As a text that comes short in the qualifies of texture and materiality that most American readers expect from Spanish American fiction, Requiem por un suicida, a novel by the Mexican journalist and university professor Rene Aviles Fabila, is perforce a perplexing piece of writing. Due perhaps to the homogeneous nature of its language and the apparent one-dimensional character of its theme, this is a work marked by the disenchanting quality of a difficult simplicity, a fact that makes it characteristically teasing in its hermeneutic possibilities.
Heavily foregrounded on the thematics of suicide, teeming as it is with suicidal stories and theories on suicide, the novel deceitfully leads the unsuspecting reader on the surface of its most apparent propositions, away from the ironic values that make it a piece of writing that commands serious critical attention. There is here the authority of a theme that gets in the eyes of the reader, counterbalanced by a style only in appearance rhetorically sober and deceitfully flat in hermeneutic intention. In a case like this the task of the reader should be to maneuver skillfully the hermeneutics of a text that is equally poised between ambivalent, even contradictory forces. More than anything else, the reader must deflect and steer clear of the sirens that sing in the voice of the narrator. In an extreme heuristic move, the reader might find in Aviles Fabila's novel much to be dismissed as a textureless and unconvincing effort to portray the redemptive virtues of love and suicidal annihilation, at the same time that enough is given as to be able to suspect its ironic intentions.
Aviles Fabila's novel stands firmly grounded on this ambiguity, and the focal point that gives rise to such an ambivalent textual dynamics is both the main character in the story and the structuring of the recit. Thus approached, Requiem por un suicida appears as what it truly is: a trap for readers unaware of its deceitful clues and its real hermeneutic possibilities. The reader must surpass the protruding thematic dimension and glimpse the distant horizon that makes possible the work's ironic qualities. The deceitful power of the narrative is due in great part to the fact that the past of the main (and perhaps only) character is barely alluded to by the narrator, and dimly visible in the most immediate horizon of the narrative.
On this level the narrative space swells with the obsessive suicidal project of Gustavo Trevino, a middle-aged writer whose existential project had been politically and artistically defined by the well-known cultural concerns of the sixties - "la decada prodigiosa," as he would call the 1964-74 period of social and political upheaval. For the character, those are heroic years, an epoch long left behind and buried by the time the main story in the novel is taking place. However, eminent in the narrative instance is not this past but Trevino's plans to commit suicide, and a long, obsessive discourse that consecrates self-inflicted death as the highest expression of man's moral and esthetic possibilities. Another major anecdotal development on this level is one in which Trevino, the first-person narrator in his own story, is himself writing a novel.
At this point a peculiar mise-en-abime is produced that, given its centrality in the structure of the novel, proves decisive as a hermeneutic device. The device is here called peculiar since, aside from the fact that a story unfolds within another story, the story thus being generated functions as a mirror for the original one. The device is deceitful, at the same time that it effectively controls the reading of the novel as a key component of its textual norm. It is deceitful since it mares a boundary that is never there, the boundary between fiction and reality as suggested by the first and second stories. This much being accepted - a boundary between fiction and reality that soon shows to be nonexistent - a first step is taken on a path that leads to the unmasking not only of the character-narrator in its lack of moral credibility, but of a whole period in the history of modern radical culture, one in which political posturing will be superseded by mere cultural and literary posturing.
At the end of the novel there is an epilogo that concludes, "Regresando de Europa, Gustavo concluyo una novela sobre el suicidio, su propia novela, y finalmente se mato." At this point, though, the reader has enough reasons to believe that the character thus taking his own life is mere printed matter, a character a la lettre. And so it was, one is led to believe, Gnstavo's "decada prodigiosa." Although sober in the tone of its language and narrative strategies, Aviles Fabila's novel quite effectively brings to closure some of the monumental hopes and failed expectations that ran their course in this century.
Rafael H. Mojica University of Michigan, Flint
Source Citation: Mojica, Rafael H. "Requiem por un suicida." World Literature Today. 69.1 (Winter 1995): p101. Literature Resource Center. Gale. New York Public Library. 2 Jan. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=nypl>.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A16870675
