[In the following essay, Hardin argues that Garro's use of the stone as the framing device and central metaphor in Recollections of Things to Come allows her to foreground the marginalized female and indigenous identities as well as position herself, as a woman writer, at the center of human expressions of artistry.]

The Journey has just begun. Seek the meaning of the sacred knowledge. Seek the meaning of cycles within cycles. The stones know. They are the old ones who show the way. They are the ones that speak.—Hunbatz Men

In her essay, “A Room of One's Own,” Virginia Woolf details the problems of a writer without an established tradition: “But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon [women's] writing—… that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them … when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help” (Woolf 76). For much of Western history, art by women has not been recognized as art, but has been relegated to the margins, if it has even been allowed to remain. By writing her female protagonist's self/art in stone, Elena Garro challenges the ability of the patriarchal institutions to destroy her work (or her self), to forget her work, or to relegate it to the margins. Although the title of the novel is Recollections of Things to Come (Los Recuerdos del porvenir), Proust's title, Remembrances of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu) might be as accurate: the stone motif situates the female artist at the beginnings of art—cave paintings and stone monuments, Aztec pyramids and Mayan stelae. By inscribing herself onto stone, the narrator pre-writes herself, is her own creator; she creates herself as a timeless text, capable of moving both forwards and backwards and finding/expressing the artistic voice that Woolf shows to have been denied women for so long. Furthermore, by using the stone, Garro gives voice to the other marginalized groups in Mexico, the indigenous populations. The stone is a framing device, and thus is marginal to the text; so, from this textual position of marginality comes the voice, which in a post-modern condition is “privileged.” Since both time and perspective are decentered, the entire novel can be read as a means to destabilize the privileged center—a Spanish patriarchal, forward looking perspective—by incorporating the female and indigenous voices. By examining the margins of this novel with Derrida's trace and Kristeva's chora and idea of self-mothering, along with Mayan and other indigenous ideologies, I will attempt to show how the stone becomes the body, the city, the text, and the sign of women and indigenous persons from the earliest arts, and how Garro places herself, not in the future, but at (or before) the beginning of the master narrative.

Garro's novel begins with the narrative voice establishing itself in relation to the stone: “Here I sit on what looks like a stone. Only my memory knows what it holds … I see it and I remember … I, melancholically, come to find myself in its image” (3). At first, the narrator seems to be a person sitting on the stone, narrating the story of the city; however, as the reader proceeds through the novel, he or she discovers that the narrative voice is actually that of the city or area—“I was Ixtepec” (243). This revelation transforms the opening four sentences; the city speaks the story of the stone. Yet, the stone holds and reflects the memory of the city, Ixtepec, as well as that of Isabel. Adriana Méndez Rodenas suggests that the narration is collective and thus disrupts the conventional laws of the novel: “Desde la primera frase, la novela de Elena Garro altera las leyes de la novela con la presencia de un narrador colectivo, el pueblo de Ixtepec” (Méndez Rodenas 845). By changing the standard narrative of the novel, Garro forces the reader to recognize that an entire convention and tradition is being challenged. This stone holds the memory of Ixtepec long after the city has disappeared; it functions much like the Maya and Zapotec stelae and other stone “texts,” such as pyramids or temples, which, primarily, are how we know many pre-conquest writing systems (Marcus 31). According to Joyce Marcus, in her study on Mesoamerican writing systems, “it was only the Mesoamerican ruler's words that were true enough to carve on stone, giving the stone life and making the words eternal” (Marcus 13). The act of writing becomes one of validating or creating the power of the leader, it gives the stone life as a text, and by placing the text in stone, it eternalizes the word. Therefore, Garro, by having her narrator speak from the stone, by having the stone be the locus of memory, decenters or democratizes and feminizes the political power structure (Isabel, Julia, and the other persons in the city replace the leader as the focal subjects of the narrative), animates the environment, and establishes the primacy of language, both written and spoken, as cultural object and transmitter. Also, the act of writing in stone eternalizes the narrative; eternity goes both forwards and backwards into time. It is as if the spirit which becomes invested in the stone during inscription was always there. Michelangelo's David did not exist before it was sculpted, although Michelangelo felt that David was always there, waiting to be released; so also is Ixtepec's narrative there before it is written.

In his introduction and notes to the Popul Vuh, Dennis Tedlock mentions the interaction of deities and stone. Jaguar Quitze, one of the first four human males, carries “[t]he stone whose genius or spirit familiar was Tohil,” a patron deity and giver of fire, and places “this stone on a mountain that came to be called Patohil” (Tedlock 365). This incident demonstrates an acceptance that the spirit or genius of a deity can exist within a stone. Tedlock states that the name Patohil means “at Tohil” (365); this name indicates an association between the stone and the deity—the site of the stone is the site of the deity. In an other instance, Tedlock describes a mythic episode during which the Sun reveals itself in full to Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz and the heat turns them, along with the jaguars, pumas, and snakes, to stone (Tedlock 51). Despite the deities being turned into stone, there is no evidence in the mythologies that their petrification was permanent or that it altered the way in which the people viewed their deities. The essence of the deity is not corporeal.

Furthermore, by placing the locus of memory in stone, Garro removes the narrative from temporal limitations. Besides the apparent time conflict in the title—it brings the past, “recollections” (los recuerdos), into contact with the future, “things to come” (porvenir)—the stone also provides a bridge between or an escape from time. The stone recalls the indigenous past by its being an inscribed memorial stone; it also demands a future—the act of writing assumes that there will be a tomorrow—why record an event if there will not be one to read that record? Also, by the very nature of the medium being stone, the narrative is giving an eternal existence, eternal on a human scale because the stone can exist for millions of years, both before and after its inscriber. In a cyclic time scheme, such as the ones many Mesoamerican civilizations adhered to, each telling of the story is a repeating of the past experience and a pre-telling (pre-peating) of a future experience. Méndez Rodenas, in her discussion of Garro and Kristeva, relates cyclic time to female time: “el tiempo femenino se proyecta en términos de una repeticíon, lo que Julia Kristeva define como ‘ciclos, gestaciones, la recurrencia eterna de un ritmo biológico que se conforma al de la naturaleza’” (Méndez Rodenas 848). Cyclic time is a means by which women and indigenous populations can find presence in a cultural narrative which has for so long sought to silence both their presence and their history. The present is merely a meeting of the past and future where one can read oneself into/onto a cosmic history. History is atemporal because there is no end, or beginning; there are only events that recur and are given narrative importance by the reader. The cycle does not change, merely one's place on the circle.

The idea that the knowledge of the cosmos, and thus time itself, can be spoken from the stone is repeated by a Mayan priest and shaman, Hunbatz Men:

“Hunab K'U, the supreme principle of the cosmic teaching, is now reminding us to renew again the ceremonial centers of the Maya wherein resides the universal wisdom. This knowledge can be found in the sacred places of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador where stand the great pyramids and temples of old. From these timeless centers of knowledge, the voices of the ancient ones will begin to emanate from the rocks, the glyphs, and the geometry of our jungle-enshrouded cities. Here we will learn to communicate again with the natural forces of creation.”

(Hunbatz Men and Bensinger vii)

According to Hunbatz Men, the centers where these sources of wisdom reside are “timeless,” the voices emanate from the rocks and glyphs, and the people will once again be able to communicate with nature.

If Garro had these myths in her conscious, or her subconscious, when she wrote her novel, then we can read the importance of the stone motif as one of reconnection with the voice and spirituality of the indigenous and pre-conquest past. It is a way to bring the spirituality of the indigenous past into the secular and industrialized, mestizo present and future, creating a heterogeneous existence which does not adhere to western master narratives of time, ethnicity, or religion. The texts that speak are natural; the voices are the earth and its forces encouraging the people to reconnect, to listen close enough to hear what has always been there, to hear what had been drowned out as new narratives sought to obscure and efface the old.

Besides connecting the present with the past and future, the stone also serves to give voice to the female which had been essentially silenced by the patriarchal institutions of the major indigenous civilizations, the Catholic church, and the Spanish and Mexican political structures. According to Alicia Ostriker, “[w]omen writers have always tried to steal the language” (Ostriker 315). One means by which language can be stolen is the alteration or subversion of cultural myth: “Whenever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends” (Ostriker 317). Garro steals the language by appropriating the text, the memorial stone which speaks the memory of the people. Instead of the ruler who dictated history, by “manipulat[ing] dates, life spans, astronomical cycles, and real events to put myth and history into a single chronological framework” (Marcus 15), Garro now controls the text and can decide which history to create. She gives voice to the women, the indigenous persons, and the men. Her text defies the male tradition by going to the roots of that tradition and writing itself there, on the stone, forcing all who are in the tradition to see, as T. S. Eliot proposes, the tradition readjusted:

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.

(Eliot 38)

It is as if Garro's text was always already there. She has forced the alteration of the “whole order” to accommodate her narrative which challenges that “whole order.” By placing her narrative in the indigenous past, Garro places it in the past of every mestizo and indio. If we accept Carlos Fuentes's designation of the Mexican as the product of the coming together of the Spanish and indigenous cultures—“Madre impura fue Nuestra Señora la Malinche, la traidora amante del conquistador, la puta madre del primero mexicano” (Fuentes 41)—then Garro's text is in the past of all Mexicans. Her voice cannot be muted without the Mexican past itself being muted. Her story is now history; history is now her story.

The process of remythification creates its own validation if one accepts the Derridean idea of trace:

The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace. The trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace … Originary-being must be thought on the basis of trace.

(Derrida 85)

If all appearances of a narrative are already traces, then one version cannot claim privilege over another. The “originary-being” is itself a trace; the Zapotec and Maya are themselves traces of previous civilizations, such as the Olmec. As the “always already,” the narratives, or civilizations themselves, cannot claim the rank of originary, and thus each reinterpretation, readjustment, or reappearance of the narrative is justified and can provide its own raison d'être. Therefore, Garro's myth can claim for itself the same importance as the patriarchal myths because there is no originary narrative; each narrative has a predecessor; each is merely one narrative in an infinite chain of narratives. In an infinite chain, each link is equidistant from the “beginning,” because there is no beginning; this then prevents any reading of the stone's narrative from being marginalized by time or space. The phallocentric center has crumbled and each resulting pebble has similar “prominence.”

Furthermore, the Mayan and Zapotec texts cannot provide complete narratives. Even now when large amounts of the texts have been deciphered, there is so much which is not known. It is difficult to know how many layers of language each text was meant to transmit (puns, allusions, symbols, etc.), and the texts themselves only deal with a small fraction of the entire narrative of the civilization. How can a narrative which is incomplete, which represents little more than one stratum of society, be given precedence over all texts which come after it, especially if, as Marcus argues, the material is not always even historically accurate? The precedence of the Maya and Zapotec texts is further questioned in light of Hayden White's theories of history as fiction:

there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which areas much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.

(White 82)

If the narrative histories are themselves fictitious, or at least subject to selection and interpretation, both by the original observer and inscriber as well as the contemporary reader, then how can the “original” be attributed any more truth or importance than the contemporary fictional narrative? Writing is selective and interpretive on the part of the writer, and thus incomplete and slanted; furthermore, all readers bring to the texts different understandings and experiences, and thus change the reading of the texts. With such possibilities, definitiveness becomes impossible; there can be no central or core text.

Garro's narrative, while using the frame of the inscribed stone, reveals how much of that inscription is not read, but is heard, or understood.

“I am Isabel Moncada, the daughter of Martín Moncada and Ana Cuétara de Moncada, born in the town of Ixtepec on December 1, 1907. I turned to stone on October 5, 1927, before the startled eyes of Gregoria Juárez.

I caused the unhappiness of my parents and the death of my brothers Juan and Nicolás. When I came to ask the Virgin to cure me of my love for General Francisco Rosas, who killed my brothers, I repented and preferred the love of the man who ruined me and my family. Here I shall be, alone with my love, as a memory of the future, forever and ever.”

(288-89)

The above passage is the entire description on Isabel's stone, her history. However, what we receive from the narrative is considerably enhanced. What is five sentences becomes nearly three hundred pages. The narrative voice which emanates from the stone is as much of a creative force in the narrative as either the stone or the reader. Garro shows that the story is not in the facts, but in the interpretation and the retelling, just as the novel is the interpretation of the events of the novel. Quickly one sees that the possibility of there being an origin, much less of one being able to arrive at or decipher it, is infinitesimal.

Now that we have discussed the space and validation of the narrative voice, it is important to justify locating the voice in the frame, in the margins of the text. Robert L. Delevoy states that “[t]he frame had, since the beginning of easel painting, contributed to the bringing out of its visual function” (Delevoy 153). However, during the final years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the Symbolist and Art Nouveau artists became “concerned with the dialectic between frame and image” (Delevoy 154). Artists such as Jan Toorop, Ludwig von Hofmann, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Gustave Moreau, Max Klinger, and others sought “[t]he delimination which is the characteristic feature of any text … rendered uncertain, or at least ambiguous. The principle of inclusion is stretched and confused. Limination, formerly signal of the end of a text, becomes something vague” (Delevoy 154). By blurring the line between painting and frame, these artists expand the text to include the margins; that area which had previously lacked any artistic meaning other than the signification of the end of the artwork was now part of that artwork and contained its own share of the narrative. This action also challenged the “authority” of museums and collectors to limit or frame the texts/paintings by their own imposition of generic frames. Integrated frames open the space of the narrative, allowing new creative spaces to emerge. It is from one of these spaces, the literary framing device of the inscribed monument, that Garro's narrative speaks.

Speaking from the margin, the narrative voice is able to speak for the marginalized, in this case, the women and the indigenous population. Garro exposes the extent to which women are marginalized within the culture by having primarily the males, but also a few women who have internalized the patriarchal traditions, repeat the female stereotypes and roles. After it is reported that General Rosas has brought a train full of jewels, clothes, and food for Julia, a dialogue erupts in which she is indicted as the cause of the revolution:

“That's where the town's money goes!” the doctor exclaimed.

“He keeps her covered with gold!”

“We fought the revolution for women like that!”

(84)

Instead of blaming Rosas for his extravagance, the woman is indicted; Julia receives the blame for the excesses of the revolution just as la Malinche does for the Spanish conquest. However, Isabel is quick to respond, “‘You people did not fight the revolution’” (84). Instead of pointing out that Julia had nothing to do with the revolution, Isabel points out that those men had no part of the revolution and thus no basis to comment on it. The argument is undermined without Isabel having to make a feminist point out of it; however, from the margin, the reader can see by the context of the novel that this interchange is an indictment of the male non-revolutionaries and the general, but not of Julia.

Later on, Conchita recounts things she was told as a child: “‘A closed mouth gathers no flies’ … It left her immobilized. She remembered her father and grandfather speaking about how unbearable women were because they talked so much, repeating it to her at every moment” (169). As a girl, she is taught that she is not to speak, that she is not to have a voice, and this prohibition immobilizes her. Without speech, she is removed from active participation in a culture in which speech is privileged. Further, her father and grandfather claim that speaking makes women unbearable, but they are never quiet long enough to allow the women to speak in the first place. If women are not allowed to speak in the culture, they must speak in the margins, and then from the margin, comment on the dominant culture. Garro continues her exposure of the stereotypical views of women which are prevalent in society: “’All women are whores!’ the angry Rosas said” (241); “Women are supposed to obey” (268). These examples reduce all women to sexual objects who are to be subservient; participation in the society is limited to sex and service. Since women are silenced within and subjected by the culture, it is necessary for them to find a place to speak and live; that space is the margin.

The indigenous populations of Mexico, marginalized within the culture, are also given voice in the novel. The first good example of anti-indigenous rhetoric which is revealed by the text is an unattributed exclamation: “‘If only we could exterminate all of the Indians. They are the disgrace of Mexico!’” (21). The indigenous population, who had been the central population before the conquest, was pushed into the margin, otherized. The above quotation not only expresses the marginalization of the indigenous peoples, but also the desire to completely silence them; one can speak from the margin, but not from the grave. Segovia emphasizes this point when he says, “‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian!’” (66). Unlike women, who are necessary for the propagation of the species, Indians could be killed without the Spanish “race” risking self-annihilation. By Garro's placing the entire narrative within the locus of memory of an inscribed stone monument, she forces the reader to confront the indigenous history and accept that the Mexican is intrinsically linked with the Indian, even in the non-mestizo, non-indio: “‘We're all part Indian!’” (22). In Cristóbal nonato, Fuentes argues that the interaction of the Spanish and indigenous cultures creates the Mexican identity; to that extent, any Mexican is part Indian, if not hereditarily, then culturally. While in the novel, the indigenous voice is neither great nor always separable, the frame of the novel suggests that Garro is infusing the entire narrative with the indigenous voice because the entire narrative is filtered through the indigenous motif.

The narrating stone, the margin of the text, impinges upon the text not only by its presence as memory, but also by its presence as metaphor and symbol, as well as its echo in other stones. This extended presence of the stone allows it to reverberate in all aspects of time, life, and nature. The stone, even before Isabel is turned into it, gains an ominous presence in the narrative as it metaphorically sits above Ixtepec: “When [Félix] thought of the future an avalanche of days pressed tightly together came hurtling down on him and his house and his family” (14). Here, the stone represents the future, but it is a potentially destructive future; it is a constant reminder of the cyclic destruction/recreation of history. This idea and metaphor is repeated later in the novel when Martín searches for his memory: “A rain of centuries fell on the party in Ixtepec. And had he unleashed the landslide of the centuries on the bodies of his children?” (201). Now it is the past which sits above the town, which holds the potential for urban annihilation. The stone, the content of the avalanche, is both past and future, and holds the ability to efface the present through the destruction of the town.

Besides being a medium that endures time, stone is also shown as being capable of transgressing space through the metaphor of the meteor. “The Isabel who was suspended could detach herself at any moment, traverse space like a meteor, and fall into an unknown time” (25). Isabel, who is transformed into the stone at the end of the narrative, is associated with a meteor, which is itself made of stone. Unlike most stones, which are immobile, meteors cross millions of miles of space, which in Einsteinian terms is inseparable from time. Not only is Isabel like a meteor, but in a later instance she is said to be “capable of changing into a shooting star, of running away and falling into space without leaving a trace …‘A meteor is the furious will to flee’” (26). The meteor represents the will to flee, the desire to disappear, but at the same time it is stone, the sign of permanence and presence. As we see with Isabel, the will to leave is not sufficient; she is always already in the stone, on the hill above the valley. The meteor can cross space and time, thus freeing Isabel from local and temporal contraints, but its being stone also confines her to that space.

Being able to cross space and time gives the narrative a cosmic and universal scope; the meteor can pass through all narrative space(s). According to contemporary cosmogonies, “it is possible for both space and time cosmologies to be finite, without any boundaries or edges” (Hawking 44). Without boundaries there can be no hierarchical privilege based on centrality, because there is no center; therefore, all positions are equally central and marginal. Crossing space and time will not allow one to arrive at a center or origin, although one can arrive at the beginning of a cycle—the moment of the Big Bang, for instance. Garro seems to realize this because the motif of the meteor is not continued throughout the novel; the meteor is surpassed by the motionless stone. With origin being a mythic construct, the narrative voice must instead look for a marginal site from which to speak; that site is the atemporal stone.

Placing the narrative in an atemporal, non-linguistic site, Garro creates what could be later called a space through which the chora may emanate. For Julia Kristeva, the chora functions “[d]uring the period of indistinction between ‘same’ and ‘other,’ infant and mother, as well as between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ while no space has yet been delineated (this will happen with and after the mirror stage—the birth of the sign)” (Kristeva 284). This voice, the chora, speaks outside of the binary oppositions constructed in language and identity. It exists in the continuity of mother-infant a communication without differentiation. Like the chora, Garro's narrative position is in that space of non-differentiation: does the stone create the narrative or does the narrative create the stone? Both are true because the text seems to exist in the state of always already; one cannot go back before the narrative or before the stone—they each create, or mother, the other. Toril Moi writes that the chora is a rhythmic pulsion rather than a new language. It constitutes, in other words, the heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language, that which can never be caught up in the closure of traditional linguistic theory” (Moi 162). Garro's narrative exhibits the qualities of the chora in its refusal to be a stable, lineated text, as well as in its refusal to repeat the binary oppositions of the patriarchal hierarchy. It allows the voices without defining them; since the narrative arises out of the collective memory of the stone, each time the narrative is told, it is a new narrative. The narrative disrupts because it attacks the monolithic idea of history; this permits interpretation, alteration, and readjustment.

The idea of self-mothering is vital. According to Kristeva, giving birth is a process during which the woman experiences a reunion with her mother, in fact, becomes her mother:

an excursion to the limits of primal regression can be phantasmatically experienced as the reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother … By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself.

(Kristeva 239)

Kristeva describes this process as one which can be experienced during the birthing process; when a woman gives birth, she and her mother come to share the same space. There is a maternal joining which permits the woman to come into contact with her progenetrix. This female continuity has similarities to the Derridean idea of trace; each interaction between mother and daughter has echoes of earlier interactions, earlier female experiences and voices. In the same way, the interaction between Isabel and the stone is one where each gives birth to the other, is the other's mother: the stone is the locus of the narrative voice which relates the story of Isabel who turns into the stone. It is at this point where one can escape the confines of official temporality by entering into a continuum with the past and the future. This relationship creates a continuity with the past, the indigenous past of the stone as well as the female past of Isabel. Since there is no differentiation between Isabel and the stone—Isabel was “transformed into stone” (287).

The stone that relates the narrative of Recollections of Things to Come is ancient, a trace of the indigenous in revolutionary Mexico, a female voice in a patriarchal community. Garro appropriates the medium of stone so that her text may itself gain equal status to the mythic glyphs and steale of the Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec. But her story is not one of kings and deities; it is one of women, a town, and a general. What in previous narratives had not been worthy of being recorded is now inscribed in the collective memory. Garro opens her narrative to the voices that the Maya excluded, to the voices that the Spanish excluded, to the voices that the Mexicans excluded, to the voices that the Church excluded, to the voices that the fathers excluded. All voices may not be heard by any one person in this novel, but that does not mean they are not there. This narrative is a collective memory that floats outside time and space; what one hears is what one allows oneself to hear from the few words inscribed on the stone. If each text creates itself, then each text must also create its reader and/or be created by its reader. My reading now sits there, with the thousands of others, on the stone, creating and recreating, watching and experiencing, the events of Ixtepec.

Works Cited

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