Breathing New Life into the Ailing Novel

When he began writing in the ‘50s, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes told an overflow Cal State Fullerton audience Tuesday night, many had declared the novel dead.

Cinema had come into its own, while television was taking hold of a growing audience. Nonfiction works of journalism, psychology, history all contributed to an escalating barrage of information.

But, he said, those who proclaimed the death of literature had confused information with knowledge. The stream of data was “so rushed, so mutilated, so incomplete,” Fuentes said, that it represented “an explosion of information, (but) an implosion of meaning.”

Fuentes is the author of “Where the Air Is Clear,” “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” “The Old Gringo” (a film of which opens Friday) and his latest, “Christopher Unborn.” Along with other Latin American authors, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Mario Vagas Llosa of Peru, he helped to resuscitate Hispanic literature in the second half of this century and gained an international reputation in the process. Fuentes visited Fullerton as part of a lecture tour that comes to Irvine Tuesday and Wednesday.

The son of a diplomat, Fuentes had spent much of his childhood in Washington, but chose Spanish as the language of his writings when he realized “I only dreamt in Spanish, I only swore in Spanish and only made love in Spanish.”

Moreover, he said, the Spanish-language literary tradition had been largely dormant for more than two centuries after the time of Cervantes while the English-language tradition had enjoyed a “strong, uninterrupted tradition. . . . Whenever it goes to sleep, along comes an Irishman to wake it up,” Fuentes said. “There was so much more left unsaid in Spanish (literature).”

Many Latin American writers, most notably Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez, play a prominent role in both the artistic and political lives of their countries. This is largely, Fuentes theorized, because the cultural tradition of Latin America has been fairly continuous while myriad political systems and regimes rise and fall.

“Our civil societies have been weak,” Fuentes said. “Writers have been silently elected to speak for these people.” Fuentes is an influential political critic both in Mexico and the United States. He has long been a critic of U.S. interventionist policies in Latin America, and restated his position in a noontime question-and-answer session with students.

“Every time the United States has intervened militarily in Latin America, it has spelled disaster both for Latin America and for the United States,” he said, in response to one question. “We’re no longer living in the ‘50s,” he said, explaining that the world is no longer lorded over by two superpowers, but is increasingly multipolar.

He does not see Colombia’s drug wars as a legitimate excuse for intervention, posing the problem as one of demand rather than supply. “The basis of the power of the drug lords of Colombia is in the streets of America,” he said, drawing cheers from the student audience.

Mexico and other Latin American countries suffered during the Reagan years because of what he described as the President’s “somewhat artificial” fixation on stamping out the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, at the expense of dealing with such regional problems as debt, immigration and drugs. Parroting Reagan’s campaign line, “It’s morning again in America,” Fuentes retorted: “Today, we feel it’s the morning after in America.”

In his newest novel, “Christopher Unborn,” Fuentes envisions a Mexico of 1992 suffering from crippling debt, pollution and overpopulation, problems largely stemming from the corrupt and ineffectual PRI, the party that has ruled Mexico since the revolution.

Fuentes, who has described the book as an “exorcism” and not necessarily a prophesy, said he sees hope in recent elections, in which the PRI stranglehold appears to be weakening. “I think that Mexico is already a multi-party system, no matter what the PRI may think,” said Fuentes, who has been campaigning in recent months for election reform.

“The society has outstripped the institutions. . . . I’m hopeful that we’re marching toward something better than before.”

Fuentes will speak on “Spain’s Art and Image: The Relationship Between Painting and Literature” on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at South Coast Community Church in Irvine. Admission: $8. Information: (714) 856-5000. Fuentes will participate in two round-table discussions on Wednesday at the UC Irvine University Club, one at 10 a.m. in English and the other at 11 p.m. in Spanish. Both will be free and open to the public.