Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss by Brian L. Price (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss by Brian L. Price Magdalena Perkowska Price, Brian L. Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 189 pp. ISBN: 978-113700-847-3. Since the publication in 1993 of Seymour Menton’s Latin America’s New Historical Novel, this literary genre has received a considerable amount of critical attention. While the tendency among the first wave of criticism was rather encompassing in its intent to define Latin American historical fictions, more recent studies tend to have a reduced scope and focus on national or regional historical reconstructions. Brian Price’s Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss clearly belongs to this second trend, cleverly negotiating its place among earlier studies on the Mexican historical novel (Guerrero 2008; Osuna Osuna 2008) and on failure in Mexican literature (Ochoa 2005). It explores “the rhetoric of failure in Mexico’s historical imagination” (3) in six novels published between 1982 and 2008. All of them deal with the nineteenth century and reconstruct foundational moments in Mexico’s history: the independence movement and the nation-building process. The study is composed of a short but dense introduction, four chapters, and a brief conclusion. The introduction sets forth the historical, critical and theoretical framework for the terms rhetoric of failure and failure narratives. Price contends that the rhetoric of failure, which is “predicated upon the notion that Mexico got off to a bad start and has never fully recovered its footing” (14), is a “deliberate narrative choice” (4) by authors who seek to “highlight, reinterpret, and even poeticize perceived cultural, political, and social shortcomings” (4). Failure narratives are nationalistic, that is, grounded in the nation’s guiding fictions, and although authors engage with failure for diverse reasons and in different ways, these narratives always imply a need for reinterpretation of the past that leads to “a conscious criticism of the present” (16). This connection between the past and the present is the central aspect of Price’s approach to failure narratives and their rhetoric. By distancing himself from the once dominant “deconstructive postmodern analysis of the internal mechanisms of [historical] fiction” (17) and turning instead to E. Runia’s theorization of the unconscious [End Page 149] repetition of the past in the present, Price intends to focus on “how the novel responds to the contemporary problems” (16), that is, on what makes it “a vital and active participant in the present” (17). Conceiving the selected novels as a configuration that articulates a truth (A. Badiou), the author then proposes to examine four different uses of failure in recent historical fiction written in Mexico: corrective, recuperative, instructive, and redemptive or paralyzing. The corrective use of the rhetoric of failure is presented through an analysis of Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s last novel, Los pasos de López (1982), read as a selfreflective and subversive correction of official history. Price situates his discussion of the novel in a triple context: Hidalgo’s insurgency and its interpreters (Alamán, Sierra, Luis Mora, Vasconcelos, and Krauze); the evolution of Ibargüengoitia’s oeuvre, in particular, his construction of a critical subjectivity and of “a self-ironizing voice” (40) in the Excelsior articles; the post-Tlatelolco disillusionment with unfulfilled revolutionary promises and the beginning of the 1980s crisis. Price reads Los pasos as an alternative version of independence in which laughter, parody and history combine to reveal a “comedy of errors” (49) or a “massive theatrical flop” (57) that later became idealized and mythicized for the purpose of statecraft. Ibargüengoitia’s reinterpretation thus restores “elements of the real history that have been hidden by myth” (47). The second chapter explores the recuperative use of the rhetoric of failure, represented by Fernando del Paso’s celebrated novel Noticias del Imperio (1987) on the French invasion in 1861 and the short-lived Second Empire under the Archduke Maximilian and his consort Carlota. Price names this use recuperative because, as he claims, besides articulating “a sustained critique of empire” (62), del Paso’s novel rectifies a failure of the hegemonic liberal historiography about the Second...