García Márquez's narrator tantalizes this desire for order in the readers by providing just a few of the dates and references that Morse Peckham calls 'indicators of pastness' in historical narrative. At the same time, the undermining of such indicators, which becomes a covert structural imperative in the text, responds to the narrator's recognition that, in Peckham's words, 'such indicators — historically authentic details — are not only symptoms of the rhetorical overdetermination of history. They can also become ends in themselves.' García Márquez's indicators are underdetermined; no matter how our rage for order compels us to rearrange the scattered facts, the result is inevitably a recognition of discontinuity. Clearly, time itself is deformed by irony; the sequence that can be derived from the story reveals no law, no access to meaning, no culmination of a teleological historical endeavor. In the retelling of the episode of the massacre of the banana workers, for example, One Hundred Years of Solitude develops this theme. The omniscient narrator's tacit support for the unofficial versions of the massacre represented in the stories told by José Arcadio Segundo and the unnamed child makes the question of oral history unproblematic in outline, though often unreliable in specific detail — for example, in the discrepancy about the number of dead carried by the hallucinatory train. Curiously, García Márquez's fictional account has historically served -618- as an impetus to permit the unwritten episode to be recognized and reinserted into the offical history of Colombia.
The inhabitants of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the lonely old dictator eking out his waning years in El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), the bitter exsoldier in El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1974; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968), the half- forgotten hero in El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labryinth, 1990), all suffer from the same loneliness, from the same plague of forgetfulness. In Autumn, the dictator's mother tries to reveal the 'true' story of his conception and birth to her inattentive son, a story that diverges radically from the accepted historical version of his immaculate conception and miraculous birth. Significantly, it is the essential that is ignored in this episode: Bendición Alvarado 'tried to reveal to her son the family secrets that she did not want to carry to the grave, she told him how they threw her placenta to the pigs, Sir, how she could never determine which of so many fugitives had been your father, she tried to tell him for the historical record that she had conceived him standing up…,but he did not pay her any attention.'
The contagious plague of forgetfulness spreads throughout the village of Macondo, throughout the entire country, throughout the world, and even reaches past the pages of the text to affect us, its readers. We tend to forget how much of the story we owe to the manipulations of the various narrative agents. The storyteller, who filters the whole of the work through his perception and controls it with his imaginative recreation, is at the same time in García Márquez a curiously reticent figure. Despite his eagerness to define his position in traditional storytelling terms, despite the fact that we are often given the narrator's name — most famously, the Cervantine Melquiades, in the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude — the narrator remains unidentifiable. This ruse, for we must see it as such, of choosing a site and then refusing efforts at situation, defines the storyteller's art, which ostensibly chooses one site (even in the most concrete sense: the room in the Buendía house, or the stool set out in front of a store) while mediating (or occupying simultaneously) two places: that of history and that of myth. It is a position the storyteller/ narrator cannot maintain easily; in fact, he could not maintain it at all without the readers' forgetfulness, our unconscious complicity in -619- his ostensibly overt placement of the story's center and in his devious usurpation of that place.
Mexican Carlos Fuentes's work includes several of the misshapen masterpieces described by Gass, attesting to his own profound engagement with the problem of a language that does not always do justice to indigenous reality; astonishingly innovative and rewarding works like his La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964), about the twelve hours of dying, and seventyodd years of life, of an unsavory post-Mexican Revolutionary opportunist named Artemio Cruz, a spurned illegitimate peon offspring of a mulatto woman and the local landowner. Or Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976), a mythic-philosophical-historical recreation of four hundred years of combined Spanish and Spanish American relations, a novel in which the reader may soon come to the conclusion that not only has Fuentes read absolutely everything ever written but that it all, somehow, has found a way into this vast book.
The problem of how language structures reality is also central to his Cristóbal Nonato (1987; Christopher Unborn, 1989), a postpunk, Laurence Sternian, dystopic projection of a 1992 Mexico City in which inhabitants speak a stylized Spanglish and worship a governmentally created concoction of myth and media hype named 'Mamadoc.' Sterne, and particularly Balzac, are acknowledged influences on Carlos Fuentes, and the last month of the first trimester of the novel, 'It's a Wonderful Life' (the Spanish original calls the same section 'Una vida padre'), contains a delicate and specific homage to Fuentes's forerunners in his Shandyian placement of prologue and epigraph at page 132 and his adornment of that passage with a graphic representation of the sperm/serpent, Shandyian in basic shape, that also, with ironic wink, reminds the reader, should she choose to be reminded, of the snakes inherited by Balzac through fortune and typesetters' creativity, allusions that Fuentes complicates with a host of tributes to other texts including, of course, those everpresent masters, Vico and Joyce, who peek in on its 'vicogenesis.'
At issue is no longer a matter of rational understanding of the truth or of any truth-claims whatsoever, but another enabling/ disabling condition: that which forces us to recognize the world as the world of the text, whose only significance lies precisely in its existence as text. And furthermore, to recognize the subterfuge of -620- languages as well: one of the overriding concerns in this stubbornly, playfully polyglot novel. 'La lengua,' that fleshy, material thing, becomes a word, a multilingual pun, a fragile verbal arabesque delicately framed between figurative quotation marks, an unreadable — if undeniably aesthetic — cipher, a zero- degree artifact of writing. As in Sterne's novel, and even more consistently so, the narration of Fuentes's work is from the point of view of a first-person voice, given overridingly to a narrator who, by traditional standards, should be an eyewitness to the events described, but who, in both books, is clearly in no condition to witness anything at all. The novel begins as Cristóbal's future parents conceive him in an ecstatic union on Acapulco's beaches, and ends, congruently, with his birth.
The shape of Fuentes's tale, however, as befits the man Suzanne Ruta has called 'our leading North American political satirist,' is more solid, darker, and more socially committed than that of his eighteenth-century precursor, more closely aligned with Fuentes's stated aims to create a Latin American counterpart to Balzac's massive 'Comédie humaine' than with the antic satires of Sterne. The arabesque snake curve takes on another signification, as the whipping tail of the sperm-snake becomes the whip — 'a black whiplash in his mind': grammatically bi-generic in Spanish, physically transsexual. Its political referents are likewise double and ambiguous: the symbol of the master's authority or the torturer's tool, the whipping curve becomes, at the same time, the liberating arabesque of graffiti on oppression's pristine wall. One reading of Fuentes would align him with the lash of that master's whip, another with the helplessness of the whipped child; one with the potent snake, another with the undigested, indigestible meal, one with the 'Elector,' brother to Cortázar's 'lector complice' (the complicitous reader, from Rayuela [1963; Hopscotch, 1966]) who freely picks and chooses among the allusive/elusive offerings, one with the unhappily coerced child, sister to Cortázar's despised 'lector hembra' (female reader): 'the most likely thing is that You are a poor adolescent girl from the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón forced to copy out…some classic passage from this novel.'
Like Terra Nostra, to which it serves as counterpart and counterpoint, Cristóbal Nonato is a novel about discovery, and about the continuing drama of the encounter between cultures that began at the -621- Conquest. Not the least of its peculiarities, however, is that this is a novel set at angles to the more common Hispanic bias in Latin American historiography; in Cristóbal Nonato the perceptive filter is, shockingly, dominated by an Anglo-American and Northern European range of metaphors, and despite their revolutionary rejection of things gringo in their terrorist 'acapulcolipsis,' Angel and Angeles are, as a punning play on their names might suggest, more anglo than angel. 'What distinguishes the Spanish conquest from that of other European peoples,' says Octavio Paz, 'is evangelization,' and what distinguishes Fuentes from other quincentenary conquistadores is not evangelization but what might be called his insistent return to the Sternian/Lawrencian metaphor of a dangerous invaginalization.
