Terra nostra by Carlos Fuentes

First published: 1975 (English translation, 1976)

Type of plot: Historical allegory

Time of work: From the first century to New Year’s Eve, 1999

Locale: Rome, Paris, Mexico, and Spain

Principal Characters:

• Pollo Phoibee, the protagonist of the Parisian section of the novel
• Celestina, a female pimp who also appears as a young woman with tattooed lips
• Felipe, also called
• El Señor, Philip II, King of Spain from 1556 to 1598
• Isabel, Elizabeth Tudor, (also called La Señora), Queen Elizabeth I of England, married to Philip II
• Felipe the Fair, Philip I, King of Spain in 1506, son of the Emperor Maximilian I
• Joanna Regina, the Mad Lady, wife of Felipe the Fair
• Guzmán, the secretary to El Señor
• The three Bastards, half brothers of Felipe
• Tiberius Caesar, the Emperor of Rome

The Novel

Although the narrative of this complex novel begins on July 14, 1999, in Paris, and ends on New Year’s Eve of the same year in the same city, the historical time frame of the events spans many centuries. In Paris, Pollo Phoibee meets Celestina, a naive young woman with tattooed lips, who asks him to explain to her the mysteries of chaotic modern civilization. As Pollo slips and falls into the river Seine, the time of the narrative shifts to the first century and the assassination of Tiberius Caesar, and to the sixteenth century of Felipe, King Philip II (also called El Señor), who is engaged in building the Escorial, the massive palace and mausoleum near Madrid. Pollo, transformed into one of the three mysterious, illegitimate sons of El Señor’s father, Felipe the Fair (Philip I), becomes the lover of Isabel, Felipe’s wife (Queen Elizabeth I). Another of the sons washes up on a beach in the New World and is welcomed by the Aztecs as the promised redeemer. When he returns to the court of Philip II with news of the discovery of America, the king refuses to accept the possibility of a world beyond the confines of the known Old World, all of which he has sought to reproduce and preserve in the Escorial.

Meanwhile, Joanna Regina has had the body of Felipe the Fair embalmed and preserved against the ravages of time. She then takes as her lover the third illegitimate son of her dead husband. Felipe continues to build the Escorial, in an attempt to enclose within the enormous structure all times and all spaces and thereby defeat the forces of change and preserve his ultimate power. His wife, Isabel, remains secluded in her room, in which she has re-created a Moorish pleasure palace furnished with white sand, blue water, and a bed of total sexual abandon. As she cultivates physical pleasure, she seeks in vain to escape her nightmare of lying prone in the courtyard at the mercy of a mouse which incessantly gnaws at her genitals and “knows the truth.”

Toward the end of the novel, Felipe climbs the endless stairs of his mausoleum. On every step, he encounters the opportunity to make new choices and change the course of his past life. Instead, he reinforces his refusal to accept the possibility of a New World that would disrupt the totality of his hermetic space. The last chapter of the novel portrays a return to Paris at the end of the twentieth century. In the ruins of the city, devastated by riots and famine and the collapse of Western civilization, Pollo and Celestina unite in an ecstatic act of love and become one hermaphroditic creature who gives birth to a new creature, the New World of the twenty-first century.

The Characters

Most of the characters of Terra Nostra are historical in the sense that they have analogues either in the history of Hispanic civilization or in the fictional characters of Hispanic literature. In many cases, the fictional narrative alters the factual relationships of the historical and literary personages. Felipe the Fair and his wife, Joanna, the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, are portrayed in the novel as the parents of Philip II, though they were in fact the parents of Charles V, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who was the father of Philip II. Although Philip II did try to marry Queen Elizabeth I of England after the death of his second wife, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth refused. In the novel, Isabel has spent her childhood in the Spanish court and, married to Felipe, exemplifies the lascivious alternative to Felipe’s frustrated attempts at enforcing an absolute asceticism in the world contained in the Escorial.

Celestina is the female procuress from the Renaissance play by Fernándo de Rojas, and the Chronicler who is engaged in writing the history of a gentleman of La Mancha is Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; English translation, 1612-1620). The mysterious bastard pilgrim who washes up on the beach reflects the protagonist of Luis de Góngora y Argote’s Soledades (1613; The Solitudes), and the scribe Guzmán is reminiscent of the main character in Mateo Alemán’s La vida de Guzmán de Alfarache, atalaya de la vida humana (1599, 1604; The Rogue: Or, The Life of Guzmán de Alfarache, 1622). In the final scene of Parisian destruction, there is a game of cards played by characters from modern Spanish American fiction—Oliveira, of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966); Cuba Venegas, of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1967; Three Trapped Tigers, 1971); Humberto Peñalosa, of José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970; The Obscene Bird of Night, 1973), and Pierre Menard, of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). In addition, there are numerous extended references to characters created in various cultural manifestations of Spain and the Spanish Empire—the paintings of Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel, the films of Luis Buñuel, the novels of Cervantes, and the Don Juan dramas.

The four central characters of Terra Nostra are Felipe, his secretary Guzmán, his wife, Isabel, and his mother, Joanna, the Mad Lady. The other characters tend to be archetypical or symbolic, functioning as representations of various specific roles played by the despotic Felipe and by those who threaten his existing order. Thus, most of the minor characters are reflections of the struggle between the absolutism of Felipe and the forces of freedom and multiplicity led by the sensuous Isabel, the bureaucratic, opportunistic Guzmán, and the insane, deposed Mad Lady. The minor characters are not well developed, precisely because they are both references to historical persons or literary personages and reincarnations of the four characters who form the central power conflict of the novel.

Critical Context

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes is one of Latin America’s leading writers. His most successful novel, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964), is a stylistically complex revelation of the life of a twentieth century Mexican who helped shape the image of his country. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes turns to sixteenth century Spain as the historical moment in which the whole of Hispanic cultural and political history can be revealed. Just as The Death of Artemio Cruz is directly related to the ideas developed by the Mexican essayist Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad: vida y pensamiento de Mexico (1959; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1961), Terra Nostra is a fictive narrative of the ideas developed by Fuentes in his essay, Cervantes: O, La crítica de la lectura (1976; Cervantes: Or, The Critique of Reading, 1976). As Fuentes says, his novel reveals an attempt to reconcile the dual history of liberal Spain and reactionary Spain, a concept also explored by Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude.

Terra Nostra attempts to be a “total novel” not only in its interpretation of the whole of Hispanic history, but also in its stylistic complexity. In Terra Nostra, Fuentes treats “memory as total knowledge of a total past,” not only what actually happened but also “what could have been and was not.” To convey this complex vision, he employs a dazzling array of narrative devices, so that, in the words of Milan Kundera, the novel becomes “an immense dream in which history is performed by endlessly reincarnated characters who say to us: it is always us, we are the same who go on playing the game of history.”

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. Concentrating on four novels, including Terra Nostra, 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.

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.