Modern Languages Open (Dec 2014)
Me acuerdo… ¿Te acuerdas?: Memory, Space and the Individualizing Transformation of the Subject in Twenty-First-Century Mexican Fiction
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 Vidas perpendiculares (2008), and in José Emilio Pacheco’s canonical novella Las batallas en el desierto (1981). The publication of Vidas and Las batallas 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. Vidas and Las batallas present two highly divergent visions of the subject and her or his relationship to the social body, where in the case of Vidas 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.
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