National Identity and Narrative Voice in Mexican Short Stories

NARRATIVE VOICES AS REFLECTIONS
OF THE DYSTOPIAN CITY
IN UNA CIUDAD MEJOR QUE ÉSTA
VIOLA MIGLIO
University of California, Santa Barbara
The present paper analyzes the short stories of the collection
Una ciudad mejor que ésta (‘a city better than this one’) edited
in 1999 by David Miklos, to discover the tension between the
narrating voice and the main character(s) in the story.1 This
anthology of young Mexican authors is peculiar in that the
editor solicited the submission of short stories with the specific
request that they should not write about Mexico City, but some
other city. The result is a striking collection of stories taking
place in many cities, often very far away from the Mexican
capital, but at times simply within or below Mexico City.
Some of the short stories in the collection portray the
city)whichever this may be)as a sort of dystopian reality
juxtaposed to a utopian entity (the unreachable El Paso in
Parra’s story, or the obsessively tidy artist’s studio in García
Bergua’s story), where the individual can still control his/her
own destiny. In an effort to raise their stories beyond the
parochialism of a local setting, and responding thus to the
editor’s request, the language of the stories aims at being
1
I would like to thank Sara Poot-Herrera who first brought to my
attention the use of language in M iklos’s collection and gave me the idea
to write a paper on this topic.
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‘neutral’, ‘non-placeable’)paradoxically, however, the nonplaceability of the narration’s idiom becomes entangled with
the dystopian image of the city in which the characters find
themselves trapped, whereas the Mexican ‘slip-ups’ of the
narrator or the openly Mexican idiomatic expressions of the
characters seem to represent)if not utopia)at least the comfort
zone, a subconscious and subversive declaration of identity
that is even beyond the author’s control.
The stories have in common that the characters are
expatriates of some sort who look at and analyse the ‘alternative’ city where they are located through their Mexican eyes.
In this case it is understandable that Mexican idioms and
idiosyncrasies surface in their parlance. This is the case in
Parra’s short story (Parra 1999), where his Northern Mexican
character is almost “nailed” to the Mexican side of the Rio
Bravo by his use of language, which is even excessively loaded
with low class idioms, while his eyes soar over the tall
buildings to his impossible dream city El Paso, so close and
yet so far away.
Even more interesting are cases where only the idiomatic
expression of the characters or the narrator betray the identity
of the city: this is the case of Ana García Bergua’s “La ciudad
a oscuras”, where free indirect speech blending into stream
of consciousness erases the borders between narrator and
character, but both narrator and character are undoubtedly
Mexican (el súper, mira nada más, su cuarto, una caguama,
los niños héroes are just a few examples of linguistic and
cultural mexicanismos). The cities they move in are the very
imperfect Mexican capital and the perfect version of it
reflected in the main character’s room-sized city of paint cans
and paintbrushes, kept spotlessly clean and tidy in the artist’s
effort to fight against the difficulties of living in the monstrously dirty, chaotic, and polluted city.
Finally there are cases where there is a clear tension
between the narrating voice and the character, this is the case
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967
in Montiel Figueiras’s “Metro”, where the narrator’s Spanish
aims at being neutral, highly literary and non-placeable:
... el olfato zaherido por ese violento almizcle del que se han
apropiado las habitaciones furtivas del orbe, un cigarrillo
deshilachándosele en la comisura de la boca ... (147)2
whereas the characters’ Spanish is clearly Mexican:
El teléfono volvió a crepitar.
)¿Bueno? ... (144)
In this case the city in question could be one of a few big
Mexican cities with an underground train system as the title
implies; the reader’s curiosity is undoubtedly awakened about
the identity of the city; and once again in the different authors
of the collection, one finds the neutral Spanish of the narrator
pitted against the clearly regional, idiomatic Spanish of the
characters, creating a tension that goes beyond the reader’s
simple curiosity for discovering the identity of the city.
The apotheosis of this tension is to be found in the short
story opening the anthology, Jorge Volpi’s “Lo que Natura
no da...”, where the author has clearly tried to separate the
identity of the third person narrator from the main character,
a Mexican young man studying at a university in Spain.
Whereas the main character even openly plays on differences
between peninsular Spanish and his own Mexican Spanish
(see below), the narrator is excessively and unnaturally
peninsular. This artificially sounding parlance is almost jarring
for the reader, especially the careful one that will discover
lexical marks of Mexican Spanish even where the author
consciously tries to expunge any and every trace of local
idioms.
2
For quotations from the primary texts, I will dispense with the year
and only mention the page number.
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I will analyse some of the short stories and show the
mixture of regional idioms in the author’s attempt at attaining
regional neutrality
.
LEAVING IT ALL BEHIND
The opening verses chosen by Miklos to set the pace for the
short stories collected in the book also provide the title for the
whole anthology:
Iré a otro país, veré otras playas; / I’ll go to another
country, go to another shore,
buscaré una ciudad mejor que ésta. / find another city better
than this one.
They are taken from the poem ‘The City’ by the important
Greek poet Constantin Cavafy.3 Their tone is upbeat, full of
enthusiasm and hope that the narrating ‘I’ of the poem will
be able to leave a place which is not ideal (for what reasons
the reader cannot know from the fragment), live new and
seemingly positive experiences (I will go to another country,
I will see different beaches) and find another city where life
will be better.
Already in Miklos’s choice of this poem we find that
peculiar version of dystopia that conceives of the present
situation of the character (the city of Cavafy’s poem and that
of many of Miklos’s stories) as the “worst of all possible
worlds” (Gottlieb 2001:3), juxtaposed to the possibility of
redemption offered by the utopian pursuit of “another city”,
a city better than this one.
However, a twofold deception of the reader is concealed
in the two)incomplete)verses quoted by Miklos. First of all,
the narrating ‘I’ is not alone in the poem, the complete first
line reads as follows:
3
See under Cavafy 2002 for the English version of the poem and
Cavafis 1911 for the Spanish one.
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
969
You said: “I'll go to another country, go to another shore, find
another city better than this one.” (Cavafy 2002)
Therefore there is a narrating voice different from the speaking
‘I’ of the direct speech, whose importance will become clear
shortly.
Also, the follow up to the quoted two lines is far from
upbeat and optimistic:
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
[them totally. (Cavafy 2002)
These lines set the tone for the second stanza, where the
importance of the first narrator, the one saying ‘You said’ in
line one, becomes as clear as his dooming voice:
You won’t find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same
[houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
[elsewhere:
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small
[corner,
You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. (ibid.)
Apart from being perversely deceptive as a choice of
introducing verses)especially after the mutilation of the first
part of the line and the reduction of the first stanza to the first
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CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD / VIOLA MIGLIO
two lines, Miklos’s choice is exquisitely appropriate to the
task at hand.
He has asked the young participating authors to write about
another city, anything but Mexico City, and they undertake
the task full of hope and optimism, but little do they know that
they are doomed to fail, that Mexico City will always loom
large in the background of their narrative, even when their
story takes place thousands of miles away or many centuries
before Mexico City even existed. Unlike the novels that
Gottlieb analyses, here we are not dealing with “societies in
the throes of a collective nightmare” (2001:11), in Cavafy’s
poem and in Miklos’s stories, the nightmare is lived by the
individual, but there is still a sense that the character is a
victim, experiencing a sense of displacement (typical of
nightmares, as Gottlieb observes, but also of expatriate
literature), and trying in vain to regain control over his/her
destiny against superhuman forces that the character often does
not comprehend. In Cavafy’s poem, these forces seems to be
a sense destiny beyond human control and of guilt caused by
the consciousness that the ‘I’ is the cause of his own ruin. In
some of Miklos’s stories these incomprehensible forces are
represented by the gray, faceless, post-industrial, sprawling
city gobbling up its inhabitants.
Why would Miklos be so perverse as to dupe the reader
into believing that Cavafy’s poem offers any hope of
redemption? One can only surmise that Miklos’s interpretation
of the collection is in a way similar to the one presented here,
i.e. that there is no escaping the looming city, and its dystopian
ways, no matter how hard one tries, and that Cavafy’s verses
and the title were chosen after the short stories were collected.
And yet Miklos maintains that:
[...] me llamó la atención una característica compartida por todos
estos narradores: la ausencia de crítica política, social o
económica patente en sus relatos. De igual manera, se evita casi
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
971
toda referencia a lo “mexicano”. [...] Todo pareciera indicar
que no pretenden heredar la tradición de sus antecesores
inmediatos. (Miklos 1999:14)
Miklos seems to be contradicting the clever choice of Cavafy’s
poem, or at least he does not take it to its extreme conclusions,
which is why he may have only excerpted the beginning two
lines. Leaving homeland issues and problems behind seems
to be a common thread of the very recent short story writers
from Mexico in general, as pointed out also by Poot-Herrera
(2002:2).
How can we see the dogged persecution of these authors
by the infamous D.F.? Sometimes the texture of the story
admits it openly, at other times we can surmise it in the
linguistic subtext that cements the stories. Again, linguistic
tension in the Spanish of the short stories builds a parallel with
Cavafy’s tension between demotic and purist Greek, which,
as Auden mentions (1961) is a very relevant part of all his
poetry.
Fuguet and Gómez, the editors of McOndo)another Latin
American anthology of short stories, very poignantly warn
that “Temerle a la cultura bastarda es negar nuestro propio
mestizaje” (1996, quoted in Poot-Herrera 2002:6). Denying
their origin seems to be exactly what many of Miklos’s authors
are trying to do, often literally debasing the mestizo or
indigenous component of the Mexican culture and population.
For example, Jorge Volpi’s narrator makes a wry comment
in “Lo que Natura no da”: among the negative things found
in Spain, he mentions:
Discriminación en razón del color de la piel: las españolas
prefieren que los latinoamericanos sean más morenos. (44)
This implies, of course, that the narrator who complains is one
of those ‘whiter’ Mexicans (güeros) and that his lighter skin
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CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD / VIOLA MIGLIO
colour is one of the reasons why he has not been too successful
in seducing Spanish women.
Another example of what seems to be mestizo self-hatred
manifested in the contempt for the Indian, is to be found in
what Miklos mildly terms ‘misanthropy’ (Miklos 2002:14),
but should really be defined as vehement misogyny and racism.
I am referring to Guillermo Fadanelli’s “3000 pesetas”
(Fadanelli 1999). The narrator is a Mexican in Madrid talking
about an old flame of his who is now also living in Madrid
and with whom he has shared a noche brava of sex and
violence in a squalid hotel room. He mentions that the reason
for a Spaniard having fallen in love at first sight with the
woman is simply related to her ability at performing fellatio
and says:
...todos los que estuvimos alguna vez en la cama con Leticia
sabíamos que su boca, cuando dejaba de interesarse en las
palabras y se concentraba donde debía, no te dejaba otro camino
que el enamoramiento. (67)
But his contempt for this ingenuous nymphomaniac of
Indian origin, a working class Mexican whose parents made
enormous sacrifices to put her through school, surfaces time
and again:
Me gustaba verla fingir una cara de puta que no tenía, una cara
que, además de lo obvio, estoy seguro, había terminado de
convencer a su amante de traerla a Madrid, ponerle un
apartamento y soportar durante varios meses sus desplantes de
india cosmopolita. (67)
And finally, as the narrator and main character decides to let
her wait at the café without showing up:
...pensando en la mujer que me esperó tres horas antes de pagar
la cuenta... e irse, muy segura de sí misma... a recorrer el mundo
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
973
y a mostrarle a los europeos lo que es capaz de hacer una india
que ha decidido superarse. (70)
So not only are these young authors not interested in
political or social engagement, but they create characters)and
some of them are suspiciously reminiscent of the authors4)who
are politically incorrect intellectual snobs, güeros that feel
superior to their fellow-Mexicans both because of social status,
education or skin colour.
THE NARRATOR AND THE CHARACTER(S)
Miklos makes a grouping of the authors taking part in the
anthology: who develop an anecdote in present progressive
narration (Bergua, Parra, Volpi), those who are fascinated by
literary tradition and history and pay particular attention to
language (Enrigue, García-Galiano, Granados, Herrasti, Soler
Frost), those in between (González Suárez, Montiel Figueiras),
and finally those describing the marginalization and excess
of a parallel sub-world (Bellatín, Díaz Enciso, and Fadanelli).
I would like to propose a different grouping, based on the
identity and type of narrator:
Author
1s t person
narrator
Volpi
X
Herrasti
Fadanelli
4
Omniscient
narrator
Mexican
narrator/
main
character
Mexican
city?
Mexican
X
X
Other type
))
Mexican
In two stories, Volpi’s and Gonzáles Suárez’s, the main character
is a Mexican who received a scholarship to study abroad, which they
misuse doing anything but studying... Their bibliographical note
mentions that the authors both received scholarships from the Mexican
Writers’ Centre and one of them, Jorge Volpi, was at the time studying
in Salamanca, just like his character in ‘Lo que Natura no da...’
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GarcíaGaliano
GonzálezSuárez
))
X
X
Mexican
Soler
Frost
Omniscient
blending
into 1s t
Foreign
Bergua
X
Mexican
Enrigue
X
))
Montiel
Figuei.
X
Mexican
Granados
S.
X
Díaz
Encisa
Bellatin
Parra
X
X
Unclear
X
Foreigner
))
X
X
Mexican
X
There is no real statistically significant tendency connecting
Mexican character and type of narrator, but possibly four out
of five first person narrators are Mexican. So that whenever
the narrator is a character in the story, the tendency is for the
narrator to be Mexican, whereas the more objective third
person, often omniscient narrator is usually not connected to
Mexico, linguistically or otherwise.
In the next three sections I will analyse how the narrator’s
use of language reveals a tension between regionalism and
globalisation in two authors from Miklos’s anthology. I will
not analyse stories that take place in Mexico, because in such
stories Mexican idioms are only to be expected. I chose two
stories that do not take place in Mexico: one of them has a
Mexican narrator/main character (Volpi’s), the other one
(Herrasti’s) does not. The analysis will show that there is a
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
975
tension between what is said and how it is said, the modismos
often denying the cosmopolitan desires of the author, doggedly
pursuing the narrator to remind him that no matter how far
away one flees, one’s nature will always be part of whom we
are.
LINGUISTIC TENSION IN VOLPI’S
“LO QUE NATURA NO DA ...”
Volpi’s “Lo que Natura no da” is a story about a Mexican
student in Salamanca attending lectures given by a famous
Basque professor, becoming infatuated with the professor’s
wife, and being the complacent victim of the professor’s
jealousy. Most of the dialogues are based on differences
between peninsular and Mexican Spanish:
–¿De dónde eres?)Me halagó su interés). ¿Colombiano?
–Mexicano.
–Mejicano )me arremedó con un acento calcado a
Speedy
González. (25)
And also:
Ya me disponía a comenzar mi conferencia sobre las
particularidades lingüísticas del español de México (el único
tema con que lograba atraerme un poco de atención) [...] (26)
The peculiarity of the narrator is that he is a Mexican and, as
mentioned before, he consciously plays on Mexican idioms
and differences between peninsular and Mexican Spanish. Yet
there are some linguistic characteristics of the text that aim
at making it either linguistically neutral, or even peninsular.
One particularly jarring feature is the repeated use of the past
subjunctive in –se: of 29 instances in the text, only two are
–ra forms, and 27 –se forms.
Luego miró su reloj y, como si nada hubiese pasado, se limitó
a añadir: –¿Nos vamos? (ibid.:28)
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CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD / VIOLA MIGLIO
In Latin American Spanish, this form has basically disappeared
apart from literary discourse, where it may still be found
sparingly. In Spain it is also most often relegated to cultivated
written Spanish. However, not even in Spain would the
frequency of this type of form be so high in a text: it must be
a conscious manipulation on the part of the author.
The author is subtly trying to prove the intellectual
superiority of his alter ego-narrator-main character, who suffers
at the hands of his Spanish professor and wife. It is a type of
grass roots revenge: the character openly criticises the idea
of the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, but must often
give in. These are examples of his criticism:
Sólo un espíritu altivo e irónico como el suyo podría atreverse
a iniciar la penúltima de sus conferencias [...] con estas palabras
[...] Escandalizado, me volví para mirar al público, pero no pude
ver más que sonrisas morosas y gestos de asentimiento [...] (17)
Trastabilló un par de veces ... e incluso cometió una pifia al
tratar de acordarse de una parte de la Iliada, en griego, y
reconocer que había olvidado uno de los versos. (A pesar de
la conmovida dispensa que le tributaron mis colegas, yo tenía
la impresión de que ninguno notó la falla). (29-30)
And this is the ironic but significant attitude of the character:
Era una especialista en intimidarme. Con razón Moctezuma
había sido vencido por Cortés: no era una cuestión de armas
sino que de actitud. (31)
And the idea of the Spanish conqueror and the Mexican
conquered is taken up a few pages later:
Me sentí como un imbécil. No debía permitir que ella dominase
la situación; ella podía tener toda la sangre de conquistadora
que quisiese, pero yo no iba a dejar el honor patrio por los
suelos. (33)
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
977
Therefore the character possesses the meta-linguistic
abilities to discuss at length the differences between Mexican
and peninsular Spanish, as well as openly criticising his
colleagues and professors and thereby showing his intellectual
superiority. The narrator, on the other hand, shows his
superiority by his fluency in both varieties)and specifically
in peninsular Spanish. Or at least this is what the author would
like to show, and he does so by using)se past subjunctives,
but also by other means: literary Spanish has adopted a trait
that is originally typical of Galician and Galician authors
writing in Spanish such as Álvaro Cunqueiro and others. It
is the use of a –ra past subjunctive with the meaning of the
past perfect (in the case below instead of ‘había reiniciado’):
Desde que cuatro siglos atrás fray Luis de León reiniciara su
curso en estas mismas aulas [...] luego de los años de injusto
encierro que lo habían separado de sus queridas lecciones [...]
(17) [my italics]
As well as a number of lexical items often openly
borrowed, but at times surreptitiously introduced: charla
‘lecture’ (19) instead of Mex. plática, resaca ‘hangover’ for
cruda etc.
But when it is least expected, the mexicanisms seep
through: so that on page 21 one finds plática for charla
‘lecture’, graduarse ‘to graduate’ (30), and even a –ra past
subjunctive right in the middle of an apology of the Mexican
albur (35). Not to mention that he has his very Spanish
character Felicidad use the verb escuchar ‘listen’ for oír ‘hear’
(40), again a very Mexican usage unknown in standard
peninsular Spanish.
The result is an unfortunate mixture not just of voluntary
regionalisms, but also of subconscious ones that make the text
very hybrid and prove once again Cavafy’s profecy that “This
city will always pursue you.”
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LINGUISTIC PERFECTION AND MEXICANISMS:
VICENTE HERRASTI’S “APÓCRIFO TESALIO ”
This short story would later become a novel, La muerte del
filósofo (Herrasti 2004), that critics have abundantly praised
for the refined use of language and the ability to recreate ‘the
spiritual universe of the Greeks’ (Miguel León-Portilla quoted
in Herrera 2005:1).
The story takes place in ancient Greece, where Gorgias,
the famous rhetorician, is writing his last speech in what is
to be the night before his death. The musings of the old man5
and the thoughts of the tyrant Jason, who is his Maecenas,
intertwine in this superbly constructed, complicated short story
about personal events that affect not only the main characters
(their death), but also the city and the people they have come
in touch with.
In this short story, diction is paramount and every word
has been carefully weighed before being inserted in the text.
Miklos has, quite appropriately, placed this author in the group
of those who write little (a cuentagotas), and whose main
preoccupation is the precision of language (Miklos 1999:13).
Consider this passage:
Le dolían los ojos y apenas soportaba los calambres que
aquejaban las articulaciones de su mano diestra (la siniestra ya
de plano estaba inmóvil, pues el meñique se había torcido tanto
que desde hace décadas reposaba sobre la primera falange del
dedo medio). (49)
Not only is there a desire to find the mot juste at all times, but
also a strain to find the archaic word (flama for llama, siniestra
for izquierda, hinojos for rodillas are just a few examples).
5
In the short story he dies at 109, the Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy says 105, 483-378 BCE. (http:// www.iep.utm.edu/ g
/gorgias.htm, accessed 12/5/05).
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
979
Here, and more often than in Volpi’s story, the past subjunctive
substitutes the past perfect:
[...] vociferó el cetrero analizando ahora las entrañas de la oca
que antes persiguiera Gorgias. (61) [my italics]
Gorgias se limitó alternativamente a mirar el rostro del tirano
y los rollos iluminados por las velas que éste trajera. (62) [my
italics]
In this case it may be ascribed to the desire of the author
to make his text supra-national, adopting thus peninsular traits
that have become recognizably literary usage. Another one
of such traits is leísmo, i.e. the use of the indirect object
pronoun for the direct object, when the referent is a human
male:
Jasón debía su intempestiva vigilia al cetrero que recién le había
visitado en sueños. (53)
The narrator is an omniscient third person, and given the
setting, no Mexican characters are to be found. Herrasti is a
self-defined ‘obsessive compulsive writer because I take great
care about correct language use’ (Herrasti interviewed in
Herrera 2005:1).
Despite the painstaking attention to detail, the omniscient
narrator who even penetrates dreams shows some peculiar
characteristics that localize him (it?) very solidly in Mexico.
Let’s examine them: one may perhaps doubt the use of de
plano meaning ‘completely’ as deriving from a more frequent
Mexican usage of this adverbial form, but the use of escuchar
‘listen’ for oír ‘hear’ is undoubtedly a mexicanism:
“Qué pena que con el hombre muera la palabra”, dijo Jasón por
lo bajo, aunque no lo suficiente para evitar que Gorgias
escuchara. [...] “Maestro, ¿puede escucharme?” (59)
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Another lexical hint to the origin of the text is the use of
the word necio for ‘stubborn’: the first and most common
meaning of this word in Spain is ‘ignorant’ according to the
R.A.E., but that cannot be the meaning in this case, as Gorgias
is talking here about Plato:
“Quien se asocia con tiranos tarde o temprano es tiranizado”,
bien claro se lo había dicho; mas Platón era joven, impetuoso
y necio. (50)
There are few certain examples of Mexican idioms in
Herrasti’s text, unlike the jarring note that the mixture of
regional registers causes in Volpi’s story, only a magnifying
glass can reveal the slight linguistic discrepancies. What is
peculiar is the desire of the author to make his text supraregional, stamping out Mexican idioms by using many more
clearly recognizable peninsular ones. Even in what is an
undeniably finely chiselled construction, repressing Mexican
parlance is not always completely possible.
CONCLUSION
We agree with Sara Poot-Herrera (2002:454), who uses the
word liminal about the young generations of Mexican short
story writers, an epithet that originates with Mauricio Carrera
(Riverón and Carrera 2002). He talks in fact about a ‘Liminal
Generation’ (Generación del Umbral), that is, a generation
of changes and transitions that grew up during decades of
economic crisis, which maybe explains why they refuse to
write about Mexico, a country marked by frustration and
disappointment (Carrera quoted in Poot-Herrera 2002:454).
This refusal means turning their back on Mexico and looking
for a global context.
While the use of standard Spanish is an open attempt at
reaching for this global context and it is perhaps important
in order not to alienate readers from different regions, it is not
always possible to expunge all regionalisms. Depriving the
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
981
text of the author’s Lokalkolorit can be equated to the
objectionable practice of some translators that decide to
expunge all local references to the place where the original
story takes place in order to make it more appealing to the
public that reads the translated text. Such adaptations make
the original much less incisive and are ultimately futile, since
they fail to make the reader of the translation approach a new
and unknown world. I hope to have shown that no matter how
neutral authors try to be, some mexicanisms are bound to
surface in a longer text.
While I will not attempt at broaching the subject of ‘which
standard Spanish’ should be used by Mexican writers,6 I would
like to point to the tendency that these young writers from
Mexico have of equating standard Spanish or neutral Spanish
with peninsular Spanish.
This is a dangerous misconception: peninsular Spanish is
not any more neutral than any other standard variety: forcedly
using peninsular idioms runs the risk of producing hybrid
languages with a jarring result (as in Volpi’s short story).
Moreover it has a problematic ideological side: these authors,
so up in arms against Mexico and wanting to leave it all
behind, in fact seem to resort to their old colonial masters for
linguistic guidance. A perverse twist indeed, if one thinks in
terms of postcolonial studies...
Their attitude seems to reinforce Mexican malinchismo,
excessive appreciation for the foreign and contempt for all
things Mexican, the feeling of inferiority and self-betrayal
Mexico harbours towards the ‘colonial powers’ (Spain first
and later the U.S.A.), embodied by Cortés’s lover Malinche.
Even if this were true, the subconscious pointers subversively
establish cultural identity revealing the Mexican origin of the
text, and rebelling against the author’s levelling hand.
6
Or Latin American ones in general, see the detailed discussion of
this topic in Thorgrímsdóttir 1999.
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Clearly, the tension between the narrative voice and the
setting or the characters reflects a discomfort of the author with
his/her surroundings; perhaps the desire for ‘neutral Spanish’
is an attempt, not only at leaving Mexico and its problems
behind, but also at reaching a wider audience, or at being
considered global, international writers, rather than merely
parochial, Mexican ones.
At the same time, the impersonality of the narrating voice
reflects the dehumanized, dystopian nature of the big city)a
modernist motif, see for instance D. H. Lawrence)from which
any escape fails. In this sense, neutral Spanish is also an
attempt to control and contain the city, denying its fragmentation and complexity. However, just as the sprawling, grayness,
inhumanity and chaos of the big city are unstoppable)language
variation is equally irreducible.
VIOLA MIGLIO / CIEN AÑOS DE LEALTAD
983
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