In literary and historical studies, we hear a lot about post-colonialism. We hear far less about pre-colonialism and what led colonialists down their destructive paths towards the domination of their conquered territories. In his monumental novel Terra Nostra, Mexican author Carlos Fuentes tackles this subject, taking into account a myriad of byways, sidestreams, and subplots that all feed into this massive literary undertaking.
This is one of those densely written novels that immediately confuses the reader with layers of symbolism, non-linear narrative, characters that appear in multiple times and places without any clear explanation as to whether they are the same or not, shifting time frames, dream sequences inside of dream sequences, multiple characters with the same name, improbable anachronisms, and so much more. I could write an entire essay alone on all the things in this story that are deliberately meant to throw the audience off track. Fuentes repeatedly pulls the magic carpet out from under your ass so you find yourself tumbling through the air into disorienting labyrinths of prose without giving you many clues as to how to get out or where you will be if you ever do.
The best way to approach this monster of a novel is go straight into its heart and summarize thmain character Felipe el Senor. Please note that this summary does not go in the order in it follows in the narrative. He is the king of Castile in Spain and successor to his father, also named Felipe. The kingdom is a feudal estate so that the king is entitled to everything produced by the peasants. The king is also entitled to have sex with any bride on the night of their wedding. This is what happens when the elder Felipe rapes a peasant girl named Celestina before she can consummate her marriage with her husband. This sets all of Felipe el Senor’s life into motion. The younger Felipe inherits not only his father’s kingdom, but also his father’s syphilis which is called “the French disease” throughout the novel. Felipe thinks of his father as a disgrace so he becomes preoccupied with ending the familial dynasty by not having any children thereby not having a son to put on the throne when he dies according to the law of primogeniture. Felipe el Senor also turns to religion and theology to purify himself in order to get closer to the Christian God.
As Felipe el Senor is coming of age, he runs off to a beach where he has a chance encounter with four subjects if his feudal estate. All of them have utopian dreams. Celestina, the same woman who was raped by Felipe’s father, dreams of a world where carnality is not considered sinful and dirty. The monk Simon wants to live where there is no sickness or disease. Ludovico is a student who wants to see a world without religion. Pedro is an old man who is building a boat to sail off to another land. In this, the foundations are laid for exploring the attitudinal themes current on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that led to the impulse of colonialism. Felipe tells them to forget their dreams because he can bring paradise to his home in Spain. They go through the villages, telling everyone no matter their age, race, gender, religion, or class status that utopia has arrived and takes them to his castle. They indulge in a massive orgy complete with food and wine. Then Felipe tells his four friends to leave and has his knights slaughter everybody partying in the castle. This passage is derived directly from alchemical symbolism and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Felipe’s motivation for this mass murder is that he wants to prove to his father that he can be powerful enough to be king.
In the first third of the novel, another plot element that gets introduced is that of the Three Bastards. When Felipe takes a deer hunting party to the hills near a beach, presumably the same beach where he previously met his four utopianist friends, three identical men wash up on the shore. Each has a red cross permanently marked on their back and each also has twelve toes. They are also accompanied by three green-glassed bottles with rolled up parchments inside of them. We learn more about the Three Bastards, who they are and what they represent, later in the third section.
As mentioned previously. Felipe turns to mystical Christianity to cleanse himself of the filth of existence. His initial impulse is to invade Flanders, hire a mercenary army of Teutonic knights, and slaughter a heretical sect called the Adamites. We later learn that this cult was founded by Ludovico and Celestina and boasted the painter Hieronymous Bosch as a member. After the Adamites are killed, the Teutons celebrate by ransacking a church, getting drunk, fornicating, pissing, shitting, and vomiting all over the floor. This is the first of Felipe’s existential crises because he sees first hand that you can not rid the world of filth by killing people you deem to be unclean. The second component of his crisis is that he meets Ludovico in the church who explains the Adamite philosophy to him. Sex can not be sinful because it was not sinful in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Therefore, Heaven can be reached by living the way Adam and Eve lived before she ate the fruit. Remember that Felipe has sexual hang ups due to the impurity of his syphilitic body and his desire to end the Castilian dynasty by not producing a son to be crown prince. He usually lives a life of celibacy.
The alternative version of Christian practice causes Felipe to return to his partially built castle and meditate in his private chapel on a painting of Jesus and his disciples that anachronistically moves around like a television screen. Felipe explores alternate interpretations of the New Testament like the possibility that Mary was promiscuous and her cuckolded husband Joseph made up the story of the virgin birth to hide his disgrace. Another idea is that Jesus escaped crucifixion by having another man substituted for him on the cross at Calvary. These ideas come from Gnostic Christianity, a heretical theology that gets examined in other parts of the book. Felipe doesn’t believe in these theories, but they cause him to consider that there might be different ways to interpret the Bible and it also causes a theological rupture for him too. His mind is steeped in Augustinian thought so he believes both that getting close to God means cleansing oneself of the filth of existence and that the eternal represents divine purity and perfection while the temporal and ever changing world represents impurity which is evil. Whatever doesn’t change is eternal and divine therefore the only things in the world that don’t change are death and literature. Since the medieval Bible manuscript he owns doesn’t change, he erroneously believes that the written word is eternal and perfect. Whatever dies stays dead, so death is also eternal and perfect. He has realized that killing heretics does not cleanse the world of filth and evil, so he turns inward, building a castle with a private chapel where he will isolate himself from his kingdom and the rest of world. The chapel contains a necropolis housing the relics of his dead ancestors and stands as a monument to eternal death which he thinks of as perfection and divine purity.
All is not well in the necropolis-castle. Felipe’s wife Isabella is sexually frustrated so she brings a homunculus to life in a mandrake root and tries to create a golem using body parts she steals from the necropolis reliquary. Meanwhile, two monks who live in the castle tower use their religious practices as a cover for secretly pursuing their passions for art and astronomy, again indicating the coming of the Renaissance. The peasantry, due to their rotten living conditions, begin discussion on rebelling against the king. And in the middle of all this is Guzman, Felipe el Senor’s chief advisor, who despises both the king and the peasants yet plans to play the two sides off against each other to exert his own power. Felipe falls further into crisis as he begins to doubt the accuracy of the Bible and could possibly be losing his mind due to syphilis. By the end of the third section, it is obvious that Felipe’s desire to get close to God is little more than a massive ego trip. He feels no remorse for killing innocent people be they heretics, Jews, Muslims, or peasants and grows more and more into obsessive self-absorbtion as a quest to reach God by separating himself from the world. His attempt at redemption has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with escapism into a fantasy world that negates all that exists.
In the second section, a story is told by one of the Bastards, known as the Pilgim, about a journey to a new world across the sea. He gets on board a ship with Pedro, the elderly ship builder introduced earlier in the novel who dreams of sailing away to a new land. They use the planet Venus as a navigational guide since it appears in the western sky every dawn. This is a subtle hint of the Pilgrim’s identity since the indigenous Azteco-Toltec people associated Venus with their returning sun god Quetzalcoatl. If you are familiar with the mythology and Mexican history, you can already see where this is leading.
The ship gets caught in a whirlpool and sucked down to the bottom of the ocean. This is obviously symbolic of a passage through a birth canal. They land on the shore of what is now Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico. Pedro, a symbol of the Old World, gets killed while the Pilgrim is welcomed into a community of indigenous people who treat him as a hero meant to replace their elderly dying chieftain. That chieftain is kept inside a basket that just might resemble a cradle, but in any case, he gives the Pilgrim some clues as to his true identity and what he must do to fulfill his destiny. Before going off on a series of adventures and encounters, the Pilgrim meets with a young witch whose physical appearance links her to Celestina. On their first meeting, she is a young woman who promises him love if he pursues her into the interior of the New World, Eros in pursuit of Thanatos. Along the way he encounters monsters who we later learn represent his dark side which he must incorporate into his being. This involves Quetzalcoatl’s alter ego the Smoking Mirror. Mirrors, self-reflection, and death are closely linked throughout the whole novel.
The second time the Pilgrim encounters Celestina, she is on top of a pyramid where various rituals are performed including a human sacrifice in which the victim’s heart is cut out of his living body. At this point Celestina has aged into maturity and takes on the aspect of a goddess who devours all the filth brought to her by the community for the sake of disposal. Again, she gives further information and instructions to the Pilgrim.
The third time he meets with Celestina, the Pilgrim is being hailed by the Aztec people in the city of Mexica as their god Quetzalcoatl who is prophesied to return and bring peace to their empire. They give the Pilgrim access to everything in the city but he rejects all of it for Celestina who appears for the final time. This time she is an old hag and tells him he can only receive her love temporarily before he is sacrificially killed.
This whole second section is heavy in mythological symbolism, alternate time dimensions that pop into the narrative occasionally, and parallels with other themes in the first and third sections of the book. One example is that the Pilgrim on his journey purifies himself, eliminating his filth, and eventually rejects the world’s wealth to be in solitude with his goddess in a way that parallels the crisis of faith suffered by Felipe el Senor. As we learn in the third section of the novel, the elder King Felipe is actually the Pilgrim’s father and his mother is Celestina. Recall how Felipe rapes Celestina at the beginning of the story. The cycles of death, birth, and return are constant throughout this whole book.
In the third section, the trajectory of Felipe el Senor’s life and ascetic rejection of the world continues. The story of the Three Bastards takes on more prominence. One of them , Don Juan, arrives and seduces Felipe’s wife, Queen Isabella and then moves on to all the other women in the castle, namely nuns and duennas. The second Bastard, the Idiot Prince, marries a dwarf and the two of them retreat into a relic filled coffin because he can’t handle the complexities of life. The Pilgrim tells his story to Felipe, who doesn’t believe it, but it inspires Guzman and others to build a ship and sail off to New Spain which we now know as Latin America. Before leaving, Guzman leads a failed peasant rebellion against the King and then takes the peasants who lost the battle overseas to colonize the Americas.
But then there is the backstory of the Three Bastards who are all sons of the elder King Felipe and the brothers of the younger Felipe el Senor. They are raised as wanderers by Celestina and Ludovico. All three boys represent different characteristics of Castilian Spanish society. Also, some characters speculate that the Three Bastards are actually all the same person since no one ever sees the three of them together.
That carries over into another theme. While living in a Jewish village, Ludovico gets a job translating between Hebrew and Spanish. While working with the rabbi, he begins studying the cabbala. The rabbi goes into a long discourse on numerology. These long passages can be a challenge for those of us who are not inclined towards mysticism, but the important part that applies to the rest of the novel is the first three numbers. Number one represents totality but also solitude. Number two is a factor of conflict because two individual entities can not synthesize into one. Therefore three is necessary to unify one and two , holding them together in a trinity. This goes on until number 24 or so, but the explanation of the first three numbers plays out throughout the entire novel. Whether this has symbolic meaning or if it is simply a narrative device is debatable.
Lastly, the colonization project of New Spain and the settlers’ return to Spain is given marginal literary space. Colonialism turns out to be a disaster for both the Spainish and the indigenous people who live in the colonies. But despite the extreme length of this text, the colonialism really emphasizes what the novel is all about. Before leaving for the New World, Spanish society was in a state of crisis as it transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. They were emerging from feudalism, religious backwardness and hypocrisy, poverty, disease, and a desire for impossible utopias to be reached into democracy, economic mercantilism, science, rationalism, and social justice. Fuentes demonstrates how this flux in social changes was transferred over to the colonies of Latin America, a traumatic birth for a new society that left it in a mess that only replicated and exacerbated the failures of the Old World.
Felipe el Senor does not believe any of this is happening because it is not written in a book. Aside from depicting the conditions that lead to the troubled birth of Latin America, this novel forces you to ask the epistemological question of how we can know what we know with certainty. Memory and the written word are imperfect and inaccurate, so how can we be certain of anything if we rely on these to make judgments about truth? Fuentes plays a sly trick when he has one character say that the Jews had preserved Greek scientific manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and yet, all the historians I have read say it was the Muslims who preserved those ancient Greek writings. But what if those historians were wrong? Fuentes forces us to confront the limitations of our own ability to know.
There is so much more that you could spend a decade or two explaining all the different ideas contained in Terra Nostra. Another point that Fuentes makes is that one lifetime is not long enough to reach completion as a human being. Is he suggesting reincarnation? Maybe. But one idea I get from that thought is that since we can only experience one life within our lifetime, through the lives contained in books we can have access to an infinite number of other lives lived either in fiction or reality. Even if the written text is inaccurate, those fragmentary understandings can still help us to live more than once, at least vicariously. Terra Nostra is not a book for everyone, but if you’re up for the challenge it’s worth the effort.
