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COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association
In this article I consider the second of Laura Esquivel's novels, La ley del amor, published some six years after Como agua para chocolate (1989), a work that attracted a great deal of critical attention in both Mexico and abroad. (1) La ley del amor initially received considerable interest, although critical and public reception was mixed. To date, few academic articles have been published on this work, whilst reviews in newspapers and journals remain mixed, and sales have failed to reach the astronomical heights of the earlier novel. (2) Whereas the first novel, with its timely publication, was able to cash in on the vogue in foreign foods and the globalization of cookery, whilst also appealing to an established market for 'magical realism', this second novel has provoked a less enthusiastic reception. Indeed, the varied reactions to it are indicative of the ambivalent stance of the text itself, an ambivalence which, I shall argue, is especially evident in the novel's employment of varying genres. In this article I therefore examine the novel's engagement with a variety of cultural paradigms, in particular those of popular culture, and suggest the questions raised by its representation of the self and the body in the light of these engagements. I consider the ambivalent encodings of the novel, and propose ways in which this later work constitutes a much more problematic relationship with the postmodern and with issues of globalization than does the first. In the course of my analysis I aim to show that La ley del amor is far from being either a conventionally romantic novel or a serious treatise on the New Age, since the effect of its inclusion of science fiction paradigms is to disrupt and distort the discourses associated with such texts, that the particular site of enactment of these tensions is the body, and that what is thus being enacted is in effect the dilemma of a feminine subjectivity in a postmodern era.
The novel is a self-styled 'novela multimedia' (according to the publisher's description), which includes an audio CD, with excerpts from various of Puccini's operas and popular Mexican danzones, and several sections of drawings by the Spanish artist Miguelanxo Prado interspersed throughout the book. Complementing this intermingling of media is a blurring of boundaries between literary genres as the book moves from science fiction to romance and New Age philosophy. Amongst this assortment of codes and genres, the plot races over several centuries, focusing primarily on the story of Azucena, a twenty-third-century astroanalista, who is a futuristic psychoanalyst, and her quest to meet up with her alma gemela and install a new ley del amor across the globe. In order to accomplish this mission, Azucena travels through space to distant planets, changes bodies twice in order to avoid detection, and finally triumphs over the forces of evil. Interspersed with this convoluted tale are the previous lives of the protagonists and other characters in the novel, who at various junctures undergo regressions, and find out that their lives have been linked in intricate ways in the past. In this futuristic environment, the technology includes appliances such as televirtuales, which actually recreate events in the houses of the viewers, aerofonos, which transport the user instantly to different locations, and camaras fotomentales, which can capture the thoughts of the object or person photographed. The text also refers to several New Age practices and beliefs, including auras, karma, reincarnation, the power of crystals, Ying and Yang, and angelic speech channelled through mediums. Indeed, some elements, such as the Ouija cibernetica, occupy an uneasy space of crossover between aids to spiritual fulfilment and commodities in this hyper-modern world.
As this brief summary reveals, the book is a curious mixture of high-tech and New Age theories, and this assortment of popular discourses is one that proves central to the novel's dealing with the body and with subjectivity. I shall first examine two specific examples of the popular that are inserted into the text, and shall then analyse the intermingling, and, it must be said, clashing, of the two most prevalent discourses, those of New Age romance and science fiction.
In the futuristic landscape of La ley del amor, images of popular culture abound: we witness mariachis travelling on a space ship rehearsing Amorcito corazon with a reincarnation of Pedro Infante (p. 126) and we read that the landlady Cuquita's favourite programme turns out to be the twenty-third-century version of El derecho de nacer, a long-running Mexican telenovela (p. 91), to name just two examples. Whilst these two manifestations are undoubtedly popular, the notion in itself of popular culture is certainly contested, and the dispute over this categorization proves central to the workings of the popular in La ley del amor. Jesus Martin-Barbero has noted the tendency to classify 'lo popular' as either the romantic idea of 'lo autentico', or as the negative idea of 'vulgarizacion', but proposes instead that the popular in Latin America is an 'espacio denso de interacciones, de intercambios y re-apropiaciones, el movimiento de mestizaje'. (3) Nestor Garcia Canclini, meanwhile, concurs that the traditional view of 'lo popular' as being in opposition to 'lo culto' is invalid, since this binary is complicated by the third term, 'lo masivo'. However, Garcia Canclini then illustrates how this triangular structure is in itself being eroded, since, 'tampoco lo culto, lo popular y lo masivo estan donde nos habituamos a encontrarlos'. (4) He suggests the ways in which such clear-cut distinctions are being blurred in the process of modernization and globalization.
The popular manifestations in La ley del amor refuse to be assigned to fixed categories, in a similar way to the destabilizations chronicled by critics of the popular. The mariachis are both of the people and a mass cultural form. On one level, the mariachi signifies a Mexican popular culture of the people, a folk music conveying local and national themes that is often played by street musicians. Notwithstanding, mariachis have an ambiguous status as popular musicians, having now become fetishized self-parody, often gaining employment as a tourist attraction. (5) Indeed, the very mariachi bands themselves gained in popularity through their appearance in motion pictures and on the radio from the 1940s onwards, appearing in some two hundred Mexican films in the heyday of Mexican cinema, a fact which again signals the collusion of popular folk music with the mass media, and reveals how the very notion of an autochthonous Mexican music of the...
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