SOURCE: Leal, Luis. “The Early Writings.” In Mariano Azuela, pp. 38-52. New York: Twayne, 1971.

[In the following essay, Leal reviews the writings of many of Azuela's precursors, moving on to provide an overview of Azuela's writings before the revolution, including several short stories and his first four novels.]

I AZUELA'S PRECURSORS

During the colonial period the novel in Mexico, unlike poetry, did not flourish. It is true that there were some works that contain narrative elements, such as the Sirgueros de la Virgen (Songs in Praise of the Virgin, 1620) by Francisco Bramón, a pastoral romance with a slender narrative thread; Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1680), a historical narrative structured like a picaresque novel; and La portentosa vida de la Muerte (1792) by Joaquín Bolaños, in which personified Death relates her own life. But it was not until 1816 that José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi wrote what could be called a true novel—El Periquillo Sarniento.¹

Although Lizardi used the picaresque structure which is a Spanish form, the novel depicts Mexican society at the end of the colonial period.² Lizardi's thinking was influenced by French writers such as Rousseau, and it clashed with the traditional Spanish attitudes. The most important aspect of the novel, however, is not its philosophy, but the popular elements he introduced into literature, such as the language and the characters.

Unfortunately, Lizardi's example was not followed. The novelists of the Romantic period looked again toward Europe for inspiration and produced second-rate sentimental romances unworthy of the name. The exceptions were those written by Luis G. Inclán and Manuel Payno. Inclán's novel, Astucia (1865), gives an excellent picture of rural Mexico. His characters are Mexican rancheros, and his style reproduces the language spoken in central Mexico. Manuel Payno, a contemporary of Inclán, wrote his best novel late in life. His Bandidos de Río Frío did not appear until 1889, although his first novel had been published thirty years earlier. In Los bandidos one finds again a true picture of Mexico and its people. His characters, some of which are taken from real life, are representatives of Mexican society. Payno, as well as other novelists writing at the time, were following the precepts of Ignacio M. Altamirano, who had recommended that they write about Mexican subjects in a style worthy of a national literature. He himself had written novels and novelettes such as Clemencia (1869), La navidad en las montañas (1871),³ and El Zarco (1886; first ed., 1901), to mention only the most outstanding.

French Realists and Spanish Regionalists had a powerful influence upon Mexican novelists. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century there was a period of transition between Romanticism and Realism in novelists such as Rafael Delgado, the author of La Calandria (1891); José Tomás de Cuéllar, painter of Mexican customs in an ironical vein; and José López Portillo y Rojas, whose Regionalist novel, La parcela (1898), is a perfect example of the influence of the Spanish novelists, especially Pereda. Following Altamirano's advice, López Portillo had chosen a Mexican subject and located his novel in his native state of Jalisco, but it turned out to be, as Azuela pointed out, a halfway success, since his characters speak more like Spanish farmers than Mexican peons.

After these novelists of transition come the true Naturalists, among whom Gamboa is the most representative. His novels, such as Suprema ley (1896), Metamorfosis (1899), Santa (1903), and Reconquista (1908), written under the influence of Zola and the Naturalists,⁴ represent the best effort in fiction that had been attempted up to that time. These novels are well constructed, well written, and well motivated.

Azuela also began writing under the influence of the French Realists. His first four novels, written between 1907 and 1909, still reflect the influence of that school. Speaking about the writing of his first novel, he said: “I was in my fifth year of Medical School [in Guadalajara] immersed, not so much in the study of pathology and therapeutics, as in the reading of the Realistic novels of France and Spain, then at their highest in popularity. The novel Sor Filomena by Goncourt had enchanted me with its admirable descriptions of the life of the students of medicine during their internship in the hospitals of Paris. Who of us then did not dream about the Latin Quarter of Paris, as described by so many poets and novelists?”⁵ It must be remembered that during that time the works of French novelists, even those of inferior quality, were translated into Spanish and published in every newspaper and magazine throughout Spain and Latin America. If a Mexican novelist wanted to sell his books, he had to imitate the French writers, as the public was used to reading this type of novel. About this problem Azuela commented: ‘I wrote María Luisa [his first novel] fifty-three years ago. At that time the Realistic school was at its peak. The novelists that predominated were Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Daudet, and Maupassant, and we students were as eager to read them as we were to read the Spaniards Pereda and Valera. The influence of the Romantic writers had not yet, however, disappeared; most readers still enjoyed the literature of Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Eugène Sue, very far yet from the psychological complications that today even the barbers demand.”⁶

Why did Azuela and other Mexican novelists imitate the French authors? Although the problem is much more complex than it appears to be, it may be said that during the Díaz administration writers were trying to adapt themselves to a new official philosophy and to a new way of life brought about by the break with the past that had taken place among the intellectuals and the political leaders during the period of reform under Juárez. Having rejected the Spanish tradition and unable to go back to an Indian heritage, they had to turn to France, since writers in other Spanish-speaking countries had nothing original to offer. The United States, although geographically close, could not be imitated due to the difference in language and cultural backgrounds. On the other hand, French culture could be easily assimilated, as all the educated Mexicans of the period spoke French. By imitating the French writers, who were in the forefront of literary development in Europe, Mexican authors could also demonstrate their intellectual independence from Spain, which they had not done up to that time. The experiment—for it was an experiment—was so successful that the result was a literary reform, especially in style.

As a result of this imitation authors like Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera were creating a new Spanish style, a style characterized by a lightness and grace unknown to the traditional Castilian writers. Gutiérrez Nájera and other Mexican modernistas began to write artistic short stories and novels in which the form, and not the subject matter, was the most important element. Of one of those modernistas Azuela had this to say: “Amado Nervo wrote delightful and incomparable novels which reflect his poetic nature as much as his verse.”⁷ Of one of his novels he said: “I like El Bachiller of Amado Nervo more than any of the novels of the most famous Mexican novelists.”⁸ These two influences, the Mexican modernistas and the French Realists, were to be predominant in the formation of Azuela as a novelist.⁹

II THE FIRST STORIES

Azuela began writing simple sketches in 1889, when he was still a medical student in Guadalajara. Unpublished during his life (they appeared for the first time in volume III of his Obras completas in 1960), these sketches show Azuela's interest in people and in direct characterization. The first part, called “Registro,” is a collection of pictures of girls he knew; the second part, called “Páginas íntimas,” is a recording of adolescent adventures.

From the simple sketch Azuela went on to write regular stories. The first that he published were appropriately named “Impresiones de un estudiante.” They appeared in the magazine Gil Blas Cómico of Mexico City between March 5 and November 22, 1896, signed with the pseudonym “Beleño.” The last one is the story of a prostitute who dies in the hospital. One of the students using her corpse to practice an autopsy had been her seducer. The story is important in the study of Azuela as a novelist because the plot was later developed into a full-length novel.

Except for another sketch, “Esbozo,” published in El Noticioso of Guadalajara on March 27, 1897, under the pseudonym “Fierabrás,” Azuela did not publish anything until 1903. The stories which began to appear that year show a definite improvement over the “Impresiones.” Azuela has learned to use irony and even sarcasm in the portrayal of character, as can be seen in “Esbozo,” a story about a mediocre medical student. He is now conscious of the many social injustices prevalent in Mexico and denounces them in “De mi tierra,” a story awarded first prize in a literary contest held in Lagos in 1903. At this early period, however, the social protest was secondary to the telling of the anecdote. Teodora, the servant girl seduced by the master of the house, has to explain to her husband why their son has blond hair.

A theme that is to recur in many of Azuela's works, that of the tragedy of the poor caused by injustices of the rich, is introduced in “Víctimas de la opulencia” (1904); a young servant girl sacrifices her own son so that the son of the lady of the house may live. The social protest, however, is weakened by the sentimental ending.

Another story published in 1904, “En derrota,” has a rural setting and deals with the conflict between a peon and the overseer's son, who fight over Camila, a girl very much like the Camila of The Underdogs, and which undoubtedly served as a prototype. The elements of Naturalism of this and the preceding stories, even if subdued, already point to the kind of novel that Azuela will write during this early period.

III THE FIRST NOVEL

The first novel that Azuela published, María Luisa¹⁰ (1907), is based on the last story of the seven which appeared under the collective title “Impresiones de un estudiante.” María Luisa is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who has been seduced by a medical student. María Luisa, the protagonist, is the victim of her own degenerate background, but the author does not dramatize her life as a prostitute, in the manner of a Nana or even a Santa. It is obvious that Azuela, at that time, was not interested in describing, like the French Naturalists, the worst aspects of life. The emphasis falls, rather, on the protest against society for allowing a young girl like María Luisa to be perverted by the ideal offspring of the well-to-do. If Azuela, in this novel, had described life in Guadalajara's houses of ill repute, he would have anticipated Gamboa's Santa, a novel dealing with prostitution in Mexico City and which leans heavily on Zola's Nana.

María Luisa, which is more like an elaborated short story than a novel, has serious defects. The characterization of María Luisa and some of the others is inconsistent and often contradictory. Pancho, seducer of María Luisa and a “heartless cynic,” is sometimes presented as a likable fellow: “He was not,” the novelist says, “in effect a bad fellow; his innocent-looking eyes and the accent of his perfectly frank speech confirmed the sincerity of his words.” A much more serious defect is the sudden change in the nature of the characters. Pancho seduces María Luisa without actually wanting to, and the friendship between the protagonist and her friend Ester is not clearly drawn, as their mutual feelings change without apparent reason.

Besides poor characterization and motivation, the plot structure is rather weak. Immediately after María Luisa begins drinking, the narrative is cut short. In the next and last chapter, three years later, she is in the hospital on the verge of death, a victim of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and pneumonia, the result of her decadent life. While this is plausible in life, it cannot be accepted in a novel without some of the events that lead to the climax being dramatized, so that the illusion of the passing of time is created.

But if the novel has defects it also has its good points. The dialogues are interesting and never dull; the speech of the characters reflects their regional and social status: it is neither vulgar, nor does it show affectation. At the same time, Azuela does not squirm, as do other Mexican Realists and Naturalists, at the use of the Spanish typical of the nation. Indeed, this is a distinguishing feature of Azuela's style, as are the short, fine descriptions of the Mexican landscape.

In the numerous costumbrista sketches, especially those in which he describes the boarding houses patronized by the students, Azuela demonstrates his satirical and sometimes humorous attitude. The emotive scenes, like the fight between María Luisa and the aunt who serves as a go-between, add a dramatic touch. No less interesting is the characterization of El Chato, because here Azuela uses for the first time a technique which he is to develop fully later, that of capturing the essential nature of a person by presenting, and often integrating, both his physical and his moral traits. El Chato has a deformed body and his face, in spite of his youth, is like a parchment. His receding chin shows a reddish tinge, the result of his licentiousness. Morally, he is sly, cunning, and contemptuous. This contemptuous attitude, however, turns out to be nothing but “a flash of malignance in the abyss of his stupidity.”¹¹ The picture of a degenerate student appears frequently in Azuela's novels. He had become well acquainted with the type during his student days in the boarding houses of Guadalajara and could draw El Chato from firsthand observation.

While his first novel is not lacking in literary merits, its primary value lies in what it reveals about the origins of Azuela's narrative art. Here are the beginnings of the making of the future novelist of the revolution. Within these early pages there is a glimmer of the theme of his masterpiece, The Underdogs: “María Luisa was the daughter of pure accident. She was born when soldiers of our eternal revolutions came into town stained with the blood of their own brothers, seeking the pleasures of the flesh and unleashing their powerful instincts. After being satiated with death, they wanted to be satiated with life.”¹²

Azuela himself described his first novelistic work as “an observation of the students in Guadalajara at the end of the nineteenth century,” and the protagonist as “a sister of Mimí Pinsón, of Margarita Gautier, of Musseta; a spurious sister, but nevertheless a sister. A novel of my youth, of my student days in the sweet, romantic and passionate Guadalajara.”¹³

IV LOS FRACASADOS

Los fracasados (The Failures), published in 1908, is Azuela's first full-length novel. Written in Lagos de Moreno in 1906, it did not appear until two years later.¹⁴ The theme of the novel, the failure of the idealists who could not cope with the negative elements in their environment, was a novelty in Mexican fiction. Azuela's liberal ideas, which can hardly be noticed in María Luisa, pervade Los fracasados and give significance to the action. The conservative elements in the town, represented by the alliance of the rich hacendados, the clergy, and the corrupted politicians, cannot be conquered by the idealist Reséndez. Nevertheless, his failure is not as tragic as that of Father Cabezudo, who has to fight against the ignorance and stupidity of his parishioners.

Azuela, back from medical school, wanted to write a novel about life in a small town. With this in mind he set out in search of material. He did not take long in finding it. One early morning, when he was returning home from attending a patient, he went into the town's church. There the priest, whom Azuela recognized, was in the middle of a strong sermon against liberalism. “At that time,” Azuela later recollected, “my Jacobinism was past its critical period and I was in my convalescence; instead of finding the pastor disagreeable and hateful, I was captivated by his religious passion, his fervor, his speech in good faith, his neat thoughts and, especially, his bravery in expressing his ideas without subterfuge and with great vigor.”¹⁵ In the priest the novelist recognized the ideal person for his work: a frustrated idealist, a pathetic figure preaching in the desert. “When the minister came down from his sacred pulpit, in the midst of the confused rumoring of the people kneeling and waiting for the mass, his divine words still resounded in the high church ceiling, and it seemed to me that they had an empty sound.”¹⁶

Besides the ideological conflict between the politicians and the clergymen, there is a contrast between good and bad: some of the characters like Reséndez, Consuelo, and Father Martínez are good, intelligent, and understanding; others, like Dr. Caracas, the daughters of doña Recareda, and Father Delgado, are evil and ignorant. The novelist has not yet learned the technique of creating real characters that stand out from the group, and not just simple types like those found here, such as the small-town lawyer, the political boss, the judge, the local doctor, the secretary of the city council, and the parish priest. Nevertheless, the ability to characterize that is so much admired in the novels of the later periods is already apparent. Father Cabezudo, for instance, after preaching a whole lifetime against the liberals, finally realizes that the true enemy is not liberalism, but wickedness itself. The scene in which he discovers this truth is one of the best in the novel. Doña Recareda has plainly misunderstood the minister's admonitions against the liberals. “For we are authorized by you, señor cura,” she says, “to kill the liberals if the act is of benefit to our soul and increases God's glory.”¹⁷

In Father Martínez, Azuela has created an original character. He is not like the typical priest in most of the novels of the period. Although a friend of the liberals, he is not a renegade. In the novel his function is to demonstrate that not all priests are reactionaries. No less interesting is the lawyer Reséndez, a character drawn from life, according to the author. In Reséndez, Azuela portrayed his friend José Becerra, the lawyer, poet, and revolutionary who later was instrumental in determining the novelist's participation in the war against Huerta and later Carranza.

The plot of Los fracasados unfolds without undue complications. Reséndez, upon completing his law studies in Guadalajara, accepts a position in a small town of the state as secretary to the city council. He arrives with a great deal of enthusiasm, ready to put into practice the ideal of social justice he has learned from his professors. He soon discovers that there is little in common between the classroom and the real world, for he has to fight against powerful reactionary forces controlled by persons without scruples who are ready to sacrifice their principles in order to keep their power. Reséndez is defeated through trickery, and after an attempt to kill him fails, he escapes with his life. There is, of course, a secondary intrigue. Reséndez falls in love with Consuelo, the daughter of one of the men in control of the town, the hacendado don Agapito. The fact that Consuelo turns out to be the daughter of Father Martínez (conceived before he had become a priest) shows that Azuela had not yet learned the subtleties of his art.

More important than the plot is the criticism Azuela makes of the social institutions that existed in a small town typical of the Díaz era. The contemporary writer Agustín Yáñez has done the same thing in his novel Al filo del agua (1947).¹⁸ Although these two novels differ in technique and style, there are certain similarities between them. The theme, the scenery, and the characters are the same. The conflict between liberals and conservatives is the same. In both works there is an identical religious parade, in defiance of the Laws of Reform. The town where the events of Al filo del agua take place is very much like the Alamos of Los fracasados. The society depicted in both novels is that which existed in Mexico's provincial towns just before the Revolution of 1910. In Azuela's novel the action takes place in 1906; in Yáñez', in 1909. The excellent work of Yáñez, written forty years later, is much superior to Azuela's in both style and technique. Nevertheless, life in a small town as painted by Azuela has the charm of being a first impression of events as seen by a contemporary while Yáñez' novel, although much more artistic, is a re-creation of a period gone by, of a society seen at a distance through the eyes of the imagination.

Azuela's strongest point, in this and subsequent novels, is the vigor and force with which he presents the problems of that society he knew so well. His ardent liberalism and his impatience with human stupidity come through with clearness and precision. Attorney Reséndez, the hero of the novel, realizes that Mexican life under the Díaz regime needs to be improved, as it devalues intelligence in favor of audacity and intrigue. Those in power are mediocre, unlearned, and without talent, but daring and unscrupulous.

In spite of the severe criticism of the Díaz regime, Azuela was not punished for the publication of Los fracasados. Just a few years before the novelist Heriberto Frías had been court-martialed and condemned to death (although the sentence was not carried out) for publishing his novel Tomóchic in the newspaper El Demócrata of Mexico City in 1893. The novel described the ruthless destruction of an Indian village in northern Mexico by a regiment of Díaz' soldiers. The wide publicity it gained throughout the nation led to its suppression and to the punishment of its author, who was an officer in that same army that had destroyed the town of Tomóchic. Was it that the attitude of the Díaz government toward adverse criticism had changed between 1893 and 1908, or was it that Azuela's novel went unnoticed by the critics and the public? The latter explanation seems more plausible, as Azuela himself complained that his novel had been noticed by only a few critics. He received letters from Victoriano Salado Alvarez and Amado Nervo. The only notice that appeared in newspapers or periodicals was that of Ricardo Arenales in the literary review, Contemporáneos, of Monterrey in 1910.¹⁹

Compared to the latter novels written by Azuela, Los fracasados is relatively unimportant; however, it marks the end, as he says, of his period as an amateur in the art of the novel. The few favorable comments he received were enough to make him decide to dedicate himself seriously to the writing of fiction.

V MALA YERBA

Mala yerba (1909),²⁰ translated into English by Anita Brenner under the title Marcela (1932), is doubtless Azuela's best novel of this early period. The greatest improvement is to be found in the technique employed. For the first time he is able to skillfully blend human actions and descriptions of nature. When one of the peons is assassinated, the storm that rages turns into a symbol of the social explosion that is to envelop the whole country. The descriptions of nature, although given symbolic meaning, faithfully reproduce the Mexican landscape, giving the novel an authentic note. The same can be said about the descriptions of the people, their daily life, and their speech. To really capture the spirit of life in the country, Azuela said, “It is not necessary to have been born on the ranch, but it is essential to be thoroughly acquainted with the environment, to know the people first-hand, especially at an early age, when we can receive vigorous and rich impressions.”²¹ And indeed Azuela, to write Mala yerba, drew on his experiences as a boy on his father's ranch, where he became acquainted with the peons, cowboys, and servants.

The story told by Azuela in this novel is one of social protest. While in Lagos, serving as municipal doctor, he had the opportunity to become acquainted with numerous legal cases. “I was able,” he said in an interview, “to find out about all the crimes committed by the hacendados. How astonishing the number of cases! An hacendado could kill a peon under the least pretext, or even without one. That, of course, took place during the days of Porfirio Díaz. Things are different now. Oh, how many crimes!”²² One of these crimes gave him material for his novel. Going over the proceedings of a murder trial one day, Azuela became interested in the case and decided to use it for the novel that he was planning to write about rural life. It was the case of a rich hacendado who had murdered his stableman and his own young and beautiful wife after accusing her of infidelity. In Mala yerba Julián Andrade, the decadent hacendado, orders that his stableman, Gertrudis, be killed because Gertrudis is the lover of Marcela, a young girl that Julián desires. At the end of the novel Julián kills Marcela, with his own hands, while she is unconscious and thus cannot defend herself.

It was not the first time that this story had appeared in Mexican literature. Before 1909 it had been used by Victoriano Salado Alvarez in his short story “De autos,”²³ and by Amado Nervo in his novelette Pascual Aguilera (1896). Azuela himself had used the plot, although without development, in his short story “De mi tierra” (1903), in which Teodora, a well-developed girl of sixteen, is seduced by the hacendado just before she marries her sweetheart Macedonio, one of the peons.

The similarities between Nervo's novelette and Azuela's novel are limited to the nature of the characters, since the outcome of Pascual Aguilera is entirely different. However, Refugio (the heroine in Nervo's story) is very much like Marcela; Santiago, Refugio's sweetheart, could be a brother of Gertrudis; and Pascual Aguilera, Nervo's protagonist, belongs to the same social class and has the same attitudes toward the men and women of the hacienda as Julián Andrade. The similarities, however, end here. Nervo's style is modernista, and even the peons and rancheros speak like educated Mexicans. For this reason, the dialogues are artificial, not suited to the characters. On the other hand, Azuela's peons and people of the countryside speak and behave like the typical inhabitants of the region, and, in Azuela's novels, the sense of injustice is ever present. He is constantly protesting against the corrupt judges who side with the caciques against the defenseless peons. From this point of view, Mala yerba could be considered as an introduction to Los de abajo. These injustices, tolerated by the Díaz government and so well depicted by Azuela in this novel, help us to understand the causes of the revolution.

In the development of Azuela's narrative technique, Mala yerba represents a moment of transition. Still found here are the Naturalistic elements characteristic of his first novels. Marcela, for example, is still characterized as a woman (very much like María Luisa) who is dominated by her environment: “Over Marcela weighed the tremendous power of the arrogant breed of debauchers who were never denounced by their victims.”²⁴ Throughout the novel are found descriptions of the customs of the people of that region which Azuela knew so well. The most important costumbrista scenes are the horse race and the bull fight. The scene where Tía Poncianita appears (chapter XI) is a true cuadro costumbrista, reminiscent of the best pages of Luis G. Inclán, the author of Astucia. The lively dialogue between the peons and the women from the town (chapter XII) is an excellent re-creation of the popular speech of that part of Jalisco called Los Altos, where the novel takes place.²⁵

A new element in this novel is the appearance of the ironic attitude, which is to predominate in future works. The description of the indolent judge, a judge not unlike those that appear in the novels of the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos, serves to break the tension which results from the nature of the tragedy. After Marcela's death, which would be the logical end of the novel, Azuela adds a short chapter which has the sole function of satirizing the judge and justice in general under the Díaz regime. The judge, who has been unable to make justice prevail and punish the guilty party, says to his secretary: “I am very sleepy and I am going to bed. Tomorrow, very early, come to my house to milk the goats. And I also want you to pull up from the furrow a few sweet potatoes for my María Engracia. Good night, don Petronilo.”²⁶

The most important aspect of this novel, however, is the revelation of the author's social consciousness. Although in the previous novels and short stories this social awareness is not absent, it is in Mala yerba that for the firt time the mixed attitude of indignation and sentimentalism disappears completely. The solid tone of indignation, without any sentimentality (and this is what distinguishes Azuela from Federico Gamboa), makes Mala yerba the best novel of the early period. After Los de abajo it is perhaps Azuela's most popular novel. The translation by Anita Brenner made it famous in the English-speaking world. Azuela himself had an obvious preference for this work, as demonstrated by the fact that during his latter years he wrote a sequel to it, Esa sangre, published after his death.

During the same year that Mala yerba was published there appeared a short story, “Avichuelos negros,” in which Azuela satirizes the customs and ideas of small-town people. María is not permitted by the morally overzealous women, the “black ugly birds,” to take care of her lover, who is dying of tuberculosis, because she is not legally married. In her absence he dies and the rats gnaw his feet.

VI SIN AMOR

Sin amor (Without Love), although published in 1912,²⁷ was probably written before Mala yerba. It follows slavishly the technique of the French novel of the period and is therefore less representative of Azuela's style. The author himself recognized that he had not been true to his nature. “There is in Sin amor,” he tells us, “something strange to my being, something that clashes with my spontaneous and even rude frankness. This strangeness is not found, I believe, in the subject matter, but in the form in which it is expressed.”²⁸

In the subject matter, to be sure, there is nothing original. It has to do with the social aspirations that a middle-class mother, Lidia, has for her daughter Ana María. Wishing to be accepted by the social circle they consider the highest in the small town, that is, the group formed by the rich, they sacrifice their dignity and their honor. Ana María finally succeeds in marrying the richest man in town, Ramón Torralba, by sacrificing her happiness, for it is a marriage of convenience, without love.

To make the tragedy of María stand out, Azuela develops, on parallel lines, the story of a friend, Julia Ponce, who marries a poor officer and is thus able to retain her dignity. This aspect of the novel, however, is not well developed. The marriage of Julia and Enrique is a very obvious situation, inserted in the novel with the only purpose of giving emphasis to the vulgar and disastrous marriage of Ana María to Ramón.

Azuela attributed his failure this time to a lack of objectivity on his part in the presentation of the problems of the middle class. “Perhaps,” he said, “my being too close to the middle class prohibits my looking at it objectively and my studying it in all its aspects. My observations are therefore expressed with passion and perhaps with injustice. Novels about the middle class are the ones that I enjoy least, and I have shown this unsympathetic attitude with my own Sin amor by not publishing a second edition.”²⁹

The novel is very much like Los fracasados. The action takes place in a small town, the same Lagos de Moreno of the former novel. Nevertheless, in Sin amor there are very few direct references to the town, and the descriptions of the landscape are not as vivid as in Mala yerba. The novel is, undoubtedly, the least realistic of this period. In the style, Azuela shows the influence of the modernistas. This is the way he describes a nightfall: “It had become dark; twilight ended in a final flicker: like a Rembrandt oil painting that fuses in a Ruelas etching.”³⁰ Julio Ruelas at that time was the illustrator of the Revista Moderna of Mexico City, a literary periodical published by Amado Nervo, Jesús E. Valenzuela, and other modernistas.

No less artificial in Sin amor are the characters. Although taken from life, they are stereotypes which never seem to become real persons. Don Salustiano represents the greedy moneylender. Nacho de la Rosa is a frustrated poet. Escolástica (the name itself is an abstraction), represents the hypocritical woman who pretends to be interested in culture. Canales is the attorney who has failed. Don Salvador is the trustworthy bartender who knows how to keep the secrets of the dandies. Only the young feminine characters, Ana María and Julia, receive special attention. They are well characterized and become women who live and have human warmth. This is, perhaps, the only advance in technique that Azuela demonstrates in this novel: his ability to create acceptable feminine characters. Otherwise, omitted are the criticism of the social institutions, his strong, vivid, regional style, and his fine descriptions of the Mexican landscape. There is a wide difference between Sin amor and Mala yerba. If the latter is a definite success, the former has to be classed as a failure. This failure is due, perhaps, to the fact that Azuela forgets himself and tries to imitate European novelists. As he himself says, Sin amor is an imitation of the novel El pueblo gris by the Spanish novelist Santiago Rusiñol.

Sin amor closes a period in Azuela's development as a novelist. “With this novel,” he wrote, “ended the first cycle of my production, at the moment when the nation was beginning to tremble with the revolution of Madero in the North.”³¹

Notes

1. English translation by Katherine Anne Porter under the title The Itching Parrot (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, and Company, 1942).

2. Consult Jefferson Rea Spell, The Life and Works of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931).

3. English translation by Harvey L. Johnson, Christmas in the Mountains (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1961).

4. See Robert J. Niess, “Zola's L'Oeuvre and Reconquista of Gamboa,” PMLA, LXI (1946), 577-83.

5. Obras completas, III, 1012-13. Azuela was in his fifth year of the study of medicine in 1897.

6. Ibid., p. 1025.

7. Ibid., p. 687.

8. Ibid., p. 1276.

9. The principal studies about the novel in Mexico before Azuela are those of John S. Brushwood, The Romantic Novel in Mexico (Columbia, Missouri, 1955); Joaquina Navarro, La novela realista mexicana (Mexico, 1955); Ralph E. Warner, Historia de la novela mexicana en el siglo XIX (Mexico, 1953); John L. Read. The Mexican Historical Novel, 1826-1910 (New York, 1939); also the first part of J. S. Brushwood and José Rojas Garcidueñas, Breve historia de la novela mexicana (Mexico, 1959).

10. María Luisa (Lagos de Moreno: Imprenta López Arce, 1907); the second edition did not appear until 1938: María Luisa y otros cuentos (Mexico, Andrés Botas, editor); and the third is the one included in the Obras completas, II, 707-63.

11. María Luisa y otros cuentos (Mexico, 1938), pp. 8-9.

12. Ibid., pp. 21-22.

13. Ibid., p. 160.

14. The first edition appeared in Mexico City in 1908, printed by Müller Brothers; the second edition, also published in Mexico City, has the date 1918; a third edition was published in the newspaper El Nacional in 1933, and a fourth by Botas in Mexico City. The fifth and last is the one included in the Obras completas, I, 3-112.

15. Obras completas, III, 1046.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., I, 66.

18. English translation by Ethel Brinton, under the title The Edge of the Storm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963).

19. An important review of Los fracasados not mentioned by Azuela is the one that appeared in the literary review El Cojo Ilustrado of Bogotá, Colombia, XVIII (1909), 339.

20. The first edition was published in Guadalajara, in the Talleres de La Gaceta de Guadalajara in 1909. The second did not appear until 1924, in Mexico City, printed by Rosendo Terrazas. The third (1937) and fourth (1945) were printed by Botas in Mexico City. The fifth is the one in the Obras completas, I, 113-224.

21. Obras completas, III, 1056.

22. Gregorio Ortega, “Azuela dijo …,” El Universal Ilustrado, Mexico City (January 29, 1925).

23. This story was translated by the ethnologist Frederick Starr and included in his book Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1904).

24. Obras completas, I, 130.

25. For a study of the Spanish spoken in Azuela's native State see Daniel N. Cárdenas, “El español de Jalisco (Contribución a la geografía lingüística hispanoamericana),” Orbis, III (1954), 62-67.

26. Obras completas, I, 224.

27. First ed. printed by Müller Hnos.; 2nd ed. by Botas, 1945; 3rd ed. Obras completas, I, 225-319.

28. Ibid., III, 1064.

29. Ibid., pp. 1063-64.

30. Ibid., I, 269-70.

31. Ibid., III, 1064.