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Literary Review
CLASSICS REVISITED
A bagful of memories
BY RAVI VYAS
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes, Penguin Books, First published in English translation, 1964.
The breaking up of time, the refusal to accept the singular concept of linear time which the West has been imposing economically and politically, coincides profoundly with our notion of circular time, which comes from the Indian religions.
Carlos Fuentes, Paris Review Interview, 1981
In Latin American literature, the past is of more moment than the present and nowhere more so than in the writers of the post-1940s Latin American boom — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Cabrera Infante, but ab
ove all, Carlos Fuentes. Because of this concept of time, the future is set at the back of the speaker. The past which he can see, because it has already happened, lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards. This is story-telling the way we do it here but you need to state this to get a hang of the great classics of Latin America where the past is never past as it meshes into the present and the future. With The Death of Artemio Cruz, Fuentes established what has remained the most distinctive pattern for the Latin American novel: the family chronicle that is also the history of the nation, a distorted autobiography that embodies in an equally distorted form the political life of Latin America. (Salman Rushdie and many other Indian writers in English have been greatly influenced by this model.)
Not a conventional biography
Artemio Cruz is the biography of the main character whose multiple roles in the Mexican revolution of President Miguel Aleman reflects the old cliché that a revolution devours its own children. All the contradictory phases are encapsulated in the life of Artemio Cruz: leader, elected official, peddler of political influence, international businessman and a wheeler-dealer. But the novel is not a conventional biography. It synthesises the life of a character and of the society in which he happened to live through a selection of critical moments that shaped both him and Mexican society. There are at least three ways you could read Artemio Cruz.
First, the recounting of Cruz’s public and private deeds made from his deathbed. He lies in a hospital bed, after undergoing an emergency operation. His mind wanders, and recalls his entire life in a confused manner. The book then becomes a biography made from the perspective of death which colours the entire story in a mournful tone: we arrived at the end and from there begin to make our way backward until we reach the beginning. The motif of death, a predominant motif in all forms of classical imagination, is full of memories and ancestral echoes. The beginning is the end, the end is the beginning, time is cyclical.
Second, the biographical reconstruction is fragmentary and chaotic as it would be of a man in delirium. Chronological leaps take place with various contradictory perspectives. You have to figure out what these leaps of imagination amount to because the final piece is missing, denying us access to any definitive truth about Cruz. Who was he? A hero of the revolution, or its traitor? A pragmatic leader or just a manipulator? Or was he a man for all seasons and being all couldn’t fix his own identity? Or, is it the story of lost opportunities, the exhaustion of all possibilities until arriving at a point where death finds us?
Reflection on power
Third, beyond the biography it is also the political biography of a country caught up in a violent revolutionary process that goes through many phases and transformations until it negates itself. A revolution is not a picnic party. In other words, the novel is a reflection on political power and on romantic revolutionaries but who cannot escape being part of history. History is a nightmare, as James Joyce told us, from which no one can escape.
Artemio Cruz is set against the background of the Institutional Revolutionary Party of President Aleman who attempted structural reforms but which had to be cast aside in favour of the powerful political bosses and their North American allies. Mexico depended on foreign capital to modernie but this dried up as Aleman asserted himself. (The dedication of the book reveals the ideological position of Fuentes: “To C. Wright Mills, true voice of the United States of America, friend and companion to Latin America’s struggle.”)
What then do we make of Artemio Cruz? That he was the product of a series of chance encounters and personal choices, of historical circumstances and acts of his own volition, of successes and errors, whose consequences he could no longer control? Probably that could be said for all of us. But there is much to the book than a revolution that failed or the three different points of view or narrative discourses. But at a philosophical level, which is what makes this a classic, it is a meditation on time.
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