Fuentes the Modern; Fuentes the Postmodern

Abstract

Since mid-1980s, numerous discussions have taken throughout Hispanic world concerning postmodernism, partly as an outgrowth of similar discussions since 1960s in United States and Europe. Increasingly, Hispanists have joined in process of postmodemizing literature written in a multiplicity of modes, including what many scholars would consider either traditional or modem. Book-length studies have appeared on topics such as Vargas Llosa among postmodems and as part of this postmodernizing process. Simultaneously, other critical studies on writings of Carlos Fuentes have identified him as a modem writer. Fuentes should be seen as a novelist (in Anglo-American use of term Modernist) who has also published a few novels with postmodern tendencies. His commitment to Modernist aesthetics can be traced back to 1950s-the period of his early fiction and his work as co- editor of Revista Mexicana de Literatura. His vast fictional project, which he identifies as La Edad del Tiempo, is grand narrative of Modernist writer par excellence. Fuentes is seen as a bridge or transitional figure between modem and postmodem, terms which should not be considered oppositional. mitten by modernity of Faulkner, Borges, Dos Passos and Kafka at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has held a lifetime commitment to Modernist literary practices.1 At same time, he has been a well-known admirer of more gestures of writers such as Calvino and Sarduy. Consequently, he is a complex and difficult subject to define-or even discuss-within context of today's ongoing debates concerning and literatures. Having published his first volume of fiction in 1954 and continuing an active program of literary creation well into twenty-first century, Fuentes's fiction spans almost fifty years. As an adolescent, he witnessed development of what many called the Mexican Miracle, what others have identified as Mexico's modernization, and what, in contrast, others have insisted on describing as Mexico's capitalist enterprise and equally failed economic modernization. Later in his career, this Mexican writer has lived in a variety of international urban settings that some considered Postmodem cultural settings, and he has also witnessed plethora of debates about of Postmodemism and culture in Latin America.2 Paradoxically, Fuentes himself has been identified as a Modem or writer by many scholars, and Postmodern by others.3 Both concepts are so laden with nuances and debates that it has been difficult to sift through and understand terms themselves, much less their potential use with respect to any contemporary writer. In this brief essay, I will attempt to make sense of some of these apparent contradictions, as well as to clarify Fuentes's relative place in these discussions of and Postmodem. I will argue that Fuentes is fundamentally a writer of Modernist impulses who has published a significant set of novels of a predominantly Modernist mode; at same time, he is author of other novels that can be identified as fiction. Fuentes-the-Modern