Mexican Literature in Theory 9781501332517, 9781501332548, 9781501332531

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Into The “Oriental” Zone: Edward Said and Mexican Literature
3. The Perils of Ownership:Property and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
4. Pale Theory: Amado Nervo and the Absential
5. Mexican Revolution And Literary Form: Reflections On Nellie Campobello’S
6. The Nature of Revolution in Rafael F. Muñoz’s
7. Reading Rulfo between Benjamin and Derrida: End of Story
8. Rosario Castellanos’s Southern Gothic: Indigenous Labor,Land Reform, and the Production of Ladina Subjectivity
9. Beginnings of José Emilio Pacheco
10. A Theory of Trauma and the Historical Novel: A Small Theoretical Treatise on Fernando Del Paso’S
11. Embodiment Envy: Love, Sex, And Death in Pedro
12. Visualizing the Nonnormative Body in Guadalupe Nettel’S
13. Fictions of Sovereignty: The Narconovel, National Security, and Mexico’S Criminal Governmentality
14. Writing and the Body: Interfaces of Violence in Neoliberal Mexico
15. The Politics of Infrastructure in Contemporary Mexican Writing
16 .“Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG,” or Art and the Value of Innovation in the Contemporary Mexican Novel
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Mexican Literature in Theory

Mexican Literature in Theory Edited by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado and Contributors, 2018 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Anna Berzovan Cover image © D.R. Museo Nacional de Arte / Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3251-7 PB: 978-1-5013-5576-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3253-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-3252-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments 1

Introduction Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado 2 Into the “Oriental” Zone: Edward Said and Mexican Literature Laura Torres-Rodríguez 3 The Perils of Ownership: Property and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Ana Sabau 4 Pale Theory: Amado Nervo and the Absential José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra 5 Mexican Revolution and Literary Form: Reflections on Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado 6 The Nature of Revolution in Rafael F. Muñoz’s Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba Carolyn Fornoff 7 Reading Rulfo between Benjamin and Derrida: End of Story Bruno Bosteels 8 Rosario Castellanos’s Southern Gothic: Indigenous Labor, Land Reform, and the Production of Ladina Subjectivity Ericka Beckman 9 Beginnings of José Emilio Pacheco Christina Soto van der Plas 10 A Theory of Trauma and the Historical Novel: A Small Theoretical Treatise on Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio Pedro Ángel Palou 11 Embodiment Envy: Love, Sex, and Death in Pedro Ángel Palou’s Con la muerte en los puños Rebecca Janzen

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12 Visualizing the Nonnormative Body in Guadalupe Nettel’s El cuerpo en que nací Lilia Adriana Pérez Limón 13 Fictions of Sovereignty: The Narconovel, National Security, and Mexico’s Criminal Governmentality Oswaldo Zavala 14 Writing and the Body: Interfaces of Violence in Neoliberal Mexico Roberto Cruz Arzabal 15 The Politics of Infrastructure in Contemporary Mexican Writing Brian Whitener 16 “Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG,” or Art and the Value of Innovation in the Contemporary Mexican Novel Emilio Sauri Notes on Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments An edited collection is, first and foremost, a collaborative effort. Therefore, I want to thank the contributors for providing me with exciting original work written ad hoc for this volume, following the prompt I submitted. Thanks to them, this has been a very productive and exciting editorial experience. I would also like to thank Washington University in St. Louis, the School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Latin American Studies Program for their continued support and for being a generous place for academic research. Regarding the publication process, I want to thank Haaris Naqvi, who has been stellar in his support and enthusiastic from the get-go about this project, and Katherine De Chant for her dedicated, efficient, and professional work in the production process. They both make Bloomsbury a welcoming and supportive publisher for research in literary studies. The anonymous readers gave important comments for the final version of this project. Robin Myers, an excellent editor and translator, was essential to this book. Her translation of the articles by Pedro Ángel Palou and Roberto Cruz Arzabal and her work editing Ana Sabau’s contribution assisted greatly in their publication. I also want to acknowledge Claudia Barragán Arellano, of the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, for aiding me in identifying the cover image and obtaining its publication rights, and the Institutio Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico for granting permission to reproduce it. The Philadelphia Museum of Art generously provided the image in Fornoff ’s piece. Mónica Nepote and John Pluecker generously granted access and permission to reproduce the unpublished translation of her poems.

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Introduction Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

Mexican Literature in Theory is a project born of the desire to register the contributions of many cutting-edge scholars working primarily in the United States to the field of Mexican literary studies. It builds on the considerable growth that the field has experienced in the past three decades, after longstanding traditions of literary criticism regarding Mexico, built by precursors like Luis Leal, Jean Franco, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, or Juan-Bruce Novoa, and continued by figures like Danny J. Anderson, Cynthia Steele, and Debra Castillo. The field was later joined by scholars coming to the United States in the exodus that followed the precarization of the Mexican academic job market, intensified as a consequence of the 1994 financial crisis. It is undeniable that, in 2017, the community of scholars who have participated in these processes, or who have been mentored by precursors and immigrants, is the material base for a diverse, engaging, and lively field that produces original critical work. This work, in turn, has significant ramifications both for the constant reformulation of our understandings regarding Mexico and for developing the implications that historical, political, and cultural processes and practices from Mexico have in larger understanding of Latin American, Hemispheric, Transatlantic, Transpacific, worldly and global cultures and their study. The Mexicanist field in literary studies has become visible as groups like UC-Mexicanistas, based in an intercampus consortium at the University of California and led with great generosity by scholars like Sara Poot-Herrera and Jacobo Sefamí, the University of Texas at El Paso, which houses Mexicanists like María Socorro Tabuenca, Kristen Nigro, Fernando García, Sara Potter, and Luis Arturo Ramos, and an emerging consortium of Mexicanists based in universities in the Northeast, which includes professors like Susan Antebi, Debra Castillo, Oswaldo Zavala, and Ryan Long, have committed significant resources and time to the organization

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of conferences that have played an invaluable role in galvanizing solidarities and communities within the field and in sharing our research among us. In national conferences, the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association and the Mexican Forum at the Modern Language Association have become central in providing the field with visibility in those organizations. It is an exciting time to be a Mexicanist, as this community of literary scholars also dialogues with colleagues in fields like history, art history, film and media studies, and the social sciences, where research on Mexico is also in a peak moment. As Mexico faces intensive and increasing violence, the rise of Donald Trump (fueled in part by anti-Mexican sentiment), and the upcoming 2018 presidential election, the scholarly study of Mexico carries additional importance as the aggregate of knowledge produced across different fields plays a role in countering the toxic representations of Mexico in public discourse and in producing nuanced understandings of the country’s culture, society, and politics to contribute to the imagination of alternatives to the current disaster. Seeking to capture the intellectual energy and solidarity produced by the Mexicanist literary field, Mexican Literature in Theory gathers a particular subset of scholars, many of them young and emerging, whose fundamental trait is their ability to create a horizontal dialogue between Mexican literature and Mexican literary studies with the formless aggregate of resources known as “theory.” From its original design, this project resists defining theory narrowly and has instead allowed the contributors to define what does theoretical work on Mexican literature means to each one of them. Defining theory in the contemporary era is a difficult ordeal. Some presentations of it consider it an outgrowth of what is called “French Theory,” that is, the legacies of a variety of post-structuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, and other lines of thought emergent in the 1968 scene in France, flattened and mediated into a single construct by scholars in the English-language academy.1 Another account, by Nicholas Birns, traces a history of literary theory as a series of ever-widening deconstructions beginning with the critical work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, through the deconstruction of gender in feminist and queer theory, all the way to anti-racist and postcolonial theory. Birns celebrates the contributions of the theoretical tradition but essentially argues that recent approaches like the New Aestheticism or Affect Theory are practices “after theory,” that is, in the decline of the deconstructive traditions.2 A very recent book by Joseph North interprets the history of literary criticism in the United States as a tension between criticism and scholarship, locating theory as part of different turns—the “scholarly turn,”

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of the mid-century, the creation of historicist paradigms—and suggests that the constellation of more recent theoretical approaches (affect, queer theory, surfaces reading, and other) marks the return of a “critical unconscious” suppressed by the scholarly turns of the past.3 As a collective project, Mexican Literature in Theory is not invested in sustaining one version of this history over any other. Rather, the lack of consensus and the indecision regarding what constitutes theory—including even basic questions, such as whether “literary theory” names the theory of literature or the use of literary devices for a larger interpretation, or whether theory is a larger body of thought to which the study of literature is a mere part—operate in the chapters collected here as an opportunity for ample and diverse engagements that do not need to align themselves to any positive or orthodox definition of the term. It is important to acknowledge that an exercise named Mexican Literature in Theory works on the basis of the unequal and problematic relationship between both terms of the equation. Although the definition of “theory” remains open, it is undeniable that critical discourse produced in Mexico is rarely recognized as such. “Theory” names a construct in which different intellectual traditions have different levels of symbolic capital, and the privilege that Western European and Anglo-American traditions enjoy within that construct remains a factor about which one has to be reflexive, even if one can also recognize that “southern theory,” as Raewyn Connell discusses, has challenged that centrality.4 Although a book like the present one is not in a position to decisively challenge the politics of knowledge produced by the unequal distribution of symbolic capital across intellectual traditions, it is essential to not validate them either. A central aim of the various chapters here is to contend that Mexican literature is an intellectual tradition not substantially engaged by most theoretical approaches that problematize theory in productive ways and that is able to expand on, contradict, or annul claims by theorists from other latitudes regarding problems such as race, gender, disability, the Anthropocene, modernity, capitalism, Orientalism, infrastructure, and other key concerns. In some cases, contributors to the volume bring into Mexican literary studies questions from theoretical approaches developed in the last few years that have yet to be tested in engagement with Mexican cultural production. In others, contributors look at the limits of canonical readings and legacies of well-known theoretical approaches and argue that Mexican literature provides new scenes of conceptualization unforeseen by the theoretical texts or their previous readers. In some others, contributors recognize the work of theorists from Mexico and Latin America and confront

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their work with theoretical approaches from other scenes. Taken together, the chapters in this collection put forward the idea that Mexican literature is itself a site of theoretical thinking with many productive tensions and engagements with “theory” widely construed that are yet to be opened and explored. Even though it is a book in English, addressed primarily at scholars with the ability to conduct research and to access scholarly work in the language, Mexican Literature in Theory as a project must also begin with the recognition of the structural and material problems that impede the circulation and discussion of theoretical discourse in the Mexican academy. The fact that all but one of the contributors here are based in universities in the United States, and that the condition of possibility for those of us educated in part or in full in the Mexican academy to work within the bounds of “theory” as construed by this volume may actually be our migration to the English-language academy, is not simply the result of wanting to feature U.S.-based Mexicanism. It has to do with the structural inequalities that exist in the relationship between the academies in both countries, particularly as Mexican scholars have faced even more intensely the brunt of the neoliberal precarization of the humanities in their everyday life. In his presentation at the Latin American Studies Association in Lima in May 2017, Roberto Cruz Arzabal, the sole contributor of this book based in Mexico and perhaps the scholar in Mexico most familiarized with U.S.-based Mexicanism and with the theoretical traditions developed in this book, provided a compelling view of the enormous difficulties he faces in the everyday material conditions of his scholarship. Among many other things he noted that once a scholar decides to work theoretically and go against the grain of the antitheoretical positions of many quadrants of literary criticism (from the essayistic criticism predominant in nonacademic media to the deep philological tradition that remains central in academic institutions), he or she faces enormous difficulties simply accessing the texts. Mexican publishers rarely publish translations of theoretical books, and scholars must rely on unaffordable imports from Spain, Chile, and Argentina (where theoretical translation into Spanish is a more common occurrence) that circulate as photocopies and PDFs. Yet, since English is the lingua franca of a significant number of theoretical debates, Cruz Arzabal notes that access to larger conversations is even more difficult, given that the cost of access to databases, journals, and books in English, priced in U.S. dollars, is beyond the economic means of many Mexican institutions. Even in larger institutions like Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the national university, scholars are subject to a time lag in access due to policies

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such as the five-year moving walls in JSTOR and Project Muse or the lengthy bureaucratic processes involved in the simple request to purchase an imported book. A bold generation of scholars in their twenties and thirties has developed a will to engage with this type of theory from Mexico and to face the challenges of access head-on, but the fact is that their access to volumes is limited by the possibilities of precarious strategies, including collective purchases of individual copies in Amazon, requests to authors for free PDFs of their article, and the use of web tools to access copies of material circulating in the web. In light of these problems, Mexican Literature in Theory is, unfortunately, a book that gathers together the work of those of us who have access to information and scholarly resources denied to our Mexico-based counterparts, although the inclusion of Cruz Arzabal’s work has been done in the hopes of future collections that will not include scholars predominantly from the U.S. academy, but groups of critics hailing from both sides of the border in equal footing. It must be said, though, that the need to study Mexican literature theoretically is not only a matter of expanding our readings of the archives and canons of literary writing, or to expand those archives through texts rendered visible by theoretical questions. Mexican writers and intellectuals are evermore engaged in theoretical questions. As Emilio Sauri explores in his chapter, Irmgard Emmelhainz’s theory of neoliberalism is essential to understand the relationship between late capitalism and cultural institutions.5 Cristina Rivera Garza, a very successful writer in Mexico and an academic based at the University of Houston, has written important works understanding the relationship of literature with violence and with new technologies, as Brian Whitener discusses in his chapter.6 Beyond cases included in this book, one can name Heriberto Yépez, one of Mexico’s most polemical writers, who has for many years advocated for deeper engagements with various theoretical registers.7 Even if core books of theory published by Mexican presses are few and far between, one can begin to see important advances. Paradiso Editores, for instance, not only published Emmelhainz’s book but also the works of Mexican scholars engaging theorists like Badiou and Lacan and original works by thinkers in the psychoanalytic tradition. It also publishes notable translations, including Alenka Zupančič’s book on comedy, in the Spanish version by Christina Soto van der Plas, a contributor to this volume.8 And, even more encouraging, institutions committed to the renovation of the theory scene in Mexico and to the construction of theory from Mexico are strengthening. A notable case is 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, which offers graduate degrees and thematic certificates, and even consulting for

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other cultural institutions. 17 has hosted major international conferences and is a site of contact between scholars working around the world and Mexican students and academics. Framed by the complexities of the issues discussed up to this point, the chapters that constitute Mexican Literature in Theory propose different ways to think the encounter between the two terms of the title’s equation, with case studies that range from the early nineteenth century to the 2010s. All of the chapters were written in response to a direct request, and invitations (originally eighteen, which yielded the fourteen contributions to which I added my own piece) were made thinking about scholars across multiple generations doing original theoretical work. Although space constraints did not allow me to bring into the book even half of the scholars whose work would have ideally fitted in this volume’s conception, I sought a series of balances. It was important to me that the majority of texts engaged with theoretical works published within the last decade (including a number of contributions in conversation with theoretical works from the past four or five years). Rather than having a topheavy book with a who’s who of senior scholars (the type of book that yields great cultural capital but frequently is a space for rehashing known debates), I wanted to make sure that it was populated by younger scholars who have yet to publish their first scholarly monograph, in balance with mid-career scholars at the peak of their work and with a couple of senior-level academics who work in new and engaging topics. I hope readers find, as I do, that the resulting book samples many exciting lines of research and thinking from the Mexicanist field described at the beginning of this introduction, and that Mexican Literature in Theory provides a point of departure to many more volumes, including, hopefully, volumes published in Mexico, in Spanish, coordinated by and with the writing of Mexico-based academics, so the work of those of us based in the United States can enter a conversation that would undoubtedly expand and enrich the horizons and scope of our ideas. Because of the conceptual diversity of the book, I decided that the best way to organize it was the simplest one: a rough chronological order of the Mexican literary texts at the center of each one of them. In the first chapter, “Into the ‘Oriental’ Zone,” Laura Torres-Rodríguez proposes in a transhistorical sample of literary works, ranging from Fernández de Lizardi’s foundational works to Julián Herbert’s most recent book, a provocative and original reformulation of Edward W. Said’s notion of Orientalism. Torres-Rodríguez deterritorrializes Said’s work away from its focus on the Middle East, and productively discusses it by reading

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the relationship between Mexico and Asia through different configurations of empire. In doing so, her article demonstrates that the idea of Orientalism is not a mode of critique engaged solely with the concrete times and spaces discussed by Said, but rather a more powerful tool to understand global systems and cultural interactions. Rather than engaging with a single theoretician, Ana Sabau weaves, in the second chapter, a theory of Mexican literature of the nineteenth century in its relationship to the imagination of property, traversing literary and cultural texts alongside theorizations of capital, infrastructure, and the body. Sabau’s concrete focus is on the trope of water, which became an essential vehicle to think modernization and possession in nineteenth-century texts. If TorresRodríguez appropriates a category to open it to unexpected and innovative horizons, Sabau’s texts exemplify the possibility of theorizing from Mexican literature, developing theoretical insights through the art of reading. The following two texts interrogate the transition of literary writing from nineteenth- to twentieth-century paradigms, by interrogating the question of the writer and of literary form. José Ramón Ruisánchez develops what he calls a “pale theory” of the rare writer, named after a verse of his object of study, Amado Nervo. In dialogue with Slavoj Žižek’s notion of disparity, Ruisánchez locates Nervo in a peculiar place as a writer of high canonical stature but only rarely engaged theoretically. Ruisánchez proceeds to deploy a theory of the absential, as the unwritten that underlies the literary writing of the rare writing, illuminating questions of desire, pleasure, and materiality that become visible when the negativity of the absential is considered. My piece departs from a reading of very recent theoretical work on the question of literary form (particularly the work of Tom Eyers) and from the work of Jorge Aguilar Mora, a leading Mexican critic thinker whose writing engages significantly with Deleuze, to propose the idea that the Mexican Revolution is a cultural and historical site for the production of antinomical literary forms that, rather than articulating totalities or allegories vis-á-vis the revolutionary moment, render visible the constitutive excesses in the processes of totalization and the accompanying question of literary formalization. This theoretical question is explored through a reading of Nellie Campobello. Both Ruisánchez and I undertake the equation of Mexican literature in theory by setting forward questions about the way in which the writer and literary form exist in tension with either a process of modernization or the event as such. The following three contributions consider key works of postrevolutionary Mexican literature through their different articulations of questions of land,

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agrarian reform, and capital formation. Carolyn Fornoff develops an ecocritical theorization of the claim of “land and liberty” from the Mexican Revolution through a reading of the novel Se llevaron el cañón para Bachimba. Fornoff provides an enlightening reading of novels like Rafael Muñoz’s by moving from traditional interpretations highlighting subject formation and the bildungsroman toward a reading of the role of nature and the landscape to understand tensions related to the pedagogical role of works like this and to the tensions regarding the imagination of production in early formations of capitalism and industrialization. Bruno Bosteels approaches Juan Rulfo in an argument that departs from a consideration of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” to interpret questions of memory, violence, and Rulfo’s silence in his work. Then he proceeds to a reexamination of various ways of reading Rulfo, from transculturation theory to decolonial theory, to write a critique of the uses of the artifice of orality in Latin American theory. Bosteels concludes with a call to read this problem from deconstructionism in a productive engagement between Rulfo and Derrida. Ericka Beckman advances a challenging reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán by theorizing what she calls “Ladino subjectivity,” the masters in the dialectic of exploitation in the neocolonial social order of Chiapas, through the intersection of various theoretical discussions, including critical race theory, the study of the Southern Gothic, and questions of labor and colonization. In doing so, she realigns a novel that is widely read through the lens of gender and feminism into a discussion of the pitfalls of capitalist development in societies with intense histories of racial exploitation. The following two texts of the book move toward the late twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first century, understanding the process of close reading and literary writing as sites of theorization. Christina Soto van der Plas works a granular reading of key poems by José Emilio Pacheco, in dialogue with theorists like Deleuze, Badiou, and Zupančič. Soto van der Plas traverses Pacheco’s poetry to understand the way the poem enacts its drives in relation to questions of necessity, contingency, and the act of writing in itself. Soto van der Plas illustrates very well one of the goals of this book: the possibility of rendering Mexican literature as a site of theorization in itself. Pedro Ángel Palou, in what may be the most original contribution in terms of form and writing, adopts the theoretical genre of the theses to discuss the question of the historical novel, beginning with general considerations and leading ultimately to the discussion of Mexico’s foremost example: Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio. In this unique text, Palou performs the act of theorization through the full deployment

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of the elements of his own trajectory as a novelist who has written a significant number of historical novels over the past ten years and as a writer-turned-scholar whose readings of theory and critical work are crucial to inform his praxis as an author and an intellectual. The following two texts turn to questions of the body and gender. Rebecca Janzen provides a close reading of one of Palou’s novels, Con la muerte en los puños. Janzen reads Palou through questions raised by Christopher Breu on the question of the materiality of the body, which then Janzen turns to the relationship between gender and violence. Janzen shows the way in which “powerful bodies” as represented in fiction can lead to a material understanding of different societal tension. Lilia Adriana Pérez Limón reads Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel about disability along theoretical debates on “ordinary affects” and depression. Pérez Limón contends that, instead of a system that privileges able-bodiness, Nettel represents an instance in which disabled bodies assemble into communities. From this point, Pérez Limón explores the affective work embedded in dealing with disability and the ways in which that work permits for literature to imagine new conceptions of community and social order. These two texts work within new theoretical paradigms that argue that attentiveness to the materiality of the body, the tensions between its visibility and invisibility and ability and disability, and positive and negative social linkages are features of contemporary literature that allow for new forms of theoretical and political imagination. The final articles directly engage Mexican literature of the neoliberal era. Two texts discuss the relationship between literature and violence, a central topic in contemporary conversations related to Mexico’s sociopolitical situation connected to drug trafficking and mass murder. Oswaldo Zavala delivers a new entry in his series of articles on the security state and the problematic ways in which literature engages with what he considers government-influenced narrative regarding the drug war. Through an understanding of theories of sovereignty and civil society and a reading of César López Cuadras’s novel Cuatro muertos por capítulo, Zavala calls for a critique that is able to discern what actually constitutes counterhegemonic discourse and which cultural representations mask power relations. Roberto Cruz Arzabal discusses a corpus of poetic and post-poetic works seeking to formalize the various manifestations of violence in Mexico. Engaging with questions of disappropriation and neoliberalism, and the ways in which authors like Eugenio Tisselli, Sara Uribe, Mónica Nepote, and Hugo García Manríquez use textuality to think through the relationship

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between violence and neoliberalism, Cruz Arzabal puts forward an intelligent theorization of poetry writing in Mexico today. The volume concludes with two chapters that explore the ways in which literature understands and theorizes its own conditions of production and its relationship to other registers of art. Brian Whitener explores the stakes of autonomy and post-autonomy discussions in literature, by thinking relationships of infrastructure and aesthetics. Focusing on cartoneras, independent publishers doing grassroots editions of literary books with recycled carton and paper, and on Rivera Garza’s writings about electronic literature and social media, Whitener is interested in the idea of an understanding of the literary object beyond discussions of its commodity status. Finally, Emilio Sauri works on concepts of art, value, and innovation, in dialogue with the work of Irmgard Emmelhainz and through a reading of Valeria Luiselli. Sauri traverses Luiselli’s engagement with the Museo Jumex and the relationship between art and labor, to understand how the failure of innovation and value provides a window to open the possibility of a postcapitalist imagination.

Notes 1 François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 2 Nicholas Birns, Theory after Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century (Peterborough: Broadview, 2010). 3 Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017). 4 Raewynn Connell, Southern Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 5 See Irmgard Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común: La reconversión neoliberal de México (Mexico: Paradiso, 2016). 6 See Cristina Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles: Necroescritura y desapropiación (Mexico: Tusquets, 2013). 7 See Heriberto Yépez’s website Border Destroyer for a sample of his recent work: http://www.borderdestroyer.com. 8 Alenka Zupančič, Sobre la comedia: Un extraño en casa, trans. Christina Soto van der Plas (Mexico: Paradiso, 2012).

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Into the “Oriental” Zone: Edward Said and Mexican Literature Laura Torres-Rodríguez

In his essay “Traveling Theory” (1983), Edward Said was concerned with the problem that arises when a theoretical system is removed from its original social context and transported into a different one.1 This pilgrimage, according to the critic, runs the risk of domesticating “the insurrectionary core” of the theory, insofar as it requires an institutionalization and codification that conditions the theory’s intelligibility, and is determined by a certain abstraction or dissociation from the concrete political concerns that enabled the theory’s emergence as an intellectual response in the first place. Although Said’s essay is specifically referring to Lucien Goldmann’s adaptations of Georg Lukács’s theory of reification, it is not a stretch to think that he is also obliquely reflecting on the destiny or institutionalization of his most important book: Orientalism (1978), to which I owe an inestimable debt.2 At a certain point in the history of its reception within postcolonial studies, Orientalist critique turned into a sort of reading protocol that diluted its potential as a theoretical experiment. Such excessive instrumentalization of the text had the effect of alienating the most interesting studies on Asian-Latin American relations from Said’s work. The reasons for this estrangement were threefold: (i) In the initial moments of the field, it was contended that Orientalist critique was not applicable to Latin American productions about Asia, because the former did not fulfill the imperialist conditions of production that Said posited at the origins of Orientalist discourse.3 (ii) Later, Said’s work was criticized for failing to account for the complexity of the experiences of Asian diasporas in Latin America, and “the ways that polycentric positions and multisited locations constitute diasporic cultures.”4 (iii) And finally, in more conceptual terms, scholars such as Brett Levinson have denounced Said’s “tendency to slide” from

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an “existential” understanding of otherness to “an ontological” one. Thus, for Levinson, “Latin American de-orientalism repeats Orientalism rather than critiquing it, because it ontologizes alterity and cultural difference.”5 Against the grain of these three critiques, in this work I argue that Said’s book still remains relevant for the study of Latin American literature, but only insofar as the critical experiment consists precisely in inhabiting the liminal place that is opened by the discontinuity between theory and vital context. In the essay quoted earlier, Said introduced a distinction between theory and criticism in order to address the problem of a theory’s application in a foreign context. According to him, in such a scenario criticism must become the theory’s spatial and temporal consciousness, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and the time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it, then consequently that first place can be measured against subsequent places where the theory turns up for use.6

The role of criticism, then, especially literary criticism, would be to account for “the essential untidiness” of theory with regard to its adoptive context as much as with regard to the original one. Without this practice, theory becomes a dogmatic reduction of itself, an ideological trap where “criticism would no longer be possible.”7 Hence, although in this work I once again turn to Said in order to theorize certain problems raised by Orientalism within a Latin American literary context, I do not attempt to do this by making Latin American literary studies fit Said’s theoretical framework. Rather, I bring Mexican literature—whose specificity is tied to a long-running transpacific orientation dating back to the colonial period—to bear on Said’s original formulations. Through questions raised by a literary tradition that is foreign to his original context, I try to respond to the invitation that Said formulates in his 1994 revision of the essay “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”: “Would this not be an alternative mode of traveling theory, one that actually developed away from its original formulation, but [that] instead of becoming domesticated . . . flames out, so to speak, restates and reaffirms its woven inherent tensions by moving to another site?”8 The literary texts I have chosen, then, whose criterion for selection was their explicit representation of transpacific exchange, explore the limits of Said’s theories for thinking the problem of liberal and neoliberal globalization and zoning as

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seen from the Latin American context. What Mexican literature reveals about Said’s Orientalist critique is that it is still relevant, but only as long as one thinks beyond the problem of representation and restitution of “the other” in literature, to focus instead on the construction of a geographic, global imagination under capitalism, with its zones of exception and its borders. To clarify and contextualize the specificity of what I understand as the Mexican transpacific orientation, I begin with an example from a foundational book in Mexican letters, El periquillo sarniento (1816) by José Fernández de Lizardi, with the puropose of untying the relationship between Orientalism and European imperialism.9 I will then proceed to analyze a collection of short stories, En diferentes mundos by Rafael Bernal, to establish the existence of a Mexican transpacific intellectual tradition that stands in opposition to the line set by Lizardi.10 Here I make a move that at first sight might appear paradoxical: I choose a story whose theoretical productivity for thinking the problems raised by Said comes specifically from a reading of it that underscores the absence of what Said understood as Orientalist representation, and from what that absence designates. Finally, I will end with a contemporary example from Julián Herbert: La casa del dolor ajeno (2015).11 I will argue that this chronicle offers a transpacific (and hemispheric) rereading of the problem of state violence in Mexico, made invisible by a primarily transatlantic paradigm. Orientalism here goes beyond its conceptualization of faraway geographies, to appear as the same apparatus that operates inside the nation-state in the process of configuring a specific division of labor based on biopolitical distinctions and determinations. In Herbert’s text, the analysis of Orientalist rhetoric—although not explicitly named as such—meets an unexpected end in the present: an improper but extremely fertile terrain of dissemination. As Said argues, “the point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile.”12

Stretching toward the Pacific Although it might seem that the Mexican intellectual tradition has generally ignored the Pacific Ocean, Lizardi offers an early counterexample of this view. El periquillo sarniento highlights the importance of the Pacific in the incipient dreams of nineteenth-century criollo modernity, and thus for Mexican

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literature.13 This kind of text, despite its nineteenth-century origins, is arguably outside of the tradition studied by Said. Lizardi’s references to Asia are linked to the particularities of Iberian colonialism in that continent and to the Viceroyalty of New Spain’s role in that configuration, a context that was not even a shadow on Said’s Anglophone intellectual horizon. However, it is precisely in this terrain of dislocation and impropriety where the critique of Orientalism can be revealed as distinct from its former self, actualized in its particular manifestations, but without losing its explanatory power. In volume II, chapter XVI, the picaresque character Don Pedro is sent to Manila, Philippines, by viceregal decree, as punishment for his corrupt administration of the town of Tixtla, Guerrero. As he says, “me hallé confeso y convicto, y la Real Sala me sentenció al servicio del rey por ocho años en las milicias de Manila, cuya bandera estaba puesta en México por entonces.”14 Upon embarking on this journey into exile, the boat responsible for taking Periquillo to Manila runs aground, and the crew is threatened with shipwreck. To lighten the ship, the captain decides to throw overboard the trunks full of silver, which accounted for Mexico’s valuable situado. The Colonel, our pícaro’s exemplary patron, is the first to sacrifice his personal fortune with these words: “Sobran minas amigos . . . los créditos de ustedes quedan seguros en este caso y libres de toda responsabilidad; lo único que se pierde es la ganancia; pero con el sacrificio de ésta compraremos toda nuestra futura existencia.”15 In contrast, an avaricious merchant refuses to surrender his trunks, and faced with their imminent loss, he jumps into the water with them. This conveniently lightens the boat, and the crew eventually rescues the trunks, including those of the drowned merchant. The Colonel’s supposed sacrifice ends up operating as an investment, whose success is proven through profit. The crew rewards his audacity by giving him the dead man’s silver. What begins under the sign of punishment and discredit is revealed as an opportunity for atonement and financial gain. As Koichi Hagimoto has noted, the transpacific run coincides with the pícaro’s reformation through the Colonel’s sponsorship, and after the latter’s death, through the accumulation of personal wealth.16 However, I add that the timelines of these reformations coincide with a transformation in his relationship with silver, that most important export good of the colonial period and of the Mexican nineteenth century.17 The literate criollo, the pícaro, is exiled because during his tenure managing the Pacific territory of Guerrero, he has illegally accumulated, and improvidently spent, the public treasury’s “marcos de plata.” Per his own confession, “descerrajé las cajas de comunidad y perdí todo el dinero

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que habían en ellas.”18 This act of corruption is presented not as an exception, but as the administrative norm in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. This is why the episode ends with the Colonel’s monologue admonishing the purely extractive colonial model and the leisure economy it encourages, represented by the greedy merchant.19 The Colonel champions investment in the development of industry and diversification of export goods like cocoa, cotton, and sugar: [Éstos] serían otros tantos renglones riquísimos que convidarían a las naciones a entablar con ellas un ventajoso y activo comercio [. . .] esto sería bastante para que aumentaran los labradores y artesanos, de cuyo aumento resultarían infinitos matrimonios que no contraen los que ahora son inútiles y vagos; la multitud de enlaces producirá naturalmente una vasta población . . . que daría hombres apreciables en todas las clases del Estado.20

Economic reform thus precedes political and social restructuring. The eradication of a “leisure” economy is accomplished by a model for disciplining bodies through specialized production. Commerce, discipline, and production are the outlines of the transpacific dream of criollo modernization at the dawn of independence. Interrogating Said’s book from this colonial Mexican example allows us to better elucidate the conditions through which Orientalism becomes possible, in that it displaces Said’s original framework and forces it to grapple with circumstances that seem to exceed its most basic presuppositions. First, the example does not appear to easily fit into either the canon of Anglo-French imperialism that Said discusses, or that of Iberian colonial rule, of which Lizardi was one of the most formidable critics. Second, we could have reasonably expected that for Orientalism to appear in the text, some form of representation of Asia and its peoples would have had to crystallize. However, the episode just discussed lacks an explicit figuration of the Asian continent and of the subjects supposedly inhabiting it. And yet despite this “lack,” bringing Said to these foreign lands enables us to foreground Lizardi’s turn toward the Pacific, in order to capture the singularity of that movement, and to question both the conditions of possibility and the effects of that gaze toward Asia. Without Said, those questions would not be within our reach, at least explicitly. For its part, Lizardi’s example allows us to clear the criticism of Orientalism from one of its principal protocols of reading: the identification of a discourse whose hallmark is a kind of dehumanizing, stereotyped representation. In Lizardi, Orientalism appears through a type of positioning toward Asia. Orientalism, then, is not only in what is named, but also implies questioning the positioning of the body it molds.

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In this reinsertion of the body and its forms of spatiality for thinking the problem of Orientalism, I borrow from Sarah Ahmed’s review of Said a feminist and phenomenological perspective. In her book Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed defines Orientalism, via Frantz Fanon, principally as a specific orientation device: “If we turn to Said’s classic Orientalism we can begin to trace the significance of the ‘making’ of geographical distinctions and how they relate to the directionness or intentionality of phenomenal space.”21 For Ahmed, more than a discourse, Orientalism appears as an apparatus through which a geographical, temporal, and cultural distancing can be instrumentalized. The “Orient” is produced through a specific orientation, as a “constitutive outside” of “Occident”; this operation transforms the very notion of “farness” into the property of specific peoples and places. Ahmed recovers an essential aspect of Said’s critique: the problematization of the very notion of “the inside” in the context of a specific set of experiential relations. Thus, more than thinking Orientalism as primarily an othering operation, I conceive it as a specific zoning device. Therefore, the “Occident” is not a place; it is the effect of a repeated logic of directionality, a practice, that determines the frames of visibility and the objects within our reach. However, these frames are historical; for Ahmed, collectives formed precisely through the reiteration of a shared orientation.22 From this perspective, the Periquillo’s episode triggers a series of questions: What collective history conditions Lizardi’s orientation toward the Pacific? What is the nature of this facing toward Asia? Where is Mexico located on the world map as a result of this positioning? From this perspective, the pícaro’s timetable for renovation is linked to the role played by transpacific commerce in the criollo’s desire for commercial autonomy. In other words, the orientation toward the Pacific is historical and collective. The routes of the Manila galleons represented for criollos a space of access to manufactured goods and luxury articles that was different from the imperial port of Seville and its complex commercial restrictions. As Katharine Bjork argues in “The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish,” it would be difficult to explain the duration and stability of trade with the Philippines without the pressure from the criollos of New Spain: “The nature of Spanish colonization of the Philippines was determined not by its functional relation to the European world system, but by its place in an expanding Asian trade network and by the interests of Mexican officials and merchants.”23 Trade with the Philippines constituted a model of competition with the imperial monopoly, primarily with its textiles. In fact, this explains why the Philippines figures in the incipient

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criollo literary field as an alternative space of autonomy within an imaginary of free trade and social mobility. For Bjork, the Philippines operates in the intercolonial system as a territory subjugated to the Viceroyalty of New Spain. With the inclusion of the Pacific Ocean in criollo representation, a world map is reconstituted where Mexico is located in the center, as a metropolitan force, and not at the periphery of the intercolonial system.24 The assertion of historical Mexican specificity does not, in itself, allow for debate against the Orientalist paradigm in thinking Lizardi’s positioning with respect to Asia. For the Colonel and Periquillo, the Pacific appears as a territory to spread out to, like what Ahmed calls a “supply point.”25 For there to be outsourcing, an outside must be constructed. As Ahmed suggests in corporal and spatial terms, constructing an “Orient” as an outside implies allying oneself with the “Occident,” affectively performing a belonging: “We could say that ‘the world’ comes to be seen as ‘orientated’ around the Occident, through the very orientations of the gaze toward the Orient, the East as the exotic other that can just be seen on the horizon.”26 Orientalism as a literary practice allows Lizardi to insert himself into its logics of liberal development and disciplinary specialization.27 The move of approaching Said anew from the example of Lizardi thus provides us with two critical points: The first is the problematization of the relation between imperialism and Orientalism, and a general understanding of the view that Latin American Orientalism, which lacks explicit imperial projects, comes from a kind of mimicry of the European Orientalist archive. In contrast, what Lizardi-as-example seems to demonstrate is that Orientalism can, in principle, be detached from its imperialist contexts, although this does not seem to be the case where liberalism is concerned. Here, Orientalism appears as the incipient phenomenology of a liberal Mexican conscience, for which the Pacific was essential. Both liberalism and Orientalism are presented here not as a structure or a culture that have their own space—Europe—and that are dispersed in a diffusionist way from “the center” to their supposed peripheries, but as a type of positioning, a “mobile calculative technique” that fragments space and spreads through different geographical zones, such that the so-called south would not be automatically exempt from it because of its location.28 Nor is “the West” a specific place, but a technology of perception and instrumentalization. This is why the problem of Latin American Orientalism exceeds discussions of the imitation of European ways, and raises broader questions with regard to the constant articulation of global capitalism as a productive matrix. It is about

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showing capitalism’s coexistence with and dependence on the multiple forms of local accumulation and exploitation that constitute it, and not vice versa.

Putting the body in Asia Lizardi represents one of the earliest examples of a particularly intense and long-running tendency of writing about Asia in the Mexican intellectual tradition. However, literary examples that, like the Periquillo, specifically deal with the particularities of transpacific exchange are scarcer in the twentieth century. Even more atypical are texts that practice a positioning toward Asia that differs from the one that Lizardi inaugurated for post-Independence Mexican literature. This is the case of En diferentes mundos (In Different Worlds, 1967) by Rafael Bernal. In rethinking Said through the problematics that this literary text presents, a reversal of Lizardi’s case appears. For if Lizardi remains relevant to a questioning of Said’s framework because in his work Orientalism is stripped away from representations of Asia, Bernal’s case reverses this apparent paradox: it provides us with representations and stereotypes of Asia that escape the Orientalist forms of zoning, without thereby ceasing to practice an orientation that is equally crucial to a productive reading of Said. Hence, in the fictitious world created by Bernal, the Orientalist coordinates become unrecognizable, forcing us to elaborate a vocabulary that can express it. Bernal presents a literary perspective for thinking other geographies that eludes the construction of distance that is essential for Orientalism. Contrarily to Said’s analysis, Bernal enables us to glimpse where the negative determinations of Orientalism are housed, even when they are not explicitly presented in his writing, but rather can be read through it. Again, this does not involve discarding Said, but rather, implies that Bernal’s anti-Orientalist literature succeeds in revealing to us under what conditions the creation of other planetary imaginaries, of other ways of living and perceiving global relations, becomes possible. Bernal’s En diferentes mundos is a little-known book, and belongs to the same writing period as El complot mongol (The Mongolian Conspiracy). It contains eight stories: the first three take place in different rural Mexican settings in a postrevolutionary context of agrarian reform; the seventh is about New York; and the remaining four take place in different Asian countries. The distribution of the stories in the book explores the articulation of similar problematics in

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different geographical settings, and invites us to think the global intersections between different local conflicts. Here I will concentrate on the analysis of a single story: “El mexicano” (The Mexican). Arguably the most important literary experiment of the story is performed through a change of literary orientation. The story begins on the pier of Manila’s Roxas Boulevard, with two characters looking toward Mexico from the other side of the Pacific. The first-person narrator specifies his location, “A mis espaldas, la ciudad de Manila se agitaba, preparándose para la noche”;29 and that of his interlocutor, “el viejo tenía la mirada fija en el horizonte; pero no daba la impresión de interesarse por la belleza de las nubes, el sol y las aguas.”30 How the story succeeds in escaping Orientalism does not depend on its ways of naming, but rather on a questioning of the body’s location, on its focalization. As I will show, the story’s perspective is not directed toward the Philippines, which is how Orientalism would operate according to Ahmed,31 but rather around it and around Mexico simultaneously, as if the two geographies were not far apart. The story’s skill lies precisely in presenting a perspective atypical to Mexican literature, that of observing (events and oneself) from Asia and its history, which unfolds a different field of visibility and contention. Broadly speaking, the story is a dialogue between a Mexican traveler—the narrator—and a Mexican migrant named Canchola living in the Philippines since 1914. Through Canchola’s words, the reader learns that he migrated to the United States during the Mexican Revolution, and then embarked for Shanghai on an English merchant ship. During the First World War, he then ended up working on a Chinese smuggling ship for lack of papers, and thus came to the Philippines, by way of Borneo. There he met a woman and had two daughters with her; these three women will be killed by the Japanese during the Allies’ liberation of Manila in the Second World War. The story involves the tradition of transpacific orientation to which I alluded in my discussion of Lizardi. However, it offers an important counterpoint to the Periquillo example, as well as to other later ones, in imagining interoceanic exchange from the experience of migrant populations, rather than from a trade perspective. Recently, there has been considerable academic focus on reconstructing the importance of the Manila galleon routes during the first globalization, but these works always celebrate the wealth of the free trade of luxury items and the cultural syncretism of its techniques.32 The celebration of free cultural and intellectual exchange between continents usually stresses the free flow of commodities, while obscuring the lives of workers who are denied

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such mobility. This becomes significant when considering the recent aspirations of global capital, whose primary arena of investment is Asia. In the story, Bernal occasionally alludes to Mexican colonial history. However, these few references to colonial history do not serve as narratives of the past to be instrumentalized. Rather, they appear as the foundation of a shared colonial history whose importance is the itinerary of its contemporary actualizations. Let us contrast, for example, the reference in the story to colonial silver, which was so important in understanding Lizardi’s Orientalist positioning. The character Canchola mentions a curious event during an episode about arms trafficking: “Y allí vi una cosa curiosa. Parte del dinero que llevaba era unos pesos mexicanos de plata, de esos viejos. Y cuando le dije que era mexicano me regaló diez de ellos . . . Me dio lástima . . . y le devolví sus diez pesos.”33 The reference to Mexican silver, the raw material most valued in the transpacific dreams of modernization up through the Porfiriato, appears here in a unique context. Canchola has been hired by some Chinese arms traffickers to make a drop to a local datu, or chief, in Borneo, who is planning to revolt against the Dutch, a revolt that fails before it even begins. However, the Mexican silver appears as a colonial holdover still in circulation in informal economies—in this case, to finance rudimentary anticolonial efforts. In other words, the reference is not about setting up a precedent for opportunities of commercial expansion toward Asia that would be available to Mexico in the present, as the Orientalist perspective would dictate. In Bernal’s proposal, the extractionist origin of the Mexican silver is recontextualized and crosses paths with the present contingencies of colonial legacies in Asia. The most important reason why Bernal breaks away from the construction of distance, which is so essential to Orientalism, is precisely because his interest is in exploring the points of intersection between two rural realities, the Filipino and the Mexican. This interest in emphasizing the local rural position in diverse armed conflicts could be tied to Bernal’s involvement with sinarquismo. This political tradition, in which Bernal was an active participant, is characterized by a unionist nationalism unrelated to the Revolution, of a social Christian bent, anticommunist but also decidedly antiliberal. Although his literary work cannot be subsumed under this experience of militancy, it is worth noting the coincidence between the cancelation of Orientalism in his story and his personal distance from liberalism. The Philippines do not appear as a scene distanced from the social and political problematics that most concerned Bernal in relation to local context. While the first three stories in En diferentes mundos concentrate

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on the rural Mexican experience during and after the Revolution, “El mexicano” continues this line of exploration in the Philippine context. Canchola, like the characters in the other stories, comes from a rural family battered by the Mexican Revolution. Bernal narrates the process through which the character, epitomized by his national affiliation through his naming in the story’s title as “el mexicano,” is incorporated into the rural Philippine resistance against the Japanese: “Eso de la guerra sí fue cosa mala. Como una revolución muy grande. Yo al principio dije que no tenía que ver con eso porque era mexicano.”34 At the beginning, Canchola’s national consciousness appears as a device for constructing distance. However, the character recounts how his ties to the rural communities along the Pampanga River up to Mount Arayat that were a consequence of his work as a trafficker transforms his conception of “distance,” “self,” and “other”: “yo me decía que era mexicano y que esa bola no tenía que ver conmigo. Pero luego empecé a sentir con ellos tantísimo padecer que traían y ¿para qué es más que la verdad?, me dolía todo eso.”35 The sentence reveals a change in the body’s alignment. Bernal pays particular attention to the political problem of the body’s location in the logics of political affiliation and construction of commonality. For there to be a political appeal, there needs to be a placing of the body among, a gesture of de-othering, a redistribution of the sensible dictated by the premises of proximity. In more conceptual terms, it is worth questioning, then, what specifically Bernal would reveal about Said’s work in Orientalism, and why such possibilities lie behind this dialogue. On the one hand, Said provides the explicit questions that allow for the interpretation of Bernal’s singularity in the Mexican transpacific tradition. On the other, the uniqueness of Bernal’s aesthetic activity reveals a broader understanding of Orientalism as the zoning apparatus itself in the context of international conflicts. In the story, the rural resistance against the Japanese cannot be easily assimilated to the faction of the allied countries. Canchola loses his family during the “liberation” of Manila by the American troops: “Cuando los americanos empezaron a bombardear la ciudad, los japoneses empezaron a quemar y dinamitar todo lo que dejaban en pie los americanos. Era como si estuvieran de acuerdo.”36 Canchola’s testimony resists being absorbed by either of the two great narratives of the war, in suggesting a logic of complementarity between both sides: fascism and liberal Occidentalism.37 Bernal is interested in narrating precisely from those zones that are invisible to the allied perspective on the war: “Yo no sé qué pensaban los americanos cuando disparaban sus cañones. Para ellos, eso era la guerra. Pero para nosotros era sólo morirse como

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un animal en una trampa.”38 Bernal’s purpose is to question the very frames of representation that the war itself institutes. That is, it is not about simply denouncing a type of inadequate representation of the victims, but about aiming at the very apparatus that restricts their visibility in a given context.39 So, it would not be completely true to say that the story condemns the allied operation per se; rather, it explores the perceptual devices that operate within expansionist and interventionist logics, in the concepts of both occupation and liberation. Bernal thus enables us to understand Orientalism as a general geopolitical logic of localization of bodies and lives in vulnerable—or privileged—geographies, as well as the very demarcation of these geographies: Me la mataron [my wife] en la guerra, cuando la liberación de Manila. Aquí cerca fue, en la Ermita, junto con nuestras dos hijas que ya eran señoritas. Yo mismo las enterré cerca del estero: pero luego entraron a quitar ruinas con los bulldozers y ya no supe dónde quedó la sepultura. Yo la había marcado con una cruz de madera . . . pero luego no dejaron ni tantita huella. Como si las hubiera sepultado en el mar.40

What is more, Bernal narrates the destruction and reconstruction of la Ermita during the Battle of Manila in 1945, one of the bloodiest and most overlooked battles of the Second World War, from the perspective of an undocumented Mexican immigrant and his Filipino family; that is, from the perspective of those for whom there will be no justice: not in the destruction, not in the business of reconstruction, neither in occupation nor in liberation. What Bernal’s literary intervention makes visible, therefore, is how the Second World War, the last “heroic” U.S. war, prepared the global perceptive framework of the Cold War, which ended up devastating Asia and Latin America.

The “House of Someone Else’s Pain” Como si las hubiera sepultado en el mar.41 Rafael Bernal The transpacific perspective offered by Bernal in En diferentes mundos has few equivalents in current Mexican literature. La casa del dolor ajeno by Julián Herbert is perhaps one of the most significant contemporary instances. In this text, Herbert conducts an exercise of historical revisionism of the phenomenon

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of violence in Mexico narrated from one of the northern states of the country: Coahuila. But the singularity of his positioning lies in his attention to the history of transpacific migration in the region. Herbert writes facing in the opposite direction to where Bernal positioned himself in stories like “El mexicano.” Although the text concentrates on the genocide of Chinese citizens in Torreón in 1911, it also covers the decades before and after the event. The broad temporal arc of the text is due to one of the author’s main critical goals: to show that the massacre can only be understood in light of a continuity between the Porfiriato’s eugenic project and the institutional anti-Chinese stance of the postrevolutionary regime. Herbert traces the contingencies of this common positioning in public rhetoric. His book, part literary chronicle, part academic essay, and part testimonial novel, can be read in support of one of the main theses I have been putting forward in this chapter: Orientalism as liberal phenomenology. Herbert’s book illustrates how Porfirian Orientalism is repurposed later during the consolidation of the revolutionary state through a new racial rhetoric. However, his critique of Orientalism is not explicit; the term is completely outside of his critical and literary vocabulary in La casa del dolor ajeno. Even so, his text directly interrogates Said’s work and reveals its possibilities for shedding light on three problems central to Mexican studies: the history of migration and the experience of different diasporic groups in the Americas; the conceptualization of war; and the construction of external and internal borders. What is more, an important contribution of La casa del dolor ajeno to the understanding of Said’s notion of Orientalism is its connection to forms of accumulation and the organization of labor in nonimperial contexts. For Herbert, Torreón constituted “el más sonoro éxito de la ingeniería social mexicana.”42 The writer recounts the development of Torreón as a project of Porfirian capitalist expansion based on a plantation economy, and connected to the northern border by the railway system. For this project, the Lake Region, “la región lagunera” outsourced the work. Due to a lack of sufficient white European immigration, they had to turn to Chinese workers, Mexicans from other regions of the country, and black and white Americans from the United States. Herbert thus shows how Orientalism operated as the mechanism through which the official perception of the Chinese diaspora in the context of Torreón could be built. Constructing certain populations as outsiders—or as distant to the nation’s space-time— is a way of reaffirming the right to use them as supply points for unprotected labor. As Herbert demonstrates, Orientalism, therefore, is not only an operation that conceptualizes foreign geographies as “far away” and “outside”; but also,

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it fragments the very space of national sovereignties, and works as the terrain where biopolitical distinctions from the “inside” of the state are established. Among numerous examples, Herbert mentions how the same United States and Mexican politicians who participated in anti-Chinese movements at the end of the nineteenth century also hired Chinese workers for their private enterprises. This particular example allows him to set a precedent for the United States’ anti-immigrant rhetoric, where the central economy takes advantage of the work of those who are represented as outside the system they support: Leo estas páginas y las comparo con lo que se imprime hoy en Estados Unidos acerca de los migrantes mexicanos y centroamericanos y no puedo evitar la zozobra: han pasado más de 100 años y los argumentos para excluir al otro no han variado un ápice. Más que un fracaso moral o social o económico, considero esto un fracaso de la retórica.43

It is not a matter of asserting that the anti-immigrant rhetoric is the same, but rather of tracing rearticulations and actualizations that make it intelligible in the present. In fact, one of the most persistent criticisms of Said was the transhistorical character that he bestowed upon Europe’s representation of Asia, as if it had always been the same. However, through Herbert, we can conceive Orientalism not as an already predetermined narrative frame, but rather as an available trajectory, a series of precedents that can be retraced starting from their particular manifestations. Even for Said, the critique of Orientalism in European literature was, above all, a political gesture of interrupting all those institutional and academic frameworks that allowed and justified the contemporary perception of wars in the Middle East. In other words, the critique of Orientalism remained fundamental as long as it continued to offer intelligibility to an opaque present. La casa del dolor ajeno dedicates most of its effort to studying, through the example of Torreón, how the politics of impunity that prevails in contemporary situations like Ayotzinapa and Apatzingán was instituted. To this end, Herbert thoroughly examines the official investigation commissions for the 1911 events. The earlier ones blame the Chinese citizens by characterizing them as Porfirist combatants; the later ones exonerate federal Porfirian authorities by throwing responsibility only on the lower levels of command and the common soldiers, and therefore on the “psychological law of the masses.”44 In contrast, Herbert’s investigation blames the modernist Porfirian elites and the highest state officials, which becomes all the more significant when one considers that the Mexican state never paid China the compensation it requested after the events, nor even apologized for what happened.

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The book is, therefore, a reflection on how the practices of an institutional (lack of) memory worked as the internal mechanism of state violence: Tras la masacre torreonense de 1911, lo que emergió no fue arrepentimiento, ni siquiera autocrítica, sino un permiso simbólico de transgresión: cualquier vejación contra los cantoneses tenía un antecedente histórico que no sólo justificaba sino que exculpaba la nueva atrocidad porque esta era menos grave que la explosión de violencia canónica. Así es como funciona la economía de la crueldad.45

Indeed, the massacre at Torreón lays the foundations for other institutional antiChinese actions later undertaken in the territories of Sonora and Baja California. As Jason Chang argues regarding the case of Mexicali, Mexican anti-Chinese sentiment gives us a glimpse into the patterns of violence that will later characterize the consolidation of federal authority in the northern part of the country up to the 1940s, and into the efforts to consolidate diverse Mexican populations under the identity of the mestizo subject. This became the condition of possibility for being recognized politically by the state, in a context of economic restructuring and agrarian reform. For this reason, Chang believes that “anti-Chinese politics contributed to the ‘de-indigenization’ of Mexican people” and their concept of communal land tenancy, which is why the Revolution continued the Porfirian liberal project through other routes.46 It could be argued, along with Herbert and Chang, that these Orientalist operations in the postrevolutionary regime indicate the ways in which the PRI state refunctionalized liberalism.47 What the transpacific perspective reveals is a long-term logic by which the Mexican state consolidated its expansion through a violence that it then tried to mask as external to its mechanisms. The book’s title refers to this process. Herbert borrows the phrase “the house of someone else’s pain,” which was painted on the wall of Torreón’s new soccer stadium. In homage to popular ingenuity, the combativeness of sporting language lends an unequalled metaphor, not only to the attitude of the laguneros toward the 1911 massacre, but also to Orientalism as a perceptual apparatus. The title of the book hints at Orientalism as a topology of extimacy, such that as Jacques Lacan notes, “what is most intimate to me is precisely what I am constrained to recognize only outside.”48 The house, symbol of bourgeois ownership, domesticity, and interiority, gets gutted from the inside out. The critique of Orientalism lies precisely in the unmaking of this inside/outside paradigm. Broadly speaking, Herbert’s text and his transpacific perspective of Mexican history point to the ways that the racial logic of liberal Orientalism and nationalism functioned precisely in relation to extimacy and complementarity. It points to the fact

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that the Orientalist problematic is intimately tied to processes of liberal and neoliberal subjectivation and subalternization in multiple geographies, a context that Said barely began to outline. I would like to conclude with a recapitulation. On the one hand, Said provides us with the means to read Mexican literature from its Pacific side, and thus to advance a broader understanding of its global intersections beyond the European prism. Likewise, thinking through other contexts enables us to combat the selfreferential tendency to defend a pristine Mexican singularity. On the other hand, the transpacific literature discussed here allows us to dissociate the debate about Orientalism from a kind of geographic determinism that proclaims it as a strictly European positioning, and therefore reinscribes an artificial First World/Third World dichotomy. The attribution of an Orientalist positioning exclusively to certain colonial legacies cannot account for the differential forms of its specific manifestations. Coloniality as the ultimate explanation falls short of a satisfactory account for the set of diverse multispatial practices that characterize Orientalism. In the texts I have just discussed, Orientalism reveals itself not as a structure, but rather as a positioning with a high degree of flexibility and mobility, like the body itself. Finally, I would like to say something about the nexus between literature and Orientalist criticism as critical methodology. What allows for the theorization and critique of Orientalism through Mexican literature is the exploration of precise challenges to global systems that are produced from within the unforeseeable character of cultural interaction. Thus, the critique of Orientalism is not a way of closing literature off or condemning it, nor of exhausting its future. It is precisely through this criticism that we can begin to imagine other ways of perceiving and theorizing global relations. In other words, criticizing Orientalism cannot represent the end of a reading, but rather its beginning.

Notes 1 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–247. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 3 For two pioneer books that represent this trend, see Julia A. Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1991), and Araceli Tinajero, Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003).

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4 Anna Kazumi Stahl and Ana Paulina Lee, “Memory and Migration,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 2 (2016): 3. 5 Brett Levinson, “The Death of the Critique of Eurocentrism: Latinamericanism as a Global Praxis/Poiesis,” in Orientalism and Identity in Latin America: Fashioning Self and Other from the (Post)Colonial Margin, ed. Erik Camayd-Freixas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 21. 6 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 241–242. 7 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 241. 8 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 438. 9 José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento (Mexico City : Porrúa, 2007). 10 Rafael Bernal, En diferentes mundos (Mexico City : Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). 11 Julián Herbert, La casa del dolor ajeno: crónica de un pequeño genocidio en La Laguna (Mexico City : Random House, 2015). 12 Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 451. 13 My reading follows several of the ideas proposed in Koichi Hagimoto, “A Transpacific Voyage: The Representations of Asia in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento,” Hispania 95, no. 3 (2012): 389–399. This pioneering article suggests the Periquillo as the first Latin American transpacific novel. Hagimoto highlights the importance of the Pacific as a liberal utopia in Lizardi, a premise that I continue in my reading, although I reach different conclusions. 14 Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento, 445. “I found myself confessed and convicted, and the Royal Court of Justice sentenced me to the king’s service for eight years in the Manila militia, which was recruiting out of Mexico at the time.” The Mangy Parrot: The Life and Times of Periquillos Sarniento, Written by Himself for His Children, trans. David Frye (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 374. 15 Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento, 464. “There are plenty of mines, friends . . . your credits is safe in a case like this, and you’re all free of any responsibility; the only thing you’re losing is your profit: but by making sacrifice, we’ll purchase our whole future existence.” The Mangy Parrot, 390. 16 Hagimoto, “A Transpacific Voyage,” 393. 17 Silver was the primary link between China and Mexico from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. In Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish-American Silver Peso: Export Commodity and Global Money of the Ancien Regime, 1500–1800,” in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, ed. Carlos Marichal, Zephyr Frank, and Steven Topik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 42, the historian estimates that a third

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of the Mexican silver produced during the eighteenth century ended up in China, whether through European dealers who traded the metal in exchange for coveted manufactured goods, or through the route of the Manila galleons. This is why silver and China hold an essential place both in the colonial imaginary and in the projects of Mexican independence such as the one illustrated in Lizardi’s case. Although direct trade with Asia stops after independence, silver continues to be Mexico’s primary export product during the final three decades of the nineteenth century, almost 80 percent (47). This fact distinguishes Mexico from the rest of Latin America, and shows that during the most important period of modernization, Porfirio Díaz’s liberal dictatorship, silver continues to be, in a strange continuation of the colonial period, the principal source of wealth, and China its primary market, despite the interruption of direct communication between the two regions. 18 Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento, 444. “I unlocked the community chest and gambled away all the money,” The Mangy Parrot, 372. 19 As Klaus Meyer-Minnemann argues regarding this same monologue, extractivism encourages the accumulation of wealth among a class of small landholders and unproductive officials (67). See “Apropiaciones de realidad en las novelas de José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi,” Iberoamericana 17, no. 2 (1993): 67. 20 Fernández de Lizardi, El periquillo sarniento, 468. [Those] will take their place among the many rich lines of goods, that will invite all the nations to undertake a profitable and active commerce with us . . . this will suffice to increase the number of farmers and artisans, and their growing numbers will lead to infinite weddings, which are avoided by the idlers and loafers of today; the multitude of marriages will naturally produce a numerous population . . . and give rise to estimable men in every class of the State. The Mangy Parrot, 393–394. 21 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 114. 22 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 117. 23 Katharine Bjork, “The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 50. 24 Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 150. 25 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 114. 26 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 116. 27 In fact, Lizardi’s creole reformism ideology does not necessarily contradict an expansionist imperial relationship with the Philippines. After independence, the Sovereign Governing Council of the Mexican Government considered it essential to keep the Philippines within the sovereign territory of Mexico for maintaining

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31 32

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Mexico’s advantageous position in the developing global system. See Francisco Javier Haro et al., Historia de las relaciones internacionales de México, 1821–2010, Volumen 6: Asia, ed. Mercedes de Vega (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2010), 62. I paraphrase here Aiwa Ong’s observation in her book: “It therefore seems appropriate to study neoliberalism not as a ‘culture’ or a ‘structure’ but as mobile calculative techniques of governing that can be decontextualized from their original sources and decontextualized in constellations of mutually constitutive and contingent relationships.” Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 13. Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 81. “Behind me, the city of Manila was seething, preparing for the evening.” Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 82. “[T]he old man had his gaze fixed on the horizon; but he didn’t give the impression of being interested in the beauty of the clouds, the sun, or the waves.” Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 115. A notable exception to this tendency is found in Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The book studies the traffic of South Asian slaves through the Pacific Ocean during the colonial period, and the ways in which the different groups renegotiated their status as slaves through their incorporation into the Republic of Indians in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 87. “And there I saw something odd. Part of the money he brought was in Mexican silver pesos, those really old ones. And when I told him I was Mexican, he gave me ten of them . . . I felt sorry for him . . . and I gave him back his ten pesos.” Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 92. “All that about the war was definitely a bad thing. Like a huge revolution. At first, I said it didn’t have anything to do with me because I was Mexican.” Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 92. “I told myself that I was a Mexican and that mess had nothing to do with me. But then I began to feel so much all their suffering and—God’s truth—that all hurt me.” Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 100. “When the Americans began to bomb the city, the Japanese began to burn and dynamite everything the Americans left standing. It was like they had an agreement.” The story of Canchola’s participation in the resistance against the Japanese, whose result is the assassination of his family, is not an attempt to demonize the Japanese in general, an act which would contain another Orientalist gesture. In fact, another of the stories in the book, “La declaración” (The Declaration) is a spy story narrating the efforts of a Japanese policeman to prevent a supposedly

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anticommunist conspiracy between a North American agent of the (political) right and a group of fascist Japanese soldiers, in the context of the Cold War. 38 Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 100. “I don’t know what the Americans were thinking when they shot their cannons. For them, that was war. But for us it was only dying like an animal in a trap.” 39 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016), 77. 40 Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 90–91. They killed [my wife] in the war, during the liberation of Manila. It was right near hear, in la Ermita, along with our two girls, who were already young ladies. I buried them myself near the creek: but then they came in to remove ruins with the bulldozers and then I didn’t know any more where the grave was. I marked it with a wooden cross, like a good Christian; but then they didn’t leave a single trace. As if I’d buried them in the sea. 41 Bernal, En diferentes mundos, 91. “As if I’d buried them in the sea.” 42 Herbert, La casa del dolor ajeno, 40. “The most resounding success of Mexican social engineering.” 43 Herbert, La casa del dolor ajeno, 86. I read these pages and I compare them to what is printed today in the United States about Mexican and Central American migrants, and I can’t help feeling uneasy: more than 100 years have passed and the arguments for excluding the other have not changed a whit. More than a moral or social or economic failure, I consider this a failure of rhetoric. 44 Herbert, La casa del dolor ajeno, 236. 45 Herbert, La casa del dolor ajeno, 104. “After the Torreón massacre of 1911, what emerged was not repentance, nor even self-criticism, but a symbolic permission to transgress: any harassment against the Cantonese had a historical antecedent that not only justified but exonerated the new atrocity because this was less serious than the explosion of canonical violence. This is how the economy of cruelty works.” 46 Jason Oliver Chang, “Racial Alterity in the Mestizo Nation,” Journal of Asian American Studies 14, no. 3 (2011): 333. 47 Chang explains this point in his article: By defining beneficiaries of the Mexican Revolution as “agrarian-right subjects” state officials accomplished three alterations to the relationship among race, citizenship, and nationality. …This meant that rights to land could only be expressed and recognized as rights contained with agrarian reforms, significantly crippling indigenous claims to territory within the nation. Enacting these policies forced Mexicans to trade their indigenous identity for access to state-allocated

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resources . . . From this perspective, Cardenas’s expropriation of CRLC land and the eviction of Chinese cotton farmers not only installed a racially appropriate laboring population but also incorporated more individuals into the state apparatus of liberal rights-bearing political subjects. (352–353) 48 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the Other, trans. Cormac Gallagher Jacques Lacan in Ireland, accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-16-from -an-Other-to-the-other.pdf.

3

The Perils of Ownership: Property and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Ana Sabau

Introduction In reading the opening chapters of José Tomás de Cuéllar’s novel El comerciante en perlas, readers were confronted with a scene of original appropriation.1 Set in a number of locations across the Pacific Coast, the feuilleton novel traced emerging routes of global capital as it narrated the story of Eduardo Mercier, a French young entrepreneur and economic adventurer who managed to amass a millionaire fortune by participating in the epoch’s most popular “economic rushes” from the gold mines of California to the pearl fisheries of Central America. The scene at hand begins with Eduardo making the acquaintance of an old marine captain known as Carlos Ardou. Shortly after their meeting in a cafe in Panama, Eduardo accepts an invitation from the captain to take a trip to the coasts of El Salvador in search of a bank of pearl oysters that promises to make both of them rich. With no avail in finding the submarine fortune and confronted with the increasing frustration of a sailing crew at the verge of mutiny, Eduardo negotiates with the angry sailors to remain three extra days at sea. During that time, he ventures alone into the Central American coastline in one final attempt to find the oyster bank before returning to Panama. After departing and encountering an isolated island in which he is attacked by a ferocious tiger, Eduardo dives into the ocean to unexpectedly find the largest conglomeration of pearl oysters ever imagined. Astonished by his finding, Eduardo goes back into the sea and begins to rip as many shells as he can, voraciously filling his pockets with pearls. He then decides to head back to the ship, not before creating a map in his memory of the exact trajectory that has led him to the pearls. During his

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return, Eduardo is attacked once again, this time by a group of sharks and also falls prey to a tropical fever. As he swims in desperation for his life and poses his glance on the distant ship that waits impatiently for him, he manages to shoot a flare into the sky that notifies the sailors and captain of his presence. Eduardo is found shortly thereafter and is carried back into the ship where the crew has also been subject to misfortune. Amid growing tensions with Captain Ardou, and a fever outbreak that has cost the lives of two sailors, Eduardo unconsciously recovers in his cabin. The pearls in his pockets remain unfound. It is only as the ship approaches the coasts of Panama that Eduardo awakens from his slumber and shares his hidden fortune with the captain. They both agree to keep their riches from the other sailors and decide to become business partners, founding the banking house of Carlos Ardou and Eduardo Mercier with the wealth earned from economic speculation with the pearls.2 This charged literary sequence presents only the first of many economic ventures in Eduardo Mercier’s life. It is also, as I will develop below, a passage that offered readers of El Federalista a colorful vision into the workings of nineteenth-century ideas on possession.3 Although seemingly disconnected from the Mexican context, the internationalist novel should be read not only as a fiction about global capital expansion, but also as a literary translation of the changes in property relations that had been unraveling in Mexico since the 1850s. El comerciante en perlas thus opens a window to think about literature as an avenue, both parallel and divergent from legal discourse, through which readers accessed more concrete and embodied understandings about what possession meant. As Chad Luck explains in The Body of Property, legal discourse is often wrapped in abstract jargon that keeps at bay a head-on approximation to the question of how exactly one comes to own something, and what is implied by the ongoing gestures of appropriation through which the world is transformed.4 Based on the writings of José Tomás de Cuéllar (Facundo), one of the most important writers of his time, this article will study literature as a tool that expanded, disseminated and shaped liberal ideas about property and possession at a crucial moment of primitive accumulation in Mexico’s history. Rather than viewing literary texts as one-way conduits, I approach them as textual spaces where important ideas on the social were negotiated. Published in periodicals often open to receiving commentary from their readership, the texts considered in this article are sites where emerging ideas on ownership were tested and tried. Although much has been written from a historiographical perspective on the

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agrarian reforms that began during the 1850s and which were fundamental in reconceptualizing property under a liberal cloak, little appreciation has been given to how literature was an important venue to build everyday life views on possession beyond legal discourse. The second half of the nineteenth century in Mexico was the moment in which the juridical infrastructure for a new wave of dispossession and enclosures on the commons was established. The famous Ley Lerdo promulgated in June of 1856— and which would become a decisive influence in future laws on the ownership of land up to the Mexican Revolution—was geared toward the confiscation of corporative landownership. The law mainly sought to dismantle the possessions of the ecclesiastic body but had serious repercussions for other existing forms of communal property. Although recent scholarship has questioned the efficacy of the government in actually implementing these reforms on the ground, the law and its future formulations nevertheless indexed an important transformation in how property was perceived.5 In the first section of this chapter I will return to the opening scene of El comerciante en perlas to expand on how the novel offered a literary translation of the liberal ideas on possession that emerged after the Ley Lerdo was first instantiated. In contrast, the second section of this article will focus on a number of miscellaneous texts published by Cuéllar in La Libertad between 1882 and 1884 as part of a column titled “Artículos ligeros sobre asuntos trascendentales.”6 I will here argue that Cuéllar’s fin de siécle literature anticipated legislation on the privatization of water and is therefore an example of the ways in which literature laid the grounds for reimagining social relations around the commons, making it an important tool for the enclosures that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Literature and the phenomenology of property: Scenes of appropriation and liberal reforms The literary sequence that narrated Eduardo Mercier’s pearl-dive into the ocean touched upon the most fundamental theorizations of property within the liberal tradition. As mentioned earlier, the scene was one of original appropriation, and as such it presented an individual (Eduardo Mercier) who encountered a previously “un-owned” site of natural resources that he was then legitimated to exploit, in a Lockean manner, through the use of his labor.7

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Since the agrarian reforms of the 1850s were promoted on the basis of establishing a system of individual private property where man became the fundamental and minimal measure of the social body, the passage of the pearls in Cuéllar’s novel could be read as a literary elaboration—a “phenomenology”— of individual ownership.8 It is not a coincidence, for instance, that the process through which Eduardo comes to possess a rich collection of pearls begins with him leaving the ship on his own, embracing a solitary and risky adventure. Possession here is an individualized experience, limited to the bodily and intellectual responses of a single man. In contrast to the dryness of juridical discourse, the novel was able to transmit the embodied experience of ownership to its readers. The trajectory toward appropriation, according to the detailed passages in Cuéllar’s text, was one of excitement, challenge, and adventure. Not only did Eduardo have to risk his life in order to appropriate the resources through which he would later amass a millionaire fortune, but also the journey to find those resources on his own was presented in the novel as an exhilarating experience, one in which possession and affect were entwined: Entre la multitud de ostras pequeñas que tenía delante, Eduardo vio una de un tamaño enorme; abrióla, y ya se disponía a arrojar las conchas, cuando vio destacarse de una de ellas un objeto negro que fue a rodar por la arena; bajóse, lo recogió, y lo examinó temblando . . . Era una enorme perla negra del tamaño de una haba, límpida, brillante, y de un óvalo perfecto: sobre uno de sus lados, solamente tenía una manchita blanca que formaba una estrella. Sin saber su valor, Eduardo conoció que ella sola valía una fortuna. Examinóla atentamente; pásabala de una mano a otra, besóla cien veces, con el corazón henchido de gozo, gozo que triplicó su valor y su fuerza para continuar la obra.9

The above quotation presents possession as a sensorial experience involving touch, sight, and other embodied responses that are activated toward the process of making an object one’s own, that is, examining it in detail, kissing it a hundred times, etc. As the passage remarks, becoming the proprietor of the black pearl was also accompanied by more complex emotional responses like tremors of excitement and joy, emphasizing the “affective circuits through which objects and subjects come to be bound.”10 Furthermore, as evidenced in the final sentence of the passage, all these responses, which are also steps in the process toward ownership, are, for Eduardo, not only the fuel for further appropriation, but also what grants meaning to his actions. In this way, the novel establishes

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property as a means of subjectivation. In the vein of Luck’s reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “property is the externalization of a person’s will, [and is therefore] vital because it allows other people to witness and recognize a person as a person.”11 In finding the largest conglomeration of pearl oysters that brings his journey to an end, Eduardo is again taken by the euphoria of possession. As he steps back into the sand and is able to finally absorb what this moment of appropriation means for him, he holds the precious pearls that can barely fit in his bag, pockets, and vest, and spreads his arms while yelling to the top of his lungs: “Gran Dios! El mundo es mío!”12 This moment of heightened emotion is followed by Eduardo’s return to the ship, where the process of ownership is completed in a return from individual isolation to the social. The novel thus also reveals that property only has meaning insofar as it creates a relation to others. Possessing something is only relevant when there are others who could also claim ownership to that which is possessed.13 The secrecy with which Eduardo guards his recently acquired fortune, sharing it only with the man who will be his business partner, is thus part of the novel’s translation of liberal ideas on private property. Possession is seen not only as an individual sensorial and intellectual experience, as stated earlier, but also as a principle that structures relations between the self and others. In this form of relation the latter are seen as threats, as competitors. The passage presents appropriation as a risky endeavor insofar as Eduardo almost loses his life several times in the process of becoming the owner of the pearls. This struggle between life and death further emphasizes ownership as a dialectical process of subjectivation. Nevertheless, it is also noteworthy to remark that the protagonist actually survives, quite unrealistically, all the dangers that he faces. In a sense, Eduardo’s safe return to the ship against all odds allegorizes the relation between property, safety, and order in the liberal tradition. It is as though the gesture of appropriation that sets in motion Eduardo’s courage and strength would guarantee his survival and individuality even when exposed to the riskiest settings. Property in this sense—and as I will expand on below—is presented by the novel as a principle and a relation that safeguards the order of the world. Notably, Eduardo’s pearl fishing experience occurs only after a complicated journey into the wild that includes, as previously stated, a long swim through the troubled waters of the ocean and a confrontation with a tiger. This voyage toward nature and away from “civilization” is not only a journey in space, but also in time. It is a voyage that takes Eduardo into a “pre-historic” or “pre-contractual”

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setting where he comes face-to-face with the forces of a “primitive,” “untouched,” “un-owned” natural space. In presenting this setting as the background for the process through which Eduardo becomes the owner of the collection of pearls, the novel evidenced two fundamental procedures working at the heart of liberal ideas on property: its naturalization and the necessity for it to be a continuous process through which man makes his place in the world. To expand on this, allow me to take a slight detour into Manuel Payno’s important study on political economy and property, an essay contemporary to El comerciante. In this 1869 treaty, the renowned liberal writer—who was also the main editor behind the newspaper that published Cuéllar’s novel—offered his take on the history of property within the framework of Roman law. He argued that democracy and ownership were not opposed concepts but rather ideas that depended upon each other. To support this, Payno established property as the one constant traversing the whole history of humanity. Influenced by the ideas of Adolphe Thiers in Du Droit du Propriété—which was published in 1848 to refute the spread of communist ideas in France—he insisted that property was not only an aspect of human life but most importantly a fundamental law of nature.14 Property in Payno’s liberal vision was the essential mechanism through which all living creatures were assigned their “proper” place in the world. In other words, property, beyond its connotation of ownership, was the basic principle through which order in the natural world was guaranteed: Con la creación nació la propiedad. A los peces les tocaron las aguas, al hombre y a los otros animales la tierra, a las aves el viento. Quitad por un momento esta gran distribución de la naturaleza, y destruiréis enteramente el orden físico. Sumergid al hombre en el agua, sacad al pez del mar, obligad al pájaro a que atraviese andando las mismas distancias que con el auxilio de las alas, y veréis por todas partes introducido el desconcierto y la muerte.15

Similarly, in presenting Eduardo’s appropriation of the oyster bank and its pearls through a scene reminiscent of an original or primitive encounter between man and previously unclaimed resources, the novel inscribed property as the binding principle between the laws of nature and history. The passage is therefore a literary translation of the process proposed by Locke (and then widely disseminated into other strains of liberalism), through which the common world given by God to all men came to be privately owned. This took place, according to Locke, through the extension of the individual into the world through his labor.16 Eduardo’s act of

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appropriation therefore has two temporalities: that of nineteenth-century capital expansion and the returning time of original appropriation. Property for both Payno and Cuéllar was a given natural law that simultaneously opened the path to history. It was the movement through which man (continuously) fulfilled the place he had been originally assigned in the world. Interestingly enough, this “naturalization” of property went hand in hand with theorizing and making ownership an ongoing process, one that had to continuously be inscribed. Consider, for instance, the following quotation from Payno’s treaty: “la propiedad es el verbo, la sustancia misma, el elemento preciso de la vida de las sociedades.”17 Here Payno not only ontologized property, but also made it out to be the kernel action and motor of a teleological movement of human history. Despite its best efforts to present property as a matter of natural right (instead of conquest and domination), the novel’s inscription of the continuous gesture of appropriation allows for a reading against the grain that renders visible the intrinsic violence stemming from the processes of enclosure, of appropriating the world and moving from common property to private property. This move can be thought in relation to Karl Marx’s rendition of primitive accumulation.18 During Eduardo’s first encounter with Captain Ardou, the sailor reveals to him the secret about the oyster bank and how he came to find it in the first place. Allow me to quote this anecdote at length: ¿Que dónde se encuentran? Ese es mi secreto, joven. ¿Que cómo lo he sabido? Por las mas grandes casualidades. Lanzado sobre las costas del Pacífico por una tempestad, al volver de California, adonde había ido a vender un cargamento, desembarqué en una bahía que creía desierta, donde encontré, ¿qué diréis que encontré? Una mala canoa con una pésima vela hecha de hojas de árbol y juncos, y un poco más lejos dos salvajes ocupados en abrir ostras. Me acerqué a ellos y les vi recoger dentro de una calabaza un objeto que ellos sacaban de las ostras. La curiosidad me hizo acercar y les pedí explicaciones. Pero cuál fue mi sorpresa al ver que tenían a su disposición un banco de ostras perleras! Saqué mi bolsa y les di cuarenta duros que contenía, en cambio de un puñado de perlas. Puse manos a la obra y extraje algunas el mismo día. Al día siguiente volví sin decir nada, a mi equipaje, en el cual no tenía gran confianza; los indios habían desaparecido, contentos de haber hecho buen negocio. Comencé a trabajar, y con buen éxito [. . .] Los cuarenta duros que di a los indios me produjeron ellos sólo diez mil francos.19

Ardou’s confession is important insofar as it contravenes Eduardo Mercier’s scene of original appropriation as an event that can ever occur beyond the social.

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In this passage readers find out that the oyster bank has been in fact appropriated through a previous act of dispossession that is nevertheless not presented as such. In a sense, Ardou’s pride in having tricked the indigenous couple by paying them less than the legitimate value of both the pearls and the labor they have implemented in extracting them is a whitewashed literary rewrite of primitive accumulation. Paying the “savages” forty pesos for their pearls is more than that: it is dispossessing them from their means of livelihood—hence the observation that the couple has not returned to the oyster bank—but also a first instance of “purchasing” their now-commodified labor power. Through the repetition of the encounter with the oyster bank, first with Ardou’s account and then with Eduardo Mercier’s, the novel makes thinkable, if only as a slip, the ontology of capitalist expansion there where primitive accumulation needs to be inscribed over and over again; where property, appropriation, and dispossession are co-implied and ongoing phenomena. To put it in Sandro Mezzadra’s words, “Whatever happened for the first time at the origin of the history of capitalism must logically repeat itself every day: this apparent paradox prevents us from seeing the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as merely linear and progressive.”20 Lastly, Ardou’s passage also signals to the processes of racialization that accompany the machine of appropriation where the dispossessed are the indigenous inhabitants of the island, whose labor and knowledge of the region have been unjustly (and violently) appropriated. Although at first glance El comerciante en perlas seems to have been far removed from the specificities of land tenure that the Ley Lerdo stipulated, its beginning anecdote worked through the basic principles of liberal private property which were also the foundations of the 1856 law. In this way, the novel translated the abstract jargon of juridical discourse into colorful scenes, offering its readers fodder to envision the multiple implications and intricacies of private property.

The resistance to appropriation: Literature, water, and the commons While literature played an important role in translating juridical discourse, offering embodied and concrete descriptions about what liberal forms of possession entailed, it can also be seen to have anticipated legislation in certain regards, transforming the ways in which relations to the “commons” were imagined. Although there are many different possible ways to explore this, I will

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proceed in this section by focusing on literary passages that were part of shaping these transformations through a symbolic figuration of water. Since before the conquest the question of water—from channels and rivers, to floods and pipelines—has been fundamental for the region today known as Mexico City. Concerns over the excess and scarcity of water have therefore traversed the political and cultural imagination of many generations inhabiting Mexico’s central valley. To study the figuration of water during the second half of the nineteenth century, I will continue to draw examples from Cuéllar’s journalism, while also considering a selection of texts by modernist writer Manuel Gutierrez Nájera. Approaches to property in this time often entailed attempting to understand its limits, getting close to that which resisted possession. If as seen above, legal reforms of the period were heavily focused on land tenure, which provided the concrete grounding for a liberal theory of property, the liquidity of the oceans and flowing waters were the external limits of what could be individually owned. Since legal status of waters in Mexico remained fairly underdeveloped in constitutional theory until the beginning of the twentieth century, water was often invoked by writers in order to think about the margins of private property.21 The seeming contrast between land and sea lay therefore at the heart of conceptualizations of property in nineteenth-century Mexico. The fluidity of water in opposition to the fixity of land was summoned to negatively render thinkable the limits of private ownership. In his study, for instance, Payno addressed the opposition of terrestrial domination that accompanied the history of civilization by contrasting it to the ungovernability and indivisibility of the oceans: Los mares indóciles, turbulentos, sin permitir valladares ni barreras, borrando en su movible y líquida superficie la estela de la nave, apenas pasa, no han permitido dominio ni división; así los mares son el camino para todo el género humano, y apenas en nuestros tiempos se ha consentido no en la propiedad, sino en el señoría de una pequeña faja de mar cercana a las costas de cada nación.22

Similarly, in an article titled “Las Prosperidades Nuestras,” Cuéllar touched upon the ungovernability of water as a trait that presented a challenge to private property. In the piece, Cuéllar addressed the problems concerning the maintenance of public monuments and statues with a description of water shortages in the city. “¿Qué le sucedió al agua?”23 he asked criticizing the fact that the fountains in the city were empty, entirely dry. Not without humor

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used to suggest the limits of state governance, Cuéllar refrained from solely blaming the Ayuntamiento—or, more specifically, the Water Commission—for the scarcity of water in the city. Instead, he ascribed the problem to the liquid’s unruly nature: “Si falta agua, es porque este líquido es de suyo muy voluntarioso y muy delicado, y sobre todo muy escurridizo.”24 Cuéllar’s emphasis on the slipperiness of water was hardly unusual. The “ungovernability” of water was a common referent of the time. Indeed, matching descriptions are not only found in Payno’s essay (as previously cited), but also in the access and regulation laws on public water. If the 1850s reforms led to the decimation of communal lands, the restrictions on common waters seemed both conceptually and pragmatically more defiant. According to an article from El Foro, a newspaper dedicated to bring public attention to judiciary conflicts and to offer commentary on the body of laws that governed Mexican society, running water could not be claimed as property. In almost Heraclitian fashion, the article argued that the everchanging nature of flowing waters made it impossible to contain them, and therefore impossible to own. A body of water in motion was never selfidentical, which meant that its own ontology pushed against the ways in which ownership was conceptualized at the time: “Las aguas públicas brotantes, tienen en su naturaleza propia, el primero y mejor obstáculo para no ser usurpadas por un acto de ocupación, su posesión discontinua.”25 According to Mexican legislation, the article stated, only stagnant waters could be claimed as property. If neighbors discontinued their use of running water, this was in no way (as had been the case for land) legitimate grounds for occupying, privatizing, and demanding ownership of a body of flowing water. By the end of the century, as we see from the article in El Foro and also from Cuéllar and Payno’s texts, the ungovernability of water remained a challenge for a society keen on private property. According to Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, a crucial aspect for the consolidation of capitalism was the elaboration of the “commodity fiction,” which, according to him, led to the commodification of the uncommodifiable: nature (land) and labor. In the name of the circulation and accumulation of wealth, Polanyi argues, land came to be seen as a commodity from which rent could be extracted. The commodification of nature and labor was therefore centered on a fiction: proceeding with their exploitation also meant proceeding with the annihilation of the world. Thus, the commodity fiction was what made it possible to disavow the unsustainability of such a

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relationship.26 Although Polanyi’s focus on the “commodity fiction” involved both land and labor, it is worth considering how a similar view was also built around water. Furthermore, following the argument of this section, it is important to study how literature played a role in creating the imaginary infrastructure that would support the commodification of water in the Mexican context. If flowing water could not be owned, it at least could be managed for profit. Cuéllar’s description of water as ungovernable and therefore as a liquid that defied appropriation, thus emphasized the need for a modern infrastructure that could better control its shape, its flow, its scent, and through all this make it more amenable to commodification and private ownership. The aim was to channel water directly into the city, preventing it from being misused by peasants for agriculture and other rural applications: “Luego sucede con esta agua de mis pecados, que apenas le abre un campesino de por esos rumbos un cañito, paf! Allá va contentísima, como si no supiera que su primer deber es venirse derechito a México, sin meterse con nadie.”27 Cuéllar thus insisted that given the Ayuntamiento’s inability to manage urban water on its own, it made sense to establish a new water commission, funded with money paid by consumers of water in the city and managed by “ingenieros hábiles y bien pagados.”28 Although he didn’t explicitly say so, Cuéllar’s administrative vision toward a private management of the liquid probably entailed openness to foreign investment, especially since the next paragraphs in the article were dedicated to Mexico’s foreign relations and international status. This certainly would have followed the widespread view of the Porfiriato and its links to foreign developers. Furthermore—and almost inadvertently—Cuéllar’s imagined infrastructure for the privatization of water added a new layer to the hierarchy organizing urban and rural spaces: at the expense of peasants, water had to be redirected straight into the city. Notably, in Cuéllar’s article, diverting water from its wayward nature, making it “governable” and therefore open to privatization and to certain forms of individual ownership, consisted in building an infrastructure that would channel and manage its flow. This went hand in hand with the representation of water as a resource both scarce and unlimited. In describing the Ayuntamiento’s incapacity, he explained how the government would exhaust all other resources and services if their inadequate maintenance continued. Water, however, was inexhaustible; not even the Ayuntamiento’s incompetence could deplete the nation of all its water deposits.29

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As Jean Robert analyzes in Water Is a Commons, global abundance and scarcity go together: The contradiction between the promise of ever more and perceived restrictions is called scarcity. As Paul Dumouchel has convincingly shown, scarcity is not an inherent property of nature. It is a relation. . .The existence of low supplies is compatible with low degrees of experienced scarcity, but the opposite is a fortiori true: immense supplies can coexist with unbearable levels of experienced scarcity. This relation is witnessed in, and indeed is a broad characteristic of, the modern industrial world, especially in relation to water: never have the readily accessible quantities been so great, and yet never has water been experienced so scarce.30

Indeed, Cuéllar’s experience and literary figuration of water as both boundless and scarce was part of a modernizing landscape that had begun to register the perils and wonders of industrialization, however incipient. In the practice developed by nineteenth-century writers to document Mexico’s everyday life, establishing a typology of the country’s inhabitants through costumbrista descriptions, the water boy was a constant favorite. He was included in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos,31 the famous almanac of social types, as well as in the reflections of important writers of the time, like Guillermo Prieto. Cuéllar himself offered his readers a personal take on this character. But if Payno’s and Prieto’s vignettes presented a more dialectical vision of the water boy, recognizing both positive and negative aspects of his intervention in Mexican society, the water boy was seen only as a burden by the time Cuéllar wrote his piece, an obstacle to Mexico’s modernization. The article’s opening sentence thus draws a parallel between the water boy and stagnation, describing him as the “representante impávido del status quo.”32 In the age of iron and steel that (according to Cuéllar) was represented by New York’s pipeline infrastructure, the water boy was a living relic from the Stone Age.33 Carrying water from fountains to his buyers’ homes in a clay barrel called a chochocol, the water boy was not only an anachronistic image of manual labor accessing bodies of water that were commonly owned, but also a symbolic obstacle interfering with the project of configuring urban circulation, in analogy to that of the human bloodstream. The pathway to the privatization of water emphasized a link between movement and liberal modernity as a matter of management and controlled circulation. Cuéllar had no trouble recognizing Mexico’s infrastructural inheritance from preHispanic times and through the colonial period with respect to the construction

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of aqueducts, fountains, and other water deposits. As he saw it, the landmark that separated the past from the future consisted not only in channeling water through modern metal pipelines, but also, and more importantly, in the ability to control its pressure. The great novelty in water infrastructure was making water “self-governable,” providing it with the substrate that would make it into “motora de sí misma, como la sangre en el sistema arterial y venoso del cuerpo humano.”34 The grand achievement of water infrastructure in New York, then, was having succeeded in making water constantly available. Furthermore, this liquid’s regular flow was only achieved by managing its circulation. This meant making it run and stop at different intervals. Thus, modern water infrastructure was not only a flat grid of interconnected tubes; rather, it was a complicated multidimensional network that played with depth and height in order to achieve the desired pressure and constancy of flow: El agua en New York, por ejemplo, no llega a la ciudad, sino después de haber recorrido algunas millas en grandes tubos de fierro, de donde las toman bombas poderosas para formar depósitos inmensos y elevados donde el agua se asienta, se airea y se filtra, para volver a entrar en la cañería con la presión que necesita para ir a buscar el aguamanil del baño de un tercer piso.35

As we can see, Cuéllar’s article drew a parallel between the process of managing water’s constant flow—as New York had done—and the historical shift he believed necessary for Mexico to enter the future. In the passage cited above, he described the process of making water “self-regulated” and “governable” as one that entailed not only circulation, but also filtering and purification. New York’s pipeline system therefore stood in stark contrast with the water boy and his chochocol, whose clay and leather materials (leather was used to cover the receptacle) left an aftertaste in the water: “El cuero curtido sometido a una nueva infusión, tiende a despojarse del tanino que adquirió en la curtiduría, tanino que, en unión del sebo y del zulaque, hace exclamar a muchas personas cultas candorosamente: -¿A qué sabe hoy el agua? Tiene un sabrocilo. . .”36 Like the modern water infrastructure that was destined to filter this liquid and render it odorless, tasteless, and colorless in preparation for its individualized consumption, Cuéllar saw Mexico’s movement toward progress, too, as one of purification: ridding itself of the residues left by its primitive and colonial past and their antiquated forms of communal property. In H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich explores how industrialization affected the imaginary of water, divesting it of its symbolic

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power; once the liquid of dreams and remembrance running along the River Lethe, it was now reduced to being merely H2O. Important echoes resonate between Cuéllar’s text and Illich’s philosophical reflection on water. Beyond Illich’s nostalgic tendencies, his insights capture how infrastructural changes feed our imagination—and, likewise, how changes in our imagination also end up transforming our relationships to others and the environment. Making water governable and making it a commodity was therefore accompanied by a major transformation in the connections that inhabitants sustained with each other and the world. Although, as mentioned earlier, nineteenth-century Mexican legislation stipulated that flowing water could not be owned, channeling it into private homes through pipes was certainly a powerful factor in its privatization—in the sense of both ownership and intimacy. Cuéllar’s text did outline, if not explicitly, the ways in which building a modern water system was expected to have multiple effects on the configuration of the social body. Displacing the remnants of the past with novel technologies—from canoes and lead pipes to iron tubes and reservoirs—would entail, among other things, getting rid of “ladrones de agua.”37 Logically, the idea that water was a resource that could be stolen, already classified it as a resource that could also be owned. “El aguador”—Cuéllar’s take on the water boy—therefore stages an interesting discrepancy between the legal and the imaginary, placing literature as an anticipation of juridical transformations pertaining to the privatized consumption of water. In this sense, Cuéllar’s text is also an important resource for considering the overlap between privacy and privatization. Expounding on the many advantages that would come from building a modern water infrastructure, he wrote, “Cada vecino toma el agua que necesita de cada uno de los bitoques de su uso privado, sin más tasa que su discreción y seguro de que ninguna mano extraña ha enturbiado el precioso líquido, que viene desde gran distancia resguardado de toda contingencia y hasta de las miradas profanas.”38 Accessing water in one’s home thus meant that interactions with others could be avoided. Instead of having to fetch it from the water boy, or from a public fountain where one would have to mingle with the neighbors, one could now simply open the faucet and let the liquid pour into the kitchen, bathroom, or laundry sink. The lack of contact not only transformed social relations and resulted in increasing isolation from common spaces; it also meant that the water one received had been “less manipulated.” In other words, untouched by others’ hands, it was imagined to flow neatly and purely from the spring into one’s private living space—thus

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cultivating the illusion that the water being used was, indeed, one’s own private water. Once again, as we have seen before with the novel El comerciante en perlas, Cuéllar’s writings offered readers views on the embodied and quotidian experience of individualized notions of property. Read against the grain, Cuéllar’s texts on water also reveal a crucial notion for thinking about the commons that has been mostly highlighted in recent theorizations on the matter. Namely, that the commons do not really designate a specific resource, or good, but actually refer to social relations and processes that are continuously remade.39 Emphasizing the fluidity of the commons, seeing them as processes and relations instead of as fixed goods, allows us to, as Sandro Mezzadra suggests, move past nostalgic views in order to actualize the fact that the commons are “to be produced.”40 Cuéllar’s insights that transforming the infrastructures for the circulation of water entailed also a transformation of social relations hit precisely on this mark. His insights also reveal—like previously studied in El comerciante—that private property is a relation of enmity, where the other is (almost) always a threat. If, as could be appreciated through the study of Payno’s treaty, property was seen as a relation that guaranteed stability in both the natural and social orders, the ungovernability of water—marking the limits of that which could be individually owned—was also constantly invoked to think more broadly about proper/improper relations within the social. That is to say, water was often a symbolic figuration of that which resisted appropriation and therefore undermined and demarcated the limits of modernization. It is hereto not surprising that the “ungovernability” of water often made its appearance when thinking about Mexico’s relation to modernity. This was earlier seen in Cuéllar’s take on the water boy but will be further developed below through a study of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s literary approaches to water. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera also viewed water as a basis for exploring modernization. “Nada es más triste que el espectáculo de la ciudad en una noche de inundación,” he wrote in “Pasados por agua,” one of his chronicles.41 Like many before him, the modernist writer set out to detail the troubles that flooding presented for Mexico City. Alexander von Humboldt had diagnosed the problem as of the early 1800s and envisioned solving it by draining the city’s surrounding lakes. By the end of the century, Porfirio Díaz had continued this lineage, determined to perfect the urban infrastructure and improve the management of pluvial waters by constructing the Sistema de Desagüe del Valle de México (Draining System of the Valley of Mexico).42 Gutiérrez Nájera’s

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chronicles on rain were therefore part of a broad corpus compiling dreams and projects related to managing the circulation of rainwater in the city. While Cuéllar viewed the “ungovernability” of water as linked to its usage, specifically to the lack of an indoor plumbing infrastructure that could facilitate the liquid’s constant flow and private use, Gutiérrez Nájera saw water as “unruly” for different reasons: He was concerned with overabundance, not with scarcity. His chronicles evoked water for its destructive and erosive prowess: “El agua, en efecto, lo destruye todo.”43 Despite their differences, however, both Cuéllar and Gutiérrez Nájera resorted to water in offering their respective takes on historicity and seeking to grapple with the perceived uneven temporalities of modernity. Gutiérrez Nájera depicted floods—and the muddiness that came with them—as obstacles to the cherished freedom of movement within the city. The swampiness of the inundated urban landscape provided him with images of obstruction and stagnation: cars stuck in the roads with water above their axles, wealthy people paying others to carry them over puddles, and bacteria proliferating amid clean water mixed with the residues of the sewers.44 It was precisely the breakdown of infrastructure, the inadequacy of the drainage system, and the ongoing floods in the city that allowed him to expand on his remarks.45 In an ironic tone, Gutiérrez Nájera wrote about the incompatibility of rain and urban settings: “Nunca he podido comprender las conveniencia de que llueva en las ciudades. . .Que diluvie en los campos, bien está.. . .Pero que llueva en las ciudades populosas es verdaderamente incomprensible.”46 Humor aside, Gutiérrez Nájera here captured (as did Cuéllar) the desire of his time to create and delineate clear boundaries between those social elements seen as belonging to the past and those seen as heralding the future (the proper and the improper). The image of the flooded city not only addressed the impediment of movement in the present, but it also became a figure for Gutiérrez Nájera’s historical imagination. If modernity meant that everything was subject to transformation, how could he understand that natural phenomena had remained uncontrollable for centuries, affecting societies in the same ways over the entire span of human history? To Gutiérrez Nájera, rain (and natural catastrophes) thus marked the stubborn limit of modernization, that which ought to be controlled and overcome in order for the fantasies of progress to become effectively materialized. As such, his descriptions of rain contributed to create the uneven geography that was sustained on the opposition between the country and the city.

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Lucidly describing the endless spiral of capitalist transformation and the production of unevenness, the absurdity of Gutiérrez Nájera’s remarks renders his vision of modernization evermore transparent. In his eyes, the fact that rain posed an ongoing problem for the city simultaneously confirmed its modernity and its “backwardness.” The downpours over the Mexican capital during the rainy season created a spectacle of both present and historical immobility. Gutiérrez Nájera depicted them as a regression: En la Carrera vertiginosa de la época, todo aquello que permanence estacionario, queda atrás. Llueve hoy como llovía en las épocas de Felipe II, como llovía en los años de la Inquisición, como llovió en el reinado del primer rey Carlovingio. Esto es una vergüenza. El caro líquido del agua nos ata aún a los días del retroceso y la barbarie.47

As the passage states, rain and floods provided Gutiérrez Nájera with more metaphors for the persistence of tradition. At the same time, they formed the basis of a call for change; they were both the limit and the promise of modernity. Plunging into the future, Gutiérrez Nájera ended his chronicle by imagining a somewhat ridiculous and utopian infrastructure for the management of rain, one that he fantasized would be designed and constructed sometime in the future: The invention would be used to dissipate clouds hovering over the city, using ammunition to push them away from their anachronistic position and toward where they were actually necessary: in the countryside.48 Interestingly enough, Gutiérrez Nájera’s concern with anachronism did not prompt him to envision a homogenous transformation of the entire world. Rather, his views focused on theorizing the uneven development of capitalist modernization: rain, albeit a sign of regression in the city, still had an important role to play in rural areas.49 Water’s ungovernable nature, both scarce and abundant, fluid and volatile, was brought into literary and journalistic text as a way to address the perceived obstacles that Mexico was facing in entering modernity. Within the realm of privatization and property, the resistance that water presented to ownership was seen as a residue from the past, something to be overcome. If literature was helpful in disseminating quotidian perspectives on appropriation and possession that had begun with the legal reforms of the 1850s, it also was an important tool in reconfiguring the relations to the commons, thus participating in the processes of dispossession, accumulation, and enclosures on the commons that characterized the second half of the century and that later would lead to the onset of the Revolution.50

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Notes 1 For an excellent overview of Cuéllar’s role in shaping Mexico’s literary sphere see the essays compiled in Margo Glantz, coord. Del fistol a la linterna: homenaje a José Tomás de Cuéllar y Manuel Payno en el centenario de su muerte (México: UNAM, 1997). For more information about the relation between this novel and its historic context see Belem Clark de Lara, “El comerciante en perlas (1871) de José Tomás de Cuéllar ¿una novela histórica?” Literatura Mexicana 11, no. 1 (2000): 79–112. 2 José Tomás de Cuéllar, El comerciante en perlas (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997), chs. I–III. 3 The novel was originally published in 1871 in El Federalista, a newspaper directed by Manuel Payno. 4 Chad Luck, The Body of Property (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 6. 5 Although legislated at the time, it is commonly asserted that the laws of confiscation were not thoroughly implemented until the Porfiriato years. For a recent discussion on the topic of land confiscation and reform during the period see Emilio Kourí, “Los pueblos y sus tierras en el México porfiriano: un legado inexplorado de Andrés Molina Enríquez,” in En busca de Molina Enríquez: cien años de Los grandes problemas nacionales, ed. Emlio Kourí Coord (México: El Colegio de México, 2009), 253–330. See also Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, “La desamortización de tierras civiles corporativas en México: ¿una ley agraria, fiscal o ambas? Una aproximación a las tendencias en la historiografía,” México agrario 25 (2012). For discussions related to the use of water in Mexico during the nineteenth century see Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, Martín Sánchez Rodríguez y Ana María Gutiérrez Rivas Coords, Agua y tierra en México: siglos XIX y XX (Michoacán/San Luis: El Colegio de Michoacán y El Colegio de San Luis, 2008). See also: Blanca Estela Suárez Cortez y Diana Birrichaga Gardida, Dos estudios sobre usos del agua en México, siglos XIX y XX (México: CIESAS-IMTA, 1997). 6 Ana Laura Zavala Díaz, “Los motivos de Facundo: un acercamiento a la figura de José Tomás de Cuéllar,” in La República de las letras: asomos a la cultura escrita del México decimonónico, ed. Belém Clark de Lara and Elisa Speckman Guerra, vol. III (México: UNAM, 2005), 323. 7 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: And a Letter concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 111–112. 8 In his book Chad Luck writes about a phenomenology of possession. I am here following his understanding of the term. See Luck, The Body of Property, 9. 9 Cuéllar, El comerciante en perlas, 32. Amidst the multiplicity of tiny oysters that lay before him, Eduardo saw an enormous one; he opened it and while almost throwing out the shells, noticed

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a black object in one of them that called his attention as it fell into the sand. He climbed down and picked up the object as he examined it, trembling . . . It was an enormous black pearl, the size of a broad bean, clear and brilliant, forming a perfect oval. Only one of its sides had a small white stain with the shape of a star. Although uncertain of its value, Eduardo knew that pearl alone was worth a fortune. He examined it attentively; passing it from one hand to the other, kissing it a hundred times, his heart swelling with joy, a joy that triplicated his courage and strength to continue the task. This and other translations are mine unless they are otherwise noted. 10 11 12 13 14

Luck, The Body of Property, 17, 132. Luck, The Body of Property, 186. Cuéllar, El comerciante en perlas, 33. “Good God! The world is mine!” Luck, The Body of Property, 144. Manuel Payno, Tratado de la propiedad: ensayo de un estudio del derecho romano y del derecho público y constitucional en lo relativo a la propiedad (México: Imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido, 1869), ch. 1. 15 Payno, Tratado de la propiedad, 10. With creation, property was born. Fish were assigned to waters, men and other animals to land, and birds to wind. Remove for a second this great distribution of nature and you will entirely destruct the physical order. Submerge man into the water, take the fish out of the ocean, and make the bird traverse the same distance by foot instead of by wings, and you will find but discomposure and death everywhere. 16 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 113. 17 Payno, Tratado de la propiedad, 15. “property is the verb, the substance itself, the precise element of the life of societies.” 18 Karl Marx, “Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 19 Cuéllar, El comerciante en perlas, 22. Where does one find them you ask? That is my secret, young man. How have I come to know this? By the greatest of chances. Thrown into the Pacific coasts by a storm, as I came back from California where I had traveled to sell a shipment, I landed in a bay that I thought deserted, where I found. . .what do you think I found? A terrible canoe, with a terrible sail made out of leafs and branches, and a little further away two savages occupied in opening oysters. I approached and saw them collecting within a squash an object they were extracting from the oysters. My curiosity led me to come closer and request an explanation from them. But what was my surprise when I realized that they had at their disposal a bank of pearl oysters! I took out my bag and gave them the forty pesos I had in exchange

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20 Sandro Mezzadra, “The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation,’” Rethinking Marxism 23 (2011): 305. 21 Escobar Ohmstede et al., Agua y tierra, Intro. 22 Payno, Tratado de la propiedad, 23. The indocile and turbulent oceans, impeding the erection of fences and barriers and erasing from their moving and fluid surface the trace left by the wake of the ship as soon as it passes, have permitted no dominion nor division; as such, the seas are the paths for all human race, and only in our times have we consented not to property, but to establishing a manor over a small fringe of the ocean closest to each nation’s shoreline. 23 José Tomás de Cuéllar, “Las Prosperidades nuestras,” in Los Imprescindibles: José T. de Cuéllar, selection and forward by Belem Clark de Lara (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1999), 676. “What has happened to water?” 24 Cuéllar, “Las Prosperidades nuestras,” 677. “If we lack for water, it is because this liquid is intrinsically very willful and very delicate; above all, it is highly evasive.” 25 “Cuestiones legales sobre aguas públicas,” El Foro, December 8, 1891, 598–599. “Flowing public waters contain, within their own nature, the first and greatest obstacle to being usurped by an act of occupation: their discontinuous possession.” 26 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), ch. 6. 27 Cuéllar, “Las Prosperidades nuestras,” 677. “What happens, furthermore, with this accursed water, is that as soon as a farmer from around those parts opens up a little pipe, boom! There it flows, perfectly content, as if it did not realize that its primary obligation is to travel directly to Mexico City without getting into anyone else’s business.” 28 Cuéllar, “Las Prosperidades nuestras,” 678. “skillful and well-paid engineers.” 29 Cuéllar, “Las Prosperidades nuestras,” 677. 30 Jean Robert, Water Is a Commons (Mexico: Habitat International Coalition, 1994), 17. 31 Manuel Payno, “El Aguador,” in Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos (México: Imprenta M. Murguía y Compañía, 1854), 1–6. 32 Cuéllar, “El aguador,” in Los Imprescindibles: José T. de Cuéllar 622. “representative of the status quo.”

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33 Cuéllar, “El aguador,” 626. 34 Cuéllar, “El aguador,” 623. “Its own motor, just like the arterial and venous system of the human body.” 35 Cuéllar, “El aguador,” 623.

Water in New York, for example, only reaches the city after it has traveled various miles in large iron tubes, from which it is taken up by powerful pumps that form enormous elevated deposits where the water settles, aerates, and is filtered, subsequently re-entering the pipe system with the necessary pressure to flow off in search of a third-floor bathroom sink. 36 Cuéllar, “El aguador,” 628. “The cured leather, subjected to a new infusion, tends to rid itself of the tannin it acquired during the curing process—a tannin that, when combined with the tallow and tube-stuff, makes many cultured people innocently exclaim, ‘What does the water taste of today? It has an odd tang. . .’” 37 Cuéllar, “El Aguador,” 625. “Water thieves.” 38 Cuéllar, “El Aguador,” 624. “Each neighbor takes the water he needs from each tube designated for his personal use, with no rate other than his own discretion and with the certainty that no strange hand has muddied the precious liquid, which has traveled a great distance, protected from all manner of eventualities and even from profane eyes.” 39 Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo, “Notas para repensar el despojo y lo común desde el marxismo crítico,” in La Crisis, el Poder y los Movimientos Sociales en el Mundo Global (México: UNAM, forthcoming), 9. 40 Mezzadra, “The Topicality of Prehistory,” 318. 41 Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, “Pasados por Agua,” in Los Imprescindibles: Manuel Gutiérrez Gutiérrez Nájera, selection and foreword by Rafael Pérez Gay (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1996), 294. “There is no sadder sight than the spectacle of a city on a night of flooding.” 42 Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 3–6. 43 Gutiérrez Nájera, “Inutilidad de las lluvias,” in Los Imprescindibles: Manuel Gutiérrez Gutiérrez Nájera, 312. “Water, indeed, destroys everything.” 44 Gutiérrez Nájera, “Pasados por agua,” 294. 45 For further insight into how the breakdown of infrastructure renders certain processes visible see Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 336. 46 Gutiérrez Nájera, “Inutilidad de las lluvias,” 311. “I have never managed to comprehend the convenience rain in the cities . . . It is acceptable for it to pour in the countryside . . . But rain in densely populated cities is truly incomprehensible.”

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47 Gutiérrez Nájera, “Inutilidad de las lluvias,” 311. In the dizzying race of the times, all things stationary are left behind. It rains today as it rained in the time of Philip II; as it rained in the years of the Inquisition; as it rained during the reign of the first Carolingian king. This is an embarrassment. The cherished liquid of water still ties us to the days of backwardness and barbarism. 48 Gutiérrez Nájera, “Inutilidad de las lluvias,” 314. 49 Ibid. 50 I would like to thank Humberto Schwarzbeck and Alejo Stark for pointing me in the direction of a vast bibliography on water and the commons. Finally, I would like to thank Ignacio Sánchez Prado for inviting me to publish my work in this volume.

4

Pale Theory: Amado Nervo and the Absential José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra

Como blanca teoría por el desierto Amado Nervo1 Amado Nervo was born in the small city of Tepic, Nayarit, in 1870, at the cusp of the Pax Porfiriana. Not unlike many young men of the provinces with little economic means, Nervo was educated in a religious school in Jacoma and then in the seminar of Zamora, both in Michoacán.2 His first texts were published in El Correo de la Tarde, a local newspaper of the Pacific port of Mazatlán.3 Not long after that, already in Mexico City, he garnered early success with the story El bachiller (1895) that would be translated into French as Origène in 1901 and remains part of the minor canon of early Mexican narrative.4 Despite this success in narrative and his uninterrupted and sizeable prose output, Nervo became mainly identified as a poet. From his very first collections Perlas negras and Místicas, both from 1898, he was widely acclaimed as a young master of the new style, a continuator of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859– 1895), the harbinger of modernismo in Mexico whom Nervo had been reading from his years in Mazatlán. After these promising beginnings, he became an assiduous collaborator of the groundbreaking Revista Moderna—which he would later codirect with Jesús F. Valenzuela5—and several newspapers in Mexico City, such as El Imparcial, the daily that sent him to Paris to write about the Exposition Universelle of 1900, and where he would remain until 1903 living as a translator and freelance journalist. In Paris, Nervo met other crucial modernista writers such as Rubén Darío and Enrique Gómez Carrillo, as well as his beloved Ana Cecilia Luisa Dailliez. Part of this expedition is chronicled in El éxodo y las flores del camino (1902), the crucial book that will be the focus of most of this chapter.

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At the very least until his 1905 collection of verse Los jardines interiores is published and which, for many, marks the climax of his career, he was the foremost Mexican poet. In 1906, Nervo joined the diplomatic corps and served in Madrid. From that moment onward, he purified his style, away from its initial ornate nature. Later works such as Serenidad (1914) or Elevación (1917) are good examples of this transformation. The death in 1912 of Ana Dailliez, his companion of a decade, provided the subject matter that allowed Nervo to reach the summit of his late style: the posthumously published collection of verse (alas, with a sizable fifty-page narrative preamble) La amada inmóvil (1920), a lamentation of the bereft lover.6 Nervo died in 1919, holding diplomatic office, as enviado extraordinario y ministro plenipotenciario (extraordinary envoy and plenipotentiary minister) of Mexico in Argentina and Uruguay. His body was shipped from Montevideo to Veracruz, stopping, in the course of six months, in several ports of Latin America to receive homage. His multitudinous funeral in Mexico City is, to this day, remembered as a sign of his popularity. The first of the twenty-nine volumes of his Obras completas, edited by the young Alfonso Reyes, was printed in 1920.7 Yet, by the time the last volume appeared in 1928 and the Mexican reprint was undertaken by Editorial Botas in 1932, Nervo’s fortunes had begun to change, partly because at least some of the attraction his work exerted on his audiences, as all of his biographers agree, was performative. But it was also due to the critical turn that can be traced to two of the more brilliant intellectuals of the group that came together in the Contemporáneos magazine. Jorge Cuesta and Xavier Villaurrutia anointed Ramón López Velarde as the most important poet of the recent past, while making Nervo (along with Gutiérrez Nájera and Juan de Dios Peza) the example of everything literature should not be.8 He did not fare much better with the rival group that propounded a “virile literature,” and that blandished Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo as the prime example of what such a textual masculinity should read like.9 This eclipse, however, was far from total. Witness the two-volume edition Obras completas prepared by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Francisco González Guerrero and published by Aguilar in the early 1950s.10 After this, in 1969, Manuel Durand published Genio y figura de Amado Nervo, followed by the seminal Antología del modernismo edited by José Emilio Pacheco, in 1970, the year of his centennial. Despite this, comparatively little serious thinking took place about Nervo, despite or perhaps because his poetry books remained in print, and countless generations of recitadores sin maestro, as people who recite

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poetry as a hobby or professionally are called, memorized and declaimed his verse in social occasions.11 After that, and up to this day, many of the more interesting efforts to reread Nervo have been informed by cultural studies. The basic critical move here consists in, firstly, accepting the banishment of Nervo from the center of the traditional (“high”) cultural field, but only to, in a second, compensatory moment, insist on his foundational importance in the shaping of contemporary popular culture, from his pioneer efforts in what later will be called science fiction, to sentimental journalism, and centrally, the formation of a national and in fact transnational affectivity most clearly legible in popular music: for instance, Le Pera, the author of the celebrated tango “El día que me quieras,” used an eponymous poem by Nervo from the 1915 collection El arquero divino as the basis of his song.12

Not raro enough The case of Nervo is not exceptional. Rather, it constitutes a prime example, perhaps the most salient one, of a large body of authors in the field of Mexican literature that, despite their undeniable importance, seem to elude a serious theoretical engagement. It would seem only a handful of books are able to consistently elicit this sort of critical practice—books such as the perennial favorite Pedro Páramo, Morirás lejos by José Emilio Pacheco, Farabeuf by Salvador Elizondo, and, more recently, the works of Mario Bellatin. This is not to say that other works, such as the poetry of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes’s novels, or the recent boom of attempts to fictionalize the violence created by narcocapitalism, lack critical attention. There are countless articles and dozens of theses and dissertations devoted wholly or in part to Sor Juana, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Mariano Azuela, Rodolfo Usigli, Rosario Castellanos, José Agustín, Guillermo Fadanelli, and Eduardo Antonio Parra.13 The difference between the works frequently and vigorously engaged in a theoretical fashion and the rest of the Mexican literary canon can be succinctly formulated as follows: the former are read as raros, while the latter are not.14 The fact that a clear antonym to raro remains elusive is quite telling. What word should we use to refer to the boring statistical mean that serves as the background against which the raro gathers its strangeness? Orthodox perhaps? Until the genius of a new Rubén Darío provides us with a terse complement to

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pair raro, we seem doomed to remain stuck between misnomers and a blank. For the time being, I propose to supplement the dull “orthodox” with the still awkward scientism absential that points to the undertheorized but crucial features of said “orthodox” works.15 It may be easier to understand the latter if the usefulness of the raro is first sketched. In what surely won’t remain long as his latest book, Slavoj Žižek states: The ontological axiom of disparity is that . . . a disparate structure is universal, constitutive of (what we experience as) reality: reality which we experience is never “all”; in order to generate the illusion of “all” it has to be supplemented by a disparate artificial element which fills in its gap or hole, as in a movie set composed of “real” elements (trees, tables, walls), but with a painted background which creates the illusion that we are in a “real” external world. The first philosopher who clearly saw this was Kant: the reality we experience is non-all, inconsistent, we cannot totalize it without getting caught in antinomies, so that the only way to experience reality as a consistent Whole is to supplement it with transcendental Ideas.16

If we transpose “reality” (which is, after all, nothing but a field, as the accretion of an adjective such as “social” or “physical” proves) with the name of another field such as literature, the formulation remains apt. The literary field, as the sustained efforts of Russian formalists proved, is also non-all (in the sense of the Lacanian pas-tout) thus in need of the help of transcendental ideas, to gain consistency; in this case in the more modest form of criticism, and preferably what, many times uncritically, we call “theory” . Allow me then to toy around a bit with Žižek’s example. On the example, Žižek writes, “In the gap that separates a notion from its examples, the truth is on the side of examples, examples bring out immanent inconsistencies of a notion, so when examples do not fit a notion, we should transform this notion itself ” and a bit further down, “There is more in an example of a notion that in a notion of which the example is an example, that is, the gap between a notion and its example is internal to the notion itself.”17 These passages are crucial, because, when we talk about “literature” it becomes necessary to privilege one “real element” that is, one book (or books) which occupies the foreground, and renders the rest of the library a mere background that could be entirely made of cardboard as in movie sets or model homes. There are two ways to read this gesture. The first is assuming that this chosen book effectively captures what Patrick Dove calls tone or mood, and attunement—translating Heidegger’s concepts of Stimmung and Bestimmung,

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respectively18—that is, the book in question is extraordinary not only in regards to its great quality, but also summarizes the common features of an epoch and thus effectively fends the danger of what Hegel called (at least in its English translation) bad or spurious infinity: the unending proliferation of elements that can never find their closure. The exemplary book is powerful enough to obviate the rest of the library. This is of course the assumption of the syllabus: it suffices to read Pedro Páramo in order to dispense with the rest of the Novelas de la Revolución Mexicana. Naturally, every good scholar of Mexican literature will reproach me, rightly, that my example is facetious, for Pedro Páramo is not part of that canonical corpus. Yet, had it not been for Rulfo’s masterpiece, we would have forever remained unable to formulate the set of the Novela de la Revolución, at least as we do it.19 This is the cornerstone of the second reading. Again, one book is closely examined and the rest of literature becomes its background, as in the previous reading, but there is a slight shift in emphasis through which this chosen book is able to create closure. This book is read not as exemplary, but rather as exceptional, and thus the importance of Žižek’s observations: the example is more powerful than the notion it exemplifies. In other words, the book, in this case, is chosen because it does not share the qualities of the set it allows to come to closure.20 In other words, the heterodoxy of the true raro confers positivity to the orthodoxy of the rest of the field, an orthodoxy that, before it, remained unnamed, and in fact unnamable. Somewhat brutally: it is not that the raro allows us to peek into a preexisting (back)ground but in fact retrospectively creates it. It is usually this book, no matter if it’s read as exemplary or exceptional, that attracts most of the theoretical efforts, and little or none is spared for the (back) ground, the set that congeals after the apparition and analysis of the raro. In fact, part of the attraction exerted by the raro stems from the fact that it makes large bodies of literature read themselves, as it were, thus delivering us from the tedious work, say, of having to revisit the Mexican Arcadians or Alfonso Reyes’s sizable Obras completas. One feels thankful, then, when freed from the obligation to ever reread the set rendered unreadable (or at least unnecessary) by this new and strange marvel, and the label it retrospectively generates. That is also the reason why young authors worship the raro, because the retrospective obsolescence this figure generates also creates an impulse toward the future, toward new literature, the literature that hopes to share this new genealogy.21 Now, if we want to take a closer look at the core of the raro, or at least at what has been selected as the raro, we must pay attention at the striking parallel that

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exists between its texture and Žižek’s reading of the conditions of speculative judgment: What makes a judgment a speculative one is not directly its objective properties but the way a subject reads it: one tries to pass through it as we usually do it, just smoothly following its meaning, but then we get stuck, things do not hold together, the text resists our comprehension, so we have to return to the beginning and read the sentence again, in a different way. There is no direct way to read correctly such a judgment since la verité surgit de la méprise, the true meaning emerges only through our—the reader’s—reaction to the first reading. Therein resides the paradox of speculative judgment: the most subtle meaning can only emerge through interruption, inhibition, through our experience of “something not working.”22

One should firstly underline the fact that there is no universality or positivity here: no judgment is speculative per se, but rather it may become one through the “way a subject reads it.” Secondly, and as a consequence the whole process of rereading that could be posited as the common trait of the raro canon, what “exceptions” share, is not guaranteed but must be guarded, instead, by the text itself. In other words, the discontinuous plots, the ellipses, the recourse to repetition, and the intensive tropes that characterize the more overtly experimental works of Mexican literature can be read as symptomatic of the authorial anxiety vis à vis the possibility of a genius (or idiotic, extremes touch here) reader who will be able to avoid all the pitfalls created by the text itself and just plainly consume it from beginning to end. But, what if this very circulation (that of the drive) could be achieved otherwise? What if we could read with the same intellectual intensity a seemingly simpler text, one predicated on a different interpellation mechanism, a mode that has remained thus far undetected or, to say it differently, a book whose core is the absential feature, a book that the hegemony of the raro has rendered invisible? Wouldn’t that reconstitute a different field of literature?

The Book of Absentials: El éxodo y las flores del camino Originally published in installments in the Revista Moderna and then as a book in 1902, El éxodo y las flores del camino chronicles, as I stated before, Nervo’s first trip to Europe in 1900, purportedly to write about the World Fair in Paris. The adverb is not just a tic, for if one tries to read this book to learn about the Exposition, the results are meager: the great exhibition of belle époque capitalism can be read as its first absential.

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Already in the first few pages, as “Mexico is left behind” and he crosses the plains of Texas, something interesting happens and Nervo finely captures it: Y mientras atravieso el inmenso estado que fue nuestro, flota en mi oído el “buen viaje” de la furtiva compañera de tren y se me antoja que esas dos palabras son el solo girón de patria que me resta. En efecto: el idioma es la patria, una patria impalpable y divina que nos sigue por todas partes. Basta en una ciudad lejana decirse algunas frases de la nativa lengua en voz alta, para sentir algo como la atmósfera de los nuestros.23

With the very gesture of writing about his journey, as soon as he leaves Mexico, splitting sets in. The difference between the territory of the state, and the seemingly larger one of the nation24 are here tropes for something more: the very division between the writer that leaves for Europe, and the (displaced) subject that is the result not only of the journey, but of the self-observation that ensues when writing about the journey. A few lines below, for instance, this Mexican facing Greater Mexico ceases to be as generous as he seemed in the previous passage for, “En San Antonio, recorriendo las calles, sorprendo tal o cual tipo mexicano, pero tan innoble, que no me acerco, porque sé que de sus labios sólo han de surgir frases patibularias y no quiero ver profanado el armonioso tesoro de mi vieja lengua latina.”25 Racist and classist as this passage undeniably is, it allows us to understand one further aspect of the traveling I that Nervo creates. The traveler is not only inhabited by the desire to see, there is also a desire to avoid seeing; the scopic economy here is quite complex. There is what he is surprised to find, what he avoids to explore, and also the relational lines which are constantly moving between them. Let me state it concisely: what Nervo creates from the first pages of his book is the texture of the absential feature, which usually remains silent, “missing from our understanding.” I propose that we read the subject of El éxodo not (only) as a sketch of Nervo’s future years in the diplomatic service, but rather of the absential itself qua crucial component of the subject. The more obvious level here is the literal: Nervo leaves his home in Mexico City in order to write about the world fair in Paris. More importantly, as he writes about his journey, it becomes more apparent that he is never fully there: the very condition of grace of his prose is precisely that he remains partially absent from the scenes he narrates. The texture of his book greatly depends on the often playfully conveyed attempt of the subject to catch up with himself: the subject that “has not yet been in London but sees its dismal factories foreshadowed in the brick architecture of the American cities he glimpsed from the train” the subject that, when he

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quotes Baudelaire’s La voyage or Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre in the Atlantic, intimates how much he has wanted to recite them like this, it almost seems that he has committed them to memory longing for this background; the subject that attempts to visit H. G. Wells in London, “[p]ero Wells no está visible más que en sus libros, en todas las librerías. Le busco inútilmente. Viaja ahora.”26 In these examples he seems out of joint, condemned to perpetually arrive at the wrong time to meet not only the world, as in the boring topic of the periphery never being able to catch up with the metropolis, but, again, to meet himself, to achieve a subjective (in)consistency that would seem the crucial goal of his sinceridad.27 In order to further this inquiry, allow me to quote Monsiváis, who seriously engages the nature of sinceridad: A lo largo de su obra y de su vida emocional, Nervo se ajusta a la meta primordial, la sinceridad, el proceder de acuerdo a lo “que dimana del corazón.” Esta perspectiva es el certificado de unidad orgánica con sus lectores, es su recurso primer y último, su don escénico, su aporte vital y técnica, su método para situarse ante los conflictos. De acuerdo a la estrategia, el que es sincero se nutre del valor que el artificio y el ocultamiento emocional eliminan. En Sincerity and Authenticity, el ensayista norteamericano Lionel Trilling propone un distingo que resumo abruptamente: lo sincero es la vehemencia subjetiva y lo auténtico lo más cercano a la objetividad; de acuerdo a esto, Nervo es siempre sincero porque nunca se distancia de los sentimientos expresados por la confesión y de los aciertos de “la corazonada.” La sinceridad es su ventaja inequívoca y su limitación más severa, es la vía hacia los aciertos perdurables y, también, es el desbordamiento que al dar vueltas sobre sí mismo admite no tan ocasionalmente el fracaso.28

This is indeed an important passage, because Monsiváis underlines the performative (and hysterical) nature of sincerity. Since my innermost truth is far from self-evident, I need to insist on it. Sincerity is vehement because it is fueled by the (founded) suspicion of its own impossibility: I am trying to express something that ultimately is invisible to me prior to its expression, that is, sincerity is the articulation of an absential. Although sincerity was protected by conventional tropes, rhetoric and received ideas of genre in his more conventional and sentimental passages, in El éxodo, because of the topic that serves him as a vehicle, Nervo is better equipped to simultaneously exercise and examine it. The most important trait of this absential activation is to stress that, in it, the subject is here written as an absence to himself ($).This is precisely what makes

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El éxodo one of Nervo’s most lively books, not the list of predictable itineraries in tour cities, but the character Amado Nervo emerges as the truth of El éxodo much more forcibly than in, say, La amada inmóvil commonly deemed the summit of his sinceridad. Perhaps the only place where comparable passages can be found is in his correspondence, but there they lack the unity of this book. In one of the more memorable scenes of all the turn of the century Latin American literature, Nervo writes: En un rinconcito de la Abadía de Westminster, en una capilla medio alumbrada por la gloria extraña y doliente de los vitrales, hay un viejo sitial de roble, cuyo asiento es una piedra, recubierta en sus dos superficies más amplias por dos planchas de madera y como engastada en ellas. En ese sitial han sido coronados muchos viejos reyes de Britania, de los que duermen ahí cerca, en los mausoleos polvosos cuyas inscripciones apenas se descifran a la media luz de las vetustas naves. Pregunto y me dicen: —Esa piedra es la piedra de Jacob. —¿La piedra de Jacob? —Sí, la piedra en que Jacob reclinó su cabeza para dormir; la piedra que fue testigo de aquel sueño . . . Y se me explica cómo aquel objeto maravilloso vino de Mesopotamia a la City, a través de infinitas vicisitudes. Yo lo creo, lo creo todo . . . Cuando deje estas sombras góticas propensas al misterio; cuando salga a la vida enfermiza y ebria de actividad de la metrópoli, ya no creeré. La sonrisa escéptica vendrá con la sonrisa del sol . . . Pero ahora sí creo, en primer lugar porque eso es bello; en segundo y en tercer lugar . . . por la misma razón.29

This short fragment can be activated as a very concise theory of literature. The problem seems to be (when one has been educated in the tradition of “difficult” literature) that it is so well written that it seems hard to return to it, even to dwell on it. But isn’t that the very condition it describes? This is the way to read sincerity as something impermanent, that requires labor in order to be sustained. And does this not echo Alain Badiou’s reflection regarding the complex economy of the truth, firstly as event and then supported by a multiplicity that “proclaims” and that is Badiou’s definition of subject, that is, the subject is always the subject of a truth-event? In his early Theory of the Subject, Badiou writes, A subject is such that, subservient to the rule that determines a place, it nevertheless, punctuates the latter with the interruption of its effect.

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Mexican Literature in Theory Its subjectivizing essence lies in this very interruption, by which the place, where the rule is deregulated, consists in destruction. A subject is equally the process of recomposing, from the point of the interruption, another place and other rules.30

That is to say, in his later parlance, event is the rupture of the cause–effect link and subject is he who occupies the place of this extraordinary occurrence, but his presence would be ineffectual without the last process: recomposing from the very exception a new narrative and thus a new world. But there is, of course, something more. I believe the case of Nervo merits attention for he himself sets the example on how to read this. The narrator of these episodes of El éxodo is not just writing about his immediacy, but also, rereading himself, writing his apperception; his playfulness stems from the fact that he can see himself, not only in the present, but simultaneously from the future, from the distant point of view of his readers in El Imparcial or Revista Moderna. In other words, he can see the naïve tourist as a subject enjoying himself, but also of the moment his joy shall cease. In fact, chapter XI, “En defensa de la mentira,” opens with a recapitulation of this church visit. It is also one of the most overtly theoretical tracts of the book, and if one manages to bypass the obvious drag of its aged rhetoric—“sólo la mentira es bella,”31 and the rest of the modernista ornaments—an important moment emerges: Quitad del mundo la mentira . . . los sexos no irán ya el uno hacia el otro engañados por el genio de la especie, que es un gran mentiroso . . . los pueblos se detendrán en el camino del progreso, porque ya no podrán seguir el señuelo de una esperanza . . . los luchadores dejarán sus armas a la vera del camino, porque ya no pueden enarbolar el lábaro de un ensueño. La gente cristiana enterrará la leyenda de Jesús, y llorará sobre ese cadáver inmenso; la Naturaleza, la madre mentirosa y santa ya no pondrá arrullos en la garganta de la paloma enamorada, ni espolvoreará piedras preciosas sobre el plumaje del pavo real; y los hombres todos, como en el tremendo cuadro que describe Mallarmé en el Fenómeno futuro, se encaminarán hacia su lámpara, con el cerebro ebrio un instante de una gloria confusa, perseguidos por el ritmo y con la angustia de existir en una época que ha sobrevivido a la belleza.32

The passage offers an important meditation on fiction, and the status of literature as the deployer of mentira par excellence. Without it, sexuality, economy, emancipation, religion, and even humanity as we conceive it would be absolutely impossible, for there is no way to directly posit them.

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The passage, furthermore, begs the question: how should we understand these foundational “lies” in light of sincerity? Are they to be read in simple opposition or, rather, in a more complex dialectical relation? I believe the latter to be the case: inasmuch as sinceridad is the attempt of something impossible, namely to bring out my agalma for the benefit of the community of my readers, it must always rely on the rhetoric powers of fiction, and thus, it must voluntarily err. This is, Nervo knows, and in El éxodo says as much: truth can only be produced mediating it through the symbolic. In other words, literature (qua fiction) is the name of the oscillation between the (failed) rhetorization of the absential and the textual trace of this failure. The literary subject, namely the I in El éxodo, crystalizes as the apperception of this oscilation. About this subject, Žižek says: From the Lacanian standpoint, it is not enough to say that every symbolic representation simply fails, is inadequate to the subject it represents (“words always betray me . . .”): much more radically, the subject is the retroactive effect of the failure of its representation. It is because of this failure that the subject is divided—not into something and something else, but into something (its symbolic representation) and nothing, and fantasy fills the void of this nothingness. And the catch is that this symbolic representation of the subject is primordially not its own: prior to speaking, I am spoken, identified as a name by the parental discourse, and my speech is from the very outset a kind of hysterical reaction to being spoken to: “Am I really then, that name, what you’re saying I am?”33

I agree with this reading, and in it, I find a convincing explanation of the importance and the jouissance that derives from the sort of work Žižek privileges, that of the usual heroes of modernism—Kazimir Malevich, Anton Webern, Samuel Beckett, and Sergei Einsenstein, the consecrated raros of the twentieth century. Yet, it makes me wonder whether the only sort of possible representation of the symbolic failure entails a coding that makes the reader labor through obscurity, deeming the rest of the literary-artistic field as mere (ideological) trash. This, then, is what my reading of Nervo does, add to the received modernist canon a modernista supplement that allows us to see the absential at work, that forces what it never ceases to not write itself, to become written and immediately suspect because it has been written. It should be obvious that literary economy must be read in light of the circuit of desire. To do this, allow me to quote another chapter by Nervo, where we find the young aspiring writer arriving in France, the earthly paradise for a

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cultivated Latin American of his generation. Yet, immediately after he attempts some initial enthusiasm, he tersely states: Lo primero que me sorprende es que no me sorprende nada: Mi corazón late metódicamente . . . como de costumbre; no se aceleran mis pulsos; mi cara, en frente del espejo de un café donde hacemos colación antes de tomar el tren que debe llevarnos a París (¡a París!), es la misma cara mate, angulosa, de perfil israelita, que me a acompañado por donde quiera. En su obstinada palidez no hay un solo presentimiento rosado.34

Allow me further to swing back to Disparities in order to provide Nervo with the interlocutor that has eluded him for more than a century (and is it not an additional possibility to define the absential: that which does not cease to wait for a reader, for the other that dialogues with it?). I think this economy of the unsurprising, and the new, of the uses of fiction must be read in light of desire and drive. Žižek writes: Desire is related to interpretation as drive is to sublimation: the fact that sublimation is, as a rule, mentioned together with drive, not with desire— Freud never spoke of the “sublimation of desire,” nor does he ever speak of the “interpretation of drive” but always links interpretation to desire—bears witness to a profound theoretical necessity. The title of Lacan’s seminar from 1958–9 (“Desire and its Interpretation”) is to be taken as a direct assertion of their ultimate identity: desire coincides with its own interpretation. When the subject endeavours to interpret (is own or, originally, the Other’s) desire and never finds the ultimate point of reference, when it forever slides from one reading to another, this very desperate attempt to arrive at “what one really wants” is desire itself.35

This passage sheds light on the split that is so definitive in these fragments—and that seems absent from the poems included in El éxodo, its “flowers”—it may (and should) be read as the parallax between desire and interpretation of desire, the desire to be in a certain place and the metonymic displacement of the explanation. It’s worth it to allow Nervo himself the role of theorist, and not only of the theorized object. A few pages after his original lucid description of his lack of excitement, he reflects: Se va especialmente de América a París, porque aquí se nos predica constantemente que en París hay muchas cosas nuevas para nosotros . . . ¡Mentira! El hombre no va ni ha ido jamás tras de la dicha. El hombre va y ha ido siempre tras de lo nuevo. De aquí la ley imperiosa del progreso. Las razas se

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cansan de un dolor viejo, de un dolor viejo que viene a convertirse en una discreta felicidad, y caminan ansiosas de un dolor nuevo, que es una emoción desconocida. Desde luego, el hombre, maravillosamente organizado para el dolor, es absolutamente inepto para la felicidad.36

Isn’t this a wonderful way to describe the marginal pleasure derived from what a few years later Freud would begin to explore as (death) drive? Even more so, if we conceptualize it, as Žižek suggests: Does drive not emerge as an attempt to turn failure into success? So that while desire again and again misses its goal, its full enjoyment, drive emerges when this repetitive failure, the endless circulation around the lost object, itself turns into a source or satisfaction. One should thus reject this temptation to reduce one of the poles to its opposite, and to persist in the absolute between the two.37

Nervo in fact is, again, especially in this book almost preternaturally clear when he approaches jouissance. About it, he writes: “el poeta se queja de no sufrir. Y esta nostalgia es más común de lo que se cree. ¿Quién osará negar que un espasmo en el instante divino del amor, no es un dolor? ¿Quién se atreverá a afirmar que esas llamadas alegrías locas no son un tormento?”38 This is not merely the consequence of his Catholic upbringing but, rather, the gift of his apperception. It is not surprising that this happens precisely in a book about travel, and not just about any trip but obviously a journey of initiation. I believe, furthermore, that the often-arcane distinction between desire and drive can be translated neatly in terms of the distance. While it is clear that Nervo, the young man of promise from the provinces has the deep desire to see Paris, once he approaches it, he is lucid enough to know that he will be inevitably disappointed once he is there, that is, there shall be “no there there”; he will face the absential, not only “outside” as that disappointing city, landscape, culture, but as something that reflects the impossibility of being sincere. Sometimes, in certain works of powerful writers, the absential can become part of the texture of the book, for absence itself becomes the crucial feature of its style. Yet, I believe that in the end, as my abundant quotations should have shown, in El éxodo—as much as it is an exodus from the certainties of his self— Nervo proceeds differently. Here apperception is acute enough to dislocate the Nervo that dreamed of Europe and the Nervo that arrives in Europe. He is candid enough to confess to both what disappoints him and what charms him, but he is also reflexive enough as to tease out the reason without betraying his wonderful

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diction, without having to resort to a different tone or abandoning his style. I believe that it is time that we heed the observation that inspired these pages in the extraordinary book La democracia de los muertos where the poet and critic Luis Miguel Aguilar suggests that is nothing else than a fu, the Chinese form, often used by Li Po that combines prose and rhymed verse.39 I think this allows me to read it like a new raro, one that emerges from its absence to illuminate us on the absential.

Notes 1 “Like pale theory through the desert” is a truer translation than the more literal “Like white . . ..” Amado Nervo, Los jardines interiores, in Obras completas II, ed. Francisco Gonzalez Guerrero and Alfonso Mendez Plancarte (México: Aguilar, 1991), 1542. 2 On the life of Amado Nervo, the best text is Carlos Monsiváis, Yo te bendigo, vida (Tepic: Gobierno del Estado de Nayarit, 2002). Both Alfonso Reyes, Tránsito de Amado Nervo in Obras VIII (México: FCE, 1955), 10–51, and Bernarndo Ortiz de Montellano, Figura, amor y muerte de Amado Nervo (México: Xóchitl, 1943) remain useful and pleasurable to read. Also very useful is http://www.amadonervo.net/, the webpage created by Gustavo Jiménez Aguirre and his research team with a wealth of materials on Nervo, including eight biographical sketches. 3 On Nervo’s early texts, see Amado Nervo, Ecos de un arpa y otros textos inéditos, ed. Gustavo Jiménez Aguirre et al. (México: Rafael Padilla Nervo, 2003), Amado Nervo, Tres estancias narrativas (1890–1899), ed. Gustavo Jiménez Aguirre et al. (México: UNAM-Océano, 2006), and Amado Nervo, Lunes de Mazatlán: crónicas, ed. Gustavo Jiménez Aguirre (México: UNAM-Océano, 2006) as well as the aforementioned amadonervo.net. 4 Although young Nervo’s attempts at naturalism might seem naive today, the parts of his early narrative prose that forget to be tremendous remain charming, as this passage proves: “A los trece años, habíase enamorado ya de tres mujeres, cuando menos, mayores todas que él; de ésta porque la vio llorar; de aquélla porque era triste; de la otra porque cantaba una canción que extraordinariamente le conmovía.” [“At thirteen he had already fallen in love with three women at least, all of them older than himself. The first because he saw her crying, the second because of her melancholy, the third because she would sing a song that extremely moved him.”] Amado Nervo, Otras vidas: novelas cortas (Barcelona: J. Ballescá y Ca., ND), 87–88. 5 On the Revista Moderna (and its precursor, the Revista Azul) see my forthcoming “El ethos modernista,” in Literatura mexicana del siglo XIX II, ed. Belem Clark de Lara and Ana Laura Zavala (México: UNAM, 2017).

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José Joaquín Blanco insists that there are “several Nervos,” not only the early and the late Nervo, but notably the prose writer much freer than the “convenient poet.” See his “Los cuentos de Amado Nervo” (Nexos, Noviembre 2000) available at http://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=9825. 7 On the death of Nervo and his Obras completas, Marcela Reyna, “Vender palabras al público: bitácora epistolar de la primera edición de Obras completas de Amado Nervo,” Literatura Mexicana 16, no. 1 (2005): 169–179. This edition is available in full at www.archive.org. 8 The crucial years here are 1928 and 1935, the former the date of publication of Cuesta’s Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna, prol. Guillermo Sheridan (México: FCE, 1985), that excludes Gutiérrez Nájera (and Juan de Dios Peza) and although Nervo is included, Cuesta says that “the man in him destroyed the artist.” On the Antología see Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Naciones intelectuales: Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria Mexicana 1917–1959 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 85–96. In 1935 Xavier Villaurrutia writes the prologue of Lopez Velarde’s Poemas escogidos (México: Cvltrura, 1935), which Cuesta will review enthusiastically. A second, more ample selection is printed in 1940. On this arc, see Juan Domingo Argüelles “Elevación y caída de Amado Nervo” in the best anthology of Nervo available today: Amado Nervo, El libro que la vida no me dejó escribir: una antología general, ed. Víctor Díaz Arciniega (México: FCE-UNAMFLM, 2006), 723–748. 9 Interestingly, Azuela defended the prose of Nervo in 1944. Mariano Azuela, “Amado Nervo,” in Obras completas III: Teatro, conferencias y ensayos (México: FCE, 1960). An excellent overview of this polemic can be found in Víctor Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (México: FCE, 2010), 72–129. 10 Amado Nervo, Obras completas, 2 vols, ed. Francisco Gonzalez Guerrero and Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (México: Aguilar, 1991). Despite its success, this edition proves inept in one very important aspect. Because it separates the prose from the verse, it, in fact, mutilates some of Nervo’s more interesting hybrid volumes such as El éxodo y las flores del camino. Surely this shall be repaired in the new edition that Gustavo Jiménez has underway. 11 Manuel Durand, Genio y figura de Amado Nervo (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1969). José Emilio Pacheco, Antología del modernismo, 1884–1921 (México: UNAM, 1970). Furthermore, two of the most influential cultural agents of the twentieth century put together Nervo anthologies: Antonio Castro Leal and Alfonso Reyes. A good thirty pages are devoted to Nervo in Luis Miguel Aguilar, Poesía popular mexicana (México: Cal y Arena, 2010), 165–194. 12 An excellent example of this was the cycle of conferences devoted to Nervo that took place in October 2015, in El Colegio Nacional, where his bearing on popular culture—from bolero music to radionovelas and telenovelas, even self-help

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Mexican Literature in Theory books—was explored. A further twist can be found in the recent epistolary novel coauthored by Guadalupe Loaeza and Pavel Granados, La última luna: el amor secreto de Amado Nervo (México: Ink, 2016), where Nervo’s quasi-incestous love for Ana’s daughter Margarita, in his late life, is fictionalized. There is a geoacademic explanation for this, while Mexico-based scholars tend to write works grounded on philological traditions, the more theoretically oriented North-Atlantic scholar works with a very limited corpus of “politically useful” (typically to exemplify identity positions) literature further constrained by the need to teach overarching surveys and the cultural monopoly of ever bigger publishing empires. Naturally this sketch immediately begs to name important exceptions such as the recent Tamara R. Williams and Sarah Pollack, Cuadernos del nómada: Fabio Morábito ante la crítica (México: UNAM, 2015) or the dossier on José Agustín prepared for Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 69 (2016), both theoretically sophisticated. Finally, the global fascination caused by the narrative of Roberto Bolaño has created an extremely diversified panorama, for his works have been read not only in Mexico and the North-Atlantic circuit but, before that, in the Southern Cone. This part of the phenomenon, Bolaño’s critical wake, remains largely unexamined. Of course I take the term from Ruben Darío’s 1895 classic Los raros (available at https://archive.org/details/losraros06daro). Because of this prestige I will continue to use it Spanish. A passable approximation in English would be “maverick.” Therence W., “Deacon labels an ‘absential’ or ‘absential feature,’ a neologism for what is missing from our understanding of the physical dimension of . . . physical . . . phenomena.” Slavoj Žižek, Disparities (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 40. Žižek, Disparities, 13. Derrida himself spends a good deal of his Verité en pinture exploring the examples Kant offers in his third Critique. Žižek, Disparities, 100–101. This is the relevant passage: Following the publication of Being and Time and beginning in the 1930s, Heidegger turns his focus from anxiety to various specific moods that he regards as belonging to a given epoch in the history of being. While the structure of what he calls Bestimmung (attunement) is very similar to that of Stimmung or mood, and while the law of precomprehension of being remains in effect, the turn to Bestimmung facilitates a more far-reaching exploration of the historicity of the relation between thought and being—not according to the discipline of historiography but in relation to what Heidegger had come to view as the historical nature of being. All thought as such has to be attuned (bestimmt) to its world in a specific way, prepared or tuned by the “voice” (Stimme) of being itself. Certain dispositions or moods seem to belong characteristically to a given time and place and its specific way of experiencing being. This, the quasi-ahistorical

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Stimmung of which Heidegger speaks in the 1920s becomes Bestimmung, the historical determination of an epochal tone, climate, or appointment. Patrick Dove, Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (Albany : SUNY, 2016), 36. It must be added that all the works of literature that his recent book examines are prime examples of Southern Cone raros. Of course, Dove shrewdly guards himself from claiming that any of these books (or even all of them) provides direct access to the historical frame that shapes thought in the time of advanced capitalism. Rather, his claim is that their strangeness affords glimpses of this otherwise inaccessible ground. For a more ample consideration see my forthcoming review of Dove’s book at Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. 19 In fact, the canonical two-volume set that Antonio Castro Leal prepared for editorial Aguilar was first printed in 1960, five years after Pedro Páramo. Precisely the weakness of the most recent reflection on this set, Danaé Torres de la Rosa’s thoroughly investigated Avatares editoriales de un “género”: tres décadas de la novela de la Revolución mexicana (México: Bonilla Artigas-Iberoamericana, 2016), is its lack of theoretical muscle. 20 This can be “translated” thus: S1 is the signifiant-maître; as indicated by its index, it is structurally first. Each utterance of S1 functions as if it were unprecedented. S2, on the other hand, is knowledge, le savoir; as indicated by its index, it is structurally second. S1 functions as the signifiant-maître as long as it is excepted from knowledge; by uttering that signifiant, the subject asserts that it is the name of everyone’s ignorance, including his own. Among the verbal tenses, it is disconnected from all past tenses. S2, by contrast, is crucially connected with a past tense: it is still already known (Jean-Claude Milner, “The Prince and the Revolutionary” (unpublished manuscript) qtd. in Žižek, Disparities, 253). This entails, of course, the possibility that any given signifier can shift its privileged position as S1 and fall into the chain of knowledge, as I will explore later. 21 A good example of this fascination is the August 2012 issue of Letras Libres España devoted precisely to the raros (http://www.letraslibres.com/espana/revista/los -raros) of the Spanish-speaking world and the young authors hoping to inherit the niches created by Emar, Lamborghini, Copi et al. 22 Žižek, Disparities, 72–73. 23 And while I cross the huge state that once was ours, a “buen viaje” from a fleeting train companion hovers in my ear and I feel as though those two words are all that is left to me of my country. In fact, my language is my country, an immaterial country that follows me everywhere. It’s just a matter of exchanging a few phrases in our language to feel a bit of our atmosphere in a remote city.

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24 The radical destabilization of the habitual binary nation-state, positing nation as the imaginary restoration of what has been lost due to the imposition of the order of state capital can be found in Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, trans. Michael Bourdaghs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 215. 25 “Wandering the streets of San Antonio I find some type that seems Mexican to me, but he is so low, that I avoid him, for I know that his lips cannot utter anything more than rabble-talk and I do not want to witness the profanation of my old Latin language.” Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 10. 26 “But Wells is only present in his books, available in all the bookstores. I look for his to no avail. He is travelling.” Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 20. 27 In fact, and due to this subjective disruption, even the moments of apparent plenitude—a Wagner opera, visiting bucolic Switzerland—become suspect. 28 Throughout both his works and his sentimental life, Nervo aims for a central goal—sincerity—acting according to “what the heart dictates.” He creates thus a compact with his readers, his first and last trait of style, his scenic gift, his vital and technical contribution, his way of facing conflicts. According to [this] strategy, he who is sincere can tap a force that artifice and emotional unavailability cannot. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling distinguishes between the two. His thesis can be summed, somewhat bluntly, in the following way: sincerity is a subjective vehemence, while authenticity is closer to objectivity. According to this, Nervo is always sincere because he remains unable to distance himself from the sentiments he confesses to, and from the truth of his “gut feeling.” Sincerity is simultaneously his undeniable advantage and his most sever limitation, the way to his perennial achievements and also the excess that orbits itself often leading to defeat. Carlos Monsiváis, Yo te bendigo, vida, 32. 29 In a little corner of Westminster’s Abbey, in a chapel half-lit by the strange and painful glory of the stained-glass windows, there is an oak honor-seat with a stone inlaid covered by two planks of wood. In this seat many old Briton kings were crowned, and that sleep a few steps from me, in the dusty mausoleums whose inscriptions are hard to decipher in the semi-penumbra of this ancient naves. When I ask, I am told: “That is Jacob’s stone. “Jacob’s stone?” “Yes, the stone where Jacob laid his head to sleep, the stone that witnessed his dream . . . And I am told how, through many vicissitudes, this wonderful object made its way from Mesopotamia to the City.

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And I believe, I believe it all . . . When I leave these gothic shadows that welcome mystery; when I step out to the sick life drunk with metropolitan effervescence, I shall believe no more. My skeptic smile will arrive with the sun’s smile . . . but for now, I do believe, firstly, because this is beautiful, secondly and thirdly, for the same reason. Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 24. The relevant passage can be found in Genesis 28. In King James Bible, it reads, “And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.” Available at https://www.biblegateway.com/passa ge/?search=Genesis+28&version=KJV. 30 Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans., intro. Bruno Bosteels (London: Continuum, 2009), 259. Variations, and reformulations on this seminal definition, can be found throughout the rest of the major works by Badiou. An important and short instance of this is the “Subjectivation” chapter in Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 91–104, where he discusses what happens when the event is not accepted and proclaimed, but rather treated with indifference of hostility, which creates different subject-positions. 31 Which could be rendered literally as “Only lies are beautiful” or more interestingly and I believe, closer to the spirit of Nervo’s argument as “Only fiction is beautiful.” Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 28. 32 If the world were devoid of the lie . . . the sexes won’t gravitate towards one another, fooled by the genius of the species, which is a great liar . . . the peoples will stop on their way to progress, because thy will no longer perceive the decoy of hope . . . fighters would leave their weapons on the side of the road, for they would no longer be able to wave the flag of a dreams. Christians will bury the legend of Jesus, and will weep over its immense corpse; Nature the saintly and lying mother will no longer put love the coo of the dove nor precious stones on the peacock’s feathers; and all men, as in Mallarmé’s tremendous scene in “Le Phénomène Futur, ” would walk towards their [work] lamp, with their brains drunk with a fuzzy glory, chased by the rhythm and angst of living in a time that has outlived beauty.

Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 28–29. Mallarmé’s prose poem can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/french/blix/3334/texts/ mallarme_poemes_prose.htm. 33 Žižek, Disparities, 210. 34 The first thing that surprises me is that nothing is surprising: my heart beats methodically as usual, my pulse does not accelerate; my face, in the mirror of the

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35 Žižek, Disparities, 327. 36 One goes from America to Paris especially, because here we constantly hear that in Paris many new things await us . . . It’s a lie! Mankind does not pursue bliss. Mankind seeks and has always sought the new. Thus the impetuous law of progress. Every race gets tired of an old pain, an old pain that turns into a modest form of happiness, and they move about wishing for a new pain, a new sensation. Of course, man, wonderfully gifted for pain, is completely inept for happiness.

Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 35–36. 37 Žižek, Disparities, 327. 38 “The poet pines when he is not suffering. And this nostalgia is more frequent than supposed. Who would deny that the spasm at the divine moment of love can be called pain? Who would say that the so-called crazy joys are not a form of torture?” Amado Nervo, El éxodo y las flores del camino, 37. 39 Luis Miguel Aguilar, La democracia de los muertos: ensayo sobre poesía mexicana 1800–1921 (México: Cal y Arena, 2001), 174.

5

Mexican Revolution and Literary Form: Reflections on Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

The reading of literature through theory in the English-language academy has been undergoing various debates that seem to mark, if not the ending, at least a turn away from the dominant paradigms of the cultural studies moment. As Joseph North shows in his precise and intelligent book Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, this neoliberal crisis has led to the emergence of various theoretical paradigms frustrated with (what they characterize as) narrow and esoteric theories of the 1980s and 1990s—most of which identified with French post-structuralism. As a counter, scholars from different brands have sought to develop theoretical paradigms that, without fully breaking apart from critical theory or cultural studies, have sought to read beyond the modes of historicist critique and symptomatic reading that have defined the literary humanities for the last couple of decades. North identifies three of these: “intimations” interested in the turn to affect, new aestheticisms and formalisms seeking to return to core questions of the discipline, and “expansions” trying to break from linguistic and national boundaries and focus on grand contextual frames like “world literature” or the “Anthropocene.”1 Yet, one could even add a few others, like the discussion of new “literary materialisms” in the Marxist sense, as proposed by a recent collection edited by Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri.2 Beyond the institutional considerations, what seems to have emerged is a renewed call for the understanding of the nature of the literary form, in tension (or even in contradiction) with the type of “symptomatic reading” favored by Marxist and cultural studies approaches. Instead, various critics have recently advocated for “surface reading,” which, as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus explain in a well-known introduction to a dossier on the matter, groups a series of approaches that advocate attention to the visible in literature, rather than to

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the hidden or the latent: the materiality of the book, the structure of literary language, the literal meaning of the text, etc.3 Mexican readers of these debates would not find any of these concerns surprising, given that Mexican literary criticism has strong roots in various traditions of what could be characterized as “surface reading,” from the extensive philological tradition that pays extensive attention to the materiality of the book and the text (one can remember here Alfonso Reyes’s many writings discussing physical books in detail or the many debates on the material genesis of texts by canonical authors like Sor Juana or Juan Rulfo) to the strong impact that structuralist linguistics and semiotics had in the academy, yielding piles of books on linguistic structure and the literary language. Yet, the Anglophone academic debates raise significant questions about the nature of literary form that the philological and semiotic approaches do not address, and that have to do with the dialectical relationship between form and historicity. This question has emerged in various approaches to literary form that seek to bridge the divide between “symptomatic” and “surface” reading, or that seek to question the dichotomy surface/depth as posed by various neopositivist approaches to literature. In what follows, I will develop a conversation between various authors engaged in the theory of form in some of the debates mentioned earlier (particularly with Nilges, Tom Eyers, and recent theorizations developed by Anna Kornbluh and Todd McGowan after the work of Slavoj Žižek), and Cartucho (1931), Nellie Campobello’s extraordinary fragmented novel composed by vignettes on the Villista insurrection during the Mexican Revolution. I will also engage with the work of one of Mexico’s finest literary critics and theorist, Jorge Aguilar Mora,  whose work has paved the way for a renewed study of the literary culture of the Revolution since the early 1990s. I will contend that the dramatic transformations of literary form that stemmed from the Mexican Revolution as a historical and aesthetic experience provide a significant stance to discuss form theoretically and with attentiveness to literature, without falling into the pure interpretative mode of symptomatic reading or the fallacy of the binary surface/depth proposed by some of the more positivistic accounts of literary form. Rather, I will engage Eyers’s claim that one must focus on “formalization,” understood as “the name for the aspiration of totality that must nonetheless result in various different kinds of incompletion, through the gaps of which one might nonetheless glimpse the speculative capacities of form.”4 I also second Nilges’s call for a study of form that is not a nostalgic throwback to critical practices of close reading that preexisted theoretical critiques identified with symptomatic

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reading. I believe his claim that “literary history, by extension, is the history of cultural regulation of capitalism that progresses through crises and registers on the level of form” is not only correct, but also provides a good departing formulation for my reflections here, given that its attentiveness to literary form does not allow a simplistic reduction to the surface/depth binary.5 Form must be understood as something that registers cultural regulation in both “surface” materiality and “deep meaning,” noting that the idea of a literature that has to be deciphered through allegorical interpretation does not exhaust the ways in which the literary symbolizes social and cultural relations at the formal level. Even though Eyers and Nilges develop their insights in materials fundamentally different from the ones I will discuss here (Eyers basically engages with French poetry, while Nilges is concerned with post-Fordist literature and culture), I think that the Mexican Revolution as a historical site both of reorganization of capitalist relations and of radical cultural reformulation allows for an important test case to develop and debate approaches to literary form interested in accounting for the relationship between form and society beyond allegorical interpretation. The present chapter is part of a series of explorations on literary form and the Mexican Revolution that I have sought to develop in recent years, which seek to read literary writing beyond the ideas of the national that still pervade in Mexicanist critique. The Mexican Revolution is a long durée historical process, in which a variety of disconnected uprisings and revolts (from peasant armed movements to organized labor strikes to urban liberal anti-reelection campaigns) with roots in the late nineteenth century eventually result in the reconfiguration of the state and the creation of the seven-decade-long one-party system, as well as the political and cultural hegemony that sustained it. Materially speaking, one could generally argue that the core periods are the military moment, characterized by various conflicts among factions between 1910 and 1920, and the gradual consolidation of the postrevolutionary state between 1920 and 1940. However, as Gilbert Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau show in Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution, one can most definitely study the Revolution as a long process of consecration of the rule of law and hegemony, as well as its continuous challenge by social upheaval, from the late nineteenth century to the present, given the “durability and flexibility of ‘revolutionary’ traditions and symbols, through which both the state and its opponents have sought to legitimate themselves.”6 Looking at literary form is one of the ways in which one can understand the long-term potentialities opened in the realm of cultural production by the

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revolution, as a way to manage the cultural regulations of capitalism, in the sense discussed by Nilges, and the “everyday forms of state formation,” as Joseph and Daniel Nugent name the formation of hegemony in the post-Revolution. It also represents the long tradition of revolt and organization, alive today in the role that Zapatismo, Villismo, Cardenismo, and other manifestations of the Revolutionary imaginary have in today’s Mexican culture and politics.7 In my previous pieces, I have focused on the decade of 1910s, in which fiction, as embodied in Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 2015), developed interventions on the novel-form which echoed the parallel war experience recorded in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel.8 In the realm of the essay, which plays a central role in the imagination of what would become Mexican national identity, I have worked on the way that Alfonso Reyes’s Visión de Anáhuac (1519) (1917) provides a key example of the tension between idealism and modernism in literary form at this juncture.9 After this formative period, when Mexican literature began to engage not only with its revolutionary process but also with the forces of the global avant-garde, literary form, along with other forms of cultural production, became territorialized into a dialectical process of totalization. As Horacio Legrás discusses in his recent Culture and Revolution, one of the fundamental processes in that period was “extension,” that is, “the fact that the revolution uncovered Mexico as a totality that all Mexicans could claim.”10 Two key features of this process, as discussed by Legrás, are essential for my purposes: the role that intellectuals have in the imagination of this totality, and the incomplete nature of the totalization process. Literature operated as a technology for cultural totalization, alongside muralism, cinema, photography, and other forms of cultural production. The cultural process was essential to the constitution of the revolution as both hegemony and repository for upheaval because, as Legrás explains, Revolution meant many things in different locations, but always and as a rule it meant some idea of justice where the specific content of that justice was deduced from the nature of the grievances that preceded the revolutionary moment. The unity of consciousness was often negatively provided by the very discourses and networks of power under assault. The revolution translated this complex memory of layered and overlapping allegiances into politics and rendered synchronous a history of diachronic differences that could, for the first time, claim to be on equal footing in the calculation of national totality.11

Connecting Legrás’s analysis with Eyers’s notion of formalization, what I propose here is that literary form is a site in which the incompleteness of the totalization

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process and key literary works across the historical spectrum of the revolution can be read, as Nilges suggests, as “manifestations of the cultural regulation of capitalism that is itself a network of negative relations.”12 While the Mexican Revolution ostensibly implied issues directly related with changing forms of capitalism (Mexican literature in many cases deals with questions of land reform and ownership as other chapters in this collection study), it is important to keep in mind that the cultural apparatus that emerges out of the Mexican Revolution is not merely superstructural, but rather a complex process of subjectification in which cultural regulation is not solely a matter of economic relations but also the construction of semi autonomous forms of the imaginary. It also has to do with the connection of formalization and totalization with modernization. The problem of modernization and capitalism has been central in the Latin American traditions of thinking about literary form, from Roberto Schwarz’s concept of “misplaced ideas” to Ángel Rama’s “literary transculturation.”13 Yet, influential and powerful as they are, those notions have important constraints when engaging with the Mexican revolution: Schwarz essentially builds from the inherent contradictions between nineteenth-century liberalism and the quasi-feudal structures of landownership in the plantation system, while Rama imagines form as the site of uneven encounter, or even synthesis, between European modernism (the hegemonic literary repertoire of twentieth-century global capital) and the local cultures of rural Latin America, confronted with their engagement with neocolonial modernization. As Ericka Beckman discusses in a more recent argument, though, she notes that “rural literature might be viewed not as a mediation on local color or vanishing tradition” but rather in consideration of the role of the countryside as “the site of cycles of extraction and accumulation that form part of a history of global capitalism.”14 The Mexican Revolution is a peculiar example because its culture seeks to capture and territorialize the very upheaval against the history of extraction and accumulation into a subjectivity that would re-ordain the state and capital in the modernizing projects of postrevolutionary hegemony. What literary form captures in the Mexican Revolution then is not so much the process of representation that underlies transculturation, and that makes sense both of uneven modernization as such and of the idea of the nation as “conflictive totality” as theorized by Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar through his notion of “heterogeneity.”15 Instead, it is an archive of the tension between hegemony and upheaval internal to the incomplete process of totalization. Thus, literary form is not to be read as an allegorical device that narrates (in the sense

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of Jameson’s old and flawed “national allegory” thesis) the formation of the imagined community, but rather the persistence of the inherent conflict of the social that the imagined totality fails to resolve. Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931) is a landmark narration in short chapters and fragments of autobiographical tone, on one of the fundamental breaks within the imaginary of the Revolution, Villismo.16 As Max Parra has studied in depth in an admirable book, literature was essential to preserving the image of Pancho Villa and his revolution, one of the archives of “social upheaval” in the Revolution to use Joseph and Buchenau’s term.17 As Parra describes, literary form in these years was focused on the tension between cultural producers from the intellectual elites who supported the memory of a more radical revolution and the state’s institutionalization efforts and the erasure of some of the popular bents: Representations of Villa’s grassroots insurgency and of his personality articulated different and, at times, competing views about the class and cultural “Otherness” of the rebellious masses. These views, in turn, were symptomatic of a larger cultural war taking place: a war fought over the dead, over how the Mexican people should remember their fallen revolutionaries at a time when the meaning of war, and therefore its legacy for the present, was still unresolved.18

The transformation of literary form here was, to use Nilges’s terms, the result of a moment in which the cultural regulation of capitalism enacted by the postrevolutionary Mexican state, which would more properly be developed in the accelerated capitalist modernization known as the Mexican miracle in the 1940s and onward, was not fully in place, and literary form was able to capture the sediments and reminders of popular upheaval of the agrarian revolt. Mariano Azuela’s compelling portrayal of Villismo was unable to capture this tout court because of a lack of historical hindsight, his own withdrawal from the movement before its demise, and, most importantly, his reflexive construction of the narrative from the construction of the urban intellectual, which enacts some of the illegibility of the movement. Yet, in the cultural wars of the 1930s described by Parra, the fidelity of various writers to the Event of Villismo registered in hybrid literary formalizations that engaged the historical erasure of the movement through representations of the grassroots. In other words, it is a formalization of literature that takes place against the grain of the cultural totalization of the Revolution itself. This is an important point: we must remember here that the cultural object known as “novela de la Revolución Mexicana” is a category

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that territorialized a canon with great aesthetic and ideological diversity into a construction tied to the institutionalization of cultural nationalism in both the state and literary criticism.19 In his magisterial writings on literature and the Mexican Revolution, Jorge Aguilar Mora notes the existence of a “horizonte de fracaso, hasta en las narraciones de parte de los vencedores” which “no procede de un horizonte histórico, sino del reconocimiento de que no se produjo una conciencia colectiva de los acontecimientos y menos una renovación del lenguaje.”20 Aguilar Mora’s contention, based on Azuela and a lesser-known work by Manuel de la Peña, is essential to understand the theoretical question of literary form, because it claims that the lack of a “consciousness,” that is, of the experience of a totality as such, and the non-renewal of languge (he points to the coexistence of corny modernista style and schematic dialogue with the recognition of popular speech or impeccable descriptive style) are correlative to each other. Or, to put it in the terms developed up to this point, Aguilar Mora’s analysis illustrates that the incomplete totalization of the Revolution as a historical experience has, as a consequence, an incomplete process of formalization. Cartucho enacts this incompleteness. The book is a memorial recreation, in a set of short vignettes, of the everyday experience of the Villista revolution narrated from the perspective of a little girl. Although in his reading Aguilar Mora emphasizes issues regarding memory, the child’s perspective and notions about the existential experience of Civil War, he provides important keys to understand Campobello’s forms in the terms that interest me. Aguilar Mora points to “la fragmentación de la historia, la diseminación azarosa de imágenes que se conectan internamente a través de canales profundos pero indistinguibles del tejido de las palabras.”21 Parra develops a similar argument from a subalternist perspective: “Cartucho is unique in that the events are not subordinated to a value system that is external to the regional cultural world of the characters, as is the case with Los de abajo. Instead, they communicate an implicit and explicit empathy and solidarity with a view of the world ‘from below.’”22 Aguilar Mora and Parra both follow up their respective arguments with reflections on the question of the representation of the experience of violence and the articulation of popular memory against official historical account, to which one must certainly add the fact that Campobello is the major woman writer of the Mexican Revolution in this period to reach recognition and ulterior canonization. Therefore, her perspective is quite inflected by gendered forms of narration and a significant number of critics have produced feminist

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readings pointing to this direction.23 Although these interpretive canons (the subalternist and the feminist ones) have contributed to value Cartucho’s central role in Mexican literature, I think that in their focus on the popular, gender, and violence they do not follow the formal concern that is expressed both by Aguilar Mora and Parra. In their different languages, they essentially coincide in describing Cartucho as a fragmented text, which operates against the grain of an ideological totality (official history, the value system of the bourgeois writer, etc.) through a formalization that imagines totality otherwise, via images that weave themselves below the surface of the text or an empathy and solidarity “from below.” These two constructs, I would argue, challenge, respectively, the literary form as a “national allegory” or “foundational fiction” where the character would represent, as Fredric Jameson argues, “the embattled situation” of the nation, through a literary form based in discrete and antagonistic connections between its voices, and the experience of totality described by Legrás through an alternative subaltern community constructed by bonds of fragmented memory and contingent solidarity.24 Insofar as the allegorical form is a technology for the imagination of totality, at least in Mexican and Latin American literature up to early 1930s, Campobello’s book constituted not only a gendered challenge to a predominantly masculine tradition of historical memory, or a subaltern representation of a historical experience placed under erasure by state historical accounts (particularly in relation to Villismo). More significantly, its form challenges the possibility of materializing totality into text by enacting what Eyers describes as “a shared incompletion across both literary language and its various outsides—materiality, history, poltics, nature—that, far from preventing literature from interfacing with those outsides, rather makes such a nonmimetic reference possible, in a connective movement that puts impasse to creative use.”25 Although reading Campobello from this stance may result problematic, since Eyers is mostly thinking about poetry in the development of this process, his concept of “speculative formalism” is useful in moving beyond existing readings of Campobello in at least two regards. First, the importance of Campobello’s formal challenge is not a matter of the content of what it represented. If she was able to speak of women, violence, or death in such a resonant way, it is because the core of her narrative is not her purported realism, but rather the suspension of the “reality effect” of the novel of the Mexican Revolution as a genre.26 I invoke here Roland Barthes’s idea of the “reality effect” as “the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.”

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Although Campobello constructs a realist signifier of her own, her fragmentary narrative and the way in which it enacts memory and solidarity suspend the totalizing technologies of historical referentiality in hegemonic modes of narrative, from the naturalism that reached its peak in the work of authors like Federico Gamboa to the, at that point, institutionalized version of Revolutionary history in the genre of the “novel of the Mexican Revolution.”27 In other words, Campobello’s achievement is not that she is more “realist” than other novelists— whose realism was based, as Aguilar Mora himself notes in a passage cited earlier, in trite notions of the popular—but that her narrative renders visible the trauma that makes the allegorical formalization of the Revolution impossible. As I will discuss momentarily, her characters are notable precisely because they cannot possibly embody “the embattled destiny” of the nation: most of the most important figures in the book are sentenced to death by firing squad, or embody a heroic nature that is not symbolizable in the Revolution as totality. Second, Campobello’s writing puts forward a different interfacing of the literary with its outsides: rather than operating from the reflexive I of the liberal letrado mediating between a monstrous popular uprising and the ideological frameworks of the urban bourgeoisie (as critics like Ángel Rama have written regarding Azuela),28 Cartucho interfaces with a realm of popular history and grassroots social knowledge distinct from the problem of sovereignty and the question of the state that preoccupied more canonical works of revolutionary literature. Also, as Aguilar Mora notes elsewhere, writers like Campobello challenged the hegemonic regime of Mexican literature itself, in which there was “desesperación por establecer diferencias de clase ocúltandolas bajo el criterio del conocimiento literario.”29 Indeed, the “reality effect” that she challenges is a manifestation of the regime of knowledge to which Aguilar Mora refers. Campobello’s non-allegorical form was also a challenge to the literary knowledge inherited by nineteenth-century elites at the base of the structures of symbolic capital in the literary field. For this reason, her mode of writing would become marginalized for a good part of the twentieth century, to the point that her book, until very recently, had a rocky trajectory as an object of critical reflection.30 But, to go back to Nilges’s assertions, Cartucho’s importance resides in its suspension of the formalization of the cultural regulation of the Mexican Revolution and its register of the antagonisms and tensions that the process of totalization was unable to suppress. Cartucho’s formal challenge is particularly visible in the chapter most widely cited by critics: “Nacha Ceniceros.” The brief chapter is divided in two mini-sections.

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In the first one, we learn that Nacha Ceniceros, a female colonel in Pancho Villa’s army, accidentally shot Gallardo, another colonel and the man with whom she was in love. In response to this, Villa orders her execution, which is narrated from the perspective of Nacha in the sparse yet poetic mode that characterizes Campobello: Lloró al amado, se puso los brazos sobre la cara, se le quedaron las trenzas negras colgando y recibió la descarga. Hacía una bella figura, imborrable para todos los que vieron el fusilamiento. Hoy existe un hormiguero en donde dicen que está enterrada.31

The second fragment disavows the first one, and we learn that, in reality, Nacha Ceniceros returned to her house, disillusioned with “la actitud de los pocos que pretendieron repartirse los triunfos de la mayoría.”32 The narrator proceeds into a paean of Nacha, the longest paragraph in the chapter, noting that she was a very skilled horse rider, usually surpassing men in her abilities, and that she joined the Revolution because Díaz’s men had murdered her father. The narrative voice further points out that she could have married a prominent Villista and become famous but she opted instead to rebuild her destroyed home. After this vindication of Nacha’s reputation, the narrator points out that those who lied about her would get their due: “La red de mentiras que contra el general Villa difundieron los simuladores, los grupos de la calumnia organizada, los creadores de la leyenda negra, irá cayendo como tendrán que caer las estatuas de bronce que se han levantado con los dineros avanzados.”33 The passage, clearly in an adult voice and not in the child voice usually recognized in the book, concludes, “Ahora digo, y lo digo con la voz del que ha podido destejer una mentira: ¡Viva Nacha Ceniceros, coronela de la revolución!”34 The political message of this passage is fairly obvious: Campobello’s narration denounces the creation of a black legend against Villa and provides an account of a revolutionary hero that proves Villista courage. Yet, at the formal level, the true radicality of Campobello’s writing becomes visible. The first part of the story is an apocryphal narrative—a fantasy, one could say, in a psychoanalytic note—that participates in the process of totalization of the Revolution as such. It is based in the full annulment of Nacha’s revolutionary identity: she is shown weeping, emphasizing her “feminine” traits (there is mention of her braids, presenting her being a woman as a weakness in a male-dominated world) and as an unskilled soldier (she is supposed to have killed Gallardo by mistake, suggesting her inability to handle a gun). The second fragment effectively undermines not only the apocryphal story but also the process of historical

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totalization: by representing Nacha as a brave general, a skilled horse rider, and a woman who opted to return home rather than participate in the corruption of the Revolution, the narrative introduces an antinomical element not only into the process of totalization of the Revolution but also into the literary formalization of that process. The gap that divides both fragments, a visible blank space that appears only in this chapter, and that is not used in any other part of the book, is a manifestation of the traumatic kernel of the Revolution, of the irreducible gap between the lived experience of revolutionaries and the narrative formalization necessary to create the ideological fantasy of Mexico as a totality. In this, Campobello breaks both the allegorical and the referential technologies that characterize the novel of the Mexican Revolution qua the literary form of a totality and opens the space for the visibilization of a process of formalization that resists cultural regulation. Anna Kornbluh provides a compelling description of an idea of literature that, in my view, is compellingly performed in Campobello’s writing. To grasp’s literature’s resonance with the Real requires affirming that literary language fundamentally operates a disjunction between reference and allegory, that the being of the literary inheres not in always already allegorical momentum, but in this disjunctive, nonsensical, material power. Disjunctive, resistant to univocity or conceptuality, literature can also be thought as a distinct vehicle of antinomies, of aestheticizing antinomic thought without the mandates of a logical decision. Literature is not propositional; it is, rather, the aesthetic confluence and syncretism of partial, overlapping and competing positions.35

For reasons of space, I will not engage here in a metatheoretical discussion of Kornbluh’s approach to Slavoj Žižek, from whom she derives the discussion of the Real. I am interested, though, in the idea of literature as a “disjunction between reference and allegory” because it adequately describes Campobello’s relationship to the literary formalization of the Mexican Revolution. Although the way in which she is typically read (as providing an “alternative” reading by giving voice to Villismo/the subaltern/women) is by no means invalid, I would say that such alternatives are more an effect of her writing than a structural feature. The condition of possibility for her ideological stance to become an effective alternative to the Mexican Revolution—even if she lacks, as Aguilar Mora points in the passage cited earlier, the cultural capital to do so—is precisely that, of all the authors engaged in the “novel of the Mexican Revolution as a practice,” she is the one that articulates a literary form that does not enact the allegorization

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of the historical referent, but rather the aestheticization of antinomies that the process of totalization would erase. Gender, subaltern subjectivity, Villista politics are all symbolic positions that materialize the constitutive excess of the Mexican totality. If all of them are readable in Campobello’s, it is because her narrative materializes in the present of totalization (namely, the project of cultural regulation of the Revolution taking place in the 1920s and 1930s), a return of the Real of the revolutionary Event. The process of totalization of the Revolution is in part the construction of a positive fantasy to symbolize the traumatic fact that its Evental nature is essentially negative. Gareth Williams has noted that the peak of the Villista movement, as manifested by images of Villa in the presidential chair in 1914, bears “witness to the political truth of the irreducible, contingent nature of that agrarian moment and its relation to sovereign power.” Williams further points that a proper reading of the moment requires particular suspension of what I have been calling here totality: if we are to restitute political significance to that moment we should first extract it from all official (postrevolutionary) metaphysics and bourgeois mnemonic or identitarian narratives of national (ethnogeographic) unification. For truth in its relation to equality is at stake for politics in these images, at least as much as memory in its relation to a postrevolutionary bourgeois police or its metaphysics of reification and capture.36

Williams’s reading of Villismo, built in engagement with Jacques Rancière’s work, points toward the creation of an “interregnum” in which the peasantry sustains the manifestation of perpetuation of the force of law without law. This space of mutual contamination and indeterminateness between sovereign law and peasant insurrection in 1914 is the very ground of the emergent political subjectification that lies at the heart of the Mexican Revolution’s social curve.37

Cartucho’s resistance to totalization (or to the metaphysics of national unification, as Williams terms it) is part of the reason why the Villista imagination becomes so crucial to her narrative, but it is very important to point out that she does not so much enact the peasant component highlighted by Williams, but rather the undecidable subjectivity of the experience of being in the Void between peasant insurrection and state subjectificiation. If Campobello’s novel operates through the consistent repetition of violence (as we attest many characters facing execution squads, mourned through the memory of their bravery), it is because the Revolution returns not as the experience of radical democratic

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horizontality later suspended by identitarian metaphysics analyzed by Williams, but by the affects elicited in reexperiencing the violence of the normalization and suppression of revolutionary excess in the process of totalization. This is why it is crucial that Campobello’s stories are not located in the apotheosic moment of 1914, but rather in an unspecified collection of remembrances that make it difficult to pin the actions to specific historical moments. In this, the past is something that is always undecided in Cartucho, and indecision is the key feature of its narrated world: Villismo is the name of a moment of undecidability located between the fidelity to the revolutionary Event and the reluctance to become part of its totalization. A feature of Campobello’s literary form is that its resistance to a full allegorical formalization of the revolutionary totality preempts the possibility of a fixed reading of its politics. Based on theoretical work by Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin, and against the grain of readings of Cartucho as the incorporation of subalternized voices, Lucas Izquierdo argues that the novel’s depiction of the bandit is very much aligned with the constitution of the sovereign and what we may call a biopolitical totalization of the Revolution: “Immersed in the cultural politics of postrevolutionary Mexico, Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho coalesces banditry, politics, and death to participate in a transatlantic politicoliterary enterprise that points to a fundamental and archaic gesture of sovereign constitution by which the figure of the outlaw is granted humanity in death.”38 In my view, this reading extrapolates theorizations about banditry and the state (which, as illustrated by the work of Juan Pablo Dabove, has its roots on the tension between national formation and the excessive agents that failed to be terrorrialized into the rule of Law), and fails to account for the non-allegorical nature of Campobello’s narrative. Izquierdo correctly notes, based on Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” that “Cartucho oscillates between the epic wisdom and oral tradition present with the kind of fragmented knowledge perceived in modern information.”39 But this oscillation is not a path toward the symbolization of the nation (an operation that is in fact not only absent as such from the novel, but also very much contrary to its spirit as we saw in the “Nacha Ceniceros” chapter). Although many of Campobello’s characters are dead in the time of their remembrance, their humanity is not a matter of the belated recognition that precedes the totalizing gesture of memory. One could even say that unlike, say, Azuela, the epic in Campobello is not a reflection of the grand Revolutionary moment, but rather something that flashes briefly (like the paean to Nacha) in the context of a narrative that is largely focused either on historical injustice or

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on the moments that suspend the epic toward other affects. Villa, for instance, is shown crying in various passages, including one in which he gets overwhelmed with emotion after giving a speech to some townsfolk begging them to not be afraid of him—a suprising anti-epic gesture in which he deflates his own legend to render his commitment to justice, or another one narrating the passing of Martín López, his second in command, in which Villa’s tears place him in a horizontal relationship with everybody else: “Pancho Villa lo lloraba, lo lloraban los dorados, lo lloró toda la gente, hasta los más encuerados.”40 The point is that the type of ideological certainty that Izquierdo’s reading projects toward Cartucho is not implausible, yet it is inaccurate. It is, in my view, symptomatic of Cartucho’s formal refusal to construct a clear-cut allegorical meaning. This refusal is, in my opinion, the reason why her work is one of the fundamental places to find the Mexican Revolution in its formalization, in the figuration of the constitutive gap of Mexico’s crucial historical experience. In a recent essay, Todd McGowan has argued that the value of a masterpiece is not measured in historicist terms: The masterpiece is not a work that transcends its time but one that changes the symbolic coordinates of its time. It refuses the options provided by the ruling order and points toward the impossible. As a result, the masterpiece neither provides affirmation for readers nor supplies them with what Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital.” Instead, the authentic masterpiece traumatizes readers by substracting the security of their symbolic coordinates under them.41

Cartucho is one such masterpiece. In the moment in which the novel of the Mexican Revolution began to turn into a machine of cultural capital, and in which the ruling order began harnessing hegemonic narratives, Campobello formalized the return of the Real of the Revolution, which, like the ideals of Nacha Ceniceros or the tears of Villa, pointed toward the impossible, the political imagination of Villismo, as the ruling order sought to foreclose it.

Notes 1 Joseph North, Literary Criticism. A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 125. 2 Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri, Literary Materialisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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3 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. 4 Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism. Literature, Theory and the Critical Present (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 186. 5 Mathias Nilges, “Form(alism’s) Now,” in Literary Materialisms, eds Nilges and Sauri, 182. 6 Gilbert Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 2. 7 See Daniel Nugent and Gilbert Joseph, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 8 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Novel, War and the Aporia of Totality. Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Azuela’s Los de abajo,” Mediations 29, no. 2 (2016): 47–64. 9 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “The Alphonsine Literary Form. Idealism, Modernism and the Essay,” in Alfonso Reyes: His Poetry, Essays and Literary Theory (tentative title), ed. Roberto Cantú (Under editorial process, 2018). 10 Horacio Legrás, Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory and the Making of Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 5. 11 Legrás, Culture and Revolution, 26. 12 Nilges, “Form(alism’s) Now,” 182. 13 See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992); Ángel Rama, Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, trans. David L. Frye (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 14 Ericka Beckman, “Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction,” Modernism/Modernity 23, no. 4 (2016): 815–816. Beckman’s example from Mexico is Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, which I discuss elsewhere in terms of the question of form too. See Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Juan Rulfo. El clamor de la forma,” in El llano en llamas, Pedro Páramo y otras obras (en el centenario de su autor), eds Pedro Ángel Palou and Francisco Ramírez Santacruz (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2017), 171–202. See also Beckman’s text in the present volume, which discusses similar questions. 15 See Antonio Cornejo Polar, Sobre crítica y literatura latinoamericanas (Lima: Centro de Estudios Literario Antonio Cornejo Polar/Latinoamericana Ediciones, 2013). 16 Nellie Campobello, Cartucho. Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México, in Obra reunida (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), 91–164. I do not translate the title because the English version keeps the Spanish original: Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, trans. Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). I will cite from this translation in the notes, although I agree with

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Mexican Literature in Theory Jorge Aguilar Mora that the translation is flawed. See Jorge Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la Revolución y otros ensayos (Mexico: Era, 2011), 88. Max Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution: Rebels in the Literary Imagination of Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution, 5. For the most recent and complete account of this process of institutionalization see Danaé Torres de la Rosa, Avatares editoriales de un “género”: Tres décadas de la novelas de la Revolución Mexicana (México: Bonilla Artigas/Iberoamericana Vervuert/ITAM, 2015). For the most canonical study of the genre as such, see Adalbert Dessau, La novela de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996). Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la Revolución, 20–21. “This horizon of failure, even in the narrations of the supporters of the victors, does not proceed from a historical horizon, but of the knowledge that there was no collective consciousness of the events produced, and much less a renewal of language.” Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la Revolución, 83. “The fragmentation of history, the random dissemination of images that connect internally, through deep channels, but indistinguishable from the weaving of words.” Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution, 49. For an analysis in this direction, see Tabea Alexa Linhard, Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 162–185. See also Mary Louise Pratt, “Mi cigarro, mi Singer y la Revolución Mexicana: La danza ciudadana de Nellie Campobello,” Revista Iberoamericana 206 (2004): 253–273. For the concept of “national allegory,” see Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. For the idea of “foundational fiction,” which describes nineteenth-century romance novels as allegories in a sense analogous to Jameson’s description, but perhaps with a more significant inclination toward national totality, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991). It should also be noted that Legrás has, in an earlier book, a short reading of Cartucho emphasizing Campobello’s dialectical narration. What I would highlight of that study is the idea that Campobello’s formal features are more important in the surface and in their challenge to the idea of truth. See Legrás, Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 141–148. Eyers, Speculative Formalism, 1. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989), 148. It is important to recall here that the “novel of the Mexican Revolution” as an institutional construction was formulated significantly in the cultural debates of

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1925, when conservative cultural critics like Francisco Monterde and Julio Jiménez Rueda elevated Azuela as a representative of a national “virile” literature. See Víctor Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). Ángel Rama, “Mariano Azuela: ambición y frustración de las clases medias,” in Crítica literaria en América Latina, comp. Carlos Sánchez Lozano (Medellín: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional de Antioquia, 2006), 206–258. Jorge Aguilar Mora, Una muerte sencilla, justa, eterna . . . Cultura y guerra en la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico: Era, 1991), 46. “desperation to establish class differences hiding them under the criterion of literary knowledge.” For a discussion of Campobello’s critical reception, see Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la Revolución, 87–88. Campobello, Obra reunida, 107. “She wept for her lover, put her arms over her head, with her black braids hanging down, and met the firing squad’s volley. She made a handsome figure, unforgettable for everyone for everyone who saw the execution. There is an anthill where they say she was buried.” Campobello, Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, 21. Campobello, Obra reunida, 107. “By the attitude of those few who tried to divide among themselves the triumph of the majority.” Campobello, Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, 21. Campobello, Obra reunida, 107. “The curtain of lies against General Villa, spread by organized groups of slanderers and propagators of the black legend, will fall, just as will the bronze statues that have been erected with their contributions.” Campobello, Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, 22. In this case the translation has significant inaccuracies: Meyer replaces “creadores” (creators) with “propagators,” which changes the meaning of the passage by reducing the agency of those indicted by the narrator. In addition, “with their contributions” wrongly translates “con los dineros avanzados,” which means “funds given in advance” and lacks a possessive. Although the translation conveys the passage’s metaphorical meaning (the statues can be read as a metaphor of official history), the ambiguity as to whose contributions (the lies of the perpetrators or the lives of those dead in the battle) are referred to here is lost. Campobello, Obra reunida, 107, “Now I say—and say it with the voice of someone who has known how to unravel lies, Viva Nacha Ceniceros, Coronela de la Revolución!” Campobello, Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, 22. There is another inaccuracy here: the original says “destejer una mentira” while the translation opts to use “lies” in plural. This is incorrect because it is clear that the narrator is not speaking of her general ability to discover the truth but rather of the discovery of the specific truth about Nacha.

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35 Anna Kornbluh, “Reading the Real: Žižek’s Literary Materialism,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 42. 36 Gareth Williams, The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police and Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 47. 37 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 63. 38 Lucas Izquierdo, “Cartucho (1931): Bandits, Politics and Death,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 37, no. 2 (2013), 352. 39 Izquierdo, “Cartucho,” 345. 40 Campobello, Obra reunida, 147, 159. “Pancho Villa and his dorados have cried for the departed, and so have all the people, even the most hard-hearted.” Campobello, Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, 72, 85. The translation here opts to keep the rhyme, which explains why something that does not exist in the original “the most hard-hearted,” replaces “los encuerados,” which would more properly be translated “the naked ones.” There is an important loss of meaning here, since the passage implies that the whole hierarchy of the Villista army, from the top to the poorest one, mourned Martín López. 41 Todd McGowan, “The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies,” in Sbriglia, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature, 99.

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The Nature of Revolution in Rafael F. Muñoz’s Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba Carolyn Fornoff

The first appearance of nature in Rafael Muñoz’s revolutionary novel Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba (1941) is the mention of a tree that is growing in Alvarito Abasolo’s courtyard.1 Alvarito explains that his great-grandfather planted it upon learning of Mexico’s independence from Spain. The conspicuous symbolism of this timing could not be more self-evident: nature signifies national identity. The 100-year-old tree’s textual presence marks the continuity between the independence and the imminent revolution; it embodies the connection between Mexico’s past and its future. Muñoz’s literary collapse of nature and nation is hardly surprising, given the centrality of land as a concern of the Mexican Revolution. Emiliano Zapata’s famous slogan, “Land and Liberty,” analogously linked the environment with autonomy as inextricable conceits. In a speech given by artist and writer Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) at the Teatro Principal in Veracruz in December 1914, Atl proposed that land redistribution should be the revolution’s foremost ambition, even though it “frightens the Revolutionists themselves.”2 Citing a popular revolutionary tenet, Atl argued that redistribution should be carried out according to just one condition: “The earth belongs to him who works it.”3 Such efforts to renationalize and redistribute natural resources—to renaturalize the relationship between nonhuman environment and the humans that inhabit it— energized the revolutionary bola. Historian Christopher Boyer has argued that although the Revolution of 1910 “had multiple and interconnected origins . . . [the] popular unrest caused by massive commodification of the ‘lands, woods, and waters’ (to quote the Plan of Ayala) clearly stoked the fires.”4 In spite of the insistent collapse of land with liberty in revolutionary discourse, scholarship has remained reluctant to take representations of the

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Figure 6.1 Dr. Atl, Self-Portrait with Popocatépetl, 1928, Philadelphia Museum of Art, January 1, 1949.

nonhuman in the revolutionary novel seriously. Discussions mostly echo Atl’s articulation of the environment as a static resource, a passive object that must simply be repossessed by the rightful (human) subjects to whom it “belongs.” Yet if we take Atl’s words at face value or solely read the presence of nature in Muñoz’s novel as a stand-in for nation, we risk glossing the issue’s complexity. Atl’s striking landscape paintings, for instance, complicate the human/subject, nonhuman/object binary that his political rhetoric of “belonging” reinforces. His bold, swirling paintings of Mexico’s volcanoes, dunes, and lakes highlight their impersonal, affective power to enchant the humans that view them. Far from simplistic national symbolism, these landscapes are imbued with dynamism and vibrancy, configured as agential sources of creativity. Of particular note is Atl’s Self-Portrait with Popocatépetl (Figure 6.1).5 In this painting, Atl superimposes his own image against that of the iconic active volcano, which looms behind him. While the artist’s body is foregrounded, the two images are aligned so that the peak perfectly coincides with Atl’s rounded, bald cranium. If we read this overlay in a metaphoric vein, it suggests that the human mind and volcanic crater are comparable sources of bubbling, creative

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energy. Elena Jackson Albarrán explains that the volcano was a preferred referent of Atl’s. “Dr. Atl styled the volcanoes, and by extension himself, as metaphors for the Mexican Revolution . . . Atl’s smoldering jagged peaks evoked the inherent revolutionary potential spewing forth from beneath Mexico’s fertile soil.”6 Thinking beyond the metaphoric, the parallel placement of human and nonhuman bodies on the canvas configures them as imbricated: two life forms that rely upon and energize one another. This pictorial imagining of human creativity as strengthened by the affects produced by nonhuman bodies anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s observation: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do . . . what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body . . . either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”7 Atl’s self-portrait undermines the fantasy of human uniqueness by imagining the affects of artist and volcano as allying to amplify their relational capacities. The product of this entanglement, the canvas itself, is the “more powerful body” intimated by Deleuze and Guattari. It too has the power to affect its viewers, revealing the shared capacity of natural and cultural objects to generate response.8 I begin with this short digression in order to draw out one of the central questions driving this chapter. How might we reframe our understanding of the interplay between “land and liberty” in revolutionary cultural production from the merely symbolic to a more nuanced interpretation? I’d like to suggest that reading with an ecocritical eye allows us to think seriously about the role of landscapes in the Mexican Revolution, not just as backdrop or national symbol but as an agent that “both structures and is structured by human behavior.”9 Scholars working within this vein have argued that examining the relationship between the natural and human worlds in literary texts allows us to recognize, as environmental historian William Cronon has so precisely put it, that “human acts occur within a network of relationships, processes, and systems that are as ecological as they are cultural.”10 In other words, this sort of reading pushes back against the humanist notion that nature and culture are separate, distinct realms—a disconnect that has engendered the current crisis of climate change— and instead compels us to consider their entwinement. This chapter thus concurs and builds upon Horacio Legrás’s recent assertion that “The revolutionary act of imagining Mexico seems not to be grounded in an act of imagination at all but rather in the physical appropriation of the territory that implied a direct experience of its enormous dimensions and complex

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makeup.”11 This physical intimacy and proximity with land made the nonhuman the “quintessential object of revolutionary practice,” a space that inspired and shaped revolutionary tactics.12 Other critics have also recently contributed to ecocritical scholarship on early twentieth-century Mexican literature. Two notable examples include Mark Anderson’s study of Agustín Yáñez’s ecological framing of the revolution in Al filo del agua, and Kerstin Oloff ’s analysis of Fuentes and Rulfo’s anxieties about ecological degradation.13 Expanding upon this work, and responding to Jennifer French’s assertion that we need a “materially oriented theory of literature,”14 this article argues that Rafael F. Muñoz’s novel, Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba, inscribes Chihuahua’s arid landscape as crucial to and formative of revolutionary subjectivity. In it, flora and fauna function as key cultural tools for self-reflection and interpreting the logic of revolt. The wilderness, and particularly the expansive mesquite brush, is inscribed as a residual space that resists the productivity demanded by nationalist discourses of modernization. While this novel has been mostly interpreted as a straightforward revolutionary bildungsroman, what has been less noticed is that in this narrative about becoming, the environment holds a key pedagogical role, teaching the protagonist Alvarito to notice and feel difference, and to view the world as constantly shifting and reorganizing in ways that confound linear interpretation.

The revolutionary novel By the mid-1940s, over 200 novels had been published in Mexico about the Revolution.15 In spite of its abundance, revolutionary literature was also belated; the genre’s most exemplary texts were written fifteen to twenty years after the fact. Legrás notes that although such a delay is atypical of testimonial literature, this temporal lag underscores the Revolution’s far-reaching hold on the cultural imaginary. It “opened a hole in reality that literary and other discourses strove in vain to close for almost seventy years.”16 The novels and short stories that endeavored to represent life in revolutionary Mexico favored naturalist techniques, such as objectivity and empiricism, which were believed to best communicate the revolutionary ideal of patriotic masculinity. Yet while the genre celebrated the war’s revitalization of virile mexicanidad, its authors struggled to understand the disparate motivations of the parties involved. Many depicted the revolution as a capricious fight that lacked ideological underpinnings. This

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generalized dismay was caused, Legrás hypothesizes, by the letrados’ inability to comprehend the unprecedented rise to agency of the campesino masses.17 Rafael Felipe Muñoz is often cited as part of the core group of revolutionary authors, but his work has been somewhat less attended to by scholarship than that of his contemporaries, such as Mariano Azuela or Martín Luis Guzmán. Muñoz’s first novel, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1931),18 has sustained the most critical attention, cemented into the popular imaginary after it was adapted into an eponymous motion picture by Fernando de Fuentes in 1936.19 Yet critical reception of the novel itself has been uneven. Because Muñoz did not write Vámonos in one blow, but rather composed it by assembling various journalistic pieces that he had previously published in El Universal, followed by a portion written to round out the narrative, critics found the novel to be lacking in coherence.20 In spite of Villa’s titular centrality, Vámonos is not really an ode to the caudillo, but to his followers: ordinary serranos who embodied the manly Mexican ideal. Max Parra argues in his persuasive reading of the novel that Muñoz’s sensationalist journalistic style was well suited to exploit “the premodern sublimity of frontier warfare” and repackage it “into a consumer product of considerable literary quality.”21 By the time Muñoz’s third novel, Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba, was published in 1941, the revolutionary genre had largely been played out. In a letter to Alfonso Reyes in 1929, Contemporáneos writer Jaime Torres Bodet expressed his exasperation with its tired conventions: “¿No cree usted un poco desorientado este género de nacionalismo—que necesita tanto de color local y del tema?”22 Mexican readers, however, were clearly not tired of revisiting these themes. (And as I will argue, Muñoz reworks and elevates the clichéd cult around “color local” such that the role of the nonhuman is ultimately resignified.) In fact, these novels’ ostensible homogeneity was further cemented by the invention of the generic label uniting them. According to Jorge Aguilar Mora, the placement of this large, heterogeneous body of literary production under the label of the “novela de la Revolución Mexicana” produced a reductive compartmentalization, in which difference was obscured by a seemingly uniform set of concerns. Although the label may have “rescued” certain works from neglect, it relegated others to a limiting mode of analysis. Aguilar Mora singles out the works of Muñoz and Nellie Campobello as suffering from this categorization: “han quedado encerrados en ese circuito que sólo los recupera como síntomas de una época, y no les reconoce su valor como discursos narrativos de repercusiones que van más allá de ser meros ‘testimonios’ de acontecimientos de la Revolución Mexicana.”23

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Unlike many writers of the genre, Muñoz experienced the revolution firsthand in Chihuahua as a young journalist. This experience inflects his literary prose, which is adeptly paced and written in accessible language. Yet if his earlier works, including Vámonos, were primarily preoccupied with entertaining the reader with bloody retellings of combat, Se llevaron el cañon marks a departure from his fast-paced, plot-driven wheelhouse. As F. Rand Morton noted in 1949 in his prologue to the novel, “el estilo se ha vuelto más poético, menos brutal, más ocupado por la naturaleza y de un modo más lírico de pintarla . . . Ya no es el hecho sangriento sino el hecho emocional que toma el lugar principal.”24 Morton’s assessment rings true: the most compelling aspect of the novel is its depiction of the affective, experiential side of the revolution, which is decidedly linked to physical space. In this sense, Se llevaron el cañon can be read as a travel narrative that takes the reader on a tour of Chihuahua’s expansive, animated landscapes. Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba follows the story of Alvarito Abasolo, a young boy from Chihuahua who comes of age by joining the 1912 revolt led by Pascual Orozco against the nascent government of Francisco Madero, only eighteen months after he assumed the presidency. Enamored by a newfound sense of purpose, Alvarito is wholly disinterested in the revolt’s ideological motives. Instead, it is the feeling of belonging to a tribe, the Colorados, combined with the paternal charisma of his leader, Marcos Ruiz, which inspires him. Orozco’s rebellion against Madero was short-lived. It lasted a little over a year, and was ultimately quashed by Victoriano Huerta with the help of Pancho Villa in July 1913. Although the novel ends with the Colorados’ defeat, Alvarito is not disenchanted, but filled with the triumphant contentment of having become a real man. By choosing a young teen to narrate this story, Muñoz makes a case that the complicated politics of the Mexican Revolution were not so complicated for those that participated in it. Alvarito’s youthful thirst for adventure and transparent desire to impress his superiors can be read as a critique of the immature motivations of revolutionary actors. Yet, although Muñoz compellingly contrasts revolutionary fervor against the senselessness of its violent means, the novel largely remains impartial, and takes the revolt’s affective pull seriously. This narrative focus on the power of affect is underscored by the novel’s title, taken from the popular revolutionary song that served as the Orozquistas’ unofficial anthem. Muñoz complicates what could have been a relatively straightforward critique of the revolt’s impetuses with tonal ambiguity and subtle irony,

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problematizing the correlation of a movement’s failure with its lack of historical importance. Like other bildungsroman and travel narratives, the novel is structured around the Oedipal breakdown of the familiar unit. Alvarito’s father, who decides to flee Chihuahua as the rebels move in, is literally and symbolically replaced by a more virile paternal figure, revolutionary leader Marcos Ruiz. Second, the novel is focused solely on the male collective, and defined by the near-total absence of women. This gendering is reinforced spatially; it takes place far from the domesticating space of the urban, and buttresses the masculinist fantasy of selfactualization achieved through enduing the hardships of war and wilderness. Third, the novel dramatizes the tensions of modernity, specifically the fraught commingling of technology and nature. This friction is evidenced by the novel’s very title, in which the word “cañon” signifies both the canyon where the climactic battle takes place and the cannon itself, the technology that allows the federal troops to defeat the rebels. Finally, as I will examine at greater length, the novel is steeped in regional specificity. Chihuahua’s landscape is configured in two slightly contradictory modes: as a space that gives material and affective importance to the idea of the Mexican nation, but also as a space that ultimately resists state—and even human—capture.

Reading nature Muñoz’s attention to nonhuman life in Se llevaron el cañon, I argue, thinks about the link between land and liberty not as a static exchange, but as a co-constitutive relationship. That is, the revolt and its human participants are situated as enmeshed within a deeper ecological history. In Muñoz’s telling, nonhuman territory and human event inform each other and cannot be disentangled. Each imprints the other; the revolutionary experience is the experience of the arid landscape. The stifling heat, capacious plains, thorny mesquite brush, all conjoin to give rise to the feel of revolution. Thus while part of Muñoz’s literary project is to articulate the revolution’s ideological aporias and masculinist subject formation, it also brings the nonhuman to the narrative fore as a fundamental element that structures the affective pull of the revolutionary nostalgia that remained popular throughout the 1930s and 40s. Muñoz’s articulation of this commingling between human and nonhuman exemplifies what Isabelle Stengers, a philosopher of science, has termed

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“reciprocal capture.” Stengers uses the term to describe biological practices of interdependency. A flower and a bee rely upon each other: they each self-fashion, but through the relationship with the other. Stengers explains, “we can speak of reciprocal capture whenever a dual process of identity construction is produced: regardless of the manner, and usually in ways that are completely different, identities that coinvent one another each integrate a reference to the other for their own benefit.”25 This notion of “symbiotic agreement” or coinvention, with its implications of interwoven exchange, is at work in Muñoz’s narration of revolutionary process as unintentionally creating or adding meaning to the landscape, while reciprocally, the revolutionary subject is produced through his relational engagement with the wilderness. The environment is inscribed as both part of the disparate causalities of revolutionary action and a participant in the creation of revolutionary meaning through its presence in, and framing of, these events. The relevance of the nonhuman to Orozco’s Rebellion is built into the novel’s structure. Se llevaron el cañon is made up of short chapters that relate distinct moments and encounters over the course of the yearlong revolt. This compact chunking is commonplace to the genre; brief chapters that focus on characters and action make for a quick, engaging read and emulate the bola’s perceived frenetic motion. Playing within this mold, Muñoz purposefully inserts chapters that dwell upon the in-between moments of tedium and waiting that also organized the revolution. These moments of stasis interrupt and redirect the reader’s attention from the plot to the backdrop. While these interludes could be perceived as filler or as an obligatory generic nod to “local color,” they serve an important structural role by pausing the action and changing narrative tempo. One of the novel’s most compelling narrative interruptions occurs about a third of the way through, when Alvarito and the Colorados make their way through the thick mesquite brush that envelops Chihuahua’s countryside. By this point, Alvarito’s initial romanticized view of nature when he first leaves town— describing the mountains as “amigos míos” and the plain as “una mujer que se nos ofreciera y la tomáramos ávidamente: al galope”26—has been destabilized. In the place of the essentializing collapse of nature with passive femininity, a different sort of relationship that is forged on uncomfortable intimacy emerges. The initial binarism of human/subject and nature/object, in which the human protagonist observes the landscape and discursively captures it as a lyrical jewel, is problematized by the experience of being in nature. This being in, and not just

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looking at, prompts the revelation that the human too is reciprocally captured by the environment: not just subject, but object. With this revelation, distance is replaced by proximity, which reorients Alvarito’s perspective: “Del campo había huido la distancia: todo alrededor mirábase pequeño, estrecho, cercano.”27 Suddenly the power dynamic between human and nonhuman is subverted; the nonhuman is no longer easily apprehended or holistically communicated, like a landscape painting. Instead, human perception is confounded by nonhuman space and rendered myopic. Stripped of the illusion of a totalizing perspective, Alvarito can only decipher the landscape through corporeal proximity. A sandstorm generated by the horses’ galloping hooves underscores the porosity of the human body with the elements: “Nos perforó el martirio de sed. Primero la nube de arena ha obstruido nuestra nariz; después, la boca ha quedado tan seca como el arenal mismo . . . Era como si hubiéramos caído en tierra con la cara para abajo.”28 Enveloped in dust and sand, the band of Colorados transforms into a herd: a confused, thirsty mass that forges forward, jockeying for position. As Stacy Alaimo maintains in Bodily Natures, descriptions like these make it difficult “to pose nature as mere background” or to reductively imagine the environment as “inert, empty space or [simply] a resource for human use.”29 Rather, Muñoz’s inscription of the porosity of the human body configures nature as a shaping force of the revolutionary experience. Muñoz’s narrative insistence on trans-corporality or interchange between human bodies and nonhuman environment, of course, has nationalist implications. It makes palpable the inherent connectedness of the revolutionary subject with the specificity of the territory that he fought to reclaim. Yet it is important to stress that in the novel, nature is not just invoked as the revolt’s scenic backdrop—the picturesque stage upon which national events play out—but is articulated as a force that destabilizes the narrative of those very events (i.e., the plot itself). This performative tension between history and territory can be thought of as a literary analogue to Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film ¡Qué viva México! (1931).30 In her lucid analysis of the film, Zuzana Pick explains that Eisenstein smartly capitalized upon Mexico’s arid landscapes to heighten the drama of depicted revolutionary events. In the film, clouds, trees, and cacti are stylized so as to portray the “vast and forbidding landscape as a nationalist spectacle.”31 The protagonism of the nonhuman is so prominent in the film, particularly in its “Maguey” episode, that “the awe-inspiring scenery dominates just about every image in the extant footage . . . threatening to derail the narrative.”32

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Nature similarly derails narrative in Se llevaron el cañon, as Muñoz adeptly shuttles back-and-forth between his characteristic flair for action-packed sensationalism, and a more poetic exploration of the landscape and the affective response it engenders. These two narrative modes—movement and meditation— rub up against each other. The latter decelerates narrative tempo and upends the reader’s expectations for thrilling sequences of warfare and macho bravado. In the chapter “Mezquital,” Alvarito and the Colorados wend their way through the dense mesquite thicket. The brush surrounds and eclipses the men, quickly subverting the earlier sensation of masculinist mastery over nature as they galloped across the rolling plains. Enfolded into the mesquite’s “cortina verde,” the troop is forced to slow down and change formation. “Oponiéndonos como un alambrado espinoso con sus ramas entrecruzadas . . . todos quedamos como sitiados en aquel matorral.”33 Hacking their way two at a time through the dense brush, the thicket makes it impossible to see what lies ahead or behind. Trapped and vulnerable to unseen enemies, the men vacillate between feeling scared and bored. As Alvarito affirms, “aburre el mezquital.”34 Notably, the experience of being trapped in the brush is articulated as simultaneously terrifying and boredom inducing, as if there were something both horrific and banal about confronting the mesquite’s materiality. We might suggest that this bifurcated response arises from Alvarito’s revelation that he cannot capture the mesquite in its totality, that its logic is totally “withdrawn” from him (to borrow from Timothy Morton’s object-oriented-ontology line of thinking).35 The total strangeness of this encounter elicits two contradictory affective responses: the human is revealed to be held captive (literally as a body) by the thicket, at the same time that he awakens from his captivation to his own captivation, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben. Revisiting Heidegger’s thoughts on boredom, Agamben posits that to be bored is to experience a state of pure potentiality. In boredom, “Dasein is delivered over to something that refuses itself,” and in this state of suspension, potentiality emerges.36 For Agamben, potentiality is freedom: the freedom to choose to do something, but also to the freedom to choose not to do something. The boredom that bubbles up in Alvarito as he waits and wades through the thicket pushes back against a teleological interpretation of the revolution as moving in one linear, purposeful direction. Muñoz’s formal and discursive insistence on stasis in Se llevaron el cañon allows the novel to question what might become possible in the “unproductive” space of the mesquite brush— unproductive in the sense that it isn’t commonly seen as a resource nor as

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aesthetically pleasing, but as an invasive pest—as well as its analogue, the “unproductive” scenario of a minor revolt doomed to failure. These narrative interruptions that focus on minor affects flesh out the contours of identity revision that took place over the revolution’s longue durée, positing these processes weren’t just born from the clash of historical actors and interests, but through unexpected encounters with landscapes that had been seemingly familiar yet were usually held at a sanitized distance. Bodily intimacy with these territories (particularly for the young urban bourgeois letrado) allowed them to be rediscovered in their uncanny mundaneness, and ultimately reformulated the value and meaning of both landscape and revolutionary (urban) subject in tandem. While many writers of the genre espoused the contradictory postrevolutionary ambition to represent rural subjects while simultaneously renouncing rural culture (in favor of urban, bourgeois morality), Muñoz did not fit this mold. Rather, as Parra explains, Muñoz “did not write to overcome or leave behind [rural culture], but to preserve and remember and to mythologize the revolution in the hinterland.”37 Parra’s observation that Muñoz never abstracted or “othered” popular violence (as was the case with writers like Azuela and Guzmán), but always contextualized it as “integral to human reality,”38 could be extended to his treatment of the hinterlands themselves. While at times the language chosen to illustrate the environment tends toward overblown symbolism, for the most part nature is not abstracted as something external or distant from the characters. To the contrary, the environment is something to be attended to, and to identify with, that affects the characters’ moods and interpretation of the revolt itself. Chihuahua’s rugged landscape is taken seriously, and represented in a way that underscores the importance of regional specificity at a political moment that was more focused on integrative nationalism. In a subsequent chapter, “Divagando,” the action is again interrupted by another meditation about mesquite. No longer in the thick of the brush, Alvarito now observes it from the vantage point of a passing train. “Era el mismo mezquital, compacto, invasor, que llegaba hasta los bordes inclinados del terraplén para tocar con sus ramas los discos rodantes y las tablas de los carros. Y al pasar a la carrera ante nuestra puerta, el mesquite me fascinó, me atrajo hacia él, me hizo completamente suyo.”39 No longer boring but alluring, the fullness and plenitude of this enchantment surprisingly enacts a similar corporeal effect to that of boredom. To be enchanted is to be transfixed, to suspend body and time. Philip Fisher defines enchantment as a “moment of pure presence,”

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when the object’s difference is so striking that “we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.”40 Captivated by the mesquite, the material-affective pull of the nonhuman again brings the novel’s storyline to a halt. As a brief aside, it is notable that rather than solely privilege nature as the nonhuman interlocutor par excellence, Muñoz implies that nature and technology have comparable effects: they erase the self ’s seemingly bounded autonomy through the sublime. Another one of Alvarito’s meditations underscores this experience of erasure: “Unicamente yo pensaba; pensaba en el olor del humo, en el frío brusco del viento, en el mugido de la locomotora, en el sueño que tendrían las estrellas . . . Pensaba en las cosas y no pensaba en mí. Había perdido la noción de la propia existencia.”41 The allure of the object—whether thicket or locomotive—constitutes a form of capture that reframes the human subject as an object, an object of thought and of the nonhuman other. These enchantments erase the confines of the singular self, pushing past individual identity and toward becoming-other. The line between life and nonlife, subject and object, is blurred. The mesquite’s allure is heightened by its lack of utility. In the text, mesquite has no discernible human purpose; it is withdrawn from human manipulation as resource, and as such, can be appreciated from a place of disinterested pleasure. To a certain degree, this understanding of aesthetics anticipates the contemporary theorization of object-oriented ontology, which argues, as Elizabeth Povinelli has elegantly put it, in favor of “a sense-perception of objects [that is] independent from our cognitive capture.” This decoupling of reason and beauty, Povinelli furthers, unexpectedly echoes Immanuel Kant’s proposal that “aesthetic judgment experiences a form of truth (beauty) [that is] freed from our purpose.”42 Derived from the Nahuatl word “mizquitil,” mesquite is the vernacular term used to describe the genus Prosopis, or flowering plants from the pea family. A woody, drought-resistant legume, although mesquite inhabits arid regions throughout the world, its over forty species are thought to have originated in Mexico and South America.43 This unpalatable, thorny plant is often thought of as a noxious pest, particularly by ranchers and farmers, because its high-density canopy suppresses the growth of perennial grasses, producing territories that are ill-disposed for livestock grazing and difficult to manage. Although mesquite is a defining feature of Chihuahua’s flora, Se llevaron el cañon is perhaps the first literary work to seriously thematize the plant’s significance.

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I find it productive here to include a lengthy citation that establishes the poetics of the mesquite, as told through the voice of young Alvarito. Es un arbusto del campo; nadie lo planta, nadie lo cuida; lo mismo asoma en el arenal que en las arrugas del basalto, donde los vientos han dejado una costra de tierra. Parece no tener sed ni hambre, pues crece donde nunca llueve y donde el suelo es estéril; vive de la luz, vive del viento, corre por el llano, sube por los flancos de los cerros . . . A veces es un solo tronco, grueso como un muslo; en otras son cien ramas que salen en todas las direcciones de un mismo hoyo de la tierra, sin cuidarse de ser rectos, despreocupados, versátiles . . . Tiene también espinas, pero nada más para proteger unas vainas rojas que se hinchan con la semilla, que caen, que se dejan arrastrar por la fuerza del viento y que van a convertirse en más mezquites, miles de mezquites, millones de mezquites.44

In this tribute, Muñoz subverts the commonplace that mesquite is a useless, invasive species, instead celebrating its self-generating, self-sustaining embodiment of multiplicity and difference. The novel goes on to explain that while the plant’s wood is occasionally used for fires and fences, its primary “gift” is that it provides shade for all sorts of life. In the winter, it grays, becomes bald and black, and crumbles into pieces. But from the dried sticks that are dropped and buried, the plant is reborn in spring.45 An autopoietic system, the mesquite maintains and renews itself, without need for human intervention or management. Legrás has noted that revolutionary sovereignty was marked by the “drive to touch, accept, or appropriate it all.”46 This holds true for Muñoz’s reevaluation of the mesquite’s “uselessness” and invasive nature, which are reframed as positive qualities, and as a productive metaphor for the revolutionary spirit. No desaparecerá nunca asesinado, como otros árboles, por el hacha, porque sirve para muy poca cosa. Es eterno, como las rocas; es variable, como las ondas que el viento hace en las dunas. Vive sin necesidades, sin preocupaciones, sin cuidados. Se expande, se eleva, se arrastra . . . Cuando lo quitan porque estorba, resurge más allá . . . Y cuando nadie lo utiliza ni para vallado, ni para leña ni para sombra, . . . es libre, . . . es alegre47

Crucially, Muñoz does not advocate for making the desert more “productive” or economically fecund, but instead celebrates the liveliness of a space that we might presume to be characterized by the absence of life. An inhospitable terrain for human agriculture, the Desert, Povinelli explains, has long been perceived as “denuded of life” and thus stands as a space that “with the correct deployment of

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technological expertise or proper stewardship, [could] be (re)made hospitable to life.”48 This representation of the Desert frames it as “an inert state welcoming a technological fix,”49 a configuration that dramatizes the tension between life and nonlife, and responds to our anxieties that nonlife will quench out life. In this popular imagining, the Desert symbolizes a threat to human existence while also functioning as a motivator to seek out greener, more fecund terrains—and for these reasons, has long been a privileged backdrop for apocalyptic or existentialist narratives. Yet this is not the case at all in Se llevaron el cañon. While Muñoz doesn’t shy away from the desert’s more uncomfortable effects on the humans that traverse it, the novel takes seriously its logic and reconfigures the desert as neither inert nor needing a technological fix to make it more hospitable. Extending Jennifer French’s keen observation that anxieties about neocolonialism are “consistently displaced onto a discourse of nature” in Latin American literature,50 we can suggest that Muñoz’s celebration of the mesquite’s resistance to economic productivity is, in large part, a response to the intensification of national industrialization during the Second World War. During this period, Mexico experienced an unprecedented export boom, and rapidly expanded industrialized agriculture to meet international demand. Technologies such as fertilizers and pesticides were introduced to facilitate largescale agricultural production.51 Peripheral regions that had previously lain fallow could suddenly be exploited because of growing infrastructure, like the trains that crisscross the novel. Alvarito’s projection that the mesquite is the “happiest” when it goes unused can be read as a veiled critique of these processes of ecological and economic change, as well as a rejection of the call for agricultural industrialization that advocated for removing pesky plants like mesquite in order to open up more “productive” space for raising livestock and growing exportable plants.52 The personified feelings of freedom and happiness projected onto the mesquite also point to Muñoz’s conviction that the body (or matter) should be disarticulated from its use value. This same formula is echoed in the novel’s conclusion, when Alvarito declares that he is finally “¡Libre, eterno, feliz!”53 This closing declaration of contentment is initially perplexing, since the revolt has been defeated. With the revolt’s failure, Alvarito’s fellow Colorados have set off for home and he finds himself alone, aimless in the mountains. Thus his happiness is decidedly not linked to victory or ideological yield. Seen in this light, the mesquite—with its autopoeitic logic of self-generation and resistance to productivity—provides the model for revolutionary subjectivity that is ultimately adopted by Alvarito by the novel’s conclusion.

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While most letrados disdained the revolution’s seeming lack of ideological coherence and unfocused trajectory, in Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba, Muñoz shifts focus from ideology to affect in order to account for the event’s long-lasting hold on the cultural imaginary. Interestingly, the enchantment of the nonhuman is a central narrative tool through which the revolt’s affective contours are shaded in. Muñoz formulates the revolutionary experience as a return to nature, which enabled an intimate familiarity with the specificity of national territory in a way that modernity threatened to efface. Of course, this experience of wilderness is formulated through a gendered lens, as a space for testing and proving masculinity. Chihuahua’s arid deserts encapsulate the promise of refuge from the disenchantment of urban, domesticated, feminized modernity. In this way, the reader—who was unlikely to be one of those already working the land— could feel the enchantment of “land and liberty” through the page. Yet Muñoz also explores the nonhuman with textual richness, often framing the environment’s capacity to overwhelm, captivate, and outlast its human interlopers as a key counterweight that lays bare the relative transience of human history. If the iconic image of the revolutionary leader foregrounded him against the arid landscape, an image that emphasized the hero’s protagonism against the backdrop of “the future country he will create,”54 Muñoz’s novel scrambles this fantasy of human primacy. The environment’s logic, temporality, and scope concurrently subvert and uncannily echo the organization of human life and the revolution itself. Nature operates in the text both at and above the scale of the human who composes it: history is eroded by larger ecological forces, the temporality of nature juxtaposed against the ephemerality of revolutionary events. As a result, Muñoz figures revolution as entangled with other nonhuman forms of being, a matrix of relationality in which different forms of life are always becoming, and becoming-with each other.

Notes 1 Rafael F. Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba (Mexico: Factoria Ediciones, 2001), 6. 2 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), The Mexican Revolution and the Nationalization of the Land: The Foreign Interests and Reaction (New York: Mexican Bureau of Information, 1915), 7. 3 Dr. Atl, The Mexican Revolution, 8. 4 Christopher Boyer, “Cycles of Mexican Environmental History,” in A Land between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, ed. Christopher Boyer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 10.

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5 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), Self-Portrait with Popocatépetl, 1928, Atl color (oil, wax, dry resin, and gasoline) on canvas, 26 ¾ × 26 ¾ inches, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 6 Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 108. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 257. 8 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xii. 9 Christopher R. Boyer, Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), xiv. 10 William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1349. 11 Horacio Legrás, Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 25. 12 Legrás, Culture and Revolution, 25. 13 Mark D. Anderson, “Was the Mexican Revolution a Revolt of Nature? Agustín Yáñez’s Ecological Perspective,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 40 (2006). Kerstin Oloff, “The ‘Monstrous Head’ and the ‘Mouth of Hell’: The Gothic Ecologies of the ‘Mexican Miracle,’” in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, ed. Mark Anderson and Zelia Bora (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016). 14 Jennifer French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 11. 15 Jorge Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la revolución y otros ensayos (México: Era, 2011), 10. 16 Horacio Legrás, “The Revolution and Its Specters: Staging the Popular in the Mexican Revolution,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2005), 4. 17 Horacio Legrás, “The Revolution and Its Specters.” 18 Rafael F. Muñoz, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Mexico: Biblioteca Era, 2007). 19 Fernando de Fuentes, ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Mexico: Cinematografía Latino Americana, 1936). 20 Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la revolución, 16. 21 Max Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution: Rebels in the Literary Imagination of Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 118. 22 Rubén Gallo, “Jaime Torres Bodet’s Primero de enero: The anti-novel of the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 2 (2006), 196. “Don’t you find this genre of nationalism—that relies so heavily on local color and themes—to be a bit confused?” 23 Aguilar Mora, El silencio de la revolución, 178. “They have remained enclosed in a feedback loop that allows them to be only recuperated as symptoms of an era, and

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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doesn’t recognize their value as discourses of repercussions that go far beyond mere testimonies of the Revolution’s events.” F. Rand Morton, foreword to Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba, by Muñoz. “his style has become more poetic, less brutal, more concerned with nature and a lyrical mode of painting it . . . It’s no longer the bloody event that takes center stage, but the emotional one.” Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 36. Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 31. “friends of mine”; “a woman that offered herself up to us and we took her avidly: galloping.” Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 47. “Distance fled from the countryside: everything around us looked small, nearby, close.” Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 37–38. “We were pierced by the martyrdom of thirst. First the cloud of sand obstructed our noses, then, our mouths grew as dry as the sand itself . . . It was as if we had fallen face down into the earth.” Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. Frigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein, ¡Qué viva México! (1931; New York: Kino Video, 1998). Zuzana Pick, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 133. Pick, Constructing the Image, 119. Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 63. “green curtain”; “Opposing us with its crossed branches like a spiny fence . . . we all were besieged by that thicket.” Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 63. “The mesquite bores.” Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011), 165. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 65. Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution, 138. Parra, Writing Pancho Villa’s Revolution, 139. Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 80. “It was the same mesquite, compact, invading, that reached the sloping edges of the embankment to touch the rolling discs and boards of the railcars with its branches. And as it raced past our door, the mesquite fascinated me, attracted me to it, made me completely its own.” Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 56. “I was only capable of thinking; I thought about the smell of the smoke, the brisk cold of the wind, the lowing of the locomotive, the dreams the stars might have. I thought about things and did not think about myself. I lost the notion of my own existence.”

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42 Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 84. 43 R.J. Ansley, J.A. Huddle and B.A. Kramp, “Mesquite Ecology,” Texas Natural Resources Server (1997). 44 Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 80. It is a bush of the countryside; no one plants it, no one cares for it; it emerges from both the sand and from the folds of basalt, where the winds have left a tiny crust of dirt. It doesn’t seem to be thirsty or hungry, because it grows where it never rains and where the soil is barren; it lives from light, from the wind, it runs across the plain, climbs up hillsides . . . Sometimes it is a single trunk, thick as a thigh; other times a hundred branches emerge in all directions from the same hole in the earth, without caring to be straight, unconcerned, versatile . . . It has thorns, but only to protect the red pods that swell with seed, that fall, are dragged by the wind and become more mesquites, thousands of mesquites, millions of mesquites. 45 Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 81. 46 Legrás, Culture and Revolution, 26. 47 Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 81. It will never disappear, like other trees, by the ax, because it serves for very little. It is eternal, like the rocks; it is variable, like the waves that the wind makes in the dunes. It lives without needs, without worries, without care. It expands, it rises, it creeps . . . When they remove it because it hinders, it reemerges . . . And when no one uses it for fencing, firewood or shade, it is free, it is joyful. 48 49 50 51 52

Povinelli, Geontologies, 16. Povinelli, Geontologies, 19. French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, 7. Oloff, “The ‘Monstrous Head.’” It is important to clarify that while Muñoz may seem to suggest that nature is the antithesis of industry, the final chapter in Se llevaron el cañon complicates this assertion, through Marcos Ruiz’s return to a mountain that was a coal mine, configured as the privileged place of refuge for the revolutionary promise. 53 Muñoz, Se llevaron el cañon, 172. “Free, eternal, happy!” 54 John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 198.

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Reading Rulfo between Benjamin and Derrida: End of Story Bruno Bosteels

The task of memory “Acuérdate” (“Remember”), the reader or listener is told from the start, in the title of one of the lesser-known stories in Juan Rulfo’s 1953 collection El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain and Other Stories). Just a few sentences into the story we hear the same imperative repeated, this time in the form of the demand for something that the addressee either should do or, for a number of as-yet unspecified reasons, may not be likely to do: “Pero te debes acordar,” only to end with the final observation: “Tú te debes acordar de él, pues fuimos compañeros de escuela y lo conociste como yo.”1 As a matter of fact, a call to remember resounds often throughout the entire collection of short stories—whether in the form of an actual imperative or in an open invitation, as if blown to the four corners of the wind, to perform the task of memory at a moment in history when this may no longer be self-evident. Several of the narrators in these cruel and impeccable stories seem to be telling their tale precisely in response to an impossible demand for remembrance. A good case in point is “La Cuesta de las Comadres,” the second story in the disheveled copy of El llano en llamas that I am using (the last edition to be corrected by the author, published in the Colección Popular of the Fondo de Cultura Económica), in which the narrator confesses to an unnamed interlocutor—perhaps a police officer or some other representative of the law—how he killed Remigio Torrico, after the latter falsely accused him of having killed his brother Odilón Torrico. In this case the narrator’s confession ends with the following words: Me acuerdo que eso pasó allá por octubre, a la altura de las fiestas de Zapotlán. Y digo que me acuerdo que fue por esos días, porque en Zapotlán estaban

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quemando cohetes, mientras que por el rumbo donde tiré a Remigio se levantaba una gran parvada de zopilotes a cada tronido que daban los cohetes. De eso me acuerdo.2

Throughout El llano en llamas a motley crew of characters seem to feel an irresistible urge to tell their story as an act of defiant remembrance. The sole purpose of telling one’s story seems to be to find a friend in whom to confide one’s sorrows. In a prologue written in the late 1980s for a joint edition of Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas published in Spain, Rulfo speaks of the misery and suffering in which his home country has been steeped ever since the conquest of Tenochtitlán. Were modern-day Mexico and Spain to collaborate in the direction of social justice, though, he feels as though this centuries-old situation need not last for much longer. “No debemos, pues, lamentarnos de nuestras miserias,” he adds. “Lo hacemos sólo por el puro gusto de quejarnos de todo. Siempre. Y siempre hemos buscado a un amigo sólo para contarle nuestras dolencias.”3 In the stories of El llano en llamas, however, the different characters set out to tell their pain and sorrow regardless of whether their interlocutor is a friend or foe. Most often, as Rulfo observed in an interview with regard to one of these stories, the addressee moreover does not get to speak in turn and may not even be listening with all that much attention in the first place: “En ‘Luvina’ el monólogo está hecho en otra forma; allí el monólogo se enfrenta ante un oyente, el hombre está hablando. Claro que el que escucha no interviene para nada; el que habla relata al que oye sus propios movimientos.”4 And, in the few instances where we do hear from the interlocutors, it is only through the speech anxiously reported back to us by the narrators themselves. This is especially the case when the speaker is addressing himself to a representative of the state apparatuses, whether a lawyer, a land surveyor, a tax collector, or a public prosecutor. “Eso que me cuenta de todas las muertes que debía y que acababa de efectuar, no me lo perdono. Me gusta matar matones, créame usted. No es la costumbre; pero se ha de sentir sabroso ayudarle a Dios a acabar con esos hijos del mal,” so the shepherd tells an unnamed señor licenciado in “El hombre,” only to go on complaining about the dire situation he now finds himself in as a result of his opening up to this representative of the law: ¿De modo que ora que vengo a decirle lo que sé, yo salgo encubridor? Pos ora sí. ¿Y dice usted que me va a meter en la cárcel por esconder a ese individuo? Ni que yo fuera el que mató a la familia esa. Yo sólo vengo a decirle que allí en un charco del río está un difunto. Y usted me alega que desde cuándo y cómo es y de qué modo es ese difunto. Y ora que yo se lo digo, salgo encubridor. Pos ora sí.5

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To tell a tale, whether tiny or tall, if it does not help to stave off death, as in the classical case of Scheherazade, at least seems to provide these storytellers with the relief of lifting the burden of guilt off their chest while letting a bit more time idly go by, without the immediate threat of renewed violence. “Ahora estoy junto a la alcantarilla esperando a que salgan las ranas. Y no ha salido ninguna en todo este rato que llevo platicando,” Macario tells his perhaps imaginary audience at the end of the story that bears his name: “Mejor seguiré platicando.”6 Or, in the words of the narrator who gives us the story of “La herencia de Matilde Arcángel,” perhaps the greatest example of the art of oral storytelling recreated in El llano en llamas: “Les contaré esto sin apuraciones. Despacio. Al fin y al cabo tenemos toda la vida por delante.”7 For the storytellers in question, to keep on talking, as slowly as need be, seems to be their modest attempt to answer that obscure demand, which from all sides besieges them with the pressures of a veritable injunction, that is, the interpellation to remember. Louis Althusser’s canonical example of the process of ideological interpellation, captured in the snapshot of the police officer hailing a passerby in the street (“Hey, you there!”), is even anticipated verbatim in “¡Diles que no me maten!” in which the army coronel can be heard calling out from behind the door to the assassin of his soon-to-be-avenged father: “¡Ey tú!” (“Hey, you!”).8 In Rulfo’s case, this overarching interpellation, which recalls several of his storytellers to the task of memory, immediately begs a set of questions that I want to begin addressing in the following pages: What exactly is here in need of remembering? Where does this need come from? Why does there seem to be a kind of original duty or demand to respond to the task of remembrance? Why does the discharging of this debt take the form of the telling of a story? Finally, to what end do Rulfo’s characters engage in the act of storytelling?

End of story “End of story,” in English, serves as a colloquial expression to put a sudden stop to the discussion. As with all abrupt affirmations of authority, the expression at the same time betrays an underlying weakness or insecurity. For in what only appears to be a peremptory gesture the speaker who utters this phrase cannot avoid admitting that the affirmed opinion is just a story. Not only all the rest but it, too, is pure literature. With Rulfo, beyond the anecdotal but certainly not negligible factor of the author’s legendary silence after publishing his 1953 collection El llano en llamas

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and his equally slender 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, to be followed only by the novel or script El gallo de oro (The Golden Rooster) composed around the same time but published only three decades later, we are indeed confronting the question of the end of literature and, more specifically, the end of the art of storytelling—whereby the notion of the “end” must be understood in the double sense of both purpose and demise, or destination and termination, combined into a single ruinous aporia. In what follows, then, I propose to discuss several ways of interpreting this end or these ends of the story, while in each case interrogating the theoretical presuppositions at work behind the interpretations in question. Two figures in particular will tower over this debate in terms of their possible influence on the field of Latin American studies in relation to the question of the end or ends of literary storytelling: Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Nearing the end of a life that he himself would cut short so as to avoid a worse fate at the hands of his Nazi persecutors, in an essay first published in 1936, Benjamin diagnosed the modern disappearance of the figure of the storyteller, whose death or demise he connected to the waning communicability of experience in general. And so, “the art of storytelling is coming to an end,” Benjamin observed. “One meets with fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly. More and more often, there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if a capability that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, has been taken from us: the ability to share experiences.”9 Almost thirty years later, Derrida seems to take away the last remaining reason for lamenting this disappearance. Il ne faut pas se raconter des histoires (One must not tell any stories or histories to oneself), so Derrida proposes as a general rule for the task of deconstruction in his 1964–1965 seminar on Martin Heidegger, recently published as part of the posthumous edition of Derrida’s seminars and lecture courses. Borrowing freely from the opening lines of Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Being and Time, in which the German thinker in turn had referred the reader to Plato’s paradoxical rejection of mythic storytelling, Derrida explains: To liberate the question of being and history, one must, then, stop telling stories, which is to say that one must take a step beyond ontic history. This step, which can look like an exit from history in general toward the ahistorical, is in truth the condition of access to a radicalization of the thinking of history as history of being itself.10

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Not to tell oneself any stories or histories would be the central maxim for a mode of thinking that seeks to destroy or deconstruct the history of Western metaphysics as the history of one long series of “just-so-stories,” which is how Sigmund Freud described his “necessary fictions” or “scientific myths” such as the story of the killing of the primordial father. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, in a famous line of which Derrida was also fond, these are stories made up of the diverse intonation of a limited number of metaphors: “quizás la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonación de varias metáforas.”11 Now what would happen, I want to ask, if we contrasted these two interpretations of the end of the story—one rooted in a materialist history of modern capitalism and the other in a painstaking deconstruction of the history of Western metaphysics—in light of the short stories from Rulfo’s collection? Or, to put the question the other way around, what would happen if we revisited the stories in El llano en llamas to test the boundaries of a contradictory impulse behind much contemporary theorizing about the state of literature: between the nostalgia for the art of oral storytelling and the repudiation of all stories and metaphors, as if in a final and definitive twist on the critique of ideology, in the name of a generalized theory of writing—albeit in the melancholy knowledge that one will never be able to do so without telling more stories and producing more metaphors?

Violence: A life To the question of knowing what is being remembered in Rulfo’s stories, it may seem easy enough to answer by pointing to the extreme level of violence that is being retold. Violence of different kinds and degrees: murder, rape, torture, theft, abandonment, expulsion, dispossession, abuse, extortion, and humiliation all figure prominently in the stories told in El llano en llamas. “There is violence in all of Rulfo’s stories, and in several of them it is the dominant theme,” William Rowe remarks in an excellent reader’s guide to the entire collection, leading to a trancelike state of ecstasy: “The stories express a poetry of violence. Through violence, the characters gain access to an instinctive-irrational level of being, which resists reduction to ethical, sociological or legal explanation.”12 We could go so far as to say that all the stories in this collection are part of a single history of violence told over and over again from multiple angles and perspectives—from the victim to the

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perpetrator and back, without neglecting the role of the guilty bystander or the public prosecutor. El llano en llamas, though, does not just tell the entranced history of violence in general. Rulfo, to be sure, in his nonfictional work repeatedly expressed a keen awareness of the conditions of violence, destitution, and abandonment that long after the revolution continued to mark especially the fate of rural Mexico, generating entire ghost towns as a result of emigration to the nation’s capital or to the United States. “Ahí está la cuestión de por qué algunas personas llegaron a acumular muchas tierras sin tener derechos legales, haciendo desaparecer pueblos para correr a la población y evitar así la dispersión de la tierra,” Rulfo thus observed in one of his numerous interviews. And, to some extent, all that this author ever wished to tell was the story of this violent disappearance. “Ciertamente: ‘Es más dificultoso resucitar un muerto que dar la vida de nuevo.’ Pero—soy de chispa retardada—mi propósito no era hacer historia sino contar una historia, ésta. Decir, por ejemplo, yo viví en un pueblo que se llamó San Gabriel.”13 However, to focus on individual towns and their idiosyncratic inhabitants, no matter how diminished and increasingly invisible to the central authorities, also shows that the aim of these stories is not merely to offer a wholesale denunciation of violence. Rather, they seek to locate the precise moment when such generic violence, which we could argue stems from the persistence of the process of the so-called primitive accumulation, impacts the singularity of one person or one community’s incomparable existence. The point is not to tell the history of violence but a history, that is to say, the unique way in which a life is violently impacted by the general force of history. This is no doubt part of the reason why in El llano en llamas so many of the storytellers, having difficulty remembering not just when but if they partook of a crime, seek to tie the moment of violence to events more easily placed and dated on the calendar of local festivities and natural disasters in their community. It is in light of this attention given to the violent point of impact of history in general on a life in the singular that we can understand the effort expended by the anonymous narrator of “Acuérdate” in trying to remember, together with his classmate to whom the story is addressed, the exact moment when things took a turn for the worst for their mutual friend, to the point where he killed his brother-in-law for no apparent reason other than a deep-seated resentment: “Quizá entonces se volvió malo, o quizá ya era de nacimiento.”14 Or else, we also can think of the desperate attempts on the part of a worried mother, in “Porque somos tan pobres,” to recollect when exactly her two older daughters lost their

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ways. In the words reported back to us by her young son, this is what for the life of her she cannot seem to remember: Quién sabe de dónde les vendría a ese par de hijas suyas aquel mal ejemplo. Ella no se acuerda. Le da vuelta a todos sus recuerdos y no ve claro dónde estuvo su mal o el pecado de nacerle una hija tras otra con la misma mala costumbre. No se acuerda. Y cada vez que piensa en ellas, llora y dice: “Que Dios las ampare a las dos.”15

Finally, in several of these efforts the difficulty involves the task of memory to the second degree, inasmuch as what the storyteller is trying to recall includes his or her capacity for remembrance itself. It is, then, a question of trying to recapture the possibility of memory as the faculty indispensable for the art of storytelling. “Y ahora ya ve usted, me tienen detenido en la cárcel y que me van a juzgar la semana que entra porque criminé a don Justo,” the elderly cowherd Esteban tells another law enforcement agent, in “En la madrugada.” He continues: Yo no me acuerdo; pero bien pudo ser. Quizá los dos estábamos ciegos y no nos dimos cuenta de que nos matábamos uno al otro. Bien pudo ser. La memoria, a esta edad mía, es engañosa; por eso yo le doy gracias a Dios, porque si acaba con todas mis facultades, ya no pierdo mucho; ya que casi no me queda ninguna.16

The story being told, in other words, at the same time aims to reconstruct the lost capacity for remembering and retelling a story in the first place. “For,” as Benjamin also remarks, “storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to.”17

The living death of the storyteller Of the many features that according to Benjamin define the dying art of storytelling, two in particular deserve to be underscored: the importance of orality and the role of community or companionship. About the first of these characteristics, Benjamin observes: “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among the writers who have set down the tales, the great ones are those whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.”18 Many of Rulfo’s storytellers, of course, not only are not nameless, but, what is more, in at least two instances their proper names get to serve as titles for the stories

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themselves. This already begins to point at a gesture of appropriation typical of the modern author, a gesture that breaks off the circuit of transmission between storytellers and listeners and, like a photograph or movie still, leaves behind only the fixed image of the written short story. To be sure, from Carlos Blanco Aguinaga to Walter Mignolo, the author of El llano en llamas has often been praised for his technical skill in reconstructing at least the fiction of orality, especially in the aftermath of centuries long colonization under the central rule and grammar of written Spanish. “No es la ficcionalización de la oralidad lo que caracteriza la obra de autores como Rulfo,” Mignolo explains. “Es, más bien, la ficcionalidad de una oralidad que identifica la juxtaposición de tradiciones culturales nativas y colonizadas. Son, en otras palabras, los remedos de las situaciones coloniales (valores, modos de pensamiento, forma de ser y de vida) hechos literatura a través de la escritura de la oralidad.”19 What is more, in one of his most famous statements to interviewers, Rulfo himself pointed out that to recreate the spoken language of people from the Mexican countryside, albeit reconstructed in writing after the fact from the point of view of the modern metropolis, was very much the end-goal of his style of narrating. “Lo que yo no quería era hablar como un libro escrito. Quería no hablar como se escribe, sino escribir como se habla. Buscar personajes a los que pudiera darle tratamiento más simple,” he states. And, citing “Nos han dado la tierra” as an example, he goes on to explain what the accomplishment of such a purpose entails: Llegar al tratamiento que me he asignado. No es una cuestión de palabras. Siempre sobran, en realidad. Sobran un qué o un cuándo, está un de o un más de más, o algo así. Pero los cuentos son casi espontáneos o naturales. Si no están desarrollados como están imaginados—cosa difícil, siempre—más o menos se puede decir, de la versión final, que eso era lo que yo quería decir. No hay ambigüedad en ninguna de las historias. A excepción de una que otra que tal vez no tenga importancia. A pesar de que ninguna debe tener importancia, en realidad.20

All the conceptual oppositions undergirding the aura that surrounds the art of storytelling can be found here: speech/writing, spontaneity/technique, imagination/development, naturalness/ambiguity, etc. And yet, promptly undercutting the supposed purity of the break marked by these oppositions, we also encounter an unsolved antinomy at the heart of Rulfo’s idiosyncratic approach, which for all the appearances of spontaneous orality never ceases

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to be the explicit result of a written treatment and one that the writer, instead of letting himself be guided in this by his subjects, has sovereignly assigned to himself. Benjamin incidentally draws a fascinating distinction between two remote origins of the storyteller, as defined respectively by peasants who till the land and merchants who trade across the sea: “If we wish to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, we find one embodied in the settled tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman. Indeed, both spheres of life have, as it were, produced their own tribe of storytellers.”21 Needless to say, those characters who also happen to be storytellers in El llano en llamas belong almost exclusively to the former group, whereas Rulfo himself, especially in his capacity as a traveling salesman and publicist for the Goodrich-Euzkadi tire company but also later as salaried employee working for the Mexican state, represents a modern example of the latter: one who no longer travels over sea—like the Phoenician merchants, whose mythic stories famously reached ancient Greece in the time of Plato, or like Marco Polo, whose tantalizing tales were as attractive as the nascent logic of capitalism behind his merchandise ultimately would prove to be destructive to the empire of the Great Khan— but over land and by car. As Cristina Rivera Garza has recently suggested with reference to another of Benjamin’s texts, Rulfo’s role in this regard was, to say the least, ambivalent. Like the figure of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus invoked in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Rulfo the company man and state bureaucrat must have looked forward to the progress being made under President Miguel Alemán, while at the same time the would-be storyteller in him, who was always close to the rural and indigenous communities targeted in this process, could not avoid looking back at the pile of rubble and ruin caused by the so-called miracle of Mexican modernity: Rulfo no sólo fue el testigo melancólico del atrás que la modernidad arrasaba a su paso, sino también, en tanto empleado de empresas y proyectos que terminaron cambiando la faz del país, fue parte de la punta de lanza de la modernidad corrupta y voraz que, en nombre del bien nacional, desalojaba y saqueaba pueblos enteros para dejarlos convertidos en limbos poblados de murmullos.22

Looking both forward and backward, the writer simultaneously becomes witness to the progress and the destruction of an eternally incomplete project of modernity that is inseparable from catastrophe. About this profound ambivalence, not to say contradiction, Rivera Garza wonders out loud: “¿Se

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puede ser las dos cosas a la vez sin morir en el intento? ¿Se puede ser ambas cosas y seguir, después, escribiendo?” These are questions to which everything in the hybrid essay-fiction that is Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué conspires to answer in the affirmative: “Testigo y ejecutor del espíritu modernizador del periodo alemanista, Rulfo lamentaba, en efecto, el estado de las cosas, lo que estaba a punto de desaparecer, mientras simultáneamente, elogiaba las oportunidades que el quehacer de ingenieros, agrónomos y biólogos ofrecía a las comunidades de unas tierras hasta ese entonces volcadas hacia adentro.”23 Because of this ambivalence, we should not be too quick to conclude that a Benjaminian take on the fate of the storyteller offers merely an occasion for nostalgic recollection, as if the lost aura or halo surrounding this type of secular sage were not also the result of brutal social hierarchies that capitalism was beginning to bring down as much as it was already refunctionalizing them. Benjamin’s interest, in fact, lays not in lamenting the end of storytelling as such, much less in seeing in this end merely a “symptom of decay” for which modernity and technology would be to blame following an argument that could easily slide back into a ponderous and reactionary kind of thinking: “It is, rather, only a concomitant of the secular productive forces of history—a symptom that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing.”24 In addition to pointing the analysis in the direction of the specific material determinations and historical coordinates behind the changeover from oral storytelling to modern narrative fiction, this formulation has the bonus advantage of describing the melancholy appeal of so many of Rulfo’s short stories: they make it possible to find a new kind of beauty in that which is vanishing. Their principal aesthetic effect in this sense plays itself out at the level of feeling or mood, or in what today’s jargon would be called the life of affect, that is, what Benjamin as well as Heidegger before him described as the fundamental tonality or affective disposition of Stimmung. This last term is the one rendered as “aura” in the English translation of Benjamin’s essay, while “halo” was the author’s proposed solution for the French rendering of his text that he was still able to oversee. “The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller.”25 Is this not also the aura or halo that for better and for worse surrounds Rulfo, the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of just two slender volumes of fragmented stories?

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The fiction of orality in these stories, moreover, goes hand in hand with the inextricable bond that according to Benjamin ties the storyteller to a given community or people: “A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people.”26 Contrary to the modern novel or even the short story, both of which are typically written and read in private seclusion, the act of telling a story involves a sharing of experience that is not just oral but also collective: “A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader.” For just as “even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words aloud for the benefit of a listener,” so too the telling of a tale opens up a circuitous rotation in which the listener and the narrator can trade roles between them: The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has secluded himself. The birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none.27

Rulfo’s stories may no longer present any explicit counsel or moral lesson, but they still tap into the collective chain of transmission in which one narrator merely retells the story told many times over by others before him. This is nowhere more evident than in the story “En la madrugada,” where the old Esteban, who also happens to be the narrator of part of his own story, makes the entire town responsible for the rumors spread about him as the alleged murderer of don Justo: Y que dizque yo lo había matado, dijeron los díceres. Bien pudo ser; pero yo no me acuerdo. ¿No cree usted que matar a un prójimo deja rastros? Los debe de dejar, y más tratándose de un superior de uno. Pero desde el momento que me tienen aquí en la cárcel por algo ha de ser, ¿no cree usted? Aunque, mire, yo bien que me acuerdo de hasta el momento que le pegué al becerro y de cuando el patrón se me vino encima, hasta allí va muy bien la memoria; después todo está borroso . . . Y, sin embargo, dicen que maté a don Justo. ¿Con que dicen que le maté? ¿Que dizque con una piedra, verdad? Vaya, menos mal, porque si dijeran que había sido con un cuchillo estarían zafados, porque yo no cargo cuchillo desde que era muchacho y de eso hace ya una buena hilera de años.28

As for the rotation in which yesterday’s listener can become today’s storyteller, we can at least hear the possibility of such a structure in “El hombre,” when the shepherd recounts how the man whose dead body he eventually would discover

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had seemed to him innocent enough to tell him about his wife and kids. “Me contó que no era de por aquí, que era de un lugar muy lejos, pero que no podía andar ya porque le fallaban las piernas . . . Me contó que se había pasado dos días sin comer más que puros yerbajos. Eso me dijo,” the narrator retells to his anonymous interrogator in prison. “Pero no parecía malo. Me contaba de su mujer y de sus chamacos. Y de lo lejos que estaban de él. Se sorbía los mocos al acordarse de ellos.”29 From conveying the sorrow felt over the loss of one’s intimate family to the invention of a minimal alternative community through the telling and retelling of stories, it appears to be just a small step, even if our legs are giving out from under us modern readers of literature. In theory, at least, everything in Rulfo’s El llano en llamas seems to be in place for a large-scale recreation of the art of the storyteller, complete with the dominant features of orality and community outlined by Benjamin.

From transculturation to the decolonial option Adapting Benjamin to the Latin American context, we could even go a step further and, in the name of transculturation or decolonization, offer a theoretical reading of Rulfo’s storytelling as an act of both radical experimentalism and counterhegemonic resistance. Originating in the field of anthropology as the Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz’s proposed alternative for acculturation, now involving aspects of both deculturation and neoculturation, the idea of transculturation in the context of Latin American literary and cultural theory is associated above all with Ángel Rama’s pathbreaking 1982 study Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. In this study, only recently translated into English under the title Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, stories such as Rulfo’s “Luvina” or “La Cuesta de las Comadres,” even more neatly so than Pedro Páramo, represent preeminent examples of the ongoing transculturation of narrative fiction: Lo que antes era la lengua de los personajes populares y, dentro del mismo texto, se oponía a la lengua del escritor o del narrador, invierte su posición jerárquica: en vez de ser la excepción y de singularizar al personaje sometido al escudriñamiento del escritor, pasa a ser la voz que narra, abarca así la totalidad del texto y ocupa el puesto del narrador manifestando su visión del mundo. Pero no remeda simplemente un dialecto, sino que utiliza formas sintácticas o lexicales

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que le pertenecen dentro de una lengua coloquial esmerada, característica del español americano de alguna de las áreas lingüísticas del continente.30

Here, too, even more central to the process of transculturation than the fiction or polished version of orality is the presupposition of an organic connection between the narrator or author and the collectivity in which they would be rooted: El autor se ha reintegrado a la comunidad lingüística y habla desde ella, con desembarazado uso de sus recursos idiomáticos. Si esa comunidad es, como ocurre frecuentemente, de tipo rural, o aun colinda con una de tipo indígena, es a partir de su sistema lingüístico que trabaja el escritor, quien no procura imitar desde fuera un habla regional, sino elaborarla desde dentro con una finalidad artística.31

The result is an updated version of the typically romantic image of the author as a natural emanation of his community, the spontaneous voice of the elementary people, only now elevated to the prestige of an unequivocally modern, if not also high-modernist, artificer. Though he pays but scant attention to the material conditions that enable such an artifice, Rama evidently knows this image to be little more than a wellcrafted lie, a figment of the imagination of skilled writers who never cease to work from within the confines of the lettered elite. But, according to him, therein lies precisely the innovation of transculturators such as Rulfo. They literally write across cultures and serve as essential mediators between popular and elite, oral and written, or rural and urban spheres of modern life—all for the sake of what appears to be the expanded use value of the aesthetic in general and the literary in particular. “Si el principio de unificación textual y de construcción de una lengua literaria privativa de la invención estética, puede responder al espíritu racionalizador de la modernidad,” Rama admits, “compensatoriamente la perspectiva lingüística desde la cual se lo asume restaura la visión regional del mundo, prolonga su vigencia en una forma aún más rica e interior que antes y así expande la cosmovisión originaria en un modo mejor ajustado, auténtico, artísticamente solvente, de hecho modernizado, pero sin destrucción de la identidad.”32 Thus, a desire at all cost to extol the genuine artistic worth of the process of narrative transculturation leads to the critic’s failure to consider the extent to which this process actively, if also ambivalently, contributed to the violent destruction of those forms of life whose usefulness was supposed to have been extended as part of the conflict of modernization in Latin America.

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In what to this date remains by far the most sophisticated reading of Rulfo in any language I know, Neil Larsen has offered a devastating critique of the interpretative fallacies behind this canonical reading of the author as transculturator in El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo. Writing more than two decades ago, in a chapter of his 1990 book Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies, Larsen admittedly did not have even secondhand access to the wealth of background information now available about the author’s different jobs in both the private industry and the state sector. And yet, using his unparalleled theoretical acumen, he already manages to show how the project of transculturation that writers like Rulfo are supposed to represent fits in perfectly with the modernizing project of the Mexican state in the era of what Larsen describes as its postpopulist condition, inaugurated under the presidency of Miguel Alemán. The agency ascribed to the privileged realm of the aesthetic, in this context, becomes a cultural surrogate for a form of hegemony that no longer requires the direct intervention of coercive state actors. For this same reason, transculturation appears as a strategy of reappropriation and containment at least as much, if not more so than, as a liberatory or subversive countermediation: What determines the general shift to a modernist aesthetic of countermediation is, I argue, on the one hand, the enhanced power and rationalization of the peripheral bourgeois state itself—typically as a result of populist revolutions or coups led by the middle class—and, on the other, the fact that this same rationalization only elevates to a higher plane the contradiction between itself and the prevailing political “irrationality,” that is, the relative absence of political subjects able or willing to act as the “molecular” units of peripheral capitalist rule.33

What in the transcultural reading of Rulfo’s narrative fiction appears to operate in defense of the peasant and indigenous populations who are its subjects henceforth works in the service of a thoroughly revamped Mexican state. The latter for the most part may appear to be absent from Rulfo’s narration, its role reduced to the reported speech of lettered men who otherwise remain silent, but in actual fact state power has merely withdrawn, leaving room in the buffer zones of culture for a demobilized intelligentsia to experiment freely with the simulacra of popular language. Bourgeois state power, in other words, has not failed so much as it manages to lead the threat of mass unrest and violent insurgency into the conduits of recognizable cultural forms whose aura has been naturalized and dehistoricized into the appearance of a self-sustaining plenitude:

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“The transparency of writing to its regional object, understood transculturally as a failure or at least deferral of the bourgeois episteme, perhaps tells us something we are loath to hear—that this same ‘cognitive structure’ has now learned to represent itself exclusively in the cultural/aesthetic signs of its Other,” Larsen concludes. “The state has in this special sense erased itself by assuming shape as the abstract, institutional horizon within which a wayward literary talent is ‘free’ to develop and ‘experiment’ with representationalities heretofore dictated by the immediacies of a still-unsettled phase in the consolidation of hegemonic power.”34 Mignolo, on the other hand, only seems to be upping the ante by repeating the claim that Rulfo’s writing somehow gives us access to the voices of this cultural, linguistic, and epistemic Other. Less concerned with the literary value of the end product, he sees in this writing an alternative form of Third World literature: one that, far from having to obey the program of national allegory famously outlined in an old essay by Fredric Jameson, lends an ear to the submerged voices of the colonized populations of Latin America. In Rulfo’s case, this would involve a kind of transculturation in reverse, whereby the dominant alphabetic culture, with its concomitant model of causality first inherited from colonial times in New Spain and then spread across a newly independent Mexican nation under the criollo or mestizo-controlled state apparatus, comes to be subverted from below by the barely repressed presence of indigenous voices: La novelística de Rulfo en México, como la de Arguedas en Perú, son ejemplos paradigmáticos de los lazos que, en países del tercer mundo ligan procesos de alfabetización, tradiciones orales de culturas colonizadas y literatura. Por eso es relevante, en la biografía de los dos autores, sus conexiones permanentes con la antropología y con los proyectos indigenistas.35

Thus, even if Rulfo’s writing presents nothing more than a fiction, there nevertheless would be an element of decolonization at work in these artificially contrived simulacra of orality. As early as in 1954, one of the first reviewers of El llano en llamas had made the astonishing claim: “Es el indio el que habla y lo hace para sí. No le importa tanto ser o no ser entendido plenamente, ni tan siquiera interpretado.”36 Writing in the wake of the fifth centenary of the “discovery” of the Americas, Mignolo reformulates the same claim by arguing that Rulfo’s fiction stages nothing less than a civilizational conflict between the alphabetic writing of the world’s colonizing powers and the nonalphabetic orality and imagery of the colonized.

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This is the conflict that would explain the often-mentioned strangeness of Rulfo’s literature: La extrañeza que provoca la primera lectura de la obra de Rulfo—que ya mencioné—es un ejemplo de una forma de pensar y de hablar que proviene no sólo de la imagen de ultratumba provocada por los personajes, sino de las fuerzas subterráneas, sumergidas, de las lenguas nativas que pugnan por hacerse oír mezcladas con la sintaxis, la fonética y la semántica del castellano.37

For literary and cultural theory, the consequences of this decolonial reading are no less portentous than those of the transcultural model from which it is openly derived. Above all, taking into account the element of decolonization at work in the fictionalization of orality requires a different concept of literature or of the literary than what has been bequeathed to us by the European Enlightenment and its reactions in Romanticism. This new concept would not be limited to the peripheries of the Third World but might actually also lead to a radical reinterrogation of the oldest paragons of literature in the West: Un cambio de la noción de literatura a partir de la experiencia de las literaturas del tercer mundo implica un cambio de dirección tanto en la lectura como en los estudios literarios: no necesariamente justificar estéticamente (según los criterios de la estética filosófica de occidente) las prácticas literarias del tercer mundo, sino partir del proceso de etnografización de la estética articulada en estas prácticas para recalcar los valores etnográficos en Virgilio, en Dante o en Cervantes. Una de las maneras de escapar a las formas de dominación intelectual es invertir las categorías que sirvieron para colonizar el imaginario y la valoración de la producción cultural en regiones del tercer mundo.38

There remains, however, a haunting question as to whether these transcultural and decolonial projects can ever truly access the voices of the indigenous, peasant, or otherwise marginalized populations, when the agents performing such projects remain members of the lettered elite responsible for their exclusion and exploitation. Larsen raises this question with regard the practices of transculturation, but his words are no less applicable to the model of decolonization: “Does the erasure of the traditional frontier separating the ‘civilized’ and ‘reasoned’ voice of the narration per se and the ‘unenlightened’ speech of the hinterland in itself constitute a penetration of the regional ‘linguistic community’? If the old, colonizing ratio has been silenced, is the voice we are hearing truly that of the colonized?”39

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Can the subaltern speak in the languages of transculturation and decolonization? This is a question that continues to haunt the history of literary and cultural theory in Latin America. As Josefina Ludmer observes in a side remark of her essay “Las tretas del débil” dedicated to Sor Juana: Nos interesa especialmente el gesto del superior que consiste en dar la palabra al subalterno: hay en Latinoamérica una literatura propia, fundada en ese gesto. Desde la literatura gauchesca en adelante, pasando por el indigenismo y los diversos avatares del regionalismo, se trata del gesto ficticio de dar la palabra al definido por alguna carencia (sin tierra, sin escritura), de sacar a luz su lenguaje particular. Ese gesto proviene de la cultura superior y está a cargo del letrado, que disfraza y muda su voz en la ficción de la transcripción, para proponer al débil y subalterno una alianza contra el enemigo común.40

Giving voice to the subaltern, bearing witness to the other, or restoring the dignity of the oppressed cultures are operations that always risk steering the potential counterrationalities of the underprivileged back into the mold of established cultural hegemonies. In this sense, for all their allegiance to ethnographical concreteness, perhaps such endeavors are not so different as they believe they are from the high modernist quest for an aesthetic representation of extra-aesthetic negativity, pure and simple.

From the deconstructive turn to demetaphorization All these options, whether transcultural, decolonial, postpopulist, or otherwise counterhegemonic, are precisely the still essentialist and identitarian stories that, from a deconstructive point of view, we should stop telling ourselves about the literature and culture of Latin America. As I mentioned before, ne pas (se) raconter des histoires, with the full ambiguity of histoires in French meaning stories, histories, or even jokes, is Derrida’s version of a negative principle first formulated in the introductory paragraphs of Being and Time, where Heidegger himself refers to Plato’s Sophist: “The first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being consists in avoiding the mython tina diegeisthai, in not ‘telling a story’ [keine Geschichte erzählen], that is, not determining beings as being by tracing them back in their origins to another being—as if being had the character of a possible being.”41 Later, Heidegger adds a helpful remark in addressing the difficulty of finding the

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appropriate language for his analyses of being through being-there, or Da-sein: “With regard to the awkwardness and ‘inelegance’ of expression in the following analyses, we may remark that it is one thing to report narratively [über Seiendes erzählende zu berichten] and another to grasp beings in their being. For the latter task not only most of the words are lacking but above all the ‘grammar.’”42 If the history of metaphysics is comprised of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors, this is because being has been reduced to the self-presence of a being: God, nature, or the human subject. These are the dominant metaphors, or the recurrent hegemonic figures, that continue to dominate even those critical, anticolonial or anticapitalist attempts to break with the instrumental rationality of the capitalist West. Interestingly enough, on a more personal or anecdotal level, Derrida for his part used to describe himself as a man incapable of raconter des histoires, which in light of his Heidegger seminar could be read as a self-congratulatory remark, rather than as the modest confession of an infirmity or incompetence. Thus, at the opening of “Mnemosyne,” his text to the memory of his longtime friend Paul de Man, Derrida admits, “I have never known how to tell a story.”43 And yet, elsewhere, the founder of deconstruction portrays his greatest desire for writing a new book, after his highly experimental Glas, as one of doing exactly that: “What he wanted to change the most profoundly was his way of approaching writing. For this book to be really other, he would need to emerge from philosophical discourse, ‘tell a lot of stories.’”44 Like the war to end all wars, deconstruction presents itself as the story to end all stories. Therein lies its irresistible appeal and irrefutable peremptory power, that is, in the ability to make the claim that all hitherto existing ways of approaching the question of being and history are metaphysical. End of story. Of course, this, too, is just a story, one that merely relies on a different but equally limited set of metaphors: above all, speech and writing as metaphors, respectively, for the pristine self-presence of truth and the ineradicable play of difference. And, like all stories, this one, too, depends on a theory or philosophy of history of its own. After all, deconstruction cannot operate—nor for that matter can it lay claim on a praxis of inoperativity— without the presupposition of history as the history of Western metaphysics. However that may be, what should be clear is that none of the theoretical presuppositions behind the Benjaminian take on the art of storytelling can withstand the test of deconstruction. First of all, there is no speech free and uncontaminated by the play of difference marked by the concept-metaphor of writing. Put differently, orality is not the truth of some autochthonous essence present at the origin, only

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to be interrupted from the outside by the accidental intrusion of alphabetic writing and textuality. On the contrary, every origin is always already a trace, and just as “this necessity of the trace makes it so that speech is always already writing, always already text, so that the text does not make an irruptive appearance, does not take speech by surprise, and thus may possibly translate and express it in writing properly so-called,” in the same way Derrida claims that decline, oblivion, idle talk, the moment of the text, are all essential possibilities that are always already present at the heart of speech, that inauthenticity does not supervene on authenticity, does not surprise it from the outside but is its essential, permanent and necessary accomplice. It is complicity or duplicity that is fundamental; difference, and not the virginal and mythical authenticity.45

Second, there is also no such thing as an original community or people given in its transparent self-presence prior to, or outside of, the play of power inscribed through writing or the law broadly understood. Such an understanding of community is properly mythic, just as the original myth always tells the myth of the origins of the community. Deconstruction, in this sense, must absolutely resist the temptation to assign to art or literature the mythic function of putting to work the essence of community: “This function may be allotted to art because it is in its essence Dichtung, and in its turn Dichtung is conceived as more essentially Sprache (language) and this latter as Sage: myth. Only a myth, in other words, is able to allow a people to accede to its own language and thereby to situate itself as such in History.”46 All mythic stories about the self-presence of a community to itself, supposedly lost due to the outside invasion of an element of externality in the form of writing but potentially preserved in the fiction of orality, must be suspended. Does this mean that there are no more stories to tell, no more metaphors to intone differently in the wake of deconstruction? Is theory, or thought in the broadest sense, that is, thinking in the sense of postmetaphysical thought, bound forever to proceed by way of denarrativization and demetaphorization? Derrida himself, in his 1964–1965 seminar on Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, points out that even postmetaphysical thought cannot proceed to the destruction of the metaphysics of the proper and the metaphorical without producing further metaphors: The work of philosophy in general, or rather, let’s say, of thinking, far from simply consisting in crowning scientific work from the outside, in reflecting

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on it or criticizing it from the outside, in working on it; the work of thinking is basically nothing other, in what is called science or elsewhere, than this operation of destruction of metaphor, of determined and motivated reduction of metaphor, whenever and wherever it happens. Which does not mean that one leaves the metaphorical element of language behind, but that in a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin and in its metaphorical functioning and in its necessity. It appears as such. One can perhaps call thinking and the thinking of being (the thinking of being as the horizon and the appeal of an impossible non-metaphorical thought) what calls for such a gesture of de-metaphorization.47

One will only ever be able to stop telling stories to oneself by telling another history and using other metaphors. And if, for Derrida and his followers, the endless task of deconstruction still and always remits us to the writing of literature, this is precisely because the question of the end or ends—including the end of philosophy as both destination and death—does not stop being posed in literary texts as well: “If the work on writing must necessarily pass through literature and text, it is first of all in so far as it poses to literature the question of philosophy and the end of philosophy; it is secondly, and perhaps most importantly, insofar as literature conceals fundamentally what we have chosen to call here the question of destination.”48

Coda: “Juan Rulfo, Author of The Republic” Plato, as both Heidegger and Derrida never stopped pointing out, could not resist telling stories or myths in the same breath with which he wanted to put an end to all storytelling and expulsed the poets from the ideal city-polis in The Republic. One of these myths—many of whom Plato says came to Athens from Phoenician merchants famous for their storytelling—is the Myth of Er, part of which now reads as though Rulfo were the author of The Republic, or as though Plato were the author of The Burning Plain and Other Stories: After all the souls had chosen their lives, they went forward to Lachesis in the same order in which they had made their choices, and she assigned to each the daemon it had chosen as guardian of its life and fulfiller of its choice. This daemon first led the soul under the hand of Clotho as it turned the revolving spindle to confirm the fate that the lottery and its own choice had given it. After receiving her touch, he led the soul to the spinning of Atropos, to make what had been spun irreversible. Then, without turning around, they went from there

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under the throne of Ananke, and, when all of them had passed through, they traveled to the plain of Lethe in burning, choking, terrible heat, for it was empty of trees and earthly vegetation. And there, beside the river of unheeding, whose water no vessel can hold, they camped, for night was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure of this water, but those who weren’t saved by reason drank more than that, and as each of them drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But around midnight there was a clap of thunder and an earthquake, and they were suddenly carried away from there, this way and that, up to their births, like shooting stars.49

Above all, what this myth asks us to remember is the moment when a singular form of life was assigned to each of the souls. The burning plain or plane is the realm of oblivion and forgetfulness. But Rulfo’s stories, like all other literary forms, are also forms of life. Popular tales, written short stories, modern novels, poems: these are nothing but the different forms of appearance of a certain fatality inscribed in the body. It is up to us to decide whether we want to take one more drink to forget about them or else remember the births and destinies that sprout forth from them like shooting stars.

Notes 1 Juan Rulfo, “Acuérdate,” in El llano en llamas (Mexico: FCE, 1953; second edition revised by the author, 1983), 140, 144; “Remember.” “But you ought to remember . . . You must remember him, because we were classmates at school and you know him just like I did.” The Burning Plain and Other Stories, trans. George D. Shade (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 133, 136. 2 Rulfo, “La Cuesta de las Comadres,” in El llano en llamas, 27; “I remember that it happened about in October, during the fiesta in Zapotlán. And I say I remember it was during those days because in Zapotlán they were firing rockets, and every time a rocket went off in the direction where I dumped Remigio a great flock of buzzards rose up./That’s what I remember.” “The Hill of the Comadres,” in The Burning Plain, 28. 3 Juan Rulfo, “¡Buenos días, España!” in Toda la obra, ed. Claude Fell (Paris: ALLCA Archivos, 1992), 404. “We should not complain, then, about our miseries. We do so only for the pure pleasure of complaining about everything. Always. And we have always looked for a friend only to tell them of our sorrows.” 4 Juan Rulfo, Juan Rulfo: Autobiografía armada, ed. Reina Roffé (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1973), 55–56 . “In ‘Luvina’ the monologue is made differently; there the monologue confronts a listener, the man is speaking. It is obvious that the one who listens does not intervene at all; the one who talks relates his own movements to the listener.”

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5 Rulfo, “El hombre,” in El llano en llamas, 44, 46; Now that I hear from you about all the deaths he owed and caused, I can’t forgive myself. I like to kill killers, believe me. It’s not what’s usually done, but it must feel nice to help God finish off those sons of evil . . . So now when I come to tell you what I know, I’m in cahoots with him? That’s the way it is. And you say you’re going to throw me in jail for hiding that guy? Like I was the one who killed that family. I just came to tell you that there’s a dead man in a pool of the river. And you ask me since when and what that man’s like and something about him. And now when I’m the one telling you, I’m covering up for him. Well, so that’s the way it is (translation modified).

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

“The Man,” in The Burning Plain, 48, 50. Rulfo, “Macario,” in El llano en llamas, 77; “Now I’m by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out. And not one has come out all this while I’ve been talking . . . So I just better keep on talking.” “Macario,” in The Burning Plain, 8. Rulfo, “La herencia de Matilde Arcángel,” in El llano en llamas, 163. This story is not included in the official English translation. “I will tell you this without hurry. Slowly. After all, we have our whole life ahead of us.” Rulfo, “¡Diles que no me maten!” in El llano en llamas, 109; “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!” in The Burning Plain, 105. See also Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), vol. 3, 143. For a different interpretation of Rulfo’s short stories in light of Benjamin’s essay, see Lucy Bell, “The Death of the Storyteller and the Poetics of (Un)containment: Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas,” Modern Language Review 107 (2012): 815–836. Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 39. Jorge Luis Borges, “La esfera de Pascal,” in Otras inquisiciones, vol. 2 of Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1994), 16. “Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of a few metaphors.” “Pascal’s Sphere,” in Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 9. Borges is discussing different affective intonations (or what Heidegger might have called Stimmungen) of the metaphor of the infinite universe: whether with a joyful sense of liberation (as in Giordano Bruno) or with a dreadful tone of anxiety (as in Blaise Pascal). Derrida uses the line from Borges not only in his reading of Emmanuel Levinas, included as part of Writing and Difference, but also in his seminar, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. William Rowe, Rulfo: El llano en llamas (Valencia: Tamesis, 1987), 31.

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13 Rulfo, Autobiografía armada, 82, 85, 86–87. There lies the question of why some persons managed to accumulate a lot of land without having the legal rights, making disappear entire villages to throw out the population and thus avoid the dispersal of the land . . . Certainly: “It is more difficult to resuscitate a dead person than to give life anew.” But—I have a delayed fuse—my purpose was not to make history but to tell a history or story, this one. To say, for example, I lived in a town that was called San Gabriel. 14 Rulfo, “Acuérdate,” 142; “Remember,” 135. “Maybe that’s when he turned bad, or maybe he was just that way right from birth.” 15 Rulfo, “Es que somos muy pobres,” in El llano en llamas, 33. Who knows where those two daughters of hers got that bad example. She can’t remember. She goes over and over all her memories and she can’t see clearly where she went wrong or why she had one daughter after another with the same bad ways. She can’t remember any such example. And every time she thinks about them she cries and says, “May God look after the two of them.” “We’re very poor,” in The Burning Plain, 36. 16 Rulfo, “En la madrugada,” in El llano en llamas, 54. And now see what’s happened—they’ve got me in jail and they’re going to judge me next week because I killed Don Justo. I don’t remember it, but maybe it happened. Maybe we were both blinded and didn’t realize we were killing each other. It could well be. Memory, at my age, is tricky; that’s why I thank God that I won’t lose much now if they finish off all my faculties, for I hardly have any left. “At daybreak,” in The Burning Plain, 60. 17 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 149. 18 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 144. 19 Walter Mignolo, “Escribir la oralidad: La obra de Juan Rulfo en el contexto de las literaturas del ‘tercer mundo,’” in Toda la obra, ed. Fell, 430. It is not just the fictionalization of orality that characterizes the work of authors such as Rulfo . . . It is, rather, the fictionalization of an orality that identifies the juxtaposition of native and colonized cultural traditions. In other words, they are the imitations of colonial situations (values, modes of thought, form of life and of being) made into literature through the writing of orality. See also Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, “Realidad y estilo de Juan Rulfo,” Revista Mexicana de Literatura 1 (1955): 59–86; reprinted in Toda la obra, 806–820. 20 Rulfo, Autobiografía armada, 54–55.

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21 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 144. 22 Cristina Rivera Garza, Había mucha neblina o humo o no sé qué (Mexico: Random House, 2016), 107–108. Rulfo was not only the melancholy witness of the past that modernity swept up in its passage, but, as an employee of companies and projects that ended up changing the face of the country, he was also part of the spearhead of that corrupt and voracious modernity which, in the name of the national good, dislodged and plundered whole villages to leave them in limbo filled with murmurs. 23 Rivera Garza, Había mucha neblina, 110–111. Can you be both at once without dying in the attempt? Can you be both things and, then, continue writing? . . . Witness and executor of the modernizing spirit of the Alemán period, Rulfo lamented, in effect, the state of things, that which was about to disappear, while at the same time praising the opportunities that the work of engineers, agronomists and biologists offered to the communities of those territories that until then had been turned inwards. 24 25 26 27 28

Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 146. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 162. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 156. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 146 and 156. Rulfo, “En la madrugada,” 51–52; And they said I had killed him—that’s what the people were saying. Maybe so, but I can’t remember. Don’t you think that killing somebody would leave a telltale sign? It must, especially if it’s your boss. But since they have me here in jail, it must mean something, don’t you think? But, look, I remember very well up to the moment when I hit the calf and the boss came at me, up to there I remember very well; afterward everything is hazy . . . But still, they say I killed Don Justo. So they say I killed him? They say with a rock, huh? Well, maybe so, because if they’d said

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it was with a knife they’d be crazy, because I haven’t carried a knife since I was a boy, and that’s many, many years ago now. “At daybreak,” 58. 29 Rulfo, “El hombre,” 45; He told me he wasn’t from these parts, but from far away; but that he couldn’t walk because his legs were giving out on him . . . He told me he’d gone two days without eating, anything except weeds. That’s what he told me . . . But he didn’t seem bad. He told me about his wife and kids. And how far away they were from him. He snifffed when he remembered them. “The man,” 49. 30 Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1982), 42. What for earlier writers had been the language of lower-class characters, contrasted in the text itself with that of the writer or narrator, was hierarchically inverted. Instead of being the exception and singling out the character placed under the writer’s scrutiny, it became the narrating voice, thus covering the totality of the text and taking the narrator’s place, displaying his view of the world. However, it was not a mere imitation of dialect; instead, it used the writers’ own syntax and lexicon to form a polished version of the colloquial  language characteristic of their regional version of American Spanish. Writing across Cultures: Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, trans. David Frye (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 25. 31 Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, 42–43. The author rejoined his linguistic community and spoke from inside it, using all its idiomatic resources freely. If, as was frequently the case, this community was rural, even bordering on indigenous, the writer would work from its linguistic system, not trying to imitate regional speech from the outside but rather to polish it from within, with artistic aims. Writing across Cultures, 25. 32 Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, 43. The principles of textual unity and construction of a literary language for exclusively aesthetic invention may derive from the rationalizing spirit of modernity but when these writers took up those principles, their linguistic perspective helped revive a regional view of the world, extend its useful life in an even richer and more intimate form than before, and thus expand the original

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33 Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies, foreword by Jaime Concha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxvii. See also the self-critical correction in Neil Larsen, “Rulfo and the Transcultural: A Revised View,” in Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (London: Verso, 2001), 137–142. 34 Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony, 62 and 66. 35 Mignolo, “Escribir la oralidad,” 432. “The narrative fiction of Rulfo in Mexico, like that of Arguedas in Peru, are paradigmatic examples of the links that in the Third World tie processes of alphabetization, oral traditions of colonized cultures, and literature. This is why, in the biography of these authors, the constant connections with anthropology and with indigenist projects are so important.” 36 Sergio Fernández, “El llano en llamas de Juan Rulfo,” Filosofía y Letras 27 (1954): 53–54; quoted in Rivera Garza, Había mucha neblina, 136. “It is the Indian who speaks and he does so for himself. It matters not to him whether or not he is fully understood, not even whether he is interpreted.” 37 Mignolo, “Escribir la oralidad,” 443. The strangeness provoked by the first reading of Rulfo’s work—already mentioned before—is an example of a way of thinking and speaking that stems not only from the image from beyond the grave provoked by the characters, but from the subterranean, submerged forces of the native languages that struggle to make themselves heard mixed in with the syntax, phonetics, and semantics of the Spanish language. 38 Mignolo, “Escribir la oralidad,” 443. A change in the notion of literature on the basis of the experience of Third World literatures implies a change of direction both in the reading and in literary studies: not necessarily to justify aesthetically (as per the criteria of philosophical aesthetics of the West) the literary practices of the Third World, but to start out from the process of ethnographicalization of aesthetics articulated in these practices in order to underscore the ethnographic values in Virgil, Dante, or Cervantes. One of the ways of escaping the forms of intellectual domination is by inverting the categories that served to colonize the imaginary and the valoration of the cultural production of regions from the Third World. 39 Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony, 57.

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40 Josefina Ludmer, “Las tretas del débil,” in La sartén por el mango: encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas (Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones el Huracán, 1985), 51. Especially of interest is the gesture of the superior, which consists in giving voice to the subaltern: in Latin America, there exists an entire literature based on this gesture. From gauchesca literature onward, via indigenism and the various avatars of regionalism, it is a question of the fictive gesture of passing the word to those defined by a lack (without land, without writing). This gesture comes from the superior culture and befalls the man of letters, who disguises and changes his voice in the fiction of a transcription, in order to propose to the weak and subaltern an alliance against the common enemy. 41 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 6; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany : SUNY Press, 1996), 5. Compare with Derrida’s interpretation in Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, 25–26 and 31. For a commentary that insists even more than Derrida does on the inevitability of stories and metaphors, bringing him closer to Borges, see Jean-Clet Martin, “De l’art de raconter des histoires,” Rue Descartes 82 (2014): 104–107. 42 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 38–39; and Being and Time, 34. 43 Jacques Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 3. See also Ian Maclachlan, “Derrida and Narrative: Telling Stories, Saving Memories,” The Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 2 (2014): 248–251. 44 Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Polity, 2010), 358 and 291. 45 Derrida, Heidegger, 83–84 (translation modified). 46 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 56. 47 Derrida, Heidegger, 190. 48 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Ouverture,” in Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1980), 14. 49 Plato, The Republic, 620d–621b, quoted and commented in Giorgio Agamben, “The Myth of Er,” in The Use of Bodies: Homo sacer, IV, 2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 249–262 (I have changed “plane” into “plain”).

8

Rosario Castellanos’s Southern Gothic: Indigenous Labor, Land Reform, and the Production of Ladina Subjectivity Ericka Beckman

Ladino secrets An early scene in Rosario Castellanos’s semiautobiographical novel Balún Canán (1957), set in the late 1930s in Chiapas, Mexico, evokes a cozy scene of provincial childhood: a group of ladina or European-identified schoolgirls, the daughters of local landowners, sip posol, an indigenous maize beverage. Their Mayan nannies sit at a remove from their charges, idly digging their bare toes into cracks of the bricks. During recess, the girls chant children’s songs about lemons and oranges in the patio, while their teacher shades herself under a bamboo tree. Framed by flitting leaves, the teacher watches over the scene with a “mirada benévola.”1 Yet, as is so often in the case in this novel, the idyll is carefully evoked by Castellanos only so that it might be destroyed. Abruptly, after a visit from a mysterious lady, the schoolteacher’s sweet benevolence evaporates in a flash of paranoia, as she announces that the girls are living in dangerous times and as such must be vigilant against the enemies surrounding them: “Esta escuela es nuestro único patrimonio y su buena fama es el orgullo del pueblo. Ahora algunos están intrigando para arrebatárnosla y tenemos que defenderla con las únicas armas de que disponemos: el orden, la compostura y, sobre todo, el secreto.”2 The threat is vague and indirect, and for that very reason rings ominous: an unspecified “they” want to take what is “ours,” what makes us special and distinct. But who is this “we,” and what do “they” want to take? The “we” invoked by the teacher refers to ladinos, a term for the nonindigenous and white-identified landowning minority in Chiapas; the “they” is constituted by the Mexican government of Lázaro Cárdenas and the belated arrival of revolutionary land,

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labor, and educational programs in a region that had long resisted reform. In concrete terms, the teacher fears the educational reforms of the 1930s and their secularizing push. (Indeed, in a later scene, a pupil tells a school inspector sent from Mexico City that they do indeed pray in class: so much for secrecy.) But on a deeper level, as might be gauged in the teacher’s appeal to an innocent and inviolate femininity (a symbolic code common to white supremacist regimes), the schoolhouse scene articulates the ladino fear of losing all that is dear to them, a whole “way of life,” to borrow an expression from the postbellum United States, a social context which, as I’ll argue later, bears more than a passing resemblance to that of 1930s Chiapas. As we learn in Balún Canán, through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl who narrates parts 1 and 3 of the novel, this paranoia is sparked by a very real threat to ladino rule in Chiapas. In 1938–1940, at the end of the Cárdenas presidency, landowning elites were forced to face that which they most feared and, since the onset of the Mexican Revolution, had fought most fiercely: an end to the system of forced indigenous labor upon which their wealth and livelihoods depended. Since the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma and culminating during the Porfirio Díaz regime, this class successfully came to own church and indigenous lands, transforming them into vast haciendas, cattle ranches, and to the South, coffee plantations. But access to land meant nothing without access to labor. The viability of landownership relied upon forced labor systems such as baldiaje, a name for an arrangement in which dispossessed indigenous peasants were forced to work for the landowner for three or four days of the week in exchange for access to a small plot of land.3 Reactionary to the core, this class— euphemistically known as la familia chiapaneca—had successfully resisted most of the reforms instituted by the Mexican Revolutionary state.4 But at the end of the 1930s, it seemed to ladinos, intolerably, that their way of life might be coming to an end, as the Cárdenas administration threatened to reforms to the Agrarian Code stipulating that indigenous peons on estates had the right to claim access to land, even that on haciendas. Rosario Castellanos, herself born into the landowning oligarchy in Chiapas, masterfully transmits ladino fears of dispossession and disintegration in a moment of historical crisis in her novel.5 More than a mere matter of context or biography, however, the threat to ladino hegemony touches all aspects of Balún Canán, constituting its stylistic core. In another example from the first part of the novel, the seven-year-old narrator spies on her mother’s visit with a traveling merchant, Doña Pastora, whose offerings include embroidered shawls and

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filigreed earrings she has smuggled across the border with Guatemala. When the mother declines to buy anything, Doña Pastora says that she can instead sell her “un secreto” (a secret) instead: the exact location of an unguarded border crossing into Guatemala. The only explanation as to why this might be necessary is laconic and cryptic: “Para cuando sea necesario huir.”6 With this, the chapter ends, and we are left with the sensation that the situation might become so terrible for landowners like the Argüellos might have to flee to Guatemala, a country, as Joshua Lund has insightfully points, figured as “a space of greater colonial purity in the face of Mexican land reform,” where forced labor and white supremacy might continue unabated.7 But in spite of perceived threats, the Argüello family doesn’t flee. Instead, in the second part of the novel, the girl’s family travels from Comitán to their remote estate Chactajal; with this, we take leave of the first-person narrative of the seven-year-old girl and her impressions of daily life in Comitán, as the novel adopts an omniscient voice to relate the struggles over land and labor at the estate. By the end of this second section, the frustrated attempt by indigenous peons to organize a school as mandated by Cárdenas government ends in an outright rebellion and destruction of sugar mill. With this, the ruin of the family is marked by the literal or figurative death of male ladino figures: Ernesto, the bastard nephew brought by the patriarch to nominally comply with the creation of a school on the estate, is shot by Indians as he goes to get help after the rebellion; the patriarch himself, César, is greatly diminished when he travels to the state capital in Tuxtla Gutiérrrez and is given no redress by the government; finally, the male heir Mario dies under mysterious circumstances. Female characters, in turn, begin to go mad: César’s cousin Matilde, convinced that she has ruined family name after sleeping with Ernesto and aborting her pregnancy, runs off never to be heard from again. Zoraida, a poor ladina before she married the landowner, and who vows that she would rather than return to poverty, becomes convinced that Indian witches are “eating” her son Mario. Paranoia, fear, and horror are inscribed into the core of this novel, and drive a plot organized around decline and ruin. It is in this sense that I want to recategorize Balún Canán—most often approached either as an indigenist novel or feminist bildungsroman—as a Southern Gothic novel. In my reading, the term “Southern” refers to geography (Chiapas as the southernmost state of Mexico), but also to a particular system of racialized bound labor on large estates that link Chiapas to other nodes in the world-system ranging from Dixie to the Caribbean.8 With the term “gothic,” I interpret the novel as a

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particularly oligarchic structure of feeling generated by specter of land reform.9 For the purposes of this volume on Mexico and theory, this recategorization has two purposes: first, to bring Chiapas out of the site of ultra-particularity it occupies in Mexican cultural discourse, and to theorize its social structure and resulting representational apparatuses as pertaining to wider, hemispheric, histories of white supremacy and bound labor. Second, the Gothic—that is to say oligarchic—character of Balún Canán is a way of gaining a purchase on the class dynamics presented by this novel, not to the exclusion of oft-studied questions of race and gender, but as ultimately generative of a white supremacist, patriarchal social order.10 Indigeneity and ladina female selfhood—two guiding threads of criticism of this novel—continue to be central to my analysis, but always through the optic of Castellanos’s Gothic sensibility regarding her class. As I begin to argue in following sections, there is no ladina self outside of indigenous bound labor, which is precisely why the prospect of land reform is met with such dread. Following the Faulkner critic Richard Godden, I show how the ladina self in this novel is as a result of bound labor “Indian made,” and that the threat to this social system lays bare ladino fears of disintegration at the hands of indigenous “monsters” they themselves have created.

Ladino lords and indigenous peasants: Bound labor and Gothic effects The primary referent for what I am referring to as a Southern Gothic sensibility in Balún Canán—expressed through punctuated silences, tortured thought processes, cryptic messages—is material: the system of forced labor that bound indigenous peasants to ladino landowners, thrown into (temporary) crisis by the Cárdenas reforms. As noted above, in approaching Balún Canán as a Southern Gothic novel, I am interested in shifting analysis to the representation of ladinos in the novel, or more to the point, the representation of ladinos and indigenous subjects through the veil of ladino fantasies. And this is one of the greatest contributions of Balún Canán: it is, among other things, a ladino self-ethnography that lays bare the “secrets” of white supremacy in Chiapas, and the monsters it unleashes. In Chiapas, as in neighboring Guatemala, the term ladino is used to describe either Hispanized Indians, or, in the case of the landed oligarchy, white- or European-identified people. In Balún Canán, the term is used repeatedly by

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ladino characters to assert their superiority vis-à-vis indigenous people. This is César, the patriarch, for example, explaining why he thinks schools will be useless for Indians: “Ningún ladino que se respete conscenderá a hablar en español con un indio.”11 In another moment, César notes approvingly that his bastard nephew, Ernesto, turned out as “white” as the father who didn’t recognize him. Language, together with phenotype, moral aptitudes, and intelligence, is invoked by ladinos to assert racial superiority vis-à-vis indigenous people. Indians, on the other hand, are repeatedly described by ladino characters as lazy, stupid, dirty, superstitious, and incapable of reason or self-determination, and at the same time cowardly and treacherous. These markers of white supremacist discourse, familiar to us from other contexts in the Americas, are deployed, in turn, to justify a coercive labor relation, which in early twentieth-century Chiapas approximated conditions of slavery: to cite César again, he counts the “indiada” (agglomeration of Indians) at Chactajal as part of his property.12 As his wife Zoraida maintains, Indians won’t work unless force is used: “Con ellos no se puede usar más que le rigor.”13 It is not worth paying them, another landowner notes, “(c)omo si el dinero significara algo para ellos.”14 This patriarchal social structure is upheld by ancillary and subordinate members of the class, and one of most interesting elements of this novel is its rich portrait of the internal stratification of ladina society: poor whites, bastards, unmarried women, and legitimate wives. I will have more to say about these marginal ladino figures, but for now I want to note that all are subordinate to the patriarch, at the same time as they uphold their ladina identities in opposition to Indians. Ladina identity is internally differentiated and stratified, but coheres around the not-Indian. And yet, this opposition already points to an irreducible relationality. As the anthropologist of Guatemala Diane Nelson notes, the terms “Indian and ladino function as operative categories, defined and produced in oppositional relation to each other.”15 As in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the ladino or ladina can never define himself or herself outside of the relationship to an indigenous subject. This relationality, in turn, hinges on the fact that in the world depicted in Balún Canán, the most basic relation linking ladino and Indian is one of forced labor. As the historian María Legorreta Díaz notes of Ocosingo, the region where the Castellanos clan was dominant: Las relaciones de servidumbre constituían el rasgo esencial de la organización señorial de Ocosingo. La organización social regional en su conjunto se había constituido históricamente, en lo ecónomico, político y cultural, para retener a la mano de obra indígena y reducirla a la servidumbre.16

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By the late nineteenth century, two-thirds of the indigenous population in Chiapas was obliged to work on ladino-owned estates as part of the baldío system.17 It is precisely because of ladino reliance upon indigenous labor that the specter of land reform hangs like a nightmare over the entire novel. In the first part of the novel, told as a series of vignettes narrated by the seven-year-old girl, these specters arise through the presentation of events that the child can only comprehend incompletely, a technique that heightens the uncanny effect of the scenes. She records, for example, how Tío David, a beggar who might be called “Uncle” precisely because he is not an Indian, sings a ditty: “Se acabó el baldillito/de los rancheros de acá,” in reference to the coming end of the system of forced labor on estates.18 As a result, he reveals matter-of-factly, “se van a arruinar”: all ladinos will be poor like him.19 The girl recoils: she wants to be the one who hands out alms to people like Tío David. At other moments, the dread of the landowning class appears as a figure of sheer horror, constituting the core of what I’m calling the novel’s Southern Gothic sensibility: one day, the girl sees an Indian whose arms have been nearly severed with a machete, where he dies. The nanny explains that the man was killed as punishment for his loyalty to her father, by Indians who “ya no quieren tener patrón.”20 Later, when the girl visits a church, she is gripped by terror and screams. Her mother, furious, slaps her and demands that she tell her what is the matter. “Es igual (digo señalando al crucifijo), es igual al indio que llevaron macheteado a nuestra casa.”21 Two points can be gleaned from this. Horror in this novel is always related to system of forced indigenous labor (its overturning, but also, inevitably, its historical violence). Second, the hacienda system and its labor relations provide the only ground through which the girl can (incompletely) perceive the world. In textual terms at least, it is the macheted Indian who provides a recognizable image for Christ, and not the other way around. The hacienda and its relations of production—always violent, but now in flux—provide the grounds for interpretation of the world, the lens through which social reality can be perceived and understood in the novel.

Indians in whiteface Here I’m beginning to develop an argument that the ultimate horizon for ladino selfhood in the novel—and feminine selfhood in particular—is bound indigenous labor. To be ladino at all is to rely on indigenous labor: ladinos rely on

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indigenous labor to accumulate wealth and reproduce their daily existence, but also to produce their own sense of self in the world. This truth is inscribed as a formal principle of the novel. As noted, parts 1 and 3 of the novel are narrated in the first person by a seven-year-old girl in Comitán, in a structure that, as many critics have argued, can be read as a coming-of-age story or bildungsroman. Part 2 abruptly shifts perspective to an omniscient narrator, and decamps with the Argüello family to their hacienda, Chactajal. Whereas parts 1 and 3 take the form of impressionistic vignettes of daily life in the provincial city, part 2 reads more like a plot-heavy historical novel, focused on clashes between César Argüello and his indigenous peons on the estate. César complies nominally with demands for a school in compliance with new laws, but the schoolteacher, his half-literate and monolingual bastard nephew Ernesto, gets drunk and beats the children. After this, and following demands for a wage (which César promises to pay after the cane is cut), the peons burn the hated sugar mill, forcing the Argüellos to return to Comitán in economic ruin. With this, the novel abruptly shifts back to the girl’s perspective in part 3 to register the family’s decline, which culminates in her brother’s death. Since the novel’s publication, this uneven structure has been interpreted as a flaw, even eliciting the apologies of the writer herself.22 And yet the novel’s disjointed structure becomes meaningful precisely as an articulation of the problem of ladina selfhood in relation to bound indigenous labor: for if this novel is a first-person bildungsroman, it is one that is literally interrupted by indigenous rebellion against that system. Along these lines, we can note that the most important relationship explored in parts 1 and 3 of the novel, that between the girl and her Maya-Tzeltal nanny, is one of care and affection, but also—as Brian Gollnick points out—one of bound labor.23 The complexity of the relationship between the ladina girl and her Mayan nanny has been studied to great profit by feminist critics such as Debra Castillo and Estelle Tarica, who have identified the deeply colonial underpinnings of feminine selfhood in the novel.24 I want to take these analyses one step further to argue that Balún Canán reveals the extent to which the ladina self is “made” by indigenous labor, an observation that gives us purchase on the making—and unmaking—of ladino selves in the novel. Here I am inspired by the literary critic Richard Godden’s readings of William Faulkner’s fiction in the context of the decline of the white landowning class in the U.S. South. In his study Fictions of Labor, Godden argues that Faulkner’s 1930s fiction corresponds with and indexes a revolution in labor relations in the U.S. South, as the dominant practice

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of sharecropping (itself a form of bound labor) gave way to a regime of “free” wage labor under the New Deal. In short, the world cotton market collapsed during the Great Depression; under the New Deal, Southern landowners were paid by the state not to grow their crop, resulting in the breakdown of the postEmancipation system of sharecropping. Previously bound African American labor increasingly left the South, and moved north as part of the Great Migration to become wage laborers. Godden uses this economic context to argue that novels such as Absalom!, Absalom! (1936) register this historical shift on the levels of language and form. One of the most salient outcomes of this transition, as read by Godden through Faulkner’s fiction, is the traumatic recognition and repression by members of the white landowning class that they are, in essence, “made” by black labor. Godden writes: during the 1930s Faulkner’s essentially socially indexical language addresses a traumatic secret, everywhere evident in the objects and persons of a whiteowned world made by black work, but everywhere occluded—since the acknowledgment that white depends on black (rather than vice-versa) would turn the world the white world owners didn’t make upside down.25

Godden’s analysis hence focuses on what he calls “the primal scene of bound southern labor—that unthinkable and productive episode during which the master both recognizes and represses the fact that since his mastery is slavemade, he and his are blacks in whiteface.”26 This is in essence the open secret of white supremacy: there really is nothing natural that separates white and black, and moreover, white is itself “made” by black labor. This secret, always at risk of being revealed, and always anxiously suppressed, nevertheless “seeps” into consciousness, because, Godden writes, “the very patterns of labor that cast the white master as the person black people made (while requiring that both parties keep the secret) were themselves being recast.”27 In Godden’s materialist analysis, there is a causal link between the South’s “labor revolution”—the passage from bound to free labor—and Southern racial and sexual pathologies, rendered as literary form by Faulkner’s difficult, tortured language. Punctuated by silences and unstated traumas, and populated by narrators who do not know what they are seeing, Faulkner’s fiction, Godden writes, “anatomizes the long last days of an archaic structure of felling.”28 Godden’s analysis of Faulkner and the U.S. South allows us think through some similar problems in Rosario Castellanos and the Mexican South in the late 1930s, faced with reforms of the Cárdenas presidency. In taking this approach,

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I do not wish to argue that Castellanos’s literary style approximates Faulkner’s, or that the historical context of the U.S. South maps neatly onto that of Chiapas. Indeed, along these lines, some fundamental differences have to be accounted for: to begin with, Castellanos is for the most part a realist rather than a modernist writer, though the elliptical, cryptic vignettes of the first part of Balún Canán do at times recall Faulknerian stylistics. More importantly, the historical contexts do not chime completely. First, the history of the U.S. South is marked by centuries of African chattel slavery, whereas the Mexican South is marked by forced indigenous labor. These differences, in turn, inflected by national histories, have contributed to the creation of distinct paradigms of racialization: there is nothing akin to the “one-drop rule” in Chiapas, where the term ladino can cleave to biologized definitions of race just as it can expand to include darker-skinned and mestizo phenotypes.29 Second, in the U.S. South the bound labor relation was revolutionized in the 1930s, as planters become landowner/ financers, and African-American sharecroppers became wage laborers. In contrast, notwithstanding Castellanos’s representation of a class in decline, the ladino oligarchy and their system of bound labor were not eradicated by the Cárdenas-era reforms. Instead, as the historian María del Carmen Legorreta Díaz has documented, while the system of bound labor was shaken with the Cárdenas reforms, it persisted well into the second half of the twentieth century, as part of a long and slow transition to wage labor that lasted from 1930 to 1990. The Chiapanecan landowning class only really declined with a new round of agrarian reform in the 1970s, and with indigenous peasant mobilizations, land invasions that culminated in the Zapatista rebellion of 1994.30 Hence if Balún Canán anatomizes “the long last days of an archaic structure of feeling,” as I think it does, those long last days were very long indeed. And yet, there are suggestive resonances between the contexts of the U.S. and Mexican Souths, as two nodes in the world-system characterized historically by bound agricultural labor in a context of white supremacy. Both regions have been dominated historically by a patriarchal system rooted in racialized patterns of forced labor: African-American slavery followed by sharecropping in the United States, and baldiaje in Chiapas. Landowning classes in both regions have been predictably reactionary, anti-reformist and anti-revolutionary to the core, and have vigorously resisted reformist and/or revolutionary transformations with armed resistance or paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. South, and the mapaches in Chiapas. And again, without insisting upon historical sameness, the resonances are enough, I think, to uncover in Balún

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Canán a secret similar to the one Godden finds in Faulkner’s fiction: that the ladino world is made by indigenous labor, and that without it, the ladino or ladina subject ceases to be.31 As in Faulkner, the secret revealed by Balún Canán might be that ladinos are no more than Indians in whiteface. For if the ladina “I” is surrounded by and cultivated by indigenous people (through acts of labor that extend from the fields to the kitchen and nursery), what is it that really makes “me” special? What it is that really separates the “I” from the Indian? This anxiety runs throughout Castellanos’s novel, introduced playfully in the first part of the novel, but then later developed into a full expression of psychosis, or psychic unbecoming. For example, in part 1, the seven-year-old narrator’s Mayan nanny is trying to get her charge to drink her milk. The girl refuses, and says that she wants to drink coffee like her nanny. All the nanny has to say to the girl to get her to comply is, “Te vas a volver india.”32 This injunction is enough to stop the ladina girl in her tracks, and the chapter ends as she says to herself, “Mañana la leche no se derramará.”33 This is a wonderfully complex scene: the nanny knows that that girl’s greatest fear— even if she isn’t fully aware of it—is to “turn Indian.” Remarkably for a novel full of terrifying injunctions and warnings, the nanny deploys this threat in a casual, almost offhand way, as a means to an end in an unending series of daily negotiations with her charge. Along these lines, the very intimacy of the scene simultaneously undermines and reinforces the separation between “Indian” and “ladina.” On the one hand, there is a clear color-coding of the two beverages. Beneath this, however, deeper truths are suppressed: first, there is nothing more “European” than coffee in Chiapas, introduced as an export commodity at the end of the nineteenth century. Likewise, from the perspective of ladinas like the narrator, reared on her nanny’s breastmilk, there is nothing more “Indian” than milk. If drinking coffee might cause ladina girls to “turn Indian,” as in the nanny’s warning, what might breast milk do? The scene relayed above betrays a contradictory dependence upon and negation of female indigenous reproductive labor as constitutive of the (always unstable) ladina self. This logic is similar to what the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler identifies as “the troubled intimacies of domestic space” under colonial regimes in Dutch Indonesia. On the one hand, “the quotidian comforts of colonial life” depended upon “the constant presence of native nursemaids and housekeepers, washer women and watchmen, cooks and gardeners” as subjects “who serviced and nurtured . . . European selves.” At the same time, however, the intimacy generated by this labor raised deep concerns: Javanese nursemaids,

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for example, were instructed to hold charges from their bodies to not smell of their sweat as part of “a wider set of standards framed to ensure that European children in the colonies learned the right social cues and affiliations—and did not ‘metamorphize’ into Javanese.”34 From the earliest moments in Balún Canan, we see that both indigenous and ladina subjects know that ladina selfhood is based on keeping the “Indian” at bay, at the same time as the fact that the “Indian” sustains the ladina self (with labor, care, even breast milk) undercuts the possibility of this distinction. The simultaneous recognition and suppression of the fact that it is really the Mayan nanny who makes the ladina girl can be dealt with playfully in the beginning of the novel, but as it progresses, the contradictions hailing from this arrangement become less and less manageable, precisely because the whole social system organized by ladinos threatened to come undone under the Cárdenas reforms.

Ladina witchcraft On levels of plot, expressive language, and formal organization, indigenous labor forms the structural core of Bálun Canán, to such an extent that it provides the horizon for any notion of ladina selfhood in the novel, as most dramatically expressed through the seven-year-old narrator of parts 1 and 2. I now want to trace the consequences of such a realization through episodes of ladino unbecoming and disintegration in the novel. For outside of their relation to bound indigenous labor, I want to argue, ladinos know they are nothing, even when they don’t know they know it. Now on one level, the adults in Balún Canán have a rather clear-eyed assessment of their economic dependence upon indigenous labor. The landowner César, for example, tells the indigenous leader Felipe, who has threatened to strike if workers are not paid: “Si no hay quien levante la caña nos vamos arruinar.”35 After the indigenous peons, who are not paid, rebel, César tells a fellow landowner that they can hire ladinos to work instead. The latter scoffs, telling César that he’d never been able to sustain that “tren de gastos,” or level of expense.36 But parallel to this story of economic clear-headedness runs another story, one of psychic undoing that is rarely addressed by critics. This psychic undoing, I want to argue, is itself a sublimation of a threat to the system of bound indigenous labor that literally and figuratively sustains the ladino landowning

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class. As the novel progresses, paranoid utterances and guarded silences morph into episodes of hysteria and madness, which reach their peak in the aftermath of the indigenous rebellion on the estate. This is true especially in the case of female characters such as César’s wife, Zoraida, and a set of unmarried cousins who live alone at on a remote ranch. Ladina women become a particularly active site of psychic turmoil, precisely because of the central role they play in the (re)production of the ladino social system. Their episodes of unbecoming signal a deep symbolic crisis, and are the most potent sites from which the novel diagnoses the “freeing” of indigenous labor from its bound position. Along these lines, it is not coincidental that the ladina episodes of psychic disintegration are expressed through indigenous belief systems focusing on witches and monsters. I want to argue that it is through witchcraft and monsters—key elements of Gothic narratives—that the traumatic realization that the ladino world is “indigenous”-made can be expressed in Balún Canán, if only in distorted form. As deployed in the novel, witches and monsters do not represent any “pure” indigenous belief system. Instead, they represent ladina fantasies about indigeneity, through which this class fantasizes its own undoing in a moment of historical crisis. Following Godden, without the Indian being bound to the ladino subject in the labor relation, he or she ceases to “be.” To develop this argument, I turn to two examples of ladina appropriation of ostensibly indigenous beliefs: first, the deployment of the dzulúm, a shapeshifting, mystical creature; and second, the belief that curses have been cast upon the Argüello’s son by witches at Chactajal. In the first part of the novel, the seven-year-old narrator’s Mayan nanny tells her the story of the dzulúm, who is sometimes an animal who decimates flocks of sheep, and, at other times, a beautiful blue-eyed man who bewitches ladina women and carries them off, never to be seen again: “Dicen, que hay en el monte un animal llamado dzulúm. . .”37 She goes on to tell the story of an orphan, Angélica, was taken in by the girl’s grandparents. This girl, white “como vara de azucena,” and submissive to her benefactors, is one day bewitched by the dzulúm.38 Sensing she was in danger, Angélica became agitated, until one day, she disappeared without a trace. A linguistically Mayan-sounding name, the dzulúm is presented to us by a Mayan woman in a storytelling mode frequently employed in the novel to transmit indigenous knowledge and memory. And yet, for all of its indigenous markers, this monster is what Stephen Shapiro, discussing the Gothic as a response to capitalist transition, has identified as one of those “‘invented traditions,’ where the monsters seem to be nativist, folk traditions, but are

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actually new constructions that register globalizing conditions in local-seeming idioms.”39 As examples, Shapiro points to the “mumiami” (mummy) that emerged under British colonialism in East Africa; and, in the Caribbean, the zombie, a stock figure of popular culture today, which originated among Haitian slaves. As an “invented tradition,” the dzulúm undoubtedly carries within itself the suppressed (from the point of view of indigenous peoples) memories of violence and dispossession. Described as having blue eyes, the dzulúm steals women, demonstrating a rapaciousness consonant with that of the landowning class. It is in this context that Joanna O’Connell has insightfully called the dzulúm a “diabolical representation of the landowner.”40 At the same time, however, the dzulúm seems to have been created to express specifically ladina anxieties: namely, the despoliation of “pure” white femininity. And this makes sense, as the monster is quite literally, a ladino invention. The dzulúm, other critics have noted, in spite of its Mayan-sounding name, was invented by Castellanos herself.41 The point here is not to criticize Castellanos’s lack of authenticity, but instead to show how supposedly archaic and premodern indigenous beliefs are themselves mobilized in the novel to capture and express ladino fears and anxieties about indigeneity. This becomes clear when we consider that the dzulúm is wielded not by indigenous but by the novel’s ladino characters (especially women) as a symptom of the crisis marked by land reform and possible indigenous uprising. A case in point is the novel’s staging of the story of the strange goings-on at the Palo María ranch, where three unmarried Argüello sisters live. We hear the story from the perspective of one of the sisters, Matilde, when she shows up unannounced at Chactajal, where the rest of the Argüello family is staying, early in the second part of the novel. Matilde, herself somewhat deranged when she arrives to Chactajal, reports that Francisca has taken out the stocks, and placed Indians in them to punish them, whipping them until they die. Additionally, she has shrouded all the windows in black, and has removed her bed and replaced it with a coffin. It is rumored that Francisca was taken by the dzulúm, and has been given special powers. Since then, “Los indios llegan a consultar con ella. Y al que dice: tal cosa va a suceder, sucede.”42 Francisca “goes native,” so to speak, to keep control of her estate, incorporating into herself the very barbarism ladinos associate with indigeneity. In an instance of what Michael Taussig has in another context called “the mirror of colonial production,” the conjured threat of indigenous barbarism is met with unspeakable violence on the part of Europeans.43 In the process, “ladina” witchcraft justifies

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a system that is even more violent and coercive than that of the past, involving torture, and death sentences. Neither archaic nor authentically Mayan, the dzulúm, Castellanos brilliantly shows, highlights the extent to which ladinos themselves are imprisoned and deformed by their own fantasies of indigenous barbarism and superstition. Matilde, in turn, herself is a striking example of ladina hysteria, induced by patriarchal control but expressed through “indigenous” monstrosity. After arriving to Chactajal, she is tortured by her own desires for her bastard cousin Ernesto, much younger than she, desiring him and repudiating him on the grounds of his social inferiority. She becomes pregnant, and calls a curandera. Zoraida allows the curandera to kill a bull as part of the healing, even though she thinks it’s “excessive.”44 In essence, ladinos give credence to indigenous practice; what no one will admit, however, is that Matilde is pregnant and wants to abort the fetus. After the Chactajal burns, Ernesto is killed by peons on estate, and Matilde becomes convinced that her cousin César, the patriarch, will kill her for dishonoring the family name. Becoming frantic, she asks César if he’s going to kill her. César, perhaps more worried about the ruin of his hacienda, simply tells her to leave. Recalling the story of Angélica Argüello told earlier in the novel, the narrator notes that Matilde then disappeared: “Nadie siguió su rastro. Nadie supo dónde se perdió.”45 Castellanos suggests that Matilde was carried off by the dzulúm, and, in a sly gesture, allows what the novel knows is ladina fantasy to assert itself as truth. The hysterical episode, sparked by sexual repression in a rigidly patriarchal and racist social order that depends upon ladina sexual “purity,” in essence lays bare ladino fears of destruction by “indigenous” monsters of their own creation. The ladino fantasy of destruction by indigenous monsters becomes even more compelling in the novel’s resolution, which revolves around a supposed curse against Mario, the Argüello’s only son. In the aftermath of indigenous rebellion at Chactajal, the family returns to Comitán, and with this to the perspective of the seven-year-old female narrator. César Argüello, accompanied by another landowner, Jaime Rovelo, travels to state capital in Tuxtla Gutiérrez to demand the attention of state authorities, which in this moment is not forthcoming. In this moment of economic ruin and absent patriarchal authority, we learn from the narrator’s nanny that the witches at Chactajal have cursed Mario. The nanny approaches the boy’s mother, Zoraida, sobbing, to tell her; the latter responds by beating the nanny with a comb and casting her from the home, calling her an “india revestida.”46

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The insult is inapt, not only because it is baldly racist, but because it is ultimately the ladina woman who, deep down, internalizes the “Indian” curse as a sign of a particularly ladino form of psychosis. And indeed, for the rest of the novel, until her son Mario actually does die, no one can convince the mother that the witches are not eating her son. She approaches a Catholic priest for counsel, who complains, in a fury, that members of his congregation bring children to him not to make them Christian, “sino . . . para ahuyentar a los nauhales y los malos espíritus.”47 The most important function of Catholic rites, notes the priest, is to ward off the indigenous spirits that ladinos, as Christians, should know better than to believe in. When the priest is unable to convince Zoraida that her only son is not being eaten by witches, she takes Mario, whose health does in fact begin to deteriorate, to a medical doctor. This doctor isn’t much help either: after suggesting that Mario might or might not have appendicitis, he writes a prescription for quinine, pointing to malaria (paludismo) as a possible culprit. Zoraida lets the paper fall to the ground, however, having accepted her son’s fate: “No podemos hacer nada. Ni usted ni nadie, doctor. Porque a mi hijo se lo están comiendo los brujos de Chactajal.”48 Whether there are really witches “eating” Mario is not the point, but rather that his mother believes this to be the case. The supposedly archaic and premodern beliefs associated with indigenous people take flight as a projection of ladino anxieties. This is not to deny that witchcraft is not an important part of indigenous spiritual practice, one that belongs to a genealogy that extends well beyond the history of colonialism and forced production on estates. In Balún Canán, however, indigenous magic functions at bottom as a Southern Gothic symptom of ladina disintegration. And indeed, is it really any wonder that the landowning family would experience its downfall as an indigenous curse? First, it gestures toward the ladino subjects’ colonial unconscious—revenge is what awaits their class. At the same time, the ladino internalization of the indigenous curse points to what I think is perhaps the Balún Canán’s most stunning realization: that ladinos—whose sense of self depends upon their proclaimed separateness from Indians—are themselves “indigenous.” The statement that ladinos are themselves “indigenous” is not meant to erase “real” indigenous people. Rather, it is note that ladino landowners are quite literally made by indigenous labor; and that the threat to that labor system forces ladinos into a traumatic recognition of that fact. Bound labor—the horizon of social existence on the estate system—threatens to become unbound, and with

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this, the very sense of being ladino/ladina is thrown into crisis. When ladinos imagine their destruction at the hands of Indian witches, it just might be that they are recognizing—in distorted form—that the ladino world is in fact “Indian made.” Given the prospect of indigenous liberation, ladinos are forced to countenance, with horror, the prospect of their own undoing. Hence it is quite significant that the novel ends with the consolidation of a different mode of ladina selfhood. In the penultimate scene of the novel, often discussed by critics, the girl thinks she sees her former caregiver on the street, but when the woman doesn’t recognize the child (either because she is not the nanny or because she is but decides to ignore the girl), the girl’s initial excitement gives way to the stark realization that she will never again be able to recognize her nanny. “Además,” she adds somewhat coldly, “todos los indios tienen la misma cara” (285).49 The girl’s symbolic renunciation of the indigenous caregiver marks her internalization of ladina racism. In the final scene, the girl takes up a pen and writes her dead brother Mario’s name on the wall. With this gesture, often celebrated by critics, the girl comes into being as an autonomous, lettered female subject who, on an autobiographical level, prefigures Rosario Castellanos’s own transformation into writer. As Estelle Tarica has argued in a more critical vein, however, this form of selfhood is predicated entirely upon a dis-identification with indigeneity.50 The Gothic impulses of the novel are reigned in, as this resolution imagines a mature individual who still knows herself as ladina (in opposition to the Indian), but is no longer encumbered by the bound labor relation. Ladina psychosis, it would seem, might only be countered by the liberal fantasy of the autonomous individual.

Notes 1 Rosario Castellanos, Balún Canán (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), 14. “benevolent gaze.” 2 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 14. “This school is our only heritage, and its reputation is the pride of the town. There are people who are conspiring now to seize it out of our hands, and we have to defend it with the only weapons we possess: order, composure, and, above all, secrecy.” Rosario Castellanos, Nine Guardians, trans. Irene Nicholson (Columbia, LA and London: Readers International, 1992), 18. 3 My understanding of labor regimes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chiapas draws heavily from María del Carmen Legorreta Díaz’s Desafíos de la emancipación indígena: organización señorial y modernización en Ocosingo, Chiapas, 1930–1994

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(México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2008). Landowners in Chiapas responded to the passage of the Ley de Obreros in 1914, which stipulated the end of debt peonage, with the creation of a paramilitary group known as the mapaches, which armed themselves for six years against “la ocupación carrancista.” One of the leaders of this group was none other than Rosario Castellanos’s father, Ernesto Legorreta Díaz, 53. Once Carranza was ousted, the mapaches began to restore Porfirian order as much as possible. See Stephen Lewis, The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910–1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 18. The Castellanos family rose to prominence in Ocosingo during the mid-nineteenthcentury Reforma by acquiring Dominican estates during the Reforma (Legorreta Díaz, 42–43). Rosario’s family owned two estates, Rosario and Chapatengo, until they moved to Mexico City in near penury in the late 1930s, in the context of the Cárdenas land reforms, though the details surrounding their loss of land are murky. Oscar Bonifaz, Remembering Rosario. A Personal Glimpse into the Life and Works of Rosario Castellanos (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1990), 15. Castellanos, Balún Canán, 48. “Because the time will come when you will have to run away,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 49. Lund, The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 80. My discussion of Chiapas as “Southern” recalls Joshua Lund’s characterization of the region as “something like the ‘deep South’ of Mexico, with all the discursive weight implied by such a term intact.” Lund, The Mestizo State, 78. Recent critics have read Southern Gothic fiction as expressing the psychosexual and racial anxieties of the white planter class, particularly in moments of historical transitions from patriarchal to commodity relations. Lisa Hinrichsen, for example, writes that the genre hinges on “the psychic dynamics that support Southern life, parsing in the process its own ambivalent attachment to structuring social fantasies—ideologies of race, class and gender—as they were beginning to be destabilized in modernity.” Hinrichsen, “Writing Past Trauma: Faulkner and the Gothic,” in William Faulkner in Context, ed. John T. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 221. I am also inspired by critics such as Kirstin Oloff and Michael Niblett, who have shown how the mobilization of supernatural elements in Caribbean Gothic narratives registers the experience of capitalist development on the peripheries of capitalism. See Oloff, “‘Greening the Zombie’: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology and Socio-Ecological Degradation,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16 (2012): 31–45 and Niblett, “Spectres in the Forest: Gothic Form and World-Ecology in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 44, no. 18.2 (July 2014): 53–68.

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10 My focus on class aligns with that in a recent essay by Brian Gollnick, which identifies this entry-point as “the one area in which more remains to be said about Balún Canán.” Gollnick, “On the Politics of Scale in Balún Canán,” Hispanic Review 84, no. 2 (2016): 193. 11 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 185. “No self-respecting ladino will condescend to speak Spanish to an Indian,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 177. 12 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 76. 13 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 188. “With them one can only use force.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 180. 14 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 218. “(a)s if money meant anything to them.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 209. 15 Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 211. Aaron Bobrow-Strain, in his ethnography of ladino landowners in Chiapas, writes that the definition of ladino is protean, ranging from “the frank deployment of racial hierarchies to subtle rituals domination and subordination.” Though the category does not cleave only to phenotype, and can indeed include darker-skinned people, the term ladino “operates primarily to define and confirm a binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” with the “them” invariably meaning indigenous people. Intimate Enemies: Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 36. 16 Legorreta Díaz, Desafíos de la emancipación indígena, 80. “Relations of servitude constituted the core of Ocosingo’s seigneurial organization. Historically, the region’s social structure as a whole had been constituted economically, politically and culturally in order to retain indigenous labor and reduce it to conditions of servitude.” All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 17 Legorreta Díaz, Desafíos de la emancipación indígena, 51. 18 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 26. “The baldío has ended/ for the ranchers here.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 27. I have modified Nicholson’s translation here, which reads “The tithe-days has ended/ for the ranchers here” for accuracy. 19 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 24. “All the farmers will be ruined,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 27. 20 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 31. “don’t want a master any longer,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 34. Nicholson’s translation is “prefer to have no master,” but I think a more literal translation conveys the sense of “ya” in the phrase to denote they do not want the master anymore. 21 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 41. “It’s like . . .” I say, pointing to the crucifix, “it’s like the Indian they brought to our house, all cut up with the machete,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 43. 22 In an interview with Emmanuel Carballo, Castellanos states: “La estructura desconcierta a los lectores. Hay una ruptura en el estilo, en la manera de ver

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25 26 27 28 29 30

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y de pensar. Esa es, supongo, la falla principal del libro. Lo confieso: no pude estructurar la novela de otra manera.” Quoted in Estelle Tarica, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 141. “The structure perplexes readers. There is a rupture in the style, in the way of seeing and thinking. That is, I suppose, the book’s main flaw. I admit it: I couldn’t structure the novel any other way.” This translation is mine. Gollnick, “On the Politics of Scale,” 207. See Debra A. Castillo, “Rosario Castellanos: ‘Ashes without a Face,’” en De/ Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith y Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1992), 242–269; and Tarica, Inner Life, 137–182. Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6. Godden, Fictions of Labor, 3, my emphasis. Godden, Fictions of Labor, 7. Godden, Fictions of Labor, 130. Bobrow-Strain, Intimate Enemies, 35. Legorreta Díaz notes that by 1950, about half of Chiapas’ indigenous population remained in servitude, and that it was only in the 1970s that wage labor became dominant. Desafíos de la emancipación indígena, 195. Landowners, temporarily weakened under the Cárdenas reforms, remained dominant until a new round of land redistribution, together with the rise of indigenous movements that culminated with the Zapatista rebellion in 1994. Bobrow-Strain, Intimate Enemies, 4. While outside the scope of the current essay, it is worth noting that Castellanos’s particular understanding of the antagonistic and mutually constitutive relationship between ladino and Indian subjects owes a great deal to her readings of the French philosopher Simone Weil. In Weil’s articulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, injustice inflicts damage upon both the oppressor and the oppressed, an observation Castellanos repeatedly transferred to the Indian/ladino binary in Chiapas, to diagnose, as outlined in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo, “the attitude of the conquered toward the conquerors, the treatment of the weak by the powerful . . . the current of evil that runs from strong to weak, returning once again to the strong” (qtd. in A Rosario Castellanos Reader, ed. and trans. Maureen Ahern [Austin: University of Texas Press], 33). See also Beth E. Jorgensen, “Actos de atención: intersecciones en el pensamiento social de Weil, Castellanos y Poniatowska,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 31, no. 3 (2007): 413–429. Castellanos, Balún Canán, 30. “You’ll turn into an Indian.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 14. Castellanos, Balún Canán, 30. “From tomorrow there’ll be no spilt milk.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 14.

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34 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2010), 6. 35 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 187. “If there’s no one to harvest the cane we’ll be ruined.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 179. 36 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 218. 37 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 19. “They say that in the forest there’s an animal called dzulum.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 22. 38 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 20. “Like a lily on its stem.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 22. 39 Stephen Shapiro, “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity,” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 32. 40 Joanna O’Connell, Prospero’s Daughter: The Prose of Rosario Castellanos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 101. 41 Castellanos’s invention of supernatural being is discussed by Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga in “Vampires in Balún Canán: The Monstruous and Dzulúm,” HIOL: Hispanic Issues On Line 15 (2014): 143. 42 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 114. “The Indians consult with her. And what she says will happen to someone, happens,” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 112. 43 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 134. 44 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 165. 45 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 212; “Nobody followed her tracks. Nobody knew where it was that she finally got lost.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 201. 46 Nicholson translates this as “upstart Indian.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 218. 47 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 244. “But only so the holy water can help to ward off the werewolves and evil spirits.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 233. 48 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 265. “There’s nothing we can do. Neither you nor anybody, Doctor. My son is being eaten by the sorcerers of Chactajal.” Castellanos, Nine Guardians, 252. 49 Castellanos, Balún Canán, 285. “Besides, all Indians look alike.” Nicholson trans., 271. 50 Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of Jane Eyre and bourgeois feminism, Tarica shows how the ending of Balún Canán internalizes “the civilizing mission of indigenismo and uses it as a feminist instrument, as a justification for female autonomy and self-discovery.” Tarica, Inner Life, 173.

9

Beginnings of José Emilio Pacheco Christina Soto van der Plas

There is no beginning in and of the work of José Emilio Pacheco. Entering into the world of his poetry and narrative means stepping into a timeless space where everything has always already begun and, at the same time, is constantly ending, only to begin again. The literary project of José Emilio Pacheco is singular because it recasts a tragic and at the same time ironic view of history, literature, and everyday life. No other Mexican author in the twentieth century had such an incisive and yet unpretentious ability to render simultaneously possible an account of the literary tradition while rereading it from the vantage point of an atemporal instance. Located in such an intersection, Pacheco’s poetics is mainly preoccupied with the experience of time and its many conceptions and manifestations in language. The premise behind this chapter is that certain poems are arsenals through which we can rethink the language that shapes how we give or don’t give meaning to experience (from literature). And Pacheco’s poetic principles—or many beginnings—are, without a doubt, powerful weapons and productive structures with which criticism can engage in some of the literary and philosophical debates on the logics of temporality, particularly the one regarding the double articulation of the necessary repetition of history and the contingent encounters that rearrange it. This debate is at the core of one of Pacheco’s earliest books of poetry, El reposo del fuego, published in 1966 after Los elementos de la noche. The long poem intervenes in reframing three key processes of what I propose is a logic of the temporality of literary forms of thought: the affirmation of disaster, the moment of writing, and the insistence and act of poetry. The first affirmation is constituted in the moment of the abstract or intelligible where repetition is formulated as the necessary formal structure of the eternal return. The second moment deals with the dialectical process of cuts and interruptions of the continuous flow by breaks and contingent events. And the third form is the creation of a reader that gives

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itself value and courage to be invested in how the poem takes shape through his gaze. Thus, the role of poetry is to articulate the previous three instances where not-all is necessary and contingent. Instead, it operates as a logic that rearticulated the language of how a subject experiences the world, history, and its own story. Following a similar tripartite scheme to the one I am proposing, the meditations of El reposo del fuego are divided in three parts that move from more abstract ontological statements to the description of the laws of elements to the more concrete space, myths, and history of Mexico—particularly of Mexico City. Each of these sections is driven by images and combination of different elements: the first one by wind and fire, the second one by water, and the third one by earth. The contradictory movement and mixture of elements shape the poetical unity of El reposo del fuego which is inherently linked to its central theme and title, an affirmation of what the poem makes possible, of what it dares to articulate: “El reposo del fuego es tomar forma/con su pleno poder de transformarse.”1 The hypothesis, then, is the following: the poem acquires a form, “takes hold,” only when it is in motion.

Necessity and repetition: The disaster Composed by images, woven with words and silences, the poem is a world. From its first line, this composition is projected and created. But seeing the trace of printed words does not mean that the poem has indeed created a world. What sets it in motion truly creates the world of the poem. The sum of images, elements, silences, and words in a text that make up the structure of a world do not amount up to the creation of such a world. There is a missing piece, which is excluded from what is written but that insists on being inscribed, against all odds, in the poem: the impossible “beginning” or “first line” of the poem, the break with the language of the world onto which the poem is inscribed. This means that the poem extracts words from their everyday use and gives them, if not a different meaning, a different arrangement and syntax. The basic principle of poetry—at least from modernism onward—is to take words out of their instrumental use and function in order to give them another meaning, to compose a different world from the one we imagine as real. In moving, the poem begins by interrupting the continuity of the signifying chain, and also posing that a poetic form can reformulate and undermine the predominant

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and necessary space of what is possible in everyday language. With the same language in which it “falls,” the poem is always carving its own syntax. If we conceive of syntax as the “rhythm of word combination in ordinary speech,”2 the poetic function consists in creating its very own combinatory as different from the one of ordinary speech. In this precise sense, the dynamic sculpting of signifiers is precisely what gives consistency to the “new” and impossible world the poem creates and recreates. From the “beginning,” in El reposo the world is given to the reader as already shattered. Starting with the affirmation that nothing can change the endless disaster of the world or the syntax it has imprinted onto history, the initial stanzas construct a series of images in which the verbal movement captures the paradoxes of change fading away into the chain of inevitably tragic events. The first lines of El reposo del fuego establish the following opening image: Nada altera el desastre: llena el mundo la caudal pesadumbre de la sangre. Con un hosco rumor desciende el aire a la más pétrea hoguera y se consume.3

The initial affirmation in present tense is that nothing alters the ongoing repetitive disaster. The prevalence of disaster will be the background and the ontological presupposition of the whole book and much of Pacheco’s work. As Octavio Paz said, “para José Emilio el tiempo es un agente de la destrucción universal y la historia es un paisaje en ruinas.”4 The world of the nascent poem sets its starting point in “nothing”—a nothing that has no power against the inevitable repetition of disaster. At the same time, however, this “nothing” contains all of the actions that might have altered disaster and have not. It is therefore not a negative word, but a word containing all impossibilities. The first line opens our eyes to what is already happening in the world, what is given, unalterable, written in stone. We do not, however, encounter an immobile world, devoid of transformation, but rather a series of images of becoming. On the one hand, in the poem, the world carries the heaviness of the hopeless affirmation of disaster as well as the impossibility of changing the dynamic and logic of repetition. On the other hand, something moves: blood and air. Even though they are consumed in the eternal bonfire, they mark the finitude of the body. These two basic elements of life and sustenance for our body—which Pacheco says is the recipient of our

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eternal decay and unfulfilled desires—are part of the endless cycle of disasters and death as consumption.5 The contradiction sets the verses in motion, both eternal and finite. Later on, the same connotation of consumption can also be read in other sections of the poem, where blood and smoke fuel the everlasting fire: “Sangre y humo alimentan las hogueras./Nada mella el fulgor.”6 Here, the precise and brutal combination of motion and rest is not only a motif of El reposo but, more importantly, its metonymic engine: from stillness to motion, from the stream of blood to the stoniest bonfire. Thus, what cannot be altered are not necessarily the calamities, but rather the cycle and splendor of movement, the beginning and end, the thickening of the blood and the consumption of air in the embers of fire. This twofold composition of the world the text presents can lead us to formulate a first affirmative definition of disaster: the dynamic of that which does not stop happening—necessity. Destruction is indeed a constitutive part of the world but, instead of lamenting this fact, what El reposo sets out to do is to define the role of poetry as a kind of thought that can present us with this image of the world and create a productive space of action and language capable of subtracting itself from a purely destructive drive. What the poetic conception of El reposo concludes is that disasters are necessary in as much as they are the energy that drives history. As the poetic voice says, an “obstinado roer [que] devora el mundo,/arde en el transcurrir, empaña el día/y en la noche malsana recomienza,” and it must be taken not as that which puts out the fire, but as “ira [que] esculpe en fuego a nuestro tiempo.”7 Our time—or time, in general—is sculpted or formed by the stubborn erosion, the recommencement of the cycle of necessity: the affirmation of destruction and transformation. Ungraspable by nature, the poem endows the mechanism of repetition of disaster with a determined form, that of broken verses. The dynamic of repetition functions as an act of sculpting and eroding time, girdling it in a poem. Transformation is at the core of the second poem of the second section of El reposo del fuego titled, in parentheses, “(Don de Heráclito).”8 The poet takes Heraclitus’s natural philosophy as a “gift” in the sense that it is “given” as an accursed share—destined for violent destruction—his poetry must deal with. More than thinking the gift as inheritance and intertextuality, as it often has been, what matters here is the fact that the gift of fire demands a counter-gift.9 And in Heraclitus’s specter, haunting the poem, we could also include the legion of poets that Pacheco assumes as precursors, accepting their “gift,” for which he is “in debt”—or indebted. Just as Prometheus stole fire and was forever tied to a rock,

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and Epimetheus accepted Pandora as a gift, what the verses following Heraclitus articulate is the accursed time before and after thought which is, perhaps, the truth of the poem itself.10 This means that the poem, before thought—as a promise or Prometheus—is part of a mythical realm, outside of time. But, at the same time, it is the afterthought—epigraph or Epimetheus—what comes late and is left after all “theoretical” endeavors in search for understanding. As Friis says, “poetry is Promethean: it is stolen, used, and then stolen again, passed on from one writer to another.”11 The conception that Pacheco has of inheritance and tradition is located in a time out of joint in which the poet accepts his ancestors’ empty gift, only to re-sculpt the past by providing us his version of it. Pacheco adopts what he calls “the wise Chinese resignation”: “comentar y reescribir incansablemente a nuestros ancestros, intentar variaciones y agregados a la ineludible repetición.”12 In many ways, the poem locates itself within the disastrous consequences of receiving the gift of fire and owing something for it so that it is forever tied to the stony bonfire—in our reading, the malleable but also stagnant concept of tradition. Within such inherited violence El reposo opens up a brief interval in which the excessive energy of language—the embers of fire—is consumed. This energy can be felt in the length, rhythm, and graphical disposition of the lines and stanzas: brief, sharp, paused, and broken. El reposo presents us its world little by little, through its saddened gaze. The rhythm of the verses forces us to read and linger in a pause: between the prologue and the epilogue—but also without any logos. In parallel with the Heraclitean composition of T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets— later translated by Pacheco in 1985—what can be affirmed is: “In my beginning is my end” driving “the world to that destructive fire/which burns before the ice-cap reigns.”13 This very same destruction and death drive, as we have seen, is replicated in the core proposition of Pacheco’s poem: Fuego es el mundo que se extingue y cambia para durar (fue siempre) eternamente. Las cosas hoy dispersas se reúnen y las que están más próximas se alejan.14

Fire serves as the power of destruction, death, as well as a principle of vitality. In the same way on which air descends to the bonfire to be “spent,” the doctrines of fire, the cosmic order and the transformation of elements that Heraclitus inherited us can only be “consumed” in acts and words. Beyond an illustration, the images of the elements—fire, water, earth, and air—operate as the proposition of

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a poetics based on the principle of the unity of opposites, the unifying structure of the universe and truth of human experience. For Heraclitus, by meditating on fire we can perceive the hidden harmony that unifies opposing principles not only within the cosmic order, but also in the destiny of the human psyche.15 In these meditations, “[t]his poetry . . . in Heraclitus’ pronunciations, obliterates the philosophical function because in it thought allows itself the right of what is inexplicit, which takes on power in language from another source than the selfexposure of thinking as such.”16 We can add here that for Pacheco we must not only meditate on this fact, but actually practice the art of poetry as a destructive and useless accursed share capable of becoming a form of eternity spending itself, an “intenso garabato,/febril desdibujo de la muerte.”17 If poetry has any potential, it is that it can poeticize the thought of the thinking, it can sculpt in fire before and after the thought, but outside of the logos of instrumental language (and reason): the poem is a beginning and end in itself. The consumption of fire, the repetition of history in disastrous images, is, indeed, “tristísimo.”18 But in this sadness poetry finds the space to think its hasty scribble with the necessary disaster it entails. It is an accursed gift, but a gift that sculpts our age and time. And, as a counter-gift, the poet offers his version of tradition, seized by the moment of the writing act.

Contingency and break: Un-drawing As I have said, the movement of the repetition of disaster is, in Pacheco’s long poem, the given. It is as if history—particularly the devastating history of the twentieth century—were both petrified and repeated over and over again, always recommencing. There seems to be no way out of the contradictions that El reposo traces and retraces. Repetition is essentially inscribed in the necessity of disaster, and is apparently the only possible law of movement in time: Rumor sobre rumor. Quebrantamiento de épocas, imperios. Desenlace. Otra vez desenlace y recomienzo.19

The rhythm of this stanza given by its punctuation, the beginning in italics, the single comma, and verse break lays down the rules of movement that the words suggest. The quaking or break ends abruptly the ongoing emphasis

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of the line and starts the same process again, but in a different tone. There, the line reading “desenlace [ending]” falls off or slides down from the many epochs and empires. After the slow pace of the first three lines, words are gathered together and are repeated, faster, without punctuation. If we return to the definition of disaster as that which does not stop happening and poetry as breaking point that scribbles and subtracts energy—the useless remaining energy—from a purely destructive drive, then we can say that the “quebrantamiento,” or break of both of the verse and of the vertical structure of history, “rumor sobre rumor,” is how a poem falls on the page.20 Certainly, the point in which order breaks down is always already part of the cycle of endings and beginnings. However, even if the rupture does not change a structure, at least it reconfigures how its cycle and dynamic are written down and stalled in the verses and their punctuation. That is to say, essentially, the break changes the syntax. Following the idea of writing the “breaking point” in and of the verse, the second poem of the first section of El reposo marks a difference, at least if only because it introduces a voice-gaze in first person, without a name, addressing someone else, perhaps the reader or a reader. This nameless imaginary “I” is trying to make sense of the “hechos brutales”21 as he exclaims: Hoy rompo este dolor en que se yergue la realidad carnívora e intacta. Hiendo tu astilla inmóvil, mansedumbre.22

The disaster has been established, but here something different arises from it: today, there is a break. From a mythical time where fire is perpetually consuming everything, the poem is, suddenly, set “today” at the time in which a voice breaks with the sadness and pain that has resulted from the unalterable destruction that fills up the world. It is in the gaze of this poetic voice where we can locate the minimal difference—a different syntax—that manages to get away from the disaster of the world’s unrelenting destructive drive. Or, perhaps, it is destruction itself, the one generating the minimal difference, a “split at the very core of the same.”23 On the one hand, we have repetition, where nothing alters the disaster and reality remains intact; on the other hand, a difference in the form of the contingency of a present tense breaking with the pain that repetition produces. The break happens as an event that takes place in the site of repetition, the place of the stoniest bonfire. The difference lies in the form, not in content. Indeed, we cannot alter a catastrophic history but what we can do is rearrange it from the

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perspective of a “today,” through poetry and the new syntax made possible by it. This is precisely the way in which Pacheco creates his own version of the whole poetic tradition he inherits: retroactively modifying and rearranging the literary forms that seemed to be necessary and he received as a gift or accursed share, which figures overdetermine his poetic project. In this way, the voice breaks off the pain of the intact reality and cleaves the other’s still splinter, “today.” In this moment, life stands still and draws a breath, in between verses. The break is presented and, at this point, a different world or different possibilities appear. The voice in first person introduces a gaze in the poem, addressing someone else, within or outside the scene. In order to look for the (impossible) beginning, for the reason that brought about an image, the poem needs to imagine a gaze. Only by looking can the gaze be crafted, in the contingency of a “today.” This gaze orders the world according to a perspective as it is also bound to a subject. But the gaze is always already inscribed in the perceived object and from that point the gaze returns: a reflexive torsion by means of which the onlooker is also included in the scene he crafted himself. The gaze inscribed in the present time of El reposo, breaking the ache of the bloodthirsty reality, has no ability to understand, so it merely sets the scene— and itself in the scene. It claims not to understand the meaning of the eternal repetition of disaster: Miro sin comprender, busco el sentido de estos hechos brutales. De repente oigo latir el fondo del espacio, la eternidad gastándose.24

Even if the poetic voice is making a great effort to understand why and how “nothing alters the disaster,” he ends up going back to the beginning, the excessive expenditure of time that is wasting away as it escapes and eludes his senses. The first-person voice provides us, as readers, the image of himself, seeing and hearing. With him, we misapprehend the world and detach meaning from images, from the poem’s composition: there is nothing to be understood about the passing of time. Or, as Pacheco will later say with the title of one of his books, No me preguntes cómo pasa el tiempo (Don’t Ask Me How Time Goes By). Seeing and hearing, inside and outside, the object of an inquiry and the

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inquisitor. But precisely in the blind spot and “all of a sudden,” the gaze meets the eye that beholds it: an image is frozen, traversed by “la eternidad gastándose,” eternity wasting away or “spending itself.” At this point then the question is if the gaze is able to “desdibujar” or un-draw that which is set in stone, necessity, repeating itself. Are the inquiring gaze— today and all of a sudden—and the rupture of the verses capable of unsettling the mechanism of history’s compulsion to repeat? What I have been proposing is that, even if nothing alters the disaster, what poetry can accomplish is to devise the language and syntax of other possible logics so as to retroactively change how we understand history. Between contingency and necessity, what is at stake is how the poem in its “today” poses the possibility or impossibility of an event, of something that suddenly, “de repente,” breaks the “rules” of repetition by making the impossible happen. The problem here is the impasse of how we conceive of time, structured either as teleology and causality in the order of necessity or as contingent events not subordinated to an end. El reposo provides us a possible mechanism to confront this dilemma. However, I want to emphasize that poetry is in no way interested in solving such a philosophical problem or, as Lacan would say, waking up philosophy from its indestructible root or its “eternal dream.”25 A poem—and certainly not Pacheco’s poem—does not hide propositions behind images and metaphors. Here, as I said, the gaze included in the scenes refuses to make sense, to understand the brutal acts and the stubborn erosion of history. And it is in this refusal that the poem finds its most productive and creative drive, as it begins a crusade by sculpting (with a different syntax) the impasses of the world and of time. Between the “nothing alters the disaster” and the “today I break with the pain,” there is a minimal difference. If there is to be a moment of rupture, it can only occur against the background of a continuous flow. On the one hand, we have a continuous chain of causes. And, on the other hand, cuts and sudden interruptions of the flow cleave the still splinter of mechanical causality. In the joint articulation of these two temporal logics the poem poses its very own reading and version of our contradictory experience of time and the—ineluctably poetic and imaginary—mechanisms we are in need of using to meditate about it. We can conclude that El reposo del fuego is a poem that, at the same time, accepts as certain the fierce fire of destruction and breaks off the ache that the slavery of this affirmation entails.

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The act: Writing a poem Going back to the lines that follow the initial stanzas and that will be echoed throughout the poem, it is possible to say that these stanzas articulate how Pacheco envisions the space of poetry: Y hoja al aire, tristísima, la hoguera contempla la incendiaria sed del tiempo su víspera de ruina. . .26

In the end of the El reposo del fuego, the poem will be more clearly identified with “hoguera” and “hoja al viento.”27 Thus, it is possible to read retroactively these lines as the insertion of a conjunction between the previous initial stanza that had set the scene and time—beginning with “Nada altera el desastre”—with the observer—the poem—contemplating the ravaging thirst of time. In fact, the poem not only includes the gaze but also fabricates the disaster—it is its raw matter and condition of possibility.28 This means that the poem as a leaf into the air is the site where the language to portray disaster is inscribed—the leaf—and, at the same time, it is the fleeting act of writing, seizing, and shaping such a disaster—the air that descends to the bonfire. Always in motion, the leaf into the air and the bonfire are constantly reinventing their form so as to better capture our ever-changing experience of time. As the poem later inquires, “Si se extiende la luz/toma la forma/de lo que está inventando la mirada.”29 If the poem is a contemplation or meditation on the gift and sentence of fire, it is also what shapes and utters the forms through which we can symbolize violence. The poem, in this sense, is a gaze continually shedding light—the verb is in present continuous, “está inventándose”—and re-shaping the world. The light is the conditional line that links together both the gaze and what it is creating and re-creating. In fact, we can even say that Pacheco assumes the gaze as always absent from its place or always displacing itself, due to its encounter and inclusion into the contradictory movement of history or nature. For Pacheco to write is to truly “illuminate” the already existing contradictions in nature and history by shaping them from a different point of view. This “illumination” produces a shift in perspective— toward a vision able to grasp what another perspective occludes—and creates another version, brightening the understanding of the site of our gaze. As Villoro says, Pacheco is an “artesano de la mirada” that teaches us how to see.30 However sad, desolate, and inconsolable the poem might be, it is not helpless. It has as its task not to cry or accept humiliation, but rather to be in contempt

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and raise its voice when seeing hatred, hunger, disdain, and murder, challenging the assumption that nothing alters the disaster. The world is on fire, but the space through which the poem forces us to see and hear is already questioning our beliefs through the “ineluctable modality of the visible,”31 leading us to think through our eyes and not through reason: “Todo el mundo está en llamas./Lo visible/arde y el ojo en llamas lo interroga.”32 Reflected on the gaze in first person, almost as a mirror, the world is in flames. We can see it as the poem presents it for us in an image, albeit only a reflection and not a representation. The visible in the realm of the imaginary is then questioned by its impasse, the eye on fire—the blind spot. But to see the world in flames does not mean to remain still. Instead, it implies that it is necessary to question what is happening as well as how the image in language is conveying the act. For Pacheco, to assume the passing of time, as Ortega says, necessarily entails questioning language.33 Is language a transparent reflection of the world it is seizing? Does language symbolically represent the world in flames? Or, is the nature of language itself, its ontological void, the problem of the gaze itself? To provide a hypothesis, I want to raise these questions through the angle of Difference and Repetition, in which Gilles Deleuze says that “[t]o contemplate is to question” and he wonders if the “peculiarity of questions [is] to ‘draw’ a response.” To which he adds, “Questions present at once both the stubbornness or obstinacy and the lassitude or fatigue which correspond to need.”34 These brief affirmations touch upon what is at stake in the way in which El reposo formulates the role of poetry as it relates to three instances I will discuss: first, its own need or compulsion to repeat; second, how it contemplates while simultaneously questioning the quaking of epochs and empires; and third, how the poem is an intense scribble, an un-drawing of death—of finitude, that which is written in stone. As I have pointed out, El reposo both in its structure and in its theme relies on the basic mechanism of repetition and clearly not on representation. The poem does not represent any aspect of reality and it is not within the realm of the symbolic. Instead, the very rhythm, rupture of the verses, “inheritance” of contradictory statements, among other things, signal that we are dealing with something that goes beyond the mere “contemplative” state of theory. In the poem, the first-person onlooker does “see,” “contemplate,” and “hear,” but it refuses to make sense of the brutal facts, just as it refuses to accept necessity as the only possible contingency, as the only possible world and history of breaks or “quebrantamientos” we could imagine. Beyond contemplating the ruins of

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the world in flames, the poetic voice of El reposo takes on an active and more forceful role as it compels the reader to truly see what surrounds him: “mira en tu derredor: el mundo ruina.”35 The colon opens up the readers’ vision to what the poetic voice deems necessary for him to see, that is, the result of the stubborn erosion of the world, a world in ruins—or even a ruined world. As we read the poem and are forced to see how eternity is spending itself, what is left for us is to interrogate and illuminate the blind spot of the gaze through which we perceive our myths, history, and personal story as indelible. The reader, therefore, claims the poet’s gaze as his own—through reading—and then separates what he imagines in time and space. The poetic voice can then affirm that the other’s sad eyes have seen what he has never seen: “Ojos tuyos tristísimos: han visto/lo que nunca mire.”36 Here, between what the poet has seen in the past and the eyes of the other—or the reader—something does not correspond, not even in the verbs or in the verbal tense of the visual references: “han visto,” “nunca miré.” What the other has seen, the poet has never gazed. Between the first subject and the second one, between seeing and gazing or their means, “la vista,” “la mirada,” there is a minimal difference that makes a complete imaginary identification impossible. The “sad eyes of yours,” as object and as past experience, are “that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness.”37 Beyond narcissism, then, the reader enters the poem via the other’s gaze, contemplating and traversing the scenes that the poem is composing. In this movement, the images in the poem—and the reader can be counted among them—necessarily have a (de)formative function. And, in the interconnecting of the first and second visions, as well as the initial abstract vision and the “we” the poem also uses, the reader is constructed as an impersonal production of a multiple gaze that is addressing everyone. Finally, going beyond the visible, in an imperative statement, the voice forces us to act by saying, “Hay que lavar la herida, deshacerse/de la letra tatuada en nuestra sangre.”38 Pacheco refuses to yield poetry to one of its usual definitions as a contemplative and beautiful aesthetic product capable of “drawing responses.” Though it certainly repeats the fact that the world is forever and essentially wounded and flawed, the poem actually “un-draws” the inscription of its agony. As a result, Pacheco refuses to conceive of the poet as a prophet dwelling “in the neighborhood of things necessary and everlasting, partaking in their Being.”39 What El reposo ultimately denounces is the stillness of a contemplative life of theory—in its original sense, “contemplation” as bios theoretikos as opposed to the political, active life of labor. Instead, the poem must try to get rid of our

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“fall” into language, the tattooed letter we bear not as our fate, but as the trace that overdetermines us. Just as air descends to the stoniest bonfire, Pacheco’s proposition is that poetry, from its sadness, must interrogate that which has been written in stone or tattooed in our inherited contradictions. At the same time, however, we must not fall into the trap of saying that a poem truly has the potential to be critical of reality. In the end, it is only a fleeting scribble, a leaf in the wind, letters falling on a page. El reposo does not try to institute a more productive or active engagement in a political vision of the labor of poetry. The poet is well aware of how transient and useless a poem is. Throughout El reposo, writing is often designated as a useless activity: “Es retórica,/iniquidad retórica hasta el llanto”; “es por completo inútil hacer esto”; “llanto de cuántas cosas inservibles/que en el polvo arderán.”40 A leaf into the wind, a scribble, the moment of reading. How can poetry be anything other than these fleeting instances? What is certain is that poetry does not submit to the “useful.” The reader sees the useless consumption and nonproductive spending that implies “recognition of a sovereign value that . . . is not justified by any clear utility.”41 In its turn, the poet accepts this value as given in the leftovers of language. The poem is language’s indivisible remainder. In principle, the poem is opposed to silence. It is the counterstatement of Wittgenstein’s final proposition in the Tractatus claiming that “[w]hereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”42 Here, the poet refuses to take on such a passive role and forces himself to write, in spite of it all: Hay que darse valor para hacer esto: escribir cuando rondan las paredes uñas airadas, animales ciegos. No es posible callar, comer silencio, y es por completo inútil hacer esto antes que los gusanos del instante abran la boca muda de la letra y devoren su espíritu.43

The poem operates from the imperative that it must speak, even though poetic language is useless and fleeting—a language that is subtracted from the world and has no ability to act in the fixed economy of language. The poem dares speak, it gives itself the “value” to write and have a voice for the first time in the worst of circumstances. The poem, as Badiou claims, “demands in its own words an operation of silence,” to say that which is impossible to say against

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the background of the common language of “communication and of reality, the language of the disarray of images, always mediated and mediatized.”44 To be able to un-draw the language of destruction, the language of repetition, the language of an imposed silence, the poet needs to have real courage. Writing poetry in the ill-fated twentieth century but also during, for example, the Spanish ruling of Mexico, is truly an act of faith. This, understood in the sense that an act—to write under these circumstances—is the intervention of the timeless into time. It is the useless act against the inevitable course of history that has always opened the mute mouth to devour its spirit. But this act is crystalized and emphasized in the poem as a radical gesture and violent interruption of the ongoing disaster. The poem is, then, the courageous act of un-drawing of the tattooed letter in our blood, of finitude. As the poetic voice said before, as we analyzed, “para durar (fue siempre) eternamente.”45 And to this, Pacheco adds that neither the world nor art “se conciben sin cambios y movimientos, muertes y resurrecciones. La historia no se detiene: todo instante es transición. Tener la fe necesaria para dedicarse a un arte incluye, exige la certeza de que está en perpetua metamorfosis y en progreso constante.”46 This certainty is the imperative of poetry, in spite of it all. And yet, something always eludes the poem and its language: Y no es esto lo que intento decir. Es otra cosa.47

This undefined and ungraspable “other thing” is what drives the poem forward in terms of repetition and of its attempt to shape and grasp experience through language. The poet is trying to say something—or say “it”—to convey the meaning of his words, but he is unable to fully express the true contradictions contained in El reposo del fuego. The poetic voice has the perpetual feeling that perhaps “this is not yet it,” and so it is always possible to go one step further or discover yet another aspect of experience. “In very repetition,” says Mladen Dolar, “there is already, in a minimal way, the emergence of that which escapes symbolization.”48 But what “keeps eluding our knowledge, however, is simply our own gaze.”49 And this gaze is, in fact, constituted through and by the poem. El reposo del fuego cannot be read without being rewritten and ruined: “Es hoguera el poema/y no perdura . . . Cada poema/epitafio del fuego.”50 But while it fades away, the poem inscribes itself on our finitude; it is the trace of fire, the witness of destruction. The poem allows us to experience how not-all is

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necessary and not-all is contingent. There is another vein: the poem as an act that rearranges history as it sets it on fire and then recovers the ashes of such a destruction. In this way, I propose that the poem is an arsenal of words, of logics, of images with which we can counter ordinary language as it is a very punctual act of changing history’s syntax. As such, the poem is the impossible beginning, the contingent act inscribed in the necessary repetition of disasters, empires, sadness. To begin, once again, or to recommence, in the face of destructions and endings, is the task that drives the insistence of El reposo del fuego by José Emilio Pacheco.

Notes 1 José Emilio Pacheco, Tarde o temprano (Poemas 1958–2009), ed. Ana Clavel (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 44. “The rest of fire is to take shape/ with full power to transform itself.” 2 Osip M. Brik, “Contributions to the Study of Verse Language,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), 121. 3 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 37. “Nothing alters the disaster: the stream/of blood fills the world with its grief./With a coarse gasp/the air descends/to the stoniest bonfire/ and is consumed.” 4 Octavio Paz, “Cultura y natura,” in La hoguera y el viento. José Emilio Pacheco ante la crítica, sel. Hugo Verani (México: Era/UNAM, 1993), 16. “for José Emilio, time is an agent of universal destruction and history is a landscape in ruins.” 5 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 41. 6 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 40. “Blood and smoke fuel the fires./Nothing curtails their brilliance.” 7 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 44. “stubborn erosion [that] devours the world,/burns out in transit, dulls the daylight/and in the sick night starts up again.” “ire [that] sculpts our age in fire.” 8 Heraclitus’s gift. 9 This idea was proposed by Marcel Mauss and later discussed by Derrida, Bataille, and many others. See: Marcel Mauss, The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966); Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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10 My idea of “before” and “after” thought comes from the etymology of the names “Prometheus” and “Epimetheus.” Prometheus is the one who thinks in advance, or forethinking, and Epimetheus is the after-thinker. See “Prometheus,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/152 416?redirectedFrom=prometheus&. 11 Ronald Friis, José Emilio Pacheco and the Poets of the Shadows (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 72. 12 José Emilio Pacheco, “José Emilio Pacheco,” in Los narradores ante el público. Primera Serie. Comp. Antonio Acevedo Escobedo. Segunda Edición (México: INBA, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Ficticia, 2012), 280. “to endlessly annotate and rewrite our ancestors, to attempt variations and additions to the unavoidable repetition.” 13 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971), 25. The full stanza reads: “Comets weep and Leonids fly/Hunt the heavens and the plains/Whirled in a vortex that shall bring/The world to that destructive fire/Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.” In the same spirit, it is interesting to note that the epigraph of The Four Quartets are two fragments from Heraclitus. 14 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 44–45. “Fire is the world lighting-up and going-out/to last (it was always) for eternity./Today distant things are brought together/and those that are closer distance themselves.” 15 Many lines from El reposo are variations of some fragments by Heraclitus. For example, Pacheco says “El mar es agua pura ante los peces/y nunca ha de saciar la sed humana.” And Heraclitus’s fragment LXX: “The sea is the purest and the foulest water: for fish drinkable and life-sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly.” Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61. 16 Alain Badiou, The Age of Poets and Other Writings in Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), 48. 17 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 40. “intense scribble/feverish blurring of death.” 18 “Very sad.” 19 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 50. “Rumble after rumble. The quaking/of epochs, empires./Ending./Once more ending and starting over.” 20 [rumor over (on top of) rumor] 21 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 38. “Brutal acts.” 22 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 37. “Today I break off the ache where bloodthirsty/ reality stretched on and on intact./I cleave your still splinter, meekness.” 23 Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 168. 24 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 38. “I stare without comprehending, trying to find the meaning/of these brutal facts,/And suddenly/I hear a beating in the depth of space,/eternity wasting away.”

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25 Jacques Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes,” in Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 315. 26 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 37. “And sadly, like a leaf into the air, the bonfire/ contemplates the incendiary thirst/of time, its eve of ruin . . .” 27 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 60. “bonfire,” “leaf into the air.” 28 “Nothing alters the disaster.” 29 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 46. “If light spreads,/it takes the shape/of what the gaze is inventing.” 30 Juan Villoro, Homenaje a José Emilio Pacheco (Michoacán: Instituto Michoacano de Cultura, 1988), 35. “Artisan of the gaze.” 31 A phrase I take from James Joyce which can also be the definition of Pacheco’s poetics: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.” James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 37. 32 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 59. “The whole world is in flames./What is visible/ burns and the eye on fire questions it.” 33 Julio Ortega, “Poemas de José Emilio Pacheco,” in La hoguera, sel. Verani, 101. 34 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 78. 35 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 47. “look around you: the world, a ruin.” 36 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 48. “these sad eyes of yours: they have seen/what I never gazed.” 37 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton and Company, 1998), 71. 38 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 42. “The wound must be washed, to get rid of/the tattooed letter in our blood.” 39 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 27. 40 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 56–58. “This is rhetoric/iniquitous rhetoric lament;” “it is completely useless to do this;” “cry of how many useless things/that will turn into ashes.” 41 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 312. 42 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Major Works: Selected Philosophical Writings (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 82. 43 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 57. “For this you need real courage:/to write while blind beasts,/enraged talons, haunt the walls./It is not possible to be silent, to eat silence,/ And it is completely useless to do this/before the short-lived worms/open the mute mouth of the letter/and devour its spirit.” 44 Badiou, The Age of Poets, 25. 45 Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 44. “to last (it was always) for eternity.” 46 Pacheco, Los narradores, 279–280. “can be conceived of without change and movement, death and resurrection. History does not stop: every instant is a

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Mexican Literature in Theory transition. To have the necessary faith to devote oneself to an art includes and demands the certainty that it is in perpetual metamorphosis and in constant progress.” Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 49. “And this is not/what I am trying to say./It is something else.” Mladen Dolar in Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 164. Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow, 107. Pacheco, Tarde o temprano, 60. “And the poem is a fire/that does not last . . . Each poem/an epitaph of the fire.”

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A Theory of Trauma and the Historical Novel: A Small Theoretical Treatise on Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio Pedro Ángel Palou

Foreword. The historical event or occurrence emerges from the past and refers us back to it, but it lives in the present. That is, it is necessarily evaluated (or, we could say, inserted into the present), in terms however tenuous and presumably objective, whenever it is evoked. Historians and novelists—those who write “real” or fictionalized history—communicate the reception of the past in its lived moment. For this reason, as we will see, they become witnesses and offer testimony. The novelist does so more directly and sincerely, since he lacks the historian’s pretenses of objectivity. He turns his version (of the past in the present) into a manifestation of himself and his time, which means that his novel is no longer historical, strictly speaking, but rather only a novel. There is no such thing as hard theory and soft theory; there is simply theory or anti-theoretical thinking. A novel, however, always embodies a theory, even within itself, sustaining it; the novel’s form is its discursive response. Ricardo Piglia states that the genre’s social insertion is unquestionable: novels “discuten a su manera, las mismas cuestiones que discute la sociedad.”1 That in their own way is the subject of this chapter.

Section One: History and the novel 1. 2.

There is no such thing as the historical novel. Every novel, even if it creates an illusion of the past, lives in the present. Some novels focus on certain moments in history or on certain figures from the past. Once the novelist sets down his first sentence, however, they have become, simply, stories—no adjectives needed.

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A novel—no matter what kind of descriptor the publishing world uses to sell it—is always testimony. It is the account of an event by a survivor, a witness. Why has he survived? Perhaps because the novelist is part of a historic change that overwhelms the narrative present: his present. While we’re at it, too, let’s build the future. Gnoseologically, not ontologically, no event takes place in the past, in time. It unfolds in the present of the narrator’s discourse. The witness must testify: this is the only way for the event to occur.2 In order for whatever occurs to become a discursive event, it must come from trauma. The testifier narrates; the textifier reads. The narrator, then, testifies. The reader textifies. Both, however, take part in the trial: they sit in the dock of an invisible judge whose nature is not exactly the search for truth, but rather the search for a cognitive utopia. The narrator cannot be disconnected from the incidents he relates. The reader cannot be a spectator to what he reads: being a testifier or a textifier demands, necessarily, participation in the catastrophe. Catastrophe, disaster, trauma. Words used in entrapping, defining, attempting to understand. An event is incomprehensible in itself. Any attempt to comprehend it is obscene. In fact, all possible forms of comprehension must be collected in order for it to become universally comprehensible. An event is excessive. Its very excess is what imposes the initial silence and then the fruitless attempt to tell it or read it. Only the reader who consents to be traumatized, who accepts that he won’t understand everything, who agrees to postpone words, to go mute, can be a textifier. The witness’s language collapses in confronting the excess of the event, which is too much for him. His experience cannot be measured as knowledge, but rather performed: enacted through language. No good novel means anything. Every good novel does something. Here I refer, of course, not to linguistic/semantic signification, but rather to transcendental semiotics, as Bruno Latour approaches this concept.3 The narrator is a performer. So is the reader. If the narrator uses his discourse in an attempt to understand the past, the reader—who is never naïve—seeks to understand that narrative version of the past. In this way, he is another “performer,” an active reader, not a simple actor in a text that manipulates him.4

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15. The novel doesn’t need the imperative in order to do something. It doesn’t need a direct appeal, either. Things simply are. Words neither seek things nor represent them. Words aren’t the Real (in all their dark jungle, as Saer called it), but they also aren’t the Imaginary. They are the Symbolic. They are signifiers, structures. They have no meaning, and their sound doesn’t matter much in prose. They are infinite substitutes. Transcendental signifiers; that is, symbols, allegories. 16. A so-called historical novel needs an I (a first person). 17. After Beckett, novels know that the speaker can no longer be an I, but rather a Not-I. 18. K is a Not-I once he stops being called Joseph. Kafka hasn’t yet discovered the truth of the post-human novel. When he is executed like a dog, and his humiliation seems to survive him, he finally abandons the illusion of Identity. 19. I, say I. Unbelieving, writes Beckett. There is no direct speech in literature. The speaking voice has no name. Nor does whomever listens to it. Testifier and textifier experience the trauma only by repeating it, not understanding it. The only way to act is to understand, to put on the mask, to become a persona. We know that the I of the enunciation isn’t the I of what is enunciated. Discursively speaking, Kafka isn’t—doesn’t belong to the same level as—either Joseph or K. The testifier and the textifier put forth here are not only discursive subjects, but also real ones, and they belong to the same level: the textifier evaluates or tries to evaluate the version offered by the testifier (author)—despite the time elapsed. 20. The true reader, the textifier—subject of disaster, participant in the catastrophe of reading—stops wondering about the Text, the Imaginary, or Reality (there is no Great Other here, no Real). What he wonders now is something simpler and more radical, because he is now a survivor of the disaster. He wonders, who am I? What has happened to me? I am no longer I. My I is what is at stake. I am I because I have ceased to be. My Identity is suspended; it has been collapsed by the trauma of the text. I shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical, Beckett says in The Unnameable. I shall put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person[.] Every reading transforms the textifier—not the careless, casual reader; only the committed one—into a new survivor. 21. Literature begins when it becomes a problem. A problem that confronts versions (of the world and of history), makes the reader into a survivor, and then turns him into a textifier.

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Section Two: The novel as a problem 1.

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What we call literature is a problem. First of all, a theory of the novel cannot be mistaken for its singularities. The “literary” as such is always being called into question. With its centrality displaced, it isn’t a singular discourse, but rather an intervention with respect to other discourses. Contemporary visual artists intervene in objects; novelists intervene in discourses, distorting them by making them act, by performing them. Let us not yet assign a content to what we call literature; it is sitting in the defendants’ dock. The crime with which it has been charged is as old as the term itself, but we no longer know the name of the authority sentencing it—a situation familiar to K. In most novels, the narrator is a tyrant. He is the authority. The power is his, if not the glory. Even so, even in those dictatorship-novels, like Nabokov’s, the narrator ultimately cedes his power to the reader, who makes the real decisions. More than anything else, novels comprise the art of repetition. Borges, who understood this, chose to write condensed novels. May the reader return, countless times, to the knife scene in El hombre de la esquina rosada; may he cut across the Jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan. May the reader feel, as he himself felt, the pain of love shot through his entire body. Only that which we have lost, he asserted, is truly ours. For this reason, perhaps, the best reading of a novel occurs in rereading it, in one of its traumatic repetitions. The narrator, says Walter Benjamin, draws all of his authority from death. He is always a killjoy. The curious thing is that the novel’s role is, and has been since its inception, to question authority as a concept. Literature is an orphaned speech searching for a new fate, a new identity. We could attempt a definition of the novel. A definition, incidentally, that starts with Lazarillo: So you write what you shall write, says the anonymous narrator, who begins the novel as a juridical novelty, a form of jurisprudence (in fact, this is what the novel originally means in Italian). From that point forward, especially with respect to novels in the first person, it is an unrequested confession before a nonexistent court.5 K knew quite a bit about this. Which is why the novel is always a place where power can be pondered as a question, as a problem. This in turn—and not

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because of its fictional nature or its authors’ wild imaginations—is why the Inquisition banned novels in its American colonies. All novels address the enigma of power. What happens, then, between the narrator’s authority (power) and the reader’s authority (power), between the testifier and the textifier? Why do novels move us? Why don’t we know why we feel affected by reading them, and why we can’t even explain what it is that affects us? Freud thought of it, in The Moses of Michelangelo, as an enigma in the face of understanding. Novels move us, but we are unable to understand what they represent to us. Literature’s orphaned language silences us, collapses us. Silence so that we may later speak. The structure of the encounter is what strikes me as essential here. Because the testifier’s orphaned language calls to the textifier’s speaking body, even if it has gone temporarily silent. (The etymology of “testifier” leads us to a third party, but also to a participant, let’s not forget). The encounter is the enigma itself. The encounter is the only thing that matters, even if it is immeasurable—especially because it is immeasurable. This is why a novel’s meaning never matters (besides, no novel has a meaning); what matters are the relationships of authority and power in the encounter posed by its reading. The summary judgment that occurs, over and over again, throughout its pages. Death, as we have already said, confers all its authority to the narrator. Let’s repeat it here, this time in the words of Jacques Derrida. On the death of Emmanuel Levinas, that secular theologian who spoke of words through the concept of God, Derrida utters these phrases: “Death: not, first of all, annihilation, nonbeing, or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the ‘without-response’ . . . It is the murderer who would like to identify death with nothingness . . .” The narrator wants, is obligated, called, to find that something-incomprehensible in death. He is a survivor. He has an ethical duty before the murderer, who seeks the establishment of nothingness: muteness, total silence. Death installs the place of the past in the present. Death is always history. The event is impossible to grasp if assimilated into the present context. Literature is always a historical discourse, transmitting the load of the excessive past into the present and bearing it into the future. This is why the testifier’s authority is different than the conventional narrator’s: his role isn’t to define, in a totalitarian way, what is fiction

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or what is truth. His authority is granted to him by the event itself, the event’s excess, and the incomprehension of the latency period in response to the traumatic event. The reconstruction of events doesn’t exist for the testifier. He cannot return to the past; he must reenact its occurrences. In fact, in the novel Remainder, Tom McCarthy has his nameless character, a survivor of physical trauma (a heavy object fell onto him), call himself a re-enactor. He hires a company not to restore his memory—an impossible task—but to let him reenact, as he wishes, what happens to him and others in everyday life. He manipulates the present in accordance with the arbitrariness of what he decides he wants to remember (repeat) in the future. Including murder and violence. The novelist Tom McCarthy and the philosopher Simon Critchley, both English, have founded (partly in jest, partly not) an International Necronautical Society,6 whose ideas are embodied in the novel. In asserting that every notion of transcendence is a failure—being is not plentitude but rather an ellipsis—they have decided to collect trash, debris. We are made of matter, yes, but of matter that decomposes, rots, dies. If all of our relationships—with others, with reality, with ourselves—are inauthentic, the Necronauts, who aren’t nihilists, seek new strength in their meticulous attention to what is damaged, partial, absent, unnamable. We can only get to know (narrate, bear witness to) the fragmentary, the incomplete: sketches and traces, tracts and silhouettes. In this way, the novel—the narration of disaster—isn’t made up of the whole; it must be roughed out by the textifier who reads and thus regroups the traces. As in a life: no more and no less. The textifier can only be born if the testifier dies. There is no there there. The possibility of the “total” novel, the complete novel, is finished— although bookstores are still full of such specimens that refuse to die. Done, too, is the possibility of traditional realism, spellbound by adjectival language. The “lyrical realism”7 that Zadie Smith has intelligently ascribed to a kind of faith in certain clichés: the transcendental importance of form, the incantatory power of language in revealing the truth, the continuity and essential complexity of the first person. In the face of these nineteenthcentury mandates, post-Joyce novels had to feel, at the very least, distress. This is why the contemporary novel suffers from generalized anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, which is among the causes of anxiety itself).

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19. After Joyce, or after Beckett or even Faulkner, you cannot see the other by trying to encounter an “I.” In the eyes of the other is an abyss, a void. An uncomprehending survivor. 20. There is no authentic history of the I. Some novels don’t yet know it—poor things. 21. How artificial realism is! What do we have here? A trauma, a repetition, a death, a comment. May no one claim he understands!

Section Three: Trauma and the novel 1.

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Shoshana Felman8 was quite right in stating that, as readers, we are forced to participate in scandal. The reader’s innocence cannot remain intact. The scandal isn’t found only in the text; it resides in our relationship with the text, in the text’s effect on us, its textifiers traumatized by the event of reading. The scandal of the speaking body—it couldn’t have been better said. Ignorant of what he knows, the testifier is a body. Unaware of his knowledge, the textifier situates himself before the text’s reserve of silence. The testifier goes mute as he thinks—given that his work isn’t precisely speech—and the textifier goes deaf in the face of the scandal, the excess of the event that he has revived by reading (it) (himself). We are speaking bodies. Testifying and textifiing are attempts to enter into the secret of the event, its signifying excess. In his book Dispatches,9 Michael Herr says that the war (he means Vietnam) was necessary in order for him to understand that he was as responsible for what he saw as for what he did. “The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes.” This passage summarizes the whole truth of the traumatic experience. The incomprehension of what has occurred, the storage of the event, and its return (sometimes many years later), always experienced as a reenactment, as a new disaster. Realism, then, does not exist. There are no realist novels, in the same way as there are no historical novels. Calling a literary adventure “realist” is a mistake, because literature doesn’t copy reality; it is, rather, a copy of a copy of the real.10

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Barthes had accessed this idea before his death, crushed under the wheels of a laundry truck as he left the Collège de France. According to Barthes, artistic realism never places the real at the origin of its discourse; it always works, rather (even if we can’t manage to trace it), with the real that is already written, a prospective code, simulacra. And so, with singular intuition, it locates (as do we) the traumatic event, which is entirely narration and entirely reading, within a general collapse of all economies: the economy of language, the economy of genres, the bodily economy, the monetary economy. A collapse, or, as I prefer to put it, a disaster that eliminates the order of equivalences. A disaster or catastrophe that makes it impossible to keep representing. The culture of the copy, of the “fake world,” is the culture of bad representation, the failed copy. The universe in which everything dies except death. This is the great paradox: Today we know that death never dies (a truth that the Coyote never learned in spite of his perennial enemy, the Roadrunner). Its territory—as is humor’s and the novel’s—is the place of repetition. Trauma doesn’t negate history; trauma’s role, indeed, is to return to history after an event in trying to understand it. Trauma’s historical power lies precisely there, in being unable to remember. Freud calls it the latency period. And the only person who remembers, then, is he who returns to the scene of the crime, to the origin of the disaster; he who recreates or relives the forgotten experience. We cannot perceive any part of what happens to us; we can only recreate it. Each of our lives isn’t real: it’s a copy. A simulacra. In Coetzee’s What Is Realism?, part of his fiction/essay project The Lives of Animals,11 his protagonist Elizabeth Costello says: “I am a writer . . . and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me.” However, another narrator, Susan Barton, in Foe, Coetzee’s novel about Crusoe, says, “When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone . . . Is that the fate of all storytellers?” The main character of Hiroshima Mon Amour—the film directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras—is also familiar with the power of repetition. She has needed her encounter with her Japanese lover in order to narrate her own story, her trauma. And telling it strikes her as a

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betrayal. She tells her other lover, a German occupation officer who died in her town before they could flee (he died, curiously, on the day of liberation itself): “I have told our story. I have you betrayed you this evening with this stranger. I have told our story. It was, you see, tellable . . . ” The permission granted by repetition is what makes her think she can, that she has been permitted to tell the story. She has understood only through repetition. At the start of the film, when the stories are only bodies, or fragments (arms, two different pairs that, we later understand, belong to the two couples), the speaking bodies tell us: (HIM) You saw nothing in Hiroshima. (HER) I saw everything. Everything. The female protagonist, who was not in Hiroshima, saw. She is a textifier of this horror in her new lover’s presence because she was a testifier—in France, at the same time— of the death of her lover, a Nazi soldier. 10. She was locked away by her parents, who felt humiliated by her romance with the enemy. She was abducted by the inhabitants of the town, Nevers, to teach her a lesson. To mark her. Although the romance was what truly marked her, traumatized her. It wrote the letters of disaster on her body. 11. The textifier is a survivor, too, recovered from the shipwreck of catastrophe. Seeing and hearing from within the place of trauma makes us participants—or, better put, mourners. The textifier’s immediacy blinds him before the event. The closer one finds himself to trauma, the less he can know it. Cathy Caruth12 turns to Freud so that we can understand him. She goes to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism. She reads them, astutely, as books about the very writing of historical disaster—the First World War, the Second World War—and the personal disaster suffered by the Viennese psychoanalyst. She reads them as Lacan also read The Purloined Letter, by Poe: as evidence of a crime. 12. In his seminar on the obsession with repetition—or “repetition automatism”—Lacan insightfully reads Freud. There is a displacement of the signifier, an itinerary shaping the symbolic order that (paraphrasing Lacan) grants authentic existence to fiction. The law of fiction, then, is the same as the law of repetition automatism. There is a drama (a trauma), a narration of trauma and the conditions through which that narration is made possible. Narration, he tells us, doubles the drama of a remark without which it would be impossible to stage. We could say that action, strictly speaking, would remain invisible from the trenches. None of the drama can be grasped, seen, or heard without the narrative point of view.13

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13. I have previously said that a novel is neither phonetics nor semantics, but rather a structure. Lacan once again, now in a different persuasive context, supports this idea: originally, subjectivity has no connection to the Real; rather, it is a syntax that produces the signifying framework in the Real. No further remarks, declares the prosecutor of the cause. 14. I is another, writes Rimbaud. Not I am another. No. I is another. In the use of the third person is Verlaine’s young lover, the fugitive, uses this third person in the present, disassociating the I from being. The subject has been reconstructed forever. It is false to say: I think. No one can cogitate all day long if he is not. The old imbeciles who Rimbaud said didn’t understand the false significance of the I. Thus, the writer’s position is always precarious— trivial, writes Barthes, in the sense of the prostitute who finds herself at the intersection of three roads. (To Barthes, moreover, the writer is not a being, but rather a subject of a practice, which is writing: our testifier and our textifier.) 15. We cannot know something we don’t embody. The body is the condition of the drama, the narration of its felt evolution. 16. Testimony—the task of the witness or his reader, the textifier—is not the same as history. History (and historiographical gestures, as Shoshana Feldman has shown us) results both from the passion of forgetting and from the passion of remembering. History can be used to make people forget. History can be reactionary, can draw the thin line negating responsibility and memory, can embody: the blankness of the page where notes are taken. 17. Today, more than ever, we are obligated to engage in an ethics of testifying. These early years of the twenty-first century are marked by an incapacity to think about the meaning of human life. Humanism was an invention from when we hadn’t yet encountered humanity, hadn’t yet come upon others (on other continents, of other genders). Which is why all of our serious, long-lasting relationships are transactions. Empty transactions. Who sees? Who is the messenger? These are two questions we cannot leave unanswered. 18. In The Storyteller, one of his last essays, Benjamin diagnoses a trouble that still afflicts us: the end of storytelling. Our inability to share experiences, he believes, makes it impossible for us to tell stories (as if the capacity for empathy, that which made us human, separating us from our primate

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cousins, had run dry). Since the First World War, thinks Benjamin, men returned poorer, not richer, in communicable experiences. Why? Because of the body’s muteness, wholly fragile in the face of death. Every document of culture is a document of barbarity, writes Benjamin. And the noise of information (which does not mean knowledge) covers the silence of the wounded body: Journalism is “the expression of the changed function of language in the world of high capitalism.” 19. We have neither a public discourse nor a public space; this has been usurped by commercial ends and the noise of information. Twenty-firstcentury wars are CNN wars, Fox wars; they have sponsors; they have their own silencer, their own censor—not only in whomever reports an event, but also in the editor who selects what we know or see or hear about the war. Their objective is to depersonalize, dis-embody. Caruth and Feldman have insisted that PTSD results, among many other things, from the fact that soldiers returning from war have no social or collective space in which to integrate their experiences of death. If trauma remains a private matter, if it cannot be symbolized collectively, it cannot be shared; it must remain silent. It has no narrator. 20. Beware of history as the property of those who can control and manipulate its discourse! Historicism is based on a confusion between truth and power. History, says Felman, is the perpetually troubled arena in which collective memory is deemed a constitutive disassociation between those two forces. Fascism is a philosophy of history as victory. Its voice deafens, speaking from the authority and certainty of power, not from the doubt and fragility of truth. Incidentally, let us get used to the plural. The historical novelist must avoid collaborating with fascist discourses, avoiding, too, complicity with historical barbarity and with the crimes of culture, both latent and patent. 21. The true novel that uses the past as its terrain is, then, ambiguous. History will be sad, Benjamin tells the historians of the future. Flaubert, who was familiar with the cause of this sadness, said: Few will be able to imagine how sorrowful one must be in order to resurrect Carthage. Curiously, this is the task taken up by the true novelist of the past, his paradoxical endeavor: to narrate extermination and save the dead. Benjamin once again, unerring as a proverb: “[E]ven the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”

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Section Four: Noticias del Imperio, Three novels that don’t always make one 1.

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The central tradition of the novel in our country is historical. The Great Mexican Novel, our equivalent to the U.S.-American utopia, involves history. So it was born, with El periquillo sarmiento (a swindler transplanted to our lands in the line of Guzmán de Alfarache, El buscón, and Tom Jones). The genre also contains elements of journalism and costumbrismo; it is a novel of intersecting discourses. The Mexican novel, too, has always shown the element of trial and confession, a key characteristic of genre since its origins. The best nineteenth-century Mexican novels are historical ones: Riva Palacio (Martín Garatuza; Monja casada, Virgen y mártir), Manuel Payno (El fistol del diablo, and especially Los bandidos de Río Frío). It is by no means superfluous that we also owe El libro rojo to them, a novel based on cases, trials, of the Inquisition. The twentieth-century Mexican novel got its start as historical chronicle (narrating the Revolutions of our revolution). We need only think of Los de abajo, recovered by the Contemporáneos in 1927. This path was established as a subgenre in such a way that our novelistic avant-gardes are a score-settling with that incipient but critical tradition: Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo; Al filo del agua, by Agustín Yañez; El luto humano, by José Revueltas. Not superfluously, the two great novels that conclude the cycle are parodies: of language and identity in La muerte de Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes, and of the cliché of character in structure, memories, in Los relámpagos de agosto, by Jorge Ibargüengoitia. The new Mexican historical novel didn’t “begin,” as has been said simplistically, when Fernando del Paso published Noticias del Imperio in 1987. No. Del Paso redirected the literary tree, its strong trunk. Instead of using the Revolution, now dying even as political discourse, he turned to the nineteenth century (which Ibargüengoitia himself had used in his last published novel, Los pasos de López, about Santa Anna). Fernando del Paso’s literary path had begun as a reckoning with Rulfo in José Trigo, our only authentically Joycean novel. He had then traveled to the canon of parodic novels par excellence, Rabelais in his Palinuro de México: an inexhaustible novel that may be his true literary legacy. In it, he

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portrays the Porfirio Díaz era with great irony. And with melancholy and pain, Del Paso addresses the event that forever broke with the ideological enthusiasm of institutionalized revolution—the massacre of October 2, 1968—in a fragment of the novel that is simultaneously staging, acting, a play in itself: Palinuro en la escalera. However, a brilliant writer doesn’t merely rearrange the library, recategorize tradition; rather, he reorders the entire canon. In literature, we must remember, there is no difference between canon and repertoire, as there is in music, because the performer is the reader. The supra-reader/ writer is the one who, through creating a new work, leads all previous literature to be read differently, as T.S. Eliot knew well. In this way, Noticias del Imperio establishes a revision of all Mexican novels that is ultimately nothing other than a return to its densest trunk. An optical illusion, because the prior moment—what Margo Glanz calls onda y escritura, or “new wave and pure writing”—had made us forget the revolutionary novel and its parodies, making us think, in turn, that youthism and its gospel, or our particular and often failed rewriting of the nouveau roman, were themselves the Mexican novel. At different points, Ignacio Solares and Eugenio Aguirre, Enrique Serna and Rosa Beltrán, and Eduardo Parra (among others) have been nourished by a long tradition that called for Del Paso’s exceptional reading to expand the canon. A reading of the past from the present, Noticias del Imperio is actually three novels. One, the most imaginative, comprises monologues by the old empress Carlota (a device that considerably evokes the ghost Orsini in Mújica Láinez’s extraordinary Bomarzo); another (the most dated, the least effective in the book’s present-day rereadings) consists of third-person Tolstoyan fragments, with a far-off narrator/judge; and the third, highly incisive, written in close observation of the characters on both sides of the Atlantic. There are the book’s best historical moments: the battle scene in “Camarón, Camarón,” for example, or the execution of Maximilian. At certain points, the narrator’s self-awareness positions him as a judge—to the detriment of the novelesque illusion. In “El último de los mexicanos,” the book’s near-final paragraph, Del Paso establishes his historical creed. As in certain films, the narrator tells us the end met by each character: who died, where it happened. Until, one day, Carlota Amalia of Belgium dies—the empress who so passionately spoke

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to us and to Maximilian from her madness. Dead dogs don’t bite, suggests Del Paso, but he adds: . . . la última página (. . .) jamás sería escrita y no sólo porque la locura de la historia no acabó con Carlota: también porque a falta de una verdadera, imposible, y en última instancia indeseable Historia Universal, existen muchas historias no sólo particulares, sino cambiantes, según las perspectivas de tiempo y espacio desde las que son escritas.14

10. This essayist-narrator doesn’t always work, telling us where he speaks from, where his guard tower is located, as Luis González y Gonzáles said of the historical point of view. It works least in the following pages, when, in light of the fallen empire, he analyzes contemporary Mexican history. If this were possible, why would he himself need to say: “One will always be able—given talent—to set history aside, and, based on an event or some historical characters, construct a self-sufficient dramatic and novelistic world.” Although the novel itself proves that history cannot be escaped. 11. The truth of history and the exactness of the invention, thinks Del Paso. And if not, let us turn to the beginning of the novel: “En el año de gracia de 1861, México estaba gobernado por un indio cetrino, Benito Juárez, huérfano de padre y madre desde que tenía tres años de edad.”15 There are three inscriptions of trauma: first, indigenousness as a stigma, qualified as cetrino, which, according to the RAE, can mean “greenish-yellow in color,” but also “melancholy and sullen”; second, orphanhood, having lost both parents; and third, the childhood described elliptically as difficult for the año de gracia of 1861, phrased, too, with a certain touch of colonialism. 12. The historical novelist is not a literary critic. The pages of Noticias del Imperio that could easily have gone in an appendix, pages in which the author reviews the books he read and their contributions to his own, are an excisable tumor; even so, they are essential to Del Paso because the documentary sources he exhausted for nearly a decade weigh him down like a tombstone. The historical trauma told and retold by historians ultimately becomes part of the wound, as Malabou reminds us.16 13. The undertaking calls for an action at the limit: something that deconstructs the experience and discourse of limits. This is the historical novel’s true means of political participation. Writing historical novels is an act of resistance—to oblivion and power. Only thus is it meaningful.

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14. In the final aphorism of Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno wrote, “The only philosophy which can be reasonably practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”17 There is no redemption (a messianic term) without reconciliation (a human one). Reconciliation not in the Judeo-Christian sense of forgiveness—whereby, throughout human history, sadly, the forgiver considers himself superior to the forgiven—but rather in the nearly graphic sense: he who sees the other and accepts him thus accepts himself as well. 15. Seen this way, man is not a fixed, finished being, but rather a set of weak intensities, if I may be allowed the Beckettian term, which can enter into resonance with others, not in perpetual competition: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” says one of his characters. Perhaps this is what prompts Del Paso to reconstruct the monologues of the novel’s true victim (not the country abducted and violated by the conservatives): Carlota of Belgium. The empress of the homeland, the absent mother, banished, vilified.18 Carlota is a synecdoche of history—Mexican history or uppercase History. She embodies the trauma. 16. Reconciliation that negates all romanticism, that produces a crisis in the etymological sense (something that breaks, separates, and thus permits it to be seen) of being. Reconciling with the other, precisely because he is an other (and not because I romantically want him to resemble me). In these uncertain times, serious reconciliation can only emerge from difference, not from similarity. It is the most radical act in a world that demands radical thinking as the only way to think at all. I think of Carl Schmitt and his ferocious critique of romanticism, which he saw as occasionally subjectified: in a secularized world where human beings stand at the very center of the stage, everything that appears is relevant, an occasion. Metaphysical narcissism is nothing but a form of selfishness that refuses all genuine reconciliation. Romanticism is a form of selfabsorption, to put it bluntly, much cherished by teenagers. Carlota, driven mad, is our adolescent homeland, the impossibility of living beyond the Other. 17. We need a mature reconciliation of another order, more enduring by being more complex—one that is born of disappointment, as I have said, but which overcomes it. In this disintegrated, individualistic society, only a reevaluation of the political can serve as the prelude to this reconciliation

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I am proposing. Not one produced by the idea that the individual emancipated from bourgeois social order is the sole metaphysical authority. 18. No! “No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere,” says Beckett, and I will quote it again. Let us not think about a future of absolutes. Late capitalism, which met its end and birthed us from its death rattle, has left us a future built entirely of fragments. Our identities are fragments. And this is its best legacy, now that it is slowly dying and singing its funeral dirge to the market. A new state will emerge; politics will return and will be necessary again. The bonfire of our intellectual vanities, asserts Simon Critchley, will yield the ashes of compassion, generosity, and tenderness. This is the hope, at least: that the impending dismantlement of human arrogance will yield a future of genuine reconciliation. 19. In this sense, the diagnosis of late modernity—the recent collapse of Hurrah for Capitalism! and its new idols—could not actually be more dismal: Old nihilism has been followed by a new form of thinking that has not rejected metaphysics and which has sought survival in religious fundamentalism (Islamism, ultraconservative follower of the idea that intelligent design is a more accurate version of evolution than Darwinian theory) and political fundamentalism (with populism at the helm on both the left and the right, but also with Putin’s antidemocracy not far behind). Nietzsche already knew this, and his Will to Power waxed ironic on the new capital-letter Idols. In a secularized world, Republicanisms, Nationalisms, and Fundamentalisms would soon be on their way. If atheism yields conformism, it no longer needs thought to exist; doubt perishes. This world sans metaphysics must cause us distress, not solace. 20. Here emerges disappointment, a category of thought invented by the extraordinary essayist Jorge Cuesta with specific reference to Mexican culture. Disappointment means distance, perspective. From religious disappointment—the famous Nietzschean God-is-dead—to the political disappointment of our atrociously violent time, a time in which blood runs in the streets with the merriment and the nerve of champagne bubbles. There is a reason why Carlota goes mad over the impossibility of having a child by Maximilian, as does the conservative homeland for lack of royal descendants: . . . si alguna vez voy a regresar a México con el vientre casi a punto de estallar, será no porque esté preñada nada más que de viento, será de tempestades y borrascas, de torbellinos, para que cuando los mexicanos me den de palos, como siempre lo

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hicieron y reviente, les lluevan juntas, Maximiliano, las desgracias y calamidades, todas las que se merecen por haber sido tan ingratos con nosotros.19

Carlota, a piñata broken by ingratitude; Carlota Pandora, punished and upbraiding the sallow Indian’s homeland presented in the first pages, the homeland of the mestizos, of the liberals, the wounded homeland. The son, her son, she says in another passage, is not the son of Bazaine, nor of Napoleon, nor of Mejía, nor of an angel, the wind, or the void, but rather “hijo del tepescuincle, un hijo de la mariguana, un hijo de la chingada.”20 21. Disappointment as an analytical category. “Distancing,” to use Bertolt Brecht’s term. I have no qualms about affirming this as a more plausible way out than returning to a belief in metaphysics (whether religious or political), or in transcendence, or in the total novel. The central question about what it means to be human in a world where the answer couldn’t be farther beyond the human, not outside us but within us, is indeed central in this way. For Del Paso, there is no true nor impossible nor undesirable Universal History, but rather individual, changeable histories, “depending on the perspectives of time and space from which they are written.”21 The illusion of totality at work in Noticias del Imperio seems to depart from this interpretative drift, from this difference the novelist has found. Which is why Del Paso sometimes covers all the bases and asserts, “nunca se sabrá, otros dijeron, se piensa . . .”22 The novel wavers in his discourse, but it does not negate itself in its cathedralesque architecture. To what extent does Noticias del Imperio serve the state? Can a novel be a mirror for a society that turns to the past to justify the present? In the tradition of Mexican liberalism, Juárez is the example and standard (as Justo Sierra said), and Maximilian, along with Iturbide and Huerta, is one of the state’s favorite villains. Noticias del Imperio does not successfully rupture that hegemonic discourse through the novel’s interpretative freedom. The dead reappear or are never dead and Carlota soliloquizes in the same terms as Paz does in El laberinto de la soledad—a lyrical shift that isn’t equivalent to Molly Bloom’s, because it neither frees her nor frees us. We are only those hijos de la chingada who emerge after the monarchical belly bursts. Sallow orphans, like President Juárez, and—this is the most painful part of Del Paso’s interpretation—perhaps irredeemable, too. Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

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Notes 1 Ricardo Piglia, La forma Inicial: Conversaciones en Princeton (Mexico: Sexto Piso, 2016), 152. “Novels discuss, in their own way, the same questions that society discusses.” The translation of this citation—and the others throughout this article, unless otherwise stated—is by Robin Myers. We can also see the development of this idea in Ricardo Piglia, Por un relato futuro: Conversaciones con Juan José Saer (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2015). 2 I use the term “event” as Alan Badiou defines it. For his reflections on literature, I prefer his The Age of the Poets (London: Verso, 2014). 3 Especially in his An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 4 As Judith Butler conceptualizes this idea not only in her early work on gender but particularly in Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Ignacio Sánchez Prado makes powerful use of the term in his article on Palinuro de México, Fernando del Paso’s other novel, perhaps the best overview of the traditions that influence his work. See Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Dying Mirrors, Medieval Moralists and Tristram Shandies. The Literary Traditions of Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro of Mexico,” Comparative Literature 60, no. 2 (2008): 142–163. He adapts it from Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). The incorporation of the notion of repertoire also allows us to consider how a novel also performs a literary tradition. 5 Other very recent operational definitions of the novel can be found in Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Tim Parks, The Novel: A Survival Skill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6 See http://www.necronauts.org/interviews_simon.htm. 7 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/ 8 In her Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9 Consulted in Spanish translation. Michael Herr, Despachos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001). 10 Compare to Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2013). 11 J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 12 See especially Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 13 Compare to Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (London: Verso, 2015).

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14 Fernando del Paso, Noticias del Imperio (Mexico: Diana, 1987), 638. “. . . the last page . . . will never be written, and not only because the madness of history didn’t finish off Carlota: but also because, given the lack of a true, impossible, and ultimately undesirable Universal History, many other histories exist—not only personal, but also changeable, according to the perspectives of time and space through which they are written.” Elizabeth Corral Peña has given us the best review of the novel’s historical sources: Noticias del Imperio: Los nuevos caminos de la novela histórica (Xalapa Universidad Veracruzana, 1997). 15 Del Paso, Noticias del Imperio, 29. “In the year of grace of 1868, Mexico is governed by a sallow Indian, Benito Juárez, orphaned of father and mother since he was three years of age.” 16 Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (New York: Fordham, 2012). 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 247. 18 Del Paso, Noticias del Imperio, 488. “I chose to dream [says Del Paso’s Carlota] and remain in the dream. And for dreaming, oh, for dreaming, as I was telling you, I have paid a very high price, which is being both alive and dead forever.” 19 Del Paso, Noticias del Imperio, 359. . . . If I someday return to Mexico with my belly about to burst, it shall not be because I have been impregnated by the mere wind; it will have been by storms and squalls, by maelstroms—so that when the Mexicans set upon me, as they have always done, and I come open, all hardships and calamities shall rain down on them together, Maximiliano, all they deserve for having been so ungrateful to us. 20 “son of a paca, son of marijuana, son of a bitch.” 21 Del Paso, Noticias del Imperio, 638. 22 “It will never be known, others said, only thought . . .”

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Embodiment Envy: Love, Sex, and Death in Pedro Ángel Palou’s Con la muerte en los puños Rebecca Janzen

A boxer shares his memoirs in Pedro Ángel Palou’s novel Con la muerte en los puños (Death at His Fists) (2002). The focus is on a struggle for its narratorprotagonist, Baby Cifuentes, who finds it difficult to put his embodied experience into words. This challenge mirrors a widely understood tension in Mexican and other literatures, between the body and the text; it also alludes to a less frequently examined tension, where those who write novels are from a social class that does not often have to physically work, and who focus on their characters’ bodies, even as it is hard to adequately represent any embodied reality, let alone one that comes from another background. Con la muerte en los puños, which won the 2004 Xavier Villaurrutia prize, calls to mind a song by José Alfredo Jiménez, Con la muerte entre los puños. Jiménez’s song serves as the novel’s third epigraph, which makes this allusion explicit. It describes a boxer from a lower socioeconomic background who eventually became a world champion.1 His career ends as he loses an important fight in the city of Guadalajara, and so he leaves that city and his boxing career for an unknown path.2 Palou’s novelized version of this song is similar in many ways.3 It takes place in the mid-to-later twentieth century. In these decades, his protagonist, Baby Cifuentes, joins the army, learns to fight and eventually becomes a national champion. The novel takes its cue from boxing to tell this story in fifteen rounds, plus a final knockout. In the words of reviewer Elena Poniatowska, “su libro es muy chingón, se lee con el alma en un hilo.”4 Con la muerte en los puños explains that Baby Cifuentes’s life began in Tepito, a tough neighborhood in Mexico City. He grew up there among various types of people: “latinos desempleados

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y sus hijos güevones, buenos para una chingada, entre contrabandistas y cuacos vulgares, drogadictos y borrachos de mierda, aprendices de enfermeros inyectándose heroína desde niños, nunca se está en paz.”5 This mixture of people from all walks of life, primarily from lower socioeconomic classes, reverberates throughout the boxer’s memories. Some of these memories focus on his family. He did not care for his mother and he hated his abusive stepfather, who Baby Cifuentes eventually murdered. “Se siente culero haber matado a un hombre, se siente de la chingada.”6 The boxer confessed to his family and his mother went to prison on her son’s behalf. In spite of these problems with his stepfather, Baby loved his grandfather, don Goyo, who had boxed as a young man. Under his grandfather’s influence, Baby shifted from killing people with his bare hands and street fighting to learning how to box. He won many fights and became fairly famous. As Baby’s fame grew, so too did his mishaps in love and lust. His favorite lover was Marisol, a woman married to a drug trafficker. Baby is plagued by guilt because he thinks he is responsible for killing Marisol; certainly her husband Tomás painted Baby as the perpetrator. Con la muerte en los puños takes place in the later half of the twentieth century; this is at the same time as incredible technological development, from laborsaving household devices to mass transportation, that took place in Mexico and throughout North America. These technological innovations eliminated some level of physicality from activities of daily living. It is also a time of incredible economic stress and downturns. In Mexico, the ruling and consumer classes, who already employed people to look after their physical needs, such as housecleaning, cooking, and childrearing, became even more distant from those people involved in producing new consumer goods. This distance was both ideological and physical: after NAFTA, more manufacturing moved to the Mexico-U.S. border region, at a significant distance from important cities like Mexico City, Guadalajara, and even the northern industrial city of Monterrey. This meant that it was easier for the ruling and consumer classes to ignore the lived realities of those involved in production, and the fact that those people’s bodies were the cost of improved lives for some in urban centers. Theorists have often used the terminology of biopolitics, that is, how powerful forces manage a given population’s bodies, to examine this process. This, I believe, offers a corrective to this deliberate ignorance of the body. Michel Foucault, for instance, encouraged his readers to focus on the ways that governments adversely affected the bodies of certain populations, such as people with mental

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illnesses.7 Later, Giorgio Agamben brought Foucault’s theories into the realm of life and death and suggested that the state had a desire to be sovereign over its population. His most famous work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, examines concentration camps during the Second World War in order to posit that the sovereign asserts its power by considering any member of its population bare life, that is, a life that may be killed at any time.8 Christopher Breu’s Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics adds to these fundamental theories by exploring the rise of biopolitics and thanatopolitics, or the politics of death, in an era when those who are writing about biopolitics and thanatopolitics are increasingly distant from those whose bodies the twentieth- and twenty-first-century state has rendered bare life. His work deals with U.S. novels from 1959 to 1991 and argues that “Both the privileging of the so-called immaterial or virtual and the idea of complete biopolitical control imagine a material world that is a passive site of inscription and unproblematic manipulation.”9 Thus, at the same time as theories of biopolitics have instructed us about the body and the ways that the state would like to assert its dominance over the body, society and social theorists have become distant from the bodies about which it is writing. These theorists have also become more interested in the immaterial, such as in dreams and feelings, and the virtual, such as the technological posthuman, to describe the body as a way to explore these immaterial and virtual concepts. This linguistic register relates to the novel’s historical and political moment. Breu’s work helps us understand it from a biopolitical perspective. For him, “the built environment, modes of representation, the figuration of the body, and the experience of everyday life are profoundly intertwined with late-capitalist production, consumption, and signification practices that both remake the material world and produce an ever-growing fantasy of its transcendence.”10 He notes that the simple representation of “the body resists and complicates biopolitics.”11 Thus, in his view, “[t]heory and critical thought should work to disrupt their fantasies of mastery while still attempting to be as adequate as possible to their objects.”12 I believe that the representation of the female body is central to these embodied fantasies and to embodiment envy. For this reason, I turn to feminist scholarship. Allaine Cerwonka and Anna Loutfi, for instance, note that there is a telling absence of the female body in Agamben’s work and argue that it has a disturbing sex blindness.13 The legal scholars observe that he ignores the fact that female life has always been negated and that for this reason, “biopolitical theory

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[has but no longer can] avoid making the female body central to its analysis of human life as an undefined essence both protected and unprotected by law.”14 In Palou’s work, all humans of lower social classes are hyper-embodied; many women are reduced to their function as Cifuentes’s sex partners. When one of them dies, there is nothing anyone can do. Ruth A. Miller elaborates on human rights and explores if, and how, the modern state’s human rights laws protect any bodies. She shows us that these laws protect some bodies and not others. In the latter case, these ostensibly good ideas become “instruments of cutting, splicing, and stitching—as tools in the construction of the physical, flesh-bound citizen, rather than in the construction of the abstract, law-bound citizen.”15 That is, these ideas, based on the eighteenthcentury liberal tradition, and modified throughout the twentieth century, focus on such small parts of the human experience that they destroy human integrity. They are a way for the lawmakers to express their embodiment envy. She adds that human rights discourse as it pertains to the sexual and reproductive arena “has inscribed not just bare life but potential life into political systems—in the process opening up women’s bodies to constant regulation.”16 This constant regulation relates to the obsession with the immaterial. In Palou’s novel, these tendencies manifest as the hyper-representation of the women’s bodies and the boxer’s perpetual fights.

The Mexican present in Palou’s work This chapter thus extends Breu’s reading to posit that Mexican society and literature also imagine bodies without their accompanying physicality. Mexican literature, too, exemplifies what Breu consistently has asserted, that this interest in the body can only exist in conjunction with invisibilization of the powerful forces that manipulate the bodies of the population. That is, that the figurative manipulation of the body in social theory and in literary fiction is only possible when those writing are in some way distant from those bodies about which they are writing. Yet, at the same time, the body is omnipresent. The material and the embodied will always puncture any desires of immateriality or virtuality. It seems that Breu would be open to a broader application of his work. He contends that “the late-capitalist literature of materiality [has] engaged questions of materiality long before the materialist turn was made in literature and cultural studies. Accordingly, we can profit greatly by looking to the texts

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themselves for clues as to how to think about materiality in the context of our globalizing present.”17 For this reason, this chapter brings Breu’s observations about social theory from the United States and Europe to bear on the Mexican context and Palou’s literary fiction. Even though this context and novel differ in significant ways from the works Breu analyzes, there are some similarities. As the Mexican state and economy grew throughout the mid-twentieth century and early twenty-first century, the state developed an impressive biopolitical dimension. To use Breu’s terminology, the Mexican state is evermore interested in completely controlling and ignoring its population, even as it has become fascinated with the immaterial. Examining one Mexican novel through the lens of Breu’s vision of the tension between materiality and immateriality will shed light on the Mexican present and recent past. Con la muerte en los puños was published six years after the literary project called the Crack Manifesto. The manifesto, by Palou, along with Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, and Jorge Volpi, was written as a way to group together five novels, one by each author.18 Palou’s contribution, “The Crack’s Fair,” establishes the importance of a single narrative voice and classified Crack novels as those born of doubt and with intricate language.19 This literature celebrates the immaterial and avoids making concessions to its readers. Critics are divided on the Crack manifesto and on Palou’s work, then and now. Rafael Lemus’s negative review of Con la muerte en los puños, “Nocaut,” for instance, critiques the Crack movement. In his view, it was purely commercial; he assesses Palou’s recent work in the same way. He states that it belongs in a bookstore, and not on a bookshelf.20 Mattias Devriendt’s master’s thesis, on the other hand, is more positive. He notes that the Crack left a strong legacy of postmodernism, especially with regard to intertextuality, parody, and metafiction. Devriendt examines a lucha libre scene in Palou’s 1995 novel Memoria de los días (Requiem for those Days) and mentions boxing in Con la muerte en los puños to suggest continuity between Palou’s novels from the 1990s and the early 2000s.21 In a later article with Diana Castilleja and Eugenia Houvenaghel, he elaborates on the presence of elements of popular culture in Palou’s work.22 Perhaps this interest in lucha and popular cultural expression formed a background to Palou’s later interest in boxing. Con la muerte en los puños is not a Crack novel. Indeed, as Poniatowska noted, the Crack members were nervous about its publication because none of them had written “algo semejante, algo que estuviera tan cerca del México de los pobres, el de la miseria de los boxeadores y el de su derrota final.”23 The novel emphasizes

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the material in an era when Palou’s colleagues would have liked to forget it. This is similar to other novels of the time period. As Breu has observed, “those who have the privilege of imagining that they can transcend embodiment become envious of those who are defined as excessively embodied through . . . their relationships to the more material dimensions of the production process.”24 That is, when novels represent the body, they represent what Breu terms “embodiment envy,” or the wealthier and consumer classes’ envy of the bodies of those involved in the production of goods and services. This analytical lens, then, recognizes the distance between the context of production and consumption and the forces of production. Perhaps as part of this envy, outside of the novel, Palou conducted extensive research: learning how to box, researching boxing, and spending significant periods of time with boxers. He strove to use authentic language. To ensure this, he showed his manuscript to José Sulaimán, the president of the World Boxing Council from 1975 to his death in 2014, and to boxers “Finito” López and “Pollo” Meneses to read, and he received their stamp of approval.25 Reviewer Guillermo Samperio adds that Palou manages to convince the readers it is an authentic text as he “introduce reflexiones certeras que equilibran este punto flojo de la novel.”26 In Lemus’s view, however, it aims for authenticity only to become mechanical.27 Even Marco T. Aguilera Garramuño, who provides a favorable review, agrees that the language is not quite how people would speak.28

Putting the body into writing Part of the reason the novel strives to use authentic language is that it claims to be Cifuentes’s reflections on his life. These reflections focus on the material through the relationship between writing and drinking alcohol. This emphasis on his body counters the dominant discourse of progress and the growing realization that NAFTA has not benefitted that many people. This is similar to how Breu describes J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash. He argues that Ballard’s work focuses on car crashes to counter the dominant ideology of car culture.29 By the same token, the way that Cifuentes’s body is trained to destroy other bodies points out the darker side of Mexican society. The novel opens with a phrase that ponders how much Cifuentes hates his wife: “Me pregunto cuánto tiempo hace que mi mujer me caga la madre.”30 Then, it shifts abruptly to his memories: “He escrito al fin estas doce primeras palabras, movido por la curiosidad.”31 Thanks to their encouragement, he put these first

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words on paper because his friend Gavito had given him a notebook. This friend calls to mind other characters with the same name from elsewhere in Palou’s oeuvre, or the singer Juan Gabriel.32 Cifuentes’s writing, we learn, has come out of several periods of intense thinking, and he claims that he writes so that other people know that he is a person who has thought about his life. “En la cárcel, en el box, en la miseria he pensado. Son los tres mejores lugares para pensar.”33 He thinks that he might have something to offer; yet, he doubts himself. “¿De qué chingaos puedo seguir escribiendo?”34 He also acknowledges that he does not come from the intellectual class and so he subordinates himself through his writing for his audience. This experience aligns with what Breu has observed, that “service workers (such as sex workers), affective laborers, factory workers, and agricultural laborers are imprisoned in a degraded embodiment for that suffers for the pleasure of the privileged.”35 Returning to Baby Cifuentes’s perspective, “he viajado más y visto mucho más cosas que sus amigos que arreglan el puto mundo desde sus mesas de café.”36 This discourages him, and he wonders if he should continue to write. These reflections focus extensively on his body as Baby Cifuentes drinks increasing amounts of alcohol. He states, “Ya estoy muy cansado para seguir escribiendo, y muy pedo. Lo dejo para después. No mames, que pinche dolor de cabeza.”37 The novel focuses on his headache rather than on his memories. Moreover, the protagonist embodies what Emily Hind has come to describe as the image of the classic alcohol-fueled or alcohol-dependent male genius.38 He finds his words when he is drunk: “He de estar borracho para escribir estas cosas. O muy pedo, más bien. Me cuesta harto trabajo agarrar la pluma y mi letra está del carajo.”39 He expresses himself best in these moments: “Es lo cabrón de beber solo, la soledad es canija y uno se mete dentro, muy dentro de uno mismo. Se ve refeo allá adentro.”40 The novel fetishizes his drunken solitude. It suggests that only there can the boxer leave his physicality to join the immaterial world of writing even as his reflections highlight the physical effects of drinking. This returns us to the idea of embodiment envy.

Boxing and street fighting In a further example of this envy, Baby Cifuentes’s writing elaborates on boxing and the difference between boxing and street fighting. Indeed, Elena Poniatowska’s review of the novel pays attention to the science of boxing.41 The

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contrast between Baby Cifuentes’s reflection on writing in Con la muerte en los puños and his description of his childhood and boxing career points to broader jealousy of his boxing capabilities. It suggests that in Mexico, those who have access to reading and writing may fetishize this sport, and that this fetishizing sells books. To begin, the novel explains that boxing is more refined than street fighting. “Cada pelea es distinta, no importan cuánto te hayas preparado para el combate. Tienes que aprender a estudiar cada movimiento del rival, adelantarte a sus reacciones, comerle sus piezas, darle jaque mate.”42 Careful study of the sport and of the opponent means he should be able to win. Yet, we only realize that this care is necessary because of Palou’s emphasis on the boxer’s movements and physical responses to outside pressure. The narrator-protagonist Cifuentes elaborates: “La pinche secuencia de apertura es fundamental. Si sales con un jab y luego rematas con la izquierda es seguro que se tambalea. No te infles entonces, estudia al cabrón primero, ¿cómo reacciona? Ahí lo agarraste. . .”43 This shows that there are some strategies that can distract the opponent. Then, once the opponent is on edge, it is possible to win. This physical description of winning punctures the page and calls to mind the bodies the powerful would prefer to ignore, or let die—even though they are obsessed with these bodies. Losses have devastating consequences, which are described physically and yet devoid of physicality: “Ves y no ves nada en realidad . . . Otra forma de estar ciego.”44 This absent blindness and absent sight suggest Baby Cifuentes’s precarious existence; his novelized memoirs occupy a space between consumers and those whose bodies are the means of production.

Blood and death Street fighting, we learn, is different from boxing as it leads more often to death. The descriptions of these events highlight the body to such an extent that it appears to be bare life and it aligns with Miller’s analysis of human rights discourse. On several occasions, the narrator emphasizes certain body parts to such an extent that he almost figuratively dismembers himself. As Baby Cifuentes explains, the particular movements of the fight, unlike the movements in boxing, are disconnected from any broader strategy or plan. For instance, when he fought someone in his neighborhood: “Le di un derechazo fulminante en la ceja. Le abrí la jodida ceja. Me puse feliz al ver su sangre.”45 He is joyful

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at the prospect of seeing another person’s blood and we discern this level of contentment from the physical description of the fight. On another occasion, he thinks that he might have died and he wonders if the dead feel pain, again, showing us the tension between the immaterial and the material. Then, he realizes, “no estaba tan enterrado, tan frío, porque me dolía como un carajo . . .” [“I wasn’t buried or cold enough, because I hurt like hell”].46 As it creeps in to his mind and his experience, the material overtakes his immaterial reflections. He offers a graphic description of his pain: “Era un dolor frío, como de cuchillo hundiéndose en la carne.”47 He reflects on his own body, and how it has been manipulated: “Ves la carne, y deja de ser rosa y luego es blanca, como la luna, pero más mojada . . . Yo he visto muchos muertos. Y eso era ahí acostado. Me metí en la fuente vestido.”48 He tried to end his life, but he did not succeed. His reflections on street fighting, then, continue to illustrate the contrast and tension between the body and reflections on his lived experience.

Death and sex Death, for Baby Cifuentes, always relates to sex. He has slept with many sex workers, had several short-term flings, married Norma, and fell in love with Marisol. The way the novel describes these experiences dehumanizes these women because it splits them into their body parts further points toward broader societal embodiment envy. These recollections completely ignore the woman and even he is represented in ways that evoke bare life. For example, the novel opens in Ciudad Juárez, when the boxer is cheating on his wife for the first time. A sex worker, Denisse, had asked him what he did for his job, and he responded, “madrear pendejos.”49 When she does not understand, he shows her the scar on his eyebrow and explains that he is a boxer. They drink and have sex. Baby’s recollections of this event suggest that a man dies what Freud called the little death when he has sex: “Después de venirse un hombre es un jodido cadáver, me cae, cuelga los guantes y es como si se hubiera petateado.”50 It is as if he has just fought a match and had lost. Except he wears protection in the boxing ring. This emphasis on his body at the expense of hers points to his power in the patriarchal system. Its presence in the novel also serves as a way for male readers to work out their embodied fantasies of sexual prowess on represented women.

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Other sexual experiences leave Baby Cifuentes breathless and exhausted and are a way he works out his own embodiment envy, which we, as the novel’s readers, mirror. At one point, he is with a woman he calls “la güera” (“the white women”) Ariadna. “Después de esa cogida sensacional, de campeonato del mundo, quince raunds sin parar, dormimos como recién nacidos” (After that sensational fuck, like the world championship, fifteen rounds without stopping, we slept like newborns).51 This likens sex to boxing, as both are exhausting embodied encounters with other people. He then reflects on the rest of his time with this woman in a hotel in Acapulco: “yendo a la playa a nadar, aunque también nos metíamos a la alberquita de la suita cuando teníamos calor.”52 His recollections are reduced to his body and she does not even play a role in them. His most powerful sexual experiences further dehumanize him and his sexual partners. His favorite woman, Marisol, died in a bathroom in a pool of her own blood.53 Given his own experiences with drugs and alcohol he is not certain what has happened, or why. Cifuentes is, however, certain that if Marisol’s drugtrafficking husband had wanted, he would already be in jail.54 He explains: Me quedé en que vomité todito sobre la alfombra y luego me eché un coyote de quién sabe cuántas horas, aunque intermitente como luz de automóvil. Al final, después de un ratote, me desperté con muchas ganas de miar. Otra vez intenté levantarme y ni madres, y sucio, lleno de sangre y guácara, me arrastré pecho tierra hacia el baño, que estaba cerrado . . .55

He ends his recollections by going to visit Marisol’s husband Tomás and trying to kill him.56 Even his most loving recollections are colored by his body—his vomit, his urine, and his blood. They are a powerful way for readers to work out their envy of the powerful bodies of those who produce goods and services. These moments, like the novel’s other reflections on street fighting, boxing, and drinking, point to a broader societal tension that we are exposed to through Breu’s work.

Notes 1 Pedro Ángel Palou, Con la muerte en los puños (Mexico City : Alfaguara, 2002), 12. All translations are the chapter author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 Palou, Con la muerte, 13. 3 Palou, Con la muerte, 15.

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4 Elena Poniatowska, “Box y literatura del Crack II,” La Jornada, June 27, 2003, accessed October 20, 2016, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2003/06/27/03aa1cul .php?printver=1&fly=. “His book is f—ing awesome, it is read with one’s heart in knots.” 5 Palou, Con la muerte, 168. “unemployed Latinos and their lazy children, who are only good at messing around; among people who make contraband and vulgar asses; drug addicts and shit-faced drunks; nursing students who have been shooting up heroin since they were kids. One was never at peace.” 6 Palou, Con la muerte, 30. “It feels amazingly awful having killed a man, you feel like you are from hell.” 7 See for example Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1989, London: Routledge, 2001). 8 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 58, 82. 9 Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 2. 10 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 26. 11 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 189. 12 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 183. 13 Allaine Cerwonka and Anna Loutfi, “Biopolitics and the Female Reproductive Body as the New Subject of Law,” feminists@law 1, no. 1 (2011), accessed October 10, 2016, http://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/article/view/18/77. 14 Cerwonka and Loutfi, “Biopolitics and the Female Reproductive Body as the New Subject of Law.” 15 Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 3. 16 Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 175. 17 Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 23. 18 Jorge Luis Herrera, “Entrevista con Pedro Ángel Palou: ‘Soy un narrador que se desdobla,’” Colmena 46 (1990), accessed October 22, 2016, http://web.uaemex.mx/ plin/colmena/Colmena%2046/Aguijon/Jorge.html. 19 Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz et al., “Crack Manifesto,” trans. Celia Bortolin and Scott Miller, Context 16, Dalkey Archive Press, accessed October 20, 2016, http:// www.dalkeyarchive.com/crack-manifesto/. 20 Rafael Lemus, “Nocaut,” Letras Libres, August 31, 2003, accessed October 20, 2016, http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/nocaut. 21 Mattias Devriendt, “El camino de Pedro Ángel Palou (Crack) dentro del posmodernismo: Una lectura de Memoria de los días (1995), Paraíso Clausurado (2000) y Parque Fin del Mundo (1995)” (Master’s thesis, Ghent University, 2008– 2009), 123.

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22 Mattias Devriendt, Diana Castilleja and Eugenia Houvenaghel, “Pedro Ángel Palou (La Generación del Crack): ¿Un escritor posmoderno?” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 89, no. 7 (2012): 742. 23 Poniatowska, “Box y literatura del Crack I.” “anything similar, something that was so close to the Mexico of the poor, of the squalor of boxers and their final defeat.” 24 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 23. 25 Herrera, “Entrevista con Pedro Ángel Palou.” 26 Guillermo Samperio, “Por las viejas, joven,” review of Con la muerte en los puños, Nexos: Sociedad, Ciencia, Literatura 25, no. 312 (December 2003), accessed October 22, 2016, http://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=11004. “introduces realistic reflections that calibrate this other weaker point in the novel.” 27 Lemus, “Nocaut.” 28 Marco T. Aguilera Garramuño, review of Con la muerte en los puños, La Palabra y el Hombre, no. 132 (October–December 2004): 188, accessed October 20, 2016, http://cdigital.uv.mx/bitstream/123456789/443/1/2004131P187.pdf. 29 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 119. 30 Palou, Con la muerte, 14. “I asked myself how much time means shit to me.” 31 Palou, Con la muerte, 14. “I have finally written these twelve words, moved by curiosity.” 32 Samperio, “Por las viejas, joven.” 33 Palou, Con la muerte, 149. “In jail, in boxing, in poverty, I have been thinking. These are the three best places to think.” 34 Palou, Con la muerte, 49. “What on this fucking earth can I keep writing about?” 35 Breu, Insistence of the Material, 172. 36 Palou, Con la muerte, 149. “I have travelled more and seen many more things than your friends who organize the whole fucking world from their coffee tables.” 37 Palou, Con la muerte, 73. “I am too tired to keep writing, and completely hammered. I will leave it ‘til later. Dammit. What a fucking headache.” 38 Hind, Personal communication. 39 Palou, Con la muerte, 58. “I must be very drunk to write these things. Or plastered, more likely. It is hard for me to take up the pen and my handwriting is hellish.” 40 Palou, Con la muerte, 58. “It’s the worst part of drinking alone. Loneliness makes one feeble and one goes inside, deep inside of oneself. It looks really awful inside.” 41 Poniatowska, “Box y literatura del Crack II.” 42 Palou, Con la muerte, 20. “Each fight is different, it doesn’t matter how much you have prepared for combat. You need to learn how to study the rival’s every movement, advance as he reacts, eat his dust, and then check mate.” 43 Palou, Con la muerte, 97. “The fucking opening sequence is fundamental. If you begin with a jab and then you round of with the left you will certainly tremble. Don’t get cocky, study the opponent first. How does he react? Then you’ve got him.”

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44 Palou, Con la muerte, 57. “You see and you don’t see anything really . . . It’s another type of blindness.” 45 Palou, Con la muerte, 55. “I instantly gave him a jab from the right on his eyebrow. I opened his fucking brow. I was happy as I watched him bleed.” 46 Palou, Con la muerte, 59. 47 Palou, Con la muerte, 59. “The pain was so cold it was like a knife drowning in flesh.” 48 Palou, Con la muerte, 59. “I have seen many dead people. And this one was lying right there. I threw myself in the fountain, fully clothed.” 49 Palou, Con la muerte, 15. “Fucking up stupid guys.” 50 Palou, Con la muerte, 15. “After coming a man is a fucking cadaver, it seems to me, like hanging up the gloves and it is as if he has died.” 51 Palou, Con la muerte, 143. 52 Palou, Con la muerte, 143. “going to the beach to swim, although we also went into the pool in our suite when we were hot.” 53 Palou, Con la muerte, 85, 111. 54 Palou, Con la muerte, 86. 55 Palou, Con la muerte, 85. I was sure that I vomited everything on the carpet and then I took a little nap for who knows how long, although intermittently like a car’s flashers. At the end, after a long while, I woke up wanting to piss. I tried again to get up and there was no way in hell, and I was so dirty, full of blood and vomit. I went on my stomach towards the bathroom, but the door was closed . . . 56 Palou, Con la muerte, 183.

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Visualizing the Nonnormative Body in Guadalupe Nettel’s El cuerpo en que nací Lilia Adriana Pérez Limón

The world captured through the inquisitive gaze of a child frames the story behind El cuerpo en que nací. Guadalupe Nettel tells the story of growing up in 1970s Mexico during an intense series of underground currents of sexual dissent, spiritual experimentation, anything contesting repressive conventional values, and defying production-oriented limitations. Via a conversation with a silent psychoanalyst, Nettel chronicles her parents’ open relationship, their separation, her brief time at a hippie commune, and her experimental education. It is through this lens that the author introduces the reader to a birthmark on her right cornea, which limited and influenced her vision of the world. In order to strengthen her vision, she was forced to wear an eye patch, resisting at first but submitting to it once it was secured. While the vibrant and peculiar narration of the child’s life takes the reader through an emotional, social, and political recreation of 1970s Mexico, I propose examining Nettel’s representation as a conceptualization of political communities through images of disability. Her reality seems to suggest that vulnerability is one of the fundamental features of her everyday existence. Working against the assumption that disability is a bodily metaphor for political and social decay, I read Nettel’s narrative as presenting alternatives to the current state of disability and precarity. Thus, within the theoretical framework of Ann Cvetkovich’s writing I conceptualize precarity, vulnerability, and disability not exclusively in the negative. Further, I posit that her disability is performed not merely via drifting through ordinary life but by enjoying being together with others in vulnerability. Drawing from affective scenarios and other modes of attachments developed under neoliberalism, my emergent concern is to analyze the novel as an unsettling elaboration of social and political anxieties that congeal into an alternative sociality, one that is not yet here.

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El cuerpo en que nací begins with the unsparing testimony of the narrator’s harrowing girlhood. As previously mentioned, Nettel’s candid prose hews closely to the strictures of the therapy session. The novel is saturated with Nettel’s physical pain, brought upon by a birthmark on the right cornea. The author unflinchingly depicts the effects of an ocular deformity, narrating the daily procedures that she must take to strengthen the ocular muscles of the deficient eye. She recounts the anxiety caused by having to wear a flesh-hued eye patch over the good eye. Nevertheless, Nettel’s novel and my work are not exclusively about Nettel’s pain and vulnerability; rather, I argue that it is also about the process of healing through affective engagements with vulnerable others and growing into one’s own body that Nettel describes as its outcome in the novel’s opening epigraph by Allen Ginsberg, “Yes, yes that’s what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born.”1 I claim that the anguish that the main character experiences as a child along with other modes of disability that are featured so prominently in the novel serve the purpose of community formation, bringing together Nettel’s framing of her past self with a handful of other marginalized characters throughout her life. I offer this succinct summary of Nettel’s ordinary circumstances of her daily and domestic life to call attention to the deployment and utility of disability tropes in her work. I read Nettel’s corporeal images of her visual disability as questioning the construction of a national body and I peruse the accompanying decision regarding who gets to be thought of as a citizen within the Mexican social and political community and who does not. Thus, Nettel’s corporeal metaphors used to define 1970s Mexico and used to depict political belonging shed light on how rights of citizenship are distributed. Disability theorist Julie Avril Minich explains the need to open the concept of citizenship, arguing that: Citizenship, at present, remains the institution by which we “guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights,” yet its alliance with the state makes it a decidedly imperfect institution, one that leaves many out of its fold. In fact, it might be said that citizenship is the means by which we collectively decide not to guarantee equal rights to certain people (those deemed noncitizens). Precisely for this reason, the need is more urgent than ever to interrogate citizenship with the goal of expanding its accessibility or of replacing it entirely with a new mechanism for asserting political belonging and claiming rights.2

The corporeal nature within the novel allows me to explore the links between different forms of oppression and the resulting potential for community formation. As I discuss throughout this chapter, the idea of the disabled body is

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precisely what Nettel, at times humorously, subverts and ultimately transforms in her depathologized narration of her past. I wish to place Nettel parallel to a trajectory of queer Chicana/o work that underlines mourning, melancholia, loss, racialization, and sexualized abjection within its parameters. In this manner, disability is not pathological, as José Esteban Muñoz eloquently suggests; it is “a structure of feelings” and an integral part of daily existence and survival. Muñoz writes a corrective to melancholia, thought of as a destructive pathological force and states that it is instead part of the process of dealing with all the catastrophes that occur in the lives of people of color, lesbians, and gay men. I have proposed a different understanding of melancholia that does not see it as a pathology or as a self-absorbed mood that inhibits activism. Rather, it is a mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names— and in our names.3

Because El cuerpo en que nací refuses the ideal of the visually unimpaired healthy body as a paradigm for the citizen within 1970s Mexico, Nettel provides an introspective narrative showcasing her life experience as a disabled person, and those of her friends, to survey the ways in which images and representations of disability critically engage with and ultimately unhinge the modes of national belonging. I use disability as an entry point into how we might track affective life and collective attachments in all its complexity. Through an engagement with disability and with depression this work finds its way to forms of hope that is intimately connected with experiences of despair, vulnerability, and being alienated. The many different kinds of bodies and stories represented in the novel prompt an interrogation of how material uses of disability, or alternative accounts of what gets called disability, or the current state of the political economy thought of in affective terms, have been put by a system of able-bodiness. Disability representations from Nettel to Ximena, one of Nettel’s childhood friends, and beyond are about the powerful and charged transformation of the world, and about the accessibility that is born through the visibility of disability. Instead of envisioning healthy bodies and perfect vision, Nettel imagines disabled bodies as communities that exist interdependently and act in solidarity with one another. Moreover, I wish to emphasize that the novel through its corporeal images of disability does offer the potential for a reformulation of exclusionary systems.

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The minoritarian subject employs ordinary experiences to remake collective sense of the burden of exclusion. As I will make clear, the mundane in Nettel’s work not only allows for the project of accessible world-making, but it is also a crucial practice of contesting social subordination. For instance, in my analysis of Ximena, I argue that their nontraditional friendship produces a vision of community that bypasses the exclusions upon which cultural nationalisms and citizenships are often predicated upon. Esa noche inauguró una costumbre: cuando las luces se apagaban en nuestros respectivos departamentos, ella y yo acudíamos a la cita sin falta. El ritual consistía en permanecer de pie, una frente a la otra, y así acompañarnos hasta que nos vencía el sueño. Nunca nos comunicamos de forma ortodoxa, ni ahí ni en ningún otro lugar, pero, consciente o inconscientemente, Ximena me hizo sentir que, a pesar de la ausencia de mis padres y de la absoluta incertidumbre que tenía acerca de mi porvenir, había alguien en el mundo con quien podía contar. Piense usted lo que quiera, doctora Sazlavski, yo estoy convencida—y ahora más que nunca- de que esa comunicación existió y de forma tan profunda que rebasó los límites espacio-temporales, como suele ocurrir entre las personas más cercanas.4

Ximena’s body is marked with political depression caused by her exile from Chile and the political assassination of her father. Although momentarily, both Ximena and Nettel’s nonconventional friendship functions as an allegory for other informal community formations that respond to the needs of a diverse society. By discussing how Nettel’s nightly friendship ritual produces an ordinariness of disability embodiment, I reinforce the ordinary as a place of intensities, potentials, and scenes that are not best understood or described as examples of exceptional and big theoretical categories. In public feelings and ordinary affects, Ann Cvetkovich writes about the slow process of depathologizing negative feelings. She explains that “A political analysis of depression might advocate revolution and regime change over pills, but in the world of Public Feelings there are no magic bullet solutions, whether medical or political, just the slow steady work of resilient survival, utopian dreaming, and other affective tools for transformation.”5 Nettel and Ximena’s way of living their friendship cultivated by a nightly ritual may entail significant social transformation, but what interests me the most is that they are also immediate practices of the body, which are available in the present, in the here and now. Nettel makes visible the literary and social narratives that treat disability not as extraordinary; instead they are treated as ordinary practices that pay attention

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to the present and offer awareness toward it as inherently meaningful or sufficient for the time being. Nettel provides precisely such an account, revealing how their disability might offer access to a profoundly different conceptualization of community. In the spirit of feelings of alienation, ordinary life, and friendship caused by disability, I want to look at how Nettel finds ways to live better in bad times, including countering rehabilitation with practices of self-crafting and affective engagements. In an attempt to approach thinking about disability in which it tells us more about ways of living and surviving than about despair, I highlight Nettel’s reparative practices. El cuerpo en que nací is also about healing by just living and doing nothing or what seems like ordinary or insignificant activities like finding comfort in her own despair. Speaking, for example, of her resilience and her ability to adapt to any environment forced on her like the acceptance of the mysterious appearances of insects in her room, she writes: Tras la muerte de Ximena, la presencia de los insectos se volvió mucho más frecuente y cotidiana pero ya no me asustaban. Había aprendido que hay cosas mucho más aterradoras que aquellos animales diminutos por ponzoñosos que fueran . . . A diferencia de los demás insectos, las cucarachas no me miraban con ojos agresivos y desafiantes, al contrario, parecían estar ahí para impedir que otros animales vinieran a molestarme. Por eso, cada vez que encontraba una en mi cuarto, en vez del nerviosismo de siempre me invadía una misteriosa calma.6

Positioned to critique the rehabilitated finished product of the able-body mindset pushed onto her by her mother, Nettel’s disability perspectives can help to keep our attention on disruptive and the so-called inappropriate bodies as sites for continually imagining the collective disidentifications that make possible a refiguring of accessibility. Illness narratives, though, have often affirmed medical discourses that promote the treatment of a malady as opposed to offering an analysis of those same rehabilitative discourses. However, I approach Nettel’s novel, particularly the way she reconceptualizes illness, as a form of access to new modes of empowerment via a reenvisioning of her corporeal reality. Cvetkovich develops her notion of the illness memoir and its vitality within minoritarian cultures while discussing her own depression journal. In her words, “The AIDS memoir, which has been crucial in depathologizing the HIV survivor, offers a queer take on personal narratives about illness and disability that can provide alternatives to medical discourse by giving agency to the patient.”7 Moreover, Nettel in some

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ways refuses the conventional forms of rehabilitation, if not physically removing the eye patch she did in the form of accepting her ocular deformity. It should be noted that within the first few pages of the novel Nettel makes reference to her childhood nickname. However, it is not with nostalgia that she recalls her mother and grandmother referring to her as “cucaracha” (cockroach). In a sense, by revealing to Doctor Sazlavski the suffering that her childhood body caused her, she bears witness to her pain and restores herself. Tanto parecía llamarle la atención esa tendencia mía al enconchamiento que terminó encontrando un apodo o “nombre de cariño” que, según ella, correspondía perfectamente a mi manera de caminar. -¡Cucaracha!-gritaba cada dos o tres horas-, ¡endereza la espalda! -Cucarachita, es hora de ponerse la atropina.8

I contend that with the unfolding of her emotional and physical trauma, her negative feelings do not seek to restore her body and emotions to wholeness. Rather, Nettel reconciles with that loss of wholeness, enabling her disability to stubbornly claim its dissonance. Muñoz built a theory of disidentification that I turn to in order to comprehend Nettel’s strategy that works on and against dominant normative ideologies of belonging. I quote Nettel at length with the purpose of placing her “cucaracha” identity in conversation with theories of disidentification. Me identificaba por completo con el personaje de La metamorfosis, a quien le ocurrió algo semejante a mi historia. Yo también me había levantado una mañana con una vida distinta, un cuerpo distinto y sin saber bien a bien en qué me había convertido. En ningún lugar del relato se dice exactamente qué insecto era Gregorio Samsa, pero yo asumí muy rápido que se trataba de una cucaracha. Él se había convertido en una mientras que yo lo era por decreto materno, si no es que desde mi nacimiento.9

We must come to understand Nettel’s nonresistant “cucaracha” identity in her coming of age narrative as a transgressive survival strategy. She learns to decipher the importance in disidentifying with the bad objects of disability thinking for the project of utopian accessibility. After Nettel explains how she positions her transformation parallel to that of Gregorio Samsa’s, the main character in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, she too follows an apparent conformist path in hopes of survival in a hostile private and public sphere:

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Tras la lectura de ese libro, me puse a investigar en el colegio acerca de esta especie y descubrí su extravagante pedigrí, del que no mucha gente a mi alrededor parecía enterada. Así como los reyes de España proceden de los Borbones, las cucarachas descienden de los trilobites, los más antiguos pobladores del planeta. Han sobrevivido a los cambios climáticos, a las peores sequías y también a las explosiones nucleares. Su supervivencia no implica que desconozcan el sufrimiento, sino que han sabido superarlo.10

The results are various forms of disability impasse—the sense that her bad feelings do not matter and that any effort to persuade her grandmother and mother to show different practices of caring are futile. However, I posit that Nettel opts for what Cvetkovich eloquently calls “the utopia of everyday habit” as a practice that pays attention to getting by.11 Cvetkovich’s theory proposes “that habit can be a mechanism for building new ways of being in the world because it belongs to the domain of the ordinary, to activities that are not spectacular or unusual but instead arise from everyday life.”12 Nettel extends accounts of tedium and negative affective states to suggest the ordinary power of the daily ritual. In proposing resignation as a response to oppressive disability nomenclature, Nettel conceives of a politics of resistance that involves affect and her body. In Nettel’s case, finding refuge from oppressive social and political systems meant aligning her disability to new ways of inhabiting the disciplinary spaces of the home and her Montessori school. In particular, she preserves herself not by finding conventional happiness but by merely happening. I suggest that Nettel learns to unhinge bad feelings by giving affective value to her routine. How she experienced school after her bout in depression points directly to her affective attachment to her teacher, Iris. Nettel stresses that an understanding of the construction of her oppression and unhappiness offers her respite, which is necessary for her survival. In her experiences of temporary emotional and educational failure, abandonment, and social inequalities brought upon by her disability she finds rooted a condition of possibility. I hold that these modes of unbecoming propose a different relation to being in the world. Furthermore, I turn the meaning of disability associated with negativity and pathology into thinking about its productivity. Nettel accesses new forms of sociality through resignifying the failures associated with disability. “El cuerpo en que nacimos no es el mismo en el que dejamos el mundo. No me refiero sólo a la infinidad de veces que mutan nuestras células, sino a sus rasgos más distintivos, esos tatuajes y cicatrices que con nuestra personalidad y nuestras convicciones le vamos añadiendo, a tientas, como mejor podemos, sin orientación

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ni tutorías.”13 Seen through the perspective of ordinary affects, Nettel’s coming of age narrative becomes a tentative composition of moving elements. In other words, the waiting for events to unfold and the unpredictable progression of her life develops the mundane into vibrant scenes of possible becoming. Nettel’s memoir is constructed of personal narrative and states of desire held together by the ordinarariness of what is to come. As such, in her work, disability concepts perform intense situations of noncoherence, meaning that the way she gathers her thought process in order is through how she was affected by them. We learn from Nettel’s narrative that to attempt to regulate disorderliness is futile; she learns to de-link the process of the supposedly organic able-bodiness from her self-generating present. What appeals to me in Nettel’s work is the exposure to the negative affects generated by disability that turns affirmative. I would argue that the bad feelings associated with her visual disability do not allow forms of injustice to disappear. Kathleen Stewart, in her brilliant book Ordinary Affects, for example, suggests that “modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”14 If Nettel’s disability does have unhappy or negative affects, I contend that her life story does not necessarily have to end there; it is not an endpoint, rather its very exposure to disability and its affects gives the promise of an alternative set imaginings. Making Nettel’s childhood reading and writing activities and her therapy session participant of Cvetkovich’s crafting practice allows me to treat them as a daily activity. This entails that those activities provide a way of making an accessible life out of her taxing domestic and social habitual life. Not only does the context of her everyday life presents an alternative to treating her disability, but it also allows for a reframing of what is meant by treatment since Nettel’s reading, writing, talk therapy, and other activities like it were not cures to her curved posture. Rather, these habitual activities were antidotes to a negative reading of her disability. The acceptance and assimilation of her curvature and its accompanying affects were lived with as opposed to practices that looked to banish her curved posture. More generally, the chronicles of her emotional challenges acquire importance when coupled with her physical disability. What I propose is that by reconciling with her disability she adopts a radical posture that becomes unrecognizable to normative ideology that visualizes disability as abject. Among the valuable contributions of her physical and emotional vulnerabilities are her preservation strategies. In this sense, the reader is obliged to consider the illegibility of her disabled body. By this I mean that Nettel’s performance of her everyday

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emotional life ranging from depression to questions regarding her mental health that emerge after the reclamation of her pathologized body constitutes a shift in claims for inclusion based on normative citizenship. The retrieval of the stigma of her emotional and physical trauma asserts itself challenging the normative understanding of her presumed disability. By claiming her pathology, she delinks the dominant scripts of disability. Prior to this instance of reclamation, Nettel begins to doubt her sanity. No era la amenaza de los insectos lo que me llenaba de pánico, tampoco que los demás me acusaran de mentir para llamar la atención. Lo que me hacía reaccionar de ese modo era la posibilidad de que me hubiera zafado para siempre—y a tan temprana edad—un importante tornillo. Si la verdad era algo inaccesible para mí, entonces, ¿debía dar por buenas las versiones de los otros, los que me tildaban de mentirosa, de insolente, de grosera, de mataviejitas? Ante la presencia de los insectos y de todas esas preguntas sin respuesta, lo único que se me ocurría hacer era dejar de pensar en la medida de lo posible y jugar, jugar, jugar al futbol y, en los descansos, hablar de eso, hasta caer muerta de cansancio en la cama, aunque fuera sin cenar.15

I would like to point out that the experience of disability and fear of insanity saturate her to an extent where she becomes in tune with her mental and physical challenges. It is here where she embodies herself and disposes of the normative frameworks of belonging as undesirable. Her corporeal embodiment reveals seemingly ordinary intimate spaces to be places of new and emergent modes of community and desire. Nettel’s disability trauma makes itself felt in everyday practices as much as her desire. She learns self-preservation tactic by converting the specter of her oppression into a condition of possibility. As I have been positing, the fact that her body’s stubborn existence seemed to promise the remembrance of her pain does not imply that an evocation for the performance of desire was not aroused. My use of Kathleen Stewart to articulate the capacity for desire provides a framework for considering how her illness memoir frames her ordinariness in relation to her visual disability. In Stewart’s train reflection “Sometimes When You Hear Someone Scream . . .” she suggests that the train shapes anybody’s story with a mixture of abjection and hope. “Abject and unlivable bodies don’t just become ‘other’ and unthinkable. They go on living, animated by possibilities at work in the necessary or the serendipitous.”16 Meaning that although Nettel embodies her vulnerability rooted in the unhappy affect of having a disabled

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body, she also has the possibility to use those same unhappy affects to desire when normative strategies are not an option. Nettel’s examples of desire, which I would like to point out, are not always anchored in sexual desire; they suggest a rich vocabulary of affective life available in ordinary situations created by disability. My claim is that Nettel’s memoir contains modes of thinking about desire and affective engagements that were motivated by her visual impairment. En esa época, leí con verdadera devoción los libros del movimiento Beatnik. Más que William Burroughs o Charles Bukowski, me identificaba con las novelas de Kerouak y la poesía de Allen Ginsberg, cuya biografía me impresionó muchísimo. Me sentía particularmente inspirada por unas líneas que escribió justo antes de decidirse a dejar su trabajo de publicista y a enfrentar su enamoramiento hacia Peter Orlovsky. Son los versos que elegí como epígrafe de mi libro. Como él, yo también soñaba con aceptarme a mí misma, auque en ese entonces aún no sabía con exactitud cuál era el clóset que me tocaba abandonar.17

As disability theorist Julie Avril Minich has noted, there is popularity in the overcoming narrative, which often furthers the occlusion of injustice. I delineate Nettel’s disability as a surge in the ordinary not in an effort to successfully assimilate with normative society or as an overcoming narrative. My aim is to clarify that assuming her disability identity as ordinary generates intensities that highlight connections with others, also causing pleasure in living her intensities and in the state of trying. Upon reconceptualizing her disability she distances herself from the idea of a less able body. Furthermore, by coming out disabled and celebrating, Nettel’s memoir ceases to be an overcoming narrative, which I posit would further strengthen oppressive discourses. Accepting her experience serves the purpose of reversing ideas about disability and the so-called socially maligned physical and emotional characteristics. Avril Minich, meanwhile, comments on the dangers of normalization of disability identity as “disastrous for people with more socially stigmatized disabilities.”18 However, I am not arguing for an assimilation into a normative social order; rather, I am suggesting that claiming her disability resonates with the appearance of her so-called pathological body. Nettel’s resistance to her mother and grandmother’s repressive formation is mobilized through her own self-care methods. In particular, her emphasis on the process of writing herself as a form of self-love is transformed into a form of resistance. Her attention on the affective afterlife of her visual incapacity that includes feelings of fear, low self-esteem, and isolation becomes her form

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of reparation. She acknowledges the value of her disability and her emotional distress as ordinary merged with other complex feelings. Speaking, for example, of reading and writing as an alternative treatment she finds a way out of the threshold of her family’s view of her disability. In proposing radical self-possession as a response to her oppression, Cvetkovich notes that it “can also take the form of emotional, somatic, or sensory connections to place.”19 Indeed, this becomes a possible embodiment when Nettel claims her intimate stories. In addressing her disability she finds a possible cure to her feelings of isolation. Approaching the end of the novel her mother inquires, an already adult Nettel, about her writing to later reproach her decision to write about her life. Así que guardé silencio durante varios segundos, esperando alguna respuesta de los grillos que susurraban maldiciones, escondidos en la hierba, y contesté sin pensarlo demasiado: -Estoy escribiendo una novela sobre mi infancia. -Esta vez fue ella quien tardó en dar la réplica. -Seguro hablas mal de mí.—Me dijo-. Lo has hecho toda tu vida.20

Owning her illness, be it physical or emotional, in the intimate spaces like the family unit, chronicles her most radical form of survival. Cvetkovich encapsulates, in her theory of everyday practice, mundane anxieties are constituted as a method of self-transformation. Cvetkovich is very adept at capturing the domestic habits as a sanctuary. They chronicle forms of survival in the face of challenges of daily life, which is where depression sets in and becomes chronic—or, to use a less medical term, pervasive or systemic—so much a part of things that it can’t be isolated as a singular feeling or event. But by the same token, those humble material locations are also the spaces in which depression can be transformed through practices that can become the microclimate of hope.21

The work that Nettel does of representing her traumatic events in the fabric of daily life participates in the stories she writes as a child about her classmates. The insidious effects of a culture of not only familial but also childhood bullying include in Nettel’s story the dull feeling of just getting by. Honing in on those particular scenes of anxiety Nettel finds ways to live better in bad times, as Cvetkovich has brilliantly pointed out. “El paso a la escritura se dio naturalmente. En mis cuadernos a rayas, de forma francesa, apuntaba historias en las que los protagonistas eran mis compañeros de clase que paseaban por

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países remotos donde les sucedían toda clase de calamidades. Aquellos relatos eran mi oportunidad de venganza y no podía desperdiciarla.”22 I claim that her writing practices, as well as her reading practices, inhabit the spaces of her bad feelings. They foster ways of being in her world in which she exercises more control over her body and senses. Her writing emerges from those domestic spaces that are at the heart of her crippling life experience and ultimately signal a disidentification with critiques of disability. Nettel’s written work, with strands of her childhood memory, produces a reparative solution to the problem of disability exclusion. Her unraveling, and becoming emotionally undone, presents the reader and Doctor Sazlavski the recovered occasion for making something new. My efforts to theorize about Nettel’s negotiation with her disability claims that her process, rhythm of work, and her affective relationships are what matters, they are what simultaneously de-link, unmake, and make the mundane, the ordinary, and common as something full of promise. Here I think again of Nettel’s return to writing as a form of therapeutic building. Por fin he vuelto a escribir con disciplina. Se trata de una sensación renovadora y tonificante, como tomar una sopa caliente en una tarde de gripa. Cada mañana, después de dejar al niño en la guardería, me voy al mismo café. Tengo mi mesa y mi bebida predilecta. Son mis dos cábalas. Si la mesa está ocupada, espero a que se libere antes de comenzar. No sé si estoy cumpliendo el objetivo de apegarme a los hechos pero ya no me importa. Las interpretaciones son del todo inevitables y, para serle franca, me niego a renunciar al inmenso placer que me produce hacerlas.23

I find it important to reiterate the significance of Nettel’s common practice of writing as a form of surviving her disability in such a toxic ambience. Her unapologetic claim to her body acquires a new visibility, revealing the profound difficulty of living with a disability as reaffirming the power it holds. To conclude, I have argued about the infrastructures of Nettel’s life beyond the repressive modes of able-bodied belonging as a viable form of living. The way out of the oppressive and demeaning category of disability is determined by her interpretation. Further, the novel returns to her visual impairment and her final trip to Philadelphia with her mother to see the best cornea surgeon in the United States. Nettel’s attempts to provoke her mother by saying she was content with her Quasimodo aspect arose her mother’s anger. “-No digas estupideces— respondió ella-. Aquí no se trata de establishment, ni siquiera de aspecto, sino

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de recuperar la visión en uno de tus ojos. ¿Te has puesto a pensar qué harías si llegaras a perder el otro?”24 Despite her mother’s rehabilitative desires, Nettel’s novel does not become an overcoming narrative, at least not in the form that her mother would have wished. In this sense, the impossibility to reconstruct her vision allowed her to consider a visuality previously inaccessible to her. “Por fin, después de un largo periplo, me decidí a habitar el cuerpo en el que había nacido, con todas sus particularidades.”25 Instead of offering a normative entry into Mexican society of the 1970s I seek to see Nettel’s oeuvre as capacious enough to include disability wherein possibility lies. Interrogating the limits of Mexican citizenship, where cultural signs of disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to highlight dominant forms of docility, domesticity, rehabilitation, and respectably this scholarship argues for the desirability of a loss of composure. Since it is only in such a state that normalcy, in all its forms, might be questioned or resisted and where new disabled identities and communities might be imagined, ones that are not yet here. I present these examples, although far from exhaustive, in order to illuminate how rehabilitative noncompliance has been repurposed as a strategy in surviving vulnerability within an able-bodied cultural model. I address the novel’s structure of hope operating when tending to negative frames cast on Nettel’s disability as a call for de-composition. Conceiving of ordinary life in terms of the forms of hope inspired by disability makes it possible to embrace more fully her rehabilitative noncompliance as defiant and always already political.

Notes 1 Guadalupe Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011), 9. 2 Julie Avril Minich, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014), 16. 3 Muñoz’s “structure of feelings” addresses the ways queer individuals of color understand how to survive toxic environments, he presents a means of survival in a heteronormative restrictive world. For more on “structure of feelings” please refer to José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 74. 4 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 71.

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5 6

Guadalupe Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, trans. J.T. Lichtenstein (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015), 60–61. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 77. After Ximena’s death, the presence of insects became much more frequent and commonplace, but no longer scared me. I had learned there were things much more terrifying than those diminutive little animals, venomous as they could be . . . Unlike other insects, cockroaches didn’t look at me with aggressive or challenging eyes, but the opposite; they seemed to be there to keep the other critters from coming to bother me. That’s why, whenever I found one in my room, instead of the usual nervousness, a mysterious calm would come over me.

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Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 66. Cvetkovich, Depression, 74–75. Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 16. “My habit looked so much to her like curling into a shell that she came up with a nickname, a term of endearment, which she claimed perfectly matched my way of walking. ‘Cucaracha!’ She yelled every two to three hours. ‘Stand up straight!’ Or, ‘Cucaracha, it’s time for your atropine drops!’” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 11. Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 94. I identified fully with the main character in The Metamorphosis, since what happened to him was something similar to what had happened to me. One morning, I too woke up with a different life, a different body, not knowing what it was I had turned into. Nowhere in the story does it say exactly what kind of insect Gregor Samsa was, but I quickly gathered it was a cockroach. He had turned into one; I was one by maternal decree, if not by birth. Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 81–82.

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10 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 94–95. As I was reading the book, I began to research this species at school and discovered its exclusive pedigree, which not many people in my life seemed to be aware of. Just as Spanish kings descended from the Bourbons, cockroaches descended from the trilobites, the oldest inhabitants of the planet. They have survived climate changes, the worst droughts, and nuclear explosions. Their survival does not imply they haven’t known suffering, but that they have learned to overcome it. Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 82. 11 Cvetkovich, Depression, 159. 12 Cvetkovich, Depression, 191. 13 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 196. “The bodies where we are born are not the same bodies that we leave the world in. I’m not only referring to the infinite number of times our cells divide, but to more distinctive features—these tattoos and scars we add with our personality and convictions, in the dark, by touch, as best we can without direction or guidance.” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 175. 14 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 10. 15 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 69. It wasn’t the threat of the insects that filled me with panic, nor that everyone accused me of lying to get attention. What made me react the way I did was the possibility that I—and at such a young age—might have an important screw loose. If I couldn’t count on myself, who could I count on? If the truth was something inaccessible to me, how could I accept other people’s versions of it—those who branded me a liar, insolent, and churlish little-old-lady killer? In the presence of the insects and all those unanswered questions, the only thing I could think to do was stop thinking as much as possible and play, play, play soccer and, during breaks, to talk about it, until falling into bed dead from exhaustion, even if it meant missing dinner. Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 59. 16 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 117. 17 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 186–187. In those days, I read with true devotion the books of the Beatnik movement. More than William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, I identified with the novels of Kerouac and poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose biography impressed me enormously. I felt especially inspired by some lines he wrote right before deciding to quit his job as an advertising agent and to face up to the fact that he was in love with Peter Orlovsky. They are the lines I chose to be the epigraph to my book. Like him, I also dreamed of accepting myself, even though at that point in time I still didn’t know exactly what closet I hoped to come out of.

Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 166–167.

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18 Minich, Accessible Citizenships, 159. 19 Cvetkovich, Depression, 152. 20 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 180. So I remained silent for a few seconds, waiting for a response from the crickets whispering their curses hidden in the grass, then I answered without giving it too much thought. “I’m writing a novel about my childhood.” Then it was my mother who took a while to respond. “I’m sure you’re talking badly about me,” she said. “You have all your life.” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 160–161. 21 Cvetkovich, Depression, 155. 22 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 19. “Writing was the natural next step. In my lined notebooks, the French Kind, I wrote down tales in which my classmates were protagonists who went to faraway lands where every kind of calamity befell them. Those stories were my opportunity for revenge, and I was not going to waste it.” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 14. 23 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 188–189. At last I’ve returned to writing with discipline. It’s a regenerative and invigorating sensation, like eating hot soup when down with the flu. Every morning, after dropping my son off at nursery school, I go to the same café. I have my table and my favorite drink. Those are my two superstitions. If the table is occupied, I wait until it’s free before starting. I don’t know if I’m fulfilling my goal of sticking to the facts but it doesn’t matter anymore. Interpretations are entirely inevitable and, to be honest, I refuse to give up the immense pleasure I get from making them. Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 168–169. 24 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 190. “‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she responded. ‘This isn’t about the establishment or even about looks, but about regaining the vision in one of your eyes. Have you ever considered what would happen if you were to lose the other one?’” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 170. 25 Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací, 194–195. “At last, after a long journey, I decided to inhabit the body where I was born, in all its peculiarities.” Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, 174.

13

Fictions of Sovereignty: The Narconovel, National Security, and Mexico’s Criminal Governmentality Oswaldo Zavala

On November 29, 1985, by presidential order, the notorious Federal Security Directorate (Dirección Federal de Seguridad, or DFS, in Spanish), Mexico’s intelligence agency, shut down its operations. Significantly, the DFS was dismantled weeks after the September 19 earthquake that killed over 20,000 people in Mexico City.1 Amid repeated accusations of corruption, torture, murder, and ties to drug trafficking, the scandalous disappearance of the DFS shook the country’s political class to its root. As academic investigator Sergio Aguayo explains, the importance of the events of 1985 cannot be exaggerated, proving even more relevant than the political transformation brought about by the defeat of the PRI in the presidential election of 2000 after seven decades of one-party rule.2 Since its creation in 1947, the DFS functioned in Mexico as a unique agency with attributions modeled after its only U.S. counterpart at the time, the FBI, and was in fact conceived within the new police and surveillance era propelled in the United States that same year with two transformative official actions: the enactment of the National Security Act and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first gave legal form to a permanent enemy whose identity remained for decades equal to global communism, the second allowed for the permanent institutional force to fight that same enemy. Following the lead of the United States, the DFS engaged from the start in domestic political warfare against leftist radicalism that quickly became the vehicle for protecting the governing class and, often violently, for suppressing all dissidence. In its last years of existence, however, it became clear that DFS agents were deeply involved in a wide array of illegal activities. As it is known through the works of scholars

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such as Alfred McCoy and Barry Carr, the DFS and the CIA developed through decades of joint collaboration a structural relation to control and exploit drug trafficking organizations for political purposes. Former Canadian diplomat and scholar Peter Dale Scott explains the DFS-CIA “management” of the drug trade: The key was a triarchic situation in which the Mexican drug traffic came to be partly managed and protected by the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (DFS); and the DFS in turn was partly managed and protected by its sister organisation, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).3

The shutting down of DFS was the result in part of direct links to the highprofile murders of Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía in 1984 and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in Mexican territory in 1985. Both Buendía and Camarena investigated on CIA operations in Mexico including links to international networks of the drug trade. As it has been suggested by journalists such as Gary Webb and Charles Bowden, the CIA may have played an active, deliberate role in global anticommunist strategies during the Cold War indirectly and directly related to drug trafficking. According to testimony reported by Webb, “the CIA was then collaborating with the Mexican intelligence service and cartel bosses who were providing money, arms, and training facilities for the [Nicaraguan] Contras in exchange for the CIA’s protection of their drug enterprises.”4 As Aguayo points out, the closing of the DFS must be seen as the result of a reconfiguration of state structures and governance in Mexico that had been in motion since the early years of the 1980s. Replacing the defamed DFS, the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN in Spanish) was created in the also very significant year of 1989 as a more fitting agency for the neoliberal era. But it was indeed the dawn of neoliberalism that brought to the fore the links of official institutions and organized crime, igniting a public debate centered around the question of sovereignty and the political. In Mexico’s strong governing system of the twentieth century, which allowed the PRI party to control virtually every aspect of its society, the question of sovereignty is without doubt a key factor to comprehend the last three decades of political history. In the post-Cold War era, a crucial difference emerged from the DFS to CISEN: after the defeat of global communism in the late 1980s, drug trafficking became the new threat to national security first in the United States during the presidency of Ronald Regan and gradually in Mexico from the 1990s onward. In such context, as I will argue in the present chapter, the very definition of sovereignty

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and the political underwent a radical transformation conceiving a new collective understanding of state structures and organized crime. This in turn redefined hegemonic cultural representations of drug trafficking in line with the emerging national security epistemological coordinates. In some key fictions, however, the notion of sovereignty and the definition of the political can be seen in counterhegemonic opposition to official discourse, revealing masked or hidden power relations. Along with the theoretical discussion on both sovereignty and the political, I will end this chapter with a brief analysis of a key “narconovel” inscribing such critical understanding of Mexico’s contemporary political society: Cuatro muertos por capítulo (2013) (Four Killings Every Chapter) by César López Cuadras (1951–2013). This novel, among others, allows for an effective representation of state sovereignty and what I will describe as Mexico’s criminal governmentality.

The state and the question of sovereignty For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to summarize the debate on sovereignty and the political, at the risk of appearing reductive, into two main currents: the first seeks a decentering of state power and the relocation of political categories to understand it, with different conceptualizations of civil society as the site for alternate politics (from the seminal work of Michel Foucault to the reformulations of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito, among many others); the second sees contemporary state formation still as a basic continuation and prevalence of political systems grounded on antagonism and the fundamental division, established by political theorist Carl Schmitt, of the concept of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, most prominently, but also some of the work by Slavoj Žižek, among others). It is not my goal here to articulate a possible reconciliation between these theoretical stands. My aim is to explore this discussion concerning the Mexican state and some literary representations of the complex but productive tension between civil society and state sovereignty when it comes to drug trafficking. While the question of sovereignty may not be solved in a work of fiction, I argue that it is through the critical potential of literature that an alternate understanding of both dimensions of the political may emerge challenging hegemonic official discourse about the drug trade.

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In his theoretical writings, Antonio Gramsci performed what seems at first as a foundational break between what he termed “political society” in opposition to “civil society.” It is important to understand, nonetheless, that such division is mainly for purposes of advancing a more precise analysis of those aspects of the political that are otherwise interconnected under a single concept of the state. In fact, state and civil society do not exist in separate realms. Gramsci explains: For it should be remarked that the general notion of state includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that state = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion).5

The epistemological division between the state and civil society, however, has remained as a conceptual paradigm that has derived into extreme rejections of most organic conceptualizations of the state in numerous attacks by intellectuals from both the left and the right. The late work of Michel Foucault furthered this debate with his celebrated 1970s seminars on the state and civil society at the Collège de France. Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen have studied in depth the importance of the antagonism between a form of “state phobia” and a “civil society” historicized by Foucault. Among many important findings, Dean and Villadsen shed light on two key claims: first, that state phobia may have originated as a notion, paradoxically, within the very concept of civil society. State phobia, in fact, appears “inscribed deeply in liberal and neoliberal ideas of civil society.”6 Second, that Foucault’s conceptualization of “governmentality” cannot be reduced as just another form of state phobia, but as an analysis of the state, not something that lies beyond the state. It shows the conditions of an experience of “state” as that which is confronted with an external domain, civil society, to which it must grant a measure of free action in order for government to function.7

But as the historical context in which Foucault challenged the Marxist left to rethink the state, the contemporary rejection of state theory has been rooted within the coordinates of the neoliberal right at the expense of any political thought from the left. This is how the current configuration of state phobia, as Dean and Villadsen contend, became an expression of mainstream neoliberalism: It was made amid conceptions of globalization that claimed that global flows of trade, finance, information, and culture have undone the “container” of the

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national state . . . and amid political analyses that claimed that struggles directed toward the state had been displaced by grassroots movements conducting sub-, micro-, and transversal politics underneath, across, and above the territorial state. In short, in the 1970s the rejection of a theory of the state in favor of the analysis of local struggles marked a break with a prevailing Left intellectual problematic and an attempt to open up the discussion of government and state. By the end of the twentieth century, to dissolve the concept of the state came to have the opposite effect: of merely reinforcing what had become a kind of antipolitical orthodoxy that has rendered the Left a meaningless term and to accede to a political agenda fatally shaped by the militant intellectual and political “thought collective” of which Foucault was an early analyst: “neoliberalism.”8

From this perspective, Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” Derrida’s notion of “friendship,” or Esposito’s “impolitical,” among other relatable concepts, appear as theoretical interventions in consequence with the neoliberal understanding of the present. That is, as attempts to circumvent direct critical approaches to the state because the latter is thought as exhausted by contemporary global phenomena such as terrorism, massive migration, drug trafficking, and uncontainable transnational capital. This is the postfoundational move away from the question of government to the contingency of governance as the very dispersion of state sovereignty in search of a new collective political subject decentering what is criticized as an anachronistic paradigm of the state. On the opposite side of the debate, the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe reconsiders the political foundation of the social as grounded on antagonism. Laclau and Mouffe reactivate here Gramsci’s hegemony and Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction as central categories of political articulation in spite of the post-1989 world order. They do so, however, assuming a postMarxist agenda with “the social conceived as a discursive space.”9 Political identities, they claim, are only possible through a process of antagonism that is constitutive of the political space in itself. As the encounter with the other unfolds, a political demarcation is enacted toward a discursive articulation or “suture” that is never fully achieved but only experienced as the antagonistic confrontation occurs. Laclau and Mouffe explain: antagonism, as a witness of the impossibility of a final suture, is the “experience” of the limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself.10

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As the liminal experience of the social, antagonism is produced by what Laclau terms a constant “dislocation” between opposite identities. This realization of the antagonic tension is the only possible experience of the political. Leaving aside, for lack of space and pertinence, his various conceptual disagreements with Laclau and Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek has also affirmed the constitutive antagonistic condition of the social as his basic rendering of the state: It is not only that the state is the general institution for regulating social life and its reproduction, and that, in a class society, this institution is biased, privileging one class and oppressing the other. One should drop the very idea that a “true” state would be a neutral instrument serving all its citizens, and that, in a class society, the ruling class appropriates and (mis)uses this instrument. The neutrality of the state is as such an ideological mystification since the state emerges only in class societies, with the function to enable social reproduction in the conditions of class antagonism. In other words, the state is not an apparatus which gets twisted or biased in a class society, it is twisted and biased in its very nature or concept.11

This return to a Marxist understanding of the state is compatible with Schmitt’s foundational concept of the political, if, as Žižek argues, “all social institutions are ultimately different ways to deal with class struggle,”12 it is consequential to observe the state as the prime regulator not only of social life but also of the political, that is, the central distinction between friend and enemy. As it is known, Schmitt also advanced a foundational theory of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”13 Operating as the governing structure anticipating what cannot be set in in legal precedent, the exception is defined as pure form with no content. Revising Max Weber’s definition of the state, Schmitt then locates sovereignty in the very act of deciding the content of the exception: Therein resides the essence of the state’s sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most dearly the essence of the state’s authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law.14

I would like to come full circle by arguing that Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty is not only compatible with Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality but in fact complementary to it. In his seminar Security, Territory, Population, one of Foucault’s definitions of governmentality is the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very

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complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument.15

Governmentality designates the general process through which the state acts what Foucault termed raison d’état, that is, the necessity of the state to secure its own integrity, in other words, to prevail in an historical arch without closure. As the exercise of “power” overpopulation, economy, and security, governmentality is deployed as the linking force through law and decision, that is, between legality and its exception. In urgent cases when the state is threatened, Foucault explains, a coup d’état may be exerted. The original mechanism of the coup did not entail, as it does in today’s connotation of the term, the removal of people in power, but in fact the “suspension of, a temporary departure from, laws and legality.”16 As the grounding justification to generate the institutions and the power relations to persist, including a practical condition of anomia, governmentality, raison d’état, and coup d’état form a conceptual horizon consequential with the exercise of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and its monopoly on the exception. It is only logic that Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe resort to a functional synthesis of the ideas of both Schmitt and Foucault to advance the conceptualization of “state of exception” and “necropolitics,” respectively.17 Although in a rare instance, Foucault himself once noted his proximity to Schmitt’s work. Michel Senellart—the editor of Foucault’s seminar Security, Territory, Population—recalls that in the only manuscript in which he cites Schmitt’s concept of the political directly, Foucault concedes: “everything can be politicized, everything may become political. Politics is no more or less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the first uprising, the first confrontation.”18 Foucault appropriates Schmitt’s concept of the political simultaneously with what may be understood as a return to Gramsci’s essential division of civil and political society by naming the political as that process of antagonism between a governmentality and its opposite, that is, civil resistance. Beyond the theoretical categories dissenting and even revising Marxist and post-Marxist thought, Foucault concludes Security, Territory, Population with a clarifying statement about the nature of the state: “Whether one opposes civil society to the state, the population to the state, or the nation to the state, it was in any case these elements that were in fact put to work within this genesis of the state, and of the modern state.”19 Foucult hinted here at the antagonism between a resistant civil society and the exercise of a particular governmentality exposing the limits of the social as the real of state, as Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek

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also argued. Civil society cannot be thought out without or outside the state. Contrary to the agenda that presupposes its exhaustion, the state prevails as the converging site of the political and sovereignty.

Mexico’s criminal governmentality and its literary imaginary The question of sovereignty in Mexico has been studied often by adopting a certain perception of the phenomenon as the real. Instead of examining the limits of sovereignty in state formation, many choose a superficial understanding of the actual structures of government that in fact reproduces the same neoliberal position of those theoretical approaches discussed above. In doing so, these studies opt out the tension between civil society and the state by a mere dismissal of the exercise of sovereignty, privileging instead the same political articulations conceptualized as outside of the state, in fact undoing, as Wendy Brown has suggested, the very foundations of the state.20 Sergio Aguayo’s own analysis of the DFS, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is representative of such trend in recent analyses of the Mexican state. His critique of the violent and repressive methods of the DFS are certainly in correspondence with the democratic demands promoted by liberal intellectuals such as Carlos Monsiváis, Roger Bartra, and Enrique Krauze, among others. As an attempt to denounce the deep corruption of Mexico’s political and police institutions, they all focus on the criminal excess of official structures. Aguayo has done extensive investigations on the DFS, but his conclusions focus on the random criminality of the agents and their deep limitations, while overlooking the ultimate political strategies derived from the DFS actions. While it may be accurate, and certainly necessary, to recall the illegal actions of the agents and those in leadership positions at the DFS, the argument can be made that precisely because of the extent of their intervention in Mexico’s criminal underworld, to the point of managing it, the DFS agents and their bosses exerted a degree of control that is no other than the exercise of sovereignty, for as much as it may be called criminal sovereignty. As Aguayo notes, throughout the decades the DFS operated, there was little mention of drug trafficking as an issue of national security. This was due, however, not to a negligent disregard of the growing power of organized crime in the country, but to the police system that functioned as the disciplinary force of organized crime. It is only after the dismantling of the DFS in 1985

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that the discourse on national security began enunciating the phenomenon of drug trafficking as an existing threat. President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 signing of “National Security Decision Directive 221” became in fact the first state policy in the hemisphere to label drug trafficking as a “threat to national security.” As Brian Bow explains, framing the issue as a national-security problem rather than as a social or medical problem has helped relevant agencies in the U.S. secure greater resources, increase their influence within the executive branch, and limit interference from the legislative and judicial branches.21

It is no coincidence that in the same year of 1986 Noam Chomsky criticized U.S. national security policy in Central America, and its general take on the Cold War as a “system of global management.”22 And by 1989, political scientist Waltraud Morales understood rather early how the war on drugs had become an extension of the legacy of the Cold War as a “new national security doctrine,” since militarised drug operations provided a laboratory to project US power, train local militaries in the new strategic doctrine, transfer military hardware and gather intelligence. Congress saw the doctrine as a way to reassert influence and bipartisanism over foreign policy by being “hard on drugs.” Both the Reagan and Bush administrations could use the drug war national security doctrine to generate public support behind a resurgent, interventionist US foreign policy in Latin America.23

There is thus full continuity between the 1947 National Security Act, the Cold War, the war against international communism, and the drug war. They are all geopolitical strategies belonging to the same historical paradigm. To see a rupture or discontinuity with the war on drugs as a new expression of the neoliberal world is not only to overlook the long-lasting historical arch of state dominance and its ideological construction of national security, but more importantly, to fall prey to the ideological strategies of the same state pushing the war on drugs as a legitimate and necessary agenda for the last three decades. It is precisely in the designating powers of the national security discourse lies the strongest articulation of state sovereignty. When sociologist Philip Abrams rejects the idea of the state as an ideological construct that enables legitimacy for the political class and its institutions, he is also, perhaps involuntarily, naming the same exercise of sovereignty that Laclau and Mouffe found at the discursive level precisely because it is constitutive of the social. Thus, when Abrams substitutes the

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concept of the state with “a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any given society,”24 isn’t he as well recognizing the exercise of sovereignty as the result of that same nexus? Doesn’t Abram’s ideological critique of the state correspond to Žižek’s analysis of antagonism as constitutive not only of the state but also of all social institutions? In 2006, then-president Felipe Calderón ordered Mexico’s own version of the war on drugs. With the help of $1.6 billion in U.S. aid (distributed originally over three years for the “Mérida Initiative”), Calderón deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police agents to the cities with high drug activity. According to official data, at the end of his six-year administration in 2012, more than 121,000 people were killed and 30,000 more were victims of forced disappearance.25 Among others, a statistical study conducted by Harvard University demonstrated that the militarization of cities such as Ciudad Juárez preceded the wave of violence in a direct correlation, which “resulted in an increase in the average homicide rate.”26 While Mexico’s national homicide index had stabilized and even gradually decreased for over the previous decade, the murders only increased after the military and the federal police were deployed allegedly to contain the violence of cartel wars. As sociologist Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo has argued through his own irrefutable statistical analysis, the violence of the years before Calderón’s war was simply a fantasy with devastating consequences for those cities under military and police siege.27 Mexico’s recent fiction has been, in my opinion, an optimal vehicle for representing this exercise of sovereignty. Among the numerous “narconovels” written in the last two decades, César López Cuadras’s Cuatro muertos por capítulo (Four Killings Every Chapter) stands out as radical critique of the cultural and political imaginary of drug trafficking.28 The novel is structured as a long conversation between Pancho Caldera, the former driver of a family of traffickers, and a nameless “gringa,” a young woman traveling to Mexico from the United States hoping to gather enough “real” information for the writing of a movie script. The novel focuses on language and its political use when it comes to narrate the world of drug trafficking. While most narconovels attempt to render literary versions of drug trafficking, Cuatro muertos assumes that most of what we know about the drug trade is the direct product of discursive strategies that are not based on actual knowledge about drug organizations but on received narratives from the news media, and most cultural productions including film, music, and certainly literature. But all these discursive strategies

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originate from one common source: official sources. As sociologist Luis Astorga has argued, most of the information about drug trafficking has been generated originally by government intelligence, military and police files, domestic and foreign policy reports, diplomatic exchanges, and the frequent interventions of mayors, governors, and presidents, in Mexico as well as in the United States. This binational information system builds what Astorga has called a “discursive matrix of legitimate sense” that has historically imposed our present understanding of the drug trade: that drug “cartels” operate independently of state sovereignty and skillfully insert their criminal activity within the global economy as the dark side of globalization. The distance between the real of the drug trade and our symbolic understanding of it so unbridgeable “que no parece haber otra forma, actual y factible, de referirse al tema sino de manera mitológica.”29 Caldera attempts to seduce the gringa by confirming and even exploiting the common places of her superficial knowledge of the drug trade. From the first pages of the novel, he explains to the gringa the difference in the language employed by most news media and the actual vocabulary used by traffickers themselves. There is the criminal activity, he says, “que los periódicos llaman narcotráfico, pero quienes hemos habitado en sus tripas, engullidos, regurgitados y vueltos a tragar, si es que no arrojados por el culo, le llamamos ‘el negocio’ a secas.”30 This is a key distinction that is in fact the critical axis of the entire novel. Cuatro muertos constantly deconstructs hegemonic discourse on drug trafficking in two different levels: first, by setting it against the testimonial experience of a humble family of traffickers from the Sinaloa mountains in northern Mexico that refutes the mythical narrative of drug kingpins as formidable criminals, and second, by ironically reworking that same mythology that informs most cultural productions about the drug trade as the absurd but effective material for a commercial Hollywood action film. López Cuadras’s choice of a film script as the central motif of the plot cleverly points at cinema as the cultural product most susceptible to the influence of hegemonic discourse. Cinema is placed here at the bottom end of the performative chain of representation, affected both by the news media that absorbs the official narrative of the drug trade and by the writing of the script that parodies the majority of narconovels that uncritically reproduce the same hegemonic discourse. Caldera is quite aware of the alluring potential of the drug trafficking mythology and he is resolved to capitalize on the symbolic expectations of the gringa. He promises at least four killings every chapter and spares no opportunity to insert violence, sex, and drama if that brings him closer to her bedroom. But

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as the story unfolds, the common places of the mythology are deconstructed one by one. As Caldera narrates the upbringing of Emanuel Simental, for example, we find not a wild kingpin in the making but a sensitive young boy, interested in school learning and even naturally prone to poetry. There is nothing sinister in his rural surroundings as he watches his father tending to the marijuana fields, but just the crops, the rugged land, and the hard, incessant work of a peasant. As he expands his organization, Emanuel surpasses his modest origins into a comfortable life, but nonetheless precarious. In the realm of the drug trade, there is always the latent threat of police and military raids, unfavorable political contingency, and sheer luck: El problema es que, si matas a [un soldado], mandan a diez, y si matas a los diez, mandan al ejército, y entonces sí, todo el mundo a correr. Antes, cuando llegaba la tropa, sólo se quedaban en las casas los viejos, las mujeres y los chamacos; pero desde que les dio por arrasar parejo, los ranchos quedan desolados. Familias enteras desaparecen. Así que, cuando sabemos que vienen en camino, o escuchamos el retumbar de las hélices del boludo, a correr y que santo Malverde nos proteja.31

Drug organizations prove not only to be extremely vulnerable when facing state violence, but in their fragility they also turn to the mythological performance constitutive of the cultural imaginary of the drug trade: the narcos pray to Jesús Malverde, a nineteenth-century mythic bandido who became the patron of all traffickers. In the end, the novel seems to be telling us, drug traffickers have no choice but to believe in the myth fabricated by the very political system that threatens them. The novel comes full circle when Caldera’s efforts to exaggerate the drama of the Simental family pale when confronted by the brutal reality of official power. It is at the height of his success as a trafficker that Emanuel is most exposed. In a masterful scene near the end of the novel, as he is in fact living his last days, Emanuel reads a newspaper story referring to his organization using a word that is certainly a novelty for him: a “cartel.” And Emanuel promises himself, “Un cartel, dicen los periódicos, eso voy a construir.”32 As the organization is destroyed, the “cartel” of the Simental family only existed in newspaper stories. The novel ends with three correcting lessons from Caldera to improve the gringa’s script, as if he were a consulting expert for all future Hollywood films: first, “ya no es posible distinguir entre buenos y malos,” since traffickers and

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cops work in open association; second, “si bien es cierto que existen mafias poderosas, ninguna de ellas ejerce, ni en espacios reducidos, un control absoluto del mercado”; and third, “todos los traficantes pierden, desde los más pequeños hasta los más grandes, sea porque caen en prisión, los maten o los desplacen desde los verdaderos centros del poder.”33 The true center of power, the novel clearly shows, remains within the political system we call the state. It should not come as a surprise the fact that Cuatro muertos por capítulo— and most of the fiction published by López Cuadras—is little known to most Mexican readers. In the cultural habitus of the drug trade, the literary field rewards those novels and short stories consequential with the official narrative of drug cartels and their alleged unsurpassed power. While López Cuadras’s writings are seldom reprinted in Mexico, most readers are extremely familiar with the works of celebrated writers such as Élmer Mendoza, Juan Pablo Villalobos, and Yuri Herrera, among others, who frequently garner great media attention and whose books in English translation have been applauded and studied in the United States and Europe. This is the same phenomenon that limits the visibility of those other rare authors of narconovels critical of the hegemonic discourse of the drug trade. This is the case, for example, of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda (1948–2008), Daniel Sada (1953–2011), and Juan Villoro (1956), whose most important fiction is yet to be translated into English. The neoliberal book market is yet to contradict the political system that has triumphed over the intellectual class by imposing the official explanation of the drug trade while conveniently erasing itself from the incriminating implications of its governmentality. As we have seen, the dismantling of the DFS and the adoption of the U.S. national security discourse, contrary to what others have argued, did not diminish the state sovereignty over criminal organizations, but in fact radicalize it into a lethal, devastating militarization. But state sovereignty has also conditioned most cultural productions with a uniformed, coherent narrative that insists on the mythology of kingpins and their powerful cartels as the real of the drug trade. In the margins of state power, nevertheless, the tension between Mexico’s criminal governmentality and a resisting civil society may be experienced in those few fictions where state sovereignty is examined and its discursive domination revealed. Challenging the official mythology, this literary imagination performs its most basic function: it questions power, it shows its conditions of possibility, and it brings us closer to a critical understanding crucial for the survival of our violent present.

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Notes 1 Although there is no definitive record of victims of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico cites the number of civilian deaths at 20,000. See: http://www.cires.org.mx/1985_es.php. 2 Sergio Aguayo, La charola. Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México (México: Grijalbo, 2001), 251. As it is known, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish) governed consecutively from 1929 to 2000. It was defeated with the presidential election of Vicente Fox of the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, who governed from 2000 to 2006. I will later return to the so-called democratic transition of those years and its relevance in the question of state sovereignty and the political in Mexico. 3 Peter Dale Scott, “Drugs, Anti-Communism and Extra-Legal Repression in Mexico,” in Government of the Shadows. Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson (New York: Pluto, 2009), 173–194, 173. 4 Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998), 557. For the alleged CIA link to Camarena’s murder, see Charles Bowden, “Blood on the Corn,” Medium, November 17, 2014, https://medium.com/matter/blood-on-the-corn-52ac13f7e643 (accessed August 12, 2017). 5 Antonio Gramsci, “The Art and Science of Politics,” in The Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 235. 6 Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 16. 7 Dean and Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society, 17. 8 Dean and Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society, 18–19. 9 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Social Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edition (New York: Verso, 2001), x. 10 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Social Strategy, 125. 11 Slavoj Žižek, Disparities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 18. 12 Žižek, Disparities, 18. 13 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 1934, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 14 Schmitt, Political Theology, 13. 15 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College of France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 108. 16 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 261. 17 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 18 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 390.

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19 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 358. 20 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 21 Brian Bow, “Beyond Mérida? The Evolution of the U.S. Response to Mexico’s Security Crisis,” in State and Security in Mexico: Transformation and Crisis in Regional Perspective, ed. Brian Bow and Arturo Santa-Cruz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 83. 22 Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 134. 23 Waltraud Morales, “The War on Drugs: A New U.S. National Security Doctrine?” Third World Quarterly 11, no. 3 (July 1989): 147–169. 24 Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (March 1988): 82. 25 Proceso, “Más de 121 mil muertos, el saldo de la narcoguerra de Calderón: Inegi,” Proceso 20 de julio de 2013. http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=348816 (accessed August 12, 2017). 26 Valeria Espinosa and Donald B. Rubin, “Did the Military Interventions in the Mexican Drug War Increase the Violence?” The American Statistician 69, no. 1 (2015): 24. 27 Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, El crimen como realidad y representación (México: El Colegio de México, 2012). 28 For my full critique of Mexican “narconovels” as mediations of the official discourse on drug trafficking see Oswaldo Zavala, “Imagining the US-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives,” Comparative Literature 66, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 340–360. 29 Luis Astorga, Mitología del “narcotraficante” en México (México: Plaza y Valdés, 1995), 10, 12. “that there does not seem to be another way, current and viable, of referring to the topic but in a mythological way.” 30 César López Cuadras, Cuatro muertos por capítulo (México: Ediciones B, 2013), 11. All translations are mine unless otherwise specified. “that newspapers call drug trafficking, but those of us who have inhabited its entrails, devoured and regurgitated and swallowed back again, if not ejected through the asshole, we plainly call ‘the business.’” 31 López Cuadras, 160. The problem is that, if you kill [one soldier], they send ten, and if you kill the ten, they send the army, and then that’s it, everyone better run. In the old days, when the troops arrive, only the elderly, women and children would remain in their houses; but since they now like to lay everything to waste, the ranches are left desolated. Entire families disappear. So when we know that they are on their way, or we listen to the resounding propeller of the chopper, we run and may saint Malverde protect us.

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32 López Cuadras, 179. “A cartel, the newspapers say, that’s what I am going to build.” 33 López Cuadras, 193–194. “It is no longer possible to distinguish between the good guys and the bad ones.” “While it is true that there exist powerful mafias, none of them command, even in small places, an absolute control of the market.” “All traffickers end up losing, from the smallest to the biggest, either because they are sent to prison, they are killed or they are displaced from the true centers of power.”

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Writing and the Body: Interfaces of Violence in Neoliberal Mexico Roberto Cruz Arzabal

What constitutes the political gestures of a book that doesn’t necessarily address a political subject or which engages with other texts that are “solely” political or economic in nature?1 How must signs be handled in order for the book to operate in the direction of the present and the future—like a vanishing line that originates in a permanent state of crisis and moves toward the crisis of the production system? In viewing the relationship between text and cultural practices as an intersection of powers and intensities,2 these questions ultimately address threshold-codification and crisis-production in these spaces of mediation. According to Félix Guattari, “[T]o learn the intimate workings of this production [of subjectivity], these ruptures of meaning that are auto-foundational of existence—poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined.”3 In this way, poetry could function as a space of codification and crisis for these thresholds. However, it is important to contextualize poetry’s importance in this respect. In addition to being an ideology and a program, neoliberal capitalism is a semiotic operator that has endeavored to extend the goods-production process into the production of signs;4 the arts in general and poetry in particular can participate in sign-reproduction through the policies of financialization, speculation, and the generation of capital gains,5 which is why not all poetry is necessarily posited as an autonomous space in the face of capitalism. Poetry’s role is no longer to reproduce language out of exceptionality; indeed, for poetry to serve as a critical connector of capitalism’s semiotic operations, it must occupy an indeterminate space with respect to the referentiality of language (the utility of the capitalist sign)6 and the aestheticization of life and violence—not acting solely in the pure immanence of literary writing, but rather in the political activations of poetic form and voice.

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Unlike poems and literary texts in which violence or the neoliberal economy appear as a representation, I want to propose the reading of a small body of texts that express “a singular vibration of the voice.”7 The voice of these proposed poems is defined not only by their sound, but also by their corporality, comprising the construction of interfaces that permit us to read beyond a book’s evident materiality. Following Alexander R. Galloway, my conception of the interface is broader than the one traditionally used: no longer as its own medium or as a medium’s operative surface, but rather as “the point of transition between different layers of media within any nested system. The interface is an ‘agitation’ or generative friction between different formats.”8 The interface, then, is the space of operation that enables transitions between media and forms of language. Not all interfaces are visible; in fact, part of their nature involves remaining invisible in order to function properly. When an interface appears, it has stopped operating as such and has begun to function as a medium. Thus, I have chosen to study four works containing at least two types of language whose critical relationship reveals the operativity of their interface. The book Hechos diversos (In Different Incidents, in Spanish, 2011, unpublished in English) by Mónica Nepote (b. 1970) employs a particular visual format that distinguishes between two parts of a poem: one written in poetic language, another in referential language. Antígona González (Spanish, 2011; English, 2016) by Sara Uribe (b. 1978) rearranges excerpts from disparate sources, testimonies of relatives of people killed by narcotrafficking, data on murders in Mexico, and fragments of literary and academic texts on Antigone. Anti-Humboldt (2014) by Hugo García Manríquez (b. 1978) is a visual and textual intervention in the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed by the United States, Mexico, and Canada in 1994. Finally, The 27th/El 27 (2014) by Eugenio Tisselli (b. 1972) is an intervention in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, defamiliarizing its reading as a legal text through the use of global financial flows. Each book employs a collision between two forms of interface-mediated language, impeding a functional or representational reading of the texts. These poems are not produced through the poet’s enunciation as a medium;9 rather, they are works in which the language of capitalism’s abstract machine is made visible. In the four works studied, we can observe the production of the body, or of the fracture, as effects of poetic language in the face of capitalism’s own dematerialized language, as well as the task of defamiliarizing signs and signification procedures toward the production of interfaces of materiality.

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The body: Mediations from what remains Neoliberalism is a semiotic operator that administers flows and tensions for the production of subjectivity. One of the premises for the flows of contemporary capitalism is the alienation of bodily processes from sign production; these signs’ apparent dematerialization portrays the body as a mediated body within circuits of capital. Thus, the body appears as a remnant: no longer as the space where mediations occur, but rather as what lies beneath them—the ruins of sign-production, and what, therefore, cannot be communicated. The poems in Mónica Nepote’s Hechos diversos can be read as reflections on the transfer processes and interfaces between written texts, social practices, and bodies. An original edition published by the artisanal press Ediciones Acapulco, the book was configured as a wallet containing three stitched booklets (chapbooks) and two loose sheets. Each chapbook collected poems that were structured according to shared motifs. While each group of texts could be read via the mediation processes operating therein,10 I propose, for the purposes of this article, a reading of the third chapbook alone, also titled “In Different Incidents,” as this one best exhibits the poem’s possibilities as a place of enunciation and mediation of discursive heterogeneity. With a single lens, each poem in “In Different Incidents” combines various critical operations: the poem’s enunciation, the correlative narration in referential language, and the creation of tension through a simple visual layout. The phrase in the title is a translation of the French term fait divers, which French newspapers use to denote crime stories, known as tabloid pieces or sensationalist press. Each poem refers to an act of social violence chronicled in this press, from murders known publicly for their cruelty to torture cases like those registered in the humiliating photos from Abu Ghraib or news of murdered women in Ciudad Juárez. These actions’ general context is not necessarily one of biopolitical violence or dispossession resulting from neoliberalism. Nonetheless, I find it pertinent to study these poems in relation to the other texts discussed here, as such events are indeed framed by a social process that is intimately connected with the rest: the society of hyper-mediatized images that are both consumption and medium. Nepote’s poems critically engage with what we know as visual culture.11 On the one hand, the sensationalist press habitually chronicles these types of brutal events using coarse, callous, judgmental language, one tending toward morbid and unethical fascination with corpses as an object of circulation. On the

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other, in addressing such occurrences with poetic language, one risks “softening” violence. In both cases, it appears that documenting these “diverse events” means traveling between two forms of aestheticizing violence, especially given the effects of mediating that violence. Referential language proves inadequate in registering such crimes’ true weight; aesthetic language is also insufficient, as it may conceal dehumanization and participate in highbrow aestheticization. In both cases, both types of language contribute to the overexposure of bodies and peoples through images.12 In view of this phenomenon, Nepote’s poems can be read as a critical linkage of both languages through their interaction within the mise en page and the creation of an intermediate space that does not correspond to either one, but rather to the interface produced between them. The poem “In the Cell a Name” is based on Marc Dotroux’s kidnapping, rape, and murder of Julie Lejeune. During her captivity, Lejeune writes her name on the cell wall: “Todavía puede leerse,”13 states the referential text on the mark she left behind. This trace is repeated in various forms throughout the text; however, the poetic text makes no reference to any act of violence, but rather to what remained in its wake: “Tocar el nombre/ en la superficie sucia”; “Tocar el nombre/tu testamento.”14 In examining each of these vocabularies as layers of media nesting within a system of mediation, the unit comprises both its arrangement and the media inside the container. The interface is the agitation prompted among all elements in order to communicate what none can express on its own. Both referential and poetic language prove insufficient and unfeasible when facing reality—which must be mediatized not through one of them alone, but rather through their agitation. In order to deliver a message, mediation hides the usual forms of poetry and referential language and focuses instead on the materiality of the system. Another poem in the book, “The Girls Dance,” repeats the structure of interaction between the two media: In the poetic text, an unidentified lyric voice insistently wonders about the eponymous girls (“Dónde están bailando, dónde las muchachas, todas”15), and then denies that the remains of their bodies can be equated with their lives (“Digan dónde, dónde quedan las voces, luces en la arena, no sus marcas en las dunas”16). The poem’s key moment occurs in the medium assigned to referential language. Here, where one would assume the presence of a neutral account, the referential voice states: “En Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua han sido asesinadas más de cuatrocientas mujeres en los últimos diez años. Tan sólo por ser mujeres./Nada más qué agregar.”17

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“Excommunication is given as a message, a message that proclaims: ‘there will be no more messages’.”18 The unsayable cannot be communicated in words, but rather with their remnants or with the refusal to explain, with what remains of Lejeune’s murdered body and with what takes a stance without saying so, what opposes the brutality of such murders, the material mark left by violence. The writing on the wall during Lejeune’s last days is also an attempt to express inexpressible suffering; her name remains as a vestige of impossible saying, the impossible said. Violence stole Lejeune’s and the Ciudad Juárez women’s chance to raise their own voices: In losing the opportunity to name themselves, they have been excommunicated, expelled from the community to which they once belonged—not by a political order, but by the outright act of patriarchal violence. Excommunication, like interrupted communication, is associated not with the inability to deliver and receive messages (that is, a problem with the channel), but rather with the chance to experience the message, an effect of mediation that understands what has been received, turning it into a communicative sign. The paradox posed by critical poems on contemporary violence and the violence of images is problematized, in this case, through the vagueness produced by the interface, the “being on the boundary”19 that seeks to communicate what cannot be communicated. That said, it doesn’t do so with words, but rather with what Guattari calls “a-signifying semiotics,” which “can bring into play systems of signs that, though they may incidentally have a symbolic or a signifying effect, have no connection with that symbolism or signification as far as their specific functioning is concerned.”20 Nepote’s poetic writing draws from the agitation between media in order to communicate beyond words. The interface is a fundamental element in the poems’ significance; the interaction between layers of media does not function as a symbolic element, but it has a symbolic effect on the relationship with the poem’s other components. The interface established by the layout yields different tensions and superimpositions among media, representations, and semiotics. One element I would like to highlight in Nepote’s poems is that violence is mediated by the interface not only with respect to the relationships among the media-related elements that project meaning toward the crisis of representation, but rather in the topics where it operates. In both poems, the bodies of murdered individuals become present through the emergence of traces that intervene in violence’s historicity. In both cases, then, bodies appear through the marks left by violence: “La lucha/huella fotográfica”21 for Lejeune; as negation for the

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murdered women of Juárez (“. . . no sus marcas en las dunas”22). In this sense, the mark or the trace, as both topic and interface of the poems, allows bodies snatched up by violence to reenter the terrain of language; at the same time, they create a crisis for traditional forms of representing bodies. The inoperative interface emerges from the reading, refracted, toward the nonrepresentational space that directs and channels the production of images with respect to violence. While similar in its topological relationship with bodies that suffer violence, Sara Uribe’s Antígona González differs in form. The book was written by assembling quotes drawn from many kinds of sources,23 and it coheres around the figure of Antígona González, whose fictional interventions are interspersed with the quotes. This female character tells the story of her brother Tadeo, kidnapped either by the state or by narcotraffickers (no one knows), and of the search for him—until he is found in a mass grave in San Fernando, Tamaulipas.24 In Antígona González, as a parallel to Hechos diversos, the book produces an interface that agitates the relationships between documentary and fictional texts. This one isn’t a visible interface, as in the prior book’s mise en page, but rather an invisible one that appears in the endnotes. More than facilitating a reading of these specific books, the interfaces enable other readings—those based on materiality or textual relationships, for example. When it comes to communication, what does it mean to “take the floor” if not speaking over someone else, wresting away what she says, and saying it in her place? In a context in which relationships between subjects and texts are governed by positions and hierarchies of property and dispossession, it is naïve to think that one can make use of others’ words without aestheticizing them. More than offering spaces of enunciation or re-enunciation, Antígona González constitutes itself as spaces of a loss that is carried out, not named. Mourning . . . consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead . . . One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge [Il faut le savoir]. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies—for it must stay in its place.25

If the interface is the ambiguous space between layers of media and their transitions, we can expand this idea to define media materiality as the space where a deferred loss, one that occurs in writing itself, appears. Thus, we can think of Antígona González’s grieving poetics as a deferral between writing and

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materiality; its production conditions as the mediation of a specter is none other than the violence triggered by the necropolicies that support the reproduction of capitalism.26 In Antígona González, Sara Uribe makes the book into a space for mourning by connecting two elements: the grief of the eponymous character, searching for her brother Tadeo’s body, and the unresolved sorrows of the many mourners whose testimonies are concentrated here as fragments. Antígona González is a work produced by the double movement of excavation and montage: It is written with writing’s remnants, with the residue of the news, thus giving form to the absences of the missing.27 “La absurda, la extenuante, la impostergable labor de desenterrar un cuerpo para volver a enterrarlo. Para confirmar en voz alta lo tan temido, lo tan deseado: sí, señor agente, sí, señor forense, sí, señor policía, este cuerpo es mío.”28 Antígona González continually wonders, and without rhetoric, what is left of her loved ones. The answer isn’t easy: what’s left is the fragment, the found cadaver. A void remains in place of the person who won’t return. However, in Antígona’s own voice, the response takes on aspects of perseverance: “Frente a lo que desaparece./: Frente a lo que desaparece: lo que no desaparece.”29 The ghost torments with its presence, although it isn’t entirely present. A ghost is the deferred spirit, but a ghost is also what’s unfinished. It is fitting, then, that the fragments comprising this work largely consist of relatives’ voices. More than a realist aesthetic or one of denunciation, Antígona González shows us the effects of disappearance and death in the crisis of language and quotations. As Jo Labanyi states: “What memory can do is communicate the importance of the past in the present—that is, reestablish the affiliative link with the past that capitalist modernization set out to break. Memory does so by representing not the past directly, as realist narrative promises to do, but the effects of the past on the present—its unfinished business.”30 Antígona González’s engagement with grief is focused more on memory than on ghosts; what persists isn’t what occupies space, but rather the attempt to reconstruct it. This work with loss is what permits a community to form around what disappears and what has not. In Antígona González, as a counterpoint to the silence of In Different Incidents, those “excommunicated” by disappearance resist that disappearance through the voices that name them. Grief and the book come together in an undetermined third space, a threshold in which their reappearance occurs. The disappeared don’t entirely return; they cannot be conjured back into corporality. Nonetheless, they acquire a floating form between the book’s materiality (the act

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of reading, the performance) and its deferral. Only in this way can the grieving and the missing become part of a new community, the community of grief— which only exists as an event in order to disappear once again. The book as a space of mediation, as a “being on the boundary,” is also a space through which codes take on a feeling form. Both books’ interface, then, is the space in which the body supersedes the sub-media space, what underlies the interface, what becomes visible in its alteration.

Writing: Mediations through fracture According to Boris Groys, the sub-media space—that is, the format allowing signs to appear and which consequently disappears—constitutes the space of truth. “The truth of media-ontology is not the truth of scientific description but the truth of coerced or voluntary confession . . . [The observer does not look] for the state of exception, for the special moment that allows us insight into the interior, into the secret, into what is hidden behind the medial surface.”31 An interface’s job is to conceal the sub-media space and operate on a surface that presents itself as a bearer of signs—which makes it invisible. Referential truth is a mediated truth; by contrast, the truth of the sub-media space is a field of exception, an aberration of mediation. In this regard, Groys finds the role of plagiarism and quotation singularly relevant as political procedures: “the distinction between quotation and plagiarism plays a crucial role in this context, because this distinction marks, at the same time, the border between the symbolic economy and the market economy.”32 Perhaps it isn’t strange, then, that some of recent literature’s most critically interesting works implement citationist principles. That said, these works cannot be described exclusively through the practice of citation; to do so means situating them in a potential “aestheticization” of this practice. Thus, I propose a different way of conceiving them. In “A Conversation: What Is It? What Is It For?” Deleuze explains his concept of the “pick-up” as a search for lines of flight in one’s thought: “You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area . . .”33 Using this method, he sought to show the heterogeneity that characterizes things and people, a heterogeneity that does not always allow them to know “which line they are on.” The “pickup” would ultimately be the opposite of the “cut-up” popularized by William Burroughs (a purely citationist aesthetic); indeed, while the latter “is still a

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method of probabilities—at least linguistic ones,”34 the former “is a stammering. . . . no cutting, folding and turning down, but multiplications according to the growing dimensions.”35 I return to Deleuze’s concept in order to establish an interpretation of the proceedings at work in Anti-Humboldt and The 27th. Before seeking to determine the truth or falseness of an idea, Deleuze suggests looking for another idea, a different one, to confront it with the previous—somewhat like the search for sub-media truth. This truth-of-surfaces doesn’t emerge without mediation, which is why it is necessary to create an interface that enables us to discern it. Not just any interface, however: it must be an inoperative interface.36 This is not a dialectical process, but rather a collision, the creation of lines of flight; not simply compilation, not an aestheticizing erasure, but rather the critical exception within the biopolitical exception. Anti-Humboldt by Hugo García Manríquez is clearly a counter-text to one of neoliberalism’s key documents in Mexico: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Despite its citationist and conceptual aspects, García Manríquez’s poem develops a study of textual material that heads in a different direction than that of other similar conceptualisms. The book is built by erasing passages from NAFTA in a way that emphasizes phrases and words as if they were floating against a spectral background. These words and phrases generate propitious associations that, on first reading, seem to be the product of a fleeting lyrical stutter; indeed, as we read, the background reappears, rising to the surface every time, and thus preventing us from forgetting the biopolitical framework from which they were extracted. The truth of the sub-media space is not the words left after an attempt to erase them, but rather the impossibility of total erasure. To show an example of such fragments: Each Party shall grant duty-free entry to commercial samples of negligible value, and to printed advertising materials, imported from the territory of another Party, regardless of their origin, but may require that: [. . .] Article 307: Goods Re-Entered after Repair or Alteration37

The 27th seems to be a counter-text to the document against NAFTA, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. The sub-media truth is that the article turns out to be a counter-text to itself in the age of the treaty, now put forth as the ultimate meta-text of neoliberal territoriality in Mexico.38 Following the modifications made to the constitutional article in 2013, under Enrique

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Peña Nieto’s administration, “‘the Nation’ has acquired the right to transfer the dominion over lands and territorial waters (and, consequently, over the humans and non-humans who inhabit them) into private hands.”39 The citationist principle in Eugenio Tisselli’s work40 operates through an algorithmic reading of the original text; its seemingly simple interpretative method, conducted via algorithmic networks, means that: every night, after the activity at the New York Stock exchange has come to an end, a robot obtains its last closing price and its respective percent variation. If the variation is positive, another robot chooses a fragment of Article 27 randomly, translates it into English automatically, and inserts the translation into its corresponding place within the original text written in Spanish. Given enough time, the algorithm will produce a version of Article 27 fully readable in an effective—yet incorrect—English.41

After a year in operation, the translation of the full article was complete, at which point it was restarted from the beginning.42 Clicking on each phrase in red allows the reader to see when the phrase was translated and with what percentage the Stock Exchange closed that day. The text becomes, then, an image of the extractive economy by indicating the red stains of text in an effective English; at the same time, it also becomes its own counterimage in revealing when these texts were extracted. The image’s past and present simultaneously constitute the future of the constitutional text, the legal function of which has been fractured by algorithmic incision. ARTICLE 27. PROPERTY LAND AND WATER INCLUDED WITHIN THE CITY HOMELAND, CORRESPONDE ORIGINARIAMENTE A LA NACION, WHICH HAS HAD AND HAVE THE RIGHT TO TRANSMIT THE DOMAIN OF THESE INDIVIDUALS, CONSTITUYENDO LA PROPIEDAD PRIVADA. [. . .] LA ASAMBLEA GENERAL ES EL ORGANO SUPREMO DEL NUCLEO DE POBLACION EJIDAL O COMUNAL, WITH THE ORGANIZATION AND FUNCTIONS THAT THE LAW BE ALE. EL COMISARIADO EJIDAL O DE BIENES COMUNALES, DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED IN TERMS OF LAW, THE ORGAN OF REPRESENTATION OF THE KERNEL AND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR IS EXECUTING THE RESOLUTIONS OF THE ASSEMBLY. RESTITUTION OF LAND43

“Every text presupposes a political economy supporting the codification of its own legibility. The political resides precisely in problematizing ‘the codification

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of its own legibility’: its own legibility as suspense,”44 writes García Manríquez in the endnotes of his book. The suspended codification of NAFTA doesn’t produce collective voices, but rather enunciations that surpass the personal. “The declaration which founds an institution, a constitution or a State requires that a signer engage him- or herself. The signature maintains a link with the instituting act, as an act of language and of writing, a link which has absolutely nothing of the empirical accident about it.”45 There are no collective voices behind the signing of a treaty like NAFTA. Moreover, the signing itself doesn’t constitute the establishment of a country that, once founded, will initiate a relationship with its citizens into the future; rather, it entails the formation of an archive of equivalences for transfer and conversion among physical objects and their financial value. NAFTA’s “demented” language originates in neoliberalism as a production system of meaning and subjectivities that, over the past forty years, have mobilized vast quantities of techniques, technologies, archives, flows, and multiplicities in order to remain the semiotic operator par excellence. Ultimately, NAFTA isn’t only a set of rules that govern political, territorial, and economic relations among countries, but also the discursive archive from which it is established that individuals (both human and nonhuman) can acquire exchange values among themselves within this territory. Both Anti-Humboldt and The 27th undo the equivalences among sign-bearing surfaces in order to expose the sub-media truth in the threshold of the interface effect produced by erasure. Here, too, they can be read from Groys’s perspective, according to which: The artist must, first of all, forcibly reduce, destroy, and remove the exterior in order to expose the interior. This trope, according to which insight into the interior is the effect of a violent dismantling of the prior, produces in equal measure the cases of exception relating to war, art, and philosophy, all of which announce their own truth, which is radically different from the truth of “peaceful” and “superficial” normality.46

If the great codifier of NAFTA’s language is the abstract machine of neoliberalism, Anti-Humboldt and The 27th thus function as schizo-analytical cartographies of the archive of neoliberal language—not only as interventions in specific documents, but also as producers of fissures in the linguistic forms that characterize the financial economy’s legal framework. On an initial reading, both works result from engagement with textual material, which allows for the identification of interpretations and associations that reveal

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other meanings in the treaty and the article. But this is not, strictly speaking, a matter of appropriation, because the originals remain in the background: a specter stalking the superposition of the phrases. Perhaps it would be pertinent to address another kind of excavation, one that seeks not remains or ruins but the textual structures of extractivist violence, a geology of neoliberal textuality. The permanent production of fractures across NAFTA’s surface creates an interface effect that permits a simultaneous reading of what has been extracted through “excavation” and of the site where it originally resided.47 By altering the legal text in a-signifying fragments, both works dismantle the rhetoric that naturalizes the media surface. During the recodification process, the text neither issues nor receives significances; first, it becomes a surface that refracts the reader’s gaze toward the political conditions that surround it. Though interfaces inoperative for a legal reading of the juridical text, these works raise the possibility of observing components that had been mediated by the legal interface: territory and sovereignty as social practices nullified by the algorithms and equivalences of the neoliberal financial economy. Some of NAFTA’s many paragraphs are dedicated to the installation of a harmonized system; that is, a numerical codification that permits objects or object-fragments to be identified for exportation, sale, and international recognition. “Ultimately, it is a system that aims to be able to translate not only commodities and objects, not also animal life, into fragments of an architecture without apparent contradictions: a system, in which the heterogeneous is disassembled, reassembled and exchanged. The heterogeneous, the same.”48 By contrast, the Constitution’s Article 27 is the space of jointing and territorialization of heterogeneousness through the figure of national territory: a territory no longer distributed and dominated by the national state, but rather by flows of financial capital. The harmonized system and legal code are the meta-languages that seek to become singular: “Language stabilizes around a parish, a bishopric, a capital,”49 write Deleuze and Guattari. The harmonized system is the new capital around which language attempts to stabilize. Conversely, the poem de-structures a legal/linguistic system that demands the equivalence of two language systems, Spanish and English, as well as the creation of a territorial system, North America. NAFTA is the de-territorialization of language and individuals inside a new geographic/market space: North America itself. With respect to this space, Anti-Humboldt and The 27th are works of re-territorialization within language through their engagement with multiplicities. In the way of a Deleuzian “pick-

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up,” both works are a stutter between languages, the provocation of fracture inside harmonized systems and legal codes. Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

Notes 1 This article has emerged from broader research on the relationships between materiality and poetic production in contemporary Mexico. Such research has been made possible by a doctoral studies grant from CONACYT. 2 I am adhering to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the book when I ask “in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4. 3 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 21. 4 On capitalism as a semiotic operator, see Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London: Penguin, 1984), ch. 2, “Towards a New Vocabulary”; and Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014). 5 On this respect, see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); on the Mexican context, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “Más allá del mercado. Los usos de la literatura en la era neoliberal,” in Libro mercado. Literatura y neoliberalismo, ed. José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2015), 15–40 and Irmgard Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común: la reconversión neoliberal de México (Mexico: Paradiso, 2016). 6 Here I follow Bifo, for whom “now poetry may start the process of reactivating social solidarity, starting from the reactivation of the desiring force of enunciation,” Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 20. 7 Berardi, The Uprising, 147. 8 Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (New York: Polity, 2012), 31. 9 With respect to traditional poetry, Galloway writes: All media evoke similar liminal transition moments in which the outside is evoked in order that the inside may take place. In the case of the classical poet, what is the outside? It is the Muse, the divine source, which is first evoked and praised, in order for the outside to possess the inside. Once possessed by the outside, the poet sings and the story transpires. Galloway, The Interface Effect, 32.

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10 For example, the first chapbook is titled “Prodigios” (marvels) and addresses what Galloway calls iridescent mediation; the second is called “Ventanas” (windows) and its motif is perception mediated by windows as cultural objects—but also as metaphors of what mediates between perceptions and representations. 11 Visual culture involves the things that we see, the mental model we all have of how to see, and what we can do as a result. That is why we call it visual culture: a culture of the visual. A visual culture is not simply the total amount of what has been made to be seen . . . but the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen,

12

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14 15 16 17

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20 21 22 23

Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from SelfPortraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 10. My understanding of the term overexposure follows Georges Didi-Huberman’s definition, in which the figuration of bodies and peoples can oscillate between sous-exposition (an absence of representation) and sur-exposition (cliché figuration that circulates as merchandise). On this subject, see his Peuples Exposés, Peuples Figurants. L’oeil de L’histoire; 4 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2012). Mónica Nepote, Hechos diversos (México: Ediciones Acapulco, 2014), 41; “It’s still there to be read,” “In the Cell a Name,” Mónica Nepote, In Different Incidents, trans. John Pluecker (unpublished manuscript, March 23, 2015). I am grateful to the translator and the author for their permission to access the unpublished translations. Nepote, Hechos diversos, 40; “Touch the name/on the dirty surface”; “Touch the name/your will and testament,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. Nepote, Hechos diversos, 46; “Where are they dancing, where the girls, all,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. Nepote, Hechos diversos, 46; “Tell where, where are the voices left, lights in the sand, not their marks on the dunes,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. Nepote, Hechos diversos, 46; “In Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, more than four hundred women have been killed in the last ten years. Just for being women./ Nothing else to add,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. “TRIOS” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 15. The italics are from the original text. “The interface is this state of ‘being on the boundary’ . . . [A]n interface is not a thing, an interface is always an effect. It is always a process or a translation,” Galloway, The Interface Effect, 33. Guattari, Molecular Revolution, 171. “The struggle/photographic trace,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. “. . . [N]ot their marks on the dunes,” Nepote, In Different Incidents. At the end of the book there is a list of all sources from which the numerous quotes and references have been taken; Sara Uribe, Antígona González, trans. John

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25

26

27

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29 30

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Pluecker (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2016), 172–187. This is a bilingual edition and both Spanish and English text comes from it. This refers to the discovery of a mass grave in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, which contained the bodies of seventy-two Central American migrants who were murdered by the paramilitary group Los Zetas on August 22 and 23, 2010. While the book declares neither nationality nor birthplace, Antígona González’s account concludes that Tadeo González’s body was found in in this grave (“I came to San Fernando to search for you, Tadeo. I came to see if one of these bodies was yours,” 113). However, other quotes in the book refer to people murdered in other parts of Mexico or to other relatives of those killed in the San Fernando massacre. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuff, intr. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. Without delving further here into this matter (which certainly merits a separate, broader reflection), we could consider the problem of the interface in Antigona González as a means of existence of spectrality, especially in its condition as a response to circumstances of extraction and dispossession: “Spectrality or haunting rises as an aesthetic opposed to conditions or moods generated by military, political, or economic violence in the context of modernity. It is an aesthetic that seeks ways to counteract erasure, silencing, and forgetting that eschews melancholic attachment to loss,” Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen, “Introduction. Theories of the Ghost in a Transhispanic Context,” in Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives, eds. Alberto RibasCasasayas and Amanda Petersen (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 6. The translator’s note is interesting in this respect: “The translation of Antígona González begins with the specificity of this one absent body. In a world overwhelmed by bodies . . . this translation is specific to this one body, this one person, this one search,” John Pluecker, “Translation as a way to join to take up [sic] the body,” in Uribe, Antígona González, 193. Uribe, Antígona González, 124–125. “The absurd, the exhausting, the urgent labor of unburying a body to bury it anew. To confirm out loud what is so feared, so desired: yes sir, agent, yes sir, medical examiner, yes sir, police officer, this body is mine.” Uribe, Antígona González, 66–67. “Facing what disappears./: Facing what disappears: what does not disappear.” Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 113. Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media, trans. Carsten Strathausen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19. Groys, Under Suspicion, 89.

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33 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II. Revised edition, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 10. 34 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 10. 35 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 18. 36 “. . . [D]esoeuvre—nonworking, unproductive, inoperative, unworkable.” Galloway, The Interface Effect, 39. 37 Hugo García Manríquez, Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Mexico/Brooklyn, NY: Aldus-Litmus Press, 2014), 22. As the author has sought to show the fracture between equivalent expressions in the treaty, he does not translate; rather, he intervenes in the original texts in both Spanish and English. As a result, the texts don’t match up with each other, and so I have decided to omit the Spanish-language version, unlike in other citations. 38 Different views exist with respect to when the Mexican cycle of neoliberal integration began, ranging from the bank reforms in the late 1970s to first political reforms during the 1980s to the signing of NAFTA in 1994. However, it is possible to consider that this cycle of integration ended with the so-called structural reforms signed during the Peña Nieto administration, which opened the hydrocarbon sector to foreign investment and extraction, in addition to social policy initiatives. On this subject, see, among others, Sarah L. Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy, eds., The Handbook of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2016). 39 Eugenio Tisselli, “Article 27 | Artículo 27,” in UrgeUrge (blog), September 9, 2015, http://urgeurge.net/2015/03/09/article-27-articulo-27/ (accessed February 9, 2017). 40 Eugenio Tisselli, The 27th/El 27, in Electronic Literature Collection, ed. Stephanie Boluk, Leonardo Flores, Jacob Garbe, and Anastasia Salter (Cambridge, MA: Electronic Literature Organization, 2016), http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work .html?work=the-27th (accessed February 9, 2017). 41 Tisselli, “Article 27 | Artículo 27.” 42 The first complete version can be found at http://motorhueso.net/27/first_edition .html (accessed February 9, 2017). 43 Eugenio Tisselli, The 27th/El 27 [Excerpt], December 31, 2014, http://motorhueso .net/27 (accessed February 9, 2017). 44 García Manríquez, Anti-Humboldt, 75. 45 Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 7, no. 1 (1986), 8. 46 Groys, Under Suspicion, 82. 47 With respect to this analogy, I am naturally reminded of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the historian’s labor. See Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans.

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Rodney Livingstone, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 576. 48 García Manríquez, Anti-Humboldt, 74. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

15

The Politics of Infrastructure in Contemporary Mexican Writing Brian Whitener

In discussions of Latin American literature, autonomy continues to be a persistent, if not organizing, idea. Josefina Ludmer has discussed post-autonomous literatures or writing that may represent “el proceso del cierre de la literatura autónoma,”1 while Carlos Alonso described the current novel as a novel without literature, entirely commodified and which does not desire to be different than other “discourses.”2 In the years since their interventions, there have been critiques of both autonomy and post-autonomy: Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri depart from Ludmer to argue for a distinction between art’s meaning and the commodity form,3 Patrick Dove accepts Ludmer’s post-autonomy as a “heuristic” (to then offer a critique of her notion of literature),4 while Craig Epplin, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, argues that “autonomy is real and imaginary at once, and its imaginariness does not sap its strength.”5 In each, regardless of the distance taken, or the complication offered, literary autonomy, either as an acknowledged combatant or negative impress, persists.6 Autonomy, however, is a tricky word, especially in literary discussions where notions of political autonomy (of nations, revolutionary movements, peoples, or geographical regions) mix with ideas of institutional differentiation and textual critical distance. In Latin Americanist discussions, it can often be unclear what literary autonomy might be a freedom from, and most accounts blend together, without necessarily separating out, commodification, marketization, and transnationalization. Moreover, as Jacques Rancière, as well as Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt have recently pointed out, artistic autonomy, whether in aesthetic theory or in artistic practice, is always emplotted or entangled with heteronomy. Rancière argues that aesthetic theories of autonomy are predicated, antinomically, on heteronomy, while Stakemeier and Vishmidt demonstrate

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that the practice of artistic autonomy depends upon (unseen) reproductive and domestic labor.7 In English-language literary studies, there has been a recent surge of defenses or rethinkings of the autonomy of the aesthetic—as relationality (Aukje Van Rooden), as knowledge (Tony Bennett), and as institutional differentiation (Andrew Goldstein)—but the notion of autonomy has recently come under duress in new ways as well.8 Sarah Brouillette’s “World Literature and Market Dynamics” takes up the formation of world, not Latin American, literature, but it develops a critique of world literature discussions which turn, as autonomy ones have, around commodification and marketization. For Brouillette, “what matters most is not the fact that world literature is a consumable commodity constrained by market demand,” rather, she argues for a perspective on literary production that begins from the unevenness of social relations under capitalism, wherein only some “individuals are engaged in the production and circulation of literature.”9 Brouillette’s piece attempts to nudge literary studies beyond a fixation on the commodity and market toward a literary materialism that would draw on the notions of the division of labor and unevenness of social relations under capitalism, which she contends are “more important to a materialist critique of world literature than endlessly recounting the story of the commodification of cultural difference for elite consumers.”10 My project in this chapter will be both to point to the limits of marketization and commodification discourses as used in autonomy/anti-autonomy accounts and to argue that recent developments in the field of contemporary writing in Mexico require a shift from a literary criticism focused on autonomy to one that foregrounds infrastructure. I will argue that contemporary writing practices in Mexico—in particular, the spread of cartoneras and the theorization of electronic writing in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Los muertos indóciles (2013)— draw on a minor, but important, aesthetic tradition, not of autonomy, but of infrastructure. I will advance three arguments: First, these contemporary writing projects have a nuanced understanding of the complicated terrain of literary production. Unlike lenses such as the market or the commodity, which tend to homogenize, the concept of infrastructure allows us to see unevenness between different systems of textual production and circulation, in particular outside state sponsored and capitalist ones. Second, I argue that these projects locate their cultural or literary politics not merely in the artwork itself (i.e., in critical distance) but rather, in part, in and through the means by which that work is produced and circulated, or as an intervention into infrastructure.

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Finally, in the conclusion, I make an argument for these works as forming part of a minor, but often overlooked, aesthetic tradition which distinguishes, as Walter Benjamin once put it, “between merely supplying a production apparatus and changing it.”11

Underneath the autonomy, the infrastructure In discussions of literary autonomy and its possible loss, the politics of literature or its criticality are most often seen as imbricated with a resistance to commodification and the market. While Ludmer’s original essay tends to focus on the breakdown or blurring of separate spheres, a later talk on the changing landscape of literary autonomy develops a more explicit account of marketization as a root cause of this blurring: En los años 60, en Argentina, los libros eran nacionales y se exportaban; la era de las naciones es también la era de las editoriales nacionales. Borges, Rulfo, García Márquez, pero también Cortázar, Puig y Onetti fueron publicados por Fondo de Cultura, Emecé, Sudamericana, Jorge Alvarez o Losada (y Seix Barral en Barcelona). Las editoriales nacionales en que se publicaron entre los años 40 y 80, y que exportaban literatura, fueron absorbidas en los años 90 por empresas españolas y globales, y la última noticia en esta dirección es que María Kodama firmó con Randon House-Mondadori por la obra completa de Borges por algo así como dos millones de euros. En el pasaje de las editoriales nacionales a los conglomerados se hace visible la fusión entre lo artístico-literario y lo económico global.12

Ludmer points here to a dynamic developed in more detail by Craig Epplin in his work on Argentine book culture: this world of “literary autonomy” was underpinned by a “sophisticated system of publishing and distribution.”13 Epplin notes that during the 1950s and 1960s, in the crescendo of the Boom years, Argentine presses “exported 40 percent of their production to Spain, providing up to 80 percent of the latter country’s book consumption.”14 This is perhaps a mundane point, but one which seems to get lost as autonomy discussions move invisibly between the levels of political and literary autonomy and tend to read cultural politics as located primarily in the text itself: what we think of as the golden age of Latin American literary autonomy rested up an infrastructural one, or, underneath the autonomy, there was an infrastructure.

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But what does infrastructure mean? Brian Larkin in “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure” defines infrastructure as “built networks that facilitate the flows of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space . . . They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.”15 In a major recent study of the relationship between race and infrastructure in colonial Latin American society, Daniel Nemser explains, in a way that is useful for literary discussions, that infrastructure is what “only becomes visible when it fails”: What distinguishes infrastructure from technology is its tendency to become normalized and fade from view, operating just “beneath” (infra) the surface of the phenomenal world while facilitating the operations on which that world depends. Through this assemblage of pipes, tubes, cables, wires, and tunnels flow the energy, water, waste, and data that enable, shape, and regulate the practices of modern social existence. Thus the commonplace that infrastructure only becomes visible when it fails—these enabling conditions abruptly acquire an immediate and inescapable presence due precisely to their absence.16

As Nemser’s work also helpfully brings out, infrastructures of circulation are also ones of production, in that an electric grid causes electricity to circulate, but is also connected to electricity’s site of production. Throughout this piece, when I refer to infrastructure, I will mean it in this sense, referring to both systems of circulation of objects, people, or ideas and the sites of their production. As Tony Bennett has noted, one pole of debates in sociological literary studies has been between accounts like Bourdieu, which focus on “the role of literary markets, structures of patronage, or critical institutions” and those, such as Lukacs, which see the former as “vulgar sociology” and examine instead “encounters between the world-historical social forces and epochal metaformal literary transformations.”17 I’ve presented Ludmer’s post-autonomy argument above in a way that blends these two accounts, in order to position the infrastructural as outside or adjacent to their structuring field. Thus, when referring to the infrastructural, I mean something more expansive than just the markets or institutions that frame a given work, but also I want to operate at a more empirical level than “world-historical forces” and “metaformal” transformations. That is, in infrastructure, I think we can find a language other than the market and the commodity for talking about the materiality of production and circulation that supports a given text’s existence. Infrastructure can give us some distance from overly determined autonomy debates shaped by

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the loss (or refusal) of a developmentalist imaginary and haunted by an era that is, for some, irrevocably lost and, for others, the object of a sought recuperation. Infrastructure can also, perhaps, give us some breathing room from debates focusing on commodification, which can get stuck in arguments over the (im) possibility of resistance to it, and from those on marketization, which tend toward homogenizing analyses (in that we most often speak of the market, not many markets). Infrastructure moves us into a comparative, and materialist, register: not a single market (for books, for example) or a single system of commodification, but rather sets of (uneven) infrastructures of literary/textual production and circulation. My contention is that discourses of the politics of literature as autonomous or not demonstrate their limitation when confronted with contemporary writingbased practices in Mexico. On the one hand, the classic market-based opposition between the national and the transnational (and between two historical moments of semiautonomous and post-autonomous literary production), at least in the case of Mexico, maps inconsistently onto the present, where transnational domination exists alongside several other systems of literary/textual production, including one funded extensively by the state (independent presses), an artisanal system (cartonera), and an emerging field of digital writing. On the other, in these contemporary writing-based practices we have the persistence of a minor aesthetic tradition which locates its cultural politics not merely in the form and content of a given work but in the intervention a given project, group, or practice makes into the infrastructure underpinning that work’s circulation and production. It is these cultural politics of infrastructure which are particularly difficult to see from within discourses of autonomy and which will be the ultimate subject of this chapter.

Cartonera as an infrastructural practice The phenomenon of cartonera publishing, which originated in Argentina with Eloísa Cartonera in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis, arrived in Mexico in 2008 with the creation of La Cartonera de Cuernavaca. Today, the cartonera scene in Mexico is a vibrant one with twenty or more cartoneras functioning across the country. Cartonera publishing is a low-cost, artisanal form of publishing, which consists of Xeroxed or printed pages held together between covers made from cardboard. The cultural politics of the cartonera movement in Mexico, as well as in other

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countries, encompasses not only the texts they produce but also the intervention that the presses make into the means of how literary texts are produced and distributed. As such, much of the discussion of cartonera publishers’ cultural politics to date has focused on the artisanal means of production through which the books are produced and has debated to what extent this form of production embodies a democratic horizontalism and if cartoneras, rather than enacting a new form of community solidarity, are an unwitting example of culture being used as a means of managing surplus populations.18 Academic critical work has frequently positioned cartoneras as a response to the transnationalization of the literary sphere and the domination of the literary marketplace by transnational corporations. One difference, however, between the discussion around cartoneras in Mexico and various other Latin American countries is the important role the state, through mechanisms such as el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta) and el Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Fonca), plays in Mexican literary production. In Mexico, this takes place, in particular, through state funding of independent presses such as Sexto Piso and others.19 This difference pulls into focus the limitations of a market perspective, and, by focusing our attention here, we can see the need for an approach to cartonera publishing that is able to account for unevenness and articulation amongst different systems of literary production and circulation. Aurelio Meza, a member of the Mexican cartonera Kodama, makes this difference explicit in a 2014 essay in which he compares Kodama’s position to that of Eloísa, writing, La idea de Eloísa es no tanto desmantelar sino hacer frente a la producción elitista y burocratizada de los libros. En gran medida, y aunque Cucurto soñara con que el Estado argentino ‘le diera galpones grandes’ a proyectos como el de las editoriales cartoneras, un libro cartonero es una competencia directa tanto al mercado editorial como a las instituciones reguladoras.20

While Kodama is not a strictly “anti-institutional” project, Meza notes that they do have a position with respect to receiving funding from the state: El carácter de nuestra cartonera no es estrictamente anti-institucional (pues muchas de nuestras presentaciones son promovidas o auspiciadas por instituciones como el Centro Cultural Tijuana y el Instituto de Cultura de Baja California), aunque jamás hemos pensado en recibir fondos de ningún tipo que no sean los nuestros propios . . . Pensamos que el financiamiento por parte del Estado a un proyecto independiente hace que de manera gradual pierda su

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virtud de independiente (económica, creativa o ideológicamente). Sin embargo, la participación en canales de difusión institucionales (como los centros de cultura) es a veces inevitable, incluso en lugares donde los artistas independientes y las instituciones culturales están muy polarizadas, como en Tijuana.21

As the rest of Meza’s essay makes clear, the cartonera members are conscious of the domination of the literary marketplace by transnational corporations, but what is interesting is that there is as well an awareness of the state’s role in supporting a system of independent press production and a desire to distance themselves from that. To capture this uneven and more complicated literary production landscape would require the use of a concept other than the market, in that it would require cultural critics to be able to move amongst and across these differentiated literary production systems, something that infrastructure as a term is well-positioned to do. While much criticism on cartoneras positions them as a reaction to the withdrawal of the state, in the case of Kodama, there is a reaction to and positioning themselves against the continued presence of the state in the literary sphere. Thus, while transnational corporations also dominate the book market in Mexico, the offthe-shelf account of an opposition between transnational and national production has to be complicated if narratives like Meza’s are to become legible. While certainly much critical attention has been focused on cartoneras as sites of artisanal production, another way of framing the intervention that Kodama develops, as do many cartoneras, is as one into the infrastructure of literary production and circulation. As mentioned above, debates over the cultural politics of cartonera publishing have frequently focused on for or against takes on the internal publishing model (i.e., as an example of democratization or not) and on the role cartoneras might play (á la George Yúdice) in managing social conflict via cultural integration. Viewing cartoneras as interventions into infrastructure could give us a different, more scalar means for evaluating the cultural politics of a given publisher. To give an example, let’s return to Meza’s account. Meza argues that the cartonera model, small as it may be in terms of production, involves “una ruptura de las relaciones verticales de jerarquización” found in literature.22 For Meza this de-hierachization transforms the roles of both the author and editor, bringing the author into contact with the production process and their readers and turning the editor(s) into individuals who “escriba, transcriba, diagrame, imprima, arme y pinte”: En mi ideal de taller cartonero, el autor participa en la manufactura de su propio libro, aprende a imprimirlo, armarlo y distribuirlo; a su vez, tiene contacto

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con los que serán su público inmediato, es decir, otros participantes del taller. Considero que la figura del editor se ve efectivamente trastocada: vuelve a ser un personaje multifacético que debe aprender, si no a dominar, por lo menos a conocer y manejar diversos registros, habilidades y disciplinas. Siempre he dicho que una cartonera podría ser hecha por una sola persona que escriba, transcriba, diagrame, imprima, arme y pinte su propio libro (y bueno, el caso de Olga de Chile lo comprueba).23

Using this quote as a basis, one could imagine a critique through the lens of democratization that might argue that clearly these are not truly horizontal relationships as the editor retains a great deal of control (and burden of labor) and as Meza’s imaginary includes a cartonera of one (wherein no horizontality is possible). Approaching the quote through the lens of democracy and horizontality can reveal this set of limitations—but not much more. However, if we approach the cultural politics of Meza and Kodama through the concept of infrastructure, a more expansive set of limits can be spun out and opened up to discussion. First, the circle of who is included within the “rupture” experienced in the cartonera assembly process is limited to the collective members and the author. Second, there is no articulation with a larger community, that is, no attempt to scale or generalize this rupture or new horizon out into a larger public or determined section of it. Third, while the roles within the system of production have been given some thought, there is no discussion of how or where the materials are coming from and the framing of those (in this case, nonexistent) relations. Cartonera projects move, potentially, across all these levels. Framing their cultural politics not merely in their internal aspect (democratic horizontalism) or with respect to their interface with larger communities (culture as a management tool), but through a concept like infrastructure would allow for the tracking of a project’s interventions across these multiple sites and levels. As a result, these kinds of considerations could be spiraled out to include any moment or site within the infrastructure of a book’s production or circulation: from the nonwaged work of social reproduction which enables these cartonera members to experience the frisson of a temporary rupture to a given cartonera’s articulation with other experimental cultural, social, or political practices within a determined locality. The political valence of a given cartonera would then be an index of the form of its intervention into the infrastructure of literary production and circulation—which could include questions of the limits of horizontalism and possible cultural management and integration—but which

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would also be able to examine the uneven articulation with other systems of literary production and the positioning of a cartonera project within a larger social field of cultural and political practices.

Desapropiación, or literary politics after instrumentalization The position taking of the Mexican cartonera Kodama with respect to the state is symptomatic of a current within alternative or left literary worlds which have developed critiques of the state’s use of culture and cultural funding as a means to shape, massage, and control literary and cultural discourses. In the period since the arrival of cartoneras in Mexico in 2008, cultural positions, which we might characterize on a spectrum from state-suspicious to anti-state, have proliferated in response to the Mexican state’s declaration of a “drug war” and the creeping realization that many of the 150,000 plus who have died since did so either with the legitimation of or at the hands of the state. While literary discourses have, as a result, deepened their anti-state suspicions, they have also, in certain cases, intensified their thinking around and concern for the infrastructures of literary production. One influential and crucial example of these turns is Cristina Rivera Garza’s collection of essays Los muertos indóciles (2013). Rivera Garza’s Los muertos indóciles opens with recent scenes of horror and violence in Mexico and asks what it might mean to write in such circumstances (“¿Qué tipo de retos enfrenta el ejercicio de la escritura en un medio donde la precariedad del trabajo y la muerte horrísona constituyen la materia de todos los días?”).24 Rivera Garza’s starting point is, interestingly, to point to the limits, under such conditions (i.e., “rodeados de muertos” [surrounded by the dead]), of modernist and avant-garde writing practices centered on a resistance to commodification and instrumentalization: Enfrentados a las estructuras y quehaceres del Estado moderno, gran parte de las escrituras de la resistencia de la segunda mitad del siglo XX trabajaron en un sentido o en otro con el lema adorniano a la cabeza: “la resistencia del poema— léase aquí: escritura—individual contra el campo cultural de la comodificación capitalista en el que el lenguaje ha llegado a ser meramente instrumental.” Para escapar de la instrumentalización del lenguaje más propia de la mercancía que de la creación crítica, los más diversos escritores utilizaron, entre otras estrategias, la denuncia indirecta, el rechazo a la transparencia del lenguaje o a la idea de éste como mero vehículo de significado, una cierta sintáctica distorsionada,

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la constante crítica a la referencialidad, el socavamiento de la posición del yo lírico, la derrota continúa de las expectativas del lector. Todas ellas, en efecto, caracterizaron a los modernismos o vanguardias—ya en Estados Unidos o en América Latina—a lo largo del siglo XX.25

In the face of so much death and suffering, instrumentalization and the responses of indirect denouncing and parataxis cease to be a problematic for contemporary writing. In a world in which the textual body (cuerpo textual) and real bodies have become cadavers, in which “la sangre y las pantallas [son] confundidas,” Rivera Garza proposes two linked notions: necroescritura and desapropiación.26 Necroescritura denominates a dialogic practice of writing in which the author is displaced into the position of a reader, but not one who collects texts to dominate the other, but rather who disappropriates them. Disappropriation points to a process of writing which challenges “constantemente el concepto y la práctica de la propiedad” (constantly the concept and practice of property), but in a mutual interdependence with others in and through language.27 Disappropriation could sound like a reiteration of the death or displacement of the author, but Rivera Garza takes it in a different direction: not to the abolition of the author, but in the direction of collective work, mutual care, and the common good by linking disappropriation with indigenous conceptions of comunalidad: Lejos de volver propio lo ajeno, regresándolo así al circuito del capital y de la autoría a través de las estrategias de apropiación tan características del primer enfrentamiento de la escritura con las máquinas digitales del siglo XXI, esta postura crítica se deja regir por una poética de la desapropiación que busca enfáticamente desposeerse del domino de lo propio, configurando comunalidades de escritura que, develando el trabajo colectivo de los muchos, como el concepto antropológico mixe y zapoteco del que provienen, atienden a lógicas de cuidado mutuo y prácticas del bien común que retan la naturalidad y la aparente inmanencia de los lenguajes del capitalismo globalizado.28

Against the unchecked spread of state-sponsored and legitimated violence, Rivera Garza attempts to open writing onto a communal practice, one based not in the “naïve” walking in another’s shoes, but as an experience of mutual belonging in language and of collective work with others in textual production. Clearly, there is a great deal of distance and difference between indigenous practices of governance and literary writing and it is not clear exactly how Rivera Garza’s work, so far, might bridge that distance. What I am interested in here is less the limits of Rivera Garza’s discourse and more the turn it makes to infrastructure.

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The shape this turn takes in Rivera Garza is through a thinking of disappropriation alongside digital or electronic books and Twitter. It seems that there is something important here for Rivera Garza’s emergent consideration of disappropriation as a form of comunalidad, as a form of writing that is carried on a new electronic infrastructure. At one moment in the book’s introduction, Rivera Garza recounts a series of questions she posted to Twitter concerning the relationship between writing, ethics, and the state, including “¿Estás contra el estado de las cosas pero sigues escribiendo como si en la página no pasara nada?” (Are you against the state of things but still writing as if nothing happened on the page?) Expanding on these provocations, she adds: Estos 140 caracteres, unidos por el hashtag #escriturascontraelpoder, querían poner en el tono interrogativo de la charla y la curiosidad algunas de las ideas que animan las páginas que siguen a continuación. Seguramente no todos los libros del futuro se escribirán al amparo de poéticas de la desapropiación que desestabilicen el reino de lo propio. Seguramente se seguirán produciendo libros convencionales y no convencionales al mismo tiempo; de la misma manera en que los libros publicados en papel comparten el espacio de la lectura con los libros electrónicos. Sería prudente, sin embargo, que las estrategias que configuran y estructuran a las necroescrituras de hoy formaran parte del arsenal crítico de los comentaristas contemporáneos. Acaso cuando aprendamos a leerlas con presteza y en contexto, de forma tan cuidadosa como crítica, las necroescrituras puedan mostrarnos modos de ver y experimentar el mundo con el asombro que aplaudía Kathy Acker.29

If the cartonera movement emerges out of what Gopal Balakrishnan has called the “stationary state” and Annie McClanahan the “terminal crisis” of contemporary capital, then the literary politics which Rivera Garza constructs in her recent work responds to a new saturation of this crisis with state-sponsored and statepermitted violence.30 What jumps out here is how the infrastructural comes to displace resistance to commodification as the key site of cultural politics in Rivera Garza’s account, but also how infrastructures of textual production continue to exist alongside one another, unevenly (e.g., Rivera Garza does not argue for giving up writing novels entirely for Twitter). Los muertos indóciles thinks deeply about the material basis for writing practice and opens up the possibility for a more sustained conversation about how writers might respond to state violence and terminal crisis. What feels most useful in Rivera Garza’s account is precisely how—even more than the cartonera movement has—it turns infrastructure into a visible problematic and

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enables us to ask: What are the specific material means that writing can use to confront terminal crisis and state violence? What are our options in terms of platforms and means of production? Pragmatically, in terms of what can be done tomorrow, and ideally, in terms of what can we move toward, what infrastructure would be necessary for the work that needs to be done? If we take the argument of Los muertos indóciles seriously, that confronting the twin crises of capital and state violence requires the sustained putting-into-practice of sociality and comunalidad, then as writers, authors, and cultural workers shouldn’t this push us not only to write differently but also to consider the role of literary infrastructure within that writing’s production and circulation?

Politicizing infrastructure, a minor aesthetic tradition I would like to conclude by reflecting on the ground covered so far and offering one additional spur to further thought on infrastructure and contemporary writing. In the work of the Mexican cartonera Kodama and Cristina Rivera Garza we’ve seen two examples of writing-based practices whose literary politics move beyond the representational into what I have been calling the infrastructural. These practices challenge theorizations of autonomous literature in the way that they position themselves in an uneven, complicated literary terrain not solely defined by a national-transnational opposition and how they give more weight to the infrastructural interventions of their practice than the representational ones. One might think that a turn to the infrastructural would map neatly onto a neoliberal conceptualization of the state in which the last thirty years would be a period of state withdrawal or shrinking and, thus, the turn to infrastructure would be an attempt to replace the systems of production decimated by neoliberalism. Interestingly, the infrastructural turns in Mexican contemporary literary practices seem to be motivated not by the withdrawal of the state, but, partially in the case of Kodama, by its continued presence in literary systems of production and, in the case of Rivera Garza, by its necropolitical militarization.31 These turns then are not against the state’s absence, but its continued, deleterious presence. At the same time, these are infrastructural politics that expand beyond the frame of the state to target their interventions, albeit in limited ways, against capitalism as well. I believe the infrastructural cultural politics foregrounded in contemporary Mexican writing forms a part of a minor aesthetic tradition—one that has,

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throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, burrowed alongside a more easily seen politics of representation. This minor tradition of the politicization of infrastructure is perhaps more established in Mexico in the visual arts, as opposed to literature, where institutional critique (e.g., of the late 1970s los grupos) and the production of new institutions (e.g., Museo Salinas) are, while not central discourses, more common. Infrastructural cultural politics is a minor tradition, in part, because, particularly in its most radical formulations, a politics of infrastructure involves demands that can be difficult to sustain and to realize: changes in the distribution of and access to resources and in the structures of production and circulation of artistic commodities and works. One of the interesting aspects of contemporary Mexican writing is the degree to which these kinds of discussions have begun to put more and more aspects of infrastructure into play and have thus broadened the scope of possible cultural politics. Because of its episodic and subterranean nature, full-fledged theorizations of infrastructural cultural politics are hard to find, especially if one compares them with all the debates inside Mexico and out over the politics of various representational and formal strategies and techniques of literature. One place, however, from which it is possible to formalize this politicization of infrastructure into a concept is from Bertolt Brecht’s under-theorized term Umfunktionierung (refunctioning), and I’d like to turn here to offer a final thought on literature and infrastructure. Umfunktionierung was developed by Brecht alongside his other more wellknown aesthetic concepts of Gestus (gesture) and Verfremdung (defamiliarization). It is an aspect of Brecht’s work that has tended to be overlooked in the secondary criticism, but whose importance was grasped by Walter Benjamin, who deployed it in two of his most important essays, “The Author as Producer” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” This is how Benjamin deploys it in the author’s essay: Brecht has coined the phrase “functional transformation” (Umfunktionierung) to describe the transformation of forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia—an intelligentsia interested in liberating the means of production and hence active in the class struggle. He was the first to address to the intellectuals the far-reaching demand that they should not supply the production apparatus without, at the same time, within the limits of the possible, changing that apparatus in the direction of Socialism . . . Here I should like to confine myself to pointing out the decisive difference between merely supplying a production apparatus and changing it. I should like to preface my remarks

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on the New Objectivity with the proposition that to supply a production apparatus without trying, within the limits of the possible, to change it, is a highly disputable activity even when the material supplied appears to be of a revolutionary nature.32

Echoing Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” Benjamin develops, in the above section of the chapter, a distinction between cultural projects that supply content (critical or not) to the existing apparatus and those which seek to change the very apparatus itself (Umfunktionierung). To not merely supply, but to change: this is perhaps the north star of the politics of writing to come in Mexico and elsewhere, one that would center itself explicitly on a cultural politics of infrastructure, on the securing of a material basis for production and circulation, and on the aesthetics, forms of labor, and ethics possible from within a given infrastructure. This would be a form of cultural politics concerned, as cartoneras and Rivera Garza have been, not just with autonomy but with the infrastructures that produce the possibility for a determined relation between language and a public. My aim in this chapter has been to demonstrate how the cultural politics of contemporary Mexican writing forces us to reconsider the stakes of autonomy and post-autonomy discussions of literature. These projects forward a cultural politics that considers in complicated and historically nuanced ways the relationship between infrastructure and aesthetics. In addition, I have attempted to show how infrastructure gives us a tool for examining uneven landscapes of the production and distribution of literary works and enables us to approach literary works through a lens more flexible than that of the market or the commodity. Having recovered some aspects of this minor aesthetic tradition, I think it is possible to see that there are literary cultural politics that are based neither in critical distance or autonomy alone. Perhaps more importantly, if one takes the cartoneras and Rivera Garza’s interventions seriously, it appears that if writing is to have any meaning in the terminal crisis of present, it will have to consider and connect itself more deeply into this infrastructural aesthetic tradition.

Notes 1 Josefina Ludmer, “Literaturas posautónomas,” Ciberletras 17 (July 2007): n.p., http:// www.lehman.edu/ciberletras/v17/ludmer.htm (accessed February 10, 2017). 2 Carlos J. Alonso, “The Novel Without Literature,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 1 (2011): 3.

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3 Eugenio Di Stefano and Emilio Sauri, “Making It Visible: Latin Americanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today,” nonsite 13 (2014), n.p., http://nonsite.org/article/making-it-visible (accessed February 10, 2017). 4 Patrick Dove, Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016), 16. 5 Craig Epplin, Late Book Culture in Argentina (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 11. 6 The author would like to thank Ignacio Sánchez Prado and Daniel Nemser for their engagement with this essay. 7 Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002): 150 and Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis, and Contemporary Art (London: Mute Publishing, 2016), 45–47. 8 Aukje Van Rooden, “Reconsidering Literary Autonomy: From an Individual to a Relational Paradigm,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 2 (April 2015); Tony Bennett, “Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010); Andrew Goldstein, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Sarah Brouillette, “World Literature and Market Dynamics,” in Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets, ed. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen (New York: Routledge, 2015), 93. 10 Brouillette, “World Literature,” 93. 11 Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), 93. 12 Josefina Ludmer, “Lo que viene después,” n.p., ayp.unia.es/dmdocuments/litydes _doc03.pdf In the 1960s, in Argentina, books were national and were exported; the era of nations is also the age of national publishers. Borges, Rulfo, García Márquez, but also Cortázar, Puig and Onetti were published by Fondo de Cultura, Emecé, Sudamericana, Jorge Alvarez or Losada (and Seix Barral in Barcelona). National publishers who published between the 1940s and 1980s, and who exported literature, were absorbed in the 1990s by Spanish and global companies, and the latest news of this is that María Kodama signed with Random House-Mondadori for the complete work of Borges for something like two million euros. In the passage from the national publishers to the conglomerates, the fusion between the artistic-literary and the global economic becomes visible. 13 Epplin, Late Book Culture, 13. 14 Epplin, Late Book Culture, 13–14. 15 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 328.

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16 Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 17. 17 Bennett, “Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise,” 256. 18 Epplin, Late Book Culture, 62–63; Felipe Cala Buendía, Cultural Producers and Social Change in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 128; and Ksenija Bilbija, “The Nomadic Carto(nera)graphy of the Latin American Cartonera Publishing Houses,” in Akademia Cartonera: A Primer of Latin American Cartonera Publishers (2009), n.p., http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?type= HTML&rgn=div1&byte=47049176 (accessed February 10, 2017). 19 Jania Kudaibergen, “Las editoriales cartoneras y los procesos de empoderamiento en la industria creativa mexicana,” Cuadernos Americanos 152, no. 2 (2015): 131. 20 Aurelio Meza, “Editoriales Cartoneras: Hacia una posible genealogía,” n.p., http:// www.radiadormagazine.com/2014/04/editoriales-cartoneras-en-mexico.html (accessed February 10, 2017). The idea of Eloísa is not so much to dismantle but to stand up to the elitist and bureaucratized production of books. To a great extent, and although Cucurto dreamed that the Argentine State ‘would give a sizable charge’ to projects like cartonera publishing, a cartonera book is in direct competition with both the publishing market and the regulatory institutions. 21 Meza, “Editoriales Cartoneras,” n.p. The character of our cartonera is not strictly anti-institutional (since many of our presentations are promoted or sponsored by institutions such as the Tijuana Cultural Center and the Baja California Institute of Culture), although we have never thought of receiving funds of any kind that are not our own . . . We believe that state funding for an independent project gradually makes it lose its independence (economic, creative, or ideological). However, participation in institutional outreach channels (such as cultural centers) is sometimes unavoidable, even in places where independent artists and cultural institutions are highly polarized, as in Tijuana. 22 Meza, “Editoriales Cartoneras,” n.p. “a rupture of vertical relations of hierarchy.” 23 Meza, “Editoriales Cartoneras,” n.p. “writes, transcribes, diagrams, prints, binds, and paints.” In my ideal cartonera workshop, the author participates in the manufacture of his own book, learns to print it, assemble it and distribute it, and, in turn, has contact with those who will be his or her immediate audience, i.e., the other workshop participants. I think that the figure of the editor is effectively disrupted: he or she becomes a multifaceted individual who must learn, if not master, and at least know and manage various registers, skills, and disciplines. I have always said that a cartonera could be made by a single person who writes,

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transcribes, diagrams, prints, binds, and paints his or her own book (and, well, the case of Olga de Chile proves it). 24 Cristina Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles (Mexico: Tusquets, 2013), 19. “What kind of challenges does the exercise of writing face in an environment where the precariousness of work and horrible death are the stuff of everyday life?” 25 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 21. Faced with the structures and doings of the modern state, much of the writing of resistance in the second half of the twentieth century worked, in one way or another, with the Adornian motto in mind: “The resistance of the individual poem—read here: writing—against the cultural field of capitalist commodification in which language has become merely instrumental.” In order to escape from the instrumentalization of language, more characteristic of the commodity than of the critical creation, the most diverse writers used, amongst other strategies: indirect denunciation, the rejection of the transparency of the language or the idea of it as a mere vehicle of meaning, a certain distorted syntax, the constant criticism of referentiality, the undermining of the position of the lyric I, the continual defeat of the reader’s expectations. All of them, in fact, characterized modernisms or vanguards, either in the United States or Latin America, throughout the twentieth century. 26 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 22. “blood and screens [are] confused.” 27 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 22. 28 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 22–23. Far from making the other one’s own, returning it to the circuit of capital and authorship through strategies of appropriation so characteristic of the first confrontation of writing with the digital machines of the XXI century, this critical position is governed by a poetics of disappropriation that emphatically seeks to rid itself of the dominance of ownership, configuring communalities (comunalidades) of writing that, unveiling the collective work of the many, as in the Mixe and Zapotec anthropological notion from which they come, attend to the logics of mutual care and practices of the common good that challenge the naturalness and the apparent immanence of the languages of globalized capitalism. 29 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 45–46. Far from making the other one’s own, returning it to the circuit of capital and authorship through strategies of appropriation so characteristic of the first confrontation of writing with the digital machines of the XXI century, this critical position is governed by a poetics of disappropriation that emphatically seeks to rid itself of the dominance of ownership, configuring communalities

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30 Gopal Balakrishnan, “Speculations on the Stationary State,” New Left Review 59 (September–October 2009): 5 and Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 15. 31 A paradox of Mexican cultural production that is frequently overlooked is that the state-funded national arts system was created by the Salinas de Gortari government in 1989. 32 Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” 93.

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“Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG,” or Art and the Value of Innovation in the Contemporary Mexican Novel Emilio Sauri

In a brief piece published in the Financial Times in 2015, Valeria Luiselli wonders, “whether new writing formats have actually produced significantly new forms in literature . . . if we can really, already, speak of a 21st-century poetics.”1 As Luiselli makes clear, such questions not only recall the fervor with which many early twentieth-century figures like F. T. Marinetti, Eduardo González Martínez, and Mário de Andrade greeted the arrival of modern technologies. They are also central to the origins of her own 2013 novel La historia de mis dientes. As the product of various innovations made possible by digital technologies— innovations, that is, developed with an eye to creating a new form of literature by altering the way in which novels are produced and read—Luiselli’s novel would appear to embody an affirmative response to her questions. Originally commissioned for a curated show at Galería Jumex—an art gallery owned by the juice manufacturing giant Grupo Jumex—La historia de mis dientes began as a piece in installments written for the workers of the juice factory. Luiselli explains, “It relied heavily on internet-triggered procedures and results, from Google-mining to street map-surfing to literary shredding. The workers,” she continues, “then recorded themselves reading the work out loud, and sent me back their readings, together with comments and ideas, in an MP3 file.”2 They also provided photographs of Ecatepec—the suburb of Mexico City where both gallery and factory are located—collected in the back of the novel. Luiselli jokingly sums up her collaboration with the factory workers who provided comments, plotlines, and images with the formula “Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG.”3 And yet, while this form of collaboration would eventually give rise to La historia de mis dientes, she ultimately believes that “despite the 21st-century

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process, I’d written something very close to a Dickensian novel.”4 Presumably, this is also why she concludes that “I am not sure that the modern novel . . . has changed significantly since its invention by Cervantes in 1605, when Don Quixote was published,” and that today the “genre remains pretty much the same.”5 For Luiselli, then, this “21st-century process” ultimately fails to transform the genre, which is to say, fails to “make it new” in the way various modernisms had imagined possible by wedding technically innovative means to aesthetic ends. Nevertheless, “La idea,” she recounts elsewhere, “era escribir algo que estableciera un puente entre la gente que trabaja para la fábrica y la gente que colabora con la Colección, con el propósito de reflexionar sobre los mecanismos y discursos del arte contemporáneo, y la manera en que ésos se insertan en una red más amplia de relaciones con su entorno inmediato.”6 Or as she puts in the afterword to the English translation of her novel, “There is, naturally, a gap between the two worlds: gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice. How could I link the two distant but neighboring worlds, and could literature play a mediating role?”7 What, then, might Luiselli’s realization—that the novel “remains pretty much the same”—tell us not just about her efforts to bridge the gap between these two worlds—between, as we will see, artistic labor and commodity production—but about the gap itself? Ultimately, this chapter argues that what looks here like a failure from the viewpoint of modernist innovation, will ultimately turn out to be a success from the perspective of the contemporary Mexican novel. Indeed, while Luiselli’s commitment to innovation might be regarded as a repetition of the means and ends of various twentieth-century vanguards from Mexico, Latin America, and beyond, that commitment would instead appear to prove Adorno’s claim that “In the relation of modern artworks to older ones that are similar, it is their differences that should be elicited.”8 Importantly, Adorno offers this observation in the section of Aesthetic Theory (1970) titled “Situation,” in which innovation is conceived as the artwork’s primary means to transform the materials it works on, and in this sense, to produce the genuinely “new.” Adorno consequently insists that “If a possibility for innovation is exhausted, if innovation is mechanically pursued in a direction that has already been tried, the direction of innovation must be changed and sought in another dimension.”9 Yet, as Irmgard Emmelhainz observes, the decade that saw the publication of Aesthetic Theory also marked the beginning of an era in which “la corporaciones, la economía y el arte crítico/vanguardista comenzaron a

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compartir el valor de base de innovación, conocido también como innovación disruptiva o destrucción creativa.”10 The facility with which we can imagine the CEO of a Silicon Valley start-up—or of any corporation for that matter— claiming to change the “direction of innovation” suggests the degree to which innovation itself has become a shared value between art and commerce; and in Mexico, a company like Grupo Jumex seems to understand this value in terms similar to Adorno’s when it describes its mission as providing “al consumidor alimentos y bebidas de calidad mundial . . . innovando con tecnologías de punta en sus procesos, productos y envases, generando valor a los accionistas,” while identifying its vision with an attentiveness to “distintos segmentos de mercado” in order to remain “a la vanguardia” of this same technology of processes, products, and packaging.11 Thus, if Adorno worried whether this commitment to innovation could continue to safeguard artworks from what he describes as the “abstractness of the new . . . bound up with the commodity character of art,” it doesn’t take too much to see that we have even less reason to be optimistic today.12 For while “innovation,” as John Patrick Leary reminds us, more often than not refers to an “entrepreneurial capacity for inventiveness, creativity, and accumulation—the need to expand in order to thrive,” the contemporary art world appears to have redefined such business acumen into a kind of aesthetic sensibility.13 Consider what Sarah Brouillette has described as the fundamental role the figure of the artist has played in the rise of creative-economy discourses, which, in binding cultural, social, and economic goals together, signals the further ideological entrenchment of the free market as the ultimate horizon of all human endeavors that neoliberalism names. With the rise of the creative economy, Brouillette notes, “the very definition of innovation becomes inseparable from marketability,” reimagining “the original genius of Romantic ideology as one who has found the ideal commercial outlet for a given innovation.”14 At the same time, if local and national governments, along with specialized agencies like UNESCO (to say nothing of media outlets like the Financial Times), have all been quick to adopt such discourses with an eye to selling capitalism, they have, at the same time, done so by promoting the work of art as the creation of cultural producers working at a remove from the market. “The artist,” Brouillette argues, “has to appear as that person who is not quite amenable to her own participation in ‘the process of valorization,’ while her resistance to it is precisely what makes her work valuable.”15 To return to Adorno, then, changing the direction of innovation toward a version of the new that resists the commodity character of

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art is, from this perspective, precisely what the market wants, transforming the refusal to play the game into one more move in it. And this is no less apparent in Grupo Jumex’s patronage of the arts and the group that funds the gallery that commissioned Luiselli’s text: the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, which was established in 2001 by Eugenio López Alonso, the sole heir to the company. Widely considered the most important contemporary art collector in Latin America, López opened the Museo Jumex in 2013, exhibiting contemporary Latin American art, alongside celebrated international artists like Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, and Jeff Koons, among others.16 For a critic like Emmelhainz, then, the Museo Jumex “Es un enclave de poder para hospedar a la élite local sedienta del refinamiento y de la exclusividad que brindan el arte contemporáneo, al tiempo de ser escaparate de la ambición de la empresa a nivel global en el ámbito económico, social y artístico.”17 Yet, even while taking its name from the company whose $1.5 billion revenues subsidize it, Latin America’s largest private contemporary art space has taken great care to distance its artistic concerns from Grupo Jumex’s commercial interests. As Emmelhainz notes, “para el Museo Jumex, hacer visible un lazo directo entre su colección y la empresa sería de mal gusto, aunque sea ubicada la práctica de beber Jumex en sus oficinas.”18 “En este sentido,” she continues, “el Museo Jumex está a la vanguardia de las colecciones de arte corporativas, ya que adhiere a un profesionalismo, ética y estándares internacionales preestablecidos por el mundo del arte que tiende a mantener una distancia discreta de las corporaciones que lo subsidian.”19 The aesthetic value of a particular work or collection appears to be directly proportional to the degree of autonomy from the “process of valorization” it can claim for itself, even as it plays a central role in and remains subject to that same process. For this reason, Emmelhainz wonders, “Si el Estado y las corporaciones usan el arte como herramienta para avanzar sus intereses, teniendo en cuenta que la autonomía del mismo siempre es una cuestión política, ¿dónde queda la autonomía del arte?”20 That question, as it turns out, is just as central to Luiselli’s La historia de mis dientes, a novel which provides a possible response to Emmelhainz’s question, somewhat paradoxically, by insisting on “making visible a direct link” between “gallery and factory, artists and workers, artwork and juice,” and in this sense, runs counter to tendencies that have come to define the art world in Mexico, and the creative economy around the world. As the story of Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez—or “Carretera” (“Highway”) for short—La historia de mis dientes is deeply concerned with the question of what make a work of art valuable.

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Carretera, for his part, laments that “Ningún subastador, por diestra que tuviera la lengua para el canto trepidante de números, o por experto que fuera en la manipulación del valor emocional y comercial de las cosas, sabía decir nada acerca de sus objetos: porque no los entendía o porque no les importaban,” and in contrast, sees himself “antes que nada, un amante y coleccionista de buenas historias.”21 And indeed, Luiselli makes this concern all the more legible in her afterword to Christina MacSweeney’s English translation, where she asks: How do art objects acquire value not only within the specialized market for art consumption, but also outside its (more or less) well-defined boundaries? How does distancing an object or name from its context in a gallery, museum, or literary pantheon—a reverse Duchampian procedure—affect its meaning and interpretation? How do discourse, narrative, and authorial signatures or names modify the way we perceive artwork and literary texts?22

“The result of these shared concerns,” she continues, “is this collective ‘novelessay’ about the production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature.”23 These are Bourdieusian concerns, to be sure, directed at the functioning of the restricted field of production, in which symbolic goods— including what Brouillette would describe as “the author’s staging of himself as a brand”—are manufactured for those producers who establish the criteria of aesthetic value.24 Here, who the artist is becomes as important to, if not more important than, the work, irrespective of intentions or meaning; which is to say that, from this perspective, our perceptions of the writer as an autonomous, creative, and innovative figure is already implicated in any aesthetic judgment as such. Or to put it yet another way, we never read a novel like 2666; we always read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.25 But if the name of the game is name recognition, Luiselli is not only acutely aware of this situation, but also intends to turn on its head. In Mexico, this situation is somewhat complicated by cultural institutions funded by the state, particularly Conaculta, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, which subsidizes FONCA, the National Fund for Culture and Arts, as well as the Estímulo a la Producción de Libros that funded the publication of Luiselli’s novel. Such forms of government subsidies and state patronage for the arts have a long history in Mexico, where, according to Ignacio Sánchez Prado, literary production witnessed “un grado de consagración institucional sin paralelo en América Latina.”26 More importantly for our purposes, Sánchez Prado explains that Conculta emerges in 1989 as “un gesto de autonomización

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del campo de producción cultural hacia adentro del Estado,” in effect creating a “un espacio de autonomía relativa, dado que muchos de los funcionarios hacia dentro del Conculta son, de hecho, productores culturales.”27 Yet, if Conaculta is, in this sense, Bourdieu’s field of restricted production, critics like Sánchez Prado and Emmelhainz have shown how the existence and preservation of this field also work to buttress the neoliberal state’s claims to legitimacy. According to Emmelhainz, for example, “La forma de gobernar a través del poder mediático y de la creación de públicos es inseparable a la construcción de una clase de productores culturales—que existe por y para sí misma y para demostrar la salud pública del país—a través de un sistema de becas instaurado por el gobierno de Carlos Salinas de Gotari, el FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes).”28 It is this sphere, nonetheless, that Luiselli has in mind when she states that the point of the novel is “clavar una espina en la burbuja de la alta cultura.”29 To this end, the novel makes heavy use of the proper names—though not the identities—of literary greats from Mexico, Latin America, and the West, transforming figures such as Joyce, Proust, and Foucault into Carretera’s uncles James Sánchez-Joyce, Marcelo Sánchez-Proust, and Michel Sánchez-Foucault, while others become minor characters whose presence has no direct bearing on the narrative. For Luiselli, “Usar nombres de escritores—pero sólo sus nombres, no sus identidades—fue una forma de la apropiación, desplazamiento y descontextualización.”30 She continues, “La idea era tratar los nombres como objetos, y preguntarme sobre el valor simbólico asociado a esos nombresobjeto.”31 Appropriating, displacing, and decontextualizing, in this sense, becomes, for Luiselli, a way of rendering the names meaningless, in much the same way everyday objects like teeth or a set of dentures might be considered meaningless; and indeed, Luiselli’s use of names, her “reverse Duchampian procedure,” is the flipside of auctioneering, a discourse or narrative which manipulates the commercial and emotional value of lots by making them meaningful. Carretera achieves as much when he organizes an auction to sell off the teeth of figures such as Plato, St. Augustine, Virginia Woolf, and Borges, as if to highlight the degree to which the “value” of objects is determined by the technical skill of the seller; and in a certain sense, that is the case within the novel, though only insofar as we understand “value” here strictly as “price.” And indeed, we might say that any concern over the role that the figure of the artist plays within the creative economy is primarily a concern with price, not value, insofar as what

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is at stake is the degree to which the manipulation of what Luiselli’s narrator calls the “commercial and emotional value” of individual works is essentially a question about the manipulation of price. Crying lots does not alter the value of an object, even though it helps Carretera fetch a better price. In other words, whether we understand “price” here in terms of monopoly price (as in classical economics), or as being derived from the demand curve (as in neoclassical economics), the point is that, from the viewpoint of the auctioneer, the “value” is not determined by inputs. If this makes the manipulation of consumer desires all the more important, it is because value here has to do less with the object than with what the bidder or consumer sees or is made to see. And insofar as this entire operation hinges on making objects meaningful to others, meaning here has everything to do with what this same bidder or consumer believes. To the extent that Luiselli’s primary concern is the “production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature,” what La historia de mis dientes suggests is that neither is a product of the work or of the artist’s intentions, making the reader or consumer the arbiter not just of aesthetic value, but of the text’s meaning as well. To put the point this way is to begin to see what Luiselli has in mind when she concludes the afterword to MacSweeney’s translation by noting that “This book began as a collaboration, and I like to think of it as an ongoing one, where every new layer modifies the entire content completely.”32 Yet, the Spanish book is not only different from the English one, but also “includes an extra ‘chapbook’ written entirely by [her] translator,” making the translator, like the workers at the Jumex factory, another collaborator.33 Taken to its theoretical extreme, one could imagine that there are as many collaborators as there are readers, modifying the content with each reading. Hence, Luiselli’s conviction that “appropriating, displacing and decontextualizing” would allow her “to treat the names as objects,” and insofar as the factory workers are not working within the field of restricted production, the possible failure of name recognition would appear to make resignification possible, leaving it up to her readers/collaborators to decide what their presence in the text means. And yet, critics in Mexico saw this, and the novel on the whole, as “una broma de mal gusto.”34 Describing the novel as “mero parloteo,” or “mere chatter,” Roberto Pliego declares that “Es difícil mantener la serenidad cuando encontramos que un vecino se llama Julio Cortázar, el operador de pasteurización responde al nombre de Salvador Novo, el de servicio a clientes pasa por Joselito Vasconcelos, el pobre diablo que termina por conducir la novela es Beto Bálser,

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etcétera, etcétera.”35 For such critics, Luiselli’s failure to treat the proper names of such literary figures with requisite seriousness amounts to a failure to produce a serious work of art. At the same time, to ask why the author chose names like Cortázar, Novo, and Vasconcelos for such minor characters—to ask, in other words, what she meant by it—is already to treat these as something other than meaningless objects, which is to say that it misses the point: namely, that the names are chosen at random. Yet, if it is true that the names are randomly chosen, it is just as true that they are not, for this reason, meaningless; that is, Luiselli does intend their presence in the text to mean something, for as she makes clear, such arbitrariness becomes a means toward finding out, in her words, “what happens to a name when it is emptied of its traditional content,” when it is emptied, in effect, of meaning. So, while it doesn’t make any sense to ask why “a neighbor is named Julio Cortázar,” or why the policewoman is called Yuri Herrera, Luiselli suggests that it makes complete sense to ask why the names should appear in the novel in the first place. What we, following the art historian Michael Fried, might describe as the objecthood of the names serves here as a means toward achieving what the author understands as the whole point of the novel: a critique of the fact (as one critic puts it) that “la producción cultural no significa nada más que para los miembros de la tribu.”36 Responding to readers who wonder whether “usar nombres de escritores es un homenaje a esos escritores,” she explains, “No me sorprende: nuestro país es el país de los homenajes, de la solemnidad respecto de nuestro pasado y tradición intelectual . . . la ciudad de México es un mausoleo prematuro, de preferencia dedicado a los machos alfa de la clase criolla.”37 No doubt Luiselli is thinking here to the same critics who reviewed La historia de mis dientes, including Christopher Domínguez Michael, who identifies her with the “postmodernos,” the kinds of writers that “sienten y no piensan.”38 “Pero aquellos escritores nacidos temprano en el siglo XX,” according to Domínguez Michael, “recelaban del lector, lo agredían. Eso ya no es necesario y por ello una literatura como la de Luiselli es, en cierto sentido tradicional, muy femenina . . . les gusta gustar.”39 While it isn’t obvious which “traditional sense” Domínguez Michaels has in mind, the misogynist undertones are clear enough. My point, however, is that in order for Luiselli’s use of names to count as something other than a “tribute,” that is, in order to function as a critique of Mexican intelligentsia, and perhaps even of its misogyny, La historia de mis dientes must ultimately defeat the objecthood that she strives for by way of her “object-names.”40

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Here, we can also begin to understand why Luiselli ultimately treats her own efforts to innovate novelistic production as a failure. For in making arbitrariness part of what Nicholas Brown describes as the artwork’s “principle of selection,” it fails to render the objects it chooses meaningless.41 To put the point another way, the novel as a particular kind of art form can never produce objects that are just there (as is the case with, say, photography). This is perhaps especially true for La historia de mis dientes, a story of an auctioneer and collector of useless objects that seeks to allegorize the production of value and meaning in contemporary art and literature, but in so doing, makes the objects it chooses part of the story it is trying to tell. That is, to the extent that their appearance in the novel is not accidental, the objects Luiselli chooses are there for a reason, and in this sense, make them objects of interpretation (why did she put them there?) And this is no less the case with Luiselli’s efforts to innovate the genre by way of the procedure she describes as “Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG.” For even while she has no control over the comments, plotlines, and images the factory workers provide, these are all the intended effects of a work of art organized according to that procedure. Thus, although these elements comprise what Aaron Bady describes as an “insistently collaborative” novel that produces “an implicit rebuke to the idea of isolated artistic genius,” they nonetheless achieve something else: as products of that procedure, they are the legible marks of Luiselli’s intention.42 But this also means that La historia de mis dientes fails to create what Luiselli hopes will be a bridge between the factory and the people who collaborated with the Galería Jumex—fails to create a bridge, in other words, between the worlds of commodity production and of artistic production. Luiselli’s interest in the question of how “art objects acquire value” begins to draw connections, but while “value” can mean many things here, its proximity to the kinds of labor undertaken at the Jumex factory—all of which produce value in the rigidly economic sense—raises questions about the forms of labor that go into writing a novel, taking a photograph, or creating a work of art more generally. But we should not consider these as the same thing, and this disconnect becomes all the more apparent when considered from the standpoint of innovation, which is essential to capitalism’s subsumption of labor into a self-revolutionizing process of valorization. Central to capitalist accumulation everywhere, this tendency has intensified in Mexico over the course of the last two decades, under what Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui describe as a “neo-liberal agenda of an export-oriented, open economy and a state that would eliminate the social wage while increasing the state’s coercive power.”43 Labor’s precarious situation

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would be further exacerbated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as suggested by a Mexican economist cited in the Financial Times in 2016: “the depreciation of the peso, lower input costs [notably in energy] after the structural reforms and increasing productivity in the manufacturing sector give Mexico room to remain competitive in the US market,” making “labor costs in Mexico 40 per cent lower than in China.”44 No doubt remaining competitive demands innovations, particularly in the form of manufacturing’s technical capacity and automation—what Grupo Jumex calls remaining “a la vanguardia en tecnología de procesos, productos y envases”—but the kind that must ultimately drive wages down. And this is just as true for cultural producers, as Emmelhainz observes, when she notes that in Mexico, “el artista contemporáneo encarna la figura neoliberal del trabajador emprendedor precario, gestor de su propio capital humano.”45 But as Brown also shows, “genuinely artistic labor cannot be really subsumed—not especially, but by definition”; unlike the kinds of labor that go into manufacturing juices at Jumex that have no doubt been automated and deskilled over time with an eye to becoming the “remaining at the forefront” in production, innovation within painting, photography, or the novel does not make the individual artwork any more profitable than another, that is, does not alter the process of valorization.46 Rather, innovation in the work of art always amounts to the same thing: new ways of making meaning. Which is not to say that artistic innovation cannot be profitable, as Brouillette shows in her account of literature and the creative economy. Coming at the same problem from a different direction, Brown argues that while “genuinely artistic labor cannot be really subsumed,” the problem “is rather markets, which threaten to supplant aesthetic judgment with market judgment, a usurpation that would have the effect of ‘artists who produce commodities for the market’ crowding out ‘those who do not.’” “It’s not,” he concludes, “that art is uncommodified because artistic labor resists subsumption under capital; it is rather that artistic labor is unsubsumed because aesthetic judgment presupposes something in the artwork that is extraeconomic.”47 If the distinction between the two kinds of artists that Brown invokes appears schematic, it is worth noting that the point is not that an individual artist cannot be both: there is no contradiction in an author like Luiselli committing to both of these positions. Rather, the point is that the distinction between these two positions is itself fundamental to the belief that there is “something in the artwork that is extra-economic.” Aesthetic judgment—here, synonymous with interpretation—presumes there is something in the text that makes it more than

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just another commodity produced for the market, a meaning that amounts to something more than the attempt to meet consumer demand. And it is extra-economic dimension that transforms Luiselli’s failure not just to innovate the genre but to escape questions of meaning and interpretation as well that will turn out to be a kind of success. In the context of Mexico’s “actually existing” government subsidy for the arts, Luiselli’s artistic innovation might only be read as a form of position-taking within the field of restricted production. But within a situation marked by the absence of such government supports, one in which it is self-evident that nothing concerning art’s distance from the market is self-evident anymore, the artwork’s assertion of form and meaning becomes an attack on this common sense.48 This is a difference that makes all the difference for the politics of the novel, as MacSweeney’s translation signals, when Carretera (here Highway) notes, “I’d realized that there was a gap in our profession,” for “There was not a single auctioneer . . . who was able to say anything worth saying about his objects, because he didn’t understand or wasn’t interested in them as such, only in their exchange value.”49 Carretera resolves to “reform the art of auctioning” by means of a kind of innovation, the development of a new method which, departing from his teacher’s auctioneering methods, he calls “allegoric.”50 He concludes his reflections by noting, “I wasn’t just a lowly seller of objects but, first and foremost, a lover and collector of good stories, which is the only honest way of modifying the value of an object.”51 Importantly, MacSweeney here departs from Luiselli’s text, adding the phrases “only in their exchange value” and “modifying the value of an object,” phrases that appear nowhere in the Spanish original. Considering Luiselli herself notes that “the Spanish book is . . . different from the English one,” this discrepancy between the Spanish original and English translation is hardly surprising.52 And yet, the decision to revise and rewrite the novel in this way suggests an eagerness to highlight an aspect that exists perhaps only implicitly in the Spanish version: namely, that allegory not only requires us to conceive of all objects appearing in the text as meaningful, but in so doing, refuses to render the meaning or value of the text into a question of readerly or consumer preference. Carretera believes his allegorics were “postcapitalist, radical recycling auctions that would save the world from its existential condition as the garbage can of history,” and Luiselli’s novel ultimately suggests that this is because allegory introduces questions about meaning and value that mark, as Brown puts it, a form of aesthetic judgment that presupposes something in the artwork that is extra-economic and, in this sense,

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autonomous.53 And it is for this reason that, in The Story of My Teeth, the value of innovation lies in its failure, insofar as the failure to produce a meaningless work of art marks the success of a postcapitalist imagination.

Notes 1 Valeria Luiselli, “Openings: Dickens + MP3 ÷ Cervantes – Wikipedia = 21st-century novel,” Financial Times, April 1, 2016: https://www.ft.com/ content/47f6975a-f72d-11e5-96db-fc683b5e52db (accessed August 1, 2017). 2 Luiselli, “Openings,” n.p. 3 Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, trans. Christina MacSweeney (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2015), 193. It ought to be noted that Luiselli’s afterword appears only in MacSweeney’s translation. 4 Luiselli, “Openings,” n.p. 5 Ibid. 6 Eve Gil, “Valeria Luiselli: Me interesaba clavar una espina en la burbuja de la alta cultura,” Siempre!, June 28, 2014: http://www.siempre.com.mx/2014/06/valeria -luiselli-me-interesaba-clavar-una-espina-en-la-burbuja-de-la-alta-cultura/ (accessed August 1, 2017). “The idea was to write something that would create a bridge between the factory workers and the people who collaborated with the Collection, with the intention of reflecting on the mechanisms and discourses of contemporary art, and the manner in which these insert themselves in a wider network of relations than its immediate context.” Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 7 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 191. 8 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19. 9 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 22. 10 Irmgard Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común. La reconversión neoliberal de México (México, D.F.: Paradiso, 2016), 137. “corporations, economics and critical/ avant-garde art all began to share the core value of innovation, also known as disruptive innovation or creative destruction.” 11 Grupo Jumex, “Nuestra gente,” 2015: http: //grupojumex.mx/section/our-people (accessed August 1, 2017). “the consumer with world-class food and beverage . . . innovating with leading technologies in its processes, products and packaging, generating value for shareholders”; “different market segments”; “at the forefront.” 12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21. 13 John Patrick Leary, “1. Innovation,” Keywords for the Age of Austerity, April 3, 2015: https: //theageofausterity.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/keywords-for-the-age -of-austerity-1-innovation/ (accessed August 1, 2017). Further, we ought to recall

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that, for a critic like Fredric Jameson, this exhaustion of innovation’s capacity for renewal was itself the mark of postmodern pastiche, which presents us with “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible,” and “all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.” Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern (London: Verso, 1998), 7. Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 23. Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy, 35. Ivan Castano, “Art-Collecting Mexican Juice Scion Casts Eye on Homegrown Artists,” Forbes, March 28, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ivancastano/2013/03/28/ mexican-juice-scion-turned-contemporary-art-super-collector-casts-eye-onhomegrown-artists/#b16ccf02a491 (accessed August 1, 2017). Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 141. “is an enclave of power for hosting the local elite thirsting for the refinement and exclusivity that contemporary art offers, while being a showcase for the ambition of the company at a global level in the economic, social and artistic spheres.” Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 138. “for the Museo Jumex, making visible a direct link between its collection and the company would be in bad taste, even if the practice of drinking Jumex in its offices is well established.” Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 138. “In this sense the Jumex Museum is at the forefront of corporate art collections, as it adheres to a professionalism, ethics and international standards pre-established by the art world that tends to maintain a discreet distance from the corporations that subsidize it.” Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 151. “If the State and corporations use art as a tool to advance their interests, taking into account that the autonomy of the same is always a political question, where is the autonomy of art?” Valeria Luiselli, La historia de mis dientes (México, D.F.: Sextopiso, 2010), 34. “There was not a single auctioneer, adept though he might be in the frantic calling of numbers, or expert in the manipulation of the commercial and emotional value of the lots, who was able to say anything worth hearing about his objects, because he didn’t understand or wasn’t interested in them as such.” Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 22. Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 193–194. Ibid. Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy, 10. Indeed, Luiselli draws on Bolaño’s fame to make this exact point in her earlier novel, Los ingrávidos (México, D.F.: Sexto Piso, 2011), in an exchange, for example, between the narrator and her boss, the publisher Mr. White: “¿No fuiste amiga de Bolaño?, preguntó White a gritos desde su escritorio . . . No, White, nunca lo conocí. Pues lástima. ¿Y oíste, Minni?, tenemos el honor de trabajar con la única latinoamericana que no fue amiga de Bolaño. ¿Quién es ése, chief?, preguntó Minni

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Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2014), 15. 26 Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “La ‘generación’ como ideología cultural: el FONCA y la institucionalización de la ‘narrativa joven’ en México,” Explicación de textos literarios 36, no. 1–2 (2007–2008): 13. “a scale of institutional consecration unparalleled in Latin America.” 27 Sánchez Prado, “La ‘generación,’” 13. “gesture toward the autonomization of the field of cultural production inside the State”; “space of relative autonomy, given that many of the functionaries inside Conculta are, in fact, cultural producers.” 28 Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 53. “Governing through media power and the creation of publics is inseparable from the construction of a class of cultural producers—which exist by and for itself as a demonstration of the public health of the country—through a system of scholarships established by the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, FONCA (National Fund for Culture and Arts).” 29 Gil, “Valeria Luiselli,” n.p. “to stick a thorn in the bubble of high culture.” Meanwhile, it is worth remembering, as Sánchez Prado notes elsewhere that “Through this system, most Mexican writers have a direct economic relationship to the state, which leads to frequent accusations of co-optation and to a problematic contradiction when intellectuals seek to position themselves as public figures trying to critique the political regime.” Ignacio Sánchez Prado, “Mexican Literature in the Neoliberal Era,” in A History of Mexican Literature, ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Anna M. Nogar, and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 367. 30 Gil, “Valeria Luiselli,” n.p. “Using the names of writers—but only their names, not their identities—was a way of appropriating, displacing and decontextualizing.” 31 Gil, “Valeria Luiselli,” n.p. “The idea was to treat the names as objects, and ask myself about the symbolic value associated with those name-objects.” 32 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 195. 33 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 194. 34 Roberto Pliego, “Mero parloteo ‘La historia de mis dientes,’” Milenio, February 15, 2014: http://www.milenio.com/cultura/Mero-parloteo-historia -dientes_0_245375817.html (accessed August 1, 2017). “tasteless joke.”

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35 Pliego, “Mero parloteo,” n.p. “It is difficult to remain calm when we discover that a neighbor is named Julio Cortázar, the pasteurization operator responds to the name Salvador Novo, the guy from customer service goes by Joselito Vasconcelos, the poor devil that ends up organizing the novel is Beto Bláser, etcetera, etcetera.” 36 Jorge Téllez, “La otra historia de mis dientes,” Letras Libres, February 19, 2016: http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/la-otra-historia-mis-dientes. “cultural production is significant to no one but the members of the tribe.” Michael Fried elaborates on what he describes as the artwork’s “objecthood” in his seminal 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood” (in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]: 148–172 ). 37 Gil, “Valeria Luiselli,” n.p. “using the names of writers is a tribute to those writers”; “I’m not surprised: our country is the country of tributes, of solemn respect for our past and our intellectual tradition . . . Mexico City is a premature mausoleum, dedicated by choice to the alpha males of the criollo class.” 38 Christopher Domínguez Michael, “Dos cajas de Valeria Luiselli,” Letra Libres, February 9, 2014: http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico-espana/libros/dos-cajas -valeria-luiselli (accessed August 1, 2017). “postmodern”; “feel and do not think.” 39 “But those writers born in the early twentieth century”; “distrusted the reader, they attacked him. That is no longer necessary and for this reason a literature like Luiselli’s is, in a certain traditional sense, very feminine . . . it likes liking things.” Domínguez Michael, “Dos cajas,” n.p. 40 Here, we might note how the concern with what will be described below as “positiontaking” within the field of restricted production will make such questions about identity important in a way that they cannot be for a concern with the artwork’s status as an object of interpretation. To put it another way, although who the author is as, say, a white, Mexican woman is relevant to a perspective we might identify with Brouillette’s critique of the creative economy, it remains wholly irrelevant to questions about the artwork’s status as an intentional object and its meaning. 41 Nicholas Brown, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Real Subsumption under Capital,” nonsite, March 13, 2012: http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-work-of-art-in -the-age-of-its-real-subsumption-under-capital (accessed August 1, 2017). 42 Aaron Bady, “Bolaño’s Teeth: Valeria Luiselli and the Renaissance of Mexican Literature,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 4, 2015: https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/bolanos-teeth-valeria-luiselli-and-the-renaissance-of -mexican-literature/ (accessed August 1, 2017). 43 Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui, Continental Crucible: Big Business, Workers and Unions in the Transformation of North America (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2013), 43. 44 Pan Kwan Yuk, “Want Cheap Labour? Head to Mexico, Not China,” Financial Times, January 14, 2014: https://www.ft.com/content/bddc8121-a7a0-3788-a74c -cd2b49cd3230 (accessed August 1, 2017).

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45 Emmelhainz, La tiranía del sentido común, 151. “The contemporary artist embodies the neoliberal figure of the precarious entrepreneurial worker, manager of his own human capital.” 46 Nicholas Brown, “What We Worry about When We Worry about Commodification: Reflections on Dave Beech, Julian Stallabrass, and Jeff Wall,” nonsite #19, April 2016: http://nonsite.org/editorial/what-we-worry-about-when-we-worry-aboutcommodification (accessed August 1, 2017). This is, in many ways, the claim at the heart of David Beech’s Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Leiden: Brill, 2015), though the point of Brown’s account is to demonstrate why commodification is nonetheless a problem for the work of art today. 47 Brown, “What We Worry About,” n.p. 48 At the same time, the difference here is one of degree rather than kind. MacSweeney’s English translation of Luiselli’s novel, The Story of My Teeth, is published by Coffee House Press, which, in addition to receiving grants and donations from private donors and programs, also receives funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant. 49 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 22 (my emphasis). 50 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 22–23. 51 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 23 (my emphasis). 52 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 194. 53 Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, 157.

Notes on Contributors Ericka Beckman is Associate Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), a study of the role played by literature in imagining the region’s first major experiment with capitalist modernization. She is currently writing a book on twentieth-century Latin American literature and rural modernity, principally in relation to agricultural mechanization, urban out-migration, and reforms to land-tenure systems. Bruno Bosteels is Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror (Verso, 2014). Currently he is completing two new book projects, Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso) and The Mexican Commune (Duke University Press). Roberto Cruz Arzabal is a PhD candidate in the Literature Graduate program of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He also serves as Adjunct Professor in the Hispanic Literature undergraduate program in the same university. He is a member of “Laboratory of Extended Literatures and other Materialities” and of the “Seminar of Contemporary Mexican Poetry.” He is a well-known literary critic thanks to his work in Mexican magazines like Tierra Adentro and La Tempestad. During 2015, he participated as curator and academic coordinator of Plataformas de la imaginación, an interinstitutional project about E-Lit en México. Carolyn Fornoff is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Lycoming College. Her broad research interests include twentieth-century Mexican and Central American literature and film, and the intersections between ecocriticism, gender studies, and affect theory. Her essays on Latin American literature have appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Istmo, Variaciones Borges, and the Cambridge

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History of Latin American Women’s Literature. She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Species Sadness: Race, Gender, and Animality in Mexican and Central American Literature. Rebecca Janzen is a leading scholar in disability and religious studies in the Mexicanist fields. She is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina, where she has just arrived after teaching in Bluffton University. Her current work, funded by a Newberry short-term fellowship, explores the intersection of legal and literary discourse as it pertains to minority communities in Mexico. It builds on previous work on excluded populations in Mexico. Her first book, The National Body in Mexican Literature: Collective Challenges to Biopolitical Control, explored images of disability and illness, and her second book focuses on religious minorities. This manuscript, Liminal Sovereignty: Mennonites and Mormons in Mexican Culture, is under contract with SUNY Press. It has been funded by the Plett Foundation, the Kreider Fellowship at Elizabethtown College, and the C Henry Smith Peace Trust. Pedro Ángel Palou is Professor of Latin American Studies and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Tufts University. Prior to moving to the United States he served as Minister of Culture of the State of Puebla in Mexico, and as President of the University of the Americas-Puebla. He is the author of over thirty books of fiction, essay, and scholarship, for which he has won various awards. He is part of the writers collective known as the Crack, and, in recent years, has become a leading author of historical fiction. His scholarly publications include La casa del silencio, aproximación en tres tiempos a Contemporáneos, winner of the Francisco Xavier Clavigero National Prize in History, Escribir en México durante los años locos, and La culpa de México. La invención de un país entre dos guerras. His most recent books are El fracaso del mestizo (recently translated into English as Mestizo Failure(s), Cinema, Identity and Literature in XXth Century Mexico) and Tierra Roja, a historical novel about President Lázaro Cárdenas. Lilia Adriana Pérez Limón received her doctorate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with the dissertation Precarious Attachments to Modernity: Interrogating the Mexican Body Politic through Performative Practices on Mexican contemporary culture with a focus on literature, theater, visual culture,

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performance, and cinema. Her thesis explores how Mexican cultural production has increasingly turned to an alternative political imaginary rooted outside normative frameworks of national identitarian belonging. Her work explores productions of affect in the context of contemporary Mexico. Her area of interest centers on the discourse of visuality and (in)visibility of the abject and queer bodies/corpses along with contemporary theories concerned with (dis)abled bodies and the embodiment of violence. Additionally, she is interested in conceptions of illness, disability, sound, and affect theories. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Oklahoma-Norman. José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra is Associate Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies of the University of Houston. After his monograph Historias que regresan on twentieth-century Mexican literature, he published the lyrical essay Pozos. La renconciliación, his book on contemporary Latin American literature and friendship, is forthcoming. He has coedited A History of Mexican Literature with Ignacio Sánchez Prado and Anna Nogar. Ana Sabau is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Latin America (primarily Mexico) and includes both written and visual culture. She is interested in indigenous studies, the intersection between religion and political thought, and the intertwining of science, technology, and culture. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively titled Revolutions and Revelations: Political Imaginations in 19th Century Mexico that traces different theories of equality by looking at how the concept of “revolution” changed over time throughout the long nineteenth century. The project represents an effort to unsettle traditional, nationalist narratives of nineteenth-century Mexican history, political thinking, and culture. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of six books, more recently of Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal World Market and the Question of World Literature (2018). He has edited and coedited eleven scholarly collections, the most recent of which are A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016) and

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Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (forthcoming in 2018). He has published over eighty scholarly articles on Mexican literature, culture, and film, and on Latin American cultural theory. His current book project, entitled Popular Cosmopolitanism, is a study of genre, working-class cosmopolitanism, and capitalist modernization in Mexican cinema. Emilio Sauri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research focuses on literature and visual art from Latin America and the United States, and reads these in relation to the development of the global economy from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentyfirst century. He has coedited a collection of essays titled Literary Materialisms (Palgrave, 2013), as well as a special issue of the journal nonsite (2014) on contemporary Latin American literature and theory. He is currently at work on another coedited volume of essays titled Literature and the Global Contemporary (Palgrave, forthcoming), and a monograph on literature and the ends of autonomy in the Americas (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). Christina Soto van der Plas is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She received her PhD in Spanish Literature at Cornell University in 2016. She has been part of several research and editorial projects and published book chapters and essays on Mexican, Caribbean, and Southern Cone literature. Recently, she edited the volume Imágenes y Realismos en América Latina. She translated into Spanish The Odd One In and Why Psychoanalysis by Alenka Zupančič. Her research and book project A Poetics of Transliterature, centers on the work of twentieth-century Latin American authors such as José Emilio Pacheco, Macedonio Fernández, and Eduardo Lalo, among others, to propose that literature is a kind of thought and, as such, is able to traverse geographies, genres, identities, and aesthetic categories by voiding and avoiding three core components of modern narrative: plot, character, and time as cause and effect. In her current research projects, she is focusing on the material support of writing in relation to literary forms, the corpus, project, and definition of a “Latin American philosophy” (from the nineteenth century onward), and the relationship between madness and critical thought. Laura Torres-Rodríguez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico (2006), and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania

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(2012). Her current book project Diseños transpacíficos: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia shows how Orientalism has played a fundamental role in articulating Mexican intellectual discourses, especially in the context of debates about modernity, nationalism, and state consolidation from 1900 to its recent developments. Her most recent publications include “Orientalizing Mexico: Estudios Indostánicos and the Place of India in José Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic Race” (2015) and “José Juan Tablada y la modernización transpacífica” (2016). Brian Whitener is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Alabama. His recent projects include Face Down (Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, 2013), and as a participant in the translations: Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks, 2009), The Unreal, Silver-Plated Book (Departamento de Ficción, 2011), and The Empire of Neomemory (ChainLinks, 2013). Brian is currently finishing a book about financialization and culture in Mexico and Brazil. Oswaldo Zavala is Professor of Contemporary Latin American Literature at The Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (NCSRLL-UNC Press, 2015). He coedited with Viviane Mahieux Tierras de nadie: el norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (México: Tierra Adentro, 2012) and with José Ramón Ruisánchez (University of Houston) Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (Barcelona: Candaya, 2011).

Index Abrams, Philip 235–6 absential 7, 58, 60–8, 70 n.15 abundance 44, 48 accumulation 14, 17–18, 23, 28 n.19, 34, 39–40, 42, 49, 79, 116, 145, 281, 287 accursed share 162–4, 166 Adorno, Theodor W. 191 n.14, 280–1 Aesthetic Theory 280 Minima Moralia 191 n.14 aesthetic value 282–5, 288–90 aestheticization 85–6, 243, 246–51 aesthetics 10, 76, 82, 104, 120, 124–7, 135 n.32, 136 n.38, 257 n.26, 261–3, 272–4, 280–1 affect 2, 9, 17, 57, 88, 94–5, 98–9, 102–4, 107, 211–23. See also ordinary affects Agamben, Giorgio 87, 102, 199, 233 Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life 199 The Open 102 Aguayo, Sergio 227–8, 234 Aguilar, Luis Miguel 68 Aguilar Mora, Jorge 7, 76, 81–5, 87 Ahmed, Sara 16–17, 19 Alaimo, Stacy 101 allegory 80, 82, 85, 90, 125, 214, 289–90 Anderson, Mark 96 appropriation 33–49, 95, 118, 124, 150, 254 art 279–90 artistic labor 279–90 Astorga, Luis 237 autonomy 10, 16–17, 93, 104, 261–74, 282 Azuela, Mariano 56, 57, 78, 80, 81, 83, 87, 97, 103, 148–50, 217–18, 222 Badiou, Alain 5, 8, 63, 171–2, 194 n.2 The Age of the Poets 171 Theory of the Subject 63 baldiaje 140, 144, 147

Barthes, Roland 82, 184, 186. See also reality effect Bartra, Roger 234 Bataille, Georges 173 n.9. See also accursed share Beckett, Samuel 65, 179, 183, 191, 192 Beckman, Ericka 8, 79 becoming 96, 104, 107, 161 Benjamin, Walter 8, 87, 114, 117–22, 128, 180, 186–7, 258 n.47, 263, 273–4 “The Author as Producer” 273 “The Storyteller” 8, 87, 117–22, 186–7 Bennett, Jane 95, 104 Bennett, Tony 262, 264 Berardi, Franco 255 n.6. See also Bifo Bernal, Rafael 13, 18–22 El complot mongol 18 En diferentes mundos 18–22 Bifo. See Franco Berardi bildungsroman 8, 96, 99, 141, 145 biopolitics 13, 24, 84, 198–201, 245, 251 Birns, Nicholas 2 Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos 118 Blanco, José Joaquín 69 n.6 blood 161–2, 172, 204–5 body 7, 9, 15–16, 18–22, 26, 34–6, 50, 94–5, 101–6, 131, 161, 180, 181, 183, 185–7, 197–206, 211–26, 243–55, 270 Bolaño, Roberto 70 n.13, 283, 291 n.25 boredom 102–3 Bourdieu, Pierre 88, 264, 283–4 Bow, Brian 235 Bowden, Charles 228 boxing 197–206 Boyer, Cristopher 94 Brecht, Bertolt 193–273 Breu, Christopher 9, 199–206 Brouillette, Sarah 255 n.5, 262, 281, 283, 288, 293 n.40 Brown, Nicholas 287–9

Index Brown, Wendy 234 Butler, Judith 194 n.4 Campobello, Nellie 7, 75–88, 97 Cartucho 75–88 capital, capitalism, capitalist (mode of production) 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 17–18, 20, 23, 33–4, 39–40, 42, 49, 60, 77–80, 115, 119–20, 124, 128, 150, 187, 192, 199, 243–5, 249, 254, 262, 269–72, 281, 287–90 Cárdenas, Lázaro 139–42, 146–9 Carlota of Habsburg 189–95 Carr, Barry 228 cartoneras 10, 262, 265–9, 271–4 Caruth, Cathy 185, 187 Castellanos, Rosario 8, 57, 139–58 Balún Canán 139–58 Chang, Jason Oliver 25 Chiapas 139–58 Chomsky, Noam 235 citizenship 23, 30 n.47, 212, 214, 219, 223 civil society 9, 229–39 Coetzee, J.M. 284 commodity 19, 42–3, 46, 155 n.9, 261–4, 274, 280–1, 287–9 commons 35, 40–9 Conaculta (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) 263, 283–4 Connell, Raewyn 3 contemporary art 279–90 contingency 8, 164–9, 231, 238 Cornejo Polar, Antonio 79 Crack (literary movement) 201 Critchley, Simon 182, 192 Cronon, William 95 Cruz Arzabal, Roberto 4–5 Cuéllar, José Tomás de 33–49 Cuesta, Jorge 56 Cvetkovich, Ann 211, 214–18, 221 Darío, Rubén 55, 57 Deacon, Therence W. 70 n.15 Dean, Mitchell and Kaspar Villadsen 230 decolonization 8, 122–7 deconstruction 2, 8, 114–15, 128–30

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Del Paso, Fernando 188–93 Noticias del Imperio 188–93 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 8, 95, 169, 250, 251, 254. See also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 95, 254 A Thousand Plateaus 95, 254 demetaphorization 127–30. See also metaphor Derrida, Jacques 2, 8, 113–15, 127–30, 181 n.12, 229, 231 Heidegger, the Question of Being 129 desert 105–7 desire 7, 16, 61, 65–7, 162, 218–20, 223, 285 destruction 22, 64, 119, 123, 129–30, 141, 152, 154, 162–7, 172–3, 290 n.10 Díaz, Porfirio 28 n.17, 47, 84, 140, 189 n.5 Dirección Federal de Seguridad 227 disability 3, 9, 211–23 disidentification 215–16, 222–3 dispossession 35, 40, 49, 115, 140, 151, 245, 248, 257 n.26 Dolar, Mladen 172 Domínguez Michael, Christopher 286 Dove, Patrick 58, 71 n.18, 261 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) 93–5 drive 8, 60, 66–7, 105, 162–7 Durand, Manuel 56 Ecatepec 279 economic value 106, 253, 279–90 Eisenstein, Sergei 101, 109 embodiment envy 197–206 Emmelhainz, Irmgard 5, 10, 280–4, 288, 290 La tiranía del sentido común 5 enchantment 103–7 enclosure(s) on the common 38–9, 49 environment 46, 93–107 Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando 236 Esposito, Roberto 229–31 Estímulo a la Producción de Libros 283 event 7, 64, 73 n.30, 80, 86–7, 107, 165, 167, 177–87, 246, 250 extimacy 25–6 Eyers, Tom 7, 76–8, 82

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failure 10, 30 n.43, 65–7, 90 n.20, 99, 103, 106, 125, 182, 217, 280, 286–90 Faulkner, William 142, 145–8, 155 n.9, 183 Felman, Shoshana 183, 187 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín 6, 13–20 The Mangy Parrot 13–20 Fisher, Philip 103 Fonca (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) 203, 283–4 form (literary) 7, 8, 75–88, 113, 146, 159–73, 177–92, 244–55, 279–80 Foucault, Michel 2, 198–9, 229–33, 288 Security, Territory, Population 232–3 Fox, Vicente 240 n.2 French, Jennifer 96, 106 Freud, Sigmund 66, 67, 115, 181, 184–5, 205 Fried, Michael 286 Fuentes, Carlos 57, 96, 188 Fuentes, Fernando de 97 Galloway, Alexander R. 244, 255 n.9, 256 n.10 García Manríquez, Hugo 9, 244, 251–3 Anti-Humboldt 251–4 Godden, Richard 142, 146–8, 150 Gollnick, Brian 145, 156 n.10 González Guerrero, Francisco 56 governmentality 223–39 Gramsci, Antonio 230–3 Granados, Pável 70 n.12 Groys, Boris 250–3 Guattari, Félix 95, 243, 247, 254, 261. See also Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari Chaosmosis 243, 247 Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel 41, 47–9, 53–7 Guzmán, Martín Luis 97, 103 hacienda 140, 144–5, 152 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 229–31 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 37, 59, 143, 145 n.31 Philosophy or Right 37 hegemony 60, 77–9, 124, 140, 230–1 Heidegger, Martin 58, 70 n.18, 102, 114, 120, 127–30

Heraclitus 162–4 Herbert, Julián 6, 13, 22–6 La casa del dolor ajeno 22–6 Herr, Michael 183 Herrera, Yuri 239, 286 Humboldt, Alexander von 47 Illich, Ivan 45–6 illness memoir 215, 219 imperialism 13–17 infrastructure 7, 10, 33–49, 106, 222, 261–74 innovation 10, 198, 279–90 interface 243–55 Izquierdo, Lucas 87–8 Jackson Albarrán, Elena 95 Jameson, Fredric 80, 82, 125 Jiménez Aguirre, Gustavo 68 n.2 Kant, Immanuel 104 Karatani, Kojin 72 n.24 Kornbluh, Anna 76, 85 Krauze, Enrique 234 labor 8, 10, 13, 23, 31 n.47, 35–40, 42–4, 63, 77, 139–54, 170–1, 203, 262, 268, 274, 279–90 Lacan, Jacques 5, 25, 58, 65–6, 167, 185–6 From an Other to the other 25 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 167 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe 229–35 Hegemony and Social Strategy 139–54, 229–35 ladino/ladina 8, 139–54 land 33–49, 139–54, 238, 252 “land and liberty” 8, 93, 95, 99 land reform 139–54 landscape 8, 44, 47, 93–107 Larkin, Brian 53 n.45, 264 Larsen, Neil 124–6 latency 182–4 Latour, Bruno 178 law 33–49, 77, 86–7, 111–12, 117, 129, 145, 200, 232–3, 252 Legorreta Díaz, María del Carmen 143, 147

Index Legrás, Horacio 78, 82, 90 n.24, 95, 96, 97, 105 Lemus 201–2 liberalism 78, 82, 90 n.24, 95, 97, 105 literary form. See form (literary) Loaeza, Guadalupe 70 n.12 Locke, John 35, 38 López Alonso, Eugenio 282 López Cuadras, César 9, 229, 236–9 Cuatro muertos por capítulo 236–9 Luck, Chad 34, 37 The Body of Property 34 Ludmer, Josefina 127, 261, 263, 264 Luiselli, Valeria 1, 279–90 La historia de mis dientes/The Story of My Teeth 279–90 Los ingrávidos/Faces in the Crowd 283 Lund, Joshua K. 141 McCarthy, Tom 182 McCoy, Alfred 228 McGowan, Todd 76, 88 MacSweeney, Christina 283, 285, 290, 294 n.48. See also Luiselli, Valeria Madero, Francisco I. 98 manufacturing 16, 198, 267, 279, 283, 288 market 146, 192, 239, 250, 254, 261–7, 274, 281–3, 288–90 Marx, Karl 39, 274 Capital 39 masculinity 56, 82, 96, 99, 102, 107 materiality 7, 9, 76 Maximilian of Habsburg 189–93 Mazzoni, Guido 194 n.5 Mbembe, Achille 233 mediation 79, 124, 241 n.28, 243–51 medium 244–6 memory 8, 25, 62, 78–88, 111–13, 117, 128, 150, 186–7, 249 Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso 56, 69 n.10 Mendoza, Élmer 239 mentira (lie) 64, 66, 84, 91, 219 mestizaje 25, 125, 147, 193 metaphor 49, 91 n.33, 94–5, 115, 127–30, 132 n.11, 137 n.41, 211–12, 256 n.10. See also demetaphorization metaphysics 86–7, 115, 128–9, 191–3 Mexican revolution. See Revolution (Mexican)

303

Mexicanos pintados por sí mismos 44 Meza, Aurelio 266–8 Mezzadra, Sandro 40, 47 “The Topicality of Prehistory” 52 n.20 Mignolo, Walter 118, 125 Miller, Ruth 200, 204 Milner, Jean-Claude 71 n.20 Minich, Julie Avril 212, 220 misogyny 286 modernism 55–68, 78, 79, 124, 160, 270 modernity 3, 13, 44, 47–9, 82, 99, 107, 119–20, 192 Monsiváis, Carlos 62, 234 monsters 142, 150–2 Morales, Waltraud 235 Morton, F. Rand 98 Morton, Timothy 102 Muñoz, José Esteban 213, 216 Muñoz, Rafael F. 8, 93–107 Se llevaron el cañon para Bachimba 93–107 ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! 97–8 Murillo, Gerardo. See Dr. Atl Museo Jumex 279–90 NAFTA 198, 202, 253–4 narconovel 227–39 nation 43, 79, 82–3, 87, 93–4, 99, 125, 233, 252 national allegory. See allegory nature 8, 37–8, 42–4, 93–107, 128, 168 necessity 8, 129–30, 160–4, 167, 169 Negri, Antonio. See Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri Nelson, Diane 143 Nemser, Daniel 264 neoliberalism 5, 9, 10, 211, 228, 230–1, 245, 251–3, 272, 281 Nepote, Mónica 9, 244–8 Hechos diversos 244–8 Nervo, Amado 7, 55–68 Nilges, Matthias 75–80, 83 non-all, not-all (pas tout) 58, 160, 172–3 nonhuman 93–107, 253 North, Joseph 2, 75 O’Connell, Joanna 151 object-oriented ontology 102–4 objecthood 286

304 oligarchy 140–7 Oloff, Kerstin 96 orality 8, 117–30 ordinary affects 9, 214, 218 Orientalism 3, 6–7, 11–26 orientation 12–19 Orozco, Pascual 98–100 ownership 25, 33–49, 79, 140 Pacheco, José Emilio 8, 56–7, 159–73 poetry 159–73 Palou, Pedro Ángel 9, 197–206 Con la muerte en los puños 197–206 Parra, Max 80–2, 97, 103 Payno, Manuel 38–44, 47, 188 Tratado de la propiedad 38–44, 47 phenomenology 16, 17, 23, 35, 36 Philippines 14–21 Pick, Zuzana 101 Piglia, Ricardo 177 Polanyi, Karl 42–3 Pollack, Sarah 70 n.13 possession 7, 34–49 Povinelli, Elizabeth 104, 105 price 252, 284–5 Prieto, Guillermo 44 primitive accumulation 34, 38–40, 116 privatization 35, 42–9 productivity 96, 106, 217, 288 property 33–49, 248, 252, 270 public feelings 214–20 racism 154 Rama, Ángel 79, 83, 122–3 Rancière, Jacques 86, 261 raro 57–60, 65, 68 Rascón Banda, Víctor Hugo 239 reality effect 82–4 repetition 60, 159–73, 180, 183–5, 280 Revista Moderna 55, 60, 64 Revolution (Mexican) 7, 8, 19–21, 25, 35, 49, 75–88, 93–107, 116, 139–40, 188–9 Reyes, Alfonso 56, 59, 69 n.11, 76, 78, 97 Reyna, Marcela 69 n.7 Rivera Garza, Cristina 5, 10, 119, 262, 269–72, 274 Robert, Jean 44

Index Rulfo, Juan 8, 59, 76, 96, 111–31, 188, 263 El llano en llamas 111–31 Pedro Páramo 59, 114, 122–4 Sada, Daniel 239 Said, Edward 5–7, 11–26 Orientalism 11–26 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 194 n.4, 283–4 scarcity 41–4, 48 Schmitt, Carl 191, 229–33 Political Theology 229–33 Schwarz, Roberto 79 Scott, Peter Dale 228 semiotic operator 243, 245, 253 Senellart, Michel 233 Shapiro, Stephen 150–1 sincerity 62–3, 66 Smith, Zadie 183 Southern Gothic 8, 139–54 sovereignty 9, 83, 105, 227–39, 254 spectrality 257 n.26 speculative formalism 76, 82 Stengers, Isabelle 99–100 Stewart, Kathleen 218–19 Stoler, Ann Laura 148 structure of feeling 142, 147, 222–3 sub-media 250–1, 253 subsumption 287–8 surface 75–7, 82, 250–4 Tarica, Estelle 145, 154, 158 n.50 Taussig, Michael 151 Thiers, Adolphe 38 Tisselli, Eugenio 9, 244, 252 The 27th 252 Torres Bodet, Jaime 97 totality 76–88 transculturation 102, 193 transpacific exchange 11–26 trauma 83–8, 146, 150, 153, 177–93, 216, 219 traveling theory 11–12 uneven development 48, 49, 262, 265 ungovernability 41–3, 47–59 Uribe, Sara 9, 244, 248–9 Antígona González 248–9

Index

305

Valenzuela, Jesús F. 55 vanguard 280–2 Viladsen, Kaspar. See Dean, Mitchell Villalobos, Juan Pablo 239 Villaurrutia, Xavier 56 Villoro, Juan 188, 239

Williams, Gareth 86–7 Williams, Tamara R. 70 n.13 witchcraft 149–54

water 7, 14, 33–49, 93, 160, 242 Webb, Gary 228 Weber, Max 232 Weil, Simone 157 n.31 white supremacy 140–3, 146–7 wilderness 96, 99, 100, 107

Žižek, Slavoj 7, 58–60, 65–7, 76, 85, 229, 232, 233, 236 Disparities 58–67 zoning 12, 16, 18, 21 Zupančič, Alenka 5, 8

Yáñez, Agustín 96, 188 Yépez, Heriberto 5