"A wonderful and timely book... Bartra brilliantly dissects the idea of 'being Mexican' upheld and imposed by the dominant forces in Mexico. But by extension, he asks readers everywhere if they recognize themselves in the national character proposed by the political elites of the U.S., France, U.S.S.R., or Nigeria. Bartra invites us all to step out of self-consciousness, take a good look at the metaphysics of 'national character' and then decide if they are true to you or to me... A more relevant cultural exercise can not be proposed at this time."ÐÐCarlos FuentesIn The Cage of Melancholy, Roger Bartra explores the myth of the Mexican national character, and how this myth has been used to legitimize the exploitative modern national state. Between the time of the European Conquest and the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican was viewed as a peasant who was timid, childlike, resigned, lazy, and indifferent to death. This image was modified by industrialization. The peasant became a worker who was violent, sentimental, resentful, evasive, and betrayed by modernity. In both incarnations, the Mexican is stereotyped as melancholy, as are the members of the intellectual elite who construct this image. (Bartra links this notion of melancholy with European, Romantic ideas.) As Bartra shows how the myth was constructed and why, he skillfully weaves an extraordinary comparison with an axolotl. An axolotl is an actual larva-like aquatic amphibian, swimming in the waters of Mexico, which never metamorphosizes into a salamander, as expected, and which is misunderstood by both Europeans and Mexicans as they subject it to constant scrutiny. For Bartra, the axolotl is the Mexican, always on the brink of change, always misunderstood, always melancholic. The axolotl is a mirror of the Mexican national culture. To explain the ways that the myth of the typical Mexican serves political purposes, Bartra tells us about relajo, the slackening of norms that causes disorder. Mexicans advocate relajo as a strategy of self-defense as they try to disorder the mechanisms of domination. But when relajo is institutionalized into the myth of the national spirit, it functions as a diversion that deflects protests, thus ensuring the domination of the modern state. Moreover, those who question the state are accused of renouncing the national culture. Bartra argues that "Mexicans must get rid of this imagery which oppresses our consciences and fortifies the despotic domination of the so-called Mexican Revolutionary state." Drawing from the fields of history, literature, popular culture, psychoanalysis, evolution, and biology, he challenges us to look at problems in new ways.Roger Bartra is an anthropologist and sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the editor of La Jornada Semanal, a literary magazine.200 pp. 11 black-and-white illustrations. Cloth, $38.00ss
