French avant-garde novelist Le Clezio (The Giants, 1975, etc.)
offers up a meditation and lamentation on Mesoamerican
civilizations and the Spanish conquest. Le Clezio starts by
summarizing two key documents on the fall of the Aztecs: The True
Story of the Conquest of Mexico, by conquistador Bernal Diaz, and
History of Ancient Mexico, by Catholic missionary Bernardino de
Sahagun. Diaz's text reveals a clash of "dreams," the Spanish dream
of gold vs. the Mayan dream of bearded men in armor sent by
Quetzalcoatl. The History, composed after Cortes and his tiny band
had crushed the vast Mexican empire, presents the shared dream of
its Christian author and the surviving Indians whom he interviewed:
that this lost civilization be recovered or at least memorialized.
Other dreams follow, such as those of the shamanistic "barbarian"
(i.e., non-Aztec) Indian nations, who fiercely resisted the influx
of Christianity. Four hundred years later, tormented French poet
Antonin Artaud arrived in Mexico, chasing his own dream of a world
reborn. Le Clezio superbly presents the Aztec worldview with its
"dancing, bloody sacrifices, hallucinations, dreams." In a
statement typically hyperbolic, he counts the destruction of this
world of "mystical cruelty" by "modern weapons and rational
thought" as "the greatest disaster in human history." The author
concludes by suggesting that the Aztec world, if it had survived,
might have "integrated dream and ecstasy into daily life." Heated,
hypnotic, bizarre: Mesoamerican history as if composed by an Aztec
priest. (Kirkus Reviews)
Not one dream but many unfold in J. M. G. Le Clezio's conjuring of
the consciousness of Mexico, a powerful evocation of the imaginings
that made and unmade an ancient culture. "What motivated me", Le
Clezio has said, "was a sort of dream about what has disappeared
and what could have been". A widely respected French novelist who
for many years has studied pre-Columbian Mexico, Le Clezio imagined
how the thought of early Indian civilizations might have evolved if
not for the interruption of European conquest. In an unprecedented
way, his book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the
Aztecs, which in its own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming
of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores
rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe
into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the
Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clezio
also shows us those of the "barbarians" of the north, the nomadic
Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier. Finally, Le Clezio's
book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian
civilizations - in their language, in their way of telling tales,
of wanting to survive their own destruction - moved the poet,
playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clezio in
this book. The author's deep identification with pre-Columbian
cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their
gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in
this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.
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