Decolonizing time: The Mexican temporalities of D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Carlos Fuentes

Abstract

A recent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910–1940, highlighted a juxtaposition of past and present that fascinated intellectuals, novelists and artists from around the world. Against this background, this article explores how tensions between what Adam Marrows describes as “the cosmic time of empire” and the more fluid senses of local, historical Mexican time in the modernist novels of D.H. Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent, 1926) and Aldous Huxley (Island, 1962) challenged the prevailing western concept of modernity. Their work deeply affected the next generation of Mexican writers including Carlos Fuentes, whose extensive experimentation with temporal dislocations in novels such as Terra Nostra (1975) incorporates features of utopianism and magical realism – foreshadowed by Huxley and Lawrence – that question the horizons of local and global histories and gesture towards “decolonial options” identified by Walter D. Mignolo as “roads towards the future”.

Keywords:

• Adam Barrows
• Latin American postcolonialism
• magical realism
• modernism
• Leon Underwood
• Walter D. Mignolo

Notes

1. Marianna Torgovnick (1990) analyses the controversial uses of the term “primitive” in cultural anthropology and in modernist texts, including D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.

2. Coronil (2013) incisively surveys Latin America’s marginalization in comprehensive studies of postcolonialism since the 1980s.

3. Fuentes has been criticized for being “insufficiently Mexican” as regards his engagement with Hispanic and global literary traditions, including the western modernism of Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Mann rather than Latin American “Modernismo” of the 1880s and 1890s (van Delden 1998, 4).

4. Mignolo defines the “Western code” as a single “system of knowledge, cast first in theological terms and later on in secular philosophy and sciences” (2011, xiv); an implicit by-product of this, I will argue, is in the application of this knowledge system to the reading of texts which may not sit comfortably inside or outside its frame.

5. See Cuddy-Keane (2008) for an overview of global modernisms.

6. Clark (1964) is a rare exception, asserting that didactic fiction should not be ruled out as an art form.

7. Ganguly (2004) cites Bloch in her account of postcolonial temporality, and Ashcroft (2012) discusses Bloch in terms of postcolonial utopianism.

8. Jamie Jung Min Woo (2009) provides a rare reading of magical realism in Lawrence’s novel.

9. For a utopian reading of Island, see MacDonald (2010).

10. Here the implications of Ashcroft’s (2012) reading of a postcolonial utopianism become apparent for Fuentes’s work, but also for Lawrence and Huxley.