[In the following essay, Boschetto discusses the meaning and implications of the protagonist's petrification at the end of Recollections of Things to Come.]

Elena Garro's first published novel, Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), has in recent years captured the attention of readers who recognize in its ambivalent discourse a notable contribution to “escritura femenina.” Borrowing terminology from Heléne Cixous, Adriana Méndez Rodenas has termed the novel, “un ejemplo de ‘sexto’ femenino” (845). Her study focuses primarily on the imaginary time populated by the women characters, a time Garro herself describes as “un tiempo circular e idéntico a sí mismo, como un espejo reflejado a otro espejo que nos repite” (La casa junto al río, 7). While Robert Anderson concludes that Isabel Moncada's petrification is the “deserved” result of her refusal to undertake a nobler course of action (220), Méndez Rodenas compares and contrasts the positive and negative denouements of the first and second parts of the novel and concludes that Isabel's “history” is “el reverso del destino de Julia” (848). Although both studies are invaluable explorations, they fail to address the paradoxical ambivalence of Garro's message. Our reading of Elena Garro's novel, therefore, will attempt to cast additional light on the female “sexto” and its deconstructive ambivalence by attending to the author's multileveled handling of its principal female character.

The petrification of Isabel Moncada, more precisely her transformation into stone at the conclusion of the novel, is the culmination of a tension in the work between the marginal and the central, eccentric, and phallocentric discourse exhibited in the text. Indeed, it is the petrification itself which sets this tension or oscillation in motion, because the beginning and ending of the novel blur, only to become a motionless present in time. Characteristic of Garro's novel is what Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes as “writing beyond the ending,” a form of writing which runs counter to the patriarchal authoritative principle of closure.¹ Roberto González Echevarría defines closure in the Latin American novel as “a perfect correlation between language and meaning” (2). This resolution, I will argue, is not present in Garro's text. The fissures, ellipses, and patterns of disruption and contradiction create a very ambiguous text in which, it is my contention, Garro both asserts an authoritative position and questions it.

Isabel's historical trajectory within the novel spans a course from childhood to petrification. Whereas Julia dissolves beyond the text in an apparently self-redemptive flight from Ixtepec at the end of Part I, Isabel's material consistency sustains the text from beginning to end. While Julia exists ahistorically, seemingly on the edge of time and space, Isabel is fully contained within the narrative context, with family and social ties clearly situated within the textual history of Ixtepec. The more markedly historical context in which Isabel moves allows her much greater depth as a character. Whereas Julia “es lo inalcanzable; sólo queda su perfume y su imagen” (Earle, 240), Isabel is ever present to her readers through the collective narrator's attempt to see/read, interpret/decipher “her story,” the inscription on the stone which is both body and text, exploration and decipherment. The collective narrator explores this fragmented inscription through memory, a remembrance which is also a reconstruction of Isabel's history into “herstory.”² The oscillation between resemblance and difference (history and “herstory”) produced by this remembrance constitutes the ambivalence so characteristic of Garro's novel.

Like Julia, Isabel is alienated from the myth history that transforms and redeems man. This is because both Julia and Isabel share a common cultural conditioning. As Beth Miller explains, the characterization of women throughout Mexican literature has been profoundly influenced by two archetypes present in the Mexican psyche: that of the woman who has kept her virginity and that of the one who has lost it (228). The violated woman emerges in literature during the conquest. Doña Marina, interpreter and lover of Cortes, became the prototype of this character, having been abandoned by the Spanish conqueror after he had made her the mother of his son. This double archetype of woman is also present in Garro's novel. The rape-conquest motif is highlighted in the opening lines of the novel, as the narrator refers to the taking of Ixtepec by the military counter-revolutionaries: “fui fundado, sitiado, conquistado y engalanado para recibir ejercitos.”³

While Isabel's historical consciousness develops within the confines of closure and repression, it succeeds in defining itself very early in the novel as distinct and separate, not only from Ixtepec society in general, but from close family members in particular. Isabel's nonconformity with the social mores of her class and family, for example, illustrates her depiction as the prototypical “mujer esquiva.” “—‘No me voy a casar’—contestó … A Isabel le disgustaba que establecieran diferencias entre ella y sus hermanos. Le humillaba la idea de que el único futuro para las mujeres fuera el matrimonio. Hablar del matrimonio como de una solución la dejaba reducida a una mercancía a la que había que dar salida a cualquier precio” (22).

This image of unconventional, iconoclastic behavior is also evident in an earlier scene describing the relationship between Isabel and her brothers, who are playing in the branches of a tree. The reference by the narrator to “un jardín iluminado por el sol, radiante de pájaros, poblado de carreras y de gritos” (11), recalls the Biblical tree in the Garden of Eden—the tree of life, of knowledge of good and evil, of the Fall. Garro, however, deconstructs the traditional myth, ultimately replacing it with a new one. In this scene, Isabel and her brother Nicolás are playing in the branches of two separate and distinct trees, named by the children “Roma” and “Cartago.”

“Nicolás Moncada, de pie en la rama más alta de Roma, observa a su hermana Isabel, a horcajadas en una horqueta de Cartago, que se contempla las manos. La niña sabe que a a Roma se le vence con silencio.

—¡Degollaré a tus hijos!

… Nicolás baja del árbol, se dirige a la cocina en busca de una hacha y vuelve corriendo al pie del árbol de su hermana. Isabel contempla la escena desde lo alto y se descuelga sin prisa de rama en rama hasta llegar al suelo; luego mira con fijeza a Nicolás y éste, sin saber que hacer, se queda con el arma en la mano. Juan, el más chico de los tres hermanos, rompe a llorar.

—¡Níco, no la degüelles!

Isabel se aparta despacio, cruza el jardín y desaparece.

—Mama, ¿has visto a Isabel?

—¡Déjala, es muy mala!

(11, italics are the writer's)

Myth is a story that states cultural agreement and coherence. Thus when a writer dissents from that agreement, or oscillates between being a member and a critic of her culture, she can turn to a myth because she can thereby attain a maximum tension with dominant stories. The special status of Judeo-Christian myths hardly needs elaborating. These sacred texts on which are built man's highest and perhaps most redeeming ideals have constituted ideologies surrounding and defining women as evil and duplicitous.

As the Fall is presented in Book 3 of Genesis, and as we have popularly come to understand it in its original mythic structure, death was not a possibility before the female's (Eve's) treachery. Garro's reformulation of the original myth, however, inverts this proposition by underscoring the male's treachery. Garro's retelling of the myth pivots from female powerlessness to female power. Opposed to the unprovoked perpetration of male violence and betrayal stands Isabel's acclamation of autonomy and power. As Nicolás notes, Isabel “tiene poderes,” powers which are occult and unspoken. Isabel stands separate from Nicolás in her own tree, a motif long associated with mother goddesses, which points to a difference source of knowledge and life force. She vindicates herself not through physical violence but through silence: the word and the absence of the word which stand to accuse the male with a treacherous ignoring glance. In replacing the original myth with a new one, Garro begins to seek the antitype, the revelation of the meaning of the original type. She attempts to deliver woman by inverting the age-old ethos of condemnation and alienation, and thereby ransoming Eve. This new mythic structure is symbolically represented throughout the novel by a constant displacement to the “other side” of the “cuento.”

Whereas the other characters in Ixtepec resign themselves to what they deem a closed, inescapable situation, inevitably suffering the figurative darkness that gradually discolors their daily lives, Isabel's nonconformism and aberrant behavior removes her from the negative stasis which nullifies the other characters. Her label of “mala,” which she carries from childhood, marks her with the sign of unrest, a nonconformist dynamism which, however gratuitous, does not merit the lot of those unsuccessful travelers pictured in the fairy tale who are transfigured into stone.

The early reference to Isabel dancing with her brother Nicolás “girando sobre sus tacones, con los rizos en desorden y una sonrisa encandilada en los labios” (12) contrasts with the image of Francisco Rosas who arrives in Ixtepec to “poner orden” in a town “invadido por el miedo y [olvidado] el arte de las fiestas” (12). While her mother and the beata Dorotea are dressing saints in the local church, Isabel transgresses the boundaries of propriety by shouting out: “¡Queremos ver a la Virgen desnuda!” (15). This carnivalesque profanation of the sacred is characteristic of the joyous anarchy and openness with which Isabel disconcerts family and community. Isabel is one of the few characters in the text capable of “disorderly” laughter, an “alegría desbaratada” which, like true carnival laughter, manifests itself ambivalently as “negation and affirmation, as ridicule and triumph” (Lachmann, 8). Isabel's laughter is associated with revolution, the attempt to dispel the “cosmic fear” brought about by Rosas's “infierno circular”: “Recuerdo la frase de Nicolás: ‘Isabel, un peso por una carcajada!’ y mostró a su hermana, de risa fácil, una moneda de plata que ella ganó al instante, echando la cabeza hacia atrás y enseñando la fila guerrera de sus dientes” (122-23). As instigator of the plot to save Father Beltrán and unite with the other Cristero resistance fighters, Isabel “invents” a fiesta. Joining with a few other townspeople, she becomes an active participant in the effort to liberate the populace and to become a free determining agent in historical events. “Era dulce saber que podíamos ser algo más que espectadores de la vida violenta de los militares …” (121). The feigned revelry of the festival recreates a situation of true orgy, in which normal life is played in reverse. As the narrator notes, “El miedo mágicamente disipado con la palabra ‘fiesta’ se convirtió en un frenesí que sólo encuentra paralelo en mi memoria con la locura que me poseyó durante las fiestas del Centenario” (194).

Isabel is much less capable of dissembling than are the other women of the town, including Julia, the “pure prostitute,” who abandons Ixtepec and its inhabitants not through any struggle, transformation or self-enlightenment of her own, but on the tail of her fairy tale knight, Felipe Hurtado. Ironically, Julia and Felipe had been hailed by the townspeople as messengers of hope. Their departure, however, signals, as Anderson notes, the “decisive defeat of translucence” (222).

Isabel, on the other hand, remains behind to suffer the figurative darkness. As already noted, the tree, upon whose branches Isabel clings in the opening lines of the novel, is a symbol of Isabel's autonomy. Liberation or deviation from patriarchal authority, however, has its price. For Isabel it appears to be a “descontento permanente” which plagues her from childhood, and which is closely aligned to the curse of perpetual solitude. “—¡Estoy muy soita!—dijo con rencor—Su padre la miró inquieto. Le preocupaba el descontento permanente de su hija … Estaría siempre sola” (155). The repeated references to Isabel as “solitaria,” “extranjera,” “de ojos obstinados” points to the marginalization of the female character from her rightful place in history. Isabel's refusal to remain on the outside, however, causes her to make the final leap and to cast her lot with the oppressor, Francisco Rosas: “Si pudiera daría el salto para colocarse al lado de Francisco Rosas: quería estar en el mundo de los que están solos; no quería llantos compartidos ni familiares celestiales” (161). This ambivalent gesture gathers its significance from the primal relationship between violence and desire which lies at the core of all ritual sacrifice.

Oscillation between desire and disdain, so characteristic of the sacrificial scapegoat, is repeatedly displayed in Garro's text. The victim is always different yet always the same: woman condemned to an endless cycle of sacrifice. It is the women of Ixtepec who become the sacrificial scapegoats for the underlying violence of the populace. Desire substitutes for violence, violence for desire, in an unending, unbreachable circle of repression and guilt. Julia, for example, is both “fenómeno irreal” and “heraldo de la desdicha.” For Hurtado, as for all of Ixtepec, Julia “era la imagen del amor” (95), while at the same time “una criatura que lleva la violencia en su misma fragilidad” (132).

Garro's presentation of Isabel is even more ambiguous. As Martín Moncada recalls the night in which his daughter was conceived, he fashions Isabel into a sacrificial victim, the perfect depository of ancestral and more particularly male sin and guilt. “Todos sabrían su lujuria gracias a la viveza de su hija. Se mordió la boca con ira. Isabel había venido al mundo a denunciarlo. Se juró corregirse y lo cumplió, pero Isabel siguió pareciéndose a aquellas noches. Nadie podía quitarle los estigmas … La veía como si estuviera hecha de lo mejor de ellos mismos, como si la niña fuera la depositaria de todos sus secretos. Por eso a veces la temía y se quedaba triste. ‘Esta niña nos conoce mejor que nosotros mismos,’ y no sabía como tratarla ni que decirle. Avergonzado, bajaba los ojos frente a ella” (239). Like the lamb led to slaughter, Isabel is cast in the shadow of a redemptive figure offered up by the populace for their purification and salvation. Like Julia for whom she appears to substitute “tenía que ser la criatura preciosa que absorbiera nuestras culpas” (90).⁴ Isabel carries the weight of this guilt “metida en su traje rojo que pesaba y ardía como una piedra puesta al sol” (207). As the sacrificial victim is paradoxically both despised and desired, she represents both the violence inherent to the sacrificer and the potential for surmounting that violence: “Algunos creyeron leer en las palabras de Nicolás que la salvación nos vendría de Isabel. La joven no había entrado al hotel a traicionarnos. Estaba allí, como la diosa vengadora de la justicia, esperando el momento propicio.—¡Ya no le griten! ¡Ella está allí porque allí debe estar! Desde niña fue muy hombrecito” (268, italics are the writer's).

While both Julia and Isabel share a similar sacrificial role, further comparison proves Isabel to be the antitype. This is particularly evident in Garro's reshaping of the fairy tale which surrounds the two women. While Julia finds her dream, “el pájaro que habla, la fuente que canta y el árbol que da los frutos de oro” (135-36), Isabel does not. From childhood, Isabel had begrudged her brothers' right to do what they pleased and resented having to give explanations or offer reasons for her actions to her parents. Eventually, she abandons her family, in the hope of realizing her childhood fantasies, only to be disillusioned (161).

While Felipe Hurtado serves as guide for Julia to the upper regions of light and redemption, Nicolás in inverse order appears to lead his sister Isabel to the infernal underworld regions of darkness and death. This other side of the “cuento,” the inverted fairy tale as recounted by the narrator, is a turning point foreshadowing the conclusion of the novel. “Y Nicolás e Isabel bajaban de la mano hasta el cuento de Dorotea. Asustados, se encontraban debajo de la bóveda subterránea donde se guardan las vidas de los hombres. Ardían millones de velas de distintos tamaños; algunas eran ya pabilos chisporroteantes. La mujer negra que se paseaba entre ellas se acercaba y las apagaba de un soplo. Entonces los dueños de las velas morían sobre la tierra. Nicolás salía del cuento con la voz insegura …” (155). As in Don Quixote's descent into the Cave of Montesinos, Isabel's journey into the underworld becomes a lesson in reality: “Detrás de la apariencia de ese mundo estaba el mundo verdadero …” (117). Similarly in this story, values are reversed: the loss of the earth, the light, the man, and other live souls is redefined as no loss: “Había entrado al mundo subterráneo de las hormigas, complicado de túneles minúsculos donde no cabía ni siquiera un pensamiento y donde la memoria era capaz de tierra y raíces de árboles” (206-07).

The inversion of fairy tale idealism is also evident in Garro's reformulation of the Mexican legend relating to the “Singing Tree, the Speaking Bird and the Golden Water.”⁵ While it is Julia who uses the legend to guide her way through Ixtepec in her “successful” attempt to save Felipe Hurtado from Rosas's persecution (while at the same time condemning the populace to Rosas's wrath, 135-36), Isabel succumbs to a sacrificial substitution. “History” is reframed, and “herstory” recounts the condemnation of the female through unjust replacement. As Dorotea recounts: “De le sangre de los inocentes brotan fuentes que lavan los pecados de los malos. La voz de Dorotea repetía un cuento de su infancia” (265).

Isabel's surrender to Francisco Rosas at the conclusion of the fiesta in his honor is the culminating ambivalent gesture in the novel. Her behavior suggests, in true baroque fashion, not simplicity but complexity, not mediocrity but radical decision (sanctity or sin). The heroic stature of her act is contained precisely in this indeterminate ambiguity. Isabel “turns” into a man by subsuming herself in male demands, by identifying with her oppression and oppressor. Thus she is also a “man”—seeing herself completely through male eyes.

The end point of Isabel's development into archetypal “bitch” has political significance. Her characterization as “bitch” is iconoclastic, in the sense that traditional institutions and established beliefs have been probed and ridiculed in the process of her development. Isabel has also in the end become androgynous, incorporating qualities traditionally defined as masculine as well as those considered feminine. As already noted in brief, there are numerous references in the text to Isabel's androgynous gender, both in her external appearance (“perfil de muchacho,” 27), as well as outward behavior. In the end, tragedy occurs precisely because patriarchal authority (father, brother, lover) cannot tolerate this dual nature.

The transformation of Isabel Moncada into stone at the dramatic conclusion of the novel echoes, as some critics have already noted, other literary texts and traditions. As Adriana Méndez Rodenas observes, a certain “trasfondo barroco late en la alusión a la piedra junto a la cual se asienta el poblado de Ixtepec … El teatro del Siglo de Oro modela … estas reminiscencias literarias: el Convidado de Piedra, al final de El burlador de Sevella, quien castiga a Don Juan por su pasión desbordada” (846). Displacement to the “other side,” however, does not allow the reader to ignore Isabel's romantic “leap of love,” a frenzied act circumscribed in revolutionary terms: “… La joven se puso de pie y echó a correr cuesta abajo …—¡Aunque Dios me condene quiero ver a Francisco Rosas otra vez!” (293-94). She brings to mind love and revolution, and recalls Julio Cortázar's surrealistic la Maga in the novel Rayuela, also written in the same year as Garro's text. The tone of this passage is also reminiscent of Revelation. In her passionate fury, motion is transmuted from that of “el baile-la fiesta” to that of “el exterminio.” “Su voz sacudió la colina y llegó hasta las puertas de Ixtepec. De sus ojos salieron rayos y una tempestad de rizos negros le cubrió el cuerpo y se levantó un remolino de polvo que volvió invisible la mata de pelo” (293-94). Isabel becomes, thus, an emblem of destruction. “Las palabras de Isabel provocaron derrumbe; capas de tierra silenciosa borraron el mundo” (206-07).

There is no denying that Isabel's myth history is framed within centuries of Hispanic historical and literary tradition. Isabel is, like the historical figure Marina-Malinche, a character who presents two faces, in mask and in shadow. On the other hand, it is precisely Garro's reworking of this traditional “cornerstone” which appears to liberate Isabel from it. Although we can see the character in the light of centuries of literary history, Elena Garro's protagonist is a woman of our century, displaying the contradictions and ambiguities of the modernist and postmodernist periods. In a way that can be clearly recognized in Garro's text, Isabel inhabits two plots, dominant and muted. “Seduced” by the man and the coherence of the romantic part, yet drawn to the monsters of the muted tale, Isabel wavers between the inevitable and the inarticulate. Los recuerdos del porvenir intersects the celebration of carnivalized language with the language of sexual difference. Garro's novel is thus a critical celebration of indirection. Rather than posit the more radical feminist stance of “traición o tradición,” the author disrupts traditional representation by reshaping the “cornerstone” of that very same literary tradition which has refused to accept women as makers of meaning. Indeed, the novel emerges in between “respeto y ruptura” but always uncertain, tentative, limited.

More than a sign, the stone is a metaphor for language. For Garro, language is not a prisonhouse. It does not only cage human potential, but also produces eruptions of force which do not always follow the norms or conventions that language commands. The very language that restricts human intercourse produces occasions for its own disruption and critique. This is why the stone is apocalyptic in nature and why Isabel's flight and transformation are compared to that of a meteorite streaking across the sky in its “voluntad furiosa.” “Isabel podía convertirse en una estrella fugaz, huir y caer en el espacio sin dejar huellas visibles de ella misma … ‘Un aerolito es la voluntad furiosa de la huida’ se dijo” (30). The stone in its apocalyptic symbolism of petrification takes on the overtones of the “tabula rasa,” the blank tablet upon which history or more precisely “herstory” is to be retold or rewritten. It is thus that the reader may see in the “apparent” petrification of Isabel, ambivalent traces of redemption. As victim and destroyer, Isabel is beyond good and evil. She is the embodiment of the principle of unity in multiplicity. She has become the woman with a thousand faces.

As Isabel disappears behind the fragmented inscription, she becomes language, and as such transparency. Like the water obsidian for which Ixtepec is named,⁶ Isabel maintains an intermediary position between metaphoric extremes, life and death. It is thus that the stone, like language, is both Isabel's origin and her destiny—the root and the ultimate source of her self. Margaret Higonnet, who has examined suicide as a narrative strategy, has noted in an article written for The Female Body in Western Culture that the literary suicide and sacrifice of female characters are metaphors for a refusal to be conscripted; these “speaking suicides” as she calls them, force the internal dialogue into the open, raising questions about sexual difference rather than closing them (68-69). The suicidal signature is a decision not to let others finalize or deaden one's character. In Bakhtin's vision, suicide forces the others to enter into a dialogic relation with the one to whom such a relation was denied in life. In this view, while the stone cannot erase the sign, the otherness of the female character, it can highlight it, as signature, through defamiliarization and even parody. Bakhtin also explains that “foolishness” (resistance) in the novel is always polemical: it interacts dialogically with an intelligence (a lofty pseudo intelligence) with which it polemicizes and whose mask it tears away. Isabel as fool (here I use the term fool as Bakhtin would use it, to imply foolish, alien, grotesque, eccentric) is, therefore, the prototypical resisting reader and the stone a displacement for that resistance, for it forces the “unspoken” repressions into the open, thus making them vulnerable to interpretation, contradiction and dialogue.

The oscillatory movement of this dialogue is reflected in the paradoxical stasis of Isabel. The stone, as signifier and as signified, is endlessly commutable, slipping and displacing itself from one intertextual trace to another. These intertextual tracings ambivalently both mask and discover the novel's meaning. On one level, the stone signifies fixity, death, immutability. The petrification of the body as punishment for a forbidden desire evokes the force of patriarchal enclosure and repression, woman's “destino manifiesto.” At the same time, the transformation of Isabel Moncada's body into sign, language, and text revises the former reading to render a new construction. Keeping in mind that the stone is always and only “aparente” as the narrator consistently refers to it, the writing and rewriting of Garro's text upon an earlier one revises both the old and the new. The palimpsest can only insist on the relational status of every signifying instance. As the collective narrator asserts from the beginning, “Yo sólo soy memoria y la memoria que de mí se tenga” (9). The undifferentiated memory of the stone between real and unreal, past, present, and future time creates a contradictory, suspended temporality, which again appears to anul the petrification of Isabel. As Méndez Rodenas asserts, “Los recuerdos acorda un tiempo femenino, relacionado con la historia de la piedra, y un tiempo ficticio, asociado con el presente en suspenso de la narración de Ixtepec. El manejo de la dimensión temporal en la novela se divide en estos dos ritmos discontinuos, cada uno de los cuales se apoya en los recursos narrativos que evocan o transforman la tradición” (847).

This transformation of language and historical tradition surrounding the female character, points to a new and liberating discourse which can only allow for contradictory, even mutually exclusive interpretations, much like an extended and multileveled metaphor. Garro's subtext contains neither a hierarchic doctrine nor the most open-ended statement. The stone, like Garro's novel (and most of modern Latin American literature) persistently questions the authority of language to declare its own inner and outer boundaries. Blank, unwritten, the “stone/text” is complete potentiality. For if the existence of any text involves a series of choices and exclusions, which necessarily and inescapably limit its statements to a perspective, then Garro's “apparent” text remains the plural, ideal, unlimited statement.⁷

In Los recuerdos del porvenir, Garro deconstructs the stone, the mythology of writing, the hegemonic center, in its very “apparency”: the self-cancellation and superimposition of beginnings and endings. The “apparent” stone text is thus a metaphor for “ser” as “parecer,” a silent blank, portentous, and indefinite. We need only recall the numerous references in the novel to Isabel's “blankness,” her “muro blanco,” her “insolente blancura,” her “voz blanca.” The novel is thus cast in signs that lead not to synthesis and self-revelation, but to dispersion, and indirection, as water flows into water. Isabel as stone is, to borrow from Kaja Silverman, “nothing more than a signified which refuses to connote” (257).

The heroine's regressive quest points, therefore, not so much to individuation and difference, as to the notion of indifferentiation. Just as in her play, Andarse por las ramas, Garro had affirmed the supremacy not of one gender, but of a sign system that favors multiplicity over uniformity, so in her novel of many voices, as Peter Earle has already noted, Garro invites her readers to “desconfiar de las apariencias” and recognize that any dialogue cannot be reduced to a “final” meaning or intention. What Garro succeeds in crystalizing at the conclusion of her novel is merely a blank, a blank at the center of knowledge. We, the readers, in all our multiplicity are invited to fill this potentiality.

Notes

1. “What appears … to be an infinite retardation of narrative telos is instead another kind of story, with the definition of what has finally ‘happened’ never completed, always capable of modification, always doubling and questioning itself.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 121.

2. I have borrowed this term from Sheila Ryan Johansson: “As many feminists have noted, history remains very much his story. It is not surprising that most women feel that their sex does not have an interesting or significant past. However, like minority groups, women cannot afford to lack a consciousness of a collective identity, one which necessarily involves a shared awareness of the past. Without this, a social group suffers from a kind of collective amnesia, which makes it vulnerable to the impositions of dubious stereotypes, as well as limiting prejudices about what is right and proper for it to do or not do … Even if one believes that a sense of the past has no practical applications, it remains a uniquely human form of consciousness. Women, like men, need to know what the flow of time has meant to them.” See “‘Herstory’ as History: A New Field or Another Fad?” in Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984), 427.

3. Los recuerdos del porvenir (México: Joaquín Mortíz, 1963), 9. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition. Page numbers are given in parentheses.

4. Isabel fits the role of sacrificial victim as studied by René Girard who shows that the purpose of the sacrificial rite is to channel mankind's violence, violence which might otherwise run rampant and destroy society. Girard repeatedly insists on the link between violence and desire (in Violence and the Sacred as well as in his other study, Deceit, Desire and the Novel) which leads him to posit that both the object of violence and the object of desire are often substituted. Like violence, sexual desire tends to fasten upon surrogate objects if the object to which it was originally attracted remains inaccessible. Girard then asks whether this process of symbolization does not respond to some half-suppressed desire to place the blame for all forms of violence on women, noting that “the function of ritual is to ‘purify’ violence by eliminating one member of society associated with that violence, namely the female.” As Girard finally states: “Like the animal and the infant, but to a lesser degree, the woman qualifies for sacrificial status by reason of her weakness and relatively marginal social status. That is why she can be viewed as a quasi-sacred figure, both desired and disdained, alternately elevated and abused.” See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), 36, 141-42.

5. In this particular tale a queen gives birth to two sons and a daughter. As each is born, the queen's jealous sisters substitute a dog in the baby's place. The king's gardener find the three discarded children and rears them. One day a woman visits the girl and tells her that her brothers should seek three marvelous objects in order to beautify their garden: the speaking bird, the singing tree, and the golden water. During their respective quests, each of the boys hears frightening voices, looks back, and is turned to stone. Informed of their plight, their sister embarks on her mission to rescue them and to obtain the three treasures. Paying no attention to the enemy voices, she first captures the bird, who reluctantly helps her locate the spring of golden water and the tree that sings. She then succeeds in rescuing her brothers. On her return, the bird reveals to the king that the three youths are his children, and they are taken to the palace to live. See Stanley L. Rube, Mexican Tales and Legends from Los Altos: Folklore Studies 20 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970), 349-59.

   The fairy tale's major motifs—a talking bird, a fountain, and a tree—appear together in a number of folktales. All of the Mexican versions share the following underlying mythic features: 1) a protagonist's separation from a familiar environment; 2) a demanding journey (following a warning to the hero/heroine against distraction from the mission at hand, lest he/she be turned to stone), during which the traveler seeks the universally recognized bird, fountain, and tree; and 3) a transcendence, or successful return to the original point of departure.

6. The Nahuatl roots of the toponym “Ixtepec”—itztli (“obsidian”) and tepetl (“hill”) are particularly significant when we understand that some pre-Columbian Meso-American necromancers sought visions of the past and the future in obsidian scrying-stones. These were known as aitztli, or “water obsidian.” See Lewis Spence, Arcane Secrets and Occult Lore of Mexico and Mayan Central America (London: Richer and Co., 1975), 83.

7. The remarkable quality of Garro's novel is that it is a book being narrated by its subject—not just in the standard first-person narrative sense, but in the sense that the narrator's “I” is that not of a person but of a completely text-bound and text-created entity. Isabel as stone has become the subject of the book; the subject of the book is presented as a self that is half-aware that it may be, or be in, a text.

Works Cited

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Earle, Peter G. “‘Los recuerdos del porvenir’ y la fuerza de las palabras.” Homenaje a Luis Alberto Sánchez. Eds. Victor Berger and Robert G. Mead, Jr. Madrid: Insula, 1983, 232-35.

Garro, Elena. La casa junto al río. México: Ed. Grijalbo, 1982.

———. Los recuerdos del porvenir. México: Joaquín Mortíz, 1963.

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González Echevarría, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 1985.

Higonnet, Margaret. “Speaking Silences: Women's Suicide.” The Female Body in Western Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Johansson, Sheila Ryan. “‘Herstory’ as History: A New Field or Another Fad,” Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays. Ed. Berenice A. Carroll. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.

Lachmann, Renate. “Bahktin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture.” CHS Occasional Papers. U of Minnesota: Center for Humanistic Studies. No. 14 (1987), 1-34.

Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. “Tiempo femenino, tiempo ficticio: Los recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro.” Revista iberoamericana 51 (julio-diciembre, 1985): 843-51.

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Rube, Stanley L. Mexican Tales and Legends from Los Altos: Folklore Studies 20. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970.

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Spence, Lewis. Arcane Secrets and Occult Lore of Mexico and Mayan Central America. London: Richer and Co., 1973.