Lucas Alamán and Fernando Orozco y Berra: The Reinvention of Narrative in mid-19th Century Mexico

Abstract

This article studies two works published shortly after the end of the Mexican-American War of 1847: Fernando Orozco y Berra’s novel La guerra de treinta años [The Thirty Year War] and Lucas Alamán multivolume History of Mexico. The dialog between these hefty texts sketches the entry of Mexican narrative into Realism. On the one hand, the novel, whose end rejects a moral, clearly signifies the exhaustion of what Erich Auerbach called the figural mode, and that still allowed a satisfactory activation of earlier works of the 19th century like Lizardi’s Periquillo Sarniento. And, on the other, because the History signals the rise of what Moretti calls the serious mode. The combination of what these two works achieve separately will define the project for the narrative of the next five decades.