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The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa
Martín Luis Guzman and the Politics of Life Writing
By Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2016 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-2055-5
CHAPTER 1
Autobiographical Acts within and beyond "Apunte sobre una personalidad"
El mundo está necesitado de realidades externas, objetivas, vulgares, y Usted a través del zodíaco de sus cartas actuales se me esfuma en radiosas visiones de poetas o se me rompe en un fracaso de cristales ...
The world needs external, objective, vulgar realities, and you through the kaleidoscope of your letters vanish into visions of poetic radiance or splinter into shards of broken glass ...
— Alfonso Reyes in a letter to Guzmán, 1914
Martín Luis Guzmán's most explicitly autobiographical text, "Apunte sobre una personalidad [Notes on a Personality]," was originally a speech read in 1954 at a celebration of the author's promotion to full membership in the Mexican Academy of Language (AML). Among the many prominent figures in attendance was President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, and his presence marked the beginning of a period of recognition from the highest levels of government for Guzmán and his, as one reporter described it at the time, "impressive and preeminently Mexican body of work" (Prats 1). In 1958, the author accepted a National Science and Arts Prize, as well as honorary degrees from the University of Chihuahua and the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico. In February of 1959, Ruiz Cortines's successor, Adolfo López Mateos, honored Guzmán with the Manuel Ávila Camacho Prize in Literature and, shortly thereafter, named him president of the National Commission for Free Textbooks, a position that the author would hold until his death in 1976.
As discussed in the Introduction, the 1950s and 1960s were a period of intense editorial activity for Guzman, a time when he strategically began to republish his works from the 1920s and 1930s. Through the collection, reorganization, and sometimes exclusion of the texts that he had written over the previous fifty years, Guzman fashioned a renovated self-image, one that found its fullest expression in the author's two-volume Obras complétas. Published in 1961 and 1963, well before his death, Guzman's Obras complétas is an autobiographical act in and of itself, a literary self-portrait that the author seemingly offers up to posterity. Additionally, it is the culmination of another decade-long autobiographical act: the very same self-publishing and media activities that characterized the celebrations around his eightieth birthday.
As the last in a series of textual enclosures, the composition of the Obras complétas is relatively straightforward on a diachronic level. Critics have already made invaluable contributions to the study of Guzman's work by tracing the genealogy of the works that now constitute it, back to their first appearances as short chronicles in Spanish, Mexican, and American newspapers (Curiel, "Sombras"; Olea Franco, "Reflejos"; Pineda Franco). These studies rightly call attention to discrepancies between the author's literary work and the way he would later describe it, but they do not necessarily discuss the framework in which Guzman republished his texts, the carefully composed life narrative that binds his body of work together. This chapter, in contrast, examines the origin of Guzman's renovated life narrative: a seventy-five-minute speech read before the Mexican Academy of Language in 1954.
Prepared for a ceremony marking his promotion to full membership within the AML, "Apunte sobre una personalidad" is Guzman's most explicitly autobiographical text. In it, the author recounts his life from his first moments of conscious perception to the very instant in which he addresses his audience. Affecting a pose of apology, the author presents himself as a unique individual created at the intersection of personal experience and national historical events. Drawing on a version of history that portrays Mexico's current one-party state as rightful heir to the independence and Reforma movements of the previous century, he narrates his childhood as the ongoing internalization of artistic and ideological absolutes, from fixed notions of beauty to the essence of his country and its liberal heritage. He describes himself coming of age during the final days of the Diaz dictatorship, when these absolutes had come into conflict with the country's present reality, the Revolution of 1910. Finally, in an effort to reconcile his literary inclinations and political ideals with the brutal reality of the conflict, he speaks of a series of works that are artistically unsuccessful or that simply go unfinished. In short, Guzman presents himself as a failed artist. However, by connecting his autobiographical narrative to texts that are never fully realized, Guzman reveals himself as an author whose greatest work is perpetually deferred. This rhetorical act creates a void that forces the disparate texts produced during his life into a single narrative, proof of what he characterizes as his "North" or essential character. Through this trope of deferment within his speech, coupled with its successive republishing over the next two decades, Guzman transforms "Apunte sobre una personalidad" into the reading notes for the rest of his work, the text that brings coherence and structure to the Obras completas.
Finding "North"
Martin Luis Guzman begins "Apunte sobre una personalidad" with an apology and a promise. He excuses himself for not having prepared a speech more in keeping with the academic rigor of such a solemn ceremony. He explains, however, that his often controversial role within the AML over the previous thirteen years obliges him to use the occasion as an opportunity to supply his audience with "the correct interpretation of my conduct vis-à-vis my fellow academy members" (11.460). In order to arrive at such an interpretation, his colleagues must understand the underlying personality that has driven that conduct. Instead of explaining his most contentious actions on a case-by-case basis (a task that would later fall to Academia), the only way to arrive at this level of understanding is through an autobiographical sketch.
Guzmán begins his speech using the first person but then goes on to narrate the actual story of his life in the third person. In subsequent printed versions of the speech, text breaks would separate these two voices, drawing a sharp divide between the moment in which the author is represented as speaking and the life that has preceded that moment. In his study of autobiography, Philippe Lejeune has noted that the divide between the first and third person is a feature of all life writing, but that this gap is usually "masked by the use of a single 'I'" (34; see also Starobinski 77). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have shown the limits of this critical approach, how it "cannot account for the complexities of self-narrating or the heterogeneous array of autobiographical modes" (71). They also rightly point out that such an interpretation envisions the present, first-person narrator as static and complete, which is far from the truth. Regardless, Lejeune's conception of the autobiographical "I" is indispensable in understanding "Apunte sobre una personalidad" because Guzmán conceives his life narrative in those same terms. As he promises his audience, "by painting myself as a product of my own, unique history, [I will reveal to you] the motive and logic of my actions, ... the principles that have guided my modest personality, the truth that lies within" (11.460). This opening gesture to his audience — the explicit promise to unite the first and third person by explaining the former as a function of the latter — is the autobiographical pact that initially drives the narrative of "Apunte sobre una personalidad."
Guzmán roots the story of his formation as a person in geographical and monumental spaces that both legitimate him as an heir to nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism and fuse that liberalism with a perceived essence of Mexico itself. He masks this politically charged narrative as a coming into consciousness through an artistic sensibility, a child's innate talent to absorb the essential nature of the spaces that surround him. As his young senses begin to sharpen, the bucolic and simple beauty of the town of Tacubaya (where his father worked as an instructor at the Military Academy from 1889 to 1899) fosters an appreciation of beauty in its essence ("lo bello"), while the snow-topped peak of the Ajusco volcano inscribes "the presence of history in all its majesty" onto his consciousness (11.462). Playing in the shadow of the presidential palace in Chapultepec, he begins to conceptualize his patria as a sort of protective mantle, and when he sees President Porfirio Díaz at a public ceremony on the same grounds, the latter's military regalia overwhelms him with a sense of euphoria.
It is situated within this space of natural and man-made monuments that Guzmán's father initiates him into the written word, the final tool that allows him to fully access this national, liberal heritage. When the colonel Martín Luis Guzmán Rendón catches his son pretending to give mass to his siblings, he decides to substitute the boy's growing religious zeal with a fascination with the written word (11.465). As a reader, the young Guzmán quickly graduates to the poems of writer and liberal politician Juan de Dios Peza and the popular corridos illustrated by José Guadalupe Posada. When the family moves to the port city of Veracruz in 1899, his readings take on a deeper and more international character. He spends hours in the public library with the nineteenth-century encyclopedic history México a través de los siglos, the novels of Victor Hugo and Pérez Galdós, and Rousseau's The Social Contract. In her study of Spanish American autobiography, Sylvia Molloy notes that the scene of first reading is often portrayed as pivotal, that these first books become "attributes of the individual and tell his story" (At Face 17). The titles that Guzmán cites in his own autobiography serve as printed monuments — works which, like the Ajusco volcano, bind Mexico as a nation to the author as an individual.
Guzmán tells his audience that the final step in the formation of his character occurs when, searching his father's library for new texts to read, he inadvertently finds a compass. His father explains that the instrument always points north and that he will be the same way when he becomes an adult: "You will know where your North is, and you will not waiver from it" (11.465). Shortly after this conversation, Guzmán has an epiphany while looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, realizing that he indeed does have "a North within himself" (11.468). The author explains that, from this point on, any questions that he would encounter would be merely doubts about what choices to make, not the underlining will driving those decisions. For such a decisive moment, though, the exact nature of the impulse to which Guzmán refers is surprisingly vague. At the start of his speech, he promised his audience an explanation of the essential traits of his personality ("the truth that lies within"), the single force that has driven his actions within the AML. Although the author has portrayed himself as progressing through childhood by understanding and articulating increasingly complicated signs that embody his country, the impetus of those thoughts — Guzmán's "North" — remains obscure. So while the audience of "Apunte sobre una personalidad" may see the movement of this "North" passing from monument to individual, from father to son, and from Guzmán's own thoughts to his later actions, they never receive a clear explanation of what this "North" is.
On the one hand, it seems contradictory for the author to explain that the singular "motive and logic" of his actions is a cardinal direction, neither an origin nor a destination but rather the movement from one point toward another. How can he claim that the very thing that has dictated the course of his life over the last half century is the very course that his life has taken? On the other hand, this contradiction is clearly the generative source of Guzmán's autobiographical discourse. "North" could be seen, for example, in Lacanian terms, as an absence or insatiable desire that sends the subject from one signifier to another in a potentially infinite search for meaning and presence — Guzmán's need to unify the first and third person. Perhaps "North" is not a question of individual psychology but a dilemma inherent to all autobiographical writing. Paul de Man has famously explored how the genre strives — and ultimately fails — to make an individual fully present through the medium of the written word. James Fernández beautifully summarizes this irony when he observes, "Like an epitaph, or ruins, the sign — or autobiography — attempts to make present the very thing whose absence it marks" (91). In this light, "North" could simply mark Guzmán's inability to capture the essence of his personality in words.
Of course, in the nearly thirty years since the publication of "Autobiography as De-facement," many critics have pointed out that de Man fails to consider the value of autobiography beyond its supposedly futile attempt to restore the individual through language. Angel Loureiro, for one, argues that autobiography is "a performative act and not a cognitive operation" (20). He maintains that, in striving to capture the complexities of a single life (which, by nature, will exceed any discourse), autobiographical mimesis is forced to create meaning and, thus, make sense out of that life. Guzmán's "Norte," then, is first and foremost a rhetorical strategy. The author states that a unique sense of self drives his actions when, in fact, the inverse is true. By not defining "the truth that lies within," he compels his audience to extrapolate that driving force from the events of the narrative. So where the author's "North" may mark an absence, that same void produces "Apunte sobre una personalidad," propelling the narrative forward and giving meaning to Guzmán's autobiography.
Watershed Moments, Conspicuous Omissions
Upon returning to Mexico City to attend the National Preparatory School in 1904 and then the National School of Jurisprudence in 1909, Guzman describes himself as increasingly drawn to moments of inner integrity and truth — an appreciation that stands in contrast to a void within Mexico's current political regime. He is now more given to "the contemplation of art and nature" and hopes to one day capture these "moments of beauty ... in words on paper" (11.469). When the aspiring artist has the opportunity to meet with Porfirio Díaz as a representative of the Mexico City Student Society, he sees the president as surrounded by "fiction and empty symbols" (11.470). Even the creases in his shoes seem artificial (11.472). This meeting is the first of two decisive moments in Guzmán's autobiography, experiences during his young adulthood that lead him to join the Revolution. Just as he is drawn to "moments of beauty," he feels compelled to enter the world of politics. As he explains to his audience: "the underlying principles that give each personality its unique character are irrefutable ... and ... the application of those principles quickly lay down the track [férreo carril] of one's conduct" (11.469). Here, the path traced by Guzmán's "North" is at its clearest: a direct line — literally, a train track — from character to action, from the experiences of his adolescence to his participation in the Mexican Revolution.
Historically speaking, however, there are glaring omissions in the description of these watershed moments in "Apunte sobre una personalidad," and Guzmán's path to the Revolution was not nearly as direct and unambiguous as his stated autobiography would have it seem. When Guzmán met with the president in September of 1908, for example, it was because the Mexico City Student Society had been planning a series of events to celebrate the centennial of Mexican independence, one of which was a torchlight procession where Guzmán would speak in honor of José María Morelos. With the sanction of, among others, the secretary of public education and the mayor of Mexico City, a small planning committee met with Díaz. The president approved the proposal but, according to "Apunte sobre una personalidad," did so with a warning: "Be careful, very careful; there are dormant instincts [atavismos] that, once they awake, no man can pacify." In his account, Guzmán leaves the meeting certain that the only national impulse that the president wants to suppress is "the nation's deep yearning to find itself" (11.472). This judgment clearly serves as foreshadowing the political upheaval that would occur two years later.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man Who Wrote Pancho Villa by Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody. Copyright © 2016 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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