Chapter 4

Deep Literature and Dirty Realism:

Rupture and Continuity in the Canon

Gerardo Cruz-Grunerth

T he 1960s and 1970s saw Latin America come to the forefront

of international attention. From the triumphal spirit of the Cuban
Revolution and its influence on the rest of the region to the oppres-
sion and repressive violence of numerous military dictatorships, lit-
erature and editorial production were nourished by the impulse of
this historical moment. As a result of increased attention, the literary
production of this time, which came to be known as the Boom, had
the opportunity to access European publishing houses and gain a sig-
nificantly bigger market. The Boom also signified a reformulation of
the Latin American literary canon. Thus, the Boom became a point
of departure as two Mexican literary groups theorized a revision of
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the canon thirty years later. The Crack Manifesto and MoHo, the
manifesto of dirty realist writers, introduce two distinct aesthetics
that express tension yet harmony with the established canon in their
own way. Given that both movements propose an “end” of Latin
American literature, it is essential to explore both their manifes-
tos as well as representative works—Jorge Volpi’s El temperamento
melancólico (The Melancholic Temperament, 1996) for the Crack
writers and Guillermo Fadanelli’s Lodo (Mud, 2002) for MoHo—in
order to better understand the inheritance these authors receive from
the Boom and the revision they attempt to make of the canon.
To talk of the Boom includes a recognition of certain elements—
formal, thematic, and discursive characteristics—which unify these
texts and make them form a heterogeneous yet real literary group.
This leads Fernando Aínsa to argue that “Aesthetic ideas do not elim-
inate the stressful demands reality imposes, but rather those demands
become the work’s best incentive” (Narrativa 52–53). Aínsa describes

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 86 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

the problematic of a literature that was still portraying Latin America’s

social problems while distancing itself from the propaganda thinly
veiled as a revolutionary discourse. These texts denounced military
intervention and state oppression, as well as other topics that were
often the target of censorship and repression, without subordinating
aesthetic concerns to social ones.
One of the common elements of the Boom literature, beyond the-
matic concerns, was the presence of multiplicity of genres and discourses
from other disciplines. This polyphony helped construct the “total
literary work” or “total novel.” Aínsa describes this idea, stating that
the “total novel” would end with false scholastic-like dilemmas that
divide Latin American novels into social, sociological, historical, cos-
tumbrista, objective, or ideological genres, each in conflict with the
others, as if all the elements of these novelistic traditions could not
coexist in a simultaneous, contradictory, and enriching form. Carlos
Fuentes calls it the “total novel,” whereas Aínsa asserts that the novel
is a combination of “myth, language and structure” (Narrativa 53).
The emphasis on polyphony and the creation of the “total novel”
are instrumental in portraying a new Latin American society and also
in the construction of a new canon. Combined with the commercial
and critical success of the Boom, these aesthetic elements provided a
benchwater moment for Latin American literature. One could also
argue that the Boom’s aesthetics—which employed magical realism
with the same ease that it used a testimonial approach—already rep-
resented an alteration of the canon, but as Edgar Mora has astutely
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observed regarding the study of Latin American literary history: “The

tradition of rupture in Latin America is a question that is not stud-
ied, and because it is not studied, it is too ambiguous and obscure”
(42). Perhaps because of this, the Post-Boom period took the initia-
tive in a much less serious way, and from there it continued its own
production.
Even though some scholars lump everything that followed the
Boom into the category of Post-Boom, a more narrow definition of
Post-Boom is necessary given the variety of texts that fit the broader
definition. In the shadow of writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel
García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes, these Post-Boom
texts imitate magical realism, exploiting it as an easy way to access
the global literary market and with it commercial success.1 The Post-
Boom literature has been criticized as empty, easy literature without
great artistic merits due to its simplistic repetition of the Boom aes-
thetics to create an exotic quality that global readers began to associate
with Latin American authors. Because of these criticisms, at least two

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 87

groups of young Latin American writers rejected the Post-Boom aes-

thetic and presented their own views in manifestos, the first propos-
ing an aesthetic of “dirty realism.”
The first issue of the journal La Pus Moderna (Modern Pus,
1989) provides a series of texts defining dirty realism.2 The emphasis
the journal itself placed on counterculture and postmodernity com-
plements the authors’ proposal for a Mexican dirty realism or “trash
literature.” Consistent with its countercultural roots, the very title of
the magazine was a play on the word “postmodern” in Spanish.3 The
magazine’s title altered the meaning of the original term and moved
it to the realm of the dirty, the insane, the sick, creating a perfect title
that corresponded with the ideology of the publication.
Naief Yehya and Guillermo J. Fadanelli, both of whom were part of
La Pus Moderna’s editorial staff, further the “dirty realist” aesthetic
proposal in two texts, “La literatura a la que estamos condenados”
(The Literature to Which We Are Condemned) and “MoHo, princip-
ios básicos” (MoHo, Basic Principles), also commonly known as the
MoHo manifesto. In “La literatura,” Fadanelli and Yehya state:

We were able to finally find the ideal classification for new Latin
American writers. They can be divided into assholes and intellectu-
als (don’t laugh, it took us a lot of work to arrive at this conclusion).
The intellectuals are influenced by Julio Cortázar and the assholes by
García Márquez . . . Anyway, we raise a definitive cross on Mexican let-
ters’ cadaver and we believe that, as soon as possible, we should get rid
of the body. (Yehya and Fadanelli 36)
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For these authors, the “afterlife” of García Márquez’s discourse

becomes the greatest blunder of contemporary literature. According
to Yehya and Fadanelli, within this dead literature there are also
works by old ladies who “instead of helping with Church donations
sat down to write novels whose only attribute is that they have no
sense of the ridiculous” (36).4 Equally problematic, for these authors,
is the presence of class discrimination in some contemporary literary
works in which character development and plot divide “in degrees
and neighborhoods a misery that at first glance seemed to affect
everyone” (36). The MoHo authors frame their political and aes-
thetic position through negative terms, that is, by describing the
type of literature they do not want to create. Imitating derridean dis-
course, in which the margin becomes the center, Yehya and Fadanelli
subvert tradition in favor of their own self-described underground
position: “The magazine MoHo is not a marginal publication; in
fact, outside of us everything is marginal” (50). Furthermore, in the

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 88 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

manifesto, they reject classifications like “disenchantment,” which

tended to belittle countercultural forms of artistic expression. One
finds a more political–philosophical discussion than an aesthetic one;
the MoHo authors challenge the imposed order not only for art, but
also for humanity: “If one were to have to learn a lesson, it would be
that of forgetting everything that has been learned, this whole les-
son of humanity and its achievements” (50). Once again emphasizing
negation rather than creation, the authors also imply a position free
of influence, stating “We do not have a position on man nor a new
vision of humanity” (51). Their literary proposal then comes from
the tension between this spirit of negation and the manipulation of
aesthetics; they argue that:

The creative exercises that man needed to preserve his essence were
confused with mere modes that celebrated the most banal part of the
spirit . . . Words have always been sluts that sell themselves to artists, to
politicians, to speech makers and to prophets. They have been the mas-
turbatory instrument with which we now masturbate without feeling
the least amount of pleasure . . . Everything has been a constant descent
into misery. Through the promise of a better world (a phrase which has
always sweetly bounced between publicity and philosophy) it became
an ignominious and constant present . . . We believe that literature is
dead and furthermore so are writers and thinkers . . . Talking of us is
false because we are simply alone in this eclectic and imitative game, in
this half babbling among the rubble. (Yehya and Fadanelli 36)

Although the quote contains no direct references to contemporary

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literary forms, it does manifest dissatisfaction with a system that no

longer functions. In the text, MoHo authors declare that literature
“está pelas,” which implies that literature and its authors are lost.5
While the discourse of these two writers refers to Latin American lit-
erature in particular, at the same time their statements take on much
broader implications. They are arguing that the “official discourse
of humanity” is empty, art has become silent. Thus, literature “está
pelas” (lost), it is unable to go further.
Through the discourse of dirty realism, first proposed in La Pus
Moderna, Lodo focuses on putting crude, dirty reality, and explicit
sexuality at the center of the narration. Diana Palaversich, speaking
of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Trilogía sucia de La Habana (Dirty Trilogy
of La Habana), could just as easily have been referring to Fadanelli’s
novel: “What is revealed as ‘dirty’ . . . is not sex, which many puritani-
cal readers have defined as pornographic . . . by reading between the
lines, what one does see is the dirty everyday reality that the author

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 89

magnificently describes without falling into the trap of writing a

political pamphlet” (82). That dirty realism could function as a coun-
tercultural discourse summarizes the basic position of the MoHo
manifesto. In contrast to the great Boom novels, the aesthetic of dirty
realism focuses on the individual as the product of marginalization.
In Lodo, the characters are marginal ones: the university professor
who holds the lowest rank in the academic hierarchy and receives the
lowest salary, or the man approaching fifty with financial problems
and erectile dysfunction who has no business in life other than fol-
lowing his routine. There is also Flor Eduarda, a lower class girl from
the outskirts of Mexico City who works part-time, dead-end jobs, at
places like the Seven Eleven. She is a young girl without any education
past the first years of secondary school and has become accustomed to
using her youth and beauty, as well as her body, to resolve her most
immediate problems. She cannot begin to dream of a future because
she is unable to comprehend the idea. Characters like these face great
difficulty becoming the center of deep novels, that is, novels about
the “great” themes. The literature of dirty realism provides examples
of the individual marginalized by hegemonic discourse.
Fadanelli’s representations of reality take place “in the space gen-
erated between abandonment and persecution [where] creation and
eccentric literature meet and find a balance. In other words, this is an
oblique, marginal, and maladjusted literature which rises from outside
the center” (Aínsa, Del canon 133). Fadanelli employs not just mar-
ginal characters and themes, but the literary style itself is also margin-
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alized. “Trash literature” or dirty realism belong to what Deleuze and

Guattari call a minor literature, which “doesn’t come from a minor
language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major
language” (16). Deleuze and Guattari’s definition places trash litera-
ture within a space of confrontation against the literary canon in rela-
tion to its values, themes, development, and even its language. Dirty
realism lacks its own language, because language is developed by the
institutions, through the canon; thus, this literary movement has to
create a brand new language as a variant of the dominant one. Dirty
realism modifies

a language, solemn and held responsible for the past, [and] turns the
grandiloquent tone with which it was believed to be invested into a
mocking and decentralized chronicle . . . into humor, in playful elo-
quence, into the ability for self denigration . . . by a literature which
has lost its solemnity due to its absurd . . . and black humor. (Aínsa,
Narrativa 105)

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 90 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

Thus, through sarcasm, humor, and hyperbolic grotesqueness,

Fadanelli’s novel exalts the language of dirty realism. The narrator,
a university philosophy professor, carries the appropriate background
for his discipline, which includes a disposition toward philosophi-
cal discourse and its corresponding terminology: “How interesting
could the life of an imbecile who writes essays about philosophical
minutiae in order to forswear the company of a beautiful woman be?”
(62). This novel’s discourse acquires a philosophical quality that is
not limited to the use of a word or two related to philosophy, or to
portraying the thoughts of a philosopher in the text. Since the first
person narrator determines the tone, as a result the entire text con-
stantly reverts to the essay form.
The text’s polyphony, achieved through the intertextuality of
quotes ranging from presocratic to postructural thought, enhances
its essay character. The main character, Benito Torrentera, constructs
a discourse in which his philosophical digressions juxtapose the
most abstract concepts with the most practical and ordinary parts
of daily life: “In a somewhat hidden beginning, after the insolence
of a worker, I put my hand under her buttocks to introduce a finger
in her ass. She squirmed lightly letting me handle her with a certain
freedom. She closed her eyes, biting her lip on account of the pain.
If someone would have seen, like I did, her expression of pleasurable
pain they would have understood how it is that there are those who
dare to talk about utopias” (185). These connections vary in their
emphasis between the ordinary—or the “dirty”—and the intellectual
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or philosophical. Thus, if the quote above gives more prominence to

the “dirty” side, in the following one philosophical references gain
importance, even if the author seems to be trying to achieve a balance
between the two realms:

I have always envied Kantian discipline. Old Kant was up at five in

the morning ready to carry out a routine that was always the same
until the day he died. He got up to read and to invent transcendental
categories. I get up to clean my fellow prisoners’ shit. Nevertheless,
both acts: cleaning metaphysical excrement through reason or clean-
ing fresh shit with a brush, are equally disturbing activities. (187)

The ideas of Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Plato, and other Western

thinkers connect dirty reality to philosophical thought. Fadanelli
includes reflection, digression, and a first person narrative voice
inherited from the essay tradition. This first person voice has been
used by other Hispanic authors such as Enrique Vila-Matas and Juan

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 91

Villoro.6 In Fadanelli’s text, the narrator and what he narrates are

fundamentally incorporated into the essay form, which in turn con-
nects with other subgenres, like the chronicle, the autobiography,
and autofiction. Liliana Weinberg, in talking about the essay’s form,
argues that the boundary between the novel and the essay is nebulous;
characteristics of one are found in the other, allowing for essay-novels
and narrative-essays (211). Furthermore, as Vila-Matas mentions
in Doctor Pasavento (2005): “Perhaps the great invention of Sterne
was the novel built almost entirely of digressions . . . The tangent or
digression, whether one wants it or not, is a perfect strategy to delay
the conclusion” (44). The quote about Kant found in Lodo reveals the
intellectual pretensions of both the novel and the narrator but also
serves to advance the essay characteristics that filters through most of
the novel. Each page of the novel—with its reflections, digressions,
the nonacademic and the academic quote—offers the possibility of
starting a new stage of the essay form.
There is also a metafictional aspect to Fadanelli’s novel: the nar-
rator’s voice is self-referential. He reveals how he puts together the
structure of the novel and even questions the very construction of the
work he realizes. After judging his own work, that is, the adequacy of
the way in which his novel is narrated, he then decides the trajectory
of his work of art:

The following is the story of the Seven Eleven’s robbery. I will not tell
it, nor will Eduarda, who is not capable of writing. I will use a neutral
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tone to narrate the strictly necessary events, avoiding useless digres-

sions and observations like those that fill this novel . . . Up to here the
description of the robbery is succinct and free of stylistic insolence.
A style that I have not achieved but rather the style’s killer, embodied in
the worker who, without accent or personal passion, dedicates himself
to stack brick upon brick, to collect trash and sweep away the inconve-
niences of literary avenues. (77)

In contrast to the self-referential aspect of the work, there is also an

imitation of the popular detective novel and its traditional linear nar-
rative. Adding to the polyphony of the text, the author incorporates
forms like a news article that one might find in the tabloids as part
of the detective novel discourse in the text. After all, these pages are
full of the most sordid and dirty forms of reality. The novel, as its
narrator explains, could easily be found in one of these sensationalist
articles: “I read and re-read the most apparently absurd news, I revise
the article trying to imagine to myself the events that reading the

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 92 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

most common news would unleash. An adolescent robs a mini-mart

and escapes with the cashbox. The resolution of the crime sees two
men dead and a philosophy professor in jail. Damn” (311). The most
apparently absurd news forms the basis of an aesthetic that focuses
on individuals. Fadanelli’s story expresses the style at the center of
dirty realism; it portrays the characters the MoHo manifesto theo-
rized. The guidelines Fadanelli and Yeyha proposed in 1989 became
a style focused on stories of individuals, stories traditionally margin-
alized by hegemonic accounts. In portraying the baseness of reality,
this literature looks for the real through the lens of fiction. The real
for them can be understood as “that which fractures reality by put-
ting things in their place” (Badiou 32). Dirty realism’s discourse is
that of a minor literature, in the sense that it is marginalized from
the discourse of the canon. For dirty realism, the individual and his
mundaneness displace the great themes—which interest the Crack
group so much—like the world wars, the millennial discussion about
Creation, and artistic creation.
Six-and-a-half years after the publication of the MoHo manifesto,
in May 1996, the Crack Manifesto appears. As preparation for the
presentation of the manifesto, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Eloy
Urroz, Pedro Ángel Palau, and Ricardo Chávez each wrote a novel
with the same theme: the end of the world. With the help of editor
Sandro Cohen, they presented both the manifesto and the novels on
the same day. Regarding the aesthetic principle of these five works,
Ignacio Padilla remembers that “their proposals, even though they
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were extremely personal, coincided astonishingly, and so much so,

that it did not seem risky for us to draft a type of aesthetic position
that, between light-heartedness and solemnity, would lead to a liter-
ary manifesto” (Padilla 21–22). The authors assured an aesthetic link
between novels and the manifesto.
The Crack group coincides with MoHo in its disdain for the empty
magical realism of the Post-Boom. As the Crack Manifesto states: “if
there were some kind of rupture, it would be with the rubbish, with
the pap-to-deceive-the-fool, with the cynically superficial and dis-
honest novel” (Palou, Urroz et al. 4). Even though the topic is treated
delicately, it is important to highlight that this is the only rupture
that, in principle, they recognize. Ten years after the publication of
the manifesto, Padilla remembers: “The followers of Fuentes, García
Márquez, Cortázar, Borges and company had taken literature to a
decline where total or totalizing novels were conspicuous for their
absence . . . That which gives dignity to any literature was missing”
(23). While maintaining continuity with a part of the Latin American

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 93

canon, the Crack members impose upon themselves the task of creat-
ing literary texts that they described as totalizing, as the deep litera-
ture of the great themes. In this respect, Alberto Castillo has pointed
out that the Crack’s use of the term “deep” as a category or type of
novel does not follow the definition given by the only person who
had previously used it to talk about literature, and Mexican litera-
ture at that. According to Castillo, critic John S. Brushwood, in his
study, Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (1996), men-
tions the possibility of creating a “deep” novel, which Brushwood
finds in Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (The Edge of the Storm,
1947). Castillo warns that, “The problem with this term [deep] is
that it is practically impossible to understand it if it is isolated from its
context . . . According to Brushwood, [Yáñez] is able to delve into the
Mexican national predicament and succeeds in expressing the com-
plexity of its problems” (Castillo 86). The Crack’s reformulation of
deep literature is important because it becomes the aesthetic focus of
their novels. What the manifesto expresses about the deep novel cor-
responds to “a tradition or series of novels and novelist writers who, in
their times, ‘profoundly’ understood creative work as the most genu-
ine expression of an artist who was committed to his work” (Palou,
Urroz et al.). For Castillo, however, the Crack aesthetic has com-
pletely changed the original meaning of the term: “The term [deep]
is used in an absolutely distinct mode from that which its author gave
it . . . the tradition of the deep novel that the Crack Manifesto signals
is found to be impossible to track, at least with arguments and defini-
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tions that are contained in it” (87). The Crack’s redefinition of deep
literature must be understood as referring to an engaged work: not
necessarily engaged socially or politically, but engaged with itself.
The manifesto explains that the members of the group write novels
with demands and without concessions: “to explore the genre of the
novel with its most complex and solid themes, and its own syntactic,
lexical and stylistic structures; with the necessary polyphony, extrav-
agance and experimentation; with a rigor free from complacencies
and pretexts” (Palou, Urroz et al.). Furthermore, they pretend that
their aesthetic is one of the grotesque, the ridiculous, the extravagant,
and the irregular. An additional aspect of their poetics is the rejec-
tion of constructing stories with chronotopes. Following Mikhail
Bakhtin, they look for a text that corresponds to a zero chronotope,
“the no-place and no-time, all-times and all-places” (Palou, Urroz
et al.).7 Structurally, they aim to combine different genres and avoid
a “pure narrative” mode, while linguistically they reject the use of
slang and local idioms. They avoid transient language because they

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 94 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

are looking for permanency, enduring fame like that of renowned

authors Cervantes and Rabelais.
In the manifesto, they argue that deep literature is all of these ele-
ments unified to produce a novel: “The five Crack novels are exactly
where we have to look for how much of a pact, of a compromised soul
and ambition; how much of a bet on a—let’s call it—‘deep’ literature
are actually in these writers” (Palou, Urroz et al., n.p.). Each of the
general characteristics that are a part of the manifesto can be studied
as poetic guides for the Crack novels, since the relationship of the fic-
tional texts to the manifesto is an aspect that has not been sufficiently
questioned. It would also be interesting to explore other connections
between the Crack and Mexican literary history. For example, there
is a similarity between the Contemporáneos and the Crack group
through both their affiliation to a cosmopolitan viewpoint and a pen-
chant for performance in the public sector of culture and politics.8
More important for the present study, however, is to compare the
Crack to MoHo and Fadanelli’s Lodo in order to see the negotia-
tions among literary system, aesthetic, literary tradition, and canon
through the correspondence between text and manifesto.
One can read Jorge Volpi’s novel, El temperamento melancólico as
an example of the aesthetic of deep literature in relation to the views
expressed in the Crack Manifesto. This novel tells of a film direc-
tor, Carl Gustav Gruber, who knows that he will soon die of cancer.
The novel recounts Gruber’s efforts to film his last work; it narrates
each of the steps in preparation for filming—the casting sessions, the
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meetings on location, the way in which each of the actors takes charge
of their part. Because the director seeks complete realism in his film,
there is no well-defined script for the actors. Instead, the film seeks
realism born of spontaneity. Finally, the second half of the novel pres-
ents the difficulties that arise simultaneously in the world of the film,
the real world, and the complex personal relationships between the
actors. These difficulties are captured by the lens, where the manipu-
lation of the director and the interaction of the actors also affect the
plot of the film.
By focusing on artistic creation, Volpi highlights what the Crack
authors maintained, that their interest in the novel went beyond any
expression that had to do with conventional themes, like daily life,
and, of course, Mexican culture. On this point, they pretend to estab-
lish a break with the Boom and with a literature that they do esteem,
like the works of Fernando del Paso and Carlos Fuentes. This distanc-
ing has to do with their lack of interest in writing about national
topics and about everyday reality. While in Fernando del Paso’s José

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 95

Trigo (1966) one sees the search for what the author—like Volpi much
later—calls the “total novel,” in the case of Del Paso’s novel, the story
narrates the life of a rail worker who the author employs to put into
play the complete history of Mexico. In contrast, in Volpi’s work, the
narration’s thematic possibilities are limited as he is only interested in
constructing his text around what he calls the “great themes.” Two
great themes are intertwined in El temperamento melancólico. On the
one hand, it portrays the ability to produce the best work of art in a
specific field (cinema); on the other hand, it plays with the fictional
and metafictional idea of ending the world the artist has created.
Both themes are united through the creator of the great work of
art who positions himself above any others. The narration plays with
the interrelated ideas of creation and destruction; just as the creator
gives life to a fictional world, he can destroy it. The characters’ voices,
especially Renata, the narrator, repeatedly stress the same idea: the
film would be “The culmination not only of German film, but of film
itself” (53), “The film that would be the culmination of the history
of film” (56), “We prepared to finish the history of film” (62), and
“that film in which we were trapped was the culmination of the his-
tory of film” (292).
Another of the aesthetic notions that works against the Crack’s
project of achieving the total novel is the difficulty of employing
Bakhtin’s chronotope zero.9 The Boom authors, such as Fuentes or
Del Paso, identified with the nation. Perhaps their novels were not a
demagogic discourse about Mexican identity, but the nation was the
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center of their fictional worlds. With characters like Del Paso’s José
Trigo, or Fuentes’s Ixca Cienfuegos—from La región más transpar-
ente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958)—the Mexican novels of the 1960s
and 1970s explored the human experience and its great themes, and
the authors had no need to impose limitations regarding time and cul-
ture. However, it would seem that the Crack novels—among them Si
volviesen sus majestades (If Their Majesties Return, 1996), El tempera-
mento melancólico, and En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor,
1999), to mention some of the most popular and best known ones—
have understood the chronotope zero as a negation of the national.
Despite the fact that El temperamento melancólico takes place in the
Mexican city of Pachuca and in Mexico City, and even though its
characters are predominantly Mexicans, Carl Gustav Gruber comes
from German origins. In the novel, Gruber is presented as a demiurge
of himself and of art, of the fictional world that he inhabits and the
fictional worlds he creates; he can influence the other characters and
thus affect how they act in the film. The German director, his career,

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 96 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

his artistic enterprise, his grand objective, all have nothing to do with
Mexico; the country and the nationality of the characters are merely
circumstantial. Volpi could easily change the country in which the
novel takes place and nothing else would be altered because the novel
has decentered any sense of the nation.
The business of distancing fiction from nationality is reaffirmed
through the neutral languages employed, under the cover of a natu-
ral language. Volpi is coherent in creating a possible world of fic-
tion where, as the group’s manifesto proposes, language at no point
regresses to slang, folklore, or a generational tone. This characteristic
clearly distances the Crack group from others like the Onda, which
expressed a countercultural ideology and linguistic register of the
1960s and 1970s in which slang, neologisms, references to popular
culture, and to specific geographical places and historical moments
indicate the existence of a chronotope.
Of course, the construction of novels with chronotope zero is
close to impossible; science fiction texts create their own chronotope,
which is typically a construct launched from the present. In El tem-
peramento melancólico, the chronotope is Mexico in the 1990s, while
En busca de Klingsor uses Germany in the 1940s, close to the end
of the Second World War. It becomes clear that what the manifesto
expressed as a desire to reach the chronotrope zero is actually a rejec-
tion of any chronotope that refers to popular or Mexican culture. In
both El temperamento melancólico and En busca de Klingsor, Volpi is
not creating a space, nor a geography, free of interferences but is con-
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structing a fictional city of Pachuca and a fictional Germany that are

still related to the Pachuca and Germany of the real world. Following
the ideas of Lubromior Doležel, fictionality generates historical rec-
reations of people or places that function in a new way through trans-
formation (43). Despite the fact that the author attempts to establish
distance between his narrative space and the verifiable, real space,
what the author puts into place is a possible world of fiction. This
world has been given chronotropic elements by virtue of sharing the
proper noun with a real referent. The novel maintains references to
“time, space and society (order, mentalities and culture)” (Beristáin
117). Thus, it helps to separate the interior chronotrope, that of the
fictional world, and the exterior chronotrope, that of the real world.
Fictionality installs an autonomous possible world that is governed by
its own rules and formed by the textuality of the work, which implies
the presence of an interior chronotrope regardless of its proximity to
the exterior chronotrope (Doležel 32). Volpi does not separate these
chronotopes, but rather allows them to relate to each other. At the

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 97

same time, the interior chronotrope constitutes a nonrepresentation

of Mexico, to thus avoid any nationalist characteristics. The time and
space that shape the possible fictional world do not matter for their
chronotopic construction. What does matter is the eschatological
aspect of the narration, the devaluation of the present that is replaced
by the importance of the future, which also implies an “[end] of this
life and ‘advent of the kingdom of God,’ ‘twilight of the gods,’ catas-
trophe and new chaos, or, in the end, an ‘afterlife’—a notion that ide-
alizes principles and values in an atemporal and eternal plane to satisfy
human hunger for transcendence—where the fulfillment of desire is
located” (Beristáin 120). Beristáin’s eschatological description, based
on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, sheds light on the type of relationship
between time and space present in El temperamento melancólico. The
devaluation of the present in Volpi’s novel is complemented by the
themes of the fictional world and the metafictionality of the novel.
According to Bakhtin, choosing a chronotope is not as simple as
deciding on aesthetic form but also an ideological gesture: “the chro-
notope should correspond to the structural elements of the text, but
essentially have to be a characteristic of the worldview” (Beristáin 18).
Volpi’s negation of the chronotope through the eschatological tech-
nique implies a negation of the ties with a nation and a national way
of life. Thus, the depiction of the fictionalized Pachuca in the novel
does not imply a larger dialogue with Mexican culture.
Besides the approximation to a chronotrope zero, the novel also
incorporates the essay’s discursive tradition as a form that allows
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narration as well as the use of textual polyphony. El temperamento

melancólico constructs the essay through the incorporation of dif-
ferent discourses and registers that allow for a multiplicity of voices.
This articulation of multidiscursivity and polyphony in the novel fol-
lows a tradition that comes from some of the Boom works. Jacques
Leenhardt, for example, has highlighted the intermingling of the
essay and the novel in the case of one of the best known novels of the
Boom, Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo, el supremo (I, the Supreme, 1974).
For Leenhardt, this discursive technique is more than a simple experi-
mental exercise; the tendency to incorporate the essay in the novel is
also a search for coherency:

[The incorporation of the essay form] places the ethical motivation at

the center. Following the sense in which it was understood in the eigh-
teenth century, the essayist is a moralist, but this ethical aspiration of
the essay is never sufficiently strong enough to overshadow the impor-
tance that its artistic aspect . . . The essay requires a different reader

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 98 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

from that which is envisioned by numerous contemporary authors,

every time they resort to an active reader who has to complete, perfect
and determine an “open” text. (Leenhardt 134–135)

According to Leenhardt, then, the text uses a narrative strategy that

orients itself toward an active moralist stance with the aim of coercing
the readers, who are obliged to react to what they read. This was pres-
ent in the Crack Manifesto; they wanted to produce a complex novel
that would not give concessions to the reader and would provoke
their participation in the construction of the text. The information
supplied through diverse nonnarrative discourses will enable the syn-
thesis of this information to allow readers to form their own opinions.
For example, documents corresponding to the description of a charac-
ter’s life and psychology exist, but there is no voice that interprets the
presence of these documents, all of which are fictitious, but should
be read as real within the fictional world. The narrative inserts other
texts like a newspaper interview, which had been published twenty
years before, without explaining its presence; it merely appears. In
addition, the author has included a detailed section with the tone of
a literary essay, which describes different temperaments, among them
melancholy: “Greek theory recognizes four humors: blood, phlegm,
yellow bile and black bile . . . Why is it that the ones which have stood
out in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts were manifestly mel-
ancholic? . . . Art became a profane instrument to achieve salvation,
transcendence” (Volpi 153–156). This is one of the nonnarrative texts
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that support the theme of Volpi’s narrative work. Rather than but-
tressing by repetition of the leitmotiv, the inclusion of the theory of
humors grafts the essay into the main story’s argument. The same can
be said of other insertions, like the appearance of entries in the per-
sonal notebook of director Gruber. The essay discourse in the novel is
also composed through direct essay fragments incorporated into the
text as well as other narrative fragments, like the narrator’s personal
reflections, which exhibit the essay’s style.10
However, all the artistic projects described in the novel remain unre-
alized at the end. The work does not become a masterpiece, nor does
Carl Gustav Gruber create the great film that will put an end to cin-
ematography, nor does the character in the film, the painter Zacarías,
finish the great painting that would create a crisis of continuity in the
history of painting. The “end,” in which art replaces life, is not achieved.
In effect, everything ends with the narration, Volpi’s novel, Gruber’s
film, and Zacarías’s painting all end; the narrative end of the world has
occurred without achieving a substitution of art for life.

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 99

The psychological aspect of Volpi’s novel, seen through the char-

acters’ reflections, enhances the metanarrative discourse within the
novel. Theoretically, as the characters’ thoughts develop and change
through their participation in the process of cinematic immersion,
their actions should also be altered. The process of character devel-
opment is only possible in the novel through the mediation of the
narrator. Renata affirms that: “Irrationality had invaded us: our
movements could not be judged by the logic of normality” (192)
and “art had replaced reality. Life and what was natural had ceased
to exist, now the only possible world, our only universe was that
of the film” (274). These statements say what happens intellectu-
ally for the characters. However, in spite of the narrator’s insistence,
the psychological manipulation of the characters has not affected
their behavior, only their intellect. After each scene in the novel has
been filmed, the characters return to who they were previously. In
front of the camera they can complete actions motivated by an out-
side impulse, but on finishing the scenes of the film, they return to
themselves. By placing the filming of a movie within the novel, the
author employs the fiction-within-a fiction construction character-
istic of the contemporary novel. However, Volpi does not exploit all
the possibilities of this metafictional structure. There is no attempt
at making the characters confront their own fictional nature. Here,
the novel’s characters know they are fictional, but only regarding the
film in which they are acting. The self-awareness of metafictional
texts, which is sometimes employed with the purpose of suggesting
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that there is a fictional aspect of the readers’ real world, is completely

absent in Volpi’s novel.
As observed in El temperament melancólico, the Crack literature
continues to use some of the narrative forms established by the Boom
novels, like polyphony, the total novel, and the inclusion of the essay.
However, this “total” novel rejects a discourse of nationality; the
“great” themes that it addresses do not focus on the world of daily
life, but rather reflect on “great” moments in the history of human-
ity. Aínsa has commented on the abandonment of a totalizing aes-
thetic that occurred at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the
1980s: “In contrast to novels that attempted to be true summas of
existential or phenomenological experience, recent fiction has appar-
ently much more modest aspirations” (Narrativa 104). Unlike the
Crack group, which sought to return to these total novels, but to
do so in a way that altered the original proposal of the Boom, other
contemporary texts are looking to de-mythify the canonization of
that type of novel. Aínsa explains that this will happen by “declaring

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 100 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

open parricide with the arms of ridicule, humor, irony, parody and
the grotesque. The intense revisionism announces, at the same time,
an opening to a world free of prejudices” (104). Mexican dirty reality
belongs to this reformulation of literature with an open rejection of
the Latin American literary canon.
As part of this renovating project, both Jorge Volpi’s and Guillermo
Fadanelli’s novels have found acceptance in the global market. With
translations into various languages, their works reach a public that the
generation before the Boom could never have imagined. They also
reach the same public that they criticize for creating the stigma of
easy magical realism. In contrast to this overworked technique, one
of the characteristics that both aesthetics share is the use of essay ele-
ments in their narrative. Antonio Wienrichter’s statement that works
become essays because they do not seek to represent the world but
to reflect upon it, together with the inclusion of a recognizable voice
that implies the incorporation of “a mix of materials and heterogenous
resources” (13), seems appropriate regarding these two authors. For
both of them, reflection, both of the world and of the self, is of the
utmost importance. Thus, the characters and the narrative voices are
fundamentally those of the essay, incorporating aspects of the cultured
quote and making their discourse an intellectual one. Although Lodo’s
protagonist is a philosophy professor who is involved in the practices of
his profession, the relation to the essay also implies self-reflection and
from this position contrasts with the sophisticated texts of philosophy
and culture in general. In Volpi’s novel, this reflection can be seen
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from the very title, El temperamento melancólico, which the narrator

explains is his way of being distant from the action, passive but reflec-
tive. The narrator devoid of personality incorporates all of the encyclo-
pedic cultured discourses to construct the world of the protagonists.
At the same time, the text questions this way of constructing and
destroying the fictional world with an ending that is disastrous for
both the film and the characters. The incorporation of the essay in
these two novels and in Latin American narrative in general can be
seen as part of a contemporary aesthetic. As Castillo Puche suggests,
“what [other critics] call essay, I call interiorizing, investigation, explo-
ration within, human and anthropological exploration. I believe this is
the path of the present novel (the contemporary novel)” (76). Without
a doubt, the expression of the essay form by Lodo’s protagonist is the
most disconcerting. He constructs his reflection about himself and his
world in references and quotes that contrast with the dirty realism of
the novel. This shock, or heresy, conforms to what Adorno states, that
“the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy” (23). In contrast, the essay

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 D E EP L I T E R AT U R E A N D D I R T Y R E A L I S M 101

tone of Volpi’s novel fits with the cultural project of the film director,
which takes the characters’ lives through the spiral of his uncommon
artistic project.
If this vision of the essay and the aesthetic positions of these
groups are at times irreconcilable, this does not signal any weak-
ness in contemporary Latin American literature. It is true that Jorge
Volpi declared, “Latin American literature no longer exists” (see
“Literatura”), an idea also expressed in the MoHo manifesto: “We
believe that literature is lost” (36). However, if Fadanelli’s and Volpi’s
assertions are true, what is the sense in calling this chapter an explo-
ration of recent Latin American and Mexican literature? Is it possible
to talk of conserving and subverting a canon of something that no
longer exists? And yet, in answer to these questions, both groups,
MoHo and the Crack, maintain those elements that made the Latin
American canon “explode.” In order to preserve these aspects, they
have decided to take different aesthetic paths after a journey of more
than a century of conformity and change in the Latin American liter-
ary tradition.

Notes
1. In speaking of the Post-Boom, I will refer specifically to a few texts
from the end of the 1970s and a large number of works produced
during the 1980s.
2. The first edition of La Pus Moderna corresponds to the months of
November and December, 1989.
3. Pus moderno sounds like “posmoderno” or postmodern in Spanish.
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4. The identity of “these women” is unclear; the text itself does not give
names. One can deduce, however, that they are referring to authors
like Isabel Allende, Guadalupe Loaeza, and Laura Esquivel.
5. Colloquially in Mexico the term “pelar” means to lose a game.
6. Vila-Matas’s texts, like Recuerdos inventados (Imagined Memories,
1994), combine essays, chronicles, and stories. Regarding Villoro’s
collection of essays De eso se trata (That’s the Real Point, 2008),
Christopher Domínguez Michael comments that, “In Villoro even a
collection of essays encompasses the realization of a narrative mecha-
nism” (58).
7. It is important to recognize what the concept of chronotrope zero
implies for Ignacio Padilla: “[chronotope zeros are] autonomous
worlds, they are not supposed to foreshadow anything nor to symbol-
ize anything” (Noguerol 28). Padilla also describes the chronotope
zero as “the no-place and the no-time, all the times and places and
none of them” (Chávez et al., Crack 219). Following Bakhtin, the
chronotrope is “(literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness
of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed

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 102 G E R A R D O C R U Z- G R U N E R T H

in literature” (84). The individual characteristics of certain works

reveal their spatial and temporal position and, because of that, one
can determine their specific sociocultural moment. Helena Beristáin
suggests a way of understanding the chronotrope: “In artistic dis-
course temporal, spatial and social indicators are fused together . . . it
is capable of capturing a space, a given zone together with its his-
torical/cultural content in a way that it obtains from that zone a
historical/geographic characterization” (118–119). Considering this
definition, one can understand chronotrope zero as simply the liter-
ary effort to distance oneself from this historical/geographic catego-
rization. For the Crack authors themselves, narrative in chronotrope
zero is that which seeks to free itself of the limits of a time and space,
so that the importance of its historical context is diminished.
8. The Contemporáneos were a group of Mexican writers and intellectu-
als from the first half of the twentieth century who joined in the pub-
lication of a journal of the same name from 1928 to 1931. Attracted
to the European avant-garde movements, the group consisted of
Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, José Gorostiza, Gilberto Owen,
and Carlos Pellicer. They focused on freeing themselves from the ties
to regional and national discourses connected to Mexican identity.
They opted for a literature that they defined as cosmopolitan.
9. Examples of the “total novel” are Terra Nostra (1975) and La región
más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear, 1958) by Carlos Fuentes
or Mario Vargas Llosas’a Conversación en la catedral (Conversation
in the Cathedral, 1969). Other examples are Palinuro de Mexico
(Palinuro of Mexico, 1977) and Noticias del imperio (News from the
Empire, 1987) by Fernando del Paso.
10. In the novel there is also a discourse that does not imitate the essay,
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but only narrates, and which contributes to the text’s polyphony. This
voice, which is different from any previous one, and narrates without
taking part in the story, describes in real time the parts of the movie as
they are filmed, thus employing a cinematic discourse. The linguistic
use of the present perfect coincides with the cinematic script, which
appends a brief description of the scene that has just been filmed.

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