Dying Mirrors, Medieval Moralists, and Tristram Shandies: The Literary Traditions of Fernando Del Paso's Palinuro of Mexico

The act of reading occurred amidst Del Paso's many incursions into English literature, when he found Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and thus the Virgilian character that would evolve into his protagonist.1 This encounter between history and literary tradition led to the construction of a novel that performs,2 with unparalleled cultural magnitude, the generational spirit of a young man not unlike the many who fell that tragic autumn night in Tlatelolco. [...] the analysis will focus on Del Paso's performance of a European interstitial literary tradition in the context of the modern Mexican novel.4 In other words, Palinuro of Mexico's protagonist and style link Del Paso to a literary heritage far different from the realist and modernist canons followed by Mexican twentieth-century writers of fiction.5 This essay explores the consequences of Del Paso's literary choices in the constitution of the specific aesthetics of his novel and in Palinuro of Mexico's figuration of the Tlatelolco massacre, the memory of the 1960s generation, and - ultimately - the construction of a new way of understanding the political in Mexican fiction.