The Marxist Myth of Mexico

THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ by Carlos Fuentes. 306 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.95.

It is as if an American novelist felt obliged to take in Valley Forge, the winning of the West, the Civil War and reconstruction, populism, World Wars I and II, and the Affluent Society. Nobody does this; the political novel (apart from the quickie or ad hoc novel like Fail-Safe) has been abandoned by U.S. writers along with the family saga.

By contrast, the panoramic national novel still flourishes in Latin America. Especially in Mexico, writers struggle to establish an orthodox fable of the Revolution. It did not happen once and for all between the death of Porfirio Diaz in 1915 and the uneasy truce of church and state in 1925; it is a continuous affair, its unfinished business exciting in 1964. The basic facts of national history are still passionately argued.

Venal Men. Thus Carlos Fuentes, an able and eloquent novelist, though not a subtle one, passionately expounds the dominant Marxist line: the failure of the Mexican Revolution to produce a socialist Utopia must be laid to venal men who betrayed it to capitalist thieves and their attendant priests and police.

This large, crude, simple vision may be vaguely familiar to those who remember Paul Muni as Juarez, Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa, or Elia Kazan's Zapata, which had Judases aplenty and Marlon Brando on the same white horse that tourists can see in Rivera's mural in the National Palace. A novelist has more trouble than the makers of film epics. In this case, Fuentes has had to package the whole corpus of Mexican history into the dying body of a septuagenarian symbol named Artemio Cruz.

Multiple Betrayals. Fuentes vivisects this dying body of corruption to excite disgust and detestation in the reader. The reveries of Cruz take in a cruel, gaudy life that spans the Revolution. He remembers himself as a barefoot boy in Veracruz blasting the face off a frock-coated oppressor with a shotgun; as a fugitive in Sonora; as a liberator on horseback defeating the federal artillery. He takes a hacienda for the people and the haciendado's daughter for himself. He becomes a general, begins to enrich himself. The betrayals are multiple, and by the time Fuentes lets his old renegade die, impotent for all his mines, hotels, real estate and 15 million Yankee dollars in European banks, he has all but danced with rage on the dying body.

Fuentes is at his least effective when the blunt weapons of Marxist homiletic fall heaviest. This occurs in impressionistic italic inserts in Artemio Cruz's dying reveries, and is a curious exercise in reportage in the manner of the early Dos Passes--a novelist still admired in Mexico, where the cult of proletarianism, dead elsewhere, lives on.

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