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A Literary Vision of History: Marxism and Positivism in Terra nostra by Fuentes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Becky Boling
Becky Boling*
Affiliation:
Carleton College
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Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , 1984 , pp. 125 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by Latin American Research Review

References

Notes

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 7–20, 106.

2. Carlos Fuentes, Terra nostra (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1975), p. 121. To avoid excess notes, page numbers will appear in parentheses following quoted material from this edition of the novel.

3. Eugenio Imaz has detailed the concept of utopia during the time of the discovery of the Americas in Topía y utopía (México: Tezontle, 1946). He explains that the idea of utopia was understood spatially, inspired by the discovery of the New World. Imaz traces the evolution of the idea, which was transformed into a temporal aspect of human aspirations only in the nineteenth century. In this way, utopia was freed from spatial limitations and is again plausible in time. Frank E. Manuel has examined utopianism through three modes, each of which reveals aspects of the epoch in which it appeared. See his chapter entitled “Towards a Psychological History of Utopias” in Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp. 68–98. Manuel notes that in the first manifestation, the goal of the sixteenth century was above all harmony. After the French revolution, liberty and individualism characterized the second manifestation of utopianism. The third mode emphasizes the development and fulfillment of the human spirit in which man metaphysically transcends mundane problems.

4. Alfonso Reyes, Ultima Tule (México: Imprenta Universitaria, 1942), p. 10. This work also figures as the title of a chapter in Terra nostra, p. 580. Ludovico and Julián are aware of the poetic existence of America and its influence on the conquest. Felipe II decrees the nonexistence of the New World, but Julián contradicts him: “—Ya es demasiado tarde para decir eso, Señor. Existe, porque lo deseamos. Existe, porque lo imaginamos. Existe, porque lo necesitamos. Decir es desear” (p. 617).

5. Feuer, Basic Writings, p. 253.

6. Ibid., pp. 12–13, 26–27, 43–44. This analysis of historical evolution is also described in The German Ideology, published in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), pp. 53–56, 94.

7. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), pp. 81–96.

8. Marcelo Coddou, “Terra nostra o la crítica de los cielos: entrevista a Carlos Fuentes,” The American Hispanist 3, no. 24 (1978): 9.

9. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language ('S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1956), pp. 76–77. I have based my definition of metaphor and metonymy largely on Jakobson and Halle's chapter “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” pp. 76–82. I have also taken into consideration Hayden White's use of these tropes in his formalist approach to nineteenth-century philosophies of history. Consult his work, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 31–38.

10. Hayden White, in his analysis of the great historians of the nineteenth century, has pointed out the correlation between the two literary tropes alluded to above (metaphor and metonymy) and the Marxist exposition of the concept of work: “With the division of labor, then, the Metaphorical relationship between man and man on the one hand and between man and nature on the other is dissolved, a Metonymical relationship is established, and, instead of existing with one another in the modality of identity, as was the case in primitive society, men come to exist in the modality of contiguity” (p. 301).

11. WNET, “Bill Moyers' Journal,” 19 June 1980, “The Many Worlds of Carlos Fuentes: Part 1,” p. 13.

12. Carlos Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1972), p. 31.

13. Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México (México: El Colegio de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1943), pp. 48–49. Zea shows how positivism was adapted to Mexican history. Auguste Comte presents his theories on social and historical evolution in System of Positive Polity, vol. 3 (Paris: Carilian-Goeury and Vor Dalmont, 1853), pp. 23ff. Comte describes three intellectual stages that characterize social development in Europe. The first two of these stages are provisional and preparatory. The last, the positive or scientific, represents the culmination of history and is therefore the objective of progress.

14. Zea, El positivismo en México, p. 124.

15. Ibid., p. 95.

16. Ibid., p. 105.

17. Ibid., p. 42.

18. Jacob Bronowski examines the idea of cause and effect in the chapter “The Nineteenth Century and the Idea of Causes,” in his Common Sense of Science (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 56–78. This concept dominated all the sciences from Newton to Galileo until the early decades of this century. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg formulated the “uncertainty principle.” The system of cause and effect implied the ability to desintegrate reality into isolated phenomena in order to designate the cause or, after the cause, to foresee the consequences. It suggested that one can foretell events as if the future already existed. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientist “believed that the future is fully determined. The future as it were already exists in the mathematics; and the world itself is precisely a machine which calculates it by strict mechanical processes” (p. 72). The theories of relativity and statistical probability that issued from theories on quantum physics proposed by Max Planck in 1900 call into question the hegemony of the concept of cause and effect upon which scientific positivism was founded.

19. Zea, Apogeo y decadencia del positivismo en México (México: El Colegio de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1944), p. 77.

20. For Fuentes, eccentric is a term that defines Third World cultures, including Spain and Latin America. The “eurocentrismo” of the Enlightenment “fundaba sus ideas en un concepto universal e incambiable de la naturaleza humana” (Tiempo mexicano, p. 32). But this nature excluded the cultures of the underdeveloped world, according to the way countries like England, France, and the United States define “developed.” Fuentes affirms that following the establishment of the socio-political and economic hegemony of the nations adhering to the philosophies of the Enlightenment, Spain and Mexico have found themselves on the margin of world history, which has been identified exclusively as that of the advanced positivist countries: “España y México: finis terrae, cabos del mundo. Tirad una piedra en el centro de un estanque y las ondas más lejanas, más anchas, las que se confunden con el légamo de la ribera, tienen los nombres de España y México. Ser excéntrico es la manera final de ser céntrico; puede ser el principio de un nuevo fin” (ibid., p. 54).

Nevertheless, Fuentes argues that in the present, “eurocentrismo” is destined to disappear. It is no longer valid to speak of a universal positivist ideology; it is necessary instead to recognize a multipolar world of diverse cultures. The rise of the Third World and the unmasking of the fundamental assumptions of the positivist countries have snatched the “center” forever from Western capitalist powers: “existe una pluralidad de culturas que suponen una pluralidad de valores: todos somos centrales porque todos somos excéntricos.” Ibid., p. 32.

21. Zea, Apogeo y decadencia del positivismo, p. 247.

22. Ibid., pp. 256–57.

23. Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, translated by Eric Mosbacher (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Hauser explains the relationship between consumer goods and Marxist alienation. Because everything is related by means of an arbitrary system of money, man, products, time, talent, everything has an interchangeable, assigned, and universal value; thus, man also becomes a function of money within the capitalist system. See the chapter on “Alienation as the Key to Mannerism,” pp. 94–114.

24. Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano, p. 33.

25. Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol, translated by J. M. Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), pp. 101, 122.

26. Ibid., p. 104.

27. Alfonso Caso, La religión de los aztecas (México: Imprenta Mundial, 1936), p. 8.

28. Gloria Durán, The Archetypes of Carlos Fuentes: From Witch to Androgyne (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1980), p. 163. Durán inquires into the use of the hermaphrodite whose function is similar to that of the androgyne as Mircea Eliade has conceived it. The hermaphrodite is a “pornographic” version and results from the importance that Fuentes confers on sensual, corporeal existence. See pp. 171–72, 178–82.

29. La región más transparente (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958); Las buenas conciencias (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959); La muerte de Artemio Cruz (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962).