This year's disastrous losses intellectuals on the left (Montemayor, Bolivar, Saramago), has brought us also the death of Carlos Monsivais. As a reader and critic of his work, I always found it an intellectual guide, enormous honesty, and unparalleled brilliance. I'm speechless, but I share here a text you just wrote last month for a book on Mexican narrative edited by Rafael Olea Franco and forthcoming in the Colmex.
Carlos Monsivais: the chronicle as a public narrative.
In his brilliant tour de force entitled The Parallax View, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is a reflection on the relationship between realism y narrativa que puede tener algo que decirnos sobre la narrativa mexicana: “El realismo documental es, por lo tanto, para aquellos que no pueden tolerar [bear] a la ficción –el exceso de fantasía operativo en toda ficción narrativa” (350. Mi traducción). Históricamente, la narrativa mexicana ha tenido una relación peculiar con la realidad. Si bien existe una relación estrecha entre literatura, historia y vida cotidiana, la narrativa ha sido ante todo un intento de simbolizar y darle sentido al complejo y traumático devenir de la nación mexicana. En los años cincuenta, la década de formación intelectual de Carlos Monsiváis, emergen las obras cumbres This kind of narrative: Pedro Páramo , Juan Rulfo, making the province as a post-revolutionary world of ghosts and Death of Artemio Cruz , Carlos Fuentes, who chooses to symbolize the leader of the impossibility of understanding deeper dimensions of the system. The works of Rulfo and Fuentes, as well as novels like The memories of the future of Elena Garro, a Mexican literature show unable to "tolerate" the complex reality that developed their around (the rampant modernization Alemán and his clash with provincial conservatism, deep failure of agrarian reform, the emergence the party apparatus to govern the country for decades.) Before an unbearable reality, this narrative chosen to symbolize the nation on mythical spaces like Comala or Porvenir, where the Mexican nation could exist as a local microcosm where one could make sense of signs and symbols of the concept.
Despite the genius of the symbolic worlds created by the grand narrative of the fifties and sixties, too intolerable reality that not only continues to have an essential role in Mexican life, but, due to consistent acts of repression against the dissident elements of the new national system (starting, perhaps, with the railroad) would begin to be an intellectual imperative for the country's literary class. The culture of these years, however, was entirely devoted to the mythical symbolism of the national. Beyond the novels, the fifties were characterized by an avalanche of essays on "national" , who tried various ways to translate several psychological and social policies in a nation image of a Mexican uniform and discernible: to the popular classes did not fit into the conservative German, was erected a "phenomenology of relaxation" (Jorge Portilla and Cesar Garizurieta), to a Mexican woman who had no symbolic place in the new nation, formed the stereotypes of the Virgin and La Malinche (Octavio Paz), to indigenous language that did not correspond or culturally centralized nation, they erected an idealized pre-Columbian culture that could claim as the source of the nation (Miguel León-Portilla). To follow Zizek's terminology, the Mexican culture of the fifties and sixties was primarily a way to symbolize the trauma, to make sense of a historic defeat, that of liberating promise of the revolution.
Carlos Monsivais's work emerges in the late sixties as a short on this feature of Mexican literature. Although his first texts were already circulating in the Mexican literature, the decisive event, which allowed full Monsivais emerge as narrator and as a public intellectual, was the slaughter of Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968. On the one hand, the massacre of students emerges as an irrepressible version postrevolutionary reality, an act of violence so extreme that it could not be symbolized in the codes of the Mexican literary . Furthermore, rural nostalgia and revolutionary Rulfo Garro, along with the insistence on the myth of both sources of Peace become insufficient to a student movement shows a progressive and modern urban culture, which does not correspond to the narratives of the Revolution and who, however, is there to read and write. The central discovery Monsivais, his very particular style of writing review, introduces the Mexican narrative level that "documentary realism" of which Zizek speaks. In these terms, we can say that Monsiváis is the narrator of the excess of reality that afflicts Mexican literature. Monsivais intellectual courage to confront what was Real, pit break the myths and put both in prose as in the public space a repressed Mexico, radical though it would be the base would eventually overcome the most pernicious legacies of revolutionary failure.
Days In save (1970), his first book of Chronicles, Monsivais starts with a question that will define all his work: "The rising country Where is modern personality?" (15) . The Chronicle, from this book, answers this question from two trenches. First, the narrative explores the impact Monsivais daily modernizing capitalism on culture and society of Mexico. Here goes it up interest Monsivais by media culture, of which his work is a precursor study. In a review of this book, after telling a succession of historical facts, concludes with a devastating Monsivais statement about television: "And there was the Mexican Revolution, in the eyes of Telesystems. The Mexican Revolution dramatized in episodes of 24 minutes (plus commercials), compilable on Sundays "(42). If the half-century Mexican literature was their canonical forms to participate in the cultural process of symbolization of the story, Monsivais emerges as the critical core of this process, the way in which culture, both high and popular media, distorts the political weight of history. Perhaps influenced by criticism from left to media culture, from the development of the concept of alienation in Dimensional Man (1964) by Herbert Marcuse, a book of great impact in the global student movements, to Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord and his criticism of the emerging empire of the image, Monsivais is the first consciousness of modern culture is not intended to build a Mexican-discernible, but the criticism of the collusion between that association and by the power devices . To return to the terms that have been raised, Monsivais is the first great critic of the symbolic and imaginary parts of the Mexican culture and literature.
The second book by Carlos Monsivais, Lost Love (1977) illustrates this point well. This book is the moment where a particularly Monsivais deep elaborates his critique of fiction, poetry and popular culture as symbolization strategies of the nation. This book chronicles categorized according to their different ways of articulating Mexico to particular strategies of thought and emotions. Each text within each section is usually dedicated to an iconic figure. Thus, we have sections devoted to the romantic song (Agustín Lara, José Alfredo Jiménez), left (Siqueiros, Revueltas), the figures of public scandal (Salvador Novo, La Tigress Irma Serrano, Isela Vega) and media (Raul Velasco, Miss Mexico .) His analysis of the Tigress exemplifies how Lost Love emerges as part of the narrative strategy Monsivais Mexico to confront a fully modern and fully capitalist, with its emphasis on areas that exceed the literary symbolism of myth in both rural and the authors of the fifties. Commenting on a book entitled Nana, Monsivais observes: "The Nana contributions to the understanding of capitalism: money is eroticism "(312). With this assertion, Monsivais points to several important levels of analysis: not only reduce, as would the hard left, the money to the "greed" to understand the peep show as a practice in full use of the imaginary of modernity, understand the ways that the modernity not only a matter of ideology or farms, but also desires and affections. Parallel to the emergence of what Vicente Francisco Torres has called "the Latin American bolero novel," Monsivais enters Mexican narrative, and literature of the country, symbolic territory of the media and cultural eroticism and affection of a nation eminently modern, urban, media. In this, one may say, Monsivais not only ahead of many writers who, a decade later, would resume this type of work (Sealtiel Alatriste, for example). Also a precursor of the revolution theoretical critique of cultural studies, whose founding figures (Néstor García Canclini, Jesus Martin-Barbero especially) would take Monsivais chronicles his work as a basis for .
The second element is how Front Monsivais assumes the need not to symbolize the trauma of history, but to narrate, to put it in documentary prose, to give space to cultural memory needed to crack the unfading building power. As Linda Egan has stated: "the violent dispersal of dissent and no less effective repression of difference through language project a holographic disneyesco as a nation" (252). This observation reveals how Monsivais understand cultural symbolization processes inscribed in popular culture with the processes of ideological formation of citizenship. This position is clearly seen when, in Days Save , 68 is crimped to the narrative monsivaíta: "The inexplicable about what happened in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, is explicable in the domain need a class in power. More logical interpretations have Tlatelolco not reduce the irrational world that has unleashed. More irrational than the massacre, stands the desire to establish that nothing happened in the end, temporary insanity, abuse of power-man, there can be no collective responsibility "(18). While acknowledging the possibility Monsivais both rationalize (to attribute all the power) and to symbolize (pretending that nothing happens or constructing fictitious personal responsibilities) states Monsivais clearly the need to confront the irrational and inexplicable. In other words, Monsivais not content or the description of power or with the task assumed by the Mexican novel, to make sense of fictional or imaginary nonsense of the nation. Monsivais decide, from his early work, as the narrator of chaos, disaster, injustice. Herein lies the heart of the narrative Monsiváis: the ability to historicize, to put in stories and make sense of all those historical events in the nation that the literature has been unable to tell directly. Moreover, to understand the ideology not as an intellectual process imposed from the top down for power but as an ongoing process involving production in the culture as well as politics, Monsivais not only predates the term post-Marxist criticism (Eagleton 193-220), but creates a series of literary operations with broad implications in the narrative literature. Of these two in particular stand out. First, thematically, Monsivais literary and intellectual valence gives a number of cultural issues that lacked (and perhaps still lack) of cultural legitimacy in the literary practices of Mexico. Second, and perhaps more significant, chronic Monsivais restores to a place which may be privileged joint mechanism a Mexican reality that the novel and short story fail to grasp fully. Turning once more to the intuition of Zizek with which I opened this text, the chronicle of the genre Monsivais that allows text to grab from the fact that excess traumatic than traditional processes of symbolization of the narrative can not understand or capture. For this reason is that Monsiváis is a prolific writer and proliferating, whose work extends rhizomatically in books, magazines, newspapers, academic and public presentations. Monsivais was given the task of telling that reality always over, to confront the trauma that lives in areas as diverse as gangs, extreme right and the underground world of subway.
The 68 emerged as one of transcendent signifiers Monsivais's work precisely because the spirit of the student movement is, from their point of view, one of the first clear historical examples where the crimp between culture and politics . In its recent review , 68, a tradition of resistance (2008), written on the subject of the fortieth anniversary of Tlatelolco, Monsivais identifies four "languages \u200b\u200bof 68" language "official" that justify the slaughter of a mixture of "kitsch and McCarthyism, "a language of" izquerda party "based on the" ideological struggle drunk on the rise, "a brigade language," which does not gel in an organic way, but it is lawless and vital for the duration "and a middle language which requires modernization (1978 to 1981 .) In addition, following the terminology of Homi K. Bhabha , Carlos Monsivais have argued that states the existence of two nationalisms, one teaching, imposed since the power and their ideologies and other performative, emergent everyday practices of citizenship. Their analysis of 68 operates in a similar way. The first two languages, taxes from the hegemony party or the doxa, are "inaudible", "unreadable" or "dead" since they represent a dogmatic position that represents the very vitality of movement. In contrast, the brigades are in an area formed by the relaxation, rock Cortazar's works, while the middle class expresses its disgust against the official culture of the Aztecs and Sor Juana and calls for a modern and internationalized enterprise. A good way to characterize the narrative Monsivais, born at the end of the social whirl of 68, is in its attempt to account, critically, performative languages \u200b\u200bof the national, arrived in the anarchy of youth and modern aspirations of the middle class, resisting the urge educational (and symbolized) not only of the official culture but of the traditional literary institution.
For this reason, track, and try to do as part of the book for which I write this article, Monsivais in narrative mapping in Mexico is a complex task. In a country where even the most prominent chroniclers (Elena Poniatowska, Juan Villoro, Salvador Novo, among many) are also authors more creative texts canonical genres (novels, poetry, short stories), Monsivais has really been bounded to the chronic and test . This situation has led many critics of urban chronicle in Latin America have developed a theory of gender as "marginal", "posliteraria" or "out of canon" . While chronic Monsivais faced at various times the strength of the Mexican literary world, I think the genre itself is actually quite canonical. If you look, for example, texts Monsivais dedicated to the chronicle, it is clear that practitioners have full authority in the center of national literary life: Fernández de Lizardi, Guillermo Prieto, Novo, Poniatowska and even Villoro and Fabrizio Mejía Madrid are all angular figures of Mexican literature and all have received full recognition in life. Also raise the chronicle as a genre that emerged in the depletion of the literature (as argued by cultural studies) is also inaccurate, as the chronicle is not a new genre, but a textuality that has been part of Latin American literature from their earliest beginnings.
Without resolving this issue at all, I think it important to understand the chronic Monsivais as a central contribution to the Mexican narrative, not because of their marginality, but generic and stylistic originality. In fact, much of the criticism about the work of Monsiváis is designed as attempts to answer this question and then we can find a number of clues as to how to understand it within the canon Mexican narrative. John Kraniauskas, Monsivais's English translator, argues in "critical proximity" to the genre he writes Monsiváis is the "chronic" test "or" Croni-test (essay-Chronicle), which articulates the one hand, the journalistic legacy of his writings with constant interjections and opinions of the authorial voice. In this sense, Kraniauskas raises essentially the Monsiváis texts as a genre in itself, based on the hybrid between the narrative of the chronicle records traditional ethos and test perspective of cultural criticism. In these terms, Kraniauskas argues that ultimately, what determines the gender aspect is its age and compare their effectiveness symbolic murals (60-5). For its part, Linda Egan emphasizes the influence of the new American journalism (56), from which you can set your connection to the "documentary realism" and its emphasis on "theory of popular culture" (88-9) . Finally, Jezreel Salazar, in a study focused on the city's role in the work of Monsivais, Monsivais states that differs from its predecessors in the genre to replace Novo nostalgic vision for a more "critical and realistic" (38). Also, Salazar Monsivais's work raises a challenge to the generic hierarchy of Mexican literature, fiction that place first, to conclude, via the Bakhtinian notion of dialogism and polyphony that: "The record combines different elements dialogical project seeks to link national culture to popular culture, political analysis and some will essay to literature "(130) .
This brief critical review reveals that in both narratives, the work of Monsiváis is located on the edge of the same gender, in a space that exceeds the intellectual nodes explored in fiction and defines the very boundaries of the narrative as a literary practice. In other words, one could say that in many ways Monsivais broadens the notion of narrative in Mexico. On the one hand, Monsivais, as did the new American journalists of the Sixties (Capote, Wolfe) , the notion of nonfiction redefines the notion of narrative beyond novels and stories and awards for journalism and chronicles a renewed within narrative traditions. Second, creating new dimensions of what Roland Barthes calls the "reality effect," Monsivais broadens the functions of Mexican narrative beyond the symbolism and mystification of the historical (or breaks metaliterary of authors such as Elizabeth and Garcia Ponce ) into an area of \u200b\u200bdirect intervention in public space. In a sense, the narrative Monsivais restores political function direct criticism, although it has been well studied around gender testimonial , has its origins in critical journalism Monsivais generation. Third, by engaging with these traditions to the test, Monsivais introduces a degree of critical impurity Mexican narrative, which rearticulates semiotic balance between aesthetics and ancillary extraliterary the text. While the works of Monsivais, formally, is one of the most brilliant and elaborate aesthetic of Mexican narrative, from an extremely rich style rhetorical functions as metonymy (Faber, "Metonymy") and the appropriation of discursive legacies as the Baroque (Egan 36), their texts introduce a radical question the idea of \u200b\u200b"literature itself", which is prevalent in Mexico discussions at the forefront, to rethink their public role. Finally, the use of the polyglossia Monsivais and dialogism, reported by Salazar, democratization is an instance of the figurative narrative and authorial voice that gives important spaces of the text to the various voices that constitute the social fabric that recreates.
intellectual and aesthetic force of these four contributions to the narrative Mexico Monsivais take particular form in the texts of the eighties, particularly in its iconic books Free admission (1987) and Scenes of modesty and lightness (1988). At this time, the narrative chronic Monsivais used to articulate a new literary discourse over symbolic: the emerging civil society. If the 68 woke the chronic need for a national memory, the sequence of events generated by the disaster of San Juanico in 1984, the 1985 earthquake and the 1986 world cup opened for chronic monsivaíta narrative function of this . This was a new step out of the literary practice of symbolization, as the timing of critical articulation of civil society, as emerged, transformed the chronic process of remembrance Monsivais critical parallel narrative process history. In which, in my opinion, is the summit of the work of Monsivais, chronicling "The days of the earthquake" included in free admission , Monsivais presents civil society as a construct not of political theory but as a fluid entity resulting from the practices of the participants in the different and disparate ways of relating to the earthquake and the collapse of the omnipresence and omniscience of the Mexican state: "And in early October is key practice : civil society is the community effort of self and solidarity, the space independent of government, in fact, the area of \u200b\u200bantagonism "(79). Monsivais narrative begins to evolve to represent this new civil society in its textual space. Here emerges a decisive point established by Salazar, the polyphony of the texts Monsivais. Free admission In more than ever before in his work, emerge the chorus of citizens participating in the performative construction of the civil society. Therefore, Monsivais used consistently to witness real and fictional characters to construct the very meaning of that society. For example, in the account of the earthquake, are clear expressions of solidarity that Monsiváis invoked to attest and witness the process: "What Quick thought: nothing was as good, or my plans work, and my thesis, or university for graduate school. Nothing! All mine was vanity compared to the suffering of thousands "(109). Rather than prescribe a civil society, the narrative is presented primarily Monsivais as the narration of a fact that emerges from the bottom and another (a "society that is organized" itself as the book's subtitle suggests), the chronicler attested by a polyphonic style and pluralist accounts of the actors involved in it. However, one could say that the textual process is reversed and actually we have a flow of events connected as disparate as they become in civil society (a term which is, after all, a builder of political thought and cultural ) from the eyes and pen of the chronicler.
What is clear, however, is that Monsiváis clearly assumes the position of intellectuals whose role is to discern which forms of social mobilization under the civil society and which belong to the society of the spectacle that his critical work since the sixties . The counterexample in Entry is free World 86, examines Monsivais similar in tone to the Olympics 68, as a form of official culture that turns the social energies to direct them to a politically unproductive activity. This lack of political production is clearly emphasized Monsiváis: "Of the many cities built around the World Cup, the two most widespread, with their respective prosperity are those of Televisa and underemployment" (212). Thus, Monsivais argues that the only productivity is emerging World Farandulera television business and the informal economy that is practiced around the stadiums, both reminders of the precarious social and economic life. When social bodies, which presumably have memberships common in soccer and in the earthquake, emerge in political and social solidarity, we have "civil society" when they do show entertainment is simple. Thus, the same writer who speaks with great authority of the public articulation of the various social movements of society in the process of comprehensive organization expressed bewilderment at the football show: "A ignorant of football, and I presume so, it is not easy to track flights mood of a crowd eager for a quick victory, confident that his team fight to the eager limit the colorful language that calls out trepidatorio of speakers "(231). In this contrast, Monsivais narrative shows decisively their ethos: to the extent that mass produces culture or politics or affection "genuine" (as some popular culture Lost Love), the reporter is one who understands and elucidated. When that body or that culture produces a culture of alienation or substantiation of hegemony, the chronicler distance and attack. In these terms we could say that Monsiváis is perhaps the largest in Mexico heir of the Frankfurt school (when talking about soccer, quotes Crowds and Power Elias Canetti), a leftist intellectual who, understanding the symbolic weight of the culture popular decides maintained as the critic who discusses his relationship with politics.
In these terms, if Free admission contrasts the relationship between the pedagogical and the performative in the field of civil society, Scenes of modesty and lightness does so in terms of emotion. The book is organized into sections which, in turn, are subdivided into four categories of chronic: Institutions, Dancing, Mexicanerías and social Chronicle. From these four constructs, Monsivais still more elaborate the draft Love lost, the narrative and critique of what, using a term from Raymond Williams, could be called "structures of feeling" of Mexico . Like Free admission, Monsivais discerning between popular culture and official hegemonic conservative values \u200b\u200bimposed on the population (the famous example is the text on the "most beautiful flower of Ejido") and everyday culture in which members marginalized of society resist such oppositions (being the most famous chronic reconsideration of Monaco on Dancing: hole fonqui) . Thus, sections as Mexicanerías or institutions are devoted mainly to criticism of the constitution of hegemonic cultural discourses, particularly those that reproduce structures of unequal social, economic, racial, or gender. Using the same polyphonic style, Monsivais invokes a statement by a psychologist named Bernardo Vargas, who was asked in 1972 in Great magazine, who develops a theory of romantic relationships from the Mexican soccer. Asked about the "goal-getter," Vargas says, "brings together two characters. Women, because he likes the admiration, flattery, vanity. Male because it dominates the ball. But look in this: he touches the ball (the woman), she gets rid of sending it as far as you can and in the direction of the network (the woman's uterus in the custody of the mother). (114). By strategically selecting an event so full of unintentional humor, Monsivais leaves these speeches expressing his own absurdity. However, the choice is clearly not free, as we see here how a speech allowed (psychology) contributes to the reproduction of a series of social phenomena: the imposed masculinity, sexism, homophobia, etc. If the central concern is Free admission applications for the emerging citizen force generated by events eighties, Scenes of modesty and lightness deals with some forms of social and political that go beyond the traditional democratic discourse: gender, in this case. Whereas late is the struggle for gender equality in Mexico (which is not really public echoes well into the eighties for women's rights, and maybe even this decade for gay rights), it is notable that Monsivais present this issue as one of the main problems to diagnose from the narrative. In recounting these pictures of the dominant, official culture in its full absurdity, Monsivais makes explicit its paradoxes, seeking ways fully assembled.
in institutions, as well as social Chronicle, Monsivais continues its efforts to tell the excesses of the wealthy, as a way of challenging the culture generated by social inequality. In his chronicle of María Félix is \u200b\u200bexpressed this clearly: "The Purple House on Insurgentes Sur, is one of those sanctuaries of opulence that attenuate the tremors of economic gloom. A provision of the escapees of the crisis, a sweetly inspired interior design in Houston or Dallas, the art-nouveau and art-deco eroticise morale, bring different styles that tend to convince the customer that he, in fact, is an international traveler "(164). In his critique of the upper class, Monsivais focuses on the artificiality and superficiality of cultural references present in everyday life. In this event, for example, Monsivais speaks of interior design as a strategy for bridging cultural references into a system of signs built to create a fantasy of cosmopolitanism to the cultural gap that consumer culture. Here once again applied the binary opposition between a superficial culture, which is based as a way of performativizar status and inequality, and a real culture, used for the construction of identities and emotional resistance and erotic to address the emotional imperatives of hegemony. Take, for example, a fragment of a chronic "Dancing": "In this dancing tolerated, and it does not matter (the impudence and the assertion genitals) is assumed with pride or inhibition. Thanks to the aesthetics of sexuality, generations of the oppressed and dispossessed make your transaction danzón Versailles and classical music and dance are in the body-to-body her first orgy permitted "(52). Fonqui holes, nightclubs and other venues are submitted by Monsivais lewd as the alleged hired tasteful class high. In these spaces lies eroticized sordid and an instance of cultural liberation not only because these spaces are placed between parentheses racial and economic parameters of the national culture, but because these forms of sexual sublimation released to participants of the structures of morality. To the extent that morality plays a major role in sustaining these inequalities activated interior decoration, the nightlife and underground sex is a space of resistance and questioning of social hegemony.
This, of course, does not mean that Monsiváis beyond the old dictum of Henri Bergson, "all humorist is a moralist disappointed. " Monsivais morale, however, is public and not private, and connects to the ethical uses of power. However, Monsivais moral vein is one of the reasons behind the fact that her only volume of fiction is in parables, the new catechism reluctant Indians (1983, with later editions increased). Adolfo Castanon explains this twist: "Monsivais belongs to the endangered species that is the writers for whom the book culture and biblical knowledge as knowledge essential literary form an indivisible whole" (15). This book articulates a Protestant intellectual vein then that appears only intermittently in Monsivais, but in this text sui generis even within the corpus of his works occupies a prominent place. Arturo Davila thus characterized this text: "This is also the fiction that use some alrevesamiento the official discourse, and that religious dogma overlapping work another even more amazing fable, set in a satirical level, trying to return understand the incomprehensible. A playful kind of baroque (or even churrigueresco), where reality and fiction meet and can talk. And there on that plane humorous and ambiguous while "dangerous" - where it borders on the fantastic real, it is permitted to negotiate with what is supposedly non-negotiable: the dogma of faith "(205). In this lucid presentation, Dávila parable suggests that operates here as a way of updating the matrix of the Mexican colonial narrative in a way to articulate a critique of power as a cultural category.
An example of this can be found in history "disobedient Prayer", where the body of a man of faith resist the imposed moral religious discourse: "At that point she noticed the free will of his hands , figures trace their hands on the lewd gestures obscene and denied and vilified the benefit virtuosos of his sermon "(90). The indecency and obscenity of the gestures are the parallel meeting of the bodies in the pit danzón and scenes fonqui of modesty and lightness. Although they are drawn from an everyday context, situations of New Catechism for Indians reluctant however reflect the ethos Monsiváis said that in his chronicle. While everything is presented in the language of faith and colonialism, in reality the texts written in this book provide a theoretical exploration of the moral narrative of the work of Monsivais. Castanon is right in pointing out that " his fervent criticism of the lack of faith in criticism, NCIRE Monsivais, not only affirms the vitality of the national baroque sensibility, which also power the certainty that critical intelligence is an enduring forms of hope "(21) . However, I would argue that the issue is more critical intelligence to the baroque: a morality that is deployed from fiction to maintain, even on the symbolic level the need for criticism and secularizing society perspective.
parabolic language had an impact on the narrative of Monsiváis in the early nineties and in the running when it starts their approaches to the mass meetings with the figure of the Apocalypse. Chaos Rituals (1996) is the book that crowns the consecration of both the canon Monsivais narrative of Mexico and in its role as interpreter of Latin American modernity. Religious language, secular in its update to the contemporary chaos, serves to engage the rhizomatic Monsivais proliferation of hope and apocalyptic in the current era: "Blessed is he who reads and more blessed is he who is not shaken by the scimitar the economy, it blocks access to the dubious paradise of books and magazines during these years of anger, monsters that rise from the sea, swearing that descend to sever stuttering, and dragons who loved charity film and record the whole day so no one panic call, and considered mechanical creatures and fierce advances no extermination "(248). In this proclamation of biblical aspect, there is Monsivais how modern approaches to chaos: the need for culture and intelligence critical to meeting the consumption that destroys everything, recalling the formula a couple of years after Chilean sociologist articulate Thomas Mouli, "consumption consume me." Monsivais poses the same problem at the onset of chaos rituals: "In the center consumption. In the world of large contemporary superstitions, procurement and the desire to purchase have become the gift to be reflected in the mirror of intimate prestige, and in the game where the images are essential, which is praised is the belief in consumption (of faith, basic and superfluous, of shows), which is described as a force that really channeled into society "(15). This statement frames the narrative where the civil society of the eighties, vanishes into thin air of advanced capitalism, where social forces that were organized in the past decade have yielded to the inevitable passage of consumption.
Maria Cristina Pons articulates a suggestive reading of the book: "The central problem that is emerging through the ritual of chaos is to order the dangers of the technology ubiquitous, not understood as a way of producing an appliance or machinery, but a rationality that governs the ways of thinking and behavior of a society "(115). In a sense, one can say that the clear dichotomy between the emancipation of the real and the hegemony of the surface is dissolved by the consumer and technology, as the new capitalist order transforms everything into hegemony. What is interesting about this critique, however, is that Monsiváis not opposed to a conservative outlook or keep checking. Of Indeed, his critique clearly supports the fact that past was also builder of hegemony, "Helguera invents or transforms the stage at will, populating it with artificial sweet joy, as idyllic as Campirano songs of the twenties, with Chaparritas that Pancho loran not because your return soon, with rows and houses prior to the vagaries of Progress (67). Clearly, in Monsivais, return to the past is not a viable vision.
Monsivais The Revelation is, after all, a social diagnosis ambiguous. As is seen in both rituals chaos as in his recent Apocalipstick (2009), rather the concept implies the dissolution of the reference system and morals that shaped modern Mexico since the Revolution. In a parade of two decades covering the Metro, Spencer Tunick, Gloria Trevi and the Mexican neoderechismo, Monsivais end of time poses a nation from the gradual fading of cultural parameters and the persistent presence of anachronisms die hard. Certainly, this topic Monsiváis is attuned to contemporary critical theory: as Slavoj Zizek with which I began this essay recently published a book entitled Living in the End Times . Here point lies (provisional) of arrival of the narrative Monsivais. If his earlier work was the story of modernity promised this unfinished and in turn, accuses Apocalipstick and depletion of that modernity, these promises to release the civil society and the emergence of new public bodies (in a literal notion of what would seem in principle) in his affection and erotic imagine new forms of emancipation. However, Monsivais is an optimist, a man whose critical eye, secular, bright and always engaged in chaos and the end of the world, glimmers of hope that the public intellectual and chronicler of contemporary life has an ethical obligation to display. Monsivais is a literary genre and narrative in itself and in this genre is its vast literary and political contribution.
