Techinlogy Mas Media Totaliti Llarull

TECHNOLOGY, MASS-MEDIA, AND THE LEGACY OF THE MODERN LATIN AMERICAN
NOVEL: RODRIGO FRESÁN'S "MANTRA"

Author(s): Gustavo Llarull
Source: Chasqui, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Mayo 2011), pp. 48-65
Published by: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana
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TECHNOLOGY, MASS-MEDIA, AND THE
LEGACY OF THE MODERN LATIN
AMERICAN NOVEL: RODRIGO FRESÁN'S
MANTRA
Gustavo Llarull
Cornell University
Since its publication in 2001, the novel Mantra , by Argentine Rodrigo Fresán, has elicited critical
interest.1 However, critics have either focused on very interesting but narrow aspects of the novel
(Candía; Gras Mirabet; Musset; Navarrete González), or placed it in the context of the corpus of
Fresán's work with the intention of reaching a global view of his literary production (Hidalgo; Kurlat
Ares).2 While very productive, these two approaches cannot, in virtue of their nature, examine
Mantra both in detail and as a whole. One notable exception is Paz Soldán 's comprehensive study,
published in this very journal, in which the novelist and critic offers an indispensable analysis of the
proliferation of technology and mass-media in Mantra. It is against the backdrop of Paz Soldán's
analysis, then, that this article will unfold.3
In the last decade of the twentieth century, Fresán and Paz Soldán were members of the McOndo
group, which was related, despite certain differences in their aesthetic projects, to the Crack group.
(See Williams, ch. 1 0 and 1 3, for the overlapping agendas of the two groups. For their differences, see
Carrion, which features an illuminating discussion between Paz Soldán and Volpi). Until a few years
ago,4 the writers of these groups emphasized the need to break with the tradition of the modern Latin
}I would like to thank Raymond L. Williams, two anonymous reviewers, and the Editor for their
helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. Some passages appeared previously in Llarull,
"The Long and Winding Road."
2 Although Kurlat Ares doesn't discuss Mantra explicitly, her treatment of Fresán's work is rele-
vant to this novel.
' My disagreement with Paz Soldán will appear more pronounced than it really is. For the purposes
of this article, however, I find it more fruitful to emphasize our disagreements and use Paz Soldán's
take on them as a conceptual frame for discussion, rather than cite, paraphrase, and repeat the points
on which we agree. Still, these points are numerous, and I cannot but reiterate that his incisive article
is indispensable for an understanding of Mantra .
In 2004, Volpi refrained the debate about the Crack and McOndo groups in terms of a discussion
of (and a tension between) "localism" and "cosmopolitanism." However, initially both groups shared
the aim to reject not only magical realism, but (especially in the case of McOndo) the literary pro-
cedures of the modern Latin American novel in toto (Fuguet and Gómez; Volpi et al). Volpi has
48
Gustavo Llarull 49
American novel (i.e., roughly, the arc that goes from Miguel Angel Asturias 's El señor Presidente
[1946] to the novels of the Boom). This break involves - especially in the case of McCondo - the
rejection of "totalizing" novelistic projects, as well as an interesting, provocative defense of the use of
mass-media and technology in the very texture of fiction (Fuguet and Gómez; Volpi et al).
This context of production has influenced the critical reception of Mantra , resulting in a noti-
ceable emphasis on technology and mass-media, and a correlative neglect of modern procedures at
work in Fresán's novel. Furthermore, the attention Mantra has received in some mass-mediatic ve-
nues seems to mirror this emphasis. (The French e-magazine Fluctuât , for instance, has put Mantra
among the fifteen best books published in the first decade of the twenty-first century).5
Instead, I aim to defend the claim that Mantra presents an original development of procedures
born in the modern novel, blended with the elements of technology and mass-media discussed by
most critics. This development of the modern novel doesn't amount to the orthodox application of its
procedures (though this does happen at times). Rather, it appeals to the exacerbation or "exaspera-
tion" (i.e., the transformation by exaggerating certain features of the exasperated object [Deleuze and
Guattari]) of the tendencies of the modern novel.
The motivation for this approach doesn't lie in any sort of nostalgia for the modern novel, but in
the desire to offer a reading that hopefully illuminates unexplored aspects of Fresán's groundbreaking
novel. In this connection, Jorge Volpi has complained about "errores de óptica" in the assessment of
the McOndo and Crack writers (37; see n. 4). This article attempts to correct another optical error:
that which makes some readers and critics regard Mantra primarily in terms of the presentation of a
consciousness fragmented by technology and mass-media, while neglecting elements that signal a
continuity with, as well as a development from, the modern Latin American novel. To continue with
Volpi's analogy, consider this change of approach as an optical phenomenon: if one adjusts the lens,
one will see a richer structure, richer themes, and richer allusions, which show interesting connections
with (and original reappropriations of) the modern Latin American novel. This focal adjustment by
no means diminishes the originality of Fresán's work. In fact, there is no hyperbole in saying that
Mantra opens new possibilities for the contemporary Latin American novel.
The main claims I shall defend in this article, then, are the following. First, rather than a repla-
cement or "displacement" "desplazamiento" (Paz Soldán 101) of modern literary procedures by
technology and mass-media, Mantra presents a blend of both "worlds." Second, Mantra develops
and pushes the modern project in a new attempt to reframe and question, but not abandon, the aim to
reach totality. It is, I shall argue in a Benjaminean spirit, a gesture towards totality via the fragmentary,
but not a renouncement of the totalizing attempt.
In the first section, I outline the structure of Mantra , some of its interpretive challenges, and Paz
Soldán's reading of them. In the second one, I present an alternative reading of Mantra , which in-
volves a defense of the claim that in Fresán's novel there is an original blend of modem procedures
and mass-media procedures. Also, I present a heuristic model for understanding the apparently
chaotic succession of scenes that seems to threaten the very intelligibility of Mantra , which has led
even sympathetic interpreters to call it "un délire au sens les plus technique et les plus trivial du
terme" (Pauls 7). In the third and last section, building on what has been argued previously, I discuss
the tension between fragmentation and totality in Mantra , concluding that, rather than a rejection of
tempered his position - and he explicitly refers to other writers of the original Crack and McCondo
groups, too - by claiming that rejecting magical realism doesn Ì entail rejecting the Boom ("modelo
supremo del escritor 'auténticamente latinoamericano'," he says with irony) but " recuperar su in-
tención original" (40). Fresán refers playfully to these issues in 312.
5 Mantra also won the Prix Technikart - awarded by the homonymous French magazine - for best
foreign novel published in France in 2006.
50 Technology, Mass-Media, and the Legacy of the Modem Latin American Novel
totalizing aims, there is in Fresán 's work a Benjaminian gesture at totality, both at the individual and
the collective levels.
The Structure of Mantra and Some Interpretive Challenges
a) The Structure of Mantra. Fresán's novel is divided in three parts. In the First Part ("El amigo
mexicano"), the narrator - an unnamed Argentine male in his late thirties or early forties - tries to
make sense of his life using an old school photograph as a starting point. In the photo, his childhood
friend Martin Mantra is missing. The narrator is fascinated with Mantra, and thinks that understan-
ding him will be the key to understanding himself. Ironically, his attempts at self-understanding are
threatened by an illness: a tumor gradually destroys all his memories but the memory of the letter
"X."
From the beginning, then, hyperbole, irony, and parody set the tone of the whole novel: note the
alliterative name of the character that gives the novel its title. Note, too, the parody of a typical "pa-
ge-turner" beginning: when the narrator recalls first meeting Mr. Mantra, he says, "yo conocí a Martin
Mantra o, mejor dicho, Martín Mantra me conoció a mí, me tendió su mano, y en su mano había un
revolver" (17). Thus ends Chapter One. How can one not turn the page and see what will happen?
However, the next page frustrates the reader's expectations. Instead of the continuation of the
story, one finds a meta-fictional reflection on the art of storytelling (loosely triggered by the narrator's
upcoming impossibility of telling any more stories, given his illness). And then again, once the reader
is immersed in the narrator's train of thought, the reflection is interrupted and rejected. But before, the
reader is left with one of the meta-fictional leitmotifs of the novel: the idea that one should tell a story
from the beginning, "desde su propio Big Bang," and fill it as one fills a swimming-pool (18). This
image, which initially seems capricious, proves to be very apposite in light of the reformulations (and
developments) of the reflections presented in these meandering, essayistic passages (Fresán 1 8-23).
In fact, the image of the narrative as a pool is itself "filled," completed, and developed further in
subsequent references to the pool found throughout the novel (Navarrete González). Put differently,
an idea how to tell a story is developed via the development of an image a swimming-pool
being filled - which will be iterated, with increasing sophistication, throughout the novel. But the
reflection is again interrupted: "No tengo tanto tiempo ni conocimientos [n.b.: to go on with this
reflection or to tell the story in that way]" ["I don't have that much time or that much knowledge [n.b.:
to go on with this reflection or to tell the story in that way]" (Fresán 18).
One may think that behind these "tricks," that is, once one adjusts to the alternation between
fictional and meta-fictional passages, the plot is, after all, fairly straightforward: a particular child-
hood memory- the memory of Martin Mantra -triggering the narrative of a life. This appearance
and expectation of simplicity will, again, be frustrated in ways discussed below.
The Second Part of Mantra is the narrative of a dead man, which takes place as he watches his
whole life on TV- he is actually chained to a TV set- in a limbo or Purgatory of sorts. When he was
alive, this narrator was romantically involved with Maria-Marie, a cousin of Martin Mantra. Thus, he
offers a new perspective on the life of Mantra and his family. Formally, the Second Part has the
structure of a dictionary or an encyclopedia, with entries disposed in alphabetical order. The reader
can follow that order, or access any entry at will, a device that resembles the structure of Julio
Cortázar 's 1962 novel Rayuela.
In the Third Part, an android (or a conscious computer of sorts) is searching for its creator,
"Mantrax," in the ruins of Mexico City. This Third Part and segments of the previous one are, as
Mario Lillo points out, a parody of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955). Also, the last 40 pages of the
novel (which comprise the last pages of the Second Part and the whole of the Third Part) can be read
as containing three "false endings."6 First, the last pages of the Second Part (507-09) seem to be the
Gustavo Llarull 5 1
typical ending of a modern novel, in which all its themes are tightly knit, thus enabling the reader to
reach a sense of closure. However, this "ending" is succeeded by the Third Part, which presents a
rather unsettling, anti -climactic scene of destruction. Lastly, after the Third Part, there is a list of
acknowledgements in a section called "Bajo la máscara." While the author seems to be presenting a
non-fictional, neutral, conventional list of acknowledgments, the list ends with Ana, the author's
"real" Mexican friend (i.e., his wife), which may be construed as an invitation to reread the novel, for
the First Part is precisely called "The Mexican Friend." This interpretation is buttressed upon re-
reading the "Advertencia" that precedes the First Part, in which there is a reference to the circular
time of the Aztecs.
Mantra has, then, something of a circular ending. This circularity evokes the circular and cen-
tripetal impetus of modern Latin American novels such as the already mentioned Rayuela , as well as
García Márquez 's Cien años de soledad (1967), whose endings "force" us to read and reread the
novels. Likewise, Mantra plays with the idea of trapping the reader in the text, thus inviting the
comparison of the reader with the narrator of the Second Part, chained to a TV set: the narrator is
doomed to watch his own life on TV, ad infinitum ; the reader, in turn, if she is to follow the circular
indications of the text, is doomed to read and reread Fresán's novel ad infinitum.
b) Interpretive Challenges. Paz Soldán's Reading of Mantra. The protagonists of Mantra
want to reach some form of self-understanding: the narrator of the First Part wants to re-tell his life
story and assess it, prompted by his incoming loss of memory. The narrator of the Second Part wat-
ches his life on TV and re-tells it and reinterprets it with the aid of those images. Finally, Martin
Mantra is obsessed with the idea of reaching an understanding of himself, of his family, of his family
history, and of History- -emphatically capitalized - by appeal to a filmic narrative or "extraño arte-
facto narrativo," as the narrator of the First Part calls it (75). In the more essayistic passages of the
novel, Martin Mantra explains his "theory" In the more conventionally narrative ones, the reader sees
him trying to put that theory into practice, by - among other things - attaching a camera to his head
and filming every moment of his life. The result, "Mundo Mantra," should be a "film total" (67).
The plot gradually becomes more complex because of the constant barrage of tidbits of infor-
mation that may or may not be relevant, and which are the result of the hyperbolic exposure of the
narrators to mass-media. This exposure threatens the characters' search for intelligibility. In this
regard, Mantra doesn't merely represent or comment on the confusion produced by the barrage of
information; it is a presentation of such barrage: the texture of the novel is saturated with images
pertaining to technology and mass-media - from pop songs to telenovelas (soap-operas) to TV shows
and films. In other words, the overwhelming experience of reading Mantra is an intentional effect of
the novel. (In this sense, it retains something of the power of revulsion of the early Dadaist works).
Mantra offers, as Paz Soldán notes, "una reflexión sobre el problema... de la información y su poder
viral, su tendencia a la más caótica proliferación" (99), but also a presentation of its effects, which the
reader experiences, vicariously, through reading the novel.
Other factors that contribute to the increasing difficulty in following the plot and the characters
are the aforementioned illness of the narrator of the First Part (i.e., his gradually deteriorating me-
mory, which leads him to confuse his own words and his own past life with those of Martin Mantra ),
and the conflation of past, present and future. In the hyperbolic world of the novel, everybody expe-
6"En mi estilo," Fresán has said, "reconozco. . . la influencia de la música. . . Yo escribo de un modo
muy parecido al sistema de composición de Los Beatles" (Cristofí). The notion of a "false ending,"
then, is arguably an influence of Beatle songs like "Rain" (1966), "Strawberry Fields" (1966), and
"Heiter Skelter" (1968), all of which seem to end in a last chord, which is succeeded by a coda that
replays the theme (or themes) of the song.
7 An analogous confusion occurs in "El inmortal" (1949), by Jorge Luis Borges. Shortly it will be
shown that this reference to Borges is not gratuitous.
riences this conflation due to the velocity and sophistication of technological progress. (Kurlat Ares
argues that this conflation is also a feature of Fresán's earlier fiction).
In this regard, following John Johnston, Paz Soldán has called Mantra a novel of information
multiplicity (100). These novels appeal to new formal structures in which the most heterogeneous
sources of information meet "para dar cuenta de las nuevas formas de subjetividad que emergen en
esta ecología mediático-tecnológica" (100). In Mantra in particular, this view takes the form of '4ma
relación crucial entre el poder viral de la información, la transformación del sujeto, y el desarrollo del
capitalismo tardío" (99). However, there is no consensus as to what, exactly, this relationship amounts
to, and - more important for the purposes of this article - what transformations the subject under-
goes. Paz Soldán's own take on the issue could be captured in two main claims. First, Mantra presents
"ese crítico momento en que la psiquis del individuo se convierte en apenas un canal a través del cual
fluye la información mediatizada" (99-100). Second, given the excess of information, Mantra cannot
but renounce the modem aim to create a kind of "total novel," paradigmatic examples of which are
the fictional works of Latin American Boom writers such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and
Mario Vargas Llosa (Paz Soldán 1 02).
Certainly, Mantra presents challenges to the very possibility of reaching any kind of
self-understanding - the individual psyche is indeed in jeopardy. As said earlier, in the First Part the
protagonist's attempts to make sense of his life are threatened by an illness that affects his memory. In
the Second Part, the threat seems to be the opposite: the excess of information and memories is what
makes the project of reaching a "holistic" self-understanding a daunting task recall that the narrator
of the Second Part is forced to watch images of his life constantly. In tum, Martín Mantra's narrative
project to record every single instance of his existence has problems of its own, which will be dis-
cussed shortly Finally, in the apocalyptic scenario of the Third Part there seems to be no room for
such projects.
Paz Soldán construes these problems as evidence for the two aforementioned claims (i.e., that in
Mantra the psyche merely channels media information, and that Mantra renounces the modem aim to
give expression to totality). He adds that the literary has been displaced by mass-media, and that
Fresán's novel shows the quasi-impossibility of achieving a narrative self-understanding, for Mantra
"captura nítidamente cómo el sujeto contemporáneo accede a su propia experiencia de manera
fragmentaria... el individuo sólo puede empezar a comprenderse a sí mismo a partir de un análisis de
su relación con el televisor" (1 05).
These claims are interrelated. If in Mantra the psyche merely channels media information, and
the subject has access to her own existence only in a fragmentary manner, then the attempts to achieve
some form of totality - either in the form of a narrative self-understanding or in the form of a so-
cio-historical, encompassing narrative- are doomed. Finally, if the psyche merely ("apenas," says
Paz Soldán) channels media information, it is plausible to think that the literary has been replaced or
displaced by mass-media. In the next section, these claims will be qualified.
An Alternative View. Mantra vis-à-vis the Modern Novel
a) Modern Literary Procedures and Mass-Media in Mantra: Substitution or Blend? It is

undeniable that technology and mass-media have become unavoidable components of contemporary
life in the Western world. Buenos Aires and Mexico City, the two main locations where the action of
Mantra takes place, are no exception. Technology and mass-media, therefore, are an intrinsic part of
the narratives and narrative self-conceptions of the contemporary subject- and of the characters of
Mantra as well.
In Fresán's novel, this integration of technology and mass-media into the language of
self-description takes up a substantial form. It is not just another case of "bridge texts" between
modernism and postmodernism (McCracken). In Mantra, not only do characters model their lives, or
seek understanding of their lives, through the lens of technology and mass-media (i.e., by using
Gustavo Llarull 53
technology and mass-media as heuristic devices), but technology and mass-media also shape the very
language and metaphors that the characters use to define and describe themselves. The narrator of the
Second Part describes the effect of the excess of information on people as "una ráfaga de palabras
como salidas de una feliz ametralladora caliente" (235), an image almost directly picked up from
John Lennon' s Beatle song "Happiness is a Warm Gun" ( White Album , 1968).8 Intertextuality now
includes pop songs. In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American novelists started to incorporate pop
songs into the discourse of their characters. However, the lyrics were cited by the characters, not
directly inserted in the very texture of the novel and the very speech of the characters.
Memory, in turn, is compared to those musical shows in which singers merely pretend to sing
while a recording is broadcasted ("lip-syncing"):
La memoria es el playback de nuestra vida [n.b., "playback" is Argentinean ver-
nacular for "lip-singing"] y, en ocasiones, nosotros no hacemos otra cosa que mover
los labios sin emitir sonido alguno, porque es nuestra memoria la que canta a través de
nosotros... la memoria nos ayuda poniendo a girar la música de nuestro pasado,
nuestros Greatest Hits cada tanto remasterizados, cada tanto incorporando un bonus
track , versiones alternativas de la misma canción de siempre. Hay un momento im-
perceptible pero temible y trascendente en que, pienso, finalmente estamos llenos de
pasado, de memoria, por lo que nuestro presente y lo que nos queda del futuro no es
más que un constante actuar cantar de acuerdo con lo que nos ordena y nos su-
giere todo aquello que tuvo lugar hace tiempo. (Fresán 169-70)
By redescribing the concept of memory, we come to regard it in a different light, noticing aspects or
features of the concept that had not been noticed before, which we can now grasp and utilize. There is
humor in conceiving of human memory as lip-singing, but also, describing the decline of a human life
as the repetition (with slight variations) of the same "song" captures the phenomenon of old age and
senility in a novel and yet precise way. The use of technology and mass-media has, in this context, a
positive effect, in the sense of expanding the subject's lexical and conceptual repertoire.
Even the most intimate images and metaphors - those of traditional themes such as romantic love
and its ineffability are permeated by technology and mass-media. The narrator of the Second Part
says he knew Martin Mantra's cousin had started to love him with the certainty with which "no nos
resistimos a, por ejemplo, lo que nos dicen y nos aseguran que es la imagen del eco del Big Bang
tomada por el satélite Cobe" (174). This is not only an image taken from the new technologies; it is
also an image that captures a paradox shared by both the new technologies and the stereotypically
Western notion of romantic love: the certainty of the feeling , the certainty of the acceptance of what
we are told or shown, and the ¿/«certainty of that which is being told or shown. It is the "feeling" or
impression of certainty, but the knowledge of an unavoidable uncertainty, of an epistemic barrier that
is insurmountable. We do not resist what we are told and assured is the image of the echo of the Big
Bang... or the love for (or of) the person who - we feel - has started to love us. Thus, technology, the
politics of technology, eroticism, the politics of eroticism, and the epistemic limits of these notions,
are concentrated and illuminated in a few lines.
Another example of this productive imagery: the same narrator says that their love "estaba hecho
de iridio, y brillaba en la oscuridad... nos llevábamos a la cama libros científicos, mirábamos las fotos
capturadas por el Hubble del mismo modo en que otros exploran el espacio profundo y lleno de
agujeros negros de los álbumes familiares " (192; emphasis added). The image of "black holes of
family albums" encapsulates a conceptual matrix that displays, among others, the system of memo-
8Fresán started to weave Beatles lyrics into the texture of fiction in his first novel, Esperanto
(1995). For Fresán and The Beatles, see note 6.
ry/oblivion operating in different developmental stages of the subject in capitalistic societies, as well
as the micro-politics and power strands of the family qua socializing system.
In short, communication, memory, and love - among other central features of Western socie-
ties- are often transfigured by (and described in terms of) technology and mass-media. While this
kind of imagery often strengthens and expands the language of self-description, in other instances its
use in the novel seems to suggest a criticism of the complete reduction of the language of
self-description to mass-mediatic and technological imagery, for this reduction seems to lead to an
impoverishment of lexical and conceptual resources.9
In Mantra" s hyperbolic style, at times life doesn't seem amenable to be told as a literary narrative,
but as a TV show, a telenovela , or a film at best. However, as said above, this impression is part of the
novelistic presentation of the effects of technology and mass-media. This presentation is articulated
qua novelistic strategy, in a text that remains, against all odds, a novel - a novel that displays the
attempts of its protagonists to achieve some sort of self-understanding. Put differently, the playful
self-descriptions in terms of technology and mass-media operate within a novel - as a narrative de-
vice of a novel. Even the protagonist of the Second Part, chained to a TV set, is indeed narrating his
life with the aid of the images on TV, but those images do not replace his narration.
Still, the proliferation of this kind of imagery, in which the effects of technology and mass-media
are overwhelming, is what may have led Paz Soldán to affirm that in Mantra "la literatura es un
medio... que ha sido desplazado" (101). Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in Fresán's
novel technology and mass-media are on a par with , but have not replaced (or displaced) literary
models and procedures. Certainly, in the texture of Mantra one finds turns of phrase, allusions, and
intertextual reappropiations that range from TV shows of the Americas (most notably, Mexican soap-
operas, and, among American sources, The Twilight Zone) to films, to pop music - reapproprations of
a vast array of elements pertaining to technology and mass-media. However, one also finds literary
procedures, turns of phrase, allusions, and intertextual reappropiations that pertain to a myriad of
canonical pieces of "high" culture in general and to the modem Latin American novel in particular.
The implicit reader that Mantra postulates is required to have a vast, encyclopedic knowledge of both
"high" and "low" cultural artifacts (Lillo 19).
Interestingly, one finds these two kinds of elements (i.e., "low" mass-media and "high" culture)
going hand in hand, either separately but contiguous to each other, or blended m a syncretism of sorts.
An instance of the first disjunct is Mantra' s presentation of Mexican soap operas, which are linked to
the Expressionistic strands of the twentieth century avant-garde that influenced the modern novel in
both Europe and the Americas, According to Mantra , Mexican telenovelas are exaggerated versions
of reality that are very well-equipped to convey Mexican history and mores. As one of the narrators
puts it, it is impossible to understand Mexican history "a no ser que se la vea y se la lea con los
mismos ojos de un adicto a una de esas alucinógenas telenovelas mexicanas" (304). Paz Soldán aptly
calls these telenovelas "espejo deformante y a la vez fiel" (106). Now, both the narrator's characteri-
zation of telenovelas and Paz Soldán 's very word-choice are almost a definition of the early twentieth
century's Expressionism (De Micheli). Also, they are strikingly similar to the project of Va-
lle-Inclán's dramatic esperpentos , the first of which, in turn, explicitly references the grotesque art of
9Silvia Kurlat Ares notes a similar reduction in Fresán's previous novel, Esperanto (1995). See
Kurlat Ares 224. As for Mantra , an implicit criticism of the (impoverished) language of
self-description when it is completely reduced to the language of technology and mass-media could
be inferred from passages like the following: "Rod Serling [n.b., host of the TV show The Twilight
Zone] como apóstol escritor y productor de nuestras vidas en el horario central de los televisores"
(Fresán 58); or "tal vez los déjà vu sean ... los comerciales de productos que de alguna misteriosa
manera nos incluyen" (233). See also Fresán 216ss.
Gustavo Llarull 55
the black paintings of Goya and the techniques of Expressionism (224-25). It is no coincidence that
Martin Mantra enjoys "esa especial calidad del blanco y negro expresivo y expresionista de las
películas de o con Orson Welles" (24; emphasis added). In a similar fashion, Alan Pauls calls Mantra
"un roman anamorphosique," in reference to anamorphosis, a pictorial technique by which the re-
presented object is violently distorted in order to see it in a different light - or, sometimes, to render it
recognizable only under certain perspectives (10).
In turn, an instance of the second disjunct (i.e., what I called above a syncretism or blend of
"high" and "low" culture) can be found in the recurring joint reference to Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness (1 899) and Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (1 979): "¿Tendrán algo que ver la
figura y la ideología del traficante de marfil y coronel renegado en Vietnam con algo de la cos-
mo-agonia de Martin Mantra...? ... Ya va a conseguir un Marlow/Williard que lo ayude... a contar su
historia" (Fresán 373). 10
This move claims the legitimacy of a canonical literary figure (Joseph Conrad), alongside a
"mass-mediatic" reading of his novella: Coppola's film, in which the rock band The Doors, movie
stars like Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, and the Vietnam War coexist with the enigmatic figure of
Kurtz, played by the iconic Brando. More important for the claim that there is a fusion of literary and
mass-mediatic procedures is the fact that the narrator speaks of "el traficante de marfil y coronel
renegado," thus fusing the Conrad character and the Coppola character into one. Interestingly, the
film itself presents this fusion: Kurtz/Brando reads The Waste Land in the jungle. Although Conrad's
original Kurtz does not (and cannot) read The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot's poem was first published in
1 922; Heart of Darkness, in 1 899), it is worth noting that Eliot considered using a passage from Heart
of Darkness as an epigraph to his poem (Rainley 76). The passage Eliot considered concerns the
possibility of achieving some sort of holistic view of one's life - the kind of view the narrators of the
First and Second Parts of Mantra aim to achieve. It is the famous passage that features Kurtz's last
words, about which Marlow wonders, "Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation,
and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?" (Conrad 69).
One may ask that very same question about Mantra' s narrators. The protagonist of the Second
Part, for instance, dead, watching his life on TV and in so doing fashioning a "final" narrative
self-understanding, has a clear antecedent in Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or at the very least in
Kurtz's deathbed scene.
This image of a dead person (or a person in her deathbed) narrating her life is a modern device
that has been used to reflect, hypothetically, on what form the totality of one's life would take once it
is over. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre's 1948 play, No Exit , in which the characters talk about their lives
once they are dead. Consider, again, the experiment of Pedro Páramo. Consider even a central in-
stance of the modern Latin American novel in general and the Boom in particular: Carlos Fuentes's
1962 La muerte de Artemio Cruz. Almost literally, in Fuentes's novel Cruz is trying to make narrative
sense of his life once it has ended in that limbo of sorts that is his deathbed. It is not outlandish, then,
to think of the narrator of Mantra's Second Part as a successor of Kurtz, Garcin, and Cruz.
In sum, instead of a replacement, displacement, or renouncement of the literary, there is in
Mantra a proliferation of different cultural sources, including the literary alongside (and often blen-
ded with) the more conspicuous mass-media.11 Also, strictly literary procedures occur, at times,
10Perhaps the narrators of Mantra are the Marlow(s) wrho will help Martin Mantra tell his story. It
would be worthwhile - though well beyond the scope of this article - to explore the "literary kinship"
between Marlow and the various narrators of Mantra , as well as the rhetorical operations that all of
them incarnate.
11 Paz Soldán acknowledges that this "desplazamiento" of the literary that he reads in Mantra "no
implica una derrota sino la posibilidad de un reacomodo estratégico: desde los márgenes quizás se
without any reference to technology and mass-media. "Por cada país o ciudad о reino sobre la faz de
este mundo existe, apenas escondido, otro país o ciudad o reino en todos o cada uno de los seres
humanos que los pueblan y los transitan" (Fresán 207). The lyricism of this passage, as well as the
idea it presents, is evocative of typically modern fiction. In the next sub-section, I shall argue that the
modem operation underlying this passage offers an interpretive key that sheds light on Fresán's
novel.
b) Hyperlink or Garden of Forking Paths? Heuristic Models for Understanding Mantra.

Silvia Kurlat Ares has compared the operation of Fresán's texts with that of the internet (221). Along
similar lines, Paz Soldán affirms that in Mantra "los proyectos estéticos del Boom han sido aban-
donados: el modelo ciberespacial del hiperlink está más cerca de Mantra que los autoritarios mapas
de lectura para lectores 'macho' o 'hembra' que planteaba Cortázar" (102). He adds that the proce-
dures and projects of the modem Latin American novel are replaced in Mantra by the cut-up device,
made famous by William Burroughs. To bolster this claim, Paz Soldán refers to the following essa-
yistic passage: "El cut-up como nuevo lenguaje fragmentario, donde las historias empiezan por donde
terminan y no respetan el orden cronológico" (Fresán 230). This operation is related to (though
conceptually independent from) another procedure presented in the same passage, whose aim is to
"someter cada instante al mayor número posible de variaciones, cada una de ellas presentada de un
modo que sea interesante y, al mismo tiempo, justificable" (Fresán 230).
However, these technical procedures are indeed very close to the aesthetic moves of modem
Latin American fiction. In fact, they were championed by one of the "fathers" of modem fiction:
Jorge Luis Borges. The idea of subjecting "every instant to the highest possible number of variations"
is the explicit theme and procedure of the Borgesian short-stories "El aleph" and "El jardín de sen-
deros que se bifurcan," both published in the 1940s, and both precursors of the projects of the modem
Latin American novel (Fuentes; Williams, ch. 6). Fresán himself acknowledges his debt to "El aleph"
in the following passage of Mantra:
Me refiero ahora a esa piscina y a esa chica que contienen a todas las chicas y a todas
las piscinas. Una chica-aleph zambulléndose en una piscina-aleph que conviertan a
esa chica y a esa piscina en las coordenadas desde las que puedan verse todos los
ángulos, sin confusión alguna ni mezclarse, todo lo que ocurrió y va a ocurrir, al
mismo tiempo (428).
Passages like this one, which- let us note in passing- resume the leitmotif of the telling of a story as
the filling of a swimming-pool, suggest that besides appealing to the cyberspace model of the hy-
perlink, one might very well do with the "aleph model" suggested in nuce by Mario Lillo and Caro-
lina Navarrete González.12
Alongside this aleph model, I propose another Borgesian heuristic device: the garden of forking
paths model. "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" and "El aleph" present complementary views, hi
"El aleph," Borges introduces readers to a small, spherical object that enables the person who has it to
see all places at once. In "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan," Borges expands on the Leibnizian
idea of an indefinite number of time-lines and possible worlds.13 In one world, the protagonist kills
pueda tener una mayor libertad creativa y una mejor distancia crítica" (101). However, despite these
partial concessions, it will soon be apparent that his overall interpretation shows, if not a defeat, a
Pyrrhic victory.
Augusto Monterroso argues that the very lineage of the notion of the aleph includes narrative
devices pertaining to indigenous Central American cultures, a fact that would have pleased Martin
Mantra, so proud of his "Mexicanity."
In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), his Theodicy (1710), his Monadology (1714),
and perhaps its clearest presentation in his correspondence with Amauld, Gottfied W. Leibniz
poses the existence of an indefinite number of possible worlds. This world we inhabit is simply the
Gustavo Llarull 57
his enemy; in another one, he is killed by him; in another one, protagonist and nemesis are friends;
and so on. Put differently, "El jardín..." presents alternative futures alternative lives and identi-
ties - for every person, in a web of possibilities that comprise all possible actions of all possible
persons; something like an awe-inspiring enlargement of our imaginative and deliberative capacities.
Now, both in Borges's story and in Fresán's novel, these different possible worlds exist simultane-
ously.
Recall the passage cited at the end of the last sub-section, in which the narrator of the Second Part
says that "por cada país o ciudad о reino sobre la faz de este mundo existe, apenas escondido, otro
país o ciudad o reino en todos o cada uno de los seres humanos que los pueblan y los transitan" (207).
As in "El jardín...," we find a plurality of worlds; as in "El aleph," a discrete portion of space - a
particular space -that contains all spaces. Reasserting this position, later in the novel the same na-
rrator poses the existence of "un infinito número de realidades, mundos paralelos al nuestro que no
podemos ver pero que ahí están" (441).
Besides the formulation of this position in the essayistic passages of the novel, there is a pre-
sentation of various possible worlds - some of them bizarre, but not logically or psychologically
impossible. Thus, the contradictory accounts of some events that one finds in Mantra could be read as
the presentation of these simultaneous "parallel worlds" (Fresán) or "forking paths" (Borges), which,
in turn, offer different possibilities to relíame and redescribe the events in question. Some of these
different accounts are humorous references to historical events: in the First Part there is one version of
Kennedy's assassination; in the Second Part, a completely different one, which verges on delirium:
Martin Mantra's grandfather aiming at, and shooting, and destroying "el cerebro siempre en celo de
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (385). Yet in another version, the assassin is... Jackie Kennedy. Again, we
find a modern procedure - the multiple possibilities of "El jardín de senderos que se bifur-
can" - blended with a mass-mediatic procedure: a black-humored parody of tabloids.
The interpretive challenges oí Mantra and its appearance of confusion are, as anticipated above,
in part due to the fact that the narrators are subjected to a barrage of information tidbits. However,
these interpretive challenges are also related to the project of "parallel worlds" or "forking paths;"
that is, to the presentation of a multiplicity of possible worlds via fragments of different lives, or via
different versions of the same lives ; hence the different accounts of JFK's death. By the same token,
Martin Mantra appears as the idiosyncratic child who desires to make a "total film," but also as an
adult "luchador enmascarado" ("masked wrestler") and as a leader of a social and political move-
ment: his "encarnación politizada y bizarra bajo el nombre de Capitán Godzilla" (Fresán 373). This
multiplicity of "incarnations" or possibilities may be confusing. However, if one abandons the as-
sumption that the novel will present just one "forking path," the appearance of confusion is amelio-
rated, and one is able to start reconstructing the richly layered possibilities of some of the worlds and
some of the characters of Mantra.
On an interview discussing his recent novel, El fondo del cielo (2009), Fresán suggests a similar
approach; his comments may very well apply to Mantra :
Uno [n.b., uno de los dos mundos que se destruyen en la novela] es el planeta extra-
terrestre que se auto-destruye, y el otro es la Tierra, que el libro destruye de varias
maneras posibles. Al final del libro, te das cuenta que está transcurriendo todo al
mismo tiempo , como suspendido en el espacio. La idea de presente, pasado, futuro
one God chose to actualize among all the worlds He beholds in eternity. In С ounterf actuals (1973)
and On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), the American philosopher and logician David Lewis advanced
sophisticated arguments to defend his own version of Leibniz's metaphysical postulate (also related,
as in Leibniz, to a theory of personal identity). Not without disdain for the metaphysician, Martin
Gardner has noted the connection between Lewis's theories and "El jardín de senderos que se bi-
furcan" (Gardner 7). In any case, Leibniz and his theory of possible worlds - as well as his theory of
personal identity - are a frequent presence in Borges's stories and essays.
que puedas ir manejando a lo largo de la novela, queda un poco anulada. (Tocco;

emphasis added)14
Still, Fresán doesn't mention the Borgesian lineage of this procedure. Instead, on the same in-
terview he relates it to a passage from Kurt Vonneguťs 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse Five (Tocco).
This move - aligning his work with modern and postmodem North American fiction - is typical
of Fresán's public pronouncements. Now, while his knowledge of that literary tradition is undeniable
and undeniably vast, it is simply implausible to entertain the idea that Fresán is unaware of the Bor-
gesian roots of his work. Granted, as indicated above, in Mantra there is an acknowledgment of an
"aleph-girl" in an "aleph-pool" (428); there are also references, and more than a single tribute, to
modem Latin American writers and their work. However, the influence of modem Latin American
fiction on Mantra goes beyond the mere reference, homage, parody, or pastiche - or so this article
argues. And yet, other than occasional mentions of Borges, Bioy Casares, and Cortázar, ь Fresán qua
author is reticent or reluctant to discuss the modem Latin American literary grounding of his
work - an attitude that is perhaps a remnant of his more rebellious, irreverent (and, let us not forget,
humorous) McOndo period.16
Now, regardless of the author's opinions about the procedure in question, it must be said that
something very much like this attempt to present different "forking paths" for a same life can be
found in some modem novels, such as Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1965). However, Mantra takes
up this modem procedure - Leibniz, Borges, Vargas Llosa - and exasperates it: the presentation of
these different versions and points of view on the same person (on the same life) are multiplied ad
infinitum , and are colored by the velocity, confusion, and overflow of information typical of a news
report. In this formal sense, Mantra begins where La casa verde ends - and it takes several steps
further. Still, the reference to Vargas Llosa's novel offers an interesting backdrop to assess Fresán's
achievement: paraphrasing Volpi, one could say that Fresán's rejection of magical realism (Cristoff)
is coupled with an attempt to recover (and push forward, and exasperate) the intentions of the Boom
(Volpi 4 1-2).
In sum, adjusting the lens with which we see the world of Mantra , and moving anamorphically,
we can perceive the chaos under a certain perspective - in the light of the model of the garden of
forking paths and gain intelligibility. This procedure doesn't entail a reduction, or a neat corres-
pondence of elements in the manner of an allegory. Mantra admits the heuristic model advanced here,
which, iterated, yields different vistas and perspectives on the various characters and the various
parallel or possible worlds of the novel. But this heuristic device, needless to say, doesn't exhaust the
sense of the novel. When we least expect it, the precarious equilibrium we have reached turns into
chaos again - the possible worlds collapse into each other - and we have to start over, with joy and a
little exasperation.
14This last statement, which refers to the already mentioned conflation of past, present, and future,
is similar to a critical appreciation of Fresán's earlier fiction: "pasado, presente y futuro pertenecen a
una misma categoría perceptual, donde las múltiples conciencias pueden circular atemporalmente"
(Kurlat Ares 222).
15 Al so, occasional lectures, like the one on Borges and Bioy Casares that Fresán gave in Barcelona
in 2004, do not discuss at length the relationship between his work and that of his predecessors.
16Emilse Hidalgo conjectures in this regard that Fresán's reluctance is a result of his writing be-
coming increasingly "hybridized with the symbolic imaginaries of global modernity," which she
links to "the era of global capital," and to a correlative global marketing strategy that eschews na-
tional history and culture. This issue is discussed in the last section of this article, where Hidalgo's
view is contested.
Gustavo Llarull 59
Fragmentation, Totality, and Self-Understanding in Mantra
The models of the aleph and the garden of forking paths are also helpful to discuss the way in
which Mantra deals with the issue of totality. Granted, there is a certain degree of idealization and
perhaps exaggeration in the formulation of such aim: no human perspective, no self-understanding,
no potential variation of one's life-story, no potential variation of individual or collective events in
which we explore a number of "forking paths" (Borges), "parallel worlds" (Fresán) or "possible
worlds" (Leibniz) could ever yield "coordenadas desde las que pueden verse todos los ángulos, sin
confusión alguna ni mezclarse, todo lo que ocurrió y va a ocurrir," as one of the narrators of Mantra
would have it (428). Still, this idealization is not futile. In fact, it is analogous to the ideal construct
presented earlier, when discussing the topic of a person narrating her life from the standpoint of her
finished life.
Now, both the presentation of a narrative from the standpoint of one's finished life and the sug-
gestion of "coordenadas desde las que puedan verse todos los ángulos" point at a tension between the
excess of information, which forces us to deal with the fragmentary (for, how do we deal with "all the
angles"?), and the attempt to reach, somehow, a total view through the fragmentary. This claim holds
both for the attempt to reach totality at the individual level (i.e., as a sort of holistic
self-understanding) and for the more typically modern, and ambitious, attempt to reach a "total"
understanding of a society or a historical period. Although these two levels are more of an analytic
distinction than different, unrelated phenomena -because the individual and collective matrices are
intimately related - they will be discussed separately for the sake of clarity of exposition.
a) Totality and Fragmentation at the Individual Level: As pointed out earlier, Paz Soldán
affirms that in Fresán's novel "la psiquis del individuo se convierte en apenas un canal a través del
cual fluye la información mediatizada" (99-100). Recall, too, that in the Second Part the narrator tries
to make sense of his life by appeal to the narrative-filmic construct that he is watching on a TV set.
Paz Soldán says that this image of the dead narrator "que observa - y de paso comprende - su vida en
una película en la televisión es la metáfora emblemática de Mantra ," but he immediately adds, "pues
captura nítidamente cómo el sujeto contemporáneo accede a su propia existencia de manera frag-
mentaria" (105). The explanatory relation between these two clauses is not entirely clear. From the
hypothetical case of someone watching her life on TV (and in so doing understanding it, as Paz
Soldán himself grants), it doesn't seem to follow that she apprehends her existence in a fragmentary
way. On the contrary, th q prima facie presumption seems to be the opposite: if one watched one's life
on TV as many times as one wished (even in a non-chronological order, as seems to be the case in the
Second Part of Mantra ), one would be able to apprehend and comprehend one's life in its totality, as a
whole. 17 The images on the TV set would provide detailed materials to fashion one's "total"
self-understanding, but these images would not be, in themselves, self-understanding; they would be
just its raw materials. Only with the interpretive activity of the subject would the images begin to
make sense - only then would they even begin to constitute themselves as images.
One may be tempted to object that the very idea of a person making sense of her life only after she
is dead entails the very impossibility of making sense of one's life in that way (because one would
have to be alive to make sense of it). However, as said above, this idea could be construed to convey
simply an idealization - an ideal construct - of what as a matter of fact occurs when one takes up a
17This doesn't mean one would reach a single valid interpretation of such "wholeness." One could
think of a plural, open interpretive model, which would avoid both the risk of "single interpretations"
and the opposite risk of falling into interpretive nihilism.
narrative standpoint (Ricoeur), or, in a more modest sense, when one attempts to view one's life as a
whole. Granted, we cannot literally envision the trajectory of our lives in their entirety but from the
impossible standpoint of a finished life. But this does not mean that making sense of one's life as a
whole is an impossibility. Rather, it means that it is an ever-evolving enterprise that involves projec-
ting oneself into the future and taking the hypothetical standpoint of one's finished life. On an empi-
rical, descriptive level, there is evidence to affirm that, at least in various strata of Western, capitalistic
societies, such standpoint is frequently taken when subjects make decisions of a certain magnitude
(Velleman). On conceptual and normative levels, this view is advocated by various philosophical
projects (neither of which is suspect of anachronistic or naïve metaphysical assumptions) both in
continental philosophy quarters (Heidegger; Gadamer; Ricoeur; Rorty; Sartre) and in analytic phi-
losophy quarters (Fischer; Schetchman; Velleman).18 The fact that the contemporary subject might
have to give up on the hope to achieve a transparent, mirror-like understanding of herself, or a direct,
immediate access to her consciousness - a hope that, after Freud, Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein,
is indeed naïve - doesn't mean, let alone show or prove, that the contemporary subject can "merely"
apprehend herself in a fragmentary manner.
Now, what to say of the possibility of seeing one's life on the screen, be it in the version of Martin
Mantra's "total film," or in that of the narrator of the Second Part? To continue with Borgesian mo-
dels, if "Funes el memorioso" presents a powerful, perfect, and yet formidable personal memory
(formidable, because the very excess of memories overwhelms Funes), Mantra presents the techno-
logically mediated, perfect memory as a desired ideal: "Se nos implantará una minúscula ftlmadora
en nuestras pupilas en el momento mismo de nuestro nacimiento y a partir de entonces registraremos
hasta el mínimo detalle de nuestras existencias" (Fresán 67). The Second Part presents one logical
conclusion of this project: a man watching his life on the screen.
But, doesn't Mantra implicitly reject this attempt at a holistic self-understanding when the na-
rrator of the First Part decides to abandon his efforts to retrieve his memory and gives in to illness, or
when the narrator of the Second Part feels overwhelmed by the images of his life that he is doomed to
watch ad infinitum and ad nauseami Isn't Funes, after all, hidden in the deepest tissues of Mantral
The interpretive schema advocated in this article enables us to respond in the negative. Recall that the
presentation of different possibilities (e.g., being overwhelmed and "lost" by the flood of information;
giving in to amnesia; using the new technologies precisely to fashion a "perfect" memory and to
reach a total self-understanding; etc.) is part of the "game" and invitation of the novel: a search for
variations of our world (Fresán 207, 428, 441) or the exploration of the innumerable "forking paths"
discussed above. Rather than a rejection of totality, then, Mantra offers perspectives on what the
quest for totality would look like and involve in the age of information multiplicity.
This delicate balance between new options and new risks, however, seems to be tilted and re-
solved in the apocalyptic scenario of the Third Part, which might signal the end of all totalizing at-
tempts: the ruins of Mexico City after an earthquake. Paz Soldán construes this episode as the ter-
mination of Martin Mantra's filmic-narrative project: "el ambicioso sueño de Martín Mantra no se
realiza porque ocurre la catástrofe: el terremoto de México de 1985" (104). While not implausible,
this interpretation is wanting. For one thing, nowhere does it say that the "real" 1985 quake is the
cause of this apocalyptic scenario. For another, this interpretation assumes that the events of the Third
18Granted, there are also opponents to these views (e.g., Strawson). The issue cannot be decided
here, but suffice it to say that what these opponents have proven is that these views and phenomena
are not universal (which is obviously true). Their criticism has helped refine the positions in question
(see, e.g., Schetchman's reply to Strawson). Also, it should be said that deconstructive positions
would challenge the very possibility of a narrative project of the kind presented in the body of this
article. See in this regard n. 19.
Gustavo LI arull 61
Part occur in the "real world" of the First Part. Yet, this apocalyptic scenario could be analogous to the
non-realistic world of the Second Part, where dead people watch their lives on TV and JFK is assas-
sinated in diverse ways. The Third Part, then, could be construed in less literal terms (e.g., Alexis
Candía inteiprets it as a symbolic end and a symbolic beginning), and not as necessarily related to
Martin Mantra's "total film" project. This non-literal interpretation is the one favored here, but even if
the more literal reading of Paz Soldán were accepted, one could reply that the android is indeed a
product of Martin Mantra, and that therefore his project is not necessarily terminated.
b) Totality and Fragmentation at the Collective Level: Kurlat Ares claims that fragmentation
is a key feature of Fresán's work (215, 221). Along the same lines, Paz Soldán says that, contra the
"totalizing" impulse of the modern Latin American novel, in Fresán's novel all we have is fragments.
To illustrate this claim, he compares Cortázar 's Rayuela and Mantra : "En Cortázar, la conciencia es
capaz de abarcar la información; en Fresán, la información excede la capacidad de la conciencia de
abarcarla" (100). Now, does it follow from this claim that Fresán's novel abandons the project of the
total novel? It would , provided one accepted the following hidden premise: that in order to write a
total novel, the consciousness of the narrator must encompass every single informational item.
However, Paz Soldán doesn't argue for this premise. He mentions the possibility that totalizing at-
tempts might not need to incorporate every single informational item, but he doesn't explore this
option (104). Instead, he affirms that "el poder viral que tiene la información de reproducirse hace
imposible pensar que el género novelístico sea capaz de plantearse, como quería Vargas Llosa,
abarcar la representación total de una sociedad" (102). Then he makes a further claim, namely, that it
is not the novel, but television, the medium which might attempt to capture totality:
La novela de Fresán renuncia a cualquier intento de abarcar la totalidad, y nos cuenta
una historia acerca de los intentos de abarcar esa totalidad a través de otro medio, el
televisivo. Los intentos modernistas de convertir a la novela en un género capaz de
abarcar el mundo como una vasta enciclopedia han dejado lugar a la narración de la
imposibilidad de abarcarlo, al menos a través del género novelístico... No importa que
la totalidad no se lleve a cabo; importa más que para el medio televisivo esa totalidad
pueda pensarse como ya no puede pensarse a través de la novela. (Paz Soldán 1 03-04)
Though suggestive and provocative, this assessment rests on an unwarranted assumption and an
unwarranted inference; first, on the already discussed assumption that encompassing totality entails
capturing every single informational item; second, on the non sequitur involved in inferring (or
slipping) from the correct claim that in the world of Mantra there is no possible self-understanding
and no plausible totalizing project without the intervention of technology and mass-media, to the
unsubstantiated claim that technology and mass-media in general (and television in particular) are the
only ways of reaching self-understanding and totality.
Now, consider the following: references to the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, and to the Chiapas
movement and its leader, subcomandante Marcos; variegated literary reports of Mexico (from the
letters of conquistador Cortés to Malcom Lowry to William Bourroughs to contemporary Mexican,
American, Argentinean, and European reports of the city); Latin American exiles in France; the af-
termath of Latin American di ctatorships and a grim look on their politics; Latin America's indigenous
past (and present); love and death and friendship and betrayal, among other vicissitudes of life; the
sane and the insane and that which doesn't fall easily under either category; the "establishment" and
the marginal urban spaces and voices; the close, though tense, relationship between the United States
and Mexico, among other events of our "globalized" world. All these features find their natural home
in a "classic" modern Latin American novel - and more so in a Boom novel - and yet they are all part
of Mantra .
Certainly, the way in which these features are organized, arranged (or misarranged, exasperated,
and distorted in anamorphic ways) differs from the way in which a typical modern Latin American
novel would have treated them. Consider, again, La casa verde , or even La muerte de Artemio Cruz ,
vis-à-vis Mantra : the first two novels would look excessively "tidy" and static compared to Fresán's.
They would also look, perhaps, excessively serious. In Fresán's novel, irony is ubiquitous.
The above list of features should also include, in the case of Mantra , elements of technology and
mass-media that were not so salient - nor were disposed in the same fashion or operated in the same
way - in the modern Latin American novel. But then again, to reiterate Volpi's dictum , there is no
difference in purpose: all these novels aim to present a "total" view. Put more precisely, the above
objections to Paz Soldán's position, along with the aforementioned list of features, are at the very
least suggestive that in Mantra there is an aim to reach some form of totality. Granted, a list of fea-
tures is not an argument. It is not conclusive evidence, either; but it is prima facie evidence that shifts
the burden of proof: it is now on those who affirm Mantra gives up on the aim to capture totality to
show that the "incursions" into the above-listed features do not incarnate that aim.
Still, there cannot be a discussion of totality without addressing, if only in rough form, the issue
of the political and historical dimensions of the work or author in question. In the case of Fresán, there
is no critical consensus about the nature of those dimensions. As said earlier (n. 16), Emilse Hidalgo
argues that Fresán 's work shifted from an initial and original approach to history and politics to a
growing "hybridization" that neutralizes or eschews political issues, national history, and culture. On
her view, this neutralization is already operative in Mantra. Instead, Paz Soldán claims that Mantra
suggests "la posibilidad de un reacomodo estratégico: desde los márgenes quizás se pueda tener una
mayor libertad creativa y una mejor distancia crítica" (101). However, his overall view seems to point
at a Pyrrhic victory at most: if the subject is merely a channel through which information flows (Paz
Soldán 99-100), her agency would seem to be greatly diminished, and this diminishment would by
necessity affect the realm of the literary. In turn, Kurlat Ares affirms that in Fresán -in those texts
prior to Mantra , at any rate - History is "una virtualidad (al igual que el propio texto)" (221). Alt-
hough she regards some of his earlier texts as proponents of "una nueva forma de conciencia histó-
rica" (223) and adds that in Fresán's first novel, Esperanto ( 1 995), "la Historia se hace presente como
chispazos... que lo afectan [n.b.: al protagonista] de modo discontinuo, aunque ciertamente brutal"
(225), her overall conclusion is rather grim (though she doesn't judge it as such): in the same novel
there is a "renuncia a la Historia... Quizá, nos dice Esperanto , en efecto la literatura sea un subpro-
ducto con respecto a los medios" (227).
The issue will not be settled here, but it is worth noting that the debate seems to be about the role
and operation (or lack thereof) of political and historical elements - and not about their very exis-
tence. (The list of features presented above, if anything, shows at the very least the presence of those
elements). It is also worth calling attention to an instance - one among many - in which Mantra's
irony is politically charged. Early in the novel, the narrator of the First Part says that his parents had
been members of a "comando guerrillero-intelectual," and that "rara vez estaban en casa porque se la
pasaban bombardeando supermercados capitalistas y redactando curiosos manifiestos en casas de fin
de semana con piscina y asado para todos" (50). The next page contains a description that alludes,
indirectly but palpably, to the Ezeiza massacre (i.e., the shootings and murders at Ezeiza airport upon
Perón 's return to Argentina, in 1973, which signaled the dominion of right-wing Peronist factions).
While the full effect of this description probably depends on certain level of knowledge of the events,
its tone - distant, light, and ironic at the same time - gives it an atrocious flavor.
In sum, while their role and operations are in dispute, the presence of political and historical
elements in Mantra is undeniable, and this presence, again, points at a totalizing aim. Certainly, there
is in Mantra a tension between fragmentation and totality, but this tension could be read as an attempt
to present a total view through fragments; or a total view made of fragments', or, in a Benjaminean
spirit, a collection of fragments that gesture at a totality.
Furthermore, perhaps the differences between totalizing and anti-totalizing interpretations of
Mantra are, at least in part, merely semantic. "Totality," after all, is an equivocal concept. Among
others, T.W Adorno has argued that "totality" and "totalitarianism" are not unrelated concepts
(Adorno, 1 7-50; Jay ch. 8). However, his mistrust of the notion of totality originated in the danger of
premature attempts to reach totality, and not in the thought that the term has an inherently pernicious
Gustavo Llarull 63
connotation. 19 Perhaps it would be better, then, to interpret "totality" along the lines of the
non-reductive holism of Walter Benjamin. In lieu of a concept of totality threatened by the risk of a
premature, forced synthesis, Benjamin proposed the notion of constellation (35, 160, 176), which was
later taken up by Adorno himself (Jay 247-64). Although there is no consensus regarding the impli-
cations of the notion of constellation (Jay 247), one of its more widespread senses refers to an
arrangement of items (usually fragmentary items) irreducible to each other, or to a larger deductive
schema; an arrangement that nevertheless gestures at a reconciliation between Subject and Object,
and, to that extent, an arrangement that gestures at a "totality" or "wholeness" that prefigures a
post-capitalistic state of affairs in which individual differences are not erased, obliterated, or lost in
the totality (Benjamin 35; Jay 251).
This appeal to Benjamin's notion of constellation to argue for a totality made of fragments (or, if
"totality" turns out to be a misnomer, for a constellation of fragments that gestures at some form of
wholeness ), is in part motivated by Mexico City's constellation-like features. The Distrito Federai,
which is as much of a protagonist of Mantra as the characters discussed heretofore, is a city com-
posed of superimposed layers of historically charged spaces. In Mantra , references to these different
layers are abundant. It has been argued, for instance, that part of the general plot and many of the
"stories within stories" found in Fresán's novel follow (and toy with) Aztec codices (Gras Mirabet
83-85). As Roberto Bolaño put it. Mantra oscillates between "el documento antropológico y el delirio
de las madrugadas de una ciudad, el Distrito Federal, que se superpone a otras ciudades de su sub-
suelo como si se tratara de una serpiente que se traga a sí misma." Paz Soldán rightfully reminds us,
however, of the presence of "miradas extranjeras" (107), and poses interesting hypotheses to account
for them. In this context, he appeals to Benjamin, too, but to comment, incisively, on the urban gaze
of one of the narrators of Mantra , which the critic regards as that of a contemporary flaneur - not in
Paris this time, but in Mexico City.20
Significantly, in a chapter entitled "D.F. (Historia)" (236-42), the narrator claims that it is suffi-
cient to click "rewind" to have memory - here equated with History - "played" backwards, an image
that brilliantly blends the idea of the perfect technological memory discussed above, with the pre-
sentation of a backward-marching life story and History: "Veo un agujero cerrándose en la cabeza de
León Trotsky. Veo a Diego Rivera borrar un mural..." (Fresán 238). The wink at works of canonical
modern Latin American fiction- - in this case Alejo Carpentieri "Viaje a la semilla" ( Guerra del
tiempo , 1956) - is clear: in Carpentieri story, we see the "history" of a man "played" (i.e., described,
narrated) backwards, from old age to youth to infancy to the womb; in Fresán's novel, we see the
assassination of Trotsky and Rivera at work on his murales by means of an analogous "reverse"
description.
19The consideration of extreme deconstructive positions is here deliberately omitted, for, on those
views, the very discussion of terms like "totality" would be meaningless, since ontology is reduced to
a kind of "textual monism." That is, if both subjects and texts including those we call "novels" are
solely points of intersection of other texts, the discussion of this article is worthless, or at least mea-
ningless. The rejection of these views will have to remain a presupposition of this article.
20However, with regard to the tension between fragmentation and totality, Paz Soldán interprets
Benjamin as reaffirming "la imposibilidad de los proyectos literarios totalizadores en la escritura
contemporánea" (107), and not as gesturing towards a wholeness or totality. Still, the quotation from
Das Passagen-Werk that Paz Soldán cites seems to suggest the interpretation advanced in the body of
this article: "in the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser
buildings, however well-preserved they are" (Paz Soldán 107). What is that "idea of the plan" about
which the ruins speak impressively but the idea of totality or wholeness?
At the same time, the idea of "rewinding" History and "playing" it backwards makes reference,
again, to a pop procedure: from the mid-sixties onwards, some songs have included segments that are
literally played backwards. To resume a Fresán favorite, the song "Rain" (The Beatles, 1966) has a
false ending after which its theme is repeated in an awkward-sounding way: Lennon sings a melody
that resembles that of the song, and the lyrics are indecipherable gibberish. However, everything
makes sense if the coda is played backwards. Only then does the music sound "right," and only then
do Lennon 's lyrics become intelligible - an operation that resembles the anamorphic devices dis-
cussed earlier.
The possibility of "playing" Mexican history backwards (and stopping at any time, or any space,
or my fragment of time or space) is a paradigmatic example of the reading hypotheses developed in
this article; a paradigmatic example of Mantra's blend of modern literary procedures and
mass-media; of fragmentation and totality. The innovative force and interpretive richness of these
procedures are not the least of Mantra' s merits.
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TECHNOLOGY, MASS-MEDIA, AND THE LEGACY OF THE MODERN LATIN AMERICAN

NOVEL: RODRIGO FRESÁN'S "MANTRA"

The Structure of Mantra and Some Interpretive Challenges

An Alternative View. Mantra vis-à-vis the Modern Novel

a) Modern Literary Procedures and Mass-Media in Mantra: Substitution or Blend? It is

b) Hyperlink or Garden of Forking Paths? Heuristic Models for Understanding Mantra.

que puedas ir manejando a lo largo de la novela, queda un poco anulada. (Tocco;

Fragmentation, Totality, and Self-Understanding in Mantra

Hidalgo, Emilse. "National/Transnational Negotiations: The Renewal of the Cultural Languages in

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