The Good Conscience by Carlos Fuentes

First published:Las buenas conciencias, 1959 (English translation, 1961)

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: The 1930’s to the 1940’s

Locale: Guanajuato, Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Jaime Ceballos, the protagonist, an adolescent rebelling against provincial bourgeois society
• Asunción Ceballos de Balcárcel, his aunt and substitute mother
• Jorge Balcárcel, Asunción’s husband and master of the house in which Jaime lives
• Rodolfo Ceballos, Jaime’s father
• Adelina López de Ceballos, Jaime’s real mother, long banished from the household
• Juan Manuel Lorenzo, Jaime’s only friend, a full-blooded Indian from a lower social class
• Ezequiel Zuno, a rebel miner on the run from his boss
• Father Obregón, a priest who tries to help Jaime

The Novel

In this work, Fuentes presents an extended character study of Jaime Ceballos, an adolescent attempting to rebel against the hypocritical society in which his family lives. In the long run, he accepts his fate as a bourgeois and conforms to the wishes of his family.

The setting of the novel is Guanajuato, Mexico, a provincial city in which every citizen is “a practiced, talented, certified hypocrite.” Jaime’s family lives in the social mainstream of this city of “pure compromise,” where appearance and conformity govern the actions of all good people. Soon after Jaime’s birth, his father, Rodolfo Ceballos, is relegated to a secondary position in the family household. The house is now run by Jaime’s aunt, Asunción Ceballos de Balcárcel, and her husband, Jorge Balcárcel, who have recently returned from England, where they had sought haven from the perils of the Mexican Revolution. Jaime’s mother, Adelina López de Ceballos, has been banished by Asunción, who considered her brother’s wife socially inferior, unfit to bear the Ceballos name. Also important in Asunción’s decision to remove Adelina is Asunción’s sterile husband’s inability to provide her with a child of her own. With Adelina gone and Rodolfo supplanted as head of the family, Asunción and Jorge see the young boy as “moral raw material.”

Though Jaime is reared to be a dutiful child in the calm and ordered household, he feels lonely and isolated. He finds solace in reading and religion, at one point even wanting to become a priest. When this idea is quickly snuffed out by his uncle, Jaime’s withdrawal into himself is assured. He turns to masturbation. Profoundly dissatisfied with the world that surrounds him, and wishing to commune with Christ, whom he believes will not abandon him, he masturbates at the feet of the bloodstained image of the Savior during Holy Week. Soon afterward, he comes across Ezequiel Zuno, a rebel miner on the run and hiding out on the Ceballos family property. Unlike Jaime’s posturing uncle Jorge, Ezequiel is a man of action. Jaime befriends the fugitive and promises to help him. When Ezequiel is taken away by the police, who have been called by Jaime’s uncle, the boy takes the guilt for Ezequiel’s betrayal upon himself.

Jaime’s only true friend is Juan Manuel Lorenzo, an intelligent Indian boy with whom he holds lengthy conversations. Because of Juan Manuel’s social status, Jaime’s family disapproves of the friendship, but Jaime, partly as a subconscious act of rebellion, continues to associate with the boy. On one occasion, Jaime accompanies Juan Manuel to a working-class bar, where he sees his real mother for the first time. Though Jaime realizes that the woman is his mother, he does not approach her and identify himself as her son; instead, he leaves, consciously rejecting her in much the same way that his family had rejected her years earlier.

The guilt Jaime continues to feel for the betrayal of Ezequiel and the guilt he now feels for his family’s treatment of his mother cause him to become a martyr. As a result, he goes into the mountains to flagellate himself as punishment for what the others have done. Later, silently blaming his father for abandoning his mother, Jaime cannot bring himself to respond to Rodolfo’s quiet pleas for his son’s love, as the elder Ceballos realizes that he is dying. After Rodolfo’s funeral, Jaime visits a brothel, where, much to his delight, he sees his self-righteous uncle Jorge, who is supposed to be attending a business meeting.

Later, during a visit with Father Obregón, the priest castigates Jaime for loving only himself, for being too proud to approach either of his parents to express his love for them, even if such an expression would have been a lie. Rejecting the advice of Father Obregón, Jaime attempts to speak directly with Christ. When the Savior’s voice begins to fade, Jaime, tired of fighting a losing battle, makes the decision to give in, to bow to the pressures of society and conform in order to find peace and happiness. He marks this inner change with the unmeditated but ritualistic killing of his Aunt Asunción’s cat. With this sudden act of cruelty, Jaime exorcises his past and clears his moral slate for the future, a future in which he will deny truth, choose the convenient path, “be one in the crowd,” and “live with a good conscience.”

The Characters

The most developed character, and the only one to experience any degree of change, is Jaime, whose personality is vividly revealed through the actions that characterize his personal rebellion. The reader watches Jaime develop from lonely child, to rebellious adolescent, to conforming young adult. Though he evokes the sympathy of the reader at the outset, his consistently self-centered actions gradually cause him to lose that sympathy. While the reader is able to understand the principle behind the boy’s bizarre communion with the Christ figure, later actions, particularly his refusal to approach his mother and his ostentatious martyrdom, make the reader realize that he is posturing in his behavior as much as the other members of his family.

Asunción and Jorge are the chief antagonists in the story. Though not nearly as well developed as Jaime, both are presented as individual human beings rather than stereotypes. While Asunción is masterfully portrayed as the scheming, domineering woman of the family, it is Jorge who is the more interesting of the pair. In fact, Jorge is almost comic in his role as the personification of the hypocritical society with which he seems to have a symbiotic relationship. Revealed throughout the work as a man obsessed with himself (“He only loved Jorge Balcárcel”), it is fitting that when he is spotted dancing in the brothel, he is not dancing with a partner but with himself.

Behind the three main characters are Rodolfo and Juan Manuel, who, in spite of their relative lack of prominence in the work, both possess an individual identity and play a critical role in Jaime’s rebellion, Rodolfo coming to be one target of Jaime’s anger, and Juan Manuel representing the young Ceballos’s concrete hope for escape. Even Ezequiel, Adelina, and Father Obregón, who appear only briefly, do not seem to be stock character types, though it might be argued that Ezequiel and Adelina appear only as characters of convenience, present purely because of their catalytic roles in the formation of Jaime’s character.

While Fuentes does an admirable job of presenting the principal characters, he should be praised also for the background characters he creates. Even these possess a degree of individuality, while still serving a purely thematic purpose as representatives of the morally corrupt bourgeois society. Among the most interesting of these characters are Señorita Pascualina, the self-appointed watchdog of the morals of the local youth, and Father Lanzagorta, who betrays the trust of the confessional by discussing Jaime’s problems with the boy’s family.

Critical Context

The Good Conscience is a novel of social criticism written in the tradition of the great nineteenth century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. As such, it possesses several elements reminiscent of the master of Spanish Realism: introductory chapters (in this case, two) providing detailed background information concerning setting and the social and familial milieus; a clearly defined, society-oriented conflict, with each side of the conflict represented by easily recognizable principal characters supported by a series of lesser characters associated with one of the two sides of the conflict. In a novel of this type, there is little gray area and little room for reader interpretation. Everything that the author hopes the reader to see and, ultimately, to think is clearly laid out so that there can be no mistaking the writer’s intentions.

All of these elements make The Good Conscience an intriguing piece of work within the context of Fuentes’s literary canon. The direct, easily followed narrative of this novel is not characteristic of the author’s other works. For proof of this, one need look no further than the novels that immediately precede and follow the work in question. La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air Is Clear, 1960) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964) both present a much more complex narrative, characterized by alterations of the conventional ordering of events, shifts of focus and voice, and more subtly expressed themes—all of these elements being basic characteristics of the Latin American New Novel. That The Good Conscience does not fit this pattern does not detract from the work in any way; it merely makes the novel that much more interesting, particularly for readers already familiar with the author’s other works.

Bibliography

Duran, Victor Manuel. A Marxist Reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and Puig. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. An interesting study comparing the politics in the writings of these three important Latin American authors. Many of Fuentes’s works are examined in detail.

Helmuth, Chalene. The Postmodern Fuentes. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. A solid overview of Fuentes’s work from a postmodernist point of view. Several individual works are discussed, focusing on the issues of identity, national and narrative control, and reconsiderations of the past.

Ibsen, Kristine. Author, Text, and Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Although Ibsen does not directly discuss The Good Conscience, she offers valuable insight into the problem of communication, which remains one of the central preoccupations throughout the work of Fuentes. Her analysis focuses on the means of textualization by which Fuentes activates his reader and how this coincides with his notions of the role of literature in society.

Pollard, Scott. “Canonizing Revision: Literary History and the Postmodern Latin American Writer.” College Literature 20 (October, 1993): 133-147. Scott analyzes the impact of Latin American narrative on Western literary history after World War II. Focusing on authors Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and Lezama Lima, Scott discusses narratives of conquest and exploration, international modernism, the fashioning of cultural identity, and the primacy of European culture. Offers valuable insight into several of Fuentes’s works.

Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Using Fuentes’s writings as a springboard for his discussion, Van Delden presents a comprehensive analysis of Fuentes’s intellectual development in the context of modern Mexican political and cultural life. Includes extensive notes and a helpful bibliography.