Distant Relations by Carlos Fuentes

First published:Una familia lejana, 1980 (English translation, 1982)

Type of plot: Fantastic narrative

Time of work: The early 1980’s

Locale: Paris, Mexico, and the Caribbean

Principal Characters:

• The Comte de Branly, an eighty-three-year-old French aristocrat
• The narrator, a Latin American friend of Branly who has taken France as his adopted country; only at the end of the novel is it revealed that his name is Carlos Fuentes and that he is living out an alternate destiny to that of the author
• Hugo Heredia, a distinguished Mexican archaeologist
• Victor Heredia, his twelve-year-old son
• The French Victor Heredia, a mysterious man who traces his family back to nineteenth century Cuba and Haiti; he may be a phantom, or someone who was never born
• André Heredia, the young son of the French Heredia

The Novel

Most of Distant Relations takes place during one long afternoon in Paris, but the events that it recounts take place in Mexico and the Caribbean as well as France and extend two centuries into the past. The title refers not only to the familial connections between the characters in the novel but also to the historical relationship between the French and Spanish-American traditions. Fuentes puts particular emphasis on a series of French writers born in Spanish America—writers who, to a greater or lesser degree, bridge the distance between the two cultures. A poem by Jules Supervielle (1884-1960), a French poet born in Uruguay, is recited by one of the characters and serves as a leitmotif for the entire novel. The poem, “The Adjacent Room,” refers to the notion, central to the plot of the novel, that there is an infinite series of contiguous possibilities for each historical event and for every personal destiny. This fantastic premise allows Distant Relations to be read as an entertaining and compelling ghost story. At the same time, by replacing a stable vision of the past with a precarious one in which alternate possibilities struggle to exist, it permits Fuentes to carry out a critical and imaginative interrogation of history.

Although the structure of Distant Relations is complex, it consists primarily of one long conversation between the Comte de Branly and the narrator, who then reports the exchange to the reader. Branly, a cultured and cosmopolitan French aristocrat, has been deeply shaken by his recent involvement with the Heredia family, and by an experience which culminated in the mysterious disappearance of twelve-year-old Victor Heredia. Branly explains that he met the Mexican archaeologist Hugo Heredia and his young son Victor while visiting the Toltec ruins of Xochicalco in Mexico. Branly was impressed by the father’s universal grasp of culture and love for the Indian past, and intrigued by the son’s “imperious innocence” and childish games. Branly explained the closeness of the two by the recent deaths of Hugo Heredia’s French wife and older son in a plane crash, and excused their arrogance when they appropriated a valuable, if broken, artifact that Victor found among the ruins.

Several months later, when the Heredias accepted his invitation to come to Paris, a series of events made Branly an unwilling guest in the suburban home of another Victor Heredia, a rude and resentful Frenchman who appeared in Branly’s room only at night. For several days, while the Mexican boy played with the French Heredia’s son André, Branly was forced to recall forgotten details of his own life and listen to the chaotic and incoherent family stories of a man whom he finally realized never existed. The inconsistencies in Heredia’s stories of the changing fortunes of his family in the nineteenth century Caribbean are never resolved, but they do show that in some way Branly’s destiny is intertwined with that of the Heredias.

This explanation of the French Heredia’s raging insistence on the forgotten injustices of the past also accounts for his desire to bring about the birth of a new being, one that was previously denied existence, by joining his son and the Mexican boy. Before leaving Heredia’s house, Branly tells the narrator, he witnessed the union of the two boys, each of whom brought one-half of the artifact from Xochicalco to form a whole; Branly was shocked to learn that Hugo had agreed to surrender his son to the French Heredia.

Despite this disturbing experience, Branly is somehow satisfied personally by the interrogation of his own past that he has carried out twice: once at the home of Victor Heredia, and once in the presence of the narrator. Branly, who is childless, leaves the story of the Heredias as a legacy to the narrator, who accepts it reluctantly. The narrator is someone who has refused the legacy of the past by turning his back on his Latin American roots. The reader learns in the last two chapters that he is an alternate destiny of Carlos Fuentes, but that the other Fuentes is constantly at his side, refusing to allow him to forget the legacy of the past. In the striking last scene of the novel, Fuentes is escorted by his phantom presence to the pool of the Club, where he sees a vision of the American jungle and also of the two boys, floating in the pool, oblivious of time. Their mystery is not explained, but Fuentes realizes that the destiny of the Heredias has included him as well.

The Characters

Each of the major characters in Distant Relations carries the burden of representing an era, a nationality, or an attitude toward the past. Rather than shy away from this symbolic tendency, Fuentes indulges it by letting the characters make elegant pronouncements about themselves and one another. Distant Relations is as much a work of cultural criticism as it is a gothic fantasy, and the reader never forgets that the conversation he is reading takes place in Paris between two cultured and erudite men enjoying a leisurely lunch.

The Comte de Branly is responsible for the encyclopedic quality and tone of the novel. Knowledgeable in literature, painting, film, and music, he represents the high achievements of French culture, with its emphasis on order, reason, and refined manners. When he recites the poem by Supervielle, he is “exercising the supreme gift of selection, synthesis, and consecration that France has reserved for herself through the centuries.” Although he traces his family back nine centuries, his father’s early death cut him off from his immediate past, and he identifies himself more with twentieth century culture than with the French historical tradition.

Hugo Heredia is a more complex character. Branly sees him, a Mexican whose family goes back to the sixteenth century, at first as a universal man of the century of the founding of the New World. His arrogance, however, reveals the presence of a patriarchal authoritarianism that his son Victor seems to have absorbed all too zealously. Hugo Heredia has the archaeologist’s veneration for the past and believes that the “present is incomprehensible except within the context of the past.” On the other hand, after the death of his wife and older son, he must acknowledge the fact that what he and his surviving son share is “scorn for men, respect for the stones.” At the end of the novel, having lost his wife and both of his sons, he says to Branly, “I am sorry to have deceived you. I am not a universal man from the century of discoveries. I am only a slightly resentful Mexican Creole, like all the rest of my compatriots marked by mute rage against their inadequacies.”

Given this gloomy conclusion, it is interesting that when the narrator speculates about what he might have been had he stayed in Mexico, he proposes himself as the friend that Hugo Heredia never had. Although the Carlos Fuentes who chose to live on the margin of French culture rather than stay in Mexico does not talk about his activities or personal life, he paints an “alternative portrait” of himself as a lover of French culture that is a salute to the civilization that has been adopted by so many American artists and writers. By inscribing his “Mexican” destiny in the plot of the novel, however, Fuentes suggests himself as “the reluctant phantom that appears to tell us: this is what you were, this is what your people were; you have forgotten.”

Critical Context

Carlos Fuentes is without a doubt the most widely read Mexican writer on the international scene. As Branly says in Distant Relations when he suggests that the narrator might have chosen to stay in Mexico instead of going to France, “You write about Mexico, about Mexicans, the wounds of a body, the persistence of a few dreams, the masks of progress. You remain forever identified with that country and its people.” Indeed, Fuentes is a prolific writer who is both cosmopolitan diplomat and erudite professor. He is well known for his essays on contemporary Mexico as well as for his literary criticism.

In many of Fuentes’s earlier novels, he discusses present-day Mexico by looking at its relationship to its violent and often brutal past. In later novels, he has looked at Mexico in relation to other nations and cultures, without ever abandoning the historical question. In Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976), a massive and encyclopedic novel, he examines Mexico’s relationship with Spain. In El gringo viejo (1985; The Old Gringo, 1985), he looks at Mexico’s relationship with the United States. In Distant Relations, Fuentes pays homage to French culture and literature, to what he calls “that strange love for France which supposedly saves us Latin Americans from our ancient subordination to Spain and our more recent subordination to the Anglo-Saxon world.”

Bibliography

America. CXLVII, July 24, 1982, p. 59.

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 postmodern 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. Concentrating on four novels, including Distant Relations, Ibsen 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.

Library Journal. CVII, March 15, 1982, p. 649.

Nation. CCXXXIV, January 16, 1982, p. 57.

New Statesman. CIV, July 9, 1982, p. 23.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, March 21, 1982, p. 3.

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.

Saturday Review. IX, March, 1982, p. 62.

Times Literary Supplement. July 9, 1982, p. 739.

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.

Virginia Quarterly Review. LVIII, Autumn, 1982, p. 131.