La muerte de Artemio Cruz

Carlos Fuentes’s pioneering novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz is a book that, famously, plays with both temporality and narrative voice. On one level, everything takes place within a single day as the eponymous Cruz, a wealthy business magnate and politician now semi-conscious and close to death, is surrounded by family and staff, doctors and priest, who attend to him in what turn out to be his final hours of life. Much of the story is presented as more or less chaotic stream of consciousness, as Cruz is only dimly aware of what is going on around him and returns to certain repeated phrases and idées fixes whose true significance emerges only gradually. What apparently gives sense, then, to this confused present, this intense jumble of thoughts and impressions as life slips away, are a series of episodes recounted from Cruz’s past, recollections of other days of particular intensity and importance recounted almost as a set of short stories. Collectively, these vignettes also illustrate a paradigmatic Mexican life of the first half of the twentieth century, from the injustices of the Porfirian dictatorship to initial transformations generated by the Revolution until it turns sour and sediments into institutionalized corruption. Meanwhile, if the present of the sickbed is narrated in the first person (“I”), and the past vignettes gain clarity through the use of the third person (“He”), interspersed between them–uniting and further fragmenting the story at the same time–are passages in the second person (“You”) and, mostly, future tense whether the events described are past (“Oh, you will work hard yesterday in the morning” [14]) or still to come: “you will bequeath this country: your newspaper, the hints and adulation, the conscience drugged by lying men of no ability” (234).

It would seem, then, that this is a book largely about persons (grammatical or other) and personality: that through this circuitous and multi-faceted narrative, with all its various points and places of view, we will finally uncover the secret of who is this Artemio Cruz, the figure behind the voice that on the opening page tells us, fracturing the language in the process: “I am this, this am I: old man with his face reflected in pieces by different-sizes squares of glass: I am this eye, this eye I am” (9). Moreover, the further (if implicit) promise is that by understanding Cruz, we may also understand Mexico. Hence, for instance, Pedro García-Caro’s recent and apparently uncontroversial claim that Cruz “stands as a symbol of both the revolution and the Mexican nation reborn in its aftermath. [. . .] In La muerte de Artemio Cruz, the focus of attention is placed on one character allegorically used to parody the figure of the caudillo, the leader and savior who is subjected to a moral scrutiny” (After the Nation 87). Cruz, in other words, is the personification of the Mexican nation; his story is the history of Mexico, made person(al). It turns out to be fitting that “Artemio Cruz” is in fact a sort of pseudonym, a made-up name that hides his own illegitimacy (as the child of a landlord’s son’s rape) but exposes his generality, his all-encompassing hybridity: “Cruz without true first name or surname, baptized by the mulattos with the syllables of Isabel Cruz or Cruz Isabel, the mother who had been beaten out with a stick” (257; translation modified). In the end, the novel’s crux would seem to be that I is national allegory.

But not all narratives are personal. Here, for instance, the various voices that surround Cruz’s ailing body include or are supplemented by the tape-recorder brought in by his loyal henchman, Padilla. It appears that this is Cruz and Padilla’s usual practice or habit: to go over their taped conversations and dealings, whether or not (it’s not at all clear) those recorded have consented to their recording and subsequent reproduction. And while other voices try to keep the machine out of the room, Cruz and Padilla insist, presenting this mechanized recapitulation as a rite of its own: “Today, more than ever, you ought to want me think that everything goes along the same as always. Don’t disrupt our rituals, Padilla” (11; translation modified). The device, moreover, in revealing the shadiness of Cruz’s business transactions, acts as a kind of material unconscious that undermines the false piety of the bedside mourning. No wonder Cruz’s daughter, on hearing it spit out the words “In plain Mexican, we’ll be fucked,” should shout out “Stop that machine! [. . .] What kind of vulgarity. . .” (51). But the scandal is less the bad language than the clarity with which mechanical reproduction reveals the corruption of the Mexican state. Or perhaps the real scandal is the way in which Cruz himself has, we gradually come to discover, become fully part of that state, buying into it and bought off by it.

We see, though the various third-person episodes, the steps by which a sort of primal liberty and enthusiasm is gradually both shut down and corralled. Perhaps the key turning point (though Fuentes suggests that each vignette offers a turning point in its own way) comes in 1915, at the heart of the Revolution, when Cruz escapes certain death at the hands of a firing squad by colluding with the enemy. We are told that the prisoner and his guard, a man named Colonel Zagal, “had acted not as Zagal and Artemio Cruz, but as two gears in opposing war machines” (156; translation modified). Cruz proposes to personalize their antagonism: “If you have to kill me, kill me as Artemio Cruz” (156; translation modified). But the savage irony is that this personification is only a front: Cruz’s collusion is a trap, and Zagal will himself be killed as he falls for the notion that honor and personal integrity can really be in play in what Cruz himself understands as nothing more than a cynical game. So Cruz’s cellmates are executed, which gives him the opportunity to take on the identity of one of them: Gonzalo Bernal, an idealistic if now disillusioned young man, son of the landed gentry. Taking Bernal’s place, and eventually assuming the role of the tasteful aristocrat whose house is decorated with fine colonial art and whose parties are catered with the best regional food, Cruz shows us that personality is at best a ruse. If anything La muerte de Artemio Cruz is the story of a becoming-impersonal, a multiplication and fracturing of points of view and perspectives, the many forms of death-in-life that lead to the bare life of the agonizing body helpless before the ministrations of family, church, and the medical profession, with the tape-recorder by his side emitting the only voice to be trusted in the whole crowded room.

See also: Boom!.

A Murder Neither of You Quite Remember

[Crossposted to Infinite Test.]

It may sound strange to say of a thousand-page novel, but Infinite Jest ends abruptly. Most if not all of the various plot threads remain loose, untied, and incomplete or ambiguous at best. Hence there’s an entire cottage industry (especially, of course, on the Internet) devoted to trying to discern what happens next and even what happened before. A small army of close readers have combed the book for clues and put together the fragments with diverse results. Fittingly perhaps, the redoubtable Aaron Swartz contributed one of the most complete and convincing conjectures. But there is little in the way of consensus. Suffice it to say, for instance, that the mystery of the opening scene–which by now we recognize is in fact, chronologically, the last scene–is unresolved and subject to much debate. Why is Hal apparently tongue-tied in his college interview? Is it because of drugs, either Pemulis’s DMZ or some natural variant his own body has synthesized? Is it because he, too, has now watched the “Entertainment”? Or is he even tongue-tied at all? Meanwhile, other more or less major questions include: Is Hal’s brother Orin dead or alive? Was it Orin who was responsible for distributing the Entertainment, Is Joelle disfigured or not? Did Gately survive to dig up the Master cartridge with Hal, supervised perhaps by Quebecois agent John Wayne? Was President Gently’s regime brought down by the separatists? Is the ghost of Orin and Hal’s father real? Is he in fact Hal’s (or even Mario’s) father at all?

No wonder then that so many of those who make it to the end of the book are compelled almost immediately to turn back to the first page. Significant numbers feel the urge to read the whole thing again. Is this because the novel is so satisfying or, by contrast, because there is something so fundamentally unsatisfying about the way it ends that we are convinced it must be our fault, that there are clues out there that we have somehow missed on a first reading? And so the reading becomes infinite (for some, Infinite Jest is its own addiction), and perhaps the jest is that no definitive conclusions can be drawn. But even if we don’t reread the full thousand pages, it has become clear that the book is fundamentally circular–“annular,” if you prefer, like the “annulation cycles” that pervade the background throughout. The novel’s “real” opening is in media res: page 17 to be precise, when someone “blue-collar and unlicensed” is imagined asking Hal “So yo man then what’s your story?” And so as well as beginning and middle, this line is also the novel’s (chronological) endpoint. Hence the circularity.

Or if not a circle, a fractal: Foster Wallace once reported that the book was “structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal.” And one of the things about a Sierpinski Gasket (or Triangle) is that it has no center. And even where it is densest, full of interconnections, close observation reveals an increasingly delicate filigree of lines pervaded by pockets of space. So if this is a book about being in the middle of things (and I think it is), that’s not to say that one can ever be at the center of it all. Indeed, by the time the novel ends it’s no longer quite clear who, if anyone, is the central character–I had long been assuming it was Hal, but it could plausibly be Don Gately or perhaps the spectral Jim–or even what we might describe as the main plot, and what the subplot or plots. Precisely because things don’t fully converge at the end (however much the various strands do increasingly resonate with and contaminate each other) there are still as many spaces or gaps as there are links and connections. Oddly perhaps for a book that’s in part a critique of insincerity and hollowness (for the trouble with Hal is that “inside [him] there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows” [694]), in some ways Infinite Jest has no heart.

What a circle and a fractal have in common is repetition: a fractal simply repeats in rather more complex ways. We are in the middle because, Foster Wallace seems to be suggesting, we need to learn to master (more or less) infinite repetition. We need, in the Alcoholics Anonymous cliché (and what is a cliché but a phrase that has been itself endlessly repeated?), to “keep coming back” (270), to “Hang In and keep coming” (350) until the routine has become engrained in the body as a new habit that can replace the old habits (the old, dangerous repetitions) of addiction and denial. Gately’s moment of realization is the point at which he understands that he can no longer think of the endpoint, or rather the fact that there is no endpoint, that the repetitions will never end. This is an insight that first comes from Joelle, who compares the wrong way of coming off drugs to a leap by Evel Knievel over an ever-increasing number of cars: “As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. [. . .] And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them. [. . .] Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?” (859). The answer, instead, is to think only about the present day, the present hour, “the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time.” Trying to sustain his massive post-operative pain without narcotics, Gately sees himself abiding in “an endless Now stretching in gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. [. . .] It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present” (860). Living with repetition and in repetition, “one endless day” (860), Gately discovers that “no one second of even unarcotized post-trauma-infection pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must” (885).

There are, however, other forms of repetition that are toxic, and unfortunately for the novel many of them are marked by gender. Women get short shrift in Infinite Jest: however much the novel presents a critique of Orin Incandenza’s treatment of them as “Subjects” (by which is meant quite the opposite of endowing them with subjectivity), too often the novel indulges in the same treatment itself. The only real exception is Joelle van Dyne / Madame Psychosis. Her importance arises from the way she joins up many of the threads between the various narratives, thanks in part to the fact that she has long been subjectified/objectified by a sequence of characters from her “own personal Daddy,” who refuses to countenance her as a growing woman, to Orin and even Jim Incandenza himself, who places her at the centre of the (quite obviously) male gaze by repeatedly pointing his camera at her for his movies. One could then argue whether the novel provides Joelle with any restitution: on the one hand, it (quite literally) keeps her faceless; on the other, it grants her the agency to withdraw and leave us all guessing. But the shortest shrift of all is given to Orin’s (and maybe Hal’s and Mario’s) mother, Avril Incandenza.

As in Hamlet, mothers draw a short straw, and for a reason that is perhaps clarified during one of Don Gately’s fever-dreams. Here, he is visited by Death, “Death Incarnate,” who turns out to be a woman for it “is a woman who kills you and releases you into the next life. [. . .] This is why Moms are so obsessively loving, [. . .] why there’s always a slight, like, twinge of selfishness about their obsessive mother-love: they’re trying to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember, except in death” (850). And this, finally, is also (film theorist Molly Notkin tells us) the essence of the “Entertainment,” Infinite Jest (V or VI), in which Jim has cast Joelle / Madame Psychosis as “the Death-Mother figure [. . .] explaining to the camera as audience-synecdoche that this is why mothers were so obsessively, consumingly, drivenly and yet narcissistically loving of you, their kid: the mothers are trying frantically to make amends for a murder neither of you quite remember” (789). Indeed, the “Entertainment” would seem to be a fever-dream whose moral is to distrust motherly love, to sense a conspiracy of silence behind the mother-child bond. No wonder then that the end of the book (the physical end, at least: the last page before the footnotes begin) should comprise a strange kind of rebirth, courtesy of a rather fearsome gangster, immeasurable violence, and a great deal of drugs, in which Don Gately is left on the shore “in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out” (981). Infinite Jest gives us new respect for the power of objects, the importance of the body, and the construction of habits as a dance with repetition. It proposes self-regeneration through self-forgetting, an eternal present without past or future. I only wish it did so with fewer sacrifices and, frankly, less machismo.

Jekyll and Hyde

Jekyll and Hyde have become a byword for the notion of mankind’s dual nature, the good and the bad, the virtuous and the immoral. At times the text seems to support this reading: Henry Jekyll’s “Full Statement of the Case,” for instance, opens with a discussion of “those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature” (48) and goes on to describe how the author “learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man” (49). But the first of these two observations is rather more complicated than it might at first appear: it is not that “good and ill” constitute “man’s dual nature”; rather they “divide and compound it.” In other words, any “duality of man” refers to something other than the binary divide between the good and the bad, something that becomes still more complex (“divide[d] and compound[ed]”) when the distinction between virtue and vice is taken into account. Indeed, between these two comments on duality comes the recognition that this is at best a first approximation to the truth: “I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (48). We are multiple; we contain multitudes.

Moreover, it is not as though the characters of Jekyll and Hyde themselves incarnate anything like the “primitive duality” that Jekyll mentions here. For though Hyde is perhaps the pure precipitate of all that is wicked in Jekyll, Jekyll himself remains irreducibly multiple: he is an “incongruous compound” (52), “composite” (55). There is, in short, no kind of dialectical relationship between the two, no simple contradiction: Jekyll is already divided; Hyde is best understood as a supplement or embodied overdetermination. No wonder Jekyll “loses” in the end: his good nature has to struggle not only against Hyde but also against the evil that still resides within Jekyll himself. Perhaps for this reason, and again despite appearances, it is never a matter of Jekyll or Hyde, it can only ever be Jekyll and: Jekyll plus a part of his nature that stands beside him without in fact leaving him.

Of course, there is much attention to the differences between Jekyll and Hyde. There is their contrasting stature, for example, or their distinct voices, which is how Jekyll’s manservant, Poole, determines that his master has been disappeared: “Have I been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice?” (35). Moreover, there is much discussion of the distinction between the men’s faces, and indeed of faces in general. Utterson, the tale’s narrator, demands to see Hyde’s face, “and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. ‘Now I shall know you again,’ said Mr Utterson. ‘It may be useful’” (16). Utterson goes on to declare to Jekyll that “If ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend” (17). But Utterson is wrong: he doesn’t “know” Hyde at all, and he completely misreads the signature on the man’s face; indeed, his conception of Hyde is as much a projection of his own fears and anxieties as it is a product of Jekyll’s own foibles and failings.

To understand Hyde–and the relation between Hyde and Jekyll–it is best to look to the man’s hand. It is by his hands, after all, that Jekyll/Hyde himself determines, in the absence of a mirror, his qualities at any particular moment. Jekyll’s description of his first transformation into Hyde notes that he “stretched out [his] hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations” (50). Later, when he has started to transform involuntarily from one state into another, again the hand provides the clue: “the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde” (58). But the hand is not only the sign of the difference between Jekyll and Hyde: it is also the sign of their underlying identity. “Then I remembered,” Jekyll tells us, “that of one of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand” (58-9). Jekyll and Hyde’s hand, in the sense of handwriting, is the same. As a result it is impossible to tell who is writing, except when Jekyll/Hyde deliberately alters his own penmanship–and even then, Utterson’s clerk, “a great student and critic of handwriting” (27), notes “a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped.” Utterson’s response is the horrific thought that “Henry Jekyll [has] forge[d] for a murderer!” (28). But often as not it is Hyde who “forges” for Jekyll, while at other times we can never know who has forged (for) whom. Hence Patrick Brantlinger notes the threat posed by this instability, this duplicity of signature and impossibility of “reading” either Hyde’s or Jekyll’s hands aright: “Hyde menaces society not just by his criminal violence but by his ability to write checks and letters, draw up wills, and pen blasphemies in books of ‘divinity’” (201).

Hyde (or is it Jekyll?) takes advantage of his uncanny literacy, the fact that the difference between himself and his other is strictly speaking unreadable, to send a message to his friend Lanyon and persuade him to collect the drugs enabling him to transform himself back into Jekyll once more. And it is here that the book’s most shocking scene comes: not in the mutation of Jekyll into Hyde, as one might have thought; but in the resurrection (“like a man restored from death”) of Jekyll from Hyde. It is this that prompts Lanyon to say: “My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day at night; I feel that my days are numbered” (47). For the staid bachelor society that Stevenson’s tale portrays, it is not the revelation of the evil in man, the appearance of Hyde, that is the most terrifying aspect of the story. Nor is it any kind of dualistic opposition between Jekyll and Hyde. It is the fact that Hyde gives life to Jekyll, and that in doing so he gives birth to multitudes.

hope

There’s no doubt that that Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is, as its subtitle announces, “a polemic” (13). Nietzsche rages against Western (so-called) civilization and the palpable sense of claustrophobia, defeat, sickness, and enervation in which we find ourselves: “Enough! Enough! I can’t take any more. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are manufactured–it seems to me it stinks of so many lies” (47). Hence he rails also against the various forces that have led up to and keep us in this dire situation: slave morality and its inversion of values such that what was once good is now pronounced evil; ressentiment and its negation of all that is “different” that is “not itself” (36); the cult of guilt and “the oppressive narrowness and punctiliousness of custom” (85); the ascetic ideal and its priesthood that, by making us feel that our own sinfulness is to blame for our predicament, seeks “to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming” (128).

No wonder Nietzsche’s style is so impetuous and abrasive. To wake his somnolent readers and alert them to the damage they have been doing themselves for centuries, let alone to carve out a different path, requires “a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health” (96).

One can almost feel the ebb and flow of his emotions as Nietzsche writes: disbelief, anger, impatience, frustration, irritation, annoyance, exhaustion… and hope. Yes, hope, not only because his belief in mankind’s potential as great as his dismay at the ingeniousness with which we have perversely tortured and hobbled ourselves, but also because even the ruins themselves have something that can be salvaged.

First, there is the fact that even the immense disasters that afflict us (that we have inflicted on ourselves) have their own value. The sick body, too, has its own perspective and there is no perspective so misguided that it should be summarily eliminated. Or to put this another way: the sick body, too, knows something; we cannot deny the body even in its weakness and its suffering. And all knowledge should be welcome to those who really seek to know. The various “reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousness”–note that word again–“and futility, raged against itself for so long” allow us “to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently” (119). They add to the stock of human experience and discovery, and against the poisonous ideal of a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject” we should welcome even this hobbled perspective in that “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of this thing” (119). Even the sick and the weary, the defeated and the self-defeating, have their contribution to make.

(Note by the way that it is this impulse to see value in ruination, this accommodation of impurity and difference, that makes Nietzsche very far from the proto-fascist he is sometimes lazily assumed to be. Nietzsche is engaged in a war, that’s true, but in his view the noble spirit always learns even from his enemies. And ultimately Nietzsche’s goal is more variety, not less; more life and more different kinds of life rather than the death and destruction upon which the Third Reich became fixated.)

Second, the very stubbornness and ingenuity with which we have turned against our better natures is, Nietzsche believes, itself a sign of hope. He concludes the book by noting that mankind’s self-abasement, its “rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life,” indicates our nihilism, our “will to nothingness.” But precisely the fact that we struggle so hard for our own oppression shows that at least we are still struggling: “it is and remains a will!” The final consolation that Nietzsche offers is that “man would rather will nothingness than not will” (163). There is life in the old brute yet, however much that life may be turned against itself. We may be weary, we may be suffering, but the very effort we invest in perpetuating our own degradation shows that we are not dead yet. Now if only we could put the same amount of affective energy into a battle for life, rather than against it. What a wonderful sight that would be!

resonance

A long, empassioned post from my friend and colleague Gastón Gordillo over at his blog “Space and Politics” discusses “Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution”.

More generally, Gastón is also engaged in an attempt to think what I have previously termed a politics of affective resonance.

There’s much to say about and to respond to in Gastón’s post, and surely we need to develop further a critical vocabulary of resonance, dissonance, damping, attunement (on which see Massumi), and so on.

In terms of the relationship between space and politics, I think it would be worth investigating the ways in which resonance is discussed in Physics or Engineering. And one would presumably have to distinguish between resonance as it functions in solids, liquids, and gases. (This would be one answer to Gastón’s reasonable critique that my tendency is to emphasize spatial solidity.)

But I’d also emphasize that resonance enables an intersection between a concern with space and an interest in time or history. For rhythm or tempo immediately invoke a concern with temporality. A body that resonates moves in space but also in time… literally, “in time” with others.

castell

A particularly fine video (amazingly, it seems it was shot with only one camera) of the Catalan tradition of building castells:

There’s much to be said here about bodies, tall buildings, sovereignty, and community. Indeed, in some ways these castles are almost literal embodiments of the famous frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan. A multitude constitutes the temporary illusion of sovereignty.

So what’s fascinating is the discipline and coordination invested in the construction of these human towers. But also their inevitable precariousness.

christmas

This happened on my block. Right now there’s a scorchmark on the concrete wall, and some flowers and cards that people have left.

and

Carmen Rodríguez’s and a body to remember with is a collection of short stories about tears and loss, but finally also laughter and love. Though clearly autobiographical in many ways, the story it tells of an activist who has to flee Chile for Canada in the wake of Pinochet’s coup is narrated through fragments, glimpses of a life marked by resistance and exile. Hence the protagonist’s name (when it is provided) is variously Estela de Ramírez (19), Silvia (112), Yolanda Cárcamo (129), and Laura Arzola (154): there are continuities between these figures, but also displacements and differences. The book’s Spanish translation, De cuerpo entero (“With the Whole Body”), suggests fullness and plenitude, but the stories themselves resist such a sense of completion.

To put this another way: there’s a tension here between a narrative of lack and a narrative of excess.

Clearly, the coup and the exile that follows are deeply traumatic. In the final story, “a balanced diet,” the narrator tells of how she heard that her partner had been killed by the Chilean military. Her reaction is immediately visceral: “The vomit came out of my body in the same instant that I realized that Mario was one of the executed ones. Everything became an immense black stain sprinkled with coloured lights” (156). Years later, she would like to think that she is no longer affected in the same way, but her body betrays her: “What’s it like to be dead Mario [. . .] I can talk to you without crying [. . .] oh well yes I still cry and probably I will cry for the rest of my life. . . .” (162).

Perhaps the most somber story is one that features another woman, Gloria. Its narrative progresses like a short film, tracking slowly around the room of a house in Vancouver: the camera eye passes over a desk, a dresser, a bed, posters on the wall, until it finally comes to rest on the body of a young woman and her suicide note.

Elsewhere, however, the book’s stress is on the ways in which exile and resistance also make for accretion, even multiplication, and a liveliness that laughs in the face of dictatorship. As Rodríguez puts it in her Foreword, “My heart trespasses over borders and stretches over a whole continent to find its home at the two extremes of the Americas: in Chile and in Canada” (14). Or, to return to the collection’s concluding story in which two friends meet up once more after “twenty years of absences, a whole life of absences,” the stress is not on what has been lost but on the joy that results from the re-encounter: “obviously the military did not count on this good memory, this love: they did not count on this immense desire to live, this propensity to laughter” (165).

Throughout, then, the movement that Rodríguez describes is from loss to excess. Canada itself is, at first, nothing but a black (or white!) hole, a country that Chilean characters cannot even envisage: they can imagine Argentina, they can imagine England, the USA, even Switzerland, but Canada induces no connotations at all. Gradually, however, this “hole called Canada began to take possession of Estela de Ramírez’s stomach, chest, throat, head, ears, and mouth” (21). It becomes embodied, and she becomes embodied in turn. When finally the opportunity arises to return to Chile, she hesitates. She is now attached to Canada, part of Canada, too: both legally (as a newly-minted citizen) and, more importantly, affectively. In the crisis that ensues, in which “she realized that her body was the hole and the whole was her” (35), I think the point is not so much that she has identified with nothingness, and so with absence; rather that what was previously absence has now been given substance.

So, finally, this is a book marked by the conjunction “and” that is precisely the sign of addition: Chile and Canada; loss and discovery; death and life; the past and the present; “a mind and a body to remember with” (159; my emphasis).

unknowable

Still more Roa Bastos…

The Body

“Usted mismo, Señor, dice que los hechos no son narrables” (568)

As much as this is a book about language or power, it is also a book about the limits of both, which it identifies at least in part with the materiality of the body. Indeed, even history, in so far as it is a narrative of or about power, finds its limit in the physicality (and corruptibility) of the matter that constitutes us. In fact, the book’s broad narrative could perhaps be summarized in terms of an attempt to use language to stave off the bodily dissolution threatened by the anonymous decree, an attempt ultimately doomed to failure as the Supreme recognizes the futility of the struggle to impose narrative on events.

The main body of the book (and that the book also has a body is not insignificant) ends with a conflagration engulfing the Supreme’s papers, and a vision of the dictator’s body consumed by worms. We take, I think, this to be the conflagration that has partially destroyed the texts with which the compiler constructs the novel we have before us. That the compiler is continually forced to interpolate comments (more frequent in the final pages than hitherto) indicating the state of these texts (burnt, illegible, missing) reminds us that language has to be incarnated in some physical medium for it to be transmitted. We are constantly reminded that literature has a real (not simply an ideal) presence, that the letter is also material, and so subject to the vicissitudes that may befall all material things. At the same time, the partial survival of the Supreme’s papers point to another, contrasting aspect to the letter’s materiality: the fact that the dictator is unable fully to destroy his papers demonstrates that once committed to paper his thoughts have a stubborn presence that cannot easily be revoked. In short, the paradox of materiality is that it is both obstinately resistant to change and yet also always mutable, never self-similar.

Likewise, then, the Supreme’s predicament might be described as a combination of the fact that his written or spoken dictates are insufficiently powerful to provide him with absolute power over the Paraguayan social body, yet his words will inevitably prove more durable than his own decaying flesh. On the one hand, his power is not powerful enough; on the other, his power far outstrips his own body.

Traditionally, one way in which to conceptualize this second dislocation between the mortality of those who wield power and the presumed eternity of power itself revolves around the concept of the “king’s two bodies.” As a subject of power, the king’s body is incorruptible and immortal, transcending any particular individual (hence the instantaneousness of transition articulated in the declaration “The king is dead, long live the king!”); as a human subject, however, it is recognized that the king’s body may suffer illness and decrepitude. The separation between “yo” and “él” that we see in Roa Bastos’s novel expresses therefore not only a linguistic complexity, but also a material doubling. Yet even in this neat solution to the question of power’s materiality, problems arise in the intricate relation between these two bodies. What happens, for instance, when the king seems to go mad (as with George III)? And, more fundamentally, rather than preserving an ideal, untouchable body is not this doubling itself a form of monstrosity?

As an attempt to resolve these contradictions, the Supreme’s discourse therefore attempts a constant dialogue between language itself and materiality. Yet this is always inevitably a failed dialogue, as there can be no dialogue between language and what is not language; by definition a dialogue can only be established within language. The material will always remain forever mute and (at least in part) unknowable.

unita

The Wednesday quotation, Part V: Spinoza on the union of bodies.

When a number of bodies of the same or different size are driven so together that they remain united one with the other, or if they are moved by the same or different rapidity so that they communicate their motions one to the other in a certain ratio, those bodies are called reciprocally united bodies (corpora invicem unita), and we say that they all form one body or individual, which is distinguished from the rest by this union of bodies. (Ethics 50)