Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction by Brian L. Price (review)

Emily Hind

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Tomo XLVII, Número 3, Octubre 2013,pp. 593-595 (Article)

Published by Washington University in St. LouisDOI: 10.1353/rvs.2013.0047

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mejor puntuación y concordancia. Me parece que este estudio, además, peca de un exceso de terminología técnica, pues los neologismos o expresiones importadas del alemán, el inglés o el francés, no siempre traducidos, dificultan la comprensión del lector no especializado. Una última puntualización general tiene que ver con la au-sencia de los contextos históricos-sociales desde los que se relee esta producción li-teraria hoy en día. Para Nina, el sentido de la escritura parecería estar contenido dentro de sí mismo; ser parte de una estructura lingüística codificable de forma in-trínseca al lenguaje; sin embargo, este es un presupuesto post-estructuralista que se acepta demasiado fácilmente y sin problematización. Hay una ausencia de los con-textos histórico-sociales del Ecuador actual bajo los cuales la interpretación de estos autores ecuatorianos necesita también ser reconsiderada.

Juan Carlos Grijalva Assumption College

Price, Brian L. Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 189 pp.

Brian Price’s worthwhile and thoroughly researched Cult of Defeat argues that contemporaneous political and economic crisis leads Mexican novelists to look to the past for parallel setbacks. The imagined similarity between previous and pres-ent problems in Mexico facilitates a majestic historical review that stretches from Independence (1810) to the Bicentennial (2010), with special attention to the Mex-ican-American War and Santa Anna. Price examines historical novels by the very famous (Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del imperio, Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Los pasos de López), the infamous (Francisco Martín Moreno’s México mutilado, Guillermo Zambrano’s México por asalto), and the in-between (Enrique Serna’s El seductor de la patria, Ignacio Solares’s La invasión). Price’s study takes exquisite care to cite the relevant major scholarship on any given topic and exhibits an impressive academic repertoire. All sources and quotations are incorporated into the body of Cult of De-feat, and this integration helps to ensure, first, that casual readers receive an accurate impression of the source material, and second, that even casual readers will have to wade through some highly re-readable sentences. Occasionally wearying changes in voice aside, the scholarship is interesting, sound, and, ultimately, original. Most indicative of the admirable quality of Price’s thought is the fact that the problems implicit in the book turn out to be at least as engaging as the explicit “answers.” The present review focuses on these embedded problems. For those readers in search of a quick “yes” or “no” evaluation, the recommendation in all cases is “absolutely yes.”

Price’s aversion to dead-end failure coaches a view of writing on losing as a useful, and perhaps not excessively emotional, experience: “The rhetoric of failure surfaces in the troughs and look[s] backward [. . .] to other troughs in search of answers to present dilemmas. The rationale is that something must have occurred in the past that led the nation to its current state of malaise” (8). By omitting the possessive novelists’ before the word rationale, Price hints that he shares this desire

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for rational “answers” in the midst of mess. For Price, the defeats that novelists se-lect from Mexican history represent hope by propelling “corrective, recuperative, in-structive, and redemptive rhetorical uses of failure” (19). The contradictory result of this magnanimous scholarship is that while Price is interested in failure, he himself is not willing to risk failing, a fear confessed in the first sentence of the text: “I will admit that the potential irony of failing to write a book on failure crossed my mind more than a few times during the process of completing Cult of Defeat” (ix). Thus from the beginning, Price establishes a difference between his successful project and the defeats that he would study from a distance. A desire for fair play has Price looking for solidly defined ground to referee; ergo, he rejects literary deconstruction and instead directs his analysis toward relatively current events, “toward a study of what makes fiction a vital and active participant in the present” (17). But is Mexi-can fiction “vital and active?”

If history is a competition, with winners and losers, Price’s optimism would guarantee that losers can always hope to be winners when their stories are reviewed, in the hunt for future lessons. By extension, historical novels could ben-efit from the process of eventual reappraisal. Thus despite the fact that literature does not sell particularly well in Latin America, as per the “abysmally small size of first-run printings,” Price seems to hold out implicit hope that the publishers of the future might still appreciate these loser books if, someday, people start to read more (14). Until that happens, the Cult of Defeat may accidentally identify the real loser in this contemporary story as the “intellectual,” and thus Price’s effort to remain a critic-referee rather than a writer-player likely fails to secure triumph in the present-tense. Of the five history-themed and audience-pleasing products listed, “television shows, film, video games, reenactments, and historical fiction,” Price looks only at the last, which remains a confusing choice given the wide-lens scope of the proj-ect and the concern for failing (15). In a provocative tension between the shifting poles of success and failure, Price appears to hanker for a sort of old-fashioned criti-cism that would stick to meticulous research and easily accessible, “truly” entertain-ing historical details that relate to the present. Yet for all his polite traditionalism, Price tends to shrug off the expectation for this approach to evaluate literary qual-ity, perhaps the key duty of the general-audience-friendly, footnote-free, traditional-ist critique. On occasion, Price does venture some subjective estimations, mostly in the conclusion, where “skilled” writers appear as Ibargüengoitia and Serna, the “mediocre” authors are Moreno and Zambrano, and an “outstanding” writer turns out to be the non-novelist figure mentioned in the introduction, Octavio Paz (168). The quality of a reputed masterpiece such as Del Paso’s Noticias del imperio does not come in for much assessment—a very interesting omission suggestive of Price’s suspected distaste for coming up with the “wrong” answer.

This critical dislike of failing perhaps informs the choice of an all-male cast of novelists. The inclusion of a novel by a woman might have encouraged a medi-tation on the idea that “defeat” on a national level is not necessarily the same as “failure” for the individual citizen. Some people are losers no matter what their na-tional leaders do, and likewise select others will remain perennial winners. In a pos-sibly relevant observation, the basic thesaurus available on my computer does not

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list “defeat” and “failure” as synonyms. The overall effect of Price’s courteous, almost allergic approach to social failure, which merges the latter with national defeat, in-spires my appreciative description of him as an admirably well-mannered scholar. In a last example of his civility, I note Price’s gallant use of the first-person plural throughout the book.

Call me a “curmudgeon,” but I am on the outside of Price’s gentlemanly “we.” No, really. In Price’s amusing analysis of Jorge Ibargüengoitia as a “curmud-geon,” the following definition of the term appears: “We think of grumpy septua-genarians with heavy jowls who misanthropically watch a parade of idiocy pass be-fore their rockers” (21). I do not think of curmudgeons like that, perhaps because I am one. For the doubters, I cite further: “Oftentimes misunderstood as cynics, naysayers, and doomsday pessimists, more often than not curmudgeons are social commentators who bring a unique and oftentimes surly perspective to bear on the contrived manner in which people and institutions govern themselves and others. They are the sarcastic voice of reason in a world where madness prevails” (21). Price ought to speak at my funeral. My point here is that the list of curmudgeons, like the list of analyzed novelists, only contains men, and no gender analysis accompa-nies this restriction. Thus if the novelists and curmudgeons are not to be analyzed as “men” per se, I suppose that I might as well side with the curmudgeonly ranks of Salvador Novo and Juan José Arreola, who head Price’s list. This category is all a bit strange if one has an eye for the flamboyant guy, because Novo was a toupee-adorned queen and Arreola is known, among other strong suits, for having worn a black cape. Failure is an ugly thing, and Price’s project is too chivalrous to get down and dirty in the “debris of history” (168). In sum, I find his book as interesting for what it leaves out as for what it includes. The project is fascinating and ends up ren-dering more tribute to defeat that Price possibly had in mind. Two thumbs up.

Emily Hind University of Wyoming

Reagan, Patricia E. The Postmodern Storyteller: Donoso, García Márquez, Var-gas Llosa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 153 pp.

Patricia E. Reagan’s The Postmodern Storyteller: Donoso, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa constitutes a valuable and erudite, yet ultimately incomplete, analysis of the role, effects and affects of the narrator in novels authored by three writers as-sociated with the Boom: José Donoso’s El jardín del lado, Gabriel García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador. Making use of classical rhetoric—there is a surprising dependence on Cicero—Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Walter Benjamin’s reflections in “The Storyteller” (and con-temporary readings of this seminal essay), Reagan attempts to identify the common narratological traits, as well as the distinguishing specificities of these three texts, which, in fact, are presented as constituting a sub-genre within Latin America’s post-boom novels.