“I Move, Therefore I Am” Carlos Fuentes’S Transnational Mexicanness

Chapter 14 “I move, therefore I am” Carlos Fuentes’s Transnational Mexicanness Reindert Dhondt For approximately the past twenty years, Latin American culture has often been addressed from an explicitly “postnational” perspective. This “postnational turn” in the humanities can be attributed to the erosion of the nation- state, which is in turn the result of the increasingly intense communications and interdependence between the various regions of the world, known as “globalisation” (Castany- Prado 2007: 13; Vertovec 2009: 54). Generally speaking, these studies point out that the concept of nation has ceased to be the princi- pal reference in political, economic or identity discourse. Heavily inspired by the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Mexican sociologist Roger Bartra refers in this regard to a “post-Mexican condition”, stemming from the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) and the crisis of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri) rule in the 1990s, which he believed would pave the way for a pop- ular democratic renewal. In his 1991 article entitled “La venganza de La Ma- linche: hacia una identidad postnacional”, Bartra warns of a “fierce nationalist unification” that smothered Mexico’s multi- coloured society and legitimized authoritarianism, stating that “[…] when I point out the need to overcome cultural unease, I am not proposing as a cure an integration to the Anglo- American world parallel to the economic agreements on free trade with the United States and Canada.” (2002: 63) Bartra deconstructs nostalgic nationalist myths that underlie Mexican post-revolutionary culture, unsettling classical essentialist representations of mexicanidad as a static “cage of melancholy”. According to Bartra, the challenge to build a new “postnational” identity is inextricably interwoven with the need to overcome political authoritarianism and central- ising homogenization, dismissing thus the national as something static, pro- vincial and encumbering: “[…] we are faced with the problem of overcoming nationalist pride to build a postnational identity based on the multicultural and democratic forms of a civic life that forms part of the Western world.” (64) More recently, usage of the term “postnationalism” has increased consider- ably in studies of Latin American literature and culture. In their introduction to the collective volume New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narra- tive: Post-National Literatures and the Canon (2014), Timothy R. Robbins and © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/ 9789004370869_016 206 Dhondt José Eduardo González refer to the members of the Crack and McOndo move- ments as “postnationalists”, as their work transmits a “de-territorialised” sense of identity associated more with personal and global concerns than the idea of nation (Robbins & González 3). In a decade in which concerns about national identity receded as neoliberal optimism gained the upper hand, the writers of McOndo and Crack were seen as advocates of globalization. Whereas the Boom broke with realist novels of social denunciation, but all the same kept up a political (commonly leftist) commitment, Jorge Volpi and his generation avoided social commentary and an explicit preoccupation with a shared cultural past and the search for a Latin American identity. The position taken by current- day “postnationalist” writers extends far beyond the cosmopolitan cri- tique of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges or the nineteenth- century Modern- ists, who produced fiction that has often been classified as “extraterritorial” (cf. Guerrero 173). In contrast, the so- called “postnational generation” does not aspire to question or extend the thematic boundaries of national literature as Borges and Darío aimed to do, but instead opt to ignore these boundaries com- pletely. Indeed, the Crack generation relegates to a second plane the search for an identity in essentialist terms and the construction of an imaginary national community that sustains much of Mexican―and by extension Latin American―“highbrow” literature. In his Diccionario del Crack (2004), Pedro Ángel Palou proposed a definition of “nationalism” symptomatic of the unease the term provoked among the end- of- the- century generation: “Mal entendido patrioterismo. En estética: esterilidad. Regresión anal, búsqueda de un origen imposible. Toda nación es una mezcla, un potlach, una maraña. No hay identidad, como no hay yo. El yo es los otros. La nación en singular no existe.” (202) [“Erroneously understood chauvinism. In aesthetics: sterility. Regression in time and the quest for an impossible origin. All nations are a mix, a potlatch, a tangled mess. There is no identity, as there is no self. The self belongs to others. Nation in the singular does not exist.”1] It is worth noting that the works of the “posnationalistas” reveal both the “globalisation of the novel” and “the noveli- sation of the global” (Siskind 27). In other words, to a certain extent their works illustrate the globalisation of the literary market that drives authors to presup- pose an implied reader who does not subscribe to a particular culture―consider the Alfaguara Global project or the literary blog El Boomeran(g)―and at the same time they are steeped in images of a globalised culture, most fre- quently characterised by neoliberal, mass-media and North American traits, which challenge a traditional oppositional cultural discourse that confronts 1 All translations from Spanish are mine..

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