The Death of Artemio Cruz

It is told in three voices: an I, Artemio Cruz, who begins and ends the novel on different deathbeds, and offers stream-of-consciousness medical lyricism. A you, addressing the reader-as-Artemio-Cruz, which offers a more distant and ruminative lyricism of feeling and yearning and desire, usually following the I sections directly and expanding on their emotional bulk. And a third-person narrator, riding at times Artemio but also at times his intimates: wife Catalina, son Lorenzo, surrogate dad Lucero, etc etc, and relating critical incidents in the prior life of Artemio, incidents often related to the particular anguishes brought up in the adjacent Is and yous.  In all three codes Fuentes is a brave and sometimes stunning writer, equally at home wrapping a mountainside tween in galactic possibilities and staging vicious fights between new spouses in a mansion.

Artemio himself, we learn pretty quickly, was a junior officer in a leftish and eventually successful faction of the long and complicated Mexican revolution—but after the war, tempted by the possibilities of victory and the material availabilities of wealth, he becomes a pretty nasty power-broker. He marries the sister of a man he didn’t die with at the end of the war; he takes over her family’s agricultural holdings and drives competitors to poverty; he gets elected to the national legislature and knuckles under to the President and his thugs; he becomes a cynical tycoon publishing newspaper editorials calling for hte vicious breaking of a rail-worker’s strike.

It is not always much fun: his first and realest love Regina is killed by an opposing faction in the war; his wife Catalina suspects him half-accurately of betraying her brother and treats him icily; he has a series of affairs in which he often feels both vulnerable and trapped; his son follows an implicit order to become self-made and dies a little foolishly in the Spanish civil war. Near death Artemio kinda feels like shit: he wishes he’d done some things differently, operated with a little more integrity, tries to console himself with lists of material luxuries, resents his wife and daughter. Very late, the reader learns of his impoverished but free childhood in a ruined hacienda, his descent from a line of diminished half-aristocrats, his touching sense of possibility as, after catastrophes, he leaves this place to find his own fortune. He’s hospitalized with a large abdominal clot; a stuckness in the economy or history of his body. When the doctors operate and it begins to bleed he dies. Hopeless, say the doctors, two pages after he stands on a dark mountainside thirteen years old and full of triumphant hope. Lukacs might take the disease as a metaphor for the bourgeois arrest of history: what is a hierarch other than a clot?

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With Pedro Páramo and Things Fall Apart (and Lolita, kind of) it shares at least one concept: an approach to the postcolonial through the focalization of a hierarch. Some different concepts too: in Things Fall Apart Okonkwo’s death is the dramatic climax, the resolution of the text’s mysteries and tensions. In Pedro Páramo Pedro’s death is still the climax but a different kind of mystery: a reader of Achebe knows neither that nor how Okonkwo will pass; a reader of Rulfo has a pretty good idea that Pedro will die but how and by whose hand remains opaque. And so where Things Fall Apart dramatizes the impossibility of one kind of patriarchy as it’s displaced by another, Pedro Páramo (also a more polyvocal novel) dramatizes the impossibility of life beneath a patriarch.

Fuentes’ novel works differently than either Achebe’s or Rulfo’s. It is deeply interested in the hierarch’s experience itself—you might say its dramatic emphasis is on the impossibility of living as a hierarch, on the crimes and contradictions that have gathered in the course of all that gathering. Artemio has glimpses of real happiness—as a young soldier meeting Regina, as a father riding horses with Lorenzo before his departure—but broadly he is never happier nor more likable than when at 13, a candlemaker, he climbs the mountain toward a different life. If late in life he seems to love the material more than the human it is likely because the material stays bought as wives, mistresses, employees do not.

And yet it was not very impossible: he was at all points able to do it. He did leave Bernal in the cell, did allow Lorenzo to sail to Spain, did marry Catalina and never had the conversations he needed to, did sign on with the ‘fat man.’ Part of the consolation the novel offers is the impression that these tycoons are as wounded as Artemio, do feel regrets for the harms that they’ve caused, suffer a kind of retribution in grief for whatever it is they’ve done. Is it so? I don’t think we can know. Elon does seem very divorced.

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What’s with this little grouping of postcolonial hierarch novels? Why is this such a recipe? I’m not a postcolonial scholar but I think I’d begin by glossing the colonial or postcolonial as a scene where the caprice and injustice by which power is distributed and used is unusually explicit. Relative to the situations in Europe or Great Britain specifically, where more or less differentiable national histories maybe could suggest some naturalness or necessity of such relations, the abrupt disjunctions of colonial power surfaced the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise. If it was just a case of some guys showing up and being slightly more effective (willing, armed, vicious) killers than the previous hierarchs had been, then how could power itself hold any deeper sense or truth or moral?

As a point of focalization the hierarch dramatizes this effectively: the hierarch, an Okonkwo or Pedro or Artemio or our contemporaries, is a  human individual whose conversation with historical materialism is a little more explicit than many of ours. A lot of veins have got to run through that clot. And so the hierarch-story can treat directly the historical shapes I’ve been calling the diegetic verisimilitude (the determining circumstances, the sources or causes of possibility’s foreclosure around the characters) within the sweet spot of individual mimetic narration: Artemio can have a direct conversation with the Americans negotiating for mineral rights, can personally operate scheme of usurious eviction; Okonkwo can come face-to-face with the colonial governor. At the same time, though, the personal faults of the hierarch—their cynicism, their viciousness, their bedrock selfishness—can reveal the scumminess and violence of those historical forces. A hierarch is a co-infection: historical shapes show up as explicit dramatic actions taken by an individual, and individual vices show up as traits of history itself.

Part of what this shape has to manage is the inevitable (if the fiction’s any good) accumulation of sympathy to the hierarch themselves. It is difficult for us as readers to spend much time with a character, with a person, without falling somewhat onto their side: we find ways of loving Artemio, of excusing Artemio, find beauties in Okonkwo. Of course it is human of us. But compare that shape with the clarity of ire offered by The Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or etc. I suppose you might say that the optimism of the class novel—The Grapes of Wrath is kinda-sorta colonial, it’s a book about a group of people who’d recently had the dignity of citizens finding they’ve been reclassed overnight as sites of extraction—is an optimism about history itself: a future class (a harvest, for both Zola and Steinbeck) may arrest bad developments. And that the optimism of the hierarch-novel is an optimism about individual souls: a heart does not want to be monstrous, and one day will discover how not to. But maybe the most haunting thing in this particular novel is how neatly Fuentes manages to connect Artemio’s optimism of becoming and achievement—the book’s nearly-last and most-sympathetic moment—with the later catalogue of crimes. That is what he meant on the mountainside, though it took him decades to discover it.