Customer Reviews

The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations

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*****I've read the book and contend it has nothing to do with the following:

moribundity Nietzsche and Heidegger signs, marks and traces signifier deconstructed textuality a congealed encrustation anthropomorphic metaphors radical semiotics Plato's Republic

verisimilitude the hobby horse of "S/Z" Roland Barthes writ large Derridean erasure an antediluvian age Fredric Jameson said, "Postmodernity is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Baudelaire Huysmans Wilde prisonhouse of artifice il n'y a pas de hors texte.

valorization of Gilles Deleuze Rabelais and Villon through to de Nerval, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, Celine, Eluard, Artaud, Bataille, Michaux the maudlin Verlaine Camus-esque hymns

*****and only slightly more to do with the following (minus the flowering allegations at the end):

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.

This book really gets to the bottom of the conquering of the Amerindian civilizations. Le Clezio exposes the conquering for what it was, without pointing fingers or trying to push a thesis. Le Clezio gives the facts and lets the reader decide what they think of the occurence. It is hard to read this book and not feel sympathetic to the Amerindians in their situation. Wonderful, wonderful history read.

My wife recommended this book to me earlier this year, so I bought it, read it, and put it aside. For some reason, it just wasn't quite what I expected. I even regretted having bought it. Then, just two days ago, I picked it up again and re-read it, and discovered what I had missed. Right there in the subtitle "the interrupted thoughts of Amerindian civilizations, was the whole point of Le Clézio's book. What if the Amerindian civilizations had not been destroyed? "The conception of cyclical time, the idea of a creation based upon [chaos] might have been the points of departure for a new scientific and humanist way of thinking. [T]he respect for natural forces, the search for an equilibrium between man and the world might have been the necessary braking of technological progress in the Western world. Only today we are measuring what that equilibrium might have brought to medicine and psychology" (page 208). What if ... the possibilities are almost endless.

But this was not to be so. The Amerindians of Mexico and the Yucatan, whose cities were so beautiful that they were awe-inspiring, were far ahead of Europe's greatest cities in terms of cleanliness, waste removal and clean water, and whose music, visual and poetic arts astounded the invading Europeans was "in the span of one generation ... reduced to dust, to ashes." How could this possibly happen? "The Conquest was not just a handful of men taking over ... seizing the lands, the food reserves, the roads, the political organizations, the work force of the men and the genetic reserve of the women. It was the implementation of a project, conceived at the very beginning of the Renaissance, which aimed to dominate the entire world. Nothing that reflected the past and the glory of he indigenous nations was to survive: the religion, legends, customs, familial or tribal organizations, the arts, the language, and even the history - all was to disappear in order to leave room for the new mold Europe planned to impose upon them" (page 176). "All means, especially violence, were used to carry out the program of the destruction of the indigenous societies: these means formed the set of rules which were to govern the American colonies until Independence" (page 177).

The bulk of Le Clézio's wonderful book is an exploration of the rich cultural heritage of these people as it was preserved by Mendieta, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, and those Amerindian sources, such as the Mayan Popol Vuh that were not destroyed.

Some books just never let loose of my mind and imagination, and this is one of them. The author, J. M. G. Le Clézio, born in Nice, France in 1940, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.

The things we have lost breaks my heart. This is a must read for anyone interested in Native American/Mexican history or even human history.

It's especially interesting to me to read a history of Meso-American cultures by a European. I haven't yet put my finger on what the differences are, but they're there.

That said, it's a worthy and important read. I'm not entirely fond of Le Clezio's writing---perhaps he was trying to replicate a dream-like state, but I'm probably wrong about that---or it could be a problem of translation, I don't know.

Despite all that, it's well worth the slog. It doesn't quite compare to de las Casas or Castillo, but it does modernize the subject matter in a sense and brings it back into the public eye.

It is quite gruesome in parts, but any relatively accurate portrayals of these extraordinary cultures will be. Just give yourself time to read it, if you have an active imagination like I do, and it will be worth it.

Oh, and I agree with the other reviewer: this book has absolutely nothing to do with lit crit, semiotics, decontextualization or whatever else is in fashion these days. Claiming that it does really only diminishes the extraordinary ancient cultures the book is describing. Read it for that, and that alone, and leave the literary pretensions for another time.

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.