Nietzsche in Mexico

Abstract

Nietzsche in Mexico Lance Olsen (bio) Nietzsche on His Balcony Carlos Fuentes E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branjer, trans. Dalkey Archive www.dalkeyarchive.com 332 Pages; Print, $18.00 By the time Carlos Fuentes died at 83 from a massive hemorrhage in Mexico City on 15 May, 2012, he had attained an extraordinary position in global literature. A key figure in the Latin American Boom, his name was regularly mentioned in conjunction with those of Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. His major works—arguably The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), and The Old Gringo (1985)—blend a formally innovative strain of European and American modernism (think Joyce and Faulkner) with a politically charged experimentation associated with Boom writing. Employing temporal disruptions, shifting points of view, rethinkings of syntax and punctuation, and frequent injections of magical realism designed to perplex communal notions of reality, those works complicate and nuance the political novel, often critiquing social evils even as they announce the ultimate uselessness of such critiques. Fuentes’ oeuvre was an expression of his own intellectual journey, which began in his teens with an interest in socialism sparked by the poetry of Pablo Neruda. That led him to Havana in 1959, where he penned pro-Castro articles—as well as to his increasingly critical position toward the regime. (In 1965 he was branded a traitor by Cuba for attending an international writers conference in New York.) His work became increasingly provocative—in the key, one might propose, of Nietzsche—embracing the idea of skepticism, difficulty, inconclusiveness, and ambivalence to a greater and greater extent, remaining both disparaging of the pragmatics of the revolutionary imagination and of capitalism’s profoundly flawed alternative. “Religion is dogmatic,” he once wrote. “Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.” “The thing to avoid,” as Beckett’s Unnamable has it, “is the spirit of system.” The opposite of equivocation, as Barthes had it, is a mode of propaganda. I find it remarkable, then, given his stature, his literary amazements, that Fuentes’ last novel, the mischievous and rich Nietzsche on His Balcony, published posthumously in Mexico, appeared in the States only last year. And I find myself turning to Dalkey Archive once again with gratitude and fondness for making an otherwise invisible innovative text visible here for the first time. The novel’s plot constitutes a bitter political parable in which some force (god? the universe? the brunt of his own will?) grants the heterodox philosopher a 24-hour return to earth every year following his death. On one of these, the novel’s narrator steps onto his balcony at the Hotel Metropol overlooking an unidentified city to get some air one hot humid night during that temporal in-betweenness after midnight and before dawn to discover a shadowy, hirsute Nietzsche doing the same on the next balcony. That uncanny moment in many ways is emblematic of the novel as a whole. The reader learns virtually nothing about the narrator, location, or time coordinates, and only a few quick familiar brushstrokes about the philosopher himself. It remains unclear whether the narrator is in fact meeting Nietzsche, imagining him, dreaming him, or whether his companion is the narrator’s doppelgänger. What ensues, in any case, is a series of ontological, epistemological, and political ambiguities, paradoxes, and willful contradictions. The pair begins exchanging a plethora of stories (I’m reminded of Fuentes’ observation that, like Scheherezade, we invent narratives in part to stall our own deaths), alternating over the course of more than a hundred short chapters and centering on murderers, rapists, the nature of pleasure and punishment, madness and power—all in a universe clearly beyond good and evil. Those fictive thought experiments slowly develop into a larger allegory about a hypothetical revolution. One day soldiers appear on the streets of the unnamed city, urging local shop owners to resist those in power by closing their businesses and mobilizing. Saul Mendes, a saintly leader (he evinces stigmata that won’t stop bleeding), rises to prominence and takes reluctant control as the former president’s head is...