The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations (Hardcover)

by J. M. G. Le Clezio (Author), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator) "THE DREAM BEGAN ON FEBRUARY 8, 1517, when, from the deck of his ship, Bernal Diaz first saw the great white city of the Maya,..." (more)
Key Phrases: arte huicholes, sacred pyres, war festivals, Bernal Díaz, Bernardino de Sahagun, Chronicles of Michoacán (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This examination of ancient Mesoamerican religion and myth is based on 16th-century chroniclers' accounts of Aztec and Maya myths and covers familiar ground. French novelist and pre-Columbian scholar Le Clezio's interest in these ancient civilizations is purely literary, in accord with the romantic French attachment to the lost world of ancient America that fascinated Guillaume Apollinaire and the Surrealists Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. Like them, Le Clezio is particularly enchanted with the "sacred horror" and "terrifying beauty" of pre-Columbian myth and magic and their ritual identification with death. What is freshest here is Le Clezio's linkage of North American and Mesoamerican Indian religious beliefs. He concludes his uneven study with wistful speculation about what might have been if the Spanish Conquest had not interrupted the religious and philosophical development of these civilizations: their rituals and myths might have given shape to a true philosophy, on a par with Taoism or Buddhism.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This provocative meditation on Mexican history by French novelist Le Clezio uses "dreams" (religious ideas, goals, and metaphors) to discuss Mexican civilization, especially the tragedy of its encounter with Spain. The author has written a work well founded in both pre-Columbian civilization and the Spanish chronicles of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Bernardino de Sahagun, and others. The "dreams" include Aztec religion, which predicted its own destruction; the Spaniards' dreams of gold and empire; and the "barbarian dream" (the two-sided "holy war"). Le Clezio contrasts Indian religions and Christianity, strongly favoring the indigenous peoples even as he vividly describes nefarious native practices. His reliance on the Spaniards' own words makes his indictment of them especially scathing. This expertly translated book can be compared with metaphorical works by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. Highly recommended.
- Margaret W. Norton, Hoffman Estates H.S., Ill.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (December 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226110028
• ISBN-13: 978-0226110028
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #579,606 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Song Of Joy, December 29, 2008

By	Nin Chan "Nin Chan" (Toronto, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews

One of the reasons for literature's increasing moribundity is our seemingly incurable infatuation with language. In many senses, we can blame the French (though they, in turn, would blame Nietzsche and Heidegger). With the so-called 'linguistic turn', the human subject has been transformed into a depository of signs, marks and traces who is irrevocably alienated from 'reality' (itself an empty signifier that must be deconstructed) by an impenetrable veil of textuality. The world that surrounds us has become a congealed encrustation of anthropomorphic metaphors, perception is merely a historical residue. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that literature offered so little resistance to this obsession with radical semiotics- having been banished for millenia, deconstruction finally offers the poet full citizenship in Plato's Republic.

As such, it is often nice to witness the ascent of a writer who is an uncompromising realist. By realism, of course, I don't mean the hackneyed, 19th century pursuit of verisimilitude that would become the hobby horse of "S/Z" Roland Barthes, but philosphical realism, the belief that objectivity and reality (writ large, without Derridean erasure) does exist absent the perceiving subject. Of course, such thinking strikes us as being a relic of an antediluvian age- how can one even begin to speak of Reality when the media and the internet are manufacturing reality and subjectivities at an unprecedented rate? As Fredric Jameson said, "Postmodernity is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Baudelaire had already read the portents in the 19th century, Huysmans and Wilde exulted in this prisonhouse of artifice. The verdict is out- all of those "residual zones of 'nature' or 'being'" (Jameson) have been revealed to be mirages, oases; check your archaic mystical fantasies at the door, and welcome to the prisonhouse of language. In here, only one law is sovereign: il n'y a pas de hors texte.

In this light, "The Mexican Dream" is a rather strange book. Perhaps, though, the current (justified) valorization of Gilles Deleuze and a growing interest in deep ecology bode well for the reception of this book. My own fascination with J.M.G. Le Clezio stems, perhaps, in my overwhelming affection for a certain strand of French literature, one that stretches from Rabelais and Villon through to de Nerval, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, Celine, Eluard, Artaud, Bataille, Michaux. These, I would say, are not the accursed 'poetes maudits', nourished by self-pity and acute alienation (it is not much of a surprise that it was the maudlin Verlaine who coined the term),but the unblemished innocents who remained intransigent in the face of universal corruption. Le Clezio's early writings are firmly within that tradition- defiant rhapsodies to the human imagination in the face of global commodification. While sharing the Surrealists' mystical inclinations, however, Le Clezio was also unabashed in his paganistic devotion to the earth- even his urban dystopias contain beautiful, Camus-esque hymns to the sun, the sand, the sea.

In this sense, perhaps "The Mexican Dream" can be read as an elucidation of Le Clezio's pantheistic vision, as he generously offers Western Civilization an elixir which might just save us from our own foibles. While the language throughout is lucid, even laconic, the text can be rather dense- a lot of information has been compressed into 210 pages, and the languour of Le Clezio's later writing is somewhat lost in between the endless outpourings of citations, mythical names and historical facts. Still, the prose is far from stiff- Le Clezio's fierce, unreservedly partisan (at various points of the book he castigates, in stridently bald language, the rapacity and vulgar materialism of imperial Europe) love for his subject is especially evident in the closing chapter of the book.

It is not difficult to discern why Le Clezio gravitated towards pre-Columbian Mexico. In the Amerindian Civilizations, Le Clezio has discovered a truly pantheistic world, one where even the most infinitesimal gesture is saturated with God. It is a world where time is pregnant with cosmic meaning, where poetry is enacted in dance, where life radiates with intensity: "It was the happiness of a magical age, when time was not an inevitable and useless passage, but rather a connction to the wheel of the centuries, which carried out a mysterious and perfect destiny." (pg 90) Most importantly, it is a world where the boundary that separates man and the divine is indiscernible- man lives at the heart of the sacred, in the midst of eternity, and his entire existence is dedicated to participating in the limitless rapture of God. Mysticism is not a cabalistic exercise for hermits, it is the very foundation of communal existence. Anticipating our postmodern fixation with transhuman experience (cyborgism, cyberpunk and the like), the Amerindians were versed in all forms of becomings, effortlessly traversing the thresholds between man, animal and deity.

What fascinates Le Clezio is the very LITERALNESS of Indian religion- there is nothing metaphorical, metonymical or allegorical about religious praxis, one actually BECOMES God in the act of sacrifice. The stone used to craft arrowheads IS vested with celestial power, dreams ARE the passageway to the absolute, prophecies and auguries WILL come to pass. God becomes something immanent- a pure, imperceptible presence that persists among the people. As such, rituals are "magical scenes which materialize the mysterious forces of the other world" (76), efforts to make the gods manifest themselves by assuming corporeal form. The presence of the Gods, Le Clezio notes, was so immediate, that the Indians actually became irate at them if they did not grant them their wishes! We see how mistaken the imperialists were in calling the Indians 'idolaters'-the Indians did not worship dessicated icons, images and symbols, but a material, living force that coursed throughout the social body. The beauty of this conception is almost Spinozistic in its simplicity- each of us is a part of God, the body of God is infinite, yet immanent to the earth. To us jaundiced smart alecks, such naivete is likely to strike us as quaint at best and hopelessly stupid at worst. To others, it might invoke horrifying specters of religious fundamentalism. Thank goodness we're living in a post-religious age!

Of course, things are not quite so simple- Le Clezio had, in "The Giants" and "War", offered a rejoinder to such secular triumphalism: monotheism simply goes under another name nowadays, Mammon, or, capital. In contrast to the tenets of liberal humanism (the inviolability of the subjective individual, an emphasis on negative freedom, the inherently self-serving and egoistic nature of mankind, the opposition between the individual and society and the necessity of a transcendent, sovereign structure to mediate between the two), Le Clezio finds a community devoid of Faustian pretensions. Like Bataille, he marvels at a people driven by excess, a way of living that is a dramatic alternative to capitalism. Instead of thrift, the Indians believe in splendor and extravagance (gold has no monetary value, it is, instead, regarded as 'excrement from the sun'!). Instead of self-preservation, they believe in risk and war. They place great value in poetry and rhetoric- one of the most beautiful chapters in the book is a brief excursus on the melancholy, portentous poetry of Nezuahualcoyotl- but they live in profound intimacy with the sacred, the unnameable. God is not a trope, he is not a figure of speech, he IS, and he is here among us.

In some senses, the book owes a bit to another endlessly fecund work of ethnology, "On The Geneaology Of Morals". The Indian is Nietzsche's "Blonde Beast", beyond good and evil, an expression of purely active, untrammeled spontaneity. In him, there is no delay between thought and action- ressentiment has no time to dam up and fester. Yet, perhaps what attracts Le Clezio most is the boundless smoothness of Indian space: "The world that surrounded them was much more than decor, it was the very expression of the divinity. If ownership of land was such a dificult notion for most Amerindian civilizations to conceive of, it is because the earth was without limits, like the sky, the sea, and the waters of the rivers...for the hunting-gathering peoples agriculture was an infraction of the laws of nature, particularly when it was practiced as a means for enrichment and erected barriers preventing the free movement of men and game." (202)

It is this vision of infinity that serves as the central axis of the entire book. In revealing the infinitude that lies at the core of Indian life (and, by implication, *ourselves*), Le Clezio unearths a very different image of the Amerindians than what is traditionally conceived. Yes, the Indians were belligerent and bloodthirsty. Indeed, they could be despotic and cruel, though it is important to note that we are framing all of this in the timorous moral categories of the West. Yet, perhaps they gave us a glimpse of a democracy more radical than we had ever imagined, a Holderlinian utopia where God infuses every atom, every millisecond, every corpuscule. A world where desire is no longer a dirty secret, where dreams are no longer sublimated wish fulfilments, but passageways into eternity. In excavating the collective dreams of a devastated race, Le Clezio implores us to believe in our own, in a love that will overflow the dams that authority has erected and saturate the social body. You can call Le Clezio what you will, but it is certain that he is not a cynic. If that makes him a retrograde romantic, then so be it.