and sun-
set as the natural beginnings and endings of days, he cannot measure time
in other ways except in terms of a cycle of life and death. There are befores
and afters but, like Barthes’s photographs, all fades away to haunt the ‘now’
time and again. The corpse of the past never dies; it lingers on for the
melancholic, enticing but elusive.
Cuando nació la abuela no había luz eléctrica; cuando nació mi padre

no había automóviles; cuando nací yo no había bomba atómica ni
televisión; cuando nació mi hija el hombre no había salido al espacio;
cuando nació mi nieta ya había ocurrido la catástrofe de Chernobyl.
Uno no puede dejar de interrogarse: ¿se puede o se debe estar contra
el progreso? Yo estoy contra el progreso emotivamente; sin embargo
nuestra impaciencia cuando se va la luz, cosa que ocurre con mucha
frecuencia en el Coyoacán donde vivo, es angustiosa.
[When my grandmother was born, there were no electric lights;
when my father was born there were no automobiles; when I was
born there was no atomic bomb or television; when my daughter was
born humans had not gone into space; when my granddaughter was
born, the castastrophe of Chernobyl had occurred. One cannot help
but ask: can or should one be against progress? I am against progress
on an emotional level; but our impatience when the lights go out,
something that happens frequently in the part of Coyoacán where I
live, is distressing.] (25)
Modernity’s myth of progress is reduced to the “explosions and impa-

tiences” of Barthes’s assessment. Do electric lights, cars, television, or outer
space have meaning or are they just a string of events and accomplishments
that hold no connection among themselves? Are they Monuments to some
project or just “explosions” of science, technology, or futile human en-
deavor? And even more pertinent to our discussion, how does García
Ponce’s “emotional” reaction to these occurrences translate into the work
of art? Public monuments are erected with every sexenio, as we have seen.
But those “explosions and impatiences,” those “revolutions and assassina-
tions” that do not get memorialized fade as do the photographs. Chernobyl
is a time-marking event, but so are 1968, rises and falls in political fortunes,
the fading away of familial lineages, or the waning of a human body wasted
by disease. How can one mark such catastrophes except “emotivamente”?
Perhaps this term conveys some sense of such a melancholic vision in its
reference to “distress” and disorientation. Perhaps the sporadic eruptions
of progress produce the aporias of their demise (in the case of Chernobyl,
for instance). One answer seems to lie in Benjamin’s “memory-as-theater”
cited by Avelar and not “memory-as-instrument” (10). Trapped in the art-
work amid a loss (if also potential recollection) and a spectacle, allegory
comes alive to perform the mourning rites. And, once again, for García
Ponce the allegorical comes alive in human form, in particular in the shape
of the woman.
Barthes begins his “Reflections on Photography” with a short passage
on his reaction to studying a 1852 photograph of Napoleon’s youngest
brother, Jerome. His noted “amazement” (perhaps like Paz’s “bewitch-
ment”) is not that of meeting the eyes of the young man in the image, but
the fact that “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor” (3). What
he sees is an absence, a body not there except in the implication of a gaze
captured on photographic paper. The eyes are the vehicle, not the end of
the amazement; they perform a connection with the past but do not lead
back to it literally. (In other words, they mark a desire but also mark its in-
accessibility.) The “desire” that Barthes finds kindled, that “particular, irre-
ducible, pleasure and pain that the object may call forth” (Cascardi 219),
unleashes not just a momentary encounter but the beginning of an evoca-
tory ritual. As Barthes writes, “What the Photograph reproduces to infin-
ity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what
could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never
transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads
the corpus I need back to the body I see, . . . in short, what Lacan calls the
Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expres-
sion” (4). One is reminded of Benjamin’s well-known essay on “The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with its discussion of the
aura that might be resuscitated in the moving image of cinema if not in the
static one of the photograph. As Barthes returns to revisit the image of the
Emperor’s brother and the faded likeness of his own mother, so García
Ponce produces reiterated ceremonies using Inmaculada, ones which em-
body “the tireless repetition of contingency” (Barthes, Camera 5) as desired
compensation for what whirls by “at the very heart of the moving world”
(Barthes, Camera 6). Both Inmaculada and those who gaze at her create the
contingency of a momentary reprieve from the irremediable pull of His-
tory and ‘progress’ into the unknowable future.
Cascardi notes that the photographed image of Barthes’s dead
mother never finds its way to the pages of the text of the essay. It is en-
countered in words, in affect, but not in material presence. At the heart of
Barthes’s essays, then, is something evoked through mourning but some-
thing we cannot see with our own eyes. As the author rummages through
his mother’s desk, hoping without hope to “find” her (Camera 63) among
her belongings, little meets his expectations (which are unclear to him any-
way) except that “neither as a photographic performance nor as a living res-
urrection of the beloved face” (Camera 64) does any image work for him.
“History,” he concludes, separates him from that recovery, from that life.
Cascardi indicates that these photos serve as “triggers” (219) for Barthes, as
sparks of contingency that provoke some form of affect beyond mere
recognition. All disappoints him, but he continues to leaf through the ob-
jects in his search for a relationship now lost to the image (as ruin).
Curiously, and of importance to our act of storytelling, the third-per-
son omniscient narrative voice that opens Inmaculada presents the reader
with a circumstance similar to that of Barthes. As a young girl, the charac-
ter Inmaculada visits her maternal grandmother and, in the course of eaves-
dropping on a conversation, discovers that the person Inmaculada has
always thought to be her mother is, in fact, a stepmother. The reader is al-
ready acquainted with the ‘true’ version of events, that she is “la última de
siete hermanos . . . cuya madre murió pocos días después de que naciera
ella, tal vez por su culpa” [the last of seven children . . . whose mother died
a few days after she was born, {and} perhaps she is to blame] (8). Growing
up under an illusion, surrounded by an absence compensated for by her
family with an alternative story and a performance by her older sister
Rosario who steps in to care for her, she now has to confront a different
History. Always dressed in white, always singled out as the youngest and
the one named by her grandmother (and visibly marked by her name), In-
maculada is suddenly faced with what her sister suggests by the words
“mal” and “malo” (13–14): an innocent child, spotlessly whitened by her
given name, meets up with the potential personification of good and evil.
Can her father be a ‘bad’ person? Can her (dead) mother be substituted by
a stand-in? Rosario affirms that the lie is not an evil deed, that her father is
not bad, and that the woman who is not their mother is not a wicked per-
son. Each has been cast in a role in the family drama that plays out the per-
formance noted above by Barthes in the case of his mother. Although
sporadic episodes show conduct from her father that might be less than fa-
therly, Inmaculada dwells less on these fragments than on her absent
mother. She is driven to convert this overheard story into what she calls
“conocimiento” [{firsthand} knowledge] (14), and accompanies her grand-
mother and sisters to the cemetery to find something material to link to
her. In De ánima, Gilberto seeks knowledge through Paloma, as Inmacu-
lada is motivated to ‘find out’ about herself through her dead mother. Like
Barthes’s rummaging through the ruins of his mother’s desk, Inmaculada
enters the family crypt to fill in what is missing. She will base her story-
telling on the ruins she finds there.
After that short visit to the burial site, Inmaculada returns to the fam-
ily home to study a photograph of her mother. This is a gift from her
grandmother, a monument to her act of “conocimiento,” but at the same
time a sign of unknowing because the person in the image is unrecoverable.

Inmaculada cannot even find the will to pronounce the word “mother,” and
she does not know what to experience each time she looks at the photo:
“debía significar todo pero no lograba sentir qué era eso” [it should mean
everything {to her} but she just couldn’t feel what that might be] (15). She
has no word to represent the emotion, as she has no way to know what the
feeling of meeting up with her mother should be. Rather than a definitive
retrieval of something lost, the photo opens up a new curiosity (15), a new
sense of suspicion, and new secrets. Life can no longer be “immaculate”
and orderly but becomes a jumble of things to forget, to cover over, to bury
in the sediment of storytelling. Inmaculada is herself a vestige of those
tales, of that past, of someone no longer there. She finds herself only a re-
mote part of the family from now on; she acknowledges that she finds little
in common with her younger siblings, but at the same time has nowhere
to turn for “authentication” (Barthes, Camera 107).
Opening a parenthesis at the start of the story, Inmaculada leaves the
provinces for Mexico City, a place to both lose and find herself. There she
spends a number of years working, only to return home to seek out a for-
mer fiancé with the intent to marry him even after so long an absence.
After the intervening years of physical excess and emotional relationships,
Inmaculada makes the journey back to her own mythical place of inno-
cence, goodness, and platonic love. The novel circles back to the family
homestead, the grown siblings, and the grandmother’s house in which she
is put in her old room for the duration of her visit. As she opens the
wooden door to the clothes closet, she finds the photo she left behind long
before. Her stepmother places it in her hand as if she signals that she can
take it with her to remember her filiation with a place, a time, and a family.
But Inmaculada returns the image to a drawer, never to remove it again
from its original existence in the house. Inmaculada is drawn to the ceme-
tery before she leaves, but here the similarities with Chapter 1 end.
In her absence, the cemetery has been engulfed by the provincial city
and she hardly recognizes the family crypt. Cities have grown, but so have
the weeds around this monument. Time has obviously passed, yet Inmacu-
lada is witness only to the results, the ruins; she has missed the intervening
process. She confronts the deterioration and “abandono” [abandonment]
(325) of the paths, of the vegetation, of the tombs; standing before the
crypt “[r]esultaba inverosímil” [seemed uncanny] (325). Yet there is little
difference between the time she has spent in the capital and the time she
revisits in the provinces; they conflate into one. Since she has returned to
recover a lost love, little could make that relationship less uncanny than the
recovery of a lost parent. One she has suffered for reasons outside her con-
trol; the other (her marriage) she chooses to provoke but under similarly
questionable conditions and motivations. Each scenario is as mysterious as
the other. In the time she has been gone, her grandmother has joined her
mother in the family crypt and absence accumulates on absence. This time
around, she refuses to ask the details of her grandmother’s death, but makes
herself a promise never to return to the cemetery. Strangely, however, she
does not abandon the town itself. She and her sisters share tales of the fam-
ily’s comings and goings, but the story beyond her own ends there. The
past, an object of mourning embodied in structures and their architectural
vestiges, is buried but not buried, for it is visible among the weeds. It is
both there and not there, visible and unreachable.
The reader cannot see the photo of a fictional woman, of course, but
both mother and grandmother play the same role for the character as the
photograph does for Barthes. Like the stones of India that contain hidden
stories for Paz, like the ruins that tourist guidebooks give voice to, the photo
that lies at the center of this tale is made to “speak” (Barthes, Camera 64) for
Inmaculada by her own encounter(s) with it. When it no longer says any-
thing to her, she leaves it behind materially but carries it with her as “an an-
imation” (Barthes, Camera 20) within herself. As “contingency, singularity,
risk” (Barthes, Camera 20), the photograph within her conjures up the
melancholia of confronting death-in-life or, allegorically, past-in-present.
When this moment of confrontation is resuscitated, what might have been
“immaculate” can no longer be so. It has been darkened by the photo-
graphic remembrance of loss. She cannot recognize herself in her mother’s
photo, but she does find traces of her sisters (the known) in the face of the
unknown. In her return, Inmaculada sets up the relationship between alle-
gory and mourning that Avelar calls “the end of the magical” (68). No
longer are the small towns of youth the province of a romantic return or the
realm of magic realism; nature contains instead, in this vision, “an immanent
process of putrefaction” (69), which allows her to inhabit the spaces of decay
and allow us to consider the text as ruin. So Inmaculada’s own story is part
of that strata of phantasmagoric relations in which the uncanny—death on
paper, death within life—does not seem so unfamiliar after all, for every-
thing around the character is as ruinous as the tomb she stands before.
Through allegory, the reader can be brought to evoke death in so many
other forms as well: the deaths of 1968, the corpse of the city that has a shiny
new veneer of modernity, the underbrush that shares the space of planned
expansion and construction. What might have seemed unfamiliar in the jux-
taposition of so many elements of the old and the new is now part and par-
cel of the everyday, the snapshot that citizens carry with them each time
they leave home for work and return. The photograph of Inmaculada’s dead
mother can remain hidden in the closed drawer for it is not the only object
that reminds of what is all around and it is no longer needed to bring forth
the feeling of loss. It is one fragment among so much debris.
Barthes’s anguish over his own appearance as a photographic image
destined to be seen by eyes unknown to him, and destined to survive as a
trace of a momentary experience, introduces a concept of “posing” (Cam-
era 10) that carries us into the text of Inmaculada. The focus on the body as
the essence of the photograph, what is left as an image after the physical
body has moved on, connects Inmaculada’s posing for her many lovers to
Barthes’s “transformation” before the lens of the camera. He writes that the
process, the performance, of the act of being photographed “creates my
body or mortifies it” (Camera 11). While he stops short of considering this
a political act (one he does encounter in the Communards posing on the
barricades), Barthes finds at the center of the photo “a delicate moral tex-
ture and not a mimicry, . . . my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand
shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coin-
cide with my (profound) ‘self;’ but it is the contrary that must be said: ‘my-
self’ never coincides with my image” (Camera 11–12). The confrontation
between the heavy, static ‘self’ on the piece of photographic paper and the
movable body is the dilemma presented through Inmaculada for all of the
narrative voices. As they attempt to keep her image from moving on, she
cannot be fixed to a still pose. The ceremonies that desperately (and melan-
cholically) try to stop time from dragging life toward decay only reiterate
the idea that they are monumental acts of “mortification” (Gilloch, Myth
137). Inmaculada, outside of any historical context, is on display as are the
commodities of the urban marketplace for Benjamin. She is an allegorical
figure of the impulse of modernity to configure a socially redemptive story
while producing debris that might be gathered up and reused time and
again by all those who meet her. Her time frame, however, is reduced to a
constant present. Gilloch summarizes this as two contrary impulses: “Ru-
ination and redemption—these are the Janus-faces of allegory” (Myth 138).
All takes place in the now which conjures up both darkness (ruin) and light
(salvation, redemption) in a chiaroscuro of its own.
Attracted to Inmaculada like provincial residents are drawn to the me-
tropolis, male characters impose their fantasy worlds on her only to find that
they will become witnesses to catastrophe. Along with the Angel of History,
we are all caught up in the storm (of progress) that confronts Inmaculada at
home and in the city. The challenge is to make sense, if possible, of the frac-
tured pieces that pile up at our collective feet. Faithful to her name, Inmac-
ulada is like a bright white light—not a black sun—blazing in the center of
the narrative universe. For those around her, she lives in a perpetual present,
outside the realm of value judgments and of chronological time. Her fea-
tures do not age, and her acts do not progress from innocence to guilt; she
is solely the accumulation of her experiences. When characters draw closer
to her, what they find is an “unsuturable whole” as we have read in the essay
of Barthes on photography, a performance portrait. Inmaculada is what
Barthes terms “the figure of sovereign innocence (if you will take this word
according to its etymology, which is ‘I do no harm’)” (Camera 69). Neither
good nor evil, as the language of her sisters invokes when faced with the se-
crets of their parents, Inmaculada is just herself.
As in his other novels, in Inmaculada García Ponce focuses on “the
embodied character of human existence” (Gill xii) found through the am-
biguous consciousness of a just-as-ambiguous knowledge that Inmaculada
desperately but unsuccessfully seeks. Not an abstract body but a lived one
challenged by the ‘real’ world (of the text, of course), Inmaculada lives
space and time in all of their contingencies as she tries to acquire knowl-
edge of surroundings and of herself through her senses. As a repository of
experience, the body remembers, but only with difficulty and only through
connections with new experiences which explode outward into many direc-
tions. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, such an elicited “memory is,
not the constituting consciousness of the past, but an effort to reopen time
on the basis of the implications contained in the present” (qtd. in Carbone
2). In other words, if we return to Habermas, this signals an increased per-
ception of time itself. As Benjamin’s flâneur animates the city to come alive
with sparks of recognition long hidden among the stones, so Inmaculada’s
body is awakened in a “succession of instances of now” (Merleau-Ponty qtd.
in Carbone 2) by her encounters with others. Like the photographs awak-
ened by Barthes through his gaze on their images, each takes from this in-
stant of involuntary recollection a unification with the world that,
paradoxically perhaps, he or she seems overtly to reject. That is, for exam-
ple, the “atmosphere of 68” that Martré uncovers in La invitación and that
we have found in Crónica, here it is the perception of province and city, of
a collection of sexual relations, all in “a single movement, the different mo-
ments of which flow into each other” (Carbone 3).
In her discussion of García Ponce’s fictional works, Duncan empha-
sizes this temporal notion as central to the development of all of his narra-
tives. Although she refers specifically to his story “El gato” [The Cat], the
same could be said of the novels, including Inmaculada. Duncan reviews
their structures to find that “[t]he series of scenes that compose the text
have no irrevocable order, since each novel is primarily an account of the
gradual involvement with others and acquisition of a sense of identity on
the part of initially isolated beings” (27–28). Not referred to as chapters,
the sections that compose the novel Inmaculada appear as fragments of on-
going activity. Each narrative piece is listed in the Table of Contents solely
by its first few words, much as lines of poetry are listed in anthologies.
Therefore, we do not find a progression of Inmaculada’s life from child-
hood to maturity, as one might encounter in a traditional Bildungsroman.
Instead we read a narrator’s account of an action: “Pero con ella no hice
nada” [But with her I didn’t do anything], “Álvaro dejó a Inmaculada” [Ál-
varo left Inmaculada], or “Inmaculada, con su falda negra” [Inmaculada,
with her black skirt], suggesting a series of experiences of equal importance
and without any particular order. In addition, the constellation of narrative
voices around these lived experiences are foregrounded by references in the
third person. Inmaculada has, like Barthes’s photograph, an afterlife in
these stories.
Any initial sense of the character’s isolation, or of a rupture between
inside and outside, between body and world, is broken through the inter-
related relationship between mind and body posited by Merleau-Ponty. It
is his sense of an optics of corporeality, the centrality of the human body in
the fabric of the social world, which infuses the essays and narratives of
García Ponce with a presumption of the human body—both interiority and
exteriority—as an integral part of the world, not as a subject separate from
it able to stand back and take it all in at a glance. Among his organic
metaphors for this relationship, we find the use of tissues, membranes, and
threads (Gill 4), images we might use to tie together Inmaculada and her
pleasures (much as Paloma exhibits in De ánima). If we have deployed ar-
chitectural images for edifices, social constructs, and even for the human
body, we might now add these tropes to refer to the vestiges and remains of
the corporal edifice and its experiences. Elizabeth Grosz reminds us:
Merleau-Ponty begins with the negative claim that the body is not an
object. It is the condition and context through which I am able to
have a relation to objects. . . . For Merleau-Ponty, although the body
is both object (for others) and a lived reality (for the subject), it is
never simply object nor simply subject. . . . The body is my being-to-
the-world and as such is the instrument by which all information and
knowledge is received and meaning is generated.” (86–87)
Relationships between subjects and objects are based on the actions and
meanings negotiated between them, on the space-time opened by their en-
counters, like Benjamin’s finds amid the cobblestone streets of Paris and
Marseilles. The location of the body, the alteration of geographical space,
and the continual change of perspective all contribute to the sense of In-
maculada as a character who moves through the world in the chiasm of ob-
ject time and subject time. Between lived temporality and the “coagulation
of time” (Carbone 4) into a storytelling subject, Merleau Ponty clarifies
that “we must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.”
Temporality, then, is not outside perception but perception itself: “time is
someone, . . . temporal dimensions, in so far as they perpetually overlap,
bear each other out and ever confine themselves to making explicit what
was implied in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explo-
sion or thrust which is subjectivity itself ” (qtd. in Carbone 4). The circu-
larity and redundancy of Inmaculada responds to this concept of lived time
or life-in-time. So it becomes obvious that the only way to enter into the
world as seen in this manner is through the flesh that experiences it.
The bodily situation is understood by characters at different times in
different ways, according to what Merleau-Ponty terms the “corporeal
schema” (Grosz 91) or body image as an access to relationships with other
objects. The body schema is a field of possible actions in which a subject’s
identity as and in a particular body takes place. So it is not just the (male)
observer who is incarnated in the flesh in García Ponce’s novel, as some
have posited, but Inmaculada herself in a variety of lived and shared expe-
riences. The relationship between the seer and the seen, the woman and
the voyeur, is not singularly and permanently established but, in Grosz’s
words, a “palpitation of being” (96), a continual movement and shifting in
the space of possible or unforeseen actions and encounters. That they may
all fade into nothingness as does the image in Barthes’s photo means less
than that they have taken place at all.
Through a recounting of the life story of Inmaculada, we join in an
exploration of the inner world of a woman, from childhood to the eve of
her impending marriage. Yet the construction of this inner identity is not
disconnected from the outside, but shaped by the experiences of the body.
Innocence—not doing harm but acquiring knowledge—offers a variety of
pleasures contingent on situations, not just some abstract notion of what
the title refers to as “pleasures.” The narration of her activities is slow and
deliberate in its details, as if the eye of the reader were witness to the deli-
cate movement of light and shadow over the course of time as they ebb and
flow over the subtle changes in the body and personality of Inmaculada.
Space and time become concepts relative to her orientation in them. The
different angles from which the narrative focuses on Inmaculada’s story
create a totality of fragmentary visions all evolving around her momentary
perception of her relationship to those around her. An eroticized nature is
constantly present as a backdrop, at times as a pleasure for the senses and
other times as a terrible enigma that needs to be deciphered to make sense
of the world. But the counterpoint between coherence and mystery

changes at every turn. What lurks behind the forms surrounding her? Is
there something to be perceived at one moment and not the next? And the
‘making sense of the world,’ that quest for knowledge we have witnessed
in Paloma and others, remains as a vestige, a remnant, a ruin of an En-
lightenment ideal that is slowly fading into the past.
The manner in which the story is told creates a deception of sorts, for
although it begins with a more traditional third-person narration, it later
shifts to confront the reader with a disembodied voice that has been con-
versing with Inmaculada off and on throughout the text. The reader dis-
covers that this voice belongs to one of her lovers who is also a psychiatrist
and her boss. Her tale is a confession—whether meant for self or others—
which penetrates the depths of her psyche and gives the reader an impres-
sion of a character in front of a multifaceted mirror. As she scrutinizes the
images before her, in her thoughts and imagination or on the surface of the
glass, Inmaculada recalls episodes from the past as well as she anticipates
moments in the future. After all is said and done, at the end of the narrative
it is unclear if she continues her erotic quest for self, or if she abandons it
to join the ranks of the bourgeois society she claims to detest. The ritual of
marriage looms over her, although it is not the only ritual practiced in the
novel. The final choice in this story is not made by the narrator, but is left
for the reader to imagine (or fantasize) into the story playing out, thereby
joining forces in the telling of the tale.
Like the nation that reveals fissures and cracks filled with ruinous im-
ages of the past, the narrative self in this novel is composed of layers that do
not coexist seamlessly. Rather than conform to conceptions of selfhood in
which the subject appears as the repository of truth, knowledge, or eternal
values (although her lovers might seek this in and through her), Inmacu-
lada’s search for “conocimiento” immerses her in a palimpsest of evocative
experiences. Merleau-Ponty envisions this as the superposing of layers
which metamorphose and cross over between the silences of the “mute
world” and the “flesh” of language (qtd. in Carbone 40). Past and present
are therefore enveloping one another, shifting and changing as they en-
counter each other once again. Sedimentary evidence of previous time is
part of both “the invisible and the visible” for Merleau-Ponty, so the
human body contains secrets that might be revealed by new experiences
that bring to light unexpected images and reactions. Inmaculada is the sur-
face on which this palimpsest becomes visible, if only for a brief moment.
She functions like the photographic plate which fascinates us as the out-
lines of an image come into focus mysteriously from out of nowhere.
Inmaculada’s work in a psychiatric institution in the Mexican capital is

far from an accidental choice of venue, and it hints at the underlying current
of illness in society. An obsessive return to the labyrinths of the human
mind, specifically the clinical conditions referred to as psychosis, paranoia,
and schizophrenia, constitutes one of the sites of engagement for reopen-
ing a window on the ruins of the past for Inmaculada and the other charac-
ters. (One might recall Fuentes’s construction once again as a figure similar
to this since it haunts the skyline with former promises as it also embodies
present decay and future rebirth.) A precursor of the characters in Inmacu-
lada is found in García Ponce’s short story entitled “Enigma” in which the
protagonist—a renowned psychiatrist and director of a mental institution,
who also narrates the story—becomes just another patient among many.
The cause? The narrator’s state of paranoia has been provoked by a case of
“mad love” (l’amour fou) and sexual excess à la Bataille. The character In-
maculada is represented as a conjunction of two privileged elements that
open up time toward past and future: the imagination and sensual excess.
While the surface of the skin is the locus of the second, the psyche as part
of the human body and its lived experience completes the picture.
Since this novel, the third of our visual panels of storytelling, is con-
structed on an economy of excess, it seems only logical that Inmaculada is
represented as spending all of her time immersed in bodily experiences.
Her physical body is the vehicle which allows her to access sensations of the
sublime, or states of madness, depending on the interpretation of the
reader. Inmaculada intuits that only in the space of alterity—here, the ward
of the psychiatric hospital—will she be able to give voice to those sensa-
tions elicited by events, images, and provocations (those interventions and
antagonisms described by Barthes as interruptions into the progress of his-
tory). In one scene of the novel, for instance, her quest leads her to perform
sexual acts with mental patients to test the limits of social acceptability and
to see how she will react. As Alphonso Lingis states of this eros, “Eroticism
is not satisfied with contentment; it is the ecstasy of our passions. It is the
breakthrough, out of one’s body contained within the embraces of another,
toward the beyond” (31). The limits of Inmaculada and her world con-
stantly shift, as do the artificial social and cultural borders between inno-
cence and experience, or good and evil, or passivity and cognizance, as she
strives to go beyond charted social territories into the so-called realm of the
abyss. Pleasures are drawn from this very act of redrawing the cartogra-
phies of taboo experiences into maps of the unknown, the innocent, the
discontinuous, the random, the repetitious, the ritualized and, perhaps,
even the pleasurable. The vestiges of these acts are the scars and marks on
the surface of the flesh, on the social body, on the psyche. As such, these are
the focal points to explore what has vanished but left its traces.
Rather than use colloquial language, or what has been considered
popular vulgarity, to portray these characters and their actions, García
Ponce instead turns to écriture once again. It is the power of suggestion, the
lengthy panoramic description or suggestive and detached observation, and
not overt depiction that reigns on these pages. If Susan Sontag is right, as I
believe she is, eroticism and pornography are not really about sex; they
have more to do with matters of life and death (“Pornographic Imagina-
tion” 224). In this confluence of forces, of death-in-life, we return to the
images resuscitated by Barthes through photography. Inmaculada and her
bodily activities confirm such a vision of eros and its affirmation of the lived
experience of excess, coming as close as possible to the brink of death. Gar-
cía Ponce, as Klossowski and Bataille before him, plunges into the “dark
continent” of sexuality (as Freud sees it), the dark side of eros, to reach be-
yond the binarisms of good and evil, positive and negative, sanity and mad-
ness, the same way Merleau-Ponty has posited a breaking down of the
binarism of mind-body. Eroticism is the instrument for breaking through
the limits of consciousness and knowledge, it is a consideration of the flesh
as “a raw, formless, bodily materiality, the mythical ‘primary material’, . . .
capable of acting in distinctive ways, performing specific tasks in socially
specified ways, marked, branded by a social seal” (Grosz 118). Inmaculada
knows, not rationally but through her corporeal senses, that her recogni-
tion of self lies behind the world of appearances and connects them to her.
To reach them, to pass through the veil of the surface and the visible, she
must cling to experience. In this sense, then, “los placeres de la inocencia”
[the pleasures of innocence] reflected in the novel’s title, are in actuality the
joy and necessity of experience.
For Barthes, the framed photograph is in itself an image haunted by
the ghost of painting. He writes that “it [photography] has made Painting,
through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference,
as if it were born from the Canvas” (Camera 30–31). At this moment,
Barthes comes closer to Benjamin than at any other time. His conclusion
that the early link between the cult of the dead and theatrical production (in
China and Japan, for example) is evoked in the play of light and shadow of
photography as well. So while the “Paternal Referent” of the painterly con-
tinues to be part of the strata of the artwork, a chiaroscuro layer shining
through, that facade created by actors to portray the dead on stage sounds
much like Benjamin’s baroque mourning play. The fight between “the pri-
macy of interiority and the self” (Avelar 23) and the cultural and intellectual
ruins of the nation comes into play on the stage where Inmaculada and her
cohorts perform their acts. That “condensation of meaning around a

corpse” (Avelar 3) that Benjamin finds as an allegory of social death is what
Inmaculada and the others obviate in their recreation of life among the psy-
chiatric patients. From the photograph of her mother, she moves on to
mourning a lost love, then participates in the simulacra of the hospital
world, to return once again to the rejected photo as souvenir. After her de-
parture for Mexico City, Inmaculada is fascinated by Diego, a young man
whom she is forbidden by her relatives to see. His death in a motorcycle ac-
cident removes him from the picture, and she can only resuscitate him
through gazing at a photo he has left behind. In a second ceremonial act, In-
maculada finds that time has wiped out their relationship and that Diego “es
cada vez más, por encima de todo, una fotografía. A veces me parece que
tampoco lo conocí, que todo lo que recuerdo de él es inventado, igual que
me pasa, siendo verdad, cuando veo la fotografía de mi mamá . . . Los dos
son sólo una fotografía-. . . . Inmaculada siguió—Diego fue mi novio sin ser
mi novio y mi mamá lo fue sin que yo supiera que lo era, tengo que ver su fo-
tografía para conocerla” [is increasingly, more than anything, a photograph.
Sometimes it seems that I didn’t know him either, that all I remember of
him is invented, the same like it happens, truthfully, when I see the photo-
graph of my mother . . . Both of them are just a photograph. . . . Inmacu-
lada went on—Diego was my boyfriend without being my boyfriend and my
mother was just that without me knowing she was; I have to see her photo-
graph to get to know her] (94). Each of the paper images fixes death, not life,
on the page. But each is singularly capable of linking Inmaculada, and there-
fore the narrative, to the past through an evocatory image in danger of dis-
appearing. What each brings forth, additionally, is the power of “invención”
or storytelling.
The turn from photography to spectacle and ritual takes place in the
hospital and in each of the sexual relationships Inmaculada has with its res-
idents. But here the paternal frame of reference returns in a dialogue be-
tween narrative and painting, blending the two into one interwoven series
of interconnected images. Many of the narrator’s descriptions of Inmacu-
lada suggest the production or reproduction of a painting. Scenes, events,
and actions are framed in blocks of space, creating the illusion that the
reader is contemplating a sequence of slowly swirling, mobile images. In
reality, they exhibit subtle changes from frame to frame, as if the light cast
on them were slowly changing its angle or as if a camera were tracking
across the room during the time it takes for the sun to rise and set. The
connection between the seer and the seen, the visible and the invisible (to
paraphrase a title of one of Merleau Ponty’s last works, dated 1968), is not
by any means accidental. The intermingling of the subject and the object,
the inside and the outside, the toucher and the touched, is described here
as taking place across flesh, a notion of the tissues of experience uniting and
disuniting bodies in the field of experience across time. All of this he sees as
taking place in terms of the visual, and in this aspect it is a concept taken up
by García Ponce as well. For both, vision appears to be the sense most ca-
pable of capturing the idea of the “palpitation” of being-in-the-world.
Sight is privileged as the sense best able to encompass a web of relations be-
tween one’s body and another’s, and between the social world (the visible?)
and an assimilation of its experiences (the invisible?).
It follows that the figure of the painted (the seen, the young woman,
the model) and that of the painter (the seer, the male gaze) come together
in the space of the narrative to evince an encounter of opposing forces. As
Merleau Ponty affirms in his essay “Eye and Mind” [“L’Oeil et l’esprit”],
“by lending his body to the world, [the artist] changes the world into paint-
ings” (162). So it is that the various perspectives of the artist, the world, and
the image (Inmaculada) are all interrelated since they produce an embod-
ied vision of the moment and the space in which they all come together.
This mobile relationship is at work at the heart of Inmaculada and it evokes
what Merleau-Ponty calls “an emerging organism” (Gill 28), the mediation
of the world through the vision of the artist. Like Paloma in De ánima, In-
maculada is also given her moment of mediation wherein she recounts ac-
tions from her own perspective. Since the senses link the world and the
mind through the body, they are the site of a two-way interaction: “we see
with the whole body, not just with the eye, in the same way as we think with
our body” (Gill 31). The eye (of the painter, of the seer, of the storyteller)
focuses on the visible in order to unlock the invisible, that hidden and even
uncanny ‘recollection’ sought by Benjamin as well. This privilege turns
from outside to inside and back again as the fragments of the narrative spin
around the ceremonies set up by Inmaculada and her lovers. As allegories
of access and denial, these activities conjure up celebration as well as
mourning, or perhaps we might even consider a celebration of mourning in
their midst.
The body as an assemblage of perceptions and self-perceptions is the
cornerstone of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of French painter Cézanne’s op-
tics. It is also that of Octavio Paz’s vision of artist Manuel Felguérez’s fun-
damental change to the optics of the muralists of the Mexican Revolution.
Felguérez (and Cuevas, among others) turn the eye of the seer on the world
as they also see themselves as part of the process of producing meaning
from that world at the same time. Such a double gaze (or meta-vision) is in-
strumental to the narratives of García Ponce, suggesting a more complex
relationship between subject and object, between masculine and feminine,
between the long-view of time and historical interruption. For Paz, the
mirror is the “philosophical instrument par excellence” (“Will for Form”
26), both transmitter of images and simultaneous critic of them. It occupies
a space of privilege in the artworks of Felguérez as a reproducer of spaces,
engendering and enforcing the reproduction of reproductions. But it also
reproduces the enigma of the body simultaneously seeing and being seen:
“It [my body] sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching. . . . It is not a self
through transparence . . . . It is a self through confusion, narcissism” (Mer-
leau-Ponty 162–63). García Ponce picks up on this same image when he
describes Inmaculada in terms of a vision in a mirror, an image of a young
woman seemingly unaware of being observed but suggestively mirroring
the gaze of the viewer at the same time. For the narrative voice in this
work, as it is for Inmaculada when she dictates her story to her lover-boss-
psychiatrist Miguel Ballester, the linguistic medium appropriates the role
of the artistic (visual) one. In her confession, story, or fantastic tale Inmac-
ulada is charged with performing the work of mourning—the past, the lost,
the unexplained, the mysterious—on herself and of simultaneously turning
it into a narrative. Their episodic encounters serve to recall a longer time
that strings together her fragments of experience into some sort of whole,
even if tape-recorded by her psychiatrist and therefore artificial. This de-
sire apart, her excesses become a spectacle of a life headed toward death, a
spiral of ecstasy that culminates in a lack of words and an absence of peo-
ple: her mother is gone; Diego is gone; she cannot return home. The fact
that she pretends to recover a previous lover back home lights a spark of
melancholia since the dramatic irony of the situation is evident: the reader
is aware that she cannot return to an innocent past without consequence.
As Avelar concludes of postdictatorial Southern Cone literature, and
we might surmise could be applied to post-1968 and postdevaluation and
post-NAFTA Mexican culture, “the distinction between mourning and
melancholia has to do with the locus of the loss, either situated outside the
subject, having a profound impact on him/her but being ultimately com-
prehensible as one’s loss of something else (mourning), or yet ubiquitous to
the point of engulfing the mourner him/herself in the loss, so the very sep-
aration between subject and object of loss disappears (melancholia)” (232).
The loss of writing, seen by Avelar as a keen signal of the inability to use
language except to express that loss and a concomitant enclosure of the
writer within it (232), does not envelope all of García Ponce’s characters
and narrators. Scenes of storytelling, albeit amid the “murky gray area
where mourning borders with melancholia” (Avelar 232), emerge with In-
maculada as fragments of other tales (of nation, of community, of historical
past) only to dissolve into shards picked up during the next therapy session
(and, with it, a formalized repetition compulsion). Her words may be pre-
served on tape, and the meetings between the two may occur again, but all
hope of explanation, of definitive knowledge, of understanding vanish into
empty ritual. Nevertheless, their ceremonies go on; they never relinquish
the reenactment of this storytelling desire.
In García Ponce’s essay entitled “La pintura y lo otro” [Painting and
otherness], we find a continuation of the interplay between the optics of art
and narrative. He writes of the action of painting as an encounter in the
space between the bodies of subject and object(s), which offers a latent field
of possibilities of knowledge and of breaking through the isolation and of-
fering a chance for the exploration of self and other (or the self among
others). The privileged position of vision—for Merleau-Ponty, Paz, and
García Ponce—results from its access to what are seen as “raw events.” Of
the sense of sight Hans Jonas tells us that “a view comprehends many
things juxtaposed, as co-existent parts of one field of vision. It does so in
an instant: as in a flash, one glance, an opening of the eyes, discloses a
world of co-present qualities spread out in space, ranged in depth, contin-
uing into indefinite distance” (Jonas 313). Sight therefore unifies various
objects in both time and space, placing the subject’s encounter with such an
original or raw series of artifacts into the field of vision of the artist, who, as
García Ponce writes, “aporta su cuerpo a la acción concreta de pintar”
[brings his body to the very concrete act of painting itself] (“Pintura” 393).
One is reminded once again of Benjamin’s engagement with the cinema
and the photographic image and with their potential to break into the
everyday life of the audience with images that awaken citizens from their
stupor. He writes that “[t]he radio broadcast, like the photograph and the
sound recording, meets the beholder halfway” (qtd. in Gilloch, Myth 169).
To uncover the purportedly hidden, invisible, or secret mechanisms
through which the self can be perceived or constructed, Inmaculada prob-
lematizes the phenomenon of seeing much as it does that of being seen.
Both subject and object of the gaze are under scrutiny in these recorded di-
alogues with self and other as experiments in the phenomenology of per-
ception à la Merleau-Ponty. Although it is true that many of the male
characters engage in the act of scopophilia, that is to say they revel in the
pleasures of looking, and that this behavior might be construed as another
example of the male objectification of the female, there is more to Inmacu-
lada than meets the eye. The subjection of a woman to a controlling and
curious gaze (“Visual” 16) is not the only coordinate on the shifting axis of
this narrative tale; it is one of many remnants of social discourse that mark
the surface of the narrative. Inmaculada herself is frequently caught look-
ing at her lovers, male or female, reversing the roles of so-called active sub-
ject and passive object. She also delights in the pleasures of observing her-
self acting in and on the world around her, even as she intuits it as fleeting.
The transitory nature of event in modern times, as we have stated earlier,
meets up with the ritualized repetition of story, yet the recovery of narra-
tive continuity (linked points of time) eludes Inmaculada and her listeners.
One of the aesthetic ‘ruins’ on which Inmaculada is built may be
found in the work of Balthus, painter and brother of writer Pierre Klos-
sowski. Balthus’s representation of women, in particular adolescent girls,
creates the impression that they are the constant object of the gaze of the
(male) painter; yet, at the same time, they return that steady gaze in ever
more subtle and discreet ways (see figure 6.1). The world does not just be-
long to the artist; it also acts upon and through him. His painted figures
seem to know they are being looked at, and they catch the eye of the spec-
tator in a complicity of innocent pleasure and, as Inmaculada herself seeks,
knowledge. One is again reminded of Tanizaki’s The Key, with its hint that
the private diary is also the secret public ritual exhibition of which both
writer and reader are aware. As Lingis writes of the experience of ecstasy,
“The body that sleeps [or feigns doing so] is not inert, it is incandescent
with the delicious aurora borealis that streams in its blood, sweat, and dis-
charges. The erotic rapture sweeps the flotsam and jetsam of the impas-
sioned flesh unto the tropical and arctic regions where tempestuous sirens
and demons chant and howl” (32). The invisible—mind, physiology, the
rush of feeling—melds with the visible body to form the half-closed eyes in
the portraits of adolescents peeping out from the canvases of Balthus. We
might start with the howling of the demons on the surface of the flesh as
remains of the “explosions and contestations” that both Baudelaire and
Barthes find in the experience of modernity.
Those seemingly innocent of the world, cognizant only perhaps of
social impositions and taboos, are in both Balthus and García Ponce the
erotic subjects par excellence. In what Lingis terms a “transitional state”
(43) between childhood and adulthood, these adolescent creatures are
poised at the threshold of multiple possibilities. As such figures of
promise and fleeting appearance, as modernity incarnate, Inmaculada and
the Balthus girls are facades of promise, enticing the onlooker to seek be-
yond only to frustrate any true access to knowledge. Inmaculada is poised
to marry and, according to convention, lose this quality of innocence; the
Balthus portraits reflect a moment in time and perception captured by
the artist before all of the elements in the frail equation of innocence
change. Each embodies what Barthes seeks in the photograph: some
sense of the person represented and some intrusion into the time-space
frozen in the portrait.
To further pursue the analogy between painting and writing, and the
problematic relationship between the male gaze and the female figure, we
might focus on the narrator’s depictions of Inmaculada’s body. She is described
in pictorial terms as if she were being placed in the focus of a magnifying lens
to scrutinize her inch by inch. The terms used evoke in the reader the feeling
of standing in front of Manet’s Olympia or Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Like
Olympia or Venus, Inmaculada is aware of the fact that she is being observed,
and that her body is a source of inspiration for the projection of another’s
erotic desires onto the canvas. However, even though these three female fig-
ures are depicted from the privileged position of the male eye, they refuse to
be reduced to static objects. They consistently return the gaze in a challenge
to the empire of the male. Inmaculada is represented then as being made
aware of the possibility of her body being circulated as a token in the erotic
economy of the male (which she rejects), but at the same time she takes plea-
sure in the recuperation of the gaze to promote her own version of the story.
The text of Inmaculada reflects a circular structure reminiscent of
Crónica, except for the fact that in the earlier novel the characters’ voices
that return to haunt the narrative come from beyond the grave. Within the
confines of his room, Esteban ‘hears’ the voices of Mariana and the others
who have been dead since the beginning of the chronicle. But they are now
only a product of his memories; they are disembodied. In Inmaculada, early
childhood experiences appear in the first chapter of the novel and reappear
at the end. The same holds true for the adolescent lover who participates in
Inmaculada’s initiation into erotic experiences early in the narrative; then
he reappears as he is scheduled to marry her as the text comes to a close. In
between these two moments, less of a progression than a collection of ex-
periences, rituals, and ceremonies mark the life of Inmaculada. The con-
densed experience of time brings historical narrative into modernity with
its emphasis on the contingency of perception.
Called by Moreno-Durán a “crónica de una iniciación” [chronicle of
initiation] (45), Inmaculada is based on a deliberate suspension of judgment
regarding any of the acts committed within its pages. Unlike De ánima,
whose characters remain in a constant (and paradoxical) state of alert re-
garding the morality of their actions in the eyes of the public (perhaps this
is the reason for the Laws of Hospitality), Inmaculada has already cast out
conscience from experience. She inhabits an Eden-like space, playing the
role of a truly innocent Eve before the Fall. From her youth in the provin-
cial family home, to the ward of a psychiatric hospital, and back, this pris-
tine time-space is preserved. Her paradise is predicated on the code of no
codes, “la ausencia de juicio moral” [the absence of moral judgment]
(Moreno-Durán 45).
In a conscious submission to pleasures alone in any and all of their

possible or imagined varieties, Inmaculada is the element that structures
the ritualized events of the entire novel. As a willing initiate in the excesses
of eros, this character participates in ceremonies that expose her to multi-
ple possibilities of physical experience. An innocent horseback ride be-
comes the chance to fantasize about a more intimate contact between the
body of the horse and her own. A chance encounter as a child at the door of
her parents’ bedroom while they are in the act of making love—the classic
Freudian primal scene—is processed by Inmaculada throughout the rest of
her life as an erotic memory that repeats each time she confronts a closed
door. Once again, the doorway explodes as an allegory of so many openings
and closings, so many evocations almost forgotten.
Her early erotic encounters with her playmate Joaquina, and their ex-
perimentation with dolls as phallic objects, echo in the last pages of the
novel where it is suggested that Joaquina will remain Inmaculada’s lover in
spite of her impending marriage to Eugenio. Joaquina is charged with ini-
tiating Inmaculada into the realm of the autoerotic, interestingly enough
behind the walls of the life-size dollhouse they share. This edifice is a re-
production in miniature of the domain of the traditional family and,
through their transgressive acts, the erotic makes its entry into the familial
domain. Yet they never pause to examine what they are transgressing, nor
are the two young girls presented with any sense of guilt. Their fetishized
children, the dolls, take on a role that does not seem—in this context, at
least—to contradict their innocence as playthings. Just like the character
Inmaculada herself, the dolls can be both innocent and erotic. Instead of
losing one identity to become something else entirely, they accumulate
meaning: “Ellas las cambiaban, no podían evitarlo, las muñecas nunca
volverían a ser las muñecas como lo fueran antes, ahora las dos sabían que
eran otra cosa además” [The girls {Joaquina and Inmaculada} changed
them, they couldn’t avoid it. The dolls would never go back to being what
they were before. Now they both knew that they were something else be-
sides] (26; emphasis added). Just as Inmaculada’s identity is a sum of her ex-
periences, the dolls constantly acquire meanings in new circumstances,
without sacrificing their former value.
As an adult, Inmaculada wanders through life—literally as well as fig-
uratively in search of herself—gathering together a collection of experien-
tial moments. Much as the characters in Crónica traverse class divisions and
social groups, from the countryside to the sprawling urban centers, Inmac-
ulada becomes acquainted with a variety of persons and pleasures. In each
case, what looks like an innocent situation on the surface reveals her own
reading of it as something more ritualistic, another step in her acquisition
of knowledge. Inmaculada is offered a job as the secretary of the director of

a hospital yet, for her, this position opens up new opportunities for break-
ing her isolation (as Duncan has pointed out). To her employment in such
a problematic space is added the possibility of reaching beyond the limits of
herself, by means of her body, into the unknown realms of those who are
considered ‘sick’ or somehow outcast from normal society. It is not just a
hospital where she works; it is a mental hospital and therefore a privileged
space of access to what society has repressed, excluded, or made abject.
Here resides the debris of modernity’s project.
Behind the walls of the psychiatric ward, sex therapy sessions are pre-
sented as rituals of erotic experience that strikingly parallel all the other
moments of her life. Sex as pleasure and sex as therapy are one and the
same. The prescribed rituals with patients—what are called treatment ses-
sions—are curiously similar to the ceremonial sadomasochistic sessions
that Inmaculada shares with coworker Arnulfo. A former patient himself,
Arnulfo now functions as an assistant to the director of the hospital. It is he
who is in charge of keeping daily routines running smoothly, making sure
that patients are restrained, that they are in their cells, that they eat at ap-
propriate times. It is he who maintains order within this space of liminality
for those who are being ‘cured.’ It is he who holds the key to open all
doors. No one is safe from his supervision or observation. But it is also Ar-
nulfo who offers Inmaculada an encounter with the more violent side of
eros, a shadowy realm suggestive of the bondage rituals described by the
narrators of the Marquis de Sade or, more recently, in Réage’s Story of O.
More than once, Arnulfo leads Inmaculada—who follows his lead
willingly—down a long corridor, past room after room of drugged patients,
to a dark, secluded space, supposedly far from any witnesses. Looking like all
of the other rooms on the ward, this one is different in that it functions as a
place of pleasure and restraint at the same time. There are no drugs present,
but there are manacles and belts. Yet these are endowed with meanings for
Inmaculada that go beyond their obvious use. Like the dolls in the domes-
tic scenarios acted out with Joaquina, the shackles and ties take on additional
significations in the erotic rituals. At the point of beginning the ceremony,
Arnulfo abolishes all distinctions between Inmaculada and the rest of the
occupants of that wing of the hospital. He warns her: “Si gritas pidiendo
auxilio nadie se extrañaría. Hay muchos que gritan aquí dentro” [If you
scream for help no one will pay any attention. There are lots of people who
scream inside these walls] (293). While she assures him that she has no in-
tention of doing so, going along with the ceremony of the scene he is setting
up, Inmaculada is placed in a role that is no longer distinguishable from any-
one else there. She voluntarily submits to his rules, leaving behind her job as
Figure 6.1 Balthus (Klossowski de Rola B.) (1908–2000) “The Living Room (Le Salon),”
1942. Oil on canvas. Estate of John Hay Whitney. The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, NY, U.S.A. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art
Resource, NY © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), ADAGP, Paris
Figure 6.2 Balthus (Klossowski de Rola B.)(1908–2000) “The Street,” 1933. Oil on canvas.
James Thrall Soby Bequest. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital
Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY © 2006
Artists Rights Society (ARS), ADAGP, Paris
secretary of the (absent) director, and places herself in the hands of someone
who offers her a new experience. What she does not expect, at least judging
from her surprised comments, is that some of the other enfermos [sick peo-
ple] are part of the ritual as well. These witnesses—and participants,
through the presence of the voyeur—have access to the spectacle through a
window that opens onto their hall. Arnulfo makes clear their planned role in
this scenario, one which the reader is told also has a positive effect on In-
maculada: “Inmaculada no pudo olvidar la mirada detrás de la ventana
porque el recuerdo de que la habían visto aumentaba su placer” [Inmaculada
couldn’t forget the gaze behind the windowpane because the very thought
that they had watched her increased her sense of pleasure] (295). Such a
scopophilic event is repeated in several versions within the walls of the same
room. But it also appears in other episodes of the novel, including an in-
stance when Inmaculada poses in the nude for a painting in which all of the
other models are clothed. Set up by the artist as a visual spectacle for the de-
light of those who look on, the painting of Inmaculada exposes her to the
traditional role of model in the gaze of the artist.
Like Manet’s Olympia, Inmaculada returns the gaze of the voyeur.
Feal and Feal remark that the model for Olympia is said to have been a
prostitute (165), adding an additional twist to possible similarities with In-
maculada, yet this convergence sells her short. We may conclude that In-
maculada is a woman aware of her own body and is not willing to feel
shame or avert her gaze. She is not about to forfeit her experience for the
sake of propriety or tradition; the moral vestiges of the past have been sub-
sumed into alternative narratives by Inmaculada in the frame of the 1980s.
In their defiant attitude toward the male onlooker, both Olympia and In-
maculada challenge him to admit his own role in public, to confess (as In-
maculada does on tape) his complicity in the setup. As Friedrich writes of
Manet’s painted subject, “[t]he public nakedness of a beautiful woman
sometimes becomes a question of politics” (1) since her image summons
forth unspoken rules and relations. The gaze is therefore politicized in
both painting and text. The problematizing of the representation of the
feminine continues here, as we have seen in De ánima with Paloma,
through the evocation of a controlling gaze along with a contestatory one.
The female body appears objectified—Paloma is made into a film and a
painting; Inmaculada’s image is found in a photograph and a portrait—but
there is an attempt to create space for a storytelling subject as well. Both
Paloma and Inmaculada—their names evocative of the white dove and the
pure angel—are commodities to be consumed by the eyes of the spectator
and consumers in their own right. So the palimpsest of the story of Inmac-
ulada is not reduced to others’ versions alone but several narratives woven
together in a time frame of the always-now. Critic Rafael Moreno-Durán

can thus make the claim that Inmaculada “se instala en un calendario in-
móvil” [takes up residence in the pages of an immobile calendar] (45),
never aging and marking the passage of time only through the stimulus of
external sensations, owing to the fact that she is a “body with organs” who
is in the constant process of creating herself.
The ambiguities of Inmaculada and her redefining of pleasurable in-
nocence carry through in the use of the color white as a sign or marker of
these contradictions. Named by the matriarch of the family, Inmaculada
wears white at all times. The metonymic relationship between moral or
physical purity and spotless whiteness is transgressed by the erotic activities
of the woman so clothed, revealing the artificial surface on which the story
of innocence has been written. During all three epochs of her life Inmacu-
lada is dressed in white: as a young girl, as a nurse, and as a bride-to-be. On
the occasion of her First Communion, a ceremony observed with all rigor
and devotion by traditional Catholic families, Inmaculada feels she is part
of a masquerade, but she is a willing participant. “Era como ir disfrazada”
[It was like being in a costume] (17). She enjoys the idea of looking differ-
ent, of standing out and being watched, of playing a role. More important
than listening to the words of the priest, or responding at the correct time,
Inmaculada imagines herself in the eyes of others: “Había sido más impor-
tante caminar, sentarse, arrodillarse con su nuevo traje, saberse observada
por su abuela, su papá, su tía y todos sus hermanos” [It had been more im-
portant to walk, sit down, kneel with her new dress, know that she was ob-
served by her grandmother, her father, her aunt, and all of her brothers and
sisters] (18). Not only is the day of her First Communion a rite of passage
into the community of the church and adult society, but it also is her initi-
tation into eroticism by Joaquina. Coincidence or not, the two friends
share the sacrament of Communion on the same day. But they also take
part in erotic rites of the body that very afternoon when they proceed to
their dollhouse.
The medical uniform that Inmaculada wears for her job at the hos-
pital separates her from outside society in that it represents a person who
is dedicated to health and to restoring the functions of the bodies and
minds of the sick. The cleanliness of the white dress marks her as an em-
ployee, but it also indicates her entry into the world of Arnulfo and the es-
capades they share. As he divests her of the symbol of her profession at the
start of each rite, Arnulfo opens the door for Inmaculada into the world of
sexual experimentation.
In the last chapter, as her adventures come to a close, Inmaculada re-
turns home to marry Eugenio and, evidently, to become part of the bour-
geosie she has claimed to detest all along. Divesting herself of the trappings
of her previous roles, she dons the visible sign of purity, the traditional
white gown. Her gown represents tradition in that it has been handed
down from grandmother to mother, and from mother to daughter. As In-
maculada stands before the mirror in the symbolic attire of her new iden-
tity, she is pure contradiction. The dress is symbolic of that which is
untouchable and chaste; by covering the body it marks an absence, a
promise of pleasure yet to be fulfilled. At the same time, it is the garment
of a bride, a woman about to give herself over to pleasure and, one is told,
to the unknown. The reader is also aware of her complete story, so the
happy ending functions as an allegory of the inventions of the bourgeoise
storyteller. As Miguel, the director of the hospital, reveals to his son Se-
bastián, on the last page, Inmaculada already has a “history.” The narrator
tells us: “Miguel le contó [a Sebastián] la verdad” [Miguel told {Sebastian}
the truth] (332). Whether on Miguel’s tapes that contain Inmaculada’s con-
fessions, in his own words at the close of the text, or by means of the nar-
rative voice that has related her story in the third person throughout this
narrative, the reader already has access to more than meets the eye. There
is no innocent reading of Inmaculada possible, that is to say, reader and
character share knowledge of what has transpired. While the reader is priv-
ileged to all of her story, Miguel’s confession to his son opens up the hidden
aspects of Inmaculada to society for the first time; it has been unaware of
anything but her public persona up until now. Knowing that Eugenio is the
official novio or betrothed and, having met him on the pages of the text
when they are still adolescent sweethearts, the reader can use this informa-
tion to piece together the fragments of the story of Inmaculada, leaving
nothing out. Therefore, when we read that one of Eugenio’s sisters makes
the following remark during the rehearsal dinner—“es maravilloso que los
dos se hayan esperado durante tanto tiempo” [isn’t it wonderful that they
both waited for each other for so long] (331)—we are privy to information
that makes this nothing short of the lie on which a socially acceptable story
must be based.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the body not as an object but
as a “condition” through which one relates to other bodies and to the world
of objects (Grosz 86–87), it might be fruitful to point out Inmaculada’s em-
bodiment of his concept of the contingent. Finn discusses the corporal
structure that inhabits the social one:
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is sometimes described as a philos-

ophy of contingency, that is, a philosophy that takes contingency as
both its point of departure and its intentional end—its value . . . [For
him,] contingency refers to the fundamental materiality of every

human being and every act of consciousness: the situatedness, the
‘anchorage,’ of both being and thought (of both what is and what is
known) in concrete, particular, local, and historical conditions in a
world that surrounds us and is never still” (qtd. in Grosz 94, note 19).
Inmaculada’s knowledge of the world around her is generated from her

relationships with, for example, Joaquina, Eugenio, Miguel, Sebastián, and
all of her former classmates from Catholic school. Given this framework,
it would be inappropriate to conclude that Inmaculada’s marriage and her
continuing affair with Joaquina somehow contradict one another. Like
Fuentes’s skyscraper, Inmaculada is always a construction in progress
which we see rise and fall before our eyes. She is incomplete, as is the pro-
ject of modernity.
The figure of Miguel, the director of the psychiatric hospital and one
of the many lovers of Inmaculada, functions as a narrative bridge among her
identities. The ‘truth’ that he recounts to his son Sebastián on the eve of In-
maculada’s nuptials is one of the narratives told, and shown, regarding his
perception of her. When Miguel receives a personal invitation to Inmacu-
lada’s wedding to Eugenio, he is enticed to turn into a story what he has ex-
perienced with her. As an art connoisseur and collector of paintings, he
possesses works that show in a different medium some hidden aspects of In-
maculada’s life. In his collection are at least three portraits of her (332). The
first shows Inmaculada in an ivory dress that immediately suggests to the
reader a connection to the wedding gown she is about to wear for her for-
mal ceremony. The second painting shows Inmaculada in stockings, garter
belt, and high heels. In the third she is dressed in a sequined gown, with one
of her female lovers, Rosenda, between her legs. After listening to Miguel’s
narration, Sebastián requests as a final souvenir the formal portrait of In-
maculada in white. At this point we have already seen the ambiguity of the
white gown, and his preference for this version of her identity does not nec-
essarily indicate a preservation of some type of perfect, unblemished image.
Miguel chooses to hang the other two paintings in the living room of his
home, a place intriguingly located in one wing of the hospital where he
works. By placing the less acceptable images of Inmaculada in such a public
arena, he is in actuality making the same type of statement that Sebastián
has. Neither type of portrait is superior to the other; they are all representa-
tions of her as seen by the artist. And it is to the artist that García Ponce
turns for the difficult task of portraying Inmaculada and her paradoxes.
Inmaculada, in a rare visit to the privileged space of Miguel’s library
in the clinic, opens a book, seemingly at random, and thumbs through the
pages. What she finds there is, in reality, not a casual discovery. Reproduc-
tions of paintings fill the text, among them what is described as “una re-
producción a color donde el hombre vestido de blanco con la viga al
hombro atravesaba la arbitraria calle poblada por tantos seres y acciones ex-
travagantes” [a color reproduction where the man dressed in white with a
beam on his shoulder crosses the arbitrary street filled with so many ex-
travagant people and activities] (286). Inmaculada immediately personalizes
what she sees and compares the man in white with Miguel (the center of
focus), making all others the inhabitants of a strange world akin to that of
the hospital. She finds the painted street scene as uncanny or alienating as
she does the corridors of the clinic. What makes this random choice of
pages in the book more significant is that the painting signals in fairly con-
crete terms a direct reference to one of the strongest aesthetic influences
on the writings of García Ponce.
As described in Inmaculada, the painting bears an uncanny resem-
blance to a work by Balthus entitled The Street (1933) (see figure 6.2).
Moreover, García Ponce has analyzed this painting in the context of the
rest of the artist’s production in his book Una lectura pseudognóstica de la pin-
tura de Balthus [A Pseudo-Gnostic Reading of Balthus’s Paintings]. Of this
particular painting, he writes in detail that
todo ocurre, en efecto, como en un sueño; pero los sueños diurnos

que habitan la imaginación de Balthus en ese cuadro o que alimentan
con su presencia esa imaginación parecen querer borrar, querer de-
struir todo espacio en el que exista alguna posibilidad de inocencia.
La creación es la obra de un deficiente demiurgo menor y malvado.
[everything occurs, as it were, as if in a dream; but the daydreams
that inhabit Balthus’s imagination in that painting or that with their
presence nourish that imagination seem to wish to erase, or destroy,
all possible space in which any type of innocence might be able to
exist. This creation is the work of a deficient demigod, a minor and
evil one at that.] (17)
His reading of the painting, and the inclusion of it in a novel as the prop-
erty of the director of a psychiatric ward, indicates a rereading of a suppos-
edly inconspicuous scene of everyday life (17). Such an interruption of
superficial harmony is done with what García Ponce calls “una intolerable
naturalidad” [an intolerable naturalness] (17), indicating a transformation
in perception and a chance for that “fleeting, fortuitous Proustian mémoire
involontaire” (Gilloch, Myth 207) evoked through a reencounter with the
crowds of the streets (now on canvas).
When the painting is scrutinized, it reveals an even greater parallel

with Inmaculada and her world of the hospital. What García Ponce de-
scribes as the confluence of monstrous children, artificially painted
women, and a ventriloquist’s dummy is rounded out by the appearance of
“un hombre de aspecto mongoloide [que] ataca sexualmente por la espalda
a una niña” [a man with the face of a mongoloid {who} sexually molests a
girl from behind] (17–18). What seem at first glance to be casual passersby
along a street turn out to be interpreted, by Inmaculada and García Ponce,
as witnesses to a secret ceremony on a unique corner. Inmaculada identi-
fies with the young girl, the innocent object of the monstrous desires of
the ‘abnormal’ adult, whom she compares to Arnulfo. But the crossovers
between Balthus and García Ponce do not end here, nor do questions re-
lated to aesthetics.
As Inmaculada continues her perusal of Miguel’s art book, she lingers
over reproductions of paintings of young girls in a variety of poses.
“[H]aciendo comentarios sobre el aspecto de las niñas sobre todo” [Com-
menting especially on the faces of these adolescents] (286), Inmaculada di-
rects her words to a male acquaintance, René, who listens to nothing she
has to say. Instead of looking toward representation, he starts with her arm,
but slowly moves along her body to caress its entirety. Sitting close to her,
with the book on his lap, and his arms touching her, René duplicates in his
actions and his physical disposition the painting she describes to him in
words. García Ponce’s page frames a reproduction of a painting that ap-
pears on the page of a book at which his characters are looking. Life imi-
tates art but, as we have already examined, García Ponce rejects such
crossovers in favor of a declared (artificial) separation between the two.
Mimesis aside, Inmaculada is, then, a fantasy construct of the writer. As
such, she herself becomes a ruin of his own relationship to society’s laws
and she performs on the page as in the baroque drama of Benjamin’s inter-
est. She is pure excess, in body, in spirit, in space, and in time. Feal and Feal
write of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
By rooting thought in perception, or, in other words, by ascribing to

perception an intellectual energy of its own, . . . he erases the tradi-
tional borderline between two activities that are considered to be dis-
tinct and hierarchically subordinated (with thought holding primacy
over sensorial perceptions in Plato and philosophical idealism). Thus
Merleau-Ponty succeeds in introducing a temporal dimension into
the domain of the visual arts . . . Accordingly, each painting, like each
perception, does not end with the initial effect of surprise that it is
likely to produce; rather, it constitutes a departure point for future
explorations into the reality that was initially observed. (13)
In Inmaculada thoughts occur in direct relationship to the senses; reason

does not obliterate the body. Paloma and Inmaculada, like the dreamy-eyed
girls in Balthus’s drawing rooms, evoke a temporal dimension rather than
a spatial one for their liminality, their agelessness, their capacity to evoke
effect upon effect in the spectator. Youth, for Balthus, is an ageless, limit-
less, and perpetualized dimension of the subject. Similar to the “immobile
calendar” of Inmaculada, the adolescent girls portrayed in his paintings
never change; they only accumulate moments of time, endlessly repeating
scenes in which light and shadows (evoking some vague notion of day and
night) vary, but only slightly. Adolescence is an eternal moment, one to be
preserved and constantly evoked for its promise of innocence before the
contamination of knowledge. García Ponce comments on these paintings
that, in them, “[l]a presencia de lo visible es inmutable y en su indiferencia
le da la espalda a la historia” [the presence of the visible is unchanging and
in its indifference it turns its back on history] (“Balthus” 26). Merleau-
Ponty’s contingency persists; one is the sum of one’s relationships with the
world of immediacy. History, and therefore the domain of reason and
knowledge one assumes, is cast out unless it becomes a factor in the per-
sonal perception of the world.
In Balthus’s paintings, innocence and experience perform in manners
akin to García Ponce’s Eden-like universe created in and for Inmaculada.
Whatever protest that might arise against the so-called sexual obsessions of
the artist must be considered in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on
perception once again. The “initial observation” of the painter is available
for the “future explorations” of spectator after spectator; there is no essence
of pornography or pedophilia to a scene or a character. They must be
viewed, instead, as experiences brought to the text by the perceiver. It is
within this frame of thought that Davenport describes Balthus’s subjects as
“sexy, charming French adolescents painted with humor, with wit, with
clarity, and with an innocence that we can locate in adolescent idealism it-
self rather than in an obsession” (59). It is as if García Ponce were holding
a simultaneous conversation with Balthus and Davenport when he con-
cludes, at the end of his essay on this painter, that “[d]e [una] suma de am-
bigüedades y contradicciones está hecha una obra. Es el triunfo de su
propia desnudez [la del cuerpo] que por el camino del crimen nos hace
cómplices y nos lleva a la inocencia” [a work {of art} consists of a sum of its
ambiguities and contradictions. It is the triumph of its {the human body’s}
own nakedness that makes us accomplices on the road of crime and leads us
to innocence] (“Balthus” 33). Inmaculada observes her own body in the
mirror (as Paloma has done before in De ánima); her erotic companions are
spectators of her own discoveries; the writer experiences their encounters;
and the reader is the last voyeur. In Balthus’s paintings, the same multiplic-
ity of contingent observations holds true. And, like Paloma and Inmacu-
lada, Balthus’s adolescents are endowed with a gaze that they turn back on
the viewer. When the holder of the gaze pretends to extricate innocence
from an object, there is no longer a passive relationship between the two.
The presumption of innocence—whether political, social, or moral—is cast
amid the discourses of knowledge.
Apparently abandoned to passive repose or indifference, the girls and
adolescents depicted by Balthus seem to correspond to the objectification
of Inmaculada noted by some critics. With open bodices, bare legs, and
heads thrown back in abandon they are ripe for the predatory eyes of the
consumer. García Ponce describes these figures in paintings such as “The
White Skirt,” “Girl with a Cat,” “Thérèse Dreaming,” and “Katia Read-
ing” in terms of the ambiguity represented in their eyes: “tienen, con
mucha frecuencia, los ojos cerrados. Sin embargo, tal vez no duermen ex-
actamente. Sus párpados parecen haber caído pesadamente sobre esos ojos,
como si una fuerza invencible los guiara obligándolas a tender un velo que
permita suponer la existencia de un olvido tras el que se ocultan cuando
toda su figura se abre a la revelación” [with great frequency, they {the fe-
male figures} have closed eyes. Nevertheless, maybe they aren’t dreaming
exactly. Their eyelids seem to have fallen heavily over those orbs, as if an
invincible force were guiding them down, forcing a veil to be lowered, a
veil that allows one to suppose the existence of a forgetfulness behind
which they {the eyes} take refuge at the moment when the {entire} naked
body is revealed on display for others] (“Balthus” 25). Referring to them as
catlike, García Ponce notes in the representation of these eyes the possibil-
ity of the object becoming a subject, the hint of the viewer being looked at,
even if through narrowed slits. The hint of an ambiguity in the eyes as im-
ages of innocent sleep, half-closed reverie, passivity and an open invitation
to the spectators gaze, but also as a hidden observation of one who has been
given such a scenario in which to choose how to participate, has much in
common with Inmaculada’s figure. She not only allows herself to be
watched—on the playground, in the hospital, in the artist’s studio—but she
learns from this act, even as it “contaminates her” (“Balthus” 32). Like the
sleeping nation which appears in order to be observed by outsiders in
search of evidentiary traces of modernity but turns its gaze back on the on-
looker, these women look like ‘innocents’ only because that is projected
onto them. They are the center of a universe that extends into the distance,
but they are isolated and alone in their closed, interior spaces. Figures of
women such as García Ponce’s Inmaculada, and Balthus’s Katia and
Thérèse inhabit worlds that are, as García Ponce puts it, crumbling around
them (“[e]l mundo se ha desmoronado”) (“Balthus” 32). In their solitary

postures at the center of the painting or of the triptych, the woman “se
contempla a sí misma y rompe la separación entre apariencia y conciencia”
[contemplates herself and breaks through the separation between appear-
ance and consciousness] (“Balthus” 33). Inmaculada and her painterly co-
horts bring together reason and the senses into a single act of perception.
Citizens of the modern inhabit “unsuturable” spaces, those of limbo
and incompletion, entering and withdrawing from them, as Barthes re-
minds us, and constantly accumulating experiences. If a collective move to-
ward a common future, that dream of modernity for all of its citizens, is not
rendered visible in Inmaculada, then the character herself must provide for
a destiny of her own. As the urban world is left behind, and as she ‘inno-
cently’ attempts to interpellate herself into provincial life once again, In-
maculada is readable less as embodying the celebratory triumph of the
modern than as the dancer amid the ruins of the social corpse (Avelar).
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Brief Return to the Ruin
I
n his recent work on traumatic experiences of three world-class cities
(as they are called nowadays by promoters) Andreas Huyssen opens the
discussion with an essay on “the crisis of history.” His comments are
pertinent to the texts and contexts we have been examining over the past six
chapters. As he notes changes in the discourse of history after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, after the dictatorships in Argentina, and after 9-11 in New
York, Huyssen concludes that “[h]istorical memory is not what it used to be.
It used to mark the relation of a community or nation to its past, but the
boundary between past and present used to be stronger and more stable
than it appears to be today” (1). With the advent of modern technologies
such as photography and the cinema, the past has not disappeared but has
remained as trace evidence of something that haunts the present. This
phantasmatic ghost is contained in discourse, but also in the constructs of
what Paul Julian Smith calls a “fragile modernity” (116). So we have come
to call this problematic relationship, for Benjamin promissory, between his-
torical times and the space of the ruin. Whatever faith in modernization is
promoted by official sources such as the State’s organizations is inevitably
tinged by the daily experience of the collective members of the social body.
Smith’s vision of a “divorce between the conception and the experience of
urban life” (117) in modern Spain becomes not a rupture but a shadowy
double vision in the texts of García Ponce. Mexico City’s detritus is also its
“incompleteness” (Woodward 15); the “narrow one-way street of time”
(Smith 113) is Inmaculada’s timelessness; geometry and monumentality are
both grandiose ambitions and catastrophic labyrinths. Even though Huys-
sen finds that “memory fatigue has set in” (3), García Ponce joins Benjamin
in rooting out the potentials of the Proustian mémoire involontaire.
The physical bodies of García Ponce’s characters inhabit an implicit
and shadowy historical world, whether they choose to face it squarely or
experience it through crisis. Inmaculada wanders through society’s liminal
䊏 179 䊏
spaces and outcast citizens; Evodio has to be dragged into the world
through the maddening wail of the ambulance sirens. External geographies
permeate internal ones; both are provisional and contingent in what Bam-
mer calls a “shifting social and psychological geography” (ix). Huyssen ex-
amines German, Argentinean, and United States cultures after a series of
traumatic events as palimpsestic surfaces on which the seepage of the past
into the present grows ever more convoluted. I propose that García Ponce
wrote in a similarly posttraumatic time after 1968, a watershed year around
the world and one which indicated more than ever a difficult and “fragile”
encounter with modernity.
In 1993 García Ponce added a coda to the trilogy of novels that we
have envisioned as the shifting narrative panels of the triptych. Even as
Huyssen titled his study of urban reconstruction Present Pasts, García
Ponce found in the same phrase an allegorical reference to the politics of
the ruin. His novel Pasado presente [Present past] returns to the “antago-
nisms, unsuturability, and contingency” (Barthes, Camera 220) of history
represented in Crónica, then weaves into the narrative a series of erotic
characters and experiences akin to those of Paloma and Inmaculada. Based
loosely on the lives of Mexican intellectuals during the decades of the 1950s
and 1960s in the metropolis, Pasado presente lives up to its name by conflat-
ing the past and the present into one fluid moment filled with traces of
endings and beginnings. As Huyssen concludes of late twentieth-century
Berlin, so we posit for Mexico City of the same time frame: “every post-
traumatic new beginning bears the traces of traumatic repetition, even
though increasing temporal and generational distance from the original ex-
perience may alter the discursive structure of the . . . symptom” (151). As
high-rises fill the skies, as subways stretch out to new settlements, as the
frenetic activity of construction clouds the air with debris, the inhabitants
of modernizing Mexico are confronted daily with consumer products and
with calls to rehabilitate the patrimony of the nation through its archaeo-
logical vestiges and remains. At the heart of the culture industry lies
tourism, the nation as product, but also those “contact zones” ( Joseph,
Rubenstein, and Zolov 16) in which chronological time and its constructs
seem to be purely contingent and totally ‘unsuturable.’
While the image of the megalopolis began to emit traces of decay in
earlier texts by García Ponce, his work from 1993 depicts only faint traces
of what the city once was. The official architectural monuments to past
glories have become inhabited by ghosts and rats. As artists and architects
try to “piece together the scattered jigsaws of antiquity” (Woodward 10),
narrators are faced with scenarios of transformation whose excitement lives
A BRIEF RETURN TO THE RUIN 䊏 181
on only in momentary fits and starts. The city as a whole scene of enjoy-
ment is now a marvelous ruin (marvelous in the sense of fascination that
Paz holds for the pre-Columbian Indian). During long moments of con-
templation, the narrator Hugo looks out over scenes of devastation which
from “his times” (9), whatever that implies for carryovers from past to pre-
sent, have been changed once and for all. There is no return to the past,
and no recovery from decay, yet there is no golden vision of the (modern)
future. The past was not a golden one in any case; things have just gone
from bad to worse. As the experiential dimension of instability continues,
assumptions of “learning from history” and “mediating conflicts” (Huyssen
1, 2) become the debris from which “a fundamental crisis in our imagina-
tion of alternative futures” (Huyssen 2) is constructed. Hugo tells us that
Todo ha ido empeorando, pero ni siquiera podría precisar con qué

ritmo. . . . Es natural que todo cambie, tuve que admitir mientras
manejaba hacia el Palacio de Bellas Artes. Después de mi recorrido
[por el centro], tan plagado de recuerdos que parecían perdidos para
siempre si no los conservaba para mí mismo, di vuelta a la izquierda.
Pasé frente a nuestra Alameda central.
[Everything has gotten worse, but I can’t even say how long it’s
taken. . . . It’s natural that everything changes, I had to admit as I
drove toward the Palace of Fine Arts. After my spin around down-
town, so full of memories that they seemed lost forever if I didn’t
preserve them for myself, I turned left. I drove by our Alameda
park.] (10–11)
The narrative voice tells us here that chronological time is unstoppable

(a fact), and that it is up to him to maintain the fragments of the past alive
in his thoughts (the desire to preserve the ruin and one’s place within it).
No one else will do so since the nation’s greatest project is to cancel the
past and strive, without looking back, toward the modern future. So it is his
Alameda park, not an objective geographical place in the city, to which he
refers. This zone is a place that evokes specific experiences for him and for
the person to whom he addresses his remarks; the Alameda is pure contin-
gency rather than an architectural place or a social space. He goes as far as
calling it nuestra Alameda or our shared park, one to which he can return
time and again in his memories even if those he has shared it with are long
deceased and if the times they spent together have ended. As he recreates
the city in his imagination, Hugo responds to the fragments of baroque al-
legory that Benjamin finds so promising for their revelatory potential. As
Hanssen recalls, Adorno interprets these urban landscapes in terms of a still

life, a naturaleza muerta whose mimesis is that of death and not life (3).
Alive in his thoughts alone, modern Mexico is for Hugo a remnant, a ruin,
“a falling away from pure ‘historical’ time into inauthentic ‘spatialization’
amd a temporality of transience” (Hanssen 3). The pull of memory and the
transience of modernity find common ground in the ruinous narratives of
García Ponce’s Hugo.
Whatever the sacrifices might have been—the lives of those who
died during the Olympics, those who are unemployed or chronically sick
from the pollution of the modernized industrial parks, those who feel
alienated and outside even in their homes and cities of birth—the nation
forges ahead. The narrator of Pasado presente unites the temporal dimen-
sion of the contingent experiences we have already examined in Crónica,
De ánima and Inmaculada with the spatial dimension into one overwhelm-
ing feeling of despair:
¡Melancolía, melancolía! Esa palabra sagrada no se puede dejar de

sentir. Alguien, tal vez yo, en mis muchas mañanas, tardes y noches de
ocio, tiene que hacer la crónica de esa época desaparecida no sólo en
el tiempo, sino también, en gran medida, en el espacio. Después de
todo, durante esa temporada muchos de entre nosotros tratamos de
ser escritores.
[Melancholy, melancholy! That sacred word is all I can feel. Some-
one, maybe even me, in my many mornings, afternoons, and evenings
of idleness, has to write the chronicle of that bygone era that has dis-
appeared from both time and space. After all, during those days many
of us tried to become writers.] (Pasado 11)
Rather than an obstacle to writing, this narrator’s melancholic lament leads

him to compose the personal and allegorical chronicle entitled Pasado presente
that represents frustrated desire for a recovery of that lost era while simulta-
neously recognizing once and for all that this is impossible. Hugo is not de-
prived of his homeland; he is not physically exiled, but he feels the loss of
something he cannot quite name (Kristeva, Powers 145). In the midst of that
lost paradise, as he tours the streets and neighborhoods that were once ‘his,’
Hugo compensates for a sentiment of disconnection from this historical re-
ality by creating a fiction in which he recovers himself as an actor, as a subject
in a series of roles he must play. The storyteller does not die but lives to nar-
rate this melancholic compulsion. As a coda to his novel, García Ponce ends
with a brief paragraph that could be a summation of the image of the Angel
of History. Only this time around, the rubble at his feet are pages.
A BRIEF RETURN TO THE RUIN 䊏 183
Esto está acabado. Un hombre viejo contempla un alto montón de

cuartillas, como dice Thomas Mann. Terminó la ilusión del comienzo,
como dice Musil. Lo demás es larga espera de la muerte, como dice
Bataille. O para citar un nombre aún más ilustre the rest is silence, como
dice Shakespeare. Hago una atroz mezcolanza de escritores favoritos
de Geneviève, Lorenzo y míos; termino con un nombre ilustre,
favorito de todos los amantes de la literatura.
[It’s all over. An old man contemplates a huge pile of pages, as
Thomas Mann says. The illusion of the beginning is over, as Musil
says. Everything else is the long wait for death, as Bataille says. Or, to
quote an even more illustrious name, the rest is silence, as Shakespeare
says. I make a dreadful mixture of Geneviève’s, Lorenzo’s, and my
own favorite writers; I end with an illustrious name, the favorite of all
lovers of literature.] (349)
Thomas Mann writes from a sanatorium that no longer exists, Musil writes
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire that has ceased to be, and Shakespeare
is as much of a mystery today as he has ever been. Each is the object of spec-
ulation and each inhabits a space of invention. Hugo is not the exception.
Hugo is made to stand aside and observe himself, from both past and
present, as part of a national spectacle even if he concludes that he is merely
fulfilling the expectations of others and that the fluidity of his ‘flesh’ seems
more a one-way street than a two-way passage of experiences. In what
Homi Bhabha calls the “problematic boundaries of modernity” (142)
within which these characters function, language and culture are constantly
being appropriated by discourses of the modern used to promote some evi-
dence of national goals held in common by all. But, as Bhabha points out,
these shreds and traces of cultural moments and historical events are
patched and sutured together, not in an arbitrary fashion but rather with
definite ends in mind. He reminds us that “[t]he language of culture and
the community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the
rhetorical figures of a national past” (142). It is in his Benjaminian con-
frontation with this process—one which is not contingent but a very con-
sciously planned strategy, in spite of carefully orchestrated appearances to
the contrary—that Hugo finds both a loss and a recovery of himself at the
same time. Like a survivor in the underground tunnels of Mexico City after
an earthquake (the natural disaster of 1985 that functions as a leitmotif in
the novel), a singular voice heard amid the ruins of culture, Hugo writes his
own version of the chronicle of the nation. This new Orpheus finds his sto-
ries in the fissures of the present that other discourses attempt to pave over.
APPENDIX
MEXICO AND MODERNITY: CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS FOR

GARCÍA PONCE’S TEXTS
1867 Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Austria in Querétaro. Return

to national rule. Benito Juárez, elected in 1858, was restored to the
presidency. Édouard Manet painted three versions of The Execution
of Maximilian in three successive years, 1867–69.
1910–11 Francisco I. Madero won the presidential elections and the Mexican
Revolution began.
1910 To celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Mexican inde-
pendence from Spain, President Porfirio Díaz began work on the
project of a new national theater. By 1932, this became the art
deco structure known today as El Palacio de Bellas Artes. For the
same centennial celebrations, the statue of El Ángel de la Inde-
pendencia was erected in central Mexico City, having been com-
missioned by Porfirio Díaz in 1902. By 1925 was made into a
mausoleum for the ashes of heroes of the Mexican Independence,
such as Nicolás Bravo, Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and
Guadalupe Victoria. Its structure (the winged victory) and func-
tion as a locus for both celebration and protest are similar to the
Victory Column in Berlin.
1920s Between 1924 and 1925 Walter Benjamin wrote his work the
Trauerspiel (Origins of German Tragic Drama), which was published in
1928.
1920s Between 1927 and 1929 he also collected the fragmentary notebooks
that were published posthumously as The Arcades Project.
1929 Founding of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario [National Revo-
lutionary Party], the political party that became the PRI (Partido
Revolucionario Institucional) [Institutional Revolutionary Party]
and that held the presidency until the elections of 2000.
䊏 185 䊏
186 䊏 APPENDIX
1932 Juan García Ponce was born in Mérida, Yucatán, September 22,
into a family of landed aristocracy (on his maternal side). His
recollections of these early days are filled with idyllic moments
shared with siblings and numerous relatives. The prose fragments
of Personas, lugares y anexas revolve around recollected autobio-
graphical episodes from those years, articulated around recovered
feelings and nostalgic losses.
1930s–40s Flourishing of Mexican muralism in the government-sponsored
public works projects of artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente
Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Murals, intended as art to be
shared among all citizens in a collective venue, were commissioned
for government buildings and other public monuments such as the
Mexico City water works.
1934–40 Presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. Expropriation of land and national-
ization of oil industry in 1938. Landowning families abandoned the
provinces for the capital, having lost their regional hold on hacien-
das and workers. The García Ponce family was spurred only in part
by these political changes to abandon their native territory of Yu-
catán for the capital city; the other factor was more personal and was
connected to marital infidelity on the part of his father, a fact retold
in Personas, lugares y anexas.
1934 As Secretary of Public Education, Samuel Ramos published El perfil
del hombre y la cultura en México [Profile of People and Culture in
Mexico] as a concomitant to Minister of Education José Vasconce-
los’s national projects. Ramos concentrated on ontological questions
and national identity, and his writings influenced politicians and
intellectuals in Mexico and elsewhere.
1940–46 Presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho. Under his rule a change of
paradigm began to occur as young generations began to migrate to
Mexico City from the ruined haciendas of the provinces. Ávila Ca-
macho’s taste in cinema ran to the charro archetype of Jorge Negrete
as a national prototype. The paradox is that incipient urbanization
did away with this icon, whose place was later taken by the actor-
comedian Cantinflas.
1945 García Ponce and his family moved to Mexico City, where Juan
began to attend a Marist private school for boys. In Personas, lugares
y anexas, he reconstructs home life, school days, and his adolescent
longings during these years, especially from the perspective of an
inhabitant of interiors looking out.
1946–52 Presidency of Miguel Alemán Valdés. With the social and economic
tensions of the war years over, Mexico entered a “boom” along with
much of the rest of the West. Amid the prosperity of the Alemán years
was the golden age of Mexican cinema production. The quantity of
films, as well as the profits earned from them, peaked between 1946
and 1952. Genre films—musicals, comedias rancheras [Western come-
APPENDIX 䊏 187
dies], and melodramas—guaranteed commercial success but left many

of the more experimental filmmakers out of the industry. One particu-
lar notable figure among these excluded directors is the exiled Spaniard
Luis Buñuel whose so-called Mexican phase of filmmaking produced
such works as Los olvidados (1950) [The Forgotten/sometimes titled
The Damned]. United in their rejection of the film, Mexican critics
and moviegoers preferred Jorge Negrete and other recognizable faces
and stories. García Ponce personalized the meaning of the films of the
1940s and 1950s for him as a young man in the fragment “Mi primera
casa en México” [My First House in Mexico City] in the collection Per-
sonas, lugares y anexas. His preference for imports such as The Portrait
of Dorian Grey had more to do with the nanny who accompanied him
than with the intrinsic quality of the film. For more details on this work
see my article “All Streetcars are Named Desire: The Lost Cities of
Juan García Ponce’s Personas, lugares y anexas.”
1950 Formation of the generación de medio siglo (aka Generación de la
Casa del Lago, aka Generación de la Ruptura [Generation of the
House on the Lake, Generation of Rupture]) among artists and writers
born between 1930 and 1935. These young intellectuals challenged the
aesthetic norms and nationalist goals of the postrevolutionary era.
Their models were Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz and their goal was
to renovate narrative forms and pictorial representation. Juan García
Ponce and Fernando, his artist brother, formed part of the core of
the generación.
1951 Opening of the new, model campus of the UNAM (Universidad Na-
cional Autónoma de México) [National Autonomous University of
Mexico], an educational project whose architecture combines his-
torical, traditional motifs (on the facades) with innovative structural
designs. This was declared to be the mythical home of knowledge
for future projects. “Construir la patria” [building the nation] was
the slogan used to describe the vast public works of the Alemán era.
This ranged from highways to bridges to dams, in particular the
Cuernavaca road from that city to the capital and the Mexican part
of the Pan American Highway. The modernization of Acapulco for
foreign tourists owes its impetus to President Alemán.
1950s Construction and development of the Zona Rosa [Pink Zone] in
downtown Mexico City as a magnet for tourists, young intellectuals,
and wealthy urbanites interested in exploring cultures other than
their own and in feeling part of the birth of a “new” Mexico. Explo-
sion of suburban spaces around the capital, beginning with the
planned residential Ciudad Satélite [Satellite City] and its utopian vi-
sion of democratic commuter neighborhoods extending throughout
the city. Urbanization also took the form of multifamily high-rises for
lower-to-middle income groups to accommodate immigration to the
capital; these included the complex at Tlatelolco which later becomes
the scene of the disasters of 1968.
188 䊏 APPENDIX
1956 García Ponce received the Premio Ciudad de México [Mexico City
Prize] from President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.
Construction of the Torre Latinoamericana [Latin American Tower]
office building in the center of Mexico City. With this relatively tall
skyscraper (by D.F. standards it stood alone), Latin America ac-
quired its first visible symbol of modernity.
1957 In July an earthquake centered in Guerrero provoked serious dam-
age in Mexico City. The Ángel de la Independencia statue fell from
its pedestal, suffering some damage, which was repaired over the
course of the next year. This event forms part of García Ponce’s rem-
iniscences in Pasado presente. The statue survived intact during the
devastating quake of 1985.
1960s Emergence of the Onda and Escritura movements, whose aesthetic
interests diverged into popular modes, on the one hand, and experi-
mental texts on the other. Another space of encounter between
opposing answers to the rising questions of national identity.
1961–63 García Ponce was awarded a Rockefeller Grant for travel to the
United States.
1964–70 Presidency of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz under whom student and worker
repression was intensified and reached a crescendo in the massacre
in Tlatelolco in 1968.
1966 Art exhibit entitled Confrontación de 1966 in which José Luis
Cuevas, Manuel Felguérez, Vicente Rojo, Fernando García Ponce,
and other young artists staged a challenge to the pictorialism of
previous generations, especially the hallowed muralist tradition.
Akin to the French artists’ Salon de Refusés during Manet’s time.
October 2 student massacre by government troops sent at the be-
hest of President Díaz Ordaz to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas
[Plaza of the Three Cultures], Tlatelolco, enclosed on all sides by
the same high-rises built to house urban families. Aside from the
overtly political aspect of these acts, generational gaps also were
opened by what was seen as an attack of the father figure on an en-
tire generation of his children. The material toll of human deaths
was in the hundreds, and the long-term cultural toll was just as
great. Two days later, as a representative of the Asamblea de In-
telectuales y Artistas [Assemby of Intellectuals and Artists], García
Ponce was arrested as he left the offices of the newpaper Excélsior,
where he presented a manifesto in support of the student protests.
The arrest was later rescinded since police may have confused him
with a student leader.
1968 October 12, postponed from the traditional summer schedule due to
what the federal government called political unrest, the Olympic
Games opened in Mexico City. The modern sports venue, including
many of the swimming and track spaces of the UNAM, was meant as
APPENDIX 䊏 189
a public homage to Mexico’s definitive entrance into modernity. The

economy took a tremendous hit from this enormous federal invest-
ment of funds, and the political ramifications were on the front page
of the nation’s woes for a long time. Both U.S. track and field pro-
testers (with black gloves for the Black Panthers) and Mexican pro-
testers over govenment policies shared the spotlight.
1968 García Ponce published Desconsideraciones, a collection of essays on
the visual arts, culture, cinema, and social values such as “chauvin-
ismo” [chauvinism] from the 1960s.
1970–76 Presidency of Luis Echevarría Alvarez. The term “Mexican miracle”
began to be applied to the modernizing influences. What is now
called the Guerra Sucia [Dirty War] against remnants of the politi-
cal opposition of the 1960s began.
1970 First Mundial de Fútbol [World Soccer] games held in Mexico. This
was another touted step toward modernity in the eyes of the media
and the government.
1971 June 10, Jueves de Corpus [Corpus Christi Day], the Halconazo, or
attacks by the paramilitary groups known as the Halcones [Falcons]
against demonstrators in Mexico City. Despite clear and mounting
evidence to the contrary, Echevarría remained officially innocent of
any involvement as of 2005.
1971–72 García Ponce won a Guggenheim Fellowship.
1972 García Ponce published La invitación, a novel whose backdrop is com-
posed of a general cacophony of the events of the Halconazo of 1971.
1975 García Ponce published Teología y pornografía. Pierre Klossowski en su
obra: una descripción [Theology and Pornography. Pierre Klossowski
in His Works: A Description].
1976–82 Presidency of José López Portillo. Devaluation of the peso and
boom in the petroleum industry. His inaugural address mentioned
the national “crisis.”
1980 García Ponce won the Medalla Yucatán, the first of four prizes for
contributions to culture presented by his home state. He is the only
yucateco to be awarded all four of these honors.
1981 García Ponce won the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo [Anagrama
Essay Prize] for Teología y pornografía. He was also awarded the Cruz
de Honor por Ciencias y Artes de Primera Clase [First Class Cross
of Honor for Arts and Sciences] by the Republic of Austria.
1982–88 Presidency of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado. During times of severe
economic inflation, he promised not to promise the impossible.
1982 García Ponce published Crónica de la intervención, a two-volume his-
torically framed novel which weaves together family chronicles and
national narratives to form a tale of tradition faced with modernity.
190 䊏 APPENDIX
In the same year he published the collection of essays on the arts and
literature entitled Figuraciones.
1984 García Ponce published De ánima, an epistolary novel filled with
erotic episodes.
1985 García Ponce was awarded the Premio de la Crítica [Critics Prize]
for De ánima.
September 19 earthquake devastated Mexico City. Rebuilding took
years, and even decades. In some cases, the rubble was cleared to
make way for skyscrapers and modern office complexes rather than
reconstruction of the buildings of the past. This natural disaster
cleared the way for a new skyline for a metropolis that still sought
to prove its modernity. About 10,000 died in the earthquake and af-
tershocks, and many more were left homeless years later. The rubble
revealed the flaws at the heart of the system that could not cope with
such disasters and on whom citizens could not count for relief. The
disaster spurred an exodus from the city that overpopulated provin-
cial capitals by the end of the century.
1986 Second Mundial de Fútbol held in Mexico despite the devastating
effects that lingered from the disaster the year before.
1987 García Ponce published Apariciones, a collection of essays on writers
such as Jorge Luis Borges, Malcolm Lowry, and Vladimir Nabokov,
and on artists Vicente Rojo, José Luis Cuevas, and Paul Klee. He
also included two essays on Pierre Klossowski and Georges Bataille.
1988–94 Presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Fraudulent elections
brought to power a technocracy that created tremendous wealth for
a few, promoted foreign-educated technocrats, and continued the
electorate’s growing disenchantment with politics. Never indicted
officially for fraud or any other crime, Salinas ended up living in
exile in Ireland and working as a finanical consultant.
1989 García Ponce received the Premio Nacional de Literatura [National
Prize for Literature].
García Ponce published Inmaculada, in which the concepts of inno-
cence and perversity are inverted, and the antinomies of guilt and in-
nocence no longer stand in opposition. The human body becomes the
medium through which the experiences of the social world are filtered.
1991 García Ponce won the second of the series of cultural awards from
Yucatán, the Premio de Literatura Antonio Mediz Bolio.
1992 García Ponce received the Premio de Narrativa Colima [Colima
Prize for Narrative] for Crónica de la intervención.
1993 García Ponce was named Creador Emérito [Writer Emeritus] by the
Sistema Nacional de Creadores [National Association of Writers].
APPENDIX 䊏 191
García Ponce published the novel Pasado presente, his last before his
death in 2003. A chronicle of a very personal sort, this text reexam-
ines the events of the twentieth century as they cause innumerable
changes in the people, places, and society of Mexico. The deteriora-
tion of the utopian city is the background for a narrative of promis-
cuity and indifference, ending with questions about who is to blame.
1994 January 1, the first appearance on television of Subcomandante Mar-
cos and the Zapatistas in the state of Chiapas. President Salinas and
many politicians were taken by surprise. The Zapatistas declared war
on the federal government. Neither the indigenous “question” nor
the question of national identity seem to have been solved by 2006.
In March, PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was
murdered in the Lomas Taurinas section of Tijuana while cam-
paigning for his party’s nomination. A scandal broadcasted on all of
the media across satellite networks, this event provoked more ques-
tions than answers even though a suspect was caught and jailed. The
eye of the television camera did not seem to be reliable enough to
catch the tricks of politics.
Implementation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agree-
ment) [The Tratado de Libre Comercio] created an atmosphere of
privatization, including in such public institutions as the Aeropuerto
Internacional de la Ciudad de México Benito Juárez [Mexico City,
Benito Juárez Airport] and in a variety of communications and bank-
ing networks. The maquiladora sweatshops on the U.S.-Mexico bor-
der began to provide cheap labor for exported goods, inducing a
massive immigration out of Mexico.
1994–2000 Presidency of Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León. The economic
crisis continued, as did the policies of Salinas under this hand-
picked successor.
1995 García Ponce published a collection of short stories entitled Cinco
mujeres [Five Women] as a homage to Austrian writer Robert Musil.
1996 García Ponce won the third of the series of cultural awards from Yu-
catán, the Medalla Eligio Ancona.
García Ponce published Personas, lugares y anexas, a collection of
short prose pieces, which form a constellation of autobiographical
remembrances beginning with his childhood in Yucatán and
Campeche. Rather than a chronology of events, he returns to peo-
ple, places, and spaces (as the title reflects) to evoke emotionally-
charged connections to them.
2000 Election of Vicente Fox Quesada as president. A member of the
PAN party [Partido de Acción Nacional], which created an alliance
with other oppositional parties, Fox displaced the PRI for the first
time in seventy-one years with promises of “cambio” [change].
192 䊏 APPENDIX
2001 García Ponce won the XI Premio de Literatura Latinoamericana y

del Caribe Juan Rulfo. Awarded by the Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes de México, the University of Guadalajara, the
government of the state of Jalisco, and the Fondo de Cultura
Económica, this prize recognizes life achievement.
2003 García Ponce won the fourth award in the series presented for his
contributions to culture, the Medalla de Honor Héctor Victoria
Aguilar. December 27, García Ponce died at his home in Mexico
City after a long illness.
Sources (also cited in Works Cited) for the above timeline are Sergio
Aguayo Quezada, El Pequeño Almanaque Mexicano; Enrique Krauze, Mexico:
Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996; Elena Ponia-
towska, La noche de Tlatelolco; and the website for the Ángel de la Indepen-
dencia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_%C3%8ingel.
Information on the details of García Ponce’s biography come from refer-

ences in all of his texts and from http://www.garciaponce.com, an incredi-
bly complete source about the author compiled by Magda Díaz y Morales
with links to many other sites.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: TRACES OF THEORY, TROPES OF MODERNITY
1. As he writes of the current state of the humanities and the university

in crisis, Dominick LaCapra turns, perhaps not unexpectedly, to the trope of
ruin and the works of Habermas and Benjamin as referential of the ruin in
more positive terms than negative. In a detailed footnote LaCapra mentions
that this metaphor does not belong only to those philosphers mentioned but
also to Adolph Hitler and Albert Speer, whose turn toward monumental relic
contradicts the absence of nostalgia in Benjamin’s view of the ruin. The
Third Reich gives a “ruin value” to the architectural feats (LaCapra 202) that
Benjamin disputes. We might in a future study examine the links between
dictatorial figures and the architectural ruin that survives their reigns.
2. In his book on modern Mexico, Rubén Gallo designates five fronts
on the battleground of the early postrevolutionary nation of the 1920s and
1930s: the camera, the typewriter, the radio, cement architecture, and the
public stadium. Although, as I write, his book has not yet been published, we
appear to coincide somewhat in the deployment of these ‘tropic’ items in
that I have chosen to approach García Ponce and the second half of the cen-
tury from the perspectives of three of these, namely the photograph, the ar-
chitectural structure, and the sports stadium. Gallo is to be admired for his
exploration of cultural practices and modes of representation that indicate
a break with the past. I hope to signal the shadowing of “the break and the
period” in written and visual texts of this later era.
3. In the sixteenth-century text Crónica Mexicáyotl, the cronista Fer-
nando Alvarado Tezozómoc emphasizes the eight cultural and linguistic
groups that merge in the valley of Mexico to form what will become
Tenochtitlán. But his contemporary, the indigenous historian Domingo
Francisco de San Antón Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, builds into the al-
ternative version of events contained in his narrative not merely the
patronymics of the founding of the city but the first acts of construction. In
La fundación de México [The Founding of Mexico] he describes the procuring
䊏 193 䊏
194 䊏 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
of food from the lagoons as a communal activity, followed by the physical

founding of a place. He writes: “E inmediatamente fueron a vender y a com-
prar, regresaron luego y tomaron piedra y madera, aquélla pequeñita y ésta
delgadita; y al punto cimentaron con ellas, al borde de la cueva; pusieron así
la raíz del poblado aquel: la casa y templo de Huitzilopochtli” [And immedi-
ately they went out to sell and to buy, then they returned and took up stone
and wood, the first very small and the second very thin; and at that moment
they built a foundation with them outside the cave; they gave root that way
to that settlement: the house and temple of Huitzilopochtli] (18). It is obvi-
ous that, for this chronicler at least, the material building of a community
is an early sign of an imagined collectivity that shares structures of belief
(the temple) and of exchange (buying and selling). Unless otherwise indicated
all translations from Spanish are my own.
CHAPTER 2: THE STORYTELLER’S RUINS
1. Writing on politics and aesthetics in the Latin American novel,

critic Raymond Williams notes that, in the case of Mexico, Carlos Fuentes,
Juan García Ponce, Fernando del Paso, and others of that generation “were
the producers of the grand narrative, memorable characters, and [that]
their interests were fundamentally epistemological” (41). I tend to disagree
with this statement to the extent that García Ponce’s texts, while interested
in history, are not historicist. If the “grand narratives” survive, they do not
look like they did before. Perhaps Williams and I would agree to call this
writer a modernist (Williams goes on to say he is not postmodern) for two
reasons: one, there are still semblances of plot and character, if fragmented;
two, he is the epitome of modern aesthetics in Habermas’s terms of unfin-
ished projects. The grand narratives do not spin into nothingness, but they
do not correspond to the official projects of celebratory nationhood either.
2. In her useful overview of the Mexican novel between 1968 and
1988, Cynthia Steele dedicates one entire section of her book to a category
designated as “The Novel of Tlatelolco” and to the narratives and docu-
ments produced as a result of the events of 1968. By extension, Vittoria
Borsò refers to the novels subsequent to this heterogeneous group as “la
novela postlatelolco” [post-Tlatelolco novel] (66). Steele finds some thirty
novels covering a variety of forms, among them the testimonials of La noche
de Tlatelolco [Massacre in Mexico] by Poniatowska and Los días y los años [The
Days and the Years] by Luis González de Alba. She also mentions Fernando
del Paso’s Palinuro de México [Palinurus of Mexico] and Jorge Aguilar Mora’s
Si muero lejos de ti [If I Die Far From You], but García Ponce’s Crónica de la
intervención [Chronicle of an Intervention] does not appear among those
works listed. It is impossible to second-guess the reason, but given the
length of the novel (over 1,000 pages) and the shrouding of external events
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 䊏 195
in the guise of interior monologues and baroque erotic fantasies, one could
conclude that either or both of these factors precludes inclusion in a more
overtly political group of works. On the other hand, García Ponce’s fictions
have been easily placed among “an infamous series of high-class erotic nov-
els” (Castillo 143) and, upon his death last December, obituaries across the
board seemed to deem it necessary to include the tag line “No sería exager-
ado afirmar que la literatura mexicana le debe su erotismo a Juan García
Ponce” [It would not be an exaggeration to affirm that Mexican literature
owes its eroticism {erotic component} to Juan García Ponce] (Poniatowska,
“Jardín” 36). Now to state that all of erotic writing in Mexico has as its
source García Ponce would, in opposition to what the line states, indeed be
an exaggeration. But hyperbole aside, the emphasis on the lived bodies of
men and women does permeate his narratives, and it is one of the crucial as-
pects of the European texts and pictorial aesthetic that he finds most stimu-
lating to conjure up within the context of a Mexican readership.
3. The new millennium opened with another opening: that of the
case against Echevarría and his government over the Guerra Sucia [Dirty
War] that had at its lowest point the persecutions of students and protest-
ers in June 1971. In 2004, Mexican newspapers were filled with the legal
steps being taken to prosecute the ex-president, as well as with his lawyers’
steps to win him amnesty. The ‘miracle’ was clouded from the beginning
with the blood of those who did not agree with the sacrifices to the new
gods of the international market.
CHAPTER 3: MONUMENTS AND RELICS, I
1. Regarding the idea of doubling and “replication,” see Gliemmo

(24); for the role of repetition in the structuring of the novel, see Moreno
Durán (42). Both underline the Mariana/María Inés relationship rather than
a consideration of the text in its totality of thirty chapters and the interplay
among them.
2. It should be noted here that incest, a theme explored frequently by
García Ponce’s narrators, occurs in every other of his novels among the rich.
In De ánima, for instance, Paloma and her uncle are involved physically and
the language used to describe their encounters is always positive in the sense
of proposing a transgressive force against restrictive social norms. (Each one
transgresses in a different way, nevertheless.) Another example appears in
Inmaculada where traces or suggestions of an incestuous relationship are
present when Inmaculada and her brother share an apartment. Once again,
the act is represented as a discovery of sexuality and a desired erotic experi-
ence on the part of both the participants. In the end, however, incest is de-
fended by García Ponce as a necessity for the survival of a way of life and a
social class. For him, it is a ‘natural’ instinct to preserve the innate beauty of
the bourgeoisie when faced with the ugliness of society. In the essay “Infan-
cia en Mérida y Campeche” on the author’s early years in Mérida and
Campeche, García Ponce writes of his mother’s family and their rejection of
his father’s mercantile background and lack of important family tree. Al-
though he is of Spanish descent, this fact is not enough. Upon hearing of
their impending marriage, his maternal grandfather remarks about his fu-
ture son-in-law: “¿Qué pata puso ese huevo?” [What duck laid that egg?]
(16). This is followed by a second set of nuptials between his father’s sister
and his mother’s brother Fernando. The author continues: “¿Familia inces-
tuosa? Para nada: familia de gente guapa cuyos miembros se enamoraban de
los hermanos de los otros sin tener ningún parentesco. Mi primo Manuel
Barbachano Ponce se casó con mi prima Teresa Herrero García y así podría
seguir ad infinitum” [An incestuous family? Nothing of the sort: a family of
beautiful people whose members fell in love with brothers and sisters of
others without having any family {blood} relationship. My cousin Manuel
Barbachano Ponce married my cousin Teresa Herrero García and I could go
on like this ad infinitum] (16). Aside from the obvious commentary on
provincial society, there is more here. One can catch the allegory of a closed
(and “beautiful”) nation amid this description of an impenetrable and self-
reproducing family image. The paradox lies in the fact that the beauty is car-
ried by social class and not nation, however, with crossovers among those
who qualify despite borders and geographical distance.
3. The ruination of modernity’s projects now stands at the gates of
the heart of the city. The Zona Rosa in 2004 was seen as the “Zona Horro-
Rosa,” an embodiment of the allegory of construction and destruction tak-
ing place very visibly in the Distrito Federal. In an interview with the head
of the then business association of the Zona Rosa, Edmundo Cazarez
writes that on its streets “la decadencia es total” [decadence is complete and
total] (10A). From chic neighborhood for foreign investment and diver-
sion, this monument to the dreams of the 1970s has fallen into urban dete-
rioration and is the victim of projects never carried out to their conclusion,
a “rehén” [hostage] of globalization. But these forces came on the scene
late, and the Zona is several decades ahead of them.
CHAPTER 4: MONUMENTS AND RELICS, II
1. Bruce-Novoa has discovered crossovers between the costumbrismo

of the novel Doña Perfecta by nineteenth-century Spanish novelist Benito
Pérez Galdós and the presentation of provincial society in García Ponce’s
early plays, finding that the traditional family life in both is centered
around enclosures and patios: the spaces of familial relations and activities
but also of closeted individual frustrations and sacrificed desires. He con-
cludes: “Lives are wasted; dreams abandoned. . . . Youth is suppressed by
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 䊏 197
tradition, religion, and fear—a conflict metaphorical for traditional soci-

ety’s suppression of the individual. Any outside presence, especially from
Mexico City, threatens stability through the possibility of change” (6). He
notes in particular the same type of provincial/urban opposition found later
in Crónica. Yet it seems that in the later novel, rather than a simple case of
opposition, the two sides or panels reflect cycles of fear and repression back
onto each other; they cannot be escaped in either setting.
2. Pellicer finds a parallel between the ironic narrator of Crónica and
the narrator of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities when each talks
about the planning of public rituals of the State. Pellicer writes that there
are coincidences between “cuando se refieren, uno al Festival Mundial de
la Juventud y el otro a la Campaña Colateral y las celebraciones del que
sería el Año Austriaco o tal vez el Siglo Austriaco o mejor aún un Año Aus-
triaco-Universal y al ambiente burgués que rodeó los preparativos de esas
grandes celebraciones” [when they speak of, in the first case, the World
Youth festival and, in the second, the Collateral Campaign and the celebra-
tions of what would be the Austrian Year or maybe the Austrian Century or
even better the Austrian Universal Year and the bourgeois atmosphere that
surrounded the preparations for these grandiose celebrations] (169). It is
evident in both cases that the building up of monumental and grandiose
images of national projects is accompanied by a revelation of the decadence
of the bourgoisie that promotes them. Whether national, continental, or
“universal,” these projects hold hidden secrets of coercion that only surface
in the internal conflicts of the characters.
CHAPTER 5: DE ÁNIMA, DE CORPORE: THE RUINS OF THE BOURGEOIS WORLD
1. McCarthy notes in his Introduction to Tanizaki’s memoirs that

there is a striking resemblance between them and the diaries of his charac-
ters. With regard to the themes of “woman as mother, as femme fatale, and
as harlot” (McCarthy vi) this is the case, much as it is for other erotic con-
cerns such as fetishes, passions, and obsessions. The episodic nature of the
memoir (McCarthy xi) reflects the structure of The Key as well. This struc-
tural concern arises from Tanizaki’s interest in expanding the Japanese
canon of writing to include influences from the West. For him, France was
a particular source of aesthetic inspiration. The same holds true for García
Ponce, although the Mexican writer’s interests span other European cul-
tures and those of Asia as well. Perhaps the traditional values at stake in a
modernizing Japan, for instance, spoke to him as much as those of twenti-
eth-century Europe do.
2. For one possible literary source of such rules or conventions of the
erotic, see Pauline Réage’s Story of O, written in 1954, five years before
Klossowski’s text and almost three decades before De ánima.
3. My reference is to the philosophical view that spiritual values are

not reducible to material things and processes, whereas Bataille emphasizes
the crucial importance of corporeality and materialism.
4. This concept is explored in the selections of Bataille’s writings col-
lected in the volume Visions of Excess, in particular the essays entitled “The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “The Practice of Joy Before Death.”
5. This character is found in one of Bataille’s short stories originally
published in 1956. The tale bearing her name deals with the narrator’s visit
to the brothel of Madame Edwarda in search of ‘liberation’ through the
physicality of the love-passion he finds there in the form of this woman-
as-God gone awry.
6. In the section of Visions of Excess entitled “The Notion of Expen-
diture” (and quite aptly subtitled “The Insufficiency of the Principle of
Classical Utility”), Bataille discusses the concept of what he terms “the re-
grettable condition . . . of productive social activity” (117) which considers
“violent pleasure . . . as pathological” (116) in contrast to a proposal of
human “insubordination” through which “the human race ceases to be iso-
lated in the unconditional splendor of material things” (128). In this state-
ment, the social body of the State and the human body of its citizens are
posited in direct opposition to one another.
CHAPTER 6: MODERNITY, CONTINGENCY, COMPENSATION
1. My reference to ‘paralysis’ has much less to do with any supposi-

tion of authorial disease than it does with a text infused with an enervated
and devitalized social class facing its own demise.
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INDEX
Anderson, Benedict, 3, 82, 118, 133 Bataille, Georges, 20, 85, 106, 139
Ángel de la Independencia, 25–26, 115 écriture corporelle, 50, 132, 134, 139
See also Mexico (city); modernity expenditure, 112, 139, 140, 141, 157,
“Ante los demonios” (García Ponce), 198nn4–6
57 transgression, 133, 134, 136, 137,
“Autobiografía” (García Ponce), 32, 37 138, 142, 158
Avelar, Idelber, 145, 146, 147, 151, See also Klossowski, Pierre
158–59, 161, 177 Baudrillard, Jean, 130, 134
Avilés Fabila, René, 88–89 Benjamin, Walter
See also Olympic Games of 1968: afterlife of work of art, 16, 54, 55,
Díaz Ordaz 60, 97, 142
allegory, 17, 25, 26, 29, 32, 54–56,
Balthus (Klossowski de Rola) 58, 86, 89, 152, 159, 181
adolescents, paintings of, 163, 173, Angel of History, 22, 25, 26, 47, 57,
175, 176 120, 143, 152, 182
Living Room, The, 167 fig.1 Arcades Project, 13, 53, 55, 91, 105
Street, The, 168 fig. 2, 173–74 atrophy, 127
taboos, 163 aura, 13, 34, 77, 148
Baphomet, The (Klossowski), 132 Baudelaire, 24, 25, 42, 53, 143, 146,
See also Klossowski, Pierre 163
Barthes, Roland cityscapes and architectural dream-
afterlife of photograph, 154, 158 worlds, 14, 45, 50–51, 76, 89–91,
authentication, 150 105, 123, 127, 137, 160, 179
Camera Lucida, 143, 180 excess, 17, 53
contingency, 148, 149, 151 flâneur, 42, 85, 153
expenditure, 139, 140 fossils and stones, 14, 50, 68, 144,
innocence, 153 154
past as corpse, 147, 155, 163 fragmentation, 17
photograph as object and loss, marketplace, cultural, 152
144–48, 151–53, 157, 162 melancholic vision, 54, 68–69, 86,
See also specific titles 89, 92, 97, 103, 146, 158
䊏 211 䊏
212 䊏 INDEX
Benjamin, Walter (continued ) narrative, fragmentation of, 58–60,

model for social critique, 2, 4–5, 10, 62, 63, 66–68, 73, 77, 84–85, 164,
13, 14, 29, 54, 113, 115, 116 182
modernity, Paris as capital of, 13–14, retablo, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 81
53, 60, 76, 91, 94, 144, 154 role of photography in, 71, 77, 79–82
modernity, subjects of, 25, 63 ruins of family and empire, 49, 57,
monad, 61 62, 77, 84, 90
nightmare of modernity, 58, 83 triptych panel, 46, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63,
photography, 162 64, 66, 68, 71, 84, 104
See also modernity; ruins; storyteller; crónicas, 3, 31, 89, 164, 193n3
specific titles Cuevas, José Luis, 39, 40, 97, 160
Bhabha, Homi, 183 See also Mexico (country): muralists
Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 29, 31, 196n1 and new aesthetics
Cascardi, Anthony, 143–46, 148, 149 De ánima (García Ponce)

Castañeda, Quetzil E. aesthetic influences on, 65, 113, 115,
cultural dialogism, 5–6, 121, 126 116–19, 121, 122
defining the ruin, 6 allegory, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124,
reading ruins as runes, 10, 13, 16, 23, 127, 130, 132, 136, 140
66, 105 authenticity, 130
ruin as tourist trope, 1, 66 autochthony, 131, 142
See also ruins chiaroscuro, 142
Cézanne, Paul, 160 diary format, 106, 109, 113, 114,
Corona, Ignacio, 111–12 116–20, 123–24, 126–27, 128–29,
Crónica de la intervención (García Ponce) 134–35, 137, 139, 141–42
allegory, 58, 61, 62, 68, 69, 74, 78, discourse of desire, 128–29, 130,
79, 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 92 131–32, 133–35, 137, 139,
atmósfera del 68, la, 58, 67, 89, 102–3, 141–42, 149, 160
153 edifices and façades of modernity,
bourgeois aesthetics, 56, 65, 66, 67, 127, 131
70, 84–85 family epic, 137
chiaroscuro, 49, 59, 90, 92, 106 fetishes, 119–20, 124
class divisions in, 70, 71, 72, 77–78, film, role of, 129, 130, 137–38
79, 82, 90, 91, 165 human body, 106–7, 113, 116, 122,
dust and lint as cultural residues, 124, 133, 134–35, 137, 140, 141
90–91 incest, 133, 134, 136, 142
female body, 63, 64, 66, 69–71, 77, Laws of Hospitality, 125, 126, 134,
90, 124 164
historical events as nightmare, 58, male gaze, 106–7, 110–11, 115–17,
68, 69–70, 83, 84, 92, 93, 180 125–26, 128–29, 130–31, 169
incest, 71, 91, 195n2 masquerade, 111, 118
male gaze, 62, 63, 64, 68, 70 montage, 131, 132
modernity as façade, 58–59, 63, 71, mourning and melancholy, 123, 124,
72, 73–74, 79, 80 127, 140, 182
INDEX 䊏 213
nightmare, 117, 119 Gallo, Rubén, 193n2

palimpsest, 113, 115, 127 See also Mexico (city); modernity
perversion, 132, 140 García Ponce, Juan
photographic images in, 116, 117, arte intimista, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 77,
131, 132 98, 107, 114
pleasure and innocence, 113, 114–15, artist, figure of, 162
116–18, 121, 122, 129, 130, 133, baroque style, excesses of, 17–18, 46,
134, 136, 137, 139, 154, 164 65, 69, 119, 123
rationality and modernity, 132 class structure, 37, 49
retablo, 121 eroticism, 56, 65, 91, 125
triptych panel, 55, 59, 62, 63, 104, as European adventurer, 35, 36, 37,
106, 111, 118, 136 49, 112
uncanny, 127, 135 fragmentation and destruction, 14,
voyeurism, 112, 115, 118, 119, 125, 21–22, 56, 57
126, 127, 141 images of women, 63, 65, 104, 106,
“De la ausencia” (García Ponce), 107, 110
14–16, 95–96, 97 involuntary memory, 28–31, 32,
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 61 33–34, 35, 38, 51, 60, 75, 76,
Desconsideraciones (García Ponce), 14, 77, 102, 103, 122, 147, 173,
93, 95–97 179
“Dificultades imprevistas” (García landscapes and ruins, 24, 29, 32, 35,
Ponce), 72 55, 68, 71, 72, 75, 76, 80, 81, 92,
94, 95–96, 97, 103–4
“El escritor como ausente” (García library as metaphor, 14–16, 36, 91,
Ponce), 102 95, 126, 172
“Enigma” (García Ponce), 157 mafia literaria, 42
Escritura, 42, 44, 47, 56, 59, 60, 64, 67, melancholia, 35, 40, 57, 68, 75, 91,
158 93, 96, 97, 144–45
See also Glantz, Margo; Onda Mexico City as labyrinth, 23–25,
29, 34, 36, 47, 48, 51, 127, 136,
Foucault, Michel, 133 179
Freud, Sigmund, 136, 165 porosity of memory and event, 28,
Fuentes, Carlos 66, 180
high-rise as metaphor, 5–6, 17, 33, visual stories, 66
38, 50, 70, 142, 157, 172 See also Benjamin, Walter; specific
Mexico City as utopia, 23 titles
mirror of conquest, 4 Garro, Elena, 7
mythology and tradition, 39–40, 41, generación de medio siglo, 18–19, 24, 37,
71 39–43, 59, 109
unfinished modernity, 20, 39, 74, See also García Ponce, Juan
142, 172 Glantz, Margo, 42
See also Habermas, Jürgen; Jameson, See also Escritura; Onda
Fredric; modernity; Paz, Octavio; Grosz, Elizabeth, 154, 158, 171–72
ruins See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
214 䊏 INDEX
Habermas, Jürgen Invitación, La, (García Ponce), 93

exaltation of the present, 143 dystopian allegory, 97–102, 153
modernity as incomplete project, 5,
17, 20, 64, 106, 112, 194n1 Jameson, Fredric
temporality, 146, 153 concealed ideologies, 27, 110, 111
See also Fuentes, Carlos; Jameson, dialectic of break and period, 2, 5, 7,
Fredric; modernity 16, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 41, 75,
Huyssen, Andreas, 179, 180, 181 108, 112
modernity as struggle, 17, 19–20,
Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (Stephens 109
and Catherwood), 11, 12, 60 trope as symptom, 3, 110
“Infancia en Mérida y Campeche” See also Habermas, Jürgen;
(García Ponce), 29, 30, 32, 34 modernity
Inmaculada o los placeres de la inocencia
(García Ponce), 132 Kafka, Franz, 97, 98
allegory, 146, 151, 159, 165 Klossowski, Pierre, 115–16, 163
alterity, 157 aesthetic influence, 63, 65, 121, 135,
bourgeoisie, 146, 170–71 141–42
cemetery as ruin, 150–51 Baphomet, The, 132
chiaroscuro, 152 expenditure, 112, 139–40, 158
contingency, 153, 164, 172, 182 incest, 141–42
eroticism, 124, 157–58, 163–66, 175 ritual, 122–23, 124, 127–29, 130,
human body, 146, 148, 152–58, 135
170–71, 174 simulacra, 130
innocence and pleasure, 145, 149, See also Bataille, Georges; Bau-
150, 153, 155, 157, 165, 169–72, drillard, Jean; specific titles
176 Krell, David Farrell, 50, 106, 107, 124,
male gaze, 155, 161–64, 166, 169, 127, 138
176 Kristeva, Julia
Mexico City, 150, 159 abjection and allegory, 92, 93, 110,
mourning and melancholy, 145–47, 166
151, 152, 158, 161, 182 black sun and melancholia, 92, 93,
narrative structures, 149, 152–53, 182
155–56, 161, 163–64, 169 See also specific titles
palimpsest, 169
photography, role of, 146, 148–50, LaCapra, Dominick, 193n1
151, 153, 159, 169 Lectura pseudognóstica de la pintura de
pictorial, the, 159–60, 162, 164, 169, Balthus (García Ponce), 173,
172–77 175–77
rituals and ceremonies, 148, 159, “Lo viejo y lo nuevo” (García Ponce),
163, 165–66, 169 21, 23, 25
triptych panel, 55, 59, 62, 104, 146,
157 Manet, Édouard, 84–86
uncanny, 150–51, 160, 173 Olympia, 164, 169
INDEX 䊏 215
“María Luisas” (García Ponce), 106 contingency, 145

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 106, 153 contradictions of, 1–2, 13, 16, 18, 23,
contingency, 175 73, 93, 112, 135, 140
corporeality, 154–55, 158, 159–60, counterculture in, 23, 41
171–72 fragility of, 179, 180
palimpsest, 156 horrors of, 14, 33, 48, 50, 60, 83, 85,
temporality, 155, 156, 174 121, 123, 135
visible and invisible, 159–60, 162 innovation and adaptation, 17, 27,
See also Grosz, Elizabeth 30, 41
Mexico (city) legacy of Revolution, 20, 28–29, 31,
allegorical geography, 28, 36, 41, 41, 59, 64, 70, 83, 87
42, 51, 74, 75, 77, 90, 94, pathologies of, 14, 17, 22, 24,
136 141
detritus, 179, 183 splendors of, 4, 14, 18, 19, 32, 35,
as nightmare, 95–96, 97–98, 99–100, 48, 60, 83, 121, 123, 135
103, 180–82 subjectivity in, 63
See also Fuentes, Carlos; Gallo, Zona Rosa, 23, 25, 26, 47, 73,
Rubén; Olympic Games of 1968; 196n3
specific titles See also Benjamin, Walter; Fuentes,
Mexico (country) Carlos; Habermas, Jürgen;
class issues in, 108–9 Jameson, Fredric; Mexico (city);
construction of modern State, 18, Olympic Games of 1968;
20–21, 36, 40, 48–49, 72–73, 76, Paz, Octavio; ruins; specific
78–79, 81–83, 110 titles
consumer society, 22, 38, 73, 83, Monsiváis, Carlos
107, 109, 112, 145, 169 culture, 22, 37, 48, 107, 114
disillusionment, 27–28, 114 discourse of history, 41, 46, 108
masculine and feminine ideals, modernity, 39, 114
107–9, 110, 112, 135 See also modernity
muralists and new aesthetics, 18, 31, Mulvey, Laura
39, 41, 46, 59, 94, 160–61 spectatorship and fetishism,
Porter, Katherine Anne, 11–12 110–11
ruins of empire, 7–8 Musil, Robert, 56, 65, 66, 105, 117,
travelers’ fascination with, 10, 11, 122, 123
12, 13
See also Castañeda, Quetzil E.; Nietzsche, Friedrich, 83, 94, 138–39,
modernity; ruins; specific titles 140, 145
“Mi primera casa en México” (García
Ponce), 106 Olympic Games of 1968
“Mi última casa en Mérida” (García as Gran Proyecto, 78–81
Ponce), 28 as sublimated nightmare, 68, 103,
modernity, 6, 83 114
in Brazil, 2–3 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, as grotesque
chiaroscuro, 17 figure, 49, 81, 86–88
216 䊏 INDEX
Olympic Games of 1968 (continued ) PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institu-

mourning and loss, 161 cional)
political repression, 20, 21, 48, 49, machine of modernity, 6, 18, 20, 28,
57–58, 71, 85–86, 92, 100–2, 151, 57, 86, 89
182 See also Mexico (country); modernity
spectacle of modernity, 28, 79, 80,
81, 83, 151 “¿Qué pasa con la novela en Mexico?”
Tlatelolco, 83–84, 86, 93, 98, (García Ponce), 44, 45, 55
194n2
See also Mexico (city); Mexico Ramos, Samuel, 3, 4, 7
(country); modernity; ruins Riefenstahl, Leni, 80, 82
Onda, 22, 23, 42, 43–44, 47, 51, 59, 64, Rivera, Diego. See Mexico (country):
67, 93, 94 muralists and new aesthetics
See also Escritura; Glantz, Margo ruins, 1, 6, 7
“Otras voces, otros ámbitos” afterlife of, 16, 54, 55, 62, 69, 70,
(García Ponce), 30–31, 38, 75, 91
146 artifacts, 132
temporal paralysis, 146–47 bourgeoisie, 139, 140
construction and destruction, 2–6,
Pasado presente (García Ponce), 102 16, 50, 59, 74, 76, 79, 106, 139
contingency, 180, 181, 183 cultural traces, 1, 12, 36, 82, 123,
mourning, 182 133, 135, 180
Paz, Octavio debris, decay, and residue, 1, 16, 32,
architecture of India, 8, 9, 151 36, 55–56, 58, 69, 73, 80, 83, 85,
humanist, 32 91, 96, 104, 113, 116, 128, 166,
image of mirror, 4, 6, 161 180
mastery and experience, 113–14 diary as remnant, 127, 142
pyramid, 6 empire and, 7, 10
reader as voyeur, 120–21, 126 energy of, 139
vision, primacy of, 162 fetish and fossil, 9, 14, 54, 70
vislumbres (glimmers) of modernity, Freudian uncanny, 12, 24, 50, 60, 64,
5, 16, 19, 32, 38–39, 48, 54, 60, 68, 93, 98, 115, 123
67, 90, 106, 107, 135, 181 geographies and, 13
See also Fuentes, Carlos; Habermas, monument, 3, 29, 31, 37, 39, 40,
Jürgen; Jameson, Fredric; moder- 54–55, 65–66, 73, 80–81, 83, 95,
nity; ruins 112, 115, 118, 123, 141, 144–45,
Pellicer, Juan, 55–56, 67, 73, 102–3, 147, 179
197n2 palimpsest, 8–10, 16, 44, 54, 60,
Personas, lugares y anexas (García 62
Ponce), 33, 51, 121 photography, 144
“Pintura y lo otro, La” (García Ponce), as simulacra, 131
162 truth value of, 1, 13, 29
INDEX 䊏 217
See also Benjamin, Walter; Cas- Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro, 65–66, 135

tañeda, Quetzil E.; Freud, Sig- Key, The, 116–19, 122, 163, 197n1
mund; modernity; specific titles Teología y pornografía (García Ponce),
124
Steele, Cynthia, 194n2
See also Olympic Games of 1968: UNAM (Universidad Nacional
Tlatelolco Autónoma de México), 18, 72, 73,
storyteller 78
aesthetics, 29, 32, 60, 61, 67, 69, 145, See also Mexico (city); modernity;
160, 161–62 ruins
aura of, 31, 33, 34, 50, 81
ceremonies of, 46, 85–86, 146, 163 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 69,
narrative contradictions of, 36, 38, 87–88
40–41, 47–50, 70, 127, 140, 146, See also Olympic Games of 1968:
149, 182 Díaz Ordaz
sense of geographical place, 36 von Doderer, Heimito, 56–58, 65,
voice, 29, 58, 129, 169 122
See also Benjamin, Walter; specific
titles Williams, Raymond, 194n1
Surrealism, 64, 112, 130, 131
aesthetics of, 133, 135
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), 130
HISPANIC STUDIES / CULTURAL STUDIES
MEXICO’S RUINS
Juan García Ponce and the Writing of Modernity
At face value, the concept of modernity seems to reference a stream of social

and historical traffic headed down a utopian one-way street named “progress.”
Mexico’s Ruins examines modernity in twentieth-century Mexican culture as a
much more ambiguous concept, arguing that such a single-minded notion is inad-
equate to comprehend the complexity of modern Mexico’s national projects and
their reception by the nation’s citizenry. Instead, through the trope of modernity as
ruin, author Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández explores the dilemma presented by the
etymology of “ruins”: a simultaneous falling down and rising up, a confluence of
opposing forces at work on the skyline of the metropolis since 1968. He focuses
on artists and writers of the generación de medio siglo, like Juan García Ponce,
and envisions both the tales of modernity and their storytellers in a new light. The
arts, literature, and architecture of twentieth-century Mexico are all examined in
this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary book.
“Rodríguez-Hernández accomplishes what he describes in García Ponce’s

fiction: he opens readers to new connections, moving them beyond a Manichaean
choice of modernity versus ruin, toward a flexible reading of the mobility and inter-
referential nature of both. Rodríguez-Hernández teaches his readers the pleasure
and necessity of reading ruins, whether archeological, cultural, political, or literary.
The debris of the past is ever-present.”
— Carol Clark D’Lugo, The Fragmented Novel in Mexico:
The Politics of Form
Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative

Literature at the University of Rochester.
A volume in the SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors
State University of New York Press

www.sunypress.edu

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Mexico’s

AND THE WRITING

Juan García Ponce and the

State University of New York Press

© 2007 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

For information, address State University of New York Press,

Production by Judith Block

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ONE Traces of Theory, Tropes of Modernity 1

TWO The Storyteller’s Ruins 27

THREE Monuments and Relics, I 53

FOUR Monuments and Relics, II 75

FIVE De Ánima, de Corpore: The Ruins of the

SIX Modernity, Contingency, Compensation 143

SEVEN A Brief Return to the Ruin 179

Works Cited 199

I am very grateful to a number of individuals and institutions who have con-

straight, “al mantener mis pies pegados a la tierra.” Finally, I am appreciative

Traces of Theory, Tropes of Modernity

Benjamin for the development of an urban social critique to illuminate my

which then becomes interconnected in the lightning flash of the telegraph

rupture we have mentioned which mobilizes citizens on the road of moder-

category of the dialectical model of critique, proceeding beyond forgetting

much as it is for Fuentes in sweeping architectural design). Curiously, Paz

sight of the paradox of a city in the throes of ‘progress’ and modernization

The identification of Mexico as a site of ruinous fascination has been

mas famously and polemically calls the “unfinished project of modernity”

centers of Teotihuacán might be emptied of practitioners, but new sites

The Storyteller’s Ruins

to an imposed reconciliation mediated by the Marist fathers and mandating

nineteenth century, and in historians, especially humanists such as Alfonso

Ahí todo se borra. Otra imagen u otro recuerdo: Jorge,

[That’s where everything gets blurry. Another image or another

Figures inhabit an architecture of dreams and memories in his story, frag-

In his autobiographical writings, García Ponce claims to have found

tinge of loss even as they function as narrative monuments to those moments

that began to settle as contradictions and anomalies came to the surface.

[n]o sé si en este aspecto puedo hablar en nombre de mi generación

In the transition from pleasure to “necessity,” from storytelling as enjoy-

always been allied to mythology. Whether creating a stone pedestal for

As critic Armando Pereira summarizes, Mexico City in the 1950s bus-

caría en última instancia otro realismo, un testimonio, no una impu-

El terreno de la novela es ese terreno de la libertad absoluta en el que

While the concept of “absolute freedom” is more relative than absolute if

proposition of Benjamin’s view of what constitutes a “sacred” text, and not

the subjective consciousness of the characters who, rather than situate

obscure forces of ‘horror’ that Paz finds accompany an almost uncanny

as they themselves have contributed to the formation of part of the (cul-

Monuments and Relics, I

Heimito von Doderer no trata de escribir una novela histórica; sin

THE MOVABLE BODY OF THE TRIPTYCH

An integral part of a narrative triptych of which De ánima and Inmaculada o

tial number of documentary texts as evidence of her desire to unearth the

ter, or inert mass . . . the melancholic remain[s] bound to abject matter”

intrusive forces of politics. Previous tales have been constructed around a

“Dificultades imprevistas” [Unforeseen Difficulties], which charts the re-