Capitalist Thresholds: La muerte de Artemio Cruz and the Mapmaking of Modern Mexico

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Carlos Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) delineates a theory of Mexico’s long transition to capitalism. I demonstrate that Fuentes’ novel makes sense of the world as it continually separates the external from the internal, the realm of the social from the realm of the individual, and popular from bourgeois interests. While literary scholarship has often interpreted Artemio Cruz as an emblem of the betrayal of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, I propose to approach the novel’s main character as a personification of capital, a representative of a definite social class, whose life provides a narrative enclosure of Mexico’s peripheral modernization. Throughout the essay, I focus on separation as a spatial code that accounts for the emergence of a new class formation in Mexico in the 1940s and 50 s. I argue that in its spatial integrations, La muerte de Artemio Cruz formalizes the obstacles presented by economic dependency to the expansion of a national bourgeois order.

Keywords:

• Carlos Fuentes
• La muerte de Artemio Cruz
• transition
• Mexico
• modernization
• dependent capitalism

Acknowledgements

Portions of this essay were presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s annual convention, the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual meeting, The Spatial Imagination in the Humanities virtual conference sponsored by the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas State University, and the Marxist Literary Group’s Institute on Culture and Society. I am thankful to everyone involved in the organization of these events and to Ericka Beckman, Jorge Téllez, Emilio Sauri, and Tavid Mulder for their generous feedback at different stages of the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 All quotes from Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962.

2 The novel, dedicated to Charles Wright Mills, was written, at least in part, in Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and is dated in Havana, 1960, and Mexico, 1961. See Fiddian 116; Schiller 102; García-Caro 89.

3 Following Marini (1994), I use the term developmentalism to refer to the ideology of the Latin American industrial bourgeoisie.

4 For an overview of the theme of the double see Ruisánchez, Historias que regresan, 2012.

5 Despite the controversies around the use of the term (see Rutherford and Olea Franco), the Novel of the Revolution remains the preeminent literary vehicle for the institutionalization of the social order that emerged from the Mexican Revolution. This corpus came to fruition at the same time Mexico was moving toward the industrial pattern of capital reproduction that undergirded the popular stance of the Mexican state in the 1930s and 40s. In this context, the uses and abuses of the Novel of the Revolution became entangled with the struggle over the centralization and corporatization of the Mexican state.

6 “Structure,” notes Gyurko, “is all-important in La muerte de Artemio Cruz … here the structure is visible on the surface, like a literary exoskeleton, at times even like a straightjacket over the narrative. Structure is not merely the vehicle for portraying Cruz’s character, it is the character of the protagonist” (“Structure” 30). Gerald Martin clear-sightedly established that “[n]ever was a character more explicitly judged, and yet rarely was the evidence more obviously ‘fixed’” (211-2). Jorge Volpi, analyzing Fuentes’ style in reference to Cambio de piel (1967) notes that Fuentes “accede a una especie de totalitarismo narrativo: nada se deja al azar, el autor controla, sin tregua y hasta el final, las vidas de sus criaturas” (73).

7 I borrow the formulation of a dialectics of enclosure and openness from Hartoonian who, in a very different context, uses it to describe Mies van der Rohe’s glass architecture (48).

8 In Fiddian’s opinion, the scene depicting the 1955 New Year’s Eve is “Fuentes’s most pungent satire of the mental set of the Mexican bourgeoisie … This grotesque tableau, worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, portrays the collective greed, pettiness, vanity and mauvaise foi of those whom in another context the author deprecatingly calls ‘los de arriba’” (108).

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Pavel Andrade

Pavel Andrade is Visiting Assistant Professor of Mexican/Latinx Literature at the University of Cincinnati. His research and teaching focus on Mexican literary and cultural studies, modern and contemporary Latin American literature, critical theory, and geocrticism. His current research project examines how the Mexican modernist novel gives spatial form to Mexico’s uneven transition from state-led industrialization toward a new export-oriented pattern of capital accumulation. His broader research interests include urban studies, border and migration studies, and the novel’s countertopographical imagination.