Mark Anderson, Yanez's Total Mexico1

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Agustn Yanezs Total Mexico

and the Embodiment

of the National Subject

MARK D. ANDERSON

University of North Texas

Many critics view the novela total as the most extensive Spanish-American

expression of universal literary values. As often as not, these monumental

novels are read unproblematically as objective, polyphonic encyclopedias of

transnational Spanish-American and even universal Western culture. One

commonly finds descriptions of Carlos Fuentes total novel Terra Nostra

(1976), for example, as a summa of Spanish-American literature and

culture.1 Even more discerning readings of these texts tend to emphasize

universal or absolute values over local context.2 I would argue, however,

that from its inception, the Spanish-American total novel undertakes the

specifically national political project of rewriting outmoded nineteenth-century foundational fictions, replacing the allegory of the heterosexual

criollo couple as the nucleus of the nation with a new focus on cultural,

racial, and sexual plurality.3 In my reading, total novels primarily use the dis-

course of universality as a legitimizing strategy that validates the rescripting

of the national subject in the contemporary, globalized world. In order to

examine this idea, I return to what might be considered the first total novel

in Mexico, Agustn Yanezs Al filo del agua (1947). This novel develops a

1 See Jose Miguel Oviedos Fuentes: sinfona del Nuevo Mundo, Hispamerica, 6:16

(1977), 1932 (p. 19).

2 This is evident in statements regarding the same novel, such as Roberto Gonzalez

Echevarras comment that Fuentes voluminous novel represents a considerable effort to

achieve an absolute knowledge of Hispanic culture, from Terra Nostra: Theory and Practice,

in his The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature

(Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1988), 8697 (p. 89).

3 Foundational fictions is used here with reference to Doris Sommers Foundational

Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,

1991). In the introduction to her work, Sommer suggests that some of the novels of theLatin-American boom rewrite their nineteenth-century precursors (27 29).

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXIV, Number 1, 2007


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discourse of universal essentialism that complements and legitimizes its

authors national political project in post-Revolutionary Mexico.

In Al filo del agua, Yanez establishes a series of parallels between a small

village in the state of Jalisco and the nation on the eve of the Mexican

Revolution. These correspondences rely on plays on specificity and ambi-

guity, allegory, and strategies of essentialization to create a microcosmthat seemingly embodies the national essence of 1909 pre-Revolutionary

Mexico. Yanez then uses this essentialized national psychology to justify

the policies of the Revolutionary government, of which he formed part,

during the moment in which the novel was published. At the same time,

he constructs a political persona in essays, interviews, and speeches that

proposes itself as the discursive embodiment of the Mexican national

subject. In both his novel and his political discourse, he utilizes techniques

of essentialism and embodiment to model a new, Revolutionary national

subject. Furthermore, his national project becomes linked to Westernculture through a discourse of universal humanism that assumes the exis-

tence of certain core absolute or essential values that are valid across the

individual, local, national and global contexts. I propose that this process

of embodiment and the representation of essential or absolute values

becomes a central strategy in later total novels that search for ways to

reduce totality to manageable proportions as well as to extend the authors

subjectivity to encompass that of others in the quest to achieve polyphonic

representation.

My study begins by inserting Al filo del agua into the Spanish-American

subgenre of the total novel. A discussion follows that outlines Yanezs fusion

of politics and literary production into a single project, of which the goal

was the development of a new national subject that would embody the core

values ofmexicanidad, or Mexican-ness, as well as what he perceived as uni-

versal human values. I then analyse some of the ways in whichAl filo del agua

extends its regional ethnography to symbolize the nation on the historical eve

of the Revolution, showing how Al filo del aguas village functions as a

national symbol of the need for Revolutionary change. The next section

studies Yanezs programme of civic education, which directly ties together

his novelistic production and his political project. Using Al filo del agua,I argue that literature in general and the total novel in particular formed

part of his life-long pedagogical project to create a new national and humanist

consciousness among young Mexicans. The final section glosses Yanezs plan

to write a series of novels modelled on Balzacs The Human Comedy that

was designed to represent a total Mexico. Since many of these novels

grew out of his personal experience, their use as blueprints for national con-

sciousness suggests Yanez himself as the embodiment of the national

subject. He further develops this image of the personal embodiment of the

national consciousness in his political discourse, proposing himself as theman of the people.

80 BSS, LXXXIV (2007) MARK D. ANDERSON


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The Total Novel in Mexico

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa

were the first to coin explicitly the term total novel in the 1960s; however,

many of its devices were already in use in earlier Spanish-American

fiction.4 In fact, the total novel represents the continuation of a cultural

ideal that owes much to the generations of intellectuals immediately preced-

ing Fuentes and Vargas Llosa. Vasconcelos project of universalist cultural

indoctrination in a national context during his tenure as the Minister of

Public Education in 1920s Mexico comes immediately to mind, as does the

regionally-located universalism of Reyes and Henrquez Urenas writing.

Like the work of these authors, total novels embody a utopian proposition

for both the conservation and transformation of local culture, incorporating

simultaneously national and more general Western models. Building on the

discourse of universal humanism, total novels become immense fictional

encyclopedias of Western as well as national culture and history. At thesame time, their engagement with national projects of cultural transform-

ation leads them to propose new models for national consciousness, effectively

rewriting the foundational fictions of nineteenth-century Spanish America for

the political realities of the twentieth century. This dialectic between cultural

universalism and local political transformation is particularly evident in the

total novels appearance in Mexico, with reference to the political milieu fol-

lowing the Mexican Revolution.

The advent of the total novel in Mexico supports Edward Mendelsons

assertion that encyclopedic novels begin to appear in a national literatureduring a particular moment in nation building in which a nation desires to

distance itself from its models and establish unique cultural values.5 Several

voluminous precursors to the modern Mexican total novel were published

during the late nineteenth century by authors such as Manuel Payno.

However, Agustn Yanezs Al filo del agua is the first novel that brings an

openly totalizing approach to Mexican narrative, utilizing multiple points of

view, simultaneity, abstraction, dialectics, and an encyclopedic range of refer-

ences to achieve a more panoramic vision of Mexican society and culture.

Yanezs novel appeared during a moment in Mexican history in which the

PRM (the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana, which would later become the

Partido Institucional Revolucionario or PRI) undertook a process of consolidation

4 Vargas Llosa first proposes the total novel in his introduction to Joanet Martorells

fifteenth-century chivalric novel Tirant lo Blanc (1969), which was reprinted in Carta de

batalla por Tirant lo Blanc (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1991), while Fuentes further develops it

in his La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Joaqun Mortiz, 1969).

5 See Edward Mendelsons introduction to Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays

(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 115 (p. 10). Mendelson delineates a theory of encyclo-

pedic fiction that is complementary to theories of the total novel developed by Vargas Llosa andFuentes.

AGUSTIN YA NEZS TOTAL MEXICO 81


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and institutionalization of what were billed the values of the Revolution. This

process of consolidation included a strong emphasis on the creation of a new

national consciousness through cultural education, a programme in which

Yanez participated both as a creator of culture and as a political ideologue. Al

filo del agua works within this project, constructing a shared or collective

memory of the time period immediately preceding the Mexican Revolution andlegitimizing the ideology of the official party with which Yanez was intimately

associated. The novel emphasizes psychological rather than material causes of

the Revolution, drawing attention away from agrarian reform and towards the

creation of a new mexicanidad, or national essence, with the Revolution as one

of its foundations.6

Although Al filo del agua is an intensely regional novel, it simultaneously

creates a system of correspondences beyond its borders that allows for the

magnification of scale from the local to the national. In this way, Al filo del

agua suggests itself as a microcosm of the national.

7

The configuration ofthe microcosm-macrocosm association hinges primarily on a dialectic

tension between specificity, embedded in the novels ethnographic study of

the region known as the Altos de Jalisco, and indeterminacy, which allows

for multiple levels of reading. At the same time, Yanez creates in his political

discourse the public persona of the man of the pueblo that configures him as

the microcosmic embodiment of essential national values. In both his novel

and his political project, microcosmic essentialism becomes a key strategy

for the embodiment of the national subject.

The Fusion of the Literary and the Political Subjects

Alongside garish intellectual and literary figures such as Jose Vasconcelos and

Jose Revueltas, Agustn Yanez tends to blend into the background of post-

Revolutionary politics and letters. Yet his life-long dedication to the creation

6 For a discussion of nationalistic essentialism in this novel based on the psychology of

the national subject developed by humanists such as Paz and Ramos, see Danny Anderson,

Reading, Social Control, and the Mexican Soul in Al filo del agua, Mexican Studies/EstudiosMexicanos, 11:1 (1995), 4553.

7 The term microcosm is employed here with reference to its historical uses in Western

philosophy, as delineated by George P. Conger in Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the

History of Philosophy (New York: Russel and Russel, 1967). Conger generalizes concepts of

microcosms as theories in which portions of the world which vary in size exhibit similarities

in structures and processes, indicating that one portion imitates another or others on a different

scale (xiii). Angela B. Dellapaine in Releyendo Al filo del agua, Cuadernos Americanos, 201

(1975), 182206 (pp. 18687); Wilma Detjens in Whats in a Name? The Influence of Home

in the Naming of the Microcosms of Cien anos de soledad, Al filo del agua, and Pedro

Paramo, Chasqui, 20:2 (1991), 5463 (p. 54); Michael J. Doudoroff in Tensions and Triangles

in Al filo del agua, Hispania (USA), 57:1 (1974), 112 (p. 11); and John J. Flasher in Mexico

contemporaneo en las novelas de Agustn Yanez (Mexico City: Porrua, 1969), 39, allude to

Al filo del aguas village as a microcosm; given the protracted history of the term and thecomplexity of the novel at hand, such an assertion requires further analysis.



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and diffusion of Mexican national culture left an indelible mark on the political

and literary history of his country, a contribution that has been recognized

widely by the Mexican government and literary critics. Yanez is often

granted equal status with Mariano Azuela as the initiator of the modern

novel in Mexico for his deployment of modernist literary strategies in Al filo

del agua and later novels.8

Concomitant with his project of literary renovation,Yanez participated actively in the political project of the consolidation and insti-

tutionalization of the Mexican Revolution during the 1930s and 1940s.9 He occu-

pied a great number of political and cultural posts from the 1930s until his death

in 1980, among others, Director of the Radio Office of the Ministry of Public

Education (1932 1934), Professor and Coordinator of Humanities of the

UNAM (1942 1953, 1959 1962), Governor of Jalisco (19531959), Counsellor

to the President (19591962), Minister of Public Education (1964 1970)

and Director of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (19731980).10 Yanez

belongs to the Latin-American tradition of politically engaged intellectuals,leaders such as Sarmiento and Romulo Gallegos whoput their ideology into prac-

tice in the political arena as well as in the literary. His works of fiction include

Flor de juegos antiguos (1942), Pasion y convalescencia (1943), Archipielago de

mujeres (1943), Al filo del agua (1947), La creacion (1950), Ojerosa y pintada

(1960), La tierra prodiga (1960) and Las tierras flacas (1964).

As is evident from the juxtaposition of his literary and political chrono-

logies, Yanez penned many of his novels while he was in office. He wrote

others in the lull between political positions and many of them relate directly

to his political projects.11 In fact, the connection between literature and

8 The literary techniques employed in Al filo del agua, and particularly in the Acto pre-

paratorio, have been located within the modern literary tradition, relating the novel to those of

such authors as Dos Passos, Joyce and Faulkner, by critics and authors as varied as Rosario Cas-

tellanos in Al filo del agua de Agustn Yanez: una trinidad femenina, Nivel, 99 (1971), 12 (p. 2);

Gerald Martin in Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth

Century (London: Verso, 1989), 138; Jose Luis Martnez in Iniciacion y obra: la significacion de

Al filo del agua, in Agustn Yanez, Al filo del agua, ed. and intro. Arturo Azuela (Nanterre:

Signatarios Acuerdo Archivos ALLCA XX, Univ. de Paris X, 1996), 30725 (p. 321); Seymour

Menton in La obertura nacional: Asturias, Gallegos, Dos Passos, Yanez, Fuentes y Sarduy,

Revista Iberoamericana, 51:130131 (1985), 151 66 (p. 158); Donald L. Shaw in Nueva narrativa

hispanoamericana (Madrid: Catedra, 1992), 162; and Raymond Leslie Williams in The Twentieth-

Century Spanish American Novel (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2003), ix, among others.

9 John S. Brushwood notes the parallels between Yanezs creative work and political

vocation in Agustn Yanez: Creativity and Civic Responsibility, Topic, 20 (1970), 4452.

However, he finds few direct connections between the two beyond the expression of feelings

of civic responsibility in both Yanezs political essays and novels. I argue that Yanez creates a

public persona that is meant to embody not only civic responsibility but the essence of the

Mexican subject itself.

10 For a complete listing of the political offices held by Yanez, see the on-line biography

maintained by the Colegio Nacional (,www.colegionacional.org.mx/Yanez0.htm.).

11 Christopher Harris points out that Yanezs political career influenced even the chrono-logy in which he chose to publish certain manuscripts, in Agustn Yanezs International



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politics was quite tangible for Yanez: according to Rodric Camp, he was chosen

as candidate for the governorship of Jalisco largely because of his speech

writing abilities.12

The fusion of literature and politics in Yanezs career centred on the

project of the construction of a new national subject that would embody

the values of the Mexican Revolution. For Yanez, the relevance of literatureto the construction of a national consciousness was undeniable. In his essay,

El contenido social de la literatura iberoamericana (1944), he wrote, antes

que producto cultural, mucho antes que fenomeno artstico, la literatura es

instrumento de construccion americana.13 In another essay he seconds this

point of view: Esta es la grave responsabilidad del artista: forja y orienta el

espritu nacional y lo eleva a planos de universalidad en la medida de su

poder creador.14 Yanez conceives of an active role for the writer in the crea-

tion of national consciousness as well as in the insertion of national culture

into the pantheon of universal cultural values. He shares with Chakrabartythe concept of the universal as placeholder; through literature he proposes

to elevate Mexican national consciousness to universal planes.15 In

Yanezs discourse, the writers duties go far beyond being societys chroni-

cler or scribe; rather, alongside the politician, the novelist becomes the

sculptor of national destinies. In fact, Yanez envisioned a juxtaposition of

these two careers: in a speech given while he was Governor of Jalisco, he

stated that governing no deja de ser, en realidad, labor de novelista, de

un novelista que conjuga la realidad con la imaginacion.16

Significantly, the creative possibilities of literature lead Yanez to value it

over other possible vehicles for national consciousness:

la expresion literaria es instrumento insustituible para fijar la realidad

nacional, de modo superior a los caminos de la historia, de la sociologa,

de la geografa humana y economica, de la estadstica.17

Image: Murders, Mysteries, and Critical Controversies, BHS (Liverpool), LXXXIII (1996),

27787 (p. 285).

12 Rodric Camp, An Intellectual in Politics: The Case of Agustn Yanez, Mester, 12:1 2

(1983), 317 (p. 11).

13 Agustn Yanez, El contenido social de la literatura iberoamericana (special book issue

of Jornadas, 14 [1944], 9).

14 Agustn Yanez, Conciencia de la revolucion (Mexico City: Justicia Social, 1964), 51 52.

15 Dipesh Chakrabarty theorizes that the universal [. . .] can only exist as a placeholder,

its place always usurped by a historical particular seeking to present itself as the universal, in

Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital, in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol

A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, (Durham:

Duke U. P., 2002), 82110 (p. 105).

16 Quoted in Antonio Gomez Robledo, Agustn Yanez: escritor y estadista, Nivel, 13

(1964), 4.

17 Quoted in Alfonso Rangel Guerra, Agustn Yanez (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales,1969), 9697.



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Even science is relegated to an inferior level in Yanezs discourse:

la intuicion especficamente artstica tiene la virtud de calar los mas pro-

fundos estratos de la realidad, en anchura que quiza no pueda igualar

nunca por s sola ninguna tecnica cientfica.18

For Yanez, literature is better equipped than any other medium both for the

excavation of the national essence, a subterranean stratus that lies far

below the layers of reality that can be reached by scientific investigation,

and for its simultaneous preservation from the assault of modern globalized

culture through insertion into the canon of universality. Literatures sup-

plementary, critical relationship with reality allows it to attain a deeper,

more essential representation than those techniques designed for mere objec-

tive portrayal. And once this essential national vision is achieved, literature

assumes a secondary function, undertaking

la defensa de nuestra esencialidad frente a las exigencias de la moderni-

dad en la esfera publicitaria, cuya caudalosa corriente debemos temperar,

contener, all donde afecte nuestro ser en s, nuestra idiosincrasia.19

Literatures unique position in Western cultural history endows it with the

ability to preserve the national essence by inserting it in the canon of world

literature. Furthermore, the diffusion of national literature alongside the clas-

sics of world literature as part of Vasconcelos and the Revolutionary govern-

ments literacy campaign made it a perfect tool for drawing out this national

essence in the individual and for establishing its canonicity in the context of

Western culture.

Literature thus becomes both a defensive and an offensive weapon in the

Revolutionary battle to orient and forge the new national consciousness,

taking on the double role of revealing the national essence and then protecting

it intact from nefarious outside influences by elevating it to universal status.

Of Yanezs novels, Al filo del agua best exemplifies this project, creating a pre-

Revolution national subject that, although located in a regional context,

extends itself through techniques of microcosm to become a national arche-type for Revolutionary change at the same time that it embodies many of

the values that Yanez and the Revolutionary government viewed as quintes-

sential to the Mexican subject. Furthermore, the widespread proliferation of

international criticism written on the novel attests to the effectiveness of

Yanezs strategy to validate his vision of the national subject through insertion

into the canon of Western culture.

18 Yanez, Contenido, 18.

19 Agustn Yanez, Discursos al servicio de la Educacion Publica: quinta serie correspon-diente a 1969 (Mexico City: Secretara de Educacion Publica, 1969), 125.



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A similar marriage of apparent objectivity, subjectivity, and Revolutionary

politics characterizes Al filo del agua. However, there exists a fundamental

difference between the two works that has to do with specificity. Yahualica,

the hometown of Yanezs parents that he frequently visited as a child, is

clearly the object of the eponymous study and has been identified by several

critics familiar with Yanezs personal history as the model for Al filo delaguas pueblo.23 Yet while Yahualica makes its locality clear and presents

its study within a regional context, the position and the name of the village

in Al filo del agua are deliberately masked.24 The author takes specific

steps to disassociate the village in the novel from Yahualica, such as including

the latter in lists of surrounding towns.25 In this way, the villages context is

deferred; it becomes open to abstraction, thus making it available to the

national imaginary.

Indeterminacy and abstraction also play a role in developing this switch in

scale in the authors brief prologue to the novel:Al filo del agua es una expresion campesina que significa el momento de

iniciarse la lluvia, yen sentido figurado, muy comunla inminencia

o el principio de un suceso.

Quienes prefieran, pueden intitular este libro En un lugar del Arzobispado,

El antiguo regimen o de cualquier otro modo semejante. Sus paginas no

tienen argumento previo; se trata de vidascanicas las llama uno de los

protagonistasque ruedan, que son dejadas rodar en estrecho lmite de

tiempo y espacio, en un lugar del Arzobispado, cuyo nombre no importa

recordar.26

The explication of the title given by the author is not gratuitous; it activates its

readers to a more speculative readingwhat could that imminent suceso

be?while simultaneously alerting them to the possibility of multiple

layers of meaningthe sentidos figurados. The first paragraph of the prolo-

gue, then, uses ambiguity with reference to plot. The second paragraph also

employs a play on indeterminacy and specificity, now regarding time and

place. As Francoise Perus has pointed out, el antiguo regimen evokes a

23 Among them, Ignacio Daz Ruiz in Al filo del agua en la historia personal de Agustn

Yanez y el itinerario de su obra, included in Yanez, Al filo del agua, ed. Azuela, 27583, and

Jose Luis Martnez in Iniciacion y obra: la significacion de Al filo del agua, also in Azuelas

edition of Al filo del agua, 30725.

24 Stanley L. Robe observes that despite the correspondences between the two towns, Al

filo del aguas pueblo is not named (Yanez y el regionalismo, Mester, 12:12 [1983], 5277

[p. 61]).

25 Such is the case in the following passage describing the preparations for Semana Santa,

which besides local artisans require otros aleatorios que vienen de Cuquo, de Mexticacan, de

Yahualica, de Nochistlan (Al filo del agua, 94). This and all subsequent quotations are taken

from Agustn Yanez, Al filo del agua, ed. and preface Antonio Castro Leal (Mexico City:

Porrua, 1973).26 Yanez, Al filo, 2.



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political order that has been cancelled out, while the Arzobispado casts the

focus onto the Catholic Churchs role in the geopolitical organization of the

nation.27 The author has already drawn the readers attention to the impor-

tance of the title as a metaphor for future rupture; one can only assume

that the novel takes place in a moment in Mexican history when this old

regime dominated by the Church still maintains a tenuous control but isnear to losing it. Yet Yanez names no names, preferring to maintain a

certain level of abstraction. Likewise, while Arzobispado connotes a demar-

cation of territories at a regional level, without a qualifying place name the

location remains in geographic limbo.

An attentive reader could easily connect this cancelled political order,

this antiguo regimen, with the suceso to come and arrive at the supposition

that the Mexican Revolution is the matter at hand. A context, however insub-

stantial it may be, has been established at both the regional (Arzobispado)

and the national (Mexican Revolution) levels. Yet ambiguity is still thedominant trope: o de cualquier otro modo semejante. Finally, the appro-

priation and modification of Cervantes renowned opening lines to Don

Quixote, cuyo nombre no importa recordar, direct the reader towards

the greater Western literary tradition of abstract representation. Remem-

bering the name of the village is not important, because it could be any

town, anywhere. The prologue, with its emphasis on indeterminacy and

multiple levels of reading, prepares the reader for an allegorical reading

of the text.

This tension between particularity and indeterminacy allows a system of

correspondences between different scales to develop. As the political and

social structures and processes represented at the local level are extended

through abstraction to the national level and beyond, Yanezs ethnography

transforms itself into microcosmography. Not only are these structures and

processes seen to repeat themselves at different levels, but some of them are

given priority through reiteration in such a way that they acquire a central-

ity in the formulation of the national subject that transcends local culture.

The microcosm-macrocosm relation is amplified through this process of epi-

tomization, in which the specificity of the characteristics of the pueblo is

subsumed into their essence, which, by definition, is also the essence ofthe whole, of the nation, or even humankind. In this sense, Julieta

Campos identification of Yanezs style as a realismo de las esencias is

quite accurate.28

The essence of the town is revealed to be psychological, motivated by

desire. This Freudian interpretation of reality ultimately returns to Hegelian

27 Francoise Perus, La poetica narrativa de Agustn Yanez en Al filo del agua, in Yanez,

Al filo del agua, ed. Azuela, 32768 (p. 327).

28 Julieta Campos, La imagen en el espejo (Mexico City: Univ. Nacional Autonoma deMexico, 1965), 144.



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phenomenology and dialectics, as Joseph Sommers has pointed out.29 The

interplay between subjective views of reality creates a synthesis which

the author solves for the reader in the form of an ongoing commentary on

the nature of desire and its repression. To this end, Al filo del agua portrays

individual subjectivities not as distinct personalities, but rather as parts of

a synthesis, of what is presented as the villages essentialized collectiveconsciousness.30 Yanez thus develops a collective psychological essence

through exploring the tensions between individuals and individual-society.

However, he links this essence to its historical moment and, as the novels

title suggests, it is unstable. As Anderson points out, Yanezs political

project requires the substitution of Al filo del aguas pre-Revolution essence,

based on repression, with a new national essence grown out of the Revolution

and its values.31

Allegory is another way in which Yanez develops a microcosmic-macrocosmic

relationship between the local, the national imaginary, and Western human-ism. Both Oyarzun and Marquet associate the motif of parricide in Al filo

del agua with the processes of the Revolution.32 Likewise, DLugo and

Anderson relate allegories of reading in the novel with the activation of the

extratextual reader.33 Through these multiple layers of symbolism, the

scope of the novel is expanded to encompass the local, the national, and the

abstract universal.

Al filo del agua also establishes correspondences between the local and the

national through the inclusion of themes and historic referents of national

importance, events that through post-Revolution civic education became

common markers of national identity. The Revolutionary government chose

the events mentioned in the novel after the fact, with historical distance, as

milestones for the definition of national identity. Many of these historical

referents, such as the Guerra de los Pasteles (183839) and the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), are moments that define national identity through

opposition to foreign intervention in Mexico; others relate directly to key

moments in the formation of the Revolution such as the strike and subsequent

massacre at Cananea, Sonora (1906). Key historical figures are also instru-

mental in evoking identification with the national. Only the carefully

29 Joseph Sommers, After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel

(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1968), 63.

30 Floyd Merrel, Structure and Restructuration inAl filo del agua, Chasqui, 17:1 (1988),

51 60 (p. 52).

31 Anderson, Reading, 48.

32 Kemy Oyarzun, Parricidio a la letra: Al filo del agua, Texto crtico, 12:3435 (1986),

65 80 (p. 69); Antonio Marquet, Yanez y el Acto preparatorio, in Palabra crtica: estudios en

homenaje a Jose Amescua, ed. Serafn Gonzalez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica,

1997), 34653 (pp. 34749).

33 Carol Clark DLugo, Al filo del agua: Addressing Readership in Mexican Fiction,Hispania (USA), 74:4 (1991), 86067 (p. 860); Anderson, Reading, 6369.



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chosen heroes of the Revolution are mentioned, those whose importance and

motives were considered unquestionable, such as the Flores Magon brothers

and Madero. The novel conveniently ends before controversial figures of the

Revolution such as Villa and Calles appear.

At the same time, Yanez uses the townspeoples stubborn opposition to

change to justify the epistemological violence that the Revolution will inevita-bly wreak on their cloistered worldview. Significantly, the sacred precursor of

the Revolution, Benito Juarez, and his reforms are rejected and vilified in the

village. The villages attitude demonstrates the extent to which the liberal

reforms of the nineteenth century were unsuccessful and the magnitude of

the opposition to them, an opposition so powerful that a Revolution is neces-

sary to overcome it. More than an armed conflict, this Revolution implies a

change in consciousness, a transformation in the peoples way of thinking

that is only possible through a massive programme of cultural indoctrination.

Yanezs Programme of Civic Education

Yanez was fully aware of the power of literature and mass media in general to

create a common cultural background. In an article entitled Existe una

cultura mexicana? (1951), he demonstrates awareness of nation and culture

as social constructs:

[La nacion] es la formacion de una conciencia general acerca de un sistema

de bienes presentes y futuros en que se objetivan los juicios de valor,

propios de la comunidad; es el hallazgo y la nueva busqueda de lo que setiene por valioso para el grupo nacional, tanto como elaboracion vernacula,

como adopcion de formas extranasextranjerasque sirven y enriquez-

can el sistema, porque corresponden a la realidad publica. [. . .] Las cul-

turas no son dadivas hechas a los pueblos, sino productos labrados por

estos [. . .].34

These ideas are certainly not unique to Yanezs thought; rather they corre-

spond to the ideology of the cultural movement promoted and financed by

the state under the leadership of Lazaro Cardenas, Manuel A vila Camacho

and subsequent presidents. These administrations laboured actively tocultivate national unity through the creation of a shared cultural experience

that would span regions regardless of geographical, ethnic, and ideological

differences. Enveloping both popular and high culture, this vast programme

of cultural outreach enlisted popular music, movies, radio, television and

newspapers along with painting, literature and symphonic music to

express and propagate what the official party promoted as the values of the

Revolution.

34 Agustn Yanez, Existe una cultura mexicana?, Mexico en la Cultura, 15 July 1951,12 (p. 1).



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As the director of the Radio Office of the Ministry of Public Education from

1932 to 1934, Yanez was in charge of preparing programmes that would

foment national consciousness.35 The government used radionovelas and

popular music to create a series of national personalities that would serve

as focal points for the project of national unity, becoming common points of

reference and models of national pride for audiences separated geographi-cally.36Yanezs experience with radio as a medium for the diffusion of national

consciousness also served him as a model for the Teleaulas, a programme of

distance education that he founded as Minister of Public Education in 1968.

In general, Yanezs tenure as Minister of Public Education was not charac-

terized by great changes in policy. He continued the projects of literacy and the

promotion of the ideals of the Revolution through various media, just as his

predecessors had.37 The rhetoric Yanez used remained basically unchanged as

well, as this speech from 1968, entitled Formacion cvica y educacion de

adultos, shows:Reafirmamos que la reforma educativa es parte de un vasto plan de

reforma social, a partir de una remodelacion dinamica de la solidaridad,

entendida como conciencia y practicada como habito de servicio de inter-

eses colectivos, nacionales, vinculados con sentido humanista, en perspec-

tiva universal, a las realidades y necesidades internacionales, regidas por

la independencia y la justicia. Esto quiere decir: formacion cvica.38

In this speech, Yanez makes clear his belief that the national consciousness is

related to the agency of autonomous local values in a universal humanist

context. National values are only legitimate when they are universally recog-

nized, that is to say, when they themselves become Chakrabartys universal

placeholders. The emergent national consciousness is seen as the end result

of an on-going process of Western humanist education and local civic service

that work hand-in-hand to create social solidarity both within and beyond

the borders of the nation.

The same speech could easily have been given by Vasconcelos or Torres

Bodet decades earlier, had it not been rendered ironic or even cynical by the

1968 massacre of students by government troops at Tlatelolco. By the 1960s

the political climate had become increasingly unstable and many groupshad lost faith in both the ability and the intentions of what was now the

PRI to carry out the goals of the Revolution. Yanezs apparently blind

35 Clearly, to speak of national consciousness in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s is to

speak of the institutionalization of the Revolution and the consolidation of the hegemony of the

official partythen the Partido de la Revolucion Mexicana (PRM).

36 See Michael Nelson Miller, Red, White, and Green: The Maturing of Mexicanidad,

19401946 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1998), 1516.

37 Mara d e l o s A ngeles Yanez details several direct links between Yanez and his predeces-

sors in Agustn Yanez: ideas en poltica educativa, Mester, 12:12 (1983), 10116.38 Yanez, Discursos, 25.



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support of the Revolutionary government and his public impassibility with

regard to the massacre of students at Tlatelolco attracted ferocious criticism.

In any case, the literate constituency inherited from Vasconcelos and his dis-

ciples, painstakingly constructed over thirty years, made possible Yanezs

nationalistic project in the novelistic arena.39 The amplification of a reading

public due to the literacy campaign made the novel much more viable as ameans for the conveyance of ideology to the masses, for the formation of a

national conscience.

Yanezs Novel as an Instrument of Civic Education

In Al filo del agua, Yanez creates a national prehistory, a shared or collective

memory of the way things were before the Revolution, based on this essen-

tialist vision of national consciousness. The date of publication (1947) is

important because it inserts the novel into the national project of legitimiza-tion and consolidation of the Revolution, a considerable part of which

depended on civic education. Yanezs novel appeared when the first genera-

tion of the children of the Revolutionthe first group of citizens educated

under Vasconcelos new systemwas maturing. This generation had no

first-hand experience of the way things were before the Revolution and

tended to question the effectiveness of the present administration.40 Al filo

del agua establishes a common historical consciousness for this generation

of Mexicans who did not experience the Revolution and its changes in

person, a commonality that attempts to mitigate the opposition to the officialpartys totalitarian politics that began surfacing in the 1940s. Al filo del agua

is a defensive book in that it protects a political project in its present through

contrasting the conditions of relative freedom during its time with the

repression of the past. The emphasis it places on pre-Revolution immobility,

stagnation, and on the marginalization from participation in historical pro-

jects draws attention to the magnitude of the changes carried out by the

Revolutionary government of which Yanez formed a part. Likewise, the intol-

erance and censorial control of the pre-Revolution pueblo in Al filo del agua

contrast with the relatively tolerant cultural policies of post-Revolutionary

governments.

39 For a history of the Revolutionary governments literacy programme and its relation

to the diffusion of civic values, see Engracia Loyo, La lectura en Mexico, 19201940 and

Valentina Torres Septien, La lectura, 19401960, both included in Historia de la lectura en

Mexico (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1988), 24394 and 295337, respectively. De los

A ngeles Yanez documents Agustn Yanezs continuation of this project, calling it a national

crusade (Agustn Yanez: ideas en poltica educativa, 110).

40 Even some who had formerly been staunch supporters began to speak of a crisis in the

values of the Revolution, such as Jesus Silva Herzog, who in the early forties questioned the

direction Revolutionary politics were taking in La revolucion mexicana en crisis, CuadernosAmericanos, XI (1943), 3255.



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The Revolution is indeed a presiding presence in the novel, as Sommers

has said,41 but that presence is not the Madero rebellion of 1910 that makes

a cameo appearance at the end of the novel; it is the institutionalized Revolu-

tion of which Yanez was an ideologue, the programme of incorporation of dis-

parate regions and peoples into national life; it is the construction of national

unity rather than the levelling forces of the armed Revolution. The textpresupposes knowledge of the armed Revolution and its causes, but that

knowledge is only a point of departure.42 The focus is on the present, seen

through the filter of Yanezs construction of the past.

Notably, Al filo del agua scarcely refers to the land problem, ostensibly the

core issue of Revolution ideology. Likewise, the main group disenfranchised

under Porfirio Dazs liberal government, the indigenous, has no represen-

tation in the novel. Indeed, economic disparity in general is downplayed as

a motive for rebellion in Al filo del agua. In this instance, as in others

already mentioned, the importance of the Acto preparatorio cannot be under-estimated. This very title, chosen over other possibilities such as Preface or

Prologue, plainly delineates the role the opening section plays in predispos-

ing the reader towards a particular interpretation of the greater text. For

this reason, when the Acto preparatorio insists that los ricos miserables y

estoicos, estoicos los pobres, igualan un parejo vivir,43 the text is configuring

itself against a materialist reading of the social problems it will later present.

As stoic as the villages inhabitants might be, there are grave differences in

their economic situations: while peasant Leonardo Tovar cant find money

for the operation his wife desperately needs, Don Inocencio Rodrguez and

his family seem to have no shortage of funds to make pleasure trips to the

nations capital. Tovar deals with his poverty and his wifes eventual death

with the same stoicism that Don Inocencio later displays when confronted

with his daughters disgrace and demise at the hands of her lover. The

novel minimizes material differences in favour of a psychological unity that

becomes apparent in the way in which the characters respond to adversity.

Indeed, the use of the adjective estoico for both the rich and the poor forms

part of the collective psychological profile that has already begun to be deve-

loped, what is presented as the towns spiritual essence.

This pattern of subordination of material issues to psychological essencecharacterizes much of the novel. Notably, the only extensive exposition of

the material problems that lead to the Revolution is found in the second frag-

ment of the chapter entitled Los nortenos. The nortenos are marginal figures

41 See Sommers, After the Storm, 37.

42 As Elaine Haddad points out, both the Madero rebellion and Damians crime are fore-

known events, given away by textual clues before they happen and thus effectively suppressing

the possibility of a dramatic climax. See La estructura de Al filo del agua, in Homenaje a

Agustn Yanez, ed. Giacoman, 25977 (p. 259).43 Yanez, Al filo, 12.



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in the pueblo; therefore the anonymous voice that exposes the problems of

social injustice to Padre Reyes cannot easily be read as a spokesperson for

the town in general, even when anonymity has been used earlier in the

novel to create a collective voice. Also, Damian Limon, the only norteno that

figures prominently in the action, happens to be the son of relatively rich land-

owner and loan shark Don Timoteo Limon, and his impulsive behaviour haslittle to do with economic or class problems.

Furthermore, the towns collective voice accuses the nortenos of spreading

doubt and making the youth lose their love for the land because ya no se

hallan a gusto en su tierra and acting in order to sembrar la duda and

hacer que se pierda el amor a la tierra.44 The most active proponents of

Revolution are thus disassociated from the land and figuratively exiled from

the village. The village considers their point of view to be exogenous and

therefore invalid. In fact, the nortenos are seen as near foreigners; at one

point they are accused of being agents of the gringos, who will soon come torobarse lo que nos queda de tierra, lo que no se pudieron robar la otra vez.45

The problem of the land becomes doubly subordinated, since the indigen-

ous groups traditionally affiliated with the land are absent from the novel and

the only group that does promote Revolutionary reform, the nortenos, has

been desterrado. With the land problem removed, the abuses of Porfirio

Dazs liberal government fade into the background, and the psychological

repression of the Catholic Church takes centre stage. This is why the

secular powers of the pueblo, Roman Capistran, and his successor, Heliodoro

Fernandez, are portrayed as fairly innocuous despite their accumulation of ill-

gotten gains and manipulation of the justice system. In Yanezs homogenous

universe of racial and economic parity, the prime motivators are desire and

its repression, problems of social psychology that could be resolved without

the drastic measures of the redistribution or restitution of land, a perennial

thorn in the side of the Revolutionary government.

Al filo del agua is not a novel that faithfully recreates its historical

moment, as Sommers has pointed out.46 It is a supplement that replaces

that moment in its readers minds, thereby creating a common historical con-

sciousness. DLugo states correctly that the discourse ofAl filo del agua works

toward achieving a shift in readers expectations and consciousness by chal-lenging conventions of narrativity.47 However, the novel is not deconstruc-

tive; it does not simply challenge the conventions of narrative, but also

reconfigures them into a discourse compatible with its authors political

project. The novels fragmented structure encourages the reader to participate

in the creation of meaning, but that meaning is structured by the very

44 Yanez, Al filo, 151.

45 Yanez, Al filo, 152.

46 Sommers, After the Storm, 38.47 DLugo, Addressing, 863.



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elements that DLugo sees as the authors annoying intrusions and too-

obvious guidelines.48 The authors brief prologue and the Acto preparatorio

orient the reader towards a reading of Al filo del aguas village as a national

prehistory that legitimizes the Revolutionary partys programme of national

unity, in which Yanez played an important role.

Yanezs Total Mexico and the Individual Embodiment of National

Consciousness

The totalizing perspective that Yanez wrote into Al filo del agua anticipates a

still more ambitious novelistic project. He describes this greater project in an

interview with Adam Rodrguez, tying it into his goals for the construction of

national consciousness:

Mi idea es escribir distintas obras, cada una de las cuales vaya recogiendo

un distinto angulo de la vida mexicanacomo en Al filo del agua, en que

pinto un pueblo incomunicado, sin agua, sin sanidade integrar un ciclo

que nos de una imagen total de Mexico: de su vida poltica, la artstica,

la universitaria, la obrera, la cientfica, etc. [. . .] En lugar de una obra con-

tinuada, una concatenacion de las obras en su conjunto: construir una

gran serie de obras para retratar a Mexicoun gran muralsin que

una obra dependa de la otra, sino independientes. Algo semejante a La

comedia humana de Balzac.49

He elaborates further this grandiose plan in the prologue to his book of short

stories, Los sentidos al aire (1964), which outlines a project under the heading

El plan que peleamos, primer esbozo para un retrato de Mexico. The use of

the phrase el plan que peleamos resonates on the national political level,

since it evokes both the renowned manifestos of the Revolutionary caudillos,

in which they declared the principles and demands for which they were

fighting, and the plans for action and reform proposed by the Revolutionary

government after the end of the armed conflict. Yanez divides the plan into

four categories: in Las edades y los tiempos, he places Flor de juegos antiguos,

Archipielago de mujeres, La ladera dorada and Los sentidos al aire; in El pasy la gente, La tierra prodiga, Las tierras flacas, Cornelio Luna, comisario

ejidal,Al filo del agua, La culta sociedad and Ojerosa y pintada; in La historia

y los tipos, Las vueltas del tiempo, Cronica de los das heroicos, La fortuna de

los Ibarra Dieguez, Monico Delgadillo y sus amigos and La gloriosa; and in

Los oficios y las ilusiones, La creacion, La torre, El taller de Sanroman,

Claudia Capuleto and Tonantzintla.

48 DLugo, Addressing, 865.

49 Agustn Yanez, Hay epocas en que los poetas se fugan de la realidad (interview withArturo Adam Rodrguez in Mexico en la Cultura, 30 June 1950, 3 and 7 [p. 3]).



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Clearly, this outline includes many works that never reached fruition.

However, many of those that were eventually published reinforce tendencies

seen in Al filo del agua. For example, in the section entitled El pas y la

gente, Al filo del agua, La tierra prodiga, and Las tierras flacas are all set

in Jalisco. The only other novel listed in the section that Yanez published,

Ojerosa y pintada, takes place in Mexico City. All of the novels that Yanezmeant to represent rural Mexico and its inhabitants are limited to one geo-

graphic region, while he also epitomizes urban experience, reducing it to

one novel. Yanezs Mexico, El pas y la gente, is effectively limited to the

two places where he lived: the state of Jalisco and Mexico, D.F.

Indeed, under more rigorous scrutiny of Yanezs plan, a pattern begins to

emerge in which national consciousness is concatenated with his personal

experience. In Las edades y los tiempos, proposed by the author as a compen-

dium of la vida del nino mexicano y los estados de sensibilidad del adoles-

cente, two intensely autobiographical books are found, Flor de juegosantiguos and La ladera dorada, while the women of Archipielago de

mujeres, drawn from the classics of world literature, reflect Yanezs own read-

ings as well as his adolescent fantasies. It is also telling that in the section La

historia y los tipos appears an unwritten book entitled Monico Delgadillo y

sus amigos. Yanezs full name was Agustn Monico Yanez Delgadillo; Monico

Delgadillo was a pseudonym that he used in articles he published in

Bandera de provincias, the literary review that he and his friends edited as

students in Guadalajara. He inserts himself and his friends directly into a

section dedicated to national history and archetypes. In this way, Yanez

postulates himself as a national archetype; his explicit goal of creating

national consciousness through narrative creation requires that his personal

experiences become national, collective culture. Yanez, politician and novelist

from the heart of the nation, sets himself up as the national model: he is the

body politic.

This project of embodiment becomes explicit in his political campaigns: an

enormous photo of Yanez leaps from the cover of the 28 September 1958 issue

of Mexico en la Cultura. As one turns the page, a second photo appears with

the caption Agustn Yanez: nac del pueblo, pertenezco al pueblo. Nearly

the entire number is dedicated to him; several articles and interviews accom-pany the photos mentioned above, lavishing praise on the author and poli-

tician. One of them is particularly careful to elaborate the link between

Yanez and the pueblo: Yanez es un hombre del pueblo que transcurre por la

ciudad en el camion o en el tranva, que participa en los problemas de los

humildes y comparte sus gustos.50 A double discursive process becomes

evident in which Yanez constructs a public persona that is representative of

the whole and yet simultaneously proposed as a model for future change.

50 Henrique Gonzalez Casanova, Un hombre del pueblo, Mexico en la Cultura,28 September 1958, pp. 12.



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Yanez, as the hombre del pueblo, embodies the essential characteristics of the

entire population; he is the incarnation of those unique properties of mexica-

nidad that are traceable back to the conquest, the symbolic origin of the

Mexican nation and its mestizo subject. Yet at the same time, according to

the official ideology, mexicanidad has been habitually subsumed to foreign

models throughout Mexican history and it is only with the Revolution andthe Revolutionary governments programme of civic education that it

emerges as the true national essence. Naturally, it is Yanez and the other ideo-

logues of the Revolution who are able to recognize this essence and are in a

(political) position to bring it to fruition as a recognizable, autonomous contri-

bution to universal Western culture.

Yanez may have been a man of the pueblo, but it was not the pueblo that

selected him as its representative. Huberto Batis describes the manner in

which Yanez was elected governor of Jalisco:

Yo viva a dos cuadras de un lugar que se llamaba Cafe Caliente, un restau-

rante en la calle de Libertad, cerca de Tolsaall dicen Tolsa, no Tolsa

como aquy justo ah estaba Ruiz Cortines lanzando la candidatura de

Rojas [Gonzalez, candidate for Governor of Jalisco and friend of Yanez].

Como intelectual amigo, Yanez estaba tambien ah; cuando Rojas se

muere de pronto, de un ataque al corazon. Entre otros discursos,

Agustn Yanez haba hablado del A gora, de la Polisesos terminos de

gente culta, y Ruiz Cortines le dijo a sus acompanantes: traiganme a

ese, y le propuso all mismo retomar la candidatura. De ser un profesor

en Filosofa y Letras, paso a ser gobernante.51

The infamous PRI dedazo lurks between the lines: the president handpicks

the candidate, the results of the election are a given, Yanez becomes governor.

Apparently this procedure was accepted without question by the press if not

by the populace in general: an anonymous article entitled Agustn Yanez:

datos biograficos y curriculum vitae, published in the same issue of Mexico

en la Cultura mentioned above, ends with este es el ciudadano al que el

pueblo de Jalisco elegira como gobernador del Estado el proximo domingo 7

de diciembre.52 The use of the future tense would seem to be at odds with

the democratic verb to which it is assigned.

Yanezs unflagging support of his partys ideologyespecially during the

violent repression of the student protests in the massacre at the Plaza de

las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in 1968, while he was Minister of Public

Educationattracted vitriolic accusations of complicity from intellectuals

such as Monsivais and Raul Prieto. As the organizer of the first-ever Cultural

51 Huberto Batis, Huberto Batis: no se leyo ni se lee a Agustn Yanez (interview with

Alejandro Ortiz Gonzalez, El Nacional, 18 January 1995, 18A).

52 Agustn Yanez: datos bibliograficos y curriculum vitae, Mexico en la Cultura,28 September 1958, p. 3.



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Olympics, a series of cultural events designed to complement the 1968 Olym-

pics in Mexico City, Yanez certainly had a stake in maintaining order and con-

trolling the protests that attacked the Olympics as a drain of resources that

could be better used for social reform. In a speech pronounced on Flag Day

(24 February) 1969, Yanez attributes the political unrest to a lack of education

in the area of civic virtue:

se ha levantado la rebelda juvenil, que reclama nuevas formas de convi-

vencia y de satisfactores; pero asimismo proviene de nula o inadecuada for-

macion cvica, que se revela en el afan destructivo sin el diseno del mundo,

del orden jurdico, de las instituciones a construir [. . .].53

To renounce his Revolutionary project in that moment would have been to

renounce a lifetime of work in civic education, a goal that Ya nez saw as unfin-

ished. In public at least, he remained a staunch and optimistic supporter of

the Revolutionary project and its institutions.

Conclusion

Many of the devices that Yanez used in Al filo del agua to develop the micro-

cosm-macrocosm correspondence reappear in later total novels such as Garca

Marquezs Cien anos de soledad (1967), Fuentes Terra Nostra (1976) and Del

Pasos Noticias del Imperio (1987), among others. This is not to say that the

techniques originate solely with Yanez; on the contrary, these authors share

the common influence of European and North American modernists such as

Dos Passos, Joyce and Faulkner. Nevertheless, Yanezs fusion of a discourseof cultural universalism with projects of local political transformation directed

at the rewriting of the national subject inaugurates a powerful cultural mech-

anism that became commonplace in subsequent Spanish-American total

novels. In many cases, these later total novelists renounced direct political

affiliations with government-sponsored programmes of cultural education in

favour of more critical approaches, particularly during the 1960s when pro-

foundly influential events such as the Cuban Revolution and the massacre

of students at Tlatelolco inspired reflection on the state of government in

Latin America. They did not, however, leave behind the project of re-scriptingfoundational fictions, replacing the hackneyed nineteenth-century allegory of

the heterosexual criollo couple with an emphasis on racial, ethnic, and sexual

plurality unified by shared essential national and human values.

On the same note, not all total novelists share Yanezs personal feeling

of national embodiment, but it is no coincidence that Carlos Fuentes sees him-

self as the synthetic end-product of Terra Nostras essentialized Spanish-

American history or that Fernando Del Paso, author of panoramic novels

such as Jose Trigo (1966), Palinuro de Mexico (1977) and Noticias del

53 Yanez, Discursos, 27.



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Imperio, has made known his view that ultimately we are all one.54 Yanezs

work postulates that national essentialism is not at odds with universalism,

but rather a means to it; these later authors take that lesson to heart, search-

ing for universal representation within their own subjectivity. Clearly, this

strategy has daunting implications for those, Mexicans or otherwise, who

may not feel that they share these supposedly essential values, or for subal-tern cultural groups whose subjectivities and voices may be smothered by

the total novels essentialist representation, but these are matters to be con-

sidered in another place.

54 See Fuentes interview with Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, in which he states that

Terra Nostra implica captar el universo, que es todo mi pasado, from Universos de la

novela, in Carlos Fuentes: territorios del tiempo, antologa de entrevistas, ed. and intro.

Jorge F. Hernandez (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999), 14470 (p. 156), and

Del Pasos affirmation to Ignacio Trejo Fuentes that, desde hace mucho tiempo pienso, junto

con Borges, que todos somos uno, que yo soy todos, que todos soy yo, from El que despalinurice

a Palinuro sera un buen despalinurizador: entrevista con Fernando del Paso, Semana de BellasArtes, 23 July 1980, 611 (p. 7).



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Mark Anderson, Yanez's Total Mexico1

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