Holy Place by Carlos Fuentes

First published:Zona sagrada, 1967 (English translation, 1972)

Type of plot: Mythical journey

Time of work: The early to mid-1960’s

Locale: Mexico City and Madonna dei Monte, Italy

Principal Characters:

• Guillermo Nervo, the protagonist and narrator, the son of a Mexican film star
• Claudia Nervo, his mother, Mexico’s leading screen actress
• Giancarlo, Claudia’s young lover
• Bela, Guillermo’s sirenlike girlfriend

The Novel

As much about myth, literature, and language as it is about worldly existence, Holy Place consists of a series of incompletely connected and suggestive episodes in the troubled life of its narrator, Guillermo Nervo. Nicknamed “Guillermito” (the diminutive shows endearment but also condescension), or simply “Mito” (Spanish for “myth”), Nervo unfolds as a parasitic decadent, a Baudelairian dandy totally dependent on and infatuated with his castrating mother, the protean film star Claudia. Guillermo moves from idolizing her and aspiring to be her lover to trying to arouse her jealously by taking Bela as a lover. A measure of his failure emerges when, after losing Claudia to his rival Giancarlo, he resorts to transvestitism in an attempt to possess his mother by becoming her. In the final chapter, he is transformed into a dog and must watch his maid and her lover desecrate his apartment, a literalizing of his neurotically servile role and an unequivocal announcement of the provisional completion of his fall. “Happily Ever After,” as the opening tableau is titled, thus proves to be a doubly misleading indicator, for it both appears out of its conventional place and evokes the contrary of the novel’s eventual outcome.

The Characters

Concerned as it is with the eternal repetition and transformation of mythical archetypes through the telling of tales, Holy Place offers a little in the way of traditional, mimetic characterization. As Guillermo narrates, his narcissistic and Oedipal complexes are so much in the foreground that one can grant little credence to his portrayal of others. Both secondary characters, Bela and Giancarlo, are patent reductions, she the stereotype of the opportunistic temptress and he of the dark Latin lover. Whether Guillermo sees them as such or wants his reader or listener to think so is never clarified. Although treated at much greater length, moreover, Claudia, too, is nothing more than a glossy veneer. Guillermo tries to read depth and substance into her masks, but to judge by her reported words and actions, she has only the depth of a celluloid image. The aging but still attractive star is more interested in advancing her career and tasting the spoils of her success than in understanding her obviously disturbed son. She is a myth in the sense of commercial media hype. Perhaps her perceived hollowness resides in the fact that, despite her fame as an actress (and despite her incessant role-playing), she is never shown acting professionally. Furthermore, even though Guillermo’s demands are unreasonable and even impossible to meet, she proves to be no more adept as a mother than as an actress.

Only Guillermo’s desultory and sporadic monologue remains, then, as an object of possible psychoanalytic study. Yet his contrived self-portrayal as a modern, twisted Telemachus and his bizarre final transformation into a canine endanger even the serious application of that approach. His fetishes and obsessions draw the reader’s attention, to be sure, but psychoanalysis should excavate the unconscious, and Guillermo’s desires come across as already considerably intellectualized. Furthermore, and still more distracting, his status as an essentially cultural and specifically linguistic construct never fully disappears from view. He is to an undetermined extent the Mexican embodiment of Telemachus; Giancarlo is not only his rival but also Telegonus, his double who courts Penelope; Claudia is not only his mother but also Circe, Penelope’s mirror image and Ulysses’ consort; Ulysses is out of the picture, because the archetypal Mexican father is either unknown or absent; Bela has no direct classical antecedent but functions as her own double, a grotesquely painted mask that represents the very principle of masking. Amid all this duplicity the ultimate nature of Guillermo’s identity (or identities) must remain a deliberately open question. Characterization is treated as a question of style; it is a dialogue between a modern text and its forebears. Consequently, the critical consensus with respect to his highly self-conscious and elusive postmodern narrative is that its real protagonist is the very process of change undergone by all its key elements.

Critical Context

Since Fuentes is so prolific, several of his shorter works, such as Las buenas conciencias (1959; The Good Conscience, 1961) and Cumpleaños (1970; birthday), are often overshadowed. Perhaps because it was first published the same year as his vaster and more baroque Cambio de piel (1967; A Change of Skin, 1968) and lacks the compelling combination of epic sweep and psychological introspection of La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964) or the monumental historical scope of Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976), Holy Place has received relatively little critical attention. It is, nevertheless, a solidly representative item in the Fuentes canon. In consonance with his fellow countryman Octavio Paz’s landmark volume of essays El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961), Fuentes continues to probe the Mexican national psyche. The possibility of temporal models beyond that of the simple line, and the pervasive presence of ancient indigenous beliefs and structures in a counterfeit of contemporary Western society, are two more of his most characteristic themes. Noteworthy, too, in Holy Place is the introduction of figures and attitudes of contemporary mass culture, especially film, an enduring motif which the author takes up also in A Change of Skin and again in his later novel La cabeza de la hidra (1978; The Hydra Head, 1978) and in the drama Orquídeas a la luz de la luna (1982; Orchids in the Moonlight, 1982). Audacious formal experimentation, such as the use of the second-person narrative point of view, moreover, locates him squarely among the foremost practitioners of the “New Spanish-American Novel.” Following the lead of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, such writers as Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Donoso, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa undertook in the 1960’s a general revamping of a narrative that was formerly rural in setting, naturalistic in technique, and positivistic in outlook. Working independently but not at cross-purposes, these authors of the Latin American “boom” have shown in varying degrees that play and politics, aesthetics and commitment, form and theme in literature are in no way mutually exclusive.

Fuentes is often accused of excessive erudition and of using his fictions to illustrate esoteric theories rather than to tell a story spontaneously reflective of direct experience. Fuentes himself has offered some of the most convincing responses to such criticism in his compilations of essays La nueva novela hispano-americana (1969; the new Spanish-American novel), Casa con dos puertas (1970; house with two doors), and Tiempo mexicano (1971; Mexican time). Availing himself of knowledge in the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, Fuentes expounds on the authentically baroque character of Latin American reality. Both socialist realism and bourgeois realism, he states, impoverish existence and literature. His writing attempts to restore a lost completeness to the way we conceive of ourselves and the world. By avoiding simplistic and foolishly optimistic notions of society, history, the mind, and its creations, Fuentes aims to project a totalizing and therefore truer image of contemporary mankind. Much to his credit, he does not avoid the most difficult global questions, but tackles them with unrelenting energy, lucidity, and responsibility. In the Latin American tradition it is not unusual to combine the roles of author, critic, and statesman (Fuentes has served as the Mexican ambassador to France, among other positions) in one multifaceted individual. What is rare is to find someone like Fuentes who excels in all these areas. Whereas some readers in the United States have found his occasional grandiloquence and solemnity alien to their tastes, his popularity among Latin Americans, for whom he speaks, and the respect he commands among intellectuals in the Americas and Europe attest the validity of his vision.

Bibliography

Duran, Victor Manuel. A Marxist Reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Puig. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. An interesting study comparing the politics in the writings of these three important Latin American authors. Many of Fuentes’s works are examined in detail.

Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. A solid overview of Fuentes’s work from a postmodernist point of view. Several individual works are discussed, focusing on the issues of identity, national and narrative control, and reconsiderations of the past.

Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Although Ibsen does not discuss Holy Place, she offers valuable insight into the problem of communication, which remains one of the central preoccupations throughout the work of Fuentes. Her analysis focuses on the means of textualization by which Fuentes activates his reader and how this coincides with his notions of the role of literature in society.

Pollard, Scott. “Canonizing Revision: Literary History and the Postmodern Latin American Writer.” College Literature 20 (October, 1993): 133-147. Scott analyzes the impact of Latin American narrative on Western literary history after World War II. Focusing on authors Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Lezama Lima, Scott discusses narratives of conquest and exploration, international modernism, the fashioning of cultural identity, and the primacy of European culture. Offers valuable insight into several of Fuentes’s works.

Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Using Fuentes’s writings as a springboard for his discussion, Van Delden presents a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes’s intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life. Includes extensive notes and a helpful bibliography.