Mexican Literature as World Literature

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501374821
• eBook ISBN: 9781501374807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Honorable Mention from the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for Best Nonfiction - Multi-Author Chapter 15 by Carolyn Fornoff is Winner of the 2022 Best Article in the Humanities Award, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Mexican Literature as World Literature is a landmark collection that, for the first time, studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. This collection features a range of essays in dialogue with major theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution, and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. The book features major scholars in Mexican literary studies engaging in the ways in which modernism, counterculture, and extinction have been essential to Mexico's world literary pursuit, as well as studies of the work of some of Mexico's most important authors: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, among others. These essays expand and enrich the understanding of Mexican literature as world literature, showing the many significant ways in which Mexico has been a center for world literary circuits.

1

World-Making and the Poetics of the New World

Jorge Téllez

In this chapter I chart a course for reading world literature theory in relation to colonial Latin American studies, in particular with respect to scholarship on early modern poetry. To do this, I start with the idea that the necessary infrastructure to think about the production and circulation of written culture on a global scale was already present in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain. This was due not only to the arrival of the printing press in 1539 but also to the channels of circulation of knowledge that the lettered community had established on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific.¹ The schema I propose to support this idea has three prongs. The first is a brief demonstration of how to read New Spain in a global context, or how and where to read the world within colonial Mexico. The second focuses on the possibilities and limits of world literature theory with respect to the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial poetry. In the third, I propose three case studies: Diego Mexía’s translation of Ovid (1608); Bernardo de Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana [Mexican Greatness, 1604]; and two poetics—the prologue that Balbuena wrote for his epic poem El Bernardo o Victoria de Roncesvalles [The Bernardo, or Victory of Roncesvalles, 1624] and the Suma del arte de la poesía [Summary of the Art of Poetry, c. 1591] by Eugenio de Salazar.

Even before the destruction of Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés made clear the geographic importance of this territory in relation to the possible commercial routes between Europe and Asia.² Mexico City/Tenochtitlan went from being the final destination to which goods were sent to a waypoint through which the economic flow spread from Manila through the port of Acapulco and on to Spain through the port of Veracruz. Once commercial exchange between Mexico and the Philippines began in 1573, Mexico City effectively became the center of the world.³

This central position that is so obvious when speaking of commercial flow stands when studying intellectual flows. Serge Gruzinski, for example, begins his book on the Spanish monarchy and the process of American colonization by citing the diary of the Nahua intellectual Chimalpahin (1579–1660): “Su experiencia personal, su existencia diaria lo sumergen en una ciudad de cerca de 100 000 habitantes, México, en donde coexisten españoles, portugueses, flamencos, indios, mestizos, mulatos y negros de África, sin contar a franceses, italianos y hasta algunos centenares, incluso un millar, de asiáticos desembarcados de Filipinas”⁴ [His personal experience and his daily existence immerse him in a city of about 100,000 inhabitants, Mexico, where Spaniards, Portuguese, Flemish, Indians, mestizos, mulattos and African blacks coexist; this does not include the French, Italians and even some hundreds, perhaps up to a thousand, of Asians arrived from the Philippines]. The cosmopolitanism that Gruzinski notes is an integral part of Chimalpahin’s diary, where we find references to the execution of twenty-six Spaniards in Japan in February 1597 (who would later be beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862); to the assassination of Henry IV in May 1610; and to a Japanese delegation that visited Mexico in November 1610, to cite just three examples.

Gruzinski’s call to consider the history of New Spain and of Spanish colonization within a wider context resonates not only in examples like those of Chimalpahin’s diary but also in considerations of the book trade and the translation of Classical works like Aesop’s Fables into indigenous and Asian languages, or the study of Latin in the Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco School.⁵ In commenting on the poem Grandeza mexicana (1604) by Bernardo de Balbuena, Gruzinski concludes that “México aparece en el corazón de las redes comerciales que cercan al planeta. Se vuelve el punto de encuentro de cuatro socios mundiales: al este, las grandes tierras de la Europa católica, España e Italia; al oeste, China y Japón”⁶ [Mexico appears at the heart of the commercial networks that circle the globe. It becomes the meeting point of four global partners: to the east, the great lands of Catholic Europe, Spain and Italy; to the west, China and Japan].

The sentiment of relevance and centrality that Gruzinski reads in Balbuena is a leitmotif in the writing from and about the New World during the seventeenth century.⁷ What is to be done, then, with the current reflections on world literature related to a period and a culture that seem infused into a global substrate from the start? In other words, is it possible to approach the abundant written corpus of New Spain using criteria that until very recently have essentially been concerned with the literature of modernity?

World Literature Epidemics

To begin to answer these questions, I would like to discuss three recent perspectives on world literature theory: Walter Cohen’s A History of European Literature, Alexander Beecroft’s An Ecology of World Literature, and Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading.⁸ Despite their substantial differences, both Cohen and Beecroft seem to have an interest in broadening not only the corpus of what is considered world literature but more particularly the period to which this concept is applied. In both books, they theorize the place that Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period hold within the global literary system, but they also emphasize overcoming periodizations as units of meaning. More than simply summarizing both positions, I would like to concentrate on the importance that European expansion into the Americas has in both cases.

The opening argument of Cohen’s book proposes that European literature originally emerged from world literature and that the former was reintegrated into the latter during the Renaissance. Cohen suggests that during the European expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, literary representations of empire enabled Europe’s reintegration into the global literary system. One of the main interests of this book with respect to the European colonial expansion is the idea of a global Renaissance that negatively impacts the demography of the Americas, and which, according to Cohen, has no literary correlate in Europe. Here I would like to highlight a couple of conflicts that appear when we use world literature as a tool for reading New Spain. In the first place, one might easily propose Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias [Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies] as a significant exception to the presence of American devastation in European letters. However, clearly Las Casas is not “doing” literature in the same way as, for example, Alonso de Ercilla in his Araucana. I mean by this that a problem arises from the very conception of “literary” or “literature” on which the theory of world literature is founded, which is an eminently modern concept.

Second, there is the geopolitical aspect of how we focus New World writing: With what national literature (if I may be allowed this anachronism) should we affiliate Las Casas? Is his expansive corpus a European product or an American one? Cohen suggests an answer in his discussion of the chronicles of conquest. For him, Columbus’s writings and the documents of later conquistadors, such as Cortés’s Cartas de relación [Letters from Mexico] and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Verdadera historia de la conquista de la nueva España [True History of the Conquest of New Spain], are the clearest antecedents of a new genre that he calls “utopian fiction,” which could not exist without the new world; but then he argues that these utopias are “constructed around the logic of nonrepresentation.”⁹ Ultimately, what Cohen does is study representations of empire in European letters, which he exemplifies with Camões, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Hence, just like the American territories, American letters thus become material that makes possible and supplies Western wealth (in this case, of the literary variety).¹⁰

Beecroft proposes to use the category of “ecology” to perform a comparative study of world literatures and the networks through which they circulate and communicate with one another; he proposes this category as a means of overcoming restrictions based on regions and languages. This method is central to my reading of colonial poetry through the lens of the theory of world literature, since it helps with texts whose production and circulation differ radically from the way national literatures are created and circulate in the modern age. I am referring to a literary corpus based primarily on miscegenation, but also to the conflicts that reading American colonial poetry involves, given modern geographical divisions.

Beecroft proposes six types of ecologies. The literatures written in New Spain are situated, according to his schema, between the vernacular and the national ecologies, which are a product of European expansionism and the development of nationalism.¹¹ Beecroft rightfully asserts that Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s studies on world literature focus primarily on national ecologies. In fact, Moretti’s ideas lean heavily on historical periodization. For him, the eighteenth century is the historical moment when international market forces began to exert pressure on what were until then isolated cultures, which opens the way for literatures from the center to interfere in peripheral literatures.¹² To explain this radical change, Moretti proposes the ideas of “sameness” and “diversification,” which would define the way literature circulated before and after the eighteenth century. According to him, pre-eighteenth-century literature is characterized by offering a “mosaic of separate ‘local’ cultures; it is characterized by strong internal diversity; it produces new forms mostly by divergence; and is best explained by (some version of) evolutionary theory.”¹³

However, Moretti also states that this theory is not infallible and proposes what he calls the “Petrarchist epidemics” as an example of widespread dispersion and “sameness” during the European late Middle Ages and Renaissance.¹⁴ Moretti uses the term epidemic to explain the circulation of Petrarchism in Europe. I would like to follow this path and examine in more detail the idea of a Petrarchist epidemic by decentering it from its European context and thinking it in relation to the so-called New World. What happens if, for example, one takes literally the idea of epidemics to explain the circulation of poetic forms and themes?

I am interested in highlighting two curious aspects of this way of explaining Petrarchism. The first is that Petrarch wrote his poetry in the context of an actual epidemic, the bubonic plague that devastated Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. However, literary history has made clear that patient zero of the Petrarchist epidemic was not Francesco Petrarch; rather, this movement was born of the Italian humanism running rampant during the Renaissance, specifically that of the works of Pietro Bembo. He wanted to propose Petrarch as a model for the shift from Latin to the national vernacular language, and from there this epidemic spread through Spain, France, England, and Portugal.¹⁵ In appearance, the antibodies that this epidemic generated were mainly satirical, and Petrarchism, following a somewhat flat view of literary history, was inoculated thanks to the satire and parody to which its themes were subjected during the seventeenth century.

The second point appears when we include the Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 World-Making and the Poetics of the New World
• 2 Global Sor Juana
• 3 World-Making in the New Spain of the Eighteenth Century
• 4 On (Re)productive Worlds: Transpacific Materiality and Mexican World Literature
• 5 World-Making in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
• 6 Rethinking Mexican Modernismo and World Literature
• 7 World-Making in the Twentieth Century: The Rise of Mexican World Literary Institutions
• 8 From Post-Revolutionary Cosmopolitanisms to Pre-Bolaño Infrarealism: Mexican Avant-Garde Literatures in/as World Literature
• 9 Beyond the Literary Field: Octavio Paz in World Literature
• 10 Brief History of an Anthology of Mexican Poetry
• 11 Juan Rulfo’s World Literary Consciousness
• 12 Uno se sale de uno para verse viendo: Mexican Countercultural Literature as Psychedelic Interventions of World Literature
• 13 Carlos Fuentes and World Literature
• 14 Neoliberalism, Distinction, and World Literature in Mexico in the Twenty-First Century
• 15 Planetary Poetics of Extinction in Contemporary Mexican Poetry
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright