Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

But Proust’s novel, as Roland Barthes warns us, is a voyage of both learning and disillusionment: from an age of words when we think that we create what we name (Parma, Balbec, Guermantes), to an age when the original prestige of names is ruined by contact with the outer world (“So it was this! Madame de Guermantes was only this!”) to the age of things, where words manifest themselves as something outside the speaker, as objects (Bloch’s anti-Semitic speeches are a rejection of a guilty passion in himself for another: it reveals the truth of the passion as it becomes a thing).

The third quotation is from Plato’s Cratylus, perhaps the first book of literary theory of the Western world. In it, several attitudes toward names are debated by Socrates and his friends. To Cratylus, names are intrinsic to things: they are natural. To Hermogenes, they are purely conventional: whatever name you give to a thing is its right name. Socrates concedes that an onomastic legislator might give things their fixed or absolute or ideal name; but this substantialist demiurge is soon defeated by history. He makes names, but, alas, the dialectician uses them, and, says Socrates, simply by paying good coin to the Sophists, we will not learn the true name that we come to know dialectically, in its usage, but not originally, in its essence.

Plato, who does not hold the world of letters in high esteem, would not fall into any trap laid by the likes of Marcel Proust (or Gabriel García Márquez). He makes Socrates reveal the deceit of Hermes, which is similar to that of Kafka’s messengers: though he is identified with the power of speech, Hermes, the messenger of the word, the purported interpreter of the gods, cannot even give us the true names of the divinities, for it is clear that among themselves the gods address one another in a manner different from our own. They use their true names; we do not.

It is Hermes who is guilty. He circulates words as if they were money and robs them of their permanence, which is the same as their essence; he makes words have a double meaning, sometimes true, sometimes false, always worn thin.

Socrates would then have men of reason dispense with names and rather seek to know things directly, in themselves or through each other, in their relationships. The Cratylus is, of course, a polemic against Heraclitus and his philosophy of constant change. It defends a substantialist point of view: if things are always changing, there will always be no knowledge. Names are changing and changeable words, and they belong to the unstable and unessential world where “all things are like leaky pots.”

Cratylus is not convinced by Socrates; he prefers to think that Heraclitus’s ideas are true. Socrates lets the argument rest. He bids Cratylus come back another time and teach him; and Cratylus leaves hoping that Socrates will also continue to think of these matters. So the dialogue ends on a civilized note of mutual tolerance.

* * *

This is America. It is a continent. It is big. It is a place discovered to make the world larger. In it live noble savages. Their time is the Golden Age. America was invented for people to be happy in. You cannot be unhappy in America. It is a sin to have tragedy in America. There is no need for unhappiness in America. America does not need to conquer anything. It is too vast. America is its own frontier. America is its own utopia.

And America is a name.

Gabriel García Márquez is the name of an American writer, a writer of the New World that stretches from pole to pole rather than from sea to shining sea.

America is a name. A name discovered. A name invented. A name desired.

In his classic book The Invention of America, the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman maintains that America was invented rather than discovered. If this is true, we must believe that, first of all, it was desired and then imagined. O’Gorman speaks of Europeans who were prisoners of their world, prisoners who could not even call their jail their own.

Geocentrism and scholasticism: two centripetal and hierarchical visions of a perfect, archetypical universe, unchangeable — yet finite because it was the place of the Fall.

The response to this “feeling of enclosure and impotence” was a hunger for space that quickly became identified with a hunger for freedom. Some of the names of this hunger are Nicholas of Cusa and later Giordano Bruno, Luca Signorelli and Piero della Francesca, Ficino and Copernicus, Vasco da Gama and then Columbus. Some of the names of this freedom in its European and American incarnations are:

First, the freedom to act on what is. This is the freedom won by Machiavelli in Europe and acted on by Cortés in America. It is the freedom of an epic world made to the measure of the self-made man, not he who inherits power but he who is capable, with equal measures of will and virtue, of winning it. This is the world, in the Latin American novel, of the descendants of Machiavelli and Cortés in the jungles and plains of the American continent: the Ardavines, the ferocious political bosses of the Venezuelan llanos in Rómulo Gallegos; Pedro Páramo, the fissured Mexican cacique in Juan Rulfo; Facundo, Sarmiento’s immortal portrait of the archetypical caudillo. And: Francia, Estrada Cabrera, Porfirio Díaz, Juan Vicente Gómez, Trujillo, and Somoza in the news; and in the novel, Asturias’s El Señor Presidente, Carpentier’s El Primer Magistrado, Roa Bastos’s El Supremo, and, outliving them all, incorporating them all, García Márquez’s ageless Patriarch:

“The only thing that gave us security in earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane … invulnerable to time.”

The second is the freedom to act on what should be. This is the world of Thomas More in Europe and of Vasco de Quiroga in America. Discovered because invented because imagined because desired because named, America became the utopia of Europe. The American mission was to be the other version of a European history condemned as corrupt and hypocritical by the humanists of the time. On the contrary, Montaigne in France, Vives in Spain, and the Erasmists all over, saw in America the utopian promise of a New Golden Age, the only chance for Europe to recover, eventually, its moral health as it plunged into the bloody Wars of Religion.

Historically, Father Vasco de Quiroga, the Spanish reader of More’s Utopia, lived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, arriving only a few years after the Conquest, and created communities totally faithful to the precepts of the English writer. Quiroga — venerated to this day by the Tarascan Indians as ‘Tata Vasco”—believed that only the utopian commonwealth would save the native inhabitants of America from violence and desperation.

He established the first utopian communities in Mexico City and Michoacán in 1535. That same year, Thomas More was beheaded by order of Henry VIII. So much, one would say, for utopia.

Yet utopia persisted as one of the central strains of the culture of the Americas. We were condemned to utopia by the Old World. What a heavy load! Who could live up to this promise, this demand, this contradiction: to be utopia where utopia was demolished, burned and branded and killed by those who wanted utopia: the epic actors of the Conquest, the awed band of soldiers who entered Tenochtitlán with Cortés in 1519 and discovered the America they had imagined and desired: a New World of enchantment and fantasy only read about, before, in the romances of chivalry. And who were then forced to destroy what they had named in their dreams as utopia.

So Carpentier’s narrator in The Lost Steps follows the Orinoco River upstream, to its sources, to the Golden Age, to utopia, to

this living in the present, without possessions, without the chains of yesterday, without thinking of tomorrow …