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Subversive Narrative and Mexicanidad in the Works of Luis Buñuel and Juan Rulfo

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Subversive Narrative and Mexicanidad in the Works of Luis Buñuel and Juan Rulfo Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Subversive narrative and Mexicanidad in the works of Luis Buñuel and Juan Rulfo Author(s) Kenny, Ivan Publication Date 2015-09-30 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/5552 Downloaded 2021-09-27T05:19:47Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. SUBVERSIVE NARRATIVE AND MEXICANIDAD IN THE WORKS OF LUIS BUÑUEL AND JUAN RULFO Ivan Kenny, NUI Galway Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for PhD in Spanish, National University of Ireland Galway (September, 2015) Supervisor: Professor Bill Richardson Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. iv Introduction: Mexico and Mexicanidad ................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Subversive Narrative Techniques ..................................................................... 23 1.1 Narrative Structures........................................................................................................ 24 1.1.1 Socio-realism ........................................................................................................... 25 1.1.2 Modernism ............................................................................................................... 26 1.2 Self-Reflexive Narration ................................................................................................ 27 1.3 Spatiality......................................................................................................................... 31 1.3.1 Heterotopias of Deviance ........................................................................................ 34 1.3.2 Space and Gender Performance ............................................................................... 36 1.4 Humour in Subversive Narrative.................................................................................... 38 1.4.1 Brecht and Humour ................................................................................................. 39 1.4.2 Carnival Humour ..................................................................................................... 41 1.4.3 The Grotesque ......................................................................................................... 43 1.4.4 Abjection ................................................................................................................. 44 1.4.5 Black Humour ......................................................................................................... 45 1.4.6 Entropic Humour ..................................................................................................... 47 Chapter 2: Spatiality, Ritual, and Religion in Buñuel and Rulfo ...................................... 51 2.1 Ritual and National Space .............................................................................................. 52 2.2 The Catholic Church in Mexico ..................................................................................... 54 2.3 Disruption of Normative Social Space ........................................................................... 56 2.4 Religious Ritual as Performance .................................................................................... 74 Chapter 3: Un-mapping Normative Gender Identities in Buñuel and Rulfo ................... 89 3.1 Masculinities in Mexico ................................................................................................. 90 3.2 Femininities in Mexico................................................................................................... 93 3.3 Gender as Performance .................................................................................................. 96 3.4 Subversive Characterisation of Women ....................................................................... 106 3.5 The Mexican Mother .................................................................................................... 113 Chapter 4: Death and the Mexican Nation in Buñuel and Rulfo .................................... 125 4.1 Death and Mexico ........................................................................................................ 126 4.2 The Days of the Dead ................................................................................................... 128 4.3 Death, Heroism, and Class Conflict ............................................................................. 140 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 152 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 159 Filmography Luis Buñuel ................................................................................................... 176 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Bill Richardson at NUI Galway for his unwavering support and advice right through the completion of this investigation. I would also like to thank Dr. Lorna Shaughnessy, Dr. Tony Tracy, and Dr. Lorraine Kelly, who all made valuable suggestions along the way. Special thanks must also go to the NUI Travelling Studentship, Kerry County Council, and NUI Galway for their financial assistance with the project. Secondly, I would like to thank a number of people in Mexico who made my research trips there a stimulating and fruitful experience: to Helena Papacostas who warmly invited me to stay with her family in Mexico City; to Dra. Susana Quintanilla for her incisive commentary and humour; to Dr. Rafael Olea Franco at the Colegio de México for providing access to the excellent library resources there; to Dr. Juan Francisco Alcántara Pohls at the Universidad Iberoamericana; and to Sr. Aldo Joel Balcázar Toledano at the archives in the Cineteca Nacional. Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my friends and family for their constant encouragement over the past four years. I am grateful for the many suggestions from Massimo Cattaneo and Páraic Ó Súilleabháin. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to the loving support of my mother Collette and my partner Barbara. Introduction: Mexico and Mexicanidad ‘Luchamos con entidades imaginarias, vestigios del pasado o fantasmas engendrados por nosotros mismos. Esos fantasmas y vestigios son reales, al menos para nosotros mismos. Su realidad es de un orden sutil y atroz, porque es una realidad fantasmagórica’ (Paz 2002: 80). Through a comparative analysis of selected key Mexican works by Luis Buñuel and Juan Rulfo, dating from the period 1950 to 1962, the central aim of this thesis is to determine how these two artists’ use of subversive narrative techniques addresses, and in many ways undermines, unitary post-Revolutionary ideas of mexicanidad. In other words, this study examines the impact of Mexican cultural nationalism on the artistic practices of a writer, on the one hand, and a filmmaker, on the other. In both cases, it becomes clear that state- sponsored cultural nationalism in early- to mid-twentieth century Mexico politicises the artist’s outlook and aesthetics. Such politicisation is manifest in the expression of major thematic concerns that coincide across the selected corpus of narrative fiction and film (especially religion, gender and popular culture which are all treated in chapter-length detail) as well as in the use of subversive narrative techniques which are often medium-specific but which, I maintain, serve the common end of artistic protest by means of deconstructing the myth and ideology of national unity and unitary national identity that underpins Mexican cultural nationalism in the period and which continually and forcefully informs political discourse in all its various articulations by the state during the first decades of the post- Revolutionary period. The term mexicanidad can be seen as an intricate web of discourses encompassing the social, political, and psychological aspects of national identity in Mexico, with further layers of complexity added by influential intellectual theories1, state rhetoric, and national cultural representations. Biron (2012: 18) describes mexicanidad as ‘an amorphous 1 Psychoanalytical studies on the nature of mexicanidad by Ramos (2014, 1st pub. 1934) and Paz (2002, 1st pub. 1950) often imagined the very concept they attempted to define. 1 simultaneity of complex historical, social, and psychological relations’. This constantly changing idea of the nation can be located somewhere between the hegemonic wielding of state power, and the ‘natural’ crystallization of ‘national-popular’ sentiment2. Of key importance is the issue of how being Mexican is imagined3 and codified through a variety of cultural forms, such as literature, film, and visual art. After the Mexican Revolution (1910- 20), aspects of cultural texts were often appropriated by state discourses in order to consolidate a collective sense of national identity4. Lomnitz-Adler (1992: 251) suggests that the Mexican state ‘prefers to invent that which it represents out of bits and pieces of images that are well known to all of us. This act of power stands in the way of the benefits of modernity (democracy) while it leaves people vulnerable to its economic implications’. The state also had
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