One could be tempted to describe Spirits of the Ordinary by Kathleen Alcalá as a family saga, set against the backdrop of social unrest at the US-Mexican border in the 1870s, but it feels more accurate to depict it as the deeply existential account of a set of remarkable characters torn between the mandates of gender, mysticism, their personal aspirations, and a schism between the cultural (and political) hegemony of Catholicism vs. their own Jewish ancestry.

While managing to locate our characters in a tangible setting, providing a sense of atmosphere and an inkling of time and place, the text avoids romanticizing regionalisms. It portrays the uniqueness of the scene without the banality of the many available clichés of Mexican identity by focusing on the commonality of female (human) experience in any 19th century household — a gesture more evocative of Jane Austen than Eva Luna.

In the opening scene we are introduced to Estela, a mother and society lady of Saltillo, married to Zacarías, a man born to a Jewish family who refuses to abandon his dreams of gold and settle for the comforts of economic stability, family life, and good social standing. Estela has repeatedly attempted to convince Zacarías to accept her father’s offer to help him run the family business, and failed every time:

Straightening the ruffles on the curtains she could not forget it. Stirring the soup in the kitchen while Josefina bit her lips and waited for her to leave, she could not forget it. Sewing the torn lace back onto the hem of one of her daughter’s petticoats, she could almost forget it, but Estela cringed every time she remembered the hurt, closed look on Zacarías’ face as she tried to talk to him.

While the name “Estela” does trace an outline of cultural inheritance, the text does not linger on it, striking the perfect balance between stating and exploiting this trait. Instead of diving into a full-blown description of Estela’s cultural background or otherwise define her as “Hispanic,” Alcalá employs the name as simply another brushstroke. The narrative addresses ethnicity openly, but across the book the narrator still allows us to see Estela multi-dimensionally, in the complex intersections of gender, motherhood, religious diversity, and the politics of marital domesticity.

We see this again when Zacarías reflects on The Day of the Dead. Contrasted against his father’s dismissal of the celebration as a “pagan” tradition, Zacarías validates it by inscribing the holiday on the collective horizon of peasant experience:

Julio had always dismissed this custom [Día de los muertos] as pagan, but Zacarías saw how it matched the landscape, prepared people for the more interior life of the winter months by allowing them to offer the best they had to the past, the ancestors, and to the future, before turning back to their own concerns of having enough food and fuel for the cold months of the winter. He thought of it as more particularly Mexican than any of the other religious customs that were observed […] It wasn’t grief, exactly, that was expressed, as much as solidarity.

“Mexicanness” is shown to us not in its photogenic, camera-ready rendition but as a deeply human movement that elevates its regional or ethnic-specific meaning to one of larger anthropological significance. As if throughout the text, we could glimpse a pattern of insistence in capturing the universal in the very expression of the idiosyncratic.

This leads us to an infrequent victory: the skillful de-activation of what we could call the “tyranny” of Latin American magical realism. Although Latin American magical realism has provided a fair amount of mainstream visibility to an otherwise traditionally marginalized body of narrative, it has also created a script for representations of Latin America.

Yet Alcalá seems able to take what she needs from the discourse of Latin American magic realism and make it work in the construction of her own voice, instead of adding another layer of delivery to the proliferation of the canon. The omniscient narrator, the introduction of the fantastic in an otherwise realistic setting, and the absence of an explanation to account for this disruption are traditional building blocks of magical realism, but in the novel, the author manipulates them to construct something new.

Her use of language gives us a clue as to how Alcalá creates her own textual space. The writing is unobtrusive, straightforward, as if the writer were trying to get out of the way of the story. There is a certain generosity and a rare assertiveness in the way the language is never self-absorbed or preoccupied with itself.

Estela’s encounter with Captain Carranza is a clear instance of how words recede to deliver maximum narrative impact. On her maid’s day off, with her husband out of town, Estela ventures into the city to buy sugar for her tea. When she trips and twists her ankle, Captain Carranza promptly steps off his horse and showers her with attention in a full-swing 19th century “meet-cute.” Still, there are no inner monologues recounting Estela’s feelings, no poetic descriptions of her confusion after the encounter, and no florid reflections on the tortured nature of suppressed longing. Two aptly placed sentences close the chapter: “Estela wished for a cup of tea. And there still wasn’t any sugar.”

This subtle form of withdrawal from language is perhaps most dramatically embodied by Zacarías’ mother’s silence. As a child, Mariana fell into a mystic trance where she is said to have been visited by angels and has never uttered a word since. Her character first establishes the notion of the inherent inadequacy of verbal, or human language, and the ultimate unattainability of truth through its means. Conceptually, this paves the way for an explosion of symbolic activity scattered across the novel: Mariana has the ability to speak with birds, her husband Julio is routinely given to the task of interpreting reality through his visions, and the ending of the story also appeals strongly to the supernatural. However, these elements are not placed for theatrical effect. They seem rather to respond to an organic necessity: the need to transcend the specificity of human language and access a more universal form of expression. This is how we begin to suspect that the underlying conflict being presented to us is the unsettling, problematic coexistence of the orders of the divine and the mundane.

We can see bits and pieces of this formulation across the story and perhaps more clearly as Zacarías reflects on his father:

But what was his father? Outwardly Catholic, inwardly Jewish […] And what did he seek through the Cabala? With all his manipulations of words and chemicals and numbers? The manifestation of the divine through the mundane? A sign of God on the surface of a plate? A still pond in which to discern a reflection?

Fortunately, Alcalá doesn’t offer many certainties. We are free to guess that this ostensible apathy towards textbook magic realism, this departure from local color in favor of the universal, is driven by the longing to capture the transcendence of what makes us ordinary, the spirits of the ordinary. We are summoned to bear witness to that most primary human experience, the imperious appetite for meaning, which turns the world around us into a splendid codex, brimming with hidden messages that demand to be deciphered.

+++

+