Narcoepics: A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety 9781441121981, 9781441107787, 9781472543721, 9781623565176

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Narcoepics

Narcoepics A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety Hermann Herlinghaus

N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Hermann Herlinghaus, 2013 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herlinghaus, Hermann, 1954– Narcoepics : a global aesthetics of sobriety / by Hermann Herlinghaus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0778-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4411-2198-1 (hardback : alk. paper)  1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Latin American literature—21st century—History and criticism.  3. Globalization in ­literature.  4. Narration (Rhetoric)  I. Title. PQ7081.H417 2013 860.9’98—dc23 2012029464 EISBN: 978-1-6235-6517-6

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To my father Hermann Herlinghaus, film historian (1931–1989)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1 “Pharmakon” and “Pharmakos”: Prolegomena for a Janus-Faced Modernity Counterpoint, not other

1

1

Remembering the “Psychoactive Revolution”: Provincializing the West On the meaning of dissociation, and the logics of denial

5 10

Unlearning fear, absolving the ghost of the “Pharmakos”: An open genealogy

20

2 Aesthetics of Sobriety: Approximating Narratives from the Hemispheric South

27

Ethics at an impasse: Toward abnormal interpretation

27

Humiliating sobriety—a surreptitious path

32

Thinking poverty, relocating aesthetics

41

3 Heterogeneous Genealogies: From the Latin American Narco-Novel to Narcoepics Prolegomena

51 51

First, Mexican encounter with the low-level drug business: Diario de un narcotraficante (Angelo Nacaveva)

53

Demoniac intoxication, construction of guilt, and the predicament of cynicism: Mariposa Blanca (Tito Gutiérrez Vargas)

66

Cinematic writing and the acting brain of a killer: “Lehrstück” about the borders of citizenship (Nostalgia de la sombra, Eduardo Antonio Parra)

82

Contents

viii

4 The Political “Baroque” of the Pablo Escobar Story: Pablo Escobar, auge y caída de un narcotraficante (Alonso Salazar)

93

Ominous questions

93

A “Revolution without philosophers”

98

The “Rainmaker” from the Global South: Power and predicament

104

The drama of extradition, and the impossible sovereign

112

Coda

123

5 Female Castaways: Delirio, Plasma, and Displacements from Oppression

127

“También las mujeres pueden”

127

The impossible healing: Delirio (Laura Restrepo)

129

Toward an ecological aesthetics, postoptimistic: Plasma (Guadalupe Santa Cruz) 6  From “Pharmakon” to Femicide: 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)

141 157

Thinking from the “Pharmakon,” approaching literature otherwise

157

Globalized academics in the wake of cosmopolitanism

161

Placebo intellectuals

178

Benno von Archimboldi, the “Amphibian”

191

“The Part about the Crimes”—Another Almanac of the Dead

208

Bibliography

233

Index

245

Acknowhledgments This book takes little for granted, and it does not leave widespread assumptions in their place. If this were to be phrased in one single sentence it might say that the strongest narcotics in modern societies are not what they are deemed to be. “Narcoepics” is a heuristic concept. Paradoxically, it has more to do with sobriety than with intoxication. Here we find the surprising aesthetic and ethical insight that sets today’s narcoepics apart from those modern artistic works since the nineteenth century, which were related to writers’ creative experimentation with psychoactive substances. Narcoepics are linked to affective and epistemic terrains as they have been articulated, during the past several decades, in the Hemispheric South. Narcoepics: A Global Aesthetics of Sobriety grew out of my teaching and research at the University of Pittsburgh between 2007 and 2010. Its writing was, at that same time, accompanied by the colloquy with friends and colleagues in Germany, especially with Karlheinz (“Carlo”) Barck. In September, 2009, thanks to Beatriz González-Stephan, José Aranda, and Caroline Levander, I was invited to participate in the Emerging Disciplines symposium at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, at which I addressed the formative role played by conflicts over psychoactive substances within different dynamics of transatlantic and hemispheric “modernization.” The professional synergy and wholehearted support that I encountered at this memorable event was crucial, and, shortly afterwards, I completed the definite outline for the book. During the fall semester of 2010, the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh awarded me a Faculty Fellowship, allowing me to enjoy a more concentrated tide of writing. The final writing phase was traversed by an interesting and contrapuntal experience—my transition from Pittsburgh to the University of Freiburg in 2011. Undoubtedly, I have benefitted from working with graduate students at Pitt’s Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, yet I quickly found that Freiburg’s students of Romance Languages and Literatures were eager to share the new texts and segments of knowledge that I began to introduce into my teaching. Lisa Quaas, doctoral candidate, capably helped me through the completion of the manuscript, when daily duties at my new institution threatened to delay the process. Two international congresses that I had the opportunity to coordinate are related to the intellectual trajectory of the book, as well. The first, “Narcoepics Unbound: New Narrative Territories, Affective Aesthetics, and Ethical Paradox,” took place in April, 2008, at the University of Pittsburgh. The names of the actively participating scholars and artists show the scope of a joint reflection—Elmer Mendoza, Víctor Gaviria, Felipe Aljure, Catherine L. Benamou, Rebecca E. Biron, Nancy D. Campbell, Elaine Carey, Beatriz González-Stephan, Cynthia Steele, Juana Suárez, Richard DeGrandpre, Luis Duno-Gottberg, Mark Cameron Edberg, Curtis Marez, Julián Olivares, and Elijah Wald. The second symposium, entitled “The Modern Concept

x

Acknowledgments

of Intoxication  /  Rausch: Heterogeneous Mappings,” materialized in July, 2012, shortly after the completion of this manuscript at the University of Freiburg, with the participation of Brigitte Marschall, Alicia Ortega, Gabriela Polit, Arne Romanowski, Kathrin Solhdju, Agnieszka Soltysik, Uta Werner, Scott McClintock, Thomas Klinkert, Diemo Landgraf, Leonhard Fuest, and Robert Feustel. A paper that anticipates Chapter 1 of Narcoepics was published in Melissa Bailar (ed.), Emerging Disciplines: Shaping New Fields of Scholarly Inquiry in and beyond the Humanities, Houston: Rice University Press, 2010. A section of Chapter 6 appeared in a special issue of The Global South, coordinated by Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo, “The Global South and World Dis/Order” (Vol. 5:1, August 2011). Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda included a smaller, work-in-progress version of Chapter 2 in their volume Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The majority of the literary texts from Spanish-language editions discussed in this book, have not yet been translated into English. In these cases, English quotations are translations by Deborah Truhan. Deborah, an amazing colleague and friend, has helped me, as well, with the copyediting during the writing period. Thanks to Nadya Viascan, doctoral candidate at the University of Freiburg, for collaborating with me on the index. Working with Haaris Naqvi, my editor at Continuum Publishers, was a most encouraging experience. His professional efficiency and generosity have been crucial along the way. The comments from the press readers were sensitive, and I appreciate their help. I am most grateful to my strongest affective and intellectual supporter, my mother, Ruth Herlinghaus.

1

“Pharmakon” and “Pharmakos” Prolegomena for a Janus-Faced Modernity

Intact cultures possess a knowledge of the benefits of drug-related pathways to altered consciousness, as well as a wisdom that leads them to incorporate drugs . . . into the techniques that construct the reality of its people. Western culture stands out as an exception to this universal cultural characteristic. John Schumaker . . . we are still foreign to ourselves, at the threshold of this “new world,” . . . “We” have no idea who “we” are, no idea what is inside “us.” Catherine Malabou

Counterpoint, not other No one would claim today that modern notions of culture, to the extent that they have fueled the literary critic’s work, are devoid of trajectories of disavowal. When concepts become metaphors and generate desires toward self-evidence in the exploration of unheeded territories, it might be time to take a third look. Many stories are yet to be told, if we believe that theoretical works are renarrations of a specific kind. I would like to offer one such story. It takes Fernando Ortiz’s renowned and much commented book, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (19401/78; Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar) on a journey back “home,” where culture and history, and biology are not perceived as opposites. If much incentive has been gained from Ortiz’s work for making transculturation studies a first-rank issue in Latin American literary criticism,2 an entire realm was put aside: the field of the relationships between culture and biology. However, Cuban Counterpoint offers crucial insights into the problematic of “modernity and intoxication,” enabled by a perspective that fosters the experiences and See for the Spanish edition Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azucar. Ed. Julio Le Riverend. 2 On the notion of transculturation see Fernando Coronil, “Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition.” In Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, xvff., xxx. 1

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epistemic interests of what today appears as the Global South. This study makes the two psychoactives, tobacco and sugar, the master objects of a heterological approach to modernity. The fact that these substances do not fall under the biased notion of “malignant,” legally restricted drugs lends Counterpoint a special usefulness for comparative discussion. While it questions the rationale, according to which narcotic desire carries the assumption of pathology, it scrutinizes the role that narcotic plants from the New World have played, across the centuries, in the transatlantic formation of Western modernity. This is no minor aspect, since modernity’s involvement with drugs has been accompanied by mechanisms of (self)repression, and the fact that public debates on narcotics have become increasingly difficult merits critical review. When the work of Ortiz was eagerly appropriated since the 1970s, the search for national, “transcultural” identities made Latin American imaginaries compete with the idea of universal citizenship. To decode modernity’s tales of projection and repression, in turn, brings peripheral thinking to the forefront of global reflection. In a wider connotation, our study considers the humanum not as a “process” essentially driven by labor, work, and action,3 but as a “rhythmic” reality, as well, in which biological and anthropological forces play their constant part. It is here that the image of the counterpoint comes into focus, as it can make us aware of the age-old, psychotropic element of human practice.4 “Psychotropy,” understood in principle as being related to mood- and consciousness-altering substances and practices, conveys a sturdy counterpoint in the life of “homo faber,” its sturdyness consisting of the shifting layers of meaning that undo, as well as “back up,” humanity’s rationalizing fervor. Ortiz enters the stage of early-twentieth-century cultural theory as a Latin American and a global thinker. He locates the Cuban riches, tobacco and sugar, within the genealogy of modernity’s ever present yet disavowed signifyer—narcotics. Narcotics are never homogeneous, as their compositions and effects vary; however, all of them work on the chemical messengers of the neurophysiological system. In so doing, their effects combine with other factors—cultural and environmental—that also work on the brain-body-chemistry. This field of unique combinations, that are both biologically and culturally charged, has given the problematic its tremendous and contradictory scope, often being divided between “biopoetic” and “biopolitical” approaches. Fernando Ortiz’s point of departure is figurative and theatrical: “dark tobacco” and “high yellow sugar” perform an allegorical dance, as they conduct their symbiotic, syncopatic action on peoples’ bodies and souls, displaying a contest of “contrasting ethics and the ills and benefits that each has conferred upon mankind.”5 In the course of his book, the Cuban anthropologist works toward a new awareness regarding the ancient “pharmakon,” showing how, beginning with the sixteenth century, an increasingly widespread intoxication, fueled by overseas commerce and mass commodification of tobacco, sugar, and other “pharmaka” was a modern phenomenon, transatlantically charged. As is often overlooked, Western modernity is deeply involved with narcotics, in biochemical or cultural, and of course in literary ways. This involvement is based, See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. For a cultural reflection on “psychotropy” see Daniel L. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 157. 5 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 3. 3 4

“Pharmakon” and “Pharmakos”

3

on the dark side of progress, on the prosperity of the colonial labor treadmill, with sugar standing at the origin of the introduction of African slaves into the hemispheric colonies.6 “Pharmakon,” in Greek, stands for poison, or magic potion, or medicine;7 and it may well be the shifting signifyer that embraces all three. This, together with a perspective that plays on a hegemonic take by turning the mirror of sophisticated Othering onto Europe—tobacco from Cuba eventually mellows into “holy smoke”8 in order to furbish the mythology of urban progress and cosmopolitan identities—is what Contrapunteo is about, while at the same time offering a genuine cultural and economic history of Cuba’s two main export products. Why, then, have cultural analysts, or Latin American literary and cultural studies, as well as postcolonial thinking, paid only fitful attention to the matter? Why did they overlook its genuine conceptual, and genealogical call? While cultural critics are accustomed to thinking of globalization in terms of power configurations related to capitalism, coloniality, the nation-state, Otherness, gender, immigration, and the mass media, most have neglected the formative role of modern struggles over narcotics in these regards. In a sense, narcotics and intoxication (which are not the same) continue to linger on as modernity’s visceral “Other,” one that the “Self ” has to disavow in order to keep utilizing it. Since affective expectations and aversions haunt scholarly work beneath its performed objectivity, fear of the possible delusion of the idea of the self-conscious subject might have played a part in the underestimation of Ortiz’s most obvious concern: a kind of Latin American epistemic, ethnographic, and poetic protagonism in the global venture, in which “actors” such as “tobacco” and “sugar” would stimulate and embellish the culture of the European and North American centers, thus restituting economic income and symbolic authority to the less privileged Caribbean world. Cuban Counterpoint can thus be read as a bio-poetic manifesto.9 When the book was written, uncontrolled use of tobacco and sugar was not illegal, in contrast with other psychoactive substances that fell under prohibition; however, the question of which of these substances are more detrimental to health, and which are particularly generative of addictive consequences, as well as the question of their cultural “identities,” remain contradictory issues. For example, the existing moral and legal separations between alcohol and sugar, on the one hand, and hashish and cocaine, on the other are nothing less than arbitrary. There might also have been, among humanities’ scholars skeptical of psychoactives, a rather narrow secularism, which leads to the association of narcotics and stimulants with those irrational spheres that belonged to religion or vanity, but not modern culture. If, on the other hand, readers of   See ibid., 33–4, 48–57, 84.  Friedrich Erdmann Petri (ed.), Handbuch der Fremdwörter in deutscher Schrift- und Umgang-Sprache. Zweiter Theil, Dresden—Leipzig: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1834, 232. 8   See Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Holy Smoke. 9  The text begins with the poet priest Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor (1330/43), especially the “Pelea que uvo Don Carnal con Doña Quaresma” or, in Ortiz’s diction, the satirical contest between “Don Tabaco” and “Doña Azúcar,” a creaturly (partly allegorical) relationship imagined to be both a contention and a dance. In the event that, with “Don Tobacco’s” aid, sublime intoxication is possible, can it help provide stamina to the “personalities” in modern times to endure in their oppressed existence? (see Ortiz. Contrapunteo, 297–8, 309). 6 7

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Ortiz’s book had taken note of Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion” (1921) and “Surrealism” (1929), and especially his concept-figure of a “dialectics of intoxication,” different ideas about modernity’s transgressions and the singular counterpoints of psychoactives offered to the West by peripheral cultures might have come our way several decades sooner.10 It is essential to our argument that Ortiz was a “nonspecialist” in the study of drug use and abuse. We are not heading toward free speculation on a controversial matter, but rather an approach that is capable of making sense of the paradoxes traversing narcotic substances, together with psychoactive “realities” as they have marked the rise and self-fashioning of Western modernity. As far as “specialists” are concerned, Richard DeGrandpre’s The Cult of Pharmacology (2006) has necessary things to say, for example, about the “biased objectivity” of the pharmaceutical guild. Regarding the first decades of the twentieth century, a time during which the contemporary drug control and enforcement system, pioneered by the United States,11 acquired its lasting, international contoures, DeGrandpre comments: The pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, modern biological psychiatry, the biomedical sciences, the drug enforcement agencies, and the American judicial system—all these institutions were quick to embrace and promote a cult of pharmacology not as a conspiracy but as a belief system that served their own interests, albeit in varying ways. (viii)

“Cult” is a synonym for the practical, often highly efficient (re)production of specific belief systems or affective dispositions classifying drugs as either “angels” or “demons,” which we have discussed, in another study, in relationship to a global “war on affect.”12 Here we have the first paradox: science on the one hand, and belief or fear on the other, each coupled with powerful interests.13 In the course of his study, DeGrandpre points to the establishment of a discursive order that resembles Edward Said’s idea of orientalism.14 At issue is a mechanism for making Otherness subject to judgment by affectively, as well as “systematically,” constructing it in the first place. DeGrandpre applies the figure of “orientalism,” common among postcolonial scholars, to the trajectories of mystification, which have come to characterize a major part of the modern history of narcotics. Psychoactives have become, by means of both imagination and explanation, a hyperbole—a symbol for excess—, their cultivators, in the case of  See Hermann Herlinghaus, “(In)Comparable Intoxications: Walter Benjamin Revisited from the Hemispheric South,” 16–36. 11 See David W. Courtwright. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World, 183, 184–6. The author notes: “When most people hear the phrase ‘drug trafficking,’ they think of criminals scheming to bypass strict prohibitions on nonmedical sales and use. Viewed in historical terms, this sort of activity is a peculiarity of modern times. From about the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth, the world’s govering elites, with a few notable exceptions were concerned with how best to tax the traffic, not how to suppress it. Prohibition would have struck them as futile and wasteful, had they thought of it at all” (165). 12 See Hermann Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South, 8–16. 13 “Like all technologies, pharmacology is essentially ambivalent. It can promote health, or it can be employed to tame and control populations.” David Lenson, On Drugs, 191. 14 See Edward Said, Orientalism. 10

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psychoactive plants that have been condemned and their users, being qualified as dangerous Others that call for moral scrutinity, restriction, and even coercion. Today, a wide spectrum of scientific investigations and ethical considerations convene in the plea for rigorously improved and democratized drug education.15 This implies, in the first place, readdressing the problematic of psychoactive substances in differentiated, nonbellicose ways, putting in doubt the politics of suspicion and punishment. David Lenson, questioning the reigning spirit of criminalization, writes, “The question should be: how can we allow people to get high safely, without imperiling their capacity for work, love, and citizenship?” (190). Our present study, articulated from a literary theorist’s perspective, bears a more modest and yet more extensive claim. At stake is a “third,” historico-cultural look at modernity and its hermeneutic and conceptual crucibles, one that pierces through the twilight spirit of our present, trying to recover some of the most important symbolic traces and historical antecedents underlying the conflicts over narcotics. At stake is, in other words, a new perspective of sobriety in view of the heated vocabulary related to “illicit flows and criminal things,”16 which often goes together with historical forgetting and social, psychological, or ethnic exclusion. Yet “sobriety” is not a puristic notion, but one that allows us to look through intoxication by understanding its fundamental role.17 As we will argue in our book, the plea for sobriety speaks from contemporary literature’s perception of the world and, especially, its reimagination of the “pharmakon.”

Remembering the “Psychoactive Revolution”: Provincializing the West When Dipesh Chakrabarty conceived of the arguments for Provincializing Europe,18 he did not address the one single signifier whose entrance into Western imagination produced rampant evidence of superstition, fear, and narrow-mindedness on the side of European conquerors and colonizers: psychoactive plants and the practices of their use by the autochthonous populations of the “West Indies.” Rethinking a “modern history of intoxication” appears to be an important step for bringing the critique of historicism up to date. Today, over 500 years after the transatlantic onset of Western expansion, the word “drugs” resonates with either suspicion or excess, together with narcotics having become mass commodities—extremely diversified, highly profitable, and eagerly restricted; alas, we live in a world in which the notions of excess and fear evoke, not by chance, a sense of immaturity regarding the ways in which contemporary An example, here, would be Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy by Cynthia Kuhn, Scott Swartzwelder, Wilkie Wilson. See 18–19. 16 See Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (eds), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things:States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. 17 Sobriety, in our discussion, does not stand for an absolute, nor is it equated positivistically with the word “drug-free.” As we will elaborate in Chapter 2, it is an unfamiliar concept to the extent that it forms part of the “dialectics of intoxication” heralded by Walter Benjamin. 18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 15

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societies handle their basic, bio-anthropological issues. If late modernity is about globalization, is it not also about the obsessive particularisms through which ruling elites try to secure their domains, geopolitically and locally? Or, to recall a cast of neoliberalist cynicism vis-à-vis our troubled world—chaos management should be profitable, in the first place. Regarding the first European encounter with tobacco leaves from the “New World,” Ortiz observes: When Christopher Columbus stepped on American soil, for the first time in Guanahaní on October 12, 1492, the Indians of the island greeted him with an offertory rite, a gift of tobacco: “Some dried leaves, which must be a thing highly esteemed among them, for in San Salvador they made me a present of them.” To give leaves of tobacco or a cigarette was a gesture of peace and friendship among the Indians. . . . (14–15)

For the Admiral, tobacco was nothing other than an exotic rarity. Tobacco leaves were unknown in Europe until the beginning of the sixteenth century (72). Similar scenes must have occurred regarding the Andean coca plant, of which Europe received its first account from a man, Amerigo Vespucci, whose misspelled name would dubiously account for the designation of the new lands. According to Joseph Kennedy, Vespucci wrote about his coca observations on the Island of Margarita in a letter: The customs and manners of the tribe are of this sort. In looks and behavior they were very repulsive and each had his cheeks bulging with a certain green herb which they chewed like cattle, so that they could hardly speak. . . .19

Irrespective of the arrogant blindness of European newcomers, coca and tobacco were “pharmaka” in the ancient sense of the word. They were untapped resources, and they came loaded with an invisible “call,” in that the distinction between remedy, magic, and poison was not a matter of science, in the first place, but of wisdom related to the experienced knowledges of culture and religiosity. Coca and tobacco were plants whose thousands-of-years old roles among native peoples of the Americas has been associated with medical use and combatting disorders of various kinds while they also served, at the same time, as central ingredients of autochthonous ways of life, agencies of shamanistic ceremonies and religious worship,20 besides being praised as aphrodisiacs. Their pharmacological quality was linked to their relationships with the brain-body chemistry in biological, social, and cultural ways. According to Daniel Smail’s neurohistorical perspective, mood- and consciousness-altering media have always existed, that is to say, culture and biology have never conformed a historicist The citation continues “… and each carried from his neck two dried gourds, one of which was full of the very herb he kept in his mouth, the other full of a certain white flour-like powdered chalk. Frequently each put a small powdered stick (which had been moistened and chewed in his mouth) into the gourd filled with flour. Each they drew it forth and put it both sides on his cheeks thus mixing the flour with the herb their mouths contained. This they did frequently and a little at a time, and marveling at such a thing, we could not guess the secret nor for what purpose they did so.” Joseph Kennedy, Coca Exotica: The Illustrated Story of Cocaine, 31. 20 See ibid., 15; Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar; Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, Teachings of the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. 19

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relationship in which the first would eventually replace the second.21 In that regard, and paraphrasing Latour, we indeed “have never been modern.”22 The Greek “pharmakon” and today’s pharmaceutical establishments, as well as their “pharmacological” discourses, seem to present themselves as opposites. However, they are connected via a phenomenology of conflicts, across many centuries, consisting of the struggles over narcotics, and what could turn one acceptance (that of dealing with remedies), or another (working with poisons) into the benefits of commerce, “enlightenment,” nation-building, and the invention—literally, the nurturing—of modern subjectivities, as well as their subsequent administration. If Western civilization did not bring an end to biology, one of modernity’s crucial problems, neurohistorically speaking, seemed to consist in the edification of increasingly aggressive and repressive “neurophysiological ecosystems.”23 Narcotics not only became eagerly exchanged commodities within all major cycles of modernization, but they have moved to the center of ever accelerating consumerism and growing psychotropic saturation, without which contemporary lifestyles and cosmopolitan subject positions would be virtually unimaginable. This is what we call the formative power of modern conflicts over narcotics, which started with the encounter with the Americas and led to the invention of ever more sophisticated and arbitrary ways, in which geopolitics and economy would go hand in hand with the production, circulation, and control of psychotropic effects and consciousness-altering substances. On these grounds, modern writers and artists would eventually become engaged with narcotics’ movement to the center of a god-forsaken world. Taking the vantage point of Latin American experiences regarding transatlantic expansion and exchange, and modifying Ortiz’s vision, imagining a counterpoint of tobacco and coca helps us to reveal specific imbalances. Both tobacco and coca were plants of indigenous origin and tradition from the Western hemisphere, cultigens that aroused the suspicion and the fascination of conquerors, colonizers, chroniclers, merchants, the Catholic church, transatlantic trading companies, chemists, biologists, artists, and writers. The coca leaf did not function as a catalyst of the large “psychoactive revolution,”24 that started during the seventeenth century, whereas tobacco was one of its protagonists. Cocaine, invented as late as 1860, would fall prey to the prohibition of its free use only a few decades later; and from that time on, the Andean coca plant would be stigmatized on highly imprecise grounds.25 Tobacco, on the other hand, and most likely more detrimental to health than cocaine, continued to be one of the main products serving modern societies’ limbic obsession and big economic interests: the cigarette is . . . the boon companion of industrial capitalism and high-density urbanism. Crowds, hyperkinesis, mass production, numbingly boring labor, and social upheaval all have correlatives in the cigarette. . . . For women, the Atlantic Monthly noted in 1916, the cigarette was “the symbol of emancipation, the temporary substitute for the ballot.”26 23 24 25 26 21 22

See Daniel Smail, On Deep History, 126–9, 154–5. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Daniel Smail, 155. David W. Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 1–2, 166–75. See Benjamin Dangl, The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, 38. Jonathan Franzen, How to be Alone: Essays, 148.

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On the one hand, it is impossible to imagine the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without cigarettes; but it would also be hard to hold, on the other, that drugs whose public use is being declared illegal from the early 1900s onward lose their impact on modern life, physiologically, culturally, and economically speaking. Medicine, the pharmaceutical industries, and biopolitics have been working together to determine how, and to what extent, deliberately to “poison” peoples’ bodies; those collaborative networks were not disinterested, and their decisions were considerably ambivalent. Today, the situation is all the more difficult to grasp, as the shifting politics of medicalization, the existence of increasing amounts of synthetic drugs (not all of them recognizable as such), and the pressures that hinder competent public discussions have made the field so obtuse that it seems impossible to sketch out a big picture. However, recuperating the relationship between psychoactives and culture has become an issue without which the knowledge of life would be the affair of “experts” only. To muse about this problematic, one might think of Derrida’s words: . . . the concept of drugs is not a scientific concept, but is rather instituted on the basis of moral or political evaluations: it carries in itself both norm and prohibition, allowing no possibility of description or certification—it is a decree, a buzzword (mot d’ordre). Usually the decree is of a prohibitive nature; occasionally, on the other hand, it is glorified and revered: malediction and benediction always call to and imply one another. As soon as one utters the word “drugs,” even before any “addiction,” a prescriptive or normative “diction” is already at work, performatively, whether one likes it or not. This “concept” will never be a purely theoretical or theorizable concept. And if there is never a theorem for drugs, there can never be a scientific competence for it either, one attestable as such and which would not be essentially overdetermined by ethicopolitical norms.27

This was not always the case, however, and one would have to be alert to not taking the framework of the prohibitive turn, and the ensuing fears of deviation and pathology,28 as the general historical and epistemic rule. The discourse on drugs became mythically overloaded during the twentieth century. This discourse has become “provincialized” to the extent that, in the most advanced countries, scientific development and applied science could not prevent that rhetorics of condemnation and denial would aid the new rules for narcotics administration which were established and fixed by treaties and international conventions during the first decades of the twentieth century.29 Has anyone ever spoken of psychoactive imperialism? And as we start to face the avatars of the twenty-first century, is this not one of the most dramatically understudied realms lingering in the past century’s wake? But let us take a step back. Relationships between modernity and psychoactive substances are marked by both conflict and imagination, imagination being driven by tropes such as transgression, prosperity, profit, happiness, fear, neurosis, dissociation. Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” 20. See David Lenson, On Drugs, 189. 29 See Jonathan Franzen, How to be alone, 163; Eva Bertram, Morris Blachmann, Kenneth Sharpe, Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial. 27 28

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To the big question of how the “psychoactive revolution” and the “psychoactive counterrevolution” can be read into one single picture there are still only precarious answers. The “psychoactive revolution,” a term suggested by David T. Courtwright, refers to the production, exchange, and consumption of psychoactive substances as they figured at the core of Western expansion and colonization, and as they eventually became an enabling condition of modernity. Narcotics fetishism characterized the transatlantic politics of the world’s governing elites from about the mid-seventeenth to the late-nineteenth century, when concerns about manufacturing and taxing drugs, rather than suppressing them, were dominant.“Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires.”30 There have been, above all, four such substances: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and sugar. Because of the degree to which they became neuro-chemical stimulants and psycho-cultural factors around the world, they have been the most resistant to prohibition. Coffee, tea, and sugar keep the contemporary Western world on the go, just as coca chewing still keeps part of the Andes on the go.31 By the way, and citing from McKenna’s Food of the Gods, “sugar abuse is the word’s least discussed and most widespread addiction. . . . After alcohol and tobacco, sugar is the most damaging addictive substance consumed by human beings. Its uncontrolled use can be a major chemical dependence.”32 Then there are the “little three” regulated substances: opium, cannabis, and coca (in their elaborated form, heroin, hashish / marijuana, and cocaine), less frequently consumed, and eventually restricted and prohibited. “Nevertheless, they remain highly profitable commodities. Tens of millions of people use them in crude form or in concentrated products . . . These are what most people think of when they hear the word ‘drugs.’”33 In the course of several centuries, the globalization of psychoactive plants and their derivatives, several of which came from the New World, transformed habits and economies, affected the fantasies of millions of people, and changed existing ecosystems. Narcotics were indispensible commodities and psychoactive agents, destined both to second the practices of colonization and subjugation, on the one hand, and become fuels of industrial civilization, on the other. Significantly, the use of narcotics, along with tobacco, coffee, alcohol, and to a lesser degree opium and cannabis, would rank at the center of socioeconomic change and corresponding psychoactive conditioning in Western Europe and the United States, becoming a daily habit for masses of middle-class consumers—those who came to represent the modern individual in his or her exposure to the experiences of urbanization and industrialization. But looking backward from the twentieth century’s scenarios of selective restriction and coercive control, we cannot but ask what happened at that invisible conjuncture when things started to turn around. There is no simple response, but we are certainly dealing with something quite different from a “natural” development, for example, politics that have increasingly developed on the basis of solid insights into the nature of benevolent narcotics versus pernicious and deadly ones. David Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 5. See Dominic Streatfeild, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, 6. Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge. A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, 175. 33 David Courtwright, 31. 30 31 32

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On the meaning of dissociation, and the logics of denial There’s no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. (Jonathan Franzen) As a smoker, . . . I have come to distrust not only my stories about myself but all narratives that pretend to unambiguous moral significance. (J. F.)

Let us now take a closer look at the “counterpoint tobacco and coca.” I will refer to the chiastic situation that characterizes modern appropriations of these psychoactives. At the same time, a counterpoint can surprisingly decenter a reigning melody or set a dominant motive in a different light. Both coca and tobacco originate in premodern ecosystems, in which knowledge of the “pharmakon” was part of immanent realities, practices of everyday life, and the art of human experience which were not tamed by discourse. In other words, medicines and poisons could be one and the same thing without contradicting one another. What was implied in their use was “council woven into the fabric of real life.”34 To perceive coca or tobacco as gifts from the goddesses implied a basic attitude regarding the “institution” of the gift—respect, as well as immanent knowledge. In Teachings of the American Earth, Dennis and Barbara Tedlock comment on the blind alleys of Western consumerism: When we adopted tobacco we turned it into a personal habit, and we have overused it to the point where it has killed many of us. The final irony is that there should be a righteous public campaign against this sacred gift of America, as if there were something inherently wrong with smoking. Beeman Logan, a Seneca medicine man, suggests that the trouble is with ourselves: tobacco kills us, he says, because we do not respect it.35

A complementary observation could be made about the Andean coca plant, and the terrible mythologies that keep vampirizing its existence. To unlearn the stigmatization that the late modern legal discourse on drugs has placed on the millenarian tradition of chewing coca leaves (“la hoja sagrada”) is not a moral question in the first place, but the rather simple issue of starting to use the appropriate words for a phenomenon that is easy to understand.36 The coca leaf from the eastern slopes of the Andes, Erythroxylum coca, has an altogether different story and composition than does the alkaloid cocaine. It has been a way of life, a cultural gift, a tool for healing and a means for survival. The pathological concept of “addiction” which surfaced in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century37 was, and remains to be, incongruent with the phenomenon of “la hoja de coca” (the coca leaf). “If historically maligned by outsiders, including even twentieth-century United Nations drug control agencies, coca is a benign herb

Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 147. Dennis Tedlock and Barbara Tedlock, Teachings, xii. See Fanor Meruvia Balderrama, Historia de la coca: Los Yungas de Pocona y Totora (1550–1900); Paul Gootenberg, “Cocaine in Chains: The Rise and Demise of a Global Commodity.” 37 See Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” xii, 22. 34 35 36

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essential to Andean cultures, in its use analogous to that of tea in Asia.”38 Here we find one of the powerful logics of denial—in the paradoxical tolerance of nicotine and the damnification of coca leaves, whose cultivators in Latin America are facing an ominous “war on drugs.” Cocaine, different from the coca leaf, is a powerful stimulant that, if used in high doses, especially through injection, can cause severe somatic and psychotic results.39 Huge quantities of coca leaves are to process in order to obtain small amounts of cocaine. Cocaine is not massively consumed in the countries that traditionally grow the coca plant, such as Bolivia and Peru. The demand for the potent alkaloid stems from the Global North. However, to seek a medical or social rationale that could explain, ex post facto, the situation that cocaine is illegal whereas nicotine and alcohol are tolerated, and marketed in enormous amounts, would be problematic.40 More specifically, the exclusion of cocaine versus the medical use of Ritalin and Prozac is, at least, ironic. DeGrandpre comments on the similarity between cocaine and Ritalin: How can millions of children be taking a drug that is pharmacologically very similar to another drug, cocaine, that is not only considered dangerous and addictive, but whose buying, selling and using are also considered criminal acts? If you are confused by this mix of findings, you are not alone. This confusion is widespread in both scientific and medical communities as well, as is summarized in the conclusions of a 1995 study comparing the neuropharmacology of cocaine and Ritalin, reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry: “Cocaine, which is one of the most reinforcing and addictive of the abused drugs, has pharmacological actions that are very similar to those of methylphenidate (Ritalin), which is the most commonly prescribed psychotropic medication for children in the United States.”41

The author then explains that the “usual” practice of thinking and judging—the one that has become generalized under the impact of affective politics and the dissemination of “everyday fear”42 since the onset of the twentieth century—treats drugs on heavily manichaean grounds as either benign or malign. Alcohol is implicitly denied the status of a drug, after the experiment of Prohibition was unsuccessful; perhaps because some major outlet was required to allow people to self-medicate under the pressure of stress, depression, and growing anxieties in a hurried world—nowadays the “never-ending stream of rapid-fire days and jetlag nights.”43 “For most people alcohol is not a terribly dangerous drug—but it is a powerful drug, and must be treated accordingly. No one would take a powerful antibiotic or heart medication without the advice of a “Andean coca use is local, while cocaine is for export, and the fact that they share one alkaloid of many does not make them comparable ‘drugs’.” Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, 10. 39 See Cynthia Kuhn et. al., Buzzed, 210–11. 40 See ibid., 213. 41 Richard DeGrandpre, Ritalin Nation: Rapid-fire Culture and the Transformation of Human Consciousness The Ritalin Nation, 177. 42 I am using the expression of Brian Massumi. See B. M. (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear. 43 Richard DeGrandpre, Ritalin Nation, 15. 38

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physician. But alcohol is available to virtually anyone who wants to have it, without a prescription.”44 And we have not even begun to talk about the deadening effects of alcohol consumption, in particular its psychological effects, and its socio-spatial contexts, and the discharges of violence that it can generate. What applies, to some extent, to all of these psychoactives is a prerogative that is as basic as it can easily be sidestepped when one “truth” is convoked to bury another, or when established disciplines and realms of knowledge are taken into service, provided that they can help block the “hybrid” knowledge45 that is required to address complex questions. Because of the heavy prejudice of treating drugs as inherently good or bad, we do not realize that the nature of a drug can be greatly altered simply by changing the manner in which it is used. As we should know from the narcotics used to kill our pain in the hospital, whether a drug is an angel or demon is really more a question of context and personal perspective than one of pharmacological destiny.46

The matter of use also implies drawing the distinctions between oral use, inhaling, and injection, the latter two being more apt to cause effects of toxicity and addiction than the first.47 When DeGrandpre suggests the term of the “placebo text” in relationship to narcotics use, this notion is not self-explanatory per se, but it helps us to speak of an interlocking network of diverse factors when to discussing the effects that specific drugs exert on specific bodies and minds, under specific circumstances and in view of specific psycho-affective blueprints, regarding individuals, groups, and public discourse. Placebo text refers to any unwritten cultural script that, like a religious text, informs a group’s beliefs and expectations about a given drug, animating the “drug effects” once the substance is taken. If by placebo effect one means an outcome produced not by a drug but by beliefs and expectations about a drug, then a placebo text becomes the cultural teachings, however subtle, that inform these beliefs and expectations. According to this view, once a substance is taken, beliefs and expectations join with the first-order pharmacological effects of the substance to mediate or animate the immediate and long-term effects attributed to the drug.48

At this point, facing a problematic that relates to the first-order pharmacological effects of narcotics and, at the same time, to second-order effects that are embedded in belief systems and contextual factors, it comes to us as an additional insight that “intoxication” is not induced by narcotics alone. Belief and religion, once they turn into practices that actively engage the human body can also generate effects of psychoactive transgression and even dependence. We need concepts that can meaningfully mediate between first-order and second-order effects, one of which is that of dissociation that we will address in a moment. 46 47 44 45

48

Cynthia Kuhn, et. al., Buzzed, 33. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1–12. Richard DeGrandpre, Ritalin Nation, 178. See Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness, 113. Richard DeGrandpre, The Cult of Pharmacology, 120–1. On the first-order pharmacological effects of the most used narcotics see Cynthia Kuhn et. al.,

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Our previous remarks may sound far-fetched from the angle of the culture of cognitive separations and disciplinary autonomy, as this has marked the differentiation of the modern repertoires of knowledge (nature, discourse, society, being49), but the study of the outlined issues is a crucial task for cultural theorists and anthropologists who are not averse to loosening the borders between their fields and natural science studies. Hybrid thinking becomes all the more important when the reigning spheres of “quasi-objects”50 and their domains of representation become insufficient for understanding the networks that connect life, bodies, minds, spaces, and histories. The “counterpoint of tobacco and coca” within modern cultural history,51 and especially within the conflicts over psychoactive empowerment and regulation in Europe, can now be addressed more pointedly. Compare, for example, Sigmund Freud’s early writings about “coca”—later excluded from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud—, and his late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Twenty years before Freud wrote his 1884 essay, “Über Coca,”52 Albert Niemann, a chemistry graduate student in Göttingen, had isolated the alcaloid cocaine from a large amount of coca leaves. The young Freud, using the word “coca” but referring to cocaine, wrote six papers on cocaine between 1884 and 1887 and held public lectures on the subject at Vienna’s physiological and psychiatric societies, becoming an important advocate of cocaine use, which he recommended to doctors and consumers. In “Über Coca,” Freud, starting with a historical account of the coca leaf ’s use among Peruvian indigenous peoples and even referring to Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609),53 discusses the exhaustive biomedical experiments on the effects of cocaine that were undertaken between 1860 and 1887. He writes: The psychic effect of cocainum muriaticum in doses of 0.05–0.10g consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a healthy person. The feeling of excitement, which accompanies stimulus by alcohol is completely lacking [. . .]. One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work; on the other hand, if one works, one misses that heightening of the mental powers which alcohol, tea, or coffee induce. [. . .] This gives the impression that the mood induced by coca [cocainum; the author] in such doses is due not so much to direct stimulation as to the disappearance of elements in one’s general state of well-being which cause depression. [. . .] I have tested this effect of coca [cocainum; the author], which wards off hunger, sleep, and fatigue and steels one to intellectual effort, some dozen times on myself.54 See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 89. Ibid., 88. 51 On both substances, respectively, several comprehensive historical-cultural studies are available. Compare, for example, Richard Kluger. Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris; Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime. On the coca plant see W. Golden Mortimer’s History of Coca: The Divine Plant of the Incas, and Joseph Kennedy’s Coca Exotica. 52 See Sigmund Freud, “Über Coca.” In S. F. Cocaine Papers, 47–73. 53 See ibid., 50. 54 Ibid., 60. 49 50

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Carl Koller, who first introduced cocaine as a local anesthetic into ophthalmology, specifically for surgery of the cornea,55 wrote about Freud’s respective contribution by virtue of his article “Über Coca”: “Cocaine was brought to the foreground of discussion for us Viennese by the thorough compilation and interesting therapeutic paper of my colleague at the General Hospital, Dr. Sigmund Freud.”56 While this was a breakthrough, Freud, in the exploratory fervor of his late twenties, also ventured into an experiment that was less successful than Koller’s achievement in practical medicine. He attempted, with the help of cocaine but making the serious mistake of intravenous injection, to cure Dr Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow of his morphine addiction, thus sidestepping his own advice of moderate use. The project ended in a disaster.57 After 1887, and under heavy attack from several members of the medical establishment, Freud retreated from championing cocaine,58 although he continued to consume the substance himself until 1895.59 The father of psychoanalysis, to recall the counterpoint, would develop the habit of cigar smoking which, in contrast, accompanied him during his lifetime and which, according to Louis Menand, he even analyzed as a substitute for another “addiction,” masturbation.60 This story is telling in several regards. What emerges is the question of psychoactives’ relationship to psychoanalysis and psychopathology. Irrespective of Freud’s embarrassment about his partial misjudgments, into sight comes a historico-conceptual conjuncture in which areas such as medicalization, psychology, psychiatry, and culture intertwine. The decades following Freud’s cocaine writings constitute an epoch, during which the “discontents of civilization” amply resonate or, to say it graphically, the centers of urban and industrial progress start to be drowned by the “dreamworlds” of commodities and advertisements, and by the energies that circulate adversely between the promises of gratification stemming from mass culture and consumption, on the one hand, and the neurotic pressure of the “reality principle,” on the other. If this was a world in which “the hungry psyche was replacing the hungry belly,”61 the imminent yet tricky closeness of transgression and repression had moved to the center of modern life. And not incidentally, the psychoactive “counterrevolution” regarding some narcotics (like cocaine and the opiates), unlike others (such as nicotine and alcohol) was launched during the first decades of the twentieth century. This coincides, interestingly, with Freud’s mature reflections on culture and society, in which he had lost intellectual interest in the stimulant and had turned to culture as neurosis, arguing in Civilization and its Discontents that modern Western life had become compulsively marked by symptoms of repression. Here the question arises of the extent to which Freud’s eventual exclusion of the psychoactive stimulant cocaine from his psychoanalytic concerns might have become a “symptom” itself. Carl Koller, cited reference in Robert Kennedy, Coca Exotica, 133, note 32. Carl Koller, cited in ibid., 72; also compare Cynthia Kuhn et al., Buzzed, 213. Regarding Freud’s self-critical stance, see Joseph Kennedy, 79 (also compare 68, 76–9). See Sigmund Freud, “The Dream of Irma’s Injection.” In S. F. Cocaine Papers, 205; also compare the 1987 paper, “Craving for and Fear of Cocaine.” Ibid. 59 See ibid., 121; see Joseph Kennedy, 78. 60 See Menand, Louis, “Introduction” to Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its Discontents, 10. 61 Robert Ardrey, cited in David Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 4. 57 58 55 56

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One might be skeptical of Freud’s prioritizing repression, since the problem that transgression cannot simply be “replaced” suggests a threshold, upon which different effects are played out. These scenarios that are ingrained in conflict connect, in one way or another, with the modern dynamics and institutions by which the individual subject is formed and administered. What do psychoactive substances and neurosis have in common? Can they be perceived as contrasting phenomena in the negotiation of affective states as well as hegemonies at the turn of the twentieth century? Is not the market-driven, individual and collective, geo-economically fueled, pharmacological stimulation and regulation of affect the actual modern invention, one that bears on peoples’ unconscious strata while placing the problem somewhere other than in the individual psyche whose traumatic core Freud had extrapolated onto society? Does not modernity’s drive to take hold of an uneven world consist, as well, more of the proactive management of affects and embodied imagination, including transgressions, than of Freudian repression and sublimation? Here, “dissociation” becomes a necessary term, seemingly found in an in-between located somewhere “underneath” transgression, and “above” repression. This concept will help us draw a further contra-punctual constellation. Dissociation signals a contradiction between cognitive insights and behavioral practice, prompted by the question: “How do we manage to accept, and act in accordance with, error that we know to be error?”62 This does not primarily refer to the use of drugs but has to do, rather, with the human mind’s proclivity for“illusion” and reality “distortion,” which are not viewed as simply insane, but as forms of “active ignorance.” John F. Schumaker describes it as a “complex mental operation” whose implication is twofold. First, “the brain can disengage itself in such a way that information will be processed in contravention of its own capacity for accurate higher order information processing” (ibid.). Secondly, what emerges, in a perceptual-psychological nexus, is a set of “false alternatives that serve as functional surrogates to the rejected portions of reality” (ibid.).63 The argument, to be laid out in the following pages, will touch upon the nexus between dissociation and consumerism. However, and this is the difference we intend to make, certain “narcotics” are imagined as possible differentials that can help foster an epistemological critique, as well. That is to say, far from equating the consumption of narcotics with an all-out dissociation from oppressive or “normative” realities, and not simply identifying consumerism with dissociation, the question should instead be: what are some of the intricate relationships that exist between an exchange-value oriented contemporary matrix (consumption for the sake of consumption, that is, capital maximation) and dissociative potentials, and practices that abound under late modern circumstances? We want to further elaborate on the counterpoint between cocaine and nicotine, the first being declared illegal after 1914, whereas the second kept enjoying its ironic triumph well across the twentieth century (“smoking can cause death”). At issue is, in effect, the varying counterpoint that these two narcotics conform in relationship to the dissonant concert of market economies, repeatedly adjusted geo- and biopolitically: the geopolitics of cocaine is different from the geopolitics of tobacco, as are the respective biopolitical strategies.64 62 63 64

Robert Schumaker, The Corruption of Reality, 36. Regarding dissociation theory, see ibid., 40–53; regarding the aspect of memory, see 51. See Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine; Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas: Usos, percepciones y personajes; for tobacco, see Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, and Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes.

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Let us consider David Lenson’s On Drugs as one of the studies that seriously engages the “dialectics” of first-order pharmacological effects and second-order dimensions of narcotics. Here one learns that dissociation, understood as “active ignorance” or better, purposeful “distortion” of the higher-order, cognitive and verbal state of intelligence can be a highly aporetic phenomenon. To start with “Don Tabaco” (Ortiz), nicotine is a drug that does not distort cognition, it does not “alter consciousness,” so to speak. It rather seems to stipulate thinking and serve the concentration process. Simultaneously, smoking implies disregard for one’s own health and sometimes the health of others. Jonathan Franzen narrates it this way: Because I’m capable of hating almost every attribute of cigarettes (let’s not even talk about cigars), and because I smoked what I believed was my last cigarette five years ago and have never owned an ashtray, it’s easy for me to think of myself as nicotine-free. But if the man who bears my name is not a smoker, then why is there again a box fan for exhaust purposes in his living-room window? Why, at the end of every workday, is there a small collection of cigarette butts in the saucer on the table by this fan?65

Smoking cigarettes “is a kind of template addiction,” and nicotine can be imagined as a “chameleon willing to play any drug role that the user casts it in.”66 The sector of intellect that nicotine stimulates is the one that thrives on the “pleasure of thinking” rather than on ethics. Nicotine has some effects on the appetites, mildly suppressing food hunger but not affecting sexual drive. The temporal “cigarette after sex” and “cigarette after the meal” suggests that nicotine’s principal impact on desire is to create the desire for more of itself, so that any interruption of that reflexive appetite, even for food or sex, has to be marked by a ceremonial return to it.67

One might want to slightly reformulate this: what places smoking at a special interface of ceremony and “bio-chemistry” is the sublime suspense that it can help generate, suspense of an activity in the way of completion, or reflexive breaking up, together with a peculiar sensation that makes the suspense itself pleasurable—with nicotine’s working on the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.68 This ceremonial act is seemingly so gratifying, so stunningly “self-serving,” that most smokers display a down-to-earth indifference toward the disgust and damage that they often cause to nearby nonsmokers. What surprises us about smokers is not the dissociative act as such, but the utter normalcy with which it is performed, and that smoking is so addictive “that it is often said to be harder to give up than heroin.”69 On top of things, some studies discuss the possibility that nicotine enhances, together with mental alertness, memory function.70 Jonathan Franzen, op. cit., 144. For a suggestive, as well as ironic anecdote referring to a Cold-War perception of “living in Berlin,” see ibid., 147–8. 66 David Lenson, On Drugs, 37, note 5. 67 Ibid., 37. 68 See Cynthia Kuhn et. al., Buzzed, 166. 69 David Lenson, 37. 70 See ibid., 167. 65

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Regarding the interference of smoking with the daily rhythm of arousal and satiation of desire, Lenson formulates, The fundamental change that nicotine effects is a fragmentation of the wave motion of time (chronos) into discrete particles (kairoi). Cigarettes become the commas of daily life, dividing otherwise uninterrupted waves of experience into punctuated intervals or separate temporal units (note 6). . . . An active smoker’s cognitive activity is completely divided into quanta. (37)

It should be added that this “interception” of time experience does not equal a dispersion, or fragmentation, of energies but the creation of a momentum that realigns body and consciousness in a peculiar act of surrender. It also reduces anxiety, unless overdoses result in nicotine poisoning. In that regard, “kairos” is energy condensed into a momentum of both awareness and alertness, enabled by the medium of “holy smoke.” This explains why smoking can temporally “alleviate” even the most alienating labor practices and routine activities, by providing self-administered adjustments between autonomic activity (the nervous system) and life’s external affairs.71 On a related topic, cigarettes are among the most profitable commodities; however, among compulsive smokers, they become unconsciously fetishized to an extent that the daily waste of money turns negligible. The modern cigarette smoker metamorphoses into a Benjaminian allegory at the verge of commodity fetishism. Cigarettes, as “hybrids” that have been turned commodities par excellence, virtually produce the smoking creature. They provide the medium that is power—the widely available, tasty matter of smoke that is animated and absorbed by the life-giving human breath.72 Here we have a “creature,” whose proclivity to Baroque aesthetics speaks from the transgression of the body’s “normal” state which, while tending to self-destruction, is perceived as both pleasurable and unavoidable. In the vision of Fernando Ortiz, There is always a mysterious, sacral quality about tobacco. Tobacco is for mature people who are responsible to society and to the gods. The first smoke, even when it is behind one’s parents’ backs, is in the nature of a rite de passage, the tribal rite of initiation into the civic responsibilities of manhood, the test of fortitude and control against the bitterness of life, its burning temptations, and the vapors of its dreams.73

The masculine symbolism is vividly played out by Ortiz; therefore, a free association of Walter Benjamin’s “Baroque drama” would point to the other extreme of manhood rites—the downfall of the male “sovereign,” his becoming creaturely-like.74 Apart from (cigars’ offering) a “corporeal” attribute of individual power, whose excessive use can lead to monstrous destruction, the nonreligious, compulsive smoking of our age is constitutively ambivalent. It is as though the smoker would offer himself, or herself, to a divinity that no longer exists in the “tangible” fantasies of the world, yet lingers Also compare Helene Keane, “Smoking, Addiction, and the Making of Time,” 119–33. See Andrew Weil on inhalation, The Natural Mind, 113, and 104. 73 Renato Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 14. 74 See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 91. 71 72

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invisibly behind the figurations of smoke. Money, modernity’s ever-present fetish, is generally spent to fulfill needs and to reproduce desires—their fulfillment withholds itself by their displacement from one commodity to the next. Cigarettes, however, bring the smoker closer to a gratifying sensation, where pleasure is perceived as “real,” although the fullfillment of a desire proper is not at stake. This is why the smoker can waste money in full yet dissociated awareness of his or her dependency on the “magic” product of cigarettes. This magic, however, is decisively due to nicotine’s going from lungs to heart to brain in one rush.75 With cocaine, things are different. Lenson, whose proviso above is linked to both pharmacological inquiry and philosophical reflection, believes that pleasure, unlike desire, “does not appropriate. Its existence is based upon a provisional escape from economics, whereas desire in Consumerism is the economic drive wheel and the engine of consciousness” (Lenson, 72). Pleasure can come from friendship and conversation, generosity, intellectual work, engagement with nature and crafts, “or any number of objects that do not need to be purchased” (ibid.). The stigmatization of marijuana in America,76 the author adds, is based on this aspect of its potential: “it enables the user to take pleasure from ordinary objects already within the range of perception” (ibid.). To use a different wording, it enables users to sidestep exchange value by indulging, for example, in the “value” of the senses, the imagination, the environment. The nonutilitarian search for pleasure and a “profane yet illuminated” approach to pleasure have already been found at the core of Benjamin’s writings On Hashish, especially “Myslovice—Braunschweig—Marseilles” (1930) and “Hashish in Marseilles” (1932); both hashish and marijuana derive from the cannabis plant. These texts, together with twelve protocols of drug experiments, were written at the time when the legal restriction of cannabis was set on its course. Pleasure that “does not appropriate” shines from Benjamin’s remarkable passage, where the image of the “coin” is set against the idea of money, making guilt (and debt) pervasive.77 What matters in these words, more than love itself, is the pleasure of feeling illuminated about love’s actual secret: And when I recall this state, I would like to believe that hashish persuades Nature to permit us—for less egoistic purposes—that squandering of our own existence that we know in love. For if, when we love, our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like golden coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so that they can thus purchase new birth, she now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence.78

Should it be conceivable that there are drugs that must be combated, even through war, for these very reasons? Lenson makes precisely this point: “Consumerism’s tacit metaphysics” (72) must be upheld against the odds, which brings us back to the case of cocaine. Cocaine is only allegedly about pleasure. See Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind, 113. See Cynthia Kuhn et. al., Buzzed, 157–8. 77 See Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion.” 78 Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles.” In W. B. On Hashish, 126. 75 76

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Cocaine promises the greatest pleasure ever known in just a minute more, if the right image is presented to the eyes, if another dose is administered, if a sexual interaction is orchestrated in just the right way. But that future never comes. There is a physical pleasure to the drug, to be sure, but it is incidental, trivial, compared to what is always just about to happen. . . . A sensation driven out of the present into the past or the future cannot be pleasurable. (71)

Another way of describing the studied phenomenon is to say that cocaine can render “desire” reflexive. It can do so by mimicking a world of accelerated desire, and even “consumer consciousness” while, paradoxically, “a person using a great deal of cocaine is likely to buy little else but the drug” (72). Following on this argument that touches upon dimensions from which consumers tend to be dissuaded, we read that cocaine is a “drug that diverts desire from the conventional appetite for consuming objects” and thus “mimics ordinary capitalist appropriation” (ibid.). That is to say, it can cannibalize utilitarian appropriation by generating a spiral of accelerated desire and turning it away from the fetish of commodities—a surprising insight, in the event that the mechanism is effective. “Cocaine capitalism is to conventional capitalism as cancerous cell growth is to normal cell growth in the body . . . Cocaine must be combated on a war footing for precisely this reason” (ibid.). The described potential makes cocaine, a “drug of desire,” different from the drugs of pleasure, such as marijuana and others. Interestingly, in common discourse, cocaine is confounded with drugs of pleasure. The traditional aversion to “unproductive” pleasure may be harnessed in this way without requiring an attack on greed and desire, the forces that motivate both the conventional and the cocaine markets. If cocaine is portrayed as a drug of unproductive pleasure rather than a savage mimicry of consumer consciousness, Consumerism can attack it without attacking itself at the same time. (ibid., 72–3)

Keeping dissociation in mind, and provided that the placebo factor is taken into account, this would imply that cocaine could enable one of the most active forms of dissociative behavior imaginable: a distancing from that must-have state of affairs, the one that consists in the curative day-to-day purchase in the happyness spots where today’s most ubiquitous pharmaka are displayed—commodities79 or, respectively, the daily indulgence in market society’s iconic altar—the television screen. Moreover, the “reflexivity” that such a psychoactive substance and practice potentially allow could open a pathway to the kind of heterodox consciousness that Benjamin was discussing in relationship to the project of the Paris Surrealists: winning the forces of intoxication for the purposes of critical illumination and ethical politics.80 For Benjamin and the Surrealists, hashish and opium, as drugs of pleasure, were the objects of somatic and intellectual experimentation. Cocaine, had it been available, might have signaled a still more rigorous apprehension of “profane illumination,” than the one that the German critic proposed in his Surrealism essay. We will discuss this intellectual project further in the next chapter. 79 80

See Bernard Stiegler, Von der Biopolitik zur Psychomacht, 52. See Karlheinz Barck, “Phantasie und Bilderrausch im Surrealismus.”

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Conceptual search and contrasting commonly held truths motivate our reflection, not the systematic study of psychoactive substances. Nicotine and cocaine, two of modernity’s ominous and desired psychoactives, have been placed in a relationship that can provide insights into the varying roles of narcotic substances and the nonhomogeneous character of culture-biology interfaces. From there, the “counterpoint” helps by providing a closer look at one of the harshest paradoxes: the meanings of both desire and denial as they traverse the twentieth-century’s “cult of pharmacology” and its probitive mentality. Finally, our point was to show that the pharmakon had not only migrated from Greek mythology and philosophy into the post-Christian era, but it had actually fueled, in a new shape, psychotropic Western modernity. This was due to its blossoming as a “magic” device, spread out into ever larger assortments of “holy” substances, chemically “improved,” aggressively marketed, and eventually restricted at the threshold between industrial capitalism and advanced globalization. This was also a moment at which secularization, its crises, and the psychopathology of the modern individual had started to generate more addictions than the rational mask of sanity could handle. Our initial counterpoint embraced not cigarettes and cocaine, but the unadulterated, ecological tobacco and coca cultigens of native American domestication. Therefore it should be remembered, once again, that tobacco is different from cigarettes and, above all, coca leaves should not be confused with cocaine. In Andrew Weil’s words, “it is good to learn to prefer natural drugs to synthetic or refined ones . . . Moreover, it is wise to introduce drugs into the body in natural ways . . . Indians who chew the whole [coca] leaves do not experience toxicity and generally do not become dependent.”81 As the study of drug plant-related pathways to health and affective sanity, as well as socio-existential sustainability, takes its course against the odds, there is a chance that the millenarian Andean leaf will join and genuinely energize a nonviolent understanding of sobriety. However, chewing a handful of coca leaves in New York or Berlin, in ways similar to those that accompany peoples’ sipping their daily coffee, would be a new sign of global tolerance and justice, both morally and economically.

Unlearning fear, absolving the ghost of the “Pharmakos”: An open genealogy The “pharmakon” is not an absolute value, neither evil nor heavenly, which has been of foremost interest to writers whose respective gallery becomes larger, the more attentively one looks. Here are some of the best-known names—Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Antonin Artaud, Ernst Jünger, Anais Nin, William Burroughs. Did intoxication not become a privileged sphere beginning in the eighteenth century, one which literature and art could turn into a medium to be used against a plain culture of affairs associated with the ego-self and an impoverishing life-world increasingly depleted See Andrew Weil, The Natural Mind, 113–14.

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of sensual capability and synaesthetic “insight,” spiritual energy and kinesthetic / physiological “consciousness” but loaded, in turn, with fears, egomania and all manner of tendentious judgments. If human psychis and biological existence had drifted apart, were these writers not obsessed with discovering the secret of their relating narratives? This theme has incited, over the past decades, a corpus of critical works on both sides of the Atlantic, works whose authors have begun to problematize those notions of literature which deemed themselves to be above the psychotropic challenge. However, the present study does not head in this direction. The segment of Latin American literatures that will provide our field of investigation ranks “after” modern intellectuals’ fascination with narcotics and their potential to provide access to the diversity of consciousness. There is a dialectic axis that makes these literatures on the one hand peripheral and to an extent, marginal, but propels them, on the other, to a realm of experience and reflexivity which is more “advanced” than in the case of their Western European and North American antecessors. The chief difference is the way literary modernity’s involvement with narcotic substances and experiences situates itself, historically and culturally, “before” the war on drugs. Latin American narcoepics, in turn, excel as narrative and ethical formations whose major theme is the heterogeneity of territories and life worlds which the war on drugs has violently affected. The vote of narcoepics is not necessarily to address this war directly, nor do they simply attain to the symbolism of social critique. These epics accommodate multiple imaginaries around a peculiar interface, one that we will define in the next chapter as the “dialectics of intoxication.” It is the difference between the modern literary and artistic interest in “ecstasy” and a new narratological and certainly paradoxical interest in “sobriety,” which requires that we introduce yet another concept. Whereas the “hero” of the West’s narcotic literature is the “pharmakon,” similar to Fernando Ortiz’s Don Tabaco and Doña Azúcar, the protagonist in narcoepics is the “pharmakos” (in its metamorphotic, as well as self-reflexive figurations). The concept of the pharmakos is genealogically related to that of the pharmakon, yet this genealogy has become submerged. In the twilight zones of contemporary disseminations of affective power and stigmatization, such as the distribution of fear and guilt, as well as in the different realms of literature where the unspoken and absent are called into “presence,” the pharmakos is rising to new relevance. Discovering the hinge between the proliferation of “pharmaka” for the sake of rising modernity and “psychoactive repression,” taking hold in the shadows of modernity’s exhaustion,82 presents one area of concern. The second realm awaiting dilucidation requires that we shift attention, not away from psychoactive substances and factors, but toward a peculiar mode, by which otherness is constructed or refashioned. This is concerned with, as well, the status of people and communities, or their images, which are publicly related to indecent, or abject, or straightforwardly illegal practices regarding narcotics. But who actually is the pharmakos? To find the footprints of the pharmakos, one must scrutinize literary and philosophical imagination, together with the works of mythology. Traditionally, the See Teresa Brennan, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy.

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“pharmakos” has been an open secret, contained in dynamics “where much is known but unacknowledged.”83 Two authors have brought this figure, an “anti-creature,” to the closer attention of literary studies, although hitherto to little avail. One was Northrop Frye who, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and already pointing to Socrates, called the “random victim” pharmakos, or scapegoat.84 The other contribution comes from Jacques Derrida’s treatise, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972). Frye offers a hint regarding the heterogeneity of tragic imagination, which contradicts Hegelian aesthetics. A main point in the classical acceptation of tragedy (and the impact of violence on human life as condensed in a hegemonic dramatic tradition) is the “special case,”85 the distinct, ennobled individual who, stricken by misfortune, conveys cathartic suffering to the audience or the readers. In this vein, tragic violence carries a timbre of the absolute striking from destiny (the power of the gods), or from the sphere of the law, at the point at which its authority commands a higher, a “metaphysical,” threat. Here we can talk of aesthetic homogeneity, and thus intelligibility, in that tragic violence resembles “pure violence,”86 and sublime awe becomes the maxim for vicarious affect (the cathartic force). The tragic hero is the “absolute” victim. The pharmakos, on the other hand, is the ironic victim, as it suspends the element of the “special,” the intelligible case. This figure does not have a distinct tragic identity or character. When we deal with the “ironic victim,” what is isolated from the tragic situation is a “sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (Frye, 41). One might speak of an aesthetic matrix of heterogeneity for two reasons. The role of the pharmakos is not only ambiguous, it is also paradoxical. It is ambiguous, since the “selection” of this creature for catastrophe is inadequate “and raises more objections than it answers” (ibid.). It is paradoxical because of the “low mimetic” mode that irony confers. In irony, the customary accents of pity and fear are missing. This paradox merits accentuation. A person falls prey, that is, is “chosen” for catastrophe without a deeper reason, perhaps without being guilty of wrongdoing at all, and yet the poetic form shaping the epic of the “random victim” is devoid of any pathos of the terrible. There is a fable without moralizing, and there is “realism and dispassionate observation” (42). Here we have a dispositif that deserves further attention, providing a first signpost for an aesthetics of sobriety. Frye’s assertion that irony, as a mode, “takes life exactly as it finds it,” is, of course, itself ambiguous—it harks back to the style of the sophists.87 We believe there is still an enigmatic reason beyond irony, as to why neither heightening nor pathos nor the customary strategies of lament are being Rosemary Hennessy, “Open Secrets: The Affective Cultures of Organizing onMexico’s Northern Border,” 310. 84 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 41. 85 Ibid. 86 “… the Law says nothing with which you could argue or agree with; it has no content beyond the sheer performative act of asserting its own domination. It therefore has the formalism of all pure violence.” Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, 148–9. 87 “Irony is naturally a sophisticated mode, and the chief difference between sophisticated and naive irony is that the naive ironist calls attention to the fact that he is being ironic, whereas sophisticated irony merely states, and lets the reader add the ironic tone himself.” Northrop Frye, 41. 83

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conferred to the pharmakos. It is this paradox that will accompany us in the exploration of contemporary narcoepics. Resuming the relevant observation from Frye’s genealogy of fictional modes, attention is given to the “typical or random victim” that the author considers an archetypical element in Western literature from Adam to Kafka’s Trial.88 If the tragic victim stands for the exception that, striking an admired individual, causes a cathartic shudder along our backs—what is it that the pharmakon stands for? We meet a pharmakos figure in Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, in Melville’s Billy Budd, in Hardy’s Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Dalloway, in stories of persecuted Jews and Negroes, in stories of artists whose genius makes them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence. (41)

But how can we extend the meaning of the pharmakon—when understood as cure, poison, and magic potion—to the genealogical imagination of the pharmakos? “Plato’s Pharmacy”89 offers a playful reading of Plato’s early text, Phaedrus. The fact that Derrida’s recovery of the “pharmakon,” and of the “pharmakeus” from Greek philosophy, focuses on the “movement and the play of ‘ambiguity’ at work”90 does not come as a surprise. His work is bound to experiment with a genuine set of notions that can serve the deconstructive purpose, such as his critique of Western “phonocentrism.” Our study is not an exercise in deconstruction proper, in that it links conceptual discussion to cultural diagnostics and a remapping of literature. In that regard, however, it engages in a genealogical outline, through which “pharmakon” and “pharmakos” can be shown to meet. A word about Socrates. This figure combines two distinct dimensions of the human animal, which Western discourse, beginning with Plato, sought to “transculturate” into reasonable, commensurable entities. Socrates is known as a foundational yet enigmatic philosopher, but Socrates has also been the shaman, more or less disguised. If this is so, Socrates must have played on both instruments which were probably one and the same: sobriety and intoxication. Derrida writes: “. . . isn’t Socrates, ‘he who does not write,’ also a master of the pharmakon? And in that way isn’t he the spitting image of the sophist? a pharmakeus? a magician? a sorcerer? even a poisoner? . . . The threads of these complicities are almost impossible to disentangle.”91 Now, why are they difficult to disentangle? What momentum of exclusion might be at work? Plato uses the ancient “pharmaceutical words,” and while doing so, his strategy is “curative”: “The cure by logos, exorcism, and catharsis will thus eliminate the excess. But this elimination . . . must call upon the very thing it is expelling, the very surplus From here, the tragic hero can be recognized as “untypical” victim. In turn, “the hero of Kafka’s Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end of what he is, which is an ‘all to human’ being.” See ibid., 41, 42. 89 Jacques Derrida. “La pharmacie de Platon,” first published in Tel Quel, nos 32 and 33, 1968. 90 Niall Lucy, “Pharmakon.” In A Derrida Dictionary, 92. 91 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 117. On Socrates’ “pharmaceutical charms (that) provoke a kind of narcosis,” see ibid., 118–19. 88

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it is putting out” (Derrida, 128). Here we have the series of transgressive terms to be exorcised: pharmakeia—pharmakon—pharmakeus. But one word was missing92 in Plato’s writing, although it “points to an experience that was present in Greek culture even in Plato’s day” (129): pharmakos. Pharmakos (wizard, magician, poisoner) is “a synonym of pharmakeus (which Plato uses), but with the unique feature of having been overdetermined, overlaid by Greek culture with another function. Another role, and a formidable one” (130). Recalling Edward Said’s thinking of the “beginnings,” it is perhaps less important to ask which of the two words, “pharmakon,” or “pharmakos,” precedes the other,93 than to note the overdetermination of the pharmakos. To be “overdetermined” means nothing other than to be deeply seated in social, or politico-cultural, real-life existence. Derrida, drawing on James G. Frazer and the Cambridge School of Ritualists, describes the “formidable” role of this character: “the pharmakos has been compared to a scapegoat. The evil and the outside, the expulsion of the evil, its exclusion out of the body (and out) of the city—these are the two major senses of the character and of the ritual” (130). A. Le Marchant, drawing on Harpokration, tells the story of two men, “scoundrels” called pharmakoi who, during the time of the Thargelia in Athens, were led out of the city to be sacrificed. The men had to go through ceremonial consecration first, during which they received sacred meals (pharmaka). Their eventual sacrificial death was carried out in an act of mimetic magic, the restaging of the legend of the man Pharmakos who was put to death for having stolen, supposedly, cups from Apollo.94 In Frazer who, in his classical study on magic and religion, provides one of the most extensive accounts we read: Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to death by the people outside of the walls. The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcasts as scapegoats.95

For the city to be “cured,” or purified, it was necessary that the victim be given special treatment before he or she was sacrificed. Although the word was missing, Derrida notes, “it cannot not have acted upon the writing and the reading of this text.” Ibid., 130. 93 Thomas Szasz notes,“The root of modern terms such as pharmacology and pharmacopeia is therefore not ‘medicine,’ ‘drug,’ ‘poison,’ as most dictionaries erroneously state, but ‘scapegoat.’ To be sure, after the practice of human sacrifice was abandoned in Greece, probably around the sixth century B. C., the word did come to mean ‘medicine,’ ‘drug,’ and ‘poison.’” T. S. Ceremonial Chemistry, 19. 94 Le Marchant considers this legend “manifestly unsatisfactory.” See A. Le Marchant, Greek Religion to the Time of Hesiod, 25–6. 95 James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 694. 92

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The pharmakos thus appears in historical mythology, made prominent by the influence of Frazer and the Cambridge School, as the representative of a threat or a mischief. However, to “represent” the situation accordingly, and to function as a being that can bring the danger to a halt, the pharmakos himself must undergo a treatment that actually qualifies him for this role. If, for example, he is given “dried figs, a barley loaf, and cheese,” and “beaten seven times upon his genital organs with squills and branches of the wild fig . . . , while the flutes played a particular tune” (Frazer, 695), this is the equivalent of applying certain “pharmaka” to foster a ritual identity. At stake is the otherness of evil, yet one perceives that an Other is openly fabricated on and in the body of the person who is relegated to a special creaturely condition. This inherent mechanism of transference, the more abstruse it looked, the more effective it must have been. A collective organism, a city, in order to ward off its being unpredictably infected or affected, cultivates a low-level infectious presence inside its boundaries. Pharmakoi were regularly granted their place by the community, being fed, and dressed, etc., “in the very heart of the inside” (Derrida, 133). When the moment comes, this “impurity” is violently exposed, and expelled to obtain a purging. Can all this be imagined without a deeper ambivalence that reaches far beyond the chosen victims—one that shows that the “inside” of the community is never free of impurity and of evil itself? As for the history of concepts, Lenson thinks that “there must be a primordial word that holds at its semantic core the notion of purgation, since the drugs referred to (by the term ‘pharmakon,’ the author) purge the body, where the scapegoat is the thing purged from the body politic.”96 We also have Jean Paul Vernant’s description, allowing us to associate the question: how can a community admit into its heart that which it proceeds to exorcise?97 Socrates himself was eliminated from Athens’ public order in the fifth century before Christ, on charges of heresy and corruption of the young. Much later, from the eighteenth century onward, he would reemerge as a Christ of philosophy,98 a martyr and pathos figure vis-à-vis Post-Christian Western culture. It is not far-fetched to observe, in the referred context, a line of interest which Edgar Wind, in his short article “The Criminal-God,”99 takes up from Frazer. Wind’s remarks allow for the question if the paradoxical, pagan figure of the Criminal-God does not provide a powerful matrix of acting imagination, understood as political force, to which the historical figure of Christ belongs, as well. Donald Hanks’s Christ as Criminal, among other books, could be reread from this vantage point.100 In other words, we find, on the one hand, a nexus between the words pharmakos and criminal, but according to the cultural David Lenson, On Drugs, 205, note 4. Vernant writes: “In the person of the ostracized, the city expells what in it is too elevated, what incarnates the evil which can come to it from above … In the evil of the pharmakos, it expels what is the vilest in itself, what incarnates the evil that menaces it from below. By this double rejection it delimits itself in relation to what is not yet known and what transcends the known.” Jean Paul Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” 131.   98 See Johann Georg Hamann, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten / Aesthetica in nuce, 67–73. Here I thank Martin Treml for pointing to the ideas of J. G. Hamann and Edgar Wind.   99 See Edgar Wind, “The Criminal-God.” In: Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1/1937–8, S. 243. 100 Donald Hanks, Christ as Criminal: Antinomian Trends for a New Millenium.   96   97

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memory inscribed in ancient myths, a god can also be turned into a pharmakos. If this can generate historical realities, Christianity would have emerged from a stunning misinterpretation of a situation, in which Jesus Christ had to fulfill that primordial duty. There has been mainly an archaeological concern underlying our incursion in the above references. Significantly, drugs are not “drugs,” and the spectrum along whose lines the meanings of the pharmacological episteme extends awaits more extensive discussion. Furthermore, if in one way or another, collective affect can be turned into a practical, that is a political, means, then “guilt” and fear seem to be susceptible to metamorphose into political pharmaka par excellence, as do certain aliments and narcotic substances when mythically charged with a natural drive of excess. According to the cited sources, and still different from the nonviolent sublimation of guilt through the Christian tradition, the ritual of the pharmakos served as a purgative medication to avoid a pervasive spread of guilt. Can it be that Christian reason is then turning this explicit need of a human pharmakos to be sacrificed, eventually obsolete? This is where philosophy and literature have to be, once again, visited in order to find the traces of migration into Western modernity of a figure whose seeming absence can only lead us to discover an “open secret.” Laying out the network of clues that allow a reconstruction of the status of the pharmakos in both cultural history and philosophy would require a separate study. But a conceptual line has become visible. The pharmakos was, and seemingly reappears to be, a powerful figure since “his” or “her” body can lend itself to serve two purposes—those of infection and projection. Infection has to do with impurity, or various kinds of transgression, belonging or attested to this character; projection helps the greater collective to exteriorize its own maladies by delegating them onto someone who, from a line of thinking other than that of Agamben appears to be a genuine homo sacer. In the meaning of the words that we have discussed— pharmakon and pharmakos—“medication” or cure refers to both intoxication and deintoxication (“purgation”). The crucial asymmetry that both allow to historicize, and thus to rethink is their differing relationship with either selected human bodies or peoples, or with the body politic of the “greater good.”

2

Aesthetics of Sobriety: Approximating Narratives from the Hemispheric South Ethics at an impasse: Toward abnormal interpretation Our present world is verging on an increasing sense of hazardous or catastrophic images, an alleged ubiquity of violence, together with unforeseen scenarios of either exhaustion or crisis, which are now perceived as concerning the very foundations of existence itself. We are facing the sudden closeness of what seemed to range, as long as modernity’s common sense provided for stable links between self, reflexivity, citizenship, consumption, and territory, at a conveniant distance: “good life” on the one hand, and “mere,” endangered life on the other. Life, backed by notions such as the subject, science, democracy, and rights did not appear to be at stake, at least not in the leading industrialized countries, where the biosciences have been concerned with perfection-of-life technologies,1 rather than with what Canguilhem once called “biological philosophy,”2 or with the exposure of human life that a globally ruling economy nourishes in the guise of “bioderegulation.”3 At present, however, there is an uncanny concreteness of questions related to the condition of living, and new challenges for rethinking that concept are suddenly with us. To touch upon the symptomatic relevance of the problematic, let me mention three different approaches that bring the concept of life to center stage. Giorgio Agamben, drawing on Foucault’s assumptions regarding biopolitics, observed over a decade ago that the “politicization of bare life as such,”—especially by sovereign power—“constitutes the decisive event of modernity.”4 Conversely, in a more recent study, Luc Ferry returns to classical philosophy’s investment in the notions of good life and happiness. He discusses, in a pro-Kantian way, an ethical soteriology, a “humanist doctrine of salvation” understood, philosophically, “as an invitation to conquer fears, to reconcile oneself with life, and to ‘save ourselves by ourselves.’”5 A third perspective is discussed by Lauren Berlant, who points to a crucial aporia that has taken hold of that 4 5 1 2 3

See Dedria Bryfonski (ed.). Bioethics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Georges Canguilhem. Knowledge of Life, 59. See Teresa Brennan, Globalization and its Terrors, 19. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 4. Luc Ferry. What is the Good Life? 281.

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“moral-intimate-economic thing called ‘the good life.’”6 Berlant raises the problematic of an affective epistemology in a way similar to our search for an aesthetics of sobriety, as she formulates: Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something.’ What happens when those fantasies start to fray—depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash?7

Half a century ago, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt was still able to elaborate on the modern dimensions of vita activa with relative optimism, while she preferred not to acknowledge Walter Benjamin’s (1921) concerns about the violent aporias that weighed on the notions of both “just life” and “bare life.” Today modernity, once expected to provide for the most accomplished balance between civility, its borders, and the “outer” terrains of destitution and despair, appears in a ghostly light—perhaps it threatens to change from normativity and conflict into a historical farce of itself. What lingers in its wake is the exhaustion of many people’s confidence in an unfettered good life. Can we continue to rely on this assumption as an unquestionable prerogative? In other words, would it not indeed be, as Berlant holds, an attitude of “cruel optimism” to cultivate an aesthetic and social “sensorium that’s busy making sense of and staying attached to whatever there is to work with, for life?”8 We are pointing to a shift of perception that is of immediate ethical relevance, although it seems to subvert, at first sight, common assumptions about where the realm of ethics begins and where it ends. Conflicts over ethics, or perhaps more specifically over the core and the limits of a criticism both literary and cultural, which see themselves as ethical, encounter a reframing when we start asking what the common ground is from which all questions must begin and where they must find their consummation. The legitimate (Kantian) answer would presumably be “good life,” as it comes famously attached to the sublime moral law.9 “Good life” considered as the playing field is what should be retained as the minimal basis from which, and within which, ethical questions should be raised, negotiated, and interpreted. An uncomfortable issue arises when we start analyzing one of the parallelisms inherent in the present world. The fact that narratives and episodes from Latin America, and from the hemispheric borderlands— voices of the Global South—have been addressing, from time to time, an interruption, or an absence, of vital norms of Western civil life is what fierce opinion-makers in the North have held as an ontological assumption. Such a conjecture must change at the point at which citizenship has started to move out of balance on a global scale. I am not speaking of world-homogenizing patterns but in terms of constitutive asymmetries. The 8 9 6 7

Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism, 2. Ibid. Ibid., 9. See Paul Ricoeur. Reflections on the Just, 169–170.

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ontological backwardness of the South, a powerful image, vanishes into thin air in view of disproportionate globalization’s undermining, for example, the state’s potential for fostering inclusive citizenship regimes in the highly developed countries as well, where “growing numbers of once rights-bearing citizens” are being transformed into “socially excluded internally rightless and stateless persons.”10 Globalization qua “deregulation” in the name of worldwide market freedom has made the “Western situation” into one of anxious contemporaneity, one in which it would be very problematic to view modernity’s peripheries as aberrations from a norm to whose universal legitimacy we, as “naturally” self-reflective subjects of the West, could still hold claim. Inequality, and vulnerability, and heightened neurosis have not only become widespread issues but have also come to affect both the “autonomous” individual of the metropolitan centers and the precarious citizen at the margins of democratic faith, or protection. I am not contending—as Teresa de Lauretis seems to do—that a “spontaneous” eruption of violence is simultaneously occurring in both the “postmodern, wireless world” and in the “impoverished, oppressive” environments of the South.11 The mechanisms for distributing vulnerability across the globe could hardly be more uneven than they are today. But the mere fact that the affective make-up of middle-class citizenship in the most advanced Western countries is no longer attached to socially comforting, allegedly self-fulfilling mechanisms but instead is imbued with painful fantasies and experiences may finally enable a more alert perception, as well, of the situation in the peripheries. The Global South, which started acquiring its contemporary contours after 1989/1991, is not the Third World. It has become, by force of worldwide readjustment of the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps more “contemporary” than the Global North. We are dealing with new spaces of self-consciousness and with narrative and imaginary formations of surprising affective, as well as epistemic force. They will enable us to speak, in the present book, of new, transnational, epics of sobriety. “Epics of sobriety” is related to both affective and conceptual figures; understanding them calls for rethinking not only the conventions of modern literature but also new implications of philosophical thought, together with non-Western wisdom and science from those unfamiliar territories of the South. If we remember “Critique of Violence,” one of Walter Benjamin’s crucial essays, we find a hint of doubt about Kant’s categorical imperative (“act in such a way that at all times you use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and never merely as a means”). Benjamin’s critical footnote can be contrasted as well, ex post facto, with neo-Kantian desires of ethical refashioning of today’s antagonisms: “One might, rather, doubt whether this famous demand does not contain too little—that is, whether it is permissible to use, or allow to be used, oneself or another in any respect as a means.”12 What the Kantian imperative cannot safeguard against, as Benjamin perceived with bold intuition in “Capitalism as Religion,” is market capitalism’s genuine ability to See Margaret R. Somers. Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights, 2–3. 11 See Teresa De Lauretis. Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film, 1–2. 12 Walter Benjamin. “Critique of Violence,” 241. 10

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make violence immanent to modern societies.13 In the developed Western situation, oppression appears obliterated, disguised as a free choice. In the words of ŽiŽek, “our freedom of choice often functions as a mere formal gesture of consenting to one’s oppression and exploitation.”14 Contemporary globalization, and especially after 1989/1991, has brought forces to bear on the ordinary imaginary, which threaten to exhaust, however, the fantasies of material and moral well-being, connected to the sense of formal freedom, and a general interest in “good life.” How is it that “qualified life” has been subjected, increasingly, to graduation, downsizing, or even enclosure to such an extent that the globalization of planetary space now functions through the revamping of the norms of “realism” and optimism, inclusion and exclusion, centers and peripheries? How is it that uprooted, or endangered human existence has begun to acquire unprecedented shapes of immanence while cynical common sense tries to reason away the heightened inequalities of today’s world, or permeable borders are closed down by enforcing geopolitical rule? How is it possible to access, today, those vulnerated fantasies, and territories in affective, spatial, and narratological terms? There are reasons for turning our attention to literature and cultural hermeneutics, although the interpretive legacy provided by today’s academy is up for grabs. The purpose of the present chapter is to discuss the possibility of an aesthetics of sobriety, and I would like to start by pondering the notion of “abnormal interpretation.” The production of “critique” has worked in many ways to invent formations of discourse to the benefit of “enlightenment,” sublimation, and appropriation of difference. The values of “good literature” have admittedly been uprooted, but they continue to be inscribed in the scholarly unconscious—in community with the intellectual spirits of “qualified life.” Curiously, such an interiorized gesture, while aiming at the highest standards of critical evaluation, has in fact also abolished them. From here, “normal interpretation”15 can be defined, in an elementary sense, as those practices that share underlying presuppositions, institutional frameworks, and a linguistic and categorial habitus, all of which delimits the realm of a legitimate interpretive community, its hermeneutic objects, as well as its recipients. At a principal, or perhaps pedagogic level, scholars feel responsible for upholding the modern assumption that reflexivity regarding literature and the arts is tied to deeper dimensions of truth, and supposed to generate substantial effects of the subject’s improvement. If lettered reading and reasoning have preferentially explored the bonds between “qualified life” and the genuine anxieties of those who are best entitled to lay claim to it,16 what if we moved closer to the affective and epistemic narratives of subjects who have no home in the fantasmatic universe of the (post)modern literary critic? Who are those writers and artists who have started to assume a “new homelessness” themselves?

I discuss the problematic of immanent violence in Violence Without Guilt, 24–7. See Walter Benjamin. “Capitalism as Religion.” 14 Slavoj ŽiŽek. “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” 667, 668. 15 Nancy Frazer’s article “Abnormal Justice” provided the associative blueprint for the term “abnormal interpretation,” although I engage in a different discussion. See Frazer, 393–4. 16 At this point resonates, once again, Susan Sontag’s seminal essay, “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 49–57. 13

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A situation of “abnormal interpretation” arises at the point at which vital narratives and experiences that emerge from heterogeneous imagination cannot be contained any longer within constitutive assumptions, the discursive spaces of “qualified” criticism the way it has developed from the playing field of “normalized” lettered citizenship. This holds for an influential portion of Latin American literary criticism as well, for our purpose is not to foreground a Latin American “exceptionalism” but to rethink the “normality” of the normal, in view of an increasing number of chasms in modernity’s inner edifice. More specifically, we might speak of “homeless interpretation,” which, in the face of certain transnational Latin American epics, becomes affected by globalized subjectivities that cannot, however, lay claim to “enlightened” cosmopolitanism, or even to a stable civility of life and its respective anxieties—the autonomy of the subject that could always be problematized, but whose underground we preferred not to touch. It is here that literary criticism is susceptible to being thrown out of balance, although perhaps there never was such a thing as fully normalized criticism. In the terrain of ethics, this displacement becomes paradoxical. Difference and an alleged “turn to ethics”17 have been prominent issues around which humanities scholarship in the past has organized a solid part of its creative, critical potential. But “difference” and the proliferation of ethically correct good causes have also been accompanied by a “culturalization of politics,” connected to what Zizek deems the “retreat and failure of direct political solutions (the welfare state, socialist projects).”18 In Wendy Brown’s words regarding a general depolitization of citizenship, the “cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.”19 Viewed from our perspective, criticism should face head on the territories of literary imagination that crystallize affairs of cultures that are under siege—the Hemispheric South and its unruly imaginaries, where a “corrosion of civility” and— painfully—its enabling fantasies is a daily experience. What are the contemporary realms where literary and cultural analysis can demand an ethical presence by questioning the generalized, timely notion of “cruel optimism?”20 For example, what are the relationships between cultural figuration, conceptual narration, and “affective argument” by virtue of which new epics of sobriety from the South address the impasse of living in the overwhelmingly globalized present? Our study will be dealing with an experiential sensorium and its images, with aesthetic sensibilities and uncommon territories of reciprocity, viewed through the lens of such epics as they have emerged during past decades throughout the Western hemisphere. The codes and discourses contained within an order of “normal interpretation” are turning pallid in the face of narratives, at whose core is—not “intolerance” but—an endangered infrastructure of See Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (eds). The Turn to Ethics; for a contrast, see Alain Badiou. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. 18 Slavoj ŽiŽek. “Tolerance”. Chantal Mouffe writes: “What we are witnessing . . . is the triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism that is increasingly filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real transformation.” In Marjorie Garber et. al. (eds.). The Turn to Ethics, 93. 19 Cited in Slavoj ŽiŽek. 660, note 1. 20 See Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. 17

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the ordinary, caused, for example, by the dismantling of a modern socio-economic edifice in the South, the depletion of human existences and, notably, the rise of planetary grids of informal labor practices as a result of increasing global adjustments, that is, inequalities. If “abnormal interpretation” implies that no state can be gauged in which the intellect recovers its peaceful routine, a new critical posture becomes necessary, not from nihilism, not from “optimism” but from particular strategies of sobriety.

Humiliating sobriety—a surreptitious path Literature here no longer expects anything from a feeling on the part of the author, other than one in which the will to change this world has allied itself to sobriety. It is fully aware that its only chance is to become a by-product in a highly ramified process designed to change the world. An invaluable by-product. The principal product, however, is a new attitude. (Walter Benjamin on Bert Brecht)

Heiner Müller, a dramatist and writer from the former East Germany, observed strategies for turning the most highly developed countries into castles to be protected against onslaughts from the rest of the world, and remarked that this would be, at best, a pessimistic yet unethical “variant of hope.”21 “Claustrophobic” vision is blind to the fact that history has not ended, that “the third world is power; those, at whose cost we are living will not remain passive forever. It is not a question of military-economic strength. It suffices when millions of poor people start to move out of their confinements.”22 Müller was not making an emotional statement, nor was he politically naïve. At issue was a “dialectic” question: from which “legitimate normality” or, rather, from which assumed abnormality should existence and thinking be (re)imagined in order to loosen the “string of fixed opinion?”23 Müller speaks in Brechtian diction: Why was Enlightenment defeated? At a certain point, the development of economy and of consciousness have come to diverge diametrically. “It would be interesting to design a computer program that plays on the interfaces between the economic underdevelopment of the Third World, and the intellectual depravity of the First— without previous ideological assumptions.”24 In other words, what is it that experiences from the Global South can strategically teach us, not in terms of representations of “otherness,” or politics of either hope or compassion, but regarding our situatedness in the present world, its severe limits, and its mistaken assumptions? At this moment, as we are drawing a conceptual map to test against uncanny narrative worlds, let us consider from amidst the new narrative territories the example of the narcocorrido as a figure of “abnormal” ethical import. To avoid misperceptions, Heiner Müller. “Die Reflexion ist am Ende, die Zukunft gehört der Kunst,” 12. Ibid. 23 See Benjamin, Walter. “Bert Brecht,” 368. 24 Heiner Müller. 13. 21 22

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here I am not making a case for “popular culture,” which would mean exalting narcocorridos as a contemporary phenomenon backed by “respectable” popular legacies (the “corrido” tradition), and which might now be viewed as provocation or aberration while still pertaining to the treasure chest of plebeyan art. It is worth remembering what Michel de Certeau wrote under the lemma “The Beauty of the Dead”: “Popular culture presupposes an unavowed operation: . . . Only after its danger had been eliminated did it become an object of interest.”25 By now it seems that even the inclination of postmodern art theories toward popular narratives has further contributed to create a sublime space for the “subcultural text,” appropriating the energy by which the “subversive” and the “immoral” unfold as acting imagination. In addition, any categorization in the vein of the popular, associated with being “less than intellectual,” “less than” entitled to ethical life, must be rejected here. We will refer to nonindividualist, and heterogeneous imaginaries, whose conceptual and aesthetic values have often been lost by labeling them “popular.” The narcocorrido or “global corrido,” which first started emerging in the 1970s,26 has become a sensitive topic in current discussions on violence and aesthetics. Critics feel puzzled by the immanent, laconic transgressiveness of narcocorridos. They have remarked, for instance, that these songs celebrate violence, foregrounding, as their heroes, popular subjects from the South who are involved in the inter-American, cross-border narcotics trade.27 Such judgment focusses on sentiments of uncanniness, or simply on textual referentiality, rather than assuming that global corridos display an intermedial, performative character. In the same vein, it is implied that the “counter-violence” of the narcotraficantes, laconically hailed by ballads on drug trafficking, leaves no room for ethical, let alone epistemological, reflection beyond manichaean criteria. Do we not tend to start out using criteria of “normal interpretation” to address, from that perspective, what appears as “unnaturally transgressive,” or even magic and miraculous? But what would it mean to reverse the terms of study, without finding an “alternative normality” in the world of the narcotraffickers, that is, without mythifying it either toward moral evil or “popular resistance?” If we take the perhaps most salient case, the epic songs of the norteño group Los Tigres del Norte, based in San José, California, the pernicious and often deadly peripeties in the majority of their narcoballads are obvious. Nevertheless, a minimalistic tone that these ballads convey with their paratactical narration reverses the violent actions of their plots: narcocorridos are ghostly speech-songs that intone widely shared experiences: the group’s music has enabled, among a large public, the possibility of an affective awareness of violent conflicts whose consequences are shockingly tragic, but they cannot convey a legitimate tragic code. As we have argued at length,28 the deviance of the narcocorridos of Los Tigres del Norte does not consist in the way they foreground Michel de Certeau, Heterologies:: Discourse on the Other, 119. For critical studies on the narcocorrido, see Elijah Wald. Narcocorrido; Mark Cameron Edberg. El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the U.S.–Mexican Border; Hermann Herlinghaus. Violence Without Guilt. 27 Compare, among other studies, John McDowell. Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica, 198–207. 28 Hermann Herlinghaus. Violence Without Guilt, 88. 25

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violence (“ecstasy”) but in their rejection of the curse of guilt, which mainline public opinion, often projecting fear, as well, has imposed on those outcasts who today are a growing part of the world’s informal working class. To undermine guilt and fear can be envisioned as a singular achievement of sobriety. I have taken this example to point to what seems symptomatic for the literatures that will be discussed—a defamiliarization of existing hermeneutic horizons. As interpreters, we tend to pin down compelling narrative phenomena by incorporating them into manageable categories. But would we expect that liberation from guilt is presented to us by the imaginaries of those who have functioned as invisible yet blameworthy subjects? Would we want to assume that powerful aesthetic standards are defied from that side? What counts is not the magical, not the metaphysical, nor even the horrorific face of violence, and there appears to be a strange suspension of the traditions of both tragedy and melodrama, as well. We are led into a conceptual no-man’s land where there is . . . “just” sobriety. “Ecstasy” and “sobriety” are not mere “states of affairs” but conceptual matters that can put reflexivity in a new light. As we will see later, they will also allow us to aesthetically approach the problematic of violence while avoiding a series of shortcomings, which has accompanied theoretical thinking about violence, artistic experience, and modernity. Curiously, Latin America’s new epics of sobriety suggest that we place one of Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic formulations (Surrealism, 1929) in global perspective: “The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?”29 Here we might think of the example of “narconarratives,” a realm that includes not only narcocorridos but also reaches far beyond, into an extensive sphere of prose-fiction, film, music, and performance, in which the realities of hemispheric narcotics traffic and informal travel are taken as a lens for problematizing the revamping of North–South conflicts under the pressures of advanced neoliberalism. These narratives point to an imbalance that has become strategically sensitive. And Benjamin’s formulation, when referred to a hemispheric situation regarding the status of illicit psychoactive plants and substances that are produced in Bolivia, Columbia, or Mexico, gives way to a powerful conceptual image. Ecstasy, generated by means of consumption of legal and illicit drugs, is one of the main indulgences that the Global North is unable to overcome. And there is sobriety in the South that is “humiliating,” to the extent that drug plant cultivation and the export of its derivatives allow social, cultural, but mainly economic survival in certain Latin American rural and semi-urban areas today, and are not intended for consumption as elaborate drugs in these territories. There resonates the sarcastic voice of Gómez-Peñas’ Border Brujo when he addresses his imaginary Gringo interlocutor: “I grow the pot . . . & you smoke it. I need dollars, you need magic, a perfect transaction I’d say. We both need to overcome our particular devaluations, que no?”30 The situation gets more tricky at the point at which the “North” programatically disavowes its own need for intoxication by keeping the “economy of the scapegoat”31 Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” 210. Guillermo Gómez-Peña. “Border Brujo.” In Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry, 84. 31 For a discussion of the early roots of the concept, see René Girard’s The Scapegoat. 29 30

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alive, blaming its outer and inner margins of inertia, contamination, irrationality, or violent excess. This amounts to nothing less than a war on affect in which (real and imagined) groups, territories, individuals, and symbols are singled out to redirect negative energy streams away from the spheres where they originate in social conflict, moral and political subordination, economic exclusion, and cultural intimidation. Marginalities that are affectively produced carry the burden by which a moral economy, increasingly operating in flexible, national and transnational terms, oversees the reproduction of “safe places” to counter the zones of contamination and abjection. It is in the deeply neurotic realms of dominant Western culture32 that the construction of otherness recreates doses of guilt by means of projection, thus producing a mechanism for psychically intoxicating the “subaltern,” or the ex-centric, which can be even stronger than economic oppression. Here, “intoxication” acquires a complex meaning, and cannot be reduced to a state of inebriation caused by narcotics. It is a concept that is bound up, in one way or another, with Western histories of colonization and modernity. To resume our argument in relation to the drug ballads of Los Tigres del Norte, a salient case of hemispheric “narconarratives”: their songs have become powerful by virtue of an aesthetic that—far from celebrating violence—undermines the affective marginalization of the losers in globalization—those who have moved from poverty into drug smuggling. It subverts, or fragments sensations of guilt and fear while engaging in the struggle for survival of the dispossessed, turning the corridos’ heroes, most of them low-level drug traffickers and undocumented migrants, noncitizens in today’s hemispheric exchange, into our affective contemporaries. This could be viewed as immoral only as long as criticism rejoices in the daydream of unfettered “normality”— the apotheosis of “good life” that condenses the desire for a natural apokatastasis (eventual culmination) of history. At issue, however, are aesthetic postures of a strange kind of “realism,” one that makes fantasies avowable that speak from the edges of “good life” yet resist being codified in terms of criminality or madness. The sober spirit of the ballads of Los Tigres insinuates that the Hemispheric South is experiencing what can be called, perhaps, global modernity’s dramatic crisis of citizenship. At issue, aesthetically, are sensibilities that are not caught up in the sublimation of violence and ecstasis, avoiding those “poetics” that practice a mastery of containment. A first tentative resumé of our quest must demarcate “sobriety” as an experimental notion whose presence, in previous aesthetic and ethical discussions has been, at best, a marginal one. Today’s “narcoepics” emerging from the South (and we will later distinguish this term from narconarratives), do not primarily address the socio-economic forms of violence that generate from informal labor and illicit drug trafficking across the Western hemisphere. They rather help us scrutinize existing assumptions of a “political unconscious,” due to which these processes are perceived as infelicitous aberrations from a norm, and would thus be irrelevant for epistemological and ethical debate. Metaphorically speaking, “sobriety” is at issue not as a sort of zero-sum vantage point but, rather, a concept that allows us to move into complex 32

See Norman Brown. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History.

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relationships between human bodies, transgressions of different sorts, and the social and ecological survival struggle of disenfranchized individuals and communities throughout vast territories of the Western hemisphere. In order to advance sobriety as an aesthetic issue, we have to follow Benjamin’s untimely reflections on that matter, and scrutinize the “dialectics of intoxication” for further hints. Benjamin’s interest in “intoxication” does not render tribute to either Sade or Freud. While Sade fuses transgression into a nihilistic aesthetics, Freud recurs to pessimistic therapeutics by postulating a moral need for repression and sublimation, in order for society not to be torn apart by sexual drives and passions. Benjamin, in turn, focuses on the experiences of French Surrealism. He is not only unimpressed by an affective codex of Judaic-Christian morality; in fact, with Surrealism’s help, he seeks to wrest the concepts of intoxication and illumination away from the religious domains where they have been controlled by Catholicism. Not by chance, we can encounter this very attitude in a text that Mexican author Octavio Paz published, in 1972, on the French socialist visionary Charles Fourier (1772–1837), one of the first to excel by his materialist interest in “transgression,” directed against a rising, Janus-faced bourgeois society. Paz argued that Fourier’s doubts about the “purifying” moral constituents of Western civilization had become a cornerstone for critical thinking. This net of connections can be drawn closer when we remember that Benjamin had taken a deep interest in Fourier. To add to the spiral of untimely reflections, in 1947, André Breton, the integrative figure of Parisian Surrealism, wrote while passing through the states of Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona—the Hispanic Southwest of the United States—a text entitled Ode à Charles Fourier, in which we read: “Poverty, deception, oppression, and massacre—these are still the same calamities of this civilization that you had once vigorously accused.”33 The essay “Surrealism” (1929) contains Benjamin’s main incursion into the notions of intoxication and sobriety. The text presents one of the single most far-reaching reflections on Surrealism and the historical avantgarde. Prevailing approaches to the essay have given preference to the concept of “profane illumination,” as though the summoning of profane spirits for the liberation of dialectical thought-images would resolve (or dissolve) the challenges of “intoxication.”“Profane illumination,” in a more timely wording, has to do with worldly wisdom as an instrument for cultural and philosophical criticism, a conceptual and anthropological attitude directed against both rational determinism and the affective power of Christian morality. Now, could not “humiliating sobriety” offer, perhaps, a more suitable blueprint for imagining how the “energies of intoxication”34 could be mustered for an epistemic exercise that is, at the same time, an investment in ethical thinking? Benjamin uses different figures of embodiment, which can help achieve profane illumination, such as practices of love, hashish trance, and the magic of writing. But from what vantage point could they be thought of, today, as elements of a joint ethico-epistemological quest? It is still surprising that Benjamin’s thoughts on Surrealism, which offer an important hinge regarding his Arcades Project,35 encountered one of its main references in Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1928). As Karlheinz Barck has noted, there are incredible André Breton. Ode an Charles Fourier, 39. See Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism,” 215. 35 See Karlheinz Barck. “Der Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz.” 33

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connections that still have to be “thought through” to approach the conceptual place of the Dante book within the context of Parisian Surrealism, as well as the other avantgarde movements of that time.36 By referring to a passage in Auerbach, Benjamin models his idea of “humiliating sobriety,” discovering a mystical parallel between André Breton’s Nadja and the figure of Beatrice in the Divine Comedy. Here it is useful to bear in mind that when Benjamin speaks of “Provencal love poetry” as being emblematic of the “poetry of the ‘new style,’” he takes Auerbach’s suggestion that there is what he calls a materialist anthropological inspiration behind the mystical conception of love. Both authors’ interest in the “poetry of the ‘new style’” had to do with the paradoxical conception of “realism” which, in both “Dante” and “Surrealism,” emerged at the interface of religious imagination and secular practices of writing or art. It is what Auerbach described as poetry’s “art of imitation” (of life) at the point at which it is capable of superceding life. Poetry is capable of creating evidence of the unbelievable, the miraculous.37 However, as Benjamin remarks, “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”38 It is this peculiar approach to “realistic” narration that will bring us closer to the errant cosmopolitanism, and bizarre body-consciousness that characterizes the literary identities of today’s doomed border crossers: while their dreams and cultural driving forces resemble religious simulacra in late modernity, their transgressive deeds follow a dramatic materialist inspiration. In that regard, “mystical” energies can be found in contemporary epics, to the extent that they avoid emphasizing the mysterious side of the mysterious. We can now recall the particular way in which Benjamin expounds his interest in the concept of “sobriety” in order to get closer to the aesthetic “reality effect,” that is, to the real, everyday energies of transgressive (mystical) forces when they are supposed to serve both poetic creation and political thinking. Referring to Auerbach, while discussing André Breton’s Nadja, he writes: We have from a new author quite exact information on Provencal love poetry, which comes surprisingly close to the Surrealist conception of love. “All the poets of the ‘new style,’” Erich Auerbach points out in his excellent Dante: Poet of the Secular World, “possess a mystical beloved; they all have approximately the same very curious experience of love. To them all, Amor bestows or withholds gifts that resemble an illumination more than sensual pleasure; all are subject to a kind of secret bond that determines their inner and perhaps also their outer lives.” The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious. Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in the world complementary to it? What is it that courtly Minne seeks (and it, not love, binds Breton to the telepathic girl), if not to make chastity, too, a transport? Into a world that borders not only on tombs of the Sacred Heart or altars to the Virgin, but also on the morning before a battle or after a victory.39 38 39 36 37

Karlheinz Barck. “Erich Auerbach in Berlin. Spurensicherung und ein Porträt,” 211. Erich Auerbach. Dante: Poet of the Secular World, 2. Walter Benjamin “Surrealism,” 216. Ibid., 210.

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The English translation of the original passage in Auerbach’s Dante, to which Benjamin refers, reads: All the poets of the stil nuovo possessed a mystical beloved; all of them had roughly the same fantastic amorous adventures; the gifts which Love bestowed upon them all (or denied them) have more in common with illumination than with sensual pleasure; and all of them belonged to a kind of secret brotherhood which molded their inner lives and perhaps their outward lifes as well—but only one of them, Dante, was able to describe those esoteric happenings in such a way as to make us accept them as authentic reality even where the motivations and allusions are quite baffling.40

In contrast with “normal interpretation,” it is indeed interesting to note Benjamin’s sense for “daring connections,” which allows him to draw, between Surrealism and Dante, a conceptual space. In Auerbach, we encounter a perception of that peculiar kind of realism that he will continue exploring in his famous Mimesis, first addressing the specific “force of reality” carried by “mystical illumination”41 and later, pointing to Christianity’s cunning propensity for “magic” and “bloodlust” as affective (political) strategies that are more powerful than “enlightened classical culture” and its “weapon of individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline.”42 Aesthetically speaking, individual creation, when unmoved by a demand for autonomy, can generate a nonindividualistic energy (as it recognizes itself as belonging to a “kind of secret brotherhood”), one that is able to connect with a “movement from the depths,” as we read in Mimesis, “from the depths of the multitude as from the depths of immediate emotion.”43 Benjamin is eager to conceive of the “dialectical” space where the radical Surrealist strategy of transforming existence and its conditions vibrates, not from rational discourse, nor from the masterworks of literary introspection, but from an “anthropological materialism” that we might understand in the way of an aesthetics of sobriety. Its force lies in allowing for a profane approach to transgression (“the dialectics of intoxication”), which is understood as an immanently reflexive project. Indulging in the mysterious side of transgression “takes us no further,” as it will take us no further indulging in the shocking aspects that global epics of sobriety purport. Therefore, what had been of interest in the “esotheric schools of poetry” was not l’art pour l’art but the goal to transform life in its entirety.44 Surrealism, for its part, strived to “win the energies of intoxication for revolution”; however, as Benjamin warned, any “serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement,”45 in which the concept of “sobriety” seems to have been the hidden key to the Surrealists’ strategy, even when they were unable to live up to it themselves. Sobriety conveys a borderline concept in that it also helps us to connect different epochs and narrative spaces around the world. Erich Auerbach. Dante, 60–61. Ibid. 42 Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 60–1. 43 Ibid., 61. 44 See Walter Benjamin. “Zum Aufsatz über Sürrealismus.” 45 Walter Benjamin “Surrealism,” 216. 40 41

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In order to move closer to epics of sobriety from the Global South, we have to turn Benjamin’s thought-figure to the controversial matter of violence. How would the“dialectics of intoxication” relate to the question of violence, at the point at which it surfaces through narrative imaginaries that challenge both the intellectual posture by which violence is kept at a dramatic, or sublime distance and today’s mass-media-produced low-level fear as a regulative device of civic innocence? It is, again, Auerbach who can help advance our search. In “The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres,” dealing with narrative material of a medieval nature, he addresses phenomena that will resonate in contemporary cultures as well. There is that old problem that has not ceased to perplex us—the one that presents itself when we look at violence “as” intoxication. Auerbach feels particularly drawn—not without awe—to the stylistic and rhetorico-figural resources developed by early modern literature when it comes to narrate, and thus take hold, of a terror-stricken world. A lesson is derived from Augustine’s Confessions, not for the benefit of “sobriety” but, on the contrary, for understanding a “refined” practice of ecstasy invented by Christianity, one which—with capitalism—will metamorphose into an even more powerful drive that arises from market fetishism. Revealingly for Auerbach, medieval narratives, and Augustine in an exemplary way, show a greater versatility for condensing violence into “realistic” narration than does the antique rationalist tradition. Almost against his own will, he ponders the insight, in Mimesis, that violence as an intoxicating power is difficult to resist, and it cannot be confronted head on but requires strategies of cunning reason. To recall his famous yet almost forgotten paragraph, informed by his reading of Augustine: . . . in the fight against magical intoxication, Christianity commands other weapons than those of the rational and individualistic ideal of antique culture; it is, after all, itself a movement from the depths, from the depths of the multitude as from the depths of immediate emotion; it can fight the enemy with his own weapons. Its magic is no less a magic than is bloodlust, and it is stronger because it is a more ordered, a more human magic, filled with more hope.46

Who was the enemy, by the way, that had to be controlled by “realistic” narration? Pagan societies and non-Christian ethnic communities at the threshold of modernity, or the proponents of cultural heterogeneity in a wider sense? To put magic in order,47 make it serve the monotheistic political goal, construct the gigantic Western “universe of hope” from the criteria of the few centers that were obsessed with taking control of the world, culminating in today’s delirium of hyperdevelopment—was this not colonial modernity’s very project? What were the properly cultural maxims to be imposed on the oppressed in terms of intoxication, if not those condensed in a discourse and a politics of “containment,” based on the opposition of body and mind, non-Western life and mature civilization, famously invented by Christianity? “Containment,” however, is not sobriety but the marriage of ecstasy and its subsequent denial or, to take Norman Brown’s words, the “universal neurosis” of Western culture.48 Not by chance, the Erich Auerbach. Mimesis, 61. Michael Taussig elaborates extensively on magical imagery in its relationships to the constitution, and deconstitution of power/knowledge. See Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, 366–392. 48 Norman Brown. Life Against Death, 9–10. 46 47

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narrative form of confession—introspection as the journey into the individual Self ’s afflictions, prominently guilt—emerges in the shadow of the Christian invention of original sin. Confession will metamorphose, from Augustine to Rousseau and further, into a literary master discourse accompanying the modern subject’s education by virtue of containment. Therefore, one of the sensitive questions that will resonate throughout our book relates to the ways how narcoepics “bear witness” to the pattern of confession, or attempt to exorcise it. Containment, inscribed in modernity’s culture of subject formation, is understood as both the use and the regulation of diverse situations of Rausch concentrated, however, in the domain of powers whose historical march of triumph rested on their explicit quest for, and their command over purity and order. It is because of this that Auerbach’s words resonate in an uncanny and timely way: the lesson of Christian “realism” (not rationalism), for example in Augustine’s case, is to cover up civilizing violence with skilled magic and sophisticated morality, including confession, to make it work beneath the surface, and to fly across the abyss of domination while unharmed by the forces of resistance and wrath. The Benjaminian “dialectics of intoxication,” when extended to colonization and the transatlantic rise of Western modernity, and going beyond Auerbach, helps recognize modernity as a large-scale training course, in which both intoxication and its denial have been constantly practiced. In other words, the modern discourse of rational containment has become a compass for civilization’s moral path, yet it has at the same time relied on strategies of fashioning an intoxicated, or intoxicating Other. A stunning phenomen that becomes relevant for rethinking the cultural and literary history of the Americas today, speaks from the changes that characterize the move from a “psychoactive revolution” at the center of modernity’s transatlantic rise (from the seventeenth to the end-nineteenth centuries), to a “psychoactive counterrevolution” on a global scale (the twentieth century). Transatlantic, and later hemispheric trade and consumption of psychoactive plants and substances, many of which came from Latin America, up to selected narcotics prohibition and the “war on drugs” make evident that modernity has never just operated in the service of secularist separations between society and nature, science and belief, the body and the intellect. It has, rather, fused the triumph of its hegemonic affective designs with a both instrumental and transcendental molding of practices of sometimes approval, sometimes denial of Rausch. Stretching Auerbach’s argument on violence and intoxication still further, so that a postcolonial hypothesis becomes possible, brute violence as an “intoxicating” force of early modern times will find a constitutive parallel, at present, in the attacks that we can observe on the enlightened, tolerant, and self-contained values of modern society. But what is rapidly attested to the upsurge of international terrorism in recent years is deeply connected, underneath our troubled normality, to the “weapons” with which Christianity, and later market capitalism, have operated as “movements from the depths.” When it comes to struggle, the geopolitics of empire, together with its cultural machinery, and the applied strategies of market fundamentalism have more efficient practices to deploy than those of enlightened tolerance.

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Is it too far-fetched to think that we might not encounter the actual force of resistance of those who, today, are globally excluded from the benefits of the West in an individualistic, and enlightened spirit, either? This is not just a question of why the oppressed should stick to moderation and rational containment, or of self-questioning sublimized into confession, if oppression teaches otherwise. It seems necessary, in the first place, not to rush into sophisticated moralization or mythification of violence when it emerges from the territories of the Hemispheric South or, rather, when its images resonate as part of an aesthetic-ethical posture of literatures that makes us see the “abject” yet unruly color of globalization. Today, terror and crime are too unreflexively attributed to civil unrest or deviant survival strategies of social and cultural actors—mainly the newly dispossessed—yet who are not “ecstatic” criminals. Benjamin’s formulation regarding the “state of emergency’s” being, from the vantage point of the oppressed, the rule keeps resonating, in that it points beyond (or beneath) the realms of both visible subjective and generalized symbolic violence. It reminds us that systemic violence is not a fiction, even though it cannot be seen from the “backround of a nonviolent zero level,” which we prefer to hold as the normal state of affairs. “Objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. [. . .] Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.”49 We are now close to making sense, again, of a particular image of “sobriety,” for it makes us perceive layers and meanings that are otherwise covered by the “normal” state of affairs. That is to say, “irrational explosions” of violence may appear, at first sight, to be pertaining to the “intoxicated” subject (the “brute” criminal, or the “dangerous” South); however, there is a sphere that is rigorously “complementary” to it, the sphere of “humiliating sobriety.” When narrative projects engage in this complementarity, asking for the other side of violence, we are dealing with a mode of aesthetics of sobriety.

Thinking poverty, relocating aesthetics Poverty, Herr Keuner thinks, is a form of mimicry that allows you to come closer to reality than any rich man can. (Benjamin on Brecht) A total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it—this is its hallmark. (Benjamin on Brecht)

“Epics of sobriety” is, in the first place, a concept-figure that allows for making distinctions. Although the imbalances between Latin American countries and the 49

Slavoj ŽiŽek. Violence, 2.

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hyperdeveloped North can be objectified by looking into the historicality of conflicts, there is no objective “reason” that could account for the emergence of an aesthetics of sobriety from the Hemispheric South. Rather, our concept helps cut a swath through compelling yet ambivalent artistic articulations, and is intended to be both analytic and prospective. The challenge consists in recognizing new narrative formations without imposing normativity. In that regard, I have been foregrounding “sobriety” as one of those minority concepts that allows us to become aware of an “abnormal” facet in the trajectories of modern self-reflexivity. By first finding the abnormal in the center, pointing to a self-conscious gesture (Benjamin) for which the erratic, the dubious side of Western discursive machinery becomes a movens for criticism, we intend to come closer to understanding some of today’s radical artistic projects from the South. Admittedly, “sobriety” from the perspective of contemporary Latin American authors such as Laura Restrepo, Guadalupe Santa Cruz, Roberto Bolaño, Eduardo Antonio Parra, Alonso Salazar, and others, will turn out to be different from the way the concept was perceived by Auerbach, Bretón, Benjamin, or Brecht. However, the singularity of the South vibrates, in part, through its epistemological contemporaneity, and the vigor with which it can push European thinking to the limits. Therefore, “thinking poverty” will include examining in part, and again, a facet of Walter Benjamin. Training our critical focus on Latin American narratives through the lens of an intellectual nomad of German origin means confronting his reflections and intuitions with the tectonics of experiences that would have appeared distant yet not unfamiliar to him. In the novels that we will study in the chapters that follow, violence and crime are “sedentary” issues. However, they do not resemble well-known models of hardcore crime fiction, disaster films, science fiction, or of sophisticated extremism in works of art. What matters are not the contention with a world of terror, the overcoming (or not) of exorbitant dangers, the summoning of fear for dramatic purposes, or an adjacency of literary creation to violence and terror.50 In “epics of sobriety,” the aesthetic question is bound to the “other,” that is, the seemingly absent side of ecstasy. “Ecstasy,” if we view violent action and unlawful behavior or their cathartic sublimation in that vein, is not perceived in the way of “daunting immensities.”51 If there were a perspective apt to consider the limits of modern, and contemporary experience, one could find that writers (and filmmakers) have made “poverty” a conceptual, a poetic tool in highly self-conscious ways. Sobriety appears linked to forms of unadorned dialogue, notarial first-person narration, laconic reports charged with both oral immediacy and a peculiar worldliness, strange variants of (anti)confession, and varied types of narrative fragmentation, all of which convey a sense of embodied speech, “transporting” an affective posture whose “foothold” is hopelessness: the absence of not only a “normal,” civil state of affairs but also of the desire for a Kantian sublime. However, for those artists, sobriety enables the creation of uncommon affective scenarios and, from there, an intervention into contemporary literary investigation, as well as ethical philosophy. See Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe. Crimes of Art and Terror, 2–3. Here I am using an expression from Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence, 172.

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How can we rethink “poverty” as an aesthetic strategy that serves, at the same time, a reflexive goal? “Poverty of experience,” disseminated in the aftermath of the industrial revolution in the most advanced countries, alongside pathbreaking developments of technology, signaled, for Benjamin in his reflections during the 1930s, that a surplus of information, of “explanation,” and “psychological connections”52 paired with the pressures of isolation that weigh on the modern individual truncated one of culture’s most “inalienable” capabilities—the art of storytelling. Storytelling, in turn, connects with “counsil woven into the fabric of lived life”53 and shared speech, which is “wisdom.” “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. . . . A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time” (Storyteller, 148) We find that a problematic meaning is attested to terms such as “expenditure,” “surplus,” “exhuberance,” “waste,” as it is also applied to a surplus of “explanation” (the boost of discursive reason). All of them contravene a faculty that is related to a concentration of energy, a praxis of preservation and beneficial mutual sharing (145) —sharing in the way that “counsil” lies less in an answer to a question than in “a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding” (145–6). If storytelling is the art of repeating stories while retaining their peculiar energy, resting at the same time on the gift for listening and the existence of communities of listeners (149), it presents a problematic whose latency at the margins of society’s discursive orders provides a constant, and often puzzling, call to analysis and criticism. The text that conceptually precedes “The Storyteller” (1936) is “Experience and Poverty” (1933), its argument being that “a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely . . .”54. It was at this point that Benjamin proposed a “new, positive concept of barbarism” (ibid.), one that we find prefigured in the author’s comments on Bertolt Brecht (“Bert Brecht”), dating from 1930 and later. The web of conceptual links between these texts and “Surrealism” (including Auerbach) is indeed incredible, “incredible” when viewed from an angle of urgency and rigor by which “normal interpretation” is contested. Sobriety, poverty, ecstasy, illumination, barbarism, (sur)realism are categories that seem distant and mutually incongruent when related to the modern semantic and disciplinary registers, yet they strangely converge in the quest for an aesthetics of sobriety. At issue is a project by which a critical and historicizing impetus can be drawn from aesthetic experiment, to the extent that this experience is configured in an elementary and drastic way, molding a framework for reflection that does “not expend itself ” into sophisticated insignificance. The underlying shift of perspective helps suspending the “zero level” of common sense. What is deduced from civilization’s heights is precisely a new kind of poverty: [. . .] our poverty of experience is just a part of that larger poverty that has once again acquired a face—a face of the same sharpness and precision as that of a See Walter Benjamin. “The Storyteller,”148. I have modified the English translation. (W. B. “The Storyteller,” 146.) 54 Walter Benjamin. “Experience and Poverty,” 732. 52 53

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beggar in the Middle Ages. For what is the value of all our culture if it is divorced from experience? Where it all leads when that experience is simulated or obtained by underhanded means is something that has become clear to us from the horrific mishmash of styles and ideologies produced during the last century—too clear for us not to think it a matter of honesty to declare our bankruptcy. Indeed (let’s admit it), our poverty of experience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human experience in general. Hence, a new kind of barbarism. (Experience, 732)

On the one hand, there is what Benjamin calls poverty of experience. At the same time, “poverty” has become a conceptual dynamizer, a kind of blueprint for resetting the foothold of thinking that feels asphyxiated and overburdened by an excess of information, and the wealth of modern knowledge perceived as actual “nonknowledge,” and repelled by the nexus between the abstractness of universal ethical categories, and existing power networks. Heiner Müller’s previously cited sentence on the economic poverty of the “third world” and the intellectual poverty of the “first” insinuates that such a thing as poverty of experience comes inequally distributed. It is for that reason that the intellectual’s interest turns to the margins and to marginal subjects, not as the objects for moral compassion, nor as identities in search for full-fledged representation in the official Western edifice, but as spaces that can help reflexivity clear its grounds. The affinity Benjamin felt toward the young Bertolt Brecht, and which was much detested by friends like Scholem and Adorno, falls under that light. This attraction rests on a dialectic maneuvre for which theatre offered an exemplary space. Take the figures of Brecht’s early plays, such as Mack the Knife, Baal, or Fatzer—they are not what they seem to be; they are instead heuristic models that can make us consider an attitude, a condition, a way of speaking. Something has to be performed first in order to be questioned. Embodiment precedes reflexivity. The procedure is mimetic, for it works by virtue of embodiment through gestures and words, which are “quotable.” Words need to be practiced in the first place, and then understood. The poetic effect comes last. In that sense, the enigmatic Herr Keuner practices poverty as a “form of mimicry that allows you to come closer to reality than any rich man can.”55 What Benjamin will call, in his short text of 1933, the “mimetic faculty” is thus already latent in his earlier comments on Brecht. Of interest in Brecht was the way connections began crystallizing between a new type of hero in his early plays (“Baal, Mack the Knife, Fatzer, and the entire horde of hooligans and criminals”; Bert Brecht, 368), and an “intellectual” narrator with a new kind of attitude—Herr Keuner (“Stories of Herr Keuner”; 366). Benjamin qualifies the person of Herr Keuner as a political-aesthetic model—“a man who concerns all, belongs to all, for he is the leader. But in quite a different sense from the one we usually understand by the word” (367). Such a concept-figure serves as a mirror for the philosopher, the writer, the artist in search for reorientation. One does not need to be a “poor” man in order to learn from poverty. However, as insinuated by those writings, there is no radical learning (“profane illumination”) “in the desert of the present day” (366) without sharing in a situation of sobriety. The paragraph that follows sounds insinuating indeed. 55

Walter Benjamin. “Bert Brecht,” 370.

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He is in no way a public speaker, a demagogue; nor is he a show-off or a strongman. His main preoccupations lie light-years away from what people nowadays understand to be those of a “leader.” The fact is that Herr Keuner is a thinker. I can remember Brecht once envisaging how Keuner might make his entrance on the stage. He would be brought in on a stretcher, because a thinker does not go to any pains. He would then follow—or perhaps would not follow—the events on the stage in silence. For it is symptomatic of so many situations today that the thinker is unable to follow them. His entire stance will prevent our confusing this thinker with Greek sages . . . He is rather more akin to Paul Valéry’s character Monsieur Teste: a purely thinking man without any emotions. Both characters have Chinese features. They are infinitely cunning, infinitely discreet, infinitely polite, infinitely old, and infinitely adaptable. (367)

Could we imagine “Herr Keuner” as someone who cunningly settles accounts with the intellectual poverty qua oversaturation of the “first world?” Even here we might find a mode for moving from “ecstasy” (the aggressive production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary knowledge) to “sobriety”: “We,” says Herr Keuner, pose blunt, “down-to-earth questions . . . we have our most refined answers ready to hand for those blunt questions” (368). What kinds of resistances can this concept-figure of a posttraditional narrator—an actor on an experimental stage—offer, according to Benjamin’s reading? And what approximates this figure to the concerns that we have previously extracted from the Surrealism essay? Herr Keuner, we read, is “a proletarian” who “stands in sharp contrast to the ideal proletarian of the humanitarians: he is not interiorized” (375). Let us recall an insight from “Surrealism.” “Sobriety” can work—or should be made to work—as a “transport” into a world, not mainly of the inner Self, but of things whose “revolutionary” energies are to be found in unexpected places, “in the immense forces of atmosphere,” or as a “transport” into a life “that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips” (Surrealism, 210). In other words, sobriety can turn illumination “outward,” make us perceive the energy that lies hidden in “destitution” as the “great living, sonorous unconscious” (211), so that “inconceivable analogies and connections between events” (ibid.) make their appearance in a flash. Conceptually speaking, sobriety stands at a pole opposite to that of the Kantian sublime. We come closer to the dialectical vision of the early Brecht, in relation to which Benjamin sees the reflexive element subordinated to mimetic experiment, to the extent that we recognize that a polemic vibrates against the traditions and forms of sophisticated, self-referent introspection, as well as the myth of a majestic (universal) moral law. Since Herr Keuner is “not interiorized,” he “expects the abolition of misery to arrive only by the development of the attitude which poverty forces upon him” (Bert Brecht, 375): Stick closely to the bare reality. Poverty, Herr Keuner thinks, is a form of mimicry that allows you to come closer to reality than any rich man can. This, of course, is not Maeterlinck’s mystical view of poverty. Nor is it the Franciscan idea that Rilke has in mind when he writes: “For poverty is a great light from within.” . . . It is, in short, the physiological and economic poverty of man in the machine age (370).

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What, then, does this Brechtian idea of poverty mean when it is imagined—and performed—as a conceptual gesture, an aesthetic attitude? “Herr Keuner,” “the thinker” is not a person who resembles a modern intellectual, but instead a concept-figure of someone who, by virtue of sheer involvement in abominable constellations, together with a drastic Entfremdung (estrangement) of the public’s “common” expectations, can produce, as an aesthetic effect, astonishment about the society in which we live. To the extent that this posture is both anti-sensationalist and anti-cathartic, the resulting sobriety does not flirt with the expectations of the public, the reader, or the viewer. In Benjamin’s commentaries on “Fatzer,” the egoist, we read: “‘Go on, sink!’: Fatzer must find a foothold in his hopelessness. A foothold, not hope. . . . To sink to the bottom here means always: to get to the bottom of things.” (376) In a somewhat similar diction, this spells as: “Zugrunde gehen heißt immer: auf den Grund der Dinge zu gelangen”56 (“To experience (self-) destruction always means: to get to the bottom of things.”) These intonations of an aesthetic politics, directed at a peculiar project of “epic theatre,” are closely related to a rejection of the long-traditioned model of tragedy. Brecht attempted to make the “thinker” and even the “sage” the nontragic dramatic hero on stage. Curiously, that kind of hero (for example, the packer Galy Gay in Man is Man) was intended to act as the center of social contradictions, to become affected by the worst experiences—social decline, exploitation, expulsion, manipulation by power, or profit— without being turned into a victim, that is to say, without becoming a tragic individual. Differently said, and remembering Benjamin’s “Storyteller,” the destiny of that kind of hero is not the dramatic end but an episode in an on-going story. By suspending the possibility of a cathartic engagement of the public, and by proposing a “sober” take, for example, on egoism, asocial behavior, and crime, the “thinker” is located at an end opposite to that of a sovereign hero, or of an individual whose inner conflict (when struck by violence or infortune) we could vicariously assume. Here, the experimental character of such aesthetic project becomes most obvious. If Brecht sought to imagine, and to scenically experiment, with the character types of asocial figures and hooligans as “virtual revolutionaries,” (Brecht, 369) this was not just a question of sympathy but of theoretical fashioning: “he wants the revolutionary to emerge from the base and selfish character devoid of any ethos” (ibid.).57 However, this posture is not antiethical but seeks to suspend a reigning moral culture that is blinding by virtue of a generally accepted opinion. The “seer”, the “sage” is thus designed to inhabit the hypothetic place where the most drastic poverty, or destitution, can generate a most accute insight, or perception—a controversial posture indeed. There is, on the one hand, a rejection of tragedy. This absence, however, can give way to a mystical experience through which “illumination” Walter Benjamin. “Aus dem Brecht-Kommentar,” 274. The entire passage is worth quoting: “Marx, we may say, set himself the task of showing how the revolution could arise from its complete opposite, capitalism, without the need for any ethical change [“ganz ohne Ethos dafür in Anspruch zu nehmen,” German, ibid., 267]. Brecht has transposed the same problem onto the human plane: he wants the revolutionary to emerge from the base and selfish character devoid of any ethos. Just as Wagner produced a homunculus in a test tube from a magic brew, so Brecht hopes to produce the revolutionary in a test tube from a mixture of poverty and nastiness” (“Bert Brecht,” 369).

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emerges. We have already seen that the concept of “profane illumination” undermines a straightforward belief in secularist modernity, but it certainly does not indicate a return to religious visions. Rather, we are presencing Benjamin’s attempt to invert the powers of religious illumination for profane purposes. And it is here that we have come full circle from the Surrealists’ mystical conception of love—via Brecht—to a notion of sobriety due to which destitution, obtained by aesthetic means of estrangement, offers a path to “wisdom” —seeing, and sensing, in a way and from a space that are inaccessible to rational commonality (“the tidal sludge of knowledge,” the “unfiltered wealth [of answers] which is beneficial for a few and detrimental to almost everyone,” “the string of fixed opinion,” Brecht, 368). “Mysticism,” at this point, is an epistemic issue, not a religious one; it is linked to a kind of experimental pedagogy. It evokes a procedure, or an image, that can cope with most terrifying (or enchanting) realities, but at its center resides an utmost concentration of energies, from a setting whose means are drastically limited. In other words, such mysticism has at its core a dispositive of sobriety. It is that kind of “pedagogy” that, by operating through sobriety but not explicitness, marks in diverse fashion the overall aesthetic design of the novels and audiovisual narratives that we will examine in the following chapters. This seems to be the case to such an extent that our study will coin the term of epics of sobriety from the Hemispheric South. To emphasize our deliberation on poverty a bit further, it now comes as less of a surprise to read that the untragic hero in Brecht is modeled in part upon the “medieval Christ, who also represented the wise man (we find this in the church fathers)—the untragic hero par excellence.”58 This Christ has innumerable contemporaries in Latin America, and throughout the hemisphere. Benjamin continues to pursue poverty as experience: the extraordinary tuned down to a “primitive” dispositive. Its aesthetic figuration should by any means resist an exaltation of the public. One of Brecht’s didactic plays is entitled “The Flight of the Lindberghs” (the first pilots to fly across the Atlantic nonstop from New York to Paris). At which point Benjamin evokes T. E. Lawrence, author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, who “wrote to Robert Graves when he joined the airforce that such a step was for modern man what entering a monastery was for medieval man.”59 A conceptual pursuit is addressed here, which connects the Lindbergh play with the later Lehrstücke. Benjamin expounds: A clerical sternness is applied to instruction in modern techniques—here, those of aviation; later, those of class struggle. The latter application can be seen most clearly in Mother. It was particularly daring of Brecht to divorce social drama from the empathetic response that audiences were used to.60

When we become concerned, today, with transnational Latin American epics whose violent dramas are social and existential, as their incursions in human fantasies and actions involve breathtaking moral postures whose import is nontragic, not “interiorized,” nonpsychological yet illuminating, we are touching upon a far-reaching Walter Benjamin. “What is the Epic Theater (II)?” 304. Ibid., 306. 60 Ibid. On the play Mother, see, for example, Mark William Roche. Tragedy and Comedy, 66. 58

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politics of aesthetics. In it, “poverty” appears not just as a state of affairs but as a narratological attitude. We might say that “poverty,” starting from the frame of mimetic experiment that Brecht conceived as a critical procedure, carries the potential for affective disengagement: it is perceived, in overall terms, as detachment from tragic cathartic sentiment. Sobriety is conceived along similar lines; however, it is more complex. It will be related, on the one hand, to the global narrative “localizations” that have been emerging from contemporary Latin American and hemispheric border imaginaries. At the same time, it conveys a concept that will allow us to go beyond poverty, that is, to contrast the disruption of tragic compassion with particular figures of synaesthetic affirmation. And it is here that an aesthetics of sobriety will be taken as a lens for detecting figurations that lie outside “normal” sense-making—they are not shaped by what happens within the individual (sub)consciousness. Rather, what we will discuss through novels, film, and other artistic forms are affective figures of a “political unconscious”  —figures of experience that are linked to historical, cultural, or social forms of narrativity and imagery through which nonpsychological constellations take form.61 This is why we have pointed to a dialectics of hopelessness: to sink to the bottom means to get to the bottom of things. But the “bottom of things” cannot be located in subjective interiority when it comes disconnected from social emotion. Introspection can still provide an escape when the outward forces become too oppressive. But how could individual introspection work without hope? Since epics of sobriety are thematically concerned with scenarios of destitution, transnational displacement, cultures of survival, and transgressive empowerment, and since affectivity is perceived as both an aesthetic and an ethical marker, the distancing from tragedy comes immanently linked to the stance that those epics take toward the imagination of the law. These narratives deal with violence and transgression on a regular basis, while “sobriety” reformulates the complexity of imaginary relationships between human subjects and the law, the way it is represented by certain types of tragic drama. Speaking in the way of affective investment, tragedy has probably taken the lead in foregrounding and ennobling suffering. Since this edification tends to function “at the cost of the truth”62 or of a higher goal, the metagenre of tragedy is bound up with an image of (or a feeling of) fear toward the law, as it entailed, in its antique versions, a fearful exposure to the powers of the gods. Terrry Eagleton writes that not all tragedy displays insurrection against authority; however, we often see men and women chastised by the law for their illicit desire, a censure with which admirable economy satisfies our sense of justice, our respect for authority and our impulse to sadism. But since we also identify with these malcontents, we feel the bitterness of their longing, a sympathy which morally speaking is pity, and psychoanalytically speaking is masochism . . . Pity brings us libidinally close to them, while fear pushes them away in the name of the Law.63

See George Hartley. The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the postmodern Sublime, 128, 129. Terry Eagleton. Sweet Violence, 29. 63 Ibid., 176. 61 62

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As we have previously pointed out when analyzing narcocorridos as narratives that are symptomatic of a dispositif of sobriety, the sublime “humanist” and “psychoanalytic” energies that tragedy invests in the relationships between violence, subjective actions, exemplary destinies, and the law are not the point for those epics. Light is thrown upon the aesthetic perception of law from a different angle. Experience is modeled from beyond, or beneath, the emotional territories of guilt and fear, as well as pity and vicarious suffering, condensed by a “realism” dedicated to compelling, sometimes abject scenarios where marginalization and transgression are ingrained in the everyday spaces of the Western hemisphere. In the affective spectrum of “narconarrative realism,” the towering immensity or the implicitness—the alleged goodness or unavoidability—of the law is strangely absent. It would be simplistic though, and misleading, to argue that epics of sobriety question the law. What they conspicuously put under doubt is the “force of the law”64 as sublime authority in the cases of those who were never reached by its mediating powers. For the losers in our civilization, a focus that artists tend to relate to the revamping of local and transnational “reciprocities” under relentless neoliberalism, the law has faded into “nothingness” as far as its “civilizing,” equally fearful and alluring promise is concerned. At the same time, in the South the law is imminent on a daily basis, not infrequently with deadly consequences. It is imagined as an abject proximity of coercion, for example, as undeserved evil, rather than an edifying presence or a regulative mediation. Therefore, tragedy has become “useless.” What those writers and artists from the South refuse to imagine any longer is a cathartic “ego [that] fantasizes a state of exultant invulnerability, thereby wreaking Olympian vengeance on the forces which would hound it to death.”65 Epics of sobriety do away with the daydream of a distance that still separates the self-consciously sovereign citizen from those marginal subjects who conform the “underground” reserve army, the notorious “dark matter” of planetary globalization. We need only to think of the effect of today’s prevailing mediascapes, nurturing us with that sort of wallowing in images of violence, and a “plague of fantasies” that guarantees the grinning innocence of a public,66 which sustain our Western way of life. Not by chance has tragedy’s legacy been best assumed by legions of successful media dramatists and producers. In view of an infinite spectrum of artistic and moral options, whose mirror stage is a culture of learned blindness, not continuing to indulge in “the masochistic pleasures of the death drive safe in the knowledge that we are unkillable”67 is an ethical option of sobriety but not nihilism. At issue are those fantasies and territories whose “poverty” disables a flirtation with the worst of experience through a kind of spyglass fashioned by an exhuberant and exhausting, market-driven “happy life,” and by certain standards of sublime imagination. Speaking associatively, sobriety implies simplicity. Simplicity may be a matter of courage, when by incurring in a simple “action,” or the creation of an event the See Jacques Derrida’s reflection on the concept in “Force of Law.” Terry Eagleton Sweet Violence, 173. 66 Slavoj ŽiŽek. The Plague of Fantasies, 176–7. 67 Terry Eagleton. 173. 64 65

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usual framework of affairs is left aside. The “circumstances are the conventions and the etiquette, the rules and the self-understood complications—all that which we drag along without questioning.”68 Aesthetically, in an event of sobriety, the “circumstances” are not erased but they lose their imminent power. In their stead surfaces “unrefined” surprise, and nonspectacular evidence. Sobriety can also be “ec-static,” at the moment at which it reaches beyond common circumstances, and has people move out of their selves. Hannes Böhringer says, “by engaging in a new action, I risk the precariousness and naivitè of the beginning by becoming vulnerable, and perhaps strange.”69 More broadly, sobriety will help our interpretation scrutinize narrative spaces that have been preempted by the affective side of tragic modes in art and understanding, touching upon the dimensions of experience in its relationship to violence and marginality, social and individual survival, and ethical empowerment in the shadowy spaces of global modernity. “Poverty,” as will be remembered, is a way of sinking to the bottom while getting to the bottom of things. The literary spectrum that will animate our readings offers diverse routes for “profane illumination,” synaesthetically and epistemologically speaking. This is the moment to open our reflection to the narratives in question, epics whose vital entrance into “humiliating sobriety” will accompany us throughout the present study. One more time, Walter Benjamin has the word: “We will not offer any conclusions, but will just break off. You can, Ladies and Gentlemen, follow up these observations with the assistance of any good bookshop, but even more thoroughly without one” (Brecht, 370).

Hannes Böhringer. “einfach,” 16. Ibid., 14.

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Heterogeneous Genealogies: From the Latin American Narco-Novel to Narcoepics Prolegomena There is no straightforward definition of “narconarratives.” These narratives stand for an array of interwoven phenomena whose increasing presence across the hemisphere seems to correspond to the difficulty in providing a general description of them. Therefore, genealogical inquiry in the “narco-novel,” a more delimitable realm, will have the first word. As we can assume, narconarratives refer to a realm of heterogeneous imaginaries in terms of cultural matter and artistic format, having inspired the work of writers, composers, and film directors. A solid impulse for talking about both Latin American and cross-border narco-imagination came from the rise of narcocorridos. Narcocorridos helped casting a distinct take, different from the ubiquitous interest that has been extending across the modern literary universe, which started with the Romantics’ zest for “altered states” of consciousness. Many writers and artists, especially participants in the historical avant garde movements in the “developed” world, became attracted to the relationships between narcotics and creativity. Our point is not to disregard this line of artistic search that has marked the work of intellectuals of the importance of de Quincey, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Huxley, Burroughs, and others, but once we start considering narcocorridos from the Hemispheric South, it is necessary that we recognize that, from the 1970s to the 1990s and beyond, other imaginary and epistemological approaches have emerged. The new perspectives are characterized by what could be called an “anthropological” awareness, as well as a change in aesthetic perception. When writers and artists of the late-twentieth-century wave of narco-imagination take up the problematic of psychoactive substances, their aim is no longer the “self-intoxication” of the literary or artistic subject. There is, rather, skepticism about the hypothesis that the fugitive marriage of the sensitive and reflective mind with narcotic stimuli could provide special spiritual gifts, or generate effects of liberation. A change has taken place, one which is, on the one hand, linked to an increasing sense of the ubiquity and “normalcy” of intoxication within modernity, rather than to the “privileged” state that individual (artistic) subjects may achieve with the help of psychoactives. On the other hand, we are also dealing with

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a heightened awareness of crisis, especially in view of a redefinition of imperial identity through the “war on drugs.” Under the guise of that “war,” a new construct of otherness has been distributed throughout the world—focused on a dark “enemy” against which the ongoing war is waging its Hemispheric and global battle. Symptomatically, contemporary narconarratives have emerged mainly from the Hemispheric South: in their majority, they contradict dominant discursive constructions in which “intoxication” is blamed on the South as a region of contamination and multiple threats. This is one of the reasons why we have been arguing in favor of the concept of sobriety. “Sobriety” indicates, in an elementary sense, that there is no essential mysterium about the issue of psychoactive substances. This premise contrasts with a variety of tendencies that were launched during the twentieth century, during the course of which mythification and selective prohibition of narcotics loomed large. The issue that may help us better understand the idea that psychoactive substances have been a steady presence in modern life is—and here I simplify by using one single concept—“dissociation.” Dissociation implies a certain latency of transgressive states in everyday life. It means survival through a particular “management of reality and emotion,” as we have discussed in the first chapter. Remembering Benjamin’s ironic formulation—dreams and hashish loosen “individuality like a bad tooth”—it can be assumed that self-forgetting and reality “distortion,” help buffering the nervous system and “safeguarding psychological intactness.”1 In a word, “drugs”—be they chemical, cultural, or religious—are highly “esteemed” catalysts that help the individual function in an oppressively modernized world. However, this is at best half of the truth. One might even devise a “geopolitics” of dissociation, one that works—different from Huxley’s vision in Brave New World—against the homogenization of psychoactive stimulation. Globalization has not only to do with the unequal distribution of wealth and poverty but also of those psychopathological stimuli and repressants that serve the “achievements” of Western civilization. For example, why is the largest amount of illicit (and presumably “licit”) narcotics consumed in the United States? And why, conversely, is the United States waging an obsessive “war on drugs” in poorer countries such as Bolivia, Columbia, and Mexico, with their long tradition of cultivating and merchandising psychoactive plants, but without becoming major players in the world’s pharmacological industries? It is here, in the middle of scenarios that speak of the imbalances and biases of the current hemispheric and global design, that narconarratives have emerged as fictions that bear a critical and defiant tone, as they experiment with uncommon forms of cultural and ethical reflexivity. Intoxication as a central conceptual issue will be viewed through the lens of new aesthetics of sobriety. When we refer to narconarratives, we are concerned, in the first place, with a transnational Latin American phenomenon that came to exert, by the 1990s at latest, a considerable influence on both the ways that literature and film condense the affective dimensions of contemporary sociocultural experience and how aesthetic perception is reshaped today. As we will see, at issue is a dynamic area of self-consciousness in the Hemispheric South, which is accompanied, increasingly, by a focus on violence in the imagination of the contemporary, together with attitudes that Robert Schumaker. The Corruption of Reality, 32.

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often subvert the universal claim of neoliberalist market capitalism. We are dealing with sometimes paradoxical junctures of the aesthetic and the ethical as they are shaped by narratives that bring the crudest sides of today’s conflicts to the fore.

First, Mexican encounter with the low-level drug business: Diario de un narcotraficante (Angelo Nacaveva) We will now look at a series of narratives that appear as the precursors or, better said, as genealogical blueprints for today’s narco-novels. When speaking of pioneer novels and their “implicit” connections with fictional texts of the present, we will not argue that authors in the 1990s and later have worked by way of either rejecting or assimilating these earlier texts. We look rather for genealogical lenses, for example, by being attentive to the tensions that arise between the latency of certain actions and conflicts, cultural conventions, “nonliterary” dialects and desires, on the one hand, and the ways in which writers have been extracting narrative experiences from these realms, on the other. We are struck, today, by the kind of immanent familiarity that seems to characterize narconovelists’ approaches to aberrant, terrifying “life worlds.” This was not yet the case with novels such as Diario de un narcotraficante, by Angelo Nacaveva (Mexico, 1967),2 and Mariposa Blanca by Tito Gutiérrez Vargas (Bolivia, 1986). Noticing these and other differences will allow us to start carving out a genealogical map.We will observe, for example, how several of the earliest Latin American narco-novels venture into an “underworld” of drug trafficking, while relying on traditionally “realist” modes of focalization and in the construction of an aesthetic agency. At the threshold of the 1990s, in turn, the writers of the “global wave” introduced a “realism” whose understanding is more complex. In 1962/1967, the Sinaloan author Nacaveva published Diario de un narcotraficante (Diary of a Drug Trafficker), which our title labels the “first literary encounter with the low-level drug business.” Nacaveva’s purpose was to open the wider public’s eyes to a crude world at a time during which, unlike the 1990s, narcotics traffic was latent but not yet perceived as a most notorious, transnational issue. Sinaloa and its “narcocultural” environment,3 as well as its socioeconomic fabric, had not yet moved to center stage in the Mexican and the global news. Elijah Wald, commenting on the Diary, writes that “Indio” Nacaveva “infiltrated the opium business in the 1950s,” to write a journalistic treatise about how rural opium growers were enlisted, heroin was refined in a Culiacán cellar, and it was then hand-carried across the border.4 More than a text with a journalistic work, we are concerned with this as a testimonial narrative Gabriela Polit indicates 1962 as the first publication date. See “On Reading About Violence, Drug Dealers and Interpreting a Field of Literary Production Amidst the Din of Gunfire: Culiacán  – Sinaloa, 2007,” 564. According to the author, the term “narcotraficante” started to disseminate across literature after Nacaveva’s novel. 3 See Luis Astorga. El siglo de las drogas: Usos, percepciones y personajes, 87–92; L. A. Mitología del “narcotraficante” en México, 23–8; Elijah Wald. Narcocorrido, 45–9. 4 Elijah Wald. 51. 2

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with a curious, “ethnographic” import. On the first page, the author introduces himself with a warning to the reader. His colloquial voice is directed to “amigo lector,” a voice which is half jocose, half conspiratory, and of that kind of jovial paternalism that is sometimes associated with a provincialist style. However, we do not consider the metropolitan literary canon and its dualism of worldly versus localist writing as the appropriate backdrop for our study. Nacaveva’s warning to the “reader friend” states: If you like strong emotions, this work will give them to you; if you’re a Puritan, don’t read it. If you truly want to know about the social problems of those you’re circling around, if you’re not easily scandalized, you can read it with confidence, there’s nothing bad in it. It’s true, they’re breaking the law, but do you think that if I don’t write this book, or if you don’t read it, they’ll stop doing it?5

Nacaveva, of indigenous origin, is the real name of the person who became involved in narcotics traffic in order to examine those zones, and it is the same name under which his book was then published. A smell of “brave confession” traverses the opening paragraphs, a tone that we might well see as ironic, but which is, in fact, rather terse. This “confession,” in the guise of a diary, will set out to question what the writer deems puritan blindness regarding the twilight zones of law and order while, at the same time, trying to place his adventure in a righteous light. “Confession” is a narrative model with a long history, one that—when it entered the literary tradition—was deemed to help narrators and poets invent a medium for self-exposure and self-legitimation through which their incursions in sinful, terrifying, or “abject” experiences could give a lesson to the public. With his awkward chivalrous praise of the reader, Nacaveva downplays the dangers that were implied by his voluntary decision to submit his life to the rules of the drug business. If I risked my life in this, if I wasted my time, if my children were on the brink of becoming orphans, nothing mattered; the only interesting thing in this case is that I please you, dear reader, as you accompany me in an adventure in the pages of the present work (Diario, 7).

Nacaveva, whom his friends call “el Indio”, is an admirer of “los grandes hombres.” And he does not care much if these are heroes, scientists, warriors, or even men who have excelled as gangsters. He applauds their genius and their bravery. But “what can I do,” he adds, “since I am not of that wood?” . . . “I am one of those who like to try hard, and when the struggle becomes tougher, all the better.” (10) Cheap fiction? Not necessarily, but rather the personal dispositions of someone who, not being an artistically schooled prose writer, has done an incredible job of entering the drug world “under cover” and has afterward crafted a detailed, laconic report of his adventures. The diary begins on “April 4, 195 . . .” (referring to the end of the decade), and concludes on “September 20” of the following year. It begins when Nacaveva is in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa in northern Mexico, a city that hides, within its provincial milieu, a business that assimilates even those people who seem to lead a Angelo Nacaveva. Diario de un narcotraficante, 7.

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normal life—the “trafficking in heroic drugs” (23). Thanks to Arturo, a lawyer and “químico,” a friend with crucial connections (11), Nacaveva is able to get involved in activities that start with purchasing “la negra” (“opio crudo”) to be converted into heroin which is then sold at a higher price to those who take it north, and across the border (19, 20). Arturo becomes Nacaveva’s master. He is an esteemed representative of the local elite who engages, now and again, in this kind of business, but is extremely cautious to avoid the more dangerous part, such as transporting the “merchandise” into the United States. The deal between el Indio and “Arturo” implies absolute loyalty between both friends, which means following Arturo’s rules. But Nacaveva wants to scrutinize the entire milieu including its transnational trajectories, in order to live the ultimate experience and capture its hidden truth. A seemingly suicidal gesture. Indeed, the moment that el Indio starts to act “independently,” crossing the threshold of their agreement, things are doomed to get out of control. After escaping a couple of adventures that almost cost him his life, Nacaveva travels to Nogales, “purchases” a passport, crosses the border into Tucson, and sells a small amount of heroin to a Chinese dealer. Encouraged by this experience, he tries to repeat the adventure by going to Tijuana, and from there to Los Angeles, only to be arrested by the FBI, which mistakenly takes him to be one of the major players in a Mexican drug selling mafia, tortures him with electro shocks, and hands him over to the Mexican Policía Judicial. It is there, in the hands of special police backed by the judicial bureaucracy of northern states including Baja California and Sonora, that el Indio taps into the “space of death.”6 Despite his extraordinary physical robustness, he sees himself close to dying from unending torture, while he is unable to provide the information that is asked of him. Only his casually being handed over to the police of his home state, Sinaloa, will lead to the rediscovery of his true identity—a local reporter of Culiacán’s major newspaper— and thus save his life. The plot of the novel—its structural core based on sequence and succession—sounds familiar, resembling other stories dealing with protagonists who become involved in drug trafficking. However, material actions and their sequential meanings can deliver, at best, half of the ethnographic “truth” about a particular milieu. We therefore have to look beyond the plot and will comment on several revealing scenarios of the story. The first relates to the torture that Nacaveva, as under-cover reporter, experiences at the hands of the FBI and the Mexican special police. The second issue connects us with the particular cultural repertoire that marks the existence of those intermediary actors who are the bulk of people in which low-level narcotics traffic is—literally—embodied, that is, bodily sustained in and throughout space. Thirdly and perhaps most strikingly, the novel brings us in contact with the actual world of peasants who cultivate psychoactive plants deep in the rural areas of the northern Mexican sierras. This third realm is mostly absent in mass-media-based depictions of the illicit business, while it has been the main target of “socio-ecological” cleansing carried out by the belligerant operations of the war on drugs. “August 20” is the day on which, according to the diary, Nacaveva succeeds in selling his “merchandise,” heroin, in Los Angeles, and receives $8,000. Shortly afterward, at a I am using Michael Taussig’s expression. See Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, 4–5.

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bus terminal from where Nacaveva tries to head back south, he is arrested by two FBI agents. The narrative “I” will now report on a continual interrogation accompanied by electro-shock torture (called “el chirris mirris” by Mexican agents), including the application of shocks to his testicles. How these hurt me, they are so strong that I feel that they are in the pores of my skin, I feel that they go to the depths of my brain. Can I support another interrogation? I don’t know when it will be, not which day (335).

This inquisition, during which FBI agents enquire about el Indio’s identity and that of major players in the organized crime network, touches, now and then, on matters of nationality and “transnational” prejudice. Here we become aware of el Indio’s patriotic attitude. Drug trafficking from the South to the North suddenly reveals a hidden “nationalistic” tone, one in which historical resentments resonate. Says one of the torturing agents: “Most people involved in smuggling are Mexican, they are the ones who wage war against us the most.” Nacaveva answers, “I don’t care if they’re Chinese. We’re your neighbors. You guys have waged many wars on us, one way or the other” (329). At this moment, when the drug issue is placed in a larger context of geopolitical subordination, the US security agent resumes the gesture of coercion, “We’ve already got you and your friend” (ibid.). The next day, when Nacaveva rejects a chauvinistic remark (“Don’t talk about my country,” 334), the interrogator answers back, “Ha, ha, ha. Are you so patriotic? As much as you are, or more so, because I do have a country, I said with the intention to offending them.” At which point the officer replies by invoking the trope of “humanity,” and thus universality from the standpoint of power, “Well, for your country, for the good of everyone, tell us the truth, help us, humanity is suffering because of the junk that you guys bring in.” Nacaveva: “Don’t bring my country into this, pig” (334–5). Why the discourse that condemns the smuggling of drugs from Mexico into the United States needs a universal claim is a question that we should continue to think about. The big “H,” heroin, is a chemical derivate of opium poppies, and, poppy plants were not native to Mexico, but were introduced from Asia via imperial or postcolonial routes during the late nineteenth century. Nacaveva’s affirmative image of his homeland falls apart the moment that the FBI hands him over, at nighttime, to the Mexican police who are in charge of illegal drug smuggling (la Policía Judicial), and take him across the border to Mexicali. (The money that the FBI took from Nacaveva remains either in their hands or is shared with the Mexican police who take him back south.) In judicial terms, the situation now becomes oblique. According to Mexican law, an arrested person has to be consigned—within three days of the arrest—to the juridical apparatus of the state (see 344, 351), implying receipt of a status that includes legal rights. However, it turns out that the “situation of exception” that allows, for an indefinite period, torture at the edge of life while basic human rights are not acknowledged, is handled by the very special police that the state is supposed to oversee (see 349–50). Not only is el Indio tortured at the hands of the State, but when he finally reveals his actual name and identity he is forced—under electroshocks and beatings—to sign an invented report, a “confession” written by the torturers in which “They’re blaming me for crimes I didn’t commit, even murders of

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people I don’t know” (350). This is one of the sections in the testimony where direct speech in the form of either dialogue or first-person narration punctuates a dark space of “pre-legal” bureaucracy. We cite at length. I sign the act thinking that when I’m with the agent from the Public Ministry, I’ll retract everything that it says, at the same time that I accuse these guys of making me sign it with blows (347).

Nacaveva is now transferred to the “Ministerio Público Federal,” the legal space of “confession,” to deliver his declaration. Here he is placed before one of society’s representatives of the law. “Sit down over here”—orders a little guy who I suppose to be the lawyer. “Listen, do it further away, he stinks a lot.” I turn around and look at him, such contempt for a poor detained man, such ill-treatment, without even knowing if he is innocent or guilty. What defense will I have being in his hands? “I am gong to read your declarations for you to ratify or to rectify, if necessary,” I am told by the person I presume to be the representative of society. He reads what I have signed, all lies. Now I’ll say that it is not true, they can’t do anything to me. When he finishes reading he says, “You signed it.” “Yes, sir, but I was forced to do it by the circumstances, by blows” (347–8).

An abyss opens, which is bound to lead to the second, the definitive destruction of a human as citizen. “What did they hit you with, huh? You’re a little white dove. I wish that everyone who ends up here would admit that they’re guilty, that they willingly declare their guilt. Let’s see, you, take his confession,” he orders the man who had been interrogating me. The two agents lift me up and take me to the wall. “We are going to shock him,” says the one who speaks. “Do whatever you want, but make him ratify the confession. It’s very late and I have to go to a dinner to go to. I can’t waste my time with this stinking guy.” [. . .] “Is it possible, sir, that you’re going to let them torture me in front of you? Is this the social representation that we have?” He turns and looks at me like he would like to blow me up with his stare. He doesn’t answer me and says, “Make him sign his declaration or take him away. I can’t be wasting my time.” “Sir, do you believe that this declaration that I signed under torture and that I will not ratify in front of the judge will be worth anything?” I ask. “Heat him up again a little bit, to see if it will stop his talking.” The agents beat me until I’m left senseless. When I wake up, I’m again in the dungeon, thrown down in the middle of the room where they have held me for I don’t know how long (348–9).

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Why could this practice, backed by the “law,” be described—to paraphrase an idea from Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” —as a form of “mythical violence?” It performs a bloody interference into the body’s “bare life” while imposing a condition of guilt that subjects the human to being either “sacrificed” or exposed to retribution.7 Mythical violence does not need proof of guilt. As we will see later, violence that is based on an outright mythification of anything related to the traffic of illicit psychoactives is one of the issues that is examined in narconarratives. From the scenario described above, which stands at a culminating point of the novel, we will now take two steps backward, in order to pay attention to what appears as a particular logistics of bodies in space—a repertoire of identitarian practices—which exists in the regional, Sinaloan world of narcotics trade. In order to pursue his plan, Nacaveva had to become initiated into the informal profession in the first place. At the beginning, he had to gain entrance to a group of people that used to meet everyday at the cantina of Ismael—a dealer of dubious nature. The apparent lack of activity of these idlers was deeply offensive to the self-motivated Nacaveva and his work ethic. Yet, as his partner Arturo explained, there was no information from the avatars of Culiacán’s underworld whatsoever that would get past the “ears” of the cantina. In the logistical exchange processes of finding a provider of “opio crudo” from the Sierra, buying it, and refining it in Culiacán, having it taken to the North and resold, and so forth, there were only a few “main actors,” mostly in the hierarchy of one or another gang. All the other people involved consisted of “extras.” What is the role of the extras? They constitute an informal communication network, populating, like “living bugs,” urban space everyday. These people hang out in bars and cafés, stand on corners chatting or reading the newspaper, do car washing and vending in public places, or take a stroll with their “novia,” making sure that the “real” actors are informed of any changes or news quicker than the official information process can run. Thus, time in the life of the newly bred “narcotraficante” Nacaveva is divided between long periods of doing “nothing,” getting exposed to the cantina habits, which he abhors but which he must nevertheless share, and sudden periods in which heightened mobility and extremely hard work are required in order to make use of a good constellation without getting trapped. What looks incoherent and volatile is, at the same time, harshly determined by unwritten codes. El Indio has to unlearn his modern daily routines, spend many hours in “useless” conversations with people in whose exchange of loyalties he becomes a necessary element, and drive around to make sure—in a world before cell phones—that no information gets lost. Although he and his master Arturo work on their own, they can both benefit from Arturo’s profession as a lawyer who has helped out several members of Ismael’s gang whose network he can now use. The pair’s purpose is to become more independent, although they cannot avoid being eventually approached by more powerful gangs whose deals they do not want to join. This dilemma leads Nacaveva to make the mistakes that get him into trouble. Throughout the book, the narcocultural aspect of the business comes into sight as a question of habits and gestures that exert a fundamental impact on the concept of the everyday. What the Diario de un narcotraficante offers is a glance into the See Walter Benjamin. “Critique of Violence,” 249–250.

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“ecology” of relationships among people who had sustained, for decades, the lower, mostly local spheres of the informal trade cycles at a time still predating the neoliberal hemispheric design. Thus, the book is dedicated to a “phenomenology” of the drug business at an end of an era, when large transnational distribution circles and powerful systems of patronage including corporate agents, together with the acceleration of the “war on drugs” were less pervasive than they are today. The habitus that characterizes the individuals and small local gangs dedicated to buying raw substances from rural growers, to acting as urban, intermediate dealers, or to engaging in small-scale chemical extraction of alkaloids such as heroin, in order to resell the refined powder, which is then moved across the border, is what occupies the major part of the diary. Those “laborers” inhabit the margins of a capitalist work culture that is ruled by the competitive civil labor market. They infringe the law and risk imprisonment or death, being, as they are, fiercely motivated to intercept the official exchange mechanisms of their society. When Nacaveva complains, in his diary, about the “duty” of regularly having to get drunk and having to invite the entire crew of Ismael’s gang every time he and Arturo launch a deal, he rejects a kind of flaneurism—an informal public practice in the provincial “metropolis” of Culiacán—which seems to be, in his eyes, the apex of nonproductivity, and thus lacks righteousness. What he cannot get used to is an aberrant life style that is attractive to many people, especially at the level of precarious citizenship or outright social marginalization. The men with whom he shares fiestas, as well as a fateful conspiracy against one disloyal gang member, never consume the drugs they deal. When they get intoxicated, they do so in an alcohol orgy, as part of a scattered crowd that is addicted to the myth of a life of free spending, thanks to the visions of “fortune” that the world of the narcotics trade never ceases to promise. Nacaveva wants to be brave, to earn the respect of an ordinary Sinaloan gang, and to write a book on the secrets of their craft. He does not understand, however, the identity rituals, that is to say, the “abject” flaneurism of people whose habits pervade Culiacán’s urban culture, much like the frenetic, monotonous rhythm of proletarian masses marked Edgar Allan Poe’s perception of London’s cityscapes in the early nineteenth century. This comparison is, of course, controversial yet it allows us to remember that Benjamin’s interest in the flaneur was not the search for a historical “species” in danger of extinction, but rather focussed on the trajectories of a literary figure and its crystallizing (the detective story), or concealing (anecdotical city anthologies) nineteenth century urban experience in London and Paris as essentially modern experience.8 In the narco-novels under consideration, we will repeatedly encounter a kind of “group flaneurism” that indulges in the desire of unrestrained expenditure for “the hell of it,” and against which someone like Nacaveva tries to safeguard his “private” identity. These coarse “flaneurs” are people either at the lower or the uncertain ends of the social spectrum of a peripheral urban modernity, whose narrative depiction defies any sort of intellectual fascination with the “popular crowd.” However, on the part of the novelists, the aim is not to dismiss Apropos nineteenth century urban experience in London and Paris, see Christine Schmider and Michael Werner. “Das Baudelaire-Buch,” 572–3.

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the crowd as such but to bring it into sharper focus, at the point at which informal, globalized economies have pushed it into new maladies. Our reading establishes an asymmetry, as far as a literary-critical tradition is concerned (including Benjamin himself), which has tried to imagine the presence of urban (subaltern) masses as a productive “shock therapy” for the “lonely individual.” Nacaveva, the narrator is an antisublime subject par excellence, who could—nolens volens—lead Baudelaire’s fantasies into an abyss. Let me cite the passage from “Les Foules,” in which the practice of flânerie is presented, for the individual self, as an entry into the universe of a multitude’s soul: He who easily marries the crowd knows feverish pleasures which will be eternally unavailable to the egotist, locked up like a chest and the lazy person, shut up like a mollusk. He adopts as his own all professions, all joys and all miseries that circumstances present to him.9

In Benjamin’s formulation of 1938 we read about Baudelaire: “The deepest fascination of this spectacle [of “marrying the crowd”] lay in the fact that as it intoxicated him it did not blind him to the horrible social reality. He remained conscious of it, though only in the way in which intoxicated people are ‘still’ aware of reality.”10 Benjamin’s formulation is confusing, since it seems to divert the attention from Baudelaire’s “metaphysical” spin in his search to crystallize modern (urban) subjectivity.11 In Nacaveva’s book, the narrator abhors “intoxication,” while it is welcomed—in alcohol orgies—by the “people,” the scattered crowd of dealers and ordinary gang members. And it should be remembered that this is not an intoxication caused by the consumption of drugs but by a confluence of spatial, socioeconomic, and psycho-cultural factors. We might say that the specific intoxication that characterizes the idleness—the nonlife style—of the “extras” in the drug business, as they populate the Diary of a Drug Trafficker, is a matter of cultural “repertoire,”12 a daily scenario of unconsciously lived group identities, yet one that cannot be translated into the language of the modern subject that is normatively constituted as individual. Pursuing the reasons for this conceptual dilemma would mean scrutinizing the historical genealogies of those subjectivities that become “timely” to the extent that they actively inhabit and shape informal space. This is a contradiction without which it would be impossible to understand how the hemispheric drug business has survived against all odds. At issue is drawing a genealogical contrast with the figure of Baudelaire’s flaneur (in Benjamin) not as the sensibility of the artist striving for the woeful unity (“modernity”) of the intellectual self, but as, that which escapes the self’s normative framework of identity. Vis-à-vis a provincial, urban world of “degenerated” manners (see Diario, 258, 284), represented by the “scattered crowd” that helps the business function, there is a still more invisible social and human realm. It is to this sphere that Nacaveva will   9 Cited in Margaret Cohen. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of SurrealistRevolution, 201. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” 31. 11 Note Margaret Cohen’s critique., 212. 12 On the notion of “repertoire,” see Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.

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become affectively attached. Since the black-market purchase of the raw material for the chemical processing of “la H” (heroin) becomes increasingly difficult for el Indio and Arturo, they figure out a more direct way of obtaining “la negra.” They venture into the mountainous backlands of the Sinaloan sierra (arriving at a place about two hours by car from Guamúchil), where opuim is grown by peasants in remote, secret areas—the kind of illegal agriculture that evolves amidst dramatic rural poverty, the lack of modern communications, the threat imposed by the police and army units to destroy any opium field they discover, and corruption networks that benefit local authorities used to depriving the peasants of their harvests, thus profiting from their double destitution. Here, poverty in the midst of “poverty” reveals a savage presence. It is, on the one hand, ingrained in rural life that cannot actually sustain itself with local food production (see 171) but is, on the other, ruthlessly exploited when peasant communities resort—despite constant threat—to the cultivation of “alternative” crops. Elijah Wald, in his study Narcocorrido, will write about the Sierra Madre region, the “cradle of the Mexican drug trade,” where steep slopes and hidden valleys offer concealment for marijuana and opium fields: For the folks in the hills, growing marijuana or opium poppies is not a moral issue, it is an economic necessity. [. . .] Fortunately, Mexico’s northern neighbor has provided an inexhaustible and consistently lucrative market for the local produce. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the farmers, it has also sponsored eradication programs that have periodically turned sections of the sierra into war zones [. . .]. The result has been a view of the narcotráfico that is quite different from views in the cities north of the border: it is a dangerous business, but the danger is not of addiction and social decay. It is of dying at the hands of organized gunmen, whether uniformed officials of the state or henchmen of the drug lords—or both, as these categories often overlap.13

The appearance of Nacaveva and Arturo in this world—the Diary reflects the late-1950s—is narrated as one that brings about a strange mutual solidarity. The two men are not interested—unlike corrupt policemen, local politicians, and violent gangs of opium dealers—in stealing “la goma” (a sap collected from the opium poppies; 259) from the peasants. Instead, they want to pay a decent price that they consider a basic recognition of hard work. That “price,” which reflects a scale based on a supply-and-demand logic is, of course, far more attractive than the “false” price forced upon cultivators by violent gangs, or bare life that they can, at best, retain when being robbed by the police. What makes Nacaveva’s diary different from a romantic vision that would present two decent drug dealers—both holding civil professions that allow them to make a solid living—as benefactors of the poor? (see 283) On the one hand, it is the testimonial, almost “notarial” style that avoids romantic embroidery. The entire story could appear, to a certain extent, inverosimile, in that it applies the classical male pairing of “master” and “apprentice” to the world of regional narcotics conflicts in northern Mexico. Elijah Wald. Narcocorrido, 25–6.

13

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However, its style that consists of first-person narration mixed with large passages of dialogue conveys phenomenological insights beneath or beyond a worldly aesthetic. As Arturo, the “master,” and Nacaveva, the stubborn yet inexorable “apprentice,” come in contact with local communities who live in a pre-electric world of petroleum lamps, the perspective of the narrator is of curious partiality, resembling, by condensing the “other world” into dialogic form, the veracity of a traditional storyteller. We meet “Don Antonio,” a village patriarch at 92 years of age, who was a sergeant during the Mexican Revolution, has no less than 34 children (252), and still oversees the affairs of a precarious community that takes care of his existence by paying him “tribute.” Recounts Nacaveva: The strangest thing that I’ve seen in the twentieth century: as they arrive they greet him and they kiss his hand. His children call him “apa,” and the grandchildren “tata.” Everyone treats him with great respect. They talk with him and, if they don’t, he asks them about any problems they’re having, and to each he gives advice. There is no doubt, he is an open book. How to treat sick animals, how to sow, this, that. What could possibly happen in the huts that this man doesn’t know about? (156)

From the narrator’s perspective, the most dramatic tone is not applied in the passages recounting his own torture by the police toward the end of the book, but to the moment at which Don Antonio becomes mortally ill, a situation that threatens to shatter the existence of an entire rural community. To resume the narrative gestus: a descriptive, traditional realism alternates with “popular” dialogue, for example when Nacaveva, talking with the patriarch, touches upon a historical figure from the endof-nineteenth-century Culiacán—Heraclio Bernal, who became the legendary “Jesús Malverde,” the saint of the narcotraficantes.14 In the same vein, his own heroic ancestors will be remembered by Don Antonio who keeps musing about the strangeness of the name “Nacaveva.” “Listen, don Antonio, do you remember Heraclio Bernal?” I ask him. “Of course, I do. I was already getting big at the time of his adventures. His fame reached even here. They say he robbed the rich to give to the poor. I heard a lot about him. I had a brother, who decided that he wanted to meet him, but it used to be hard to get out of here, you had to go by horse for a great distance. Nacaveva, hmmm, now I remember, was an Indian.They say he was very brave, he killed many Spaniards, yeah, he killed a lot. He didn’t want them to come in here, to Mexico.” “Don Antonio, and during the Revolution, what happened to you?” I always ask a lot of questions.

The extent to which Don Antonio’s remembering Nacaveva’s ancestors is a narcissistic device belonging to the personal mythology of the diary writer or was part of an See ibid., 47–68. See Óscar Liera’s theatre play about Malverde, El jinete de la divina providencia (The Horseman of Divine Providence).

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obtuse social memory in that region cannot be clarified. What is obvious is Nacaveva’s liking of a style that is close to (the virtue of) ordinary life itself. It is, more than a literary expression, the untrammeled gesture of the man—a full-fledged machista, by the way—in his trying to report on what seems, in overall terms, more “trivial” than spectacular. If there is a tendency to subsume his first-person narration to third-person rhetorical situations, or dialogue, this responds to an awareness that the literary “self ” is secondary to the peripeties of the adventure itself. The narrator, when reporting on his actions and observations, sounds mostly impersonal, and he may well perceive his own reflective consciousness (his “self ”) as foreign to the actual goals of the diary project. In this perspective there is a “narrative identity” that resonates the way it is understood by Ricoeur: it is characterized by the absence, or better said, by the displacement of the self—perhaps posing a certain stylistic mode of sobriety? Thinking of the dialogue cited above, we hear that Nacaveva’s famed indigenous ancestor “killed many Spaniards” in order to prevent their entrance in Mexico; words that are strangely unspecific, untouched by a differentiating “historical consciousness,” just resting on a laconism of honor (the respect for “los grandes hombres”). Let us look at the kind of conversation that evolves around the issue of drugs, when “Don Antonio” has agreed to help the strangers in their endeavor to obtain “la goma.” The village elder enquires about their motives: “What do you do with this stuff?” Arturo explained it. That they make powder, that they inject it, and what the people who use it feel. That it can also be smoked. Laconically, he tells him a story of where it’s from, how it was imported into Sinaloa, where you harvest the high quality, not so much like in Europe, and that they use it in medicine, and that in Mexico it has little use. “You don’t use it yourselves?” “No, not us. We just prepare it and send it to our cousins up north who pay us well, since there are already a lot of users there who got the habit in the war [the Korean War], they were wounded and doctors prescribed it to relieve their pains, and once they got the habit they used it for vice.” “Well, if it gives some earnings to us who are poor, it’s good” (166).

So far we have a regional, rural perception about what had started to evolve into a pervasive and rapidly growing transnational business. When the small reserves of “la goma,” or “la negra,” the gummy extract from opium poppies, which had been secretly kept in the village are sold as well, Don Antonio suggests that Nacaveva and his lawyer friend get involved in cultivation and harvesting. Under the guidance of one of his sons, Juan, they enlist people from the pueblo to sow, cultivate, and harvest an area of two hectars in a well-hidden mountain valley. The sowing is done in December, almost too late for that year, and the harvest—“la pizca”—starts on “April 7,” and will continue until late May. The opium “pizca” is a particularly laborious one, in which the “bellota de la amapola” (259) is collected in small amounts by hand, placed in cans, later emptied “en una tina grande” where the milky sap (285) will coagulate into

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a thick, and gummy liquid. This labor is usually cheap, but must be carried out with extreme caution. When time for the harvest arrives, Nacaveva writes about the people involved, not without a certain astonishment: There are a lot of people, men children, and stout women, others young, and almost all of them wearing pants, and on top of these, skirts, with wide hats and their heads covered with a cloth that they tie under their chins (269). . . . the women are better at this and earn as much as the men (260). The most admirable thing about these people is that they work without malice, so that it seems that they are working at something totally normal. Could it be that they really don’t know they are breaking the law? How is it that they try to ignore it? (270)

Here it is worth looking to history, in order to put the “completely normal” work habitus of the sierra peasants in context. History is already implicit in the previous citation—when we read that opium poppies were not native to Mexico. In fact, opium was introduced into Sinaloa and Sonora in the modern era by Chinese expatriates, as well as via the growing popularity of opiate use in the United States after 1870.15 The situation along the United States–Mexican border changed drastically as a result of the Opium Prohibition Act (1909), the Harrison Narcotic Law (1914), and the Volstead Act (1919). According to María Celia Toro, what at the beginning of the century constituted legal exports of minimum value soon became a significant smuggling activity and later turned into a black market problem after different Mexican administrations outlawed trade and production of opium and other drugs.16

Wald, after doing extensive fieldwork in Mexico’s northern states during the late-1990s, describes the city of Culiacán as it looked a hundred years ago. Poppy beds brightened many town squares, and I met people in Culiacán who could still remember the clusters of pretty red flowers that used to surround the cathedral. [. . .] Most people, . . ., if they used the drug at all, would have received it in one of the standard medical preparations, such as laudanum or paregoric. (It is always worth keeping in mind that the line between “good” and “bad” drugs is a legal, not a chemical, distinction. Often, the drugs that are made illegal are not the most toxic, but rather the most common and familiar, hence the most available for overuse or abuse. Heroin, for example, first became internationally popular as a cough remedy marketed by the Bayer company). [. . .] Any understanding of Mexican attitudes to the international drug trade must take this view into account. Mexico is, on the whole, a producing rather than a consuming nation, and the traffickers in marijuana, opiates, cocaine, and, most recently, methamphetamines are generally serving not a local demand but users in See David Courtwright. Forces of Habit, 35–6; Luis Astorga. Drogas sin fronteras, 127 ff.; L. A. El siglo de las drogas, 15–38. 16 María Celia Toro. Mexico’s War on Drugs, 7. 15

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the United States, far and away the world’s largest consumer. Because of this, even Mexico’s moralists and antidrug forces tend to feel a certain resentment toward Washington’s approach to international narcotics control.17

This echoes the remark that is made by one of the FBI agents, when Nacaveva is held captive and tortured in Los Angeles (“humanity is suffering because of all the crap you are bringing in”). It cannot be denied that such dicta of an affective war have continued to resonate, especially in recent decades, within much common-sensical “knowledge” in the north. The narcotics realm is perhaps one of the most misleading—that is to say, misled—topics in contemporary times, where imperial ideological discourse presents itself as medical and moral. According to Wald, the suggestion that Mexico is somehow responsible for its northern neigbor’s drug crisis—regularly made by US politicians and law enforcement officials—is seen as both absurd and insulting. It is a simple fact that if Mexico stopped serving as a supplier, that would not end or even significantly change the drug problem in the United States, whereas if the Yankees stopped buying, most of the Mexican drug trade would disappear virtually overnight.18

There is no doubt that the factors that contributed to the growth of heroin (and marijuana) production in Mexico after World War II were decisively global, related, on the one hand, to changes in the existing international heroin trade routes and, on the other, to the increase of consumption in the United States.19 Nacaveva’s novelistic account is situated in an epoch that lies between “La Gran Campaña,” Mexico’s first eradication campaign (1948) in which military units destroyed agricultural lands across an area of 1,500 square kilometers in the Sinaloan sierra (see Toro 12–13), and the so-called Operation Condor, starting during the late 1970s. This second campaign was conceived and carried out as joint transnational operation, in which the United States and Mexican governments launched concerted logistic and military actions to destroy marijuana and poppy fields,20 forcing several thousands of villages of small farmers to flee the affected region.21 If, for people living in the sierra, opium and marijuana have become the crops that could help mitigate, temporarily, their handto-mouth subsistence, this happened only after opium became an economic player in the twentieth-century hemispheric exchange. Therefore, “the gomeros, so called because they originally dealt in the black, gummy form of opium, or goma, became part of the regional folklore.”22 In other words, the “little blueish seed” that needs at least three months to be grown and cultivated, in order to produce a “cash crop,” was Elijah Wald. Narcocorrido, 50. Wald continues: “Because of this truth, even conservative Mexicans tend to resent the United States’ unilateral policy of “certifying” Latin American countries as compliant with US enforcement efforts. If the Americans were serious, Mexicans keep repeating, they would deal with their problem at home rather than pretending that they could solve it by sending troups into the highlands of Mexico or Colombia” (50–1). 19 See María Celia Toro. Mexico’s War on Drugs, 11–12. 20 Ibid., 17–18. 21 See Elijah Wald. Narcocorrido, 51. 22 Ibid. 17

18

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alien to Mexico before the twentieth century, in contrast with the Andean-based coca plant whose millenniary history began on the South American continent perhaps 3,000 years ago. Nacaveva’s Diario de un narcotraficante stands out as testimony that merits a genealogically alert approach. There comes a moment in the diary when Nacaveva tells us that, after having survived his adventure, he will return to “militant journalism.” There has been no hint, whatsoever, that could help us understand his notion of militancy. Or is there one, in the end? On the one hand, we might feel estranged by the mixture of pathos and aloofness that traverses the book. But, on the other hand, is not a “repressed” pathos part of the untold generational histories that his name represents, a tragic indigenous past that he calls “heroic?” And could not this past, which he acknowleges with a few stoic remarks, also account for his holding on to the absurd adventure of “metamorphosing” with what he abhors—the traffic in “heroic drugs”? The Diario winds down across 350 pages of basically the same, somewhat clumsy style, rendering account of Nacaveva’s hemispheric adventures and still avoiding the introspective “depth” that has marked the ominous Western tradition of confession. The person who endeavors to read Nacaveva’s diary as an “open source” will find, beneath its dragging narration, stunning clues for an archaeology of regional Mexican drug traffic, speaking to the reader from a time when narrative contributions to this topic were still extremely rare. Elmer Mendoza is the novelist who has decisively contributed, almost three decades later, to turn the northern-Mexican, transborder, narrative substance of the Diario into a blueprint for a branch of contemporary literature–Mexican narcofiction. Among his works, especially the almost unknown, first novel Cada respiro que tomas (1991, Every Breath You Take) and El amante de Janis Joplin (2001, Jennis Joplin’s Lover) trace the picture of life-worlds in which drug traffic eventually translates into a plebeyan cultural “universe.” This goes together with the creation of a new cultural persona that excells by a perplexing relationship between literary hero and real-life actor: the narcotraficante. As Mendoza spells out in “El incierto trabajo de crear un personaje narco” (2008, The Uncertain Work of Creating a Narco Protagonist), the paradox is this: literary writing mutates into a multilayered ethnography in which the relationship between non-fiction and poetic creation has become strikingly unfamiliar.23

Demoniac intoxication, construction of guilt, and the predicament of cynicism: Mariposa Blanca (Tito Gutiérrez Vargas) Ending coca here isn’t possible. Coca will never end. Coca has been here forever. (Berto Bautizado, Bolivian coca union leader)

We will continue feeling out our course of genealogical mapping, guided by the question of how to expound the emergence of a literary field around the problematic of

See Elmer Mendoza, “El incierto trabajo de crear un personaje narco,” 4–7.

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narcotics traffic. Bolivia is of central interest in this regard, although it has received less attention than the more spectacular cases of Columbia and Mexico. Bolivian literature has been crucial for understanding the Andean indigenous world as it defies eurocentric or metropolitan epistemologies.24 Nevertheless, scholars attentive to Andean literary and cultural legacies have rarely recognized that the age-old tradition and ecological endurance of coca cultivation and use in the Andes was not only a mark of a genuine sociocultural universe but can also help advance a critique of Western hegemony further by addressing the issue of intoxication in relationship to the “pathological” status of the modern Self. Here we might find one of the reasons for the lack of interest that Latin Americanist scholars have had in a writer such as Tito Gutiérrez Vargas. This author seems to float in a kind of no-man’s land, since neither the legacy of Mariátegui to Arguedas and beyond nor the “innovative” trends in metropolitan prose (from postmodern, to post-dictatorial, to “post-Macondo”/ McOndo) seem to apply to his writing. And, perhaps, some critics might find that Gutiérrez Vargas’ prose offers nothing other than a notorious variant of realismo mágico. What is it that Tito Gutiérrez Vargas’ trilogy on the cocaine trade on the eastern side of the Andes can convey to critical understanding? At issue are the novels Mariposa Blanca (White Butterfly), first published in 1986, followed by El Demonio y las Flores (The Demon and the Flowers, 1999), and Magdalena en el Paraíso (Magdalena in Paradise, 2001). These texts are set in a fictional time frame that refers to the 1980s in Bolivia, as well as their aftermath. A double phenomenon calls for consideration. The spatial focus of these narratives tends to be localist while implying that its seemingly “compact” regional cosmos is fissured by hemispheric forces. This produces all kinds of contrasts, and the effects on social existence and communitarian livelihood are, more often than not, tectonic. It is here that actions and powers related to the narcotics business can easily display a mythical spin, whereas its transnational driving forces may remain somewhat invisible at the local level. Prose literature is not safeguarded against—as some distinctively modern(ist) attitudes have tended to overlook—the alienating powers of reality. Rather, it constitutes scenarios of imagination from which rhetorical, affective, and material struggles display their own figures of intensity, as well as perplexity, and silence. The territory of the Chapare (located in the heart of Bolivia’s eastern slopes of the Andes), into which Gutiérrez Vargas’ prose compels its readers, is part of a much larger region, an area in which the cultivation and every day use of the coca plant have existed for at least three thousand years.25 This world appears now shattered, traversed by a feverish climate which is due not to the tropical environment, but to the magic power of the mariposa blanca (the “white butterfly”). The title metaphor aludes to the suffocating veil that the traffic of coca and, above all, of crude cocaine paste have extended over See the approach of Elizabeth Monasterios. “Uncertain Modernities: Amerindian Epistemologies and the Reorienting of Culture.” 25 See Joseph Kennedy. Coca Exotica, 15. Due to a minor quality of the coca leaf in comparison with the northern areas of the Yungas, the Chapare was not the center of traditional coca leaf cultivation. It mutated into an axis of trade under the impact of the structural adjustments that changed Bolivia’s economy during the 1980s. 24

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the Chapare. Before engaging Gutiérrez Vargas’ imaginary directly, we have to trace the background against which his novels take shape, but which he does not directly address. First, the neoliberal overhaul of the Bolivian economy during Paz Estenssoro’s final presidential term (1985–9) generated, among other consequences, a huge new wave of peasant migrants, accompanied by the “displacement” of tens of thousands of miners due to factory shut-downs. Those miners and peasants who descended to the eastern lowland frontier to grow coca helped supply the internal (mainly indigenous) demand for coca leaf as well as the rising cocaine economy. In the 1980s, coca paste and cocaine became the nation’s most profitable export commodities, their value approaching or exceeding that of total legal exports. The income and jobs linked to coca and cocaine cushioned the economy’s fall after neoliberalism’s crippling blows to production [regarding mining, agriculture, and urban labor; author’s emphasis].26

Different from Peru’s involvement in the global commodity flow of cocaine since the final decades of the nineteenth century, coca cultivation in Bolivia was confined to traditional, local and regional commerce until the 1950s and 1960s.27 Second, from the late 1980s onward, we can register the rise of the coca growers’ movement under the leadership of the young Evo Morales, which began to resist imperialist policies that criminalized the cultivation of the millennial plant. In 1988, the imposition of law 1008,28 strongly supported by the United States, expanded the basis of forced eradication. This is a literal case of how a “national” law was enacted in response to geopolitical prescription from the North. According to Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Between 1982 and 1988, the legal bases for the war against “excess coca” were installed and, starting in the year that Law 1008 was enacted, the infrastructure, training and militarization of the bodies that would be in charge of implementing it were extended. In this process, the coca growers’ victory of 1982 was reversed and the conditions for the invasion into the heart of the traditional coca-growing zone by the state and its foreign bosses were created. The Embassy of the United States and the army of that country, using satellites, were making calculations and measurements to locate these “excess” coca plantations . . . 29

The introduction of the war on drugs in Bolivia’s eco-communitarian region generated another dramatic scenario in the Western hemisphere, one whose political sensitivity has continued to grow. Ever since the increased militarization of interdiction efforts during the 1980s, the movimiento de los cocaleros, displaying an enormous convocatory capacity, has continued to organize marches and other civic actions. Its structure has grown to encompass six unions with 40,000 coca farmers in the Chapare. Its aim has Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons, 96. See Paul Gootenberg. “Cocaine in Chains: The Rise and Demise of a Global Commodity,” 328, 330, 337. 28 See Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui about the specifics of law 1008, and its imposition. Las fronteras de la coca, 35–7. 29 Ibid., 36, 37; see also Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, 100. 26 27

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not only been to resist the drug war’s violations of human rights and crack down on small farmers but, above all, to establish a union-controlled, local coca market that will help conserve the ancient ecological tradition, while amelliorating unemployment and hunger resulting from enforced neoliberal economic policies.30 As it foregrounds the eco-cultural centrality of the coca leaf within a millennial history of the Andean region, the cocalero movement has simultaneously denied any responsibility for increasing cocaine trafficking31 as this responds to hemispheric north–south disproportions, especially the booming demand in the United States and Europe for cocaine from the late 1970s onward. Evo Morales insists: “I am not a drug trafficker. I am a coca grower. I cultivate coca leaf, which is a natural product. I do not refine (it into) cocaine, and neither cocaine nor drugs have ever been part of the Andean culture.”32 The difference between the coca leaf and cocaine (its chemical derivate) has been compared, for example, to that between grapes and wine. According to Sanho Tree, “[coca] is almost impossible to abuse in its natural state.”33 However, international media have tended to ignore this distinction since a United Nations study called the leaf an “addictive substance detrimental to health.”34 In sum, the picture of the Chapare region reveals a double dimension of conflict. Long before Morales was elected president in December 2005, we find the rise of the cocaleros national-popular movement becoming a socially vibrant, and politically serious factor while, at the same time, a harsh, neoliberal refashioning of the country is forcing a growing segment of the rural and semi-urban population to survive by turning to the tradition of coca farming. It is commonly believed in Bolivia that it is shortsighted to lay the blame on poor communities that sell the coca leaves they produce both to union-controlled market places, and to other market segments including drug traders, while closing the eye before transnational factors, especially the geopolitical and economic interests of the North in an ongoing war on drugs. Gutiérrez Vargas’ novelistic cycle is focused on the Chapare, the province where—following the closure of the large, state-run mining company in the northern part of the country, a crisis in altiplano farming, and local conditions—coca cultivation and commerce started to boom, as did the traffic of its low-quality derivatives. This area became, during 1980s and later, the main target of military coca eradication operations. In Mariposa Blanca, the author reports in the opening pages, associating the mid-1980s: In those days you heard marvels about the Chapare. Throughout the country the economic crisis gave no hope. In hospitals, babies were born who looked more like dried up fetuses, many of whom were thrown into the estuary of the Rocha River. Anemic mothers, who did not eat because the little food they had barely sufficed for their children. Not many years had passed since a time when it was said that nobody died of hunger in Bolivia. The times were changing so much. In

33 34 30 31 32

See Benjamin Dangl. The Price of Fire, 39–40. See Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson. Revolutionary Horizons, 97. Evo Morales in Alejandro Landes. Cocalero. Documentary. Argentina, 2006. See Dangl, 38, note 4. Ibid.

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There is a moralizing zest that emanates from what could be called narratorial agency, as it moves between third-person narration and dialogic passages, especially when emitting “omniscient” commentary.While the novel assumes a conventional literary form, often using inflated metaphors nurtured by an imagery of good and evil, purity and contamination, its prose is rich not only in phenomenal detail but also with internal contradictions between social commentary and a “sermonizing” tone. This tone allows us, apart from looking into particular forms of survival and labor, to address a scenario of afflicted consciousness that seems to attest to the writer’s own “introspective” identity. At the outset of the novel—after an exposition that conveys images of the town of Chinahuata with its pathological bustle related to the sale of extracts from the coca leaf (bolas of cocaine paste), we meet the main figures, Lázaro and Josefina.36 Their relationship faces an existential crisis. Lázaro, 23 years old, is an unenthusiastic medical student from a poor family, living in one of Cochabamba’s rustic neighborhoods, who inherited a modest dwelling after his parents’ early death. Josefina, slightly older, is a woman of pleasure who became attached to Lázaro, not because she loved him, but because she felt like a “tired warrior.” After having lived turbulent years, Josefina needed someone dumb to entertain her illusion of a social anchoring. Lázaro was one of those “stupid” ones. “Chaste until he was 22, with Josefina he had known not only a woman, but an incomparable female, she who in such a violent manner had elevanted him beyond paradise” (Mariposa, 18). But it happens that the woman becomes pregnant—as she tells Lázaro—and a situation of affliction takes its course. Lacking the money to start a family, and driven by Josefina’s zest for leading an attractive life, the couple opts for a change. Driven by bizarre rumors that in the Chapare there is money everywhere, they decide to try their luck in Chinahuata, “the drug capital” (13), a place where even stray dogs get stoned. They can only afford to travel in an old market truck in order to get from Cochabamba to the Chapare. But anything that helps Josefina and Lázaro reach the tropical “paradise”— “land of crazy hopes and bad ambitions” (8)—is the order of the day. We learn that by the time of their arrival, Chinahuata was not a village any longer but a compulsive market. Only a decade earlier, in the mid-1970s, it had consisted of a few wooden houses, a church, and a small shed. The environment was a “paradise,” in which indigenous people led a tacit, needy life. The rural population’s precarious existence does not prevent the narrator from evoking the picture of Eden. Every Saturday, several trucks loaded with products for use and consumption used to arrive, and the indigenous peasants who descended from the surrounding area sold a few bags of coca leaves in order to obtain the basic goods in return. Then, they bought a meal that seemed like Tito Gutiérrez Vargas. Mariposa Blanca, 19. The timeframe refers to the years 1983/1985, as a reference to the Malvinas War indicates (see Mariposa Blanca, 112).

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Christmas dinner to them, drank chicha or beer, only to return to the monte at night, with their bundles on their backs and without a single centavo. But something had happened in the meantime, and it came from towns like Santa Cruz (30–1)—the demand for coca started to increase exponentially. First, there was the period when provincial administrations emitted “tarjetas,” cards that authorized the sale of coca leaves. When the commerce accelerated, drawing in an ever-increasing number of merchants, labor migrants and itinerants, these cards were no longer issued, unless people could afford to pay a huge bribe. The spiral of demand kept rising, and the prices for the leaves continued to increase. Peasants in the Chapare region had produced little coca before the 1980s; cultivation was traditionally concentrated in the northern Yungas (north of Santa Cruz) where it served the local needs of the indigenous population. When, at a certain point, things started to boom in the Chapare, the commerce that grew up there was fueled by the growing demand of a transnational market and the drive among displaced people to follow the myth of the pressing global business. Several factors knocked down traditional life in Chinahuata during the mid-1980s. The narcotraficantes were the ones who introduced new money into the place. They came to buy unrefined cocaine paste, in popular parlance called la merca (38), or bolas de droga (bollo, 8), which would then be transported to other places like Colombia, where laboratories were said to turn it into pure cocaine, which would then go on its way north. To attract the narcotraficantes several conditions had to be met. Production and commerce were arranged at the local level, so that the coca could first be purchased by the fabricantes who produced the “merca” and then sold it to the comerciantes who, in turn, served as the providers for the major traficantes. In order to become a comerciante, one needed a “tarjeta,” an authorization card. The sale of the cards benefitted the police and local authorities. When things took off, and the cards turned into hot commodities, alliances between those who had the connections to get an authorization and those who had the money emerged. The result was informal “societies” putting together players from both the economic and the “judicial” sides (see 31). At the very lowest end of the game, los cocaleros—the cultivators of the leaf—could finally take an astonished look past the edge of deprivation. Selling their harvest several times a year suddenly allowed them to take their entire families to the Chinahuata restaurants, where they tried unknown meals, indulged in bottled beer, and bought lemonade for their children. “While they ate what they had ordered they spilled out the money on the table and began to count” (32). A popular practice for making some quick money, but without actually climbing the social ladder, was to become a matón, literally, a “killer,” also called “coca molino” (coca miller). Since young Lázaro was neither adventurous nor unscrupulous, he became involved in this peculiar “occupation.” The task of the matones was to “pisar la coca”—to tread on the coca leaves. This activity, the first step in the informal process of producing cocaine paste, had to be carried out in secluded, forested places, scenarios resembling a very odd form of archaic treadmill in the late twentieth century. These places are called “campamentos” (jungle camps), or “fábricas,” a rustic form of “laboratory,” and their main equipment consists of large “pozos” (pits) in which the coca leaves are put, and treated. The procedure is as follows:

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The result, after a final chemical processing in which lime is added and stirred into the coca mash, is the cocaine paste—la pilcha (83)—that is sold in the form of “bollos” weighing approximately 100 grams each, or of the larger “papayas,” both awaiting further refinement in more sophisticated laboratories abroad (in Colombia, for example). The process of making coca paste, a rudimentary form of cocaine, in jungle camps is sometimes called “la pichicata” (85, 86). It is this rural, southern picture of dispersed sites of fabrication of the “raw material” for cocaine, which is seldom considered by analysts of neoliberal deregulation of human labor. In Mariposa Blanca we read that, in most cases, the fabricantes do not have considerable capital. Theirs is a discontinuous, and frenzied style of getting the work done. First, they purchase the leaf and the basic chemicals, then they contract the treaders (“matones,” or “patas verdes”), all of which is then transported to the illegal camp by truck. When the leafs are treated for one night, or several nights and the paste is ready, the patron pays the “coca molinos” (“matones”) and releases them. After he has sold the bollos or papayas on the black market, the fabricante always throws a party—“a good drink” in which “you waste a good part of the sudden riches” (49). In fact, there is nothing to be celebrated during this basic ritual: “What they are looking for is a way to calm . . . the tension that builds up during the hours of work at the site, in which the dangers lie in ambush like shadows of fear” (50). After two or three days, the same procedure is played out again—purchase of the leaf and chemicals, hiring the matones, a truck, and up and into the mountain hideouts. These clandestine coca paste “laboratories” can function in environments where large amounts of fluctuating, unskilled labor are available—under conditions of dramatic structural crisis as it has affected Latin American economies during these past decades. Gutiérrez Vargas dedicates more than one-third of his novel to Lázaro’s experience as a matón in a jungle camp whose chief (“el patrón”) is called “el Profe.” The actual intensity of the novel emerges from the relationship that unfolds between the young Lázaro and the “Prof,” revealing the actual dimension of this peculiar text, as it is linked to a confessional and expiatory narrative journey. The weakness of Mariposa Blanca is found in a dissonance between pointed reports about the local climate related to the informal business, together with critical social commentary on the one hand, and an exhorbitant rhetoric about guilt and evil, on the other. However, this dissonance will allow us to speak to a more general problem of modern culture in its relationship to “intoxication.” Before addressing the relationship that develops between Lázaro and the Prof, let us refer to some of the reports that we receive from the narrator, when he is not indulging in sermonizing speech. There is, for example, a peculiar notion of delinquency among

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ordinary people. Several years before the business started to develop, poverty was the general state of affairs in the Chapare, and it was most telling in the physical appearance of the children: “anemic, malnourished, eaten up by parasites and illnesses . . .” (62). “Today,” throughout these mountains that are real hotbeds of matones, bolleros, and intermediaries, no one “feels the weight of consciousness” and no one considers himself criminal. The spirit that reigns in a jungle laboratory is the same as in a bakery, although the tension and the expectations are higher: Will the process generate a good product and in sufficient quantities? (63) What will be the outcome at the time of the sale? Will there be buyers? Or will they be intercepted by the forces of repression? The results can range from a straightforward failure, the loss of money, of liberty, and even of life itself to great success. Now, reference to the local “coca molinos” and the local patrons of the camps means, as well, that the actual people who pull the strings of the business are enjoying their lives elsewhere. You would find them in the cities, at the “parties of patronage with the best of society, arm in arm with honorables and excellencies. Speaking horrors about the drug trade, these days, is an easy and cheap way to gain notoriety, for unworthy ends” (63). While the authorities like to imprison the matones—the people working as treaders—the padrinos of the drug business serve each other at secluded party tables. Therefore, the patas verdes do not have a “consciousness problem,” they view themselves as “peones” and victims since, in the end, it is them—not the traders with money—who are put in prison (see 133). How about the role of the armed forces? “The army has never combatted drug traffic” (86). What is refered to, throughout the novel, as a constantly pending threat is called—in an allusion to their uniforms—“los leopardos,” a special unit dedicated to enforcing the rules for the drug trade: “[The leopards] didn’t try to destroy the production and sale of cocaine, they simply conditioned it” (86). When they attack the camps, it is because “the bills are not paid up” (137). The gallery of “functionaries” that operate in the world of the drug trade consists of the “fabricantes,” “bolleros,” “compradores,” “distribuidores,” and the “encubridores” and “salvadores.” The last two roles are filled by those who “arrange for the big fish who are caught to gain their freedom in the blink of an eye” (139). Then there are “los atracadores” (224) and “los volteadores” (145, 207, 226), who are not considered part of the generally tolerated game but seen as its cancerous offshoot. The “atracadores” are violent gangs who destroy, kill, and intercept the process basically at the lower levels of the business, for example, attacking and burning the camps to steal the “merca” and sell it themselves. There are always reports of violent abuses of the population, especially of women, in which the dividing line between “atracadores” and “leopardos” appears blurred. In other cases, the “leopardos” control the roads and intercept cars to “confiscate” either “la pilcha” (cocaine paste), or the money from its sale, thus acting as “volteadores.” It is good business and a relatively easy one for those who attack and intercept, according to the belief that is remembered in Mariposa Blanca’s narratorial voice. A commentary about the hemispheric predicament into which the coca plant has been pushed is embedded in the thinking of Lázaro, the protagonist. As we have remarked before, this is one technique for making the narrator’s concerns immanent to the text. In earlier times, coca was a benign leaf, “Lázaro thought,” and all the workers

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in the mines, the peasants, and the other laboring people understood it that way. In the midst of back-breaking labor, and due to the lack of sufficient food, they filled their cheeks with the dry leaf that, like a miracle, dissipated hunger and fatigue. “Back then, we would have put this plant on an altar, when today we can only look at it under the guise of perdition . . . No one has ever been seen dying for having chewed coca, or even getting sick” (153). Continues Lázaro: “We did not invent cocaine! Today they see us as guilty of destroying those who are initiated by the delinquents up there, in those countries [of the Global North] who have the impudence of pointing their fingers at us” (ibid.). As if this were not enough, “they have built up gigantic forces of repression in order to subjugate fragile countries without respecting either their laws or their honor.” All this amounts to “a low comedy of shame and humiliation, rather than a true fight against the evil”. In the consumer countries, as we read, even delinquents are backed by the law, but “here” the law does not even protect the inocent: “It is thus that we have to suffer the beating, and they are on the side of impunity” (153–4). The picture of the Bolivian state and its rulers which emanantes from this evaluation of the 1980s is utterly dreary. Here everything was a theater of appearances that those shameless politicians mounted to distract society and to lead many people to the temptation of bribery and protected delinquency. Military men, judges, police, paramilitaries, ministers. Who should judge whom, now? The same thing will happen in politics. With our governments of calamity, which take on power to enforce those laws that they are tired of walking all over and infringing. So, in the future, we will be judged by those bad guys who defend themselves with law in order to be criminals. And they have also made us get used to this! (154)

The summing up regarding the global drug problem is equally sharp: “With the known means of repression, narcotraffic will never be stopped . . . Only if there is not a consumer will the production end” (155). Mariposa Blanca reveals its controversial meaning at the moment at which we recognize the intimate dilemma that the matter of coca, on its way to becoming “cocaine,” presents to the author. Certain inconsistencies could hardly be explained, if it were not for Gutiérrez Vargas’ own desire to free himself, at least temporarily, from the weight of his topic, turning the literary enterprise into a site for projecting his own fear outward, that is, for engraving it in the text. During the 1980s, it was fairly uncommon for a Bolivian novelist to face the peripeties, the sudden excesses, and the local imagery of the drug trade head on. Gutiérrez Vargas opted for a hybrid style in which we find, on the one hand, a “naturalistic” depiction presenting the impact of a particular environment on human behavior and relations—the prevalance over individual characters of almost uncontrollable social and natural forces, condensed in the feverish, euphoric, and violent energy that has cast its grip over Chinahuata, Eterazama, and other zones of the Chapare. On the other, the narratorial voice, with its sudden drive to generalistic opinion derived from Christian belief, pretends “omniscience” but sounds intrusive when trying to hide unmistakable fear behind moralistic assumptions. This reads presumptously when young “Lázaro,” the presumable heir to his namesake in the

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New Testament, says about the “coca molinos” (the treaders) in the jungle laboratory whose group he has just joined: “What happened? How can there possibly be so much confusion in these souls? How could they lose so completely the divine capacity to clearly distinguish the boundaries between good and evil?” (152) How are we to understand the background of Lázaro’s own inner “righteousness,” the one he considers he is owing to society? Shortly after beginning to work as a “coca molino” in this place “forgotten by God” (137) he declares: “I am going to pay society back for the bit of garbage that I threw on it” (151–2). Thus he pretends to continue, against all odds, on his way to “moral perfectibility” (174). In other words, Lázaro is never in doubt about what is right and wrong when he succumbs to “sinful” behavior—and there is not one single case in which he does not promise himself to atone for it. One way of unearthing the protagonist’s actual dilemma is to ask for his relationship with the phemonenon (and the fantasma) of intoxication. His exhortations are directed against “el veneno” (the poison, 103) that is produced (with his own short participation) in Bolivia’s laboratories to enter the “chemical war,” an imprecise term that is supposed to circumscribe the killing of people through drugs. Psychoactive artifacts are referred to, in rather unspecific terms, as diabolic substances that poisoned, as well, the attitudes of the local population in the Chapare tropics after they were seduced by easy money making, and especially the attitudes of those who—suddenly escaping from a long, colonial heritage of deprivation and social marginalization—started indulging in ugly, excessive, and “animalistic” behavior. When Lázaro derogatively comments on “el campesino feo” (the ugly peasant, 180), he implies indigenous laborers, both from the rural fields and from the mines. Racist remarks (202–3) surface several times throughout the novel, such as: “I think that there’s nothing in the world more ridiculous than one of our moneyed campesinos, and the bars in Chinahuata were full of them . . .” (38; see 88). Although the narrator contends that many of the folks in the area who now dance to foreign rhythms and misbehave while getting drunk and intoxicated by marijuana, unable to distinguish between excess and delinquency, were previously the victims of hunger, misery, and parasites, it seems that he favors the “timeless” image of those who sow maize and plant potatoes in the mountains and altiplanos—the picture of exhausted faces without hope, “like badly fired clay statues” (164). Massive local involvement of indigenous families in the drug traffic meant uprooting and sometimes “monstrous” deviations, but it also meant that Bolivia’s ethnic lower class started to indulge in things that they were not supposed to have access to. The main ethical question underlying Gutiérrez Vargas’ imaginary is related to the perception and attribution of guilt. The mechanism for locating the site of guilt in the narratorial consciousness has to start by uncovering the web of projections that the novel has woven. At the beginning, when alerted to Chinahuata’s feverish climate where people are trying to exchange poverty for money making, we read: “Deep inside those hearts there was a feeling of guilt” (15). Now, this does not seem to be the case at all, since the novel illustrates—the feeling of guilt instead lies “deep inside” the individual literary consciousness. The young man who speaks to us as the afflicted hero of Mariposa Blanca is profoundly fascinated by intoxication, and while

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following a need to project his desire outward and onto others, he believes that rational detachment can make him, at last, the observer of a “fallen world,” not its victim. It is that very attitude that Gutiérrez Vargas inscribes in his exploratory novel: subjectivity is constructed in the passage from experience to confession to remediation, so that the “observing” and atoning subject can eventually come out first. Lázaro’s is the daydream of numerous ordinary citizens to live in accordance with a world of higher principles in the absence of “good” authorities; his are the fears of someone who cannot endure existence without containment (vs. the powers of evil and hell) but who recognizes that uncontained behaviors and pleasures can be “paradise.” Evoking literary paradigms, we might think of a “subject” that has not come to terms with the transition from romanticism to existentialism. For the introverted Lázaro, the notion of love had begun with writing poems to girls he adored, before reality taught him how stupid this was. In other words, beneath his overall pessimism, severed by his destiny as an orphan from a provincial, poor middle class background, there lingers a heightened fantasy with its glow of happiness versus a dreadful, nauseating life. The incommensurable experience arises when Lázaro meets the person—a substitute for his father whom he had never met—who has stepped even beyond existentialism. This means that this man—the Prof—has not only accepted existentialism’s idea of finitude but has actively involved himself in a “negative” territory of existence. This happened when he realized that upholding the positive values of life meant complying with hypocrisy and cynicism. The erosion of existentialism does not occur in a vacuum of philosophical abstraction but rather is bound up with the socio-historical circumstances that shape Bolivian reality. Asking in an associative manner while we think of other novels and films from the Latin American segment of the Global South, what does it mean for a politically minded intellectual to come to terms with modernity, not as a lasting promise, but as the practical degeneration of its guiding principles? El Profe is the “fabricante” who runs the primitive laboratory in which Lázaro has started working as “coca molino.” He is a man of insignificant stature and with long hair, somewhat slim and ruddy, and he does not display the charismatic appearance of “Martín” —el Chivo—in Gonzalo Iñárritu’s film Amores Perros, nor does he resemble the stranded philosophy professor Amalfitano in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. However, these “heroes” belong to the same gallery of declassified academic intellectuals, speaking to us from territories where the most squalid of existential conditions, or the immorality of certain good standards have caused people to lose their status of highly educated, cosmopolitan citizens. “Mine is a long story,” says el Profe, “which cannot be told. I am like a suicidal person who doesn’t agree with what is going to happen, but who pulls the trigger” (111). A hemispheric “intertextual” link appears when we note that the man likes the border corridos of Los Tigres del Norte. In fact, he likes to sing variations of the famous narcocorrido La Banda del Carro Colorado: “Dicen que venían de Villa, en un carro colorado, así lo dijo el soplón, que los había denunciado . . .” (129). El Profe is reserved about his own past, but eventually starts to trust the young man who, alas, should be completing his study of medicine instead of working in an illegal laboratory. We learn that el Profe had been imprisoned as a student leader during a military coup. And that he was tortured by state forces then, and on other occasions,

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which was how he lost his innocence regarding justice: “I understood how pathetic law is in the hands of man: it’s not above all, but rather in the service of some” (142, see also 144). At a determinant moment, presumably when he was in desperate need of help, his family and friends turned their backs on him (“the dagger of ingratitude is the one that penetrates most deeply in the soul,” 111). When asked for his real name, el Profe responds that he cannot remember. . . . there was a time when I had a family, friends, a name; but when people I loved pushed me down the path to loneliness, I left my name hanging next to that sign that Dante saw at the entrance to hell. Since then they call me el Profe, and they don’t think about me, but about those who pursue me. My only hope: a short life; my only desire: a quick death” (171).

Lázaro’s return from the jungle to Chinahuata to meet up with Josefina, whom he had left there, and now carrying some little “earnings” from his work as “coca molino” fails sadly. He is told that, while he was gone, “his woman” has become attached to a man who has 15 hectares of coca fields, a nice car, a house, and other things. While wandering along a river bank, he remembers Josefina’s words: “a man without faith is like a dead warrior before the fight begins” (160). This is his destiny—to fight without faith—he thinks, and takes himself into a cantina to get drunk, only to be brutally beaten up and have his earnings stolen. Though in terrible shape, he manages to return to the Prof ’s camp where he is received with open arms. It is there that he starts gaining a few insights into narcotics and “intoxication.” Lázaro remembers having read a “specialist’s” article affirming that “chutear”— smoking a marijuana joint—causes “irreversible lesions to the brain” (135). Now he is told by el Profe that, to some people, it does not cause any harm at all, while it does affect others, but to widely varying degrees. He also learns that cocaine is not marijuana, and that chewing coca can even help people resist addiction (see 189–191). The young man’s fear of intoxication has, at its root, his relationship with women. In the presence of his mother who died when he was perhaps 13 years old, he was an autistic boy. Much later, Josefina, the ex-bar girl, led his body and fantasies, for the first time, into the experience of utmost ecstasy. After drinking from the glass of unfettered desire, he is unable to consider this experience as a profane act, overwhelmed as he is by its boundless tremor, that causes fear and dependence at the same time. Josefina, for her part, always perceived the young man as ugly and somewhat limited, and did not hesitate to invent a lie about her pregnancy to make him go with her to the Chapare. When Lázaro equates alcohol- and marijuana-related forms of intoxication with the tectonic power of sexual attraction and intercourse, he is almost correct from a neurophysiological viewpoint of arousal, which would perhaps include the activation of similar neurotransmitters in the human brain. The problem lies in Christian morality and its affective aftermath as it has influenced even late-modern assumptions of normality and abnormal behavior. Lázaro cannot cognitively confront what he sees and experiences as “ecstasy” in the tropical Bolivian hustle of low-level drug trade. From there to the tropes in the novel which link “la tierra de la droga” to images of evil and hell is only a single step. Ours is not a Freudian interpretation, since religiosity

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as self-deception is not a matter of (childhood) neurosis nor Oedipal relationships. Lázaro’s self-deception and moralizing escape appear as a “therapeutic” self-defense against reality. While, theoretically speaking, the experience of intoxication could find a way into cognition, for him there is only the (desired) atonement for sin and guilt. Ironically, contact with the drug trade reawakens his plans to finish his university medical studies. But sobriety, for Lázaro, could only be light years away from intoxication, a distance that he cannot bridge and which therefore has transcendent meaning. Its ordinary name is “morality.” What he does not perceive—and the novelist does not seem to, either—is that, by being an affective construction, morals can also function as a colonizing factor of consciousness. Besides, as numerous examples have shown, “modern” medicine is not safeguarded against this predicament. If a narconovel such as Mariposa Blanca can contribute—apart from its literary deliberation— to timely ethical reflection, we might have to reverse the lesson that Lázaro tries to learn when el Profe, the manufacturer of coca paste, is finally killed by the military. Keeping in mind the author’s need to construct a narrative of atonement, it does not come as a surprise that Lázaro succeeds in escaping with the big money that el Profe threw to him before being massacred by the armed forces. Lázaro now does what el Profe has predicted to him: “you’ll get out of this well, I see in you a person who knows how to think and control himself ” (94). Indeed, he does know how to control himself, even during his final meeting with the “fallen” Josefina to whom the now-matured young man will not again fall prey. Asked by Josefina what he is going to do from now on, Lázaro responds: I have $100,000 in this briefcase, the product of delinquency and death, and I think they can be put in the service of redemption and life. I’m studying medicine, and with this money I’ll be able to help certain dogs who are howling in anguish, overwhelming the serene nights of our town (280).

What the image of “certain dogs” implies is a vision of beings who have become dehumanized, converted into lamentable monsters by excessive drug use. However, this “dog” who was once a man, who Lázaro, in his first encounter with the underworld, saw roaming deliriously around the jungle camp, contradicts the social grounding of much of what is professed in the novel. The “dog” functions as one of the poetic devices that helps by adding shades of monstruosity to the local social cosmos. And it provides the protagonist with a moral passageway back to normal society. Problematizing the “lesson” that underlies the way Lázaro’s story is fashioned means concluding our reading not with the young protagonist, but with the scapegoat figure of el Profe. This man might actually have traveled from the capital of La Paz all the way down to the Chapare after his own ideas about life and society collapsed in personal tragedy. Gutiérrez Vargas’ narrative implies that Lázaro’s substitute father—being a “delinquent” —has to die in order for the “young man” to fulfill his good tasks in life.37 The confessional “return narrative” (return from temporary sin into self-restauration and atonement) relies on a modern recit: rational containment bridges both the “sanity” of “Was what God wanted to teach him missing?” says Lázaro when aluding to el Profe’s death (Mariposa Blanca, 269).

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the individual Self and the order of society. In other words, we are also talking about the conditions of possibility for the supposedly inalienable right of citizenship. But remembering the overall socioeconomic situation in Bolivia, described earlier, what then is the destiny of a multitude that is exposed to fragile, or nonexistent citizenship? Is Lázaro indeed someone who could credibly represent the path to goodness for people like him in a country like Bolivia and perhaps in other countries? Or is he a figure who embodies only a combination of narrative intelligence and repression, which is projected upon him by the more experienced subject of the author? And why is the other central figure, el Profe, the person more likely to realize an individual “rational” project doomed to fail? When thinking about the relationship between representation and repression, we should remember that Nietzsche once wrote: “Cynicism is the only form by which ordinary [gemeine] souls can come close to righteousness [Redlichkeit].”38 Is Lázaro’s identity bound to an unconscious form of cynicism? We leave this pending and turn to another question. When the novel establishes private tragedy as the condition that marked the path of the fallen intellectual, el Profe, does it mean that this is a way of bypassing the historical coordinates of the man’s political activities? Could it be that the 1980s were in fact a time of deep nihilism, regardless of the forms and contents of the alternative political engagements we might think of? It is not by chance that Mariposa Blanca can be read as an open disagreement between an explorative social phenomenalism that focuses on local-transnational constellations of the narcotics trade and the fictional recuperation of Christian commandments. Historical memory could tell us that Christian values are especially important for the stability of life worlds in which citizenship, understood as a complex, rights-bearing status of the individual, is selective and hierarchic, rather than ubiquitous, in its modern metropolitan form. The lack of specificity regarding el Profe’s past does not have to prevent us from recognizing the ethical posture of this figure. Among his comments about the ordinary people involved in the business we find expressions such as: all those who have engaged in the simple commerce of “bollos” and “papayas” (reduced quantities of cocaine paste, with just small gains) suddenly felt that they were respected, being “citizens in this demential world.” (111) “Just like the country produces exaltations of patriotism, this world generates its own feelings of belonging, and identity, . . . passions and conditions that suddenly confer [the sensation of] citizenship” (ibid.) And he states: “You may think that we, the delinquents of the drug trade, are demons with bloodthirsty eyes and guns, unable to feel like human beings do. But we are equal to any other Christian, neither better nor worse than the others” (140). And, believe it or not, he continues, there are not a few who, having made some money here, return to their urban lives as teachers or students, nurses, or even housewives. I believe that we, the delinquents, are by no means worse than those judges who condemn or liberate, depending on who offers the greater or lesser amount of slush money . . . ; those businessmen who get rich in a few years, while the children of their workers die of anemia; or those shameless politicians who pocket the money of the people, and who, not content with this, jail, murder, or pursue the innocent . . . (141). Cited in Karl Jaspers. Nietzsche, 405.

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Why, one might ask, is el Profe unable to return to the “normal” world? There could be several answers, which takes us to an interesting, less conventionally determined space of the novel. That which is missing at the level of an “open” aesthetic is provided in terms of ethical potential, and the question arises if this potential is outdated, or if it can in any way stand as an antidote to “capitalist realism.”39 El Profe is an “old-fashioned” subject: he has continued to be a man of principles in a cynical official world. He is not the kind of fictional person who, like Fernando Vallejo’s Grammarian in La Virgen de los Sicarios, brilliantly plays a demagogical game to his own pleasure. El Profe learned, while following a path of political commitment that left him, at a certain moment, in circumstances of bare life, facing the sheer need to survive, that the narcotics underworld of the Chapare was not the bosom of evil. Nor do the injustices that affect ordinary peoples’ existences originate there. Let us briefly draw on a particular concept of “corruption” whose meaning is not political or economic, but psychocultural and socio-anthropological. “Corruption of reality” (John F. Schumaker) can simply mean a “regulation of reality” by the forces of religion or ideology turned into emotion, or by other factors that keep “intoxication” at that constant level at which a majority of people accepts a constructed normalcy as objective reality. As the novel shows, guilt and Christian morality provide crucial, operative values—in fact, a psycho-practical handbook—by which young Lázaro succeeds in both transgressing the norm and returning to it. In other words, the young man is a perfect accomplice in the subtle exchange process between what “is” and what is “make believe,” which is also the process of transaction, back and forth, from the “open secrets” of society to its “hidden untruths.” El Profe, for his part, has experienced first hand how the globally charged drug trade euphoria, in an area that had been nothing other than rurally isolated and deprived for centuries, has uprooted and ennervated poor people’s reality. This is a “corruption” of reality to the extent that the actual ecstasis of the social body in the underdeveloped region, is based on illusions of wealth and on physical arousal through excesses of entertainment, rather than on the transformation of existential and political conditions. A surrogate happiness, so to speak, yet connected to a collective drive to overcome what has been the innate, historically ingrained fatalism of the region. Lázaro, in turn, liked to confuse those levels of intoxication, while conflating surface eruptions of hilariousness and violence into a mythical notion of evil at whose core he placed the words “poison” and “drugs.” However, as el Profe knows, there is a larger, and more influential realm of “corrupted reality”—the psychopathological, regulatory mechanisms that allow those in power to remain in power. Interiorized feelings of guilt and fear are its steady, proven intoxicants, and they can generate both social and individual addiction, while projecting evil outward and onto the devilish cocaine. Paradoxically, the Prof ’s choice, if we can speak at all of a choice, was to lead an almost sober existence. He is not overwhelmed by the local excesses in Chinahuata and, more vehemently, rejects the condition of guilt (and fear) or Christian hypocrisy that the greater society demands of people who still aspire a normal life. At issue is what John Schumaker has called I am paraphrasing from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? See 13.

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the “paranormal self-deceptions”—the “vital lies that serve as indispensable defenses against a human condition for which there is no other remedy.”40 In sum, el Profe’s nihilism originates from his insight that neither form of surrogate happiness provides a solution to the problems of a world that he had once endeavored to change. Alluding to the subterranean links between both realms of a false, yet all to real, “happiness” can help foster our understanding of globalization, in a way that makes us think still further about an ethics of sobriety. At stake are critical perceptions that reach beyond the regional universe of our novel and into the pathological situations of the modern Western “Self,” which are unevenly distributed between north and south. Under the constellations laid out in a controversial book called Mariposa Blanca, el Profe’s option for sobriety leads to his violent assassination. There is another way of phrasing his tragedy. It has to do with the distance that lies between Gutiérrez Vargas’ novel and the affirmative cultural, and socio-physiological imaginary of the Cocaleros movement, as it has become, under Evo Morales, the cornerstone of a new political project in the hemisphere. The novels that follow Mariposa Blanca, conforming Gutiérrez Vargas’ narconarrative trilogy bear comparable artistic and moral postures. An incursion in the Bolivian “informalization”–under global economic impact—of the long-standing tradition of coca cultivation and local consumption is traversed by elements of mythic language and hyperbolic style that the author views naturally connected with the drug world, and its alienating effects. El demonio y las flores (1999, The Demon and the Flowers) narrates a drug-war scenario of the 1980s and 90s. Don Ramón, the “Gran Ministro,” obtains the country’s presidency thanks to his entanglements with an influential coca distributor. After moving to the top of the government he begins to brutally repress the narcotics business, owing to his sudden dependence on U.S.-prescriptions and international financial flows. From there, a narration of betrayal and excessive violence unfolds that leads to the invasion of “Campo de Nieve,” an area inside the Cochabamba jungles, and a sacred space for the Sipoye aborigines. The military raid ends in a disaster associating the topos of “mythic violence” as “threatening,” “bloody,” bringing “at once guilt and retribution”41, overlaid by the premonitory myths of indigenous culture. The third novel, Magdalena en el paraíso (2001), resembles a fictive scenario of “magical realism” (an anti-paradise) in which the corrupting effects of both the drug trade and its eradication vibrate along bestial excesses, inertia, and buried memories. If Mariposa Blanca was dedicated to the rise of the Chapare region as a post-traditional center of raw cocaine elaboration, Magdalena en el paraíso figures the decay of the business, together with its total destruction presented by the lived speech, as well as first-person narration of Mateo, a journalist. What surfaces, at the same time, is a peculiar variant of the ecological novel from the moment at which the “white butterfly” appears. Together with bellicose coca plant eradication, a dangerous caterpillar was introduced in the eastern lowlands. The insects, turning into white butterflies and spreading like a jungle fire terminate with everything that is green. John F. Schumaker. Wings of Illusion, 31. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249.

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Toward the novel’s end, an image of the ancient Sipoye tribe is evoked, staging the reappearance of a lost people. One morning in the aftermath of destruction, the tribe assumes in Chinahuata (from where the first novel set out), performing its ancient cult to the plant (Magdalena, 287–88). The leading Indians carry with them, like idols, the few remaining plants. And Mateo’s, the journalist’s voice muses: “For a moment I stayed looking how these men and women vanished among the torments of sand, and I climbed the tower to ring the bell in order to awaken that Being, that had been slumbering deep in the mountain slopes. Would it be the guide for a seed to allow for a human society of the future? Would I be heard?” (288) Here, the writer concludes with a fundamental perception of the modern conflicts over the coca leaf: in the narcotrilogy’s diction, coca is obsessively alive, be it under the guise of national perdition, or salvation.

Cinematic writing and the acting brain of a killer: “Lehrstück” about the borders of citizenship (Nostalgia de la sombra, Eduardo Antonio Parra) . . . a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax leading to a state of rest . . . (Brian Massumi) Phenomenology asked of “actual experience” the original meaning of every act of knowledge. But can we not, or must we not look for it in the living being himself? (Michel Foucault)

Using a rationale of verisimilitude, we should now focus on those novels that, by addressing narcotics traffic within the context of more recent fiction, can reveal a different lens. Some of today’s narco-novels invite writers to resist manichaean, denunciatory approaches and to be suspicious of the desire to instruct their contemporaries by reducing complexity. The overall challenge consists in not setting intoxication and sobriety apart. The group of novels for which Diario de un narcotraficante and Mariposa Blanca are somehow precursors but also provide, in the end, an ingenious sphere of contrast continues to grow. Fiction authors addressing the transnational localities and shifting imaginaries of psychoactive trade since the 1990s as a facet of the global “modernity of drugs” include the Mexicans Elmer Mendoza, Leonides Alfaro, César López Cuadras, Juan José Rodríguez, Bernardo Fernández, Cristina Rivera Garza, Iris García Cuevas, Yuri Herrera, Rafael Ramírez Heredia, Heriberto Yépez, Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, the Colombian writers Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal, Alfredo Molano, Arturo Alape, Jorge Franco Ramos, Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa, from Bolivia Juan de Recacochea, Julio César Quiroz, Miguel Ángel Añez Suárez, and from Brazil authors such as Marcio Cristino, Patricia Melo, Jorge Mourao.

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We will not pretend to explore this terrain further, whose mere extension shows that the drug trade has become a “convocatory” topic that helps assembling experiences and fantasies of surprising variety. We intend to move from the thematically indicative “narco-novels” to the concept of “narco-epics,” and thus open up our framework. In a sense, it is the difference between narrative typology, on the one hand, and conceptual, and ethical geography, on the other that is at stake. To take this step that helps us show that narco-epics are not necessarily, nor even primarily concerned with drug trafficking, we will look at a novel published by the Mexican Eduardo Antonio Parra in 2002: Nostalgia de la sombra. Our intention is not to see what artistic representation as the equivalent of crude experiences and conflicts looks like, but to discover claims about imbalances that have come to conform contemporary life in the figurative and affective scenarios of the novel. With Nostalgia de la sombra (Longing for Shade), Eduardo Antonio Parra has created a Brechtian Lehrstück (dialectical-didactic play) that proceeds by blending “cinematic” writing with phenomenological prose, together with a sophisticated style that associates Juan Rulfo’s Paso del Norte (1953). Let us consider a specific situation as poetological point of departure: an individual existence is pushed to its utter limits—thrown onto the threshold of life and death, and the person defending his life assumes violence as a visceral force, so much so that it fervidly transforms the “subject.” This man, mutating into a violent creature, offers a case scenario from which a peculiar realism ensues. On the one hand, there is the ocurrence as a singular experiential terrain, not shot through with moral, psychological, or social signifiers. In contrast with the novels that we have discussed so far, there is no matrix that helps the “implicit reader” fall back to a distancing or a hermeneutic comfort zone. “Representation” and the “subject” are not respectfully set apart. The case stands out on its own merit. On the other hand, the constellation is so radical that it would be a mistake to assume that it is limited to or solely determined by the interests—the transgressive subjectivity— of the individual in question. Political and historical “content” are not absent, but this is not laid out as a flat space within which the character moves, be its markers socio-historical or metaphysical. If there were a tapestry of both worldly and power-related factors that embeds the existence of subjectivity, the given frame precludes its “representation” —its symbolic analogy to figures of morality, law, logos, and identity. There is also skepticism about interiority as a distinct narratological asset. The author chooses a narrative style that builds on that other, sometimes invisible, reflexivity that artists can gain from cinematic techniques. One is reminded of the interfaces between the search for realism and avant garde rigor, as it manifested itself, for example, in Döblin’s programmatic expressionism (1913)42, or in the experimental aesthetic of the early Bertolt Brecht. We find a mode of narration and presentation that bans “private” psychological or explanatory dimensions from the way in which the novel is told. Of course, we do not have to go back that far in order to describe a type of “realism” that restrains authorial self-presentation by foregrounding experiential “factology.” In American literature, “dirty realism”43 is one of the terms that

See Alfred Döblin, “Berliner Programm,” 112–15.

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has been proposed to refer to segments of contemporary fiction. In Latin American fiction, “post-avant garde” fantasies of the “real” have been devised, formulated for a cultural diagnostics emerging from the Hemispheric South. However, “avant garde” projects, and we try to avoid the “post–post” here, are not just formal ventures; they defamiliarize the normal in the first place. Terms such as “dirty realism” are descriptive labels. Nevertheless, the concept of “Lehrstück” can teach us, even today, to look “behind” the shock that the narrative produces in the first place. Aldona B. Pobutsky states that Parra “has established himself as the author of a particularly visceral and brutally explicit prose.”44 And indeed, Parra is interested in the power of mimesis, even while he attempts to work through a scenario of alienation and to provide an implicit blueprint for dissection and critique.45 Nostalgia de la sombra begins: There is nothing like killing a man. The sentence resonates inside his skull and Ramiro recognizes a slight rise in the blood temperature under his skin. It is the only way to know for sure that it was worth it being born. He walks slowly, carefully, adjusting his steps to the irregular surface of the pavement while he avoids the hawkers of bills and documents, the beggars, the informal sellers who keep the street in a state of siege. He doesn’t see their faces . . . he moves on while looking down . . . concentrating on the thought that keeps repeating and diversifying in his mind like a litany. Suppress a neighbor. Put him off the train. Take him out of the game. He raises his eyes when he gets to the plaza that he always remembers as full of dissenters, of teachers in tents, of protesting campesinos . . . Nothing like the feeling that the blood of another is wetting our skin and that we felt his last breath. See how he breathes his last, how he grows feeble trying to suck in a mouthful of the air that will never again fill his lungs. He stops beside the fountain above which a seated old woman dominates the scene. Her profile makes him think of ancient coins. . . . He lights a cigarette . . . He breathes in the smoke . . . and in his throat, the alcohol he drank during his meal backs up. Yes, moderate his efforts. Put him face down. . . . Without anger, without pity, for the simple pleasure of feeling ourselves powerful.. . . He belches and a feeling of nausea clouds his vision. . . . Getting rid of a man is easy, Damián. But you never told me to kill a woman (Nostalgia, 9–10).

For Ramiro, the protagonist of Eduardo Antonio Parra’s novel, killing is both a mission and an obsession. “There is nothing like killing a man,” is the obsessive sentence that casts its spell over Ramiro’s “feeling brain,”46 giving rhythm to the narrative and to Ramiro’s life: “Ramiro recognizes a slight rise of the blood temperature under his skin.” These sensations that open the text originate in the protagonist’s first direct encounter with violence. It took place ten years before the present of the novel: one See Michael Hemmingson, The Dirty Realism Duo: Charles Bukowsi and Raymond Carver on the Aesthetics of the Ugly. 44 Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky. “The Thrill of the Kill: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience in the Prose of Eduardo Antonio Parra,” 1. 45 See Eduardo Antonio Parra. “Norte, narcotráfico y literatura,” 61. 46 See Antonio Damasio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. 43

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night, the newspaper proofreader Bernardo, who will become the murderer Ramiro, is attacked on a street of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey and turns from victim to perpetrator by killing three men. This transfigurative experience is the main theme of the narration. Parra has set out to explore the implications of the act of killing: he describes Bernardo’s evolution from unimportant, middle-class citizen to hit man. He is particularly interested in the ways a human being’s bodily consciousness can be transformed during an act of violence.47 Parra’s treatment of this theme is striking in its remarkable frankness and neutrality. Instead of choosing a moral or psychologizing approach, similar to those of the novels considered earlier, the author opts for a “phenomenological writing” in order to gauge human consciousness with the greatest possible impartiality. If Parra is prone to phenomenology and French existentialism must be left open, yet the underlying posture is inadvertently clear: consciousness is not the so-called cogitatio, or the res extensa (separated from the body). It rather appears as an “experience-being.” This approach bridges the gap between the physiological and the psychological. All psychic activities have to be captured, first and foremost, as physiological sensations. Behind this vision, and alluding to Merleau-Ponty, we can recognize “existence” as an entity with a certain physiological autonomy, rather than as a mere reaction to stimuli or a simple act of consciousness: “there is [. . .] a certain energy in the pulsation of existence, relatively independent of our voluntary thoughts.”48 One might also remember Gregory Bateson’s musings on the “ecology of the mind.”49 Parra deterritorializes such acceptances while he explores the interface-scenario between an urban “ecosystem” (the map of actions associated with Monterrey) and the mental-anthropological breakdown (transfiguration) of an “average” citizen’s consciousness. This constellation also provides an ethical test case. Can astonishment still be raised by a literary work that deconditions a sensorium of “cruel optimism,” that is, of the reproduction of conventional fantasies of the good life and the usual “affective components of citizenship”50 against all odds? What does it mean when a literary work creates a scene of imagination that suggests shaking the emotional tableau of dissociative comfort? Nostalgia seems to favor, at first sight, an unbiased view of personal experiences of violence, yet its style relies on cunning momentum—that of a Brechtian mode of “defamiliarization.” How can “instinct” be pushed so far that it becomes independent of thinking consciousness? This force of instinct is described as the “bowels,” the “demoniac,” the “bestial” or animal part, that Bernardo/Ramiro experiences for

See Eduardo Antonio Parra. La Jornada Semanal. Julio de 1996, 15. Cited in Miguel Rodríguez Lozano. “Sin límites ficcionales: Nostalgia de la sombra de Eduardo Antonio Parra,” 72. 48 “There is, then, a certain consistency in our ‘world’, relatively independent of stimuli, which refuses to allow us to treat being-in-the-world as a collection of reflexes—a certain energy in the pulsation of existence, relatively independent of our voluntary thoughts, which prevents us from treating it as an act of consciousness. It is because it is a preobjective view that being-in-the-world can be distinguished from every third person process, from every modality of the res extensa, as from every cogitatio, from every first person form of knowledge—and that it can effect the union of the ‘psychic’ and the ‘physiological.’” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 92. 49 See Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 50 See Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism, 9, 2–3. 47

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the first time in Monterrey during that nocturnal assault. At the beginning, he (Bernardo) responds passively to these original attackers. He lets the blows and kicks land on him as if he were paralyzed (see Nostalgia, 40). When he has collapsed to the ground, drenched in blood and at his assaulters’ mercy, he finally loses his temper (mutating into Ramiro). In this extreme situation, danger and pain numb the cogitatio, his conscious perception and rational decision-making ability. The bestial part of Bernardo surfaces: “blood, anger, an unknown or forgotten ferocity begins to stir him up.” (52) He falls into a state of ecstasy (see 53), into a murderous frenzy, Achilles-like, which eventually ends with the death of the three muggers. Bernardo’s memory of the moment he killed one of his victims with a blow to the heart is described as orgiastic. “El hombre y la bestia,” the “Man and the Beast,” is the main idea for the initial scene of Bernardo’s imaginary movie, the “screenplay” which intertwines with the novel by virtue of a narratologically formative mise en abyme. Bernardo meets an old man wearing a Texas cowboy hat in a bar a few hours before he is mugged. In his perception, the man’s face becomes that of a “devilish being” (40, 35, 52) penetrating, sardonic, brutal. His gaze, his provocative injunction: “I’ve seen you! Hey! You’re frightened, aren’t you? I’ve seen you!” will eventually become the protagonist’s inner force that denounces his fear and cowardice. When the bestial breaks out in Bernardo during his beating, he feels as though the old man’s voice were suddenly speaking from his guts. This transformatory scene signals that Bernardo is becoming Ramiro, the murderer, while it is supposed to represent, at the same time, the first shot of the imaginary screenplay we read about above, in the second chapter. Thus, odd numbered chapters provide a glance into the novel’s present (Ramiro), while even numbered chapters help assemble a past of which Bernardo’s intended film project forms part. Plot and screenplay intersect; Bernardo progressively turns into Ramiro and thus enters the filmic script that Bernardo had dreamed of completing one day (32–3). In this feature, Ramiro has begun to assume the role of the sicario, the hit man. In his ordinary life as a newspaper copyeditor, Bernardo had developed a liking for “good stories about gangsters,” not those that exaggerated violence for its own sake. The story that he intended to develop on the background of northern Mexico pictures the encounter between an “an old business chief ” (34), “accustomed to imposing his will,” and a rising drug lord, “a narcotrafficker whose power has grown in the city in an underground way” (35). Coincidence determines that the businessman’s son threatens the drug lord’s daughter. Bernardo fancied that the movie begins with the drug lord’s revenge carried out by a perfideous hit man, one of those who cannot be stopped once they have been inflamed with the desire to kill. The mise en abyme set forth by the novel accentuates the problematic of a (possible) transformation, one which is more complex than Bernardo’s becoming the hitman Ramiro. While the rise of informal power networks related to the spread of the narcotics business infiltrates the cultural imaginary, becoming a ubiquitous narrative topic (reflected in Bernardo’s film project), the actual issue is found in the breakdown of a constitutively modern difference. A growing segment of the population is confronted with the rise of narcopower, especially in the northern

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Mexican states, and while the public tries to make sense of it (in mass communication, politics, art), the socially and ethically learned citizen does not yet realize that the grounds on which such transformations might still be addressed and represented accordingly have been fading away. Bernardo’s film project does become reality, not as a well-designed work of art, but as an irruption of the “real” which cancels out representation, producing both an “ecological” (invisibly environmental) and a physiological contamination. Bernardo’s purpose was to design a denunciatory movie (“una película de denuncia”): “There would be a lot of action, and he would try to keep the plot going with a political, social, psychological background . . . Above all he liked the feeling of tragedy that permeated the storyline from beginning to end” (35). However, the new scenario in which Bernardo loses himself begins to eradicate the very possibility of tragedy. Tragedy is a phenomenon that does not exist without distance—the distance of those whose fear and shared suffering with the subject of misfortune provides the basis of understanding right and wrong and, above all, reconfirms, affectively, a reigning commonality vis-à-vis a violent Other. But what if the “onlookers” of tragedy, the morally educated middle-class citizens acting as a voyeur, are drawn into the vortex of violence themselves? Bernardo, who likes that special “air of tragedy,” steps into an experience that makes the tragic obsolete. When he becomes the sicario Ramiro, his eventual death is not even worthy of filmic representation. This means that the novel has taken the place of the impossible film. Parra speaks to his readers as a proponent of a post-tragic epoch, conveying a narrative plateau that is, on the one hand, nightmarish and boundless regarding the presence of violence and, on the other, concerned with estrangement—neither catharsis nor introspective domestication. It is a rigorous aesthetic move that the novel advances to the point at which empathy becomes entirely alien, and where astonishment absorbs the energies that might otherwise be spent on an individual drama, that is, the loss of individuality. When Ramiro asks Damián (his “superior,” a man of the higher society) why he was chosen to kill the business woman, the answer is: “See, you have no identity” (22). In other words, it is from the moment that Ramiro’s pathological transubstantiation turns normal, becoming embodied as the prevailing mode of perception and thus an addiction, that things start looking awry. The character’s definitive assimilation into a lawless urban underworld occurs when he takes up residence among garbage pickers in a dump that constitutes the novel’s most vividly described social environment. This experience of the fetid and violently insecure existence of Monterrey’s most destitute citizens, when combined with the protagonist’s middle-class past and his subsequent employment by unnamed participants in the booming business of money laundering for drug traffickers, affords him . . . an unusual perspective on three urban worlds that . . . coexist but never touch.51

Glen S. Close. Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence, 51.

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Structurally and epistemically, the novel implodes the already-described constitutive difference between the representation of reality and contamination (by the “real”)— the difference that marks the condition of the possibility of modern subjectivity. At the level of narrative progression, however, a melancholic element rises to the surface. After ten years of carrying out a sicario’s business as usual, the killing of other men, Ramiro is assigned the murder of Maricruz Escobedo, a beautiful woman who works as a financial manager in Monterrey. This constellation begins to be charged by desire, to the extent that Ramiro imagines the upcoming violent encounter as an ultimate erotic experience. Nevertheless, the melancholic tone resonates as an opaque, and physically all the more intense reminder of his previous life—“killing a woman” is not what the brusquely “decivilized” Ramiro is able to accommodate from his violent condition. And this will finally bring the open or latent drama that captures the novel’s present (odd numbered chapters) to a sort of modernist closure again, in which estrangement fades away: the hitman is unable to carry out his assignment accordingly, and is himself shot. He thus “returns” to the world of his past, Monterrey, where he was a husband and father. Here, the mise en abyme works by revealing the asynchrony between even and odd numbered chapters, together with the slightly melodramatic implosion of a transformative experience that, otherwise, would have left Ramiro on the side of evil. This mise en abyme is, of course, a reflexive narratological maneuver. It is as though the author were holding up a mirror to his own novel and, in doing so, hinting at the possibility that the narration is, after all, just a part of Bernardo’s screenplay which, however, could just as well be part of the repertoire of the “corridos norteños” (35). The narration unfolds, in the odd numbered chapters, almost entirely from Ramiro’s memories, accessible through his “acting imagination” in which his immediate, corporeal perceptions take the lead over the work of consciousness. What happens “inside his skull” and what is felt “under his skin” always matters. Special attention is given to bodily mechanisms such as agitations in the blood system, states of awareness, and ecstasy that the narrator describes with moral and psychological neutrality. Not only general and judgmental concepts such as assault or emotion, but also psychologically connoted terms such as fear, or anxiety are avoided. Parra enables his readers to experience the protagonist’s bodily agitation while pursuing his deeds in the sense of phenomenology. “To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them.”52 The phenomenological aesthetics of the novel lets metaphors and poeticity rise up, while the changes perceived by altered consciousness are not self-serving, but held together, almost imperceptibly, by a sort of dialectic laconism. The operating mode of Ramiro’s memories, one of the central themes of the novel, is described with didactic precision. When Ramiro goes by the place near the dump where he spent some time after the attack, one reads: “Just like coins, names and nicknames fall into the empty space of consciousness and trigger echoes that turn into images and anecdotes” (161). While exploring different stylistic modes and speech patterns, the book finds a peculiar Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology, 111.

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affective tone precisely by virtue of its physiological melody. Ramiro’s memory is often conditioned by impulses and sensations that keep his body alert and moving. If psychological elements surface, they are part of embodied experiences, rather than conforming an autonomous scale, as occurs in one of his encounters with the man who gives the orders to kill: “Damián held out his hand. The glitter of irony was diminished, his pupils showed a slight touch of disgust, or of sadness, Ramiro couldn’t identify it well. It was a handshake that was smooth, distant, and cold.” (25) There is nothing spectacular about Ramiro’s “ecology of mind,” or anything evocative of evil. What happens is simply the orchestration of a constant awareness about the environment and his own body and its energy levels. Because of this, distracted urban wandering is out of question, and strong emotions are detrimental to his kind of “work.” No “stream of consciousness,” no attempt at self-understanding, although the text conveys the core of an inner experience; it does so by avoiding dissociative reflection and immersion in memory or sentiment. That way, Ramiro, in the odd numbered chapters (as distinct from the even sections), is always “before” (or “ahead”) of his self, making sure that he remains inmersed in movement while his sensory-motor system functions as a seismograph of his environment. Through the act of reading, the reader becomes the eyes of the protagonist. In contrast to what Damasio has termed the “feeling brain,” Ramiro’s brain appears as the integral neurophysiological apparatus that keeps both the emotional limbic system and the rational neocortex in check. We are dealing with an intimate yet nonprivate experience. This is the hinge between phenomenological writing and didactic-dialectical purpose. In other words, as basic as it seems that the physiological system and its “ecological” conditioning predate the meanings that the mind fashions on its own behalf, it has now and again been literature’s ambition to join in or even accommodate, as Bergson says, the dualisms matter-memory and affect-intelligence.53 It should not be a surprise that it is from here that techniques resembling “cinematic writing” help Parra work at the level of immediacies and similitudes. The narration can thus easily shift focus and frame, it can, for example, leave “Ramiro’s skull” in order to direct the viewer’s attention to other details, or to immerse the protagonist in his own environment. This does not disconnect our virtual perspective from Ramiro’s acting brain, since it lives by means of a camera-perspective sui generis. We have, rather, two distinct “camera angles,” one personalized and the other contingent, both driven by rhythm and montage. This way, boundaries between “inside” and “outside” become contingent rather than being erased.54 In one instant ocurring in a bar, in the first chapter, Ramiro glances at the photograph of Maricruz, the woman he has been hired to kill. Only the emeralds of her eyes glowed, possessors of their own light. Her eyebrows, her hand, her hair and mouth trembled, and they were filled with wrinkles as if trying to reflect the woman’s true age. Ramiro lowered his eyelids, raised his head and reopened them. The walls of the cantina had moved away from him, shaking in the twilight until they distorted the faces of the men in the distance. The light from the light bulbs that remained lit brightened and dimmed for no reason (22). See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 225. Here my reading is different from Rodríguez-Lozano’s. See “Sin límites ficcionales,” 68.

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What happened? Physiologically speaking, the answer is simple. “I’m drunk. That’s good. I’ve already lost count of the drinks. Will they keep giving me brandy or some of that adulterated stuff?” (22–3) Once we talk about an “inner” experience, focused on the interaction between body and brain, the matter of intoxication by violence is never an unmediated one, nor can such arousal function in a continuous, uninterrupted way. For Ramiro, alcohol is the “equalizer,” in that it helps him put a break on his overstimulated circulatory system. Similar to the physical immersion in violence, it reaches every cell in his body. In the hit man’s condition, an elixir is needed to slow down the devilish state of alertness and movement. How could he otherwise recover the excess-levels in his body—regarding motor-coordination, reflexes, reaction time, breathing, self-protective perceptions, and the like. The banality of the situation is less so, if we remember that in public parlance, when it comes to the issue of violence and drugs, alcohol remains embedded deep within the common fabric of life and landscape without being substantially controlled. The extent to which the life of people engrossed in low-level drug traffic or crime is actually mediated by excessive alcohol consumption—the most ancient and unrestrained drug of choice in the world—is one of the tangential issues about which narco-novels do not leave much doubt. This is part of a larger perception arising from these works: if evil is an issue, uncomfortably and ubiquitously, there should not be an a priori assumption of evil but a specific interrogation of the terrains of modern Western culture, communication, and economy. Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky suggests a graphic interpretation of Parra’s novel, one that reads the fictive criminal scenario in a Bataillian clue of the eroticization of violence. Ramiro’s being hired to kill a woman is viewed as that sort of ultimate intoxication, leading to both characters’ shared death, which is supposed to embody the novel’s actual transgressive core fused into a “sublime combination of love and death”—the antihero’s “final transgression.”55 “. . . [T]here is something morbidly sensual in his planned act of femicide, since Ramiro will consummate the ultimate possession of this woman’s body. Parra’s novel strongly suggests that seeing her life slipping away will be the most intimate act the protagonist can perform on her, the supreme sacrifice and the high point of Ramiro’s life.”56 As appealing as this reading may be, it clings to Bataille’s universalizing desire regarding the erotics of violence, of death. That desire is charged by the malaise of civilization as such; in other words, at the moment of Ramiro’s violent encounter with Maricruz, the entire scene could provide for an imagination in which crime opens a door (of “perception” and consummation) to the ultimate experience of the otherwise repressed subject. However, recalling the idea of the mise-en-abyme upon which the novel is designed points in a slightly different direction. Is there not, in fact, a violent erotics of “profane illumination,” rather than a sublime fusion of love and death? Would not the thesis of the supreme act of destruction as “communion” displace the aspect of estrangement, by a kind of counter-cathartic yet purging and empathetic quod erat demonstrandum? In sum, Nostalgia de la sombra offers a phenomenological and existential allegory of someone who appears as an extemporal, fiercely globalized version of Musil’s Man Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky. “The Thrill”, 6–7. Ibid., 8.

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Without Qualities.“Fiercely globalized” refers to Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s observation:“The world of Ramiro’s journey is complex because violence is not a product of moral choices but rather something that happens, a consistent present that becomes a constitutive part of the social tapestry in the distinct environments he navigates.”57 According to this critic, the novel is not to be read from the trope of the “citizenship of fear”58 that presents violence as an Other to be warded off by the individual; rather, it is “the narrative of a ‘citizenship through violence.’”59 In such a line of thinking, Nostalgia de la sombra can be viewed as implying a rigorous aesthetic decision, one that requires a conscious posture of “abnormal interpretation” in order to sidestep the artistic implications of “neoliberal fear.”60 As Susan Sontag once wrote, “Reflective art is art which . . . imposes a certain discipline on the audience,”61 and this applies to Parra’s strategy to design his novel, in a dialectical way, as Lehrstück on the matter of violence in today’s Hemispheric South. It is, however, difficult to place Parra’s work within strict formal confines, although it might be read, as well, as a “novela negra of the neoliberal era.”62 Nostalgia de la sombra creates a scenario that allows us to look at an endoscopy of a hitman’s consciousness, rather than a suspense-packed crime thriller. It provides an imagination that does not share Fernando Vallejo’s (Colombia) sublime mythification of adolescent hitmen, La Virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins). Genealogically speaking, Parra’s novel, while using a different literary method, is comparable to Alonso Salazar’s testimonial portrait of the life-space experiences of Medellín’s teenage gangs, No nacimos pa’ semilla (We Have Not Been Born to Life). This similarity resides in their reaching beyond intellectual unease in the face of brute cultural matter, as it has sometimes translated into contemplative, voyeuristic, or transcendentalizing works. Delinquency and narcotraffic are dealt with as “mobile frontiers”63 and lenses; they not only separate and exclude but also articulate complex realities, economic and political interests, transformations of subjectivity, cultural fantasies, literary searches. Parra argues that the rigorous part of the new narratives from the Mexican north (“la literatura del norte”) is not interested in heightening violence nor turning narcocultural tales into items for the wholesale book market. This would instead correspond to “the hysterical and superficial vision of the middle class whose information comes from the press and television.”64 What these conflicts over narcotics, a visceral part of Mexico’s uneven modernity, can help perceive is a nonessentialist, immanent problematic. “Narcotraffic is an integral phenomenon, capable of bending—not destroying—all aspects of human (modern and “nonmodern”) existence, as well as bringing to light all its miseries.”65 These words help addressing a clue that, touching upon the “dialectics of intoxication,” makes up for the difference that we have been discussing in this chapter, condensed, as it was, in the passage from “narco-novel” to “narco-epics.” Ignacio Sánchez-Prado. “Amores Perros: Exotic Violence and Neoliberal Fear,” 45. See Susana Rotker (ed.). Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado. “Amores perros,” 46. 60 See ibid., 39. 61 Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 184. 62 Glen S. Close. Contemporary Hispanic, 125. 63 See Josefina Ludmer. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Perfil, 1999. 64 Eduardo Antonio Parra, “Norte, narcotráfico y literatura,” 61. 65 Ibid. 57 58 59

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The Political “Baroque” of the Pablo Escobar Story: Pablo Escobar, auge y caída de un narcotraficante (Alonso Salazar) Escobar’s story questions all of Colombian society, the political elites, the economy and the Armed Forces, about the coherence of our state and our ability to construct a nation in which life with dignity is possible for everyone. And it questions the international community, and especially the United States, about the charade of maintaining a war, the so-called War on Drugs, that hasn’t diminished drug use and has created phenomena of criminality and the destruction of life and of nature that are unprecedented. Alonso Salazar Many key words are reserved for the bad guys and their organizations—syndicates, cartels, gangs, triads, secret societies, mafias, guerrilla outfits, terrorist networks—and they all denote their special and separate status of being unauthorized, clandestine, underground. Such language constructs conceptual barriers between illicit bad-guy activities (trafficking, smuggling) and state-authorized good-guy activities (trade, migration) that obscure how these are often part of a single spectrum. We need to approach flows of goods and people as visible manifestations of power configurations that weave in and out of legality, in and out of states, and in and out of individuals’ lives, as socially embedded, sometimes long-term processes of production, exchange, consumption, and representation. Itty Abraham & Willem van Schendel

Ominous questions When Pablo Escobar, perhaps the most notorious actor in the globalized cocaine trafficking networks that traversed the Western Hemisphere, was killed by elite troops of the Colombian police, with the aid of the United States, on December 2, 1993, the Colombian magazine Semana published the following, spellbinding summary:

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Narcoepics He prevented three presidents from governing. He transformed the language, the culture, the physiognomy and the economy of Medellín and of the country. Before Pablo Escobar, Colombians didn’t know the word sicario. Before Pablo Escobar, Medellín was considered to be a paradise. Before Pablo Escobar, the world knew Colombia as the land of coffee. And before Pablo Escobar, no one thought that a bomb could explode in a supermarket or in an airplane in flight. It’s because of Pablo Escobar that there are armored cars in Colombia and that the need for security modified architecture. Because of him, the judicial system was changed, the penitentiary policies were reconceptualized as was the design of the prisons, and the Armed Forces were transformed. Pablo Escobar discovered, more than anyone before him, that death can be the greatest instrument of power. (Salazar, Pablo Escobar, 22)

As the head of the Medellín drug cartel and ruler of both a regional and hemispheric grid of illicit transactions, the impact that Escobar had on Colombian society and beyond was so extensive that his execution by the special forces seemed to put a logical closure to that chapter of “la guerra del narcotráfico” (the drug war). At least, this was the hope of many. By “la guerra del narcotráfico” we mean, specifically, the pressure that Escobar and other players in the informal economy had put on, and the vendetta they led against, the Colombian state from 1987 to 1992 to undermine the law allowing extradition of Colombian criminals to face US prosecution.1 In a certain sense, we would have to speak of a “counterwar” that responded to the US-led “war on drugs” with which the Colombian state was forced to cooperate. When Alonso Salazar published Pablo Escobar: Auge y caída de un narcotraficante in 2001, the complexity of the issues put forward in this narrative surpassed, by far, the criteria that the mass media coverage, political discourse, and “public opinion” had thus far established. Escobar miraculously survived, after his death, as part of Columbia’s traumatized cultural memory,2 and Salazar’s project was nothing less than the presentation of hermeneutic and historical clues to this phenomenon. At the same time, his book stands out as a masterpiece of investigative testimony. Salazar, writer, academic, and, from 2007 to 2011, the mayor of Medellín, conveys a perplexing narrative, perhaps even more so than in No nacimos pa´ semilla, his book about sicarios and violent young gang members from the city’s marginal comunas. As one reads one learns that Escobar was not one character but many contrastive personae in one. This “one” was always straightforward yet elusive. At first sight, Pablo Escobar is a testimony sui generis about the drug tycoon, based on meticulous research in press materials and analytic studies, epistolary sources, anecdotes, and information obtained across the entire social and political spectrum in which the man had acted or left his imprint. The voices that the author incorporates in his tightly woven tapestry include parts of interviews with Escobar’s mother and other family members, state functionaries, parliamentarians, military personnel, and lawyers, as well as with people in the different hierarchies of the drug cartels (especially those of Medellín and its See Alonso Salazar J. and Ana María Jaramillo, Medellín: Las subculturas del narcotráfico, 71–2. Also see note 32. 2 The telenovela Pablo Escobar: El patron del mal, produced in 2011/12, is based on Alonso Salazar’s book. 1

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rival from the Cali area). Salazar’s free indirect style weaves together a narrative stream that exhausts readers by the amount of incredible connections and revelations, an account that neither other “biographers” nor political analysts of Escobar have been able to parallel. There is, however, one fictional character, who surfaces, once in a while, throughout the book and who plays the role of a “subcutaneous” narrator. His name is Arcángel (Archangel). Arcángel appears, in the first chapter, as the guardian of Escobar’s grave, a scenario without pomp but highly frequented in the years after 1993, and which serves as the initiative site for retrospection to begin. As we read in the opening pages, the author has given Arcángel certain knowledge and opinions that witnesses did not dare to publicly present (12). La parábola de Pablo, a literary hybrid, deploys an imagination that is not simply “fictional” but “archaeological,” a narratological search that embraces the realm of a personal history that is, on the one hand, a singular outcome of late capitalism and, on the other, one that breaks some of its main geopolitical rules. It is a difficult reading due to the challenge of making sense out of several trajectories of the unbelievable and of realities that appear to be shockingly “unrepresentative” of what has been called political modernity. The Colombian political system in the second half of the twentieth century was not only involved in enabling and sustaining the power of the country’s transnational drug economy, but played a pivotal role in that process. Pablo Escobar is also a book about national and human tragedies; however, it refrains from the Aristotelian and later Hegelian rule—sophisticatedly assumed by some of today’s most successful action movies—to give the narrative of tragic violence a “cleansing” aspect. Salazar shuns an aesthetic ideology whose stamp is a “perverse blend of terror and delight,” when spectators or readers of violence feel comfortable enough to reap “pleasure from it.”3 The “gentrification of tragedy,” rather common today, could easily capitalize on the Escobar case. But Salazar weaves his testimony together in a laconic manner, exposing shattering truths about society, morality, and the bases of civil life today. At stake is a contemporary kind of “realism” without any moralistic tone, a realism not simply understood as a condensed representation of a crude reality, but of an embodyment of uncomfortable topographies of experience, which is enabled by a writing that uses experimental and minimalistic approaches. The narrative, packed with surprising patterns of action and moments of drama, is stripped down to a minimal amount of pathos. By offering an archaeological incursion into the networks that have conformed the history and the kingdom of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Salazar calls on his readers to ponder other strands as well. He traces a picture of the “other,” the scarcely known Colombia within the contemporary Latin American and global realm; in doing so, he connects the exploration of obtuse zones of geopolitics and neoliberalism as they have subdued the hemisphere with numerous specific insights into the corruption of state politics. If the regional–transnational drug-traffic systems of the 1980s and 1990s created socioaffective (both traumatic and empowering) realities of enormous scope, this phenomenon must be read, as well, against the background of increased global See Terry Eagleton. Sweet Violence, 26, 27.

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inequalities and the geo-economic interventionism from the north, which followed the “decline,” that is, the systematic defeat of the socialist, or leftist, movements. The illicit narcotics business and its cultural charisma, which reaches far beyond the popular classes, have been sensitive toward both traditional and new forms of marginalization and social need. Pablo Escobar would embark on an militantism sui generis, one that was transgressive of any Pharisaean convention. It relied on the impetus to create a kingdom out of narco money, loyalties, and pressures, in which the “institution” of the gift acquired an anthropological and political density that was unknown to Marcel Mauss.4 In it, social works—together with a flooding of parts of the upper and lower classes with new drug money—institutional, and, in part, technological infiltration of the juridical and military apparatuses of the state, stunning networks of military “partisanship”5 combined with the self-edification of Pablo as the ruler over a gigantic cult of friendship, but also over the lives and deaths of a growing number of Colombians. Until recently, critics felt comfortably inclined toward the topos of the “minor” hero, be it evocative of works of Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and so many others, the ingeniosity of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, or the praise of the ironic and “pluri-reflective” subject in the field of postmodern aesthetics. Heroes with extraordinary bad or good qualities and “foundational” powers of action seemed to have moved out of place (remember the slogan, “our time is not for heroes” . . .). “Big criminals,” as they continued inhabiting significant segments of the Hollywood movies complex, seemed to evoke the fascination with dubious taste, rather than a critical alertness to the experiences of the social world and even the strategic remappings of the globe after 1989/91. This skeptical spirit is present, for example, in Ileana Rodríguez’s approach to Salazar’s narrative, which she entitles “Reinventing the Popular Heroic.”6 But can such concepts help unravel the paradox that Salazar is able to turn “outdated” subjetivities into devices for understanding complex scenarios of the global present? From another angle, Salazar’s compatriot, the writer Fernando Vallejo, has imagined, in La virgen de los sicarios, a fusion of the “big criminal” and the intellectual-in-crisis. Vallejo and Salazar occupy different positions in the aesthetic and ethical spectrum of contemporary literature; however, the topos of the “big criminal” at a time when ethics has become, once again, a battlefield brings closer the works of both. Salazar perceives Escobar as a figure of both the political and the literary history of his time. It is Salazar, indeed, who discovers that Gabriel García Márquez’s “magical-realist” world does not belong to a remote, or “nonmodern” Macondo but is embodied in the lives and deaths of the protagonists of the hemispheric narcotics trade. To be succinct, there is nothing exotic about this coolness of narration whose subject-matter is often violent, but does not itself indulge in the violent event. See Marcel Mauss. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. I associate this notion with Carl Schmitt’s study Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. 6 See Ileana Rodríguez. Liberalism at its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text, 144–52. 4 5

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Among those of us who started to distrust the systemic alliances between civil society, market power, and state regulation but vehemently reject foundationalist narratives, there might be a sense that the expressions of today’s violence, which are labeled/dismissed as “terror,” emerge along a line of chaos and irrationality. There can be no legitimate goal where violence is turned into a political means beyond the authority of state apparatuses. Salazar renders this kind of self-evidence questionable, by historicizing the conflicts that lead Escobar into an ever more desperate and fatal politics against the Colombian state. The aim of the book that, in the first Colombian edition was entitled La parábola de Pablo, is neither to defend the illicit narcotics trade nor to succumb to an idealization of its “hero.” But it has to be observed that a case like Pablo Escobar’s is not simply an historical accident. It comes, on the one hand, as a call to see that blind faith in the universality of the liberal-democratic model can result in the production of monsters. At the same time, one should remain aware of the possibility that the “big criminal” embodies a radicalization of actual social dues and hopes and can, at the same time, embrace a formative project of larger scope. This reconsideration is not the exclusive domain of those who rule over the discourses of politics. Writers who invest their imagination in scrutinizing “legal” givens in the global arena, such as the “war on drugs,” are not naïve pacifists, nor do they approve of illicit activities and “criminal things.” Yet they have become critically attentive to the question of “why intoxication in one world” has to be grounded in “humiliating sobriety” in one complementary to it. A poetics of sobriety emerging from humiliation can be more succinct than a discourse on narcoterror. When Escobar was born on December 2, 1949, his mother, Hermilda Gaviria, named him Pablo after St. Paul the Apostle. The gesture is remarkable, for she could not know of the meaning that St. Paul’s letters would take on in contemporary philosophical discussions. Presumably, and connected to the threats that years of the “violencia” after 1946 would mean for her family and her lower middle-class environment, Escobar’s mother always carried redemptive hope. We read, from the personal narrator´s voice that is advanced by free indirect style, and thus includes the expressions of people speaking about Escobar: “He was baptized Pablo, like the evangelist who was familiar with the evil arts but later consecrated himself to offering his life in the service of God” (38). This formulation belongs to the time during which Salazar carried out numerous interviews, years after Escobar´s death. If it is derived from a conversation with Hermilda Gaviria, his mother may have placed the image of her son between evil and sacredness. Was she just a tormented Catholic from Antioquia? The question has to be reformulated: what did it mean to adhere to a Catholic identity and, at the same time, share the spirit of Antioquian modernity, into which the marginalized wanted to aggressively enter? The ominous fabric of power that enables large-scale narcotics trade is a “worldly” matter, not a religious one. Escobar´s treatment of life and death, however, seemed to reveal at least as much “religiosity” as it did pragmatic aspects. If Escobar and his cartel, when besieged by the state were able to attack major Colombian cities with “partisan” (Schmitt) scenarios of assassination and revenge, can these operations be understood from a standpoint of interests of power alone? Has there perhaps been ethical momentum, as well, hidden under the monstrosity of a

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rebellion that was not devoid of social wrath and political revenge? Escobar’s most feared and cursed actions have not yet been looked at under an eschatological sign, nor has the force of rupture that he introduced into the existing world been considered in the way of political martyrdom. When the “Capo” was supposed to be hunted down by the security apparatus of the state, yet successfully kept hiding in Colombia for several years, he mounted such an avalanche of violent attacks on what he believed to be an illegitimate political spiderweb, that only one force should accompany him beyond death—an unforgiving “righteousness” of ends, similar to the one that speaks from the concept of natural law.7

A “Revolution without philosophers” After describing Pablo Escobar’s ascent to become one of the main players in the Colombian transnational cocaine trade during the 1970s, Salazar offers the following commentary on the new “mafias,” including names such as Griselda Blanco (la Reina de la Coca), the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers from Cali, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha (el Mexicano) from Bogotá, and Carlos Lehder from Armenia. They talked about creole mafias, but in reality it wasn’t about lodges with traditions, rituals and codes of honor like those that are known of in Sicily, . . ., but of groups of narcotraffickers and bandits for whom the terms magicians and emergent agents with which they were baptized in popular talk were fitting. Magician might be an association of mafioso with “rainmaker”—he who can do everything, or who suddenly appears—but emergent has a more obvious meaning: narcotraffic favored the insurrection of plebeyan sectors that protagonized a profound transformation of Medellín and of the country, which a writer called “revolution without philosophers.” (75)

Salazar’s text excells as an inquisitive narrative about the illegal narcotics business, because it is able to provide the readers with crucial, often hidden coordinates of Colombian political history (see 69–71). By 1958, the “Violencia,” the civil war between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the two hegemonic parties, had in 20 years generated such a dramatic displacement of the population that Columbia went from being a rural country to being a country of huge cities, that is, cities whose peripheries were populated by millions of poor people (69). In 1958, the ruling bodies of both parties signed a political agreement that would, for 16 years to come, alternate the control of government every four years between the two. “But this pact did not include social reforms, nor did it create forms of political involvement of the peasant masses and the new poor of the cities” (ibid.). It was under such historical circumstances that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a peasant guerrilla organization, was formed with initial objectives aimed at a democratic society and the See Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 81–107.

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peasants’ right to work their own lands (see 70). Other guerrilla groups, such as the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and the Ejército Popular de Liberación (EPL) emerged during the 1960s under the influence of the Cuban Revolution. In 1970, a populist movement, the Alianza Nacional Popular (Anapo), began to present a serious threat to the power of the ruling parties that maneuvered, in a dubious electoral process, to install their own candidate as president (Misael Pastrana). In response, the radical part of the Anapo founded the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19). Salazar comments, “The existence of four guerrilla groups announced that the country would not step soon out of the labyrith of its ancestral violences” (70 and 71). Within these political constellations, and accompanied by an unstable economic situation during the 1970s, informal yet powerful interests in Colombia moved to vampirize sectors of not only national but also hemispheric trade. The narcotic business metamorphosed into the most dynamic force in the uneven modernization process in this country, whose economy, with its high unemployment rates, had been relying on the traditional agricultural sector, mining, and manufacturing. Gootenberg, in his study Andean Cocaine, states, “One of the great historical mysteries about modern cocaine trafficking” is how it passed into the hands of Colombian drug lords and changed, during the 1980s, “into one of history’s richest and most volatile illicit trades.” He explains that an international drug trafficking class from Medellín, serving a “rising breed of luxury cocaine users in the United States,”8 succeeded in monopolizing extensive continental networks including those in Miami and beyond by the late 1970s. Although narcotics trade had moved for decades from Peru and Bolivia through Chile and Cuba / Miami northward, but then “just two actors remained in the unresolved riddle of illicit cocaine: the Colombians and the Americans to the north.”9 Colombians reorganized an already existing Andean “coca capitalism” by seizing the “rutas del sur.” They imported peasant basic coca paste from Peru and Bolivia, refined this raw cocaine in laboratories that cropped up in jungle areas controlled or “taxed” by guerrilla forces, developing a logistically and technologically efficient network of “rutas del norte,” and ruthlessly establishing a sales monopoly in the United States. Among the reasons Gootenberg provides for the aggressive rise of the Colombian drug trafficking class is the national political crisis that had weakened the Colombian state, while rendering unforeseen constellations for the rise of an illicit Antioquian, regional, trans-hermispheric industry. The state of Antioquia and Medellín, its capital city, were the “industrial heartland” of the country until the 1960s, when the manufacturing sector was hit by decline. At this point, the most daunting of the Antioquians, a population reported to be idiosyncratically and historically suited to being violent entrepreneurs (a national myth qualifies them as a “lost ‘white’ race, reputedly Israelites”10) seized the opportunity to expand their activities into the illegal sector and eventually to reinvent the cocaine business. This would be only half of the truth if we leave unexamined the fact that substantial parts of the traditional oligarchy and of political and juridical functionaries at all levels were eager to derive major benefits from the “wellspring” of illegal drug money. Paul Gootenberg. Andean Cocaine, 301, 300. Ibid., especially 300–5, 306. 10 Ibid., 302. 8 9

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The picture traced by Alonso Salazar resembles the tightly woven pieces of a narrative tapestry in which political history and the life stories of numerous people intersect. He also shows that Pablo Escobar is not a “historical mystery” but someone who appears as a rebel without transcendental discourse, able to seize on “the sudden eruption of chance, the event,”11 in order to produce a substantial change in the situation of his country. His capacity to transcend the existing Colombian realities was astonishing and shocking. According to this testimony, and unlike other accounts, there had been no “solid middle class” environment in which Escobar could grow up.12 He was born into a lower middle-class family from El Tablazo, and his mother, a Liberal and Catholic elementary school teacher, was forced, after the outbreak of the violencia, to undertake an odyssey across Antioquia to escape being killed by Conservative mobs (Pablo Escobar, 40–1). Despite several violent displacements, and with the family’s having to resettle now and again, Pablo, with his exceptionally strong mother and surrounded by a network of brothers, cousins and uncles who were eager to prosper in several small and medium businesses, did not bend to the doom of precarious life. Together with his cousin Gustavo, the young Pablo began selling aluminium markers for gravestones and other things. A few years later, after a short period of studying accounting at the Universidad Autónoma de Antioquia, Pablo tells his mother that he is not going to continue studying but will take care of the family. Doña Hermilda reports this step retrospectively with a toughness that speaks for itself. I thanked him for intending to collaborate with me . . . It didn’t seem bad to me that he liked money, because if you don’t have a peso in your pocket, you’re bored, sad, you hang your head, you don’t find a way out of the maladies. And Pablo, with the lesson learned, used to say: I won’t die poor. . . . (43)

At this time, the narrator laconically says that Pablo ceased to play around with delinquency and made it his profession. In contrast, in the book by Alba Marina Escobar, Pablo’s sister, his quitting the university is presented as having been highly emotional.13 From early on, Pablo Escobar was a dreamer. When he was 14, in 1963, at the Liceo de Bachillerato of the University of Antioquia, admiration of Camilo Torres, the Marxist theologian who would become a guerrilla priest, was as common as was that of Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution. The adolescent from El Tablazo absorbed a series of “anti-imperialist” and “anti-oligarchic” wordings that he would use for the rest of his life. But his own path would be pragmatic and anarchic. In his adolescent years, Pablo was suspended from school several times for taking on inappropriate leadership roles. For example, “he sat at the teacher’s desk and told the students not to take the exam,” because they would be the losers (33). Here we can see an early, visceral distrust of the so-called social moratorium14—that organized period of education and See Alain Badiou. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 37. Gootenberg speaks of “solid middle class formation” (305) which, according to Salazar’s narrative is exaggerated. 13 See Alba Marina Escobar and Catalina Guzmán. El otro Pablo: La historia íntima del Narcotraficante que doblegó a Colombia, contada por su hermana, 56. 14 See Mario Margulis and Marcelo Urresti. “La construcción social de la condición de juventud.” 11 12

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social assimilation during which the youths of the better-off classes learn to become efficiently docile and worldly minded people or, remembering Freud, during which young adults are “born” by replacing desire and aggressive instincts (the pleasure principle) with the “reality principle.” In a country like Colombia, individual stories of “education” tend to break the rule. Escobar the teenager, whose own father was a unambitious, sensitive loner, desperately seeking a master who could teach him what schools did not convey—turn life into a radically different thing—had no trouble making his choices. He chose the aristocratic Padrino over the unruly “philosopher.” In a filmic glance across urban scenarios that were familiar to the walks of Escobar and his buddies, Salazar traces the picture of two personalities who used to walk the streets of El Envigado (a working-class community that is part of the greater Medellín area). Both were men with a patriarchal flair, conveying role models of a specific kind. Between the end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s, down the streets of Envigado walked Fernando González, with his beret and cane, a philosopherprovocateur, as fruitful in his thought as he was useless in a land like Antioquia, where a refined Catholic morality is proclaimed and people prey without rest, while agile and at times illegal forms of enrichment are practiced without shame, in which people dream exaggeratedly of money, of vile coin. (43)

Street scenarios are imagined as the informal theatre of synergetic exchange—those affective avenues of public space whose energies cannot be directly seen but only sensed. The philosopher González, father of the “nadaístas,” stood for both anticlerical provocation and “poetic dissent.” But Envigado’s actual psychotropic power lay elsewhere. This “little Detroit” was not the right place for the “useless flower of poetry.” An authentic charisma would radicate from another man: Through the same Envigado Park don Alfredo Gómez also strolled—an old man, diabetic, conservative, with an aristocratic presence . . ., who in spite of having obtained his fortune smuggling cigarettes, kitchen appliances, whiskey, fabrics and porcelains was considered to be a great man. El Padrino . . . came to be so powerful that he was received almost as if he were a head of state when he visited Panama, Honduras and El Salvador, countries where he had extensive investments. In Colombia, politicians and generals asked his permission, and the letter even lent him soldiers to escort the caravans of contraband. . . . (43–4)

While Pablo Escobar did not feel attracted by the poetic philosopher, he showed an olympic zest for becoming Padrino Gómez’s apprentice. He was eventually noticed by the veterans of the “business” who, for their part, were amazed at Pablo’s mimetic genius and his capacity to become the friend of virtually everyone he got involved with. We might think, for a moment, of that untheorized capacity called “practical intelligence,” or even “practical wisdom,” which in Greek ethymology relates to the word “metis,” paraphrased as “cunning intelligence” by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant,15 See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society.

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basically the “capacity of the gods.” In Escobar, it was a capacity to not only mimic the habits of other people and creatures, but to move with total ease on the basis of social instinct and an extraordinary logistical talent. Regarding the techniques of transnational drug smuggling, Escobar would become a bricoleur. He would invent or perfect, during the 1970s and 1980s, a catalog of methods and camoflages that would come to be applied across the hemisphere (see 158). Remembering the series of efforts of social and cultural scientists to understand the crisis of praxis and theory of socialism as it became manifest during the 1970s and 1980s, little attention was paid to a conceptually underdeveloped sense, among intellectuals and academics of the Left, of the “magical powers of capitalism” and the specific problems of how these powers could be contested. Revealingly, Benjamin’s fragment “Capitalism as Religion” (1921), together with other unconventional studies, was absent from main discussions in critical theory, and cultural studies, as well as “postcolonial” and “subaltern studies,” until almost the end of the twentieth century. Across these realms, secularization was mostly a self-understood premise of a hermeneutic and critical work concerning the present. If Marxism purported to view religion as a matter of ideology, not of culture, something similar applied to its approach to capitalism as a whole. An ideological and macropolitical critique of the basic social structures in dominant Western modernity contributed too little to understanding what Benjamin had exposed as the system’s unique pragmatic-cultic “basis.” This had been the extraordinary achievement of Benjamin’s approach—the boldness to think about political economy in terms of interlocking affective, psycho-anthropological, and “monetary” mechanisms. For Benjamin, capitalism resembled a universal fabric that had vampirized Christianity’s biggest achievement—that of making people accept (interiorize) guilt as a “natural” part of life. More specifically and paradoxically, capitalism metamorphosed “guilt” and “debt” into one psycho-economic reality. By imbuing daily routines with their dependence on capital as god, turning utilitarianism “religious,” no specific theology or dogmatic teaching was needed any more. Daily routines became fused into an ongoing sacred state that matched the cult of the commodity, with consumption, money-fetishism (and today credit-vampirism) all pervasive.16 These thoughts are the key, as well, to Pablo Escobar’s decision to make capitalism work for him, which meant two things: first, to actually understand “intoxication” as a central issue of capitalist culture and economy and, second, to seize power over intoxication. If there has been a certain ethical drive, not in Escobar’s actions and crimes but behind the sense of “righteousness” that he maintained until the end, it was linked to his vision that the verdict imposed on the main illegal narcotics of the twentieth century, was one that the rich and sophisticated countries accounted for. And that the deprivation hovering over the countries of the South was not the world’s higher destiny. A double contradiction underlies Escobar’s success story—his ability to move, in “no time,” from his lower socioeconomic background to becoming one of the most powerful, wealthiest people of the 1980s. By intuitively understanding “intoxication” as a fundamental force within the global system, he discovered that Rausch was not See my discussion of Benjamin’s short text in Violence Without Guilt, 24.

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the same for the global North and the South. Historically and structurally, Colombia needed not mind-altering drugs but capital, in the first place, as well as people able to help the country achieve what it deserved—a somewhat naïve but also cunning, rebellious attitude, given Escobar’s tireless drive to make the most improbable things work. Was there anything that Southern countries were able to export to the North, which would be exempt from dramatic price instability and unfavorable distribution hierarchies across the world market? Well, certain highly valued narcotics seemed to be the solution to this riddle, and this was because of the Northern consumers’ high demand for illicit cocaine, especially from the 1980s onward. It is not far-fetched to compare the major Colombian and Mexican players in the international drug market (los grandes capos), their plebeian roots notwithstanding, with those adventurous and violent entrepreneurs who once acted as early capitalism’s pioneers in the process of the “original accumulation” of capital. Escobar’s decision to surpass the existing laws, or to bend them to his interests, did not mean he would disregard what was at the heart of capitalist morality and profit maximization. It meant that he would disregard hemispheric modernity as a “Monroe-inspired,” geopolitical predicament with rampant US supervision. However, the time in which a narcocapitalist project from the South could drastically, as well as violently, change the rules in order to establish a modified order of national and hemispheric scope had passed. Moreover, Escobar’s idealism, his vision of Colombian prosperity based on a transnational narcocapitalist initiative of fabulous dimensions (the “magical” aspect), was, in its own missionary fervor, unimpressed by the puritanist zest that vibrated in the North’s anti-drug policy. The entire problematic acquired a complexity that even challenged presuppositions about the existing economic world order, when Escobar and other capos made their offer to the Colombian state to simply pay off its external debt. The alarm this gesture caused among the global power players becomes transparent if one conceeds that debt is a matter of dependence and not of financial return, in the first place. Building on intoxication, Escobar knew he would be working in two different directions—that of manufacturing and providing enormous amounts of cocaine to consumers in the North, and that of “el billete” for him, his network, and his country. Felipe Aljure’s film, The Colombian Dream (2007), makes pertinent the intoxicating power that the drug economy held over substantial parts of Colombian culture. Narcotics traffic changed the status of money in this peripheral country by boosting an actual delirium with dramatic consequences. The desire to partake in the game of el billete suddenly undermined the existing structure of social hierarchies and values, becoming a mediator for the erection of pseudo-dreamworlds in actual life. An aggressively ecstatic promise, not just for a better but for a completely new life, to which part of the lower and middle classes succumbed, and in which the upper classes indulged while trying not to show their face. In the logic of the “Colombian Dream,” Pablo Escobar, the Medellín cartel, and their allies literally became the rainmakers of Colombia by tapping the North’s own need for “magic,” propelling large quantities of illicit cocaine into the black markets of the US, and introducing miraculous amounts of narcodollars into their own country. But the Escobar story has more things to tell. Its hero completely uprooted the concept of the political status quo in Colombia.

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The “Rainmaker” from the Global South: Power and predicament The study that precedes this book, Violence Without Guilt, argues that if a leading part of political philosophy today has started to engage itself in the analysis and critique of global capitalism, at issue is not only a theorizing about the disaster zones of contemporary modernity. The Global South is the existential and epistemological blueprint, from where a critical hermeneutics of our world has to set out. It was Benjamin who, in his “Critique of Violence” (1921) repoliticized the concept of “bare life.” According to his arqueological inquisition, in which Marxist critique and eschatological imagination combine, “bare life” has a primary connotation related to guilt. “Bare life” is essentially and “naturally” burdened by a guiltiness that exists, which is without visible trace or evidence of wrongdoing. From this unusual focus, bare life can be thought of as a notion that is eminently political. Agamben’s well-known discussion of the sovereign’s power over life and death17 shows only one side of the coin. The other side has to do with the visceral yet cunning interest that ruling powers take in capitalizing on the subconscious of the people—a kind of “pre-sovereign” reality. What the sovereign is able to instantiate as exception (the right to punish, as Hobbes would say) is held in suspense as long as citizens, trying to keep their latent guiltiness at bay, “dissociate” themselves from practicing nonconformist, rigorous citizenship. Social contracts, citizens’ rights, individual autonomy, and rational politics are the signposts of subjectivation so that subjection can exist. In a world that has been forsaken by God and a higher good, “guilt” has become an ubiquitous notion and, not by chance, it is meant to draw on intoxication. Guilt is that condition that everyone is eager to escape (thus accepting its spell), but which is omnipresent at one level or another, and—in the shape of ongoing projections—is all the more required or coopted for sanctioning those excesses that “big politics” has been imposing since passing the epocal threshold of 1989–91. For example, the phenomenal achievement of the discourse on terror is not that it combats terrorists, in the first place, but that it creates a subconscious layer that starts operating as a safeguard against practices or even thoughts that fall under the diffuse, all-out concept of terrorism. Thus, preemptive strikes against the potentiality of terrorrism can acquire the status of normal affairs. This strategy is not a post-9/11 invention. A previous training course, especially since the 1980s, when the stigmatization of the political Left lost its efficiency was the war on drugs. The aims of the war on drugs are, of course, manifold and its consequences, in part, beyond control. But it is never too late to ask the simple question: who benefits most from the the drug war and, today, from the current politics of “democratic” wars? This is not to imply that Escobar was innocent, however. His “guiltiness” would allow, after his death, making the war on drugs still more sophisticated and more ruthless, as well as more cynical. As far as Colombia’s political ruling circles were concerned, their pragmatic and ruthless members realized that eventually turning Escobar into a scapegoat in order to sanitize what was, in fact, a multilayered organism with myriad types of clientelism and self-serving interests, would allow a great conservative coup that would support a See Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer, 106.

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neoliberal makeover of the country to be launched.18 One of the authentic tragedies, inscribed in the concatenation of events and the hidden maneuverings of politicians, military players, and “diplomats” during the late 1980s would be the sacrifice of Luis Carlos Galán—a presidential candidate and one of the very few who was determined to put an end to a corrupt system and inaugurate a new era of national politics. If we concede that Salazar’s narratives19 help us reflect on the contradictory locus of homo sacer in the Western hermisphere, it comes as a challenge to consider Pablo Escobar’s life and death in the way of a politics of bare life. Even Doña Hermilda herself, Escobar’s mother, shows a radical stance regarding the perception of what is termed law and order. She experienced firsthand, during the civil wars of the violencia, when she and her family escaped, as if by miracle (40), from being massacred by conservative fanatism, how being killed “outside the rule of law” was a reality imminent in life. What her son inherited from his mother, whom he adored like a saint, was to hate the conditions that had relegated humans to precarious existence, experienced as surviving and striving in close familiarity with rightlessness—a drastic form of guiltiness per se. The young Escobar’s vow—to become a Leftist, but a rich one (33, also 43)—sounds no less strange than that of a person who associates money and possessions with dignity and charisma, but who is also determined to bring about change for people of his social class and, especially, the local communities of the greater Medellín area. Later, Escobar spends large amounts of money as a way to show affection, demanding unconditional respect and loyality, while never perceiving the state as an abstract authority. The violent aspect of his hatred of bare life, his and his family’s search for respect and for rejoicing, not precisely in spending as others did, but in buying the favors of others, and in the purchase of houses and fincas, will reside in Escobar’s turning the wheel around—ordaining on his enemies the status of homo sacer. Pablo learned from his mother that combating precarious life was a sacred mission,20 but the lesson provided by El Padrino (Alfredo Gómez, “el gran capo del contrabando,” 51) was more insidious. What for others would have meant an unlearning or a betrayal of political modernity had less negative connotations for Escobar, who grew up outside the virtues of abstract rights, that is, at the margins of a social edifice whose success rested on its sublimization of justice and reason. In 1974, Padrino Gómez had established a network inside Colombia’s conservative political class, one that allowed him and his contraband business to count on the backing of parliamentarians from different strands. That same year, the 24-year old Escobar is imprisoned for car theft, and it happens that he meets Gómez in the La Ladera penitentiary—Gómez having finally been caught for smuggling, using military trucks. He is released after a few months, due to “lack of evidence,” and Escobar recalls that politicians of the highest national ranks had visited El Padrino in his prison cell (53). Pablo benefits from these connections and he, too, is released. In his prison records registering a “lack of proof,” there is a prosecutor’s note that refers to the deaths of several witnesses and other irregularities. “With these events, Pablo understood that his bosses, in spite of their sins, moved in the legal world with surprising liberty” (54).

See Forest Hylton. “Extreme Makeover.” We are referring to both No nacimos pa’ semilla and Pablo Escobar. 20 See my discussion of the concept of “sacred labor” in Violence Without Guilt, 113 ff. 18 19

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In 1976, shortly after he married Victoria Henao, from a relatively prosperous family, Pablo runs into his first major confrontation with the law. A group of his traffickers is intercepted by the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, 57) that proceeds to set a trap for him. After the police discover cocaine valued at 23 million pesos, hidden in a spare tire, they seem ready to accept a bribe. The gang members make a phone call, and shortly afterwards Escobar, his brother Gustavo, and his cousin Mario appear at the predetermined spot, the La Playa Ice Cream Store in the municipality of Itaguí. Pablo greeted the agents in a friendly manner and invited them to sit down at a table. “Everything in life has a solution . . . I’ll give you five thousand dollars as down payment on a bigger amount and everything will be fixed,” he was saying when other agents stormed the ice cream store. “You’re under arrest for trafficking and attempted bribery.” They confiscated three vehicles and took them to jail. (57)

The case was assigned to a female judge, Mariela Espinosa, who, we read in a terse description, was “a tall, thin, intelligent and honest woman” (57). When she started receiving threats, her answer was “If I have to die for putting someone, no matter how important, in jail, I’ll die” (ibid.). Pablo, for his part, sets forth a strategy to influence the judicial apparatus in Medellín. He managed, without the decision being approved by the Supreme Court of Justice, no one knows how, to get the trial moved to the court in the distant city of Ipiales, arguing that the merchandise [the drug] had been bought there. Pablo hired as his lawyer a brother of the judge himself, the one who had refused the offer of a bribe, in order to remove him from the case. The new judge agreed, in exchange for money, to set him free after a few months. (58)

Mariela Espinoza had to archive the case, after declaring that she herself, the director of the DAS, and the detectives carrying out the operation had been threatened. Pablo “refrained” from killing her in revenge, but because of “her obstinacy he condemned her to walk on foot for the rest of her life” (ibid.). Every time she bought a car, the vehicle was stolen, set on fire, or pushed over a precipice. In turn, Monroy Arenas, the director of the DAS in Medellín, and two police agents who had been involved in the traffickers’ imprisonment were killed. Between the time that he took revenge on these representatives of the state executive, and the end of Escobar’s vendetta against almost every prosecutor, politician, or journalist who had the courage to rigorously address his role in the drug trade, another eight years would pass. However, the matrix of a dreadful strategy had become clear. State functionaries who wanted to see him behind bars or in later years handed over to US justice, were punished for not obeying the unwritten rule of accepting big money. Escobar, after benefitting from Gómez’s “infralegal” politics, learns the lesson so well that he surpasses El Padrino’s achievements in coopting the law. Escobar’s mother, whose memories Salazar uses as one of the testimonial clues, tells us “if half the country isn’t in jail for corruption, it’s because Pablo always paid cash, he never used checks” (22).

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He gave money to politicians, to high court magistrates who advised him on judicial formulas, to guerrilla fighters with whose cause he sympathized, to bankers and builders who projected excellent deals for him. . . . To others, instead of giving them money, he did them favors. One politician asked him to lend him an airplane for his electoral campaign, another asked that he kill a hostage. Another one, to ask him: “Please make two attempts against my life,” and Pablo, generous as always, gave him the two attempts for free, increasing his popularity and propelling his election. (23)

Escobar’s alleged “generosity” was not a euphemism, for he was quick to donate large quantities of money to bring about a culture of favors and assignments that gave him the image of being an omnipotent provider. Extravagant amounts of illicit drug money served him as politico-affective means that he calculated meticulously. Across a spectrum of empire built on informal hierarchies, that is, on a blend of the culture of the gift and foundationalist capitalist behavior, readers encounter a large gallery of people who became members of his “court” and then his adversaries as his ship began to sink. Is this an anti-modern political art of using big money, or are we dealing with an underground sphere that is enabled by the excesses of global exchange and redistribution of wealth? Salazar’s readers learn of Pablo’s way of earning and spending, of his being inflexible and caring at the same time, of his versatility and boldness as he “buys” judges, police officers, and politicians, and giving himself, time and again, “a banquet of women with fresh skin, new breasts and toned bodies” (54). What seemed, from the outside, to be brutal and irrational excess was carried out and supervised by a man whose demeanor was essentially simple, and who detested the snobbish self-fashioning of the upper class (see 160). The times in which global capitalism redefined its politics in the hemisphere by means of what Naomi Klein later called the “shock doctrine”21 were “good times,” in a country like Colombia, for someone with Escobar’s instinct and talents. Pablo and his brother Gustavo had become seriously involved with Padrino Gómez by 1973, the same year that General Augusto Pinochet, in order to clear the way for hemispheric “politics” conceived of by the Chicago Boys, submerged the democratic government of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende in a blood bath. Economic “deregulation” became the neoliberal trope, especially in the cases of weaker countries, which was the maxim that all dictatorships of the Southern Cone pushed forward. Other Latin American countries were given the same message without a “modernizing” coup d’etat—the promise and the warning that there was only one path out of the crisis. It might not be far-fetched to observe that Escobar, and all the other Colombian drug-trafficking cartels that rose to unprecedented power during the 1970s and 1980s, worked to successfully impose their own absolute economic “liberalism,” disregarding even the authority of the superstate north of the Río Grande. In fact, however, Escobar was never hostile toward US culture; he admired the great mythical heroes of the American way of life, drawing lessons from them

See Naomi Klein. The Shock-Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

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that would fit his own genius. In that regard, as well as in others, he was a master of paradox. During the 1970s, the demand for cocaine in the US grew to such an extent that the “snow business” largely replaced the trafficking of marijuana (48–9). “A kilo of coke in Colombia is bought for seven thousand dollars. In the United States, it is put in a grinder, chopped up, powdered milk is mixed in and it becomes three kilos. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars” (49). Put in the words of the implicit narrator, In spite of the immense sums that are dedicated to curbing the traffic and lowering its consumption, coke was and is a frenetic business that lives on an anxious society. And it finds its niche especially with those executives who are after higher productivity. Coke, with the implicit values that it carries, is the typical drug of neoliberal capitalism. (158)

In this “golden epoch” of cocaine, López Michelsen, the president of Colombia, took a neoliberal measure “sui generis.” In order to facilitate the influx of dollars for the nation’s benefit, he established the so-called ventanilla siniestra (the sinister window), authorizing the Bank of the Republic (el Banco de la República) to launder the dollars generated by the marijuana and cocaine trades (60). Pablo used to allow himself one marijuana joint per day, late at night when he was sketching out strategic decisions, planning several transactions at the same time and enjoying a few hours of rapt concentration. But he refused to sell drugs to people in his own country. On December 2, 1982,22 Escobar accompanied the politicians Santofimio Botero and Jairo Ortega on their trip to Madrid to attend Felipe González’s inauguration as prime minister of Spain. There is an anecdote that after the ceremony, at a private meeting, a well-known Colombian journalist approaches Pablo to ask for some cocaine. The answer is brisk: “I am a decent man, I do not provide that stuff ” (98). During those same years, Escobar seriously tried to become a politician. This started with his involvement in social work, to improve the existential conditions and the self-esteem of young people in some of Medellín’s marginal comunas (see 77–8, 79–81). There he preached against drug addiction. When he was initiating a project to construct 5,000 new apartments for Medellín’s poor families (80), as well as supporting schools, he also tried to launch a social discourse; he organized about 100 committees to which he provided the financial and material aid to carry out communitarian projects. “Words like ecology, participation, self-direction / autogestion . . . were mixed in his discourse with a populism and an immoderate exultation of his personality” (78). Salazar’s narrator believes that, with his social works, Escobar resembled a somewhat medieval character blending the social bandit, the generous patriarch, and the primitive politician (81–2). In early 1982, Escobar started campaigning for a short period of time to become a Liberal parliamentarian (91). His connections were important: Alberto Santofimio Botero, a leading politician from the “Partido Liberal,” and Jairo Ortega, once the My correction (“October 1, 1982,” the date given in Salazar’s book, does not correspond with the actual event).

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lawyer of El Padrino and founder of “el Movimiento de Renovación” in Antioquia (92). A problem arose when, at the same time, Ortega had invited Escobar to be an alternate on the list of candidates that he chaired for the Chamber of Representatives. Luis Carlos Galán, the young and radical leader of New Liberalism at the national level, was campaigning for the presidency. The conjuncture was not good, and Galán, together with Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, his second in command, decided to expel both Ortega and Escobar from the movement, which they did at a mass demonstration in the center of Medellín. Given Galán’s strong attacks against the “corporate” ambitions of the drug cartels (see 72–3), the act was unusual for Colombia’s political class, but it could have been expected. What was startling was rather Escobar’s role: what made him join Galán’s movement when he was the “most strongly moralizing among the presidential candidates” (ibid.)? The narrator’s comment points to the question of if, and to what extent, Pablo’s commitment was actually more than a flirting with politics. Was he eager to become a parliamentarian in the reform movement in order to help introduce real changes and to commit himself to social works? “Did he really share with Galán the fight against a corrupt ruling class, as he repeatedly said? If this were the case, his peculiar ethics seemed to believe in the immorality of stealing from state finances while not contradicting his role as a prosperous exporter of cocaine” (ibid.). Escobar’s resentment against the “Colombian connection,” the old nexus between the oligarchy and government leaders, grew stronger over the years. While he was on his fabulous rise of illicit income and influence, he even aspired a protagonism within his country’s high society and was surprised that they, although benefitting from his business, closed their doors to him. “My money is worth the same as theirs,” he argued, while being struck by the double morality of the oligarchy. “How poor are Medellín’s wealthy!” Escobar used to say when he looked at his own, enormous fortune (see 23). He did not have any problem with “cynical,” that is, corrupt institutional and transinstitutional networks that he had learned to use to his own benefit. Yet he considered himself to be different—someone who had not been born into a privileged home and class—but felt from early on a tectonic zest that would help him become a “sovereign,” a prince of his own kind, rising above those rich people that he paid but also disguised. At the core of this attitude resided a strange, a nonsecular belief—that a person like him could impose his will on the existing structures in a contemporary yet still peripheral society. Amazingly, this attitude could transmute itself into sacred ambition from the moment that both politics and the law start targeting Escobar: he metamorphosed into a death-dealing creature that distributed violence beyond “worldly” norms. These are compelling yet also precarious analogies; Escobar had a foundationalist personality, but he despised the secular metaphysical authorities: the modern state and the law. This might have, in the end, accounted for the affinity he felt toward Luis Carlos Galán, the reformer. Deep was his rage, then, about Galán’s declaring him an “undesirable person” from the viewpoint of the reform movement. His hurt egocentrism and limited political rationality, together with the severe misjudgments of his political “allies,” led him to join, shortly afterwards, Santofimio’s own presidential campaign (93). This 1982 campaign stirred up public debates about the entrance of “hot money” into big politics in Colombia. However, as we continue to read, Belisario

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Betancur, the conservative candidate, was also reported to have received large bribes after 1978 (see 97). Betancur was said to have promised, during the 1982 campaign, to “not extradite” Colombians to the United States. A clue to understanding the interest of the Medellín cartel, as well as other groups (see 89), in fueling presidential campaigns is linked to the matter of “extradition.” Having backed the “neoliberal” dictatorships of the Southern Cone, ruling circles in the United States became increasingly concerned about Colombia in view of the activities of major informal players at the local, national, and transnational levels— the three main guerrilla organizations and the drug cartels. While crucial parts of Colombia’s political class still backed powerful narco-interests in the 1970s, President Turbay (1978–82) congregated with Washington on the matter and in 1979 signed, almost without Colombian press coverage, the Extradition Treaty23 (72). In the years that follow, Escobar and his allies venture to figuratively move mountains in order to undermine this bilateral legal construct of the global era and to counter the eventual impossibility, for Colombia, to sidestep the geopolitical imposition. Conflicts over the Tratado de Extradición entre Colombia y los Estados Unidos propelled one of the worst escalations of violence that the country was going to face in the twentieth century.24 After Galán and Lara declared Escobar an undesirable person preventing his participation in the New Liberalism movement, Escobar set a trap and Rodrigo Lara Bonilla got caught, having accepted a check for “hot money” from the narcotráfico (118–19). Both President Betancur and Galán publicly backed Lara, who had mounted a strategic attack on the narcotraficantes, among whom he identified Escobar as the main “capo.” The media joined the campaign and, for the first time, Escobar entered the spotlight in national and international news reports (120). Guillermo Cano, director of El Espectador, scrutinized archives and republished a note from 1976, indicating Escobar’s involvement in the illegal transaction of Itagüí, which Pablo had skillfully managed to relegate to the archives (121). The Ministry of Justice had a case reopened against Escobar and held him responsible for the assassination of DAS agents several years earlier. The message was clear as Lara, who by then was the Minister of Justice, made the ongoing denunciation of Pablo Escobar Gaviria a cornerstone of the new liberal politics, as he simultaneously intensified relationships with the State Department. El Capo despised what he called a conjunctural attempt to gain media popularity. At this point, Escobar still held the status of parliamentarian and saw in these actions a concerted intrigue against his political future. The situation escalated when Lara succeded, in October 1983, in having the Chamber of Representatives remove parliamentarian immunity that Escobar had enjoyed less than one year. When Santofimio eventually presented him the letter of renunciation, the response was, “I am the one who writes the letters, Dr. Santofimio” (123). In the narrator’s words:

See www.elabedul.net/Articulos/Reserva/ley_27_de_1980.php. On the matter of extradition see M. Cherif Bassiouni. International Extradition and World Public Order; Helen Keller. Rezeption des Völkerrechts, 413–60; Kai Ambos. Drogenkrieg in den Anden, 93 ff; Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann. Policing the Globe, 151–4.

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Pablo suffered the first big defeat in his life. Until now he had progressed, his fortune was immense, he was obeyed by all—the traffickers—in Medellín and he was widely recognized in the guild across the country. He’d achieved acceptance in important sectors of the military, economic and political establishments, and had successfully walked along the path of social leadership. He had even thought that, like the Kennedys in the United States who had moved on from being whiskey smugglers to presidents and presidential candidates, he and his sons, in a country like Colombia where last names and honor were bought, could repeat history. But no. Now it turned out that he was declared proscribed while those who had official power, also full of sin, could move on in peace. (123)

These last words allude to what would become the underground story of the defeat of Colombia’s gran capo. Within the crisis of a system too many of whose protagonists were guilty, there was a chance to refashion the ancient figure of the pharmakos, the scapegoat. With his political farewell, Escobar distributed the following words: I am publicly announcing my definitive and total withdrawal from politics . . . in spite of the abundant votes of solidarity that have come to me from all the municipalities and the popular neighborhoods of Medellín. I will continue my all-out fight against the oligarchies and injustice, and against the party hacks, authors of the eternal drama of tricking the public . . ., petty politicians: essentially indolent facing the pain of their neighbor, and the same climbers when it relates to bureaucratic partition. Because of this, the depressing contrast of those who have nothing confronting those who understand as their own exclusive legacy the accumulation of capital, opportunity and advantages, and who are far from filling any social function, hurts me. I will now establish well the enormous difference between my seventeen years of arduous and tireless civic battle, compared to the few months of my active participation in politics, to which I gave myself completely, thinking that in this way I could direct many things and resources in favor of the people. In order to finally conclude that those pressures and popular afflictions are far from the awareness of the politicians, whose egotistical looks are only found fixed on touching up their own deteriorated narcissistic images and to increasing their tottering, rotten fiefdoms. (123–4)

No doubt, from the beginning Escobar had been badly advised by the politicians Ortega and Santofimio when they urged him to enter their campaign. The fact that he was clearly not a master of cynicism—that “birth mark” of the Colombian political aristocracy, which Laura Restrepo scrutinizes in her novel Delirio (see Chapter 5)—shows the moral and practical dilemma of a hero, in Salazar’s epic, who engaged in illegal business while cultivating the illusion that by doing so he could serve the greater good. While Escobar was suffering political defeat, Lara Bonilla had become directly involved with the DEA (the United States Drug Enforcement Administration) to plan the destruction of what was considered to be the “largest processing center” of cocaine in Latin America, “Tranquilandia,” operated by the Medellín cartel. On the American side there was the goal of working through specific training scenarios and test cases

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in order to enforce strategic and technological control of the hemisphere. Chemical processing supplies used in Tranquilandia, such as ether, were of foreign origin and had to be delivered in tanques to the tropical Caquetá jungles along the River Yarí. With the help of satellite tracking instruments that the DEA had installed in one of the tanques, the coordinates of the area were established, and the laboratory was taken in an aerial police raid on March 12, 1984. To Minister Lara’s own surprise, huge amounts of cocaine valued at several million US dollars were confiscated, as well as three airplanes and two helicopters. An infrastructure including a 1500-meter landing strip, electric generators, a medical center, a drugstore, corrals for domestic animals, loads of canned food and beer, and several laboratories was destroyed (see 124). The narrator tells that, according to the official version, the camp had been surrounded by guerrillas who fled when the air attack occurred. The United States embassador coined an expression that would be henceforth used to target several enemies with one shot: “narco-guerrilla” (125). As the narration argues, the FARC taxed coca cultivation and processing, as they did other commercial activities functioning in the region under guerrilla control. However, armed conflicts and kidnappings showed that the FARC were not acting as Escobar’s ally.25 Geostrategically, at this point the DEA had carte blanche to operate “on behalf of ” Colombian matters, and its use of supraterritorial weapons and intelligence devices would decisively tip the scales. In other words, the sovereign behind the scenes was not Lara Bonilla, Minister of Justice, who acted as the “arm” of the executive, but instead a foreign governmental agency. This “sovereign” nexus between coercive and technological power will become more obvious when Escobar is persecuted by the newly formed Elite Force of the Colombian Police, but he could only be trapped, finally, with the aid of the technical apparatus of a globalized military intelligence.

The drama of extradition, and the impossible sovereign When Colombia became the central scenario, in the 1980s, of the US-led war on drugs, the application of philosophical-political categories such as sovereign power, state of exception, and empire appears to be, on the one hand, suggestive, but results, on the other, in complications. Salazar, while recounting Colombian history, traces an “anthropology” of political conflict; his narrator presents the interplay of political actors and social subjects but, while paying attention to individual and institutional motivations and particular circumstances in which decisions are taken, refrains from personalizing the spheres of conflict. This mode of sobriety seems appropriate in view of the heated rhetoric and semi-religious justifications of the war on drugs as a global crusade against evil. By calling things by their names, referring a large variety of voices about Escobar’s role, and exploring realms of suspense not as occasions for dramatic heightening but for immanent “revelations,” a sense of analytic commitment arises According to Salazar’s narrative, the FARC did not negotiate. See for example 146–7.

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without moralization. An alertness is born where the “abnormal” and improbable is narrated in its stunning presence, but not turned into a teleological given. A few thoughts of Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth (1950) come to mind, referring to the introduction of the concept of exception into international affairs. According to Schmitt, a new type, and a new image of a state of exception, contesting European traditions of war took hold with the crisis of the Jus Publicum Europaeum26, that was signaled with the rise of America after the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine27. Has not the war on drugs eventually functioned as a hemispheric extension of the post-World War II role that the United States took on as the greatest, that is, the especially “elected” authority in a new world order that emerged from the war against German fascism? Schmitt indeed spoke of America’s “elect(ed)ness,” using a religious, pre-secular metaphor in the mid-twentieth century.28 The air raid on Tranquilandia in Colombia’s tropical jungles should perhaps not be interpreted in Schmittian terms, belonging to different historical constellations. It is, nevertheless, associative of certain Schmittian images of a planetary, despatializing aerial warfare ensuing from the international (dis)balance of forces that crystalized with, and after World War II.29 The presence of powerful narcotraficantes as new local and hemispheric agents from the 1970s onward contributed to extending the discourse of criminalization, and to moving the laws of extradition forward. From the 20th-century situation, Schmitt had already pictured that “normal wars” would become obsolete, and that an era of “absolute war” would begin, a problematic that he continued discussing in his 1963 book, Theorie des Partisanen (Theory of the Partisan).30 Salazar’s story about Pablo Escobar shows that, at the point at which the extradition of “criminals” became part of a geopolitical strategy to redefine the enemy on the Western hemisphere, and was enforced by sovereign warfare, a conflict scenario arose that was unprecedented in modernity. 31 Ironically, the escalation of the fight between Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and Escobar in Colombia becomes recognizable as a clash of two visions of radical national change, visions that concerned Colombia’s position in the hemispheric economic and political playground. Roughly speaking, Escobar tended toward economic “sovereignty” and his own political influence and that of his clan, together with effective social contributions, applying both money and coertion beneath and beyond the existing law, while using the drug market in the North to his own benefit. Lara Bonilla aimed at overcoming his country’s “contaminated” political system, and simultaneously favored the American hegemonic interest. See Carl Schmitt. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum. See ibid., 264–65. See ibid., 265. Regarding the transformation of the concept of sovereignty in Schmitt’s later writings like Nomos and Theory of the Partisan, Sigrid Weigel writes, “sovereign is not he who decides about the state of the exception, but sovereign is the victor,” who occupies a “sovereign state’s” territory (S. W. Walter Benjamin: Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder, 66). And, as can be added regarding the international manufacturing of drug prohibition treaties and contemporary extradition laws, “sovereign” is also who interferes in another sovereign state’s jurisdiction. 29 See C. Schmitt, Der Nomos, 293–98. 30 See C. Schmitt. Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, 93–94. 31 For recent discussions of Schmitt’s geopolitical thinking see, for example, Alain de Benoist. “Global Terrorism and the State of Permanent Exception,” 74. 26 27 28

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After the attack on Tranquilandia, Escobar, who had previously “collaborated” with the functionaries of the legal system, had started to observe the actions of the Minister of Justice, the person who, supported by the president and foreign intelligence, had dared to make the country’s executive act against narcopower. According to the narrative, Escobar offers 150 million pesos to the M-19 organization to kill Lara. They not only reject the offer but defend this “Galanista” as one of the government’s “most progressive” politicians (Pablo Escobar, 126). Leaders of the Cali cartel, on the other hand, recommend punishing Lara after he had stepped down from his post and become an ambassador. Escobar is said to have replied,“I need the minister, not the ambassador” (ibid.). On April 30, 1984, when he is returning home at dawn in his Mercedez Benz, the minister is mortally wounded by two young men riding a motorcycle (see 126–7). Receiving news of the successful mission at the Hacienda Nápoles, one of his favorite homes, Escobar feels that he can change the world. There are unmistakable hints in the text, pointing at his sovereign ambition and his ability to impose on society scenarios of “Baroque excess.” He did not waver in confronting “embodied violence” (the state executive) with physical, corporeal violence—mortal punishment. Escobar’s obsession is not congruent with Schmitt’s modern paradigm of sovereignty (“sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”), but it shows a tyrannical arbitrariness that is evocative of Benjamin’s assessment of “baroque sovereignty”: he who dominates violence is also sovereign, in that he can bring about a state of exception.32 Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, famously pictured a particular theatricality as the (anti-)subjective, the “creaturely” scenario of “tyrannical transformation.” In the baroque theatre of violence, a fatal mechanism brings the tyrant and the martyr close to one another. It is in this kind of extreme scenario that secular and nonsecular concepts intersect, played out in the transgressive posture of the creature of the self-appointed “sovereign” who destroys himself and many others. But, different from the Baroque theater plays that Benjamin discusses, Salazar’s text holds its intensity by submitting Escobar’s wrath of vengeance to utmost dramatic reduction. Escobar, who is not a medieval prince or monarch, seems to associate an imaginary scenario in which the image of Baroque violence is “replaced” by the paradoxical relationships between violence and intoxication—the “drama of intoxication” that is bound to the conflicts over drugs in the local-transnational conundrum of Columbia’s globalized modernity. Once again, Benjamin is helpful, not because he indicates the destructive, fatal outcome of extreme violence, but in that he looks into the paradoxes of violence as res mixtae:33 phenomena in which the political and the aesthetic, the religious and the secular intersect, and which cannot be subsumed under common notions of popular culture nor are of a defaced populism. Salazar foregrounds the “drama of intoxication,” a scenario that is evocative of the “Baroque drama” yet devoid of a Baroque aesthetic of excess. The drama of intoxication is not a linear consequence of the production and distribution of illegal drugs, but a complex issue that is ultimately tied to the geopolitical and geoeconomic predicament of the war on Compare Sigrid Weigel’s formulation, Walter Benjamin, 82–3. Ibid.

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drugs itself. Intoxication is associated with the uneven, local and global dynamics of capitalist enchantment, in Gómez-Peña’s words: “you need magic, we [in the South] need dollars . . .” Pablo Escobar, “more than anybody, knew that only by becoming legal the (narcotics) business would disarticulate itself ” and the drama would cease to exist (113). The burial of Lara Bonilla, the assassinated minister of justice, took place in Neiva, an occasion during which president Betancur announced to the powers of narcotraffic: “Halt there, enemies of humanity, Colombia will extradite you” (128). Similar to Schmitt’s rhetoric about the chosen America to perform “total” justice34, Betancur’s words implied that the enemies of “humanity” had to be tried in US courts. Escobar, for his part, saw the president’s public announcement as the breaking of his electoral promises. First, Escobar considered presenting proof that the Medellín cartel had supported Betancur’s election, but he followed a recommendation not to throw more wood on the fire. After meeting in Panama, the major capos of the cartel—Escobar, the “Mexican” (Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha), Carlos Lehder, and the Ochoa brothers— decided to explore the possibility of bringing about negotiations with the government, looking for “a formula for surrender to the government” (131–2). They considered approaching Gabriel García Márquez as a potential intermediary but finally opted for ex-President López. López who realized that what was at stake was the voluntary surrender of those who controlled 80 per cent of the cocaine traffic from Colombia to the North—offering to abandon and hand over laboratories, airplanes and travel routes, and the willingness of the capos to present themselves to the Colombian legal system—contacted the president on May 29, 1984 (133). It was a time when a juridical project of unusual dimensions was at issue. Betancur seemed interested, but he maneuvered the information into the hands of the big press, so that it appeared on the first page of El Tiempo. Washington reacted immediately and, of course, negatively. The series of informal political deliberations that had come into being broke off. As reality would soon show, at this very moment, the possibility of avoiding an unprecedented avalanche of bloodshed was at stake, which would envelop Columbian cities until 1992/93, together with the devastating maneuvers through which part of the corrupt political hierarchies tried to save face while other political actors and social groups were sacrificed. The year 1985 would be packed with incredible events figuring a national tragedy, destined to take an even higher toll during the succeeding years. The new minister of justice continues the measures that his predecessor had initiated, bringing the legislation on the narcotics trade “up to date” and proceeding to extradite an increasing number of people to the United States. At this point, Escobar (who was responsible for Lara Bonilla’s murder) decides to throw his “(sub)military” powers into full-blown action. The year had just begun. Coronel Ramírez, the leader of the operation against Tranquilandia who was recently promoted to general, is shot to death. The following month, the renowned journalist Guillermo Cano, editor of El Espectador who kept denouncing Medellín’s narco business is also assassinated. But this is just the starting See Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, 266.

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phase of the multiple escalations. In the narrator’s words,“For Pablo, the route of politics closed. From that time, he tried to destroy that world where he could no longer reign. He threw himself completely into the world of war, where he fought with the living and ghosts. He was searching in war, in being invincible, for a new path of transcendence” (135). On a different yet not entirely remote scale, the president had allowed (or was not able to avoid) the army to arbitrarily interfere into the peace negotiations with the the guerrilla forces. For many Colombians, 1985 would become the year in which “justice” was laid in ruins. On November 6, a unit of the M-19 political guerrilla movement occupied the Palace of Justice by force and held almost 20 supreme court magistrates captive, for 24 hours, in order to exert pressure on President Betancur. In the 1985 action, labeled as “mad” by the leader of New Liberalism, Galán, and later qualified as “naïve” by its own authors, M-19 attempted to occupy the Supreme Court building, and from this place to call upon the media in order to ask Betancur to accept responsibility for truncating the peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas. Salazar’s narrator cites Alejo, an ex-member of M-19: In the fullness of the twentieth century we did a political reading of the liberal doctrine of the French Revolution. . . . some people have asked us: “Okay, so why didn’t you enter congress where the rotten politial class was?” The answer is simple: because we were going to renew a suit against the President of the Republic for deficiency, and the competent authority for judging him, according to the Constitution, was the Court. In this we were following the law exactly. . . . We knew that by storming [the court building] there would be a gun battle and deaths, but we did not suspect that the state had evolved toward a presidentialist state managed by the military leadership. (144)

During this attack, during which Alfonso Reyes Echandía, the captive president of the Supreme Court, tried to contact Betancur to plead for a cease fire to allow negotiations but did not get any response from the president, 11 Supreme Court magistrates and its president died, among some 50 deaths (142). What was supposed to be a violent action for the guerrilla in order to reach the symbolic stage of “justice” and to push for political negotiation, together with an attempt to exert “legalistic” pressure on the president, ended up being a blood bath in which the military’s special troops attacked the palace. Salazar speaks of a “holocaust” (145). Official propaganda spoke of a terroristic act fueled by the narcotraficantes in order to destroy the judicial archives and create chaos. But the ex-guerrilla Alejo, cited by Salazar’s narrator, explains the drug politics of M-19: “We were the only revolutionary organization that took a clear position on narcotraffic. We proposed legalizing capital; no extradition, trials of the narcos in the country, and legalization of drugs as a definite solution” (144). Escobar’s own relationship with M-19 had been complicated and strangely unorthodox, oscillating between the capo’s sympathy for the idea of social change and the audacity of guerrilla actions and his outrage when members of the movement kidnapped the sister of Jorge Luis Ochoa of the influential Ochoa clan, who was a player in the Medellín cartel. Both illicit movements, the Medellín cartel and M-19, with solid logistic power and strategic political ambitions, represented serious threats to the conservative political establishment that, beneath the surface, had

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not hesitated to accept narcomoney. In one word, 1985 was the year in which the military apparatus of the state was set on course to attack both forces frontally.35 In Salazar’s text, the situation acquires the marks of a catastrophe, and Pablo Escobar seems to act increasingly under an eschatological sign. As we read, the holocaust at the Palace of Justice exterminated the public authority of the legislative branch in Colombia, speeding up a process of “deinstitutionalization.” A week after the tragedy, a natural disaster in the center of the country ocurred when apocalyptic avalanches generated by the errupting Nevado del Ruiz volcano buried more than 30,000 people, and entirely destroyed the town of Armero. “This is how history is made in Colombia. One tragedy follows the other, without there being time to think about them, and there is sediment forming, of memories loaded with abundant pain, fertile for revenge” (145). The testimonial novel about Pablo Escobar is not a sublime account, although it is implicitly fictional. Its fictionality rests on experience and conflict mediated by a carefully constructed text. This has several implications, one of which relies on Salazar’s use of the significant form of the “exemplary history” (“Pablo’s parable”) to explore the meaning of an authentic case that, in society, has been over-codified by a host of negative attributions. Since antiquity, the actions and inner drives of “hero-villains” have spoken to chroniclers and fiction writers with particular intensity, but it was the “invention of tragedy” that actually laid the grounds for placing violence at the center of representation. Salazar, by eschewing the unfathomable edge of tragic fascination, may have felt that the legacy of epic writing, in turn, was still open to him. It allowed him to access contemporary political history in a literary way. Here, epic discovery and renarration of the life of Pablo Escobar meant that “defamiliarization,” for the novel to become a Brechtian Lehrstück (dialectical learning play) was not necessary. Epic narration allowed the capture of the Baroque excess that marked Escobar’s life and death precisely by avoiding any verbal heightening or hyperbolical expression. The principal of presentation of the “epic material” is admonitory address implicit. In this specific case, “epic writing” moves close to the investigative gesture by which the renarration of the multilayered Escobar story becomes possible. This way, the entire history can be brought forth as if it were pure fiction. It was the improbable and unbelievable in contemporary human history that would be shaped in epic form, whittled down to an elementary eloquence, so that readers could confront the hidden question: what lends the Escobar story its profane yet prophetic contours, in one word, its truthfulness? The features of a singular epic are woven together in the second part of the book, one that we call the drama of extradition, tuned down to a nondramatic, heterogeneous narrative whose nerve centers are, of course, all the more dramatic. Situated mainly between 1986 and 1993, it unfolds from the clash between extreme narcocapitalist power and the North’s struggle to secure its geo-economic and military hegemony in the hemisphere, producing scenarios in which, on one side, medieval forms of warfare intersect with, to use Schmitt’s expression, “telluric”36 yet deterritorializing partisan

On the question of peace attempts see Salazar, Pablo Escobar, 145, 146. See Carl Schmitt. Theory of the Partisan, 20–22; Louiza Odysseos. “Crossing the Line: Carl Schmitt on the spaceless universalism of cosmopolitanism and the war on Terror,” 74 ff.

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techniques while, on the opposite side, the DEA, together with Colombian elite forces, uses some of the most advanced planetary technology. The Colombian political system, especially at the level of militarized state politics, becomes the senario in which this conflict is fought out, as Colombian civil society is deprived, in praxi, of its rights of democratic agency. Pablo Escobar and his allies were fiercely determined to make extradition a first-rank public issue in Colombia. It is here that a martyr-like figuration emerges from a secular conflict, showing that the great capos of the drug business tried to create this legacy by acting as “informal” spokesmen for a nation feeling threatened by unholy powers. Escobar, el “Mexicano,” Lehder, and others try to assume the role of “los extraditables” (the “extraditables”) at public events, and they attract the attention of the media by acting as heroes under siege. Pablo dreamed, among other projects, of influencing the politics of television, and he practiced speaking in front of a camera and sponsored the production of several regional television programs in the state of Antioquia. In 1983, he organized the “First Forum against Extradition” in Medellín, to which he invited the adored television actress Virginia Vallejo,37 together with several priests and lawyers who supported the cause (100–1). This kind of initiative was linked to campaigns in the major cities including a mass demonstration in the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá. Carlos Lehder coined its main, heroically self-victimizing slogan: “Es preferible una tumba en Colombia a una prisión en Estados Unidos” / “A grave in Colombia is preferable to a prison in the U. S.” (156). In June 1987, during a time in which the extradition treaty was declared formally incomplete by the Supreme Court (155), Lehder is captured by military and police forces and taken to a police station. In surprise, he saw himself being put into a helicopter by masked agents and taken to the Catán military base; “and immediately they put him on a DEA airplane” (156). The drama of extradition unfolds with numerous storylines: at its center is Escobar’s death-dealing wrath against all opponents, combined with his underground actions to bring about a juridical situation that would allow him to be legally tried in his country. However, at issue was not just the capture and extradition of the major capos of the Medellín cartel, but also a substantial part of Colombia’s truncated political history. It does not come as a surprise that the class in power turned to active maneuvering to either hide or whitewash their own involvement in illegal activities. The killing of opponents was a strategy that did not exclusively belong to Escobar. Escobar became used to the idea that he would have to go to prison. In 1989, the parliamentarian J. E. Nader presents the project of a law designed to invalidate the application of the Extradition Treaty (199–200). The vote on the project is blocked by the two major protagonists of New Liberalism, Alberto Villamizar and Luis Carlos Galán, who, by then, had become widely popular and were expected to win the upcoming presidential election in 1990—a constellation that, according to Salazar, the ruling elite perceived as a threat. As we read, it was no secret to the army and the state’s intelligence forces that Escobar sought revenge, but that at the same time, strong paramilitary interests were opposed to Galán’s politics. Preparations for Galán’s assassination were under See Virginia Vallejo. Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar, 2007.

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way. Galán was aware of the danger; in 1989 several important judicial functionaries (“judiciales”) had already been killed (201–5). On August 18, 1989, during a public demonstration in the town of Soacha, the leader of the New Liberalism movement is shot. In the book that Juan Manuel Galán published about his father several years later, he reveals that Galán, the candidate, had complained to General Maza about the insufficient security measures that the state was offering him during the campaign, but did not get more protection (210–12). Even worse, when the wounded Galán was on emergency transport to the hospital, he was not taken to the nearby Soacha clinic but to a more distant and less well-equipped center, so that he was literally bleeding to death. To date, the constellations of Galán’s murder have not been sufficiently resolved (see 207). Although the army carried out, after Galán’s assassination, additional attacks on the Medellín cartel and its substructures, it had acted with measured negligence regarding Galán’s security while he lived (212–13). This seemed to be due to the growing influence of the anti-leftist paramilitary right within national politics. Given that an entire military apparatus had been set in motion to eradicate the Medellín cartel, Escobar’s existence becomes fantasmatic. He and the core of his gang are on the move and escape constantly, circulating between the numerous hideouts, fincas, and establishments across both Medellín and the region of the Middle Magdalena River, which are part of his logistic grid. At the same time, Escobar continues preparing and coordinating numerous coercive actions against his enemies (selected political functionaries, journalists, and police, as well as members of his own large network who he believes are traitors), while he secretly meets with lawyers and allies from Bogotá and other parts of the country. This is the time that witnesses the kidnapping of persons from the upper class including family members of leading politicians, for example, the wife and daughter of Villamizar, constellations of an unprecedented drama that are reported in Gabriel García Márquez’ novelistic testimonio Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping, 1997). Strategically, Escobar is undergoing severe loss. The group of Fidel Castaño, who has become the head of the anti-guerrilla, paramilitary organization sides, from now on, with the elite force of the police, directed by General Martínez, which has been designed to locate and destroy Escobar’s support networks, his locations and infrastructures, and himself. At the same time, the elite unit had gained the support of the rulers of the Cali drug cartel in their effort to destroy “el capo más desafiante.” The narrative through which Salazar tells of Escobar’s ongoing flight and retreat is based on different sources, one of which is the reports of General Martínez. Several times, he is cited verbatim from sources in which he later recalls the conflict in first-person narrative (251–2, 259). Another source is the memories of Roberto Escobar Gaviria, Pablo’s brother.38 An immanent narrator takes care of moving between scenarios and threads: Pablo was in a wood and zinc cabin in Aquitania, in the middle of the Middle Magdalena jungle . . . From there, while he walked along rivers and labyrinths . . ., inspite of the blows, he made his fame as an invincible man grow. He continued to play with aces in his hand: when the people infiltrated in the Armed Forces told him of operations Roberto Escobar Gaviria. Mi hermano Pablo; see, for example, 255.

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against him, he usually left his refuge, moved to a neighboring municipality and then returned to the zone of Napolés, where he moved freely. (253)

In the summer of 1990, the overall situation is still marked by escalated conflict, uncertainty, and ongoing fears. “In the Elite Corps’ military base, officials permanently evaluated: they had eliminated Pablo’s key lieutenants.His possibilities of communication were limited, but he maintained . . . control of delinquency in Medellín. A new wave of kidnappings, with which he made the state bow, showed them that the capo still had his operative capacity” (263). The unimaginable occurs when César Gaviria, the newly assigned president, decides to take the pulse of the country—a country tired of the proliferation of car bombs, magnicides, and kidnappings—and resolves to “negotiate with narcoterrorism” (ibid.). Gaviria “knew that the issue was how to deal with Pablo regarding the theme of extradition without the Colombian government appearing to the international community to be giving him impunity” (ibid.). At issue was a negotiation that would lead the capo to be tried without being extradited. The “improbable,” extreme situation is linked to Escobar´s being a fugitive, and at the same time pushing hard to force his will on an unbalanced state apparatus.39 A scenario unfolds at the edge of, or beyond normative regulation of conflict, being heterodiegetically embedded in free indirect style, and thus differing from the personalizing narration that reigns, for example, in Mi hermano Pablo. On the one hand, readers are led through the puzzles of one of the truly Baroque power struggles40 of the late twentieth century. On the other, we do not watch the drama from a frontal perspective, for this would result in tainted realism, in either a tragic or an abject heightening. It is as though readers were following Pablo Escobar’s steps from a somewhat displaced angle, a sort of daimon-like take. Fabio Ochoa, a former member of the Medellín group who had already surrendered himself to jurisdiction has the idea that, with the help of the priest Rafael García-Herreros—a venerable old man, a Colombian television personality, a great social benefactor—Escobar could be convinced to surrender. A “saint” would be the proper medium to attract a warrior, especially a faithful warrior like Pablo. And thus it happens. The “magical realism” of this situation is not literary but part of the theatricality of late twentieth-century Colombian history. According to the narrative, Pablo Escobar was literally taken by the hand by the 83-year-old priest, and convinced to drop several of his ongoing petitions that had complicated the process of surrender. Using an image that is not unfamiliar to Colombian political imagination, the Minotaur is led out of his labyrinth and into the custody of “civilization.” But this Minotaur had been alert as he had cunningly prepared the ground for his reclusion by the state. As though it were a nonplace, worthy of a science fiction scenario, La Catedral, the only prison that Escobar is willing to accept as his new place of “residence” comes into sight (see 278). Tainted with a “surreal” slight of destiny, given the overall geopolitical situation, the phrase that concludes Chapter VIII resounds: “And on the 19th of June in 1991, after the Constituent Assembly had prohibited the extradition of citizens, the warrior turned himself in” (279). According to Coronel Naranjo, “the institution was not in the capacity to contain the terrorism any further” (Salazar, 285). 40 See in Salazar. 266, 267, 271, 272; 275–6. 39

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La Catedral was a perfect heterotopos; its construction had been planned by Escobar himself. He had chosen the site, and it seems that he had also arranged its purchase by the municipality of Envigado whose mayor supervised the construction.41 The place was located on a steep mountain top, some 7,000 feet above sea level (2,133 meters), offering a topography that could inspire the image of a castle. Since Escobar had the idea that air attacks were a special threat, he had chosen a place that was usually covered with fog from late afternoon well into the morning (283). When the fog disappeared, the view toward the city of Medellín was splendid. The access to the areas of Itagüí and Envigado, and on the less steeper side to the Cathedral itself could be perfectly observed. Escobar had achieved an agreement in which a main issue was his own safety and that of members of his gang who surrendered together with him.42 Will Escobar, moving into the La Catedral prison, refrain from directing financial coups and a hierarchic culture of loyalties through Medellín’s informal grid of violent transactions? He has a blend of Machiavellian capacities, but he lacks the caution and measure that the Italian author had recommended for efficient rulers, even in an age of absolutism. The problem was that Escobar’s power would have vanished, or turned against itself, had he not kept fueling its channels with lots of money and all kinds of orders, but money and authority were not generated by peaceful or legal activities. The agreement between Escobar and the government goes bad after exactly one year. For several years, his enemies from the Cali cartel, in their attempt to improve their position vis-à-vis extradition, had been collaborating with the government and its special forces to destroy the gran capo. Former members of the Medellín cartel also joined the anti-Escobar crusade of the “Pepes” (the “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”).43 Pablo, from his new, “secure” place of reclusion, seeks to avenge and punish, while keeping his financial channels working (306–7). This, together with his rigorous control of the prison complex and surrounding area, including its armed administration, eventually leads to the government’s decision, as Escobar himself had always feared, to seize La Catedral by military means. By entering the “Cathedral,” Pablo Escobar had indeed obtained a site of his own, and thus a political status. He himself had established the rules for his imprisonment and had also set up the rules for control and administration of his new castle. The Cathedral brought Pablo and the members of his gang temporary security from military persecution, and it provided a new headquarter from which he could begin to reactivate his debilitated power networks. Here, he came to resemble “homo sacer” most closely and in a particular way—meeting place of the secluded outcast and the sovereign who could still decide over the lives and deaths of other people. Scenarios of history can be enigmas to which only aesthetic figures can give a deeper meaning. La Catedral appears as the actual Baroque stage of the Escobar story. It was at the point where the “drama” migrated from temporary movement and discontinuity into a spatial and even “choreographic” setting that it became recognizable as “Trauerspiel”—as a

See Roberto Escobar Gaviria. Mi hermano Pablo, 45–6. See ibid., 46. 43 Regarding the Cali cartel, see in Salazar. 178–85, 316–17. 41 42

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dynamic in which the tragic is replaced by a logic of sadness.44 Let me restate—it is the bizarre, almost fantastic closeness of Baroque contours of the “tyrant” (in decline), and the “martyr,” which discloses the main aesthetic symptom, together with the narrative convergences of Salazar’s illuminating book. Escobar, in the year during which he reigned from the “Cathedral,” not only sought to prolong an informal state of exception across the country by keeping in function his politics of life and death, but in his new castle, he ruled in literal and theatrical terms. After a few months, the prison was called the “Club Medellín,” metamorphosing into a meeting place that was visited by the most diverse members of Colombian society—priests and lawyers, soccer players of national rank, beauty queens, politicians, journalists, cartoonists. Escobar’s fashion sense was strangely unorthodox. He preferred blue jeans, tennis shoes, white shirts with blue stripes, and an elegant watch but abhorred gold chains or bracelets that would have made him look like a “mafioso.” At the same time, he used a black Russian fur hat that his mother had brought from a Moscow visit and which, combined with a red scarf from Spain, he attempted to turn into an identity symbol like Che Guevara’s beret (295). Due to his body weight of over 110 kilograms (some 240 pounds), despite his medium hight, and a rapt expression on his bulky face, several fotographs testify to an impressive countenance.45 On the occasion of Pablo Escobar’s surrender in June, 1991, a cartoonist in Medellín had made a cartoon for the newspaper El Tiempo entitled “The Epistle of Pablo.” The image showed him with wings and the halo of a saint ascending toward heaven, accompanied by the blessings of Padre García-Herreros. Escobar had Guezú, the caricaturist, brought to La Catedral and gave him an assignment to produce a book with the cartoons that the media had circulated during the past decade. The book was actually completed, in a luxury edition of 400 copies and sent—after being signed by Pablo Escobar Gaviria and finger printed—to people of public rank, as well as to the press, the radio, and TV stations. The head of the Medellín cartel as a cartoon hero. Most artists had made Pablo not exactly an object of laughter; their targets were rather the political and military forces that Escobar had embarrassed so many times. Behind what appeared, at the time the book was manufactured and distributed, as a sardonic attitude in Escobar’s self-stylization was a blend of two aspects that rarely combine. On the one hand, Escobar had never forfeited his respect for the symbols of Catholicism; on the other, he was unmoved by the kind of fear that religion infuses, according to Hobbes, in most people and which translates into “fear of the law.”46 Only this way could he become a popular cartoon hero during his lifetime. But assembling the book of Pablo Escobar also showed his metamorphosis into the image of himself, his farewell. This was, in a sense, a farewell to the mission of the martyr that he could not keep up with. When the government decides to attack the Cathedral, Escobar’s castle, by military means on July 22, 1992, what ensues is a sort of “afterplay,” involving one more coup of As we refer to Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama (see, for example, 91, 95–6), our interest is associative, and heuristic; an analytical differential owes to Salazar’s ability to renarrate a political drama of Baroque dimensions by avoiding to apply any kind of hyperbolic device. 45 One of those photographs is reproduced in Alba Marina Escobar’s book. 46 See Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 145. 44

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the cunning Capo. Escobar, together with his brother Roberto and several of his men, sucessfully plot their escape from the prison where they had spent 396 days (303).47 Escobar knew, of course, about the new constellation of forces that had gathered across several dividing lines in order to destroy him and his structures but he was, as long as he could renitent to accept it as a reality. Finally having to bend to the unavoidable becomes imperative when his support networks break down and his allies, including his lawyers are killed while the life of his family is in grave danger. When he can no longer exert power, he changes his behavior drastically. Within a few days, Escobar gives up all the precautions that he had maintained for 499 days while he was ingeneously hiding in several urban localities of Medellín, between the summer of 1992 and December 3, 1993 (308–10, 342). On December 2, his forty-fourth birthday, and the following day, his only desire is to talk on the cell phone with his wife and son, knowing that this means a hastening toward the end: he is finally vulnerable to the phone tracking technology that the elite force has been using to locate him, and is triumphantly shot, practically with his phone in hand, by a squad of the special troops trained by Delta Force, the DEA, and other players in the anti-Escobar coalition (341–2).48 Salazar handles this part, narratively speaking, as though he were using voicesin-off. One of these voices is that of the elite force’s chief, General Hugo Martínez, both the way it was recorded afterward by Salazar and also taken from Martínez’ declarations. Martínez’s “testimony” is neither sensational nor triumphal; it includes several reflective moments regarding Escobar’s personality, as well as the overall situation in which Martínez had been acting.49 The drama is thus reduced to its actual matrix-structure, conveyed through a narrative that combines biographical attention with a near-scientific impetus to capture the “microscopy” of interlocking actions and actors. This is almost, but not quite, the end of the book.

Coda In the Baroque setting brought about by an informal sovereign who sought to decide life and death in one of Latin America’s pathological arenas of global capitalism, the “disease” did not lie in Pablo Escobar’s human nature however, but was rooted in an unbearable degree of social crisis. Therefore, Foucault’s assumption about modern transformations of the mechanisms of biopolitical power during the past centuries50 cannot account for this turmoil of conflicts, in which belligerant struggles emerge outside and above the micropolitics of power and are brought to geopolitical “resolution.” In his thoughts about German Baroque drama, Benjamin discusses, in addition to the figures of the tyrant and the martyr, a third one—that of the intrigant, the machinator. The escape is described in detail by Roberto Escobar Gaviria. Mi hermano Pablo., 68 ff. Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann describe the tracking down and elimination of Escobar as a “high-profile example” of transnational law enforcement. See Policing the Globe, 162. 49 See general Martínez’s disillusionment when narcotic traffic is reorganized (Salazar, 217). 50 See Michel Foucault. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” In Paul Rabinow (ed.). Foucault Reader, 258–9. 47 48

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The “intrigant’s” capacities are of particular interest if one agrees that this figure is not only a political rationalist but also possesses a certain kind of anthropological, and even physiological, knowledge. The intrigant is perhaps a true Machiavellian type of person. He is “entirely will and reason,”51 his posture is rather “neoclassical” than “Baroque”and he dominates the important affects of political life, which are love and fear: “their boundlessness.” Calculating fear is also, in addition to solid political and economic interests, a main driving force for the illegal players of the conservative anti-Escobar coalition, including the members of the Cali drug cartel. The Cali capos expected that, by helping to take down Escobar, the government would exempt them from the threat of extradition. Love, on the other hand, was what bound Escobar to his mother, his son, his little daughter, and his wife who, for many years, had been close to Pablo’s empire without actively participating in the narcotics business. When he could not ensure their security any longer but saw them in severe danger, the world changed. This applies, as well, to masculine alliances—to the astonishingly extensive pact that had assured Escobar not only the loyalty, but the fraternal and even “saintly” love of his fellows and subordinates. Those who “officialized” themselves as “los Pepes”—“The Persecuted by Pablo Escobar”—in January, 1993 (316) and engineered the final defeat of el Patrón embraced diverse factions of the paramilitary, military, drug trafficking, and political hierarchies. As the fore runner of the nucleus that possessed the logistic power and the “intelligence” to accomplish this mission, operated the paramilitary complex under the lead of the Castaño brothers, and was tightly connected to the Cali cartel and government authorities (312, 333, 334). Fidel Castaño, a visceral anti-leftist member of the landed aristocracy that, throughout the better part of the twentieth century was on the top of Colombian society, had a criminal record of being accused of committing several massacres in peasant communities. But his links to important sectors of the army and his anti-guerrrilla obsession had earned him not only liberty, but the consolidation of an entire paramilitary operating structure.52 The Pepes were as politically heterogeneous as they could be, both in composition and (legal and illegal) status. Carlos Castaño once described them with uninhibited egotism: “From the President down, we were all Pepes” (316). The narrator adds, more specifically, “The office of the Attorney-General of the Nation granted judicial pardons to some fifty narco-traffickers who at that moment promised to collaborate with the law, in other words, to fight against Escobar” (317). This extensive group of “persecuted” enemies included state functionaries, business people, the Cali cartel, the survivors of Escobar’s retributive attacks, and other people who had personal interests in the vendetta. One of the first issues the Pepes took care of was killing Guido Parra and his son, and four other lawyers who had worked for el Patrón. Pablo’s brother Roberto and one of the lawyers had approached Attorney De Greiff in order to start negotiating a second voluntary surrender by Escobar. But the talks were quickly truncated. On Escobar’s side, his mindset was expressed in a letter he wrote to the government, and in which he offers to provide concrete information to the authorities as to who, among the paramilitary players and the police, had moved the machinery with which the most active and popular politicians of New Liberalism, as Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 95–6. Corresponding information is provided on the following pages: 83–8, 316; 146–7; 226–7; 241–2; 323..

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well as numerous representatives of the left were killed, including his own contribution of money for Galán’s assassination. In turn, the “Patron” asks guarantees for the lives of his family, as well as measures to be taken against the Cali cartel. Laconically, the narrator notes, “the authorities did not respond . . .” (329–30). At the beginning of the book, we met Arcángel as a man with one single, laconic mission—to be the guardian of Escobar’s grave. In the course of the story, Arcángel appears here and there, and we begin to perceive that he was a member of Escobar’s inner circle, although someone who has never committed murder. At the point at which it is noted that Arcángel surrendered for trial before el Patrón entered the Cathedral, it becomes clear that this fictive person has an authentic basis, even a biographical relationship to Pablo Escobar. Arcángel is released from prison—where he “learned again the art of patience and of a contained life” (14)—one year after Escobar’s death. In other words, he is not a “big criminal” but part of the minor population of narcoepics’ social universe—an anonymous man in the crowd, a castaway, “an elemental man” (18). If Salazar’s immanent “narrator”—with his meticulous research and ethnographic exploration—disentangles the factual networks underlying Pablo Escobar’s life, Arcángel’s mission, in turn, has to do with a less tangible sphere than that of the Patron’s deeds. This sphere is marked by a situation of memory—it lives through a movement of afterthoughts and aftertastes, in which there is no sentimentality. Arcángel contributes what the “ethnographer” of a live cannot provide. This is a question of sobriety to the extent that Salazar cautions to not look at the hero straightforwardly, or redramatize his life from the perspective of unbearable crimes and their eventual punishment. He needed, rather, a “daimonic” lens, as tiny as it might be—“like the daimôn in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind”53 and thus half-invisible. Hannah Arendt, in speaking from a preferred nexus between Greek classicism and modern liberal speculations, touches upon the paradox by depriving it of its historicality: “. . . the misery of the mortals is their blindness toward their own daimôn.”54 In contrast, sobriety can mean, in our framing, being aware of the malaise. It can suggest avoiding the assumption, as Salazar does, that Escobar could be neatly assessed by his actions, performances, and words as such, or as common opinion would handle them. The figure of Arcángel is, therefore, not comparable to a classical daimôn, but Arcángel’s approach to the man who was once his godfather, so to speak, and whose grave he is now protecting, could not be stripped of empathy any further than in the way it appears through Salazar’s narration. People who keep visiting Escobar’s grave are carrying unfulfilled desires, as though a miraculous social benefactor, or a violent “rainmaker,” could rise again, or has never actually disappeared from their world. But Arcángel—who keeps watching the world from the tomb, in the middle of a sea of crosses—knows that his patron was mortal, definitely mortal. And he remembers it, asking himself, “What does the death of Pablo Escobar mean?” And above all, he remembers his answer: “Nothing! Absolutely nothing, everything will continue as it was.” (348) Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, 179–80. Ibid., 193, note 18.

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Female Castaways: Delirio, Plasma, and Displacements from Oppression “También las mujeres pueden”1 Myths tend to attract and confuse, especially when they are linked to women. One might remember the mediatic images of “La Reina del Pacífico” (Sandra Ávila Beltrán), after she was imprisoned in 2007 charged with having played, for decades, a crucial role in the organization of hemispheric drug trafficking routes. Arturo Pérez Reverte, author of La Reina del Sur (2000), when asked if his novel was inspired by what he had heard of Beltrán, could give a novelist’s happy answer: “Certainly not.” Rather, he believed, his narrative had been able to anticipate reality. Julio Scherer recently tried to make Beltrán’s story plain in a book, in which he synthesizes several conversations he conducted with the drug trafficking celebrity when she was in prison. One immediately senses, at the moment of starting to read, having entered “mined territory.” Female histories, especially in the realm of illegal business, are the domain of mail assessment. In the journalist’s style of conducting the interviews, judging from their final discursive form, the paternalist ductus appears as a natural ingredient.2 Or perhaps one could argue, in this case, that this has been a matter of both moral indignation and heightened curiosity, verbally disguised. Women’s involvement in the trafficking business is not a new issue. Elaine Carey writes in her text, “Selling is More of a Habit Than Using: Women and Drug Trafficking in North America, 1900–1970,” that the Mexican Lola la Chata “emerged as a dominant figure in the illicit narcotics trade during a time when women—particularly elite women of European descent—were portrayed as the victims of urban narcotics peddlers who allegedly swarmed to urban centers throughout the world in the 1930s.”3 The first means of making this phenomenon culturally familiar to contemporary audiences were narcocorridos. Who does not remember, far beyond Mexico’s boundaries, the

The expression, translatable as “Women can do it as well,” is the title of a narcocorrido sung by Los Tigres del Norte (see Los Tigres del Norte. Jefe de Jefes). See Julio Scherer. La Reina del Pacífico: es la hora de contar. 3 Elaine Carey. ““Selling is More of a Habit than Using”: Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930–1960,” 77. 1

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corrido “Contrabando y traición,” composed by Angel González and performed in 1971/72 by the still unknown Los Tigres del Norte. Elmer Mendoza, in Cada respiro que tomas (Every Breath You Take, 1991), renders tribute to the corrido’s heroine, “Camelia la Tejana,” who had become a legend in popular consciousness across the northern Mexican states.4 When young women from lower social strata enter the world of illicit trafficking and remain trapped in scenarios in which life becomes a matter of turning one’s body over to the rules of the game of violence, the world looks more like the ones fictionalized in Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (Colombia 1999; made into a film by Emilio Maillé in 2005), and María llena eres de gracia (Maria Full of Grace) by Joshua Marston (Colombia, 2005). The spectrum of narratives dedicated to women’s entrapment in the narcobusiness has continued to grow, extending to television melodramas—Sin tetas no hay paraíso (Without Boobs There Is No Paradise) is one example, a telenovela based on Gustavo Bolívar Moreno’s novel of the same title (2005). From there, the public has become acquainted with a dubious—that is, mass-marketed—typology of specific female roles: the one who gets involved by her family and friendship relations, la sicaria (the contract killer), la mula (the carrier), la mujer trofeo (the trophy), and la capo (the chief).5 All these types are more or less close images in social dramas in real life. Masculine approaches dominate the new literary interest in the involvement of, especially, marginal female subjects in the topographies of violent survival. Several of these novels and films have made a point about an aporia, and they have thus turned into successful works. Women are shown to resort to aggressive masculine behavior for the sake of progress, personal power, and self-defense, trying to escape from a life that doomed them to poverty and multiple submissions. Not surprisingly, the film heroines excel due to their beauty and astuteness. Teresa Mendoza (in La Reina del Sur) has learned to defend herself with all available means and to use men to reach her business goals. Rosario Tijeras, a young woman from the Comunas, was raped at the age of eight; when she is 13 and confronts the same act of violence, she takes revenge by castrating the perpetrator with a pair of scissors, thus earning her name. Through her brother, a sicario, she then enters into the low sphere of the drug business. The aporetic phenomenon, foregrounded by the artists, is this: What looks like an audacious project of female “empowerment” has to undergo, in order to succeed, an assimilation to aggressive as well as ritualistic modes of action belonging to a masculine canon. Temporal female liberation by means of participation in, and sometimes cynical, often erotic appropriation of archaically enforced “identities”—thus could be the visceral label of these works. Novels and films that take a more complex, partly subversive perspective on cultural identities as “contractual” narrations6 are less prone Elmer Mendoza. Cada respiro que tomas, 53–5. See Mónica Lavin. “Las damas del narco;” Elaine Carey and José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán. “The Daughters of La Nacha: Profiles of Women Traffickers;” Howard Campbell. “Female Drug Smugglers on the United States–Mexico Border: Gender, Crime, and Empowerment;” Francisca González Flores. “Mujer y pacto fáustico en el narcomundo: Representaciones literarias y cinematográficas;” Luis E. Molina Lora. Narrativa de drogas: una investigación transatlántica en la producción cultural de España, México y Colombia;” Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky. “Towards the Latin American Heroine: The Case of Jorge Franco Ramos’ Rosario Tijeras.” 6 See Carole Pateman. The Sexual Contract. 4 5

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to being noticed. This is not necessarily an issue of female versus male writing, as Víctor Gaviria’s film La Vendedora de Rosas (The Rose Seller, 1998) has eloquently shown. We will focus on two novels of singular scope, although academic criticism has thus far paid them little attention: Delirio, written by the Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo, and Plasma, created by the Chilean writer Guadalupe Santa Cruz. The assessment of the narcospace in both is different from that of the previously mentioned works, as there is a displacement of the decorum of heterosexual stability, on the one hand, and an alluring notion of female “criminality,” on the other. What we might perceive from these novels, at first reading, is the women’s escape from, or resistance to, contemporary scenarios of violence and cynicism. But we also find approaches to the problematic of intoxication in which the somatic, the political, and the ecological interact in surprising ways.

The impossible healing: Delirio (Laura Restrepo) You have the enormous eyes of a starving child . . ., but only momentarily, because when she looks at me without seeing me, I feel that she no longer has eyelashes, nor retina, nor iris, nor eyelids, and that instead, the only thing she has is hunger; a ferocious hunger that cannot be satiated (Delirio).

Delirio (2004) is a novel about various “absences.” We meet the main character, Agustina, but among the chief narrative instances hers is missing, except for her childhood voice. Behind this “desubstantiation,” an atmosphere of “delirium” appears as a latent form of the woman’s torment. Two male figures are modeled, at the level of prevailing perspectives, by their inability, or unwillingness, to assume liability for Agustina’s state of mind; both talk to her “in off,” her husband, Aguilar, in order to fill the silence of not knowing what disturbed his wife during the weekend he spent with his children from a former marriage, and there is another man, by the name of Midas McAlister, speaking knowingly. Perplexity about Agustina’s fantasma is a crucible for the narrative. As we enter the reading and learn that the heroine’s family belongs to the Colombian aristocracy, confronting with the dangers of disintegration by the force of global modernity and engaged in recovering finances and political status by all possible means, the narcotics business comes into sight. The play, for members of the traditional upper class, to capitalize on drug traffic without publicly assuming its existence proffers the larger framework for the author’s quest. The impression that we are dealing with a fictive “case scenario” of a women’s flight into transgression springs up. But Agustina is not Emma Bovary. If her situation were associative of a late-nineteenth century, Western European context of rising psychoanalysis, “delirium” could be imagined as related to both madness or hysteria, and the female (struggle for) subjectification. Restrepo might play with this possibility, yet her pledge heads in a different direction.7 Agustina’s condition ranks somewhat closer to that of other “mad,” female characters in modern Latin American fiction; see Gabriela Polit. “Sicarios, delirantes y los efectos del narcotráfico en la literatura colombiana,” 134.

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The novel begins by insinuating a threshold state of subjectivity, an escape from a society’s symbolic order, especially its language. Agustina has abandoned her identity with herself, in other words, her illusion of identity that drives daily existence created by the adult, discriminating, moderate, and verbally articulate conviction that an individual is all of a piece. The young woman, in her mid-twenties, has suddenly lost the ability to speak coherently and accordingly to communicate: “She is frantic and disconnected and overwhelmed, her head exploded into pieces” (18). It seems as if another person had taken possession of her body (19). Aguilar, a professor of literature who gives up his post, mutates into the floundering (frustrated) biographer of his wife’s past. Midas, in turn, speaks from a special insider’s perspective. The voices of both men, respectively, fill the void opened by Agustina’s “absence.” One would expect that here we have Laura Restrepo’s indirect, ironic, perhaps poetically programmatic way of putting in doubt the male soliloquy as an overbearing “institution.” This obstinate and adaptable institution finds its background in the patriarchal myth of the grammarian as “father” of the nation, or at least of the political edifice in which Colombia made its presence from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Fernando Vallejo provided this myth with a fictive scenario, one that is as radical as it is frightening. His novel La Virgen de los sicarios (1994, Our Lady of the Assassins), belongs among narcoepics as an antidote to most other works. What a comparative glance into both novels would not unlikely show is an uncanny contrast between the male figure of Aguilar and that of Fernando, the grammarian. The former is the image of a mediocre humanities professor and his partly melancholic, partly melodramatic affair with an ex-centric upper-class beauty, vis-à-vis the violent drama that was Colombian society; the latter demands an ecstatically violent yet calculated renewal of sovereignty, enabled by the itinerant intellectual aristocrat. As for the novel, it is surprising that irony is almost absent when Restrepo traces the masculine attempts to unravel reality, and present-time history for Agustina. As we will see, a restitutive hope, on the author’s part, wishes to give Aguilar, the husband, the kind of opportunity that can bring Agustina back to “this” world. But is it really Aguilar who matters? If the novel unfolds an overall pathological situation, in which intoxication lingers close to denial, Agustina’s role might be that of the victim, or of the seer, or of both. In a sense, Delirio becomes the missing autobiography that the young woman attempted to write, four years before her mischief occurred. This very project is the reason that the couple began their relationship, when she approached the man for help. “Professor Aguilar, I’m the woman from the other day at the film club, and I need to ask you for a favor. It’s that I would like to write my autobiography, but I don’t know how to do it . . . It’s an obsession that I have, and I think you can help me with this, it’s for some reason that you’re a professor of literature” (my emphasis; 199). The irony was spontaneous, unintended. Nevertheless, in our eyes, Aguilar cannot but exist as an ironic being, the more melancholic his belated retrospective becomes. Therefore, his voice is only one among many. The novel resembles a narrative stream with no coherent structure; it unfolds through several signifying realms that intersect, diverge, and substitute one another. Syntactically and morphologically, no visible marks accompany the constant shifts in narrative perspective. Critics have suggested terms

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such as “heteroglossic” and “multivocal” narration. Readers are immersed in a journey, back and forth, across an in-between of four episodic contexts, where the order of time is at best a puzzle. It can be deduced that, events occur in the mid-1980s, when Pablo Escobar had created a kingdom out of drug money and flooded sectors of the upper classes with money, “gifts,” and requests for absolute loyalty, drastically interfering into the national political spectrum.8 One sphere of references is linked to the floating presence of Agustina’s state of consciousness, present in the husband’s speech, swinging between resignation and loving hope. Another touches upon the diaries of her German grandfather and her Colombian grandmother, as Aguilar remembers Agustina talking about them. In a third realm, the voice of Agustina, the child, emerges heteroglossically—her first-person narration accompanied by third-person rhetorical ornament, or segments of direct speech, which are not emphasized as such—devices that Restrepo uses throughout the novel (see 44–7). The fourth scenario, incidentally interrupted and later taken up again like the other parts, is the soliloquy of Midas McAlister, speaking to the heroine in second-person in an evocative way, marked with a spirit of intimacy, sardonism, and distress. Agustina’s genealogy reads like one of those fables, familiar from the prose of Álvaro Mutis and especially Gabriel García Márquez, that lend humans a weird stature—their “independent,” usually tragic life stories owing to their eccentric distancing from the norms of the ordinary world. Thus the German grandfather, a composer and musician, whose name sounds like that of a circus artist, surfaces: “Nicolás Portulinus had a difficult relationship with words, which explained those profound silences of his which were becoming more and more extended . . . But at other times, he would talk torrentially, and he got trapped with one phrase and another forming ambiguous and giddy run-on sentences in bad Spanish” (92). No wonder that such a grandfather could provide the magic blueprint for Agustina, the child. Nevertheless, the actual learning experience is magic only to a degree, since in its background the phenomenon of dissociative “disorder” lingers. The strange Portulinos is painted with anecdotal brushes; his folkloric image reveals a drama that becomes rampant when a person discovers that she or he is part of an insane family structure and is unavoidably destined to vanish. Portulinus had been prone to states of delirium himself (93). Obsessed with numbers and rivers, he sometimes used to name all the German rivers in alphabetical order. His affinity to the number “two” was not merely a cabbalistic preference, but a performative way of compensating for an absence. He was obsessed with hearing the litany “nosotros dos” (the two of us) as often as possible, uttered by his wife Blanca, in order to find peace outside his nocturnal dreams. Portulinus encounters a fatal end when, one day, he apparently drowned himself in the local river during the years of la violencia under circumstances that remain in the dark. Here, Agustina’s mother, Eugenia, who was supposed to take care of her father, opens the deep undercurrent of See the previous chapter of our study. Vania Barraza Toledo has enumerated details in order to situate the novel in and around the year 1984 (see “La Reestructuración y el desplazamiento social en el espacio urbano de Bogotá,” 273, 278–9); however, the circle of temporal allusions is spread across the 1980s, and beyond.

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the novel: guilt and its denial by way of projection. The suicide, or death, of such an eccentric German was not allowed to besmirch the honor of the family; and an official version was prepared for the annals of the clan: Portulinus had decided to return to Europe. Thus, he was deprived even of a tragic reputation. Agustina’s childhood unfolds in the shadow of an open secret, in which nude photographs illustrate the issue. The girl has discovered a bunch of pictures that show her Aunt Sofía naked, as she poses for her father, Carlos Vicente Londoño. The relationship between her father and her mother’s sister has not led to the destruction of the foundations of the family, nor will it, as long as things remain concealed. Agustina, prone to a divination from early on, makes the photos a fetish that she and her homosexual brother Bichi “attend” on a regular basis. The children’s ritual is situated between curious play, and their first learning experience of dissociation. When the hour comes, Agustina and Bichi, naked from the waist down and surrounded by “several receptacles of water,” summon the photos from a hidden place, like the host from the tabernacle, look at them one at a time, and cast a spell. This is to protect Bichi from their father’s beatings, because of his “abnormal” condition and, at the same time, to make a pledge that the secret will not be revealed. Thus, the children dissociate themselves from two unpleasant issues: the father’s infidelity toward their mother, and his violent stance toward Bichi. Their ritualistic play, in the end, protects the promiscuous and authoritarian father, who is violent toward his “feminized” son from a transgressive stance—going to bed with his children’s aunt. The case is prefigurative, insofar as it reveals the roots of Agustina’s personal agency. She longs for a place in which her difference of consciousness and her brother’s identity have a natural right to exist. Agustina has an inclination rooted in her unconscious, to surround herself with symbols of purification, making water vessels her daily companions. She does not know that guilt is not only a pervasive issue in her family but is also affectively transferred to the more eccentric family members by means of both violence and intrigue. Her brother Bichi whom she loves and protects whenever she can is the weakest part. Agustina and Bichi are paradigmatic “queers,” so to speak, punished and eventually disinherited by the others under Eugenia’s lead. As much as they try to dissociate themselves from their surrounding reality, they remain helpless vis-à-vis the dominant drive to repression and demagogy. The mother’s cold-heartedness toward the crazy Agustina and the homosexual Bichi is just the opposite of the way she pampers and promotes her other child, Joaquín (Joaco): macho, vain, and a reckless entrepreneur of conservative rut who, as an adult, works with Midas to do business with the drug hierarchies. In a desperate attempt against her violent father, Agustina finally brings the secret of his dalliance with Aunt Sofía to light. But to her surprise, Doña Eugenia, the victim of his infidelity, is quick to invent, once again, a false explanation: the photos were not taken by her husband, but they were actually pictures that her son Joaco took of the maidservant (Delirio, 321). Here the center of the maternal ideal, dramatically hailed by a moral canon in Colombian society discloses a terrible facet. Judging from several literary works, among which is also found No nacimos pa’ semilla, strong maternal characters, especially from the lower and the upper extremes of society, conform an informal yet fierce underside

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of contemporary power structures. At issue is not simply permissiveness regarding masculine superiority, but a quasi-religious invigoration of an affective economy by the specter of mothers as moral saints, or by their acting as simple mirrors of patriarchal culture. The power of such figures is shown to be crucial in a world of disintegrating truths: when they are strong enough, they can make us believe the most improbable, or “recreate” values that have ceased to exist. Midas is known as the mythical king who wanted gold and glamour at all costs, but he was punished, and finally became ridiculous. Midas McAlister, in the beginning, was not a member of Colombia’s high society. He excelled by taking chances and became a mediator between the old rich elite and Pablo Escobar, when the Capo decided to invest his money in Colombian real estate and in the larger economy. According to Midas, without his help, “all those traditional fortunes . . . would have disappeared.” Talking evocatively to Agustina, and presenting himself in third-person, “your father and your brother Joaco . . ., because before, if they were rich in pesos, it was he, Midas McAlister, who multiplied their earnings for them, making them rich in dollars, that there was a reason they called him Midas . . . ” (44). For him as for the others, these were delirious times, so much so that, when Midas got Agustina pregnant, he refused to marry her. Under the spell of big money and in its rampant opportunism, Agustina’s family accepted the affront, and continued to tolerate Midas as a friend. The “mishap” was forgiven; after all, was not Agustina unpredictable and difficult to handle? The narrative agency that is Midas speaks from the point at which he has fallen in disgrace. In fact, he has earned Escobar’s distrust; only from this situation does he “return” to Agustina, by virtue of what we consider the novel’s main voice, his offering to deliver her past to a woman who appears to have lost both her mind and her memory. I’m going to tell you about it “a calzon quitado” because you have the right to know it,” Midas McAlister tells Agustina. “After all, what am I risking by telling you about all of this, if I don’t have anything left. Your husband walks around lost like a cork in a whirlpool, trying to find out what the devil happened to you, and you yourself don’t know much, because look, pretty Agustina, every story is like a big cake, each person cares about the slice that he’s eating, and the only person responsible for everything is the cake maker (12).

The enigmatic beginning of the novel, Agustina’s advanced delirium, owes, as we later realize, to the machinations of Midas. At the outset there is Aguilar, who recovers his wife from a hotel room and is desperately worried about Agustina’s having lost her mind. It was Midas who had taken the woman to the hotel, with a body guard looking after her until her husband arrived. And it had been Midas who anonymously called on Aguilar to tell him to pick up his wife. What had happened? During the weekend of Aguilar’s absence, Agustina attended one of the old family gatherings at which Midas was also present. There Agustina overheard that her mother and Joaco, the macho prodigy, once again, were going to insult her brother Bichi because of his homosexuality. This made Agustina lose her balance, and enter a mental state of furious absence; but due to another interference, she will not be able to return to a “reasonable” condition, as she had done in other cases in the past. Midas is responsible for the aggressive

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disturbance, after which he takes her to Bogotá’s Wellington Hotel, and by so doing, he virtually delivers her body back to her husband while her mind, in Midas’ view, will finally have to “understand” what life in Colombia has been about. From there, Midas’ voice sets out on a journey of both explanation and self-justification. “Well, get out of this romantic novel, nineteenth-century doll, because your grandfather Londoño’s productive haciendas are nothing more than countryside today, so come to earth in this twentieth century and get down on your knees before His Majesty the King don Pablo, sovereign of the three Americas” (71). Blaming Escobar for his truncated destiny is a way of bowing to a godlike force, a step that makes it plausible that Midas, the “tiger of rapid businesses,” will mutate into a confessant. Why is nothing left for Midas when he offers to tell the truth, this man who could once afford to reject marriage with Agustina and prefers business “without distractions?” Why has he suddenly had to jump into a hiding spot in Bogota’s urbanian world, as if he were returning to his place of origin? Pablo Escobar has become a major threat to him, setting a trap for him, and making him pay for the arrogance that is worth Midas’ name. Midas had turned away two women from the Capo’s less mundane family circle from his elite fitness studio, ridiculing their lack of physical noblesse. Now he finds himself in a situation in which several of his former partners, among them the DEA agent “Rony Silver,” hold him accountable for the disappearance of millions of dollars. Midas is sought by the police, as well, because of a murder that occurred in the studio. The gym existed, like numerous new establishments all over Colombia after the marijuana business9 was replaced by cocaine traffic, as a place for laundering money from Escobar’s transnational activities. Eventually, the fitness establishment becomes Midas’ downfall. Restrepo makes it the scenario of abject excess that has befallen part of the upper-class camarilla—the murder of a woman, staged for entertainment purposes.

Between abjection and “objectification”: Mapping the aesthetic impasse There is no doubt that Laura Restrepo, with the vexed reconstruction of Agustina’s “memory,” demands responsivity toward an extraliterary realm. As a former journalist of Semana, she met with García Márquez after he had won the Nobel Prize. An admirer of Gabriel, Restrepo and other younger colleagues criticized the “so-called magical realism” of Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude) for its “ahistorical fatalism.”10 However, and while she remains loyal to her ambition to be a political and cultural chronicler of the present, Restrepo’s Delirio is not devoid of brushes of influence. If the text opens an aesthetic field of historical references, seeking the roots of the dilemma in the decay of the Colombian upper class, its antecedents remaining tied to the historical times of violencia, and its present marked by the anachronistic entry into global modernity, what then is the status of the figure of the delirium? The Laura Restrepo’s novel El leopardo al sol (1989) is dedicated to Colombian constellations of the marijuana boom of the 1960s. 10 See interview in Elvira Sánchez-Blake and Julie Lirot (eds.), El universo literario de Laura Restrepo, 359. 9

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metaphorical superposition, embracing an individual state of consciousness and the intoxication of Colombia’s bourgeoisie with narcocapital, provides a suggestive frame, but what is the aesthetic and epistemological challenge? If “delirium” is taken as a lens, that can condense that which systematic inquiry cannot, then what is the particular momentum that the transgressive “order” of things can reveal? Or otherwise, if the novel provides, at last, a somewhat healing narrative, what are the limitations inherent in Restrepo’s restitutive drive? We will come back to these questions. Let me take a closer look at the male voices as structuring and guiding devices. Midas offers a condensed assessment of the machinations of Agustina’s mother and her favorite son, the macho, who are the perfect duo for producing convenient historical revisions and big lies, the coincidence of which becomes an epidemic force Bichi went to Mexico because he wanted to study there, and not because his girlish mannerisms received constant chastisement by his father; Aunt Sofi doesn’t exist, or at least it’s enough to not mention her in order that she not exist; Mr. Carlos Vicente Londoño loved his three children equally and was a faithful husband until the day he died; Agustina left her paternal home when she as seventeen as a rebel, a hippy and a pothead, and not because she preferred running away to confessing that she was pregnant to her father; Midas McAlister never got Agustina pregnant, he didn’t abandon her afterward, nor did she have to go alone to get the abortion . . . Joaco didn’t steal their paternal inheritance from his siblings but rather did them the favor of administering it for them; there was no one named Aguilar, and if he perhaps were to exist, he doesn’t have anything to do with the Londoño family . . . (264).

“This is, according to Midas McAlister, the Londoño catalogue of basic distortions . . .” (265). Toward the end, one learns what happened during the mysterious weekend. After having escaped from the cynically violent reign of the Londoños and living in Mexico for years, Bichi announces his visit to the family. Because of this, Agustina accepts the invitation to join a gathering at the finca “de tierra fría” en Sasaima, where Midas is also present. But things turn out to be worse than ever, and what ensues is a plot to deny the younger son his right to enter the family ambit. The experience becomes present through Midas’s voice. Midas’ focus is effective as it oscillates between a third-person voice that acts as if an omniscient shadow were speaking in his stead (see above), and a secondperson angle speaking to the woman: “. . . Agustina, my life, seated there at the other end of the table, and I realize that hearing all the repertory of misrepresentations one more time . . . was for you a martyrdom . . .” (263). Midas perceives how Agustina, for whom Bichi was the only member of the family that she loved, is close to being stricken by the delirium. . . . first your hands that you were wringing, then that ugly grimace that twists your face, and then the maximum SOS, which is your voice when it turns metallic and starts to pontificate . . . everything that you do tends suspiciously toward religiosity, I don’t know if you understand me, you start saying grandiloquent words and to predict things as if you were a prophet, but a petulant and unpleasant prophet . . . and without a helmet (274–5).

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When Midas decides to take Agustina out of this intolerable situation, we would expect that he is concerned with her well-being; however, while he takes her, on his BMW motorbike “at sonic speed and without a helmet” to his aerobics studio, he gives in to a diabolical idea. Sara Luz is the name of the young woman whose murder in Midas’s studio (her “disappearance,” according to some members of the club) is causing growing suspicions. Why not ask Agustina, he thinks to himself, to act as a “seer” for the curious crowd that would come together for the super rumba dance on that Saturday evening, to give some visionary yet distracting spin to the sensible matter. Parapsychology in the service of covering up a crime, so to speak. When Agustina hears about Sara Luz’s disappearance and passes her fingers over the signature that the unfortunate woman had left in the entry book, senses that there is a message emerging, one which she might be able to capture. Midas, in turn, “knows” that delirious adivination can only produce nonsense. But as Midas reproaches later that evening, Agustina, once she started sniffing around in the studio and than entered into a trance again, did not do what she was expected to do. In front of the entire crowd she came up with an announcement of blood, “inconfessable blood innundating the channels . . . ” of the edifice. “That woman, they killed her here, here, Agustina revealed, and they stomped her to death. Stomped her, no, Agustina, Midas put in, control yourself, doll . . .” (293, 294). Who would not think of García Márquez and his gallery of illuminated characters at this point? In her trance, Agustina visualizes images resonant with the murderous scenario that was organized, shortly before, by “Araña.” Midas calls Araña an “Old-money” offspring of the Colombian aristocracy, one who has quickly learned to appropriate the code of narcopower without losing his demeanors of a “minister without briefcase.” An accident during a polo game paralyzes “la Araña Salazar,” Salazar the Spider, from the waist down; thus, destiny desexualizes one of the most ruthless of the richs, formerly accustomed to exposing his manly attributes together with his material power acquired through dirty business. Araña, defaced and attached to the wheelchair, appears as an allegory of decay, by becoming a subject of defilement. He asks the younger Midas, to pay off a bet, to allow a special spectacle to take place in the studio, a cheap and sordid sadomasochistic show that is supposed to stir up the “Spider’s” lost virility, featuring Dolores (Sara Luz) and her “executioner” partner. Araña: “Miditas, son . . . let me clarify that ever since last night, I’ve had the greatest desire to watch a small bitch who really suffers . . .” (153–4). At night, with the fitness rooms closed, the event is narrated indirectly by Midas’ references to Araña’s ecstatic shouts that he overhears from his office, while third-person voice and first-person narration slide into one another. . . . if now and again from down below I heard a roar of la Araña demanding blood, I acted as if her were not with me . . . and if my ears suddenly heard some feminine lament, I acted as if I didn’t hear it, I’m sorry, Dolores, girl, I can’t help you, you’re off my screen, but sure, at time she complained horribly and then Midas got nervous and couldn’t think about anything else (192).

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At one point, Araña’s bodyguards come to Midas to tell him about an “inconvenience;” and as Midas realizes that Dolores was tortured to death, he finds an Araña full of resentment—resentment against the young woman who, he says, played a “dirty trick” against the men; deepest perversion—to cultivate death, and then blame the excessively tortured victim of having committed a fake (195). The narrative opens into a void, after the suffering and horror were represented indirectly, that is, with a low-key intensity. Can the identity of the narrator, Midas, be sustained the way it existed before the horror show? Yes and no. From hereon, Midas’ speech becomes recognizable as a confession. Confession can carry the worst, once it is animated by someone who becomes the sublime addressee—Agustina. The attempt of getting Agustina’s help to distract the public from the murder failed, and Midas becomes inextricably trapped. Cold fear sets in, so he recurs to the religious device. Desperate desire, of course, ensues, desire that, through confession to the afflicted woman, promises Midas temporary relief. Here we have a major, perhaps the decisive, agency of the narrative. Despite sophisticated superpositions, the blending of different voices, and an overall structural mode of decentering (making the novel appear as a hybrid of modern and postmodern writing),11 there is one main narrator, in that it is only Midas who provides the lens for us to start grasping the deeper issues. Desire for Agustina conforms the “real,” only after Midas is thrown out of his spiral of success. His new borderline existence, becoming a hunted man, has moved him close to the young woman’s boundary-subjectivity. In the absence of any durable affective bond, confession takes the lead. Confession opens the valley of abjection. In one sense, Midas is the abject hero—his consenting to Araña’s terrible bet, as well as to other crimes, was driven by opportunism; he would have lacked the courage and thoughtless exhilaration to actually be a monster. The abject hero, according to Michael Bernstein, has no absolute recklessnes or pride; he is “immoral, sinister, scheming and shady.”12 But Midas emerges, in addition, as the abject narrator. He confesses to Agustina, through the lens of her family’s machinations, his successes and failures; and while doing so, he keeps admiring the authentic monsters that act on a limitless scale, and allow themselves to reject the normal codes by remaking them, be it in the case of “el Patrón” (Escobar), or that of Araña, or Agustina’s mother and elder brother. Now, how about the literature professor, Aguilar, the character that Restrepo converts into the restorer of memory, and thus the chief narrative voice? Aguilar is morally defined against Midas. However, we will show that Midas is epistemologically set vis-à-vis Aguilar. Both are structural agonists, imaginary speakers in a forum, the impossibility of which in Colombian public society led Restrepo to create her novelistic agora. Aguilar is Agustina’s husband, whom Midas called to pick up the woman from the post-disaster hotel room. And this is the very beginning of the text, conveyed through Aguilar’s voice: “I knew that something irreparable had happened the moment that a man opened the door of that hotel room and I saw my wife sitting on the other side, looking out the window in a very strange way” (11). Says Aguilar In 2004, Delirio obtained the “Premio Alfaguara de novela.” Michael André Bernstein. Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero. 26, 29.

11 12

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that, before this weekend, “when I left” nothing strange could be seen, self-assurance of not having committed a mistake, followed by an “. . . only God knows . . ..” Then comes a retrospective part, referring to the years of mutual relationship, the voice shifting to third person for a moment: “He had tried every way to make her see reason, but she won’t give her arm to be twisted and insists . . .” (12). A few paragraphs later, Midas’s voice notes, “Your husband is lost like a cork in a whirlpool.” “She’s useless, but I love her so . . . ” (62), says about Agustina, Aguilar who, holding a PhD in literature but having to sell dog food, does not feel supported by his wife in his efforts to earn a living. She is not the least bit concerned about having been deprived of her part of heritage by her own brother. The way she doesn’t comb her hair, it means that she doesn’t want to be bothered with anything related to reality, and nevertheless, her messy hair makes Aguilar want her and, like everything about her, makes him tremble, given the privilege of having at his side this splendidly beautiful creature who so graciously refuses to grow up . . . (63).

The rhetoric is not unfamiliar, when the mystery called female creature or enchanting Other is perceived as devoid of a history, overwhelming or frightening by its sheer presence. We hear the husband’s “protective” melancholy: My wife’s disturbed reasoning is like a dog that bites me and at the same time sends me a cry for help with his barking which I am incapable of responding to; Agustina is a starving and badly wounded dog that would like to return home but can’t do it, and the next minute is a street cur that doesn’t even remember that once upon a time he had a home (12).

Aguilar is not to be blamed for his “active” ignorance, since the Londoño family regarded him as nonexistent. But how can he overcome his masculine blindness that was unable to comprehend that the woman had once approached him for “biographical” help and that she had meant it seriously. There is Agustina’s crucial phrase, in which Aguilar finds no sense: “she told me it was the lies that were driving her crazy. What lies? . . . And what does she say about her own lie, exploded Aguilar, about going to a hotel with a man behind my back that weekend?” (48) Aguilar contacts Anita, the hotel maid, trying to uncover a possible liaison of his wife’s, becoming into a detective who is guided by the affect of redundant jealousy.13 At this point, Aunt Sofi appears in the couple’s house like a magic: she is the woman who knows, not only about things such as the secret photo sessions, but she is also fully aware of the abysses in the Londoño clan. Sofi emerges as the “other” voice that will take Aguilar by the hand, enabling him to assume his role as the “legitimate” chronicler. Sofi warns Aguilar of the self-intoxicating powers of jealosy, for she has come on a mission—to help fill in the gaps in the drama of Agustina’s afflicted memory. She is the one who knows about the debacle from the inside, as does Midas, and she now sides with Aguilar in the attempt to rescue her niece 13

Regarding further musings regarding Aguilar’s failures, see Vania Barraza Toledo. “La reestructuraciÓn . . .” , 275, 276, 289.

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from the delirium. The aunt had left the family ambit after Agustina, when she was 17 and because of her father’s excesses against her brother, had revealed her father’s infidelity. As the ensuing story goes, split into the above-mentioned narrative streams, Sofi helps Aguilar unravel the psychic space—the dark box of Agustina’s mind—by uncovering, or making plausible the origins of insanity within the history of the family and the country: The group of Sofi, Aguilar, and Agustina, finally travels to Portulinus and his wife’s previous “casa de campo,” in order to find the grandfather’s diaries.14 What was once the hot zone of political violence in Colombian history (“la violencia,” 1946–57),15 and later became an area controlled by guerrilla groups, and is still traversed by drug trafficking networks serves Restrepo as a kind of spatio-historical archive, from which the visceral origins of Colombia’s malady supposedly can be reconstructed. Now, has Agustina become an allegory of a nationwide dilemma, that is, a female symptom of the absence of peace, tolerance, and truth? In other words, would the delirium be perceived, in this artistic logic, as the effect of Agustina’s assimilation of the compulsions of an unredeemable past, in which the country’s original sin, and that of her family, seem to converge obtusely: a female victim of the national predicament. Allegories can be powerful, as well as blinding. But they cannot be “healed” by the narrative repair of blocked memories. What do we do with the allegorical insight? If allegory somehow signals immutability, it cannot, in and of itself, account for this state of affairs. At the immanent aesthetic level, a more complex interpretive challenge remains to be confronted. Imagining with Restrepo that in the destiny of the grandparents, Portulinus and Blanca, lie the origins of omission and denial in the Londoño family, and that Portulinus’s death could have been due to that “mythic original sin” immersed in the violencia period (see 241–2), one understands the digressions that the novel takes into the grandfather’s anecdotal world. According to Gabriela Polit, “The story of Agustina’s grandparents is a series of scenes that echo the stories of old Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude.”16 Shot through with a mythic air, here we find an overlapping of family history and political past inherent in the spatial referents, both of which converge in Sofi’s recalling the sexual dilemma as the nucleus of intolerance and violence. It starts with her mother Eugenia’s horror of her own sexuality, from where ensues a compulsion to censure and regulate the sexual lives of others . . . an attitude that she shared with Carlos Vicente [Agustina’s father], in this shady inclination the two met, and this was the pillar of authority as much for the one as for the other . . . as if by hereditary

Gabriela Polit holds that in this novelistic section, Restrepo attempts to construct the “archive,” the archival core of her novel by appealing to both the Colombian literary tradition and to a mythical original sin: the violencia years. In “Sicarios . . . ” , 139. 15 Forrest Hylton resumes: “La Violencia (1946–57) was a mix of official terror, partisan sectarianism, and scorched earth policy that resulted from the crisis of the coffee republic, the weakness of the central state, and the contest over property rights. It was distinguished by the concentrated terror used to suppress radical-popular politics and confine rising racial/ethnic and class conflict within bipartisan channels” (Evil Hour in Colombia, 39). 16 Gabriela Polit. 139. 14

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apprenticeship they knew that whoever controls the sexuality of the rest of the tribe gets to rule . . . It’s a kind of force more powerful than anything else . . . interpreting the sexual lives of people as a personal insult must be an ancestral characteristic of the families of Bogotá . . . the heart of pain dwells there, a pain that is inherited, that multiplies, that is transmitted . . . (245–6).

On a comparative note, the sexual psychosis that is inherent as “an ancestral characteristics” (246) in the ontological somatology of Colombia’s aristocratic race, accounts for the programmatic, although highly sublimated rage that energizes Fernando Vallejo’s novel La virgen de los sicarios. In Restrepo’s novel, however, when an explanatory drive starts to surface, the delirio ceases to be addressed as a complex issue and turns an episode awaiting resolution. Aunt Sofi, speaking of the “vertebral column” of the family’s psychosis needs Aguilar’s rhetorical reassurance: “I don’t know if you understand what I’m referring to, Aguilar.” “Of course I understand,” said Aguilar. “If I didn’t understand this, I wouldn’t be able to decipher this country,” (sic) (245). All in all, to decipher Agustina, the husband has to decipher the “country.” Polit says it that way: “In Restrepo’s novel, feminine delirium is a manifestation that confronts power . . . This suggestive proposal, however, negates itself the moment that the author tells us the history and origin of this delirium and converts it into an object of reason.”17 The inner logic of the novel points from abjection to “objectification.” Revealingly, Delirio conveys an anachronistic design. It purports a certain narrative avant-gardism and heteroglossic dissonance; however, when confronting the dialectics of explanation and containment, it opts for making things clear; and as though this were not enough, at the end, Agustina will send out to her husband Aguilar a positive sign for melodramatic re-encounter. We are left with a kind of recuperated peace and love between the upper-class ex-centress and the debauched yet “rehabilitated” literature professor, which is supposed to insinuate a space of tolerance, as well, in which characters like the homosexual Bichi can find a legitimate home. “Colombia’s Agustinas continue seeking the aid of the Aguilars, which enables moments of recognition and re-encounter with the Bichis that intolerance had expulsed from the country” (Polit, 140). The main difference between Delirio and La Virgen de los sicarios becomes pertinent at this point. The moral Janus face and extreme sexual intolerance, paired with opportunism of Colombia’s aristocratic elite, is addressed by both Restrepo and Vallejo. Vallejo’s aesthetic extremism pushes imagination beyond the possibility of a moral integrity contract between the established classes. Restrepo, in turn, seems to be longing for exactly that. So what, in the end, is the actual enigma of the Delirium’ s delirium, remaining in the dark? It is not uncommon among audatious artists that they open a Pandora’s box and fail in their attempt to close it again. Restrepo’s healing narrative is unable to come across an affective matrix that resounds in Agustina’s situation. It is what we call Agustina’s hypothetic role as a female pharmakos, a scapegoat, a creature who, like her brother Bichi, her family establishment needs to “sacrifice,” in order to maintain a moral contract based on denial, and hence violence. Only from here can we become aware of the existent, subcutaneous relationship between Ibid., 141. “Augustina’s delirium loses symbolic force when the discourse that contains it gives way to an explanatory logic” (Polit, 139).

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dissociation, on Agustina’s side, and violent projection on the side of her mother and elder brother. At stake is the kind of “delirium,” that can arise when the force of dissociation from the “real world” (the symbolic order as a sickening power) grates against opposite forces of reality simulation, in which cynicism and demagogy take the lead. That is, the hidden conflict is actually manifest on the affective plane: Agustina’s forces of distancing and adivination are exhausted by the energies of projection that her mother and elder brother generate from every fold of daily existence. As an effective means of self-protection, dissociation cannot cope, in this case, with the poison—the evil pharmakon— of olympic family guilt when it is exteriorized and transferred. For this kind of poison is transmitted across hidden spheres. Agustina the illuminated “queer,” a master of dissociation, has always been obsessed with purifying rituals without knowing why. The novel’s voices speak of lies—the absence of truth accounting for the family’s poisoning. Purification, however, cannot work in the service of the abstract category of truth. When guilt, unassumed by the responsible parties of domination, is being projected onto others, both silently and aggressively, how can the targets of projection—the “pharmakoi”— resist or fight back? This is the deeper and unresolved question that lingers in the novel’s underground. There are forms of intoxication, both physiologically and in the social psyche that are difficult to combat by methods of purification. Explanation, laying out the historical as the anecdotal referents of disavowed memories, as was practiced in the healing attempts by the husband Aguilar and Aunt Sofi, would be a rationalized form of “purification.” Yet guilt lies beneath the referential world, lingering at the crossroads of soma, affect, and immanent histories. If projection functions as an aggressive mechanism of intoxication, “healing” might have to work, for example, on the plane of either immanence or an existential mysticism, while the happy ending seems merely to postpone the actual problem. Such is the dramatic issue, or the epistemic question, that makes us hold our breath while we read Laura Restrepo’s Delirio. So one might visualize, as well, another scenario, in which the symbolism of bowls of purifying water adorning the private space, and the historicizing pact between the reponsible husband and the loving aunt, would be rather helpless against the visceral matrix of terror, ingrained in a sphere of Colombian moral and political culture.

Toward an ecological aesthetics, postoptimistic: Plasma (Guadalupe Santa Cruz) Something in her makes you let down your guard, distracts your attention, erases the tracks (Plasma).

Plasma (2005), by Chilean author Guadalupe Santa Cruz, is an austere masterpiece, an outstanding text of “minor literature” when viewed in a Deleuzian light.18 Scarcely known in the academy, the novel has an unecstatic intensity that, by enabling a sense See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

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of poetic intoxication, contrasts with the very meaning of the word “drugs.”19 This term does, however, lend the narrative its visible design, that of a detective story. At its beginning, we see a tableau of dispersed papers, filthy, and in runny ink: “Greasy waste sheets used like composition paper, the backs of tickets, napkins, stained, . . . unnumbered pages, pages and pages of loose paragraphs, the margins of magazine pages scribbled in the same writing, the same feeble and rapid writing . . . ” (Plasma, 9). These writings conform the “dossier” of Rita Rubilar, a woman whom the police suspect to be dealing in drugs.20 Bruno, the detective, receives the order from his superior to find, between and behind the scribbled letters the drugs themselves, the “estupefacientes.” Decipher the texts! Since there is no paperwork regarding Rita’s antecedents and biography, Bruno learns that the “tracks are offered, most likely, in the writings that she abandons everywhere.” (Plasma, 11) Another “character,” an impersonal one, emerges in italics, “la Cordillera.” But who speaks when La Cordillera emerges through images, and broken surfaces? The Cordillera is cracked into its faults at this hour, it splinters in shadow, it becomes tinder and ferocious. Its grayish-purple grooves are avalanches of dryness between the pallid terraces, lost monuments of sand holding up the rough elevation of the slopes. No, no, it’s not about climbing them or falling down them, but rather of resting the body that flees through one’s eye across this indifferent medium . . . (9).

La Cordillera is a text, as well; it is, at the same time, an entity that reverberates, indifferently, as it simultaneously speaks through and with a voice in first-person narration. Is it Rita’s? Is there a relationship between the notes that Rita carelessly leaves behind and her environment? Writing as movement, cryptically embedded in the geographic–atmospheric presence of the Cordillera . . . Bruno leaves the city, Siago [Santiago], and travels northward, heading to the town of Fajes, located in one of the many folds of the Andes mountains. Fajes is inhabited by Rita’s world. Why Rita’s world, and not just Rita? Driven by other questions, Bruno cannot grasp the dimensions of this impression. He carries Rita’s notes, papers that the police collected in several places in the village. A fragmentary, profane “art,” agency of transference between energetic-as-sensorial awareness and the tremendousness of a surrounding nature, an unromantic, yet inebriating poetry. Where did the energy of these writings come from? Was it not actually due to the woman’s being stoned? This seems to be clear, at least for the police. The detective begins to immerse himself in the scribblings—there he would find the right track, as per his superior’s order. Guadalupe Santa Cruz has opted for a heterogeneous work; her minimalist, 157-page long novel combines several modes of style and different voices, both immediate and latent, together with a variety of narrative forms. Moreover, a distinction between poetic writing and a profound “documentary” sense for a region and its people would be difficult to make. Geographically, the novel speaks from Chile’s Norte Grande, bordering on Bolivia and Peru, home to Aymara populations and inhabitants of the Atacama areas. A self-reflective playfulness, postmodern as it might be, is not the matter Guadalupe Santa Cruz, Plasma, Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2005, 9. See ibid., 10.

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at hand. The text is intuitive and consciously figurative, offering an afecto-cartography called “Plasma,” from whence a precarious spirit emanates. Rita, whose closeness to a heightened or different consciousness can be associated with the delirium of Restrepo’s heroine, comes from another world than that of Agustina, a noncosmopolitan universe. The book’s chapters bear the names “La Cordillera de Fajes,” “La Cordillera de Caica,” “La Cordillera de Quispe,” “La Cordillera de la Sal,” and “La Cordillera de Bernal Bello;” still, there is no geographic code to this sort of territory. Rather, Bruno, whose task is to find clues in Rita’s village Fajes, sinks into perceptions of . . . a great desertic area with a “slick” that is not an oasis . . . a dried-out river . . . “ravines related to Rita Rubilar, since ravines hold suspicions” (10), concealing their humidity in the intermediate gulches . . ., “carrying seeds soaked in moist, and contamination all over.” In the heart of the aridity, the chasms generate rain, “they make the soil speak.” Ravines are oblique, they “attract strangers, wreathing clandestine trails . . . people from the border” (ibid.) They all are, apparently, related with Rita, allowing an indigenous immanence to resonate: Chiya, Dopque, Misca, Pasama, Vilica, Aspa, Caripi. . . . a zone were rules and taxes are suspended, Bruno thinks, and suddenly the aroma of wild fruits abounds. Then, “not printed within any scale but insisted upon” in the police dossier, there is a fugitive shadow escaping the administrative projections: “the floating population of Fajes, the incommensurable outlanders (afuerinos) and their dead freight” (10–11). The image combines a harsh and overbearing geographic formation, suspicious soils, contaminated “all over,” and “people from the border.” The contamination is not metaphoric, as the reader will see. A flair of lyrical omniscience permeates the detective’s perception; it will accompany the slow undermining of the man’s consciousness, emerging from a twofold female agency—that of Rita Rubilar and, from a slight distance, that of the writer Santa Cruz. Bruno’s first-person voice muses about the lack of clues, a situation that starts nurturing his imminent desires. First, the detective lacks consistent information from his superiors, so any available expedient contradicts the previous one. Rita’s notes, left abandoned in diverse places of the environment, are irregular, with altered letters, as they come scripted in an “album of disposables.” “An urgent calligraphy, persecuted by time, saying slow and useless things” (11). Bruno, when dislocated and transferred into the Cordillera region del Norte Grande, faces a different world from that of the city of Siago, familiar as “enormous luminous board,” factory of electric blood (13). “Electric blood,” one of the text’s “ecological” oxymora, is a chief factor of the networking society to which Bruno was accustomed, even physiologically attached. Computers and cell phones, prime devices of utility, had become his “factish gods” of existence.21 Being extensions of the body only dissimulated their actual power: they created a sort of hyperphysiological landscape, remaking space and redefining life by virtue of a new commonality—the joint flow of neuronal and artificially encoded energies of all “connected” people. The world of “electric blood” conforms the background against which the contours of other bondages and exchanges, both fleeting and dense, are modeled. Reading the novel, one senses that there was a portent, slowly pulsating, perhaps a silent illness, or a siege . . . and, at the same time, a flow of embodied imagination carrying a different energy—Rita’s For a pointed discussion of this notion, see Bruno Latour. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.

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moving beyond “Self ”-understood things. If there is a deeper contention that can be associated with the novel, it unfolds, perhaps, at the level of configurations. “Plasma” is a fluid part of blood, a liquid sustainment; it is also a figurative formation, a “Gebilde” of connecting shapes, and it therefore provides the metaphor for an “ecological form.” There is latent tension, lingering behind the images of tectonic surfaces, which the text conveys—an intermingling and wrestling of embodying substances, and movements of bodies, or even a conflict between matrixes, so to speak. In other words, “plasma” connects nonindividual sites of embodiment. One of Rita’s notes says: “I inhale the powder, tiny pieces of cordillera, fossils that are activated in contact with my wet tongue and my blood. I’m its torrent, its course. I’m not afraid of that rocky dryness, I don’t fear its cutting splendor” (13). Here emerges a neurophysiological metaphor of the body’s intoxication by an environment that is not premised on an idea of passive exteriority. The detective, sitting in the airplane where his displacement commences, a “fish with various eyes, a metallic fly” (ibid.) reports, “I underline the word inhale, the noun little dust.” Bruno overlooks what the “little extracts of the cordillera, fósiles” are about: they have nothing to do with biochemical drugs. And they are not about “mental health,” in the modern medicinal sense. Rather, these extracts connect body– mind–matter with a sustaining force for whose understanding the term “hallucination” does not suffice. The status of the cordillera insinuates a before- and in-time, something that unfolds and refracts across thousands of years, or in the course of a second, but which is now digesting civilization’s waste. Later in the text, the man will say, “I don’t know what Rita is addicted to,” while he slowly becomes addicted to Rita (88). Both, “addiction” and “plasma” are contested issues, seemingly easy to grasp and yet fugitive notions that confound the conscious search of the knowing, and controlling subject. At the end, after a long nomadic venture, in which Rita and her partner are followed by the detective whom they will rescue when he is about to die, she is imprisoned in Siago, to be condemned on a trumped-up charge. In order to establish a narrative of her felony, photos showing the ravine and wild seeds are used in combination with notes, in which Bruno speaks of the intoxicating power that Rita Rubilar had exerted on him. The discourse of the tribunal, functionalizing information against its context, does not allow Rita’s language: “The advocates say that . . . it wasn’t my job to give information to the court, that I took on inappropriate attributes . . .” (145–6). Who, then, is Rita? Bruno the detective, when arriving in Fajes, is taken in by the woman’s presence. His first-person ego seems still intact when he realizes that Rita is everywhere. “I saw her, here and there . . . without apparent direction of her movements . . . mimetized with the landscape” (17). It would not be easy to surprise her, since she confuses the onlooker. Her itineraries vary, her moving through space resembles a flow, her posture is inclined slightly forward: no terrain presents an obstacle for this woman. With her indolent steps, Rita “paves the earthen streets and sidewalks” (18), paratactically inhabiting the village, lacking the purposefulness of the ordinary citizen. Rita’s way of walking her environment is as diffuse and incongruent as the notes that she leaves on disposable paper sheets. “I walk after that rarity,” writes Bruno in his diary, after a person who is a natural dissimulation, not even possessing a proper home.

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The entire tableau might sound a bit magico-realist, until the novel, the afecto-cartography, starts to reveal its charges of an ecological and bio-economic threat. Silent tension and ongoing contention gravitate around something too big to be named: the remaking of the space of the living, embracing all living beings, and including inorganic matter. Here emerges a new type of existentialist drama without dramatic plot, or so to speak a consciously misconstrued one. Rita, in her natural wandering across the desolate village space, “flows into the Fábrica as if that were not her place, her work routine, then she abandons it in the same way, without any apparent marks of her working day, her work routine of the shifts, of the rhythms” (18). This means Rita is actually two persons—she belongs to an unskilled female workforce of the globalized periphery, and she is part of an eccentric, antineurotic, and harsh world called the Cordillera. Suddenly Fajes, that remote place uplifted to a transnational, decentralized production site, has uncovered its “reason for being,” its predicament. What surfaces, as if from nowhere, is a glass-and-steel complex with large production and assembly lines (34), connected to the outside world by a railroad track, a mountain road, and of course electronic networks. The surroundings are marked by chasms that are not geological; from the ground, covered with “toxic grains,” the “strange light of a screen that has been turned off ” emanates—it envelopes Bruno in a shining blindness, overlaid with an air that vibrates under “metallic radiation,” (41). This village is not a village; it is turned into a town the wrong way. There is a saying that the Factory is a packaging company. Bruno, following Rita into her environment after obtaining a false labor contract, observes her amidst the mass of female workers. He also perceives the particulars of this business without getting its “story.” Standing in a production line when an error occurs, Bruno’s hands are suddenly tainted by a viscose substance of a dark scarlet color, and he asks his neighbor if this was “real jelly,” and the answer is, “No, Caballero, it is plasma” (39–40). The story of the Fabrica is about what only few Latin American readers would not be able to deduce; it is written from invisible hands of market corporativism, within a framework that is much more extensive than the Andes. In the Fabrica, there are transportation and assembly belts, but also laboratories and workshops. Some products circulate visibly on the conveyor belts, while others, “more delicate,” are transported by technicians on little trolleys, or trays to the “confidence units.” This is not where Rita works. But the detective has gotten close to that which strict vigilance keeps intruders away from: chemical laboratory procedures with jelly like substances that are bottled and packaged and the presence of strange “larvas” (37). In a word, at issue is the preparation of an elaborated drug, although the simple story is that Rita is making “boxes for butterfly larvas, destined for exportation” (36). We will address the labor scenario in a moment. This must be done from the premise of difference. Rita is a decentering presence. Her behavior in the Fabrica is hieratic, and so she has a kind of immunity to the regime of suspicion and regulation that presses on the female labor force. At this point, her “dissociation” acquires a complex and diffuse meaning—it helps her to be unaffected by suspicious male managerialism; behind this shield, it allows her a basic integrity as a person, as a creature whose transgressive leaning has taken on a natural spin. Rita Rubilar suddenly resembles a metaphorical

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being, whose self-protective behavior reminds us of the environment’s patience vis-àvis its ongoing depletion. Calculated self-protection is not the issue here. Rather, this strange female subject becomes an ethical person. This poses the problem of a woman’s self-protection, not as a learned art of tricking society, but as a particular mode of being-in-the-world, in other words, as an ecological problem. This aspect signals the strength and, even more so, the fragility of such “nature.” Displacement from oppression is not its contestation, and Rita’s body remains, in Bruno’s eyes, a moving target; but displacement does allow for a stance beyond the rational double bind, from where the abuse of human and ecological life can be distinguished, but without assuming an autonomous and healthy state. In search of the dope that he expects Rita to be “transiting,” Bruno observes every move she makes in the Fabrica. His account is graphic: Not only have I regularly inspected the different artefacts in the restroom, removing the covers of the toilet and water tank, but I’ve also manipulated the hand dryer, the soap dispenser, and the toilet paper looking for hidden packages. Although up to now I’ve only collected new manuscripts in Rita’s handwriting, abandoned without pretence on the different surfaces in the restroom . . . (36).

The male inspection of the women’s restroom,“naturally” framed in an autobiographical mode, is evocative of the new rules of economic globalization in decentralized production sites. The chronically detrimental working conditions of low-skilled female workers in the regions of the former third world include sophisticated techniques of biological and corporeal vigilance. A major issue is identified by Melissa W. Wright in her book, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. Thus we find Chile’s remodeled rural environment in proximity with the post-NAFTA landscapes covering the southern zones of the Mexican–United States border, especially the thousands of maquiladora factories. From one angle, it seems that Santa Cruz has set her heroine in conscious contrast with the female victims of both physical and emotional wasting away (in the assembly factories) and brutal violence (in the surrounding semi-urban environments) that the name of Ciudad Juárez has become so strongly associated with. Her protagonist seems to hold back and sidestep the wearing out of the workforce, as well as the environment caused by one type of neoliberal assembly and production company, massively distributed across the globe. Rita’s world would show us another visceral atmosphere, not that of the dehumanized women from Santa Teresa, thematized in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (2004). However, as we will discuss in the next chapter, there is an implicit dialogue between the works of the two Chilean writers. Plasma and 2666, published in almost in the same year share a figurative, and political denominator that criticism has not yet addressed. These imaginaries explore a heuristic possibility: the revival of the ancient pharmakos in and through the body of the female scapegoat—women’s exposure to anachronistic and atrotious practices of violence in the contemporary climate of the Global South. Bringing back to light the etymologico-conceptual relationship between pharmakon and pharmakos, which we outlined in Chapter 1, and looking into the modern, and global conflicts about narcotics, these novels foreground new ways of looking at a contested field. They can

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open up our perceptions to an elementary truth: in the shifting history of the West, when drugs were considered to be either straightforwardly beneficial to health or poisonous, or occupying a grey middle ground, in most cases economic, political, and cultural interests have been at issue. Unmasking reality can be a matter of asking simple questions, together with some explorative imagination. And there is one question that must be asked in the most concrete manner possible: when a pharmakon or a person associated with certain pharmaka is turned into a pharmakos, when does this happen, why and where and by whom is this “transaction” carried out? This illuminating thread that contemporary narcoepics help us perceive, turns Plasma and 2666 into ethical works, that are among the most advanced examples of contemporay art. In Plasma, after scrutinizing Rita’s work environment, the detective realizes: “I’ve been working for uncountable months in the Fábrica, observing a women I still don’t know, without finding any indication that proves drug trafficking” (43). But this insight does not matter anymore in the eyes of a legal apparatus that requires guilty people to come from among those suspicious populations that inhabit the margins of decent language, hygienic norms, convenient morality, and proper (urban) space. Rita’s final condemnation by a tribunal in Siago is due to strategic alliances, between a globalized corporativism and the law. This becomes pertinent when we see Rita sharing prison space with other women, all of whom are driven by a particular concern: Cirila, water, Elisa, light, La Inmueble communal earth, and Vilka, writing. A female group formed around the concern for existential notions, related to collective traditions in the use of nature and its resources. Water is the central issue. Cirila, who defends the natural sources of water as a common good while lacking education and modern registration as a specialist is accused of “water robbery.” The accusatory argument is presented from the standpoint of privatization, which sets the resources aside for use by transnational mining companies. Rita, when the charge of drug trafficking is dropped due to a lack of evidence, is accused of killing the detective Bruno, who had eventually died of exhaustion during his long persecutory trek across the northern Cordillera. As we proceed, we must consider this trek. In Fajes, Rita lives in an old house, together with her parents and other renters. There Benedicto, her father, who complains about it to Bruno, sees Rita’s work in the Fabrica as her having abandoned the family rules, based on paternalist sexual contract.22 Rita does not prepare lunch, nor care for the chickens, nor does she stay at home to take care of the housekeeping. “Bad woman, always in the street, chasing men. She’s not virtuous, Rita. It doesn’t work, she doesn’t know what world she’s living in . . . Born bad, born bad,” continues the father’s litany (46). Worst of all, says Benedicto, Rita would not accept her father’s speaking on her behalf; even though she is not terse, but because she does not know how to “respond with an answer” (47). She speaks but does not answer. Being a “useless” woman, she gives things a twist leaving the father “in bad standing.” Rita leaves her father “mal parado” in a double sense, by speaking without listening, and by not respecting the relationship between a woman and a home. Who is Efraín, by On the “marriage contract,” see Carole Pateman. The Sexual Contract, 154 ff.

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the way? asks Bruno. He is the “enlister who is always hanging around with Rita,” someone, says the father, who recruits men as workers for offices, and “workshops” (46). Is not he courting Rita? “The Rita is useless . . . ” On the same day, in the shabby restaurant El Pájaro Azul, Bruno overhears Rita say, “we are going to leave” (50), and here “La Cordillera de Caica” begins (53). For Rita, Efraín “is an artisan, is a master craftsman,” and he is a drummer. When both abandon the village, are they heading to the “Fiesta de Cuyo” taking place many miles from Fajes? Something alike speaks from Rita’s immediate notes that are guided by the drums of a band: “The heart is pulled along by the beating on the drumskin” (55). This is why, paradoxically, there cannot be a destiny. The drums anticipate an energetic journey led by a dance of molecules in which bodies, surfaces, shape and color join, vibrations that Bruno’s nervous system cannot but register with irritation. The drums also mark Rita’s sexual perception of vast and arid nature, her embodying a particular space-time, her excitement and intoxication without drug use. This sand is particles fallen from the notes, sand full of drums that are the immensity of our bodies echoing across the pampa. The sand is my musical frenzy, the wind instrument that raises me up, that makes my sex wriggle and rubs it to the explosion of reds pulled across this vastness (55).

With the beat Rita’s anxiety pulsates, as well: “I’m afraid for the water that doesn’t run, for the dry rivers and their rocks stranded in mid stream, I’m afraid for the shadow . . . ” (ibid.). With the drought, the world loses its shadows, and its “green sound,” but as long as the drums persist there is a sensual knowing, a vibration that places the body above the “ego,” a kind of hope sustained by healthy intoxication. From ravine to ravine, from one green to another the detective follows on Rita’s and Efraín’s tracks, as he notes: “I had a dog’s legs and a dog’s nose in order to step on their heels in those inhospitable wanderings” (57). In this scenario, the pathological assumption is turned on Bruno himself. Not only has the detective become a doglike being; as a spy he is finally unable to survive when this condition takes him beyond the citizens’ secure terrain. For the first time in his life, the scarcety of water becomes his problem. In Cuyo, a no-place, a village of “arneros,” everything resembles collectors, sieves, absorbers, especially for water (59). A voice in first-person plural is heard, behind which Bruno’s first-person seems to fade away. Three days of partying begins. Dancers and musicians are possessed, as though an all-mighty had set them in motion, as if their bodies had consumed hallucinogens to erase their fatigue. “All the town was a soul in sorrow,” repeating without “knowing” the same gestures thousands of times, transported into collective pulsation by the arid, untuned sound of the flutes (60). And the narrative “we” becomes a moment of alterity in Bruno’s perception of the world. We only talked about the towns that had disappeared because their waters had been drained by mining, of the villages buried beneath the waters of the mining dam, of the shortages of water in Cuyo in order to supply the miners, of the allotments of water for the fields after the mines have been supplied, of the diameter of the

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tubing in the Quelamí Valley, in Corral Quemado, in Aguas Negras, in Chumata, always smaller than the diameter of the aqueduct that crossed the mountains in the direction of the mines. The water canals dried up and the springs stopped bubbling, the ponds didn’t fill completely. In parts of the desert cracked by the drought you could hear the murmur of water running within the hard rubber aqueduct, they said. With moist eyes they heard this noise, their encapsulated dream in which their green oases were reduced and drained, their ancient grapevines, the plantings of corn, of bran, of quinua, of papaya trees jostled and disappeared. Water was returned to them like merchandise in the tank trucks that went from town to town, at the price of gold (63–4).

From the perspective of a certain “cruel optimism,” that is, a stubborn “attachment to conventional good-life fantasies”23 it might be hard to understand the extent to which the word “water” has begun to acquire, in both rural and urban Latin America today an alarming, even an “utopian,” sound. Another narrative that puts viewers in the throes of this existential drama is Alex Rivera’s movie Sleep Dealer (2008), presenting Mexico’s near future as a “brave new world” where high-technology allows the exploitation, across large distances, of a peripheral workforce, without migrants having to cross the border northward anymore. Plasma is not a counter-utopia, but rather a tale obsessed with singular bodies and spaces, and the ways language generates their existence; it pictures the theme of water from the meaning of “plasma” as it points to the universal component of blood, condensing experience as “movement, exchange, and fluidity, together with the attempt of reigning institutions to turn those ‘universal fluids’ into lucrative assets.”24 After roaming for weeks across the territories of El Norte Grande and through an equally vast vocabulary of Chilean regionalisms, Bruno, the detective, is close to dying of thirst. He has himself become drugged, due to the implacable rays of the sun, the energy charge of the desert soil and mountains, his instinctive chewing of coca and “cebil” leaves, and his madness caused by Rita’s unbearable, inexplicable pleroma,25 which has begun to produce a growing desire toward the woman. Hallucinating,26 Bruno senses the proximity of voices: “some birds were talking to me” (68). It is Rita and Efraín who have found him. “Blue. Blue. Blue. It entered me through my eye. . . . It entered my through my eye, totally exposed in spite of my eyelids, it entered me through my nose, I inhaled blue, I listened to blue in the heights, my orifices waiting” (70). When Rita eventually discovers the detective’s written notes, she is upset not about the compromising fact as such, but about her father’s words that appear “recorded” as those of a “witness.” In his mindless state, Bruno overhears how Rita rejects Benedicto’s accusations by indirectly calling her father to account for his double morality: “Does he think I did not see . . . how they tortured . . ., the injustices that he ignored in the village?” Silent, and sometimes violent submission to the order of things in a globalized Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism, 1–2. Guadalupe Santa Cruz. Communication to the author, April 16, 2011. 25 See the usage of the term in Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, 16. 26 “The skies flow and the cove is a thread of water where strange figures of animals quenching their thirst can be seen, nursing at milky aureolas, urinating translucid and fertile liquids” (Plasma, 68). 23 24

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locality like Fajes has not only harmed women; it affects children and animals, and it has victimized the environment. Rita, in turn, becomes involved in a sexual relationship with Efraín without standing in a “social contract” to him. The detective learns that Rita and Efraín saved his life. Bruno’s voice, previously the first-person guiding instance of the text, repeatedly shifts to “we.” We were three, from place to place . . . We crossed plains and low hills, . . ., small oases, trading music for food or a roof when, after noticing goats or burros grazing among the peaks, surfaced in the vastness a human settlement. We lay down next to stone walls or between the walls of abandoned ruins. Outside the towns, first the dogs appeared, then the garbage scattered by the mongrels, rusty pushcarts without wheels, the insides of mattresses, strips of plastic and rubber, car batteries and old-fashioned military boots. I threw the uncharged mobile phone that was a weight in my backpack toward one of these piles (78–9).

Spaces of “commonized” poverty and yet nonplaces, testify against their will to the historicist arrogance of modernizing discourse. There is no track of time and visions of water have populated the no-man’s land of the imagination. In Quispe, a harbor town, Bruno, Rita y Efraín find themselves exposed to the other extreme of the fluid element, a space where the winds of the Cordillera and the Pacific embrace and writhe (83). I know that I’m facing a throat of water that can swallow us in its somber quietness. They are thousands of horses of indigo-colored blood, disposed to lift themselves up with their muzzles snorting foam, they are currents that, when they combine, will knot together in a single direction, lights of the darkness that, its blindness awakened, would trample one another to spy further on . . . It’s not a glass of milk. It is the recipient of the tsunamis (88).

Bruno has become a farce of himself, “a pleasing deformation girds itself around this mask of me” (84). “Being ‘esperpentos’ was the transition for becoming other,” words that allude to the carnival that has just started to permeate this coastal zone. “Being another was the antechamber for being many . . . Everything mixed up with everything” (86), and Bruno begins a sexual encounter with Rita as if he were under the force of a tectonic event. The detective’s language has ceased to be his own, but at the edge of self-understood being, it has become infinitely more intense. It has mutated into a glossolalic enunciatory flow, almost unmediated by instrumental purpose and rational balance. Throwing away the cell phone meant getting rid of the last anchor that could attach Bruno to the world’s coordinates, previously confirmed in his notes as they were dictated by the requirements of the “law.” In the meantime, “I write without a pencil. I dictate the words to the rocky wall” (73). There is no world of life anymore which could lend the man an unwritten yet subjectively experienced attachment, a state that becomes manifest in his body under erosion. The desire to “understand” the phenomen called Rita is now absorbed by an unnamable addiction, beyond any conceivable substance that could produce addictedness. It generates a lethal fear in Bruno.

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“Where were we marching and why? We walked with the weight of chains on our feet” (90, 91). There is solidarity among the three people, Rita, Efraín, and the detective, in order to calm the hunger, but there is also an abyss seperating them. “We didn’t talk the hatred” (92). Within an impossible menage-à-trois Bruno feels hollowed out, pulverized. When Efraín made a fire on the beach, the image of plasma turns abrasive, drawing the detective in as if into a vortex. My carousel of fear began again, it was melting the things that hurt me. Derailed cross-ties, dancing an alien son. Rails turned into scrap metal at the door of the tall smelter, mixed with faucets, spigots, water taps, unused containers, metallic bundles of pieces of wrecked car, bearings, crankshafts, airplane wings . . . in a deafening noise of metallic scraping, of knocking, of sonorous teeth of iron, of rattling, all destined to be reduced, to be melted and thwart my journey . . . Spinning around in a basin while the gigantic spoon dissolved the motors, the last trace, the end of the propulsion which I was going to witness, drinking a black coffee (91–2).

The apocalyptic image still carries a laconic tone. Voices, nonidentifiable voices, carry insults, throwing into the detective’s face “everything that I still had to know.” These are voices that conjure up the repressed past of the country—chains, slaves, murders. The trip had led them into dark regions. Abandoned cemeteries at the beach testify to a collective subconscious populated by massacres and wars. This coast, metonymic topos and exhausting presence is also the non-place of Rita’s past, the place where she and her mother were violated during the war time.27

While Bruno is inhabited by other voices, he realizes that writing had been his true desire, but it was buried by his fabrication of reports about other peoples’ “delincuencies.” This is the moment that his first-person voice fades away. From chapter three to chapter four, the narration becomes an immanent dialogue between the woman and the detective, with Rita assuming the narrative lead. Her voice is removed from the sections written in italics (as read by Bruno), and turned into the “regular” instance of the discourse. “Swallow your solitude, Bruno. Rita and Efrain talk as if you weren’t present . . . they make love in your apparent absence as if you had never crossed their lives” (108). Rita talks to Bruno until he cannot hear her anymore (“Are you listening to me, Bruno? Bruno?”) Bruno’s death signals Rita’s taking over the narrative agency, a form of “plasmatic” transubstantiation, so to speak. As Rita resumes her return to their place of departure, she names her own fatum: “We didn’t have to do it and we did it; we went back to Fajes, we returned with the corpse over our shoulder” (115). In Fajes, a delegation of legal persons from Siago is already waiting for them. But worst of all, there is Rita’s father Benedicto “with his head uncovered, as if he were at a funeral, clutching his hat with a trembling hand” (117). Rita feels herself being hand-cuffed and pushed toward a gray van. In a way that is evocative of Kafka’s The Trial, Rita’s first-person voice takes the novel to its end; and it generates a remarkable textual hybrid. On the one hand, a self-reflective mode emerges that is not, however, “narcissistic.”28 Rita, the unschooled woman who Lisa Quaas. Review of Plasma. University of Freiburg. February, 2012, 3–4.

27

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lived as if she were part of a larger aleatoric stream, writing down poetic messages on the waste papers obtained from everyday space, starts to narrate what she experiences in prison and how she feels about it. At the same time, and after months of incessant attacks on her “queerness,” her entire presence remains a mise en abyme, as it rises against the hyperformalized, speech-saturated environment of the courtroom. In contrast, but also in conjunction with the Fábrica, the local site of globalized, low-skilled labor in La Cordillera de Fajes, another spatial metaphor surfaces, now referring to the Cordillera de Bernal Bello that surrounds the capital Siago— La Farmacia, the Pharmacy. Rita’s trajectory, at the structural level, a sphere that she kept neutralizing and unsettling by her transgressive mode of being leads from the Fábrica to the Farmacia. It is this other “company” that offers to act in support of the woman’s exoneration before the law, provided that she gives up her stubbornness. The syntax becomes passive and urgent (“They pushed me down on the back seat [of the car] with a slap, they blindfolded me,” 121); and violence turns into a linguistic reality that disturbs Rita’s energetic way of being herself. In other words, violence inflicted by physical means on her body is not what unbalances her being; it is the language of the police and interrogators that causes injurious effects. “ . . . Questioning, questioning, crushing with questions, crushing me completely with the questioning, until I don’t understand, until I don’t listen to the questions . . . knife voices, hammer voices, drill voices, broken glass voices . . . ” (ibid.). A significant semantic shift is implied. Some judicial speech can be divided between “perlocutionary” speech (speech that is not itself the effect or is not a violent utterance as such) and “illocutionary” speech (it has immediate injurious effects, for example, “hate speech”).29 In Rita’s perception, this distinction does not apply. The inquisitive interpellations and cross-questionings that she is peppered with are themselves perceived as injurious, and “to the blows of questions they separate the words that I receive” (122). Narco-theque, psycho-pill, anesthetic, elixir-pharmacy, pharmacopoeia, dosage indicators, substitutes, they ring, they ring, the words ring like bells, they clash one with the other until they die, they are bleeding me out and I don’t understand, they don’t refer to me, they are words pronounced by another needy tongue that shoots in my name at the words, that takes revenge by thrashing the words, it’s torturing them to make them die, it’s hollowed them out and it can drive me crazy listening to them like this . . . narcotic, pharmo-psychotropic, barbituo-coexcipient, antidote-magistral (ibid.).

While the syntactic and semantic components of the interrogation are instrumentalized in order to categorize Rita’s past within protocols of drug use and narcotics trade, the interviews take on a ritualistic spin. Religion is paradoxically at stake, not in the sense of canonized belief, but as a practice of interpellation that is supposed to “clear” the mind of the addressed person. This clearing of the mind presupposes an By “narcissistic” we alude to Linda Hutcheon’s describing a narrative operation: “a work is apt to produce within itself a dramatized mirror of its own narrative or linguistic principles” (Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, 17–18). 29 See Judith Butler’s reflection in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 39. 28

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intoxicating intensity in its own right, like obsessive prayer, a siege of the interrogated consciousness by means of loud, repetitive, hypercodified, and cumulative speech, a practice that unleashes a substantial amount of energy and propels it in a specific direction, energies intensified by the sheer number of male bodies surrounding Rita’s deterritorialized creature. In order to “unravel wound after wound,” Rita returns to her “antiquity of words” (122), which is neither a recovery of something pure nor a noncontaminated “meaning.” She simply turns language into an aleatory instance again, so that it can resonate, together with a different type of energy, while not ruling out the languages of body and the environment with specialized codes and forms of intelligibility. Explanatory language, administered by the rulers, interpreters, and transcribers of codes, is anagrammatically disorganized and thus, in part, reappropriated. When they attacked with the word addiction, I had already trained it. I snatched from them, inside my blindfold, the a, and they loaded their revenge in diction, but the a was mine, and while I had custody of the a, the a would be my alphabet, it was my alphabet, they could not “diccionar,” they could not dictate pain to me, because the a was encrusted on my lips, in the blindfold of my eyelids, a small bruise of alphabet in solidarity with me (123).

Rita’s voice testifies to her victimization, and it simultaneously falls back on passages of catachretic and anagrammatic style, as if taking refuge from the avalanche of prescribed and rhetorically imposed meanings. It is also a way of distracting her fears,30 as she distracts her interrogators to the point that she unbalances the discourse in the courtroom. In the courtroom, Rita is again asked the evil question: “In what world do you live in? I don’t know what defective globe is attributed to me, so that their enormous distrust is put upon my shoulders” (140). There is no “world,” she thinks, there are only paths (caminos). How could Rita be accused of dealing drugs? When she recognizes, among the “witnesses” gathered to testify in her case, people from her hometown, Fajes, she realizes that in the eyes of the others, she had become a mysterious creature, moving in a no-man’s land, while belonging to her family and to the workplace, La Fábrica. But perhaps she was as alien to La Fábrica as to her own parents. People in Fajes, in the presence of this female castaway, were aggressive, provoked by her cunning silence, her shrewd loneliness (143), her visceral otherness, her nomadic immersion in the Cordillera, whose border regions, crossed by seasonal workers, immigrants and dealers, could only belong to those evading the law. Rita is an ethnic figure without indigenous background, and she generates an antipatriarchal air, although her floatingness resists categorization. The papers that Rita had covered with hermetic, lyrical notes, writings that seen through the lens of the law were suspected of containing clues to the narcotics issue, as they seemed to be written by a drugged person. Rita refuses to sign the accusatory documents that she does not understand. “… death appeared to me, seated on an armchair and death was seated there, the mother said to her daughter (who was) death (“le decía a la hija muerte”), she asked why the daughter of her death was so thin, she asked the person of the death, seated person, person comfortable on the armchair, death talked with her daughter, death accepted a question … ” (123–4).

30

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Finally, she is not charged as a narcotics dealer, but from behind the lack of evidence, another charge has come up to replace the first one. She is declared guilty of the murder of detective Bruno Alfonso Cuneo Ton “for not giving assistance in the face of his evident disability” (154), which is contrary to the facts of the matter. In prison, Rita is put with women who had been displaced within and from specific geographies that have been intervened in and mercantilized by foreign interests.31 Around the controversial issue of ecological justice, a new politics of criminalization has emerged. The women with whom Rita shares prison space are emergent personalities “who create a favorable atmosphere for the reorganization of some globalocal zones from the bottom up” (18), resisting the recodification of natural resources to benefit global capital. The law’s special interest in taking these women to account can be explained from a neoliberal logic. At stake are the natural resources that share an age-old communal genealogy that the modern state has made “national properties,” and which global economic “adjustment” turns into privatizable, highly lucrative assets. Water is the biggest concern. Cirila, who defends the natural water resources as a communal good and had launched a legal claim in favor of the irrigation of water-deprived areas, is accused of “water theft.” In its accusatory logic, the charge is made on flexible grounds, so that the guilt of the person can be upheld under different evidential circumstances. Similarly, when because of the lack of evidence the charge of drug trafficking becomes pointless, Rita is accused of having killed the detective Bruno, who had eventually died of exhaustion on his long persecutory treck across the northern Cordillera. According to Áurea Sotomayor, there is a legal subtext in which right and wrong regarding the country’s crucial resources have been preventively updated. Chile’s constitution, rewritten in 1981 during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet contains the so-called Water Code which, by splitting the natural water–earth binomial, allows water to be marketed to the highest bidder and forces the Aymará and Atacameño peoples to emigrate.”32 Isabel María Madaleno uses the term “The Geopolitics of Thirst in Chile” to describe a form of displacement directed at the “emigration of indigenous peoples from their original enclaves— places that are rich in metals—after depriving them of their agricultural lands and pushing them toward the city.”33 Rita Rubilar is not an activist dedicated to socio-ecological rights; therefore, she is even more suited to becoming a pharmakos, a scapegoat. There is certain irony, neither sophisticated nor naïve—as Northrop Frye would have it—but an irony whose implicitness is ethically charged. We remember, “irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him [her] than anyone See Áurea Sotomayor “Agua, espacio y Derecho en Plasma, de Guadalupe Santa Cruz,” 12. Also see Isabel María Madaleno. “The Geopolitics of Thirst in Chile—New Water Code in Opposition to Old Indian Ways.” 33 Áurea Sotomayor., 6. The 1981 water code establishes “the liberty regarding the ways of usage of water, the acknowledgment of the concession of rights and the limitation of the role of the state and public institutions regarding the regulation of this usage” (Isabel María Madaleno and Albero Gurovich. “Usos conflictivos del agua en el Norte de Chile,” 353–72). 34 Madaleno and Gurovich, 354. 32

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else would be.”34 In the confusion of voices that assail Rita, or otherwise prone to the catachretic expressions that she knows how to handle, she senses that the matter of water and the issue of drugs are intertwined: “Listen, the narco-splitters call to one another. The distributive frames of water are narcos. They want to detour you. The drug isn’t yours. (They want to) break you away, there’s no net, they are the ones who have the wires” (127). In the discourse of the trial, water and drugs are connected through rhetorical traps that blur the distinctions between speech and conduct, imposing a protocollary meaning that is almost impossible to reject (144). On the other hand, both issues are indeed related to one another. If there is an existential right to water that should not be subordinated to aggressive geo-economic interests, can there be also one to self-administering the psychotropic needs of one’s own mind–body system? Rita says, “For Siago I am a criminal,” a “cimarrona” (runaway). Why? Her practice of self-intoxication has been genuine, uncompromised. She does not share a culture of enchantment for which the country’s capital has become the epitome and which somehow reminds us of the “soma”-induced happiness of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). Rita’s legal punishment consists in her relegation to Siago, where she must stay, forbidden to go back to her Cordillera. In other words, her genuine transgressive state was not wanted in a production site like La Fábrica. Now there is one single company that exerts sovereignty over a luminous urban world—the “big company,” La Farmacia (The Pharmacy), and for Rita, there is no way to sidestep its orbit. “My state of estrangement is unmeasured” (155). La Farmacia has covered the surface of the entire city with visual and symbolic prescriptions, with patriotic, religious, or educative images and motives of how to be happy. “The people chew their pills and floury pastes admiring the lights of the city, they are beautiful, they move, they make waves and run the length of this dark mass that is the Bernabé Bello cordillera,” Siago’s mountain horizon. Rita, along with many others, is provided with pills and capsules that produce a certain “taste” (155–6). When she cannot create, in her imagination, a perception that takes her back into her mountains, she realizes that her existence as such is at stake. “ . . . I am being relegated but I don’t want to be . . . ” [my emphasis] (156). “Being,” in the woman’s experience, was plenitude, was a form of unity that could combine body, mind, and matter, and keep desire active, unasphyxiated. But how can Rita avoid “being” under the spell of the omnipresent new “taste,” that La Farmacia benevolently provides? Rita’s epilogue is secretive, sobering: “Perhaps back at the quebradas will she find a name for that which I write, this flavor” (156). The rest is simply a matter of paradox. Guadalupe Santa Cruz has made her eccentric heroine, by way of a “poetry of the fluid,” a singular proponent of what Paul Carter once called “water consciousness,”35 a poetic sphere in which a new, an ecological “epistemology of the sacred”36 finds figuration.

Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 41. See Paul Carter. “Trockenes Denken: Vom Verlust des Wasserbewussteins und von der Poesie des Fluiden.” 36 See Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson. Angels Fear. 34 35

6

From “Pharmakon” to Femicide: 2666 (Roberto Bolaño) I did not feel indebted to the boom in any way. Roberto Bolaño

Thinking from the “Pharmakon,” approaching literature otherwise New books, to the extent that they become pathbreaking, tend to realign interpretive endeavors and concepts along their imaginary trajectories. This happens all the more avidly, the more these books stand in the way of proven categorial conventions. In other words, there cannot be an equilibrium between a formative narrative energy as it unfolds under the impact of obsession, illumination, and—to put it in a more visceral way— “hunger,” and the existing academic and advertising apparatus of sense-making. Roberto Bolaño continues to incite, especially since his tragic demise, an increasing academic interest that, not surprisingly, carries the weight of progressive specialization. Interpreters have placed his works alternatively within the parameters of detective fiction—or the black novel—or within a new cosmopolitan Latin American prose, built on the ruins of national cultural values, a literature of redemption, or even late sequels to Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela and Leopoldo Marechal’s Adán Buenosaires.1 There is an ongoing search for metaphors that can help capture the provocative aspects of the writings of the Chilean author. Nevertheless, the astonishment that results from Bolaño’s imaginings, fused into a strange narrative “machinery,” persists.2 It seems that there is no single, specialized approach that can make Bolaño’s adventure accessible to interpretation, an adventure that is somatic and conceptual, fictional and existential, dialectical and pedagogical at the same time. Among the novels that we have discussed so far, 2666 is the one that relates, perhaps most provocatively, to the dialectic expressed in Benjamin’s comment on Brecht—it leads us to focus on a work and an attitude that resemble “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” See Heinrich von Berenberg, Jorge Herralde, Ignacio Echeverría, Rodrigo Fresán. “Roberto Bolaño: adalid de una nueva literatura,” 74. 2 See ibid., 75. 1

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The international literary market of the last decade has been in obvious need of a new Latin American prodigy of the stature of Gabriel García Márquez. Roberto Bolaño, who died at the age of 50 in 2003, has been selected to fill this gap. This is not the main criterium for including his posthumous novel in my study. My interest is heading toward an in-between space. The “novel” 2666, instead of providing one of the decade’s three most salient cases of the master genre of prose, conveys a narrative experience, as well as a mystical adventure of different scope. Let us remember the “pharmakon,” the way this concept emerged in Greek mythology and philosophical thought. Plato, in his Phaedrus, drew on the ambivalence of the term whose meaning oscillates between “poison,” “philter,” and “cure” (see Chapter 1). Socrates’ and Phaedrus’ famous yet still perplexing dialogue revolves around the affective and the cognitive status of speeches and written texts, both viewed as “pharmaka,” whose inherent powers become a matter of debate. As we will show, Bolaño’s novel falls under the rubric of narcoepics, not primarily because it relates to hemispheric narcotics conflicts (which it does, as well) but owing to the complex inscriptions that suggest that we actualize the concept of the pharmakon. Plato’s use of the word “pharmakon” in relation to the seductive, as well as addictive, powers of either masterfully constructed and delivered speeches or of “logography” (speech writings)3 is not the only reference point in Greek culture, as far as the ambiguity of the term is concerned. Its genealogy relates, in considerable part, to the narrative and epistemological reservoir that has been discussed by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant in relation to the concept of “metis.”4 When analyzing Bolaño’s novel, we will eventually apply the term “pharmakon” to refer to the concept of “cunning intelligence,” and we will address the figure of the scapegoat—“pharmakos”—that we introduced in the first chapter. Derrida, in Plato’s Pharmacy, argues in such a way as to displace rhetoric in favor of the art of writing, which he has set out to put in its “proper” place (that of deconstruction). His reading of the classical Phaedrus gives a value of ultimate ambivalence to the written text under the signs of presence and intention, not representation: writing is both drug and play.5 Derrida, debating the discourse of Socrates, becomes a sophist himself when he approximates the “pharmakon” to writing, on the basis of an equivalence of the “pharmakon” and ambivalence. According to this view, the “pharmakon” is the expression of a preexisting condition, one that precedes all oppositions, and is called contamination. The “pharmakon” appears as that medium in which oppositions are dynamically at play with one another—speech / writing, inside / outside, good / evil, body / intellect.6 Against the classical idea that speech comes first and writing second, Derrida argues that nothing comes before the “pharmakon” whose enactment of the movement of ambivalence relates more to the arbitrary sign (Saussure)—written, or otherwise “encrypted” signs—than to oral rhetoric, since living speech is “finite” while the sign can outlive death.7 See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 77–80. See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, 96, note 48. 5 See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126–127; see also Derrida. “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” 24. 6 See Jacques Derrida. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 127. 7 See ibid. 3 4

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What Derrida is less concerned with is an anthropological, often body-related, “preexisting quality” of the “pharmakon”: psychoactives as a “means” of life and survival, as well as weapons of struggle and “conflict management,” all of which is limited neither to the written sign nor to oral rhetoric. The sophistic shifting between writing and speech is not the only problem when it comes to addressing the “pharmakon” as a first-rate yet widely forgotten conceptual tool. Both speech and writing are susceptible to being “overturned” by the pharmakon, or to becoming “pharmakological media” themselves. In Greek mythology, for example, the “pharmakon” surfaces in relation to “nectar and ambrosia,”8 substances to which the gods owed their vitality and eternal youth. Pharmaka were of high “use value,” as well, in the struggles between the gods and the titans and, time and again, in the conflicts between humans and gods. Their potency was appreciated in those situations in which sheer violence was of no help. The cunning knowledge about how and when pharmaka could be beneficially applied was a matter of both wisdom and political intelligence. In Plato’s dialogue, revealingly, the pharmakon relates not only to speech and to writing, but to a heterogeneity of things, for example, to several forms of behavior, and to four types of divine madness among which we find the oracular wisdom (the gift of prophecy) received from Apollo, the mystical rites of Dionysus, poetry conferred as the gift of the Muses, and erotic intoxication.9 In other words, the ambiguity of the pharmakon is a physiological, anthropological, mystical issue (and, of course, poetic), one not necessarily resting on the matter of the ambivalent sign’s speculative or mediatic status. Today, neurophysiological findings have given evidence that “intoxication” and “addiction”—in their difficult ambiguity of “poison” and “cure”—can be issues of either drug consumption or specific, culturally inflected practices like religious prayers or ritualistic dances, for example, even as they can also be induced by certain effects ascribed to mass communication and electronic media.10 Thus, the conceptual origins of the “pharmakon” can help us better understand an often paradoxical complexity, which a belligerant discourse on drugs tends to conceal. At this point we are touching, again, upon the scope of our concept of narcoepics. Writers in the Americas have become increasingly concerned with the realm of drug traffic and its human and socio-ecological consequences, and about the contradictory role of narcotics economies as part of the neoliberal design of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, as these writers also show, the problematic of “psychoactives” (a term that can and must be correlated with the Greek “pharmakon”) is far more complex than the trade and consumption of substances, and its present-time violent outgrowths across the hemisphere, could indicate. If we recall our discussion of Benjamin’s “dialectics of intoxication,” at stake is a pathology of modern life in ample terms, and not only as far as its “abject” deviations are concerned. Drugs are major agents of psycho-physiological states, cultural practices, political conflicts, and economic developments and, at the same time, these developments are connected

See Marcel Detienne and Jean Paul Vernant. Cunning Intelligence, 120, 123, 126. See Plato. Phaedrus, 26–7, 33–4. 10 See Bernard Stiegler. Von der Biopolitik zur Psychomacht, 52. 8 9

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with addictive ways of life that are not biochemically but culturally induced, as well as nurtured, by economic factors and technological media. Under the guise of similar complexity, “modern” writers and artists have often dealt with the issue of narcotics. At the same time, the anthropological-political density of the conflicts surrounding intoxication and addiction might not sustain a belief in the power of literature as the ultimate “poison” or “cure.” The perplexing issue is that literature cannot, perhaps, have the last word about the pharmakon, but it can certainly offer a unique agency of perception and understanding. Literature can have a role not as “literature,” but as a kind of “pharmakon” itself, due to which a novel, or a poem suddenly approximates “narcotic” imagination—implying a spiritual impact on the body through which affect resonates—rather than resembling an artistically codifiable text. In Roberto Bolaño’s case, we will address his strategy of “sobriety” that helps pierce through several layers of intoxication. This literary strategy is certain to cunningly outplay, or expose, the destructiveness and exhaustion of the experience of the contemporary. Bolaño assumes the ubiquity and the contradictions of the pharmakon in his own way. Other writers of narcoepics have done this as well, including, for example, Fernando Vallejo. Vallejo is not a virtuoso of “sobriety” but, instead, of verbal aggression and religiously charged rhetoric and, from there, of a strategy of “intoxication,” staging a scenario in which violence is fictionalized as both “poison” and “cure.”11 What approximates Bolaño and Vallejo in terms of critical perspectivization, however, is not a similar sense of reality and history, nor a comparable style, but rather their enactment of literary writing as a (“pharmacological”) agency of transgression and affective “transport.” It is in the sense of that formulation that we come close to Socrates’ use of the word “pharmakon.” Affective transport, as Benjamin has argued in his comment on Auerbach’s Dante (see Chapter 2), is not simply a matter of emotion or sentiment, but an aestheticopolitical strategy. Foregrounding the concept of the “pharmakon”—poison, philter, or cure without clear boundaries between these “agents”—and perceiving Bolaño’s 2666 in a close relationship to it, the question should be how this novel engages the creative borders of literary writing and pushes reflection toward the thresholds of the possible. Writing, while trying to “live up” to the ambiguity of the “pharmakon,” endeavoring to compete with the “drug that is not a drug,” is about to cross its own boundaries, and is thus taken by surprise. At the same time, writing, to the extent that it becomes a practice of both somatic involvement and disengagement of the body, is thrown into that dimension of experience that the dialectics of intoxication is all about. In a word, 2666 is of interest as a tectonic “presence” that “resurrects” the body, an attempt to achieve a singular “being-in-the-world” and, from there, historical intuition and memory, in whose wake follows insubordinate silence, and perhaps wisdom, and only from here can we speak of a global, transcontemporary Latin American novel of its own kind. Bolaño’s sober narrative is a way of “beginning,” cutting a swath in a terrain—the reallife “utopia” of global capitalism’s ludicrous excesses—where beginnings are believed to be henceforth impossible. As we should remember from Edward Said’s reading of “Curation,” in Vallejo, is classically related to a figure of sacrifice; see my analysis “Inverted Christianism: A Sacrificial Romance” in Violence Without Guilt, 156–65. 12 See John F. Schumaker, The Age of Insanity: Modernity and Mental Health. 11

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Vico, a “beginning” can be understood as a genealogical attitude under circumstances whose ever-accelerating presentism—or should we say, the overintoxication due to consumption and all kinds of pressing anxieties in our “age of insanity”12—have blocked our perception of “untoward” living and thinking.

“Globalized” academics in the wake of cosmopolitanism The novel 2666 consists of five large sections that, taken together, conform an opus of 1119 pages in Spanish, and 893 pages in the English translation:13 “The Part About the Critics,” “The Part About Amalfitano,” “The Part About Fate,” “The Part About the Crimes,” and “The Part About Archimboldi.” The narration starts in Europe and ends, not precisely in “Mexico,” but in a visionary “Ciudad Juárez” called Santa Teresa. At the extremes of a huge narrative grid that extends across territorial and temporal displacements, as well as transnational encounters, we find three major scenarios that are incongruent with one another, allowing Bolaño to construct a reign of startling interconnections. First, there is a group of intellectual characters from Western Europe—literary critics who find their joint purpose in the search for a German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi; second, but conforming the final part in the novel, we encounter a stunning, twentieth-century-wide caleidoscope of the life of Archimboldi himself (whom the critics never succeed in finding); third, the ghostly world of “Santa Teresa,” an urban nightmare at Mexico’s northern border modeled upon Ciudad Juárez and its present-time reality of hundreds of femicides—“Mexico’s most merciless and unpunished crimes”14—rises up to become the center of attention. We will begin by exploring the first two parts—“The Part About the Critics” and “The Part About Amalfitano”—in which the uncanny tension between modern and global perceptions of the “self ” of the academic literary critic takes shape. Four European literary specialists, Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Liz Norton, academics who excel through intelligence and determination, turn out to be masters of projection. At one side of the libidinal map that guides their endeavors, there is the vision of a novelist, an image that provides them with the foundational myth to nurture their enlightened selves. The enigmatic, always absent Benno von Archimboldi is deemed by them the greatest post-war German writer and should, therefore, be a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Their utmost satisfaction would be to find Archimboldi, giving him proof of their genuine understanding of his work, and leading the evasive writer to public presence and recognition. Speaking in terms of the “pharmakon,” Archimboldi functions as a placebo text15 for the “Critics.” At the same time, when the According to Jorge Herralde, Bolaño’s original idea was to publish the novel as one single piece, not as five separate books. See Jorge Herralde, Para Roberto Bolaño, 57. See also Marcela Valdes. “Introduction: Alone Among the Ghosts,” 16. 14 Víctor Ronquillo. Las muertas de Juárez: Crónica de los crímenes más despiadados e impunes en México. 15 For a discussion of the term “placebo text,” see Richard DeGrandpre. The Cult of Pharmacology, 122–37. 13

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four academics—the Archimboldian apostles—meet the Chilean literature professor Amalfitano who, in his exile from dictatorship, has become stranded in the Mexican “Santa Teresa,” the Europeans derisively declare this Latin American colleague (who is a specialist on both Heidegger and Archimboldi) to be a disaster—“a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university” (2666, 114). The need for an inferior Other complements their search for a superior object of desire, much like the tidal movement reveals, and turns invisible, the face of the dark earth beneath the water. Pelletier, Norton, Morini, and Espinoza, regular attendees at academic events across Europe, at one point decide to make a trip to Mexico, after meeting a Mexican student at a seminar in Toulouse who reports that Archimboldi was recently spotted on his way from Mexico City to Hermosillo. “‘Imagine’, said Pelletier, ‘Archimboldi wins the Nobel and at that very moment we appear, leading him by the hand,’” back to Europe and into public light (ibid., 105). Bolaño, however, subverts the game of cultivating otherness through projection. Their travel to the Mexican–US border leads the European academics to the edges of their way of life as constantly self-referential, worldly subjects of higher thought. What unfolds is an implicit critique that contrasts the novel 2666 with that part of modern and postmodern “travel writing” at whose symbolic center there reigns the “sovereign” cosmopolitan perspective of the Western subject, even if its individual representatives end up failing.16 Bolaño affords much irony to Western cosmopolitan self-consciousness, although—at first glance—a worldly predestination of his heroes appears to be the main topic of his fiction. The cunning game by which Bolaño’s narrator, in 2666, takes “the critics”—the “Archimboldian apostles”—out of their stable world unfolds on the gentle soles of a Socratic coup. In the face of this gigantic and uneven novel, our reading will have to work across different layers. Conceptually, this requires probing the focus that we have opened through the “pharmakon.” Remember that Phaedrus is Plato’s only text placing Socrates outside [the city] of Athens, where he finds a countryside inhabited by nymphs and spirits. At the beginning of the dialogue, the interlocutor Phaedrus is surprised to find Socrates outside the city (“you never leave town to cross the frontier nor even, I believe, so much as set foot outside the walls”). Socrates responds: “You must forgive me, dear friend; I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug for getting me out.”17 The philosopher admits that this time Phaedrus has led him into an exception: the speech on the matter of love that he brings from Lysias acts like a “pharmakon”—a drug—on Socrates who says: “A hungry animal can be driven by dangling a carrot or a bit of greenstuff in front of it; similarly, if you proffer me speeches bound in books I don’t doubt you can cart me all around Attica, and anywhere else you please.”18 Socrates follows Phaedrus but, in fact, he follows the “pharmakon” of Lysias’ artful speech that, in the form of a scroll, Phaedrus hides under his tunic. Sickness of obsession is what draws the philosopher out of his confines, as he wants to learn about every good I have dealt with the concept of cosmopolitanism in “Zur neuen Krise der kosmopolitischen Imagination” (On the New Crisis of Cosmopolitan Imagination). 17 Plato. Phaedrus (230 d), 7. 18 Ibid. 16

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(speech) writing available. The issue is less anecdotical than it might seem. Intellectual curiosity and the drive toward cognition, together with the search for “representational” righteousness—a more active term than “legitimacy”—are deeply resonant with bodily desire. In order for them to become forces of action, a dry idea would be insufficient unless it worked as a placebo. What the wisdom of Plato’s early text implies seems to partially invert, on the side of the Socratian argument, Plato’s more mature ideas. In contrast with the classical hierarchy in which thought and abstraction rank highest (a norm that Socrates will, at last, pretend to obey), the “pharmakon” teaches otherwise. Those substances and artifacts that can simultaneously unleash forces of poisoning and curing are of the highest value among a contemporary intellectual elite (e.g. Bolaño’s European “Critics”), as well as for those agents who can compensate—in the best of cases—for their lower status with knowing about pharmaka. Socrates should know for sure, and contemporary neuroscience could testify to this matter more generally. There is a certain postcolonial sarcasm in Bolaño’s leading us to compare the superb scholars Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton, an avant-garde academic group at a time of harsh and divisive globalization, to the “hungry cattle,” alias Socrates, who would let the “pharmakon” drag him across Attica. “Hunger” for the extraordinary, from which the need for a mediating placebo, to nurture a superior mission, arises, is a more suiting trope for understanding the contradictions of intellectual labor and identity than has been admitted so far. At least, this is Bolaño’s own experience, one which we find disseminated across the entirety of his writing. In 2666, “The Part About the Critics” helps him settle accounts with a segment of the European intellectual heritage, in that it brings the visceral side of the “modern critic’s” identity to the fore. Discourse and rational or sublime artistic logic are the ornaments—the flowers in the crown of the enlightened habitus that has been stabilizing, against all odds, the course of a ship called Western “literary humanities.” But the actual driving forces for the late modern critic, in addition to the self-understood desire for a life backed by the academic institution, have been connected to a perpetual, delirious reinvocation of the fleeting saint—the literary or theoretical super hero. In other words, we can speak of a deep, secularized desire for “religious” experiences. Amalfitano, the Chilean professor relocated and stranded in Santa Teresa, is less obsessed with the literary saint Archimboldi than is the group of European academics, since he inhabits the precarious site of the global fabric of symbolic powers that makes him more vulnerable, as well, to affective marginalization. His reasons for ending up in Santa Teresa are entirely different from that of the neatly established critics. Amalfitano will experience a kind of “pharmacologico-religious” passage that is not mythically charged, as in the case of his European colleagues, but of a peculiar, profane mysticism. In “washing away”—to be read, as well, as a physiological metaphor—the melancholy of the deterritorialized professor, it liberates a deintoxicating force. Meanwhile, hunger for the living saint known as Benno von Archimboldi (the “Placebo text”) is what pushes “the Critics” on their way toward the unknown, and it will leave them ashore in the late twentieth-century Mexican–US borderlands, a territory of violence, exhaustion, and human as well as communitarian erosion. But to decipher the novel’s paradoxes, we have to move more slowly. Let us first approach the presence of the “pharmakon” in Bolaño’s narrative in a more explicit way.

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Perhaps not by chance, it is through Amalfitano, the academic from the Latin American periphery and a Chilean like Bolaño himself, a “loser” in the eyes of the four Archimboldian apostles, that the reader encounters the novel’s “primal” pharmacological scene. Amalfitano, after Pinochet’s military coup, had exiled himself to Spain, where he married a Spanish woman, Lola, in Barcelona, and their daughter Rosa was born. A major portion of “The Part About Amalfitano” is dedicated to Lola’s eventual abandoning of husband and daughter, and her subsequent relationship with a Basque poet whom she keeps visiting in an asylum. Here, Bolaño weaves a tale in which images of Almodóvar’s All About My Mother resonate. Lola’s peripeties are told—as happens with many others in Bolaño’s book—in a cool and dry manner, without a wallowing of the narrative voice, and without raising tones in any kind of dramatic manner. Lola, after deserting Amalfitano and Rosa, loses herself in an existence where she spends her nights at cemeteries or in the street, indulging in fleeting sexual relationships, and not disturbed by either destitution or excess. After an absence of seven years, she suddenly reappears before her husband to tell him that she has another child, that she has AIDS, and that she will soon die. Shortly afterwards, Amalfitano, whose contract at the University of Barcelona is about to end, leaves Spain with Rosa and moves to Mexico to become a professor at the University of Santa Teresa. Similar to a famous scene in Almodóvar’s movie, there is a male character who weeps in silence in the face of utter misfortune, while women do not flinch from the terrible (see 185). After Amalfitano has lived in Santa Teresa for several years, he is suddenly struck by a fleeting memory that is evocative of Socrates’ fascination with the pharmakon. One day, a dubious Mexican “friend” mentions the Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl to Amalfitano. Trakl, a pharmacist, was drafted into the German army at the beginning of World War I, and he committed suicide in 1914 by taking a drug overdose. The sudden naming of Trakl makes the Chilean professor think about a drugstore near where he had lived in Barcelona, and he remembers that in this store, “a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, . . . would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours” (227). One night, Amalfitano asked what books the young man liked. The response was that he liked books like The Metamorphosis (Kafka), and Bartleby (Melville), among others. For Amalfitano, there was something frightening about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist [the Spanish original reads “enlightened young pharmacist,” 289] who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, . . . (227).

“What a sad paradox,” thought Amalfitano. “Today, not even enlightened pharmacists have enough courage to confront the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown” (trans. modified; Spanish, 289). These young pharmacists prefer the perfect exercises of the great masters. “They want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against

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that something, that something that terrifies us all . . ., amid blood and mortal wounds and stench” (227; Spanish, 290). Amalfitano, in his preference for the allegedly imperfect, for the crude side of the “great masters,” may sound somewhat pathetic, or naïve. However, he implies that “pharmacists” with a vital inclination toward literature, in particular, should know that venturing into the unknown, walking on perilous grounds, is what marks the “combates de verdad” (the real battles), where there is “blood and mortal wounds and stench.” As for Trakl, it was his inner struggle with the experience of a pathological, decadent bourgeoisie, and with the shock of the World War I, that had led to his taking the drug overdose that killed him. We will later see that, in the case of the European critics, the pharmakon seems to work, with the exception of one violent scene, as a “benevolent,” sublime force. However, Amalfitano holds that the “pharmakon” has to do with “real” intoxication, as “that something that terrifies us all,” on both the part of the creative (individualist) mind and a more “objective,” material “it” that leads consciousness out of its learned self-containment. Due to the ambivalence of the “pharmakon,” there can be more or less subtle interpretations. The young Catalan pharmacist practices a mild yet ongoing “cure” by devouring the “minor works” of the masters, which excel simply as decent exercises in the métier of writing. Amalfitano, in turn, shows himself skeptical about texts (and readers) that cultivate the art of intellectual containment, or sublimation. He instead judges “great works” by dint of their imperfection, their zest to become involved with poisonous, intoxicating experiences, to the extent that these can shatter (the imagination of) life itself. The memory of the drugstore conveys an associatively rich juncture, contrasting with a notion of literature as it is held in the reifying and canonizing tradition, as well as with the status of criticism as an “objectifying” agency. On the one hand, there is the allusion to an altered state of consciousness as it nourishes the most intense experiences in the work of artists, musicians, and writers. On the other, for Amalfitano, reality itself, especially in its conflictive, transformative movements, generates dangerously altered states of mind. In other words, the appearance of the pharmakon in Bolaño’s narrative shows how crucial intellectual and existencial matters are susceptible to turning into mind-altering forces, like in the Greek mythological conflicts over life and death, knowledge and power, beauty and deformation, or the annihilation of creaturely bodies. A hermeneutical attitude is required here, going beyond (or beneath) the dual distinction between the subjective and the objective. The “pharmakon” shatters, or “preexists,” the dualism. Amalfitano, struck in his destiny by personal and political disaster, cannot expect much help from Socratic wisdom and the promise (in Phaedrus) that the power of the pharmakon could be sophistically negotiated. However, he is closer to Socrates, the philosopher who was unable to leave a written work and who became a martyr,19 than he would probably admit. Amalfitano’s obsession with books is, in the end, an excentric one, and the idea of the pharmakon will help us untangle what otherwise might look like a crazy game. In the eyes of the four critics, Amalfitano, who will give his European “colleagues” a hand in their search for Archimboldi after they arrive in Mexico, appears like “the See Johann Georg Hamann. Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten: Aesthetics in nuce, 69–73.

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unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism” (114). On the one hand, Amalfitano feels pushed by the forces of destiny, the exile that leads through Europe and to what seems to him to be the most inverosimile place, to the extent that he does not understand why the hell he and Rosa are in Santa Teresa—that densely-populated city standing “in defiance of the desert on the border of Sonora and Arizona,” where the “University [. . .] was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain” (185). In any case, he earns a monthly salary working there (163). On the other hand, and against what readers might take as primary evidence, Amalfitano is a conceptual figure, a character whose fictional life world comes close to being a Brechtian scenario of “hopelessness,” representing someone who has sunk to the bottom, so that we can see the bottom of things (134). The Chilean professor whom destiny has taken to the opposite end of the Latin American continent, to one of the “hellholes” he had not known before, now lives in a little one-storey house in “Colonia Lindavista” (199), in a barrio with neighbors he never sees because of their high entrance gates and an ominous state of abandonment of the houses, giving the impression that the neighbors might have “left in a hurry, with no time even to sell” (ibid.). Relocated to this place, Amalfitano brought with him his now 17-year-old daughter Rosa, with whom he shares the house, and books from different periods of his life. One afternoon, the professor stumbles over a volume that he does not remember ever buying (185), Testamento geométrico (actually published 1975) by Rafael Dieste, a Galician poet (133, 186), mathematician, and speculative thinker. How did this book end up in his library? How was it possible that it had disappeared from his memory? (188) His musing about this strange occurrence functions as a narrative device that helps him remember situations from the past and thus adds pieces to the puzzle of his shattered trajectory. When the closeness of the Testamento geométrico becomes unbearable, Amalfitano converts the book into a “readymade” à la Duchamp. The professor himself is not free from the burden of a controversial “pharmacological” question—the one he had in mind when he was talking to the young pharmacist in Barcelona—the question of what it takes (or risks) to turn chaos into order, especially if this occurs at the cost of what is commonly held as “sanity” (189). Not knowing how Dieste’s book ended up in the middle of his intimate space increases his perception of chaos. Reestablishing a primary sense of personal order implies turning the dangerous proximity of the Testamento geométrico into “freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight” (189). The book is moved, in an odd ritualistic gesture—or in a flight of madness?—from the center of his home—his “home office”—to its edge, the yard. “The idea, of course, was Duchamp’s” (190). Amalfitano walked into his devastated front yard . . ., and he gripped Dieste’s book tightly . . . And then he looked up at the sky and saw the moon, too big and too wrinkled, although it wasn’t night yet. And then he returned to his ravaged backyard and for a few seconds he stopped, looking left and right, ahead and behind, trying to see his shadow, but although it was still daytime and the sun was still shining in the west, toward Tijuana, he couldn’t see it. And then his eyes fell on the four rows of cord . . . It was the clothesline. [And he clamped the book with three clothespins] and hung it from one of the cords and then he went back into the house, feeling much calmer (190).

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Regarding the ludic idea of exposing the book-object to “nature,” the Surrealist artist Duchamp was reported to have liked the idea of humiliating “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” saying that, in that way, the treatise would indeed learn the facts of life (191). Amalfitano pretends he is performing the same kind of experiment— being curious about how the volume will endure the assault of the desert climate of northern Mexico. Yet the issue turns into a double-edged event, and the professor will soon be seduced into a ritual—a hunger for illumination—that becomes the focus of his daily life. The Geometrical Testament’s relocation to the margin creates the effect of a new crucial space, in addition to being an allegory of Amalfitano’s own destiny. The professor falls into the habit of inquiring, the first thing in the morning and whenever it occurs to him during the day, if the book exposed to the desert wind, the sun and the other elements has “learned” anything about real life (see 195). What happens, instead of changes affecting the book, is that Amalfitano starts to perceive forces that act upon him. The intertextually inclined reader might think of a passage in Benjamin’s “Surrealism” that speaks of the “revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded” things, pointing to a genuine Surrealist way of transforming, for example, “enslaved and enslaving objects” into (a perception of) “revolutionary nihilism” (W. B., 210, vol. 2.1). But Amalfitano’s personal and political map, his nihilistic grounds so to speak, are different from both Breton’s and Duchamp’s. His working on or with the hidden energies that (can be made to) operate in “his” world, if we want to apply this mystically charged expression, is susceptible to being contaminated by terrestrial winds and atmospheric spirits, as they have mingled with social conflict, and violence along the hemispheric border. The geometry book starts speaking back in a way that gets Amalfitano away from his usual thought patterns and into drawing Borgesian figures on paper (192–4). These are drawings that include hypothetical groupings (“taxonomies”) of names that he perceives as the product of his affected mind. He draws simple geometric shapes, triangles, and a rectangle, “and at each vertex he wrote whatever name came to him, dictated by fate or lethargy or the immense boredom he felt” in the heat of his Mexican environment (191–2). The names that appear at the corners of his figures are mostly those of renowned European philosophers, but he suddenly adds others such as those of the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca, the Argentine physicist Mario Bunge, the German surgeon Trendelenburg, and the critic Harold Bloom, and even Vladimir Smirnov, “who disappeared in Stalin’s concentration camps in 1938” and, at the opposite end, the name of Mikhail Suslov, Soviet party ideologue and statesman (194). What Foucault had perceived as a dissolution of the ordering epistemes of Western thinking (“our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other”20), linked to the intent to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge when referring, in Les mots et les choses, to “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” by Borges, becomes, in the character Amalfitano, a kind of gnostic distancing from, or a sarcastic take on, the genealogical project of deconstructing modern philosophy while maintaining its discursive bases intact.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, xv.

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At first sight, we might find in Amalfitano, a strain of modern (Nietzschean) nihilism together with epistemic chaos and, conversely, an orderly map of self-referential discourse and mythic fables, Self and Other, in the Archimboldian critics, as hegemonic counterparts of the doomed Chilean academic. Nevertheless, Bolaño will send the search of the European academic missionaries into a no-man’s land where they encounter nonknowledge, noisy silence, and fear. Amalfitano’s search is a gesturing toward “imperfection,” in which the lesson of the “great writers’” struggling with crude life—its forces of intoxication and violence—resonates between existential exhaustion and a stubborn reflexive attitude. In his doomed and often sad gestus, Amalfitano is nevertheless more spirited than Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Norton. As we will see, one of the major thematic foci in Bolaño’s novel is the places that the diverse protagonists occupy on a map on which insanity spreads across the globe. Amalfitano is aware of his desire for an ordered state of mind to better organize his chaotic living, but he also senses the closeness of this order, this guarantee of a neatly working consciousness, to a hidden virus of insanity (189). Asking for a fictional map of “insanity” requires that we move back from Amalfitano to (The Part About) the “Critics,” and then forward to the final “Part About Archimboldi,” before eventually discussing “The Part About the Crimes.” Roberto Bolaño is looking for the “big picture,” one of the reasons why 2666 has been called a hallmark of global fiction in the wake of the twentieth century. Yet, it is the novel’s virtue that it defrauds us of any expectation of fictional “fulfillment.” Can the contemporary world be imagined as an apocalyptic one? On Bolaño’s side, there are only some metaphors that could chrystallize the apocalypse, such as the dream image of the crater that befalls several characters. We might expect that the suffocating, terrible everyday of Santa Teresa will condense into symbolic form. However, there are “only” narrative identities21 and numerous traces—each one being more disconcerting and frightening than the other. There is, in addition, an awareness of violence as deeply ingrained in the history of the globalized earth, as well as in its present-time pulsations that are, insanely, saturated with boredom and the most pointless of routines. Thus Bolaño is skeptical of the aesthetic “pharmaka” of sublime horror, or pathetic drama, or other cathartic dispositifs in relationship to violence. Amalfitano, the most precarious subject among the protagonists, becomes ethically and aesthetically a threshold figure. Forced exile is one of the compelling factors that can push people into depression. Amalfitano’s odyssey seems to embody this; the way he experiences loss marks the condition of an intellectual fallen into “hopelessness” (loneliness, sarcasm about everything concerning Chile, his homeland, self-doubt, boundless sadness, 114, 134). Hanging the Testamento geométrico from the clothesline in the yard of his new home, a nonplace in an alien land, means mimetically doubling his own existence as a vagrant “ready made,” exposed to the forces of the environment, and with no protection other than his learned “humanistic” competence. By hanging the book in the back yard—far enough away so that observation from inside the house is possible—Amalfitano also performs an act of dissociation. He has invented a scenario that allows him to exteriorize an important part of himself (his bookishness) See Paul Ricoeur’s framing of the term in Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 246–7.

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and thus start looking at his “self ” anew. The performance has a centrifugal effect on his lettered “self.” What derives from the object is a magical power, taking power away from what the book should (but could not) represent—the ordering, centripetal mind of the academic. The mimetic procedure is similar to the relationship that Taussig described as “out-fetishizing the fetish.”22 The scenario of the “excommunicated” book, instead of providing a case of schizophrenia, opens an unexpected way for dealing with pending “insanity.” Insanity is understood as a profound mental disorder, the opposite of “psychological well-being” in existence, invisibly connected to the state of affairs of the real world.23 One night, Amalfitano is assailed by a voice. It says, “Hello, Óscar Amalfitano, please don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong” (201).24 Here we have the voice of an invisible authority whose “purpose” is to bring about a transformation in the calledupon subject. Thus far, one could presume that the Testamento geométrico, still hanging in the yard, might resemble an idol, even a “totemic” fetish—the “object” of a curing process, as it is “attended” on a daily basis. But could it “speak back” with a voice as the sign of its invisible embodiment, or just an energy? The professor feels deeply alarmed and rushes through the house and yard . . . but finds nothing wrong. Soon the voice returns: “I beg you to forgive me. I beg you to relax. I beg you not to consider this a violation of your freedom. Of my freedom? thought Amalfitano . . .” (202) The man’s ensuing night is one of disrupted sleep traversed by an image of his deceased wife Lola standing behind a high fence and waving at him (202). A (formally) omniscient, immanent narrator reports that that same night, at dawn, the Santa Teresa police discover the body of another teenage girl, mutilated and killed, disposed of in a vacant lot in the outskirts of the city. This is followed by a filmic, atmospheric image connecting, as in a parallel montage or a very large tracking shot, different spaces in the city. . . . a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind (202–3).

Additional perceptions that reveal an uncanny, “cosmically” charged aspect of the environment follow the next day, when Sylvia Pérez, a colleague from the university, takes Amalfitano and Rosa on an excursion. Sonora presents a landscape that overwhelms Amalfitano—violent formations of basaltic rock, tuff and sandstone, . . . “a landscape that seemed best suited to the young or the old, imbecilic or insensitive or Michael Taussig. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 1, 2. See John F. Schumaker, The Age of Insanity, ix, x. 24 This associates the reiteration of the clause “do not be afraid” in the Gospel of Luke (The New Testament). 22 23

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evil and old who meant to impose impossible tasks on themselves and others until they breathed their last” (205). As far as the United States on the other side of the border is concerned, a dream image—the professor falls asleep in the car—depicts Mexico’s northern neighbor in the shape of “quicksilver” arising from the autochthonous landscape of prehistoric rocks—“the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain” (206). When Amalfitano returns from the outing he realizes that “the shadow of Dieste’s book hanging from the clothesline was clearer, steadier, more reasonable . . . than anything they’d seen on the outskirts of Santa Teresa or in the city itself, images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments” (206). The relationship is nevertheless “dialectical.” The object becomes a foothold when it is set vis-à-vis petrified nature—it becomes spiritualized. At first, Amalfitano’s reaction to the imbecilic landscape and its timeless, violent formations seems to convey a sentiment of “planetary abandon.” But the shadow of the hanging book, the image of the imaginary object, insinuates a locus that, rather than being independent of the outside world, will help gather mystical energies in order to open our perception to a hidden side of reality—the world of the crimes. With the eventual return of the nightly voice, Amalfitano believes himself close to madness. “Don’t worry,” says the voice, you have not lost your mind, “all you’re doing is having a casual conversation. So I haven’t lost my mind, said Amalfitano. No, absolutely not, said the voice” (209). Hermeneutically speaking, one tends to cling to the referential aspects of a speech, rather than to the mode of experience that is enabled by an utterance or a dialogue. A mode of experience25 is not necessarily an issue of the consciously involved subject, but of a something that works “through” the subject, goes beyond it, or is immanent in the speaking subject so that, under certain conditions, “what” is said is secondary in relationship to the way in which the utterance itself takes on an interactive life. An interactive agency, or a sort of “flow,” starts to occupy the place of the speaking subject, as with the iterative clause “so I haven’t lost my mind, said Amalfitano. No, absolutely not, said the voice.” This mode of reconfirmative address, in which the subject, instead of producing his (Amalfitano’s) own message, gives in to a contractual linguistic relationship, characterizes several exchanges between the voice and the professor. There is a Brechtian tone to Amalfitano’s situation that, however, is less Brechtian than it is prone to a mystical trope—the trope of learning how to get lost.26 But was not Brecht’s “method” of Verfremdung (estrangement) a way of gaining, for example, a sense of transformative knowledge from Chinese wisdom—a knowledge that was supposed to “theatrically” enact the loss of learned preconceptions? This enactment would not work through discourse (messages to the public), nor through catharsis, but instead would rely on a pedagogically conceived space for transgression, similar to the strictured “dialogic spaces” that Michel de Certeau describes as the condition of possibility for mystic speech.27 The Chilean professor, in Bolaño’s novel, For a discussion of Spinozean, and Deleuzean ideas regarding “modes of experience,” see Daniel W. Smith. “The Place of Ethics in Deleuze’s Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence.” 26 See Michel de Certeau. “Mystic Speech,” 80, 81–3. 27 See ibid., 91, 92. 25

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understands ending up in Santa Teresa as “getting lost”—losing the formative and identitarian reference points of his life, except for the presence of his daughter. At the same time, beginning with his “excommunication” of the geometry book, he starts experiencing a more active way of “getting lost,” although it might just be a case of losing his preconceived forms of knowledge. This procedure, which we could view as one of several of Bolaño’s incursions into the mode of mystical writing, is “dialectically” linked to the way the nightly voice starts speaking “through” Amalfitano. This enables Amalfitano to start looking “through” the things (in German: etwas durchschauen). Here we cannot evoke mysticism as if the mystic texts from the dawn of modernity were at issue. Today, there are many ways of addressing the relationships between literary writing and altered states of consciousness, although interpretive knowledge has remained precarious in that regard. There is a “profane mysticism” at work in Amalfitano’s situation, one in which his alien, northern Mexican environment acquires a “plasticity” that his learned philosophical ideas and ordinary knowledge would have prevented him from perceiving. It might, however, be helpful for us to scrutinize some historical contexts of Western mysticism for basic analogies. If, according to de Certeau, the mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided the historical trope for an epochal loss— the decadence and falling apart of the Christian world, both as belief and as experience— Bolaño’s novel hints at a global state of affairs of similar dimensions. The mystics’ place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their historical status and situations, belonged to “social milieux or ‘factions’ in full retreat,” affected by the consequences of socioeconomic degradation, or marginalized by progress or by war (see Certeau, 84). Among those milieux we find singular experiences of people embarking on a perilous walk that turned into a spiritual journey. Particular practices of writing, performed in specific places and under certain ethical, physiological, or communal rules, could lead to situations that transform loss into intensely illuminating endeavors that could “work back” on the real world. These experiences were, in the full sense of the term, a matter of the “event.” They could, for example, arise from the existentially threatening, culturally erosive, and sometimes singularly empowering situation of gifted minorities “with no assurances for the future” (ibid., 85). “The present, for them, was the restricted scene upon which the drama of their doom was enacted . . . They had nothing left but present exile” (ibid.). Mystical writing as a genre of literature, as understood by de Certeau, transforms an experience of fundamental or existential dimensions—for example, disaster—into a mode of utterance that excels through its unusual powers of imagination, an imagination that affects the body in the same way that it can influence the surrounding world. We are talking about singular (“sacred”) confluences of consciousness and energy, forms of plenitude that can help people survive under the most adverse of circumstances, generate effects of healing, or create a sense of spiritual-somatic freedom. After Amalfitano placed the Testamento geométrico among the forces of “nature,” and from the way the professor is being spoken to by the “voice” (2666, 208), a peculiar Gelassenheit28 (letting-be attitude) emerges, together with an alertness. The voice offers Amalfitano a “mutually beneficial relationship” (208). It says that the condition for this See ibid., 81 (on Meister Eckhart).

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relationship to work out is “calmness” (“it’s absolutely crucial that we stay calm,” 208). Let us look into this mystical “colloquium.” The voice: Calm is the one thing that will never let us down. And Amalfitano said: everything else lets us down? And the voice: yes, that’s right, it’s hard to admit, I mean it’s hard to have to admit it to you, but that’s the honest-to-God truth. Ethics lets us down? The sense of duty lets us down? Honesty lets us down? Curiosity lets us down? Love lets us down? Bravery lets us down? Art lets us down? That’s right, said the voice, everything lets us down, everything. Or lets you down, which isn’t the same thing but for our purposes it might as well be, except calm, calm is the one thing that never lets us down, though that’s no guarantee of anything, I have to tell you. You’re wrong, said Amalfitano, bravery never lets us down. And neither does our love for our children. Oh no? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano, suddenly feeling calm (208).

Again, a Brechtian outcome. Now the exchange about madness ensues, in which Amalfitano is told that he has not lost his mind. He recapitulates: “So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end” (209). One cannot but feel estranged at such an antilogical fiat that reveals the author’s inclination to turn ambivalence into a “methodical tool.” The expression “everything lets us down” is not a statement of truth, but part of a “methodical” alienation of the familiar, in order to establish a “foothold” in hopelessness, which is understood as a particular state of “sobriety” in the absence of the certainties that a “normal” state of affairs was once supposed to provide to the sovereign citizen. Brecht’s early aesthetics was conceived in the varying terms of a strategy, in which a variety of paradoxical moves and heterotopian figures emerges through estrangement as an intrusion into the numbness, the false familiarity of the everyday. Bolaño does not have to be a connaisseur of Brecht in order to make Amalfitano a conceptual figure. An overall question that resonates throughout 2666 has to do with the search for aesthetic energies that can help to productively engage with the negative. What happens to Amalfitano as he keeps arguing with the voice—the “it”? He becomes irritated when “it” reveals a sexist spin (the voice “asked him, begged him, to be a man, not a queer,” 207), a possible hint at Bolaño’s interest in the masculine figure of the artist-detective, or at his corroding approach to a certain artistic posture. “What is it you have against homosexuals? whispered Amalfitano. Nothing, said the voice. I am speaking figuratively, said the voice” (209). The voice is sarcastic regarding a certain habitus bound to artful chaos, a sublime chaos used by some artists as a mask to cover up what is just a desire for “anesthesia” (209). But there is an implicit allusion to the femicides in Santa Teresa, and what Amalfitano perceives, especially when his daughter is mentioned, as a warning to be on the alert. (“You’ll have to be careful, my friend, things here seem to be coming to a head,” 210). Past midnight, perhaps around two or three o’ clock, the professor steps onto the porch and sees that someone has been watching the house from a black car. He can even make out the features of the driver as he drives off—“a fat man with very black hair, dressed in a cheap suit with no tie,” 210). “When he was gone, Amalfitano came back into the house. I didn’t like the looks of him, said the voice the minute Amalfitano was through the door” (210).

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In the mystic voice a scurrilous rhetoric reverberates, pertaining either to a declassified prophet or a preposterous detective, or both, shot through with a paternalistic pathos, all of which exerts a strong effect on the exiled professor (“Do you understand that you have nothing to fear from me? Yes, said Amalfitano,” 210). In an odd yet intense manner, the voice becomes “therapeutic” in order to lead the professor out of his unacknowledged fear and his lethargy, thus producing a de-intoxicating effect. “There is no bad blood between us. The headache, if you have a headache, will go away soon, and so will the buzzing in your ears, the racing pulse, the rapid heartbeat. You’ll relax . . .” (210). After the departure of the suspicious observer in the black car in the street, the voice tells Amalfitano to do something useful. “Something useful like what? asked Amalfitano. For example, wash the dishes, said the voice. And Amalfitano lit a cigarette and began to do what the voice had suggested” (210). After Amalfitano has done quite a bit of nightly washing, cleaning, and tidying up and—like an addict— looks for additional things to take care of but cannot find anything left, he goes to sleep without undressing (211). When Rosa wakes him three hours later, it had been a long time since Amalfitano had slept so well. Amalfitano’s classes that morning would be entirely incomprehensible to the students—an additional hint that he had experienced another state of consciousness, as well as the sudden absence of his melancholy. Psycho-physiologically speaking, there is nothing sensational about the energies that this nightly “event,” the encounter with the voice, has provided Amalfitano. As Aldous Huxley stated in his essay, The Doors of Perception, there are proven methods at hand that allow us to change our “ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.”29 However, the places that can give way to experiences of illumination will always remain precarious, or stunningly distinct, from the worlds where ordinary men and women live. As for Bolaño’s character Amalfitano, it is not his spiritual—both somatic and mind-opening—experience as such that is extraordinary, since plenty of Western artists and writers have been interested in the borders of consciousness. Rather, the singularity of his experience lies in the geographical, sociointellectual and narratological background against which it is staged. It is the “peripheral intellectual” who breaks the spell of sophisticated blindness, “words are uttered, but fail to enlighten” (Huxley), whereas the Archimboldian apostles, the “Critics,” protagonists in the first part of the novel, will seek this experience in vain. Actually the Europeans are much more alert to this general deficit of “illumination” than Amalfitano, which is why they obsessively pursue the writings and existential traces of Archimboldi, the literary “barbarian” whose work is late in emerging from the avatars of an overburdened twentieth century. But the “Critics,” as they approach the “mystery” of Archimboldi, will never succeed in tapping it, while Amalfitano is the threshold character who—through his own transformation—helps tear away the veil from the mythified literary genius. The particular interest that Bolaño shows in the trope of the detective novel becomes understandable. Any expectation that the big referential enigmas of 2666—Archimboldi’s “real identity” and that of the perpetrators of the femicides of Santa Teresa—will be solved is bound to fail. In fact, Aldous Huxley. “The Doors of Perception,” 2.

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the detective novel only makes sense as a precarious trope that helps launch different kinds of narrative personnel on their inquisitive journeys into the no-man’s-land. In the face of an “incomplete” secularity, both violent and “civilized,” of a global state of affairs toward the end of the twentieth century, as reimagined by Bolaño, the energies that suggest tearing away the veil of mythification will start to build when critical perception meets mystical experience. This is what lends Bolaño’s novel its genuine stature in contemporary literature and, as we have been arguing, this is what starts to come to the surface when we think about the “estrangement-effect” to which Bolaño submits the basic tropes of his book (human empathy through shared dialogue, the wordly project of the European critics, a narrative habitus derived from the black novel, the longing for an affective solution to fundamentally tragic situations and inhuman realities, and a new, a “sober” kind of hero). We begin to realize that it may not be the legitimate academic voices from renowned universities that will help uncover the novelistic personality—or the heuristic narratological function—of Benno von Archimboldi but, rather, the character Amalfitano, at the moment when he abstains from melancholy and fear by recognizing his “minor self.” Keeping in mind Benjamin’s reading of Brecht’s dialectical dramaturgy, Amalfitano “makes use” of hopelessness when he overcomes the thickness of the doom, the silent pulsation of tragedy, which his daily exhaustion and latent nervousness have imposed on him. He really hits bottom, something that—in another state of body and mind—could quickly end in a nervous breakdown or other severe pathological state. Amalfitano, astonished, realizes that he is excited by what he has just lived (“I feel like a nightingale . . .” 211). Of course, as the voice said, that is no guarantee of anything. It is, perhaps, comparable to the trope of the “nihil volo”30—that special disposition in the mystics’ experience in which unflinching will unites with an “emptiness” of purpose, thus opening an enhanced subjective perception of the things or forces to come—a sobering experience by which an active disposition is created, instead of an “action” based on the rational or the customary mind. Here we find an example of “nihilism’s” invigorating ambivalence. Different from a Nietzschean nihilism, as it is, for example, read by Hannah Arendt,31 the purpose of Amalfitano’s turn has nothing to do with an abstract philosophical judgment of the world. When the voice asks the professor to rediscover “the perspective of the simple things in life” (209), this means speaking in clues. Recalling another moment, in which the nightly voice interpellates Amalfitano, “you haven’t thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand” (210). If what resonates is nothing less than the perspective of “life itself ”—“a simple and antiquated and ridiculous sentiment” (211), at issue is an awareness that is commonly obstructed by both the disembodied intellect and the rules of conduct interiorized via common sense at a given time in a given context. This is why an academic intellectual may be spellbound by situations of danger and catastrophe, yet unable to (re)act. Amalfitano breaks that spell with his newly acquired awareness. His “awakening” translates into an alertness without fear, that is, without the previously looming nervous breakdown that the Santa Teresa environment seemed to impose on the exiled philosophy professor. See Michel de Certeau. “Mystic Speech,” 92. See Hannah Arendt. The Life of the Mind. Part Two, 169–70.

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The perspective of “life itself ” could, for example, be a matter of survival. It could also be a matter of “sanity,” to the extent that it looks behind those ordering powers that have proffered life its modern, and cynically violent destination. Amalfitano, in his materialist leanings, discards the possibility that the voice belongs to a superior or divine spirit. Perhaps it is a “lost soul” (212), or was there a connection to the saint from Hermosillo, Madame Cristina? This woman seemed capable of piercing through the morass of Santa Teresa’s violence. It is the time, or the state of perception, that makes the professor see, in dream images (210) and daily ocurrences, that the disappearances and killings of women are a subterranean part of the entire city’s “life world.” His colleague, Professor Sylvia Pérez, together with a group of feminists, participates in the organization of protests that demand transparency in the investigation of the murders. Their posters say “No to impunity” and “End to corruption” (213). Yet an occult force in late twentieth century has invaded the everyday life of a city that appears as urban and agitated as it also seems inevitably to belong to the desert. Paraphrasing Michail Romm’s film title, The Ordinary Fascism, one might say that Amalfitano feels the ordinary presence, the atrocious immanence, of the Santa Teresa femicides (in Spanish “feminicidios”)32, even in his private and academic environments (see 215). His is a sobering experience that makes him alert and more practical, on the one hand, and more sarcastic, on the other. Getting his daughter Rosa out of this country becomes his primary concern. When Rosa says goodbye to her father and joins “Fate,” the black American journalist from New York who came to Santa Teresa to report on a boxing match and is now about to return to the US, focalization and description converge to give way to a downcast scenario (344). It is a filmic image, as we can “recall” from a series of contemporary movies: the moment before the two young people depart on their trip, Professor Amalfitano leaves the house where the book is always hanging in the backyard, wearing a very wrinkled white shirt and jeans, bare-foot, his hair mussed up, and crosses the street, to start talking with a neighbor, while his body, seen from behind, is retreating. It is not just this undramatically sad image, whose posture is similar to those of the final scenes of Amores Perros (Mexico) and Un Oso Rojo (Argentina), in which the figure of the father moves into an inscrutable void. Amalfitano is somehow close to the characters of the ex-guerrillero and outcast “el Chivo,” a former university professor from Mexico City, from Amores Perros, and “el Oso,” a man from Buenos Aires’ lower-middle-class who got involved in crime in order to provide for his wife and daughter. In all three cases, a father abandons himself to a “hopeless” destiny, but before doing so, he has conscientiously enabled or secured a future for his female child, trying to guarantee a place of unfettered citizenship for the daughter by distancing her from the precarious, dangerous world of the father himself. These scenarios belong among the calamities of neoliberal development, whose pressure on parts of the academic middle-classes in Latin America have been growing increasingly. A nonmelodramatic, silently tragic yet antisublime gesture resounds On the programmatic change of the term “femicidios” into “feminicidios” see Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, “Sinergía por nuestros derechos humanos,” 63–84.

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here. As an outsider, Amalfitano is not concerned about getting an alternative for himself. Neither is he simply driven by external circumstances that he cannot evade. As a character who has found his foothold in (the “stoic” attitude of) the Geometric Testament, facing an alien environment yet taking elementary precautions to protect his female child, the professor may look old-fashionedly, benevolently patriarchal. This active nihilism, acting from hopelessness, however, is one of the marks of a stunning narrative figure from the periphery that articulates the position of the intellectual’s planetary homelessness. Let me introduce a prolepsis, so as to better illustrate the hinges that Bolaño installs in his multilayered, open-ended, dark “odyssey.” Amalfitano occupies a place—the threshold of the normal—to which the book’s main characters are drawn: Santa Teresa on the Mexican border, facing the “sad American mirror of wealth and poverty” to the north. The point is not that the philosophy professor will directly meet all those characters, although he does encounter most of them. Rather, his transformation into someone who “sees” helps him get closer to the underside of the discursive world. The structure of detective fiction tends to create an expectation that enigmas will eventually be solved. But Bolaño’s purpose is to approximate uncanny scenarios and to let them press on one another. A breathtaking loop that folds far distant moments of world history together becomes transparent when Rosa is leaving Santa Teresa. She knows Guadalupe Roncal, a feminist reporter from Mexico City, whom she decides to accompany to the Santa Teresa prison before leaving the country. At this same time a German, Klaus Haas, is accused of committing several of the Santa Teresa femicides and is held in a Mexican state prison during an endless series of half-finished trials. Later, toward the end of the novel, it turns out that Klaus is the nephew of Benno von Archimboldi, whose original, pre-artistic name was Hans Reiter. This last section of the novel, “The Part About Archimboldi,” reveals the writer’s former role—as an ordinary, young recruit who was drafted at the beginning of World War II—in the crimes that the German occupation army committed in Poland and Russia. Much, much later, when Archimboldi is over 80-years-old, he will embark on what is presumably his last trip. From an unknown place in Europe, perhaps Italy, he travels to Mexico City, then to Hermosillo, and from there to Santa Teresa in order to see what he can do to help his imprisoned nephew. The European critics, who are always after the writer, trying to track him down and make him a public figure, cannot understand, however, that his last journey forges the “impossible” link in the historical picture of the twentieth century. It brings a particular outline, even a blueprint of modernity’s global historicity of violence to the fore. This connection reaches from Europe to today’s Western hemisphere or, more specifically, from fascist Germany to the Mexican–US border, generating a vision in which the links between barbarian crime, suffering, and desire in ordinary people, moral anemia and psychic exhaustion in the better-off middle-classes, the socially infectious impact of political corruption, and the erosion of a cosmopolitan intellectual ideal have come to converge in one single picture. Here, pain is a matter of nontragic, antisublime aesthetics. Hans Reiter’s “journey” takes him from his being a soldier in World War II, across Western Europe in the postwar years, where he becomes “Archimboldi” the writer, and then toward the end of his life, to Mexico’s northern border, one of today’s most extreme sites in terms of the proliferation

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of violence, together with the casualties that uneven globalization keeps sending forth in the Western hemisphere. Ironically, Reiter’s nephew, Klaus Haas, falls prey to the judicial mockery that plays out in Santa Teresa at the end of the 1990s. Thus it occurs to the Mexican authorities from the state of Sonora to set up a trial in order to convict a man who appears, in Bolaño’s imagination, as a deterritorialized version of the classical “pharmakos.” The “pharmakos” is that figure that possesses, or acquires, a specific capacity for being turned into a scapegoat to be sacrificed or punished, to strenghten the others, or to get rid of a problem. In his physical appearance, Klaus is a younger version of his uncle “Benno von Archimboldi,” alias Hans Reiter. He is a German of gigantic stature, blond hair, and timid manners who came to Santa Teresa from New York to open a computer supplies store. When narrating the scene in the Santa Teresa prison where Guadalupe Roncal and Rosa meet the accused Klaus, Bolaño takes care to give this character an aura of the ogre of mythic tales, so as to make him suit the role not of the guilty man but of the typical “pharmakos” who, in this case, plays his part with a semblance of mockery. From the visitors’ room, both women hear the footsteps and noises signaling that a portentous creature is nearing. The footsteps came closer [. . .]. Suddenly a voice began to sing a song. It sounded like a woodcutter chopping down trees. [. . .] I am a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me, Rosa translated the suspect’s string of curses . . . And then the footsteps and the laughter could be heard once more, and the goading and words of encouragement of the inmates and the guards escorting the giant. And then an enormous and very blond man came into the visitors’ room, ducked his head [. . .] singing the German song about the lost woodcutter and fixing them all with an intelligent and mocking gaze. (349)

The appearance of the prison giant at the end of the third part of the novel forebodes a perception of the actual Archimboldi (who will supposedly “come to rescue” Klaus), although we do not yet know that the writer is the imprisoned man’s uncle. The only aspect we can intuit is that, in both men, the imposing stature seems to cover an incalculable and vulnerable personality, a contrast whose prospective meaning can be illustrated by a formulation of Northrop Frye. “The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society . . ..”33 The words in the prisoner’s song, “I am a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me,” are not only an anticipation of the uncle’s final appearance in Santa Teresa (which will remain invisible) but apply to Archimboldi’s own identity, especially his mocking of the literary critics in their intent to “rescue” his excentric, real-life appearance for the sake of academia and public fame. Archimboldi, the German “alien” writer, and Amalfitano, the exiled Chilean philosophy professor, are the intellectual nomads of the novel, yet they never meet. Their exposure to precarious existence and to becoming “victims” or, in the case of Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 41.

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Klaus Haas, accused of being a perpetrator of crime in the greater political story seems to lead both men into forms of spiritual transgression. This confers on them, on each in his own way, a peculiar wisdom of how to survive. Amalfitano and Archimboldi both stand for a sobering dimension of subjectivity, which is not properly modern yet global in the crude sense of the word. Following this somber vision, to be an “intellectual” means having no home and getting the closest possible awareness of the violent state of affairs that has so deeply infected the world. It can also mean, as we will see in the case of Archimboldi’s story, becoming an “amphibian” and hiding, like the cuttlefish that shoots its ink as protective “pharmakon,” from both his enemies and academic admirers.

Placebo intellectuals After presenting this overall examination of the novel, we will now take two steps backward, in order to pay closer attention to its beginning, “The Part About the Critics,” which allows us to look into the ambivalent spheres of that part of the world that is said to represent a “balanced,” Western European modernity. There is a tendency, especially among students and scholars of Latin American literature, to read 2666 with the major emphasis on part four, “The Part About the Crimes,” which focuses on the most disturbing acts of violence inflicted upon women along the US–Mexico border, and overlooking those that are just “normally disturbing.” This is because of the vibrations of veracity that emerge from this huge, novelistic section in which Bolaño displays, notably drawing on Sergio González Rodríguez’ book of testimonios and documents, Huesos en el desierto (2002, Bones in the Desert), a monumental corpus of documentary representations. These elements are fused into a narrative that unfolds with paratactical intensity: fragments of newspaper reports, forensic descriptions of the mutilated corpses of women, articulations of feminist civil activism, together with numerous references to the dehumanizing aspects of the maquiladora system and economic accumulation throughout the border regions, the violence committed by police and organized crime, narcotics traffic, and state corruption. Yet the centrality of the experience of violence at the US–Mexican border does not give the novel a mark of geographic exceptionalism. 2666 is a book about a planetary state of affairs, pointing to the heart of everyday existence as a figure in which the uneven development generated by global modernity translates into particular pathological scenarios, spanning diverse human groups including both the well-established European literary critics and the phantom characters of bestially murdered young women from Santa Teresa, most of whom were unskilled workers in the maquiladora factories. In the background of a map in which subjective trajectories of Chileans, Mexicans, US-Americans, and Europeans flow together, or diverge, there lurks the phantasma of the German writer Benno von Archimboldi. If the Chilean professor Amalfitano serves as a threshold figure regarding the spiritual design of the novel, Archimboldi will turn out to be the actual “connecting figure.” But the roads for the hypothetical “detective”—a person

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who exists only as an immanent force in the narrative—who would want to resolve the big enigmas of the plot are closed. Therefore, we must continue disentangling that intensive yet sober stream of transcontinental experiences and visceral inquietude that constitutes the subversive heart of 2666. Let us look more closely into “The Part About the Critics.” Why has Bolaño chosen the somewhat frivolous undertakings of a group of academics from the humanities, of European descent and professional status, as the initial staging ground from which his novel sets out to become a global odyssey? In some ways, 2666 can be perceived as a book about academics, dealing with the desires of a group of European scholars to indulge in the uniqueness, not only of their masterful literary understanding, but of substantial intellectual life during times that seem to erode any idea of persistence of avant-garde purpose. It should be noted that Bolaño’s own generational experience is not that of the “Critics.” Having left Santiago de Chile, as did his character Amalfitano, shortly after General Pinochet’s coup d’ état, and going into continental and transatlantic exile, Bolaño was propelled out of the context of the socialist political culture that marked Chile and other countries of the Southern Cone during the 1960s and early 1970s, to find himself reemerging in global space, in an ongoing struggle for survival that included several ruptures. The “Critics,” in turn, experience a different displacement. Driven by their search for Archimboldi, theirs is a voluntary, temporary move from an always-contested yet economically privileged, and thus relatively stable, Western metropolitan life world, to the savage territories of Santa Teresa. When they spend a prolonged period in this environment along the Mexican–US border, Pelletier, the professor from Paris, and Espinoza, his colleague from Madrid, make their “headquarters” in a central hotel of the city where Pelletier passes entire weeks rereading Archimboldi’s novels and drinking cocktails by the swimming pool area, while Espinoza distracts himself by acting as the benefactor of a modest family with one of whose daughters he entertains a dalliance. It is from this rather “genteel” cosmopolitan positioning that these visitors to the Hemispheric South can view Amalfitano, who offers to help in their search for Archimboldi, as a “loser,” a “non-existent professor at a non-existent university.” Bolaño might have vitriolic contempt for the self-assured Western Europeans, but he is never caught employing explicit judgment. Rather, the notarial tone that characterizes his immanent narrator keeps even irony, in overall terms, at a sober level—a borderline aesthetic attitude, so to speak. Intellectually, the Europeans and Amalfitano share the same admiration for the late lamented German writer, and they may be close to each other in their artistic preferences and personal philosophical libraries. However, Amalfitano’s experience—as was Bolaño’s—is marked by “disaster capitalism.” This explains his spiritual affinity with Archimboldi, the German outsider turned into a writer and “nationless” creature in the course of the belligerent twentieth century. Intellectual affinities between vehemently “globalized” academics, such as Amalfitano, and an always cosmopolitan liberal critical elite notwithstanding, it makes a world of difference if someone is not generically part of the well-to-do, academic middle-class of the West. And it may occur that, at this point, the affective spirit of the novel calls for an unusual posture of criticism—as happened in the

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life and thinking of Walter Benjamin, and as we might find in the imagination of Roberto Bolaño, as well. What we perceive has to do with an attitude of “humiliating sobriety” as a matter of an aesthetics at a threshold, and perhaps as a philosophy of intellectual survival. But what is “The Part About the Critics” actually all about? How can we approach the habitus of intellectual “self-fashioning” as it is exposed in the initial part of the novel? What was often understood as a primary focus regarding Western rationalism and modernity was the idea of a “higher end,” from whose vantage point means and methods to achieve that end could be derived and justified. A prevailing concept of subjectivity was influenced by a similar logic: what usually matters for the subject’s identity is what makes “the subject” an individual “author.” What counts is production and achievement from a pre-established prospective vantage point: “first, perceiving the image or shape (eidos) of the product-to-be, and then organizing the means and starting the execution.”34 In other words, and we draw on Arendt here, the emphasis lies on a critical approach to the famous “what” by which homo faber came to tendentially occupy the place that was once held by God, based on the Platonic separation of knowing and doing. Is not the work of the critic, as well, supposed to be concentrated upon a worldly matter (literature, culture), that can be objectified through the analysis and interpretation of texts and guiding ideas or of discursive constructs? Is not the quality to be achieved and upheld by the academic interpreter of texts predetermined by an expectation of the uniqueness or the singular importance of his or her object of study? And is there not a subconscious power at work that seems to suggest, for example, that scholars in the humanities do good by choosing and reinterpreting the gallery of intellectual founding figures and geniuses from Plato to Derrida, or their equivalents across fields, instead of independently exploring the realms of minor literatures and less codified conceptual and cultural articulations? On the other hand, if this were viewed as a matter for debate, we might wonder if the famous “what”—what one thinks and writes in terms of a projected autonomous quality, that of “the-author-subject”— determines the individual subjectivity of “who” one actually is. From here on, I want to discuss the paradoxical issue of “who” the four literary critics are—those academics whose endeavors stand at the center of the first section of Bolaño’s opus. Taking into account that “academic striving,” scholarly habitus, and intellectual identity are crucial topics throughout Bolaño’s work, what is the status that he confers to the debated norm of the “idem”35 in his book? What can we make—with Bolaño’s help—of the powerful convention that the work of the literary critic depends on the weight and uniqueness of his or her object, linked to the aspiration that the critic can become an auteurist as well? Is not, in the end, the literary-critical enterprise supposed to make a difference where the hermeneutic and ethical appropriation and redeployment of experience in the wide sense of the word is concerned? But our novel might also instigate, at some point, the question of whether the institution of academic literary criticism is not especially susceptible to the cultivation of misconstrued Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, 225. See the distinction between “idem” and “ipse” in Paul Ricoeur. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3, 246–7.

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identities. This concern is intertwined with particular cartographies of scholarly action and legitimacy. Bolaño’s “Critics”—Pelletier, Espinoza, Morini, and Norton—represent, from the beginning, a position in the “real” as well as in the symbolic world, which was not afforded to someone like the Chilean professor Amalfitano. They never reflect about the legitimacy of their own existence as critics, which situates them at a select (or perhaps a dead?) end of Bolaño’s narrative map. Now, how did it all begin? And how, in fact, does the novel begin? This is the way it starts. The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D’Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn’t realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D’Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him (3).

A few observations come to hand. The simple fact that the novel begins in a conventional realist fashion does not say much about its rationale, apart from the observation that Bolaño seems to be free of the ambition of high literary experimentation. Imaginary transgression is not pursued as a matter of aesthetic introversion in the first place. As readers might notice with a certain surprise, there is the inclination of a French man toward a contemporary German writer, an attitude that will also characterize the ambitions of the other protagonists of the first part—three young literary critics from Italy, Spain, and England. Strangely, the German novelist bears the name Benno von Archimboldi. His works, judging by their titles (for we will never know much more about them), are thematically atypical, slightly bizarre, being as they are committed to nonGerman, or excentric topographies. But above all, the project of the literary critics-to-be to focus their work on the admired master’s fiction—the way their search is narrated—is, and will remain, unconcerned with any kind of specific artistic qualities of Archimboldi’s books. The more intense the fascination of Pelletier and his colleagues with Archimboldi becomes, the less we will get a chance to learn about the fictional cosmos of the German novelist. This is not a kind of creative “mistreatment” of artistic matter by a self-conscious writer (which is fairly common in modern and postmodern prose), nor does Archimboldi simply function as narrative bait in the manner of detective fiction. Bolaño is skeptical about a presumed transcendence of literary representation. Paraphrasing Arendt, he is concerned not about “what” Archimboldi has written as an acclaimed novelist, but about “who” this person is as the medium of a life story that becomes tangible ex post facto. A similar mechanism applies to the narrative construction of the critics as well. “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind, tells us only what he is or was.”36 Now, the “Critics” have made it their project Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, 186.

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to find out, interpret and publicize “what” Archimboldi “is or was.” This is their job, so to speak, but the “artistic” content of this mission is either exchangeable, or irrelevant for closer examination in 2666. Bolaño narrates, extensively, the academics’ routine commitment to the “what” of their subject in order to actually expose their “who,” as if their scholarly project and entire existence were a sort of occupational therapy. There is a latent irony at work when the “Critics” also try to reconstruct Archimboldi’s personal trajectory and decide to embark on their own journey to Mexico, to meet the writer in person. However, the “who” of Archimboldi is what they cannot uncover, and it is this “dialectical” procedure of “exposure by omission” that allows Bolaño to mount a both subtle and pointed critique of Western European, academic self-modeling. The Archimboldian apostles remain stuck in the famous Platonist search for the “idem.” Their unsuccessful project to discover the “ipse” is reflected back upon themselves, and their own identity will become recognizable as being based on the placebo principle: they need, as exemplary academics, the “pharmakon” of a literary giant who always remains at a distance, in order to fulfill their most basic needs and bodily desires, starting with their daily bread. That is to say, by building on a literary (or philosophical) myth, and abstracting from a “real story” that has no “author” but only a precarious hero “without heroic qualities”37 (the artist as a physical and socio-anthropological, a “speaking and acting,” being), one can, as a scholar and under certain circumstances, make a good living. This discussion regarding “The Part About the Critics” is of an epistemic nature. I do not mean to reduce to dry theory the brilliance of the “Critics’” purpose and their hermeneutic obsession of making an outsider part of the distinct canon. In the end, we are reflecting about desire and intoxication and, from there, sobriety, all of which makes us now return, for the sake of the “story factor” that Bolaño is indebted to, to the metropolitan life world of Pelletier and his befriended colleagues. Still a student in the German Department, Pelletier decides to become an Archimboldian, which means creating a framework for constructing a literary celebrity almost from the start, since none of his professors has ever heard of the writer. So the young enthusiast writes to the Hamburg press that published Archimboldi’s works, undertakes, at the age of 22 (2666, 4), the translation of D’Arsonval from the German into French, to then develop his dissertation from there, and a few years later translates other books by the adored novelist in order to eventually become the accepted authority on Benno von Archimboldi in French academic and editorial circles. When Pelletier was still “young and poor” (4), he felt that he needed to be an “ascetic,” hunched over his German texts “in the weak light of a single bulb, thin and dogged, as if he were pure will made flesh, bone, and muscle without an ounce of fat, fanatical and bent on success” (5). This worked on him “like a drug” (5), a drug that helped remove obstacles by setting his emotions in the right condition, between tears, rage, and whatever else. Archimboldi’s work, even when still that of a barely known writer, is the “pharmakon” that sets the young Pelletier on a brilliant career (5). When we speak, from here, of the placebo-text principle, this means, first, that a drug that unites body and mind in Ibid.

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an altered state does not have to be of a chemo-biological nature, such as nicotine, alcohol, or LSD. Books, and the images that they (are made to) produce of their creator, together with their “pneuma,” their “disembodied spirit,” can figure among the most powerful drugs in modern times. It means, second, that to become an aficionado who is uncompromisingly bent on his or her project implies a daily praxis, a life style, and all the necessary incitement and pressure to be put on the “self,” which can then result in a neurological and physiological disposition that results in a particular type of addiction. Again, addiction does not have to be a primordial matter of ingesting harmful narcotic products. When a book comes to play a “narcoticizing” role, there is no uniqueness per se about this book, but rather an aura that is formed through complex yet concrete relationships, in which physiological realities play their unacknowledged part, even in the case of works that produce their effect through fame, or mythic appeal. In the first part of 2666, the enigmatic writer Archimboldi and his books are a steady reference. When the novel abstains, nevertheless, from any particular incursion into Archimboldi’s literary universe, it shuns, in a sense, the famous “narcissistic” or postmodern literature’s search for metafictional construction. Bolaño’s opus is obsessively dedicated to critics and writers, yet his is not properly “metafiction” the way it has been understood in postmodern literary thinking. In that way, “The Part About the Critics” seems to make the point that it is the “pharmakon” that works as the movens for the Western scholar— something that cannot be reduced to the metareflexive mind. What the pharmakon helps to enforce, in agreement or in tension with preexisting, more specialized aesthetic references, is curiosity, astonishment, latency of desire, image-making, associativity, and temporary release from life’s profane pressures, together with a craving to continue the adventure. Any literary universe with the powers to satisfy an inherent craving, or even hunger for gratification in the reader and, in the given case, the scholar, can turn, under circumstances, into a “placebo text,” working as a drug. Of course, more subtle intellectual motives are at issue, as well. However, in Archimboldi’s case, the “Critics’” point is merely that his work is “different” from anything else known, conveying a mystical oeuvre at the margins of contemporary, lettered sophistication. But could this not be said of many others of today’s imagined, and actual, writers? Had Bolaño specified the outstanding concerns and aesthetic qualities of Archimboldi’s writing, the sense of autonomous value might have created a legitimacy in and for itself. In that case, select ideas and figures of the sublime would appear to be the moving forces of the Archimboldian apostles. But 2666 is dedicated to a spontaneously “Socratic,” rather than an Aristotelian oeuvre of Archimboldi. If we remember the Phaedrus, the “pharmakon” that can help us feed on one or another sphere of “divine madness” can be stronger—reading between the lines of Socrates’ cunning speech—than abstract ideas or artistic values. The careers of the three other critics are variations, and suddenly almost replicas, of Pelletier’s story. The scholar Piero Morini, a teacher of German literature at the University of Turin who, although he had first read Archimboldi four years before Pelletier, did not translate the first novel of the German author into Italian until five years after the Frenchman had already embarked on his respective effort (5). Morini’s translations in Italy had to overcome greater obstacles than Pelletier’s in France, but persistence and eloquence helped him succeed, even though he had been diagnosed

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with multiple sclerosis and was left permanently in a wheelchair. The third of the academic “musketeers” (possessing “iron wills,” 8), is Manuel Espinoza from Madrid. His approach to the field of German literature leads via a frustrated reception of the writings of Ernst Jünger. His career is marked by several detours, but by the year 1990, Espinoza has also become a regular participant in German literature conferences across Europe. “Like Morini and Pelletier, he had a good job and a substantial income, and he was respected (to the extent possible) by his students as well as his colleagues. He never translated Archimboldi or any other German author” (8). The fourth “Critic” is a woman from London by the name of Liz Norton, whose discovery of Archimboldi was the “least poetic” of all. Being notably younger than the three male Archimboldians of great drive, she came across one of Archimboldi’s novels in the house of a German friend when she was living in Berlin for a few months in 1988. In addition, she was more suspicious, and her mindset less focused as far as the adamant drive toward one single literary authority is concerned. Besides, and “used in a personal sense, the phrase ‘achieve an end’ seemed to her a small-minded snare” (8). Is this why Liz Norton, at one point, shows the closest though fleeting “aesthetic” perception of one of Archimboldi’s books? Reading the novel Bitzius, on a rainy London day, makes Norton run out into the park, where “the grass and the earth seeemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote” (9). The hint of the book as “a drug”—an “agent” that substitutes the narcoticizing peyote experience—could barely be more suggestive, “But the truth is that she had only had tea to drink and she felt overwhelmed, as if a voice were repeating a terrible prayer in her ear . . .” (ibid.). A significant momentum does not arise from the ways in which the “Critics” meet each other (we have already suspected that their encounter happens at academic congresses on German literature); rather it is due to the fact that they discover their joint spirit during an epochal threshold at which Europe and the world cease to be what they were during the four post-World War II decades. In fact, the entire novel sets out from this scenario of drastic change. We are talking about the years of 1989–91. Pelletier and Morini meet at a literature colloquium in Leipzig in 1989, “when the GDR (German Democratic Republic, 1949–90) was in its death throes, and then they saw each other again at the German literature symposium held in Mannheim in December of the same year (a disaster, with bad hotels, bad food, and abysmal organizing)” (10). There reverberates, on changing German soil as well as among the “Germanists,” a certain sense of chaos. On the one hand, an existing academic vocabulary has become paltry and volatile but, on the other, a spirit of a decline of critical thinking seems to be latent wherever the “Critics” go. They do not perceive this situation as a problem, since their actual “hero,” Archimboldi, is neither canonized nor has a major discursive field—for example, postmodernist, interculturalist, gender-oriented, or postmarxist—crystallized around the interpretation of his works. Thus, the “Critics” are more like a kind of secret brotherhood, those select few who really know about the German’s oeuvre as the “great black shark” of contemporary literature(11). In 1992, Pelletier and Espinoza meet Morini, and all three full professors meet Liz Norton, a

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26-year-old doctoral candidate at that time, at a symposim in Bremen, in 1993. What initiates their deep mutual affinity is, only randomly sketched, a polemic that unfolds between our Archimboldians from Paris, Madrid, London, and Turin, and, at the opposite end, a group of eminent German critics—“Pohl, Schwarz, and Borchmeyer” (11, 12). The German Archimboldi specialists are bound to their own, constrained background, comparing the novelist to Böll, Dürrenmatt, and Grass. They speak, for example, of “suffering,” of “civic duty,” and of “humor” (12), which meets the sarcastic affront of the nonGerman scholars.38 The “Critics” seem to hold up—and here the narration conveys bits of scholarly discourse only indirectly, or in ironic allusions—a Nietzschean posture regarding Archimboldi’s work, one that, in addition, emphasizes a certain dreary energy stemming from Medieval and Renaissance literature. That is, while the “usual Germanists” apply either a national, mainly West German (as well as Swiss, in the case of Dürrenmatt) framework of reference, the group of the “Critics” perceives in Archimboldi’s work a terrible, unrelenting side, together with an atypical, “trans-German” core. This barbarian aspect resonates from the background of those years, in which Eastern European state socialism is dismantled, and that which is widely advertised as “revolution” turns out to be the economic incorporation of the East European countries “not into the European Community on somewhat equal terms, but into a global capitalist system already in the process of restructuring according to neoliberal rules that marked the end of an era of social democracy.”39 Bolaño, a Chilean writer who had embarked on his diaspora almost two decades earlier, at a time when Pinochet started to impose what would become the South American, neoliberal economic model on dictatorial grounds, is, apparently, sensitive toward these European and global changes. But he doubts that there can be one single, succinct narration capable of representing the “transitions” that he has been experiencing as violent and monstrous. If we perceive, in the “Critics’” craving for Archimboldi’s work, a sense in which a larger climate of intellectual depoliticization could be encapsulated, then the story of Archimboldi’s life itself, emerging to light at the end of the 898-page novel, is stunningly political, although in an uncomfortable way. Let me show how the years 1989–91 are condensed into an imagination that is disturbing, also one of the rare moments where satire takes the lead. It is not the “Critics” facing these changes from a close yet alienating distance but, again, Amalfitano, the diasporic outsider who was left ashore in Santa Teresa, who is the “seer,” the one who sees through the suffocating surface of the modern-global everyday. In a ghostly dream, the Chilean professor meets the abject image of the “last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century” (227). The man is singing a song in Russian, but it is not always the same, for there are words in French and English as well, even pop melodies and tangos, ballads that heighten drunkenness or love (228). “When the last Communist philosopher finally reached the crater or latrine,

See also the laconic report on a 1995 international literature congress in Amsterdam, in which a hegemonic “English” and “Anglo-Indian” rally-like presence is referred to with mockery, and where the German-literature discussions are viewed as “more productive” (17). 39 See S. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 229. 38

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Amalfitano discovered in astonishment that it was none other than Boris Yeltsin” (228). Yeltsin takes a look at the professor as if it were he who had invaded his dream, then gives him a little instruction, starting with “listen carefully, comrade”: I am going to explain what the third leg of the human table is.. . . And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic, and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater of the latrine and . . . took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said: “I think it’s time for a little drink.” And after he had drunk and given the poor Chilean professor the sly squint of a hunter, he began to sing again . . . And then he disappeared, swallowed up by the crater streaked with red, . . . and Amalfitano was left alone and he didn’t dare look down the hole . . . (228).

The dream-image reveals an allegorically sharp perception of that populist politician, if we remember that Yeltsin, before becoming the head of the Soviet state in the process of its undermining, was notorious for his drinking escapades and sexual affairs. His actual merit was to embark, after completing an instructional visit to the United States, on ethnically based, nationalist demagogy, inventing a new political legitimacy that eroded the remnants of perestroika40 in an overall situation of the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. In her overview of the main factors that marked the transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the years 1989 and 1990, Susan Buck-Morss argues that what was publicized, by Western satellite media, as a popular revolutionary quest for “democracy and freedom” were in fact new forms of civil society emerging inside the old Party regimes, under the effect of the radicalization of various dissenting forces. But soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “outstretched arms of the West” carefully transmitted a corrected meaning: instead of radical reform and incorporation of the East as equals, economic and political subordination under the neoliberal breeze of global market ideology was strategically at issue. Located in such a contextual framework, with which Bolaño was closely familiar, the novelist reminds his readers of Yeltsin’s recipe by which the politician captured, for Russia’s sake and beyond, the world’s most pervasive, globally unifying forces: “supply + demand + magic.” Why is “magic” so important, in order to prevent market society from collapsing into a hole (a “garbage pit of the void”) of historically emptied life worlds, which pulsate endlessly in their reproduction of the meaningless? Here we might recall, again, Benjamin’s little-known fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” in which he thinks of capitalism, in a bold conceptual vision, as a cultic-religious phenomenon

Perestroika is briefly synthesized by Buck-Morss as “market reform within the framework of the socialist economy and democratic reform within a one-party political system” (of the Soviet Union; 226). 41 Walter Benjamin. “Capitalism as Religion,” 288. 40

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without a specific body of dogma or theology. What makes capitalism permanent is the freedom to consume as an ever-repetitive, cumulative yet “purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.”41 And yes, “epic and sex” are part of the cult that impregnates daily routines with their dependence on capital as its god. In other words, the fetishistic (“magic”) quality into which “supply and demand” have been elevated—a form of low-level, self-perpetuating ecstasy—obscures the opposition between use value and exchange value, so that the utilitarian and ritual dimensions of market societies become inseparably linked. Yeltsin was keenly aware, as Bolaño implies, that the triumphant capitalist coup in Russia and beyond relied on that duality. The novelist also calls on his readers not to overlook the dint of cynicism in the image of the execrably Dionysian Yeltsin. After having completed his political duties, the monstrous colporteur takes his place in the entrails of the latrine of history—not without the “sly squint of the hunter.” It is this type of “spectral criticism,” working with sometimes chilling, sometimes grotesque visions and dream-images, which signals the sites of crisis in the contemporary, globalized world whose furthest boundaries are hard to establish, but which will come into transatlantic perception in the liminal space of Santa Teresa. In the meantime, the Archimboldian critics, relatively unmoved by a changing Europe that, in turn, is strongly affecting Amalfitano, pursue their mission with enhanced energies. This is because of the spirit of the newly constituted group, which Liz Norton—a “blond Amazon” who speaks fluent German—has not only become part of but where she is turning into a Muse-like medium of desire. There is an intertextual moment to it. If we remember Benjamin’s interest, in “Surrealism,” in Auerbach’s figure of the “mystical beloved,” it has to do with a dialectical concept of love in which “the lady . . . matters least.” What bespeaks is a gift—a moment of “divine madness,” summoning Socrates’ zest in Phaedrus once more—which incites illumination rather than providing a down-to-earth, sensual pleasure. That way, “chastity” can become a “transport” of surprising force. We know that Benjamin was imagining a certain analogy between Dante’s Beatrice and Bretón’s Nadja, the issue being that—beyond the well-explored, masculine fascination with a female, nonrational “essence”—the physical absence of a beloved creature can still enable an energetic relationship, thereby causing a transgressively sensual effect on imagination, the original intertextual clue that led Benjamin to formulate his “dialectics of intoxication” (see Chapter 2). At such a point, ecstasy became thinkable, for Benjamin, from a condition of “sobriety.” In addition, one of Bretón’s perceptions regarding the character of Nadja says: “When I am near her I am nearer things which are near her.” In Benjamin’s reading: “He is closer to the things that Nadja is close to than to her.”42 But what are these things, or why are certain things so difficult to rescue from an “authoritarian quotidian” existence? For the male Archimboldian apostles, in 2666, Liz Norton is the creature that seems to lead them closer to Benno von Archimboldi, because she is the least methodical and calculating of them all. It is not that she has a deeper knowledge of Archimboldi’s work, nor is she aware of the master’s distant undertakings. Yet she is more intuitive and, in a way, Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism,” 210.

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more undecided than her male colleagues. The intertextual irony lies in that our male “Critics” are unable to respect a female mystical potential that might then produce, in the best of cases, actual illumination, as fleeting as it might be. In the end, the male scholars all long (and eventually succeed in that longing) for a sexual relationship with Norton, and they also long, each deep within his ego, for a petit-bourgeois marriage (children, a nice house, and an end to too much group-bonding).43 The irony points in this and in another direction: was not the matter of “sobriety” the weakest link, even in the Surrealists’ conception of love? It’s not about avoiding sex, to be clear. In fact, sex would not stand in the way of a life philosophy of sobriety, as Benno von Archimboldi’s “narrative identity” will later show. The issue is rather how to overcome the restraints, that is, the egocentric anxieties of the individualistic subject. At stake, for example, is ascetism together with those forces that could compete with the dominant emanations of myth (“Yeltsin’s” magic, for example), but also with a comforting, almost conformist indifference: a smooth, “humanistic” self-assurance that a certain academy seems to guarantee to (or require from) those who are legitimately dedicated to their metier— such as the life of the “Critics’” flowing conveniently in accord with the “placid river of European university German departments” (40). There is an ocurrence, during which Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s adoration of their gorgeous female colleague, shaped by a “greater force” (17) finally collapses into an egoistic explosion of violence. Sexist and racist modes of empowerment, or “subjectification,” can become particularly pervasive when projection is at work. Pelletier and Espinoza have come from Paris and Madrid to visit Norton, asking her if she still loved Pritchard, an intimate London companion of hers. Her answer is “no,” or perhaps “yes,” but why this kind of question, the young woman wonders, perhaps out of jealosy? Upon which both men reply that it was “almost an insult to accuse them of being jealous considering the nature of their friendship” (73). This implies that the nature of their bond is linked to a superior project. Then they go out for dinner, talking cheerfully like children, until night falls, about the “desastrous” consequences of jealosy, and the sweetness of certain open, “delectable wounds” (ibid.). The three academics are still engrossed in their conversation after leaving the restaurant, taking a taxi and passing Harmsworth Park and the Imperial War Museum, and other sites alongside the nightly streets of London. The cab driver, a Pakistani, looks as if he cannot believe what he is hearing. Norton calls his attention, indicating that he has lost his orientation, and the driver confesses that “London was such a labyrinth.” This causes Espinoza to remark that he’d be damned if the cabbie hadn’t just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrith—unintentionally, of course. To which Norton replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their description of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous After having sex with Pelletier and Espinoza, respectively, and after a “detained period of reflection,” Norton decides to commit herself to a relationship with Morini, the professor from Torino in the wheel chair, who is impeded from being as self-serving as the others.

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Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, . . ., but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and the word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren’t English, also had a name in his country and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger (73).

The “Critics,” taken totally by surprise, need a moment to react, and then tell the driver to stop his wretched car (74). Which the Pakistani does, not without pointing to the meter to settle the account. This seemed ok to Norton and Pelletier who wanted to leave the issue there, but it was an unbearable affront to Espinoza, “who stepped down and opened the driver’s door and jerked the driver out, the latter not expecting anything of the sort from such a well-dressed gentleman. Much less did he expect the hail of Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him” (74). Pelletier joins in kicking the Pakistani who was down, “curled into a ball on the ground,” despite Norton’s shouting that violence wouldn’t solve anything . . . The kicking continues, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mention seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orifice in the head, except for the eyes (ibid.).

A day later, a local television station reports that the driver’s body was found with “four broken ribs, a concussion, a broken nose, and he’d lost all of his top teeth” (77). At the very moment of the event, when the “Archimboldians” stop kicking the defenseless man they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if they’d finally had the ménage à trois they’d so often dreamed of. Pelletier felt as if he had come. Espinoza felt the same, to a slightly different degree. Norton, who was staring at them without seeing them in the dark, seemed to have experienced multiple orgasms. A few cars were passing by St. George’s Road.. . . (74)

Bolaño, by constructing this scene, goes beyond recasting those academics as violent perpetrators, which means that he does more than expose how the respectable and educated can step into the abyss of punishing an “uncivilized” intruder, thus arriving at the verge of their humanistic habitus, and meeting their colonial unconscious. The ocurrence is linked to the novel’s deeper core of violence. Let us pay attention, again, to the matter of intoxication through violence, one of the single most controversial aspects where the “aesthetics of violence” are concerned. What can we make of Bolaño’s exposure of the “group orgasm” of his critics? It might be helpful to hark back, for a moment, to Auerbach’s thoughts about medieval and early-modern literatures. The philologist’s interest in violence is stylistic, yet he is also taken in by the transgressive

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effect that a violent event can exert at the point at which it is depicted in the form of “brute, pictorial realism.” Two realms intersect—the (allegedly) intoxicating effect of a “brute and sensory,” violent experience as such, and art’s capacities to either capitalize on such an “anthropological” effect, or to raise a critical awareness, or both. The example Auerbach provides is taken from chapter 8 of book 6 of Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine refers to Alypius, a student of law in Rome who, in his intention to uphold the worldly purpose of education and rational perfection abhors the Roman gladiatorial spectacles. One day Alypius is drawn, by his fellow-students, into an amphitheater in which that kind of terrible and deadly shows takes place. The context is different from Socrates’ situation in Phaedrus, when Socrates desires to be seduced by the “pharmakon” of Lysias’ speech, however, the epistemic issues at stake are somewhat similar. Alypius states his resistance to bloodthirsty violence and “enmaddened” mass spectacle like this: “Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.”44 The “humanist” student pretends that, even when coming in close contact with the “inhuman sports,” he will not relinquish his educated moderation, his rational self-discipline, and inner distance to such badness. As we can foresee, this is wishful thinking, a rational illusion. Alypius, who decided to close his eyes during the show, is suddenly seduced by the outbursts of the crowd to “unlock” his eyes to see “that blood,” and to “imbibe a sort of savageness,” “drinking in madness unconsciously,” and being “delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime.”45 We are facing, once again the problem of intoxication and eventually of addiction, without the matter being linked to the ingestion of drugs. Do not Bolaño’s literary critics fall, when they beat up the Pakistani, into ecstasy by imbibing “a sort of savageness,” as well? It is revelatory that the novelist foregrounds the issue of intoxication through violence in relationship to the European academics, before moving the narration entirely to Santa Teresa in “The Part About the Crimes.” What the second citation shows is the way the violent act functions as a release, an unchaining of refrained desire: “It was as if they’d finally had the ménage à trois they’d so often dreamed of.” But since Liz Norton’s role, in 2666, is more tricky than that of a female “object of desire,” we have to note that the possibility for her to turn—like Bréton’s Nadja—into the “mystical beloved” fails. It fails not only because of the possessive interests of her male colleagues but also due to her own fascination with different dalliances, her “down-to-earth” undecidedness. This does not pose a problem for Liz, nor for the men, since they all share a sense of having a superior mission—their secret, erudite closeness to the literary saint Archimboldi. This attitude, directed at an experience of totality, never becomes an issue of reflexivity among the critics. They never question themselves. What had begun as an academic affinity evolved into a transcendent project of quasi-religious dedication. At this point one can associate Arendt’s synthesis of the Platonic tradition of means and ends. In numerous modern contexts, not only politics but also life is thought of in terms of “superior ends,” Erich Auerbach. Mimesis, 59. Ibid.

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and “he who wants an end must also want the means” (229). Apart from the libidinal discharge that accompanies the “Critics” ’ brutal beating of the Pakistani taxi driver, there is an assumption that is shared by Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton. It implies the principle of the pro-domo righteousness of the liberal democratic tradition of European standards vis-à-vis the fundamentalist outgrowths belonging to certain people and cultural attitudes from Islamic countries. Remember the justifying “consecration” of the kicks they gave the defenseless body, devoting them to “the feminists of Paris,” “the feminists of New York,” or Salman Rushdie. It is not that the Archimboldi-scholars would act as overt racists and defenders of anti-immigrant policies; in that case, the driver would have been susceptible to being turned into a “pharmakos,” a scapegoat. The “Critics,” following their brutal behavior, feel remorse and temporally “out of place.” However, they also feel that theirs is the pivotal space, the core of a sublime and enlightened humanity, its heigher ends. A deeper symbolic order speaks out of their subconscious that can make them forget the ugly “means” that are sometimes an inescapable part of existence. Owing to the concatenation of circumstances, the taxi driver had the bad luck to unwillingly touch upon a topic that was “sacred” to Espinoza and Pelletier, and thus the Pakistani, as well, was turned into a “placebo”—a body of projection upon which an unfulfilled desire, or an obscure anxiety, was acted out to get the men’s troubled sexual affairs straight. The “Critics’” dedication to the work and the myth of Archimboldi is not removed from the dilemmas of “this” world, as far as their artistic interest is concerned. In fact, they can perceive how radically, and how enigmatically the German’s fiction focuses on the experiences of violence and loss, on the one hand, and a chilling sense of plenitude, on the other. There must be something in the fictional Archimboldi’s novels—if we are allowed the speculation—that resembles the somber spell that certain medieval and early modern literatures had cast on Auerbach: a mode of writing that could clothe the “subject’s immersion in horror and distortion, power and destructiveness, hatred of the world, or humility, ascetism and love in an “extravagantly pictorial style,”46 a paradoxical realism that we find so stunningly restaged, as well, in several of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films. Still, the “Critics” remain distant from what might be the clue to understanding Archimboldi: a mode of sobriety that, by forging a genuine link between life experience and aesthetic invention, makes the fragile human creature—the one that in the twentieth century becomes affected by disenfranchisment, war, diaspora, together with physical, sexual, or affective marginalization—sink to the bottom, so that we can get to the bottom of things.

Benno von Archimboldi, the “Amphibian” We penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. Walter Benjamin See Erich Auerbach. Mimesis, 57.

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We are facing an immense, multilayered novel that is rich in narrative ploys and images, whose gruesome aspects are neither based in pictorial realism nor sensual excess. Bolaño, in the way he introduces the untoward and unexpected into the ordinary and lets it resound from there, brings Borges to mind. To assume that the extraordinary faces of the everyday world call for an exploration of the fantastic element of existence, implies that “histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further.”47 Looking at the “pharmakon,” we might ask how it is possible to “make sense” of this concept without giving in to, and getting lost in its boundless ambiguity? Ours is a reflection that itself performs a decentering move. Testing the conceptual challenges of the “pharmakon” against the density of Bolaño’s 2666 meant approaching the novel less as a literary composition, properly speaking, but instead to look at it sideways—through “pharmacological” glass. When we recalled the use of the “pharmakon” in Plato’s Phaedrus, it did not mean favoring a universal symbolism of classical philosophy or philology. Rather, the association was inspired by a “mechanism” that could reveal sudden coincidences: nonhistoricist “legibility” emerging from a few astonishing thought-images. The historicality of concept-images is a volatile issue, but it still has its point in the way it was once developed in contrast to Heidegger’s abstract phenomenology. Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, emphasizes an indexicality of thought images versus the “essences” of Heidegger’s historical hermeneutics. These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences,” from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. [. . .] It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.48

Benjamin wanted to access an associative energy paired with the momentous clarity of visual-reflective perception, which could be effective as a counter-narcotic. He called classical historiography the “strongest narcotic” of the nineteenth century and sought to summon up a counterveiling force. Our earlier discussion of the “dialectics of intoxication” implied that contesting a narcotic historicism49 would not lie in what Horkheimer and others held as strictly secularist critical theory. At stake was a “method” that would not mark the opposite side of intoxication but could rather be a form of “mêtis,” dealing with intoxication in the interest of sobriety. Can we now perceive the aura that accompanies Archimboldi in the clues of a literary-aesthetic mode whose force lies in sobriety? Although this character has a life story of his own, Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism,” 216. Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project, 462–3. 49 See ibid., 463. 47 48

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his main role in the novel is perhaps that of a “medium.” Archimboldi is certainly not the singular hero or antihero of the book, yet he is the “organizing ghost” that moves—for the readers, if not for some other fictive characters—from nonpresence to presence. In doing so, he remains the one whose existential attitude is that of the evanescent person. After all, even for the people who meet him in passing, he becomes an “image” eventually devoid of the personality traits that we would expect to belong to a renowned writer—he exists as a very tall man’s shadow.50 Our following observations are guided by an assumption. There are moments of an “historical index” ingrained in the memories of the twentieth century, which might become “legible” only from the way in which tensions and connecting points arise between 2666’s fictional edifice as a whole, and the part that is dedicated to the life story of Hans Reiter/Benno von Archimboldi. How does the Archimboldi figure “attain to legibility” by resisting the implicitly historicist conventions of interpretation, such as that of national philologies and the extraction of global experiences from there (German literature vs. Mexican literature, for example), or the postmodern cultural-contact models of approaching the transgression of spatial and temporal boundaries from an angle of hybrid and flexible identities? 2666 escapes both interpretive traditions. I suggest recalling, as well, Benjamin’s sarcasm regarding the “dilettantish” optimism of certain social-democratic poets during the 1920s, an optimism based on “moral metaphors” fusing together desires for reconciliation and change. Instead, the “call of the hour” was the “organization of pessimism”: “to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. This sphere, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation.”51 Citing these words associates a concept of imagination that was deduced from the attitudes and actions of the Paris Surrealists. To “organize pessimism” reminds us, as well, of Benjamin’s understanding of the early Brecht’s “aesthetics of poverty.” In our novel there is a sphere in which the enigma called Archimboldi can only be accessed through images, not through the mythical vision constructed and upheld by the “Critics,” images of a personal political destiny as constellations that are strangely immune to moral metaphors. If we ask more straightforwardly yet speaking in paradoxes, can Archimboldi be imagined as a genuine figure of the German/European “subaltern,” one whose destination, however, will be the Western hemisphere. Consonant with an ongoing mode of estrangement, the myth and the life story of the German writer with an Italian name provide the phantasmatic thread that permeates Bolaño’s transnational narrative. If cosmopolitan imagination has a paradigmatic modern core, it spans two seemingly discrepant sides—concrete experiences of travel, displacement, or any other kind of “de-provincializing” adventure in the realm of metropolitan or trans-metropolitan life, on the one hand, and the projection of a Mrs. Bubis, the former Baroness von Zumpe and one of the two women who have known Reiter best, when asked by the “Critics” what Archimboldi is like, laconically replies: “Very tall, very tall, a man of truly great height. If he’d be born in this day and age he likely would have played basketball” (28). 51 Walter Benjamin. “Surrealism,” 217. 50

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disembodied self, on the other. In the so-called travel narratives and their scalings of “transculturation,” we repeatedly find this contrastive matrix, and it is often the “observer-self,” including the autobiographical narrative mode, that seeks to guard the dream of nonparticular if not universalizing (sovereignty over concrete) experience. In 2666, one of the outstanding cases of a novel of displacement and globalized experience in the wake of the twentieth century, the described matrix is led into erosion. Chakrabarty, in 2000, writes in Provincializing Europe, that Europe has already been provincialized by history itself.“European history is no longer seen as embodying anything like a ‘universal human history.’”52 The author goes on to argue that what he intends to decenter is rather an imaginary figure of Europe, one that in several academic disciplines still characterizes clichés of universal political modernity.53 Focusing on this imaginary that has often been renewed as a target for postcolonial criticism, but without paying equally deep attention to the more recent universal attempt of a US-based cultural hegemony, has jeopardized, to a certain extent, an interest in the borders and heterogeneous aspects of the European cultural and intellectual geographies. Cultures speak to us in plural, and do so suddenly from unfamiliar places. What about Europe’s local or subaltern histories that extend beyond the well-known romantic or high-cultural literary visions, providing, instead, outlines in which globalization is prefigured in more tragic and paradoxical ways than have been considered thus far? I am not referring to life and literature under East European state socialism that do not play a visible role in the novel, but to a Europe whose contemporary global predicament, its “other” modernity, starts taking shape, in the eyes of Bolaño, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Surprisingly for a novel committed to the force of perspectivation as it arises today from the Hemispheric South, its most complex character, the German Hans Reiter (alias Archimboldi) will acquire his actual “education,” the one that marks him for the rest of his life, in both Germany and the Soviet Union, that is, as a German soldier during World War II who becomes a “seer” after being wounded and coming into contact with the life story of a murdered Russian Jew by the name of Boris A. Ansky. Nevertheless, the experiential world of Archimboldi does not become a modern construct of disembodied subjectivity, a “sovereign observer,” or an introspective “stream of consciousness,” nor is it reduced, on the other side, to the image of a “merely empirical” individual. Few novels defy our received notions of literary fiction as radiography of experiental history in the way that 2666 does. It was into utterly precarious, personal, and political constellations that Hans Reiter was born in 1920. It might not be an exaggeration to read the way in which Bolaño sets up the images of the new-born Reiter’s home in the allegorical terms of one of several German “Tragic Dramas.” Reiter’s mother was blind in one eye, his father was lame, having lost a leg in the World War I, and both came from poor peasant families. We get a sense of the matter when the immanent, stoic narrator, at the beginning of “The Part About Archimboldi,” relates how the father survived in a military hospital near Düren (North-Rhine Westphalia)—by smoking. “A soldier’s tobacco is sacred” (637). Reiter’s father, while recovering in a hospital, offers this divine sensation to a “mummy”—one Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 3. Ibid., 3–4.

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of his totally impaired comrades, lying in the bed next to him (“He had black eyes like two deep wells.”) He lit a cigarette and tried to find the mummy’s mouth among the bandages. The mummy shuddered. Maybe he doesn’t smoke, thought the man, and he took the cigarette away. The moon illuminated the end of the cigarette, which was stained with a kind of white mold. Then he put it back between the mummy’s lips, saying: smoke, smoke, forget all about it. The mummy’s eyes remained fixed on him, maybe, he thought, it’s a comrade from the batallion and he’s recognized me. But why doesn’t he say anything? Maybe he can’t talk, he thought. Suddenly, smoke began to filter out between the bandages. He’s boiling, he thought, boiling, boiling. Smoke came out of the mummy’s ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, which remained fixed on the man with one leg, until the man plucked the cigarette from the mummy’s lips and blew, and kept blowing for a while on the mummy’s bandaged head until the smoke had disappeared. Then he stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and fell asleep (637–8).

When the man wakes up in the morning, the mummy had died and been taken away. It was not the destiny of the earlier mentioned Trakl, but perhaps that of one of his terrible shadow images. In Hans Reiter, Bolaño weaves several questions together. How do we approach the biographical and ethical design of a subject that emerges from constellations of disenfranchisement and banality, and whose trajectory will not conform to what Jean Franco labels “The Magic of Alterity”?54 Can we understand the contradiction that someone who acted, during World War II, as a “good German” (a Mitläufer, who although not evil, goes along with atrocities and killings, not rebelling against them), later becomes not only one of society’s radical outsiders but a figure, as well, that provides a sense of a different kind of “humanism”? Thirdly, if this literary character helps blend together scenarios of violence and biopolitical apocalypses that are commonly kept separate from one another (Europe during and after World War II; the Mexican–US border during the 1990s), what would be—if there were one—Bolaño’s deeper concern? And, last, how does this novelistic vision that, at first sight, seems to be infested by an obsession with German culture, become the complex, self-reflexive approach of the Chilean-Latin American novelist to the violent junctures of Western modernity and globalization? Remarkable segments of the more than 250-pages long “Part About Archimboldi” have to do with Reiter’s childhood and youth, his “getting lost” in the German occupation army in Russian territory, his post-war vagrancy and contact with an influential, left-wing publishing house in Hamburg, his becoming an extraordinary writer under the pseudonym of Benno von Archimboldi while virtually disappearing from the map of personal, let alone public relationships, and, having reached his eighties, his leaving Europe and moving to one of the most frightening places in the world—Santa Teresa, alias Ciudad Juárez.

See Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 159 f.

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Reading about Hans Reiter’s childhood in a small town close to either the Baltic or the North Sea,55 which “smelled of dirty clothes” and “pissed-upon earth” (643), while his one-legged father dreams of a Prussia that no longer exists (643, 673), but who is fiercely skeptical of the rising National Socialists’ zest for a “Greater Germany” (652), may somehow connect us to the atmosphere that emanates from scenes in Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009). Bolaño does not lack the talent to make readers shudder when he paints, with allegorical brushes and in laconic, awkward sequences a local scenery, ghost towns, that seemed to be inhabited by the living dead. Thirteen years old when Hitler seizes power, Hans leaves school because of his apathy and idling and is sent to work in the country residence of a Prussian baron where his task is to dust the books in a huge library (653), and where he occasionally meets the baron’s nephew, a young cleptomanic from Berlin by the name of Hugo Halder, son of a painter, who was used to drinking cognac and smoking while devouring history books, and his nerves were always near the breaking point (654–6). The baron’s nephew introduces Reiter to “good literary books” (657), and it may be that the “devil had it that the book Hans Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival” (658). Halder’s comment, when observing that Eschenbach was the writer in whom Hans would encounter the closest resemblance to himself, sounds like an omen. Of course, there were German medieval poets more important than Wolfram von Eschenbach. [. . .] But Wolfram’s pride (I fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored in the arts), a pride that stands aloof, a pride that says die, all of you, but I’ll live, confers on him a halo of dizzying mystery, of terrible indifference, which attracted the young Hans . . . (659).

What Hans Reiter liked most about Parzival, who according to the narrator was a lay and independent knight living in vassalage, with no lands and only a few protectors, “what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass [while reading Eschenbach’s book], was that Parzival sometime rode (my hereditary office is the shield) wearing his madman’s garb under his suit of armor” (659). This does not mean, to be aware of a necessary distinction, that Reiter’s life story would come close to a picaresque model. Thanks to Hugo Halder, when the baron closes the country house in 1936, Hans finds a job in Berlin that provides a tiny wage, and then works as a watchman in a rifle factory (661), sending almost all of his meager earnings to his parents and sister. Halder also takes him to the “worst cabaret in Berlin” as well as to the Café des Artistes (662), where Hans gives the impression, to an acclaimed German orchestra conductor, that he was “an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected.” To which the narrator adds, with the mocking laconism that Bolaño holds dear, “Which was untrue” (666). In 1939 Hans Reiter is drafted. A few months later the war begins, and as a soldier in a light infantry regiment he sees himself, without understanding, crossing the border into Poland, imagining that “under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing the suit or The closeness of the sea coast is crucial for Reiter’s childhood, and Bolaño, who names his village allegorically, makes allusions to both the North and the Baltic Seas.

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garb of a madman” (670). Bolaño dedicates almost 100 pages to Reiter’s involvement in the war, which can be read as a novel within a novel, disturbing and extraordinary. Reiter will indeed embody the “madman,” and part of the consternation arising from these pages owes to the tension between experience and action. He is unable to conceive of what is happening, but officers and recruits of the seventy-ninth Infantry Division, to which his regiment belongs, view him as a very courageous soldier. Reiter senses that he is going to end up being shot (694), and he hopes for it the sooner the better. One of the sergeants notes about his behavior that Reiter, of course, was the same person as always, but when going into combat, it was “as if he wasn’t going into combat, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him” (672). Neither did he refuse to follow the orders, nor was he caught in the kind of trance that often resulted from most soldiers’ heightened fear—it was rather something else that happened with him. The sergeant could not say what it was, “but Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who shot at him several times and never hit him, to their increasing dismay” (ibid.). What crystalizes are sudden perceptions, images linked to aspects of possible distortions, or adivinations of the improbable, but there are no coherent links whatsoever between a dramatic logic and (the motives or affects of) human behavoir. The artistic tension arises between particular images and a caustic yet nonlinear narration. If madness is an issue, it is not backed by a respective set of behavioral or dramatic patterns, nor is it focalized in an introspective way. It is both a latent possibility in an insane world, and—in Hans Reiter—a rare dispositif, as we will see. We have already discussed that Reiter’s ambivalence invites some of the novel’s characters, for example, the Critics who later (yet earlier in the novel) get to know him from a distance, to perceive him as a mythical being. However, and acknowledging that Bolaño skillfully plays with this possibility, Reiter’s transgressive “self,” a not-self to an unusual extent, is of a different character. Given Hans Reiter’s childhood, adolescent experiences and precarious education, it is out of the question to consider the possibility of his consciously opposing the Nazi occupation of Polish and Russian territories. What he does ponder, fleetingly, is that a better education and a different place in society would perhaps have prevented him from the worst. When his regiment is temporarily stationed in Normandy, he comes close to deserting. What could he do under those circumstances? The vision of the 19-year-old sounds awkward. After deserting, he would live like a tramp in the Normandy, finding a cave, feeding himself on the charitable offerings of peasants or small thefts that no one would report. I would learn to see in the dark, he thought. In time my clothes would fall to rags and finally I would live naked. I would never return to Germany. One day I would drown, radiant with joy (677).

This drowning with joy is not a ludicrous idea but rather an actual clue. It relates to an underground image that can lead us in the direction that we have hinted at when naming this subchapter “Archimboldi the Amphibian.” We need to take a second look into Reiter’s childhood. After he was born, he looked less like a child than like a “strand of seaweed” (639). What the child felt attracted to, from the moment he could sense visions, was the

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“seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren’t plains and valleys that weren’t valleys and cliffs that weren’t cliffs” (ibid.). In other words, Hans did not and would not inhabit the metaphors that Germans felt drawn to. When his one-eyed mom placed the baby in a washtub, he slid from her hands and sank to the bottom, with open eyes, contemplating the wooden cove as if it wanted to remain underwater. Reiter, raised in a village close to the Baltic (or the North) Sea, started to swim when he was four (640), and he was far too tall for his age and unsteady on his feet. “Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor” (ibid.). The narrative voice that animates the letters in Bolaño’s fiction recounts that, when Hans discovered a seaweed forest for the first time, he was so touched that he started to cry underwater (641). He came close to drowning several times when he was eight and nine. The first time, he was saved by a tourist from Berlin who at first mistook his head bobbing in the waves for a clump of seaweed (645). The tourist, Vogel, was tormented by the delusive image, asking himself afterwards how he could have mistaken a boy for seaweed. He also asked himself if a boy and seaweed could have anything in common (646). In the end, Vogel resolves that he must pay more careful attention to his mental health. When Reiter is a recruit of the Wehrmacht and stationed in Besneville in Normandy, he often goes swimming and diving bare-faced in the Atlantic, no matter how cold the water is. It was not so much a matter of swimming but of floating underwater and losing himself to a state that offered him safety and radiant calmness, together with a kind of consciousnessless, cosmic embodyment, sometimes paired with a “strange, powerful despair” that threatened to keep him at the bottom of the sea forever (676–7). At these moments, and in order for him to survive, it was necessary to come up to the surface of the water quickly. Medical staff who one day visit his company find Hans completely healthy, except for his eyes that were excessively red as a result of their exposure to salt water. Not knowing about Reiter’s preferred habit, the doctor assumes that the young man was probably a drug addict. (“How is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs?” 677). The physician’s presumption is not entirely mistaken, since the bottom of the sea of cold waters (the Baltic, the North Sea, or the Atlantic) clearly has an intoxicating effect on Hans. Reiter’s rare transgressive condition, his seaweed syndrome, so to speak, puts him in a paradoxical light. In some sense, and in the eyes of people who are close to him, he is “untouchable,” that is to say, always somewhat detached from the rhythm of common behavior and speech. At the same time, his is a peculiar vulnerability, regarding both sensual perception and practical carelessness in relation to some of life’s needs. During the events of the war, it looks as if he can get closer to death than other people, showing neither visible fear nor certain rational precautions against imminent danger, sometimes surviving like in a miracle. In a way, he has, as a young man drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent into foreign territories, given up on the world of humans around him. We read that “all he sought was a bullet to bring peace to his heart” (701). All this would perhaps amount to the invention of another character in the gallery of eccentric persons and odd outsiders, marked by modernity’s violent predicaments or self-exiled from the existence of ordinary people, if it were not for the constellations that make Hans Reiter a “diver” into the worst spheres of historical, as epochal and dismal, prophetic experience.

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Using a distinction that was made by Aldous Huxley, we could say that the “Critics,” whom we have met mainly in the first part of the novel, exist by giving faith and stamina to the principle cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), whereas Reiter appears as a creature that seems to respond to the principle cogitor ergo sum (I am being thought, therefore I exist).56 From this, one could presume that the Nazi apparatus of domination can so easily determine the fate of the young man Hans, lacking “consciousness,” and make him an instrument in the war against Russia. There is, of course, no easy comparison between epochs and constellations as different as those of the “late modern” literary critics and of Hans Reiter, who was born in the aftermath of World War I. However, Bolaño is not at all convinced that the state of identity and mind described by Huxley as the self-centered, ego-driven personality that lives in “verbal sunshine,” self-perpetuating habits and abstract yet prejudiced notions at the problematic center of the sociable human species57 would actually do better regarding individual political decisions and the rational-ethical organization of life. On the contrary, the Chilean writer is alert to the dubious side of advanced civilization’s “rational” culture, and Huxley’s words come surprisingly close to his skepticism—“this world of light and air is also a world where the winds of doctrine howl destructively; where delusive mock-suns keep popping up over the horizon; where all kinds of poison comes pouring out of the propaganda factories and the tripe mills.”58 It is for some reason that the excellent literary scholars Pelletier, Espinoza, and Morini, whose lives unfold long after the war, make a peregrine German writer’s imaginary—that part of Hans Reiter that will condense his experiences into his post-World War II novelistic work—the center of their obsession, their placebo par excellence. Although we learn almost nothing about the content of Archimboldi’s later novels, these are supposedly works written by an “amphibian,” a writer who inhabits several incommensurable universes,59 and whose “embodied spirit,” his “not-self ”—the human that moves across the surface of the earth like someone floating along the seafloor—will play tricks on a self-centered or fanatic or exhausted realm of subjetivity where insight that ends should never justify means60 is still far away. In the winter of 1941–2, with the Soviet counterattack setting in, the soldier Hans Reiter is severely wounded and sent as a convalescent, after leaving the military hospital, to the Ukranian village of Kostekino, on the banks of the Dnieper River (705). This is the place where he discovers a force that actually pushes him into drowning, a submersion from which he will not recover, in terms of his existential and intellectual horizon. He becomes drowned when he starts to read the notebooks, written in German, of a Russian Jew, which he discovers in a farmhouse in Kostekino. Most of the houses are empty, a result of the attack on the civilian population, earlier that same year, by a See Aldous Huxley, “The Education of an Amphibian,” 17. Aldous Huxley, in his essay, writes these remarkable words: “Living amphibiously, half in fact and half in words, half in immediate experience and half in abstract notions, we contrive most of the time to make the worst of both worlds” (ibid., 4). 57 Ibid., 1–7, especially 3. 58 Ibid., 3. 59 We are paraphrasing Huxley’s expression, see, “The Education of an Amphibian,” 1–4. 60 See Huxley, ibid., 15. 56

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squad of the “Einsatzgruppe C” which eliminated all the Jews in the village (706). One of Reiter’s wounds was in his throat, and he cannot speak, but only see and read. It is winter, and the village resembles a “frozen paradise” (707). While other convalescents gather in the main house, made of bricks, where the fire is always lit and there are huge pots of soup, smelling of cabbage and tobacco, Reiter withdraws to one of the empty wooden houses, not knowing if he is searching for something or deciding to slowly freeze in the cold since “there was no hope” (706). Taken as a Brechtian allegory—there was no way of sinking deeper, this was the bottom. The house has a straw roof, which Reiter starts scrutinizing while he is shaken by nightmares and objects floating in the candlelight, spawns an indefinable air of “femininity.” Looking for something to use as a bandage for his throat, he finds the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky. These notebooks are also the source, in their final sections, of Reiter’s first acquaintance with what will later become his artistic name—Archimboldi (see 729, 734–5). As he recovers from his wounds in a place that must be more than an utterly remote spot in relationship to his original, northern German homeland, a place beyond time, an extraterrestrial orbit, with the unspokenness of its catastrophe, the 22-year-old soldier learns that Ansky had a special fascination with the Italian painter “Josephus Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi (1527–1593)” (729). A spirit of simplicity, a combination of minimalism with “pure bliss” in the art of Arcimboldi, can be “happiness personified” (734). This spirit helps Ansky to cope, for moments, with the sadness that has taken over the atmosphere of Moscow, where this Jew from Kostekino had become a member of the “party,” but where he was turned, with Stalin’s rise, into “an enemy of the state” (737). “When I am sad or in low spirits, writes Ansky, I close my eyes and think of Arcimboldo’s paintings and the sadness and gloom evaporate, as if a strong wind, a mentholated wind, were suddenly blowing along the streets of Moscow” (735). Bolaño puts the adjective “mentholated” in italics, as if pointing to a pharmacological phenomenon. Reiter also learns that the simplicity in Arcimboldo’s paintings is not a matter of harmony because it can include horror (734). So we have a particular constellation taking shape among notions of “low spirits”/ “sadness,” ecstasy (“bliss”), “simplicity” and “mentholated wind,” shot through with narrative testimonies of two extreme historical scenarios of the twentieth century—the Stalinist turn in Soviet life from the 1920s to the 1930s, and the “Einsatzgruppe C’s” depopulating Jewish villages at the turning point of the German occupation of the Soviet Union. This is what Benjamin would have called an image of singular historical indexicality: a “dialectical image,” in which the (fictional) experience of the German character Reiter, when meeting his daimon (“Arcimboldo”) produces, like in a flash, that moment of “legibility” that can become an element of today’s critical, noncodified imagination. Ansky’s notebooks should presumably have been written in first-person narration, but they are not presented in that way. Rather, Reiter’s third-person voice laconically puts the elements of this story together, interrupted only by the soldier’s short situational references about his stay in Kostekino. The content of these notebooks occupies a considerable part of Reiter’s testimony about the war years. Attention is paid to how the young Jew from Kostekino was involved in the tasks of the Bolshevik Revolution, first becoming a Red Army soldier and travelling across Siberia, and

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two years later being drawn in by the effervescence of the artistic and intellectual climate of the capital, Moscow. He became a cultural activist, cofounder of a theater, participating in the foundation of several magazines in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities, working at the same time as a journalist and literary critic. What helped him to set foot in Moscow’s intellectual and creative circles during the 1920s was his contact with a mature writer by the name of Ivanov, a mediocre artist but agile inventor of science fiction stories with a spin that engrossed the Russian reading public. Bolaño, or better the shadowy narrative agency that would be a quotation-marked “Bolaño,” touches upon, in an overall notarial, sometimes parodic and suddenly sarcastic style a nerve of the Soviet situation during the 1920s and 1930s. Cultural politics, on its way to both conceiving of and bringing about a proletarian culture, was open to a wide array of projects and artistic interventions, but it was at the same time dedicated to channeling their impulses into the practical-political field. Among writers, painters, and audiovisual artists, especially during the early 1920s, a utopian enthusiasm loomed large, fusing technological visions, industrial prospects, hopes for a communitarian society of a new type, and even for the future “inmortality” of the human species into the most daunting or abstruse expressions, driven by the spirit of superlatives that the revolution had unleashed. Ivanov, the science fiction writer and party mentor of the young Ansky (who would later fall victim to the Stalinist purge), is among those who create unheard-of fairy tales, whereas the Russian avant-garde experiments with all kinds of formal and metaphysical ruptures, seeking genuine condensations of artistic energies in the pulsating stream between the primitive, the “suprematist”, the minimalist, and the folkloric. Reporting on Ansky’s undertakings during those frenetic years, “Bolaño is able to capture an inner dynamic, and the eventual tragedy of the early Soviet intellectual and artistic atmosphere, and its actual tragic turn. Utopian energies and liberating narratives “became legitimating ones, as fantasies of movement through space were translated into temporal movement, reinscribed onto the historical trajectory of revolutionary time.”61 Ansky, like other Russian intellectuals of his generation, is not opposed to serving a revolutionary state ruled by the party of the formerly dispossessed; he is instead wildly enthusiastic about all that which seems to lead him into an authentic “future.” But the ecstasy of artists and intellectuals, as both spiritual awakening and dream experience, has a logic that allows it to reach beyond the normative containment that marks the pragmatic turn, and the ideological domestication of revolutionary social and cultural change by systemic state politics. Although the narration does not reach into the spheres of Stalin’s rise to the role of the “divine sovereign”—to paraphrase Schmitt—it follows Ansky’s being caught by a destiny close to that of the “young Russian Jews who made the revolution and who now (this probably refers to 1939) are dropping like flies” (728–9). One of the episodes conveys a critique of the hierarchic sexualization of revolutionary politics. On the day he becomes a party member, Ansky is taken to the writers’ restaurant in Moscow to celebrate. One of his sponsors is Margarita Afanasievna, a biologist at a Moscow institution, “who drank like a condemned woman” (714) and who, in a Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld . . . , 45.

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moment of orgy grabs, “with her tiny hand,” Ansky’s penis and testicles. “Now that you are a Communist, she said, . . . you’ll need these to be of steel” (715). Does the woman’s “condemnation” lie in serving masculinist cultural hegemony? Her allusion to symbols of a phallo-mythic exaltation seen in some official Soviet monuments and a corresponding style in the refashioning of public spaces as revolutionary cityscape is unequivocal. What is interesting is Ansky’s reaction to the patronizing gesture and to the older woman’s reproach that he, the “Jewish brat,” confuses desires with reality (that he is a dreamer instead of a “realist”). Ansky calmly replies to Margarita that “reality can be pure desire” (715). And he tells the bizarre story of a Siberian hunter “whose sexual organs had been torn off ” so that he was forced to pee “through a little straw, sitting or on his knees” but who manages to “impose his desire on reality,” first by getting married, and then resuming his wanderings in the forest and across the frozen steppe, to become a forger of life by transforming “his surroundings, the village, the villagers, the forest, the snow, . . ., utterly oblivious of what we call fate” (716). But Ansky himself will not be able to escape the fate that strikes from the phallic delirium of degenerated authority, although he is determined to hide from the eyes of Stalin’s secret forces, and will finally travel back home to Kostekino. We remember Reiter’s sense of the “feminine” air that hovered in the house of Ansky’s parents—the house that he found emptied by death. Hans Reiter imagines, when reading Ansky’s notebooks in the winter of 1941–2, that his parents were taken, along with the entire Jewish population of Kostekino, to a German concentration camp, “toward us, toward death” (737), he says to himself. “He saw Ansky in his dreams too. He saw him walking across country, by night, a nameless person heading westward, and he saw him felled in a hail of gunfire” (ibid.). “Sexualization” can mean the narcoticization of daily life under circumstances of severed survival. For Ansky it was the year 1936, when his mentor, the science fiction writer Ivanov, became a victim of Stalin’s first great purge. Ansky meets the student Nadja Yurenieva, and they make love only a few hours after running into each other. They make love, excessively and self-forgotten, suspended in a rhythm that performs the communion of gift and desperation as if they had only a little time left to live. Actually, Nadja Yurenieva fucked like many Muscovites that year of 1936 and Boris Ansky fucked as if when all hope was lost he had suddenly found his one true love. Neither of the two thought (or wanted to think) about death, but both moved, twined their limbs, communed, as if they were on the edge of the abyss. (725)

As Reiter reads the testimony, he finds that the pages are repeatedly overwritten by marginal notes regarding the question of sex (revealingly, not of love). “Only sex, nothing but sex?” Ansky asks himself, or in a slightly different reading, sex always seems to linger, in one way or another. But what was its secret, if there was one? Is there a mystical core, a question evocative of Auerbach’s, and hence Benjamin’s, musings on a mystical conception of love? Ansky ponders the ubiquity of the matter of sex, joking about Lenin’s sexuality, writing about the “American continent of sex,” discussing homosexuality, mentioning Döblin, the drug addicts in Moscow, the sick, his parents (728). Sex is the matter that Hans Reiter is about to discover for himself, and that he

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will practice in the decades to come, as a form of drugged madness, a secret space of human encounter in loneliness, a triumph over the masculine forces of the violent ego, an actual possibility of bliss in a sunken world. Reiter, when he becomes Archimboldi, will know that one of the liberties that the ruling powers have not yet entirely subdued and normativized has to do with the mysticism of the genitals, nurtured by either physical communion with an enchanting body-spirit (a person, even a group), or through the miraculous energies that can be brought to life between people making love across a distance of space and time. This is the encapsulated meaning of Ansky’s hunter story. This is, at the same time, that which Archimboldi the amphibian will discover as the movens that can be turned into writing, as that communion of entirely different states and practices that “makes sense” of the powers of the pharmakon. The years during that Ansky lived obsessed with his work as a cultural activist and literary critic were, according to the vision emanating from his testimony, marked by a changing logic that accompanied the Bolshevik Revolution in its tensions between transgression and “establishment.” Ansky belonged among those who, intellectually and artistically, made the revolution and were devoured by it, although it was no longer the same revolution, “not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream” (729). However, all this material, handwritten in German, has a quasi utopian impact on the wounded soldier Hans Reiter, so much so that the Russian Jew from Kostekino appears in the potential contours of Reiter’s alter ego, although there is no alter ego, properly speaking, due to the antiphallic, “feminine” side of the emerging affinity between both men. We might speak of a tragic yet energizing experience of intellectual “mentorship,” that takes shape from the moment at which the German is drawn in by the hidden manuscripts of Ansky, the Jew who wanted to be a communist claiming the actuality of a future, hoping to touch a blissful world with his own hands. We can perceive the affinities between both men in their natural propensity to loosen the self and to experience everyday outlets of madness. There is this other, properly intellectual part that lay dormant in Reiter from the beginning and which was at the point of being killed when he became a soldier, following the orders of the Nazi regime. But there are energies that are still awake in Hans’ outlandish simplicity—a natural loneliness without feeling lonely, an inborn, heightened sense of the eros (his feminine perception), a capacity to recover, from death, that which is life in its most intense and yet sober sense—the testimony of the other one, so intimately close and so violently distant at the same time. For several days Reiter was haunted by the thought that it was perhaps he who shot Ansky62 (737). A feeling that made him believe he was dead. And every so often he opened one of the notebooks at random, and started reading again. Ansky’s notebooks are full of names. Names, names, names (717) that Reiter has never heard of in his life, writers, artists, painters—not only Russians but Europeans, Reiter will then discover, in a dream image, that it was not he who shot Ansky. His dream shows him somewhere in Crimea, coming upon a Red Army soldier, facedown, fearing that the dead man would have the face of Ansky. He discovers, “with more relief than surprise, … that the corpse had his own face” (738). At this moment his voice, that was blocked by the injury returns: “Thank god, it wasn’t me!” (737)

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such as Sade and Lapishin (728), Mayakovski, Malevitch, Evgenia Bosch, Ivan Rajia, also Gustav Landauer and Alfred Döblin, and many others, including Gorki, the controversial proponent of “socialist realism.” Names that will mark potential signposts. If there is a way to recover a substantial part of the lives and the historical imagination that were destroyed, or devalued, in the course of the twentieth century, together with an unending stream of erring subjectivities—“erring” viewed as suspension between modernity’s olympic promises and its violent predicaments—there is the possibility of reading and rereading the secret materials written by the unruly spirits that practiced intoxication in order to change the world. These materials are “secret,” not because they cannot be accessed, although it might take rigor and faith to dig up that which lingers in irrelevance, such as that which we have seen in the case of the “Critics” who make Archimboldi’s works known across academia, and among wider circles of readers.“Secret” has that other meaning that harks back on the “amphibian” condition. Who or what can provide the clues, not for understanding once and for all a deeper poetic meaning, but for an entirely different “hermeneutics,” one that makes the ecstatic practice of reading a sobering experience itself—an experience of sinking to the bottom in order to access the bottom of things (“auf den Grund der Dinge gelangen”)? This would be a kind of “secrecy” that is set, according to Bolaño’s novel, to unravel and to resist the powers of destruction and exhaustion, and of arrogance and contempt, evil powers that work with the tools of intoxication, as well, and which can only be tricked with the weapons of “metis”—a sobering intelligence that is capable of walking through intoxication in the conflicts of a degraded, humiliated world. By reading Boris Ansky’s notebooks, Hans Reiter consciously discovers his own condition as an amphibian, awaking to humiliating sobriety. He, the one who perceives invisible feminine airs in the environment (770), is also the one through whose amphibiousness the voices and bodily energies of the murdered women of Santa Teresa, Mexico, will resonate. In Bolaño’s novel, there is one ferociously “sentimentalist” character, a high-ranking Nazi officiary who is begging for compassion after the end of the war, and whom Hans Reiter meets in an American prisoner-of-war camp close to the town of Ansbach (747). After deserting when the few remainders of his division were fleeing the Soviet Union and Poland just ahead of the advancing Red Army, and trying to hide wherever he could, Reiter surrendered to American soldiers in May 1945. In the camp, a man excells among the prisoners who possesses an “enviable serenity” (749) but who, after trying to find out how Reiter’s interrogation by American officers went, shows dispair. The aim of the interrogation is to seperate the low-level soldiers of the defeated Wehrmacht from those who were suspected of being war criminals (750). The above-mentioned Nazi whose name is “Sammer,” but who presents himself as “Zeller,” served not in the military but “on the economic and political battlefield” (751). He was a government functionary, given an administrative structure and stationed in a Polish town during the war, where he was responsible for “supplying workers to the Reich,” forced labor, destined primarily to work in the armament factories. Since this person shares a place in a shelter with Reiter, Hans has to endure Sammer’s nightly confessions, as though the Nazi longed for atonement in the presence of the young German, while trying to elude interrogation by the American troops. This is also one of the moments in 2666 in

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which there is a connection between distant events that form part of one and the same drama—the spirit of the “detective” has interfered in the plot, so that Reiter again runs into the fate of the Ansky family through an abject “testimony.” It turns out that Sammer, during the growing chaos resulting from the defeat of the German troops throughout 1944, is faced, in the Polish town that is under his administrative rule, with the “delivery of five hundred Jews, men, women, children” by train (752)—a “misdirected” train that was supposed to go to Auschwitz (758). Most resources are thrown toward the front that is receding westward, and Sammer is assigned to “resolve” this problem by his own means. Authorities from Warsaw speak of “disposing of the Jews.” What ensues for over ten pages is Sammer’s self-centered, self-righteous, although lamentful account of what happened from there, presented in the first-person singular. Let us remember that Boris Ansky’s notebook was presented in third-person narration. Sammer’s confession is a mixture of the autobiographical report of a haunted person and black farce, propelled forward by the man’s intention that he was always concerned with a “rational solution,” one that would be as ordered and measured as possible. In the end, however, he was left with no choice other than to form a gang, including the police chief of the town and a group of impoverished, drunken Polish adolescents, to carry out the slaughter. A historical narrative and a sordid, sinister tale blend. Bolaño unfolds this story with an amazing grasp of abject abyss that lingers in Sammer’s personality, a reading that is hardly bearable. The destiny of the Ansky family is not directly addressed but is present at every moment of the account. Why does the novelist present this account with such shocking explicitness and length, combined with the inanity of Sammer’s utterings? Are we touching upon a narrative that, in addition to World War II, points toward the present, toward the Santa Teresa femicides? Could this be a way of addressing the fact that the violent disposal of “undesirable” elements of the population is not only an issue of the past, but can point to large-scale, biopolitical nightmares at the end of the twentieth century, as well? One morning in the prisoners’ camp, Sammer is found dead, close to the latrines, strangled. Among the prisoners who are interrogated is Hans Reiter, who says that he did not hear or see anything unusual during that past night (767).63 There might be no way of tracing Reiter’s experiential, often outlandish and highly associative, journey after the war, without presenting an additional excursus, which must be left to another study. What remains to be addressed, however, is the trope of transformation. In the postwar years Hans Reiter, who was 25 in 1945, suddenly ceases to exist. Benno von Archimboldi is born. The scenery in which the new name takes over is both contingent and cunning in the way it is set up, not by Reiter, but by the shadowy narrator “Bolaño.” One day, while trying to survive in Cologne, a city half in ruins, working at night as a doorman at a bar that had a clientele of American and English soldiers, and writing in a notebook during daytime, Reiter intends to buy a used typewriter from an old man, who says he was once a writer but gave it up (784). Asked for his name, Reiter spontaneously responds “Benno von Archimboldi.” The old man A few years later Reiter admits to a girlfriend that it was him who killed Sammer (775–6), and was afterwards interrogated in the camp but got away since nothing could be proven.

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realizes that this is a lie, and he takes a closer look at the young “poet.” “Archimboldi’s” eyes were blue, “tired, strained, reddened.” These eyes looked nevertheless “young and in a certain sense pure,” although the old man had long stopped believing in purity. “This country,” he said to Reiter, who that afternoon, perhaps, became Archimboldi, “has tried to topple any number of countries into the abyss in the name of purity and will.. . . Thanks to purity and will we’ve all, every one of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn’t know! We had no idea! It was the Nazis! We never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper.. . . There’ll be plenty of time for us to embark on a long holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?” “I understand,” said Archimboldi (784).

The older man addresses the irrelevance of a principle that maintains the “intrinsic goodness of human beings;” one can certainly believe in this goodness, “but it means nothing,” an allusion to the feebleness of Kantian ethics (785). Sentimentally speaking, he says, even killers can be “good,” and there is a German situation that shows how perpetrators, misguided citizens, and even victims unite in tears while listening to a Beethoven symphony. “Our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I am alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry” (785). At this juncture, it seems that Hans Reiter’s giving up his German name and adopting, with a slight modification, that of the Italian Renaissance painter Arcimboldo shows both cultural nihilism and an intellectual intuition. Fear is at stake as well—the American and German police could decide to renew the investigation into Sammer’s death (see 801). But a deeper driving force is present in Reiter, and it is linked to the desire to assume his amphibian not-self more conscientiously, together with the sobering experience that marks his emergence from the war. His decision is rigorously anti-sentimental, driven, at the same time, by an attitude that was born when he met the ghost of Boris Ansky, who came to occupy the space of an “alter ego,” with insistence on the quotation marks. As we now know, Reiter was the one who strangled Sammer in the prisoner-of-war camp, and it has also been revealed that Reiter, during the war, was almost killed many times but did not kill anyone himself (777). There is an implicit rejection of purity in the gesture of taking on the Italian name, one that comes from Ansky’s notebooks, a Jewish connection, so to speak. The often invoked, but always displaced model of detective fiction would warrant a name change in the interest of escaping the consequences of Reiter’s killing Sammer, the mass murderer of the Jews, but this might not have been—as the matter is left inconclusive—Reiter’s actual motive. However, Reiter has learned to hate the Nazis, and he has learned—from an old woman, a fortune teller—to not assume the role of the scapegoat, to not “make the classic English whodunit mistake” (ibid.). Writing his first novel, Lüdicke, took Archimboldi 20 days but finding a publisher in postwar Germany was almost impossible. The only house from which he received an encouraging answer regarding the manuscript that he had mailed off to several places, was directed by a man who had escaped the concentration camp by going

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into exile. Mr Jacob Bubis, the “great editor” (800), had published books of the German Left until 1933, when the Nazi government closed down his business (792). He was able to reopen it in 1946 and to become a symbol of independent, democratic, high-quality publishing (801). Bubis says that, after returning from exile, he acquired the habit of personally meeting the authors he was going to publish, and it thus happens that “Benno von Archimboldi” was invited to Hamburg. While “Bolaño” continues to accompany Archimboldi in third-person narration, a one-page section is suddenly intercalated in which Mr Bubis talks about himself in first person. While in London during the war, compelled to watch the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids, Bubis tells a nonexistent listener—an associative anticipation of his talk with Archimboldi—that before 1933 he had published many promising young German writers. Later, in the solitude of exile, “I set out to pass the time by calculating how many of the first-time writers I published had become members of the Nazi party, how many had joined the SS, how many had written for rabidly anti-Semitic newspapers, how many had made a career in the Nazi bureaucracy. The result almost drove me to suicide” (802). When the young Archimboldi meets Mr Bubis, the publisher is 74, and has a “profound sadness” in his eyes since the times of Döblin, Musil, and Kafka, not to mention Thomas Mann were gone, but several new writers, beginning to emerge “from the bottomless quarry of German literature” (808), were not so bad. “What’s your real name?” is the first question that Mr Bubis asks Archimboldi. “That’s my name,” is Benno von Archimboldi’s answer (808). Not much of a lettered irony can be found in the entire novel, although there are now and again flashes of dark satire, but the ensuing dialogue is marked by the benevolent mixture of irony and wisdom, on Bubis’s side, and of irritated stubbornness, on Archimboldi’s part. “Do you think the exile has made me stupid?” Bubis replies. He adds that, to begin with, to be called Benno is suspicious. Archimboldi does not get the point. Bubis: “Why, because of Benito Mussolini, man! Where’s your head?” (809) Archimboldi boldly replies that they called him Benno after “Benito Juárez,” the Mexican liberal president and national hero of the nineteenth century. Bubis’ ironically contained amazment is growing, and he wonders where the young man, this tall, skinny, blue-eyed German, has gotten all this from, but replies, “I thought you were going to tell me it was in honor of Saint Benedict” (ibid.). Archimboldi, baffled and uncomfortable, just clings to his name, waiting for an opportunity to make his way out of the room. (“That’s what I’m called.” Bubis: “No one is called that.”) Bubis, of course, is aware of the grotesque realism of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the sixteenth century Italian painter. Now, what is still left for him to “clarify” is the word “von.” Is its function to prove that there is some element of Germanness left in the young man’s name? This is the moment when Archimboldi is about to flee, assuming that his chances as a credible newcomer have vanished in the air; and it becomes plain that he is implacable, not wanting to reveal the “Jewish connection” of his name to the famous Jewish publisher. He does not seek favors. Mr Jacob Bubis, an outstanding intellectual, is curious and experienced enough to not let him go, but introducing the writer-to-be to his young wife, who is supposed to have a fine intuition. And, indeed, this scene turns out to be the beginning of a long professional relationship in the course of which Archimboldi, who will not see Bubis

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again, feels himself supported by the famous publisher, even in the most precarious moments of his errant future life.

“The Part about the Crimes”—Another Almanac of the Dead . . . literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticing a thing. Roberto Bolaño To claim that, say, Auschwitz is beyond tragedy is to say that unless we react to its horror with our familiar responses of pity, outrage, compassion, and the like, we risk being collusive with its inhumanity—yet that at a different level these common-or-garden responses are shown up by the event as really quite irrelevant, so that only a humanity which had passed beyond humanity, and in doing so had become more rather than less human, would be on answerable terms with it. Terry Eagleton On June, 18, 1999, the newspaper La Reforma of the Mexican capital registered an atrocious testimony. An informant declared that behind the major criminal scenario in contemporary Mexican history—the serial femicides in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua—there was the figure of the police assassin. Sergio González Rodríguez

When discussing “The Part About Archimboldi” before the section that is dedicated to Santa Teresa, we did not trace Bolaño’s compositional scheme. In 2666, “The Part About the Crimes” (hereafter “The Crimes”) precedes the life story of the German writer. By placing the “historical” Archimboldi at the end, Bolaño may have insinuated a distancing gesture, a move not away, perhaps, from present-time hemispheric scenarios into remoter zones of history, but from the immediacy of violence in today’s global wastelands to constitutive moments of a violent twentieth century made accesible through the experiences of an untoward, nomadic intellectual. This is an intellectual whose habits as “not-self ” are, from a certain angle, tremendously timely, bearing an unusual ethical fascination. Bolaño may have wanted to let this timeliness—a proactive and, for some vital reason, partly concealed stance, performed from “hopelessness”— resonate “back” into the present from a twentieth-century odyssey. The final Archimboldi story can be read in different ways. First, it can be taken independently from the other four parts of the novel. Secondly, it marks the counterpoint in relationship to “The Part About the Critics.” That is, it contrasts the sublime myth of the German writer, invented by the “Critics,” with the “real” trajectory of the erratic Hans Reiter. At the same time, it serves as a fissured screen, through which the exhaustion of (literary) critical discourse meets the epistemic vitality of the “negative subject”—the contemporary not-self turned into an “amphibian.” There is a third possible approach: both parts, the one about the Crimes and the one about Archimboldi, can be mirrored upon the other, and the hinge between them leads us to conclude with that constellation of violence, in whose center we find the scapegoat—the pharmakos. The title of the present chapter,

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“From Pharmakon to Femicide,” is built on the hypothesis of a literary yet conceptual imagination that leads from pharmakon to pharmakos. This is a figuration that moves our attention to layers of violence that seem both half-buried like the destroyed female bodies, and boundless, like an epidemic force. To show how the scapegoat is first constructed and then annihilated, how that terrible burden is imposed upon certain individuals, and groups and, above all, upon a large, gendered collective, is what marks the novel’s secret center. This is what “The Crimes” can help us uncover, and the subsequent “Part About Archimboldi” can now, as well, be understood “backwardly.” In short, the novel has no end, but rather a final “part” that forms a constellation with the previous ones –a “now” of cognizability64. Acts of violence, their unspeakable outbursts, defaced bodies and lacerated lives, today’s geographies of fear, as devastating as they may be, are not self-evident, even in their most compelling expressions. The violent “real” has an “unreality effect.” Beneath this paradox lurks the most difficult aspect of violence—its disguised core. The visible part, increasingly taken care of by corporativized media is not necessarily what helps to gain experience and insight. How can we manage to step back without losing sight of what is most striking? How is it possible, at the same time, to disengage from the lure of the kind of representations that suggest that the Ciudad Juárez murders cannot find adequate treatment in language? How can we access the forces of the underground— that uncanny web of relationships and mechanisms—from which the crimes have been occurring by the many hundreds during the past two decades? What is the contribution of 2666 to disentangling those obscure networks? “The Crimes” extends, in the English version, across almost 300 pages, by virtue of third-person recounting of what sound like bits of police reports, forensic filings, and press coverages regarding the circumstances under which the remains of murdered and disfigured young women have been found, since January 1993, in various sites in Santa Teresa. The narration is tuned down in order to elude the signs of a narrator’s “subjectivity,” and there is an impression that the events tell themselves. A seemingly endless chain of killings, consisting of variations within a similar pattern, continuing from one month to the next with almost none resolved by the identification of the actual murderers, is told as a succession of accounts like the following: . . . in May, a dead woman was found in a dump between Colonia Las Flores and the General Sepúlveda industrial park. In the complex stood the buildings of four maquiladoras where household appliances were assembled. [. . .] In the dump where the dead woman was found, the trash of the slum dwellers piled up along with the waste of the maquiladoras. The call informing the authorities of the discovery of the dead woman came from the manager of one of the plants, Multizone-West, a subsidiary of a multinational that manufactured TVs. [. . .] The dead woman spent that night in a refrigerated compartment in the Santa Teresa hospital and the next day one of the medical examiner’s assistants performed the autopsy. She had been strangled. She had been raped. Vaginally and anally, noted the medical examiner’s assistant. And she was five months pregnant (358–9). See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 463.

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Set among such pro-documentary statements, we meet almost 40 actors on the scene of Santa Teresa’s life, peculiar personnel whom we will address later, scattered across the narrative like “wandering” signifiers. None of these characters actually becomes the bearer of empathy, or of an encompassing vision, or will lead us to a reflective distance. The relationship between the reports about the corpses is iterative, in that there seems to be no visible (“hypotactical”) progression toward uncovering perpetrators or motives, nor is an enhanced reflexivity at hand, which touches upon the heart of the matter. The sensation of a spiral-like, murderous machination arises, viscerally ingrained in the destiny of the city and its surroundings. This is not to say that reflexivity is absent, but it is alusive, indirect, and linked to a mode of disenchanted narration. This gesture concerns the subject matter itself, the crimes and their inconceivable presence. It must be observed that in contrast with other critics’ thoughts about Bolaño’s alleged “fatalism,” the character of his disenchanted, laconic telling of bits and pieces of a picture that apparently lacks “sense,” accompanied by the confusion of genres—literary fiction/police reports/press coverage—is not a giving up of the search for truth. It is a sober way of approximating actions and meanings that have moved beyond modern society’s explanatory system. “The Crimes” gives testimony that “reality” outplays literature’s capacity to (re)create experience in a unique form. Reality appears, confoundingly, under the sign of the unbearably “normal.” When Bolaño wrote the novel, the killings in Ciudad Juárez had been happening for an entire decade, impressing a recognizable pattern about the marks of bestiality and the disposal of the victims’ bodies onto media-created public knowledge, without encountering either public forces or institutions that would be able, or willing, to stop the nightmare, let alone take the perpetrators to court for legal and public consequences. Under the signs of that terrible normalcy, inconceivable from the perspective of optimistic political modernity and its investment in the principal right of citizenship, the “unreality effect” of violence flourished. For Bolaño, taking the full measure of this situation meant avoiding any attempt to fix the drama in narrative terms. Somewhat similar to Benjamin’s highlighting of a concept of history based on the “tradition of the oppressed,” Bolaño seeks to bring about a sensorium of emergency, questioning the self-fulfilling drive of the “current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.”65 Therefore, the fictive world of Santa Teresa emerges from paratactical insistence and iteration, leading readers to come across, again and again, in one- to three-page sections, another murdered woman, strangled in most cases, raped vaginally and anally, her body covered by dozens of stab wounds, with shattered bones, at times with one breast cut off and the nipple of the other torn off. If we speak of Roberto Bolaño’s (syn)aesthetic minimalism, that is especially powerful in “The Part of the Crimes” we might associate the more recent video- and installation works of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. Thematizing a chilling presence of the Juárez femicides in the daily living spaces of the border, Margolles’ art is minimalist in its formal surfaces. It finds its “space” beyond conciliatory symbolization Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” 392.

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(as well as a tired habitus of political art) as it addresses violent death by combining forensic evidence with materials, and images of desert space, and other “urban” exterritorialities. What, in Bolaño, appears as paratactical narrativization in order to counter the atrocious, ongoing “disposal” / “disposability” (Wright) of female bodies is translated into figurations of space and objects by Margolles. Regarding Margolles’ installations, Cuauhtémoc Medina holds that at issue is not a documentary principle but the application of aesthetic heterodoxy and ethical exploration, taken to their limits.66 A similar remark would hold for Bolaño’s approach to the “feminicidios.” In the novel, there is a “chronology” that is not a chronology. We read at the beginning of “The Crimes” that the killings of women began to be counted in January 1993. “But it’s likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gómez Saldaña and she was 13. Maybe for the sake of convenience, maybe she was the first to be killed in 1993, she heads the list” (353). Once we discover that Bolaño draws on Sergio González Rodríguez’ Huesos en el desierto (2002), a book based on articles and reports that the Mexican journalist had published in the newspaper Reforma, the date of the “beginning” becomes pertinent. It relates to the “serial” killings in Ciudad Juárez, as they came to be categorized, from the moment that the Federal District Prosecutor’s Office (Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal) started to meet with its local counterpart, the Prosecutor’s Office of the State of Chihuahua, generating an official chronology of the crimes.67 This happened under the pressure of a local organization called “Grupos de Mujeres Contra la Violencia,” and against the unwillingness of the local judicial, police, and other state authorities to deepen and professionalize the investigation.68 According to González Rodríguez, in mid-1997, when there had been 87 registered femicides since 1993 showing the signs of a systematic mysogenist vendetta,69 the resistance of responsable state institutions, including corporate journalism, as well as President Ernesto Zedillo himself, to face the issue continued.70 It is not a coincidence that the novelistic part “The Crimes” begins in January 1993 and comes to an end, without concluding, in December 1997: “the last case of 1997 was fairly similar to the second to last, except that the bag containing the body wasn’t found on the western edge of the city but on the eastern edge . . . Both this case and the previous case were closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations” (2666, 632–3). The years 1993–7 have cast a hitherto unknown shadow of savagery over the lifes of women in Ciudad Juárez and across the border region. If reality outplays “fiction,” Bolaño makes perceive the invisible “alliance” between fear, common desires for relief, and actual blindness. What can literary fiction, guided by a bet on sobriety and a rejection of psychological scenarios, achieve in that light? According to a common assumption that seems to hold for both historical discourse and literary representation, it is not enough for historical matter that it deserves a 68 69 70 71 66 67

Cuauhtémoc Medina (ed.), Teresa Margolles. What Else Could We Talk About?, 2009. See Sergio Gonzálz Rodríguez. Huesos en el desierto, 55–6, 62–3 Ibid., 61, 63. See Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La ciudad de las muertas, 15 ff. See Sergio González Rodríguez, 63. See Hayden White’s seminal study, The Content of the Form, 5.

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certain sensible handling of evidence. Authentic events must also be narrated as if they possessed “a structure, an order of meaning.”71 The “very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with the ‘real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.”72 Narrativity, according to the logic laid out by Hayden White, becomes a trope for “deeper understanding” on the basis of its structural symbolism—a sort of unique, hermeneutic instance. Bolaño’s construction of “The Crimes,” in turn, is averse to this equation, challenging the notion of reality’s narrative plausibility and thus, closure. What is so disconcerting about this part is its narrative strategy that organizes the res gestae as if they were “telling themselves.” Stylistically speaking, and alluding to Auerbach’s relevant studies, this places Bolaño’s narrative near the “genre” of medieval annals, which does not display a properly “narrative” structure, that is, annals do not tell a story. Unlike chronicles, they follow the chronological order of the original ocurrence of real events consisting, in fact, “only of a list of events ordered in chronological sequence.”73 There are just loose ends, paratactically linked, without any major clue or plot which, to a modern reader, seems either frustrating or naïve. In Bolaño, the paratactical mode works like this: “The first dead woman of May was never identified . . ., etc.” (359); “The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita López Santos.. . .” (374); “In September another dead woman was found . . .” (389); “In the same month, two weeks after the discovery of the dead woman in the Buenavista subdivision, another body turned up . . .” (390); “The next dead woman appeared in October, at the dump in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park . . .” (391); “In October, too, the body of another woman was found in the desert . . .” (391); “In the middle of November, Andrea Pacheco Martínez, thirteen, was kidnapped . . .” (392); “On December 20, the last violent death of a woman was recorded for the year 1993” (392); “The first dead woman of 1994 was found by some truck drivers on a road off the Nogales highway, in the middle of the desert” (399); “The next dead woman was Leticia Contreras Zamudio” (400); “The next victim was Penélope Méndez Becerra” (402); “The next dead woman was Lucy Anne Sander.. . .” (406); “The next dead woman was found near the Hermosillo Highway . . .” (411); “Two weeks later, in May 1994, Mónica Durán Reyes was kidnapped on her way out of the Diego Rivera School . . .” (412). Bolaño has chosen to not use the authentic names of the victims, trying to eschew the possibility of voyerism. The narration makes “notarial” evidence its coordinates, however, to decipher the web of underlying mechanisms is a call that weighs heavily on the novel’s readers. These statements, just the beginnings of which we have cited, combine forensic details with information about where the “dumped” corpses were found, as well as some routine measures taken by the police; they are interposed with other sections in which storytelling is not absent but helps to weave a map of indicators, none of which, however, permits a conclusive vision. Regarding the central matter of female human beings who are kidnapped, violated, and disposed of, paratactical drama74 is Ibid., 6. Ibid., 5. 74 On the concept see Herlinghaus. “Parataxes Unbound.” In Violence Without Guilt, 57 ff. 72 73

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the main principle that organizes the inner structure of “The Crimes.” Bolaño’s refusal to connect the authentic material hypotactically owes to the politicization of the question of “truth,” which could hardly be more frightening than in the case of Ciudad Juárez. It is the “plausible scripts,” plotting the guilt of certain persons and seeking to divert public opinion, that are put in doubt. The search for “truth” and the types of “investigation” and punishment that have been carried out by the Chihuahuan state apparatus and some of its mighty allies, have turned out to include well-staged theatre coups, such as the accusation of Abdul Latif Sharif Sharif75, an Egyptian chemist and US citizen in order to create “narratable” versions with intelligible tragic contours. As has been explored in a growing number of first-rate studies, the juridical apparatus in Chihuahua, fueled by the maneuvers of extremely influential, “well-connected” regional and (trans)national actors, including US-based Mexican entrepreneurs, has continued playing its role as manufacturer of “stories,” so that an undeclared “state of emergency” could be covered up.76 While struck by the paratactical “naivité” of Bolaño’s text, we have to look for the reflexive moment that is built into the tension between “parataxis” as a style, evocative of certain medieval texts, and parataxis as a concept consciously directed against hypotactical closure. In other words, there is no point in attributing constraints that characterized medieval annal, for example, the lack of insight into the causes or connections between recorded events, to the novel 2666. Nevertheless, a strange affinity exists—in both cases the paratactical mode applies to the concatenation of events that are extreme, events that threaten human groups with violent death, war, devastation, and the like. This affinity is telling, and it can also be misleading if no attention is paid to how ambiguity is articulated aesthetically. War, the annihilation of communities, hunger, floods, and other catastrophes were mythically charged in many cases of “historical” imagination, perceived as signs of destiny, provoked by the wrath of the gods. After an unmeasurable catastrophe had struck, how could the affected groups and persons confront the situation in a rational and proactive way? Fear, psychic exhaustion, and long-lasting “epidemic affects” were likely to have saturated (intoxicated) the social climate to the point that it would have been imperative to break the negative fascination of evil. Thus, the loss of life or its destruction can produce, among the surviving, a demand for narrative closure, and it is here that mythical imagination can play its part.77 Brute violence, when it silences resistance, has a tendency to enter a delirium of being “god-like,” spreading the poison of its own myth. It is here that Bolaño’s writing risks forcing the ambiguity. Paratactical narration, on the one hand, could signal the spread of a mythical force of violence, from which there is no escape, nor can this violence be explained; it just demands open-ended endurance. At the same time, by instigating See Sergio González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 13–26; Diana Washington Valdez, Cosecha de mujeres: safari en el desierto mexicano, 145–156. 76 See Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La cìudad, 87–116; Diana Washington. Cosecha de mujeres, 117–41, 143–75. 77 This has continuously created difficulties for local, and international activist groups that reject the politics of appeasement and keep scrutinizing the drama beyond the official versions imposed to “close” the tragedy. See Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso. “Víctimas de crímenes sexuales … más allá de las estadísticas,” 50–55. 75

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mindfulness through the almost mimetic reiteration of “events” that are condensed in the reports, paratactical narration can also turn the unbreakable cycle of violence onto itself. From here, and remembering that the “dialectics of intoxication” has been a major trope throughout our study, the paratactical drama that Bolaño uses to structure “The Part of the Crimes” comes close to that image of “humiliating sobriety,” by which ecstasy is reflectivly contrasted. Given this ambivalence we can think of “The Crimes” as an almanach—combining the ancient meaning of the word with global reflexivity— and taking up and into the twenty-first century the critical spirit of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). Bolaño, having experienced General Pinochet’s geopolitical dictatorship in Chile, and its sequels, as well as its aftermath, is skeptical that there could be an enlightened humanity that wins the game or passes from chaos to order. This might explain his interest in, and occasional obsession for configurations that help articulate violence poetically, which is a matter of countering the powers of the oppressive “real.” In his literary vision of Ciudad Juárez’ drama, paratactical narration becomes such a device. Parataxis, unceasingly and almost rhythmically opposes “evidence” of the murders to narrative, and aesthetic techniques of closure and redemption. It becomes most uncomfortable. This “poetic violence” is a way to reject both enlightenment and relief. Here we speak of “enlightenment” as rationalized culture that proclaims its superiority to barbarism in life and in politics. At issue is, instead, the novelist’s sensitivity helping to unravel that which keeps eluding both the law and proven logics of explanation. “The Crimes,” rather than entering into the familiar catalogue of testimonial narratives, displays testimonial insistence of its own kind. Santa Teresa becomes the novelistic space into which “Ciudad Juárez” has metamorphosed, presenting a quasi-documentary account of every murdered woman from 1993 to 1997. At first glance, Bolaño’s attention to the forensic details might seem morbid. However, his “mimetic” gesture of forcing into memory, as the narration moves from month to month, the reports of the disfigured corpses, together with the ages, social backgrounds and (modified) names of the women is a “methodical” procedure that presents an aesthetic, anti-cathartic source of energy set against the background of the general failure of the state and the mass media to take due responsibility during those years. Such detailed, chronological listings, in relation to which the novelist has only changed the names of the victims are not provided in González Rodríguez’ book, which, driven by a more “enlightened” purpose, focuses on accounts and information drawn from various perspectives and condensed into eighteen narrative units containig analytical approaches, as well. Huesos en el desierto belongs among a new, postoptimistic spectrum of novel-length works of a narrativizing, analytic journalism whose famous precursor was Carlos Monsiváis. It seems that in the documentation to which Roberto Bolaño had direct or indirect access, there were the materials assembled in 1998 by the Vice-Prosecutor’s Office of the “Estado Zona Norte.”78 The work of activists such as Informe de homicidios en perjuicio de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 1993–1998, Subprocuradoría de Justicia del Estado Zona Norte; febrero de 1998 (reference in Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso. “Víctimas . . . ” , 56, note 12). 79 See ibid., 53, 56. See also Víctor Ronquillo. Las Muertas, 48f. 78

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Esther Chávez Cano, a feminist analyst and social worker of the “Grupo 8 de Marzo” who dedicated herself, together with scholars from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, to systematically documenting the femicides,79 has been of crucial importance. Marcela Valdes tells us that Bolaño had already traveled to northern Mexico during the 1970s, but he never visited Ciudad Juárez, and “his knowledge was limited to what he could find in newspapers and on the Internet.”80 There is no doubt, however, that given the novelist’s connections among Mexican artists and journalists, his research on Ciudad Juárez was meticulous. While in most of the cases of femicides registered from 1993 to 1997 police investigation was said to lack sufficient evidence, or was not carried out correctly, readers perceive that there is an underground sphere. The novel’s narrative embraces three areas in which violence against young women is a daily reality, with a tendency to suggest massive proportions. What are the constant threats that hover over women’s bodies and lives? The perhaps most pervasive realm can be labeled “family affairs”; it is associated with the custom that makes the punishment of “misbehaving” wives and girlfriends a matter of masculinity that is widely tolerated. Since—in the cases presented in the novel—punishment is directly exercised on the female body, the husband or boyfriend seizes his customary privilege to become a biopolitical aggressor, a “private” sovereign. If this leads to the killing of the woman, the man faces legal prosecution, but the slope is slippery, and it often suffices, in Santa Teresa, that the perpetrator leaves town or crosses the border, for a case to be closed. Then there is a second terrain, one in which mysogenist excesses acquire forms of outright monstrosity. Savage violence has become established in the unwritten codes that sustain the functioning of drug-trade networks, as well as other blood-thirsty fields of informal, cross-border business, such as organ traffic and the manufacturing of “snuff-movies.”81 Thirdly, a symptomatic trait, regularly mentioned in the accounts of the defaced corpses, usually in the cases in which the victims’ identity could be determined, points to the role that maquiladoras play in the game of femicides throughout the Juárez region. “The Crimes” insinuates that tying together these “loose ends” will not necessarily help readers conclude their search for truth. However, there is no way for the search to avoid traversing these territories, either. Let me begin discussing the above-mentioned, symptomatic realms by paying attention to the maquiladora phenomenon along the border. When Bolaño wrote “The Crimes,” it is evident that the reality that drew him in as a novelist was related to machinations of violence that had vampirized life in Ciudad Juárez, spreading like bizarre spiderwebs. The design of the Santa Teresan novelistic section is set to undermine the model of the master plan, applied, for example, in the course of the official verdict imposed on the alleged “serial killer” Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, which served as an instrument by which Chihuahua’s judicial apparatus attempted to reestablish “order.”82 As we already laid out, the figure of Archimboldi’s nephew, Klaus Reiter, appears as the literary version of the authentic Sharif Sharif. 82 83 80 81

Marcela Valdes. Roberto Bolaño, 13. See Roberto Bolaño. 2666, 540–5. See Sergio González Rodríguez. Huesos . . . , 182 f., 160 f. See in Marcela Valdes.

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Roberto Bolaño used to remark, toward the end of his life, that Ciudad Juárez appeared to him as the perfect secularization of evil.83 He meant, as “The Crimes” suggests, that the powers of destruction remain in hiding, while guilt has become ubiquitous and omnipresent. The maquiladora issue becomes revelatory in that regard, for it uses the mask of economic objectivity and social demand for work. People in Juárez had to learn, after 1993, that many of the victims were women who had been working in one of the global assembly plants. Paragraphs like the following show how the incommensurable is taken to extremes through the nondramatic representation of “fact.” Attention to the maquiladoras is crucial in 2666, equivalent to an alert to the ghostly side of the economy and to certain unwritten rules rampant on the global playground. The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita López Santos. [. . .] Margarita Lopez worked at K&T, a maquiladora in the El Progreso industrial park near the Nogales highway . . . The day of her disappearance she was working the third shift at the maquiladora, from nine at night to five in the morning. According to her fellow workers, she had come in on time, as always, because Margarita was more dependable and responsible than most, which meant that her disappearance could be fixed around the time of the shift change and her walk home. But no one saw anything then, in part because it was dark at five or fivethirty in the morning, and there wasn’t enough public lighting. Most of the houses in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria had no electricity. The roads out of the industrial park, except the one leading to the Nogales highway, also lacked adequate lighting, paving and drainage systems: almost all the waste from the park ended up in Colonia Las Rositas, where it formed a lake of mud that bleached white with the sun. So Margarita López left work at five-thirty. That much was established. And then she set out along the dark streets of the industrial park.. . . somewhere along the way something happened or something went permanently wrong . . . Forty days later some children found her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena (374–5).

Images emerge, captured like by a wandering camera, in which the desolate earth, the dumping of industrial waste next to the survival zones of poor communities (the “colonias”) and the appearance of remnants of the mutilated women are fused into one and the same “still life.” With the paratactical intensity that we have described above, Santa Teresa’s environment is painted as wastelands that could, as well, resemble the aftermath of a planetary catastrophe. Is there a link between the killings, the dumpings of the corpses in grisly refuse areas, and the maquiladoras? Regarding the murders, in particular, their invisible relationship with the global factories seems to possess a programmatic spin, since the environs of the factories appear as general dumping grounds for the defaced bodies—it does not matter in which of the many plants the victim had been working. “The next dead woman appeared in October, at the dump in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park. Her name was Marta Navales Gómez. [. . .] The odd thing about the case was that Marta Navales Gómez worked at the Aiwo, a Japanese maquiladora located in the El Progreso industrial park, but her body was found in the Arsenio Farrell industrial park.. . .” (391)

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Before discussing possible connections between female, low-wage employment, kidnapping, and murder, and the proliferation of “global” waste, let me first draw on the contextual situation. Maquiladoras are manufacturing facilities dependent on the movement of global capital—export-processing assembling plants that testify to the drastic forms of exploitation on which the international division of labor has depended, especially after the implementation of NAFTA. The story of Ciudad Juárez begins long before NAFTA. The city, located across the Río Grande/Bravo from El Paso (Texas), was the official birthplace, in 1965, of Mexican “maquilas” (the short term for maquiladoras).84 Since then, Juárez has become an international “leader in low-cost, high-quality, labor-intensive manufacturing processes. Its adjacency to the United States and the constant inflow of migrants from the Mexican interior contributed to this city’s popularity among corporate executives seeking to cut factory costs while maintaining quality standards and easy access to the US market.”85 This describes one of those regional, “third-world” cities that was coopted into the rise of neoliberalism, turning into a paradigmatic locus of the Global South. However, functional terminology tends to hide that the global economy, by singling out the “South” as the most “timely” orbit for “deregulation,” systematically counts on the sacrifice of human life. This is not to say that the economy is directly responsible for the massive femicides, but it has a stake in making young women disposable resources in the cheap labor market, and probably instigates other forms of aggression that, in one way or another, ensue from the “production” of the disposable body. Melissa W. Wright discusses the forces that, under the guise of market freedom, exert violent pressure on human lives by both discursive and structural means. It has become commonplace throughout the world that global corporations must rely on third-world factories in order to remain competitive. Much “know how” has been invested in making specific discursive assumptions into general knowledge so that they can circulate in a self-evident way, being repeated by government officials, media commentators, company spokes-persons, and competing professionals alike. One of these discursive constructions is the “myth of the disposable third world woman” (Wright, 2006, 1), a sort of post-contemporary lore regarding young, unskilled yet dexterous women from the South, who can be made to generate “widespread prosperity” through their own destruction. Wright suggests the allusive figure of the “Dialectics of Still Life,” pointing to the double logic of physical disposability (the women’s status as a living “form of industrial waste;” ibid., 2) and the high value that is extracted from her temporary, “low-skilled,” and extremely energy-consuming work. The lives of the maquila workers appear “stilled by the discord of value pitted against waste” (72). This metaphor of the “still life” is thought of in the terms of a feminist-Marxian political economy, and it is discussed in relationship to the mechanism of “turnover”: the fast coming and going of female workers into and out of jobs, due to the quick dissipation of their value. The bodies of female workers in the Juárez maquiladora industry are monitored according to bio-economic criteria, including the surveillance of their menstrual cycles (and See Lester Langley. MexAmerica, 35 f. Melissa W. Wright. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, 72.

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pregnancy tests, 85), bodily postures, dexterity, ability to concentrate, docility, with the result that, in the case of Mexican women, the turnover logic assumes a natural connection between a fleeting work ethic and the eventual stiffening of “her nimble fingers,” together with the loss of focus of her “sharp eyes” (78). Since most female workers are “not susceptible” to receiving training and skills, their “corporate deaths” (their leaving one maquiladora after one or two years, and entering another in an ever more debilitating journey, Wright, 74) are attributed to “hazardous forces intrinsic to the disposable third world women” (6): an ingrained lack of discipline, ambition and loyalty (81, 82), backed by the image of excessive heterosexuality (“overactive wombs,” 86), all of which sums up as “cultural inevitability” making impossible “even the cost of her own social reproduction” (86, 16–17). In other words, the factories are not responsible for the extremely profitable speed with which female workers are turned into industrial waste. The Mexican woman entering the low-cost, global labor market might be subverting some cultural traditions by working outside the home, but her culture will ensure that she not go too far afield by inculcating her with a disposition that makes her impossible to train, to promote, or to encourage as a long-term employee. The maquilas are helpless to divert the forces of a culture that, in effect, devours its own, as women’s careers are subsumed to such ineluctable traditional pressures. (86)

What is ascribed to terse cultural custom, to the extent of supporting anthropological fatalism, is astutely “manufactured” on the psychosymbolic scale—the image of Mexican women’s particular susceptibility to serve as a docile workforce and ultimate provider of energy, thus supplying the life blood that fuels the assembly line. To say that this work is low-skilled and labor-intensive is only half of the truth. If its character were described from a neuro-cultural viewpoint, we would speak of the exploitation and the wasting away of unique resources of embodied intelligence. Those interactions that, through dexterous hands, communicate with the brain and from there, that is, from embodied image-knowledge with the environment, are appreciated under different prerogatives as perhaps the most powerful healing tools. This association is not a random one; it helps the reader reflect on the role of an important “secondary” character, the enigmatic seer of Santa Teresa. We are speaking of Florita, La Santa from Hermosillo, and Bolaño affords some irony when, after making the journalist and writer Sergio González Rodríguez one of the novel’s characters, as well, he takes Sergio’s literary “alter ego” to its limit. In “The Crimes,” we read about the “journalist Sergio” who is incapable of making sense of the allusions that Florita is conveying to him in an interview, and instead perceives the old woman as “a charlatan with a heart of gold” (2666, 571, 572). However, if we exempt Klaus Haas, the nephew and physical replica of Archimboldi who is forced into the role of the scapegoat and who, as a prisoner, makes crucial discoveries,86 Florita is one fictive person in the novel who “knows” how to place the different registers into one single picture (see 562). It is through Florita’s These are only indirectly revealed to the reader.

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visions that we may get a sense of the immanent closeness of the femicides to the places pertaining to either the maquiladoras or to the contaminated earth into which these big plants have converted their environment. The “corporate death” of female workes, at the point when they become useless for the factory, is, biologically speaking, an existential burnout, a sort of vampirism that needs large numbers of victims, not just individuals. The victims are obviously not killed in, or in the interest of, the maquilas, but their “being wasted” leaves them in a state of exposure that equals an elemental vulnerability. In the actual terms of (class-dependent) Western citizenship, the right to have rights is, at least tendentially, a matter of establishing an autonomous self (the status to guarantee a private life, indulging in its whims, and making it a sphere of “recreation”) that, in turn, depends on the distinction between “qualified life” and “bare life.” The uncanny feeling that is created by Florita’s visions is not far from the impression that representations from the European imaginary of Marx’ time, and the preceding century, have given the experience of primitive (in German, “original”) accumulation of capital. The killings are such a burden, said Florita.. . . she said that an ordinary murder (although there was no such thing as an ordinary murder) almost always ended with a liquid image, a lake or a well that after being disturbed grew calm again, whereas serial killings, like the killings in the border city, projected a heavy image, metallic or mineral, a smoldering image . . . (571).

The “heavy image,” metallic, mineral, smoldering, crystallizes into a war-like, predatory force, which might also resemble the metaphoric of capital accumulation in its savage stage, when it was perceived as a nature-like force, being either miraculous (the disproportional fantasies of progress) or unholy and threatening, with a bestial capacity to not only amass property and wealth but to convert human beings into waste by extracting their life force. Not very distant from this is Marx’s imagination of capitalism as cannibalism,87 although he was wrong in assuming that this system must devour itself. It devours living labor to an increasing extent, as global “bioderegulation” shows,88 “and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”89 Wright draws a relationship between the Juárez femicides and the corporativized myth of the disposable female workforce from the South. At the heart of these seemingly disparate stories [the murder narratives and the “turnover” discourse of the maquilas] is the crafting of the Mexican woman as a figure whose value can be extracted from her, whether it be in the form of her virtue, her organs, or her efficiency on the production floor. And once “they,” her murderers or her supervisors, “get what they want from” her, she is discarded (87).

See Jerry Phillips. “Cannibalism qua Capitalism: The Metaphysics of Accumulation in Marx, Conrad, Shakespeare and Marlowe,” 185. 88 Teresa Brennan writes: “The ruling economy requires sacrifice of human life in order to feel buoyant, and it obtains it through what I am terming bioderegulation. Deregulation has a liberating sound to it …” (Globalization and its Terrors, 19). 89 Jerry Phillips. 185. 87

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What this explanation, using the abstract concept of value, does not address is a ritualistic power that we believe inheres in both spheres, although it seems to work from different ends of the ritualistic phenomenon. Bolaño’s perception of evil is related to what one might characterize as a disjunction of ritualistic logic. The “value” that is massively extracted from young female workers, as it is taken away from women who are killed in bestial ways, is the sacred value of bodily life. In view of the absence of conclusive explanations regarding the Juárez trauma, we are led to think, once again, of an ancient meaning of homo sacer, as it points to a person (or an animal) that is in a “situation” from which it will, or can, be sacrificed. Bracketing the juridical meaning of homo sacer, as it is expounded by Agamben, and speaking more generally, practices of sacrifice in millenial history did not occur randomly but have built on diverse mechanisms of preparation and special codification (consecration) of bodies, before these were sacrificed. A particular phenomenology within ritualistic practices and traditions points to the construction of the scapegoat—the pharmakos. And some epistemological insight can be gained from cultures that the modern mind has termed barbarian. Le Marchant, referring to the accounts of Harpokration, writes that pharmakoi used to be exposed to practices of expulsion from the community before being executed.90 What was associated in ancient times with a codified exorcising of evil by a community living in awe, or under imminent danger, has become more sophisticated over time, and the exemplary, or better said vicarious, sacrificial killing of human beings may have been overcome, or replaced by other “technologies” of violence. At the symbolic level, however, a common denominator of ancient and modern practices of scapegoating is the regulation of those affective energies that transcend secular knowledge and experience. As for the status of “irrationality” today, does not a hierarchic and uneven global modernity excel by the singular, “advanced” mechanisms of holding irrational forces at bay, which it has unchained over the centuries? In essence, we are dealing with mechanisms of redistribution of guilt for a certain order, or rule, or status quo to be kept intact (or, as it also happens, to be tumbled). Mechanisms of “subjection” that require the creation of subjects destined to carry the burden for others, or to carry the negative affects of a ruling society in times of crisis and pressure, or to turn “savage” territories into manageable and profitable reservations, have been described, not only as belonging to the past but as constitutive “rituals” that have allowed Western modernity to function under the prerogatives of a cunningly “contained” civilization. The crucial notion here, reevaluated by Teresa Brennan by critically rereading Freud, is “projection.” Projection allows the flexible configuration of affective marginalities, consisting of those individuals or groups, or larger communities that are forced into “carrying the negative affects for the other,”91 into acting as potential or imagined trespassers that allow governing desires and anxieties to occupy a morally safe place. Regarding the maquilas in Juárez, and concluding from Wright’s deconstruction of the official “turnover” narratives, the assumption that unskilled female workers from the South must, per force of an inborn See A. Le Marchant. Greek Religion to the Time of Hesiod, 25–6. Teresa Brennan. The Transmission of Affect, 15.

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logic, be “turned over” after showing exhaustion, equals a preestablished condition of “guiltiness” that is rooted in their natural disposability. Can the role of young Mexican women, whose life energies are devoured by global factories, even be imagined as present-time pharmakoi? Does their being “turned over” not associate that kind of resymbolization of their existence prevalent in the devastating “evacuation” of the pharmakos from the spaces of the legitimate citizen—his or her being given with that repute, or contingency, under which anyone can harm him, or abuse of her? When we speak, in relationship to the maquilas, of a disjunction of the ritualistic logic, at issue is a power of proscription, of de facto consecration, not a final act of sacrifice. In other words, the sacrifice is virtual, as it becomes symbolically immanent to the bodies of the female workers. In this situation that makes women homeless regarding both the social contract and the traditional sexual contract built on patriarchal familial culture, other predatory “actors” and forces can “step in” to become the executors of the crimes—the actual, bloodthirsty sacrifices. Compared with traditional understanding, the paradox traversing the Juárez femicides is this structural separation—anthropologically speaking—of proscription and “preparation” of the bodies, on the one hand, and the life-destroying violent acts, on the other. Roberto Bolaño is one of the very few who recognizes this separation—which we will call the diabolic abyss—as a logic that “can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again.”92 The image is seen only by Florita, the healer from Hermosillo, giving way to that kind of literary association that can call upon shamanic perception to peer through hemispheric history’s blood-stained windows. In this way Bolaño comes closest to Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Let me now touch upon the other above-mentioned spheres, in which violence against young women has become a daily experience—the one that we have called “family affairs” and at the same time associated with the biopolitical trend that is expressed in a proliferation of new vulnerabilities. Extensive networks of manufacturing plants, as they infiltrate territories of the South, and serve as dynamizers of corporate capital and epitomes to the global economy, cannot be held literally accountable for the crimes. They have even been called a blessing for the “new,” third-world woman. By 1985, Ciudad Juárez had 180 plants, employing 80,000 workers, of whom over 50 percent were female,93 a number that kept growing during the following decades. Juárez became notorious, on both sides of the border, for a “different” Mexican woman, but not one whose social situation and public image had substantially improved. Rather, new forms of poverty and semi-poverty have been emerging along with the dismantling of the state’s traditional redistributive and protective functions. Too many of them had given birth at fifteen or sixteen, then after another child had been deserted or left with supporting an unemployed male. Absorbed into one of Juárez’ textile or electronic maquilas, they have to live in an adobe pesthole in one

Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” 390. Lester Langley. MexAmerica, 35–6. 94 Ibid., 38. 92 93

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of the city’s dirt-street colonias. There idle men with even less education than they can harrass them.94

We find in Bolaño a seemingly endless chain of story fragments testifying to this reality. Few places in the world are more symptomatic of the neoliberal makeover than Ciudad Juárez. In Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of a change that was made manifest by a segment of Latin American prose during the 1990s, regarding a furor of mysogenist violence, at stake is a “crisis of masculinity” related, for example, to the disruption of traditional familial roles. It relates to the crisis of the “providing man” that is connected to the entrance of new generations of women into the labor market.95 This is especially telling in the cases of women of lower social and spacial-ethnic background.96 A “destabilization” of the existing sexual contract by neoliberal factors prevails at a major scale, and brute practices of male violence are perceived by Pratt as a reaction to this crisis. More specifically, as articulated in a considerable group of novels97 and explored in “The Crimes,” the character of this violence is not incidental and spontaneous but foundational, and thus irrational in its perverse, calculating drives. Violence is practiced in order to inaugurate new, male-bonding spaces, capable of performing an allout punishment of female agency. We are reminded of an exclamation by the intellectual protagonist of the Colombian novel La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins). Fernando Vallejo’s literary “alter ego,” the conspicuous grammarian “Fernando,” when sealing a sacrificial pact with the adolescent sicario Alexis, says: “. . . for me it was as if women didn’t have souls. Empty upstairs . . .” (Vallejo, 14–15), as he stigmatizes the poor neighborhoods as outrightly degenerate and female procreation under precarious conditions as the guiltiest of all imaginable states. Or, as he continued: “. . . here a dissipated life is defeating death and kids are emerging from everywhere, from any hole or vagina, in the same way rats come out of the drains when they’re overcrowded and there’s no more room” (76). In the Colombian novel, the homoerotic, violent aristocratism, stigmatizing the female sex as contamination, pertains to an imagination that is different from “The Crimes.” However, there is a shared matrix from which the execution of female humans of nonupper-class descent is imagined as both a foundational and a sacrificial act. The main targets of such acts are the pharmakoi, disposable creatures or communities upon which negative affects and blame can be projected and which, in their general vulnerability, function as the victims of unwritten tragedies. Vallejo’s autobiographic narrator, the intellectual voice of the novel, acts as a violent accuser of the contaminated majority of the human race, mainly lower-class women, whereas 2666 leads intuition toward the unholy presence of the scapegoat in some of the most violent scenarios of the twentieth century, unraveling what we have described as the “diabolic abyss”—the implicit incrimination of the female pharmakos. The third realm in Santa Teresa’s drama, in which mysogenist violence is rampant, connects with the narcotics business, as it has generated grids of power by drawing in state functionaries, segments of the police, together with major players in finance and the economy. In fact, Bolaño points to the ethical and political decadence, together See Mary Louise Pratt. “Tres incendios y dos mujeres extraviadas,” 97–8. See also Marcos Fernández and Jean-Christophe Rampal. La ciudad . . . , 15. 97 See Miguel López-Lozano. “Women in the Global Machine: Patrick Bard’s La frontera, Carmen Galán Benítez’s Tierra marchita, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood.” 95 96

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with psycho-cultural brutalization, that exists, not in terms of “narco-violence” properly speaking, but on the part of those actors and institutions, such as the police, the apparatus of the state, and influential politicians, whose vampirizing on the illegal cross-border business has jeopardized its large-scale, both juridical and economic, eradication. In “The Crimes,” there is no single character who could come to our aid as a guide or as the bearer of a sympathetic quality of individual suffering. Unlike other artists, who sought to examine the individual tragedies of the victims, and their families, such as Lourdes Portillo in her documentary film Señorita Extraviada (2001), Bolaño resists giving his characters a sympathetic face. Two groups can be set out among the literary personnel of “The Crimes,” apart from a larger series of peripheral characters. First, there are the journalist Sergio Rodríguez, Florita, the Saint from Hermosillo, and the accused German, Klaus Haas. Not part of the apparatus of terror, all three are in one way or another affected by it. The other group includes, above all, police officers and agents of the government, acting at different levels and in diverse roles. The clues that can be gained from this second group are both indirect and higly allusive. So, the fragmented presence of the German Klaus Haas, Archimboldi’s nephew, has to be brought into perspective. If Haas’ story turns out to be the literary appropriation of the authentic history of Sharif Sharif, what precisely is the covert affinity between the real case and the reimagined one? We are dealing with the transformation of an individual into a scapegoat—a human being, who bears certain untoward characteristics, is converted, by means of violence, into a transgressive creature. From a literary viewpoint, we are rather accustomed to tolerating “authenticity” in the guise of fictive difference, and Bolaño’s is indeed the weaving of an extraordinary map of improbable coincidences. While Archimboldi, the “amphibian-”like German writer, has learned to metamorphose into seaweed, in order to escape the powers that are eager to subdue him, Klaus Haas, his younger “replica,” is trapped on Mexican territory by an improbable destiny. The above-mentioned, covert affinity between the authentic (the case of Sharif Sharif) and its renarration (Haas) points to an “aesthetic state of affairs” that is part of the “real,” not a literary invention. As for a particular “logic” accompanying the scapegoat, the author assumes the proximity of “fact” and renarration, and fictive difference tends to become secondary—it is overlaid with irony. We are speaking of “tragic irony,” in the way in which this phenomenon was described by Northrop Frye. The subject of tragic irony “does not necessarily have any tragic hamartia or pathetic obsession: he is only somebody who gets isolated from his society.”98 In contrast with the Aristotelian model, this is not an aesthetic strategy that features an essential truth of the tragic situation. The covert “truth” of the figure of Klaus Haas (as that of Sharif Sharif) consists of the abject assymetry between his situation and the catastrophe that strikes him. Put in Hegelian terms, the affected subject is unsuited for tragedy: “irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness. If there is a reason for choosing him for catastrophe, it is an inadequate reason.”99 This substantial inadequacy characterizes the constellation that looms over the “random Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 41. Ibid.

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victim,” the pharmakos or scapegoat. For Bolaño, sobriety as a way of fictionalizing and a politics of style means avoiding the elevation of the hero to a sublime (tragic) state, and instead bringing the “irony” that is inherent in a political plot to the fore. Irony inheres in “informal” political machinations that are as deadly as they are in the case of the femicides; they help us look more closely at the pandemonium against which, and from which—accepting Bolaño’s strategy—the femicides should be viewed. Into sharper perspective comes the raison d’etre of the “other” victim. Klaus Haas was born in Bielefeld, in former West Germany, in 1955, and immigrated to the United States in 1980, where he became a citizen (2666, 478). In 1990, he relocates to Mexico, where he successfully opens several computer stores in northern Sonora and Tijuana. It is at the Santa Teresa downtown store that Haas, in September 1995, receives the unexpected visit of Epifanio Galindo, a policeman with special authority. Epifanio, the “watchdog” of Santa Teresa police chief Pedro Negrete, is a cruel routinier. He is derogatory of the many women who were killed and whose bodies were dumped in the urban environment; for him, the female workers of the maquilas, along with other unmarried women, could simply be characterized as prostitutes. While investigating the murder of “Estrella Ruiz Sandoval” (476, 469–70), Epifanio learns that the young woman had visited Haas’ store several times (469). After the watchdog starts observing the German from a distance (“His arms are long and strong,” thought Epifanio, alluding to the fact that most victims had been strangled), makes inquiries about him among employees, and studies his police records, “everything” becomes “much clearer” to Epifanio. While interrogating Estrella Ruiz, one of her former friends, Epifanio can already envision “a very tall, very blond man walking in the dark, along a long, dark passageway, back and forth, as if waiting for him,” 470). The policeman is eager to imagine Haas’s body locked up. His fantasy is driven by moments of envy and admiration, a blend of arrogance and distrust toward the stranger, nurturing his obsessive craving to see and sense the blond giant in prison. Epifanio is the same man who organizes, on behalf of Santa Teresa’s chief of police, “protection” for Pedro Rengifo, a wealthy narcotraficante. Young Lalo Cura, a neophyte among the policemen, who are assigned to protect the house of Rengifo, is startled by that revelation: “So Pedro Rengifo is a narco? asked Lalo Cura. That’s right, said Epifanio. I can hardly believe it, said Lalo Cura. Because you are still a fledgling, said Epifanio” (472). Epifanio adds, “Why did you think he had so many bodyguards? Because he’s rich, said Lalo Cura. Epifanio laughed” (473). Epifanio, ordained to uphold on behalf of “law,” actually champions an authority through which the “separation of lawmaking and law-preserving violence is suspended.”100 Arguments in Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” written in 1921, become an involuntary prophecy of, or even a “critical compendium” for reading what Rafael Loret de Mola describes as the “remaking” of Mexico’s recent history by crime and sacrifice.101 In “The Crimes,” practices of sacrifice become manifest, especially when a “resolution” of the problems posed by the femicides to the legal system as the government’s main contractual institution and a regulator of both conflicting interests Walter Benjamin. “Critique of Violence,” 243. See Rafael Loret de Mola. “Tiempos de barbarie.” In R. L. de M. Confidencias peligrosas, 23–4.

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and the status quo threatens to expose parts of that very institution. In other words, the institution has to “protect” itself against being contaminated by “nonlegalistic” practices of violence, as well as the large-scale corruption associated with the illegal drug trade. Therefore, the “special forces” of the police, the executive “arm” of the Prosecutor’s Office of the regional state, can rampage unhindered over the spheres of civil life in Santa Teresa. The fact that, for the agent Epifanio, the “state of emergency” is simply not an issue shows that the life world of Santa Teresa as a whole has become a locus of exception. How is it possible that Klaus Haas has no chance to escape the destiny that Epifanio has chosen for him, based on the policeman’s “epiphany” that the blond giant is a unique pawn for his and his superiors’ plans? Let us recall Frye’s observation, based on his studies of Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, and others, that the pharmakos “is neither innocent nor guilty. . . . He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society.” Police records tell that Haas traveled to the United States every two months [. . .]. He had lived for a while in Denver and left because of woman trouble. He liked women, but as far as anyone knew he wasn’t married and he didn’t have a girlfriend. He frequented clubs and brothels downtown, and he was friendly with a few owners. [. . .] As a boss, Haas was fair and reasonable and he didn’t pay badly, although sometimes he got angry for no good reason and might hit anyone, no matter who it was. The boy [who responds to the agent’s interrogation; my emphasis] had never been hit, but he had been scolded for coming in late to work a few times. Who had Haas hit then? A secretary, the boy said. Asked if the secretary he’d hit was the current secretary, the boy said no, it was the previous one, a woman he hadn’t met. Then how did he know she’d been hit? Because that was what the oldest employees said, the ones at the warehouse, where the güero stored part of his stock (476).

When the young clerk from Klaus Haas’ store speaks to Epifanio about his boss, he has to resort to what others have said about Haas in the past, and when shown a picture of the victim, Estrella Ruiz Sandoval, the boy says that “her face was somehow familiar” (ibid.). A few days later Klaus Haas is arrested. An ominous awareness characterizes the way in which Haas reacts to his being put behind prison walls. He may be panic-stricken at the sudden loss of his civilian standing but he remains almost speechless, his utterings limited to a few partly laconic, partly abrupt expressions (see 477, 479). His awareness has to do with his perception of the inner ugliness that radiates from Epifanio, a perception of evil from someone who knows how to move—and to use violence—without showing any hint of emotion. It seems as if this is, on Haas’s part, also an intuition about the existence of a totalitarian underground—a “system” underneath the system—against which declarations of innocence are useless. At the police station, Haas is interrogated for four days, develops a high fever, and has to be treated “for cuts and bruises to his eye and right eyebrow” (480) that result from the beatings in a soundproof room. Haas’s surprising energy, and capacity to temporarily “escape” reality, his provocative remarks (479–81), his injuries (482) all uncanningly resonate with the literary image of the Pharmakos drawn by Northrop Frye. Haas is later transferred to the Santa Teresa prison, where Epifanio visits him to suggest a deal.

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If Haas pleads guilty to the murder of Estrella Ruiz Sadoval and of some other women, says Epifanio, “he would see to it that he be transferred to Hermosillo, where he would have a cell to himself, a much better one than this. Only then did Haas look him in the eye and say don’t fuck with me” (482). Looking back at the circumstances that punctuated the troubled life of the authentic character, Sharif Sharif, we find in Sergio Rodríguez González’s Huesos en el desierto the following account: On October 3, 1995, the Ciudad Juárez police detained the Egyptian Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, a chemic who had recently moved to Juárez after having spent several decades in the United States. He was 49 years old and his penal antecedents made him suspicious from the beginning: fourteen accusations at U.S. courts for attempts at violation . . . .102

Diana Washington Valdez provides a more specific account. Due to Sharif Sharif ’s penal records, “an immigration judge in El Paso ordained, on September 28, 1993, Sharif ’s deportation to Egypt, but Sharif appealed against the decision. He withdrew the appeal in June 1994, and left the U. S. for Ciudad Juárez.”103 Bolaño, in the novel, is fairly meticulous about making the Haas (alias Sharif Sharif) story a narratological counterpoint to the paratactical seriality of the crimes. “In May 1996, no more bodies of women were found. [. . .] The mayor of Santa Teresa announced to the press that the city could relax, the killer was behind bars and the subsequent killings of women were the work of common criminals” (508). In June, other bodies of massacrated women turned up . . . (see 509). Diana Washington, in Cosecha de mujeres (2005; Harvest of Women, 2006) provides a revelatory detail about Francisco Villareal, who was the mayor of Ciudad Juárez during that time: “Francisco Real, . . . expressed to his assistant, Irene Blanco, his assumption that Sharif was a fabricated victim.”104 The mass media in 1995 and 1996 were basically drawn to establishing a discourse in which the captivating image of the “serial killer” was brought to the fore, “supported” by the fact that the crimes, due to the compelling techniques of raping and strangling, bore a “personal signature” (471). Bolaño renarrates, in a journalistic mode, that in July 1996, in Mexico City a feminist group called Women in Action (WA) made a TV appearance denouncing the endless trickle of deaths in Santa Teresa . . . the problem was too much for the Sonora police, who were incapable of handling it, if not complicit. On the same show the question of the serial killer was addressed. . . . The show’s host mentioned Haas who was in prison and whose trial date still hadn’t been set. The Women in Action said Haas was probably a scapegoat and they challenged the show’s host to come up with a single piece of evidence incriminating him. (512)

Already on April 19, 1996, Sharif Sharif had succeeded in speaking to journalists during a press conference, an unusual custom made possible by the work of diverse Sergio González Rodríguez. Huesos . . . , 16. Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha de mujeres, 145–7. 104 Ibid., 146. 105 See Sergio González Rodríguez, 20. 102 103

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groups of social activism in the Juárez area. The “Egyptian,” as he was henceforth called, insisted on his absolute noninvolvement in the crimes.105 The narrative voice, in “The Crimes,” records that “Haas’s press conference was a minor scandal” (489), that Haas reaffirmed his innocence, and that he was subjected to “physical, psychological, and “medical” torture” (489). Among numerous details,106 Washington Valdez notes that Maximino Salazar, who was one of the lawyers defending Sharif Sharif and risking his career by challenging the government of the state of Sonora, expressed that “in Sharif, the authorities had found the perfect scapegoat. He was a foreigner who did not speak Spanish, did not have a supporting network in Juárez, and provided the perfect penal antecedents.”107 Juan Fernández, another lawyer, regarded Sharif a victim of politics, owing to the pressure that was exercized on the authorities to clarify the crimes.108 A chilling moment arises when the novel presents the pharmakos’s own feelings when he is behind penitentiary walls, perhaps the only situation in the narrative in which Klaus Haas, mostly immersed in trance, or stupor, confesses his visceral sentiment of fear. It is a fear that evokes the ancient myths of the sparagmos, or “the tearing apart of the sacrificial body.”109 Haas feels that he has entered a terrain in which, at any moment, the ritual “completion” of his destiny could take place through acts of social revenge, such as the rage of a prison mob. The literary text includes a phone conversation between the journalist Sergio González Rodríguez and Klaus Haas, the prisoner, made possible by a supportive lawyer. Haas confesses, Here in prison, the first few days, I was afraid. I thought the other inmates, when they saw me, would come after me to avenge the death of all those girls. For me, being in prison was exactly like being dumped on a Saturday at noon in a neighborhood like Colonia Kino, San Damián, Colonia Las Flores. A lynching. Being torn to pieces. Do you understand? The mob spitting on me and kicking me and tearing me to pieces. With no time for explanations. But I soon realized that in prison no one would tear me to pieces. At least not for what I was accused of. What does this mean? I asked myself. . . . Here, to a greater or lesser degree, everyone is sensitive to what happens outside, to the heartbeat of the city . . . (490).

Haas tells Sergio on the phone that, when he asked one inmate if he thought he had killed the “dead girls,” the answer was “no, not you, gringo, as if I was a fucking gringo.” “What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they know I’m innocent, said Haas” (ibid.). Paradoxically, the unmasked background of the crimes which is so hard to uncover amid the squalor of the city of Santa Teresa, is familiar to some of the members of the prison population (see 490). And Klaus Haas starts scrutinizing in the dark. The final part of 2666 is split into four narrative branches that alternate with one another: there is the account of the prisoner, Haas; there are the undertakings of the journalist Sergio González Rodríguez; there is the arrival of an American criminologist by See Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha . . . , 147 ff. Cited in Washington Valdez, 147. 108 See ibid. 109 See Northrop Frye. Anatomy . . . , 148. 106 107

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the name of Kessler, a “real” detective; and there are the press clips that continue reporting on the appearance of murdered women. Even if there were a chance that a narrativized investigator could pierce through the morass of appearances and the official attempts to bring this unbearable killing spree to an end, it would only offer a soporific parody. There is, however, a figuration of truth, one that comes out of forcing the unnameable. In fact, there are several roles replacing that of the hypothetical detective. The most stunning is that of Klaus Haas, Archimboldi’s nephew, himself. He is not the only person to be accused, but he is charged with being the mastermind of the crimes. Under his guidance, according to the story distributed to the press by the prosecutor’s office, several gangs, starting with the young “The Rebels” gang110 continue to slaughter women while Haas is behind bars. What evidence can Klaus Haas offer to prove his innocence? What can he do to resist his own deformation in prison, where surviving means that he must become involved in abject practices himself? Against hyperbolic visions of “hell,” the prison scenario enveloping Archimboldi’s nephew is painted as an arena of insanity and perverse violence, and yet it is depicted as a place where Haas is able to look through the nightmare image of an inverted society, where otherwise inaccessible knowledge lies hidden among those that are punished by the law. Bolaño is careful to avoid literary moments of the obvious—the psychological disaster that befalls a person exposed to the bestiary of prison space. The focus is on Haas’s involvement in some of the practices of the strongest inmates in order to find out what is actually happening. With his lawyer’s help and the pressure of activist groups in Santa Teresa, he will finally obtain permission to give a series of press conferences. There he tries to draw attention to several members of the local elite, part of the frontera mafia who have vanished from the Santa Teresa orbit, but who afterwards have been seen in Tucson, Phoenix, and even Los Angeles. Haas names “Antonio Uribe” as one of the killers. The reporters in attendance shrug their shoulders, they laugh; one asks, “Do you know this Uribe?” (579). I saw him only once, said Haas. It was at a club . . . (He was) sitting at a table, with people who knew some of the people with me. Next to him was his cousin, Daniel Uribe. . . . they seemed like two polite kids, they both spoke English and they dressed like ranchers, but it was clear they weren’t ranchers. They were strong and tall, . . . you could tell they went to the gym . . . They had three-day-old beards . . . they had the right haircuts, clean shirts, clean pants, everything brand-name . . . two modern kids, all in all (582–3).

“So what proof do you have, Klaus, that the Uribes are the serial killers?” asks a journalist from Phoenix. “You hear everything in prison,” said Haas. “Not true, Klaus,” said the reporter. “It is true,” said Haas. “No it isn’t,” said the reporter. “It’s an urban legend, a movie invention” (591), “a false substitute for freedom” (ibid.). Haas stands there, ridiculed, with a pale face, a “haughty and at the same time relaxed face (how could anyone be haughty and relaxed at the Here, Bolaño uses the authentic name of the group that was imprisoned in 1996, young men involved in several sorts of delictive activities of the informal, or semi-legal sphere. According to Diana Washington, the accused members of the gang who rejected the capital charge of femicide were reported to have been tortured by the police to make them sign previously constructed declarations. See Diana Washington Valdez. Cosecha de mujeres, 153–4.

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same time?” thinks the woman who is Klaus’s lawyer, while he is observing her “with scientific rigor, not from that prison room but from the sulfurous vapors of another planet” (607). A week later, the journalist from Phoenix learns that the only “reporter who had covered Haas’s vaunted and ultimately disappointing declaration had disappeared . . .” (615). Alternating with Haas’s truncated attempts to make his findings public is the arrival in Santa Teresa, in 1997, of Albert Kessler, a character modeled on Robert Ressler, about whom González Rodríguez had written in Huesos en el desierto. Ressler was a criminologist and FBI (behavioral) profiler dedicated to the psychology of serial killers, and he was enlisted by Mexican officials to instruct the local agencies that were dealing with the Ciudad Juárez femicides. Some reporters, in 2666, ask why an eminent American investigator had to be brought in. Why did Prof. Silverio García Correa, the best psychologist at UNAM, with Master’s degrees from NYU and Stanford, not get the job? The narrator has García Correa speak. Mr. Albert Kessler is a highly qualified professional, said Professor García Correa. . . . No, I don’t feel offended because I wasn’t given the job. . . . Being a criminologist in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole. It’s like being a child in a cell block of pedophiles. It’s like being a beggar in the country of the deaf. It’s like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons . . . Mr. Albert Kessler, as I was saying, is a highly qualified investigator. As I understand it, he works with computers. Interesting work. He’s also a consultant or adviser on some action movies. . . . according to my grandson, they’re plenty of fun and the good guys always win, said Professor García Correa (578–9).111

While other dead bodies are being found in Santa Teresa’s outer neighborhoods, the reporter Sergio Gonzalez Rodríguez, relocated to México City, does not write about the killings in Santa Teresa any more. The narration, however, brings him into sharper light when he is suddenly set on a new trail. Roberto Bolaño moves this character to the foreground when the novel is beginning to end. There had actually been an intense relationship between Bolaño and this Mexican author and arts journalist whose name appears unmodified in 2666. González Rodríguez worked for the newspaper Reforma, and became interested in Ciudad Juárez when he read the news about Sharif Sharif ’s imprisonment during the summer of 1995. He was assigned to report on the situation in Santa Teresa, starting with the press conference that Sharif Sharif was going to give in prison, in April 1996.112 González Rodríguez interviewed Sharif Sharif, published an article, and was then asked to join a special investigations unit that Reforma sent to Juárez. For several years, he moved back and forth between Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City. In 1999, his “reporting began to suggest that the policemen, government officials and drug traffickers of Juárez were all connected to one another, and to the femicides.”113 In Huesos en el desierto, González Rodríguez recounts how, after his investigations became more pointed, he was kidnapped and beaten in Mexico City. According to Marcela Valdes, Bolaño contacted González Rodríguez around the time when Sergio

Regarding Kessler’s actual undertakings in Santa Teresa, see 2666, 605–6. See Marcela Valdes. “Introduction,” 23. 113 Ibid., 25. 111 112

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was about to write his book on the Juárez killings. The book would trace, in a detailed manner, the process of coming to understand that what he first expected to be the work of a Hollywood-style serial killer, and eventually became visible as a spider web of impunity that protected some of Mexico’s worst criminals, “a system that implicated the police and judicial institutions of the city, the state and the country.”114 González Rodríguez recalls that Bolaño needed help with the details of a world about which press reports were not explicit enough: he wanted to know how the narcos in Juárez operated, . . . what he liked was precision. He was also interested in connecting with the mentality of Chihuahua’s police to understand . . . their conduct and misconduct. He wanted to know exactly how murder cases were written up. He wanted a copy of a forensic report. González Rodríguez unearthed one in the papers he’d gotten from a defense lawyer . . . .115

According to Marcela Valdes, Sergio remembers that Bolaño “wanted to believe that there was a rational power that could conquer the criminal” (in fact such a ratiocinator appears in Bolaño’s other novels). Valdes writes that “the parallels between the stories in “The Part About the Crimes” and the conclusions in González Rodríguez’s book Huesos en el desierto . . . are startling. . . . Bolaño . . . read the manuscript for Huesos months before it was published—but he refashioned it all to suit his own ends.”116 Finally, Bolaño decided to make Sergio a character in his novel. And thus, the end of 2666 is told through the eyes of the character Sergio González Rodríguez and, more specifically, his learning about a drama in the life of the PRI congresswoman, Azucena Esquivel Plata, “the María Felix of Mexican politics” (2666, 584). Curiously, this grande dame who approaches the journalist to offer her help in his further investigations into the Santa Teresa nightmares, tells Sergio about much of her life, shaped as an ironic, sometimes sarcastic glance into Mexican-ness—regarding (the rottenness of) morals, sex, politics, and life. Shortly after this, the reporter learns that her best friend, a woman by the name of Kelly Rivera Parker, had disappeared in Ciudad Juárez, after which the congresswoman hired a trusted detective to find out about Kelly’s fate. What surfaces at this point is the phenomenon of the so-called narcorranchos: places in the middle of nowhere in the desert that, once in a while, are awakened to life by exorbitant nightly celebrations, orgies of the powerful and the rich. It is in one of these places that the trail of the politician’s friend, a member of the upper class, gets lost and, at the same time, where local women of more humble background seem to have also disappeared. “What is it I want you to do?” Sergio is asked by Azucena Esquivel Plata. “I want you to write about this, keep writing about this” (631). The last paragraph of the book contains another discovery—another dead female body that is found, this time on the eastern edge of the city, in December, 1997. The case was “closed after three days of generally halfhearted investigations” (633).

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 30. 116 Ibid., 33. 114 115

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In the end, the part of the beautiful, disenchanted, and yet truth-seeking congresswoman could inspire at very least a substantial film script, combining individual drama and horror, crossing the line between the public secret and savagery at its most terrible; however, one might ask if this would be an adequate treatment if reality “itself ” is more terrible and continues to use cunning strategies against so many peoples’ longing for relief? If “The Part About the Crimes” were simply read as a political thriller, Bolaño seems to imply that it is not about impunity. This is what Florita, the saint from Hermosillo, had once responded to Sergio’s questions about the terror in Santa Teresa: “It has nothing to do with impunity.” How could this be? How could the murders be explained through the failures in a system of order and punishment, if the mightiest players belonging to that system capitalize on them? In this light, “impunity” itself might seem to be a euphemism, suggesting that there would indeed be a concerted, profoundly ethical as well as integrally structural interest in punishing the perpetrators of the crimes. Perhaps the novel is about infamy on a yetto-be imagined scale in late modern existence. As harsh as this may be, 2666 avoids the common responses of pity and compassion. It does not give in to a longing for relief; it gives the tortured spirit no rest. Nor has Bolaño created another metaphysics of evil, an ontology of absolute darkness. In his book, the answers are all there; they do not have to be given, since the actual problem is not finding “truth,” but rather the burial of truth. We are dealing with the imagination of a state in which the main driving forces are fear, ethical exhaustion, and an avalanche of “common responses” located between dissociation and repression, forces that in one way or another have adapted to the seemingly hermetic grid of “pure” and hidden violence of different kinds. Jorge Heralde views Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as the first great classical novel of the twenty-first century.117 If this is the case, it relies on the borderline aesthetics that the concept of sobriety has helped us address. There is no doubt that we find in Bolaño “a total lack of illusion about the age combined with an unlimited commitment to it.” This is the crucial paradox of 2666, and of many-narcoepics, that we have discussed by tracing this map of a global aesthetics of sobriety.

Jorge Heralde. Para Roberto Bolaño, 55.

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Index abjection  35, 134, 137, 140, 159 abject hero  137 abject narrator  137 abnormal interpretation  see interpretation Abraham, Itty  5, 93 academics  102, 161–3, 179–82, 188–90 accumulation of capital, primitive  219 Achilles  86 Adam  23 addiction  8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 61, 77, 80, 87, 108, 144, 150, 153, 159, 160, 183, 190, 198, 202 advertisement  14 see also consumerism aesthetics  ecological  141 Hegelian  22 phenomenological  88, 90 poetics of the fluid  155 postmodern  33, 48, 67, 96, 137, 142, 162, 181, 183, 193 of sobriety  20, 22, 23, 27–32, 34, 36–8, 41–3, 45, 46, 48–50, 52, 63, 82, 99, 125, 160, 180, 182, 187, 191, 192, 211, 224, 231 of violence  189 see also Baroque affect/affectivity  15, 21, 42, 89, 160, 213 affective marginalization  11, 35, 163, 191, 220 affecto-cartography  143 vicarious affect  2 Agamben, Giorgio  26, 27, 104, 220 Alape, Arturo  82 alcohol  3, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 59, 60, 77, 84, 90, 183 Alfaro, Leonides  82 alienation  84 Aljure, Felipe  103 allegory/allegorical  2, 3, 17, 90, 139, 196, 200 Allende, Salvador  107 alter ego  203, 206, 218, 222

Álvarez Gardeazábal, Gustavo  82 Alypius  190 Ambos, Kai  110 American literature  83 amphibian  178, 191, 197, 199, 203, 204, 206, 208, 223 anagrammatic  153, 155 Andes  5, 9, 10, 66, 67, 69, 142, 145 Andean culture  11 Andean literature  67 Andreas, Peter  8, 110, 123 annals, medieval  212, 213 Ansbach (Germany)  204 anthropology/anthropological  51 anthropological materialism  38 Antioquia (Colombia)  97, 99, 100, 101, 109, 118 Añez Suárez, Miguel Ángel  82 apocalypse/apocalyptic  151, 168, 195 apokatastasis  35 Arenas, Monroy  106 Arendt, Hannah  2, 28, 125, 174, 180, 181, 190 Arguedas, José María  67 Arizona  36, 166 Artaud, Antonin  20 assembly plants, global  145–7, 216 see also maquiladoras Atacama desert  142 Athens  24 Auerbach, Erich  36–40, 42, 43, 160, 187, 189–91, 202, 212 Augustine, St.  39, 40, 190 Auschwitz  205, 208 autobiography/autobiographical  194, 205 avantgarde  20, 37, 37, 51, 84 Aymara  142 Badiou, Alain  31, 100 Baja California  55 Baltic Sea  198 barbarism  43, 166

246

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Barcelona  164 Barck, Karlheinz  19, 36, 37 bare life  27, 28, 219 Baroque  17, 114, 121, 122 aesthetics  17, 114, 117, 123 drama  17, 114, 123, 194 political Baroque  93–114, 122 tyrant  114, 121, 122, 123 violence  11 Bassiouni, M. Cherif  110 Bateson, Gregory  85, 149, 155 Bateson, Mary Catherine  149, 155 Baudelaire, Charles  20, 51, 59, 60 Bautizado, Berto  66 Beckett, Samuel  96 Beethoven, Ludwig van  206 beginning  24, 50, 160, 161 Benjamin, Walter  4, 5, 7, 10–19, 28–30, 32, 34, 36–9, 41–7, 50, 52, 58–60, 69, 81, 102, 104, 113, 114, 122–4, 157, 159, 160, 167, 174, 179, 186, 187, 191–3, 200, 202, 209, 210, 221, 224 Benoist, Alain  113 Berenberg, Heinrich von  157 Bergson, Henri  89 Berlant, Lauren  27, 28, 31, 85, 149 Berlin  16, 20, 37, 184, 186, 196, 198 Bernal, Heraclio  62 Bernstein, Michael André  137 Bertram, Eva  8 Besneville  198 bestial  186 Betancur, Belisario  110, 115, 116 Bialowas Pobutsky, Aldona  84, 90, 128 Bielefeld (Germany)  224 biochemical  2, 16, 182 bioderegulation  219 biology/biological  1, 2, 6, 21 biological philosophy  27 biological vigilance  146, 217, 218 biomedical sciences  4, 27 biopoetic  2 biopolitics/biopolitical  2, 15, 123, 195, 215, 217 Blachmann, Morris  8 black novel  157, 174, 205 Blanco, Griselda (la Reina de la Coca)  98 blood  38, 39, 86, 88, 107, 115, 116, 136, 143, 144, 149, 150, 165, 190, 215

Bloom, Harold  167 body  114, 153, 155, 157, 194 and freedom  171 Bogotá  98, 118, 119, 131, 134, 140 Böhringer, Hannes  50 Bolaño, Roberto  42, 76, 146, 157, 158, 160–5, 168, 170–4, 176, 177–83, 186–90, 192–201, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210–16, 218, 220–6, 228–31 Bolívar Moreno, Gustavo  128 Bolivia  7, 11, 34, 52, 53, 67–9, 75, 79, 82, 99, 142 Böll, Heinrich  185 boom, literary  157 border, Mexican-United States  64, 146, 162, 163, 176, 178, 179, 195 Borges, Jorge Luis  188 Bosch, Evgenia  204 Braunschweig (Germany)  18 Brecht, Bertolt  32, 41–8, 50, 83, 157, 170, 172, 174, 193 Lehrstück  83, 117 Brennan, Teresa  21, 27, 219, 220 Breton, André  36, 37, 167 bricoleur  102 Brown, Norman  35, 39 Brown, Wendy  31 Bryfonski, Dedria  27 Buck-Morss, Susan  185, 186, 201 Bunge, Mario  167 Butler, Judith  152 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo  3 caffeine  9 Cali (Colombia)  95, 98, 114, 119, 121, 124, 125 Cali cartel  114, 121, 124, 125 Cambridge School of Ritualists  24, 25 Camelia la Tejana  128 Campbell, Howard  128 Canguilhem, Georges  27 cannabis  9, 18 Cano, Guillermo  110, 115 capitalism  3, 19, 29, 39, 40, 46, 53, 95, 99, 102–4, 107, 108, 123, 159, 160, 179, 186, 187, 219 capitalist realism  80 cocaine capitalism  19, 99 global  160

Index industrial  7, 9, 14, 20 neoliberal  53, 217 as religion  186 Caquetá (Colombia)  112 Carey, Elaine  127, 128 Caribbean  3 Carter, Paul  155 Castaño, Fidel  119, 124 Castro, Fidel  100 catachresis  155 catastrophe/catastrophic  213 catharsis  22, 23, 46, 48, 87, 90, 168, 170, 214 Catholicism  7, 36, 97, 101, 122 Certeau, Michel de  33, 96, 170, 171, 174 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  5, 194 Chapare (Bolivia)  67–81 Chávez Cano, Esther  215 Chicago Boys, the  107 chicha  71 Chile  99, 107, 142, 146, 149, 154, 168, 179, 195, 214 Chihuahua (Mexico)  213 Chinahuata (Bolivia)  70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 80, 82 Christ  25, 26, 47 Christianity/Christian  26, 38–40, 79, 80, 102 chronicle  134, 138, 212 cigar smoking  14 cigarette  6, 7, 16, 17, 84, 173, 195 see also nicotine cinematic writing  82, 83, 89 Cisneros Guzmán, José Carlos  128 citizen  29, 49, 57, 85, 87, 144, 172, 213, 221, 224 citizenship  27, 29, 30, 79, 82, 86, 91, 104, 175, 210 Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)  146, 161, 195, 208–11, 213–17, 221, 222, 226, 229, 230 Close, Glen S.  87, 91 coca/coca plant (erythroxylum coca)  6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 20, 66, 67–78, 81, 82, 99, 112, 149 cocaine  3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18–20, 64, 67–74, 77, 79–81, 93, 98, 99, 103, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 134 cogito ergo sum  199 cogitor ergo sum  199

247

Cohen, Margaret  60 coke  108 Cologne  205 Colombia  34, 52, 65, 67, 71, 72, 91, 93–125, 128, 130, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140 political history of  95, 98, 99, 106–12, 114–16, 118–20, 139 Colombian state  94, 97, 99, 103, 120 coloniality  3 colonization/colonial  3, 9, 35, 39, 40, 55, 75, 189 and psychoactives  9 commodity  5, 9, 14, 17, 19 fetishism  19, 39, 102, 186, 187 communal resources  147, 154 compassion  48, 208, 231 confession  40–2, 54, 56, 57, 66, 76, 78, 137, 205 consciousness  altered  1, 2, 7, 48, 51 bodily  85 physiological  21 stream of  89, 194 consecration  24, 191, 220, 221 consumerism  7, 10, 15, 18, 19, 102 containment  39–41, 220 contamination  35 contract  sexual  128, 147, 211, 221, 222 social  104, 150, 221 Coronil, Fernando  1 corporativism  145, 209, 219 corruption  25, 61, 80, 95, 106, 175, 176, 178, 225 see also dissociation (corruption of reality) Cortázar, Julio  157 cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan  3, 7, 31, 37, 76, 117, 143, 157, 161, 162, 176, 179, 193 counterpoint  13, 20, 208, 226 Cuban  1, 2, 3, 17 of nicotine and cocaine  7, 10, 13–15, 20 Courtwright, David T.  4, 7, 9, 14, 64 creature/creaturely  22, 25, 191, 222 creole mafias  98 crime  41, 42, 46, 56, 90, 91, 136, 175, 176, 178, 224 criminal god  25

248

Index

criminality  4, 35, 93, 96, 151 criminalization  5, 113, 154 Cristino, Marcio  82 critic, literary  180, 181 critical theory  102, 192 critique  5, 15, 21, 23, 30, 60, 67, 84, 102, 104, 162, 182, 201, 208 Cuba  3, 99 Cuban Revolution  99, 100 Culiacán (Mexico)  53–5, 58, 59, 62, 64 cultural studies  3, 102 cunning intelligence  39, 101, 158 cynicism  6, 28, 66, 76, 79, 111, 129, 141, 187 daimôn  125 Damasio, Antonio  84, 89 Dangl, Benjamin  7, 69 deconstruction  34, 85, 117, 158 defamiliarization  85 see also estrangement-effect DeGrandpre, Richard  4, 11, 12, 161 Deleuze, Gilles  141, 170 delirium  39, 103, 129, 131, 133–5, 139–41, 143, 213 denial  8, 10, 11, 20, 39, 40, 130, 132, 139, 140 Denver  225 deregulation  29, 72, 107, 217, 219 Derrida, Jacques  8, 10, 22–5, 49, 158, 159, 180 desire  2, 16, 17–19, 20, 35, 42, 48, 59, 74, 76, 77, 82, 86, 88, 90, 101, 103, 123, 136, 137, 149–51, 155, 162, 163, 168, 172, 176, 182, 183, 187, 190, 191, 202, 206 destiny  12, 22, 46, 76, 77, 79, 102, 120, 134, 136, 139, 148, 165–7, 175, 193, 195, 201, 205, 210, 213, 223, 225, 227 detective  142, 144, 149, 150, 151 detective fiction/novel  157, 173, 174, 176, 206 Detienne, Marcel  101, 158, 159 dialectical image  see image dialectics of intoxication  see intoxication dialectics of still life  217 Dionysian  187 Dirty Realism  83, 84 disaster zones  104

discourse on drugs  2, 4, 5, 8–12, 18, 19, 24–6, 97, 147, 159 discursive order  4, 43 disposable women  143, 146, 217–19, 222 see also myth disposal/disposability  211, 216, 217, 221, 222 dissemination  21 dissociation  8–10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 28, 52, 85, 131, 132, 141, 145, 168, 231 Dnieper river  199 Döblin, Alfred  83, 202, 204, 207 documentary  142, 210, 214 drama  47, 48, 87, 88, 95, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117–23, 130, 131, 138, 145, 149, 168, 171, 210, 212–14, 222, 230, 231 drugs  1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18–21, 25, 26, 34, 40, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 75, 80, 82, 90, 94, 97, 103, 104, 108, 112–15, 142, 144, 147, 153, 155, 183, 190, 198 certification of  65 of desire  19 of pleasure  19 prohibition conventions  3, 4, 7–9, 10, 65, 90 see also psychoactive counterrevolution taxation  4, 9, 99, 112 trafficking  4, 33, 35, 53, 55, 83, 93, 99, 124, 127, 139, 147, 154, 215 drumming  148 Duchamp, Marcel  166, 167 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich  185 Eagleton, Terry  22, 42, 48, 49, 95, 208 Eastern Europe  185, 186, 194 Echeverría, Ignacio  157 ecology/ecological aspects  36, 55, 59, 87, 144, 146, 154, 155 ecological aesthetics  141 ecological novel  81 ecology of the mind  85 ecosystem  10, 85 neurophysiological  7 ecstasis  21, 34, 35, 37, 42, 43, 86, 187 Edberg, Marc Cameron  33 El Paso  217, 226 El Salvador  101

Index embodiment  15, 36, 42, 44, 55, 87, 89, 96, 97, 114, 144, 169, 174, 183, 194, 199, 218 emergency, state of  41 empire  40, 107, 112, 124 energy  21, 35, 43, 47, 49, 87, 142, 153, 169, 214, 220 mystical  37, 170 England  181 enlightenment  7, 30, 32, 38, 40 Envigado (Colombia)  101, 121 epic  21, 22, 31, 33, 37, 47, 111, 117, 186, 187 theatre  46 writing  117 epics of sobriety  29, 39, 41, 47–50 eradication  69 eros/erotics  88, 90, 128, 159, 203, 222 eschatology  117 Eschenbach, Wolfram von  196 Escobar, Alba Marina  100 Escobar Gaviria, Pablo  93–125, 131, 133, 134 Escobar Gaviria, Roberto  121–3 esperpentos  150 Espinosa, Mariela  106 Esquivel Plata, Azucena  230 estrangement-effect  46, 170, 174 see also Verfremdung ethics/ethical aspects  19, 27, 28, 31, 32, 36, 42, 52, 81, 154, 199, 206 ethnographic  54 Europe  5, 6, 13, 42 evil  20, 24, 25, 70, 72, 74, 80, 141, 216 exception, state of  112–14, 122 see also emergency, state of exchange value  15, 18, 187 exhaustion  21, 27, 28, 30, 49, 147, 154, 160, 163, 168, 174, 176, 199, 204, 208, 213, 221, 231 exile  168, 179 existentialism  76, 85, 145, 149, 168 expenditure  43 experience  43, 44, 50, 83, 85, 170, 199 immanence of  170 expressionism  83 extradition  94, 110, 113, 116, 118, 120, 121, 124 drama of  112, 117, 118 extradition treaty  110, 118

249

fatalism  80, 134, 210, 218 fear  3–5, 8, 11, 20–2, 26, 27, 34, 35, 39, 42, 48, 49, 72–7, 80, 86, 88, 91, 120, 122, 124, 137, 150, 151, 153, 168, 173, 174, 197, 198, 206, 209, 211, 213, 227, 231 feeling brain  84, 89 female  castaway  125, 127, 129, 153 criminality  127, 129 empowerment  128 victims  146 femicide  90, 157, 161, 172, 173, 175, 176, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 215, 217, 219, 221, 224, 228, 229 feminicidio  175, 211 feminism  175, 189, 191, 217 Fernández, Bernardo  82, 211, 213, 222, 227 Fernández, Marcos  82, 211, 213, 222, 227 Ferry, Luc  27 fetish  17–19, 39, 132, 169 see also commodity fetishism Fisher, Mark  80 flaneur/flaneurism  59, 60 Flaubert, Gustave  20 Fleischl-Marxow, Ernst von  14 focalization  53, 175 Fonseca, Pedro da  167 forensic  209, 211, 214 Foucault, Michel  27, 82, 123, 167 Franco, Jean  82, 128, 195 Franco, Jorge  82, 128 Franzen, Jonathan  7, 8, 10, 16 Frazer, James  24, 25, 30 Frazer, Nancy  24, 25, 30 free indirect style  95, 97, 120 Freud, Sigmund  13–15, 29, 36, 101, 220 Frye, Northrop  22, 23, 154, 155, 177, 223, 225, 227 Galán, Luis Carlos  105, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119, 125, 222 Garber, Marjorie  31 García Correa, Silverio  229 García Cuevas, Iris  82 García-Herreros, Rafael  120, 122 García Márquez, Gabriel  96, 115, 119, 131, 134, 136, 158 Gaviria, César  120

250

Index

Gaviria, Hermilda  97 Gelassenheit (letting-be attitude)  171 gender  3, 184 genealogy/genealogical mapping  23, 51–3, 66 geopolitics  7, 30, 40, 52, 56, 68, 69, 95, 103, 110, 113, 114, 120, 123, 154, 214 of cocaine  15 of tobacco  15 gift  9, 202 Girard, René  34 globalization  20, 29, 30, 52, 53, 81, 145, 177, 186, 195 see also assembly plants/maquiladoras Global North  11, 29, 34 Global South  2, 4, 28, 29, 32, 34, 39, 76, 104, 146, 149, 217 gods  159 Gómez, Alfredo (“El Padrino”)  105 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  34, 115 González, Angel  128 González, Felipe  108 González Flores, Francisca  128 González Iñárritu, Alejandro  76 González Rodríguez, Sergio  178, 208, 211, 213–15, 218, 226, 227, 229, 230 good life  27, 28, 30, 35, 85 Gootenberg, Paul  10, 11, 15, 68, 99 Gorki, Maxim  204 Grass, Günter  185 Greek culture  20, 24, 258 mythology  158, 159, 165 philosophy  23, 158 Grupo de Mujeres Contra la Violencia  211 Guamúchil (Sinaloa, México)  61 Guattari, Felix  141 guerra del narcotráfico  94 guerrilla  93, 98–100, 107, 110, 112, 116, 119, 139 guilt  18, 21–3, 26, 30, 34, 35, 40, 49, 57, 58, 66, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 102, 104, 105, 111, 132, 141, 147, 154, 177, 190, 213, 216, 220–2, 225, 226 Gurovich, Albero  154 Gutiérrez Vargas, Tito  53, 66–72, 74–8, 81 Guzmán, Catalina  100, 128 Haas, Klaus  176, 177, 218, 223–9 habitus  30, 59, 64, 163, 172, 174, 180, 189, 192, 211

hallucination  144 hallucinogens  148 Hamann, Johann Georg  25, 165 Hamburg  182, 195, 207 Haneke, Michael  196 Hanks, Donald  25 Hanssen, Beatrice  31 happyness  19, 27, 49, 80, 81 Hardy, Thomas  23, 225 Harpokration  24, 220 Harrison Narcotic Law  64 Hartley, George  48 hashish  3, 9, 18, 19, 36, 52 healing  10, 129, 135, 140, 141, 171, 218 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  22 Heidegger, Martin  192 Hemispheric South  31, 35, 36, 40, 41, 51, 52, 84, 91, 179, 193, 194 Hemmingson, Michael  84 Henao, Victoria  106 Hennessy, Rosemary  22 hermeneutics/hermeneutic  5, 30, 34, 83, 94, 104, 165, 170, 180, 182, 192, 204, 212 Hermosillo (México)  162, 175, 176, 212, 218, 221, 223, 226, 231 hero  21, 22, 33, 35, 44, 46, 47, 54, 66, 75, 76, 90, 96, 97, 103, 107, 111, 117, 118, 122, 125, 128, 129, 137, 143, 146, 155, 162, 163, 181, 182, 184, 193, 207, 223, 224 heroin  9, 16, 53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 65, 198 Herralde, Jorge  157, 161 Herrera, Yuri  82 Hesse, Hermann  20 heterogeneity/heterogeneous genealogies  22, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91 heteroglossy  131, 140 heterosexuality  129, 218 heterotopos  121, 172 historicism  5, 26, 43, 150, 192, 193 Hobbes, Thomas  98, 104, 122 homelessness  176 homo faber  2, 180 homo sacer  26, 220 homosexuality  133, 172, 202 Honduras  101 hope  32, 39, 46, 48, 69, 70, 75, 77, 94, 97, 130, 131, 148, 197, 200

Index hopelessness  42, 46, 48, 166, 168, 172, 174, 175, 200, 202, 208 Horkheimer, Max  192 humanist/humanistic habitus  188–90, 195 humiliating sobriety  see sobriety Hutcheon, Linda  152 Huxley, Aldous  20, 27, 51, 52, 155, 173, 199 hybrid  17, 74, 95, 137, 151, 193 hybrid knowledge  12, 13 Hylton, Forrest  68, 69, 105, 139 hypotaxis  210, 213 hysteria  91, 129, 130 idem  180 ignorance  15, 16, 138, 181 see also dissociation illumination  19, 38, 43, 46, 167, 173, 187, 188 profane  18, 36, 44, 47, 50 image  dialectical  36, 45, 192, 200, 221 immanence  30, 141, 143, 170, 175 immigration  3, 217, 226 impunity  74, 120, 175, 230, 231 impurity  25, 26 insanity  139, 161, 168, 169, 228 age of  160, 161, 169 instinct  85, 101, 102, 107, 149 intellectual  13, 18, 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 39, 42, 44–6, 51, 60, 76, 79, 91, 96, 102, 130, 161, 163, 165, 168, 173, 176–80, 185, 194, 201, 203, 206–8, 222 interiority  30, 45–8, 80, 83, 102, 174 interpretation, abnormal  27, 30–2, 42, 91 intoxication  1, 2, 5, 19, 21, 23, 26, 35, 52, 75, 102, 135, 153, 182, 189, 190 dialectics of  4, 5, 21, 34, 37–40, 91, 159, 160, 187, 192, 204, 214 drama of  114 and literature  51, 142 introspection  38, 40, 45, 48, 66, 70, 87 ipse  180, 182 see also narrative identity under narration irony  10, 22, 89, 130, 154, 162, 179, 182, 188, 207, 218, 223, 224 ironic victim  see pharmakos Islam  191 Itagüí (Colombia)  110, 121 Italy  181

251

Jaramillo, Ana María  94 Jaspers, Karl  79 Jesus Christ  see Christ Jew, Jewish  23, 194, 199, 200–3, 205–7 Juárez, Benito  207 Jünger, Ernst  20, 184 justice  48, 115, 116 Kafka, Franz  23 kairos  17 Kant, Immanuel  42, 45, 206 Keane, Helen  17 Keller, Helen  110 Kennedy, Joseph  6, 13, 14, 67 Kessler, Albert  229 see also Ressler, Robert Klein, Naomi  13, 107 Klein, Richard  13, 107 Kluger, Richard  13, 15 Koller, Carl  14 Kostekino (Ukrania)  199, 200, 202, 203 Kuhn, Cynthia  5, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18 laboratory, illegal  71, 72, 75 Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela  175 Landauer, Gustav  204 Langley, Lester D.  217, 221 La Paz (Bolivia)  78 Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo  109–13, 115 Latin American(ist) literary criticism  1, 3, 31, 67 Latour, Bruno  7, 12, 13, 143 Lauretis, Teresa de  29 Lavin, Mónica  128 law  22, 48, 49, 98, 113, 122 transnational enforcement  123 see extradition legalization of drugs  116 Lehder, Carlos  98, 115, 118 Lehrstück (dialectical learning play)  47, 82, 84, 91, 117 Leipzig  184 Le Marchant, A.  24, 220 Leningrad (since1991 Saint Petersburg, Russia)  201 Lenson, David  4, 5, 8, 16, 17, 18, 25 Lentricchia, Frank  42 Liera, Óscar  62

252

Index

life  see bare life; good life; precarious existence/life; qualified life Lirot, Julie  134 literature (modern) and narcotics  66, 82, 93, 108, 112, 125, 128–30, 142, 147, 159, 160 logography  158 Lola la Chata  127 London  59, 184, 185, 188, 189, 207 López Cuadras, César  82 López-Lozano, Miguel  222 Loret de Mola, Rafael  224 Los Angeles  55, 65, 228 love  5, 18, 36, 37, 47, 76, 90, 124, 138, 140, 151, 162, 172, 185, 187, 188, 191, 202, 203 mystical conception of  37, 38, 47, 187 Lozano, Miguel Rodríguez  85, 89, 222 Lucy, Niall  23, 212 Ludmer, Josefina  91 Luke, Lucas  169 Lysias  162, 190 McAuliffe, Judy  42 McDowell, John H.  33 McKenna, Terence  9 McOndo/post-Macondo  67 Macondo  96 Madaleno, Isabel María  154 madness  35, 190, 196, 197, 203 divine  159 Madrid  179, 185, 188 magic/magical  18, 20, 34, 36, 38, 39, 46, 98, 186–8 of alterity  195 magical-realist  81, 96, 131, 134, 136, 157 mimetic  24 Maillé, Emilio  128 Malabou, Catherine  1 Malevitch, Kasimir  204 Malverde, Jesús  62 Mannheim  184 maquiladora  178, 209, 215–17, 221 Marechal, Leopoldo  157 marginality  35, 44, 50 marginalization  see affect/affectivity Margolles, Teresa  210, 211 Margulis, Mario  100

marijuana  9, 17–19, 61, 64, 65, 75, 77, 108 Marmon Silko, Leslie  214 Marseilles  18, 24 Marston, Joshua  128 Martínez, Hugo  123 martyr, martyrdom  25, 98, 114, 118, 122, 123, 135, 165 Marx, Karl  46, 219 masculinity  17, 115, 124, 128, 130, 133, 138, 172, 187, 203, 222 manhood rites  17 patriarchal culture  62, 101, 108, 130, 133, 153, 176, 221 masochism  48 mass media/culture  3, 14, 39, 94, 214, 226 Massumi, Brian  11, 82 maternal characters  132 Mauss, Marcel  96 Medellín (Colombia)  91, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109–11, 115, 116, 118, 119–23 Medellín cartel  103, 110, 118, 119 medieval literature  185 Medina, Cuauhtémoc  211 Melo, Patricia  82 melodrama  34, 128, 130 Melville, Herman  23, 164, 225 Menand, Louis  14 Mendoza, Elmer  66, 82, 128 Mendoza,Teresa  128 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  85, 88 Meruvia Balderrama, Fanor  10 metafiction  183 methamphetamines  64 metis  101, 158, 204 Mexicali (Mexico)  56 Mexican literature, northern (la literatura del norte)  42, 66, 82–5, 91, 128 Mexico  33, 34, 52–4, 56, 61–7, 86, 91, 127, 128, 135, 149, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 170, 175, 176, 178, 182, 204, 215, 224, 226, 229, 230 Miami  99 mimesis/mimetic  22, 24, 44, 45, 48, 84, 101, 144, 168, 169, 214 mimicry  19, 44 minimalism  33, 95, 142, 200, 201, 210 Minotaur  120

Index mise en abyme  86, 88, 152 modernity  1, 4, 5, 21, 26, 28, 29, 35, 60, 102, 129, 178, 180, 195 and exhaustion  21 global  6, 9, 50, 178 and intoxication  1, 2, 4, 5, 51, 134, 135, 160, 171, 204 political  95 and psychoactives  2, 9, 20, 21, 40, 52, 82, 159 transatlantic  2, 5, 7, 40, 187 modernization  7, 52, 99, 107, 150 Molano, Alfredo  82 Molina Lora, Luis Eduardo  128 Monárrez Fragoso, Julia Estela  213, 214 Monasterios, Elizabeth  67 money  17, 18, 34, 56, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 87, 96, 99, 100–3, 105–13, 115, 121, 125, 131, 133, 134, 136 Monsiváis, Carlos  214 Monterrey (Mexico)  85–8 Morales, Evo  68, 69, 81 morality  36, 40, 70, 76–8, 80, 83, 95, 101, 103, 109 moratorium, social  100 morphine  14, 198 Mortimer, William Golden  13 Moscow  122, 200–2 Mouffe, Chantal  31 Mourao, Jorge  82 movimiento de los cocaleros  68, 69, 81 multitude  38, 39, 60, 79 Müller, Heiner  32, 44 Musil, Robert  90, 96, 207 Mutis, Álvaro  131 mysticism/mystical  46, 163, 171, 172, 174, 183 see also love myth/mythic  38, 58, 139, 197 myth of the disposable third world woman  217 see also disposable women mythology  3, 20, 21, 25, 62, 158, 159 Nacaveva, Angelo  53, 54–66 Nadaístas  101 Nadelmann, Ethan  110, 123 Nader, J. E.  118

253

NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement)  146, 217 narcoculture  53, 58, 91 narcoepics  21, 35, 83, 91, 158, 159 narco-imagination  51, 66 narconarratives  34, 35, 51, 52, 58 narconovel  51, 53, 59, 91 narcopower  86, 114, 136 narcorranchos  230 narcotics fetishism, modern  9 narcotics prohibition  3, 4, 7, 8, 40, 52, 64, 113 narcotics traffic  61, 84, 91, 94, 110, 129 narcotraficante  53 narration  98, 120, 133, 137, 140, 151, 164, 194, 198, 201, 227 first-person  42, 57, 62, 63, 81, 131, 142, 151, 163, 197, 200 heteroglossic/multivocal  131 narcissistic  152 narrative identity  63, 168, 180 see also idem; ipse third-person  70, 207 narrator  44, 45, 60, 62, 63, 70, 72, 73, 75, 88, 95, 100, 108–10, 112, 116, 119, 124, 125, 137, 162, 196, 201, 205, 209, 222, 229 immanent  179 omniscient  169 personal  97 stoic  194 nation  7 Nazi  197, 199, 203, 204, 207 neoliberalism  34, 49, 68, 95, 105, 107, 110, 146, 217 see also capitalism; globalization nervous system  17 neurochemical stimulants  9 neurohistory  6 neurophysiology/neurophysiological aspects  2, 159 neurosis  8, 14, 15, 29, 35, 39, 78 new narratives from the Mexican north  see Mexican literature New Testament  75, 169 nicotine  9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 183 nihilism  36, 49, 79, 174 nihil volo  174

254

Index

Nogales (Mexico)  55, 212, 216 nomadic  144, 153, 208 Normandy  197 North Sea  198 novela negra  91 nuevo liberalismo (Colombia)  109, 116, 118, 124 objectification  134, 140 Ochoa, Fabio  120 Ochoa, Jorge Luis  116 Odysseos, Louiza  117 Oedipal  78 Operation Condor  65 ophthalmology  13 opiates  14, 64 opium  9, 19, 53, 56, 61, 63–5 Opium Prohibition Act  64 optimism  28, 30–2, 85, 149 organ traffic  215 orientalism  4 Ortega, Jairo  108 Ortiz, Fernando  1–4, 6, 7, 15–17, 21 other/otherness  4, 25, 32, 35, 40, 52, 87 Panama  101, 115 paramilitary complex  124 parataxis  144, 178, 210–16, 226 paratactical drama  214 Paris  185, 188 parody  201, 228 Parra, Eduardo Antonio  42, 82–5, 87–91, 124 Parra, Guido  124 partisanship (Carl Schmitt)  97, 117–18 Parzival  196 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  191 Pastrana, Misael  99 Pateman, Carole  128, 147, 150 pathological situation  2, 8, 87, 130, 159, 165 patriarchal culture  62, 101, 108, 130, 133, 153, 176, 221 patriotism  79 Paul, St.  97 Paz Estenssoro, Ángel Víctor  68 pedagogy  30, 47, 157, 170 Perestroika  186 Pérez Reverte, Arturo  127

Peru  11, 68, 99, 142 pessimism  32, 36, 76, 193 Petri, Friedrich Erdmann  3 peyote  184 phallic delirium  202 phallo-mythic exaltation  202 phantasma/phantasmatic  38, 178, 193 pharmaceutical industry  4, 6, 8, 52 pharmacological/pharmacology  24 cult of pharmacology  4, 20 discourse  7 episteme  26 pharmacopeia  24 pharmacy  152, 155, 158, 164 pharmakon  1, 2, 5–7, 19–24, 26, 146, 147, 157, 158–65, 182, 183, 192, 203, 209, 225 pharmakos  20–6, 111, 141, 146, 154, 158, 177, 191, 209, 220, 222–5, 227 phenomenological writing  85, 88–90 phenomenology  76, 85 Phillips, Jerry  219 Phoenix  228, 229 phonocentrism  23 physiological  8, 13, 21, 45, 81, 85, 87, 89, 90, 124, 141, 143, 159, 163, 171, 173, 183 Pinochet, Augusto  107, 154 placebo  163, 191 effect  12 intellectuals  178 principle  19, 182 text  12, 161, 163, 182, 183 plasma  144, 145, 149, 151 Plato  22–4, 158, 159, 162, 163, 180, 182, 190, 192 pleasure  16, 18, 19, 37, 38, 49, 60, 70, 76, 80, 84, 95, 101, 187 Pobutsky, Aldona Bialowas  84, 90, 128 Poe, Edgar Allan  59 poetry of the fluid  155 Poland  176, 196, 204 Policía Judicial  55, 56 Polit, Gabriela  53, 129, 139, 140 popular culture  33 Portillo, Lourdes  223 postcolonial criticism  3, 4, 40, 56, 102, 163, 194 post-Christian  20, 25

Index post-Macondo/McOndo  67 postmarxist  184 postmodern/postmodernist  30, 96, 137, 142, 162, 183, 184, 193 postoptimistic  141, 214 poverty (as concept)  43, 46, 47, 49, 50 of experience  40, 48 Pratt, Mary Louise  222 precarious existence/life  70, 100, 105, 177 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Mexico)  230 progress  3, 14, 128, 171, 219 Prohibition (alcohol)  4, 11, 64 projection  2, 26, 35, 75, 104, 132, 141, 143, 161, 162, 188, 191, 193, 220 prophecy/prophetic  117, 159, 198, 224 Proust, Marcel  20 Prozac  11 Prussia  196 psychoactive revolution  5, 7, 9, 40 counterrevolution  7–9, 14, 21, 40 empowerment  13 imperialism  8 plants  5 psychoactives  4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 58, 159 psychoanalysis  14, 48, 49, 129 psychological/non-psychological  5, 12, 15, 43, 52, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 169, 211, 227, 228 psychopathology  14, 20 psychosis  140 psychotropy  2, 7, 11, 20, 21, 101, 153, 155 punishment  215 purgation  25, 26 Quaas, Lisa  151 qualified life  30, 219 queer  141 Quincey, Thomas de  20, 51 Quiroz, Julio César  82 Quispe  143, 150 Rajia, Ivan  204 Ramírez Heredia, Rafael  82 Rampal, Jean-Christophe  211, 213, 222 rationalism  39, 40, 124 Rausch  19, 40, 102

255

see also intoxication real, the  88, 181, 209 realism  22, 30, 35, 37, 38–40, 43, 49, 53, 62, 81, 83, 84, 95, 120, 134, 190–2, 204, 207, 210 capitalist realism  80 dirty realism  84 pictorial  191, 192 reality, corruption of  80 reality principle  14, 101 Recacochea, Juan de  82 reflexivity  19, 21, 27, 29, 30, 34, 42, 44, 52, 83, 190, 210, 214 religion  3, 12, 29, 47, 152, 163, 187 Renaissance  185, 206 repertoire  13, 55, 58, 60, 88 representation  13, 44, 57, 79, 83, 87, 88, 93, 95, 117, 158, 181, 211, 216 repression  2, 14, 15, 36, 73, 74, 79, 132 Ressler, Robert  229 Restrepo, Laura  42, 111, 129–31, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143 revolution  46, 98, 167, 203 Reyes Echandía, Alfonso  116 Ricoeur, Paul  28, 63, 168, 180 Ritalin  11, 12 ritual/ritualistic  26, 152, 159, 187, 220, 221 Rivera, Alex  68, 82, 149, 212, 230 Rivera Cusicanqui, Sylvia  68 Rivera Garza, Cristina  82 Rivera Parker, Kelly  230 Roche, Mark William  47 Rodríguez, Ileana  96 Rodríguez, Juan José  82 Rodríguez Gacha, Gonzalo (the Mexican)  98, 115 Romm, Michail  175 Ronquillo, Víctor  161, 214 Rotker, Susana  91 Rulfo, Juan Rulfo  83 Rushdie, Salman  189, 191 Russia  187, 195, 197, 201, 203 Russian avant-garde  201 sacred meals  24 sacrifice  24, 26, 90, 160, 219, 220, 222, 224 Sade, Marquis de  36, 204 sadism  48

256

Index

Said, Edward  4, 24, 160 Saint Augustine  see Augustine, St. Saint Paul  see Paul, St. Salazar, Alonso  42, 91–101, 105–8, 111–14, 116–23, 125, 136, 227 Salazar, Maximino  227 Sánchez-Blake, Elvira  134 Sánchez-Prado, Ignacio  91 Santa Cruz, Guadalupe  42, 71, 129, 141–3, 146, 149, 154, 155 Santa Teresa  146, 161–79, 187, 190, 195, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 222, 224, 225–31 Santofimio Botero, Alberto  108 Sasaima  135 satire  185 Saussure, Ferdinand de  158 scapegoat  22, 24, 25, 34, 78, 104, 111, 140, 146, 154, 158, 177, 191, 206, 208, 209, 218, 220, 222–4, 226, 227 see also pharmakos science fiction  42, 120, 201, 202 Schendel, Willem van  5, 93 Scherer, Julio  127 Schmider, Christine  59 Schmitt, Carl  96, 113–15, 117, 201 Schumaker, John F.  1, 15, 52, 80, 81, 160, 169 secret, open/public  22, 80, 231 secular/secularization  3, 20, 216 secularization of evil  216 self  see subject/subjectivity serial killer  215, 226, 228–30 sex  16, 18, 140, 148, 186–8, 202, 222, 230 shamanic perception  221 Sharif Sharif, Abdul Latif  213, 215, 223, 226, 227, 229 Sharpe, Kenneth  8 shock doctrine  107 Siberia  200 simplicity  49 sin, original  40 Sinaloa (Mexico)  53–5, 63, 64 Sipoye aborigines  81 Smail, Daniel L.  2, 6, 7 Smirnov, Vladimir  167 Smith, Daniel W.  170 snuff-movies  215 Soacha (Colombia)  119 sobriety  5, 21, 23, 34, 35, 38, 39, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 160, 192, 196

aesthetics of  22, 28, 30, 38, 41–3, 48, 52, 84, 231 humiliating  34, 36, 37, 41, 50, 97, 180, 204, 214 social drama  47 socialism  102, 185, 194 Socrates  22, 23, 25, 158, 160, 162–5, 183, 187, 190 Somers, Margaret R.  29 Sonora (México)  55, 64, 166, 169, 177, 224, 226, 227 Sontag, Susan  30, 91 Sotomayor, Áurea  154 sovereign/sovereignty  27, 112–14, 123, 130, 155, 194, 201 Soviet Union  186, 194, 200, 204 Spain  181 sparagmos  227 speech, illocutionary  152 perlocutionary  152 Stalinism  200 state of exception  112–14, 122 Stiegler, Bernard  19, 159 stigmatization  10, 17, 21, 104 still life  216, 217 storytelling  62 Streatfeild, Dominic  9 style  catachretic and anagrammatic  153 crude  53, 178 Hollywood-style  230 hyperbolic  81 journalistic  127 laconic  42, 54, 63, 95, 100, 125, 151, 185, 200, 210, 225 minimalism  33, 95, 142, 210 “new style”  37 see also Auerbach; Benjamin notarial  42, 61 parataxis as a style  213 parodic  201 pictorial  191 provincialistic  54 sarcarstic  34, 167, 172, 175, 201, 230 sober  35, 46, 155, 179, 210 see also free indirect style subaltern/subalternity  35, 60, 193, 194 subject/subjectivity  7, 15, 27, 31, 40, 77, 83, 88, 129, 130, 162, 180, 188, 199, 208 subjection  104, 129, 188, 220

Index sublimation  15, 26, 30, 35, 36, 42, 165 sublime  22, 42, 45, 49 sugar  1–3, 9 Surrealism  9, 36–8, 43, 45, 47, 167, 187, 193 survival  159, 216 Suslov, Mikhail  167 Swartzwelder, Scott  5 symbolic order  130, 141, 191 Szasz, Thomas  24 Taussig, Michael  39, 55, 169 Taylor, Diana  60 Tedlock, Barbara  6, 10 Tedlock, Dennis  6, 10 telenovela  128 terrorism  40, 104, 113, 120 testimonial/testimony  53, 57, 61, 66, 91, 94, 95, 100, 106, 117, 123, 200, 202, 203, 205, 208, 210, 214 Thargelia  24 Tigres del Norte, Los  33, 35, 76, 127, 128 Tijuana (Mexico)  55, 166, 224 tobacco  2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 20, 194, 200 Toledo, Vania Barraza  131, 138 Toro, María Celia  64, 65 Torres, Camilo  100 torture  55–7, 62, 227 tragedy/the tragic  22, 33, 34, 47–50, 87, 95, 115, 175, 223 Tranquilandia (Colombia)  112, 113 transatlantic  2, 5, 7, 9, 40, 87, 179, 187 transcultural, transculturation  1, 2, 23, 194 transgression/transgressive  3, 4, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, 24, 26, 33, 36–8, 48, 49, 52, 83, 90, 96, 114, 129, 132, 135, 145, 152, 155, 160, 170, 178, 181, 189, 193, 197, 198, 203, 223 Trauerspiel  121 see also Baroque travel writing  162 Trendelenburg, Friedrich  167 truth  12, 20, 30, 48, 52, 55, 56, 80, 95, 99, 117, 133, 134, 139, 141, 147, 172, 210, 213 Tucson  55, 228 Turbay Ayala, Julio César  110 Turin  185 turnover  217–20

257

Ukrania  199 unconscious  4, 15, 30, 35, 45, 48, 79, 132, 167, 189 political  35, 48 United Nations  10 universalism/universalist  56, 90, 97, 100, 117, 194 urbanism  7 Urresti, Marcelo  100 use value  159, 187 utilitarianism  18, 19, 102, 187 utopia  160 Valdes, Marcela  161, 215, 229, 230 Vallejo, César  96, 118, 140, 160, 222 Vallejo, Fernando  80, 91, 96, 130, 140, 160, 222 Vallejo, Virginia  80, 91, 96, 118, 130, 140, 160, 222 vampirism  102, 219 Vázquez-Figueroa, Alberto  82 Vega, Garcilaso de la  13 Verfremdung  170 see also estrangement-effect verisimilitude  82 Vernant, Jean Paul  25, 101, 158, 159 Vespucci, Amerigo  6 vicarious affect  22, 46, 49, 220 Vico, Giambattista  161 victim/victimization  22, 23, 153, 154 Vienna  13 Villamizar Cárdenas, Luis Alberto  118, 119 Villareal, Francisco  226 violence  12, 22, 27, 29, 30, 33–5, 39, 40–2, 46, 48–50, 52, 58, 80–7, 90, 91, 95, 97, 109, 110, 114, 117, 128, 129, 132, 139, 140, 146, 152, 159, 160, 163, 167, 168, 175–8, 188–91, 195, 208–10, 213–15, 220–5, 228, 231 and erotics  90 mythical  58 mythification of  41 objective  41 poetic  214 pure  22 subjective  41 violencia (historical period in Colombia)  100, 105 vulnerability  50, 123, 163, 177, 219

258

Index

Wald, Elijah  33, 53, 61, 64, 65 Walkowitz, Rebecca L.  31 war  absolute  113 on affect  35, 65 chemical  75 on drugs  11, 52, 93 Warsaw  205 Washington  65, 110, 115, 213, 226, 227, 228 Washington Valdez, Diana  213, 226, 227, 228 waste  4, 17, 18, 43, 142, 144, 152, 208, 209, 216, 217–19 water  147, 149, 154, 155 consciousness  155 geopolitics of  154 Wehrmacht  196, 198, 204 Weigel, Sigrid  113, 114 Weil, Andrew  12, 17, 18, 20 Werner, Michael  59 Western culture/civilization  1, 5, 7, 14, 29, 35, 36, 41, 44, 171, 180, 193

White, Hayden  211, 212 Wilson, Wilkie  5 Wind, Edgar  25 wisdom  1, 6, 29, 36, 43, 47, 101, 159, 160, 163, 165, 170, 178, 207 “practical wisdom”  101 see also metis Woolf, Virginia  23 worldliness  36, 42, 54, 62, 83, 97, 101, 109, 162, 180, 190 World War I  165, 194 World War II  65, 113, 176, 184, 194, 195, 199, 205 Wright, Melissa W.  146, 211, 217, 218, 220 Yeltsin, Boris  186–8 Yépez, Heriberto  82 Yungas (Bolivia)  10, 67, 71 Zedillo Ponce de León, Ernesto  211 Žižek, Slavoj  30, 31, 41, 49