Supplementing Time on the Border: Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Laberinto and Border Theories
Paul Fallon
Department of Hispanic Studies
East Carolina University
In representing any given moment, writing supplements temporal experience. It adds a sense of presence to that experience which is actually absent, yet also threatens to substitute what it represents. While these two conflicting gestures establish a tension underlying all representation, that tension stands out notably in some recent narratives from authors on the northern Mexican border.
In this presentation, I consider how Mexicali writer Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s science-fiction tale, _Laberinto (As Time Goes By)_ (1995), posits supplementing the experience of time on the border as a tool useful both to contestatory agency and to dominant powers. Related in six sections of narrative fragments intercalated with numerous quotations revealing conflicting perspectives, the work combines high theory and high adventure. A mysterious structure, the Laberinto, threatens to destroy human civilization in a devastating explosion. The captain and historian of the vessel guarding the structure enter the Laberinto and find themselves changed into fictional characters in the movie setting of Casablanca. Little known conflicts occurring outside the structure and some 150 years earlier inform their predicament. Two groups of scientists, struggling over the use of a process of mental decoding called derridación, had taken refuge in the Laberinto and were similarly transformed. When derridación nearly destroyed all human civilization at that time, the Laberinto protected these groups, but as the two squads face off again, that destruction looms once more.
Amidst this dramatic action, through plot tensions over questions of cultural purity and competing histories, an extensive use of quotations, and the clear Derridean references, the text both cites and sites its own historical context. As the plot escapes the numerous quotations with which it interweaves, the novel conveys the citational, multifaceted, and incomplete nature of any history. _Laberinto (As Time Goes By)_ brings to light the power struggles behind remembering competing histories, and the way writing may substitute for the multiplicity of temporal experience, consigning certain aspects to oblivion. Yet even as the novel insists on the disjunction between writing and temporal experience, it consistently recalls the specific border context from which it arises. Like the work of border critics María Socorro Tabuenca and Eduardo Barrera Herrera, Trujillo Muñoz’s text signals the limitations of dominant critical paradigms of the region by emphasizing both the substitutive and additive aspects of writing as a supplement. To counter substitutive narratives that simplify border experiences, _Laberinto (As Time Goes By)_ brings to light a multiplicity of histories and registers the construction of alternative timelines as a re-membering—a recognition of and an impetus to—of community and agency.
About Paul Fallon
Paul Fallon is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He holds an A.B. in Philosophy from Occidental College and a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Kansas. His research and teaching interests include contemporary narratives of Greater Mexico, border studies, and critical theory. He has published journal articles on writers from Galicia and the Mexico-U.S. border, and is revising a book manuscript on temporal representations in northern Mexican border narratives. He is also currently investigating the representations of youth and the development of electronic media in Mexico.