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Central American Avant-Garde Narrative. Literary Innovation and Cultural Change (1926-1936) by Adrian Taylor Kane (review)

The chapter on Vicente Leñero centers on the little-studied El evangelio de Lucas Gavilán, an adaption of the Gospel of Luke to mid-1970s Mexico. It applies Slajov Žižek’s writings on Christianity and failure. As in the other chapters, the characters’ bodies are paralyzed, sick, and disabled—reduced to bare life—when they interact with more powerful characters such as police officers, prison guards, bureaucrats, and ejido leaders. In this case, however, their would-be savior Jesucristo Gómez attempts—unsuccessfully—to heal them and fails to change systemic problems. This failure parallels the failed Mexican Miracle to suggest that a Mexican miracle is not possible. The chapter ends on the hopeful note that the weaker characters are transubstantiated into the body of Gómez through the Eucharist. Those cast aside by society are joined and become the stones rebuilding Christ’s church. The conclusion examines the attention given to bodies riding the Mexico, D.F., subway system in chronicles by Carlos Monsiváis and the Facebook page “Sistema de Transporte Colectivo Metro.” This section argues that the subway, read as an allegory of the State, overpowers passengers’ bodies and examines the way bodies challenge complacent submission to the State’s apparatuses. A particularly compelling illustration of this argument centers on glass breakers on the subway whose “professionally induced pain evokes others who commit violent acts against others as they submit to the System. This self-imposed violence suggests that they have internalized patterns of repression and can inflict the effects of the System on themselves” (168). They remind passengers of their own submission to the system’s “devastating effects on their own bodies” (168). The National Body in Mexican Literature posits a creative, personal reading of Mexican literature, one that the author concedes may be hers alone. This refreshing acknowledgement seems most pertinent to the second part of her interpretation alluded to in the book’s subtitle: that the works examined contain collective challenges to biopolitical (understood uniformly as State) control. The book never resolves—to my satisfaction at least—the tension between the negative disability metaphors invariably used as a narrative prostheses for repression and the redemptive potential of the weaker characters’ bodies. Janzen reads in these representations an invitation to imagine the characters “making gestures of resistance and transformation toward their context” (16). The collective challenges to biopolitical control alluded to in the title take place in the critic’s interpretation, not in the literary texts themselves. Janzen invites her readers to view these representations of bodies as gestures toward resistance rather than as reproductions of the dominant power dynamics.