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TECHNOLOGY, MASS-MEDIA, AND THE LEGACY OF THE MODERN LATIN

AMERICAN NOVEL: RODRIGO FRESÁN’S MANTRA

Gustavo Llarull Cornell University Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra, by Argentine Rodrigo Fresán, has elicited critical interest.1 However, critics have either focused on very interesting but narrow aspects of the novel (Candía; Gras Mirabet; Musset; Navarrete González), or placed it in the context of the corpus of Fresán’s work with the intention of reaching a global view of his literary production (Hidalgo; Kurlat Ares).2 While very productive, these two approaches cannot, in virtue of their nature, examine Mantra both in detail and as a whole. One notable exception is Paz Soldán’s comprehensive study, published in this very journal, in which the novelist and critic offers an indispensable analysis of the proliferation of technology and mass-media in Mantra. It is against the backdrop of Paz Soldán’s analysis, then, that this article will unfold.3 In the last decade of the twentieth century, Fresán and Paz Soldán were members of the McOndo group, which was related, despite certain differences in their aesthetic projects, to the Crack group. (See Williams, ch. 10 and 13, for the overlapping agendas of the two groups. For their differences, see Carrión, which features an illuminating discussion between Paz Soldán and Volpi). Until a few years ago,4 the writers of these groups emphasized the need to break with the tradition of the modern Latin _________________________

1I would like to thank Raymond L. Williams, two anonymous reviewers, and the Editor for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. Some passages appeared previously in Llarull, “The Long and Winding Road.”

2Although Kurlat Ares doesn’t discuss Mantra explicitly, her treatment of Fresán’s work is rele-vant to this novel.

3My disagreement with Paz Soldán will appear more pronounced than it really is. For the purposes of this article, however, I find it more fruitful to emphasize our disagreements and use Paz Soldán’s take on them as a conceptual frame for discussion, rather than cite, paraphrase, and repeat the points on which we agree. Still, these points are numerous, and I cannot but reiterate that his incisive article is indispensable for an understanding of Mantra.

4In 2004, Volpi reframed the debate about the Crack and McOndo groups in terms of a discussion of (and a tension between) “localism” and “cosmopolitanism.” However, initially both groups shared the aim to reject not only magical realism, but (especially in the case of McOndo) the literary pro-cedures of the modern Latin American novel in toto (Fuguet and Gómez; Volpi et al). Volpi has

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American novel (i.e., roughly, the arc that goes from Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El señor Presidente [1946] to the novels of the Boom). This break involves—especially in the case of McCondo—the rejection of “totalizing” novelistic projects, as well as an interesting, provocative defense of the use of mass-media and technology in the very texture of fiction (Fuguet and Gómez; Volpi et al). This context of production has influenced the critical reception of Mantra, resulting in a noti-ceable emphasis on technology and mass-media, and a correlative neglect of modern procedures at work in Fresán’s novel. Furthermore, the attention Mantra has received in some mass-mediatic ve-nues seems to mirror this emphasis. (The French e-magazine Fluctuat, for instance, has put Mantra among the fifteen best books published in the first decade of the twenty-first century).5 Instead, I aim to defend the claim that Mantra presents an original development of procedures born in the modern novel, blended with the elements of technology and mass-media discussed by most critics. This development of the modern novel doesn’t amount to the orthodox application of its procedures (though this does happen at times). Rather, it appeals to the exacerbation or “exaspera-tion” (i.e., the transformation by exaggerating certain features of the exasperated object [Deleuze and Guattari]) of the tendencies of the modern novel. The motivation for this approach doesn’t lie in any sort of nostalgia for the modern novel, but in the desire to offer a reading that hopefully illuminates unexplored aspects of Fresán’s groundbreaking novel. In this connection, Jorge Volpi has complained about “errores de óptica” in the assessment of the McOndo and Crack writers (37; see n. 4). This article attempts to correct another optical error: that which makes some readers and critics regard Mantra primarily in terms of the presentation of a consciousness fragmented by technology and mass-media, while neglecting elements that signal a continuity with, as well as a development from, the modern Latin American novel. To continue with Volpi’s analogy, consider this change of approach as an optical phenomenon: if one adjusts the lens, one will see a richer structure, richer themes, and richer allusions, which show interesting connections with (and original reappropriations of) the modern Latin American novel. This focal adjustment by no means diminishes the originality of Fresán’s work. In fact, there is no hyperbole in saying that Mantra opens new possibilities for the contemporary Latin American novel. The main claims I shall defend in this article, then, are the following. First, rather than a repla-cement or “displacement”—“desplazamiento” (Paz Soldán 101)—of modern literary procedures by technology and mass-media, Mantra presents a blend of both “worlds.” Second, Mantra develops and pushes the modern project in a new attempt to reframe and question, but not abandon, the aim to reach totality. It is, I shall argue in a Benjaminean spirit, a gesture towards totality via the fragmentary, but not a renouncement of the totalizing attempt. In the first section, I outline the structure of Mantra, some of its interpretive challenges, and Paz Soldán’s reading of them. In the second one, I present an alternative reading of Mantra, which in-volves a defense of the claim that in Fresán’s novel there is an original blend of modern procedures and mass-media procedures. Also, I present a heuristic model for understanding the apparently chaotic succession of scenes that seems to threaten the very intelligibility of Mantra, which has led even sympathetic interpreters to call it “un délire au sens les plus technique et les plus trivial du terme” (Pauls 7). In the third and last section, building on what has been argued previously, I discuss the tension between fragmentation and totality in Mantra, concluding that, rather than a rejection of

tempered his position—and he explicitly refers to other writers of the original Crack and McCondo groups, too—by claiming that rejecting magical realism doesn’t entail rejecting the Boom (“modelo supremo del escritor ‘auténticamente latinoamericano’,” he says with irony) but “recuperar su in-tención original” (40). Fresán refers playfully to these issues in 312.

5Mantra also won the Prix Technikart—awarded by the homonymous French magazine—for best foreign novel published in France in 2006.

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totalizing aims, there is in Fresán’s work a Benjaminian gesture at totality, both at the individual and the collective levels. The Structure of Mantra and Some Interpretive Challenges a) The Structure of Mantra. Fresán’s novel is divided in three parts. In the First Part (“El amigo mexicano”), the narrator—an unnamed Argentine male in his late thirties or early forties—tries to make sense of his life using an old school photograph as a starting point. In the photo, his childhood friend Martín Mantra is missing. The narrator is fascinated with Mantra, and thinks that understan-ding him will be the key to understanding himself. Ironically, his attempts at self-understanding are threatened by an illness: a tumor gradually destroys all his memories but the memory of the letter “X.” From the beginning, then, hyperbole, irony, and parody set the tone of the whole novel: note the alliterative name of the character that gives the novel its title. Note, too, the parody of a typical “pa-ge-turner” beginning: when the narrator recalls first meeting Mr. Mantra, he says, “yo conocí a Martín Mantra o, mejor dicho, Martín Mantra me conoció a mí, me tendió su mano, y en su mano había un revólver” (17). Thus ends Chapter One. How can one not turn the page and see what will happen? However, the next page frustrates the reader’s expectations. Instead of the continuation of the story, one finds a meta-fictional reflection on the art of storytelling (loosely triggered by the narrator’s upcoming impossibility of telling any more stories, given his illness). And then again, once the reader is immersed in the narrator’s train of thought, the reflection is interrupted and rejected. But before, the reader is left with one of the meta-fictional leitmotifs of the novel: the idea that one should tell a story from the beginning, “desde su propio Big Bang,” and fill it as one fills a swimming-pool (18). This image, which initially seems capricious, proves to be very apposite in light of the reformulations (and developments) of the reflections presented in these meandering, essayistic passages (Fresán 18-23). In fact, the image of the narrative as a pool is itself “filled,” completed, and developed further in subsequent references to the pool found throughout the novel (Navarrete González). Put differently, an idea—how to tell a story—is developed via the development of an image—a swimming-pool being filled—which will be iterated, with increasing sophistication, throughout the novel. But the reflection is again interrupted: “No tengo tanto tiempo ni conocimientos [n.b.: to go on with this reflection or to tell the story in that way]” [“I don’t have that much time or that much knowledge [n.b.: to go on with this reflection or to tell the story in that way]” (Fresán 18). One may think that behind these “tricks,” that is, once one adjusts to the alternation between fictional and meta-fictional passages, the plot is, after all, fairly straightforward: a particular child-hood memory—the memory of Martín Mantra—triggering the narrative of a life. This appearance and expectation of simplicity will, again, be frustrated in ways discussed below. The Second Part of Mantra is the narrative of a dead man, which takes place as he watches his whole life on TV—he is actually chained to a TV set—in a limbo or Purgatory of sorts. When he was alive, this narrator was romantically involved with María-Marie, a cousin of Martín Mantra. Thus, he offers a new perspective on the life of Mantra and his family. Formally, the Second Part has the structure of a dictionary or an encyclopedia, with entries disposed in alphabetical order. The reader can follow that order, or access any entry at will, a device that resembles the structure of Julio Cortázar’s 1962 novel Rayuela. In the Third Part, an android (or a conscious computer of sorts) is searching for its creator, “Mantrax,” in the ruins of Mexico City. This Third Part and segments of the previous one are, as Mario Lillo points out, a parody of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955). Also, the last 40 pages of the novel (which comprise the last pages of the Second Part and the whole of the Third Part) can be read as containing three “false endings.”6 First, the last pages of the Second Part (507-09) seem to be the

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typical ending of a modern novel, in which all its themes are tightly knit, thus enabling the reader to reach a sense of closure. However, this “ending” is succeeded by the Third Part, which presents a rather unsettling, anti-climactic scene of destruction. Lastly, after the Third Part, there is a list of acknowledgements in a section called “Bajo la máscara.” While the author seems to be presenting a non-fictional, neutral, conventional list of acknowledgments, the list ends with Ana, the author’s “real” Mexican friend (i.e., his wife), which may be construed as an invitation to reread the novel, for the First Part is precisely called “The Mexican Friend.” This interpretation is buttressed upon re-reading the “Advertencia” that precedes the First Part, in which there is a reference to the circular time of the Aztecs. Mantra has, then, something of a circular ending. This circularity evokes the circular and cen-tripetal impetus of modern Latin American novels such as the already mentioned Rayuela, as well as García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), whose endings “force” us to read and reread the novels. Likewise, Mantra plays with the idea of trapping the reader in the text, thus inviting the comparison of the reader with the narrator of the Second Part, chained to a TV set: the narrator is doomed to watch his own life on TV, ad infinitum; the reader, in turn, if she is to follow the circular indications of the text, is doomed to read and reread Fresán’s novel ad infinitum. b) Interpretive Challenges. Paz Soldán’s Reading of Mantra. The protagonists of Mantra want to reach some form of self-understanding: the narrator of the First Part wants to re-tell his life story and assess it, prompted by his incoming loss of memory. The narrator of the Second Part wat-ches his life on TV and re-tells it and reinterprets it with the aid of those images. Finally, Martín Mantra is obsessed with the idea of reaching an understanding of himself, of his family, of his family history, and of History—emphatically capitalized—by appeal to a filmic narrative or “extraño arte-facto narrativo,” as the narrator of the First Part calls it (75). In the more essayistic passages of the novel, Martín Mantra explains his “theory.” In the more conventionally narrative ones, the reader sees him trying to put that theory into practice, by—among other things—attaching a camera to his head and filming every moment of his life. The result, “Mundo Mantra,” should be a “film total” (67). The plot gradually becomes more complex because of the constant barrage of tidbits of infor-mation that may or may not be relevant, and which are the result of the hyperbolic exposure of the narrators to mass-media. This exposure threatens the characters’ search for intelligibility. In this regard, Mantra doesn’t merely represent or comment on the confusion produced by the barrage of information; it is a presentation of such barrage: the texture of the novel is saturated with images pertaining to technology and mass-media—from pop songs to telenovelas (soap-operas) to TV shows and films. In other words, the overwhelming experience of reading Mantra is an intentional effect of the novel. (In this sense, it retains something of the power of revulsion of the early Dadaist works). Mantra offers, as Paz Soldán notes, “una reflexión sobre el problema… de la información y su poder viral, su tendencia a la más caótica proliferación” (99), but also a presentation of its effects, which the reader experiences, vicariously, through reading the novel. Other factors that contribute to the increasing difficulty in following the plot and the characters are the aforementioned illness of the narrator of the First Part (i.e., his gradually deteriorating me-mory, which leads him to confuse his own words and his own past life with those of Martín Mantra7), and the conflation of past, present and future. In the hyperbolic world of the novel, everybody expe-

6“En mi estilo,” Fresán has said, “reconozco… la influencia de la música… Yo escribo de un modo muy parecido al sistema de composición de Los Beatles” (Cristoff). The notion of a “false ending,” then, is arguably an influence of Beatle songs like “Rain” (1966), “Strawberry Fields” (1966), and “Helter Skelter” (1968), all of which seem to end in a last chord, which is succeeded by a coda that replays the theme (or themes) of the song.

7An analogous confusion occurs in “El inmortal” (1949), by Jorge Luis Borges. Shortly it will be shown that this reference to Borges is not gratuitous.

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riences this conflation due to the velocity and sophistication of technological progress. (Kurlat Ares argues that this conflation is also a feature of Fresán’s earlier fiction). In this regard, following John Johnston, Paz Soldán has called Mantra a novel of information multiplicity (100). These novels appeal to new formal structures in which the most heterogeneous sources of information meet “para dar cuenta de las nuevas formas de subjetividad que emergen en esta ecología mediático-tecnológica” (100). In Mantra in particular, this view takes the form of “una relación crucial entre el poder viral de la información, la transformación del sujeto, y el desarrollo del capitalismo tardío” (99). However, there is no consensus as to what, exactly, this relationship amounts to, and—more important for the purposes of this article—what transformations the subject under-goes. Paz Soldán’s own take on the issue could be captured in two main claims. First, Mantra presents “ese crítico momento en que la psiquis del individuo se convierte en apenas un canal a través del cual fluye la información mediatizada” (99-100). Second, given the excess of information, Mantra cannot but renounce the modern aim to create a kind of “total novel,” paradigmatic examples of which are the fictional works of Latin American Boom writers such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa (Paz Soldán 102). Certainly, Mantra presents challenges to the very possibility of reaching any kind of self-understanding—the individual psyche is indeed in jeopardy. As said earlier, in the First Part the protagonist’s attempts to make sense of his life are threatened by an illness that affects his memory. In the Second Part, the threat seems to be the opposite: the excess of information and memories is what makes the project of reaching a “holistic” self-understanding a daunting task—recall that the narrator of the Second Part is forced to watch images of his life constantly. In turn, Martín Mantra’s narrative project to record every single instance of his existence has problems of its own, which will be dis-cussed shortly. Finally, in the apocalyptic scenario of the Third Part there seems to be no room for such projects. Paz Soldán construes these problems as evidence for the two aforementioned claims (i.e., that in Mantra the psyche merely channels media information, and that Mantra renounces the modern aim to give expression to totality). He adds that the literary has been displaced by mass-media, and that Fresán’s novel shows the quasi-impossibility of achieving a narrative self-understanding, for Mantra “captura nítidamente cómo el sujeto contemporáneo accede a su propia experiencia de manera fragmentaria… el individuo sólo puede empezar a comprenderse a sí mismo a partir de un análisis de su relación con el televisor” (105). These claims are interrelated. If in Mantra the psyche merely channels media information, and the subject has access to her own existence only in a fragmentary manner, then the attempts to achieve some form of totality—either in the form of a narrative self-understanding or in the form of a so-cio-historical, encompassing narrative—are doomed. Finally, if the psyche merely (“apenas,” says Paz Soldán) channels media information, it is plausible to think that the literary has been replaced or displaced by mass-media. In the next section, these claims will be qualified. An Alternative View. Mantra vis-à-vis the Modern Novel a) Modern Literary Procedures and Mass-Media in Mantra: Substitution or Blend? It is undeniable that technology and mass-media have become unavoidable components of contemporary life in the Western world. Buenos Aires and Mexico City, the two main locations where the action of Mantra takes place, are no exception. Technology and mass-media, therefore, are an intrinsic part of the narratives and narrative self-conceptions of the contemporary subject—and of the characters of Mantra as well. In Fresán’s novel, this integration of technology and mass-media into the language of self-description takes up a substantial form. It is not just another case of “bridge texts” between modernism and postmodernism (McCracken). In Mantra, not only do characters model their lives, or seek understanding of their lives, through the lens of technology and mass-media (i.e., by using

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technology and mass-media as heuristic devices), but technology and mass-media also shape the very language and metaphors that the characters use to define and describe themselves. The narrator of the Second Part describes the effect of the excess of information on people as “una ráfaga de palabras como salidas de una feliz ametralladora caliente” (235), an image almost directly picked up from John Lennon’s Beatle song “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (White Album, 1968).8 Intertextuality now includes pop songs. In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American novelists started to incorporate pop songs into the discourse of their characters. However, the lyrics were cited by the characters, not directly inserted in the very texture of the novel and the very speech of the characters. Memory, in turn, is compared to those musical shows in which singers merely pretend to sing while a recording is broadcasted (“lip-syncing”): La memoria es el playback de nuestra vida [n.b., “playback” is Argentinean ver-

nacular for “lip-singing”] y, en ocasiones, nosotros no hacemos otra cosa que mover los labios sin emitir sonido alguno, porque es nuestra memoria la que canta a través de nosotros… la memoria nos ayuda poniendo a girar la música de nuestro pasado, nuestros Greatest Hits cada tanto remasterizados, cada tanto incorporando un bonus track, versiones alternativas de la misma canción de siempre. Hay un momento im-perceptible pero terrible y trascendente en que, pienso, finalmente estamos llenos de pasado, de memoria, por lo que nuestro presente y lo que nos queda del futuro no es más que un constante actuar—cantar—de acuerdo con lo que nos ordena y nos su-giere todo aquello que tuvo lugar hace tiempo. (Fresán 169-70)

By redescribing the concept of memory, we come to regard it in a different light, noticing aspects or features of the concept that had not been noticed before, which we can now grasp and utilize. There is humor in conceiving of human memory as lip-singing, but also, describing the decline of a human life as the repetition (with slight variations) of the same “song” captures the phenomenon of old age and senility in a novel and yet precise way. The use of technology and mass-media has, in this context, a positive effect, in the sense of expanding the subject’s lexical and conceptual repertoire. Even the most intimate images and metaphors—those of traditional themes such as romantic love and its ineffability—are permeated by technology and mass-media. The narrator of the Second Part says he knew Martín Mantra’s cousin had started to love him with the certainty with which “no nos resistimos a, por ejemplo, lo que nos dicen y nos aseguran que es la imagen del eco del Big Bang tomada por el satélite Cobe” (174). This is not only an image taken from the new technologies; it is also an image that captures a paradox shared by both the new technologies and the stereotypically Western notion of romantic love: the certainty of the feeling, the certainty of the acceptance of what we are told or shown, and the uncertainty of that which is being told or shown. It is the “feeling” or impression of certainty, but the knowledge of an unavoidable uncertainty, of an epistemic barrier that is insurmountable. We do not resist what we are told and assured is the image of the echo of the Big Bang… or the love for (or of) the person who—we feel—has started to love us. Thus, technology, the politics of technology, eroticism, the politics of eroticism, and the epistemic limits of these notions, are concentrated and illuminated in a few lines. Another example of this productive imagery: the same narrator says that their love “estaba hecho de iridio, y brillaba en la oscuridad... nos llevábamos a la cama libros científicos, mirábamos las fotos capturadas por el Hubble del mismo modo en que otros exploran el espacio profundo y lleno de agujeros negros de los álbumes familiares” (192; emphasis added). The image of “black holes of family albums” encapsulates a conceptual matrix that displays, among others, the system of memo-

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8Fresán started to weave Beatles lyrics into the texture of fiction in his first novel, Esperanto (1995). For Fresán and The Beatles, see note 6.

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ry/oblivion operating in different developmental stages of the subject in capitalistic societies, as well as the micro-politics and power strands of the family qua socializing system. In short, communication, memory, and love—among other central features of Western socie-ties—are often transfigured by (and described in terms of) technology and mass-media. While this kind of imagery often strengthens and expands the language of self-description, in other instances its use in the novel seems to suggest a criticism of the complete reduction of the language of self-description to mass-mediatic and technological imagery, for this reduction seems to lead to an impoverishment of lexical and conceptual resources.9 In Mantra’s hyperbolic style, at times life doesn’t seem amenable to be told as a literary narrative, but as a TV show, a telenovela, or a film at best. However, as said above, this impression is part of the novelistic presentation of the effects of technology and mass-media. This presentation is articulated qua novelistic strategy, in a text that remains, against all odds, a novel—a novel that displays the attempts of its protagonists to achieve some sort of self-understanding. Put differently, the playful self-descriptions in terms of technology and mass-media operate within a novel—as a narrative de-vice of a novel. Even the protagonist of the Second Part, chained to a TV set, is indeed narrating his life with the aid of the images on TV, but those images do not replace his narration. Still, the proliferation of this kind of imagery, in which the effects of technology and mass-media are overwhelming, is what may have led Paz Soldán to affirm that in Mantra “la literatura es un medio… que ha sido desplazado” (101). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in Fresán’s novel technology and mass-media are on a par with, but have not replaced (or displaced) literary models and procedures. Certainly, in the texture of Mantra one finds turns of phrase, allusions, and intertextual reappropiations that range from TV shows of the Americas (most notably, Mexican soap- operas, and, among American sources, The Twilight Zone) to films, to pop music—reapproprations of a vast array of elements pertaining to technology and mass-media. However, one also finds literary procedures, turns of phrase, allusions, and intertextual reappropiations that pertain to a myriad of canonical pieces of “high” culture in general and to the modern Latin American novel in particular. The implicit reader that Mantra postulates is required to have a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of both “high” and “low” cultural artifacts (Lillo 19). Interestingly, one finds these two kinds of elements (i.e., “low” mass-media and “high” culture) going hand in hand, either separately but contiguous to each other, or blended in a syncretism of sorts. An instance of the first disjunct is Mantra’s presentation of Mexican soap operas, which are linked to the Expressionistic strands of the twentieth century avant-garde that influenced the modern novel in both Europe and the Americas. According to Mantra, Mexican telenovelas are exaggerated versions of reality that are very well-equipped to convey Mexican history and mores. As one of the narrators puts it, it is impossible to understand Mexican history “a no ser que se la vea y se la lea con los mismos ojos de un adicto a una de esas alucinógenas telenovelas mexicanas” (304). Paz Soldán aptly calls these telenovelas “espejo deformante y a la vez fiel” (106). Now, both the narrator’s characteri- zation of telenovelas and Paz Soldán’s very word-choice are almost a definition of the early twentieth century’s Expressionism (De Micheli). Also, they are strikingly similar to the project of Va-lle-Inclán’s dramatic esperpentos, the first of which, in turn, explicitly references the grotesque art of

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9Silvia Kurlat Ares notes a similar reduction in Fresán’s previous novel, Esperanto (1995). See Kurlat Ares 224. As for Mantra, an implicit criticism of the (impoverished) language of self-description when it is completely reduced to the language of technology and mass-media could be inferred from passages like the following: “Rod Serling [n.b., host of the TV show The Twilight Zone] como apóstol escritor y productor de nuestras vidas en el horario central de los televisores” (Fresán 58); or “tal vez los déja vu sean … los comerciales de productos que de alguna misteriosa manera nos incluyen” (233). See also Fresán 216ss.

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the black paintings of Goya and the techniques of Expressionism (224-25). It is no coincidence that Martín Mantra enjoys “esa especial calidad del blanco y negro expresivo y expresionista de las películas de o con Orson Welles” (24; emphasis added). In a similar fashion, Alan Pauls calls Mantra “un roman anamorphosique,” in reference to anamorphosis, a pictorial technique by which the re-presented object is violently distorted in order to see it in a different light—or, sometimes, to render it recognizable only under certain perspectives (10). In turn, an instance of the second disjunct (i.e., what I called above a syncretism or blend of “high” and “low” culture) can be found in the recurring joint reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979): “¿Tendrán algo que ver la figura y la ideología del traficante de marfil y coronel renegado en Vietnam con algo de la cos-mo-agonía de Martín Mantra…? … Ya va a conseguir un Marlow/Williard que lo ayude… a contar su historia” (Fresán 373).10 This move claims the legitimacy of a canonical literary figure (Joseph Conrad), alongside a “mass-mediatic” reading of his novella: Coppola’s film, in which the rock band The Doors, movie stars like Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, and the Vietnam War coexist with the enigmatic figure of Kurtz, played by the iconic Brando. More important for the claim that there is a fusion of literary and mass-mediatic procedures is the fact that the narrator speaks of “el traficante de marfil y coronel renegado,” thus fusing the Conrad character and the Coppola character into one. Interestingly, the film itself presents this fusion: Kurtz/Brando reads The Waste Land in the jungle. Although Conrad’s original Kurtz does not (and cannot) read The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot’s poem was first published in 1922; Heart of Darkness, in 1899), it is worth noting that Eliot considered using a passage from Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to his poem (Rainley 76). The passage Eliot considered concerns the possibility of achieving some sort of holistic view of one’s life—the kind of view the narrators of the First and Second Parts of Mantra aim to achieve. It is the famous passage that features Kurtz’s last words, about which Marlow wonders, “Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?” (Conrad 69). One may ask that very same question about Mantra’s narrators. The protagonist of the Second Part, for instance, dead, watching his life on TV and in so doing fashioning a “final” narrative self-understanding, has a clear antecedent in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or at the very least in Kurtz’s deathbed scene. This image of a dead person (or a person in her deathbed) narrating her life is a modern device that has been used to reflect, hypothetically, on what form the totality of one’s life would take once it is over. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 play, No Exit, in which the characters talk about their lives once they are dead. Consider, again, the experiment of Pedro Páramo. Consider even a central in- stance of the modern Latin American novel in general and the Boom in particular: Carlos Fuentes’s 1962 La muerte de Artemio Cruz. Almost literally, in Fuentes’s novel Cruz is trying to make narrative sense of his life once it has ended—in that limbo of sorts that is his deathbed. It is not outlandish, then, to think of the narrator of Mantra’s Second Part as a successor of Kurtz, Garcin, and Cruz. In sum, instead of a replacement, displacement, or renouncement of the literary, there is in Mantra a proliferation of different cultural sources, including the literary alongside (and often blen-ded with) the more conspicuous mass-media.11 Also, strictly literary procedures occur, at times,

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10Perhaps the narrators of Mantra are the Marlow(s) who will help Martín Mantra tell his story. It would be worthwhile—though well beyond the scope of this article—to explore the “literary kinship” between Marlow and the various narrators of Mantra, as well as the rhetorical operations that all of them incarnate.

11Paz Soldán acknowledges that this “desplazamiento” of the literary that he reads in Mantra “no implica una derrota sino la posibilidad de un reacomodo estratégico: desde los márgenes quizás se

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without any reference to technology and mass-media. “Por cada país o ciudad o reino sobre la faz de este mundo existe, apenas escondido, otro país o ciudad o reino en todos o cada uno de los seres humanos que los pueblan y los transitan” (Fresán 207). The lyricism of this passage, as well as the idea it presents, is evocative of typically modern fiction. In the next sub-section, I shall argue that the modern operation underlying this passage offers an interpretive key that sheds light on Fresán’s novel. b) Hyperlink or Garden of Forking Paths? Heuristic Models for Understanding Mantra. Silvia Kurlat Ares has compared the operation of Fresán’s texts with that of the internet (221). Along similar lines, Paz Soldán affirms that in Mantra “los proyectos estéticos del Boom han sido aban-donados: el modelo ciberespacial del hiperlink está más cerca de Mantra que los autoritarios mapas de lectura para lectores ‘macho’ o ‘hembra’ que planteaba Cortázar” (102). He adds that the proce-dures and projects of the modern Latin American novel are replaced in Mantra by the cut-up device, made famous by William Burroughs. To bolster this claim, Paz Soldán refers to the following essa-yistic passage: “El cut-up como nuevo lenguaje fragmentario, donde las historias empiezan por donde terminan y no respetan el orden cronológico” (Fresán 230). This operation is related to (though conceptually independent from) another procedure presented in the same passage, whose aim is to “someter cada instante al mayor número posible de variaciones, cada una de ellas presentada de un modo que sea interesante y, al mismo tiempo, justificable” (Fresán 230). However, these technical procedures are indeed very close to the aesthetic moves of modern Latin American fiction. In fact, they were championed by one of the “fathers” of modern fiction: Jorge Luis Borges. The idea of subjecting “every instant to the highest possible number of variations” is the explicit theme and procedure of the Borgesian short-stories “El aleph” and “El jardín de sen-deros que se bifurcan,” both published in the 1940s, and both precursors of the projects of the modern Latin American novel (Fuentes; Williams, ch. 6). Fresán himself acknowledges his debt to “El aleph” in the following passage of Mantra: Me refiero ahora a esa piscina y a esa chica que contienen a todas las chicas y a todas

las piscinas. Una chica-aleph zambulléndose en una piscina-aleph que conviertan a esa chica y a esa piscina en las coordenadas desde las que puedan verse todos los ángulos, sin confusión alguna ni mezclarse, todo lo que ocurrió y va a ocurrir, al mismo tiempo (428).

Passages like this one, which—let us note in passing—resume the leitmotif of the telling of a story as the filling of a swimming-pool, suggest that besides appealing to the cyberspace model of the hy-perlink, one might very well do with the “aleph model” suggested in nuce by Mario Lillo and Caro-lina Navarrete González.12 Alongside this aleph model, I propose another Borgesian heuristic device: the garden of forking paths model. “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” and “El aleph” present complementary views. In “El aleph,” Borges introduces readers to a small, spherical object that enables the person who has it to see all places at once. In “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” Borges expands on the Leibnizian idea of an indefinite number of time-lines and possible worlds.13 In one world, the protagonist kills

pueda tener una mayor libertad creativa y una mejor distancia crítica” (101). However, despite these partial concessions, it will soon be apparent that his overall interpretation shows, if not a defeat, a Pyrrhic victory.

12Augusto Monterroso argues that the very lineage of the notion of the aleph includes narrative devices pertaining to indigenous Central American cultures, a fact that would have pleased Martín Mantra, so proud of his “Mexicanity.”

13 In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), his Theodicy (1710), his Monadology (1714), and—perhaps its clearest presentation—in his correspondence with Arnauld, Gottfied W. Leibniz poses the existence of an indefinite number of possible worlds. This world we inhabit is simply the

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his enemy; in another one, he is killed by him; in another one, protagonist and nemesis are friends; and so on. Put differently, “El jardín…” presents alternative futures—alternative lives and identi-ties—for every person, in a web of possibilities that comprise all possible actions of all possible persons; something like an awe-inspiring enlargement of our imaginative and deliberative capacities. Now, both in Borges’s story and in Fresán’s novel, these different possible worlds exist simultane-ously. Recall the passage cited at the end of the last sub-section, in which the narrator of the Second Part says that “por cada país o ciudad o reino sobre la faz de este mundo existe, apenas escondido, otro país o ciudad o reino en todos o cada uno de los seres humanos que los pueblan y los transitan” (207). As in “El jardín…,” we find a plurality of worlds; as in “El aleph,” a discrete portion of space—a particular space—that contains all spaces. Reasserting this position, later in the novel the same na-rrator poses the existence of “un infinito número de realidades, mundos paralelos al nuestro que no podemos ver pero que ahí están” (441). Besides the formulation of this position in the essayistic passages of the novel, there is a pre-sentation of various possible worlds—some of them bizarre, but not logically or psychologically impossible. Thus, the contradictory accounts of some events that one finds in Mantra could be read as the presentation of these simultaneous “parallel worlds” (Fresán) or “forking paths” (Borges), which, in turn, offer different possibilities to reframe and redescribe the events in question. Some of these different accounts are humorous references to historical events: in the First Part there is one version of Kennedy’s assassination; in the Second Part, a completely different one, which verges on delirium: Martín Mantra’s grandfather aiming at, and shooting, and destroying “el cerebro siempre en celo de John Fitzgerald Kennedy” (385). Yet in another version, the assassin is… Jackie Kennedy. Again, we find a modern procedure—the multiple possibilities of “El jardín de senderos que se bifur-can”—blended with a mass-mediatic procedure: a black-humored parody of tabloids. The interpretive challenges of Mantra and its appearance of confusion are, as anticipated above, in part due to the fact that the narrators are subjected to a barrage of information tidbits. However, these interpretive challenges are also related to the project of “parallel worlds” or “forking paths;” that is, to the presentation of a multiplicity of possible worlds via fragments of different lives, or via different versions of the same lives; hence the different accounts of JFK’s death. By the same token, Martín Mantra appears as the idiosyncratic child who desires to make a “total film,” but also as an adult “luchador enmascarado” (“masked wrestler”) and as a leader of a social and political move-ment: his “encarnación politizada y bizarra bajo el nombre de Capitán Godzilla” (Fresán 373). This multiplicity of “incarnations” or possibilities may be confusing. However, if one abandons the as-sumption that the novel will present just one “forking path,” the appearance of confusion is amelio-rated, and one is able to start reconstructing the richly layered possibilities of some of the worlds and some of the characters of Mantra. On an interview discussing his recent novel, El fondo del cielo (2009), Fresán suggests a similar approach; his comments may very well apply to Mantra: Uno [n.b., uno de los dos mundos que se destruyen en la novela] es el planeta extra-

terrestre que se auto-destruye, y el otro es la Tierra, que el libro destruye de varias maneras posibles. Al final del libro, te das cuenta que está transcurriendo todo al mismo tiempo, como suspendido en el espacio. La idea de presente, pasado, futuro

one God chose to actualize among all the worlds He beholds in eternity. In Counterfactuals (1973) and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), the American philosopher and logician David Lewis advanced sophisticated arguments to defend his own version of Leibniz’s metaphysical postulate (also related, as in Leibniz, to a theory of personal identity). Not without disdain for the metaphysician, Martin Gardner has noted the connection between Lewis’s theories and “El jardín de senderos que se bi-furcan” (Gardner 7). In any case, Leibniz and his theory of possible worlds—as well as his theory of personal identity—are a frequent presence in Borges’s stories and essays.

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que puedas ir manejando a lo largo de la novela, queda un poco anulada. (Tocco; emphasis added)14

Still, Fresán doesn’t mention the Borgesian lineage of this procedure. Instead, on the same in-terview he relates it to a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five (Tocco). This move—aligning his work with modern and postmodern North American fiction—is typical of Fresán’s public pronouncements. Now, while his knowledge of that literary tradition is undeniable and undeniably vast, it is simply implausible to entertain the idea that Fresán is unaware of the Bor-gesian roots of his work. Granted, as indicated above, in Mantra there is an acknowledgment of an “aleph-girl” in an “aleph-pool” (428); there are also references, and more than a single tribute, to modern Latin American writers and their work. However, the influence of modern Latin American fiction on Mantra goes beyond the mere reference, homage, parody, or pastiche—or so this article argues. And yet, other than occasional mentions of Borges, Bioy Casares, and Cortázar,15 Fresán qua author is reticent or reluctant to discuss the modern Latin American literary grounding of his work—an attitude that is perhaps a remnant of his more rebellious, irreverent (and, let us not forget, humorous) McOndo period.16 Now, regardless of the author’s opinions about the procedure in question, it must be said that something very much like this attempt to present different “forking paths” for a same life can be found in some modern novels, such as Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1965). However, Mantra takes up this modern procedure—Leibniz, Borges, Vargas Llosa—and exasperates it: the presentation of these different versions and points of view on the same person (on the same life) are multiplied ad infinitum, and are colored by the velocity, confusion, and overflow of information typical of a news report. In this formal sense, Mantra begins where La casa verde ends—and it takes several steps further. Still, the reference to Vargas Llosa’s novel offers an interesting backdrop to assess Fresán’s achievement: paraphrasing Volpi, one could say that Fresán’s rejection of magical realism (Cristoff) is coupled with an attempt to recover (and push forward, and exasperate) the intentions of the Boom (Volpi 41-2). In sum, adjusting the lens with which we see the world of Mantra, and moving anamorphically, we can perceive the chaos under a certain perspective—in the light of the model of the garden of forking paths—and gain intelligibility. This procedure doesn’t entail a reduction, or a neat corres-pondence of elements in the manner of an allegory. Mantra admits the heuristic model advanced here, which, iterated, yields different vistas and perspectives on the various characters and the various parallel or possible worlds of the novel. But this heuristic device, needless to say, doesn’t exhaust the sense of the novel. When we least expect it, the precarious equilibrium we have reached turns into chaos again—the possible worlds collapse into each other—and we have to start over, with joy and a little exasperation. _________________________

14This last statement, which refers to the already mentioned conflation of past, present, and future, is similar to a critical appreciation of Fresán’s earlier fiction: “pasado, presente y futuro pertenecen a una misma categoría perceptual, donde las múltiples conciencias pueden circular atemporalmente” (Kurlat Ares 222).

15Also, occasional lectures, like the one on Borges and Bioy Casares that Fresán gave in Barcelona in 2004, do not discuss at length the relationship between his work and that of his predecessors.

16Emilse Hidalgo conjectures in this regard that Fresán’s reluctance is a result of his writing be-coming increasingly “hybridized with the symbolic imaginaries of global modernity,” which she links to “the era of global capital,” and to a correlative global marketing strategy that eschews na-tional history and culture. This issue is discussed in the last section of this article, where Hidalgo’s view is contested.

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Fragmentation, Totality, and Self-Understanding in Mantra The models of the aleph and the garden of forking paths are also helpful to discuss the way in which Mantra deals with the issue of totality. Granted, there is a certain degree of idealization and perhaps exaggeration in the formulation of such aim: no human perspective, no self-understanding, no potential variation of one’s life-story, no potential variation of individual or collective events in which we explore a number of “forking paths” (Borges), “parallel worlds” (Fresán) or “possible worlds” (Leibniz) could ever yield “coordenadas desde las que pueden verse todos los ángulos, sin confusión alguna ni mezclarse, todo lo que ocurrió y va a ocurrir,” as one of the narrators of Mantra would have it (428). Still, this idealization is not futile. In fact, it is analogous to the ideal construct presented earlier, when discussing the topic of a person narrating her life from the standpoint of her finished life. Now, both the presentation of a narrative from the standpoint of one’s finished life and the sug-gestion of “coordenadas desde las que puedan verse todos los ángulos” point at a tension between the excess of information, which forces us to deal with the fragmentary (for, how do we deal with “all the angles”?), and the attempt to reach, somehow, a total view through the fragmentary. This claim holds both for the attempt to reach totality at the individual level (i.e., as a sort of holistic self-understanding) and for the more typically modern, and ambitious, attempt to reach a “total” understanding of a society or a historical period. Although these two levels are more of an analytic distinction than different, unrelated phenomena—because the individual and collective matrices are intimately related—they will be discussed separately for the sake of clarity of exposition. a) Totality and Fragmentation at the Individual Level: As pointed out earlier, Paz Soldán affirms that in Fresán’s novel “la psiquis del individuo se convierte en apenas un canal a través del cual fluye la información mediatizada” (99-100). Recall, too, that in the Second Part the narrator tries to make sense of his life by appeal to the narrative-filmic construct that he is watching on a TV set. Paz Soldán says that this image of the dead narrator “que observa—y de paso comprende—su vida en una película en la televisión es la metáfora emblemática de Mantra,” but he immediately adds, “pues captura nítidamente cómo el sujeto contemporáneo accede a su propia existencia de manera frag-mentaria” (105). The explanatory relation between these two clauses is not entirely clear. From the hypothetical case of someone watching her life on TV (and in so doing understanding it, as Paz Soldán himself grants), it doesn’t seem to follow that she apprehends her existence in a fragmentary way. On the contrary, the prima facie presumption seems to be the opposite: if one watched one’s life on TV as many times as one wished (even in a non-chronological order, as seems to be the case in the Second Part of Mantra), one would be able to apprehend and comprehend one’s life in its totality, as a whole.17 The images on the TV set would provide detailed materials to fashion one’s “total” self-understanding, but these images would not be, in themselves, self-understanding; they would be just its raw materials. Only with the interpretive activity of the subject would the images begin to make sense—only then would they even begin to constitute themselves as images. One may be tempted to object that the very idea of a person making sense of her life only after she is dead entails the very impossibility of making sense of one’s life in that way (because one would have to be alive to make sense of it). However, as said above, this idea could be construed to convey simply an idealization—an ideal construct—of what as a matter of fact occurs when one takes up a

_________________________

17This doesn’t mean one would reach a single valid interpretation of such “wholeness.” One could think of a plural, open interpretive model, which would avoid both the risk of “single interpretations” and the opposite risk of falling into interpretive nihilism.

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narrative standpoint (Ricoeur), or, in a more modest sense, when one attempts to view one’s life as a whole. Granted, we cannot literally envision the trajectory of our lives in their entirety but from the impossible standpoint of a finished life. But this does not mean that making sense of one’s life as a whole is an impossibility. Rather, it means that it is an ever-evolving enterprise that involves projec-ting oneself into the future and taking the hypothetical standpoint of one’s finished life. On an empi-rical, descriptive level, there is evidence to affirm that, at least in various strata of Western, capitalistic societies, such standpoint is frequently taken when subjects make decisions of a certain magnitude (Velleman). On conceptual and normative levels, this view is advocated by various philosophical projects (neither of which is suspect of anachronistic or naïve metaphysical assumptions) both in continental philosophy quarters (Heidegger; Gadamer; Ricoeur; Rorty; Sartre) and in analytic phi-losophy quarters (Fischer; Schetchman; Velleman).18 The fact that the contemporary subject might have to give up on the hope to achieve a transparent, mirror-like understanding of herself, or a direct, immediate access to her consciousness—a hope that, after Freud, Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, is indeed naïve—doesn’t mean, let alone show or prove, that the contemporary subject can “merely” apprehend herself in a fragmentary manner. Now, what to say of the possibility of seeing one’s life on the screen, be it in the version of Martín Mantra’s “total film,” or in that of the narrator of the Second Part? To continue with Borgesian mo-dels, if “Funes el memorioso” presents a powerful, perfect, and yet formidable personal memory (formidable, because the very excess of memories overwhelms Funes), Mantra presents the techno-logically mediated, perfect memory as a desired ideal: “Se nos implantará una minúscula filmadora en nuestras pupilas en el momento mismo de nuestro nacimiento y a partir de entonces registraremos hasta el mínimo detalle de nuestras existencias” (Fresán 67). The Second Part presents one logical conclusion of this project: a man watching his life on the screen. But, doesn’t Mantra implicitly reject this attempt at a holistic self-understanding when the na-rrator of the First Part decides to abandon his efforts to retrieve his memory and gives in to illness, or when the narrator of the Second Part feels overwhelmed by the images of his life that he is doomed to watch ad infinitum and ad nauseam? Isn’t Funes, after all, hidden in the deepest tissues of Mantra? The interpretive schema advocated in this article enables us to respond in the negative. Recall that the presentation of different possibilities (e.g., being overwhelmed and “lost” by the flood of information; giving in to amnesia; using the new technologies precisely to fashion a “perfect” memory and to reach a total self-understanding; etc.) is part of the “game” and invitation of the novel: a search for variations of our world (Fresán 207, 428, 441) or the exploration of the innumerable “forking paths” discussed above. Rather than a rejection of totality, then, Mantra offers perspectives on what the quest for totality would look like and involve in the age of information multiplicity. This delicate balance between new options and new risks, however, seems to be tilted and re-solved in the apocalyptic scenario of the Third Part, which might signal the end of all totalizing at-tempts: the ruins of Mexico City after an earthquake. Paz Soldán construes this episode as the ter-mination of Martín Mantra’s filmic-narrative project: “el ambicioso sueño de Martín Mantra no se realiza porque ocurre la catástrofe: el terremoto de México de 1985” (104). While not implausible, this interpretation is wanting. For one thing, nowhere does it say that the “real” 1985 quake is the cause of this apocalyptic scenario. For another, this interpretation assumes that the events of the Third

_________________________

18Granted, there are also opponents to these views (e.g., Strawson). The issue cannot be decided here, but suffice it to say that what these opponents have proven is that these views and phenomena are not universal (which is obviously true). Their criticism has helped refine the positions in question (see, e.g., Schetchman’s reply to Strawson). Also, it should be said that deconstructive positions would challenge the very possibility of a narrative project of the kind presented in the body of this article. See in this regard n. 19.

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Part occur in the “real world” of the First Part. Yet, this apocalyptic scenario could be analogous to the non-realistic world of the Second Part, where dead people watch their lives on TV and JFK is assas-sinated in diverse ways. The Third Part, then, could be construed in less literal terms (e.g., Alexis Candía interprets it as a symbolic end and a symbolic beginning), and not as necessarily related to Martín Mantra’s “total film” project. This non-literal interpretation is the one favored here, but even if the more literal reading of Paz Soldán were accepted, one could reply that the android is indeed a product of Martín Mantra, and that therefore his project is not necessarily terminated. b) Totality and Fragmentation at the Collective Level: Kurlat Ares claims that fragmentation is a key feature of Fresán’s work (215, 221). Along the same lines, Paz Soldán says that, contra the “totalizing” impulse of the modern Latin American novel, in Fresán’s novel all we have is fragments. To illustrate this claim, he compares Cortázar’s Rayuela and Mantra: “En Cortázar, la conciencia es capaz de abarcar la información; en Fresán, la información excede la capacidad de la conciencia de abarcarla” (100). Now, does it follow from this claim that Fresán’s novel abandons the project of the total novel? It would, provided one accepted the following hidden premise: that in order to write a total novel, the consciousness of the narrator must encompass every single informational item. However, Paz Soldán doesn’t argue for this premise. He mentions the possibility that totalizing at-tempts might not need to incorporate every single informational item, but he doesn’t explore this option (104). Instead, he affirms that “el poder viral que tiene la información de reproducirse hace imposible pensar que el género novelístico sea capaz de plantearse, como quería Vargas Llosa, abarcar la representación total de una sociedad” (102). Then he makes a further claim, namely, that it is not the novel, but television, the medium which might attempt to capture totality: La novela de Fresán renuncia a cualquier intento de abarcar la totalidad, y nos cuenta

una historia acerca de los intentos de abarcar esa totalidad a través de otro medio, el televisivo. Los intentos modernistas de convertir a la novela en un género capaz de abarcar el mundo como una vasta enciclopedia han dejado lugar a la narración de la imposibilidad de abarcarlo, al menos a través del género novelístico… No importa que la totalidad no se lleve a cabo; importa más que para el medio televisivo esa totalidad pueda pensarse como ya no puede pensarse a través de la novela. (Paz Soldán 103-04)

Though suggestive and provocative, this assessment rests on an unwarranted assumption and an unwarranted inference; first, on the already discussed assumption that encompassing totality entails capturing every single informational item; second, on the non sequitur involved in inferring (or slipping) from the correct claim that in the world of Mantra there is no possible self-understanding and no plausible totalizing project without the intervention of technology and mass-media, to the unsubstantiated claim that technology and mass-media in general (and television in particular) are the only ways of reaching self-understanding and totality. Now, consider the following: references to the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, and to the Chiapas movement and its leader, subcomandante Marcos; variegated literary reports of Mexico (from the letters of conquistador Cortés to Malcom Lowry to William Bourroughs to contemporary Mexican, American, Argentinean, and European reports of the city); Latin American exiles in France; the af-termath of Latin American dictatorships and a grim look on their politics; Latin America’s indigenous past (and present); love and death and friendship and betrayal, among other vicissitudes of life; the sane and the insane and that which doesn’t fall easily under either category; the “establishment” and the marginal urban spaces and voices; the close, though tense, relationship between the United States and Mexico, among other events of our “globalized” world. All these features find their natural home in a “classic” modern Latin American novel—and more so in a Boom novel—and yet they are all part of Mantra. Certainly, the way in which these features are organized, arranged (or misarranged, exasperated, and distorted in anamorphic ways) differs from the way in which a typical modern Latin American novel would have treated them. Consider, again, La casa verde, or even La muerte de Artemio Cruz, vis-à-vis Mantra: the first two novels would look excessively “tidy” and static compared to Fresán’s. They would also look, perhaps, excessively serious. In Fresán’s novel, irony is ubiquitous.

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The above list of features should also include, in the case of Mantra, elements of technology and mass-media that were not so salient—nor were disposed in the same fashion or operated in the same way—in the modern Latin American novel. But then again, to reiterate Volpi’s dictum, there is no difference in purpose: all these novels aim to present a “total” view. Put more precisely, the above objections to Paz Soldán’s position, along with the aforementioned list of features, are at the very least suggestive that in Mantra there is an aim to reach some form of totality. Granted, a list of fea-tures is not an argument. It is not conclusive evidence, either; but it is prima facie evidence that shifts the burden of proof: it is now on those who affirm Mantra gives up on the aim to capture totality to show that the “incursions” into the above-listed features do not incarnate that aim. Still, there cannot be a discussion of totality without addressing, if only in rough form, the issue of the political and historical dimensions of the work or author in question. In the case of Fresán, there is no critical consensus about the nature of those dimensions. As said earlier (n. 16), Emilse Hidalgo argues that Fresán’s work shifted from an initial and original approach to history and politics to a growing “hybridization” that neutralizes or eschews political issues, national history, and culture. On her view, this neutralization is already operative in Mantra. Instead, Paz Soldán claims that Mantra suggests “la posibilidad de un reacomodo estratégico: desde los márgenes quizás se pueda tener una mayor libertad creativa y una mejor distancia crítica” (101). However, his overall view seems to point at a Pyrrhic victory at most: if the subject is merely a channel through which information flows (Paz Soldán 99-100), her agency would seem to be greatly diminished, and this diminishment would by necessity affect the realm of the literary. In turn, Kurlat Ares affirms that in Fresán—in those texts prior to Mantra, at any rate—History is “una virtualidad (al igual que el propio texto)” (221). Alt-hough she regards some of his earlier texts as proponents of “una nueva forma de conciencia histó-rica” (223) and adds that in Fresán’s first novel, Esperanto (1995), “la Historia se hace presente como chispazos… que lo afectan [n.b.: al protagonista] de modo discontinuo, aunque ciertamente brutal” (225), her overall conclusion is rather grim (though she doesn’t judge it as such): in the same novel there is a “renuncia a la Historia… Quizá, nos dice Esperanto, en efecto la literatura sea un subpro-ducto con respecto a los medios” (227). The issue will not be settled here, but it is worth noting that the debate seems to be about the role and operation (or lack thereof) of political and historical elements—and not about their very exis-tence. (The list of features presented above, if anything, shows at the very least the presence of those elements). It is also worth calling attention to an instance—one among many—in which Mantra’s irony is politically charged. Early in the novel, the narrator of the First Part says that his parents had been members of a “comando guerrillero-intelectual,” and that “rara vez estaban en casa porque se la pasaban bombardeando supermercados capitalistas y redactando curiosos manifiestos en casas de fin de semana con piscina y asado para todos” (50). The next page contains a description that alludes, indirectly but palpably, to the Ezeiza massacre (i.e., the shootings and murders at Ezeiza airport upon Perón’s return to Argentina, in 1973, which signaled the dominion of right-wing Peronist factions). While the full effect of this description probably depends on certain level of knowledge of the events, its tone—distant, light, and ironic at the same time—gives it an atrocious flavor. In sum, while their role and operations are in dispute, the presence of political and historical elements in Mantra is undeniable, and this presence, again, points at a totalizing aim. Certainly, there is in Mantra a tension between fragmentation and totality, but this tension could be read as an attempt to present a total view through fragments; or a total view made of fragments; or, in a Benjaminean spirit, a collection of fragments that gesture at a totality. Furthermore, perhaps the differences between totalizing and anti-totalizing interpretations of Mantra are, at least in part, merely semantic. “Totality,” after all, is an equivocal concept. Among others, T.W Adorno has argued that “totality” and “totalitarianism” are not unrelated concepts (Adorno, 17-50; Jay ch. 8). However, his mistrust of the notion of totality originated in the danger of premature attempts to reach totality, and not in the thought that the term has an inherently pernicious

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connotation. 19 Perhaps it would be better, then, to interpret “totality” along the lines of the non-reductive holism of Walter Benjamin. In lieu of a concept of totality threatened by the risk of a premature, forced synthesis, Benjamin proposed the notion of constellation (35, 160, 176), which was later taken up by Adorno himself (Jay 247-64). Although there is no consensus regarding the impli-cations of the notion of constellation (Jay 247), one of its more widespread senses refers to an arrangement of items (usually fragmentary items) irreducible to each other, or to a larger deductive schema; an arrangement that nevertheless gestures at a reconciliation between Subject and Object, and, to that extent, an arrangement that gestures at a “totality” or “wholeness” that prefigures a post-capitalistic state of affairs in which individual differences are not erased, obliterated, or lost in the totality (Benjamin 35; Jay 251). This appeal to Benjamin’s notion of constellation to argue for a totality made of fragments (or, if “totality” turns out to be a misnomer, for a constellation of fragments that gestures at some form of wholeness), is in part motivated by Mexico City’s constellation-like features. The Distrito Federal, which is as much of a protagonist of Mantra as the characters discussed heretofore, is a city com-posed of superimposed layers of historically charged spaces. In Mantra, references to these different layers are abundant. It has been argued, for instance, that part of the general plot and many of the “stories within stories” found in Fresán’s novel follow (and toy with) Aztec codices (Gras Mirabet 83-85). As Roberto Bolaño put it, Mantra oscillates between “el documento antropológico y el delirio de las madrugadas de una ciudad, el Distrito Federal, que se superpone a otras ciudades de su sub-suelo como si se tratara de una serpiente que se traga a sí misma.” Paz Soldán rightfully reminds us, however, of the presence of “miradas extranjeras” (107), and poses interesting hypotheses to account for them. In this context, he appeals to Benjamin, too, but to comment, incisively, on the urban gaze of one of the narrators of Mantra, which the critic regards as that of a contemporary flaneur—not in Paris this time, but in Mexico City.20 Significantly, in a chapter entitled “D.F. (Historia)” (236-42), the narrator claims that it is suffi-cient to click “rewind” to have memory—here equated with History—“played” backwards, an image that brilliantly blends the idea of the perfect technological memory discussed above, with the pre-sentation of a backward-marching life story and History: “Veo un agujero cerrándose en la cabeza de León Trotsky. Veo a Diego Rivera borrar un mural…” (Fresán 238). The wink at works of canonical modern Latin American fiction—in this case Alejo Carpentier’s “Viaje a la semilla” (Guerra del tiempo, 1956)—is clear: in Carpentier’s story, we see the “history” of a man “played” (i.e., described, narrated) backwards, from old age to youth to infancy to the womb; in Fresán’s novel, we see the assassination of Trotsky and Rivera at work on his murales by means of an analogous “reverse” description.

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19The consideration of extreme deconstructive positions is here deliberately omitted, for, on those views, the very discussion of terms like “totality” would be meaningless, since ontology is reduced to a kind of “textual monism.” That is, if both subjects and texts—including those we call “novels”—are solely points of intersection of other texts, the discussion of this article is worthless, or at least mea-ningless. The rejection of these views will have to remain a presupposition of this article.

20However, with regard to the tension between fragmentation and totality, Paz Soldán interprets Benjamin as reaffirming “la imposibilidad de los proyectos literarios totalizadores en la escritura contemporánea” (107), and not as gesturing towards a wholeness or totality. Still, the quotation from Das Passagen-Werk that Paz Soldán cites seems to suggest the interpretation advanced in the body of this article: “in the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well-preserved they are” (Paz Soldán 107). What is that “idea of the plan” about which the ruins speak impressively but the idea of totality or wholeness?

Technology, Mass-Media, and the Legacy of the Modern Latin American Novel 64

At the same time, the idea of “rewinding” History and “playing” it backwards makes reference, again, to a pop procedure: from the mid-sixties onwards, some songs have included segments that are literally played backwards. To resume a Fresán favorite, the song “Rain” (The Beatles, 1966) has a false ending after which its theme is repeated in an awkward-sounding way: Lennon sings a melody that resembles that of the song, and the lyrics are indecipherable gibberish. However, everything makes sense if the coda is played backwards. Only then does the music sound “right,” and only then do Lennon’s lyrics become intelligible—an operation that resembles the anamorphic devices dis-cussed earlier. The possibility of “playing” Mexican history backwards (and stopping at any time, or any space, or any fragment of time or space) is a paradigmatic example of the reading hypotheses developed in this article; a paradigmatic example of Mantra’s blend of modern literary procedures and mass-media; of fragmentation and totality. The innovative force and interpretive richness of these procedures are not the least of Mantra’s merits. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955. Anderson, Mark, “A Reappraisal of the Total Novel: Totality and Communicative Systems in Carlos

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