¹ Carlos Fuentes, Terra nostra (Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz, 1975). All quotations are from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically within the text; translations are taken from Terra Nostra, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Farrar, 1976). As I hope will become evident in the course of this analysis, I use the phrase “mystery text” to represent more than just a text that can be classified as characteristic of a specific mystery genre. The term applies as well to the various written texts, within and including Fuentes' novel, that are in and of themselves enigmatic for contextual as well as textual reasons. Thus, what I attempt to underscore here is not only the enigma within a text to which the phrase refers but also the mystery that surrounds and therefore defines the text as a whole.

² Frank McShane quotes Fuentes in “A Talk with Carlos Fuentes,” New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1976, p. 50.

³ My analysis of the question of power in Terra nostra draws on ideas developed by Michel Foucault in both his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), and his The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978). For example, in Discipline and Punish he reminds us that “power … is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to ‘appropriation’, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory” (p. 26).

⁴ José Miguel Oviedo, in “Fuentes: Sinfonia del Nuevo Mundo,” Hispamérica, 6, No. 16 (1977), 19–32, reads Terra nostra primarily as a kind of “myth of all myths” (p. 22) but also as a historical and literary palimpsest (p. 24).

⁵ By emphasizing the notion of an original crime or murder, as well as that of a primal parricidal horde, Fuentes appears to follow, among other texts, Freud's Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism and the theories they set forth about the origins of culture.

⁶ Fuentes' literary representation of the Escorial has been discussed in Juan Goytisolo, “Our Old New World,” Review, No. 19 (1976), pp. 5–24; Robert Coover, rev. of Terra Nostra, New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1976, pp. 3, 48–50; and Oviedo, “Fuentes: Sinfonia del Nuevo Mundo.” For Fuentes' own views see Frank McShane, “A Talk with Carlos Fuentes,” and Marcelo Coddou, “Terra nostra o la crftica de los cielos. Entrevista a Carlos Fuentes,” American Hispanist, 3, No. 24 (1978), 8–10.

⁷ Most of the major figures in Terra nostra are fictionalized versions of literary, mythical, and historical figures from Spain and Spanish America. Besides Felipe. Tiberius, and QuetzalcoatI, already mentioned, there are Isabel i, Cervantes. Don Quixote, Celestina, Don Juan, [Horacio] Oliveira, and Humberto el mudito, among others. The English translation provides a list of characters that is not included in the original; see Terra Nostra, pp. 3–5.

⁸ The relationship between univocal and multiple readings or texts is discussed by Fuentes in his Cervantes o la critica de la lectura (Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz, 1976). In this companion to his novel, he provides explanations of some of the theories, both literary and historical, underlying Terra nostra. Many passages in these two texts are repetitions or duplications of each other. See, for example, the section in Terra nostra entitled “Aurora” (pp. 302–16), in which Fray Toribio and Fray Julian discuss the question of univocal versus plural readings. Their ideas and the manner in which they are presented are identical with Fuentes' own statements throughout Cervantes o la critica de la lectura.

⁹ Eduardo Gonzalez describes Terra nostra as a “web of despotic trickery” that ends “by enshrining the author as an all-powerful schemer” (“Fuentes' Terra Nostra” Salmagundi, No. 41 [1978], p. 149). While my reading coincides somewhat with his views, I also try to show, through the analysis of both Fuentes and El Senor as authors, how that “scheming” works against itself and how it may turn out to be its own undoing.

¹⁰ The description of the magus is also a projection of Fuentes into his own novel's pages, since the magus' “literary” project resembles that of the author of Terra nostra. The gypsy defines the creative process of the former as follows: “Se remontó al origen, condenado a escribir sus propias aventuras una y otra vez, créer que ha terminado el libro sólo para empezarlo de vuelta, relatarlo todo desde otro punto de vista, de acuerdo con una posibilidad imprevista, en otros tiempos, en otros espacios, aspirando desde siempre y para siempre a lo imposible: una narraciôn perfectamente simultanea” ‘He returned to the origin, condemned to write of his own adventures again and again, to believe that he had finished his book only to begin again, to relate it all from a different point of view, according to unforeseen possibilities, in other time[s], in other spaces, aspiring from the beginning and to the end of time the impossible: a perfectly simultaneous narration’ (p. 558).

¹¹ That question is posed, for instance, on pp. 69, 279. 401, and 414. It is echoed by the questions “¿quién eres tú?” and “”“¿cômo te llamas?” directed to the three young men by other characters in the novel. (See esp. the section entitled “¿Quién eres?” [pp. 63–69].)

¹² Certainly the novels of Arenas, Cabrera Infante, Cortázar. Donoso. Garcia Marquez, Puig, and Sarduy, among others, would be included in a list of such texts.

¹³ In his “Discours du récit,” Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1972). pp. 65–273. Gérard Genette defines and analyzes these two categories in narrative, and Mieke Bal clarifies and extends that theory in “Narration et focalisation: Pour une théorie des instances du récit,” Poétique, No. 29 (1977), pp. 107–27. Bal emphasizes the hierarchical relationship between these components of narrative and thus the need to clarify the points of contact between, as well as to separate, the narrateur and the focalisateur. le narré and le focalisé. (See esp. pp. 117–21 of Bal's study.)

¹⁴ The distance between these characters is also marked linguistically: Polo is an “él” in the written text and the narrator an invisible “yo.” As Emile Benveniste has shown us (“Relations of Person in the Verb,” “The Nature of Pronouns,” and “Subjectivity in Language,” in his Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series, No. 8 [Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971], pp. 195–204, 217–22, and 224–30), the third-person pronoun can be read as the sign of nonperson, the absence of person, that is, as the sign of the person absent from the instance of discourse. Only first- and second-person pronouns, as well as verbs in those persons, mark the presence of person, for they represent the situation of discourse itself. Thus, Polo Febo, as a “he,” could also be read as a nonperson, while the narrator, as an invisible “I,” could be a sign of person. As such, the narrator would exist in correlation with the reader, who could be viewed as the invisible “you” to whom the narrator speaks.

¹⁵ Following some of Benveniste's theories and the line of analysis suggested in n. 14, one could view the narrator here (an implicit “I”) and Polo (an explicit “you”) as existing in correlation with each other. The discursive interchange, signaled by the presence of the second-person pronoun, would also exclude from itself the presence or sign of the reader, who has become a “he” or “she” outside this dialogue, yet who may project him- or herself into it by identifying with one or the other subject or object of the represented dis-course.

¹⁶ Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 197, 201. 218, and 224–26.

¹⁷ Believing Celestina's own statement—“todo lo sé; esta es mi historia; yo la estoy contando, desde el principio: yo la conozco en su totalidad, de cabo a rabo, … yo sé lo que el Senor solo imagina, lo que la Senora teme, lo que Guzman intuye …” ‘I know everything, this is my story, I shall tell you everything from the beginning; I know the story in its totality, from beginning to end, … I know what El Senor can only imagine, what La Senora fears, what Guzman guesses …‘ (p. 257)—Goytisolo sees her as the principal narrator of the novel, since he understands her to narrate a real frame story (“Our Old New World,” p. 21 ). This is a neat but nevertheless unsatisfactory reading. Celestina would seem to be a perfect narrator inasmuch as she is. by virtue of her name, the ultimate go-between, the mediator par excellence; but the narrative complexities of Terra nostra do not, in the end, allow us to privilege her as such. Perhaps Fuentes unwittingly disproves structurally what he seems to assert thematically in the novel; that is, he privileges Celestina as “mother” of the “heroes” within the fictional world of Terra nostra but ultimately denies her that position within a discursive hierarchy. As Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría points out in his review of Terra nostra and Cervantes o la critica de la lectura, if Fuentes privileges Celestina “as origin,” he is in error in doing so. for he does not “take into account that she is the very negation of origins, given that precisely her major occupation is to restore virginities, to offer the new as patchwork” ( World Literature Today, 52, No. 1 [1978], 84).

¹⁸ For Foucault's comments on the interdependence of knowledge and power, see Discipline and Punish, pp. 27–28.

¹⁹ See El Senor's comments also on p. 505, as well as Guzman's description of the monarch's beliefs on p. 507.

²⁰ See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 26 (quoted in n. 3), 27, and 202; History of Sexuality, p. 94.

²¹ El Senor would take his power with him, like the narrator mentioned in Fray Julian's statement on p. 660, quoted above. To possess power here means to keep a secret, and vice versa; in Fuentes' novel certain figures of authority appear to have the right to attempt either or both.

²² In his discussion of the relationship between authority and authorship (“Molestation and Authority,” in Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971], pp. 47–68), Edward Said points out that the term “author” suggests several “clusters of meaning,” one of which emphasizes the notion of fatherhood (pp. 48–49). His study underscores that one cannot speak of authority without implicating the “molestations that accompany it,” for molestation “is a consciousness of one's duplicity, whether one is a character or a novelist” and “no novelist is ever unaware that his authority, regardless of how complete, or the authority of a narrator, is a sham” (p. 49). Both El Senor and Fuentes, apparently conscious of such limitations, nevertheless seem to plot to overcome them.

²³ We, along with El Senor, read “Manuscrito de un estoico” (pp. 681–704), a text divided into six parts and narrated by a Teodoro who begins by saying: “Escribo en el ultimo ano del reinado de Tiberio” ‘I am writing in the last year of the reign of Tiberus’ (p. 681). This text appears to be the one that comes from the past, according to the gypsy (p. 557). The second manuscript, entitled “La restauracion” ‘The Restoration’ (pp. 717–39), deals with events set in the 1970s. It can be read as either the one from the future or that of the present, depending on whether El Senor or the reader of Terra nostra serves as the point of reference. Thus the knowledge we think we have is undermined because it seems that one of the texts remains hidden, though we cannot clearly establish which one it is. (It is even possible that the “hidden” text is Terra nostra itself; if so the novel's complexities would be multiplied vertiginously.)

²⁴ Leo Bersani, in his discussion of the work of Foucault (“The Subject of Power,” Diacritics, 7, No. 3 [1977], 2–21), states that “every resistance to power is an exciting counter-exercise of power. There is no protest against power which does not rejoice in its own capacity to control and dominate” (p. 6). For Foucault's comments on power and resistance to power, see History of Sexuality, pp. 95–96.