Mischievous versions of human experience only became a major current in Mexican fiction after Juan José Arreola published his compendium, Confabulario, in 1961. Arreola's epigrammatic distortions of the past, present and future stress the irony of self and collective dehumanization. Many subsequent short story writers, including Jorge Ibargüengoitia, José Emilio Pacheco, René Avilés Fabila and Federico Arana, share Arreola's witty mode. Three salient patterns (the bestiary, the dystopia and the parody or travesty) indicate the writers' satirical kinship. But, especially after the massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968, writers employed the traditional satirical paradigms not only to express their universal skepticism but also to execute caustic dissections and mockery of Mexico's sociopolitical system.
With Punta de plata (1958) Arreola became "the first Latin American writer of stature to create in the bestiary form during recent years."1 The ancient genre serves as a reference guide to medieval natural history and theology since the bestiarist described the real and fantastic zoological world in order to interpret or illustrate divinity incarnate in Creation. Arreola's "Bestiario" retains many of the original traits, especially the discursive format of description and interpretation plus a sometimes far-fetched analogy between human and animal realms. Nonetheless, a shift in focus is indicated by Arreola's substitution of direct observation at the Chapultepec zoo for scriptural exegesis. Moreover, medieval "gentleness of manner," "hopeful goodness" and reverence for the "wonders of life"2 disappear in Arreola's acerbic, pungent sketches of a nonbeliever attesting to the sins of vanity, cruelty, cowardice, hypocrisy, perfidiousness and eroticism which plague relationships and society. "La hiena" represents the fiercest delineation of human abjectness since the repulsive scavenger "tiene admiradores y su apostolado no ha sido en vano. Es tal vez el animal que más proselitos ha logrado entre los hombres."3
Wit, however, dominates in selections which demonstrate the fallacy of human superiority based on spirituality or rationality. In "La jirafa" Arreola derides intellectualization by underscoring the inevitability of the physical: "Al darse cuenta de que había puesto demasiado altos los frutos de un árbol predilecto, Dios no tuvo más remedio que alargar el cuello de la jirafa... Pero como finalmente tiene que inclinarse de vez en cuando para beber del agua común... se pone entonces al nivel de los burros" (p. 58) Even more ironic, "Los monos" contrasts the Eden of primate ignorance with the maze-like cage of human consciousness: "No cayeron en la empresa racional y siguen todavía en el paraíso: caricaturales, obscenos y libres a su manera. Los vemos ahora en el zoológico, como un espejo depresivo: nos miran con sarcasmo y con pena, porque seguimos observando su conducta animal" (p. 63).
Two other recent Mexican bestiarists realy on the same symbol of the zoo as microcosm and mirror. Pacheco's "Parque de diversiones" and Avilés' "Zoológico fantástico" make the reader an observer of man the quasi-voyeur at the public park¡ humans are the living specimens in these literary zoological gardens. The allegorical intent is insinuated in the labyrnthic frames. Avilés initiates his bestiary with a drawing of an iron fence and a public notice on the satyrs' cage: "Estrictamente prohibido participar en la jerga y emborracharse con los residentes de esta jaula.”4 Pacheco begins and ends his collection with a mob jostling to view the spectacle of a pregnant elephant delivering a clown, "a ludicrous nativity scene in which absurdity is born into the world.”5 The following grotesque attractions include: 1) a botanical garden where young students applaud their teacher's in vivo biology lesson on carnivorous plants which devour mischievous pupils, 2) stands selling hotdogs and hamburgers made from horseflesh not feed to the displayed creatures, and 3) an overpopulated, underdeveloped monkey island ruled by tyrannical gorillas. One narrator, who complains about the constant stench, turns out to be a tiger who swears that "aunque no hubiese rejas no me movería de aquí para atacar [a los hombres] pues todos saben que siempre me han dado mucha lástima”6.
Avilés' institution keeps under lock and key endangered imaginary creatures. While observers of the hedonistic satyrs "permanecen frente a la jaula durante semanas, cada vez más tristes por no estar en ellas" (p. 9), people watch performing nagas repeat the simple act of their metamorphosis into humans. Unlike Arreola and Pacheco, however, Avilés places less emphasis on anthropomorphism than on the dullness of an existence devoid of mystery. The Hydra's health is threatened by visitors who toss sweets at her nine heads: "los niños resuelven fácilmente, entre risas y burlas" (pp. 11-12) the Sphinx of Thebes' oracles. "De dragones" maintains that the fabulous monsters languish as docile beasts since tanks and flame throwers converted man into his own adversary. By evoking debased, mythological phantoms, Aviles' fictional zoo alludes to man's willful extinction of his capacity for creativity and faith, while "De dragones" reflects the early bestiary's metaphorical approach to ethics, it also heralds Avilés' manipulation of the genre for corrosive denunciation of the Mexican polity. A narrator cum creative writer of Avilés' novel on state terrorism during 1968, El gran solitario de Palacio (1971), composes a modernized bestiary. As metafiction, the collection attempts to unmask the PRI's self-serving rhetoric through intentionally simple analogy. Cliché-twisting [e.g., "No arrojéis perlas a los políticos (porque seguro se quedarán con ellas)”7; "El político es el lobo del hombre" (p. 141)] punctuates the unrelenting animalization of politicians, the military and police. The capstone is a transcription of a pseudo-taxonomy entry for "Militaris platirrinos":
Clase: mamífero.
Orden: herbívoro.
Familia: primates.
Altura: 1.60-65 m con botas.
Peso: 60-70 kg sin armas ni medallas.
Alimentación: plátanos y varios tipos de hierbas; algunos ejemplares se aficionan a la carne humana (p. 144).
The coup de grace, an admission of the unfairness of the analogies, but to the animals, could serve as epilogue to each of the recent Mexican bestiaries.
Fictional zoos resemble mock-utopias since they describe a defective topo. The pseudo-ideal land/time genre has achieved prominence in recent Mexican short fiction. Whether they rely on 1) spatial displacement to strange places, 2) temporal projection to a dehumanized future or to a debased in ill tempore or 3) feigned praise of today as the best of possible worlds, the Mexican anti-utopias reveal the actual perversion of More's dream isle of perfect order.
Visions of the future are the exception among recent Mexican dystopias. Arreola's "Alarma para el año 2000" does, however, predict the ultimate weapon-the human body transmogrified into a bomb; Avilés' "El alimento del vampiro" forecasts the species' extinction through starvation when only robots populate Earth. In a longer piece, Homero Aridjis offers a Mexican-style apocalypse of secularization. "Espectáculo del año dos mil" dramatizes the Second Coming as a fools' carnival in Chapultepec Park.
Televised reports, sponsored by Cerveza Estrella de Oro and Pollos Sintéticos, S. A., compete for the multitude's attention with traveling salesmen of lottery tickets [“´Disfrute su premio en la eternidad... Lleve dinero, por las dudas¡,"8] and barkers of the elixir [“´Ame hasta el último minuto. Tome Geriatrol 120´” (p. 32)].
Fictional sojourns in another world have been more frequent in Mexican narrative. Arreola's settings include the far-off nation of Liberia, a literal moon of honey, the oneiric non-space of the unborn, the transcendental realms of heaven and hell. A microcosm of insects and an absurdist domain of railroads represent two of his most ingenious sociopolitical dystopias. "El prodigioso miligramo," which fables the destruction of ant society due to the anarchy and imprudence of egotism, materialism and idolatry, also mocks officials and bureaucrats, "las personas menos aptas para resolver cuestiones de prodigios y de miligramos" (p. 110). Arreola's most famous story, "El guardagujas," pokes fun at Mexico's inefficient public transportation system and its authoritarian culture. According to Luis Leal, "a pesar de las irregularidades de los ferrocarriles, los habitantes del país los aceptan 'y su patriotismo les impide cualquier manifestación de desagrado'. Los viajeros, 'con su increíble falta de cortesía y de prudencia' provocan accidentes: en vez de subir al tren ordenadamente, 'se dedican a aplastarse unos a otros'. La policía, en vez de ayudar, 'se dedica a proteger la salida exclusiva de pasajeros adinerados'. Más también... se ve en la necesidad de establecer un sistema de espionaje dedicada 'a fomentar el espíritu constructivo de la empresa'. La empresa que desea crear una imagen benigna de sí misma, podría ser un símbolo del gobierno del país.”9 The stranger changes his destination after learning of the empresa's subterfuge, omnipotence and capriciousness. A stay in dystopia brings his capitulation to a menacing public order.
Avilés shows no clemency toward the Mexican regime in his Nueva utopía (y los guerrilleros) (1973), a series of caustic vignettes on the antipode of Thomas More's paradise. The collection includes architectural plans for fortifying homes against military assault and a bibliography of primers on guerrilla warfare. Despite hyperbole, subversiveness derives in general from the shortening of distance between external reality and fictional representation. "Sangre y sonido," for example, ingeniously distorts the Department of Tourism's Light and Sound show at the Pyramids of Teotihuacan and the 1968 massacre at the Plaza of Three Cultures by advertising guided tours:
Circuito núm. 1: Matanza de estudiantes en las principales avenidas de la ciudad y persecución de los sobrevivientes hasta sus edificios escolares, sus casas u hospitales, según el guía lo considere más atractivo. Diez dólares boleto individual. Circuito núm. 3: Incluye visitas a las mazmorras policíacas donde los estudiantes y los guerrilleros son torturados y al Campo Militar donde... los soldados sacrifican a los reincidentes más fanáticos... Quince dólares boleto individual.10
The past can also function as another estranging place. Pacheco's novelette, Las batallas en el desierto (1981), portrays Mexico City in the Alemán presidency as a corrupt and corrupting milieu much like hypocrisy in a bygone Veracruz squashs ingenuousness in Pacheco' s short story, "El principio del placer." Ibargüengoitia also locates many of his fictions in a readily recognizable but older Mexico. His collection, La ley de Herodes (1967), recounts anecdotes of oneupmanship by brash thieves, treacherous land speculators, perfidious moneylenders, officious bureaucrats, ambivalent lovers and deceitful beggars. Moreover, the collection retells numerous beaches of confidence plus fiascos of lustful fervor and burlesque encounters among intellectuals. By making himself a principal actor in not very distant commedies of errors, Ibargüengoitia entertains us with the follies of life a lo mexicano.
Arana has produced the most inventive twist on history as psuedo-Arcadia. From a remote future, his Enciclopedia de latinoamericana omnisciencia (1977) looks back on "la altiva y orgullosa raza de los anos y el gran Imperio de Anía”11 of the 20th Century. The alphabetized format of expository entries contains a miscellanea of insanity and foolishness running the gamut from authoritarianism to Latinglish, which had corrected and incorrect forms of bastardization. "Guerra de los Óscares" traces the Third World War to a dispute between the Mexican and Argentine Ministers of Culture over the correct placement of the accent on the name Oscar. By fiat the "Presidente Constitucional de los Estados que Nos Dejaron" (p. 39) prohibited the existence of history. Meanwhile, the tenets of one Revolutionary Leader included: "'La cualidad suprema de un socialista guadalupano es la autocrítica. Y el punto culminante de la autocrítica es la automentada de madre'" (p. 69); “´La Virgen de Guadalupe ha sido durante siglos el opio esclavizador de nuestro pueblo. En lo futuro se admitirá únicamente como símbolo de unión, pero se escribirá su nombre con minúscula y se perseguirá a quienes la adoren en público y en privado'" (pp. 71-72). Arana assumes the literary persona of a compiler of information but his book of knowledge is a hoax. While the form imitates a particular style of composition the content demonstrates the preposterousness of conditions in present-day Mexico and Latin America. Arana's encyclopedia, like his contemporaries' bestiaries and utopias, mimics a pattern of writing as a literary camouflage which converts diatribe into entertaining art.
Arreola and Avilés have also composed numerous parodies and travesties which play on conventions of articulation but satirize the mentality and sociopolitical factors which give rise to concrete modes of expression. With tongue-in-cheek, they appropriate standardized formulas, especially patterns derived from journalism and advertising, in order to ridicule utilitarianism, objectivity and moral complacency. Arreola's "Flash," reports an accident in which a train full of people is reduced to a vacuum, the size of a mouse trap, by the misuse of a scientific instrument developed to defend against nuclear explosions. Avilés' "Hacia el fin del mundo" transcribes three days of communiques describing how conflicts over a soccer match escalate into nuclear war threatening the entire world. Both authors obviously attack the arms race and they simulate newspaper bulletins in order to lend plausibility to macabre events. Nonetheless, the logical language, stylistic flatness, nonanalytical exposition and the objectifying structure of the emotionless prose dramatize the fit between journalese and the dementia of a technological society.
The writers also commit literary "plagiarism" of the commercial, another cornerstone of current dystopia. Arreola's "Baby H. P." publicizes an attachment which converts children into generators while "Anuncio" plugs Plastisex, the made-to-order female robot. Avilés' "Refugios antiatómicos" solicits customers for individualized bomb shelters. Euphemism and "hype" dominate the tone, language, and approach of all three ads which base their appeal on expediency and acquisitiveness or avarice. Avilés' casket offers an "interior, con blandos cojines afelpados, [que] da reposo y confort y permite un relajamiento maravilloso que no será interrumpido por nada ni nadie.”12 "Anuncio" promises a literal experience in Edén: "'Hay leche y miel bajo tu lengua...' dice el Cantar de los cantares. Usted puede emular los placeres de Salomón; haga una mixtura con leche de cabra y miel de avispas; llene con ella el craneano de su plastisex, sazónela al oporto o al benedictine: sentirá que los ríos del paraíso fluyen a su boca con el largo beso alimenticio. (Hasta ahora nos hemos reservado bajo patente el derecho de adaptar las glándulas mamarias como redomas de licor.)" (p. 147). The hackneyed caveat, "si se siguen al pie de la letra las indicaciones contenidas en los folletos explicativos" (p. 145), intends to eradicate any parental fear that children will electrocute themselves while wearing Baby H. P. By appropriating the trite expressions and amorality of advertising, Avilés and Arreola create tantalizing products and prose which vivify the evils of commercialism, the profit motive, and the principles of economic utility.
Like Swift who parodied the 18th Century pamphlet in his "A Modest Proposal," the Mexicans forward projects which boomerange on "the individual who advances the scheme, the audience to which it is addressed, or the conditions which make such a scheme 'reasonable’,"13 Arreola's "En verdad os digo" simulates charity and publicity campaigns: "En vez de derretir toneladas de cirios y de gastar el dinero en indescifrables obras de caridad, las personas interesadas en la vida eterna que posean un capital estorboso, deben patrocinar la desintegración del camello. [que] convertirá a los empresarios de tan mística experiencia en accionistas de una fabulosa compañía de transportes" (p. 72). Blatant literalism results in the scientist's misreading of Christ's parable and backfires on the new Messiah of the mundane. Arreola's strategy of blame-by-praise converts "En verdad os digo" into an inverted parable which derides what it appears to laud.
With equal irony and black humor Avilés permits political rhetoric to unmask itself. The self-righteous partisan of "Sobre transplantes e injertos I," extols the Partido Único Oficial's scientific remedy for opponents of the regime: the transplanting of patriotic heads onto leftists' bodies. Moreover, "cuando un marxista también lo es de corazón, el transplante de su órgano vital se impone paralelamente al del cerebro" (p. 94). The advocate counters comparisons to Nazi genocide and delivers a moral justification for the PUO's practice: "Mucho... se ha preguntado si no resultaría más fácil exterminar a los radicales en lugar de operarlos... Cierto, es barato, pero también es un procedimiento inhumano que va contra los postulados de la revolución. Además, ¿no es interesante ver cómo un hombre que era guerrillero ahora labora en unas lujosas oficinas bancarias. ¿Verdad que sí?" (pp. 95-96). The calm, straightforward but trite argumentation for a deranged scheme actualizes the potential maliciousness of those who mouth platitudes, especialy the political clichés of Revolutionary Mexico.
In the last twenty-five years many authors have travestied the Mexican literary tradition. Arreola created a farcical crónica de provincia in La feria (1963); Ibargüengoitia spoofed la novela histórica in Los pasos de López (1981) while he satirized la novela de la Revolución mexicana in Los relámpagos de agosto (1964). In Los juegos (1967) Avilés lampooned the comtemporary artistic milieu of Mexico City, creating caricatures of Paz and Fuentes, whose masterpieces Avilés parodied later in "Las máscaras (farsa en un acto no muy extenso)" (1973). Pacheco playfully trifled with the canonical motif of the subterranean survival of the pre-Columbian world in his short stories, "La fiesta brava" and "Tenga para que se entretenga". Moreover, he rejected traditional realism in his metafictional Morirás lejos (1967). Arana's slangy Las jiras (1973) pretended not to be a text at all but rather the rambling mutterings of a hip Mexican rocanrolero. The literary iconoclasm of all these works, however, translates into seriocomical commentary on the national culture since toying with the canons of Mexican belles letters casts doubts on the heroic myths and the official history of a progressive, modern Mexico. Transgressions of Mexican literature, therefore, represent a continuation of the caustic sociopolitical vision and the satirical strategies evident in the short prose fiction of Arreola, Ibargüengoitia, Avilés, Pacheco and Arana.
Notes
1. Margaret L. Mason-Yulan M. Washburn, "The Bestiary in Contemprary Spanish-American Literature, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Alabama), VIII, 2 (May 1974), p. 195.
2. H. White, ed., The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (New York: Putnam, 1960), pp. 246-47.
3. Juan José Arreola, Confabulario (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1961), pp. 58-59. All citations from literary texts will be from the edition first-cited in the notes.
4. René Avilés Fabila, Alegorías (México: Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana, 1969), p. 9.
5. Mary Joyce Gill, Parameters of Experience in the Contemporary Mexican Short Story (Lubbock: Texas Tech univ., 1975), p. 128.
6. José Emilio Pacheco, El viento distante y otros relatos, 2a ed. (México: Ediciones Era, 1963), p. 33.
7. René Avilés Fabila, El gran solitario del Palacio (Buenos Aires: Compañía General Fabril Editora, 1971), p. 136.
8. Homero Aridjis, Espectáculo del año dos mil (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1981), p. 18.
9. Luis Leal, "Un cuento de Juan José Arreola," El Rehilete, 2a época, No. 29 (Dec. 1969), p. 47.
10. René Avilés Fabila, Nueva utopía (y los guerrilleros) (México: Ediciones "El Caballito", 1973), p. 24.
11. Federico Arana, Enciclopedia de latinoamericana omnisciencia (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1977), p. 12.
12. Rene Avilés Fabi1a, Hacia el fin del mundo México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969), p. 109.
13. James William Nichols, "Satiric Insinuation: A Study of the Tactics of English Indirect Satire," Diss. Univ. of Washington 1962, p. 35.
