IGNACIO M.

SANCHEZ-PRADO

Dying Mirrors, Medieval

Moralists, and Tristram
Shandies: The Literary
Traditions of Fernando del
Paso's Palinuro of Mexico
So tell me Palinurus, think
back to the cliff; was there time
to put your house in order
to align your will to the Will
of Fate, to fall gracefully
like that desolate swan
and leap foot-first to this shore?
Mark McMorris, Palinurus Suite
Lone candor, be constant over
us desolate who gleam no direction.
W.S. Merwin, "The Bones of Palinurus
Pray to the Northern Star"

ERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO, arguably the most important post-68 Mexican novel, was born from a massacre and an act of reading.
The massacre took place on October 2nd, 1968, when army forces fired on unarmed university students in Mexico City's Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The act of
reading occurred amidst Del Paso's many incursions into English literature, when
he found Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and thus the Virgilian character
that would evolve into his protagonist.' This encounter between history and literary tradition led to the construction of a novel that performs,^ with unparal' Fernando del Paso has openly declared that the origin of his book lies in Connolly's Palinurus.
In an interview by Jorge Ruffinelli, included in El lugar de Rulfo y otros ensayos, Del Paso says that he
never noticed Palinurus in his first reading of the Aeneid: "I learnt through Cyril Connolly that the
myth of Palinurus was the symbol of the man who lets his dreams carry him away and dies because of
them" (191; my translation). Further mentions of Connolly in Del Paso's critical works may be found
in Obras 3:100, 430, and 473.
^ My notion of "performance" and its relation to archive is strongly indebted to Diana Taylor's The
Archive and the Repertoire. While Taylor attempts to liberate the notion of performance from the
textual constraints implicit in "archive" (a notion she takes from Michel Foucault) by introducing
the concept of "repertoire," the idea that an archive operates not as an infiuence or as an inescap-

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/143

leled cultural magnitude, the generational spirit of a young man not unlike the
many who fell that tragic autumn night in Tlatelolco. Palinuro is a "corpse full of
world," to use Csar Vallejo's expression,' an embodiment both of the hopes and
dreams massacred that day and of the rich, complex literary tradition invoked by
his author to transcend the conventions of Mexican and Latin American narrative.
The present work is an attempt to reconstruct Palinuro of Mexico's literary
genealogies in order to understand the significance of its unique position witbin
tbe Western canon. In addition, the analysis will focus on Del Paso's performance
of a European interstitial literary tradition in the context of the modern Mexican novel.'' In other words. Palinuro of Mexico's protagonist and style link Del
Paso to a literary heritage far different from the realist and modernist canons
followed by Mexican twentietb-century writers of fiction.^ This essay explores the
consequences of Del Paso's literary choices in the constitution of the specific
aesthetics of his novel and in Palinuro of Mexico's figuration of the Tlatelolco
massacre, the memory of the 1960s generation, andultimatelythe construction of a new way of understanding the political in Mexican fiction. To achieve
this, my analysis is divided into five sections. Tbe first traces representations of
Palinurus in Latin and Renaissance traditions in order to describe Del Paso's use
of the novel as a moral discourse.^ The second examines Del Paso's reworking of
Cyril Connolly's character in tbe context of an aesthetic of the "total novel." The
third section discusses the ways in which Palinuro of Mexico echoes the novelistic
tradition of Tristram Shandy and Gulliver's Travels so tbat Del Paso can frame bis
moral discourse in a satiric, excessive writing style tbat allows him narratively to
perform tbe historical experience and sentimental education of Mexico's 1968
urban generation. Tbe fourth analyzes Del Paso's use of commedia dell'arte conventions to narrate the death of Palinuro in Tlatelolco. Finally, the fifth section
explains how these literary traditions collide with Palinuro of Mexico's bistorical
horizon of production in order to create a new relationship between the novel
and tbe construction of political subjectivity in contemporary Mexico.
able horizon of meaning, but as a system of resources that strategically may be performed by an
agent is, in my understanding, a very useful way to render the notion of literary tradition.
' The verse "His corpse was full of world" comes from one of Vallejo's posthumous poems (240)
and refers to the body of a murdered Republican leader in the Spanish Civil war. I invoke this verse
because the parallels between Pedro Rojas, Vallejo's Republican leader, and Palinuro are many:
both are killed in an act of political repression and both embody the values and culture of a social
group involved in a political struggle.
* I use "tradition" throughout this work to designate a "historical scheme made up of formal,
stylistic and ideological attributes common to a large number of works over a long time" (Childs
and Fowler 240). By "interstitial tradition" I mean the historical transmission of such attributes on
the fringes of canonical literary heritages.
' A comprehensive account of these canons and the construction of the main lines of the Mexican
novel may be found in Sefchovich. The consequences of the 1968 movement for the Mexican novel
have been explored by Steele, Duncan, Anderson, Young, and Merrell. Brushwood also offers a good
summary of post-1968 novelistic production in Mexico. D'Lugo studies the central currents in Mexican writing in the 1960s and 1970s, and Cabrera Lpez rereads this period of Mexican literature as a
moment in which Mexican leftist fiction is reconfigured politically. As I will show in the third section
of this article,/"a/inuro of Mexico represents a radical break from the literary mainstream described
by these critics.
^ Through this work, I will use "Palinurus" to refer to the Virgilian character and "Palinuro" to
talk about Del Paso's protagonist.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/144

I
Ever since Virgil sang of bis deatb on tbe shores of Italy, Aeneas's helmsman
has been a ghost who intermittently haunts Western hterary tradition. Palinurus's
first appearance in the literary canon occurs in Book 3 of the Aeneid, where he
discusses navigation (3.190-210). However, the passages that consecrated him as
a notable figure for generations to come are in Book 5 and Book 6. In Book 5,
Palinurus falls asleep and is thrown into the sea by the god Phorbas: "Just as an
instant sleep stole in and left him limp,/the god, rearing over him, hurled him
into the churning surf/and down he went, headfirst, wrenching a piece of rudder off" (5.827-69). When Aeneas realizes his pilot is no longer on the ship, be
laments: "You trustedob, Palinurus/far too mucb a calm sky and sea./Your
naked corpse will lie on an unknown sbore" (5.869-71). Palinurus reappears in
Book 6, tbis time in Hades, where be narrates a distorted version of bis deatb,
pleads for Aeneas's belp in getting bis corpse properly buried, and, finally, receives a promise from tbe Sybil to name a cape after bim (6.142-43).
One of tbe aspects Del Paso's Palinuro sbares witb bis Latin ancestor is tbat
botb cbaracters are tbe result of a process of literary and cultural syntbesis. As
Alexander G. McKay argues, "Palinurus' adventure surmounts a palimpsest of
models," which include Qdysseus's swim in Calypso's isle, Patroclus's apparition
in the Illiad, Menelaus's pilot's plea for a grave, and even the shipwrecks suffered
by Octavius's forces in Cape Palinurus (127-28). Del Paso's construction of Palinuro is based on a relationsbip to classicism and literary autbority tbat is rooted
in a specific form of intellectual practice common to mid-twentietb-century Mexican intellectuals. Indeed, Alfonso Reyes, twentieth-century Mexico's founding
intellectual (and a prominent classicist), had famously advocated that being a
Latin American intellectual implied belonging not only to native cultures but
also to what he called the "banquet of civilization" (82-90).^ For writers like Del
Paso, this intellectual ethos translates into the need to exercise Western culture
at large, not only to overcome the peripheral position to which Latin American
writers are usually confined, but also to resist the nationalist imperative of postrevolutionary Mexican culture. Within this framework. Palinuro can be understood as an embodiment of tbe Western canons tbat a writer like Del Paso seeks
to perform. From bis medical profession, witb its Rabelaisian imagery (see section 3), to bis affairs witb bis cousin Estefana, inspired, as we will see, by tbe
pbilosopby of Herbert Marcuse, Palinuro is a palimpsest of Western culture tbat
balances tbe autboritative position ofa certain strain (or fringe) of tbe Western
canon with the sociopolitical situation of post-68 Mexico.
Before exploring those topics, however, I must discuss the specifically Virgilian
traits of Palinuro. Virgilian scholars tend to view Palinurus as a resolute man who
is faced by insurmountable divine forces (McKay 123), a description tbat fits
perfectly Palinuro's status as an idealistic young Mexican urbanit under tbe rule
' For a discussion of Reyes's intellectual practice and his Occidentalist ideology, see Conn and
Faber. His Hellenism is discussed by Montemayor. For the cultural implications of his positions
within the Latin American context, see Snchez Prado, "Et deslinde." The relation between Del Paso
and Reyes in this regard has also been mentioned by Fiddian, Novels 20-24.

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/U5

of tbe powerful Mexican State. By basing bis reconstruction on this description,

Del Paso in effect links bis character to a tradition tbat interprets Palinurus as a
moral exemplum. J. William Hunt, for instance, bas argued tbat Palinurus represents a moral consciousness tbat baunts Aeneas and forces bim to deal witb tbe
implications of bis own fate (45-49). Mutatis mutandis, Del Paso's Palinuro baunts
Mexican power structures, and bis deatb symbolizes tbe bubris of a regime bolding on to power at all costs.
Palinurus's gbost also baunted a long tradition of medieval and Renaissance
writers wbo gradually establisbed tbe moral dimension of the character. Tbis history is important to my purposes because it illustrates tbe nature of tbe classical
traditions that sparked the interest of Mexican intellectuals at the mid-century.
Palinurus's journey follows a path similar to the one that led to Virgil's consecration as, in Ernst Robert Curtius's words, "the backbone of literary studies" (36)
since tbe fourth century.
In medieval writing the most articulate version of Palinurus as a moral figure is
the one offered by tbe twelftb-century commentator Bernardus Silvestris. Silvestris's commentary belongs to a tradition of allegorical readings of Virgil that,
according to Schreiber and Maresca, is defined by tbree features: tbe use of tbe
Aeneid to exemplify Platonic doctrine; tbe highlighting in Aeneas of a process
that goes from "early heedlessness and sin" to "understanding and, implicitly,
grace"; and a reading of the descent into the underworld in Book 6 (where Aeneas
encounters Palinurus) as the moment at which Aeneas "achieves the understanding he needs to reach his goal" (xi). Within this framework, Silvestris attributes
to Palinurus a quality tbat reinforces his standing as a moral exemplum and that,
incidentally, will find its way to Del Paso's Palinuro: lechery. According to Silvestris,
as someone who falls prey to passion and pleasure, Palinurus represents Aeneas's
desire. In this sense, Silvestris argues, Palinurus's death allegorizes a journey from
desire to reason (30-33; 75-80). Thus, when Del Paso constructs Palinuro as a
man of pleasure, as I will discuss later, he is performing a historical archive of
interpretations bound to his character's name.
Palinurus's ghost also haunts that most prominent of Virgilians, Dante Alighieri,
even tbougb be is not explicitly mentioned in tbe Divine Comedy. Various scbolars (Picone, Cioffi) agree that tbe discussions about fame in Cantos 5 and 6 of
tbe Purgatorio are modeled on Aeneas's conversation witb Palinurus, while others go so far as to argue that characters like Buoconte in Purgatorio 5 (Stefanini)
or Brunetto Latini in Inferno 15 (Havely) are modeled on Aeneas's pilot. Tbis
absent presence of Palinurus in Dante's poemwbicb preserves tbe Virgilian
model wbile allowing tbe cbaracter himself to fade into the backgroundspeaks
to the way in which hisfigurewas transmitted through the interstices of the canon.
While in tbe Renaissance Virgil remained, by and large, a central figure in tbe
Western literary tradition, Palinurus came to be more frequently invoked as an
exemplum by moralist writers. For instance, in Thomas More's Utopia, when the
narrator asks if Raphael Hythloday is a ship's captain, Peter Giles responds: "Tben
you're far off tbe mark' [. ..] 'for bis sailing bas not been like tbat of Palinurus,
but more of Ulysses or ratber Plato'" (10). The distinction between Palinurus
and Ulysses in this statement in essence provides a metaphor for Palinurus's sta-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /146

tus within canonical literature: his is a cautionary story suited to common men,
not heroes and philosophers.
This gradual marginalization of Palinurus within the Western literary tradition illustrates what is at stake when he becomes the protagonist of Del Paso's
novel. Del Paso's intertextual working must not be understood merely as "influence," since this notion overly simplifies the process at work in his novel. Western
culture, for Del Paso, is an "archive"that is, "the general horizon to which the
description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of
the enunciative field belong" (Foucault 131). In other words, PaZinwro of Mexico
does not result from the "anxiety of influence," to borrow Harold Bloom's term;
rather, it constructs itself through a strategic performance of a series of canonical discursive formations in ways that parody their cultural authority and that
ultimately rely on elements of the archive preserved on the fringes and interstices of Western culture.^
It is thus meaningful that the most important reference to Palinurus in early
Renaissance literature was made not by Thomas More, but by the Virgilian exegete Maphaeus Vegius in a dialogue entitled "De Felicitate et Miseria." Vegius
composed the dialogue between Palinurus and Charon during their journey on
the Styx in order to establish Palinurus as a moral exemplum illustrating the relation between glory and joy. For many years the dialogue was thought to be authored
by Lucan, and even its Spanish translator, the sixteenth-century intellectual Juan
Gins de Seplveda, attributed it to the Roman rhetorician. Modern scholars tend
either to characterize it as a sort of derivative Lucianism (Marsh 67) or to dismiss
it as a version of "Lucian moralized, and deprived of much of his specifically literary quality" (Robinson 85). Once again, Palinurus moves to the fringes of the
archive, while keeping his status as moral exemplum. Instead of feasting on the
banquet of civilization, Del Paso chooses the sinful enjoyment of its leftovers. As
a writer on the periphery, Del Paso selectively identifies himself with parts of the
archive that have not been fully signified within the Mexican canon. And in doing so, he revolutionizes the tradition that sustains Mexican literary practice.^

' Consider, for example, Del Paso's parodie appropriation of Dante's Inferno. As Francisco Lpez
Ruiz notes (156-62), in chapter 18, "The last of the Imaginary Islands: this house of the sick," Palinuro, who is acting as a physician, is guided by a "Virgilian" narrative voice through the different
wards in the hospital (336-78). Del Paso thus ironically transforms Palinurus from an absent presence in The Divine Comedy into the only direct connection to Dante in Palinuro of Mexico.
^ Recent attempts to theorize transnational literary practices, from Harold Bloom's The Western
Canon to Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees and Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters,

fail to understand this very point. While Moretti and Casanova acknowledge the fact that "semiperipheral" (their term) writers do produce important innovations in Western literary tradition,
their approaches cannot account for the non-canonical affinities of writers like Del Paso. While
these theories can give satisfactory accounts of, for example, Joyce's influence on Mexican writers,
they deny to "semi-peripheral" writers agency in selecting specific parts of the archive that are
not necessarily favored by Euroamerican literary tradition. For an in-depth discussion of this question, see Snchez Prado, "Hijos de Metapa" (for Moretti and Casanova) and El canon y sus formas
(for Bloom).

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/lAl

II
Palinurus's journey into the twentieth century took place in the hidden corners
of Aeneas's vessel. Theodore Ziolkowski has argued that Virgil's presence in European modernist literature is related to a process he calls the "Roman analogy":
the use of Roman history to account for the perceived rise and fall of the West in
the first half of the twentieth century. This context was reinforced by the celebration of the second millennium of Virgil's birth in 1930, and, as a result, many
Western literatures witnessed an increase of Virgilian references (3-26; cf. Kennedy). In Italy, for example, where Virgil, the Roman Empire, and fascism became intertwined (Ziolkowski 18-19), Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem "Recitative of
Palinurus" attempted to represent Palinurus's perspective on his own death (161).
Ziolkowski points out that Ungaretti sees in Palinurus "the defeated man of action" (98), an image that, along with the moral dimension constructed in Medieval interpretations of the Aeneid, will find its way to Del Paso's character.
Palinurus reappears intermittently throughout the twentieth centuryfor instance, in W.S. Merwin's poem "The Bones of Palinurus Pray to the Northern
Star," the title of which Del Paso invokes in his own novel, and, more recently, in
Mark McMorris's Palinurus Suite. Palinurus's most important twentieth-century
appearance, however, occurs in a somewhat marginal and unclassifiable book, Cyril
Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, which provided Del Paso his first encounter with
Virgil's character. While Connolly has enjoyed limited critical success in the AngloSaxon context,'" his book managed to become part of the anglophile traditions
of reading in Latin America, in part due to the influence James Joyce exercised
on Del Paso's generation. A number oi Palinuro of Mexico's commentators have
identified many different echoes ofJoyce in Del Paso (Mansour 19; Mata 42-43;
Fiddian, Novels 89-101, and "James Joyce"; and Sarduy 76), and in this particular
sense Del Paso is fully embedded in his literary generation. However, although
the pivotal role played by Joycean poetics in mid-century Mexican fiction must
not be underestimated, what makes Del Paso's book distinguishable from the
Joycean texts of most ofhis contemporaries is the displacement from a canonical
to a marginal modernist tradition achieved by reactivating Connolly's work. As
Peter Giles's distinction in More's Utopia suggests, Del Paso is not re-writing the
history of Ulysses (or Aeneas), and consequently his text does not enact the tradition of the Western hero. Rather, by affiliating himself with the melancholic,
quasi-schizophrenic subjectivity represented in The Unquiet Grave, by focusing
on a ghost story rather than narrating the accomplishment of a hero, Del Paso's
book establishes itself as the only prominent example of a Mexican (post) modernist tradition whose Joycean undertones do not constitute the central element
of its aesthetic.
One can account for Del Paso's interest in The Unquiet Grave by remembering
one of Connolly's most notorious statements: "The more books we read, the
clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece
' Although references to Connolly's work are somewhat scarce, his life has been a subject of
interest for many biographers; see, for example, Shelden, Fisher, and Lewis. See also Pryce-Jones
for a compilation of Connolly's autobiographical writings. An assessment of Connolly's dismissal by
academic literary criticism can be found in Lewis's Who Cares about Cyril Connolly!

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/148

and that no other task is of any consequence" (1). This statement has two particular consequences for the understanding of Del Paso's work. The first is that it
accurately describes the ethos of Del Paso's own literary practice." During the
past forty years Del Paso has published only four novels, the first three of which
are monumental works of more than 600 pages, each with very ambitious poetics, and written over the course of five to ten years. Unlike many Mexican writers
of his generation, who took advantage of the increasing growth of the publishing
industry in the sixties to publish prolifically, Del Paso's more careful and elaborate literary style closely reflects Connolly's imperative.'^ At the same time, however, Connolly's statement becomes highly ironic when one considers the marginal
position of his work and the tepid reception it received during his lifetime.''
The combination of Connolly's insistence upon producing a masterpiece and
his own marginality account for Del Paso's idea of writing a literary masterpiece
by fully assuming the marginal nature of his literary genealogy, in this case a
novel that D.J. Enright has called "a tedious and pretentious exercise in well-read
masochism, sick with the 'virus of good taste,' a prolonged indulgence in a halfhearted death wish" (40). In the context of Latin American fiction, this choice
calls into question the canonical relation between the region's fiction and its modernist models. Thus, as Robin Fiddian argues, even though "Palinuro of Mexico is
assimilable to modernism on the basis of its unreconstructed humanist message,
its universalist aspirations, and the totalizing sweep of its narrative arrangement,"
its "refusal to resolve its constitutive dualities" suggests a connection with a "more
fully developed strain of postmodernist writing" (Novels 103). Fiddian correctly
identifies Del Paso's ambiguous position in relation to the modernist canon that
by the mid-1970s had dominated the writing of fiction in Latin America for more
than twenty years. However, rather than too easily identifying this shift with a
"postmodern" poetics characteristic of fictional works coming from such radically different textual traditions as that of the South American post-dictatorial
novel, we must understand this ambiguity on the basis of Del Paso's conscious
affiliations with the fringes of the Western tradition. Just as the choice of Palinurus
as protagonist is in itself a form of classicism different from that consecrated by
intellectuals like Alfonso Reyes, so the invocation of Connolly speaks to a desire
to subscribe to a more radical version of modernist poetics.
Perhaps the most noticeable way in which Palinuro of Mexico invokes Connolly
against the hegemonic Joycean tradition of Mexican fiction is its development of
an unfolded, schizophrenic subjectivity that differs substantially from the mas" Mata argues that Connolly's idea that works of art should have myth, belief and vocation (44)
may also apply to Del Paso.
'^ As a result, critics have often identified Del Paso's aesthetics with that of the Latin American
totalizing novel, an aesthetics typically linked to Boom writers such as Garcia Mrquez or Julio
Cortzar. See Fiddian, "Fernando del Paso" 151, and Saenz.
" While Connolly's biographies all underscore that his group of friends included the most important writers of his time and that in private correspondence they all praised his work, Connolly is in
truth the kind of author who enjoys critical esteem but lacks a major role in literary tradition.
Furthermore, even when he was an influential part of the literary world, his work did not always find
acceptance. Hopkins, for instance, narrates the difficulties that he faced finding an editor for his
first work (158-60), while Ziolkowski observes that Connolly's friend Evelyn Waugh openly parodies
The Unquiet Grar^e in his war trilogy (139).

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/1^^%

culine notion of the subject affirmed by writers such as Carlos Fuentes or Jos
Agustn. Indeed, Agustn's Se est haciendo tarde (final de la laguna) is a particularly good example of the Joycean tradition in 1970s Mexico. Published four
.years before Palinuro of Mexico, the novel's protagonist is a young man called
Rafael, who is led by a hippie, Virgilio, into the depths of Acapuko's world of
drugs. While the plot is a reworking of Dante's Inferno, the prose style is distinctively Joycean, somewhere between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Agustn's novel
shares with Del Paso's an underlying bildungsroman structure, but, while Se est
haciendo tarde ultimately is resolved by the assertion of a masculine, individual
identity, Del Paso's wager is far more complex. Palinuro is not an individual, but
a gathering of subjectivities that unfold into both a personal and a collective
consciousness. He is, to borrow a passage from Antonio Tabucchi's novel Declares
Pereira, a "confederacy of souls" (76-77), which emerge selectively throughout
the novel, producing a more complex representation of the 1960s experience.
Connolly describes his book as an "experiment in self-dismantling" (3), and,
asJ.M. Kertzer has pointed out, he identifies himself with Palinurus in order to
unfold and refold that identification (24-25). This is the single most important
element that Del Paso takes from Connolly. There is, as Lilian Bendayn has
shown, a Palinuro 1, who corresponds with the narrator, and a Palinuro 2, a
character referred to in the third person (13-19). Monica Mansour takes this idea
even further by arguing that this unfolding of the narrative voice is complemented
by a pronominal structure that includes moments in which that unfolding does
not occur and by passages written in the second person, in which Palinuro 1 is
not even a narrative voice (40). Palinuro's subjectivity thus exists within a space in
which Del Paso performs Connolly's aesthetic of self-dismantling, an approach
that, in its profound egotism, provides a language for the emerging subjectivities
of the 1960s generation.
Because Palinuro is, after all, a medical student at the National University of
Mexico, he is a young man deeply embedded in the culture of the 1968 Mexican
student movement. As is well known, among the most important philosophical
questions of the time were the relationship between capitalism and subjectivity
and, more importantly, the anti-Freudian move to liberate the subject from its
constraints. Del Paso's book is one of the very few Mexican novels that attempt a
radical break with what Felix Guattari calls the "conservative reterritorializations
of subjectivity" (3)that is, a return to traditional notions of the individual subject. To borrow Herbert Marcuse's terminology. Palinuro of Mexico is one of the
most consistent literary attempts, perhaps the only one in the Mexican canon, to
imagine a subjectivity beyond the "one-dimensional man." Of course, there is no
direct connection between Connolly's postwar cultural pessimism and the joyful
Zeitgeist of the 1960s generation. Within the somewhat restrictive mainstream
poetics of Mexican and Latin American literature, Del Paso had to find a language that had not yet been articulated in order to express the 1968 experience.
While Mexican writers informed by Joyce and the beat generation (Jos Agustn,
for instance) tried to overcome this shortcoming by appealing to a recreation of
middle-class urban youth, Del Paso solves this question by turning to literary
languages that had not yet been explored in the Latin American tradition. That

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/150

is why Del Paso takes from Connolly, rather than from an already assimilated
Joycean discourse, the coordinates that define the subjectivity of his main character. And, of course, the choice of Palinurus as a classic archetype for his novel
responds to the need to avoid heroic archetypes that had been exhausted
namely, the Ulysses-Aeneas figure. Del Paso's performance of tradition is then a
political, ideological, and cultural wager that attempts to construct a literary language for the 1968 experience, a language that short-circuits the costumbrist
temptation of a hyperrealist aesthetic and that codifies this experience through
a literary tradition that shares the joyful, revolutionary nature of the Mexican
students killed at Tlatelolco.

Ill
When Palinuro of Mexico first appeared in 1977, and even more so in the wake
of its being awarded the prestigious Rmulo Gallegos prize in 1982, a considerable number of critics attempted to make sense of its magnitude and complexity
using the critical languages developed to analyze Latin American literary production during the preceding two decades. Consequently, early readings of the
book mistakenly aligned Palinuro o/Mexico's joyful excess with the neobaroque
tradition, which at the time had a very strong hold in Latin American studies due
to the weight of authors such as Jos Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. Artur
Lundkvist, for instance, links Del Paso's book to the tradition of Lezama's Paradiso by placing it at the last stage of a narrative of excess born of "selvatic exuberance" (73; my translation). More recently, Alfonso Gonzlez identified the novel's
Bakhtinian strand, which I will discuss in a moment, but still interpreted the novel's rhetorical devices as part of the neobaroque tradition ("Neobarroco"45). The
baroque/neobaroque matrix accounts for the emergence of, in Lezama Lima's
words, a form of "American expression" that sought to account both for the
continent's problematic colonial heritage and for the transcultural worlds that
emerged from colonial and postcolonial cultural encounters (see Morana). Concepts such as surrealism (Saenz 118-21), mannerism (Conte 97) and even
picaresque (Bradu 83) complemented this neobaroque matrix in these misguided
critical attempts to ascribe Del Paso's novel to a very infiuential strain of midcentury Latin American literature.
In fact, Del Paso's recourse to marginal literary traditions is best understood if
one considers his primary task: to discover a literary language capable of accounting for the historical experience of the 1960s generation. As Fiddian has pointed
out, Del Paso's ideology is heavily indebted to the decade's countercultural traditions, most particularly to Herbert Marcuse's anti-institutional works {"Palinuro"
218-19).'* Del Paso's work is informed by some of Marcuse's most influential arguments, such as the "liberation of Eros" as a revolutionary force, or civilization
" Del Paso constantly refers to Marcuse's work in his critical and political essays. See, for example.
Obras 3;582, 696, 801, 947, 995. In his perceptive (and, unfortunately, unpublished) series of articles "La imaginacin al poder," Guillermo Espinosa convincingly argues that Marcuse's Eros and
Civilization must be considered a "major part of the philosophical scaffolding of the book." My
argument here rests on this supposition.

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/151

and capitalism as instances of the "desexualization" of the subject (Eros 83, 95).
This explains why a considerable part of Palinuro's "excess" is manifested through
his sexual relationship with his cousin/lover Estefana, a relationship which articulates not only ajoyful "elaboration of a Utopian scenario of incest, independent of the regime of Oedipal prohibition" (Fiddian, Novels 81), but also, and
more importantly, a language of the body that relates Del Paso to a particular
literary tradition. Take as an example this description from chapter 4: "How I
penetrated my cousin's mouth and how, also, her vagina, is something I will relate another time, along with further admirable and exquisite aberrations. Suffice it for now to say, on the subject of my cousin's anus, that it was more familiar
to me than the palm of my tongue" (71-72). The idea of "admirable and exquisite aberrations" illustrates perfectly Del Paso's approach to the body: he employs
ajoyful, highly sexualized, graphic, and, at times, scatological language to give
form to the ideology of anti-capitalist sexuality present in the text. To cite another example, in chapter 14 we meet Molkas, one of Palinuro's friends, whose
salient feature is his use of masturbation to articulate his own identity. Molkas's
motto, "He had no hesitation/In prescribing masturbation/as the surest embrocation/for his woe" (263), is very much an expression of the youthful spirit I
have described so far.
These examples clearly align Palinuro of Mexico with a large number of literary productions v^itten under the aegis of 1960s sexual liberation. What sets
Palinuro apart from them is the book's use of medical language to represent the
body. "The science of medicine," reads the first line of the book, "was a spirit
which haunted Palinuro's heart throughout his life" (3). It is in this spirit that
the opening chapter describes Uncle Esteban and his beloved Polish nurse articulating their love amidst a World War I battlefield characterized by dysentery,
blood, feces, and madness in a medical language that will haunt the book's style
just as it haunts its protagonist. For instance, Estefania's patients adore her so
much that "cirrhosis sufferers forgot their Medusan stomach and tuberculosis
sufferers their violet sarcoids" (72-73), while one of Molkas's prayers parodies
the Ora pro Nobis by invoking medical terms in Latin: '"Labia Majora' said Molkas.
'Ora pro Nobis' said Fabricio. 'Struma ovarii': 'Ora pro Nobis'" (311). This subver-

sion and joyful invocation of medical language (which is, of course, ultimately a
form of disciplining the body) links Del Paso to one of the most remarkable
physicians in Western literature: Franois Rabelais.
Del Paso's narrative of excess, then, does not belong to a baroque tradition,
but to a line of literary production identified mth Rabelais's work. Carlos Ginzburg
traces this line back to Lucian and his recuperation in the Renaissance by authors such as Erasmus, Cervantes, and Rabelais, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne (48).'^ (Recall that
Palinurus survived as a character mostly through the work of Lucian's followers.)
Del Paso's work thus carries out its anti-institutional stance by invoking a canon
of texts dedicated to institutional questioning. Rabelais, as Lucien Febvre re'^ Although Cervantes' influence on Del Paso is not as visible in Palinuro as that of Sterne or
Rabelais, Del Paso's most recent book is actually an essay on Don Quixote. See Viaje alrededor de El
Quijote.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/152

minds us, was part of a movement of secularization of writing and was considered an atheist by some. He produced what Terence Cave has characterized as
"cornucopian" writing, a style that combines prodigality and self-consciousness,
two elements central to Del Paso's aesthetic. As a reading of Palinuro of Mexico
makes very clear, Del Paso's medical language and his grotesque bodily representations are heavily indebted to Gargantua and Pantagruel's revolutionary images of the body, images which have been extensively studied by Bakhtin in his
well-known book on Rabelais (303-436). Thus, Del Paso constructs a discourse
against Mexican political institutionalism by tbe performance of a literary tradition with anti-institutional roots, now transfigured into the quadrants of 1968's
emancipatory ideologies. Ultimately, Del Paso's aesthetic and political wager lies
in the strategic deployment of a particular brand of marginal classicism in order
to create a language critically to think, from the vantage point of literature, the
unnameable massacre of Tlatelolco.
Another key to the literary genealogy of Del Paso's novel is Palinuro's cousin,
Walter, who is a replica of Laurence Sterne's Walter Shandy"* In chapter 12 of
the novel, "Cousin Walter's Erudition and Tristram Shandy's Apples," Del Paso's
Walter even deploys a litany about Sterne's knowledge of Locke's philosophy
(238-39). As central as Sterne may be in the English tradition, one has to dig
deeply to fmd novelists influenced by him in the Latin American context. Before
Del Paso, the only major canonical work witb major echoes of Sterne is Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis's Posthumous memoirs of Bras Gubas (see Schwarz), wbile
Carlos Fuentes' Ghristopher Unborn, published more than a decade after Palinuro,
is tbe only other major invocation of Sterne in the Mexican tradition. Writing a
book echoing Tristram Shandy is thus in itself a radical break both from tbe late
naturalism of the novel of the Mexican Revolution and tbe mid-century Joycean
tradition that dominated (and still dominates) fiction writing in Mexico."
In one of his most famous remarks, Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky characterizes Tristram Shandy as the "most typical novel in world literature," since it
makes the reader aware of tbe aesthetic laws on which it is based (57). Tbis strategy underlies Del Paso's adoption of Sterne as a way to question some strategies
of legitimation present in Mexican fiction. Mid-century Mexican literature produced a series of highly literate novels, catalogued by critics under tbe term
"escritura" in part following tbe nouveau-roman-esque notion of ""criture" (see
Glantz and D'Lugo). Wbile many authors associated with this movement have a
highly subversive conception of sexuality, their fiction is constructed on the basis
of an aggrandizing notion of high literature tbat defuses the political dimension
'^ The traces of Rabelais and Sterne in Palinuro have been examined very closely by Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durn. His textual analysis provides specific moments of encounter between Del
Paso's novel and the works I discuss in this section.
" It is also important to note that Del Paso believed that Sterne's novel was unfairlyjudged by a
Samuel Johnson who was devoted to "insulting the most brilliant and vital novels ofhis time, such as
Tomjones or Tristram Shandy" (Obras 3:281; my translation). Indeed, 'The ineffable Doctor Johnson
deserves a place in the history, not so much of literature, but of stupidity, for his judgments on three
great works of Englishand universalliterature: Henry Fielding's Tomjones, Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels" (3:495; my translation). Consequently, Del
Paso's choice of Sterne is in keeping with his overall involvement with alternative canonicities.

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/15S

of their works (see Rodrguez-Hernndez). I contend that Del Paso achieves a

more politically charged version of literature by adopting the more radical elements of these writers and reshaping them into a carnivalized version of Mexico
that addresses all power structures in the country rather than only the moral
ones attacked by, for example, Juan Garcia Ponce's recourse to eroticism.
Del Paso achieves this more general social criticism by performing one of the
crucial elements of Sterne's cultural archive: the de-fetishization of power/knowledge structures. Iln Stavans has argued that Del Paso's book is "bookish, not
scholarly" (162), while Alfonso Gonzlez has stressed the fact that the novel's
constant references to culture and science are always superficial (Voces 34). Like
Sterne's famous novel, Palinuro of Mexico empties cultural references of meaning through such rhetorical procedures as irony, metaphor, and repetition. Paul
Surgi Speck has described Tristram Shandy's style as a bricolage that "liberates
Sterne from the limiting assumptions which underlie history and science, which
are replaced ad hoc by analogies that serve the synthesizing need of artistic creativity" (67), thereby allowing him to "imagine a better alternative than historical and scientific circumstances would seem to justify" (80). In the aftermath of
the Tlatelolco massacre, Del Paso's performance of this strategy of deconstructing reified knowledge opens the possibility of an alternative cultural imagination to the one imposed by the post-revolutionary regime. It is not coincidental,
then, that Tristram Shandy, like The Unquiet Grave, de-centers modern subjectivity through a personal, performative notion of culture (on the former, see Iser
1-55). Palinuro's joyful self is the product of such alternative possibilities and his
death a poignant comment on the destructive force of power when confronted
by them.
Julia Kristeva has argued that the literature that inherits the Menippean,
carnivalesque legacy of Rabelais "is the history of the struggle against Christianity and its representation; this means an exploration of language (of sexuality
and death), a consecration of ambivalence and vice" (80). Within a contemporary context, this assertion may be extended to more ample forms of power and
domination. It is in this space that Palinuro of Mexico exerts its ideological investments. Still, to understand fully the extent of this tradition's weight in Del Paso's
work, we must also consider the moral dimension of his humor. Elzbieta Sklodowska has argued that parody in the Latin American novel of the 1960s operated in the context of a cultural uncertainty towards the inherited values of
nineteenth-century positivist thought (22). Writers like Del Paso respond to this
generational concern by articulating, along with a critique of existing systems of
power, a moral compass constructed through humor and irony. While Sterne
provides Del Paso with elements for the former, Jonathan Swift gives him the
language to achieve the latter.
In chapter 11, entided "Palinuro's Travels among the Advertising Agencies and
other Imaginary Islands," Del Paso's protagonist undertakes a journey "like
Lemuel Gulliver" through a series of Mexico City advertising agencies:
The Agencies, the Agencies of floating soaps of ivory. The Agencies of flowing rivers of cold cream
and hundreds of tiny little horses the colour of the will-o'-the-wisp escaping from the boots for Ford
cars to become submerged in the monopolies of shooting stars and in the currents of jam existing

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/154

since time out of mind. The Agencies, the j^encies where whiskies smouldered in the icebergs which
Captain Scott brought back in an album when his icebreaker snapped the spine of the twentieth
century! (179)

In this passage, Del Paso adopts Swift's satiric style in order to convey the Marcusean anti-capitalist stance described above. As a result, Palinuro's travels in the
chapter, like many other moments of the book, juxtapose the anti-capitalist ideologies of the 1960s generation with a literary style that, despite its canonic status
in English, remained largely undiscovered in Spanish.'*
J. Paul Hunter describes Gulliver's Travels as "a kind of parodie answer to the
early novel and a satire of the novelistic consciousness" (56). In a similar fashion.
Palinuro of Mexico parodies a form of novelistic consciousness closely aligned to
the national-allegorical models prescribed by the hegemonic ideologies of its
time. Whereas many writers publishing in the 1950s and early 1960s (Carlos
Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, and Jos Revueltas, for instance) employed characters that
represented the national popular subjectivities (the caudillo, the landlord, or the
peasant) constructed by the Revolution, Del Paso provides a space of representation for those social agents who rebelled against nationalist stereotypes and prescriptions. In essence, Del Paso's adoption of Swift allowed him simultaneously
to construct a language that undermines the presuppositions of more traditional
novelistic subjectivities and to articulate an ethical/moral code that represents
the values of the 1968 generation. In this sense, one may apply to Palinuro Warren Montag's characterization of Gulliver's Travels as a book that puts into play
idea-systems "in a way that not only exposes but even heightens and intensifies
their internal contradictions" (129). Mutatis mutandis. Palinuro puts into play
the internal contradictions of the 1968 youth movement by performing it in the
dissonant, yet familiar, languages of non-canonical (at least within the Latin American context) literary traditions.

IV
In a 1974 article, James Clifford established a distinction between "hard" and
"soft" interpretations of Gulliver's fourth travel. The former equates Swift's ideas
with Culliver's, thus constructing a notion of the author as a misanthrope, while
the latter argues that the object of criticism is Gulliver himself. Del Paso's attitude towards Palinuro seems to avoid both extremes: his narration joyfully explores and admires every corner of Palinuro's sensitivity, while also displaying
the ultimate historical failure of Palinuro's generation. This is why chapter 24,
"Palinuro on the Stairs or the Art of Comedy," an almost 100-page long commedia
dell'arte that deals with Palinuro's agony after being shot in Tlatelolco, is the
fmaland centralpiece of Del Paso's ideological and literary puzzle.
" I am aware that some people would invoke the name of Jorge Luis Borges at this point. However, although Borges did play an important role in popularizing some authors of the English tradition (Swift amongst them), one must not forget that at the time Del Paso composed Palinuro
Borges's influence in canonic Latin American narratives had more to do with the so-called Boom
literature, with its ties to Cervantes and French narrative, than with a truly Anglophile tradition
ofwriting.

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/155

Considering the genealogies discussed up to this point, it is not at all surprising that the commedia dell'arte is the archive performed by Del Paso in the tragic
climax of his novel. It is hard to imagine a more subversive choice within the
literary genealogy claimed by Del Paso: a form of art whose carnivalesque traits
exceed even the literate paradigm of Swift and Sterne. Robert Henke has pointed
out that the commedia dell'arte is the product of a "transitional period," in which
both oral and written forms of production have a prominent role in culture. The
result is a "structural tension between the linear, well-constructed plot based on
a literary model and the centrifugal improvisations of the stand-up performer"
(1). The genre offers Del Paso a language common to his other sources, since, as
some critics have pointed out, the commedia dell'arte employs, like Rabelais and
Swift, tropes involving exaggeration (Smith 15) and values freedom and license
over asceticism (Jonard 27). Finally, this genre, much like other literary influences in Palinuro of Mexico, reached the twentieth century on the fringes of Western tradition, mostly through articulations of figures like Pierrot and Harlequin
in early cinema, avant-garde theatre, and non-canonical high modernist works
(see Green and Swan; for Russian uses of the genre, see Clayton).
One way to understand Del Paso's choice of the commedia dell'arte to tell the
story of Palinuro's agony is to recognize the transitional position the genre occupies in the history of literature. As Henke notes, the commedia dell'arte re-creates
a fluid moment in the history of literature, one prior to the attachment of literary writing to modern structures of power. In other words, the archive that Del
Paso is performing when narrating Palinuro's agony resides in a space of cultural
memory that has never been fully symbolized by the institutions of writing. Given
the ambiguous position Del Paso's writing occupies in relation to the Western canon,
the commedia dell'arte allows him to sustain both the highly literate endeavor of
his novel and its ironic approach towards the inherited traditions in Mexican
literature. In a sense, the commedia dell'arte's presence in Palinuro of Mexico takes
the literary traditions summoned by the novel to their limit by invoking a genre
in which writing is subverted by its most liminal, most performative dimension.
One way in which Del Paso inscribes subversive elements in the configuration
of this chapter lies in the use of Mexican nationalist icons as characters of his
commedia. As Fiddian has pointed out, Del Paso's commedia identifies the comic
characters of the genre (such as Scaramouche) with the students slaughtered in
Tlatelolco and the "evil" ones (Pantalone, for instance) with the police ("Palinuro"
216-17). One could take this point even further and argue that the "evil" characters are also invested with a clear nationalistic iconicity. For instance, a character
called "General-Death" is described as wearing "a huge red Mexican sombrero"
(498), while another character identified with death is a tourist guide who parades the different icons of Mexican modernity used by the State in the 1968
Olympics: "Ladies and gentlemen, tourists and compatriots, travellers and Frenchmen, friends and gringos: you are in the heart of the 19th Olympic games. Mexico,
'68! On your right, the Latin American Tower, the tallest building in Mexico!"
(512). Palinuro thus uses the commedia dell'arte to inscribe into his carnivalesque
narrative two structures of power: the literary tradition of his contemporaries,
questioned by the marginal canonicity I have discussed up to this point, and the

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /156

political icons of nationalism, whose defense led to the 1968 massacre. By placing
literature and politics in the performativity of the commedia, Del Paso ultimately
contextualizes Palinuro's death within the absurd space of politics and culture that
framed the 1968 massacre and destroyed the Utopian hopes of the 1968 generation.
The Commedia dell'arte thus establishes two different limits for Del Paso's project.
First, insofar as Palinuro results from a confluence of literary traditions, the use
of a liminal genre like the commedia performs a mise-en-abyme that places his
subjectivity within a radical game of referentiality. This is why the chapter is structured in such a way that Palinuro moves from "reality" to "fantasy": Palinuro's
Sisyphean attempt to reach the top of the stairs is constantly interrupted by the
carnivalesque appeareances of the commedia's characters. In this sense. Palinuro,
as a palimpsest of literary tradition, comes to represent the limits of Del Paso's
own writing. On the other hand, if we view Palinuro as a political subject, the
commedia exposes the different networks of power and resistance that lead to
Palinuro's murder in Tlatelolco. In doing so, it ultimately establishes the ideological limit of Del Paso's projectnamely, the impossibility of fully articulating
a Utopian space. The carnival of power ultimately erases the Utopian promise
inscribed in Palinuro's body.

The traumatic nature of the 68 massacre posed a daunting task for Mexican
writers. As Christopher Domnguez Michael has argued, writing about Mexico
68 amounted to a "difficult operation: the sudden interpretation of a secular
myth" (922; my translation). The strong impact that Tlatelolco had in the literary imagination created a cultural shock that redefined the terms of fiction writing in Mexico, while the secular myth of the event itself became a space of
unrepresentability. Palinuro of Mexico is an attempt to write a "total novel" in a
context where the basic tenets of national and cultural identity have been shattered. Up to this point, I have sought to lay out the complex configurations of
traditions that are at play in Palinuro of Mexico, as well as the way in which many
inherited literary forms, from the figure of Palinurus to the Rabelaisian literary
tradition, are performed as re-creations of the youthful spirit that fueled the
1960s student movement in Mexico. The question that remains, then, is how Del
Paso's joyous and mournful writing responds to a new secular myth in Mexican
literature: the construction of a post-68 literary subjectivity.
Within the post-68 novelistic tradition at large. Palinuro of Mexico has had a
mixed reception. The novelist Gonzalo Martr, for instance, openly excludes
Del Paso's novel from consideration as a member of this category, arguing that
the book is not entirely focused on the movement and, more symptomatically,
that the "inclusion of superabundant specialized information" ultimately wears
the reader out (144). Martr's book about the 1968 massacre and the student
movement is predicated upon a paradigm that limits the memory of the event to
direct recollection, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most influential texts
on the 68 massacreElena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco and Carlos Monsivis' Dias de guardarbelong to the chronicle genre.

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/157

Palinuro of Mxico approaches Tlatelolco in a very different way. Writing amidst

a debate about the ways of representing youth culture in Mexican literature, Del
Paso chose to re-signify the youth subject of the 1960s by incorporating not only
the lively traditions of radical thinking but also some of the most subversive aspects of the Western canon. In doing so, he avoided both the trivialization of the
1960s youth experience performed by the "literatura de la Onda" and a simplifying approach that reduces fiction to a mere realistic account of the Tlatelolco
events.'"
It is thus important to resist two temptations when reading Palinuro. First,
although Del Paso is indeed indebted to the Joycean tradition, what sets him
apart from most of his contemporaries in Mexico is his recourse to the tradition
I have described in the first four sections of this essay. Thus, whereas Del Paso's
earlier novel/oj Trigo is indeed strongly Joycean, Palinuro is defined precisely
by its construction of a genealogy that differs from and counters the Joycean
malaise of 1960s Mexican narrative. Second, we must resist the inscription of
Palinuro to the "Onda vs. escritura" argument that many use to classify mid-century
Mexican narrative (see, especially, Glantz and D'Lugo), because this would lead
us mistakenly to align Palinuro with the nationalist stances of such writers as Juan
Rulfo or Carlos Fuentes. While it may be argued that Del Paso builds on the
stylistics of Fuentes' Cambio de piel, there are also crucial ideological differences.
Fuentes and Rulfo mostly critique figures like the caudillo. In Palinuro Del Paso
calls into question the very system of power to which the ideas of Fuentes and
Rulfo themselves belong. To provide only one example, the heavy carnivalization
of nationalism, as performed by the commedia dell'arte, overturns the symbolic
structure that Fuentes and Rulfo, among many others, use to construct their own
fiction. In order fully to understand Palinuro's relevance in the realm of Mexican literary tradition, then, it is essential to resist the temptation to confine
Palinuro to the standard readings of Mexican fiction that restrict interpretations
of Mexican literature to Joycean infiuences, nationalism, or the (false) debate
between the "literatura de la Onda" and more "literate" writers.
In this context, it is essential to understand that Palinuro of Mexico's fundamental task is not remembrance of 68 per se but reflection on a form of cultural
subjectivity that, due to its radical nature, may ultimately lead to a more subversive system of signs. Del Paso's book suggests that a properly ethical approach to
1968 from the perspective of literature may not be, as in Jorge Aguilar Mora's Si
muero lejos de ti, a simple capitulation to the impossibility of representing the
massacre in the realm of signs (see Domnguez Michael 923). Thus, rather than
producing an "allegory of defeat," to use a phrase from the title of the Spanish
version of Idelber Avelar's study, Del Paso attempts to capture the rich, multilayered subjectivity of the fallen in order to produce a literary discursivity whose
" The "literatura del la Onda" typically narrated the experience of middle-class, urban youths,
who distinguished themselves from the student movement by not showing any particular political
commitment. For further reference, see Gunia. It is not my intention to suggest that the "Onda"
lacks a political angle. Rather, my argument is that the "Onda" defined itself by differentiating its
view of youth culture from that held by the student movement. For a reading o{ Palinuro of Mexico
as a parody of the "literatura del la Onda," see Espinosa-Jcome 461.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE/158

dimensions are more radical tban mere memory. This is why, at the very end of
the commedia, a group of students dressed in white mime masks (suggesting they
are dead) repeat the mantra: "Every dead student is a living torch" (534). Rather
than representing the unspeakable trauma of death, Del Paso chooses to exalt
the radical potential of the students' lives.
To further illustrate this final point, I would like briefly to compare Palinuro of
Mexico with a later attempt to construct a post-68 subjectivity: Hctor Aguilar
Camin's La guerra de Galio. Aguilar Camn's book tells the story of a journalist
named Carlos Garcia Vigil as he moves from the 1968 massacre to the intricacies
of the Mexican State structures. Garcia Vigil's/^ai/ios, however, runs in an entirely
different direction from Palinuro's; Garcia Vigil is a generational survivor who
becomes entangled in the Mexican State's networks of power. In other words, rather
than invoking the political potential of the student movement, Aguilar Camin's
narrative operates from a position of utter disenchantment with the possibility of
politics itself. Although Alberto Moreiras has argued that Aguilar Camin's critique of a form of politics that relies "upon violence and concealment" ultimately
allows literature to claim "its undeniable privilege as a means of thinking about
democracy" (82), and although Aguilar Camin, himself, is one of Mexico's foremost (neo)liberal pubhc intellectuals and one of the architects of the so-called
"transition to democracy" in Mexico, this only highlights the ways in which Del
Paso's Palinuro avoids a simple critique of power' in the name of institutional
democracy in order to affirm a subjectivity that ultimately undermines all power.
Given all the literary traditions invoked by Del Paso and the strategic choices
implicit in his aesthetic affinities. Palinuro of Mexico gives up the liberal myth of
literature as a space of "democracy" so as to open up a more political (and more
ethical) discourse: one that performs, in all its fluidity, the spirit of the fallen
subjects that never gave in to institutional politics. Palinuro, like the members of
the student movement in 1968, is a "living torch" that illuminates a path to a
different form of politics.
Del Paso's profound engagement with literary traditions that escape the liberal legacy of Enlightenment and high Modernism (not to mention the moral
imperatives of progressives and conservatives) reaches its most meaningful articulation at this juncture. In Mexico, amidst a tradition that sought definitive
forms of identity, Del Paso chose, with Connolly and Sterne, a heritage that undermines all fixed forms of subjectivity. In a literary tradition that chanted the
legacy of Ulysses and Aeneas, Del Paso chose to listen to the joy and grief of
Palinurus. In a historical moment where the memory of death was inseparable
from shock, Del Paso chose a carnivalesque, liminal literary form that questioned
the solemnity of his contemporaries. If writers like Aguilar Camin sought for
literature a role in the construction of democracy. Palinuro of Mexico claims for
the novel its undeniable right to undermine and question power in all of its
forms, to "speak truth to power," as Edward Said put it. This is the space of a
novel born of a massacre and an act of reading: the constant reminder that literature is the memory of freedom.
Washington University in Saint Louis

FERNANDO DEL PASO'S PALINURO OF MEXICO/\m

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