Cult of Defeat in Mexicos Historical Fiction by Brian L.

Price (review)
Emily Hind

Revista de Estudios Hispnicos, Tomo XLVII, Nmero 3, Octubre 2013, pp. 593-595 (Article) Published by Washington University in St. Louis DOI: 10.1353/rvs.2013.0047

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rvs/summary/v047/47.3.hind.html

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mejor puntuacin y concordancia. Me parece que este estudio, adems, peca de un exceso de terminologa tcnica, pues los neologismos o expresiones importadas del alemn, el ingls o el francs, no siempre traducidos, dificultan la comprensin del lector no especializado. Una ltima puntualizacin general tiene que ver con la ausencia de los contextos histricos-sociales desde los que se relee esta produccin literaria hoy en da. Para Nina, el sentido de la escritura parecera estar contenido dentro de s mismo; ser parte de una estructura lingstica codificable de forma intrnseca al lenguaje; sin embargo, este es un presupuesto post-estructuralista que se acepta demasiado fcilmente y sin problematizacin. Hay una ausencia de los contextos histrico-sociales del Ecuador actual bajo los cuales la interpretacin de estos autores ecuatorianos necesita tambin ser reconsiderada. Juan Carlos Grijalva Assumption College

Price, Brian L. Cult of Defeat in Mexicos Historical Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 189 pp. Brian Prices 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 present problems in Mexico facilitates a majestic historical review that stretches from Independence (1810) to the Bicentennial (2010), with special attention to the Mexican-American War and Santa Anna. Price examines historical novels by the very famous (Fernando del Pasos Noticias del imperio, Jorge Ibargengoitias Los pasos de Lpez), the infamous (Francisco Martn Morenos Mxico mutilado, Guillermo Zambranos Mxico por asalto), and the in-between (Enrique Sernas El seductor de la patria, Ignacio Solaress La invasin). Prices 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 Defeat, 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 Prices 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. Prices 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 select from Mexican history represent hope by propelling corrective, recuperative, instructive, 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 Mexican fiction vital and active? If history is a competition, with winners and losers, Prices 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 benefit 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 Prices effort to remain a critic-referee rather than a writer-player likely fails to secure triumph in the presenttense. 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 project 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 criticism that would stick to meticulous research and easily accessible, truly entertaining 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 quality, perhaps the key duty of the general-audience-friendly, footnote-free, traditionalist critique. On occasion, Price does venture some subjective estimations, mostly in the conclusion, where skilled writers appear as Ibargengoitia 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 Pasos Noticias del imperio does not come in for much assessmenta very interesting omission suggestive of Prices 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 meditation 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 national leaders do, and likewise select others will remain perennial winners. In a possibly 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 Prices courteous, almost allergic approach to social failure, which merges the latter with national defeat, inspires my appreciative description of him as an admirably well-mannered scholar. In a last example of his civility, I note Prices gallant use of the first-person plural throughout the book. Call me a curmudgeon, but I am on the outside of Prices gentlemanly we. No, really. In Prices amusing analysis of Jorge Ibargengoitia as a curmudgeon, the following definition of the term appears: We think of grumpy septuagenarians with heavy jowls who misanthropically watch a parade of idiocy pass before 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 accompanies 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 Jos Arreola, who head Prices list. This category is all a bit strange if one has an eye for the flamboyant guy, because Novo was a toupeeadorned queen and Arreola is known, among other strong suits, for having worn a black cape. Failure is an ugly thing, and Prices 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 rendering 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, Garca Mrquez, Vargas Llosa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 153 pp. Patricia E. Reagans The Postmodern Storyteller: Donoso, Garca Mrquez, 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 associated with the Boom: Jos Donosos El jardn del lado, Gabriel Garca Mrquezs Crnica de una muerte anunciada, and Mario Vargas Llosas El hablador. Making use of classical rhetoricthere is a surprising dependence on CiceroLacanian psychoanalysis, and Walter Benjamins reflections in The Storyteller (and contemporary 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 Americas post-boom novels.