... one cannot merely adopt satire to express a
personal or moral feeling: one must be born with
the sardonic visión... a poetic imagination in reverse gear.
Northrop Frye. «The Nature of Sarire»
Juan José Arreola (1918) served as patron and maestro to a generation of younger Mexican writers who in the late sixties and early seventies caused a debate in critical circ1es as to the artistic merit and potential of an apparent adolescent boom in Mexican letters.(l) Many neophites, inc1uding José Agustín. René Avilés Fabila, Gerardo de la Torre, Jorge Arturo Ojeda and Juan Tovar, collaborated from 1964 to 1966 in Mester: Revista del taller literario de Juan José Arreola. Although several critics c1aim that «toda una época se llamaría discípula de» (2) Arreola, only René Avilés Fabila (1940), without degenerating into prosaic imitation, has published a series of works which consistently demonstrate a kindred correspondence to the Master's in world-view and aesthetic mode. (3) While youthful idolization and apprenticeship led many of the contributors to Mester to start in the witty vein, they subsequently switched creative gears. Avilés F. continued to mature along satiric lines because he too possesses, like the Master, an ingenious and mischievous duende. Even a cursory comparison of Avilés F.'s short prose collections, Hacia el fin del mundo, Alegorías and La desaparición de Hollywood,(4) and Arreola's compendium, Confabulario, (5) confirms that both authors perceive the disjointedness of our age and share a gift for epigrammatic mockery of that condition.
When questioned about the most notable and decisive influences on his formation, Avilés F. carefully phrased hisreply: «Yendo al grano, advierto que más que influencias estoy emparentado con algunos autores como Capek o Mrozek; sin embargo tengo deudas con Arreola, con Borges, con Marechal...» (6) The list evokes tonal as well as thematic commonality: apocalypse, comic fantasy, science fiction, intellectual and philosophical gamesmanship. Nonetheless, Avilés F.'s cryptic answer implies a special and specific relationship between himself and Arreola. Instead of vague statements on influence, discipleship or dependency, the present study will address the connection and suggest that the relationship is a dichotomy of convergence and divergence around certain structural patterns, literary conventions and stylistic devices. Avilés F.'s «debts» to Arreola represent formal similarities which arise from the satiric kinship which bonds the two writers. Artistic confluence can be verified through a comparative analysis of three salient patterns of the Mexicans' short fiction: the bestiary, the dystopia and the parody.
Before discussing in detail the common modes, it is necessary to view generally the aesthetic link between Arreola and Avilés F. in order to posit the motivation behind their preference for the three paradigms. It is difficult to categorize Arreola and Avilés F. as short story writers since plot, characters, action, ambience and even narrative thread tend to disappear from their works. Their prototypical composition approaches the essay for its expositive tone or the monologue for its persona discourse. Aphoristic concision, ironic designs and the amalgamation of the fantastic and the objective, the hyperbolic and the ordinary, the ancient and the modern predominate. Literary allusions proliferate. The genesis of a composition may be popular, for example, the Bible, or erudite, i.e., medieval French poetry and social science monograms in Arreola, Greco-Roman mythology in Avilés F. Both transfigure and playfully distort these sources. Jesting in earnest, Arreola and Avilés F. select learned traditions which function as subtle mechanisms for human censure: the bestiary, which approaches «natural history- through manuscripts and authority, the dystopia, which capitalizes by inversion upon Thomas More's imaginary isle of perfection and the parody. Which burlesques a standardized form or prëexistent work in order to ridicule the underlying mentality. The Mexicans' manipulation of such long-standing satirical strategies as animal analogies and spatial or temporal displacement represents an implicit rebuke of modernity. This indirect rejection of the present recurs in the artists' parodies of news items and the mass media.
Whether viewed as serious naturalist or ingenuous pseudoscientist, the medieval besriarist believed in a dual, yet complementary world of visible elements and sacred meanings. His function was to describe, interpret and illustrate the divine symbolism of Creation, since for him nature equaled emblem. Veracity resided in allegory, and not in factual accuracy. The twentieth-century revival of the bestiary represents, in part, a challenge to rationalism and materialism. The «antiquated» genre received renewed impetus in Spanish América through Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero's Manual de zoología fantástica (1957),(7) which emulates the ancient mode in that it makes no pretense to originality. Unlike traditional bestiarists, the Argentineans selected only fantastic creatures and eschewed theological or moral interpretations. Thus, the Manual is a distillation of man's inventiveness-a monument to his disinterested, visionary proclivity. Superficially, Avilés F.'s «Zoológico fantástico» (Alegorias, pp. 3-27) serves as a supplement to the Manual, since the two works share many of the same mythological animals.
Yet, despite the title and the epigraph taken from the Argentinean text, «Zoológico fantástico» differs radically from the Borges-Guerrero compilation. Instead of transmitting a reference guide, Avilés F. espouses the medieval duality of descriptive «science» and interpretative ethics. Nonetheless, the medieval «gentleness of manner,» «hopeful goodness,» and reverence for the «wonders of life»(8) give way to biting sarcasm, inevitability of evil and contempt for human conduct. This shift in focus superimposed on an old vehicle recalls Arreola's personalized, didactic view of the real animals of Chapultepec Park (Punta de plata. 1958, entitled «El bestiario» in Confabulario). While Arreola concentrates on earthly creatures and Avilés F. prefers bizarre fictions, neither author demonstrates an instrinsic interest in the non-human. As in the beast fable, the point of view represents an oblique condemnation «of man's assumption that he is the center of the universe. »(9) In essence, focusing on man's treatment of and similarities to «inferior» brutes underlines his bestial nature. Although the Mexicans employ the bestiary form because its documentary tone helps validate their denigrating comparisons, the impact of the modern versions stresses man's current perversion of the spiritual realm, a deft inversion of the ultimate objective of the medieval authorities. Selection of the old, now discredited format represents preference for a more ingenuous, yet holistic approach to life than that afforded by rationalism.
«Zoológico fantástico» and «El bestiario» share certain unifying motifs and geometric configurations. Physical descriptions are usually based on a binary opposition between balance and imbalance, harmony and disharmony. This structural tension is made concrete via a spatial relationship denoting the innate dualism of man: the lofty becomes synonymous with the spirit in constant combat with the lowly, equivalent to the flesh. In «Los reptantes,» Avilés F. envisions baseness according to the aforementioned architectonic scheme: «Existen plenos indicios de que los reptiles desean quedarse sin extremidades. Al paso que van, dentro de millones de años, absolutamente todos reptarán, prescindiendo del uso de las patas.... no olvidemos que la tierra sirve para pisar con firmeza, nunca para arrastrarse» (p. 21). Arreola evokes the vital conflict in «La jirafa» where physical inversions negate the supremacy of the soul and, by extension, of mankind. The giraffe's deformed body demonstrates the failure of incorporeal pursuits:
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.
...busca en las alturas lo que otros encuentran al ras del suelo.
Pero como finalmente tiene que inclinarse de vez en cuando para beber el agua común, se ve obligado a desarrollar su acrobacia al revés. Y se pone entonces al nivel de los burros. (p. 58)'
Despite the similarity in directional coordinates, the two citations represent a notable philosophical distinction. Arreola views human duality as essentially irreconcilable. For him, man's definition as a rational and moral animal leads to the following dilemma: biology prohibits the perfect expression of the immaterial and, vice versa, knowledge impedes the healthy manifestation of instinct. Thus, Arreola repeatedly focuses in his bestiary upon massive animals or flightless/caged birds in order to stress the burden of the bodily. In contrast, Avilés F.'s preference for creeping and crawling reptiles, who by volition remain earth-bound, suggests a more optimistic view. For him, free will can potentially resolve the human dilemma. Determinism, in Arreola's case, results in a tone reminiscent of Genesis: antideterminism, in Avilés F.'s text, permits the use of the biblical symbol of evil divorced from its theological context.
Regardless of the metaphysical differences, Arreola and Avilés F. incarnate human dualism in the same leitmotifs: the cage and the mirror. The iron bars of their zoos represent obstacles to soaring elevation. (10) Like Arreola's zebra who «presa en su enrejado lustroso vive en la cautividad galopante de una libertad mal entendida.» (p. 57), man, for both authors, is the unconscious prisoner of his body, culture and ideology, even though these be invisible barriers.
Avilés F. suggests in «Los sátiros» that human imprisonment dates from Christianity's triumph over paganism. As hedonists, the satyrs pulsan las liras y de las flautas nacen como arabescos notas armoniosas...
Parece que no extrañan la libertad; mejor aún: se diría que nunca la conocieron. Su constante bacanal produce envidias en cuantos la contemplan (particularmente solterones y beatas). Se ha dado el caso de entusiastas que, mirando los juegos eróticos, permanecen frente a la jaula durante semanas, cada vez más tristes por no estar en ellas languidecen y ahí mismo mueren...
Aunque los guardias que rodean la jaula permanecen rígidos, inmóviles, tienen la misión de impedir que el público acepte invitaciones de los sátiros... Vean ustedes el letrero... Estrictamente prohibido participar en la jerga y emborracharse con los residentes de esta jaula. (p. 9)
Since «it was impossible to civilize them, because they refused to recognize law and order, » (ll) the satyrs remain «free,» that is, true to their nature, although technically behind bars. Despite his apparent mobility, man is entrapped by his own social code. He can only observe, but not create, the poetry of music and sensuality. Avilés F. uses the terminology of sacrifice and stasis («tristes,» «languidecen,» «permanecen,» «rígidos,» «inmóviles,» «impedir,» «prohibido») as opposed to enjoyment and dynamism in order to characterize man's «advanced» communal organism as inherently stultifying.
«Los monos» also paints an animal paradise which man cannot enter. Again, more pessimistic, Arreola points to reasoning as the restrictive principle. He manipulates not only Genesis but also the traditional bestiary illustration in which «the monkey was associated with the Fall of Man, and it is often pictured eating an apple. » (12) Animal satisfaction stands in contrast to human frustration and wretchedness:
Momo llegó a ser el simio más inteligente del mundo; pero fiel a su especie... obtuvo sus raciones sin trasponer el umbral de la conciencia. Le ofrecían la libertad, pero él prefirió quedarse en la jaula.
Ya muchos milenios antes (¿cuántos?), los monos decidieron acerca de su destino oponiéndose a la tentación de ser hombres. 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.
Atados a una dependencia invisible, danzamos al son que nos tocan, como el mono del organillo. Buscamos sin hallar las salidas del laberinto en que caímos, y la razón fracasa en la captura de inalcanzables frutas metafísicas.
(... mientras Momo se quedaba para siempre en Tetuán, gozando una pensión vitalicia de frutas al alcance de su mano). (pp. 63-64)
Delusive liberty is equated by both authors with humanness. That inferior creatures do not miss nor even prefer it represents a rejection of the theory of human superiority based on cerebral development. «Los monos» closes «El bestiario» while «Los sátiros» opens «Zoológico fantástico.» Arreola and Avilés F. consciously choose positions of emphasis for their commentaries on human captivity. Animals, even though they be encaged, are less fettered than man because they do not suffer an internal conflict, an antithetical distinction between nature and the transcendental.
The underlying irony of the literary bestiaries is that the reader discovers within them his own image-he is both the observer and the observed. Arreola's «Prólogo» ingeniously asserts via the tú and the commands that the audience «love» the repulsive creatures of the following pages; Avilés F. initiates his work with a public notice which establishes the audience's complicity:
Este parque es suyo:
ayúdenos a conservarlo
No moleste ni dé comida
a los animales
The Mexican bestiaries are kaleidoscopes whose three reflecting glasses (the reader, generic man and the animals), all equivalent, multiply ad infinitum the same vulgarized object. Avilés F.'s «Las nagas» synthesizes this triple identification:
Extraídas de una leyenda indostana, las nagas actúan ahora en una pista. El número es harto sencillo para estas serpientes (solamente aprovechan su cualidad de adquirir forma humana). Al inicio del acto, las nagas -quizá por pudor- requieren del domador para efectuar la metamorfosis, que siempre es aplaudida hasta la saciedad. Y ya entusiasmadas por el triunfo, ellas mismas repiten el número una y otra vez sin necesidad del látigo. (p. 11)
Trainers with pens as whips, Arreola and Avilés F. view the human condition as a coarse circus sideshow. Arreola, the anti-idealist, takes evolution to the comic extreme by consistently proposing the ancestral union between beast and man. Our bodily strength derives from our assimilation of the bison. We are grandchildren of a puerile elephant. The directness of Arreola's comparisons is possible, in part, because he deals with familiar creatures and popular belief concerning their personality. Our fascination with wild animals' apparent mimicry of us sets the stage for the literary hypothesis of similitude. In perhaps his greatest stroke of genius, Arreola makes the animals, particularly the less aesthetic ones, seem debased by the human likening:
el cuello del avestruz proclama a los cuatro vientos la desnudez radical de la carne ataviada... El mejor ejemplo sin duda para la falda más corta y el escote más bajo. Aunque siempre está a medio vestir, el avestruz prodiga sus harapos a toda gala superflua, y ha pasado de moda sólo en apariencia. Si sus plumas «ya no se llevan», las damas elegantes visten de buena gana su inopia con virtudes y perifollos de avestruz: el ave que se engalana pero que siempre deja la íntima fealdad al descubierto. Llegado el caso, si no esconden la cabeza, cierran por lo menos los ojos «a lo que venga» ...
... No puede extrañarnos entonces que los expertos jueces del Santo Oficio idearan el pasatiempo o vejamen de emplumar mujeres indecentes para sacarlas desnudas a la plaza. (p. 50)
An extended paradox, the selection is striking for its bald ebb and flow of dehumanization/ de-animalization. The inherent ugliness of the ostrich serves as a springboard to essay physical and moral superficiality through the careful interweaving of terminology from one species to the other. The attribution of human attitudes to the ostrich cuts less deeply than the assimilation of ostrich manners by the female. Arreola concludes that nature may be unappealing, but that self-deformation is repulsive.
Avilés F.'s bestiary descriptions are often more concise and oblique than Arreola's for two reasons. First, imaginary beasts are too far removed from everyday reality to sustain extended comparisons to humans. More importantly, the younger artist posits a different variety of dehumanization for which direct parallels are less pertinent. Whereas Arreola sustains man's ineludible corporeal essence, Avilés F. laments the vulgarization of the ideal. His zoo is filled with refugees-antiquated mythological creatures who languish in disrespect. Visitors, seeking malicious entertainment, toss sweets at the nine-headed Hydra, endangering her health. The Sphinx of Thebes «formula adivinanzas... que los niños resuelven fácilmente, entre risas y burlas, cuando van a visitarla a su morada.
Durante el fin de semana» (pp. 11-12) Demythification culminantes in «De dragones»:
Sin fuego en las fauces parecen mansas bestias. La literatura no utiliza sus servicios y entonces les resta observar de reojo a sus observadores y vivir de pasadas glorias... Sólo recuerdos de villano olvidado, Ah, si alguna potencia -de ésas muy belicosas- sustituyera tanques, blindados y lanzallamas por dragones, el prestigio de estos cobraría auge nuevamente. Incluso la poesía volvería a la guerra, al campo de batalla: otra vez a disputar por motivos románticos y no por razones mezquinas, políticas o económicas. (p. 25)
Like the ancient bestiarists, Avilés F. would have men take his fantastic creatures seriously, not sport with or ignore them. Without belief and myth, existence loses its cosmic significance. «Zoológico fantástico» demonstrates that reality has become so brutal that it replaces the function of ancient monsters, relegating them to the list of endangered species. Monsters as well as marvels may be forever lost. Avilés F.'s fictional zoo serves as a last refuge of fantasy and poetry since life has become prosaic and twentieth-century man has become the Adversary. But the contest no longer contains the potential for purification. (13)
As formal, ordered microcosms, Arreola's and Avilés F.'s artistic zoos instruct us on the nature of the outside world. The social macrocosm they telescope is all too evidently paradise lost-another zoo inhabited by «wild» men who are invisibly constrained, dangerous and dehumanized. The Mexicans insinuate that perhaps humans should be locked up in order to protect them from self.
The allegorical framework of the medieval model provides an appropriate format for satiric indirection in the modern, Mexican bestiaries. Whereas the ancient authorities perceived divinity incarnate in nature, Arreola and Avilés F. stress human disfigurement of that same world via the zoo, a man-made, rationalized, sequential and limiting construct. In the contemporary versions, the uplifting motivation of the original mode is replaced by dehumanization both as a topic and as a technique. In his zoological portraits, Arreola establishes direct analogies between man and beast. He demythifies humanness by underlining the physical restriction to spirituality. Since Arreola emphasizes the equation man/animal, it is not surprising that he concentrates on real creatures in order to speculate on metaphysics. Avilés F. views man as directly culpable for the vulgarization and demythification of existence. Thus, he conjures up the literary phantoms conserved in medieval texts. He laments, however, the eminent extinction of the fantastic beings-a clear indication of man's perversion of his unique capacity for imagination and creativity. Both «Zoológico fantástico» and «El bestiario» attest to the disappearance of holism in our age.
As fictional tops, the Mexican bestiaries mirror the external paradigm of man's attempt to enforce his artificial order on nature. From the twentieth-century perspective, utopia represents, like the zoo, a rationalization and secularization of Arcadian myth for «man no longer dreams of a divine state in some remote time; he assumes the role of a creator himself.» (14) Belief in man's capacity for progressive control over the environment, societal betterment and the re-creation of the earthly paradise forms the first tenant of the lay creed. Like many modern satirists, Arreola and Avilés F. view the historical process in inverted terms; for them, man's regulatory institutions and his deification of scientific technology have boomeranged. The search for the «perfect order, » the «good society» and the «good life» has degenerated into a regimented theatre of the absurd in which individuals are stripped of their essence. Thus, destruction and dehumanization serve as keynotes of the «ideal» land/time pattern of the Mexican pseudo or anti-utopias.
Apocalypse, alluded to in the collection titles which suggest imaginary wandering in order to reveal the here and now, reaches its highest dramatic tension in compositions of temporal and spatial imprecision. In «Autrui» Arreola's Kafkaesque vision, a persecutor-alter ego psychologically annihilates the narrator. The diary records one week, metaphor for the other's lifelong antagonistic gaze. Progressive geometric limitation of being to the dimensions of a casket terminates in the I's «death. » Instead of synthesis, Avilés F.'s «Autocanibalismo» amplifies to macrocosm by initially detailing the clinical case of a Mr. Smith, who savors one by one his own organs. Endemic «autofagia» suddenly becomes an epidemic felling serene citizens. A national quarantine cannot prevent the cyclical, world-wide contagion of suicide. Whether through culinary or funerary terminology, allusions to Midas or otherness, the impact of both stories depends on the writers' refusal to specify a causal relationship. The two selections stand as shocking proclamations of a secular doomsday of species extinction.
Many of the dystopias are less «fanciful» since tension resides in the microscopic pinpointing of everyday conditions. Distortion and magnification then underline the terrifying logic of man's vanaglorious concept of the future. As prophets of the permutations of socio-political processes. Arreola and Avilés F. consistenly mock a pernicious Trinity (State, Materialism, Science). Instead of the dreamland, this triad produces a nightmare of technological, mercantile and bureaucratic mechanization, Scientific advances, rampant commercialization and Machiavellian public policy cancel out happiness and the good life by reducing man to an object.
Reaching adulthood during the atomic age, Arreola participates artistically in the civil protests of the era. His rebellious fetuses of «Informe de Liberia» (1959) refuse birth as a declaration against A-bomb tests. The communiqué insinuates that only the unborn exercise intelligence in our belligerent world. Basing himself on an inherent human curiosity about faraway places registering novel occurrences. Arreola implicates the audience and the «developed» nations. «Alarma para el año 2000» (1961) forecasts the insuperable weapon-the human bomb. As the ultimate projection of automation and militancy, the body becomes transmogrified into a destructive mechanism which parodies scientific instruments: «Basta con apoyar fuertemente la lengua contra la bóveda palatina y hacer una breve reflexión colérica... 5. 4. 3, 2, l.… el índice de adrenalina aumenta, se modifica el quimismo de la sangre y ¡cataplum! Todo desaparece en derredor» (p. 27).
While passionate love is Arreola's ironical solution to mutual fear, willful self-destruction becomes the sign of integrity and rebellion in «La desaparición de Hollywood. » Avilés F., maturing during the nuclear age and the arms race, demonstrates less preoccupation with weapons per se than with the superstructures which control them. He envisions personal extermination as the unique salvation from a futuristic World Government planning to convert cinematographic sets into re-education facilities or an extra-terrestrial missile base. The anachronistic guard, Charlie Chaplin, prefers to die, dynamiting the antiquated realm of art and fantasy.
Combinations of three rhetorical tricks characterize many of the Mexican dystopias: 1) blame-by-praise: the pretense to the best of possible worlds; 2) the persona: an assumed personality at one with or separate from the critique; 3) the proposal: a project or scheme «which puts into concrete form blameworthy ideas, tendencies, conditions as a tactic for attacking the individual who advances the scheme, the audience to which it is addressed, or the conditions which make such a scheme 'reasonable,' or possible.»(15)
«El guardagujas» contains Arreola's most famous speaker. An ambivalent character, at once a detached observer and ingenuous commentator, the switchman expounds with pride on the machinations of the Railroad Company as if these denoted progress and social welfare. He vindicates the expediencies of illusion and fraud, countermanding free will and individualism, as «'el sano propósito de disminuir la ansiedad de los viajeros y de anular en todo lo posible las sensaciones de traslado. Se aspira a que un día se entreguen plenamente al azar, en manos de una empresa omnipotente, y que ya no les importe saber a dónde van ni de dónde vienen!'» (p. 90). As an official agent who has never ridden a train, the speaker represents not Arreola's tacit sanction but his oblique rejection of the absurd, menacing world of «El guardagujas. »
Like the switchman, Avilés F.'s anonymous voice in «Sobre trasplantes e injertos I, » celebrates Authority. This selfrighteous persona justifies the Partido Único Oficial's solution to political opposition: replacement of leftists' heads with patriotic ones. The spokesman rejects comparison with:
los atroces experimentos realizados por los nazis. Nada más falso, se trata, no de un experimento criminal, sino de un recurso políticamente legítimo para salvaguardar los intereses de la democracia y proteger a nuestro país donde se aspira al bienestar común y a la justicia social. Mucho, por otra parte, 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. (Hacia el fin, pp. 95-96)
One of the few tirades against the PRI in Avilés F's short prose, the party line advanced by a partisan permits self-entrapment. Parody of rhetoric unmasks fascism. Between the lines the deception is transparent for the reader; the speaker's naiveté converts him into a dupe and contaminates the Party with ignominy.
Avilés F. becomes the persona of the epistolary, «En las cumbres deportivas». The formal pretense provides a nonfictional mask for the Swiftian description of a new Black Legend. Like its Irish model, economic, moral and aesthetic dividends are attached to a novel, elitist pastime-the hunting of darkskinned, lower c1ass peoples in order to guarantee «espacio y comidas abundantes para los que sí tienen derechos sobre el globo terrestre» (Hollywood, p. 84). Acceptance of the initial premise of trophy safaris leads logically to cold extermination garbed as an Olympic contest:
cacería con escopeta de indígena americano para damas;
tiro con pistola a salvaje africano para varones (evento muy arriesgado: la pistola tiene que emplearse a distancias reducidas);
muerte de afroamericano con ametralladora o lanzallamas para policías...
exterminio de asiáticos con granadas de napalm para varones y para damas; (pp. 86-87)
The list of events recalls Swift's delicious recipes of infant meat. Each converts man into fauna; the 1-2-3 formula plays stylistic organization against repugnant matter.
Both Arreola and Avilés F. must employ tactics which lend verisimilitude to the most exaggerated fiction. Depersonalized voice and the pseudo-documentary typically fulfill this requirement. The editorial «we» formal address («las personas interesadas»), passive voice, commands and verbs of obligation («deben», «hay que»), the thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure and extensive passages of scientific analysis serve as vehicles of persuasion and propaganda in Arreola's «En verdad os digo». These stylistic devices correlate to the absurd plan based on a literal reading of Christ's parable about the rich young man. The concrete realization of the allegory, the scientific experiment to pass a camel through the eye of a needle, perverts the moral lesson as the profit spin-offs belie the humanistic claims of the endeavor. As with Swift's pamphlet arguing for a specific economic policy, the modest proposal of «En verdad os digo» takes as its own rhetorical techniques which reflect the linear perspective and confuse the religious and the mundane realms.
Avilés F.'s «Milagros televisados» bases itself on the same type of category jumbling revealed through inappropriate linguistic mixing. Ecclesiastic authority provokes the idolatrous aberration. Dating from his 1965 United Nations appearance and the chance healing of mass media spectators, «el Papa emitió una encíclica llamada Adivinis, ti vi, explicando y reglamentando el suceso electrónicorreligioso» (Hacia el fin, p. 87). Neologisms («fidetelevidentes», «inmaculada televisión») set the stage for the new cult and progressive biblical distortions:
Bienaventurados los que poseen televisor.
EPÍLOGO:
Hágase la imagen...
Y la imagen se hizo... (p. 91)
Since linguistic abuse correlates to attitudinal flaws, fanaticism, and ritual follow terminology. «Fidetelevidentes»:
guardan celosamente trozos de cables y antenas, sintonizadores y bulbos fundidos, como reliquias... unos, con pecados veniales, permanecen varios días hincados -o haciendo repetidas genuflexiones- frente al televisor, sin apagarlo un instante: programa-tras-programa, con los brazos en cruz; otros, los que tienen en la conciencia pecados mortales, se imponen castigos de tipo corporal, más severos, y reciben descargas de cables de alta tensión hasta expiar sus culpas. (p. 92)
Modernization and the electronic mirac1e convert the sacred into profane and vice versa. Via linguistic convergence Avilés F. captures the prosaism of an ersatz world. In a twist of fate, reality seems to have plagiarized «Milagros televisados». In the «Hour of Power», Reverend Robert Schuller «retails» religion from his «shopping center for Jesus Christ». From California, «his ever-smiling televangelist image» airs to millions of customers. (16)
More than mere device, the adoption of a «rational», upto-date tenor exposes the crass objectivity and inhumane aloofness of the scientific mentality. Satire often depends on the shocking imbalance between logical exposition and horrendous substance. Culpability is dispersed via an anonymous writing style which grows out of an impersonal method of conceptualization.
As if it were a committee report, Arreola's «Topos» describes with indifference a new agrarian process:
En la lucha contra el topo se usan ahora unos agujeros que alcanzan el centro volcánico de la tierra...
Tales agujeros tienen una apariencia inocente. Los topos, cortos de vista, los confunden con facilidad...
Recientemente se ha demostrado que basta un agujero definitivo para cada seis hectáreas de terreno invadido. (p. 55)
At first, adherence to nature and the simplicity of the plan fascinates the reader, who slowly retreats before the sadistic ingenuity which conceives it. Audience repulsion increases as the report advances inexorably toward the final, emotionless appraisal. A perspective which divorces action from consequence makes violence and cruelty abstractions. Such alienation, perpetrated on a defenseless mammal, represents the height of coldbloodedness on the physical as well as the intellectual plane.
A confessional account of urban alienation in «Las ciudades» is followed by an appendix:
CUESTIONARIO
1. ¿Cuáles son, a su juicio, los elementos que producen la neurosis citadina?
2. ¿Por qué nadie acudió en ayuda del hombre agónico?
3. ¿Por qué razón el narrador de la pequeña historia se marcha a un pueblito alejado de la ciudad, en medio del campo?
4. ¿Qué haría usted si viera a un hombre morir en plena calle?
a) Le ayudaría.
b) Llamaría a un médico.
c) Seguiría su camino.
(Marque solamente un inciso.) (Hollywood. p. 95)
Besides the obvious parody of grammar school and foreign language texts, the questionnaire vulgarizes the preceding, heart-rending tale. The standardized format, especially the statistical series of the multiple-choice entry, represents disinterest and dullness, the very estrangement the fictional narrator attempts to portray and escape. The insinuation that sensitivity must be stimulated, despite the straightforwardness of the tale, and that feeling can be articulated demonstrate rampant insensibility. By inc1uding «c» as an alternative, Avilés F. both goads the reader and mocks the objectifying «editor» who enlightens youth. The formula for learning, in this case, equals alienation.
Since the non-voice speaks in the profoundest sense for rationalism, the documents of Arreola and Avilés F. represent dystopia par excellence. They demonstrate that reason may control the world but question whether its exercise means the betterment of the environment or even man himself. Contrary to Arcadia, the future for the Mexicans forebodes not plenitude but limitation and renunciation.
Like their bestiaries, Arreola's and Avilés F.'s dystopias play on literary convention. Their apocalypses, however, rely on innovative narrative tactics, such as the depersonalized speaker and the pseudo-documentary, which correlate to and expose defective perception. Subtlety characterizes the linguistic and stylistic manipulations of Arreola's prophecies. Thus, the reader becomes initiate and participant in the witticism. Avilés F. pursues his targets more directly and persistently. He prefers to establish distance between the satiric object and the audience, doubly debunking mental abuses as literally awkward and philosophically intolerable.
In «Satire as Litmus Paper: All the News That's Fit to Imagine,» Murray K. Morton interprets fictional news items as possibility satire, a stimulus for reassessing our «conventional methods of shaping experience.»(17) The cliché-twisting in Morton's title reflects the derivative procedure of this newer satiric chameleon. The adoption of newspaper formulas (bulletins, features, advertisements) represents a «metamorphosis, masquerading by parody in the very form it is criticizing.»(18) The apparently straightforward pattern sets up expectations in the reader which are overturned by the non-conventional material contained in the mold.
Although the pseudo-news item entails stylistic imitation, its attributes are multiple. As literary hoax, the format provides indirection and fictional autonomy, converting diatribe into art. Newspaper and propaganda conventions lend anonymity, divorcing the writers from the critique and intensifying the blameworthy appearance of the targets. Commonplace phraseology lends verisimilitude to invention, often of a grotesque or implausible nature. The disparity between the real and the imagined, the possible and the Dantesque, is erased through the stereotyped mechanism of expression. The incongruity between a reassuring structure and terminology versus a distorted content causes the satiric effect. We are moved intellectually by the impartial manner in which unacceptable «facts» are presented.
The classified section appeals to both Mexicans because of its relegation to the back page (guilt by association) and its demand for brevity. Arreola's «De L'Osservatores» «transcribes» the following item: «A principios de nuestra Era, las llaves de San Pedro se perdieron en los suburbios del Imperio Romano. Se suplica a la persona que las encuentre, tenga la bondad de devolverlas inmediatamente al Papa reinante, ya que desde hace más de quince siglos las puertas del Reino de los Cielos no han podido ser forzadas con ganzúas» (p. 32). In just two sentences, Arreola attacks papal infallibility and suggests that «en el momento de instituir la Iglesia, el cristianismo perdió validez». (19) Journalistic clichés («se suplica a la persona,» «tenga la bondad») degrade the Church by contaminating its solemnity with vulgarity. As a linguistic convention, the lost and found notice permits the artist to objectify his criticism especially since the inferred source of information is L'Osservatore Romano. Thus, the note takes on the appearance of a press release. By manipulation, the Church itself gives mouth to the accusation that it has failed as the spiritual director of mankind.
Avilés F's title-headline, «Se solicita constitución,» heralds the same type of denigrating journalistic terminology: «Las recompensas ofrecidas por el señor presidente a quienes informen sobre su paradero, siguen aguardando... El gobierno lamenta oficialmente no haber tenido más que el ejemplar original... Ahora se pide, en caso de localizarla, que se imprima la constitución en considerable tiraje (Hacia el fin, pp. 84-85). Both notices convert symbols of legitimacy into perishable realities to demonstrate abuse of authority. By reductio ad absurdum. the tangible objects representing immaterial power become mere nominal masks of lawless investiture. Avilés F.'s preoccupation with realpolitik leads to the adoption of journalese in «Se solicita constitución», a pale document in comparison to the lost magna carta, just as «De L'Osservatore» is a burlesque version of the biblical parable of the Keys of the Kingdom.
«Advertisements» not only inform the reader-customer of new artifacts but warn him of the ingenious and monstrous potential of consumer's goods. The artists select discursive commercials as opposed to emotive language because they are an effective method of actualizing dehumanization in the marketplace. Arreola's now notorious trademarks, Baby H. P. and Plastisex (c), designate merchanization, utilitarianism and technological idolatry which transmogrify men into merchandise. Avilés F.'s commodities, the Refugio antiatómico, euphemism for the casket, and the Traga-helado, culmination of mechanical plaything, demonstrate the dangers of free enterprise for its production of luxury items and military hardware. The simplicity and the mixture of macabre humor and serious science fiction assure posterity's fascination with the innovative goods.
«Baby H. P.» (1952) demonstrates continuing attraction repulsion for our energy-conscious age since the apparatus realizes the mutation of children into generators. Swift's scheme for dishes of youthful flesh becomes Arreola's dynamo. Formalized address («señora ama de casa»), the guarantee («J. P. Mansfield & Sons, de Atlanta. III.»), reference to existing devices («botellita de Leyden»), ease of operation («mediante cómodos cinturones, pulseras, anillos y broches») and appeal to avarice («un pequeño y lucrativo negocio») correlate to the principle of economic utility which, taken to the extreme. sacrifices all future progeny.
«Anuncio» goes beyond the attachment to the human substitute: «Consume tanta electricidad como un refrigerador, se puede enchufar en cualquier contacto doméstico, y equipada con sus más valiosos aditamentos, pronto resulta mucho más económica que una esposa común y corriente. Es inerte o activa, locuaz o silenciosa a voluntad, y se puede guardar en el closet» (p. 150). A striking marriage of pragmatism and farce produce Plastisex (c), synthesis of erotic mania and automation. The graphic abbreviation suggests that the robot has a patent and, therefore, the sign functions as a technique of verisimilitude. Synthetic components, such as «el himen plástico... un verdadero sello de garantía» (p. 148). dramatize the reduction of woman to scientific replacement and saleable commodity. Dehumanization is intensified by the pretense to morality. As Swift's proposal represents an alternative to abortion and wife-beating, Plastisex (c) eliminates pangs of conscience resulting from prostitution and adultery. The ad agency's base manipulation of biblical poetry makes a mockery of this ethical stance: «'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 (c), sazónela al oporto o al benedictine: sentirá que los ríos del paraíso fluyen a su boca en el largo beso alimenticio» (p. 147). Exaltation, third-person pronouns and the imperatives, although true to publicity campaigns. implicate the reader in this commercialization of sex.
Based on the «proverb,» happiness is only just a purchase away, «Reportaje de un invento extraordinario o la decadencia de los EUA,» reviews «una máquina maravillosa cuya función exclusiva era ingerir helados» (Hacia el fin. p. 55). Avilés F. inverts the procedures of «Anuncio»; he humanizes the gluttonous, egocentric machine whose production follows the hierarchical nature of the consumer society: «Para los proletarios se fabricó de aluminio inoxidable barato, manual y pintada de azul overol; la clase media, siempre en ascenso, la pidió... automática, con forma de refrigerador para colocarla dentro de la línea blanca; los magnates, por supuesto, la exigieron de oro puro...» (p. 56). Personifying the vices of publicity, luxury items and object idolatry, la Traga-helado consumes free enterprise and imperialism, relegating the United States to the Third World and dependence on Latin American aid.
Absurd uselessness also characterizes Avilés F.'s «Refugios antiatómicos.» Since bomb shelters offer no protection in the nuclear age, the Military-Industrial complex distributes a model which is «individual portatil, y al alcance de todos los bolsillos» (Hacia el fin. p. 109). Rhetoric pretends to dismiss the fear of imminent annihilation: «El interior, con blandos cojines afelpados, da reposo y confort y permite un relajamiento maravilloso que no será interrumpido por nada ni nadie» (p. 109). The sense of order and well-being of the funeral industry attempts to beautify the casket, the only purchasable «remedy» for the individual. The nefarious identification of commerce and war leads to an urgent imperative: «Cómprelo para usted y su familia, la guerra nuclear se avecina» (p. 110). By limiting the use of the usted form and by postponing the only command until the very end, Avilés F. assures the impact of his apocalyptic «ad». Whereas Arreola trifles with his products and audiences. Avilés F. stings like an electric shock.
Often the Mexicans select the bulletin to convey potential scientific and technological abnormality (20). The newspaper casting makes a physiological impossibility more credible by clothing the suspect information in a pattern provoking the reader's confidence.
By means of its title, Arreola's «Flash» indicates the adopted form. The date line, «Londres» 26 de noviembre (AP)» (p. 38), serves as a realistic motif for the macabre events. Following the external norm, no year appears. Nonetheless, temporal vagueness adds terror to the bulletin. The indifferent, factual narration intensifies the reader's increasing repulsion. The tranquilizing language and incasement corroborate the logical nature of the catastrophy:
Un sabio demente, cuyo nombre no ha sido revelado, colocó anoche un Absorsor del tamaño de una ratonera en la salida de un túnel. El tren fue vanamente esperado en la estación de llegada. Los hombres de ciencia se afligen ante el objeto dramático, que no pesa más que antes y que contiene todos los vagones del expreso de Dover y el apretado número de las víctimas.
Ante la consternación general, el Parlamento ha hecho declaraciones en el sentido de que el Absorsor se halla en etapa experimental. Consiste en una cápsula de hidrógeno, en la cual se efectúa un vacío atómico. Fue planeado originalmente por Sir Acheson Beal como arma pacífica, destinada a anular los efectos de las explosiones nucleares. (pp. 38-39)
The naiveté of intent-result reversal, the unopinionated description, the size factor and the name based on the verb «absorber» intermingle to create a shocking version of a world gone mad.
Avilés F.'s «De trasplantes e injertos IV» has direct parallels to «FLash» in design and content. Four brief informational items, dated between January 28, 1969 and July 8, 1972, represent an expanding circle of dementia. The impression of temporal progression and specification vivifies the events and serves as a counterpoint to the pervasive ambience of spiritual retrogression and to the career vacillations of Doctor Crazy who, like the genius of «Flash», personifies the madness of reality. A final inversion relates true insanity with the status quo of dehumanization and pragmatism:
PEBBLES BEACH, California, 8 de julio de 1972 (APF). El ex doctor Crazy, que desde hace algunos años permanecía recluido en el Manicomio General de esta ciudad, ha sido entregado, conforme lo disponen las nuevas leyes dictadas por el presidente de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, a la benemérita Asociación Ojos, Oídos, Nariz y Garganta, para que realicen con su cuerpo experimentos de trasplantes. El ex doctor Crazy participó de cierta fama en alguna época por el hecho de haber realizado exitosamente el primer trasplante de un oído interno en este país donde la ciencia está tan adelantada. (Hacia el fin, p. 104)
The tranquil tone, enhanced by the illusion of the seaside resort and the pretense to scientific accomplishment, disturb the reader as much as the persistent lunacy.
Like pop artists, Arreola and Avilés F. create new perspectives through the manipulation of everyday forms. Avoiding direct denunciation, they invent dynamic, «real»reports which shake the reader, disorienting him by the known format and the unexpected information. Their characteristic pretexts, the «advertisement» and the «bulletin», play on our sense of certainty and credulity in order to jolt us out of complacency and apathy toward the world and ourselves. As in his dystopias, Arreola offers subtle surprise as an underlying mechanism for reader entanglement. Avilés F. prefers a frontal, often a blunt and piercing, shock to evoke a reaction. The satiric effect also resides in the selection of mass media phenomena. For both writers, the ad and the news item are prototypical twentiethcentury designs of materialism and objectivity. Their formal and conceptual parodies force us to question utilitarianism and detachment, criteria which the patterns venerate. Since the reader is both engaged and implicated by the journalistic formulas, the double bind may lead to catharsis. At least, convention loses control over perception, and skepticism is renewed. As a style translates a point of view, the Mexicans' pseudo-forms suggest that the press and the marketing agency are looking glasses which expose the distorted image man has created for himself in the modern age.
Arreola's and Avilés F.'s at times macabre, at times titillating compositions recall the visions of Quevedo, Goya and Valle Inclán whose esperpentos reflect the grotesque disfiguration of the human condition. The Mexicans do not limit themselves to national affairs but rather they focus on international tendencies which dehumanize all of us. Their farces, of profound social and intellectual bearing, continue the cosmopolitan tradition of Jorge Luis Borges whose speculations mingling fantasy and reality initiated the maturation of contemporary Hispanic American letters.
NOTES
1. See Xorge del Campo, ed., Narrativa joven de México (México: Siglo XXI. 1969); Emmanuel Carballo, Narrativa mexicana de hoy (Madrid: Alianza, 1969); Margo Glantz, ed., Onda y escritura en México: Jóvenes de 20 a 33(México: Siglo XXI. 1971); Vicente Leñero, «Reflexiones en torno a la narrativa joven de México.» Mundo Nuevo 38 (1972), 18-21.
2. Jorge Arturo Ojeda, Documentos sentimentales 1963-1974 (México: Ediciones Mester, 1974), p. 163.
3. Two of Avilés F.'s works do not fit the satiric vein: La lluvia no mata las flores (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970), a collection of short stories within «La onda» and Tantadel (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), a psychological novel. However, his «novels». Los juegos (México: Manuel Casas, 1967), El gran solitario del Palacio (Buenos Aires: Fabril Editora, 1971) and Nueva utopía y los guerrilleros (México: El Caballito,» 1973) substantiate aesthetic evolution toward the censureship of Mexican artistic and political life. As in Arreola's novel. La feria, concise fragments and satirical vignettes predominate.
4. René Avilés Fabila, Hacia el fin del mundo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969); Alegorías (México: Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana, 1969); La desaparición de Hollywood y otras sugerencias para principiar un libro (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1973). All subsequent citations will come from these editions identified in the text in abbreviated form.
5. Juan José Arreola. Confabulario (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966). Original dates of composition run from 1942 to 1962. All subsequent citations will be from this edition.
6. Xorge del Campo, Narrativa joven. p. 196.
7. See Margaret L. Mason and Julan M. Washburn, «The Bestiary in Contemporary Spanish-American Literature», Revista de estudios hispánicos. VIIL, II (May 1974), pp. 189-209.
8. The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts. ed. T. H. White (New York: Putnam, 1960). pp. 246-47.
9. Ellen Douglass Leyburn, «Animal Stories». Modern Satire, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, 1962), p. 215.
10. The first page of «Zoológico fantástico» is an illustration of a fenced enclosure-a visual preview of the cage imagery to follow.
11. White, p. 36.
12. Florence McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries. rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1962), p. 88.
13. Arreola also attests to spiritual bankruptcy in «Homenaje a Remedios Varo» which parodies the legend of' Saint George to discredit chivalresque tradition. He employs the archetypical triangle but inverts the roles converting the knight into the villain-dragon. Given the apocryphal nature of the legend, the homage conjectures that the model of human conduct is nefarious rather than heroic.
14. Robert C. Elliott. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 1970). p. 9. The Golden Age offers a divine contrast to the zoo. In illo tempore for Arreola centers on the Platonic hermaphrodite and the prehistoric matriarchate («Eva». «Tú y yo». «Homenaje a Johan Jacobi Bachofen»). Avilés F. gives primacy to humanism. Rejecting mimesis, his extinct cultivators of «Las estatuas muertas» venerated man as a living work of art. "Sugerencia para principiar un libro» denounces chauvinism, fanaticism and racism via an aphoristic biography: «Vivió en tiempos muy malos: cuando los hombres estaban divididos por fronteras, idiomas, religiones, por colores» (Hollywood, p. 70). While heralding a New Arcadia, the unwritten novel implies the uncertain realization of the book or the era. In «El camino hacia el yeti» Abominable Snowmen preserve fraternity, community and pacificism by seeking refuge from man in the inhospitable Himalayas.
15). James William Nichols, Satiric Insinuation: A Study of the Tactics of English Indirect Satire». Diss. Univ. of Washington 1962. p. 35.
16. «Retailing Optimism». Time, 24 Feb. 1975. p. 38. Arreola treats a similar case of idolatry and the social decadence it causes in «El prodigioso miligramo».
17. Murray K. Morton. «Satire as Litmus Paper: All the News That's Fit to Imagine». Satire Newsletter. VI, II (Spring 1969). p. 25.
18. Arthur Pollard. Satire (London: Methuen. 1970). p. 22.
19. Ross Larson . «La visión realista de Juan José Arreola». Cuadernos Americanos. 29. No. 171 (July-Aug. 1970). p. 230.
20. Since politics forms the core of the news and Avilés F. is by profession a political scientist, it is not surprising that he camouflages his comments on government and international affairs by injecting them into journalese. The 1969 «Soccer War» between Honduras and El Salvador inspires «Hacia el fin del mundo». Temporal synthesis intensifies the three-day sequence of bulletins narrating the absurd excalation from isolated incidences of violence to world-wide, nuclear conflict. Dictatorship is debunked via clippings in
MOTINES EN LAS CIUDADES.
PRINCIPALMENTE EN LA CAPITAL
CRISIS EN EL GOBIERNO
DEL LICENCIADÍSIMO
TODO RESUELTO. VUELVE LA CALMA.
AUNQUE AUN HAY ALGUNOS
PROBLEMAS
Again, there is a strained incongruity between occasion (telephones) and effect (martial law). In «Fragmento de noticia aparecida en un periódico de un país desaparecido», the cult of the leader paralyses the citizenry: «Únicamente nos queda esperar, resignados, nuestro fin. El cadáver embalsamado del Presidente Vitalicio nos ayudará a aguardarlo tranquilos, sin falsas esperanzas. Esperémoslo, pues, con serenidad; imaginemos obedecer una orden suya. Y con valor demostrémosle que todavía creemos en él ciegamente, tanto o más que cuando estaba entre nosotros...» (Hacia el fin, p. 74). The final ellipsis carries forward the lack of wholeness («fragmento») of the «headline suggesting the successful completion of national Suicide.
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