Border and Writing in a Historical Short Novel from the Mexican Southeast: Cuaderno de los espíritus (2014) by Carlos Farfán

Abstract

The short narrative of contemporary writers from the Mexican southeast, specially from the Yucatan peninsula, contrasts with the overwhelming narrative of the north, as it exposes a different kind of violence, “a deaf violence that, so common, has become almost invisible in the Yucatan peninsula” (Briceño, 2017: 10). Among the contemporary writers from the Mexican southeast who have stood out, outside the regional borders, is Carlos Farfán, a novelist and short story writer from Campeche who has won several national literary awards. One of the aspects of his works is the historical narrative; in this genre belongs his short novel Cuaderno de los espíritus (2014). This paper analyzes, as a sample of the new historical narrative in the Mexican southeast, this work, which narrates the last days of Francisco I. Madero’s life, during a “fictitious” anti-reelectionist tour in Yucatán. The story is referenced by another historical figure, John Kenneth Turner. Considering that the narrative about the Mexican Revolution has been written, above all, from the center and north of the country, this article exposes, in addition to the formal and aesthetic characteristics that define this work as a short novel, its pretension to compensate, through historical fiction, the identity links of the peninsula with the rest of the Mexican territory; it is a narrative that seems to claim, from a different perspective, the presence of the region in the national historical memory. For this reason, the concepts of “memory” and “identity” are central to this analysis, as is the concept of “border”, not precisely because of the idea of separation but because of the desire for transgression: spatio-temporal, territorial, ideological and personal borders.