Abstract
During the second half of the twentieth-century, Mexican fictions operated under a revisionist historical logic that employed national spaces to allegorize the relationship between the individual, society and the nation. Countering this trend, since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from an interest in collectivizing discourses of identity, displaying instead a growing faith in individualism as a means to resist state-driven cultural visions. To analyze this emphasis in individual personal emergence, this paper proposes a comparative reading of subject-formation in Álvaro Enrigue's <em>Vidas perpendiculares</em> (2008), and in José Emilio Pacheco’s canonical novella <em>Las batallas en el desierto</em> (1981). The publication of <em>Vidas</em> and <em>Las batallas</em> coincides with two moments of crisis and transformation in Mexico. Consequently, these novels of formation reflect the reconceptualization of the multiple relations between individuals, communities, and the state prompted by such changes. These coming-of-age fictions use the personal recollections of their protagonists to articulate the narration of their characters’ emergence into adulthood. <em>Vidas</em> and <em>Las batallas</em> present two highly divergent visions of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body, where in the case of <em>Vidas</em> the individual takes primacy over the community. Following Ulrich Beck’s insights regarding individualization in industrial societies, and informed by theories of memory and nostalgia, this study explores how literary understandings of identity have transformed to reflect the experience of late modernity in Mexico. This paper argues that in recent Mexican fiction history is spatialized as a way of examining individual subjectivity outside the framework that views history in literature as a discourse directly linked to collective, often national, identity.<br />
Highlights
Since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from a traditional interest in collectivizing discourses of identity
Whilst Pólux attempts to fight his deviant situation through education and social participation, Cástor neglects himself as an act of defiance over his impossibility of self-determination
The story positions the body as a stage upon which to negotiate identities; yet, though on one hand it shows the struggle for self-definition, on the other it reflects on the risks of totalitarian suppression of difference
Summary
Since the mid-nineties, Mexican literature has witnessed a departure from a traditional interest in collectivizing discourses of identity. In the same way that memory links personal identity to history, ‘nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory’ (Boym, xvi) This is of particular relevance in Vidas and Las batallas because their respective publication dates coincide with moments of transformation in the social and economic organization of Mexico. I propose an analysis of the concept of ‘nostalgia’ and the connection it establishes between collective attachments and past historical moments, to elucidate how the differences in assumptions about space, time and identity that underpin Vidas and Las batallas reveal a transformation in the conception of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body
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