First as Tragedy, Then as Parody? Future Repetitions of National History in José Emilio Pacheco’s ‘La catástrofe’ and Hugo Hiriart’s La destrucción de todas las cosas”
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Alfonso Fierro [1]
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[1] University of California System
University of California System
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, ISSN 0145-8973, Vol. 49, Nº. 2, 2020, págs. 40-56
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
José Emilio Pacheco's short story "La catástrofe" (1984) and Hugo Hiriart's novel La destrucción de todas las cosas (1992) belong within a group of literary texts from the 1980s and 1990s that articulate possible futures where recognizable events and narratives from Mexico's national history are repeated.1 In Pacheco's short story, the American Invasion of 1846-1848 seems to repeat itself, while Hiriart's novel reiterates the history of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlán, this time by aliens conquering an apocalyptic Mexico City. In the following pages, we will argue that both texts employ parody in order to critique the way in which the postrevolutionary state's nationalistic official culture exploited these episodes of national history. By highlighting trauma, violence, and sacrifice, official culture rendered the Spanish Conquest and the American Invasion as crucial episodes of nation formation in a nationalistic narrative that explained the emergence of modern Mexico as the culmination, with the postrevolutionary state, of a tortuous process of political emancipation and national sovereignty. In this sense, these texts may be read as part of a larger critique of nationalism as official culture in the context of Mexico's neoliberal turn after 1982 and the political crisis of the PRI regime by the end of the twentieth century. We are following Roger Bartra's reflection on postrevolutionary official culture as a process of creation and institutional approval of "un conjunto articulado de mitos sobre la identidad del mexicano" (400), a process in which certain artworks like murals and other cultural artifacts such as public monuments or museums played a fundamental role, as we will discuss below.
