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Strategic Occidentalism Strategic Occidentalism Strategic Occidentalism On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Sanchez Prado, Ignacio M., 1979– author. Title: Strategic occidentalism : on Mexican fiction, the neoliberal book market, and the question of world literature / Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018019339 | ISBN 9780810137554 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137561 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137578 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mexican fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Mexican fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Cosmopolitanism in literature. Classification: LCC PQ7155 .S266 2018 | DDC 863.64—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019339 Introduction Mexican World Literature On occasion, a book of literary criticism that one has been researching and writing for years will suddenly coincide with a small boom in attention to its objects of study. To my surprise, this seems to be the case with Strategic Occidentalism, a study of key authors of post- 1968 Mexican fction viewed through the lens of world literature theory. As a scholar of Mexican literature working in a university in Missouri, and as a Mexican reader living in the United States, I decided to embark on this project a few years ago, and to do so in English, partly as a reaction to a couple of frustrations: for one thing, the scarcity of English- language translations of even the most important Mexi- can writers from the 1970s onward (not to mention the scarcity of scholarly criticism on their work); and for another, the reductionist accounts of Mexi- can and Latin American literature in most Anglophone critical paradigms of comparative, transnational, and global literature— including postcolonial theory and world literature theory. To my surprise, during the process of writing this book, Mexican literature has slowly but surely broken through some of the barriers separating it from the U.S. publishing world as works by a handful of Mexican writers have begun to make their way into U.S. publishing catalogs and bookstores. A frst bit of good news came in 2015, when I learned with great joy that Deep Vellum Publishing, a Dallas- based nonproft startup press, had begun to translate the work of one of Mexico’s most revered living writers, Sergio Pitol, the subject of chapter 1. Thanks to the efforts of editor Will Evans and translator George Henson (as well as the support of other fgures like Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue), an author with a distinguished, decades- long trajectory would fnally be translated into English. This belatedness is particularly incongruous when one considers that Pitol himself is the translator of dozens of books, including numerous works by English- language writers. The fact that one of the most important transla- tors of literature into Spanish had failed to get his own canonical writings published in English certainly exemplifes the disparities that govern world literary institutions. Although Pitol is the most directly relevant author for Strategic Occiden- talism in this recent (and still very partial) boom, there are other important 3 4 Introduction cases as well. While this introduction was being written, Mexican and U.S. readers received the surprising news that the English translation of Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli’s book La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth, 2015) was selected as one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year and as a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fction.1 This is a remarkable event in itself, as Luiselli is the frst Mexican writer to ever achieve such a nomination and only the second Latin American author to do so (Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was posthumously recognized with the award in 2008). Indeed, one could argue (as Aaron Bady recently did) that Luiselli’s triumph is riding a wave of interest generated by Bolaño’s colos- sal renown.2 Yet we must be attentive to the ways in which Luiselli’s work has emerged from an ecosystem of Mexican literature that remains invis- ible to English- language readers and critics. Her success is among the latest iterations of large- scale developments, both in literary institutions and fction aesthetics, that have been brewing since the late 1960s. Just as the recent suc- cess of Mexican flm directors like Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón ensued, as I argue in my previous book, from the decades- long rise of a flm industry that is inextricably intertwined with neoliberalism, it is impossible to account for Luiselli’s achievements without understanding its conditions of possibility within Mexican literature.3 Even if I confned myself to the authors I study in this book, the extent of her rootedness in the ground of Mexico’s world literature would still be apparent. Luiselli’s frst book, Papeles falsos (Sidewalks, 2010), is a collection of narrative essays based on urban wandering, travel, and cosmopolitan cul- ture.4 It belongs to a genre of cosmopolitan writing that Pitol established as canonical in Mexican literature, particularly after the publication of his land- mark collection El arte de la fuga (The Art of Flight, 1996).5 In fact, Luiselli wrote a piece on Pitol for Granta’s online series Best Untranslated Writers, where she acknowledges having read his work since her teenage years.6 Her second book, the novel Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd, 2011), inter- twines the story of a young pregnant woman—a possible alter ego of the author— and that of Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, a cult fgure who was part of the group known as Los Contemporáneos.7 The connection between a member of this group and a contemporary writer is hardly new in Mexican fction. Two writers from the Crack group, the subject of chapter 2, wrote analogous novels in the early 1990s. Jorge Volpi connected his fctional self to contemporáneo Jorge Cuesta in A pesar del oscuro silencio (In Spite of the Dark Silence, 1992). Meanwhile, Pedro Ángel Palou wrote a novel with many similarities to Luiselli’s representation of documents from the past and their silences in his own portrayal of another contemporáneo, Xavier Vil- laurrutia: En la alcoba de un mundo (In the Bedchamber of a World, 1992).8 I am not sure that Luiselli would claim a direct connection to the Crack group, given her divergent style and the group’s divided reception in Mexi- can literature. That said, her own treatment of Owen unquestionably traces Mexican World Literature 5 a possible connection. Both Luiselli and the Crack writers model themselves on a group of writers known for resisting the imperatives of nationalist lit- erature. It is also true that the Crack group’s role in redefning mainstream Mexican literature internationally, far from the types of magical realist nar- ratives popularized by writers like Laura Esquivel, is among the factors that exempt a writer like Luiselli from serving as a native informant of stereo- typical Mexicanness. Finally, we could not understand Luiselli’s success without acknowledging the long struggle waged by Mexican women writ- ers to attain cultural and editorial recognition in Mexico— a country that once declared, back in the 1920s, that its national literature was meant to be “virile,” and where women writers, even major ones, generally occupied secondary places in literary criticism and historiography well into the 1990s.9 As chapter 3 will discuss in greater depth, Luiselli certainly had important precursors in writers from the 1950s and 1960s, like Elena Garro and Jose- fna Vicens, who challenged the doxa exercised by male authors in Mexican fction. Yet Luiselli was also preceded by the women authors who built what Jane Lavery and Nuala Finnegan aptly call a “Boom femenino,” fostered by the women writers in the late 1980s and early 1990s who took over the bestseller world (with notable blockbuster novels such as Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate) and opened important doors in the institutions of literary fction (even if some of them, like María Luisa Puga, remain woe- fully understudied).10 Indeed, Luiselli’s success in Mexico and beyond is only possible thanks to the trailblazing work of women writers like the ones I will study in chapter 3— Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua— who challenged not only the concept of what a woman could write in Mexican literature, but also the aesthetics of Mexican fction at large. My point is not to claim that Luiselli’s work is derivative. On the con- trary, she is indisputably a writer of great talent and intelligence. Rather, just like Bolaño has become a representative of Latin American literature as a whole, the fact that Luiselli may come to play such a role for Mexican fction (it is too early to tell, but not unthinkable) creates an imperative for critics and scholars to remain attentive to the larger dynamics of literary fc- tion in Mexico. If anything, Luiselli’s success and the growing access of other writers to English- language translation has made Strategic Occidentalism (unbeknownst to me as I wrote it) into a critical history of a cosmopolitan paradigm of Mexican fction and its recent ascent, as well as of the establish- ment of various literary institutions that would facilitate twentieth- century literary ventures. Indeed, as we can see now, the type of world literature studied in this book is currently replacing the magical realist conception of Mexican literature that was inherited from the Latin American Boom and consecrated by authors such as Carlos Fuentes and Laura Esquivel.
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