42 pages • 1 hour read
Carlos Fuentes, Transl. Alfred J. MacAdamThe Death of Artemio Cruz
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Making Meaning from Memory
Throughout the novel Fuentes demonstrates the extent to which memory makes meaning. As the novel opens with Cruz on his deathbed, the invalid protagonist reconstructs his life through varied memories. As Cruz is incapacitated at the age of 71 and unable to enjoy the abundant material pleasures that marked his life, memory is the only thing he has. Rather than bemoaning his present circumstances, the aged Cruz takes comfort in his rich and varied memories that compose the novel itself. In several instances, Cruz even celebrates memory using especially poetic and hyperbolic language. Fuentes reveals in his protagonist and supporting characters that memory is supremely dynamic, but its mutability adds to its potency.
Even as a young man grieving the death of his first love, Regina, Cruz wonders to himself, “who knows if memory can really prolong existence” (75). Fuentes presents memory as a meaningful, if unreliable, tool; Regina and Cruz completely (and tacitly) elide the memory of their first sexual encounter (which in fact was one of brute force), preferring to remember “that fiction about a mythical beach” (75) that Regina herself constructs.
Catalina, when faced with the prospect of an unhappy marriage to Cruz, also “must deny the memory of the rough, strong foot that sought out her own during dinner” (47). In the absence of details about her brother Gonzalo’s death, a young Catalina “clung to what she thought was the truth” (47). Catalina’s truth is her conviction that her father, Don Gamaliel, seeks to wed her to Cruz as a way to avenge himself against his idealistic deceased son, though Catalina suspects that Cruz had something to do with Gonzalo’s death.
Cruz exalts this empowering notion of memory, calling the lavish New Year’s Eve party that he throws in his old age “a pyre of memory […] a fermented resurrection of all facts” (250). On his deathbed, Cruz contends that “memory is satisfied desire.” He further exhorts himself to “survive through memory before it’s too late. Before chaos keeps you from remembering” (57). In this way, memory is Cruz’s weapon against death, something to be actively employed lest it be wasted. Because of memory’s unique power, memory is also precious. Cruz prefers to exclude memories of people as well as events. His daughter Teresa, “will marry that boy whose face you can never fix in your memory, that vague boy […] who will not waste or occupy the grace period granted to your memory” (115).
Finally, just as Cruz’s three narrators die as he expires from physical life, memory dies too. In the novel’s closing section, Cruz observes that death, which he terms “a new world of night,” is manifest as a “needle pierc[ing] your memory” (300). Cruz’s present- and future-tense narrative sections become less lucid as Cruz loses control of his memory, which, though it has the ability to satisfy during his life, will dissolve with death.
The Mexican Revolution, Idealism, and Corruption
Cruz’s lifespan coincides with revolution-era Mexico. The Mexican Revolution took place between 1910 and 1920, with scattered violence lasting into the early 1940s. Cruz spent his formative years as a soldier fighting against the federales. Though Fuentes does not retell historical events explicitly or thoroughly (and only occasionally naming even the major commanders), the Mexican Revolution plays a major role in Cruz’s life and holds a mirror up to mid-20th-century Mexico.
The Mexican Revolution began with the deposition of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, who began his career as a reformer but whose rule descended into a dictatorship during his 34 years in power. Favoring the powerful landowners, Díaz became unpopular with more liberal-minded Mexicans. Despite the fact that Díaz participated in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) as a volunteer and later in the Second French Intervention in Mexico (1861-1867), economic conditions during the twilight of his presidency were such that many had been deprived of their land, and there was a growing population of impoverished and landless peasants. Francisco Madero, a member of Mexico’s upper-class intelligentsia, publicly claimed that Mexico’s perennial problem was the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. Such a contention (published in a scathing book) threatened Díaz explicitly and galvanized support for the rebels. Díaz briefly enjoyed an eighth term in the election of 1910; however, supporters of Madero soon forced him to resign. When Madero, in turn, was assassinated while in office in 1911, the country fell into the disparate hands of the caudillos, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Alvaro Obregón, and Venustiano Carranza, some of whom are named in the novel. This period of guerrilla-style fighting forms the novel’s backdrop.
Fuentes concisely describes Cruz’s early years of military service as a Carrancista (a supporter of Carranza) as follows: “In every town they passed through, the general would investigate working conditions, reduce the workday to eight hours by public decree, and distribute land to the peasants” (63). Fuentes writes,
the bad part was that the bulk of the population was under arms and almost all were peasants so there was no one to enforce the general’s decrees. Thus, it was better for them instantly to appropriate the wealth of the rich who remained in town, and hope the Revolution would triumph, so the land reforms and the eight-hour day would be legalized (76).
Though such editorializing passages are few (as the bulk of the novel privileges Cruz’s memories of his personal life), Fuentes astutely diagnoses the problem with revolution-era Mexico: It was a contest fought by men with good intentions whose forces were too diffuse to effect swift or lasting changes.
The major contradiction of Cruz’s life is that, though he was once an idealist, his prioritization of personal gain—like that of President Díaz and the several caudillos that emerged in the wake of his rule—led to his corruption and maltreatment of the most important people in his life.
The Enduring Power of Lost Love
Regina, Cruz’s first love and victim of a violent hanging at the hands of the federales, is decidedly the most recurring and influential memory that Cruz expresses throughout the text. Though Cruz spent the majority of his life with Catalina and a series of lovers, Cruz flashes back most often, and with most passion, to his memories of Regina. Fuentes uses this disproportionate space to highlight the unique power of lost love.
It is impossible to tell whether the idyllic life Regina and Cruz briefly shared would have remained so after the war; it is likewise difficult to determine the veracity of Cruz’s memories, given his unreliable narration. Nevertheless, Fuentes presents two characters foils for Regina: Cruz’s wife Catalina and his young lover Lilia. Catalina is wealthy, and (like many contemporary upper-class Mexican unions) their marriage was arranged by her father. Though Cruz remains Catalina’s lawful husband throughout the novel and is attended (though largely reluctantly) by Catalina on his deathbed, she is estranged to him to the extent that Cruz sends their only son away to spite her.
Lest the reader suspect that Cruz’s young love with Regina might have endured, Fuentes supplies Lilia as another foil. Even as they live together in a well-appointed mansion for eight years, Cruz’s appraisal of her is insensitive and dismissive: “[W]omen put up with anything; it all depends on how much tenderness they get in return” (246). Cruz suspects that Lilia wishes she were “old and ugly, so that he’d kick her out once and for all” (246). Despite the fact that she remains considerably younger than him, Cruz doesn’t love her but only tolerates her: “[H]e never gave her the right to annoy him” (246).
These two foils suggest that Regina, though she is alive for only “seven months of young love” (63), is permitted to endure in Cruz’s memory only because the romance ended abruptly and tragically. Most importantly, Regina is the only one of Cruz’s lovers who does not age, as her tragic death prevents it. In Cruz’s mind, Regina remains the young, beautiful woman that he romanticizes, whereas he must remember the other women in his life as having advanced in years, even when they are much younger than him. Cruz’s own aging disgusts him, and he tries to recapture his youth by taking young lovers, like Lilia. However, in the beginning of their relationship, Lilia’s youth only highlights his aging (he is already wearing dentures), and later, her aging makes Cruz feel depressed. Only the love that ended prematurely, and thus allowed both Cruz and Regina to remain young in Cruz’s memory, remains a source of strength for Cruz in the end.
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