Variety and Contrast: The New Literature

THERE are three writers of special significance in current Mexican literature: the novelist Agustín Yáñez, the playwright Rodolfo Usigli, and the poet and essayist Octavio Paz. To understand more precisely the literary directions of the younger generation, we must consider briefly each of these writers. Yáñez, born in 1904, Usigli, in 1905. and Paz, in 1914, have produced their most signilicant work since 1940; and all three have had an important influence on the young Mexican writers.

Agusttn Yáñez attained his maturity as a writer with three novels: Al filo del agua, 1947, recently published in English under the title The Edge of the Storm; La tierra prodiga (The Prodigal Earth), 1960; and Las tierras flacas (Meager Lands), 1962. The Mexican novel before Yáñez — properly speaking, the novel of the Revolution of 1910 - ran to realism, often social realism, and to the accompanying narrative technique. The novelty of this kind of fiction was rather in its subject matter than in its style. And it was not until the novels of Yáñez that the stylistic innovations of the European and American novel were effectively introduced: a variety of actions occurring simultaneously, psychological analysis of character that reminds one of Proust, stream of consciousness, and parallelism between the thoughts of the characters and the action. Conceived as great nocturnal melodies, the novels of Yáñez are more than novels of characterization; they create, from the perspective of each character, the life of real towns in Jalisco before the Revolution or the life of symbolically named hamlets that are at the same time real. Of a baroque, lyrical complexity woven from human emotions and landscapes in a period when man and his world are reacting fiercely on one another, Yáñez’s novels inaugurate a mood of implacable destiny.

In his first years as a dramatist, Rodolfo Usigli was strongly influenced by Shaw and also by Pirandello. His most mature work is found in two plays: Corona de sombra [Crown of Shadows), 1943, which is the story of the tragic end of’ the Empress Carlota, and El gesticulador (The Trickster), 1943, which reveals violently and without concessions a critical portrait of an opportunistic demagogue and climber who, having come out of the Revolution, uses it for his own ends. One can see in this play a skeptical and bitter parable of human behavior; it is the work of a professional dramatist who has achieved genuine mastery among Mexican playwrights. Usigli is, whether the younger generation likes it or not. the maestro of the new school of Mexican theater, which demands rigor, form, and knowledge of new techniques.

Octavio Paz, who has had his work translated into English, French, German, Swedish, and Italian, won the international prize for poetry for 1963 given in Belgium. He has achieved one of the highest peaks of lyric poetry written in Spanish in the twentieth century. In a carefully thought-out essay, El laberinto de la soledad (published in English by the Grove Press under the title The Labyrinth of Solitude), Paz analyzes the history and character of the Mexican people, and at the same time philosophizes on his own central preoccupation: solitude. Solitude is for him both original and derived. But solitude is not an end in itself for Paz, as it was for two great poets that preceded him, Jose Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia. It is instead a point of departure, a springboard.

Paz conceives of man as once having been in his origins a complete being. But this total being is. on this earth, a being that is split, shattered at its very core, a fallen being. Merely half-beings, men seek the lost half, which once found will permit them to be complete again. Such fullness, or realization, is achieved in three privileged experiences: in the poetic image, in love, and in the feeling for the sacred. Thanks to these experiences we can return to our origins and abandon our solitude. We live whole again.

The poetic image is revelation. But what does it reveal to us? The unity of man, far beyond all the contradictions of life. “The poet,” Paz writes, “names things: these are feathers, those are stones, and suddenly the poet affirms: the stones are leathers: this is that. . . . The image shocks because it defies the principle of consistency: that which is heavy is light.” In our daily lives we generally distinguish between the “one” and the “other,” the interior and the exterior, ourselves and all the others — men, stones, stars, or gods. What the poetic experience tells us is that the one and the other have ceased their opposition, that we may live in the unity of opposed tensions, that we are at last open to communicate with ourselves and with the world that surrounds us.

A similar union of opposites exists in love, in which there is both unity and eternity: “All is coexistent, all the centuries exist in this present moment,” Paz tells us. “In love we live with intertwined pronouns.” The “1” realizes itself in the “you,” and the “you” acquires its full meaning in the “I.” In love we are “we” once we have captured, again, the “lost unity.” Our experience with what is sacred, with “the other shore.” the term which Paz uses to describe the sacred, has its genesis in love and has the character ol poetry. Like love, the sacred manifests itself ambiguously: it both attracts and repels us. But beyond all contradictions, beyond all perplexity and doubt, when the sacred becomes a genuine experience, it culminates in the communion that is “the experience of the one.”

Octavio Paz’s four great books of poetry — La estación violenta, Piedra del sol, Libertad bajo palabra, Salamandra — reveal, in the truest sense of the word, an experience of conversion. His message is that our lives have meaning only if we are capable of getting outside of ourselves to draw our strength from others. Can we ever know ourselves? More than that, by turning toward others, we ourselves live, and in others find our true being.

BEFORE offering a brief outline of the work ol the more recent writers in Mexico, it is necessary to make some general remarks about the circumstances — the economic, social, and spiritual life — in which the Mexican writer moves today.

In the first place, the contemporary Mexican writer has reached an economic level which, although it does not yet allow him to live entirely on his literary efforts, is beginning to open up the possibility that he will soon be able to. Two factors are principally responsible. The first is the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, founded in 1951 by Margaret Shedd under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. Linder Miss Shedd’s direction, the Centro annually gives fellowships to young Mexican writers so that they may work on a novel or a collection of stories, essays, or poetry somewhat relieved from economic pressure. In the thirteen years of its existence the Centro has given ninetytwo fellowships, and Mexican aid to the project has been considerably increased, both from the government and from private sources. Among the gifted writers who have received awards are Juan Rulfo, Juan Jose Arreola, Alí Ghumacero, Rosario Castellanos, Tomas Segovia, and Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.

The second factor which has improved the lot of the writer is the development of publishing in our country. Houses such as Imprenta Universitaria de la Universidad Nacional, Imprenta Veracruzana, and Fondo de Cultura Economica, publish the work of both new and established writers; and the most recent houses, ERA and Joaquín Mortiz, are dedicated exclusively to creative literature. Twenty-five years ago the normal first printing of a novel was two thousand copies. Today a first printing is usually five thousand, and it can go as high as twenty-five thousand copies. It can rightly be said that although the increase is still insufficient, the situation is at least promising, particularly if growth continues.

Among the problems that most affect the Mexican writer of today, the desire for self-knowledge and at the same time for universality is primary. Since the Revolution, many Mexicans have felt an obligation to know the meaning of life, to determine what is specifically different about things Mexican. Current Mexican literature participates in this desire for self-knowledge, not merely in theory, as was the case some thirty years ago, but also as a way of life. To this probing into the depths of the inner self — a probing not necessarily nationalistic. but rather a penetration of one’s own substance in order to achieve universality — a number of writers have made important contributions: Samuel Ramos in Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, published in English by the University of Texas Press, Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth oj Solitude, Leopoldo Zea, Daniel Cosio Villegas, and many other historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Research into the pre-Hispanic civilizations has also been important, especially the studies of literature before Cortés by Father Angel Maria Garibay, and Aztec Philosophy by Miguel Leon-Portilla. Mexican writers are no longer surprised by their Indian past or by a cultural inheritance that is as much pre-Hispanic as Spanish; they integrate both strains in what we may call a cultural mixture.

The post-war anguish and the different ideologies that came out of it have influenced the new Mexican writers both directly and indirectly. Existentialism, Marxism, and the new liberal ideologies inform all their assumptions, spoken and unspoken. The Mexican writer is absorbed in the problems of our times, particularly as they relate to Mexico and to the destiny of Latin America. It is not surprising that Mexican literature today, feeding on hope and despair, as in fact does current Western literature generally, should tend toward seriousness, criticism, and at times, disgust. Literature has stopped being a game and has become the living manifestation of the anxieties and hopes of the writer. This does not mean that current Mexican literature is limited only to social protest. It means simply that both the literature concerned with social problems and the literature of a more creative nature arc scarred by the gravity of the times.

These are some of the factors which influence Mexican letters today. But what predominates in this literature is variety, a variety which yields richness. It manifests itself primarily in fiction and poetry, but it also exists in the theater.

IN THE field ol the novel and the short story a number ol writers should be mentioned: Jose Revueltas. a revolutionist with an inclination toward the social, and the metaphysical as well: Emma Dolujanoff. the author of some very beautiful stories of the Indians of northwest Mexico; Sergio Galindo, a critic of the middle class; Guadalupe Duenas, who writes stories of irony and fantasy; Tomás Mojarro, a brilliant storyteller of fields and countryside; Juan Garcia Ponce, who, with a style that is direct and clear and at the same time mystical. probes the everyday mysteries; Vicente Leiiero, the most disciplined of die young fiction writers. But to indicate clearly the principal currents of present-day Mexican fiction we should concentrate on four writers whose work has already reached maturity; Juan Rulfo. Juan Jose Arreola, Rosario Castellanos, and Carlos Fuentes.

Born in 1918, Juan Rulfo is the most original innovator in the new generation of short-story writers and novelists. In his novel Pedro Páramo as in his collection of stories El llano en llamas (The Plain in Flames). Rulfo writes with a sage mixture of popular language that is never imitative but always fresh, and with a deep poetic intuition. Both these aspects of his work blend to produce an organic unity, a unity where the fantastic and the real, the dreamed and the experienced, merge and are involved with one another under the common denominator of solitude and death.

In the storv “Nos ban dado la tierra” (“"They Have Given Us the Earth”) a group of men try to survive in an inhospitable land, in “this hardened cow’s hide that is called the plain,” and see themselves condemned to misery and death; in “Luvina’ we are in a town where only the wind exists, “a town with one plaza only, without a single weed to slop the wind.” In every Rulfo story threads of reality appear; each one is narrated in the first person, acquiring the intimacy of the confessional, as if the characters had to get rid of the solitude that exists in them by communicating it, in their monologues, to the reader. Thus the stories ol Rulfo occur in an immediate present that comes alive in the memories and associations of the omnipotent and central character. It is of special significance that the word “remembrance” appears in the majority of Rullo’s works. In some moment of their lives the characters have to remember sometimes in order to try to forget — their past. The time that Rulfo uses is a closed time. The future remains closed, buried by stone and mortar. There remains only the present of remorse intertwined with the violent facts of the past—with murder, crime, and death.

Hence the profound sadness in the work of Rulfo. Hence also its no less profound fatalism. Bound by what has already occurred, the characters ol Rulfo are petrified before an implacable destiny. Life leads to no escape.

The negation of time, which is only partial in El llano en Hamas. is total and Anal in the novel Pedro Paramo. It has no plot. Presided over by the shadow of Pedro Paramo, owner of lives and land, the novel is related only to the past, and in it play the shadows and the echoes ol those who sometimes lived. 1 he novel, an incarnation of nothingness and the nobodies that are the characters, is like a present and reiterated remembrance of death.

The work of Juan Jose Arreola, born in 1918, is very different. He is the author of two collections of stories, and a play and a novel which are on the way to publication. He is a master of stories that are fantastic, imaginative, and at the same time as precise as a game of chess. Sometimes Arreola reminds one of Kafka, as in “El guardagujas” (“The Switchman”), where imaginary passengers wait for trains that never arrive. At other times he reminds one ol Jorge Luis Borges, when he creates imaginary worlds that come to replace reality. But Arreola is differentiated from the other two by his humor. For example, Arreola writes, “After long experience. the agriculturalists came to the conclusion that the only efficient weapon against the mole is the hole. One must trap the enemy in his own system.” In the use of symbols and metaphors, Arreola is the most precise artificer and artist among the new Mexican writers.

Rosario Castellanos, born in 1925, is an excellent poet and novelist. Her work is not only a testimony to the file of the Indians in Chiapas but also a protest against the miserable condition of their lives. This same protest reappears in Oficio de timeblas, framed in a magical and primitive world, with a cyclical fate and no escape.

Somewhat younger than the other three authors, Carlos Fuentes, born in 1929, initiated his career with a little book of surrealist short stories, Los días enmascarados (Masked Days), 1954, which reached only a very small audience. His first success, not only nationally but internationally, was La region mas Iransparente (The Clearest Space), a panorama of urban life in Mexico conceived to a certain extent in the manner of John Dos Bassos. Of similar style is La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death oj Artemio Cruz), a violent attack on the heirs to the Revolution. who, in Fuentes’ view, altered the meaning of the Revolution when they pul it at the service of the bourgeoisie. The background of social protest in Fuentes’ novels should not make us forget one important fact: the highly creative imagination of the author, which is revealed in one of his best stories, Aura.

BETWEEN 1945 and 1955, the predominant literary genre in Mexico was fiction, but we should not overlook the theater and poetry, which have always been extremely fertile areas in Mexican literature. Current drama has not yet reached the level of the other literary forms. But some playwrights have achieved effectiveness in discipline and technique.

The most common type of play in the theater is the pieza, the name used for the comedy of manners. Emilio Carballido in Rosalba y los llaveros, a delicate psychological piece; Sergio Magaña in Los sigtios del zodiaco, a play about the worried young people of our day; Luisa Josefina Hernández in Los sordomudos; and Hector Mendoza in Las cosas simples have done the best work of this type. But neither the theater nor the authors have limited themselves to producing only comedies of manners. Carballido has written fantasies such as La zona intermedia, a medieval religious pageant on modern themes; Magaña has written a fine historical drama, Moctezuma II; and Luisa Hernández, a tragedy, Los frutos caidos. The best representatives of the lyric art theater are Elena Garro, whose play Un hogar sólido is a concise, crystal-clear, humorous symbolization of death: and Hector Azar, a writer of works which are rooted in the tradition of the picaresque, as much Spanish as Mexican. It should be added that at least four of these new playwrights are also novelists: Carballido, Magaña, Luisa Hernández, and Elena Garro, whose Recuerdos del Porvemr, soon to be published, is one of the best of the recent novels.

Poetry in Mexico alter Octavio Paz is, generally, a poetry that seeks discipline, equilibrium, and harmony in a reaction against surrealism and the other isms of the twenties and thirties. The generation that began writing in the forties includes an excellent group of poets. They live in a mechanized world, a world between peace and war, a fact of life which has had its effect on Mexican poets as it has on all other poets in the modern world. They are witnessing also a spectacular increase of urbanization in their country. Both of these conditions lead them to believe that a poet must not consider himself as being apart, and that he should be an artisan much more than a creator of symbols. Of course, these poets are distinguished from one another by their individual differences; and within the limits which I would dare call artisan, each one is an original poet, full of promise.

Among those who are making their mark are Rubén Bonifaz Nuno, Jaime Sabines. Tomas Segovia. Manuel Duran. Marco Antonio Montes de Oca. and two very young poets, Homero Aridjis and Jose Emilio Pacheco.

it has been said many times that Mexico is a land of contrasts. And this is true. Snow and the tropics, life and death, wealth and poverty, are facts of the physical Mexico as well as of the spiritual Mexico. Mexican literature is also variety and contrast, and it has had to struggle to establish itself. This means that our literature is dynamic and on the road to progress, it by progress we understand growth toward the innermost spiritual essences and not just a meaningless advance. And we already know from the classics, from Heraclitus, that progress comes out of change and that opposites, if they are not dissonant, create unity, a living unity like that of the bow and the cello.

Translated by Juan At. Alonso