The new narrative of Mexico

In this book Kathy Taylor examines four novels by contemporary Mexican writers in the context of a theoretical discussion of the writing of both historical and fictional narrative.

Latin American narrative was inaugurated with the imaginative creation of the "New World" as seen through European eyes, stories born of the inseparable embrace of history and fiction. Contemporary Mexican writers have reclaimed this tradition while experimenting with new narrative forms and the problematics of writing itself.

As one Mexican writer put it, "Novels have become problems." Not only do their novels function as testimonials to socio-historical realities, but the problems of writing and criticism of the genre are incorporated as central themes of the works themselves.

In Mexico, where the burdens of the past seem to dominate the present to the point of obsession, the writing of a story becomes for many writers a question of how to write history. While the writing and rewriting of history is a recurrent theme of these narratives (which cannot easily be defined as novels), the texts themselves contain the (hi)stories of their own creation.

The reader of these texts is placed in a role reminiscent of that of the historian, whose task it is to reconstruct a story from fragments of other texts. Thus, both writer and reader become involved in the creation and recreation of art with its new visions and different versions of an historical reality

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The works chosen for study here represent very different approaches to this common trend in contemporary Mexican writing. The documentary "socio-literature" of Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) contrasts with the fictionalized testimonies in Elena Garro's Testimonios sobre Mariana (1980). Jose Emilio Pacheco's Moriras lejos (1967) involves complex forms of fiction and allegory while Federico Campbell's Pretexta (1979) is a textual maze of authorial masks and layers of fiction.

While analyzing these novels and the stories they tell, this book raises questions such as: What is history? What is the relationship between the histories we write and the stories we invent? How does the historian/writer become part of the story

Thus, the common theme of the writing of narrative - narrative as history, and narrative as fiction - is threaded throughout these diverse works. While reflecting the reality of the postmodern world in which it is produced, this writing reveals with its internal mirrors the premises and structures with which we interpret and "invent" our surrounding reality.

It also points to the past as something that cannot be changed, but must continually be rediscovered if we are to understand who we are and might become. Invention and discovery, remembering and rewriting; that's how the story begins