Crack Manifesto

Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Jorge Volpi (Translated from Spanish by Cecilia Bartolin and Scott Miller)

The Crack’s Fair (A Guide) Pedro Ángel Palou

Italo Calvino, I believe, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, was the one to accurately point out the challenges facing the Crack novels. In those pages, Calvino refected on how literature and, above all, the narrative have been losing their potential readers to technology developed for entertainment: video games, mass media, and, most recently, for those who can afford them, virtual reality games through which—oh, para- doxes of development—someone with a very modern helmet and ana- tomical gloves can see, hear, and even touch the adventures offered on compact discs. How, then, can a narrator with his scarce means compete to attract readers lost in this vast world of obscurities? Calvino, always one step ahead, knew the answer: by using the oldest weapons of the oldest pro- fession in the world—no matter what people say about prostitution: Lightness. Calvino refected upon this virtue of literature, thinking that works such as Romeo and Juliet, The Decameron, or even Don Quixote

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 177 H. Jaimes (eds.), The Mexican Crack Writers, Literatures of the Americas, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62716-8 178 Crack Manifesto have their powerful narrative machineries built up according to an unu- sual lightness. Or better: to an apparent simplicity. It was easier to con- vey a terrible moral message by using this resource. The sharp look, the acidic social criticism are subject to a light and fresh humor which is not free, by its turn, from the most terrible of sarcasms. Chesterton used to say that humor in literature must produce hilarity, while freezing the smile in a refective grimace that can stop time and unbury the mirror. The frst place which we have visited at the Crack’s fair: The House of Laughter. Quickness. Communication theorists have known for a very long time that an infation of information brings a defation of meaning. The Persian Gulf war, the frst war broadcast via satellite, was a good example: in reality, we knew nothing of it although we believed we were watching and getting to know everything. However, we cannot deny that the frst thing to scare us was the dreadful sterility. If shortly after the beginning of the century the world shook itself, and the verb is graphic, with news of the Titanic’s shipwreck, nowadays the tragedies of the war in Sarajevo do not shock nor even provoke pity: they inform. The second place visited: The Roller Coaster. Multiplicity. Don Quixote is maybe the ultimate work par excellence in literary history. Gargantua and Tristram Shandy are at its heels. It is obvious to point out reality itself is multiple, it comes to us as multifac- eted, eternal. We need books in which a whole world is revealed to the reader, and can trap them. This word has a unique use here. It is not about identifcation, but the superpositioning of worlds which are being talked about. Using all the metaphorical potential of the literary text so we can say again: “So here you are, meet one another.” The third place visited at the Crack’s fair: The House of Mirrors. Visibility. The last virtue of prose, its crystalline texture. Even Flaubert agreed that: “What a sensitive matter is this of prose! One never fnishes to correct it. A good piece of prose must be as rhythmical and sonorous as a good verse.” Not sheer formalism, but a search for intensity of form, going deeply into the magnifcent virtues of the Spanish language and its multiple meanings. The fourth place at the fair: The Crystal Ball. Exactitude. Calvino subtly told us we should isolate the values to which we have been referring. And this item illustrates how there cannot be exactitude without precision, how there cannot be quickness without precision and exactitude, and how it is impossible to have lightness Crack Manifesto 179 without vertigo, transparency, and speed. Every good piece of prose is exact. Even more, it is balanced. The old concern about form and content is useless when a literary work faithfully searches for exactitude. Conan Doyle, for whom effect was everything, was pretty aware of that. To achieve it, one must use everything else. However, maybe the best lesson taken from Calvino’s words is that of the impossibility of exactitude in a literary work if it is naturally opened, reached without effort. Picasso said: “Inspiration does exist, but you have to fnd it working.” What are we trying to say? Agility and capacity of description (and to describe is to observe with the intention of making things interesting, exactly as Flaubert wanted, but also to select the big little things which are not just part of life, but which are life) are the ingredients that allow the reader to keep on reading restlessly to elevate his curiosity. This is what the narrator must pay more attention to at the end of the century: exactitude, which means to use the right word at the right time. And with this we have named the penultimate place visited: The Shooting Gallery. Consistency. Italo Calvino planned to write this section based only on the analysis of one of Melville’s most beautiful texts, Bartelby the Scrivener. This odd character, employed by a notary, refuses, little by little, to exist, repeating the sentence “I’d prefer not to.” In the end, Bartelby is locked up and dies repeating that sentence, even refusing to eat. Consistent with its life project and its future, the Crack novel longs for renewal in the last spot to be visited: another walk through the Crack’s fair, with the same willingness for failure, as shown in the following tetralogy:

1. The Crack novels are not small, edible texts. They are, rather, a bar- becue: let others write the steaks and the meatballs. Between that which is disposable and ephemeral, the Crack novels oppose the multiplicity of voices and the creation of self-ruling worlds, which is not a tranquil task. First commandment: “Thou shall love Proust above everyone else.” 2. The Crack novels are not born from certainty, which is the mother of all creative annihilations, rather from doubt, the older sister of knowledge. There is not one kind of Crack novel, but many; there is not one prophet, but several. Each writer discovers his own breed and shows it proudly. Descendants of champion fathers and 180 Crack Manifesto

grandfathers, the Crack novels take all their risks in stride. Second commandment: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s novel.” 3. The Crack novels are ageless. They are not novels of formation, and Pellicer’s phrase reemerges: “I am old, and believe that the world was born with me.” They are not, therefore, the frst works of their authors, sweet temptations of autobiography; they are not about frst loves or family histories, which underline everything. If the writer’s most valued possession is the freedom to imagine, these novels go much further, demanding more from their narra- tors. Nothing is easier than to write about oneself; nothing is more boring than a writer’s life. Third commandment: “Thou shall honor schizophrenia and listen to other voices; let them speak through your pages.” 4. The Crack novels are not optimistic, rosy, adorable novels; they know, as much as Joseph Conrad does, that being hopeful in an artistic sense does not necessarily imply believing in the world’s kindness. Or they search for a better world, being aware that such a fction can exist only in a place we will never know. The Crack novels are not written in the new Esperanto, which is the language standardized by television. It is the celebration of language and a new baroque: of syntax, lexicon, and the morphological game. Fourth commandment: “Thou shall not take part in a group that accepts you as a member.”

***Crack’s Genealogy

Eloy Urroz

In his well-known book Mexico in its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity, the American critic John S. Brushwood insisted that Yáñez established the tradition of the “profound novel” in 1947, and, following in the same tradition, Pedro Páramo was published, which Brushwood also commented upon: “It is natural that some readers com- plain about the diffculty of the novel’s accessibility, and that some of them prefer just to despise it instead of making an effort to understand what it is trying to say. This reluctance to such an active participation is comprehensible, though I still think that the fnal results are really worth the efforts.” What is notable in these two cases are, frst of all, the oppor- tune adjective “profound” to refer to a tradition or a series of novels and Crack Manifesto 181 novelist writers who, in their times, “profoundly” understood creative work as the most genuine expression of an artist who has compromised with his work. When Brushwood talks about the “diffculty of access” to certain books, for example, the Crack writers immediately think about the novel “with demands” and “without concessions;” “demands” whose results, in the end, “are worth the efforts,” and “concessions” that, in the long run, only help to further weaken the panorama of our narrative and to discourage honest readers. So, the dilemma of the Crack novels is that they aspire to the heroic feat of fnding what Julio Cortázar called “active participation” from their readers, at the same time the authors sell and the readers consume an abominable “reluctance.” Thus, Crack’s genealogy is taking shape. Crack points out and throws away the books to which it owes a debt, and also the books which Crack excommunicates, being their inquisitor—since there are many books that would be burned without mercy or hope of recovery. In addition to this tradition which had its heyday with Yáñez and Rulfo, as we have already mentioned, the Crack writers pay reverence to works such as: Farabeuf, Los días terrenales (The Mundane Days), La obediencia nocturna (Nocturnal Obedience), José Trigo, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz), and some others. But, since then, what has happened? What are the exemplary works from our literature or, at least, what are the stories which we, writers born in the ’60 s, can cultivate or perhaps fnd a suitable model to attempt to kill and, soon afterwards, usurp its throne? There are none; they have been dying from anemia and auto-complacency. The risks and the wish for renewal have languished. A lake swamped with letters and emptiness, be that with novelists who do not write or, what is worse, with writers who cannot be called novelists. To be honest, there are few exceptions and these novels are nothing more than “good,” I repeat, politely good, without any ter- ror which violates the insipid social contract, the insipid literary norms. The chain of legitimately “profound” novels has been suffering, then, from misfortune once the big publishing houses started to hesitate some years ago and preferred selling their customers apocryphally “profound,” apocryphally literary titles, cheating those readers and not support- ing the willingness for the demands that one can fnd in texts such as Hopscotch, A Brief Life, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. The phenom- enon has turned out to be so portentous and obvious that there is nothing to do about it, but to declare it is a lamentable matter. However, the 182 Crack Manifesto

Crack writers dream about the existence of—somewhere in our Illiterate Republic—a group of readers who are sick and tired of it, disgusted by so many concessions and complacencies. They, and you, cannot be deceived anymore. The concessions, I say once more, disturb them and make them think that their capacities are being underestimated. It is to this group of people—unfortunately only a few thousand—that the Crack novels wish to reach, following, I repeat, this genealogy that has been forging the national culture, ever since the Contemporáneos (or maybe a little earlier than that) decided to really take formal and aesthetic risks. So, there isn’t a break, but continuity. And if there were some kind of rupture, it would be with the rubbish, with the pap-to-deceive-the- fool, with the cynically superfcial and dishonest novel. Anyway, what is sure is that no matter what I say here or what any of my associates say, in the end, the Crack novels will speak for themselves. Here they are: El temperamento melancólico (The Melancholic Temperament), Memoria de los días (Memory of the Days), Si volviesen sus majestades (If they Regained Their Dignity), La conspiración idiota (The Stupid Conspiracy), and Las Rémoras (The Obstacles). If they have a common denominator, I think it is the aesthetic risk, the formal risk, the risk which always implies the wish to renew a genre (in this case, that of the novel), and the risk to continue with what is the most profound and most arduous, eliminating, without preambles, that which is superfcial and dishonest. No more underestima- tion of yourselves. Yet, as the poet Gerardo Deniz said, and what in my case has turned out to be a motto, “Time does not heal. Time verifes.” Let’s let time have the last word on Crack.

***A Pocket Septet

Ignacio Padilla

Weariness and Deprivation If Pessoa could create, all by himself, a whole generation in a dictato- rial Lisbon devoid of literature, it was—no matter what they say—due to weariness. One morning, after a restless night of sleep, Álvaro de Campos woke up just to write: “Because I hear, I see. I confess: it is weariness.” And in his insomnia, great poetry was born. Similarly, I do not believe that all ruptures, ranging from the daily delirium to the most cruel and radical resolutions, come by means of ideologies, but of Crack Manifesto 183 weariness. That is why it is more than looking for sharp defnitions and theories. By chance, some odd “isms” may appear that have more to do with amusement than with a manifesto. There is, of course, a reaction against exhaustion; weariness of having the great Latin American literature and the dubious magic realism converted, for our writing, into tragic magicism; weariness of the patriotic speeches which, for a long time, have made us believe that Rivapalacio wrote better than his contemporary Poe, as if proximity and quality were one and the same thing; weariness of writing poorly in order to be read more (but not better); weariness of the engagé; weariness of the letters that circle like fies over corpses. From this weariness, there comes an act of general demise, not just literary, but even of the circumstance. I am not talking about obso- lete or deceitful pessimisms or existentialisms. Perhaps we will always have the advantage that the spirits of comedy, laughter, and caricature will serve as alternatives.

Absent Confict and Other Defnitions of Negative Thought The Sicilian expression “generation without confict” is not as unfounded as some may claim. The irony exists for those who have read Ortega y Gasset, and know that, among the characteristics he indicated that constitute a generation, confict was included. Well, the lack of confict is one of the few elements that unify us, whether we like it or not. And, if something is happening with the Crack novels, it is not a literary movement, but a plain and simple attitude. There can be no greater proposal than the lack of one. Let’s leave it to those more pious than us to elaborate it in their own time, as they undoubtedly will. This is not the only defnition in negative thought, nor is the lack of confict unique: as if we were scholars defning God or hell. All we could say is that, more than “being something,” the Crack novels “are not many things,” they are everything and nothing, the expression which Borges properly used to defne Shakespeare. Sometimes, defnitions kill mystery, and literature without mystery is not worth being written.

Creationism for Scatology Let’s not be fooled here: there is no scatological originality in the Crack novels, even though they are certainly apocalyptical. It would be unfair to grant them this classifcation; it would do injustice to a long 184 Crack Manifesto tradition that is not exactly Mexican. If that weren’t enough, even the end of the ideologies and the fall of the Berlin wall were much ahead of their writing; it has been a long time since they left us a world made of suffxes, of only suffxes that we aggregate—sometimes seriously and, almost always, as a desperate joke—with what already existed, with what already has been. A long time ago, Beckett foresaw a similar situation, not in Waiting for Godot, but in Endgame. Like Hamm and Clov, we do not write during the apocalypse, which is old, but in a world located beyond of it. If these novels seem to have an anxiety for creationism, not in the literal sense like Huidobro, but in the amplifed sense of Faulkner, Onetti, Rulfo and many others, it is because we think it is necessary to build this grotesque cosmos so we have more of a right to destroy it. Once it is destroyed, the Crack novels will appear in the empire of chaos.

The Chronotope, or About an Aesthetic of Dislocation The world beyond this world does not aspire to prophesy or to symbol- ize anything. Sometimes, there are tricks to achieve an odd effect while honoring Brecht and Kafka; something grotesque, something of a cari- caturizing paraphrase; in fact, Crack novels aim to make stories whose chronotope, using a Bakhtinian word, is zero: the no-place and no-time, all-times and all-places, and none of them. From the comic book, we have brought what the adaptors of Amadís de Gaula did by accident, more than half a millennium ago when he placed his Públio Ovidio Nasón in front of a bunch of microphones. The dislocation in these Crack novels will be nothing more than a mockery of a crazy and dis- located reality, the product of a world being controlled by mass media takes it to the end of a century which is truncated in times and places, broken by a surplus of ligaments.

The Halo and the Word It is the Crack novel’s role to renew the language inside of itself, that is, feeding it with its oldest ashes. Let the others (those who defnitely have faith) be in charge of treating the language as if it were a band or by using a rock-and-roll speech (which has also become old). There are more books to be made. There is more in peremiología, in the rhapso- dy’s orality, in archaisms and the atavistic language, in orality and folk- lore, in clerical-juggleresque rhetoric. These resources have shown more Crack Manifesto 185 resistance to time and, although the alchemy may seem diffcult, its results are richer.

Praise to the Monsters Nobody writes novels anymore, or more accurately, nobody writes complete novels. But, I ask myself, novels for whom? Complete for whom? It would be better to talk about excellent novels and names like Cervantes, Sterne, Rabelais, and Dante, together with those who followed them closely. They are organisms that, though gigantic, exist not to be fright- ening; though monstrous, we should not avoid them. More arrogant, to me, is the author who keeps his distance from these giants, having a doubtful reservation, than those of us who openly accept them. The literature that denies its tradition cannot and should not grow with it. No monster rejects its shadow. Novel or anti-novel, mirror against mirror, only in this way is it possible to have a rupture in continuity.

Rupture and Continuity It’s not worth the trouble to shake the bottle of garrapatas. This is a game, like everything in literature. The one and only; the novel, no matter what people say, always comes and always will. When we break it, it remains. In fact, if there is nothing new under the sun, it is because that which is old counts for novelty.

***The Risks of Form: The Structure of the Crack Novels

Ricardo Chávez Castañeda

Commonplaces such as “the pages speak to us” or “the book can defend itself” are pertinent when evaluating aesthetic representations. If a manifesto is, in the best of cases, a map to outline what is obvious from a moder- ately attentive look at the common denominators, then the works represent the true kingdoms of commitment to a position and a proclamation. The fve Crack novels are exactly where we have to look for how much of a pact, of a compromised soul and ambition; how much of a bet on a—let’s call it—“profound” literature are actually in these writers. 186 Crack Manifesto

The extraordinary thing has been the coincidence. These novels were created without a collective slogan. If afterwards they were grouped together, it was due more to the shared destiny of the always inconsist- ent methods of the publishing houses and, more importantly, to a cor- respondence of postulates, promises, and maybe (why not?) of failures, than due to the author’s will. Expositions such as this do nothing more than share our astonish- ment: going back to the episodic accidents of that time has been, so far, the only point of unifcation amongst ourselves—writers who were born in the ’60 s. With more words or fewer words, what has united us today is a shared sentiment, if one thinks that novels are already—for better or for worse—a boundary. From now on, all we have to do is examine and try to cross it.

What Have the Conditions of This Agreement Been? What Was the Oath? The novels are the only place to fnd these answers; however, it is possible to anticipate the map that every principle’s declaration draws, in order to make it easy for adhesions and offences. The Crack novels, essentially, share the risk, the demand, the rigor, and the total will that has been generated by many mistakes. Si volviesen sus majestades, Memoria de los días, La conspiración idiota, Las Rémoras, and El temperamento melancólico reject any previously attempted or mass market formula. They take the risk to experiment. They can be blamed for unfulfllment, but not for insuffciency in this ambition: to explore the genre of the novel with its most complex and solid themes, and its own syntactic, lexical and stylistic structures; with the necessary polyphony, extravagance and experimentation; with a rigor free from complacencies and pretexts. In this way, while a complete sect takes the charge of narrating the end of the world in Memoria de los días, the voices of the actors inter- rupting the movie made in El temperamento melancólico is what make us realize the infnite haughtiness of a director who thinks he is God. Or, at the other extreme, Si volviesen sus majestades keeps, in the apparent order of its main story, a chaos of linked stories, the same happening to the three short novellas that, a la Cervantes, interrupt the main journey of Ricardo in Las Rémoras. And, in one last tour de force, La con- spiración idiota bets on scrutinizing the children’s secret language with a Crack Manifesto 187 lexicon as original as the one mumbled by our buffoon in Si volviesen sus majestades. So, you will fnd in the Crack novels not just the achievements of the project, but also its limits; not just its victories, but its confusions. There is nothing oblique or moderate about it, because the options that really matter are of great extremes, so high or so low as to warrant an ascen- sion or plunge. Such a book is necessarily profound and demanding with its readers. The Crack novel demands, but also offers. It boasts of being reciprocal: the more one searches, the more one will get from it; being sure that the pre-existing iceberg is there to resolve any doubt. Here, one clarifcation is necessary. Novels inhale the voracious world and then exhibit it. Novels pretend to be scientifc, philosophic, mysteri- ous, etc., and at the same time they reject as much as they desire. The Crack novels generate their own universe, bigger or smaller depending on the case, but always complete, closed, and precise. The Crack novels create their own codes, and take them to their last consequences. They are self-centered cosmos, almost mathematical in their buildings and foundations, absolute in their urgent need to comprehend the realities selected from all perspectives, which, in literature, are translated by a multiplicity of registers and interpretations. There is no vortex which is not made or has not been approached, like a net that is a combination of knots and holes. In conclusion, we are not doing anything new. At the most, we are bringing back a forgotten aesthetic of Mexican literature. We have selected our origins and just one of the thousand possible paths. The proposition has already been stated, written, and, now, published, because any dialogue, in terms of literary proposal, is accomplished with books: “the pages speak to us,” and “the book can defend itself.” The Crack is ready to do it.

***Where Was the End of the World?

Jorge Volpi

Feverish, the bizarre members of the Church of La Paz del Señor that appear in Memoria de los días go on a pilgrimage to Los Angeles searching for new members and—though not being aware of it—for the destruction of their world. This varied set of characters, many of them 188 Crack Manifesto eccentric—the notary public, the wrestler priest, the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, the varieties of a perverse narrative lottery—goes around the world trying to convince the nonbelievers that the universe is at the point of disappearing, exactly as Carl Gustav Gruber, the acclaimed cin- ema director from El temperamento melancólico, disappears. Some people listen to him, few follow him, the rest make fun of and disapprove of him. It is a crazy American, the carbon copy of David Koresh, who will start the massacre among the sectarians. The scientists, just as the critics, think they have the last word: Judgment Day has been a mistake; objectively, nothing has changed. What they don’t know, what they are not able to comprehend is that the sacrifce which took place in Los Angeles was, in fact, the disaster that had been announced so many times. It is because they cannot realize that, paraphrasing Nietzsche, the end of time does not happen outside the world, but inside the heart. More than a mere superstition, the end of the world supposes a particular state of the spirit; what matters less is the external destruction when compared to the inner collapse, this state of anguish that precedes our internal Judgment Day. In the same manner, only a millennial accident has made others go to these lands on pilgrimage: Ricardo and Elías, absurd Siamese twins who have invented themselves without realizing it, go forward on this road which goes from La Paz to the California border, heading for this same Babel of immigrants and, from there, possibly to Alaska. In a complex world in which there are plenty of stories inside stories, like in Si volviesen sus majestades, the aesthetics of Escher or Borges seems to arrive at their fnal destination in Las Rémoras, the novel and the fshing village where this ritual of reunifcation is celebrated. As everyone knows, we are divided or multiple beings. The extreme, here, is that only writing is able to connect us with our past; it makes it possible that the imaginary friends from our adolescence show up as real creations or, even more, as our contemporary writers. Hidden, the end of the world is here, the beginning of a Utopia, the beginning of a new world: united at last, Elías and Ricardo, both creator and creature, stop in the middle of the desert and, while urinating at the side of the path, contemplate the infnite space—the end, the origin of the universe—that still lies ahead of them. This is not different from what happens to the gang of older ado- lescents who undertake La conspiración idiota. Several adults dedicate themselves to recalling their adventures as children, especially the destiny Crack Manifesto 189 of Paluica, the oddest of all, who, many years earlier, decided he had to be good. So, they get together from time to time to try to decipher the little mystery that keeps them united to Paliuca. However, the apparent obviousness of the plot hides a secret: truth does not exist, what really matters is the inner experience of the characters who are the only ones able to explain to us who they are. The style and the syntactic texture of the sentences—exactly what happens to be the language of Senescal in Si volviesen sus majestades—are what change the conventions to show us, once more, that the end of the world happened a long time ago, in this abstruse and unnamed zone which separates innocence from cruelty, childhood from maturity. Should no one think it is a coincidence that this loyal Senescal from the transparent reign abandoned by its majesties dreams constantly about traveling to Kalifornia—with a “K”, since in this world the letters have ended up substituting the society—to dedicate himself, in the end, to his cinematographic passion. But this is how it is: Kalifornia is the recur- rent trope of the fnisecular passion, an area of massacre or escape. Yet, unlike his peers in Memoria de los días or Las Rémoras, Senescal will never get close to his dream. Because, oh sorrow, the end of the world is he himself. In his turbid fgure, his exquisite sadomasochism with the buffoon, and his frank language that reminds us or, better, touches the Spanish of the “infamous Avellaneda,” there is the entire universe and also, horror of horrors, its fertile destruction. The end of the world is also schizophrenia, fantasy, a hypochondriacal “big crunch.” The conclusion cannot surprise anyone: Senescal has been doing nothing other than searching through his sentences and his delirium like a mentally disabled Rumpelstiltskin—his identity, the same as that which could be applied to almost all of Crack’s characters: from now on, his name will be Chaos. By his side, Carl Gustav Gruber, the famous and non-existent German movie director, shares with Elías, the notary public from Las Rémoras, and with Amado Nervo, the Pluma de Oro from Memoria de los días, a very notable characteristic: artist by force, everything he touches turns into dead bodies. Isn’t infertility, without going much further, the real end of the world? Mediocrity, forgetfulness? Gruber flms obsessively: he has cancer and, to make matters worse, he contaminates his actors through his words, by his atrocious melancholic mood. He hires, with the same obsession for perfection, his retinue of last men—another brotherhood, another fraternity like in La conspiración idiota—who are distinguished by their excessive malleability. Each one of them feels like 190 Crack Manifesto or is an artist, like Gruber. Every one of them is ready to sell his soul for such a noble cause. And every one of them will pay for it. The end of the world can be believed and praised, as in Memoria de los días; can be reached by car or train, as in Las Rémoras; can be recalled and rebuilt in childhood and in the past, as in La conspiración idiota; can be cultivated inside oneself to the point of madness, as in Si volviesen sus majestades; and can also be granted to others as an infamous Pandora’s box like in El temperamento melancólico. Be that as it may, in any one of these cases, nobody is free from this last illness, this ffth rider, this plague, and this entertainment: this last state of the heart. Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

Ricardo Chávez, Ignacio Padilla, Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, and Jorge Volpi (Translated from Spanish by Ezra Fitz)

Twenty Years Is Nothing 1. 22 years ago, fve aspiring writers gathered at one of their homes to decide on a name for their literary group. What were they searching for? Fame? Transcendence? Were they looking to imitate their heroes? Or to do something apparently more prosaic: to publish their manu- scripts and go after that particular specter known as a readership? 2. It is the winter of 1994 and the PRI has once again swept the elections. Just one year, yet rife with surprises and catastrophes: the Zapatista uprising and the assassination of a presidential can- didate. If these fve writers are shivering, it’s not because of the December chill but the political and economic debacle of a country decimated by crises. 3. Two years later, they announce the name of their group, present their novels, and release their manifesto. (Meanwhile, in Chile, other young writers undertake a parallel adventure.) I watch them from a distance: what is their goal? If it is to stir up their peers, they get it. A game, a provocation, an advertising strategy? It is unlikely that the echoes of that afternoon are still resonating today.

4. Like most young people, these fve do not ft in with their time. They renounce it. And grow bored. It’s 1996 and the future does not exist. 5. Globalism and its sinister twin, neoliberalism, begin their con- quest of the planet. Mexico is still an island. 6. The fve have read Borges, Rulfo, and Paz, as well as the marathoning Boom authors, much the same way that Alonso Quijano read tales of chivalry. The pages are reality. A better reality than theirs. 7. Elsewhere, acrobats masquerading as García Márquez triumph. The fve ready their horses: they love originals while disdaining copies. And nobody listens. 8. Between 1996 and 1999, the fve fall out of fashion. But then, between 1999 and 2003, the little world of Spanish literature— with its monarchic aspirations—rediscovers and anoints them. 9. In the twenty years that have passed since then, literature has evolved into a literary marketplace. A clinging sphere with no exits. Even those who rebel—and oh how the market loves rebels!—bend to the rules of supply and demand. 10. The discreet apotheosis in Spain is a misunderstanding. They, who lived in the bowels of the Boom, are presented as its liquidators. And they, who could not possibly be any more Mexican, are seen as anti-Mexican. 11. Soon enough, rivals accuse them of having been produced by the market itself. Startled, these fve push back. In vain. They are, after all, products of the market. Just like their critics. 12. And yet they write. 13. Meanwhile, Latin America is no longer the Latin America invented by the Boom. And nobody knows what those two words mean, despite being repeated time and again by quacks and hacks at forums and conferences. If Latin America doesn’t exist, there can certainly be no Latin American literature. 14. With the frst ray of golden light shone by Philip II, the peninsu- lar viceroys organize and classify literature in Spanish. Publishers, editors, agents, subagents, marketers, promoters, academics, critics, and writers are all encompassed by his empire. And Latin Americans fall into the trap. 15. The fve, who have been joined by two more, walk hand in hand with their enemies and rivals on a pilgrimage to Madrid and Barcelona. They are seeking prizes, awards, and advances. Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 193

16. Twenty years ago, they never thought they could live off their books, let along enrich themselves at their expense. For a brief moment, the fat Spanish cows cling to the mirage. 17. Mexico and nearly all Latin American countries drift, at least in name, towards democracy. Being a writer no longer means shout- ing yourself hoarse in the public square. Members of the new youth take a deep sigh of relief and concentrate on mastering the art of cross-stitching. 18. There was another death during this time, one which, of course, nobody mourned: that of the critic. Before he was hated and feared, but today he is looking for employment as an elevator operator or chimney sweep. 19. Twenty years ago, these fve got together to tear up the rules for ascending the literary ladder designed by their elders. Today, who stands as the voice with which to break this new code? 20. The mainstream triumphed, and with it, the absolute predomi- nance of literature in English. Literature in Spanish is a whistle in a rock concert. 21. If the market were a Dragon, who would slay him today? Suggest someone other than Aria or Vila-Matas, please. 22. In these past twenty years, Letras Libres and Nexos, the two most powerful unions in the country, have also been dismantled. Inadvertently, their members continue to attend their meetings. 23. Paz dies. Fuentes dies. García Márquez dies. Monsiváis and Pacheco die. Nobody replaces them at the altar. 24. New writers claim they detest the mafas while secretly trying to imitate them. They simply do not include their names. 25. The digital revolution does not subvert literature. Reading can be done in countless ways, and can accommodate one more. But writers are barely mentioned. 26. Social networks stir up the spectacle for society. Today, celebrity lasts for two hours. The writers leave their pens and computers behind and go off to perform stand-up comedy. 27. Profound, polyphonic novels: these are what the manifesto clamors for the most. Novels against the banality of nationalism and labels. Regarding this point, at least, the struggle has not changed. 28. The group has produced a handful of enduring works. Some will fnd it scant. But what they don’t realize is that anything that lasts 194 Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

longer than three months in today’s market is assumed to become an instant classic. 29. Twenty years ago, Mexico was a hornet’s nest of corruption and authoritarianism. Today, it is a cemetery. How does one write while sitting on graves packed deep with corpses? 30. Any literary group involves tension between centripetal forces like friendship and shared ambitions, and the centrifuges of envy, jealousy, and fear. It is an ever-precarious balance. Nobody could have expected it to last twenty years. 31. As with Dumas, the musketeers are now twenty years older. They have fewer illusions. Some are ignored, while others simply won’t look you in the eye. They are separated by everything, and yet they cannot cease being who they are. 32. I try to look back at the days when they were young. And to compare them with the wrinkled, fat, bald transcripts of today. What remains? Their desire to write great novels. Novels that will change will change a reader’s life. 33. The group itself, was, of course, a fction. It could not have existed any other way. A clutch of wills, a poetic bulwark against time. A brave, beautiful fction.

By Jorge Volpi

Twenty Snapshots from the Twenty Years 1. The novel aspires to imperfection: ever since Rabelais, the novel has sought to be amorphous. In this contradiction lies the form. The short story, however, aspires to perfection. Borges, Chekhov, and Arredondo were obsessed with this, and they wrote perfect stories. 2. The short story is absolute. The novel is everything that the short story is not, though it may include stories, just as it may include the world. 3. Each novel is a test of the world, and therefore a new and monu- mental failure. For the novel, every defeat it its greatest victory. In order to write Bleak House, Dickens had to rehearse many times over, exercising with a number of great novels before being able to write his masterpiece, and yet Bleak House is still imper- fect and amorphous, like Don Quijote, Los Bandidos de Río Frío, Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 195

Moby Dick, À la recherche du temps perdu, Midnight’s Children, Palinuro de México, or La Vida Exagerada de Martín Romaña. 4. The great novelists—which Fuentes has been, though Rulfo was not—exercise, they fght, they slog away like an athlete with his weights (every day, and for his entire life). The great novelists attempt it time and time again, and it is in that attempt that their greatness lies. 5. The fnal solution to the problem of the novel lies in its writing. 6. The Crack began as a delusion otherwise known as the will: the will of a group of young people who wanted to write great novels, polyphonic novels, novels unlike those which had been published before, stories devoted to the creation of something new, even if newness didn’t exist, stories dedicated to breakage because the only way to continue writing is through the breakage itself. 7. Appropriating stories, discerning materials, testing ideas, fltering, discarding… Rewriting words, sentences paragraphs, and remov- ing the clay and mortar to conceive of a new reality, as real or illu- sory as our own. 8. Adding a lie to a novel is never a lie. Perhaps it is simply the only way to a hidden or silent truth. 9. Each semicolon implies a choice; it implies that another choice has not been made. The same holds true for every historical action or event: the course of this or that character could have been different depending on style, point of view, timing, or narrator. The alternatives generated represent the moral dilemmas of the author as well. 10. I do not know if the novel’s days as a genre are numbered. It is more likely that readers of novels will be gone before the novel itself is. And this is because the genre, more malleable than any other, continues to expand: there are television miniseries, soap operas, virtual games, transcripts that do nothing but repeat themselves by other means, things which have defned the art of fction since Homer: mimicking the world, and convincing us that this other reality is at once similar—and alien—to our own. 11. The best novels defy our values, undermine our presumptions, and question our way of living and thinking. 12. The best novels do more than just “entertain,” as was Cervantes’ wish. They also irritate, they discomfort, and in the best of cases, they subvert. 196 Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

13. The novel unmasks—and stirs from their lethargy—Eros and Thanatos, who are often much more dangerous while asleep than awake. 14. The novel is a vicarious form of the human condition which allows us to experience or witness other possible dilemmas of our own existence. 15. The novel should state what nobody ever dares to say. But this does not matter if you don’t say it well, if the author doesn’t infer the form from within. 16. When Brodsky won the Nobel Prize, he said that it was less likely for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot another human being than someone who has not. (The same, I think, could be true of a potential murderer who has read Sade or Sábato.) Perhaps that is why these inutile things known as novels continue to function. I use the word “inutile”—which the Portuguese poet used to defne poetry—because despite its incal- culable benefts, the art of the novel should nevertheless seek no other purpose than its own art. As Lawrence said, the morality, the metaphysics of a writer should be subject to the work of art, it should be subject to its form, and never the reverse, which would put him at risk of writing a pamphlet under the guise of a novel. 17. As with science, where every new theory either verifes or refutes the extant, the novel verifes and refutes the one that came before it. 18. Thirty years ago, I became obsessed with an idea: forming a literary group. The notion came, of course, from the Beatles, but also from the so-called “Generation of Friendship” or the “Generation of ’27,” which I admired and continue to admire. I thought that a group would always be stronger than a single author; a group could have more literary and historical solidar- ity than a solitary writer, although, over the years, some of these same writers ended up being abhorred. The “Generation of ’98,” “Los Contemporáneos,” Spain’s so-called “Generation of ’50,” the Boom, the “Bloomsbury Set,” the “Lost Generation,” and especially the “Mid-Century Generation” in Mexico proved this to me. I read many of these authors simply because they were part of a larger group, and as such, one writer led me to another. And my instincts told me that the group I dreamed of as an eighteen- year old could work. This did not mean, though, that I would not admire the great loners: Stendhal, Kafka, Lowry, or Onetti. What Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 197

it did mean was that, If I wanted to be read rather than being fled away, it would be more likely if I joined a group of other young people whom I admired. And I found them. (I found them, and some of them I lost). 19. Something else happened, something unexpected: a healthy rivalry developed, a competition among equals, both of which drove me to produce my best books. That rivalry, that envy spurred me onward, exciting my vanity and dispelling my laziness. Without their books, I may not have written any of my own, or if I did, they would have been quite poor. Ultimately, I realized that the Beatles couldn’t have existed if not for ferce competition. There could have been no Reality and Desire if Lorca had not lit- erally envied Cernuda, his dear friend, or if Cernuda, in turn, had not known he was himself admired by the one whom he loved and envied the most. 20. The Crack is like a novel, in that it has a beginning, a climax, and an unexpected and not always happy ending. But this, in truth, does not matter much, in much the same way that it matters not whether Don Quijote died in 1615 or 1616. The journey, the joy, and the infnite reading is the only thing that matters in the end.

By Eloy Urroz

The Poetics of Crack 1. Twenty years ago, those tolling the death-knell of the novel were no less numerous than they are today. The Crack was born as a defense of the novel as a whole, which is an all-ftting international commodity, true, but also an art form, perhaps the most fexible and most widespread literary genre in the world. The novel always questions itself. Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne represent a trio of madmen who devoted themselves to a genre that had just been invented and which they believed could encipher the world. The novel seeks out the wonder in its own death rattle. On the page or on the screen. As much in Coetzee as in The Wire. 2. The novel is an international genre, and its infuences need not be specifc to its country. Trying to conceive of a Latin American novel—or an “Arequipan” or “Northern” novel, for that matter—is like trying to conceive of Protestant horseback riding. If a novel is made adjectival, it is also made trivial. The Crack began 198 Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

with local traditions and bet on universality. It did not seek to destroy the Boom, as some have stated, but rather to continue it. There was a literal “crack,” a fssure in the tradition which, even today, sounds like the snapping of twigs and branches when one walks through a forest. 3. There is no adjectival novel. No historical novels, no erotic novels, no crime novels. The only true novel is a phagocytic organ- ism. It gobbles down everything and spits it back up, disrupted and transformed. This is why Don Quijote is not a novel of mar- tial valor, why Alice in Wonderland is not a novel of fantasy. In 1907, Mahler tells Sibelius that the symphony—itself a novel of music—must be like the world, it must comprehend everything. The novel contains everything, which makes it like the world, but it is not itself the world. The novel resists all that is literary about domesticization, which is something the marketplace attempts to impose while attempting to tear down the literary rhetoric that makes it a commodity: that particular lyrical realism that brings nothing to the table when it comes to the critiquing of reality. And yet here we live, twenty years later, amidst the sadness of literary domesticization. 4. Great novels rewrite, in reverse, all of novelistic tradition. The Crack, a collection of novels along with a manifesto, blew into libraries like a frigid wind. 5. When it comes to the novel, nothing is more pernicious than nationalism, which is a European modifer, of course. Nationalism is a lie, and the novel hates lies. In fact, it abhors them. The novel is about the search for literary honesty. Everything that happens within its pages is absolute truth. And the Crack is a novel without modifers, without a nation. 6. Cesare Pavese spoke sagely about his beloved Stendhal: the novel creates stylized situations and repeats them, feigning what we call style. A good novel resists a bad translation because what the novel has demonstrated is that the style is, above all else, a vision. 7. Novelistic styles are systems that operate within a language, though their effects can be seen as extralinguistic. They are port- able stylistic machines. Like cars or cell phones, they can be imported and taken anywhere. 8. The novel presents. It does not explain. Joyce referred to Trieste as “Europiccola.” That’s one thing he well understood: a writer is always an exile, perhaps the ultimate exile: a displaced, Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 199

cosmopolitan person who ceases to have a homeland. He also knew that a provincial person is someone who is empty, someone devoid of content. The provincial writer is anchored in nos- talgia because he has nothing, whereas the cosmopolitan exile, in having lost, has everything to gain. According to Borges—the author of short stories and essays such as The Aleph, which is perhaps Argentina’s greatest novel—only what we have lost is ours. Dixit Miguel Torga, “The universal is the local without walls.” Praise be upon him. But also Unamuno: the world is a Bilbao, but greater. 9. The Crack now knows, despite the market and its trivialization, that a great novel is a veiled mockery of reality and the misinter- pretations you make while reading it. It is a ruthless take on the city, made from a common place. 10. Now, twenty years later, the novel that the Crack aspires to write is a manual for the nonbelievers, a treaty of apostasy. It is a case made against banality and an indictment of the market, which, in our countries, as Piglia says, is a hoax. It is a wrecking ball tear- ing down the notion of literature as cliché. It is a weapon of mass destruction aimed at the foolishness stemming from irony, that supreme form of knowledge. Real life is repetitive, as is the novel. Real life cannot be understood. Therefore, the novel does not play the role of knowledge, but experience. And the only place where we can experiment with disaster is in literature. Twenty years later, the Crack novels continue to believe that literature is not yet dead and buried.

By Pedro Ángel Palou

The New Pocket Septenary 1. The Crack was not, nor did it ever intend to be, either a generation or a movement, much less an aesthetic. It was more of an attitude, an invitation, if anything. An invitation to regain certain attitudes about reading and writing. And while it interpolated publishers, authors, and critics, the manifesto was directed primarily at readers. 2. The Crack was, from the beginning, a game, a joke that some for- tunately took quite seriously. We had no particular strategy (we weren’t that prepared), and we certainly weren’t calling for the imminent dismissal of our teachers (we weren’t that foolish). 200 Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

3. The Crack Manifesto was born of a fragmented, contradictory post. Hence the many and varied interpretations. There are many Cracks, and at this point perhaps the least well known of these is the one presented by a group of novelists back in 1996. 4. Several myths and misunderstandings reshaped or rebuilt certain postulations put forth in the Crack Manifesto, which was unstable enough to enable this sort of thing. Among them, perhaps the most prevalent and notable ones are, frst, the rejection of a Mexican set- ting, and, second, a confrontation with the great fgures of Latin American literature. For the most part, the novels authored by the signatories of this manifesto involve Mexico, but in all of them and on behalf of all of them, we have maintained our right to set our stories on the world’s (or underworld’s) stage, where we can best express these particular stories which, yes, have always been at home in the nation we know as the Spanish language. 5. Works by the Crack were conceived in novelistic essence, resound- ing triumphantly with impurity and imperfection. They were rooted, however, in the heroic failure of the short story, which aspires to the impossibility of imperfection. The short story is to utopia what the novel is to dystopia. The novel will continue to triumph by assuming and embodying the dystopian imperfection of reality. The story, however, will only succeed if it acknowledges its quixotic shortcomings, and realizes how much of the sublime lies in them. 6. The Crack was a literary friendship, an archipelago of solitudes and individuals that will, perhaps, remind us that literature, solitary though it may be, can also be experienced collectively. Some contribute, others dissolve away. Interested, more than anything, in creation (and perhaps in teaching), members of the Crack have never held the requisite malice, nor have they sought to wield or exercise the power, to become one of those literary chapels that have done so much harm to culture in our country. Nor have they banished nor ordered the crucifxions of even their most bitter critics. Whatever the case may be, at the end of the day, we will be left with perhaps two or three works. That is what’s relevant. That is the only thing that matters. 7. The Crack didn’t go it alone. While it was one of the frst catalysts in a process of refashioning and redignifying Spanish language literature, this would have happened regardless. Some of the signatories Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 201

remain convinced that breaking with continuity is indeed still possible. We still reject the facile, we still deify the novel as a whole, as we do with challenging literature, language, and possibilities. We believe more in recovery than in pure innovation, we reaffrm our right to dislocation, and we are acutely aware of the fact that there are others more skillful and more articulate than ourselves who will take charge of creating and proposing alternatives as we stand here on a feld surrounded by the bodies of those who have fallen during this battle in which we had no choice but to participate.

By Ignacio Padilla

The Crack: A Children’s Primer 1. Human beings gather together to fashion their clothes, to raise their homes, to extract food from nature. It is normal, we think, to do these things together, because otherwise it would have been impossible. However, this desire for groups somehow becomes suspicious when it happens in the world of art. Why? Lesson #1: twenty years ago, we became suspicious. 2. Can art truly be done alone, as is the case with masturbation or suicide? Is it not the case that being inserted into the tradition and gaining offcial status requires our greatest lives and our greatest deaths? Lesson #2: perhaps a horizontal union, as opposed to a vertical one, is not an entirely reliable one. 3. The people proclaim themselves, the congregations baptize themselves, friendships are revealed, and family names are registered. Lesson #3: self-proclamations, self-baptisms, and being visible and verifable are all legitimate things. “We are the Crack.” And then came the silence, the rejection, the ostracism. Lesson #3A: the self-proclamation, the self-baptisms, and being visible and verifable are all unpardonable when done under certain conditions that are considered antisocial. 4. Human beings are a gregarious sort. They do not simply live, they live together. They do not develop separately, but in common union. We need one another. However, in every society, there emerges a strange species that exists somewhere between “us” and “you.” Along every border and in every margin lives “them”: the solitary. Lesson #4: people who have dedicated 202 Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016)

themselves to art form part of this subspecies of human beings who are either cursed by or condemned to solitude. 5. Artists live in a cultivated yet fatal state of solitude: the curse of discovering you’ve made yourself into an island is compounded by the processes and geological deposits which turn that fact into tragedy. Lesson #5: what’s unforgivable is pretending that solitude and tragedy can be lumped together. 6. Art is not of this world. It is an end, in and of itself, and its reality lies elsewhere. Lesson #6: everything artistic is subject to suspi- cion in this world. 7. An end, in and of itself, does not accept other conclusions. Lesson #7: for the Crack, art itself has not suffced. 8. The promises and the future. Every artist embodies a purpose, a promise, a project that can only be gauged by time. Lesson #8: there is no need to proclaim one’s personal poetics, for they should be expressed in the work. 9. Pride and personal vanity are the collateral damage that result from being an artist. Lesson #9: these are forgivable, provided it is done individually, not collectively. 10. Everything can be memorialized. Our memories can be joined together in an act of remembering: twenty years ago, fve particular Mexican writers decided to try to publish fve books in which nobody was interested, despite having been well praised. These are the so-called “Crack novels.” Having previously failed as individuals, they now faced the same fate as a group. Two years later, three of the fve were published. These writers then decided to write a manifesto and release it publically. The Mexican literary mainstream subjected them, frst, to the law of dismissal and later to the law of indifference. Lesson #10: this is what we commemorate. 11. All of memory is a verb: “to remember.” Intent is required. Thus, what we remember is that which is falling into oblivion. Lesson #11: we should always be asking ourselves the following questions: What is being remembered? Who is creating the memories? Why? For what purpose? In contrast to what and against whom are we doing it on this, the twentieth anniversary? 12. Human beings are a strange manifestation of life. Live is com- prised of three actions: attraction, fight, and a balance between these two forces that generates immobility. But apparently the lives of human beings have a fourth action which is neither Crack Postmanifesto (1996–2016) 203

closeness, nor remoteness, nor stillness, but distraction. Lesson #12: every distraction reduces an attraction to something. We redirect our attention, moving it from here to there. And if the “there” is the twentieth anniversary of the Crack, then what is the “here” from which we removed our attraction and intention? 13. A bird’s ability is to fy, a fsh’s ability is to swim, and a human being’s ability is to understand. Lesson #13: since we are going to be distracted, we must understand something, we must make something clear. 14. Literature is measured in books, and books are measured in their quality, which is a synthesis of truth, beauty, and transcendence. Lesson #14 (in which we pose the only pertinent question): what do the Crack novels say about the Crack itself? 15. We are not concerned with how the house was built, how the land was cultivated, or how our shirts were sewn: it is the new- comers who recognize the importance of food, shelter, and clothing. Lesson #15 (in which we confront the only pertinent question): what do the Crack novels offer, other than our words and our commemorations, to those who have come after us?

By Ricardo Chávez Author Index

A D Aguilar Camín, Héctor, 170 del Paso, Fernando, 25, 40, 115, 170 Agustín, José, 16 Domínguez Michael, Christopher, 14 Augé, Marc, 143 Donoso, José, 105, 114, 120

B E Bauman, Zygmunt, 4, 116, 127, 129 Eliot, T.S., 2 Becerra, Eduardo, 27, 29, 34, 117 Elizondo, Salvador, 25 Bellatin, Mario, 25, 34 Enrigue, Álvaro, 25 Beltrán, Rosa, 25, 34 Esquivel, Laura, 19, 163 Benjamin, Walter, 78, 142 Estivill, Alejandro, 16, 18 Bolaño, Roberto, 27, 75, 78, 114, 165 Borges, Jorge Luis, 75 F Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 14, 29, 30, 32, 164 Fadanelli, Guillermo, 4, 26, 116 Faulkner, William, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 106 C Friedman, Milton, 99 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 27 Fuentes, Carlos, 15, 17, 19, 25, 26, Carballo, Emmanuel, 17 39, 44, 47, 68, 105, 113, 115, Cernuda, Luis, 45, 116 118, 119 Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo, 1, 6, 8, Fuguet, Alberto, 5, 18, 34 13, 18, 49, 58, 74, 161, 164, 185 Cortázar, Julio, 63, 108, 168, 181 Cuesta, Jorge, 61, 117

G N García-Galiano, Javier, 26 Nettel, Guadalupe, 28, 111 García Lorca, Federico, 116 Neuman, Andrés, 28 García Márquez, Gabriel, 73 Novo, Salvador, 39 Giardinelli, Mempo, 113 Gómez, Sergio, 5, 18 González Boixo, José Carlos, 6 O González Suárez, Mario, 25, 34 Ortega y Gasset, José, 80 Guillory, John, 8

P H Pacheco, José Emilio, 15–17, 47 Herbert, Julián, 28 Padilla, Ignacio, 1, 5, 7, 13, 14, 19, Herrasti, Vicente, 16, 18, 161 26, 27, 33, 41, 74, 87, 99, 101, Herrera, Yuri, 28 107, 143, 163, 173, 182, 200 Palou, Pedro Ángel, 1, 8, 13, 18, 20, 47, 49, 74, 114, 117, 120, 130, I 132, 133, 164, 173, 177, 198 Ibargüengotia, Jorge, 17 Paz, Octavio, 3, 15, 26, 33, 105, 117, 121, 131, 132, 134, 144 Pitol, Sergio, 15, 25, 105, 114, 115, K 119, 120, 122 Kleinburg, Gerardo, 119 Poniatowska, Elena, 75 Krauze, Enrique, 15 Poot-Herrera, Sara, 24 Kundera, Milan, 105, 106

R L Revueltas, José, 15 Leñero, Vicente, 25 Rivera Garza, Cristina, 24–26, 34 Lorenzano, Sandra, 21, 24 Rulfo, Juan, 90

M S Marías, Javier, 105, 111, 119 Sábato, Ernesto, 110, 113 Marías, Julián, 15 Santajuliana, Celso, 6, 19, 45, 58, 164 Mastretta, Ángeles, 19 Sicilia, Javier, 21 Melo, Juan Vicente, 119 Skármeta, Antonio, 19, 105 Molina, Mauricio, 172 Soler, Jordi, 24 Monge, Emiliano, 28 Monsiváis, Carlos, 15, 16, 21 Moretti, Franco, 167 Author Index 207

T Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, 28 Taibo II, Paco Ignacio, 171 Velasco, Xavier, 25, 26 Toledano, Héctor, 170 Vila-Matas, Enrique, 15, 34 Toscana, David, 25 Villarrutia, Xavier, 117 Volpi, Jorge, 1, 5, 7, 13, 14, 18, 19, 22–24, 27, 34, 41, 45, 49, 57, U 59–64, 68–71, 73, 75, 88, 100, Urroz, Eloy, 1, 8, 13, 14, 19, 44, 45, 105, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 74, 100, 103–105, 108, 109, 116–118, 120, 173, 187, 193 112, 116, 118, 120, 173, 180, 196 Usigli, Rodolfo, 119 Y Yáñez, Agustín, 180, 181

V Vallejo, Fernando, 75 Z Vargas Llosa, Mario, 3, 104 Zambra, Alejandro, 28 Subject Index

A 87, 88, 99, 110, 143, 163, 164, Aesthetics, 17–19, 30, 57, 58, 70, 76, 166, 181, 182 79, 137, 188

G B Globalization, 3, 8, 76, 127 Berlin Wall, 3, 5, 46, 74, 76, 184 Boom, 15, 19, 27, 32, 34, 70, 73–75, 88, 104, 105, 109, 115, 163, I 165, 166, 171, 173, 191, 195, Ideology, 3, 20, 29, 78, 79 196

M C Magical realism, 2, 3, 17, 19, 30, 33, Capitalism, 5, 64, 99, 129 73–75, 81, 85, 103, 163 Communism, 3, 155 McOndo, 5, 18, 22, 28, 30, 47 Crack Manifesto, 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 30, 32, 34, 41, 63, 74, 108, 110, 112, N 120, 121, 130, 131, 143, Neoliberalism, 3, 103, 172, 191 161–163, 165, 166, 168–170, 173, 198 Crack Postmanifesto, 6 P Crack writers, 1–8, 16–18, 20, 21, Post-Boom, 2, 19, 70, 75 25–28, 40, 41, 44, 47, 50, 51, Postmodernism, 40, 58

S T Space, 3, 4, 16, 25, 26, 30, 32, 34, Tlatelolco, 16, 20, 40, 45 42–46, 48, 50, 67, 68, 85, 108, 109, 114, 120, 131, 143, 144, 167, 188