This study by Sandra Messinger Cypress, author of La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (University of Texas Press, 1991) and a professor of literature at the University of Maryland, is misguided on two accounts: it emphasises literary analysis at the expense of in-depth biographical exploration, which results in an unbalanced approach; and it attempts a feminist vindication that is structurally flawed.
Cypress’ central theme is the marriage between Elena Garro (1916–98) and Octavio Paz (1914–98). In her view, these two figures are essential to understanding Mexico in the twentieth century, but the recognition granted them is lopsided. Paz was a towering intellectual whose contributions to literature (essays such as those included in El laberinto de la soledad, a plethora of lucid, heterogeneous poems, as well as biographies such as Sor Juana o las trampas de la fé, translations, plays, speeches and other works) are widely known. For them he was deservedly awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Garro's oeuvre, on the other hand, is little known. Her most famous titles are Recuerdos del porvenir and her story La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas. This asymmetrical recognition, in the author's opinion, is gender-biased. Paz is at the core of the nation's literary canon, whereas Garro is excluded from it. The objective in Uncivil Wars is to even the field.
Needless to say, it is an impossible task. There is no doubt that Garro and Paz had a stormy relationship. They married in 1937 and after having a daughter, Helena, they divorced in 1959. As Cypress describes it, the marriage ‘was conflictive and marked by numerous liaisons that generated not only gossip but also literary works in which they and their lovers appear as characters’. After the separation, they engaged in ‘uncivil wars’. Their paths, existential as well as political, diverged. At the core of that divergence are their intrinsically different dispositions. In historical terms, what pushed them apart was their reaction to the student massacre in Tlatelolco Square in 1968. Paz, then a diplomat, resigned his post in protest, returning to Mexico soon after. Garro is said to have been supportive of the student movement, yet later on became a key informer against those who supported it. Consequently, she suffered exile and ignominy.
Immediately after their separation, Paz encouraged Garro's literary career. He praised her debut novel Recuerdos del porvenir, calling it ‘truly an extraordinary work, one of the most perfect creations in contemporary Latin American literature’. As time went by, however, support mutated into rejection, disdain and silence. For years Garro and her daughter, who apparently sided with her mother on most issues, lived away from Mexico, mostly in Spain. Paz failed to connect with them. Garro often complained of cold shoulders from the Mexican elite. Not only did she decry persistent harassment, but she also encountered countless difficulties in getting published. She attributed these obstacles to Paz's magisterial influence. Cypress connects these difficulties to the concept of cacicaje, an atrophied system, akin to feudalism, still in place in Mexico, whereby everything is made to rotate around the centralised figure of the cacique. Paz, to use his own words, was ‘el ogro filantrópico’, a totemic, gravitational figure whose tastes dictated the nation's intellectual appetites for decades. After his death, cacicaje in Mexican culture might be said to have diminished somewhat, although Enrique Krauze, Paz's designated successor, is still known to rule through intolerance.
In wanting to do good, Cypress’ Uncivil Wars is a book torn in half in more ways than one. Her feminist premise is that Paz's light has contributed to Garro's shadow. That premise is unconvincing on a simple ground: Garro's literary talent is mediocre. In other words, had her oeuvre been more lucid, such vindication would be valid. Yet while posterity at times is in need of correction, it isn't always wrong. Sor Juana is a suitable example: while she was also the target of censorship, in her case from seventeenth-century Church officials, her legacy today is brighter than that of any male author of the colonial period. The reason is simple: her sonnets, plays and philosophical investigations are superb. In contrast, Garro's stories, including ‘La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas’ – one of the pillars on which Cypress bases her thesis – pale in comparison to, say, Julio Cortázar's ‘La noche bocarriba’, with which ‘La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas’ shares an atemporal quest. And Recuerdos del porvenir, a novel about rural Mexico in the time of the revolution, pales in comparison to Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo. Garro produced scores of other smaller works, primarily plays and memoirs, which I've read through the years. None would endure serious scrutiny. Cypress quotes Elena Poniatowska, who once posited that Garro's identity is inseparably linked to the sentence, ‘Ah, the one who was the wife of Paz.’ No matter how hard Uncivil Wars tries to debunk such a truism, the book unfortunately ratifies it.
The most unrealised aspect of Uncivil Wars is its emphasis on literary criticism. Chapter after chapter, Cypress offers information about the life and career of Elena Garro and Octavio Paz in order to explore their creative output, political positions and ultimate posterity. This approach doesn't work. Had she embraced one of these two sides, the biographical, the study would have been far more convincing, let alone more readable. The focus should have been the tumultuous marriage between Garro and Paz and what that marriage says about Mexico and what Mexico says about it. Instead, what Cypress has given us is a literary study of Recuerdos del porvenir, El laberinto de la soledad and other titles so as to shed light on the life of their authors. In offering this critique, I am fully aware that Cypress is by training a literary critic, thus her approach. Nevertheless, in most disciplines scholars of literature frequently embark on literary biographies. Bizarrely, that genre is not favoured by Latin Americanists, perhaps because indiscretion is seen suspiciously in the Hispanic world.
In short, Uncivil Wars is a missed opportunity: savvy in its choice of topic, but disappointing in its execution.
