4 - Ambivalence and the Crisis of the Mimic Man: Irony and Context in ‘Luvina’

Summary

In this chapter, I will consider the ways in which the narrative of a post-Revolutionary teacher, as related by Rulfo, represents ironically the remnants of a colonial discourse. As part of the context for this discussion, it is vital to confront the wider implications of cultural studies in its relationship with ethical considerations. Culture with a capital ‘C’, as Terry Eagleton warns us, is dangerously exclusionary when dominant values become ‘universal’ truths, and therefore exempt from political considerations: ‘Culture in its more mandarin sense, by disdainfully disowning the political as such, can be criminally complicit with it.’ Any such interpretation of Mexican culture, for example, might excuse the Mexican urban state of repression of the Mexican rural population with the notion that ‘universal’ truths represented by an infallible Western civilisation must be absorbed by a ‘backward’ peasantry. On the other hand, there is also a danger of ‘criminal complicity’ in culture with a small ‘c’, exemplified by ‘blind particularism … far too eager for a local habitation’ where the glorification of individual cultures can result in a ‘pluralized nonconformism, in which the single universe of Enlightenment, with its self-sameness and coercive logic, is challenged by a whole series of mini-worlds displaying in miniature much the same features’. Thus, whilst acknowledging the peripheral viewpoint of the Mexican peasantry, I do not wish to assume that they represent a discrete world of fixed values of ‘some pure essence of group identity’.