The Death Of Artemio Cruz (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
Framed by dying guy in hospital in 1960, apparently with his life flashing through his brains, at which points narrative descends to other dates. Narrative is formally complex, jumping not only from 1960 back to prior times, but within each analepsis (told in third person & past tense) including a return to 1960 (told in first person & present tense) as well as a second-person section, in varying tense (not sure what to make of that). I suppose the multi-perspectival presentation is consistent with Marxist author’s underlying Hegelian inclination that there will be varying conflicting perspectives on any question. (The second person narrator is generally more hostile to protagonist than the first- or the third-person.)In 1960, dude controls a “vast network of businesses”: the newspaper, the real estate investments—Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Culiacan, Hermosillo, Guaymas, Acapulco—the sulfur domes in Jaltipan, the mines in Hidalgo, the logging concessions in Tarahumara, your stock in the chain of hotels, the pipe factory, the fish business, financing of financing, the legal representation of U.S. companies, the administration of railroad loans, the advisory posts in fiduciary institutions, the shares in foreign corporations—dyes, steel, detergents—and one fact that does not appear on the diagram: $15 million deposited in London, New York, and Zurich. (9-10)By geographical reference, these holdings appear to be focused internally on Mexico, rather than partaking much in what later would be designated as ‘globalization’—it is a bit early for ‘globalization,’ of course—though M&E could famously state in 1847:The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. […] It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.( Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. I). Likely that this novel is the reduction of this process down to the life of one person, whose life’s work oversees the destruction of old caudillo plantation power (he displaces a guy who “imagined himself the final product of a peculiarly Creole civilization, a civilization of enlightened despots” (44)) and the integration of Mexico into the world liberal system, mainly through “short term loans,” speculative “acquisition of property,” “property for subdivisions in Mexico City,” purchasing a newspaper, “purchase of mining stocks and the creation of joint Mexican-U.S. corporations,” “intermediary between Chicago, New York, and Mexico,” “manipulation of the bond market,” “acquisition of communal properties stripped from the peasants to create new subdivisions in the cities of the interior” (10). Displays the normal war profiteer attitude in concluding that “going into business with the Colombian coffee growers when the war in Africa began had not been a bad idea” (12) in 1941. Made plain later when dude coordinates with ambassadors and cappies from the US (111). Reveals the liberal world market influence when stirring up xenophobic paternalism against unionization by having his newspaper to allege “a brazen red plot. Alien infiltration totally foreign to the essence of the Mexican Revolution” (52) even while deploying ‘foreign’ concepts such as “the Antichrist” (id.) and boasting how he “could sniff the breeze for the perfumes of other lands, the aromas drawn out of other noons by the wind” (53). Dude has a thing for remembrance, noting that some days have been “pushed toward oblivion, etched in memory” (11) and lamenting that “these ugly old bitches” of his household “keep me from remembering” (25), which apparently developed to the point that tasked his assistant with “storing all the tapes of my conversations” (24), which tapes are replayed at intervals in the 1960 sections. (In the 1960’s sections, where he’s dying, his daughter insists that “he’s just faking” (26) in order to deflect them from the search for his will.) We find that “memory is satisfied desire” (57, 201). But cf. “he wanted to efface all trace of the start of their life together, to be loved without a memory of the act that forced her to take him for a husband” (94). (This derridean bit will be echoed in moments of literal undecidability (see 100, 115, 216.)Some Hegelian considerations—“all extremes contain their opposites” (27)—that loop into politics of remembrance: “she whispers words that seek to mix with that memory of yours that never ceases, lost in the depth of these hours, unconscious, exempt from your will but fused with your involuntary memory, which slides along the interstices of your pain and repeats the words you didn’t hear then” (85). The epistemology of remembrance is made manifest: The will? Don’t worry: it exists, an officially stamped, notarized document. I don’t leave anyone out: why should I leave anyone out, hate anyone? Wouldn’t you have secretly thanked me for hating you? Wouldn’t it give you pleasure to know that even at the end I thought about you, even if it was to play a trick on you? No., I remember all of you with the indifference of a cold bureaucratic formality. (196-97)Dude is “doling out a strange fortune to you, a wealth which you will all ascribe [NB: a writing on top of the writing of the will]—in public—to all my efforts, my tenacity, my sense of responsibility, my personal qualities” (197). It is gets uglier than this: “Tell him to show the sharp differences between an anarchic, bloody movement that destroys private property and human rights and an orderly, peaceful, legal revolution like Mexico’s, a revolution led by a middle class that found its inspiration in Jefferson. After all, people have bad memories” (id.), which solicitation is made after narrative that presents the revolution quite a bit differently. All of this is complicated considerably by the Spanish Civil War sections, which constitute letters from dude’s son, who has gone off to fight against fascism, and addresses letters to his father regarding the war—some of the most effective writing in the novel—“don’t ever forget me” (230), “I’ll never forget this one, Papa” (231). Despite the abandoned body, despite the ice and sun that buried it, despite the eyes open forever, devoured by the birds, there is something worse: not being able to remember him, being able to remember only through photographs, through objects left in the bedroom, books with notes written in them.” (234)Famous ‘motherfucker’ chapter is premised upon a “return to the origin,” plainly part of the epistemology of remembrance: “return to the phony golden age, to the sinister origins, the bestial grunt, the struggle for bear meat, for the cave, for the flint, return to sacrifice and madness, to the nameless terror of the origin, the burned fetish, fear of the sun, fear of masks, to the terror of the idols, fear of puberty, fear of water, fear of hunger, fear of being homeless, cosmic terror: fucked mother, pyramid of negations, teocalli of horror” (137-38).Places cappy prophetics (“your desire will be identical with your destiny” (28)) in juxtaposition with pre-modern fatalism (“no one can plot against the intentions of Providence” (40)). Plenty of great lines: “Chaos has no plural” (56); his words shout as “the thousand voices of this one man” (78); when aged, because of the “cancer of time” dude declines relations with a younger woman—“instead of exciting him, her young body inspired him with restraint, with a kind of malevolent austerity” 146); POW in revolution and interrogator come to confrontation “like two opposed war machines,” wherein “the prisoner received the information about his execution with absolute indifference […] that obliged him to realize the monstrous tranquility with which he accepted his own death” (177) (NB: that ‘indifference’ is key to the epistemology of remembrance, supra); “Under the misty sun of dawn, under the blazing, molten sun of midday, on the black paths and alongside the sea, this one, now tranquil [monstrous?], dense, and green, there existed for you a ghost [hauntology?], not real but true” (218).Sections toward the end become increasingly heteroglot, even celinean. Very much worth the effort, overall.Recommended for those who have lived so much dead life, readers who think that action contaminates us, and persons whose only freedom is to decorate a temple and fill it with tranquil astonishment, with sculpted resignation, with the horror of emptiness, the terror of the dead times, of those who prolonged the slow deliberateness of free labor, the unique instants of autonomy in color and form, far from the exterior world of whips and branding irons and smallpox.
carlos fuentes is another one of those latin american writers that makes me hate myself. beyond his tremendous skill as a novelist, he's good looking, well dressed (the world was just cooler when novelists and film directors wore suits), worldly, dashing, daring, and claims to have slept with jean seberg and jeanne moreau. the bastard. and then i came across an article he had written (first three paragraphs below) and now hate him as the series mentioned would probably be my favorite bunch of books ever written. and they don't exist. oh, and the 3 1/2 stars that this book deserves gets rounded down for this offense."In the fall of 1967 I happened to be in London at the same time as the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson's portraits of the American Civil War in ''Patriotic Gore.'' Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding incarnation: the Latin American dictators.Individuals such as Mexico's Santa Anna, the peg-legged cockfighter who lost the Southwest to President James K. Polk's Manifest Destiny; or Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gomez, who announced his own death in order to punish those who dared celebrate it; or El Salvador's Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who fought off scarlet fever by having street lights wrapped in red paper; or Bolivia's Enrique Penaranda, of whom his mother said, ''If I had known that my son was going to be president, I would have taught him to read and write'' - all of them pose tremendous problems for Latin American novelists: How to compete with history? How to create characters richer, crazier, more imaginative than those offered by history?Mr. Vargas Llosa and I sought an answer by inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write a novella each - no more than 50 pages per capita - on their favorite national tyrant. The collective volume would be called ''Los Padres de las Patrias'' (''The Fathers of the Fatherlands''), and the French publisher Claude Gallimard took it up instantly. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to coordinate the multiple tempos and varied wills of a wide variety of writers who included, if my recall is as good as that of Augusto Roa Bastos' character El Supremo, Mr. Roa Bastos himself, Argentina's Julio Cortazar, Venezuela's Miguel Otero Silva, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cuba's Alejo Carpentier, the Dominican Republic's Juan Bosch and Chile's Jose Donoso and Jorge Edwards (one of them promised to take on a Bolivian dictator). When the project fell through, three of these authors went on to write full-length novels of their own: Mr. Carpentier (''Reasons of State''), Mr. Garcia Marquez (''The Autumn of the Patriarch'') and Mr. Roa Bastos (''I the Supreme'')."bastard.
What do You think about The Death Of Artemio Cruz (1991)?
This was the first Fuentes book I ever read and he hooked me. I am now buying and reading all the rest. He is one of the great writers of the 21st century and totally overshadowed by Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llossa. This book is the story of Artemio Cruz as he reflects upon his life from the Mexican Revolution. He made it rich and did dubvious things to gain power. He seems to have no regrets but I won't give the story away. Written in the early 1960s, Fuentes uses early post modern style which means paragraphs can be pages long (like James Joyce). The most monumental section was his use of the F*** word about Mexico. I read it aloud just to get his gyst. It must be powerful in Spanish. However, the flow and train of thought writing blended with the flashbacks made this a "hard to put down book". His language is rich thanks to the translation.
—David
Artemio Cruz is a man whose impending death compels him to look back over the span of his life to re-live its peak experiences. In a real sense Cruz was more than a man living in Mexico during a time of revolution: he is a microcosm of Mexico itself. I deeply respect and admire the inventive, narrative technique, which in some respects is revolutionary. The switch of narrative voice in its person is daring and works brilliantly to make the narrative come alive. The story line becomes personal and engaging in the first person and yet more objective in the second and third persons. One really gets to know Artemio in the first person narrative segments. The flashbacks intrigued me in the way that Fuentes used changes in time to serve the narrative as they take the reader to high-points and low points of this man's rise from abject poverty and military adventures to his love affairs and rise to power with its attendant material wealth. Cruz is a fascinating literary figure whose human weaknesses are legion but he is roundly and credibly drawn and leaps off the page by virtue of the narrative technique of Fuentes. The translation by Alfred Mac Adam is elegant, poetic, lyrically rich and does justice to this literary novel: I highly recommend this great translation. This is a great book by a supremely gifted writer and translator: I hope you decide to read Artemio Cruz.
—David Lentz
There are pros and cons to my annual read-a-book-in-Spanish self-imposed requirement.Pros:1. I feel oh-so-cultured and smart.2. My Spanish is back to near-fluent levels by the second half of the book.Cons:1. I have basically no idea what happened in the first half of the book.2. It takes freaking forever.Based on what I actually understood, this is a pretty darn good novel about Mexico and an old dude named Artemio. However, shifting perspectives, Mexican idioms, and lots of historical/political context perhaps make this an overly ambitious selection for a gringo.
—Becky
