[In the following essay, Martinez studies La Malhora as a modern novel, attempting to draw connections between this and his later works, including El desquite and La Luciérnaga.]

La malhora of 1923, Azuela's tenth novel, comes five years after his last novels of the Mexican Revolution: Las moscas [The Flies] and Las tribulaciones de una familia decente [The Trials of a Respectable Family], one year after the beginning of the Mexican mural painting movement, and two years before the re-discovery of Los de abajo [The Underdogs] which establishes Azuela as the novelist of the Mexican Revolution. By this time, as I have suggested in a recent article,¹ the modern spirit sweeping through Europe had generated a tremendous intellectual and artistic energy which brought winds of change to Mexico. Azuela as a novelist was abreast of the most recent developments taking place in the genre; and compelled by the times to be modern, he was propelled into the writing of three modern movels, of which La malhora is the first.

In this study I should like to identify what I feel to be the extrinsic and intrinsic values of La malhora and to show how it relates to Azuela's preceding and subsequent works, particularly to his next two modern novels, El desquite (1925) [Revenge] and La luciérnaga (1926) [The Firefly]. With La luciérnaga Azuela reached the peak of his trajectory as a novelist and brought the modern Mexican novel into the international mainstream. La malhora, therefore, is important because it is the first of Azuela's modern novels and because in several ways it foreshadows the next two. Until recently the three works had been undeservedly neglected; they are all important for an understanding of Azuela's evolution as a novelist.

La malhora represents a significant but partial change in Azuela's usual manner of composition. This change is characterized by an increased consciousness of craft, by a preoccupation with the interior lives of the characters in the novel, and by experimentation with novelistic structure and technique. La malhora, however, holds forth considerable evidence of Azuela's inability to abandon several novelistic principles of the naturalistic or social novel, particularly as it had been practiced by his masters, Balzac, Zola, and the Goncourts. His indebtedness to these French authors, considerable in the novels of the Mexican Revolution, is especially obvious in La malhora's subject matter, characterization, setting, method, and in some of its narrative techniques. It is with these aspects of the work that the present study is concerned, as well as with those aspects which reflect Azuela's evolution beyond his novels of the Mexican Revolution.

Like his French masters, Azuela is directly concerned with the world around him, with contemporary problems and life, and with social life in particular. Like Balzac, Azuela was of and for the people, a painter of their customs and life. Azuela's subject matter, characters, and setting are based on first-hand experience and direct observation. Like Flaubert and Balzac, Azuela frequently declared that he was concerned with “truth.” La malhora, moreover, exhibits a number of resemblances to the Goncourt brothers' Germinie Lacerteux; la malhora is Altagracia, who is fifteen years old and already a prostitute at the beginning of the novel. Germinie is fourteen when she comes to Paris. Altagracia is seduced, Germinie is assaulted; and both end up having numerous lovers and succumbing to alcoholism. There are other resemblances. What is important, however, is the shared principle of truth behind the French and the Mexican novels. The Goncourt brothers, in their preface to Germinie Lacerteux, said:

We must beg the public's pardon for offering it this book, and give warning of what will be found therein.

The public likes untrue novels; this novel is a true one.

The public likes stories which appear to take place in society: this story comes from the streets.

This statement applies suitably to La malhora; Azuela's novel is also based on literal, documentary truth, and it comes from the streets.² Like Germinie Lacerteux, La malhora also deals with “the lower classes,” with a “society below society”; and Azuela, like the Goncourts, seems to ask “whether there should … exist, be it for the writer or reader … classes too unworthy, sufferings too low, tragedies too foul-mouthed.”³ For La malhora Azuela drew heavily on what he had seen and felt while living and practicing medicine in a slum area of Mexico City. In El novelista y su ambiente [The Novelist and His Times], he says:

Never did I have such abundant material and within reach of my hand than for the writing of La malhora. From infancy and in my adolescence I met a great variety of shady characters. … In this way I learned their vocabulary, their gestures, their mannerisms, their slang (caló). Later I enlarged this knowledge during my revolutionary wanderings. And when I became a physician treating venereal diseases at a Public Welfare Clinic, situated in the very bowels of Tepito, there was nothing left for me to learn.⁴

El Tepito is a slum area in a neighborhood called La Bolsa. During those years, he goes on to say, his patients were inhabitants of that squalid area, the heart and soul of the metropolitan underworld. It was quite common, he says,

to come across men and women stretched out on the sidewalk, placidly sleeping off their drunkenness, caressed by the warm rays of the morning sun, in the hours of eight or nine. I witnessed fights in the street above all between women with hair on their chests … who after hurling at each other the most vile invectives, would grab at each other's tangled hair, exchange blows, sink their teeth into each other until they were rolling on the ground, bloody and driving fists into their faces. … With elements of this sort I composed La malhora.

(III, 1115)

Azuela closes the third part of La malhora with one such street fight between Altagracia and an unnamed woman. The fictional version, however, is even more violent: Altagracia emerges victorious after biting off the earlobe of her opponent who lets out a scream like a rat caught by a trap (II, 970). Juxtaposed with an ambiguously rendered dog fight which opens the third part of the novel the violence is considerably dramatized.

La malhora is a novel of the city. The setting of the first and fifth parts of the novel is the squalid slums of El Tepito in Mexico City. In La malhora, and to a greater extent in La luciérnaga, Azuela has depicted his own version of the bowels of a modern metropolitan city as Zola had done in Le ventre de Paris [The Bowels of Paris]. Like his master Zola, Azuela also dealt in these two novels with the sordid life of the modern city: alcoholism, prostitution, violence, drugs and murder. Azuela drew his characters from Mexico City's shady underworld: Altagracia; el Flaco and Marcelo, both house painters; and la Tapatía (the name means person from the state of Jalisco in Mexico), the proprietress of the pulquería El Vacilón. (A pulquería is a place where pulque, an alcoholic drink, is sold.) These concerns make Azuela's La malhora reminiscent of his first novel, María Luisa, which also dealt with the seduction and subsequent degeneration of a young girl who ends up as a cadaver on the dissecting table of a hospital where her seducer is serving his internship. The “fallen woman” and the prostitute appear frequently in the novels of the Mexican Revolution. These denizens of the underworld will also reappear under different names in La luciérnaga in a manner reminiscent of Balzac.

Other characters in La malhora further establish a continuity in Azuela's development as a novelist. The prudish and devout Gutiérrez sisters and their emphysematous mother are reminiscent of Azuela's characters from respectable middle class families. Such characters appear in several novels of the Mexican Revolution, such as the Viña family of Los caciques [The Bosses], the Lara-Téllez of Las moscas [The Flies], and the Vásquez-Prado of Las tribulaciones de una familia decente [The Trials of a Respectable Family]; they also foreshadow Dionisio's family in La luciérnaga. The Porfirista general is also one of Azuela's favorite stock characters. All of these characters in La malhora link this work with preceding and future novels.

In La malhora there is also a more than noticeable echo of Zola's naturalistic principles, spelled out in The Experimental Novel of 1880, and of Hippolyte Taine's theories, particularly those concerning the role of heredity and environment in human life. In El novelista y su ambiente [The Novelist and His Times] Azuela said: La malhora deals with

the case of a girl raised in the sewers. Her tragedy is the rude tragedy of those creatures born in garbage who wane and die with the first rays of sunlight; it deals with Altagracia … born with many inherited physical and mental flaws, nurtured by the ways and morals of the metropolitan underworld. Brutally violated by one of them when she is just arriving at womanhood she ends up losing the rest of what balance remains to her. Under an oppressive obsession for revenge she makes a life for herself aimed at killing the abominable man who clipped from the bush the flower barely a bud.

(III, 1115)

As mentioned above, at the beginning of La malhora Altagracia is barely fifteen years old. In the first of the five parts of the novel, “Bajo La Onda Fría” [loosely translated as “A Winter Spell”], most of the action takes place inside the pulquería called El Vacilón. Some of it takes place in the darkened streets of El Tepito, and in a large hospital room. The first part closes with the discovery of Altagracia's naked and nearly frozen body in the snowy grass of a park on the Avenida del Trabajo.

In this first part a third person narrator provides the reader with present and background information on Altagracia; some of it is placed in the mouth of other characters. The relationships of the shady underworld characters with each other and with Altagracia are also established. The reader learns that Altagracia's father was murdered by Marcelo, who is now involved with la Tapatía, and that he is the man who had seduced Altagracia and pushed her further on the road toward physical and spiritual degeneration. Inside El Vacilón, Altagracia dances drunkenly and obscenely on top of one of the tables. In her tattered and filthy rags, prematurely aged, disfigured by dissipation, she already bears the marks of the victim of squalid surroundings. The third person omniscient narrator of the novel gives this summary of and commentary on the effects of environment:

Shabby disgraceful ballerina from the canvas tents of Tepito, who from Marcelo's arms had passed to countless others and rolled among the gutters and who now on table tops no longer drew even a despicable smile for her obscenities, dragging herself down, lower, she had turned herself into a thing, a thing of the pulquerías, an offensive thing to be resigned or accustomed to.

(II, 954)

For Marcelo had only pushed Altagracia, offspring of two alcoholics, along a path she was already travelling. Altagracia's life had been determined by heredity first of all; the first pulque had entered her blood when she was in her mother's womb. Her surroundings compounded those beginnings. This point is given emphasis early in the novel. After identifying the murder victim as her father, Altagracia collapses unconsciously. When she comes to, she is in a large hospital room. One of the two men investigating the homicide, described by Azuela as a pompous young peacock, interrupts his partner when he asks Altagracia directly if she had known the murder victim he says:

“No sir, first the background. Because, don't you know there is no tragedy without causes.”

Allright then, let's proceed in order. First, the stench of a slimy underground [zótano], black as coal smoke, where she was or might have been born, the arches of a large neighborhood. Secondly, her mother and father passing the days in drunken stupor, and quarreling, until the mother's swollen belly bursts forth with her dark agave plant; then the streets, the raunchy cantinas, the slum districts, the stage of Tepito and everything else. The company from which one learns about things; but what things!

“Perfectly! Don't you see? … Heredity, upbringing, surroundings. All we need are the causes. In history, in letters, in life, all tragedies have their causes. Understand?”

(II, 958)

In the fifth part, also titled “La malhora,” almost at the end of the novel, Azuela provides a running summary of Altagracia's life. This summary is given by Altagracia herself in the first person. It too includes an acknowledgement of the influence of surroundings in her life. The summary is a little over two pages; Altagracia, in half-dialogue, is speaking to a doctor who had been treating her; he had obviously probed deeply into her sordid past.

Goodbye, doctor, goodbye! I am leaving, crying over my illness without cure and the hopes which I leave buried here. … I know where I was born and among what people I grew up. It's also true that I don't know how to express myself like decent people, that I'm dumb, but that tone of voice, “what seems to bother you?” Precisely that bothers me, that nothing should. But this is my skirt of four months ago and this is not my waist of four months ago.

… Oh! If only you like the others had not asked me so much! Because your questions dug up dirt from the bottom of my heart. How many men have I had? Which one did I love the most? Which one do I remember still? Did we do this or that, did we not do … ? If after doing with me the rooster flew the coop? … And do I long for him and cry over him or dream of him still? Things and things, but I cannot see that they have anything to do with my illness. …

As I leave I am saddened by what you told me yesterday. “Altagracia, you're not to even smell pulque. The world will close up to you but two paths, the insane asylum or prison.” … Look, doctor! I was born with pulque in my mouth. Pulque was my blood, my body, and God forgive, it was my soul.

(II, 974-75)

In the remaining part of the summary of her life (II, 975-76), Altagracia tells her listener about her seduction and subsequent degeneration. This background information was made known to the reader, by the omniscient narrator at the beginning of the novel, and there are references to it in other parts. This first-person summary, then, refers back to the novel's beginning; this gives it a circular form, since the novel ends where it begins, even though it is only in Altagracia's story that there is a going back to the seduction. The seduction must be understood as a significant frame of reference which marks a kind of harsh rite of initiation for Altagracia into other aspects of the squalid life into which she was born.

The divisions of the novel allow for another interpretation. Altagracia's account recapitulates the novel's main episodes beginning with her succumbing to alcohol and marihuana after the seduction. The reader follows, in her own words, the account of her misfortunes and experiences as a servant in the homes; first of the benevolent, insane doctor, then of the prudish and devout Gutiérrez sisters, after that of the old Porfirista general, and finally, of her return to the streets and pulquerías.

In the divisions of the novel, retraced by Altagracia's story, Luis Leal sees an innovational cuadriform structure, organized around Altagracia, the central character, who never abandons any of the scenes: “The author has structured four episodes, trivial to be sure, in the life of a prostitute and created a new form in the Mexican novel.”⁵

This summary reflects Azuela's naturalistic preoccupation with the story of and the causes that brought about Altagracia's downfall: heredity and surroundings.

Even more significant is the added structural importance of this literary strategy of recapitulation which Azuela discovers in La malhora. This allows Azuela to give retrospective coherence and continuity at the end of the novel to its fragmented structure, in a way which emphasizes the viewpoint of the central character. For this reason, La malhora foreshadows El desquite and La luciérnaga.

Concerning the novel's naturalism, moreover, La malhora, in form and technique, also evolves quite naturally out of Azuela's preceding novels. The episodic and fragmentary structure, which is fundamentally chronological, is carried over from Los caciques, Los de abajo, and Las moscas. Other techniques are also retained from these and other earlier novels: straight conventional narration and exposition, summary, foreshadowing, description, block characterization, author commentary, first person narration, and increased use of dialogue. In La malhora, however, the characters' points of view begin to take on an enlarged importance.

As one can see, realistic and naturalistic elements are numerous in La malhora. In this respect there is, therefore, no really sharp break between the earlier social and the modern novels. Given many of these traits of the novel, and given the naturalistic preoccupations of Azuela which they reflect, there can be no denial that La malhora is a social novel.⁶

But while it is true that La malhora is a social novel, it is also a novel which exhibits Azuela's preoccupation with the consciousness of its two main characters. It is this preoccupation with interior reality that moves Azuela forward from the social to the modern novel.⁷

What is new in La malhora, then, is Azuela's use of characters who are plagued by alcoholism and madness: Altagracia and the demented doctor, respectively, and the techniques Azuela found necessary for depicting their inner states of consciousness. Azuela was therefore compelled, in order to provide a plausible depiction of alcoholic and pathological visions, to experiment with what he called the “new technique.” (III, 1113) He had to “dramatize”⁸ the consciousnesses of his characters.

Azuela had previously depicted an alcoholic perception of things in Las moscas. In that novel, following a round of heavy drinking, one of the characters, Donaciano Ríos, remains drunk and half awake after many of the others in the same train car on which he is travelling have passed out. Here are parts of Azuela's depiction, from the beginning of Chapter III, of what Señor Ríos sees and feels:

Songs ended in hoarse shouts and insane laughter. … Toward midnight they began to give out. Their speech became incoherent and inarticulate and then hiccoughs, and the weak whimpers that herald the approach of insensibility. They lay, legs outspread, in a heap of bodies overcome by fatigue and alcohol.⁹

In what follows, as the saying goes, Azuela the author is everywhere. Having set the scene, he then goes on to tell the reader about drunkenness. Azuela tells the reader what is going on in the mind of Señor Ríos:

Señor Ríos could not close his eyes because he had a conviction they were about to be attacked. His gaze was fixed on a dark alley. A sudden panic took him by the throat. He thought he saw suspicious shapes along the right of way. Good God! The Carranzistas! He tried to scream, but his voice failed him. What was the use anyway! The soldiers were all dead drunk. Finally, plucking courage from his very agony, he asked himself whether he might be the victim of an illusion. … He rubbed his eyes and explored the landscape more attentively.¹⁰

The omniscient narrator continues in this manner, telling us what Señor Ríos imagines out there in the darkness as the train pounds along: human figures, Carranzistas attacking, rifle shots. The reader is told that his imagined figures are really telegraph poles. There is a flashback: Señor Ríos imagines himself in his comfortable and peaceful home. Then he passes out and “he dreamed that his escape to the capital on a cattle train was only a dreadful nightmare.”¹¹

With the possible exception of the underlined passages above, which are not emphasized in the novel, the reader is not really installed in the consciousness of Señor Ríos; his thoughts are not really shown.

This kind of conventional narration and exposition carries over into La malhora, but Azuela's technique becomes increasingly fragmentary, less discursive, more enumerative and ambiguous. In two sections of the novel, which precede and follow Altagracia's first person account of her downfall, Azuela is clearly exploring the interior life of Altagracia, but he makes her alcoholic vision serve his lingering concern for exposition and summary. After Altagracia leaves the doctor to whom she has told her story, she finds the nearest pulquería and she consumes two drinks. The following passage represents Azuela's rendering of the alcoholic frame of mind of Altagracia after these drinks:

Explosion of images, desires, recollections. Disconnected, absurd, diverse ideas rise and fall in her brain. Multi-colored clamor; handclapping and whistles and the daybreak sounds from a non-existent canvas tent; the stupid croaking of a lottery vendor who may not even believe in the peace of the dead; the sorrowful laments of sticky hand organs, the little horses which don't move and the trumpets no one hears. White beds also, and white uniforms and great white halls and tormented silhouettes. The cadaverous countenance of the surgeon and the contradictory gleam of his eyes and his eternally smiling mouth; the hateful and inpenetrable face of an impertinent and prying medical practitioner, the tack-tack-tack-tack of a Singer [sewing machine] and the intolerable murmurring of prayers of three cockroaches who never tire of making the sign of the cross; a rusty crucifix. … Overflow of shapeless ideas and feelings, images which fuse and disperse; smash-ups of found longings, sack of insane scorpions.

(II, 977)

In this passage there is a noticeable effort to efface the omniscient narrator. But Azuela is there with his irony and sarcasm. Exposition gives way to a piling up of details. There is a marked absence of complete sentences. While it is true that the flashbacks provide a summary of Altagracia's life, the whole passage is intended to suggest that they take place in Altagracia's drunken mind. It successfully conveys such symptoms of alcoholism as obsession; an intensification of sensory awareness, visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory; perturbation; and fantasy. Many parts of the novel taken together exemplify Azuela's use of the techniques of repetition and summary, and while they are fundamentally chronological, they are scattered and offered in fragments. Some of the imagery of La malhora, as in the passage just given, is surrealistic, as Luis Leal has rightly pointed out:¹² “multi-colored clamor,” “a nonexistent canvas tent,” “the stupid croaking of a lottery vendor,” “the little horses which don't move and the trumpets no one hears,” “the cadaverous countenance,” etc. Many of these characteristics align La malhora with the Mexican movement called estridentismo.¹³ In all of these ways Azuela successfully depicts the interior states of Altagracia's mind.

But neither Altagracia's alcoholic vision nor the demented doctor's pathological vision can be said to exhibit in their presentation Azuela's mastery of the stream of consciousness method. It is not until La luciérnaga that Azuela masters this method. But La malhora shares with stream of consciousness fiction the preference for the interior world of the characters and a preoccupation with technique. Two definitions of stream of consciousness will help in pointing out why Azuela only approximates the method in La malhora. Robert Humphrey, in his study Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, has said:

Stream of consciousness fiction is essentially a technical feat. Its successful working-out depended on technical resources exceeding those of any other type of fiction. Because this is so, any study of the genre must be essentially an examination of method. A study of devices and form becomes significant if we understand the achievement that justifies all of the virtuosity. Stream of consciousness is not a technique for its own sake. It is based on a realization of the force of the drama that takes place in the minds of human beings.¹⁴

But there is another quality of stream of consciousness which is not stressed in Humphrey's statement. As Joseph Warren Beach has rightly stated:

The stream of consciousness technique is almost invariably applied to persons of an extremely “introverted” type, to neurotics and those of unbalanced mind, or to occasional states of mind of normal individuals bordering on obsession or delirium: states of mind in which the consciousness is given over to the chaotic play of sensations and associations.¹⁵

On first glance at these statements one would think that La malhora fulfills these requirements. What is absent in La malhora is “the chaotic play of sensations and associations.” An examination of the second part of this novel, bearing in mind what has already been said of Altagracia's alcoholic vision, will point this out.

The second part of the novel presents the pathological vision of the insane doctor. This part is called “La reencarnación de Lenin” [“The Re-incarnation of Lenin”]. One important critic of Mexican letters, and a personal friend of Azuela, Francisco Monterde, has said that “the soliloquy of the demented doctor approximates the ‘interior monologue’ of Joyce.”¹⁶ and Raymundo Ramos has said that “the interior monologue of the demented doctor constitutes a foreshadowing in the technique of the Mexican novel.”¹⁷ The method is not stream of consciousness, nor is the technique either soliloquy or interior monologue, even though there may be some resemblance. Contrary to critical opinion, moreover, the madness of the demented doctor seems to be accepted, first of all, because he tells the reader that he has been in an insane asylum at the very beginning of this part of the novel. (II, 963) Two pages ahead the doctor says that a discussion concerning the difference between killing a man and killing a dog has cost him a second trip to the insane asylum. (II, 965) What does suggest the benevolent doctor's unbalanced mind is not the chaotic flow of thought or a confused and disconnected association of ideas. Secondly, the reader is able to grant the doctor's madness because of his predilection for unusual philosophical and theosophical speculation, concerning himself and Altagracia; his tendency toward strangely poetic disquisition; and his hallucinatory obsession with his dog Lenin, all of which is expressed by a choppy, fragmentary style. The doctor, in addition, is obsessed with eyes, with his wife's, but especially with Lenin's (as he remembers them on a medical operating table) and with Altagracia's. In fact, throughout all three of the modern novels, Azuela exhibits a more than usual fascination with eyes; eyes are an important leitmotif in all three novels, and this fascination suggests that Azuela saw eyes as a significant clue to human personality.¹⁸

In this respect the leitmotif of the eyes explains the title of this second part of the novel and advances a commentary concerning the “dog's life” of Altagracia. For Lenin the dog, in the mind of the demented doctor, is re-incarnated in Altagracia:

She raised her downy small forehead (a two-weeks old donkey) and looked at me. The look of an animal, of a domesticated animal, shall we say. It turned out that her two firefly eyes in the darkness of my room kept me from closing my eyes. I did not understand until I got up and opened the balcony for her to the splendid night. Lenin's eyes! Yes sir! Why not? And theosophy? and Einstein? As far as I am concerned that's enough for me. For me, Universe, for me.

(II, 964)

It is at this point that the doctor begins the account of Lenin, his dog. This episode, narrated in the first person, is based on the association of Altagracia's eyes with Lenin's in the mind of the doctor. The text of the novel continues:

By the way, I've not said who Lenin is. A story, the day of my triumph or of my downfall, one and the same. At ten o'clock the academic welcoming address, at ten forty-five the other. That is to say, when under my uniform I could still feel the warmth of the embraces and still hear the rounds of applause and the intimate fraternal words: “Venerable apostles of Christian charity … noble lives dedicated to the amelioration of human suffering.” And the rest. Why sir, did I have to lay my eyes on Lenin's eyes? Strapped down on the dissecting table, his tense limbs outspread, abdomen facing up, a silver-grey velvet belly, clammy and perturbed, his breathing heaving in and out with terror. Eyes of glass inplacably expressive, overflowing with … I don't know. What? Bitter reproaches? humble and resigned impotence? Plea for the smallest grain of pity? Bewilderment before the omnipotent biped? … The heart, consequently, wavered like an untamed bird in a cage. The scalpel would not obey my uncertain hands. But. And the recollection of “sutures for the major vessels of the organism.” … I turned away abruptly. Lenin's reclining neck, first the incision then the spilling scarlet. And a hoarse bark, suppressed by the mouth muzzle.

I swear that the rest was not my doing. The surgeon's knife, it, cut the straps. Lenin gave a violent leap, broke the window and from the third floor balcony, landed like a sack of bones on the shaded street below.

(II, 964)

The doctor's obsession is evident in this spoken monologue, quoted extensively because it is a good illustration of the pathological vision in La malhora. But even outside the context of what precedes and follows it, the doctor's monologue exhibits an orderliness which is also found in the rest of “La reencarnación de Lenin”: a natural forward flow from one detail to the next, causal sequence, rational speculation, the doctor's report of others' views of him. It is a report of an incident which took place in the past, recreated in the mind, but leading logically out of what precedes, in this case, the association of Altagracia's and Lenin's eyes. A report of the doctor's institutional commitment, his release, and of a second commitment follows, with an explanation for both commitments. The report borders on soliloquy but the inclusion of dialogue and half-dialogue (as the passages below indicate) in this part of the novel, with Altagracia and another character Alfonso, suggests that the doctor is not always alone. It is a first person monologue with flashbacks. But it is neither direct nor indirect interior monologue. Moreover, it is, I feel, a less disjointed presentation of an imbalanced mind's inner states than the depiction of Altagracia's alcoholic mind.

In two other passages Altagracia is associated in the doctor's mind with Lenin:

Come closer … Don't be afraid … Altagracia, don't run away … Lenin.

She took a leap and stared at me. A mistake is possible. Yet I continue believing in Lenin.

(II, 965)

And:

Why do you hide? … Look at me! Look me in the eyes! … And now you're leaving. Wait Altagracia, I mean Lenin. Lenin, wait. I must tell it all …

… She leaped suddenly and stared at me. Just like on the day he leaped over the balcony.

(II, 966)

The fragmented pathological vision is convincingly presented, but Azuela makes it difficult to assess whether one is to understand the whole thing as being all spoken in souls, as a soliloquy must be, or as taking place completely inside the mind of the insane doctor. This part contains ambiguities which heighten the plausibility of the pathological vision, without ever going so far as to verify it, however. Azuela has said that he could point to a number of unresolvable puzzles [rompecabezas] in all three of his modern novels, but rather than explain them he preferred to leave them for the entertainment of his adverse critics (III, 1114). That is why the modern novels have also been called “hermetic.”¹⁹ This part also closes with a footnote supplied by a third person narrator; this adds to the confusion. Another possible interpretation of this part is that it may be understood as being the doctor's written account (a journal entry, perhaps) of his role in Altagracia's life. But this too remains uncertain. In any case it can be said that with the benevolent doctor Azuela does not present pre-speech, chaotic levels of consciousness.

What Azuela has done in this and other parts of La malhora, in the manner of Conrad, is to alter the conventional focus of narration from the omniscient author to the observer-character²⁰ (the insane doctor, the shady characters in El Vacilón, the investigator in the hospital) and to the central character (Altagracia) who is kept by Azuela, like Dionisio in La luciérnaga, always in the foreground of the novel's narrative. In fact, the characters of the three middle parts of the novel are important because of the way they enlarge Altagracia as the main character. They help to define the tribulations through which she passes over a period of eleven years on the way to redemption, forgiving, as she does, at the very end of the novel Marcelo (who deflowered her and killed her father) and la Tapatía,²¹ who had left her to freeze to death in the park.

The third part of the novel, for example, called “Santo … Santo … Santo, points out the subordinate characters' roles. The title of this part [Santo means saint] is roughly equivalent to the exclamation “Holy, holy, holy Jesus!” It is an exclamation which comes to the mouths of the two prudish and devout sisters for whom Altagracia works, whenever they are shocked or scandalized by blasphemy or lack of piety. From them Altagracia begins to acquire some religious feelings and compassion. The fourth part of the novel takes place mainly in the home of a retired old Porfirista general and his one hundred and ninety pound sister, Eugenia, a vexatious and intolerably boisterous and demanding person. The old general advances additional information, mainly physical details concerning Altagracia's appearance. All of them supply viewpoints which help develop the main character, Altagracia. In this respect La malhora foreshadows the next modern novel, El desquite, which uses point of view with even greater consistency.

Another thing which Azuela has done is to employ a combination of stylistic devices which contribute to and compound the complex, fragmented, and discontinuous structure of the novel. Also the narrative of the novel as a whole combines more than one form. It is first of all a chronological or linear narrative: Altagracia is barely fifteen at the beginning of the novel. At the end of La malhora eleven years have passed: five at the end of her employment with the Gutierrez sisters (II, 970), one more year before working for the general (II, 971), and five more following that (II, 974). Only in the use of flashbacks or in the character's spoken or mental re-creation of a past incident is there a break in the forward flow of the narrative. The best example of the latter is the section of the novel which closes the first part. Altagracia is found naked and nearly frozen in a park, and while efforts are being made to revive her, her consciousness recreates her confrontation with Marcelo and la Tapatía when Altagracia had attempted to knife him. In this section Azuela has successfully depicted Altagracia's slipping in and out of the state of unconsciousness, her mind alternately dwelling on her aborted act of vengeance (the past) and on the efforts to save her life (the present). In this section Azuela likens her repeated recollection to the repetition of the same film over and over and over (II, 962-63). The same combination of stylistic devices are used here.

Raymundo Ramos has said of Azuela's handling of time in this novel:

In this narrative Azuela has employed the contrast of swift and slow time, distributed in the normal flow of the novel … The fragmentation of linear time represents for its time, an innovative literary contribution.²²

The two other forms of the novel, its cuadriform and its cyclical forms, have already been pointed out.

La malhora, then, is important because it clearly brings Azuela from the social to the modern novel, to the novel of consciousness. La malhora, moreover, points in several ways to Azuela's subsequent development. The pathological vision of the benevolent doctor points directly to Jose María in La luciérnaga; and Altagracia's alcoholic vision points to both that of Lupita in El desquite (also recapitulatory) and of Dionisio in La luciérnaga, as well as to the serene recapitulatory vision of Conchita in the latter novel.

In all three novels Azuela's literary strategy of having central characters recapitulate their lives has the added importance of neatly tying together several narrative strands of the novels. La malhora, for all the reasons indicated, is therefore of much importance for an understanding of the chronological development of Azuela. It was a stepping stone for Azuela on his way to the peak of his trajectory as a novelist.

Notes

1. “Mariano Azuela and ‘The Height of the Times’ A Study of La luciérnaga,” Latin American Literary Review, III (1974), 113-30. I suggest, moreover, that with La luciérnaga Azuela reached the peak of his trajectory as a novelist.

   The present study is a slightly modified version of Chapter II of a recently completed study of the three modern novels: “Mariano Azuela and ‘The Height of the Times’; European Modernism in La malhora, El desquite, and La luciérnaga.” This study has been translated into Spanish by M. A. Serna-Maytorena with an introduction by Luis Leal, and has been submitted for publication in Mexico.

2. Quoted in Paths to the Present, ed. Eugen Weber (New York and Toronto: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1970), p. 143.

3. Ibid., p. 144.

4. Obras completas de Mariano Azuela [The Complete Works of Mariano Azuela] (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958-60), Vol. III, p. 1114. All subsequent references to Obras completas will be indicated by the volume and page numbers and will be included in the text of this study. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

5. Mariano Azuela: Vida y Obra [Mariano Azuela: Life and Work], (Mexico: Ediciones de Andrea, 1961), p. 127.

6. Arnold Hauser makes a very good case for the modernism of Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac and Zola. See The Social History of Art (New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1958), vol. 4, esp. pp. 26-30.

7. See Martínez, op. cit., esp. pp. 117-118.

8. See Jacques Souvage's explanation and discussion of the “dramatized novel,” in An Introduction to The Study of The Novel (Gent: E. Story-Scientia, 1965), pp. 41-60.

9. Mariano Azuela, Two Novels of Mexico: The Flies and The Bosses, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956), p. 19.

10. Ibid, pp. 19-20.

11. Ibid, p. 21.

12. Mariano Azuela: vida y obra, p. 54.

13. Estridentismo refers to the first avant-garde school of poetry in Mexico in the twentieth century. In subject matter, forms and techniques it is much indebted to such European tendencies as dada, futurism, imagism and surrealism. See John S. Brushwood, Mexico in its Novel (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 189-200; Luis Leal, Panorama de la literatura mexicana actual [Panorama of Contemporary Mexican Literature] (Washington, D.C.: Unión Panamericana, 1968), pp. 37-44; Germán List Arzubide, El movimiento estridentista [The Estridentista Movement], (Jalapa, Veracruz: Ediciones de Horizonte, n.d.); Kenneth C. Monohan; “El estridentismo y los críticos” [“Estridentismo and the Critics”], Cuadernos Americanos, CXCVII (1974), pp. 219-33; and Frederick S. Stimson, The New Schools of Spanish American Poetry (Madrid: Editorial Castalia. 1970), pp. 132-37.

14. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 21.

15. The Twentieth Century Novel (New York: The Century Co., 1932), p. 529.

16. “La etapa de hermetismo, en la obra del Dr. Mariano Azuela” [“The Hermetic Period, In the Work of Dr. Mariano Azuela”], Cuadernos Americanos, II (1952), p. 287.

17. Preface to Tres novelas de Mariano Azuela [Three Novels of Mariano Azuela], (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969), p. 13.

18. The use of this leitmotif in La luciérnaga has been studied by Kurt L. Levy, “La luciérnaga: Title, Leitmotif, and Structural Unity,” Philological Quarterly, 51 (1972), pp. 321-28; and Eliud Martínez, “La visión alcohólica de Dionisio en La luciérnaga de Mariano Azuela” [“The Alcoholic Vision of Dionisio in La luciérnaga by Mariano Azuela”], Revista Universidad de Sonora, III (1972), pp. 14-20.

19. Francisco Monterde, op. cit.

20. Robert Humphrey, op. cit., pp. 24, 35 and 127.

21. The ambiguous ending of La malhora had puzzled critics until Azuela resolved the problem. See Bernard M. Dulsey, “Azuela Revisited,” Hispania, XXV (1951), pp. 331-32.

22. Op. cit., p. 13, my emphasis.