Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the Battle for Cultural Memory

Abstract

A continuous urge in Sandra Messinger Cypess's work has been both to give Octavio Paz his place and also to put him in it. And it would be fair to say that this has been an enormous effort, mostly because it so clearly goes against the prevailing winds. In her early work, Cypess took to task Paz's powerful and pervasive reading of the figure of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who was Hernán Cortés's interpreter and concubine. La Malinche has a long and controversial place in Mexican national mythology and in the country's attendant sense of identity. Paz cast La Malinche as a rape survivor, literal and metaphorical, and created a subtext of female passivity and victimization that has pervaded the discourse of mexicanidad for the last half century or so. With her groundbreaking first book La Malinche in Mexican Literature (1991), Cypess challenged this powerful reading by following the development of the figure through various periods and genres. She was arguably the first critic to offer the necessary counterreading to Paz's, and this reading stood almost alone as a powerful feminist antidote to Paz's vision of inherited victimization.In her current book, Uncivil Wars, Cypess once again takes Paz on, this time by examining his work and presence in Mexican culture in sharp contrast to those of his ex-wife, the writer Elena Garro. Cypess's disciplinary training is in theater and performance studies, and although her work extends well beyond these, she retains a keen eye for the theatrical: there is nothing more dramatic than a marital war projected upon the national stage, which is essentially the premise behind this book. The facts are simple: this “first couple” of Mexican letters had an acrimonious marriage (p. 9). Paz ultimately overshadowed Garro, arguably “winning,” with a trajectory that culminated in his Nobel Prize in 1990.The resonances between the various “civil wars” invoked in this book are rich. The national civil war is of course the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, so fundamental to Mexican modernity. Virtually all intellectuals and artists had to engage with its legacy in one way or another, including both Paz and Garro. War, however, as Cypess notes, is a “‘man's’ theme” (p. 7) — with notable exceptions like Nellie Campobello and Garro herself. That is essentially the story here: one of notable exception, of female emancipation from a man's world, of the ability to fight back and ultimately walk out on a bad relationship on one's own terms.Cypess does not deny Paz's importance or brilliance. But she sees Garro as the almost universal opposition to Paz's mandarin-style, machista, and, in many ways, monolithic energies, which have arguably embodied Mexican culture for almost 60 years. Cypess makes a powerful argument for Garro as a creative innovator in her own right, one who reimagined the national narratives surrounding the revolution from a unique perspective equal in power to Paz's.In a chapter on “cultural memory,” Cypess shows how Garro's complex, high-modernist prose narrative about the revolution sharply differs from the somewhat conventional and linear narrative structure employed by so many artists and writers who dealt with the revolution, including most of the preceding authors of the novela de la revolución. In another chapter, “Love and War Don't Mix,” she recounts Paz's and Garro's difficult engagement with the Spanish Civil War and the shifting political valences that came with that unavoidable conflict, in effect alleging that Paz was a political opportunist whereas Garro was not. A series of chapters hews closer to the theme of marital strife. In “War at Home” Cypess examines betrayal of an initial promise, a familiar theme in many novelas de la revolución, as a projection of the conflict within the Paz-Garro union. In “From Civil War to Gender War: The Battle of the Sexes,” she connects the domestic disappointments of the couple to the dynamics of burgeoning women's movements within Mexico, with which Garro became associated later in her career.Cypess argues convincingly that Garro's feminist stance and her active resistance against an ingrained macho culture corresponded with her open warfare against her husband and her resistance to the cultural, political, and ideological machinery he both headed and represented. It is a delicious and insightful premise, which highlights unavoidable aspects, rarely discussed like any family secret because of its unpleasantness, of Mexican culture of the second half of the twentieth century. Garro remains in the shadow of her more famous ex-husband, but this book goes a long way toward recalibrating that imbalance.