the novel’s methods. “They live a life we don’t understand,” he says:

Do they want to know more about our lives? Well, they will have to make them up, because we’re still nothing and nobody.

The Americans’ gradual realization that their identities are neither so contained nor so separated as they have been taught to believe is figured throughout the novel by the image of the mirror. The question that haunts Harriet throughout the text is the Gringo’s insistent need to know if she looked at her reflection. Turning up again and again throughout the book in fragments and ellipses, the Gringo asks her, “Harriet, when we entered the ballroom, did you look at yourself in the mirror?” When she makes love to Tomás Arroyo in the ballroom and embraces the continuum of life and love for the first time, Harriet is surrounded by mirrors at which she doesn’t look. In effect, she must deny the validity of Western individualism in order to live. The fact that she cannot stay is linked to her awareness of the roomful of reflections that surround her—this will be only a temporary respite from isolation. In the first and last lines of the novel she is returned to her “bordered” self—“Now she sits alone and remembers.”

As Inocencio Mansalvo’s words, quoted above, make clear, the Mexican peasant voices of The Old Gringo express no sense of personal individuality— not as it is understood by the Gringo and Harriet. The North-American sense of self-contained identity that makes life-story telling possible is absent. Prior to the revolution, the peasants are caught in an unstriated and perpetual “pre-mirror” stage. As illustrated by their astonishment in front of the mirrors, the revolution represents a psychological revolution that is as great as the simultaneous socio-political one. Arroyo explains the peasants’ reaction to their reflections—silence and subsequent jubilation—to Harriet in terms that are strongly resonant of Lacanian theory:

They had never seen their whole bodies before. They didn’t know their bodies were more than a piece of their imagination or a broken reflection in a river. Now they know.

The identities of the oppressed and the colonized are here shown to be hybrid self-compositions of history, imagination, and partial viewing—just like the novel itself. Resistance and self-determination conversely require an initial understanding of the powers and limitations of people as individuals. Arroyo’s fatal weakness and his greatest source of power are the same thing—his possession of a sense of self as clearly defined as that of the gringos. In this way, it is his need for personal revenge on his father, Miranda, that leads him to stay too long at the hacienda and then to murder Bierce when his documented rights to the hacienda are destroyed. Both of these acts of proprietary self-interest doom him—placing him in opposition to the Villa-established revolutionary principle of movement. As he says, he is fighting because he understands injustice as it relates to him, because he understands himself as an individual who can resist. It is:

All because one day I discovered the ballroom of mirrors and I discovered I had a face and a body. I could see myself. Tomás Arroyo.

All of the leaders of the revolution, especially Pancho Villa, need to establish themselves as individuals in this way in order to revolt. In so doing they begin to mimic the cheap political expediency of the “yellow journalists,” as the symbiotic association of Villa with the Hearst press corps makes clear. What Fuentes’s novel as a textual whole presents is an attempt to “freeze” the process of movement into one narrative moment—a blend of perspectives, realities, and times that the Gringo understands as part of the process of revolution— the principle of revolution, as it were. Caught between an unknowing “pre-mirror” stage, and a self-interested individualist stage, the novel’s technique of assemblage allows the characters to be always “becoming”—always moving restlessly forwards, backwards, and sideways in time, with narrative history as a principle of movement instead of a delimiting act of definition.

The expression of this idea can be seen clearly in Fuentes’s literalization and use of the metaphor “to burn one’s bridges.” Bierce, the product of a linear culture, leaves the El Paso railway bridge burning behind him when he crosses into Mexico. He has come here to die and there is no turning back. When Harriet returns to Washington, she too leaves behind a crossing in flames. For both of them, return across chronological or developmental boundaries is impossible. Significantly, the Gringo crosses his burning bridge with a copy of Don Quixote in his suitcase. A powerful satire of quest narratives, this text serves as a commentary on the Western culture and personalities of Bierce and Winslow. As a book that is often credited with the creation of the modern novel, the presence of Don Quixote signals that the nature and history of Western narrative is being called into question. At the same time, the text’s major theme, that heroic quests are a symptom of madness, subtly undercuts the Gringo’s heroism and his stated mission.

As all of the Mexican characters realize, Bierce’s bravery in battle, his fearlessness, is the product of a kind of narrative derangement. His obsession with the end of the story, the fact that he has “come to Mexico to die” by offering his services to Villa’s troops, is as much a deluded product of Romance literature as Don Quixote’s “tilting at windmills.” The bridge burning behind the Gringo thus becomes symptomatic of his inability to understand life as anything other than a linear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Only later, when it’s too late for him to stop what he has set in motion, will he start to realize that his obsession with his “ending” has prevented him from living. His Calvinist sense of Predestination—the fated nature of individual lives—is contrasted with the populist Catholicism of the Mexican lower classes. Where Calvinism offers no alternative to the prescribed ending, stating that individual souls are bound either for heaven or hell and can do nothing to alter their fate, Catholicism offers an endless process of change and redemption through confession and acts of contrition.

In this way, the Gringo’s quest—his initial belief that his life will be ended in Mexico and that his fate is decided by a determined set of actions— is linked to his Calvinism, and both are tied to his role as an author. His trained, conscious mind turns his shifting dreams into “an elaborate plot peopled with details, structures, and incidents.” The power of the story he has invented for himself, the power of storytelling, and the impact of his religious childhood make him unable to embrace the multitude of possibilities that revolutionary Mexican culture offers. As Harriet says, in their way of thinking they have crippled themselves by folding “death into life”—allowing “the end” to take over the story. When Arroyo arrives at the Mirandas’ hacienda, the buildings are burning before him. In effect, “the end” precedes him. His bridges are burnt before he comes to them, undermining normative narrative conventions of cause and effect, just as the secret of his motivation comes out only in the final pages of the novel.

By positioning it this way, Fuentes allows us to question the logic of traditional novels, the conventions of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman that demand an orderly, logical progression of character development and motivation. In dissolving the first and greatest boundary of the Western-European tradition, the boundary between ourselves and others, The Old Gringo dissolves all of the philosophical and social boundaries that govern literary representation. In so doing, the novel calls into question the abiding myths of Western culture itself. They too are “figments of someone else’s imagination,” and the only real border is in the mind—“a dark and bloody frontier we dare cross only at night.”

Source: Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000. McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.

The opening of The Old Gringo (1985), by Carlos Fuentes, sets in place the chief organizing principle of the novel, the narrated memories of Harriet Winslow, an unmarried schoolteacher from Washington, D.C., who, the reader discovers, once came to Mexico to instruct the children of the rich hacendado Miranda family and there became embroiled in the Revolution. Her contacts with the uillista general Tomas Arroyo and the Old Gringo polarize her experiences between an apparent infatuation with Arroyo and an attempt to substitute the Gringo for her lost father. In her memories of the incidents which led her to place the body of the Old Gringo in her father’s empty tomb in Arlington, an elegiac tone—one of mourning for lost experience as well as a questioning of the value of that experience—is clearly discernible. Like the heroine of a classic Western film such as The Virginian (1929), Harriet, as the “Eastern schoolmarm” character type, confronts the heroic Westerner, in this case “doubled” into the figures of the Old Gringo and Arroyo, and in the process re-examines her own preconceptions about civilization. She becomes conscious of her marginalization from the society around her, as an intellectual woman who questions her past and present. One concern of the discussion here will be the importance of the female perspective in the elegiac Western narrative: rather than a mere foil or pretext for the hero’s actions, the female character serves a critical function in clarifying the degree and nature of the hero’s loss of relevance in present- day society. The heroic figures themselves, the Old Gringo and Arroyo, can lay strong claim to kinship to the heroes (and villains) of Western film and fiction. Equally larger-than-life and ironically viewed, the Old Gringo has the superhuman marksmanship and courage of classic Western heroes such as the Ethan Edwards of John Wayne or the Shane of Alan Ladd. But he carries about him a cynicism and world-weariness which, though mirroring his real-life source in Ambrose Bierce, yet recall the elegiac musings of the aging gunfighters J. B. Books of The Shootist, Steven Judd of Ride the High Country, and Pike Bishop of The Wild Bunch.

The term “elegiac Westerns” has been applied by popular culture and film critics such as Michael Marsden and John Cawelti to Western films which are characterized by a quality of lament for the passing of the hero, and by extension, of the heroic age of the American West. These Westerns share the central element of a frequently poetic treatment, anywhere on a scale from ironic to tragic, of the myths and heroes of the Old West as cultural icons whose time has passed, usually with some indication of the influence of technology on their passing. They share the quality of nostalgia found in the literary Western as typified by Zane Grey and Owen Wister. The motif of the gunfighter cognizant that “his days are over,” as the titular hero of Shane is told, is frequent, as is the tendency for many of the heroes of these films to be aging. The element of the now vulnerable hero, an erstwhile near-superman with a six-shooter, may be tragic, as in Ride the High Country or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or it may be savagely, even morbidly ironic, as in The Wild Bunch. But in all cases, the once invincible hero of dime-novel Westerns has become a complex representation of a member of an age which has passed and whose violent solution to once simple situations has now become either outmoded, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or merely criminal, as in The Wild Bunch: Pike and Bishop could at an earlier stage of their development (or decline) have been Stephen Judd and his friend Gil.

Much as the aging, sick, and outdated hero of The Shootist (1976), played with understated sensitivity and power by John Wayne, wishes to die with self-respect, so too does the Old Gringo wish to die in a moment and manner chosen by him. Both characters shun their reputations. The Old Gringo avoids mentioning his name or revealing significant autobiographical data, such as his association with William Randolph Hearst, to anyone but Harriet. Similarly, Books, the aging shootist, is reluctant, at least at first, for the truth about his identity to get around the small town to which he has come, as he does not wish to give fame-hungry guns a chance to prove themselves. He even forces a Ned Buntline-like newspaperman to leave his boarding house at gunpoint after hearing his publicity scheme.

Important to The Shootist is the discrepancy between the myths or legends which have formed around Books and in general around the figure of the gunfighter, as opposed to the historical reality of such figures as well as, in this case, the personal biographical facts about J. B. Books. In The Old Gringo, a similar conflict between historical fact, legend, and falsification of history is established, since the character of the Gringo is based on the historical figure Ambrose Bierce: their “biographies.” as Joaquin Roy has shown, tend to intersect in several ways, the chief of which is their journey to Mexico with the intention of dying or disappearing.

The picture given of Books and of the Gringo is well-removed from “history.” The Fuentes narrative, filtered through the recollections of Winslow, presents a picture of the Gringo, who only slowly comes to be revealed as Ambrose Bierce; his anonymity is maintained during the earlier part of the novel, until he begins to reveal himself to Harriet. The Gringo character, presented in legendary proportions (as in the battle scenes or the early incident of heroic “proof,” in which the Gringo demonstrates his marksmanship), is in part derived from legends about Bierce, especially the tale about his disappearance in Mexico. As Joe Nickell has suggested in his “Biography: The Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce” [Literary Investigation: Texts, Sources, and “Factual” Substructs of Literature and Interpretation, UMI Press, 1987] this tale may have been fabricated by Bierce to cover his withdrawal from society, perhaps to live in Colorado until his expected death, probably from suicide. In any case, the Gringo, or Bierce, becomes as much a part of Winslow’s perspectivist recollections as does the portrait of the Mexican Revolution which emerges from such mythmaking works as Vámanos con Pancho Villa! [Let’s Go with Pancho Villa!] (1949), by Rafael Luis Muñoz.

Similarly, J. B. Books is placed into parallel in an interesting manner with the filmic image, that is, the mythic or fictionalized image, of John Wayne. The film opens with clips from some of Wayne’s earlier movies, all showing him in heroic or dynamic sequences. Here the effect is not, as Marsden and Nachbar have stated [in “The Modern Popular Western: Radio, Television, Film and Print,” in A Literary History of The American West, Texas Christian University Press, 1987], to “suggest that Books and Wayne are identical,” but rather on the one hand (1) to show the character of Books as derived from a corpus of myth; (2) to imply that the public image of Books as heroic may be as much of a fiction as was the image of Wayne as a frontier hero; and (3) to emphasize the elegiac core of the film, since the clips lead us to remember the past deeds of Books.

The sense of loss and marginalization felt by the Old Gringo is mirrored in Harriet Winslow, who has never, at least until the unfolding of the narrative here, become reconciled with her father’s abandonment of her and her rather domineering mother and has in fact collaborated or acquiesced in fictionalizing the desertion into a heroic death for her father at San Juan Hill. Harriet, like the Gringo, and like Ned Buntline or any other popularizer of the Western hero, is engaged in “mythmaking,” that is, lying and the falsification of history.

Or perhaps, one might say, in rationalization, since Harriet would rather eschew mention of her fixated concentration on her father, an undeserving object of such attention. The Electra motif here is similar to the less clearly expressed, but nonetheless central complex dramatized in True Grit, novel and film (1969), in which Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), a stubborn adolescent girl, enlists an aging marshal. Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne), to help her bring to justice the murderer of her father. She is inordinately determined to punish the killer, driving Rooster and a Texas Ranger who accompanies them sometimes to exasperation. One of the more interesting aspects of True Grit, clearer in the Charles Portis novel than in the more emotionally diffuse Henry Hathaway film, is the gradual transference of Mattie’s affection from her father—who soon drops into the background of the narrative, becoming only a motivating plot element— to Rooster, whose “cussedness,” at first repellent to the arch Mattie, gradually becomes endearing to her. Harriet Winslow, on the other hand, does not see the Old Gringo as repellent so much as she recoils from his cynicism; nevertheless, as does Mattie with Cogburn, she becomes fascinated with the Gringo and literally supplants her father with him. An interesting sidelight on The Old Gringo and True Grit is their narrative technique, as both are told in flashback (on much differing levels of sophistication, however) by their female protagonists.

The female perspective is often quite important to the elegiac Western. Just as Mattie criticizes and ironizes the action around her (especially in the novel), so Marian (Jean Arthur) in Shane provides a reasonable perspective on the rivalry between ranchers and homesteaders. It is she who perceives the truth about Shane’s vulnerability and about his incapability of fitting into present-day society and who points up the absurdity of the hard-driving male solutions to range problems. Similarly, in High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) Amy (Grace Kelly) acts as a balance to her husband’s sense of perhaps misplaced duty by questioning the morality of violence as a solution. Such female characters are not merely stereotypical “voices of civilization” who try to restrain male depredations: more than this, they serve as surrogates for a critical perspective on the essential absurdity of the hero myth. Thus, Laurie (Vera Miles), in The Searchers, generally treats Edwards and Pauley in a rather indulgent manner, as if they were irresponsible adolescents who refuse to let the past alone and who thus jeopardize their present.

One should not make the error of seeing the elegiac elements in The Old Gringo as positively nostalgic (as, perhaps, one could see Ride the High Country); if nostalgia is an element here, its core of loss is emphasized. Or it is shown as nostalgia without basis, as in the fond stories propagated by Harriet about her father. As The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reveals the lie behind the fame of Ranse Stoddard and calls into question as well the myth of the Western hero (who, as Robert Ray has noted [in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980, Princeton University Press, 1985], is shown to be the other side of the outlaw coin), so too The Old Gringo questions and criticizes the revolutionary past of Mexico—Frutos Garcia dies a comfortable, scarcely heroic death in his house in Mexico City in 1964—while still not sparing the Porfiriato. Arroyo’s fantasy about the Indians’ land title is deflated by the criticisms of the Gringo concerning the lack of worth of the written word and by the inability of Arroyo to read, and is finally exploded by the Gringo’s burning of the papers. The legalistic appeal by Arroyo is shown to be just as fruitless, one might suggest, as has been the sad appeal to treaties by the wronged original inhabitants of North America. The heroic myths about the U.S. Civil War are questioned by references to the ironic stories of Bierce about that war, in which its “glory” is deflated. Thus, The Old Gringo demonstrates its affinity less to autumnal elegies like Ride the High Country or to pastoral hymns like Shane than to more corrosive and demystificatory critiques such as The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man (1970), and, occupying a middle ground, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Like Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch, the Old Gringo wishes to emend his compromised past with heroic action—however futile—and as do Pike, Tom Doniphon, and J. B. Books, he dies an outsider, only finding an ironic re-integration into the community after his death.

Source: Kenneth E. Hall, “The Old Gringo and the Elegiac Western,” in University of Dayton Review, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 137-47.

In reading Carlos Fuentes’s El gringo viejo, (1985; The Old Gringo) one is struck by the masterful way in which he has conjoined fictionalized biography, dramatic action, and ideological concerns. It also becomes evident that it is a novel in which character psychology has a dominant thematic and structural role. Central to the psychological component are father-child conflict and the concomitant motif of patricide. This study examines Fuentes’s use of literary doubling in his treatment of these themes and in his portrayal of the novel’s three principal characters.

The “gringo viejo,” of course, is a fictionalized Ambrose Bierce—the controversial American journalist and short-story writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, the historical Bierce set out for revolutionary Mexico, aware of the likelihood of dying there. Although he did maintain some written correspondence with a friend in the United States, it was not long before Bierce disappeared without a trace. In Gringo viejo, Fuentes presents an imaginary account of the writer’s experience in Mexico.

A second main character is Harriet Winslow, a young American who meets the “gringo viejo” in Mexico and whose recollections of him form the novel’s organizational frame. In contrast to the disillusioned and cynical old man, she is portrayed as naive and idealistic. Contracted to tutor the grandchildren of a wealthy landowner, Harriet is present at his estate when it is over-run by a group of revolutionaries who have allowed the “gringo viejo” to join them.

The third major character is Tomás Arroyo, the leader of a band of insurgents and the illegitimate son of the owner of the estate where Harriet is employed. Also an idealist, Arroyo embodies the spirit of protest that has motivated the revolutionaries to rebel against a system and a history of oppression and injustice.

Readers familiar with Ambrose Bierce’s life and works will recognize the biographical accuracy and inaccuracy of various situations, statements, and persons presented in the novel. They will also readily perceive Fuentes’s allusions to some of Bierce’s short stories. The most important of these references are to “A Horseman in the Sky,” a story whose title is evoked in the following descriptive passage. “At this early hour the mountains seem to await the horsemen in every ravine, as if they were in truth horsemen of the sky.”

Set in the United States Civil War, “A Horseman in the Sky” begins with a description of a young Federal soldier who has fallen asleep while on guard duty. A flashback provides information about him. The only son of a wealthy Virginia couple, the boy had unexpectedly decided to join a Union regiment that was passing through his hometown. Acquiescing to his son’s betrayal of the State of Virginia, the father stoically advises him: “Well, go, sir, and whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty.” [The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, compiled by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, Doubleday, 1970]. The reader is then returned to the war scene to witness the young man awakening to the sight of a horseman on a distant ridge that borders a cliff. A grey uniform indicates that he is a Confederate scout who has discovered the presence of the Union force. For several moments, the young man anguishes over whether to kill his enemy. Recalling his father’s parting counsel, he finally takes aim at the rebel’s horse and fires. The scene immediately shifts to a Federal officer who observes “a man on horseback riding down into the valley through the air” [The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce]—obviously the Confederate soldier upon whom the sentry has fired. Another shift in scene occurs as a Federal sergeant approaches the young guard and asks if he discharged his weapon. The boy acknowledges that he shot at a horse and observed it fall off the cliff. Responding to the sergeant’s inquiry as to whether anyone was on the horse, the young guard hesitatingly states: “Yes … my father” [The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce].

A common treatment of decomposition or fragmentation in literature involves the creation of several characters, all of whom represent a single concept or attitude. This technique has been referred to as “doubling by multiplication.” Borrowing the motifs of parental conflict and patricide from “A Horseman in the Sky,” Fuentes employs doubling by multiplication to link his ostensibly dissimilar characters and to introduce the presence of psychological conflict in the novel. In doing so, he alters and simultaneously commingles historical fact and the fictional antecedent of Bierce’s story. The “gringo viejo,” who, like Bierce himself, had been a Union soldier, is described as experiencing a dream in which his father served in the Confederate army. Without elucidating the nature of the father-son conflict, Fuentes introduces the patricidal motif by attributing the following thought to the “gringo viejo”: “He wanted what he had dreamed of—the revolutionary drama of son against father.”

Juxtaposed with this dream is a dramatic battle scene in which the “gringo viejo” single-handedly attacks a group of Mexican Federal soldiers. Reinforcing the dream’s psychological symbolism, the narrator clarifies that the American’s inordinate act of bravery was in reality the externalization of unconscious rage directed at his father’s memory: “it was toward this horseman, flashing his anger from the mountaintop, the gringo rode, not toward them, their machine gun lost now.” The thematic and structural importance of the “gringo viejo”’s dream and its patricidal implication is apparent in Fuentes’s allusion to it on five other occasions in the novel. The conflictual nature of the paternal relationship is also underscored by the following description of the “gringo viejo”’s father: “a hell-fire Calvinist who also loved Byron, and who one day feared his son would try to kill him as he slept.”

Harriet Winslow’s father, like the “gringo viejo”’s, was a military man. Because of him, she too bears the burden of psychological scarring. The narrator singles out two circumstances that have had lasting impact on her: (1) her discovery of her father’s licentiousness and infidelity with a black servant and; (2) his abandonment of his wife and daughter in order to live in Cuba with another woman. Recurring references to her father attest to Harriet’s psychological struggle in dealing with her loss of him on both the ideal and real levels. Paralleling the characterization of the “gringo viejo,” her latent patricidal inclination is also expressed symbolically. When Harriet and her mother are overwhelmed by the economic necessity occasioned by the father’s disappearance, they declare him dead in order to obtain a government pension. Harriet’s lexical choice in referring to the incident has obvious psychological significance in the context of the patricidal theme: “We killed him, my mother and I, in order to live.”

Arroyo’s father, while not in the military, was also an authoritarian figure by virtue of the absolute power emanating from his socioeconomic standing Like Harriet’s father, he was licentious. In fact, Arroyo is a produce of his abuse of power and position to sexually exploit a family servant. Arroyo’s hatred for his father stems from that circumstance, as well as from the latter’s refusal to recognize him legally. Even as a child, he would have readily killed his father if given the opportunity: “I spied him as he was drinking and fornicating, not knowing his son was watching him, waiting for the moment to kill him.” The intensity of his hatred only increased over the years, as evidenced in his virulent declaration to Harriet toward the end of the novel.

As these references indicate, the patricidal motif is developed in Gringo viejo in a concrete, insistent manner. A further examination of textual evidence points to the presence of a psychological paradigm that is less obvious, yet fully consistent with the motif as employed by Fuentes in his portrayal of all three characters. In his recent study, The Son-Father Relationship from Infancy to Manhood: An Intergenerational Inquiry, Peter Blos underscores the Freudian notion that usurpation of the father’s position can be interpreted as an unconscious attempt to “annihilate” him. Interestingly, Blos uses the term “patricide” figuratively to describe such usurpation. Reflecting this phenomenon, there is a moment or circumstance in Gringo viejo in which each protagonist duplicates some important trait of his or her father and, moreover, is identified with him at that moment. (Consistent with the basic premise of psychological criticism that textual evidence can point to unconscious as well as conscious motivation in characterization, none of the protagonists in Gringo viejo perceives the psychological significance of these details.) In the “gringo viejo”’s case, it is repeating his father’s trip to Mexico more than fifty years earlier and distinguishing himself as a brave soldier: “The gringo thought how ironic it was that he the son was travelling the same road his father had followed in 1847.” For Harriet, it is her rejection of her cultural and religious values through surrender to her most primitive sexual desires with Arroyo. In doing so, she consciously identifies with her father: “Don’t you know that with Arroyo I could be like my father, free and sensual.” In Arroyo’s case, it is returning to the Miranda ranch and acting with the same arrogance and violence as did his father. The parallel between the two is underscored by Harriet’s admonition of Arroyo: “you provoked yourself to prove to yourself who you are. Your name isn’t Arroyo, like your mother’s; your name is Miranda, after your father.” If it is true, as Jean-Michel Rabaté asserts, that “a father is not a ‘problem’ but a nexus of unresolved enigmas, all founded on the mysterious efficacy of a Name,” then Arroyo’s choice of surname and Harriet’s comment have particular significance in the patricidal context. Similarly, it should be remembered that the “gringo viejo” does not reveal his family name to anyone except Harriet while in Mexico. These details sub- stantiate that, even on the unconscious level, the patricidal wish is central to Fuentes’s depiction of all three characters.

As the plot of Gringo viejo unfolds, the paternal issue has profound effect on the manner in which the three protagonists relate and respond to one another and to events. In this regard, the “gringo viejo”’s role as father figure for Harriet and Arroyo merits special discussion. Their disposition toward relating to him as such is consistent with their figurative orphanhood: “General Tomás Arroyo, who, like her, had no father, both were dead or unaware, or what is the same as dead, both unaware of their children, Harriet and Tomas.” The “gringo viejo”’s role as surrogate father is compatible with his advanced age, position of respect among the revolutionaries, and the paternal affection and behavior he demonstrates toward both characters on several occasions.

As a father figure, the “gringo viejo” facilitates Arroyo’s and Harriet’s resolution of the psychological conflict they experience as a consequence of their individual relationships with their fathers. It is well to clarify, however, that neither father has any active contact with his offspring in the historical present recreated in the novel, and that Harriet’s and Arroyo’s fatherlessness, as is often the case in literature, “is not so much the absence of relationship as a relationship to an absence.”

In relating to the “gringo viejo” as a substitute father, Harriet and Arroyo each embody one pole of a basic endopsychic conflict: the love-hate relationship of child to father. Consequently, Fuentes has drawn his characters by also utilizing the literary device of doubling by division: “the splitting up of a recognizable, unified psychological entity into separate, complementary, distinguishable parts represented by seemingly autonomous characters.”

Arroyo, of course, represents the negative pole of the paradigm. The principal issues in his psychic struggle are lack of identity stemming from his father’s refusal to acknowledge him, the hatred it engenders and the need to express that hatred and to avenge his father’s treatment of him. (On a conscious level, the latter need is one factor which explains Arroyo’s participation in the Revolution.) These issues play a decisive role in the culminating action of the novel: Arroyo’s murder of the “gringo viejo.” As the plot unfolds, a number of references are made to papers which Arroyo is safeguarding on behalf of his corevolutionaries. The papers date from the colonial period and constitute a legal claim to the land that Arroyo’s family had appropriated. They also represent a de facto affirmation of personal and social identity: “The papers are the only proof we have that these lands are ours. They are the testament of our ancestors. Without the papers, we’re like orphans.”

The “gringo viejo”’s eventual burning of the papers therefore acquires profound psychological significance. On the one hand, the papers are symbolic of Arroyo’s identity and claim to legitimacy within the social system. On the other, the man who destroys them is, at this point in the novel, a substitute for his father. Consequently, the childhood trauma of the son being reduced to a nonperson is symbolically recreated and relived on an unconscious level. The destruction of the papers provokes the hatred underlying Arroyo’s previously mentioned patricidal wish and is externalized and expressed through his murder of the “gringo viejo.” The psychological dynamics of the act mirror the drama of the Revolution itself: the socially and economically disenfranchised striking out against the fatherland that has denied them their patrimony and identity. Hence, with consummate artistry, Fuentes intertwines the personal drama of his characters with the historical drama of the Revolution.

Harriet’s relationship with the “gringo viejo” as a hypostatic father is developed more fully in the novel, and in a way which suggests her awareness of it. The exclusively positive nature of the relationship corroborates Fuentes’s presentation of her and Arroyo as a “composite character.” Having been deprived of a father from the age of sixteen, Harriet finds in the “gringo viejo” a person with whom she can openly share her innermost thoughts and feelings; an object of tenderness, concern, and love; and, ultimately, a literal replacement for her absent father. Her awareness of what the “gringo viejo” signifies for her is first alluded to in a conversation in which he states: “I thought a lot about you last night. You were very real in my thoughts. I think I even dreamed about you. I felt as close to you as a ….” Before he completes the thought, Harriet interrupts by asking: “As a father?” In a subsequent exchange, she explicitly and dramatically communicates to him that he indeed represents a father to her: “Don’t you know … that in you I have a father? Don’t you know that?” Similarly, when Harriet senses Arroyo’s determination to kill the “gringo viejo,” she begs him not to the kill “the only father either of them had known.”

It is Arroyo’s murder of the “gringo viejo,” however, that provides Harriet a lasting solution for her psychological conflict. Having returned to the United States after his death, Harriet publicly states that she had gone to Mexico in order to visit her father, and that she had witnessed his assassination at the hands of Arroyo: “She says she saw him shoot her daddy dead.” Some time later, when his body is disinterred, she identifies it as her father’s and has it buried in the family plot next to her deceased mother. Her words to the lifeless body of the “gringo viejo” confirm the presence of unconscious as well as conscious psychological motivation in the novel: “An empty grave is waiting for you in a military cemetery, Papa.” The abandoned child has fulfilled her need to have and love a father.

In sum, Gringo viejo is a multifaceted novel that deftly combines dramatic action, historical verisimilitude, and ideological statement. It is also a work of profound psychological dimension and implication. In utilizing the literary device of the double and developing the patricidal motif which he borrowed from Ambrose Bierce, Carlos Fuentes has imbued his novel with remarkable structural coherence and has touched upon human issues which

transcend history, geography, and culture. Source: Joseph Chrzanowski, “Patricide and the Double in Carlos Fuentes’s Gringo viejo,” in International Fiction Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 11-16.