Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Contemporary Latin American Fiction [New ed.] 9781316512425, 9781009067195, 1316512428

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NAZISM, THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN FICTION

Addressing the question of why many Latin American fiction authors are writing about Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust now, this book charts the evolution of Latin American literary production from the nineteenth century, through the late twentiethcentury ‘Boom’, to the present day. Containing texts from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, it analyses work by some of the most well-known contemporary writers including Roberto Bolaño, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Jorge Volpi, Lucía Puenzo, Patricio Pron and Michel Laub; as well as notable precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Ricardo Piglia. Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Contemporary Latin American Fiction argues that these authors find Nazism relevant to thinking through some of the most urgent contemporary challenges we face: from racism, to the unequal division of wealth and labour between the global ‘North’ and ‘South’; and, of course, the general failure of democracy to eliminate fascism.   .  is a research specialist in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at University College London. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and previously lectured at the University of Cambridge and Birkbeck College, University of London.

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NAZISM, THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN FICTION EMILY M. BAKER University College London

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University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #–/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Emily M. Baker  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Mum and Dad

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Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) ‘lack of identity.’ This is what philosophy calls ‘finitude,’ and the following texts are entirely and uniquely devoted to an understanding of it. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page ix

Introduction

From ‘Imagined’ to ‘Inoperative’ Communities





Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction: From Dictatorship to Neoliberalism in El comienzo de la primavera by Patricio Pron and Wakolda by Lucía Puenzo



The Function of Allegory From Subalternity and the Nation-State to Gender and Neoliberalism The Argentine Hour of Eugenics A Patagonian Point-of-Contact Dolls: Female Socialisation and Capitalist Clock-Time

    

Nazism and Borges: Contemporary Re-readings by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres



Heretical Contemporary Re-writings: The Anxiety of Influence Democratic Conspiracies Borges Multiplied Fascism and Resistance The Ethics of the ‘Face’







Myth Interrupted: Identity and the Absence of Nation in En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi and Amphitryon by Ignacio Padilla Mexican Myths The Novel as Myth, Language and Structure Interrupting the Myth Premature Post-Mexicanity?

vii

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    



   

Contents

viii 

Sovereignty, Democracy and ‘Nonselfsufficiency’ through Touch in Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub Trauma and Memory Studies Second-Generation Postmemory, Third-Generation Forgetting Sovereign Father, Democratic Son Touch As a ‘Setting-in-motion’ Community Revealed in Death and Birth

     

Epilogue



Bibliography Index

 

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Acknowledgements

Fundamental to the completion of this book was the generosity of many friends, colleagues and family members, to whom I am immensely grateful. The contexts of the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS), Jesus College and Robinson College at the University of Cambridge facilitated many of these connections: Natasha Tanna, Rebecca Jarman, Cherie Elston, Geoff Maguire, Niall Geraghty, Carlos Fonseca, Catriona McAllister, Elsa Treviño, Dunja Fehimović, Liliana Chávez, Paul Merchant, Sandra Velázquez, Viviane Carvalho de Annunciação, Sam Mather and Chriselia de Vries. Through her directorship of CLAS, Joanna Page built a strong and valuable network and community spirit, and Julie Coimbra went above and beyond her mandate to support every person associated with the centre, past and present. Further special thanks go to Franco Pesce, Rachel Randall, Mara Polgovsky and Joey Whitfield for reading aspects of my work and providing much-needed advice; and to Lucy Bollington and James Kusher for stimulating discussions late into the night. The Robinson College Writing Accountability Initiative helped me through the final stages of editing, with special thanks to Emily Kate Price, Ian Burrows, Scott Annett, Elizabeth Rawlinson-Mills and Lucy Foster. This research was enabled by a studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as further financial support from Jesus College, the Simon Bolívar Fund of CLAS and the School of Human and Social Science at the University of Cambridge. During fieldwork trips to Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, I was lucky enough to meet with many interesting people, and I would like to thank, in particular, Michel Laub, Berta Waldman, Marcos Seifert, Alejandra Giannini, los Venzanos, Laura Martínez-Díaz, and Gabriel and Marisol Tarriba for being so generous and welcoming. This book started life as a doctoral dissertation and would not have been possible without the guidance of my supervisor, Rory O’Bryen, who patiently read my work with meticulous care, providing invaluable ix

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x

Acknowledgements

criticism throughout the process, as well as providing broader support and friendship. Geoffrey Kantaris, Bernard McGuirk, Steven Boldy, Joanna Page, Erica Segre and Ed King also all had deep and formative influences on my work and helped me to shape sections of it. Rebecca Earle, John King, Guy Thomson and Tim Lockley at the University of Warwick can all be credited with setting me on the path of further study and being helpful and encouraging along the way. Parts of Chapter  were published in Modern Languages Open, and parts of Chapter  were published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research and the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, with kind permission to reproduce them here. An outline of the theoretical framework was published as part of a discussion of trends in Hispanic Studies in Transational Spanish Studies (edited by Catherine Davies and Rory O’Bryen, ). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of all of these essays. Special thanks go to Ray Ryan, Edgar Mendez and the anonymous readers at Cambridge University Press for their kind support and feedback throughout the editorial and production processes. Finally, deepest thanks to my family: the late Peter and Mary Smith for constant encouragement throughout my life; the Whitlocks for their generosity and fun; my brothers and their partners: Lawrence, Gregory, Caroline and Alice for keeping me on my toes; Alison and Paul Baker, the best parents anyone could ever wish for, for constant belief, love and support; and Katie, for being wise and kind, and for bringing me eternal happiness, my best friend.

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Introduction

In  and  the Mexican authors Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla caused a stir on the national cultural scene when they published novels dealing with events, people and philosophical questions relating to Nazism and the Second World War that did not include any ‘Mexican’ themes, characters or locations. One critic, José Felipe Coria, said, ‘Ya no podemos considerarlos autores mexicanos porque ni su tema ni su tratamiento se remiten a México (We can no longer consider them to be Mexican authors, because neither their topics, nor their treatment of them, refer to Mexico)’ (Ortega Ávila). The esteemed author and critic Elena Poniatowska said of the ‘Crack Generation’, the wider group to which they belonged, ‘La verdad, los escritores le tiraron siempre a la sofisticación, a escribir sobre temas internacionales, que interesaran en Alemania, Francia, Italia e Inglaterra.. . . Eran un poco esnobs, la verdad (The truth is, the writers always aimed for sophistication: to write about international themes that would be of interest in Germany, France, Italy and England.. . . Honestly, they were a bit snobbish)’. Yet, the fallout provoked by Volpi and Padilla’s novels merely confirmed the impulse behind their post-national literary gestures in the first place. It proved that cultural nationalism was alive and well in Mexico (and Latin America, more broadly) and that the pressure on authors to showcase their nation on the literary world stage was still strong. However, it was not the absence of Mexico that first caught my attention when reading these novels. Instead, it was the presence of a particular set of historical referents: Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust. Viewed in the light of stories by Jorge Luis Borges from decades before such as ‘El milagro secreto’ (The Secret Miracle) and ‘Deutsches Requiem’, as well as Carlos Fuentes’ enigmatic novel Cambio de piel (Change of Skin), José Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos (You Will Die in a Distant Land), Carlos Onetti’s El Pozo (The Well) and Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration), the examination of these 

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

Introduction

interrelated historical phenomena formed part of a sporadic – but significant – Latin American literary corpus that had built up since the events themselves unfolded in the early part of the twentieth century. There has been an accelerating trend in dealing with these themes among a new generation of Latin American authors, starting with Roberto Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América (Nazi Literature in the Americas) published in . Bolaño’s fictional anthology of ‘nazi’ writers was followed closely by two post-war detective novels: Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) and Padilla’s Amphitryon (Shadow without a Name), discussed earlier. Bolaño produced another significant Nazi / Second World War–themed plotline in the posthumously published . This came out in the same year as Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Los informantes (The Informers; ) – a novel that interweaves the story of a father and son with that of a Jewish émigré to Colombia and the wider United States foreign policy in the Americas during the Second World War. Soon after, two Argentine interventions emerged: Patricio Pron’s El comienzo de la primavera (The Beginning of Spring), the story of an Argentine student who bears witness to debates about Nazi complicity amongst philosophy faculty members in Germany; and Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda (), a reimagining of the famous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s trajectory through Argentina as he fled capture by the Mossad. Finally, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, two novels by Brazilian authors appeared: Michel Laub’s Diário de Queda (Diary of the Fall; ), about a Jewish Brazilian whose grandfather had survived Auschwitz, and Marcos Peres’ O Evangelho segundo Hitler (The Gospel according to Hitler; ), an apocryphal reinterpretation of the life and work of Borges linking him to a satanic cult formed of Nazi officials. This list is by no means exhaustive. It does not include texts with minor related subplots or characters. It forced me, however, to consider the following: is it a coincidence that many of the most successful contemporary Latin American authors have chosen to re-visit this particular historical moment and its aftermath? Do these narratives have anything in common in their approaches to the subject? Are they similar engagements to those of their canonised precursors such as Borges, Fuentes, Onetti and Piglia? Or does this wave represent new directions in Latin American (and world) literature? This book sets out a framework within which to answer these questions. By taking a thematic, rather than national, approach to contemporary Latin American literature, I offer a cross-sectional portrait of a generation of authors who are usually considered less likely to share commonalities

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Introduction



across national and regional boundaries than previous generations. Attempts to delineate ‘generations’ are always imperfect and incomplete; but at the very least I propose that there is an important distinction to be made between the immediate post-‘Boom’ generation (identified and characterised by Donald Shaw, amongst others) and the generation of authors predominantly born in the s and s examined here. The ‘Boom’ generation itself constituted a phenomenon against which the production and success of all subsequent Latin American authors continues to be measured, to some degree. The so-called big four – Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez – achieved success on a scale not seen in Latin America prior to their eruption on the world literary scene in the s. A brief literary and contextual history from this point to the present will provide a basis for establishing what is different about Bolaño, Volpi and others from the Boom and the post-Boom writers. Although there is some debate as to the specific characteristics of the Boom generation, two of the main distinctions of its writers were as follows: first, their cultivation of a strong cross-country (Latin American) affiliation between themselves; and second, their achievement of the internationalisation of Latin American literature. It was Europe’s engagement in two brutal wars for a significant part of the first half of the twentieth century that, in many ways, created the cultural conditions for the Boom generation to break onto the world stage and become one of the bestknown cultural movements from the Latin American region. The Boom authors seized upon the loss of status and legitimacy of Europe as a ‘civilisational’ cultural model, to narratively present their own alternative ways of being-in-the-world. Indeed, the genre of ‘Marvellous’ or ‘Magical’ realism, which became almost synonymous with ‘Latin American literature’ for the non–Latin American reading public, represented an attempt, according to Phillip Swanson, to ‘develop a non-Eurocentric Latin Americanist perspective’ (New Novel ). The Cuban Revolution further contributed to the sense that an alternative model of social and economic community was possible and itself shaped the nature of cultural debates in the s. The strong investment of the Cuban regime in culture saw a growing demand for political commitment from writers, asking them to make a choice between a dubious dichotomy of revolutionary (socially realist) literature and formal experimentation (aestheticist / apolitical writing) (Franco, Decline ). Whilst Jean Franco makes a case for a tension between the Boom writers’ claims of public commitment and their essentially apolitical production,

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

Introduction

Swanson, in line with his notion of the Boom as essentially a marketing boom, points out, ‘One might even be forgiven for suspecting that the new novel, of the Boom in particular, depends on ambivalence and ambiguity for its literary appeal, yet needs attractive political certainties for its promotion and marketing’ (Swanson, New Novel ). Carlos Fuentes, one of the main thrusts behind the Boom’s cultural coherence, provides a useful case study of how contemporary international and domestic Mexican events shaped literary preoccupations, as well as how an interpretation of Nazi history was incorporated into this picture. Closely monitored by the FBI due to his initial support for the Cuban Revolution he was denied entry to the United States during the early sixties and later due to his criticism of the Vietnam War. Whilst his most significant early novels La región más transparente (Where the Air is Clear) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz) dealt with national themes, including a critique of the stagnation of the Mexican Revolution, the fissurous political landscape of the late s produced Cambio de piel (Change of Skin). This represented a shift away from the preoccupation with national identity and an investigation of Nazism alongside other eruptions of barbarous violence. The novel emblematised a moment of widespread disillusion in the authority of nation-states, as the debates about the war in Vietnam came to a head and student movements across the globe clashed with the authorities. The novel was published only two years earlier than Fuentes’ work of criticism, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (The New Hispanic-American Novel), and is thus often seen as the practical application of Fuentes’ theory, which included a call for the discovery of a ‘mythic language’ for the region (discussed further in Chapter ). Cambio de piel’s chaotic structure and juxtaposition of violent events – such as the conquest of Mexico, the Holocaust, and the Vietnam War – suggest that violence is cyclical, evoking Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘eternal recurrence’ of war (The Gay Science ). Indeed, Fuentes uncannily predicts the next horrific event in Mexico: The Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred the year after the publication of Cambio de piel in October of . It was prophesised in a passage in which graffiti from the recent election of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is juxtaposed by Fuentes to a vignette about the massacre at Cholula during the conquest of Mexico (). It was the administration of Díaz Ordaz that ordered the military occupation of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the military to fire on a protest in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, which is said to have killed around  people, many of them students, and wounded many more (Zolov ).

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Introduction



By the s, any revolutionary optimism remaining in the rest of the region was also waning as – in an increasingly polarised ideological context – other states turned to the use of military force to suppress popular insurrection and roll back the tide of revolution. In the Southern Cone, dictatorships of varying levels of violent brutality took hold; leftist movements and their cultural narratives were driven underground, and many authors were forced into exile. The unifying moment of the Boom appeared to have been short-lived; there was an abrupt end to high-modernist textual ‘games’ and writers turned towards more personal themes to evade censorship or interrogate the particular forms of violence suffered within their respective societies. It is an engagement with these violent histories and their immediate aftermaths that has been the most urgent concern of the so-called post-Boom generation. Post-Boom authors felt the need to move away from the Boom’s avoidance of three elements that would become broadly characteristic of the latter’s production: ‘plot-centred novels, overt political commitment and proletarian characters and settings’ (Shaw ). Established figures of the post-Boom include Manuel Puig, Antonio Skármeta, Gustavo Sainz, Sergio Ramírez, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas and Miguel Barnet. Other characteristics that broadly united them included a shift from the ‘epic’ to a focus on the everyday; an emphasis on dissidence and rebelliousness, pain and the body; and practices of mourning and critical melancholia. In Chile the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) was emblematic of an ethical-political avant-garde moment of the s. In some ways their practices – albeit more visceral and shocking as a response to the more acutely concentrated political violence of the era – anticipated the ethical orientation of some of the more contemporary works that will be analysed here; likewise, the focus upon touch and the haptic. Touch is configured in the more recent novels as a potential site for reconciliation, whereas language proves to be violent and exclusionary. The authors primarily examined here – Patricio Pron, Lucía Puenzo, Roberto Bolaño, Marcos Peres, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Michel Laub – have diverse styles and concerns amongst themselves. But it is worth considering the factors they have in common, as well as the differences; and how, in turn, their preoccupations differ to those of the generation known as the post-Boom. One such difference, I suggest, is that these newer works are characterised by an attempt to move beyond – or enact closure of – the dictatorship-related themes that were a key concern of much fiction produced in the s and early s. This goes almost directly against what I had expected to find.

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

Introduction

In line with memory and trauma studies, disciplines that have taken lessons from the aftermath of the Holocaust as a means of understanding other contexts in which dictatorship and post-dictatorship trauma is widespread, I imagined that authors would refer to the themes of Nazism, the Second World War or the Holocaust as means to explore, in a displaced sense, Latin American military dictatorships. Indeed, even if the texts do flirt with such comparisons, more often than not, they emphasise the different historical circumstances, rather than any meaningful similarities between these spatially, temporally and politically distinct cases of dictatorship, oppression and violence. I argue that crucial to understanding these works is to acknowledge their rejection of a wholly introspective and self-critical gaze towards their own societies. Instead, they turn the mirror back on Western culture and politics to reflect the structural flaws of the contemporary international order. What they show is that aspects of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust exemplify the acute philosophical and material tensions inherent in our modern global system of governance in times of democracy, as much as in times of dictatorship. Furthermore, with the extension of a neoliberal political economy across the globe and the deepening of structures of inequality, precarity and war – the authors examined here are increasingly exploring ontological means of expressing our relationships to one another. This might attest to the fact that, as we have seen in this section, conventional politics does not seem to have created communities that protect people’s basic human rights to live out their lives in a natural way, with shelter, care, dignity and without the fear of death or torture. The need for an ontological approach to the problems facing humanity is explicit in the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Nancy and begins with an assertion of the violence inherent to the Western metaphysics of the subject; also humorously and creatively alluded to in Ricardo Piglia’s engagement with the Nazi theme in his  novel Respiración artificial (Artificial Respiration). In some ways, Piglia’s novel is a bridge between the two generational processes described here (the first: the post-Boom, an introspective gaze during the time of dictatorship; second, the critique of the wider global system) but must properly be situated in the post-Boom camp. Famously evading censorship by the regime, it casts a sideways look at the Argentine dictatorship by weaving a fabric of convoluted and digressionary conversations about literature, history and philosophy. The second part of the novel (entitled ‘Descartes’) consists of Professor Tardewski, an ex-student of Wittgenstein living in Argentina, telling anecdotes to the narrator

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Introduction



Emilio Renzi. One of the anecdotes is about a trip to the British Museum library, where he was mistakenly given a copy of Mein Kampf by Hitler. Tardewski, who is superstitious ‘como buen positivista lógico (like any good logical positivist)’ decides that it is fate that the text has fallen into his hands, so he decides to read it. What struck him first, he says, ‘lo que comprendí de inmediato fue que Mein Kampf era una suerte de reverso perfecto o de apócrifa continuación del Discurso del método . . . de René Descartes (what I understood immediately was that Mein Kampf was a kind of perfect reverse, or apocryphal continuation of the Discourse on Method . . . of René Descartes)’ (Piglia, Respiración artificial ). He elaborates, ‘¿Podría ser ese libro (pensaba yo mientras anochecía en la biblioteca) considerado como una flexión final en la evolución del subjetivismo racionalista inaugurado por Descartes? (Could this book [I thought as the night drew in in the library] be considered as a final flexion in the evolution of the rational subjectivity inaugurated by Descartes?)’ (). Elaborating upon the similarities he goes on to say, ‘Los dos eran monólogos de un sujeto más o menos alucinado que se disponía a negar toda verdad anterior y a probar de un modo imperativo e inflexible, en qué lugar, desde qué posición se podía (y se debía) erigir un sistema que fuera a la vez absolutamente coherente y filosóficamente imbatible (Both were monologues by a subject, more or less delusional, who were disposed to negate all previous truths and prove, by imperative and inflexible means, from which place, by which position, one could (and one should) elaborate a system that was at once absolutely coherent and philosophically invincible)’ (Piglia, Respiración artificial ).The ‘subject’ who constructs originary discourse, like Descartes inventing – by his own fireplace – the cogito, does not take into account the Other or others and is therefore the ‘absolute for-itself’ which is both impossible (humans need to cooperate to survive) and ultimately violent (Nancy, Inoperative Community ). Tardewski humorously critiques both the method and violent ends of the cogito saying, ‘se podría decir que Descartes escribió una novela policial: cómo puede el investigador sin moverse de su asiento frente a la chimenea, sin salir de su cuarto, usando sólo su razón, desechar todas las falsas pistas, destruir una por una todas las dudas hasta conseguir describir por fin al criminal, esto es, al cogito. Porque el cogito es el asesino, sobre eso no tengo la menor duda, dijo Tardewski (one could say that Descartes wrote a police-procedural novel: how can the investigator, without moving from his seat by the chimney, without leaving his room, using only his reason, eliminate all the red herrings, destroy one by one all of the doubts until managing to describe, finally, the criminal, that is, the cogito. Because the

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

Introduction

cogito is the murderer, of this I am in no doubt, said Tardewski)’ (Piglia, Respiración artificial ). The cogito is the murderer, of that Tardewski is in no doubt. That is because the non-discursive self-referential ego has no space for the Other, the contingent, or experiential knowledge. It is for this reason that, for Jean-Luc Nancy, instead of the ‘subject-representing’ we should think in terms of the ‘being-communicating’ (Inoperative Community ). Sovereignty must be shared: ‘shared between Daseins, between singular existences that are not subjects and whose relation—the sharing itself—is not a communion, not the appropriation of an object, nor a self-recognition, nor even a communication as this is understood to exist between subjects’ (Inoperative Community ). These singular beings, Nancy argues, are ‘constituted by sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced by the sharing that makes the others: other for one another’ (Inoperative Community ). In the novels Diário da Queda and Los informantes, examined in Chapter , the spacing between members the same family is asserted as a means of seeking to disrupt the divisive function of inherited conflict and/or memory, and its use to justify violence in the present. Piglia seeks to come to terms with the brutal violence of the Argentine dictatorship at a time when its threat is still very real. Yet by incorporating references to other forms of violence, such as that unleashed in line with the blueprint from Hitler’s self-referential Mein Kampf, he demonstrates that this violence is not unique to Argentina, but inherent to the operation of the Subject-State (see Section ‘From “Imagined” to “Inoperative” Communities’). In the following passage from La ciudad ausente (The Absent City), Piglia articulates one of the uncomfortable realities at the heart of a number of novels in this thesis (most notably Puenzo’s Wakolda and Bolaño’s ). I shall quote at length: La tortura es la culminación de esa aspiración al saber, el grado máximo de la inteligencia institucional. El Estado piensa así, por eso la policía fundamentalmente tortura a los pobres, sólo a los que son pobres o son obreros o están desahuciados y se ve que son negros, los torturan los policías y los militares y muy excepcionalmente han torturado a gente que pertenece a otra clase social y en esos casos se han desatado grandes escándalos . . . porque cuando se deciden a torturar a gente de rango un poco más elevado se produce un escandalo y en estos años, después que el Ejército actuó atacado por el rencor homicida y el pánico y fueron torturados y brutalizados hombres, mujeres y niños pertenecientes a clases distinguidas de la sociedad, todo se denunció y se supo y si bien por supuesto la mayor parte de los asesinados han sido obreros y campesinos, también fueron ejecutados sacerdotes, estancieros, industriales, estudiantes, y al final tuvieron que

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Introduction



retroceder ante la presión internacional, que acepta como un dato de hecho que se masacre y se torture a los humillados del campo y a los pobres, a los desgraciados afiebrados de los ghettos y de los barrios bajos de la ciudad, pero reacciona cuando se trata de ese modo a los intelectuales y a los policías y a los hijos de las familias acomodadas. Torture is the culmination of this aspiration to knowledge, the maximum degree of institutional intelligence. The State thinks that way, which is why the police habitually torture the poor, only the poor or the workers and the dispossessed who are visibly darker-skinned; the police and military torture them and very exceptionally they have tortured people who belong to a different social class, and those cases have provoked huge scandals . . . because when you decide to torture people of a slightly higher social status it causes a scandal. And these years, in which the military has acted based upon a homicidal panic, men, women and children belonging to the distinguished sectors of society have been tortured and brutalised, everything was denounced and brought to light, and even if the majority of those killed were workers and peasants, there were also priests, landowners, industrialists, students, and in the end they had to retreat in the face of international pressure, which accepts as a given that the humble rural folk and the poor, and the disenfranchised of the ghettos and the low-class neighbourhoods are massacred and tortured, but reacts when intellectuals, police and the children of well-to-do families are treated this way. (Piglia, La ciudad ausente )

The most extreme form of (biopolitical) control or ‘aspiration to knowledge’ is expressed through torture, and Piglia presents a scenario in which poor people, workers and people of colour are routinely and habitually tortured (the implication is, during times of ‘normal’ political and economic governance); it is only when ‘people of slightly higher social status’ are tortured (under ‘states of exception’/dictatorship) that ‘international pressure’ comes to intervene (La ciudad ausente ). The wider implications of this are that political memory work (in other words, using fiction as a space within which to mourn losses incurred during dictatorship), whilst necessary and urgent for those involved, in certain senses replaces a more sustained and universal critique of the violence of the contemporary economic system. Walter Benjamin’s maxim that the ‘“state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ is a running theme throughout the chapters that follow (Illuminations ). Among the new generation examined here, the attempted closure of political memory work related to the ‘post-dictatorship’ or ‘transition’ periods is the first of two broad trends in contemporary Latin American literature that I observe. The second relates to a shift away from confidence in traditional forms of political institutions and collective movements,

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Introduction

towards a form of politics that is, in reality, more of an ethical ontology: the narrative rehearsal of relationships of responsibility-towards-others. It is this approach to community that, for some of the authors, holds the potential to lay the fundamental and necessary groundwork, for the alteration of our most urgently preoccupying humanitarian injustices and crises: from macro phenomena such as mass racialised labour exploitation, to personal problems such as alcoholism and social alienation. Central to this disillusionment in politics qua parties and other traditional institutions is their heavy reliance on territorially bounded, exclusionary entities: in other words, nations.

From ‘Imagined’ to ‘Inoperative’ Communities If one wants to critique nationalism in any form, the horrors of Nazi ideology and its destructive consequences are an excellent place to start. More broadly, however, struggles over nationhood (of one form or another) have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths over the last two hundred years. It was this fact that provided the impulse for Benedict Anderson’s now classic study, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. How was it possible that these relatively recent constructions (nations) had persuaded ‘so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings’ (). In his study into the origins of nationalism, Anderson finds that novels and newspapers were crucial in forging a sense of territorial and cultural connection in the early days of nationhood by describing national landscapes and customs to their readers. As Anderson notes, the development of ‘nationalist’ sentiments emerged in the Americas prior to in Europe. The desire for independent control over politics and economic resources by creole elites necessitated ideological separation from the Spanish and a way for each nascent nation to culturally distinguish itself from its nearest neighbours (). This sparked a long tradition in which Latin American writers sought to identify ‘national’ characteristics and inspire patriotic loyalty often, as Doris Sommer has found, through representing fictional romances between people from different sectors of society. A useful byproduct, therefore, of authors such as Volpi and Padilla writing stories about Nazism, set in Europe, is a critique of the residual cultural nationalism that expects them to continue in this tradition. Unlike many of their literary forebears, the authors examined in this study resist the historic role of literature as a means of creating an identification of the ‘subject’ or ‘citizen’ with their given state. Rebecca

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Walkowitz, in her study of contemporary world literature finds that, ‘There may be many nations in the text, but the text doesn’t treat the nation as the most important or most coherent unit of belonging’ (Walkowitz ). Whilst Volpi and Padilla eschew writing about Mexico completely in their two novels, other texts contained in this study are predominantly set in the authors’ countries of birth. Yet even in these cases, they tend to thematize the significant internal diversity within these national units. For example, Puenzo’s Wakolda places a spotlight on the German and Mapuche communities in Argentina. Vásquez’s Los informantes and Laub’s Diário da Queda focus on Jewish immigrant families in Colombia and Brazil, respectively. In additional to this illuminated diversity, it is the wider philosophical deconstruction of identity and the denunciation of the violence of identitarian thinking, as represented by these authors, which are my concerns here. Vásquez and Laub, in particular, assert the irreducible ‘singularity’ of each and every one of us that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy insists upon as part of his notion of an ‘inoperative’ community (Inoperative Community ). It is, therefore, this trajectory from a rejection of the mandate to create ‘imagined’ communities, towards the increased articulation of ‘inoperative’ ones that forms the basis of the framework I propose for interpreting this contemporary strand in Latin American literature. This argument is not at odds with that put forward by Hector Hoyos in his book Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. He sees the uptake of Nazi themes by Latin American authors as one instance of a form of ‘cultural globalization’, a demonstration that cultural simultaneity has reached a global scale (). Yet my reading places emphasis not so much on the ‘global turn’ skilfully evinced in Hoyos’ book, but rather an ‘ontological turn’ which echoes that currently observed in many different disciplines from philosophy (Martin and Heil), to anthropology (Paleček and Risjord) and literary theory itself (McDonald). In Jean-Luc Nancy’s ethico-ontological framework an ‘inoperative community’ is defined as a community that does not make work out of death. In his words it does not ‘operate the dead being’s passage into some communal intimacy nor . . . operate the transfiguration of its dead into some substance or subject – be these homeland, native soil or blood, nation . . . family, or mystical body’ (Inoperative Community ). The idea that blood and soil are in any way connected is a fallacy, and to sacrifice oneself for that notion is a tragic foreshortening of a life that will never experience the supposed community-to-come. Nazi Germany was a particularly savage form of ‘operative’ community, compared by Nancy to the

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Introduction

‘suicide of the German nation’ (Inoperative Community ). This was because it sought not only to destroy internal ‘others’ (Jews, Roma, homosexuals and communists), but also required a huge sacrifice of its own preferred (Aryan) citizens in the vain hope of achieving the ‘pure immanence’ of a ‘German’ community united in blood and soil (Inoperative Community ). Nancy strongly underscores the point that death will never lead to any such form of immanence; it is utterly final. In other words, identities are exclusionary and communities that claim bonds between themselves, over and above other groups (whether this be for national, religious, ideological, racial or any other reasons), especially those that call on people to sacrifice their lives for that community, are ‘operative’, and futile. For Nancy it is precisely our mortal finitude and our lack of any identity that all singularities share, which reveals the true ethical nature of community-in-separation, or being-in-common (Inoperative Community xxxviii). This type of non-identitarian or non-state association has been opposed to ‘deterritorialized flows’ and ‘cosmopolitan fictions of globalized, migratory identities’ by Nickels in World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance. He asks, ‘What if we replaced this loose, undefined spatiality – really, the abstract, agentless space of global capital – with Merleau-Ponty’s definition of space as the lived schema by means of which humans project and test out their capacities for action on their environment’ (). Nickels situates his ‘Nonstate’ relations within a phenomenological genealogy with reference to Merleau-Ponty and Husserl as a basis for identifying and distinguishing actions and associations that operate ‘outside of state-centric forms of legitimation and ideological habit’ (). In the works examined here, authors show the ways in which associative groups that can also be religious, familial, ethnic and gendered can at times cut across – and at times compound – state-based forms of violent exclusionary ideology, which is why all such associative groups should be treated with caution. Only phenomenological associations, not grounded in discourse, but instead grounded in a mutual awareness of finitude (of our common status of being-towards-death) can overcome man-made rhetorical divisions and the (il)logic of sovereignty. Fiction plays a particularly important role in cementing the artificial operative bonds between people we have been discussing, but writing can also be involved in their dissolution. Nancy uses the terms ‘myth’ and ‘myth-making’ to designate the kind of ‘foundation by fiction’ that has been at work in shoring up the Latin American national communities since their independence. The unworking of these fictional social bonds takes

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

place, conversely, through the ‘interruption’ of the ‘myth’ of communal fusion (Inoperative Community ). According to Nancy community can be ‘offered’ or ‘inscribed’ in writing; but only writing as understood as the articulation of a ‘singular voice’ – one that itself rejects being ‘sublated’ into any form of closed or immanent community – and one that defies participating in an attempt to bind people into exclusive groups (Inoperative Community –). Amongst the authors under investigation here, this form of writing is most knowingly deployed and thematized by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Michel Laub, analysed in Chapter . There is, however, a danger that this kind of post-identitarian thinking might be understood to imply a state that has been reached, as opposed to a philosophical ideal. As Chapters  and  testify, Latin America is a context in which many modes of violence and exploitation disproportionally affect racially-determined (non-white) populations, and as such it is necessary to be attentive to the privilege of asserting an anti- or postidentitarian mode of being-in-the-world, and the ongoing and necessary struggles that it might obscure. I have sought, myself, to resist enclosure within the limits of identitarian and disciplinary boundaries by dealing with production from five different countries, including Portuguesespeaking Brazil – as well as referring to other global literary and philosophical tendencies in the analysis where relevant. In reality, this is nothing new in the field of Latin American cultural studies. Above all, I aim to be sensitive to the demands of the texts themselves in terms of the national, regional and international debates and frameworks that they seek to engage with.

Chapter Outline Chapter  focuses on two novels that can be seen as new generational mediations on the themes highlighted above with reference to Piglia’s La ciudad ausente. Patricio Pron’s El comienzo de la primavera establishes a dialogue between the German and Argentine post-dictatorship contexts, and in doing so he highlights the inevitable insufficiency of justice in relation to dictatorship crimes, or that which Brett Levinson calls ‘radical injustice’ (). The novel’s melancholic register and parallels between two distinct historical moments lend themselves to an examination with reference to Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. Lucía Puenzo, on the other hand, rejects parallels between her novel’s rendition of the activities of Josef Mengele and events related to the Argentine dictatorship or postdictatorship. Instead, she foregrounds the foundational reliance of the

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Introduction

Argentine nation on the exploitative labour of a racialized mass that have been rhetorically and materially excluded from the benefits of being ‘Argentine’ in both the past and the present. Chapter  turns to heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América,  and, in particular, O Evangelho Segundo Hitler by Peres can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, they encounter other barriers that they seek to overcome such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds: the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first I explore in relation to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universalities’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. In Chapter , the ghost of Borges is still present; when Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla received criticism from the Mexican literary establishment for ‘renouncing their Mexicanity’ by not dealing with Mexican themes in En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon respectively, they referred to Borges’ famous essay ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición (The Argentine Writer and Tradition)’ to justify their lack of inclusion of ‘local colour’. I examine this choice to turn away from Mexican themes in the context of Mexican cultural and political history, arguing that Volpi and Padilla perceived a unique historic opportunity to re-configure the relationship between intellectuals and the state, with the final fall of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in  after  years. An analysis of the themes of ‘myth’ and Nazism in these novels, as well as in Cambio de piel by Carlos Fuentes and Morirás lejos by Jose Emilio Pacheco allow for a comparison of structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of myth. I argue that Volpi and Padilla engage in a narrative rehearsal of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that literature’s task is to ‘interrupt the myth’ of (national) identity. The final two novels, Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub, analysed in Chapter , both feature a single male narrator that shares biographical details with the authors. Both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, I demonstrate that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses correspond to weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez

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examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of Angelina, a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. In Diário da Queda it is, likewise, a lack of touch and familial intimacy that frustrates the happy development of a father and son who are the second and third generation born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil after the war (the narrator’s grandfather). Chapter  tackles the novel’s radical critique of the use of Holocaust memory to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.

Notes  Volpi En Busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) and Padilla Amphitryon (Shadow without a Name).  All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are my own unless indicated.  Around the same period, the launch of the South American McOndo movement voiced a similar critique of literary pigeonholing following the success of the Boom generation, and in particular of Gabriel García Márquez’s branch of magical realism. This shows that this was not just a Mexican but a Latin American phenomenon.  See Sánchez Prado, ‘Mexican Literature in the Neoliberal Era’ for more on the economic ties between Mexican authors and the state in this period, as well as the effects of changes in the global publishing industry.  See Avelar, The Untimely Present for a discussion of post-Boom literature with a particular emphasis on functions of mourning and melancholia.  A preliminary sketch of this framework was published as ‘From “Imagined” to “Inoperative” Communities: The Un-working of National and Latin American Identities in Contemporary Fiction’ in Catherine Davies and Rory O’Bryen, eds. Transnational Modern Languages. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, .

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 

Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction: From Dictatorship to Neoliberalism in El comienzo de la primavera by Patricio Pron and Wakolda by Lucía Puenzo El comienzo de la primavera () by Patricio Pron and Wakolda () by Lucía Puenzo, despite being published only two years apart, have little in common other than both including the theme of Nazism. Wakolda tells of Josef Mengele’s journey through Argentina in the s and his contact with two families: one upper-class Argentinian and the other Mapuche, as well as examining the two families’ interactions with each other. El comienzo, in an inverse spatial logic to Wakolda, tells of an Argentinian student’s travels around Germany in search of a (fictional) philosopher Hans-Ju¨rgen Hollenbach, a student of Heidegger. In doing so, the protagonist Martínez becomes privy to some of the university politics of the Nazi era. Despite their differences, the analysis of these two novels together reveals an allegorical deployment of themes relating to the Nazi past. Pron’s novel, quite straight-forwardly, raises ethical questions about individual and collective guilt in a way that makes a post-war German past speak indirectly to public debates in Argentina at the time of the trials of the aged and unremorseful generals of the – Dirty War. There is, however, an attempt to signal the imminent closure of these debates given the increasing age of those involved, leaving hope for – and the possibility of – renewal: ‘El comienzo de la primavera (the beginning of spring)’ in Argentine society. In a speculative reading of the last page of the novel I suggest that Pron signals the need to find closure with regards to political memory discourses in order to address the new political concerns of the present relating to inequality and precarity within contemporary Argentine society. In this sense Wakolda picks up where El comienzo leaves off; I posit that the series of historical moments that Puenzo unites, coalesce in the revelation that a precarious racialised labour-force has been the backbone to the Argentine republic’s liberal economy throughout its history. The episodes serve to remind us of Walter Benjamin’s famous maxim that the ‘state of emergency’ with regards to the oppressed in society is not an 

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exception, but rather, ‘the rule’ (Illuminations ). Secondly, if this state of affairs is to be ‘recognised by the present as one of its own concerns’ (Illuminations ), then we can speculate that Puenzo indirectly points towards the intensification of the Argentine economy’s reliance on a migrant and precarious labour force of Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians around the time of writing of the novel, who are paid less on average and are subject to worse working conditions than Argentinians (Lukin). Puenzo uses Mengele’s racist gaze to shed light upon the foundational and ongoing racism at the heart of the Argentine national project. While Pron explicitly frames the activity of writing about post-war Germany as his ‘forma más directa de hablar sobre Argentina (most direct form of talking about Argentina)’, Puenzo, in an interview about Wakolda, is explicitly hesitant about pursuing such parallels between the post-war and post-dictatorship periods. The reason for which Puenzo seeks to distance herself from this parallel is not due to an ethical dilemma regarding the comparability of the dictatorships or the use of the Holocaust as a cypher for forms of trauma in other contexts (disagreements surrounding such appeals to the Holocaust are, of course, not restricted to Argentina, and have been widely the subject of controversy in the last few decades). Her warning against the drawing of such parallels seems to originate in the fact that the political issues she wishes to foreground are not related first and foremost to memory and the dictatorship, but rather to historic and ongoing forms of racialised and gendered marginalisation, particularly those that undergird and are further exacerbated by economic liberalisation processes. Whilst in the case of Pron the questions of complicity, guilt and justice in the post-war German context create an anamorphic lens through which to view the post-dictatorship Argentine political landscape, at the centre of Wakolda there is a tale of biopolitical control and (foreign) intervention upon the body of the young female protagonist who has a growth defect (an economic allegory) and who is aggressively administered growth hormones by Mengele. As such, Puenzo’s novel can be seen to re-orientate political priorities away from the postdictatorship concerns with memory and justice, and towards the bodies who suffer under liberalisation processes, bodies that are gendered and racialised. In the first section of this chapter, I read both novels as allegories of different aspects of the contemporary Argentine reality, with reference to Walter Benjamin’s theory of the relationship between allegory and melancholy from The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In the case of Pron – and as anticipated by Benjamin – the justice processes are shown to be

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

inevitably insufficient, belated, and therefore prone to take on a melancholic quality. In the case of Puenzo, we see that the allegorical mode seeks to make use of the past to shed light on present forms of oppression, much like Maggi’s investigations into historical dictatorship in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial. Nevertheless, Puenzo’s investigation serves to decentre both the Argentine dictatorship and the Nazi one (that it ostensibly returns to), tracing instead an alternative genealogy of racist biopolitics in Argentina from the foundation of the Conservative republic with the Conquest of the Desert in –, through to the s, and by extension, the present. Puenzo evokes a responsibility to address human rights (in this case relating to racial discrimination and economic marginalisation) in times of democracy, not just during apparent ‘states of exception’. By means of a comparison of the novel and its filmic version El médico alemán (The German Doctor), I also observe a shift from a foregrounding of racial issues in the former, to the more apparently transnational preoccupation of gender, in the latter; confirming Francine Masiello’s hypothesis that metaphors of subalternity have increasingly been replaced by gender metaphors in contemporary Latin American cultural production, under neoliberalism.

The Function of Allegory It is necessary to briefly examine the Argentinian political and cultural cycles in the post-dictatorial era to contextualise Pron and Puenzo’s gestures. In her book on the post-dictatorship film La imagen justa (The Just Image), Ana Amado outlines the first two phases from the immediate juridically-inflected demands of family members and victims in the s, to a boom in testimonial, fictional and filmic representations of the experiences of militants in the s expressed with particular vigour during the presidency of Carlos Menem (–) when judicial processes had been blocked (–). The disturbing high-profile confessions of a number of the members of the military were a preface to the foundation of the Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS; Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) in , who took symbolic justice into their own hands by publicly identifying former torturers (Amado ). In the decade of the s economic crisis and the reaction against the effects of the intensification of neoliberalisation under Menem added another dimension to the politico-cultural task at hand. The two political projects (post-dictatorship justice and protest regarding the economic situation) complemented and

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mutually strengthened each other at first. This was because they were seen as interrelated: the dictatorship was responsible for the initial economic liberalisation processes that caused the crisis, and the lack of postdictatorship justice was also associated with the need to ‘forgive and forget’ for the sake of a maintaining a healthy economic climate (Masiello ). The new wave of protests relating to the economic crisis drew upon the tactics and wealth of experience built up by groups such as the ‘Madres de la Plaza de Mayo’ and other justice related movements. This united struggle eventually achieved a more favourable climate for both legal and social justice, enabled also by the return of the Peronist party, and the election of Néstor Kirchner in . To those who were less directly affected by dictatorship (more and more members of the generation to which Pron (b. ) and Puenzo (b. ) belong), the trials of the ex-generals which began at this time functioned as somewhat of a political smokescreen, masking the deepening economic crisis. Furthermore, as trials of the increasingly aged, and frustratingly defiant generals finally occurred (legal processes that had been long fought for) there was the gradual realisation that ‘justice’ could not restore the ‘lost objects’ (‘Mourning and Melancholia’ ) for the families still grieving their desaparecidos. ‘Melancholia’, distinguished as it is by Sigmund Freud from ‘mourning’ by its ‘pathological cast’, is at odds with a desire for closure by authors such as Puenzo who deliberately turn towards the plight of different political subjects (‘Mourning and Melancholia’ ). It is at this point that the priorities of Pron and Puenzo’s different projects appear to diverge. However, as my reading of Pron’s novel suggests, he gestures towards the inevitable closure of memory work, as the events and actors fade further into history. The allegorical register of Pron’s El comienzo de la primavera is hinted at in its title that makes reference to the  work Fru¨hlings Erwachnen by Frank Wedekind: a German tragedy about societal pressure, sexuality and suicide in adolescence. Benjamin himself described Wedekind’s work as ‘das Trauerspiel vom Erwachen der eigenesinnigen Naturkraft in der Kreatur (the tragedy of the awakening of the wayward nature of the [human] creature)’ (quoted in Wedekend). Yet the themes and preoccupations of Wedekind’s play – despite the intertextual allusion to them in the title El comienzo de la primavera – appear to resonate more directly with those of Puenzo’s novel than with those of Pron’s own, given that Wakolda is explicitly about the societal and sexual pressures on a young Argentine girl’s body. Pron’s referencing of the German play (within the novel itself, in addition to the similarities between the titles) does

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nonetheless constitute an invitation to read El comienzo as a tragedy and as an allegory, and to explore the interrelation of these two genres as theorised by Benjamin in his study, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Allegory, for Benjamin, is characterised by its foregrounding of emblems of death as a means of representing history as a ‘a petrified, primordial landscape’ (Origin ). He follows, ‘Everything about history that, from the very beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head’, discussing here the scull that was the baroque trope par excellence (). For Benjamin, this trope is a reminder of ‘man’s subjection to nature’ as well as ‘the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual’ (Origin ). The Trauerspiel then contains its own reminder of ‘finitude’, to carry the viewer outside of a transcendental vision of itself in history, as we saw emphasised in Jean-Luc Nancy’s work referred to in the Introduction to this book. El comienzo accordingly centres around the feuds between ageing members of the German university, most notably Heinrich Schrader who wishes to call the philosopher Hans-Ju¨rgen Hollenbach to account for his intellectual complicity with Nazism, before Hollenbach dies. He sees the opportunity in Martínez, a young Argentinian who wishes to translate Hollenbach’s work. The imminent death of the central characters, and the desired but incomplete justice make this a classically ruinous topic conforming to Benjamin’s oft-quoted comparison that ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (Origin ). As expected, the novel does not achieve any resolutions to the ethical questions that it poses regarding complicity and justice but instead is acutely aware of, and explicitly articulates, its own futility in this regard. Nevertheless, the title of the novel also contains another possible interpretation. Whilst appearing ironic, given that the focal group of characters of the novel are very much in the ‘winter’ of their lives, there is a sense that closure – in this chapter at least – is nearing, as the events of the dictatorship are, an ever more distant and indirect experience for many Germans / Argentinians. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, comparisons between dictatorships can often obscure wider continuities between dictatorship and non-dictatorship governance, a trap which – at times – Pron could be seen to fall into. There has been much discussion about the parallels between the Nazi regime and the Argentinian Junta by social scientists, political theorists, psychoanalysts and those from the disciplines of trauma and memory studies. The Argentinian scholar Daniel Feierstein has discussed genocide in both cases as being one part of a broader strategy

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within the state’s reorganisation of society through terror. Andreas Huyssen stresses parallels between the processes of commemoration saying, ‘It is the discourse about the Holocaust and about Holocaust representations and memory that haunts or shadows the Argentinian debate’ (). Pron’s engagement with Nazism was, by his own admission, ‘parabolic’. He said of the novel: después de haberla escrito, descubrí con cierta sorpresa que había utilizado al nazismo por su carácter parabólico, por la desmesura de los hechos pero que en cualquier caso la clase de preguntas, que en mi opinión no son filosóficas, pero si éticas, que plantea la novela pueden ser aplicables tanto a Alemania como a otros países donde ha habido gobiernos totalitarios, como el franquismo en España o la última dictadura en Argentina. Bien visto, esa era mi forma más directa de hablar de Argentina. after having written it, I discovered with a certain amount of surprise that I had used Nazism for its parabolic character, for the excessivity of the facts, but in any case, the type of questions, which in my opinion are not philosophical, but rather, ethical, that the novel raises, can be applicable as much as to Germany, to other countries where there have been totalitarian governments, such as Francoism in Spain or the last dictatorship in Argentina. Seen as such, it was my most direct way of speaking about Argentina. (Pron, ‘Hablando’)

Pron is accurate in his characterisation of his work planting ‘ethical’ and not ‘philosophic’ questions. The main thrust of the detectivesque plot leads to the revelation that Heidegger, seeing in Nazism the possibility of saving the German ‘being’ from corruption by technification and decadence, bequeaths the task of teaching the next generation to Hollenbach, one of his former doctoral students. This is because he was no longer able to have influence from within the university system (having resigned in ). Hollenbach is the fictional philosopher whose works the main Argentine protagonist Martínez wishes to translate into Spanish. During his search through Germany for Hollenbach, he meets a number of other colleagues who assumed different levels of passive complicity or active resistance to the Nazi regime and discovers, finally, that Hollenbach was not only complicit, but also ideologically invested in Nazism. This comes as a source of disillusionment for Martínez, who admired Hollenbach’s philosophical work – a parallel, of course, with the dilemma posed to many students and thinkers by Heidegger’s temporary endorsement of Nazism. The novel appears to depart from Pron’s stated interest in the ‘comportamiento del mundo académico alemán, y en particular de Heidegger, respecto del Nacionalsocialismo (behaviour of the German academic world, and in particular of Heidegger with respect to National

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

Socialism)’ – which he declares in his bibliographic Nota at the end of the novel (). The view of Heidegger during the notorious period when he was made rector of the University of Freiberg is explored in the novel though a fictional ethical dilemma posed to Heidegger by a student. The parable, in short, tells of a pilgrimage in the name of a ‘Gran Tradición (Great Tradition)’ according to which any person who becomes ill on the pilgrimage must be thrown into the depths of a rocky valley and left to die. The student asked Heidegger, in the light of the parable, who would be responsible for the death. Heidegger’s answer, we learn in the novel, was exemplary of his views at the time and flesh out one of the driving arguments of his famous  speech, ‘La universidad alemana’ (Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität)’ (quoted in El comienzo ). In this speech, as quoted by the novel, Heidegger argues for ‘la necesidad de la Gran Tradición (the need for the Great Tradition)’ as a unifying factor in the face of the social fragmentation occasioned by technology and the industrialisation of production. Heidegger thus qualifies in the novel: ‘No hay más libertad que la que hace a la responsabilidad individual para con el destino colectivo’ (There is no more freedom than that which ties individual responsibility to collective destiny)’ (El Comienzo ). He follows: ‘Eso es lo que su “Gran Tradición” significa: la voluntad de sacrificio del protagonista, del que quienes lo arrojan al vacío son meros ejecutores . . . No hay culpables en su historia excepto, quizá, aquella madre que pretende disuadir a su hijo del acatamiento de la tradición (That is what your “Great Tradition” means: the willingness of sacrifice of the protagonist, those who throw him into the abyss are the mere executors . . . No one is guilty in your story except, perhaps, the mother that attempts to dissuade her son from compliance with the tradition)’ (). This vision, not of collective, active responsibility but of absent responsibility holds a worrying likeness to the logic by which the Argentinian generals carried out the ‘purification’ of the Argentine population. According to this logic the generals were merely executing the presumed necessary sacrifice of ‘diseased’ elements that were a threat the ‘social body’. Pron, describing his work as raising questions pertinent to ‘otros países donde ha habido gobiernos totalitarios (other countries where there have been totalitarian governments)’ (), acknowledges that neither Nazism, nor the junta were isolated incidents, and indeed implies that our understanding could be enhanced by viewing one in relation to the other. Upon examination of Wakolda we shall see that Puenzo, however, insists upon the recognition of Nazism, not as an aberration, but as a continuation in a long history of racially justified exclusion and

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The Function of Allegory

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necropolitics, inherent to the operation of the modern state, and not just as a function of ‘totalitarianism’. Pron’s novel raises questions about the responsibility of the university establishment to the state, and in particular, philosophy, whilst Wakolda interrogates the role of the medical profession both during democracy and dictatorship. When Immanuel Kant sought to determine the ideal relationship of the different disciplinary branches of the university to the government in his  work ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’, he came to the conclusion that the three ‘higher’ faculties of medicine, law and theology should be in the service of public assistance according to the needs of the government, whereas philosophy should be afforded independence. He says: ‘It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university also contain a faculty that is independent of the government’s command with regard to its teachings; one in which reason it authorised to speak out publicly’ (Kant ). At stake was his notion of ‘perpetual peace’ which could only come about if independent minds had the freedom to determine how best to move towards it (and instruct the governments thus). Both the Nazis and the Argentinian junta took a number of steps to control the universities including appointing ‘sympathetic’ parties to the major university positions, and burning books deemed to be ideologically unsound. As early as , the Argentine anarchist writer Osvaldo Bayer, to whom Pron makes reference in his bibliographic Nota, wrote explicitly about the parallels between the two dictatorships in this regard. In Exilio he stated, ‘Los libros son las primeras víctimas, inmediatamente después siguen los hombres de pensamiento subversivo, “undeutsch”, anti argentino (books are the first victims, immediately afterwards follow the subversive-thinking men, “un-German”, “anti-Argentine”)’ (). In terms of university activity, it is well known that the Nazi party banned Jews and political opponents from entering the Civil Service through the ‘Gezetz zur Wiederherstelling des Berufsbeamtentums (Law to re-establish the Civil Service)’. It is these university appointments and manoeuvrings under the Nazi regime that are the subject of the investigation into complicity in El comienzo. In Argentina, however, the ‘depuración ideológica (ideological purification)’ was undertaken more brutally than the initial phase of ‘forced retirements’ in the German case. A group called the ‘Triple A’ or ‘Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance)’ brutally assassinated leaders of groups who tried to obstruct intervention of the ‘Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganisation)’, or ‘El Proceso’, into university affairs, and kidnapped and tortured suspected proponents of ‘desorden (disorder)’ in the

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

universities. It is thought that twenty-eight per cent of the total disappeared during  and  were secondary and university students and educators, with a third of those from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Izaguirre). Questions raised in the novel such as the status of the university establishment and actions of individuals within it formed part of scholarly and public debates in Argentina during the time that Pron would have been writing El comienzo. Furthermore, questions of individual and collective complicity in the novel map fairly simply onto discussions surrounding the ongoing trails of members of the Junta. Nevertheless, as often is the case with comparisons of this kind, it is usually the differences that end up being re-affirmed, rather than the similarities – as anticipated by Benjamin in discussing ‘The violence of the dialectic movement within these allegorical depths’ (Origin ). In this case, at an ethical level, there is a distinction to be made between those that actually killed or ordered to kill (the Argentine generals on trial), and those ‘Mitläufer’ (the German university establishment), defined by Bayer as, ‘quienes, afilados a un Partido – en este caso al partido nazi – no desempeñaron ningún papel principal pero le prestaron su apoyo activo o pasivo (those affiliated to a party – in this case the Nazi party – who did not undertake any principle role, but who lent it their active or passive support)’ (). Pron’s novel appears to engage with the question posed by Bayer of ‘¿Qué se hará de todos estos Mitläufer cuando llegue la primavera a la tierra Argentina (What shall be done with all those Mitläufer when the springtime comes to the Argentine land)’ (emphasis added; ). In the novel, the character Schrader, who wishes to call Hollenbach to account for his philosophical complicity, enlists Martínez for the task of establishing the truth, saying to him: ‘Sólo una persona sobre la que no pese ninguna responsabilidad sobre aquellos hechos puede juzgarlos, sólo usted podía indagar en el pasado de manera imparcial (Only a person upon whom no responsibility weighs regarding those facts, can judge. Only you can investigate the past in an impartial manner)’ (El comienzo ). The main point here is that whilst Schrader believes Martínez to be an outsider to the German situation because he is Argentine, given the parallels between the two situations, in reality there can be no true objective outsider. Writing almost three decades on from Bayer’s original manuscript, Pron has the advantage of seeing the justice processes in Argentina play out in the media (although he is living in Germany at the time). One of the principal questions of the novel relates, precisely, to the notion of belated justice and the gains to be made from judging old unremorseful men who

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The Function of Allegory



had been either living in impunity or in and out of prison. In the novel the philosophers’ aged and decrepit states are often explicitly referred to. This maintains an awareness in the reader’s mind of the inevitable passing of a whole generation and its memories – not as an excuse to suspend or suppress justice – but as a reminder that for the next generation new political horizons are emerging. On the other hand, the impending death of many of the perpetrators, as well as those who are still in pursuit of truth and justice, makes the task of bringing the murderers to account before it is too late, seem more urgent. It is not just the lack of information that frustrates this process, however. Brett Levinson has discussed (specifically in relation to the post-dictatorship Argentine context) the fact that ‘compensation for any wrong is grounded on an arbitrary, thus problematic, “scale” of equivalence and/or exchange; no necessary equivalence between crime and punishment exists’ (). As such the families of victims of the Argentine dictatorship are beholden to that which Levinson calls ‘radical injustice’ (). Radical injustice exposes individuals ‘to an unfairness for which they feel no “adequate,” “correct,” or “conventional” punishment – indeed no convention at all, and thus no punishment at all – exists or can exist: not even an ideal, utopian, or imaginary one’ (Levinson ). The sense of renunciation to this melancholic scenario in which justice is either absent or inevitably inadequate is emblematised in the following phrase at the end of the novel when Schrader says to Martínez ‘Supongo que la vida siempre se impone a la muerte, aunque sea a costa de que la verdad permanezca en las sombra (I suppose that life is always imposed upon death, even if it is at the cost that the truth remains in the shadows)’ (El comienzo ). El comienzo leaves us with both a sense of the belatedness, futility, and inadequacy of justice as well as the unavoidable intellectual complicity of academics and cultural producers. The parallels explored above between intellectual complicity under the Nazi regime and intellectual complicity with the Argentine junta are unavoidably extended in an allegorical mode in fictions that are aware of the continuity between politics and its aesthetic intellectual supplementarity. If, as we saw, ‘allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realms of things’ (Origin ) then Pron invites us to recognise that these reflections on memory are also signifiers of the ruination, or indeed the insufficiency and imperfection, of both legal justice and its accompanying memory work, in cultural representations. Francine Masiello, in her extended study of the ‘art of transition’ in the Southern Cone context finds that, ‘Literature and art open the way for readers and spectators to take conceptual leaps necessary for the

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

practise of politics; they also signal the monumental impasses that travellers find in their path’ (). The politics signalled in El comienzo de la primavera are those of a search for justice, no matter how belated. However, the ‘impasse’ referred to by Masiello – that which cannot be overcome in the novel’s own memory work – here relates to the blurred boundaries between different levels of complicity that leave members of society unable to make sense of their own or others’ roles and responsibilities in the process of restitution. Nevertheless, the ending signals both a desire to ‘carry on’, and a possible way out of this melancholic impasse. Martínez puts his hands in his pockets and, ‘rozó con los dedos de la mano izquierda un pequeño rectángulo de cartón. Pareció recordar algo y comenzó a caminar de regreso a la estación sin mirar atrás (grazed with the fingers of his left hand, a small rectangle of cardboard. He appeared to remember something and started to walk back towards the station without looking back)’ (El comienzo ). There is no explicit clue as to what the rectangle represents or what Martínez ‘remembers’. As such, the image might recall the enigmatic question and image at the end of Bolaño’s Los detectives salvajes asking, ‘¿qué hay detrás de la ventana? (what is there through the window?)’. One possible explanation is that it reminds Martínez of the cartoneros, a pragmatic group of informal cardboard recyclers, who have gained increased visibility and attracted cultural and scholarly interest due to various ‘Editioriales cartoneras (Cartonera editorials)’ that have sprung up in Buenos Aires and other major Latin American cities. This interpretation points to a new political horizon for Martínez’s generation, which is symbolically reinforced by the fact that Martínez does not look back. The specific questions of guilt and complicity in relation to dictatorship can be left in the past, but there is a contemporary economic and social catastrophe unravelling, of which there is no doubt that his generation have a responsibility to address.

From Subalternity and the Nation-State to Gender and Neoliberalism It is where Pron leaves us, at the end of El comienzo, that Wakolda takes off; turning away from the working through of post-dictatorial memory to instead focus upon bodies that are controlled, exploited and marginalised even (and especially?) under ‘developmentalist’ governments. In Wakolda genocide is a central preoccupation, but it is not tied to the mass tortures and murders carried out by el Proceso, but rather to the extermination of

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Subalternity & Nation-State to Gender & Neoliberalism

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indigenous populations during the Conquest of the Desert. The phrase ‘campo de concentración (concentration camp)’ is mentioned, deliberately invoking the Nazi death-work, but instead referring to indigenous labour forces working as slaves in the Bolivian mines at the end of the nineteenth century. Puenzo’s contemporary return to these historic questions thus builds upon Argentinian historian David Viñas’s now canonical work Indios, ejército y frontera (Indians, Army and Frontier) on the extermination of indigenous populations in the s and its place in Argentine historiography. In said work, Viñas had quipped: ‘quizá, los indios ¿fueron los desaparecidos de ? (perhaps the indians were the disappeared of ?)’, provocatively alluding to other disappearances at a time, , when the term ‘desaparecido’ was saturated with the preoccupation with the rule of Videla’s military junta. Such a provocation was aimed at restoring visibility to the foundational exterminations of the Conservative republic that had been occluded by contemporaneous discussions (Viñas, Indios ). In addition to the way in which Puenzo sheds light on unresolved historical terror, it should be added that her focus upon these unresolved issues also attained increased significance at a moment in Argentine history when certain precarious groups were becoming visible again, in the form of the masses of marginalised Paraguayan, Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants arriving in the urban centres of Argentina under the new terms of MERCOSUR, the South American trade bloc originally created in  (‘Perfil Migratorio de Argentina’ ). I propose, therefore, that what Puenzo seeks to create, in Benajaminian terms, is a ‘Jetztzeit’ which Adam Lowenstein, defines as ‘an allegorical moment, an instant in which an image of the past sparks a flash of unexpected recognition in the present’ (). Before turning to a more detailed analysis of the novel, I wish to make a brief detour via the filmic version of Wakolda, ‘El médico alemán (The German Doctor)’. This film can be situated within the context of what Deborah Martin has identified as ‘an insistent focus in recent Argentine cinema on the young’, observed in conjunction with a focus on ‘“marginal sexualities” (intersexuality, homosexuality and child sexuality)’ in an article in which Puenzo’s earlier film ‘XXY’ () is discussed alongside and Julia Solomonoff’s ‘El último verano de la boyita’ () (‘Growing Sideways’ ). Two of Puenzo’s critically acclaimed films that also originated as novels, ‘XXY’ () and ‘El niño pez’ (), share in common with Wakolda a central female character who can be characterised as an outsider, and for whom gender and sexuality are contested and complex areas of identity. In speaking about the similarities between her

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

film ‘XXY’ and ‘El médico alemán’, Puenzo underscores her enduring recourse to, and interest in, ‘temas de la genética de la normalización de los cuerpos, del peso de la sexualidad e incluso del erotismo (themes to do with genetics, the normalisation of bodies, the weight of sexuality and even eroticism)’ (quoted in Mattio). The situation of her work within a growing body of work on childhood in Argentina and Latin America more broadly, allows for productive and illuminating dialogues with wider debates in cultural studies and film theory that have examined different tendencies regarding the function of the child and childhood in cinema (and literature) from around the world. Early incursions into the process of identifying Latin American specificities concerning the treatment of children have often focused on the allegorical function of the child as a symbol of the nation. Indeed, as Martin observes, ‘the national allegory continues to be present in recent Argentine film’ finding, in general terms, the child has often represented the ‘discourse or fantasy of the future’ (‘Growing Sideways’ ). If we infer an allegorical meaning from the storyline of Wakolda’s child protagonist Lilith, it tells a tale of frustrated growth (she has a growth defect) which could be interpreted, of course, in economic terms. An evil outsider (Mengele) intervenes and forces growth through techno-scientific means, at unsustainable rate, without any attention to the care of the (national) body that is being tampered with. Lilith, ultimately sterilised by Mengele, has her reproductive capacity completely suspended in a bleak presentation of Argentina’s possible economic ‘future’. This is a somewhat simplified reading of a novel that uses questions of gender, as described earlier (see Section ‘Function of Allegory’), to engage with many different debates, not just purely economic ones. Indeed, all four of the main female characters in the novel have their reproductive functions tampered with or suspended by Mengele, an insistent theme that suggests a possible literal focus on the restrictive laws regarding women’s control over their reproductive rights in Argentina (and other parts of Latin America), which have been an ongoing topic of public debate. The complex matrix of debates within which Wakolda and ‘El médico alemán’ can be situated (addressing questions of race, gender, economics and politics) highlights the usefulness of the metaphor of gender for addressing a range of different issues. Writing about Argentine and Chilean post-dictatorship transitional cultural production Masiello finds that ‘The gendered body is the prime metaphor of difference and likeness: it serves the debate about the self and other and tracks the tensions between elites and subalterns; it articulates the tension between North

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Subalternity & Nation-State to Gender & Neoliberalism

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and South, between one’s native language and its translation, between genealogy and difference, between permanence and disorder; it represents ongoing movement’ (). The gendered body fulfils a number of these functions in Wakolda in particular in terms of shedding light upon the intersectional burdens of different racial / gendered experiences when Lilith’s ‘elite’ Argentinian family come into contact with a subaltern Mapuche family, and Lilith is doubled in the figure of Yanka, a fifteen-year-old Mapuche girl who – it is inferred – has been impregnated by her father. Another of Masiello’s observations is pertinent to the analysis here; she notes a shift from preoccupations with questions of ‘subalternity’ broadly speaking to a greater emphasis on ‘gender’ which she accounts for by a distancing between intellectuals and their (subaltern) object of study, when compared to the s which had seen a renewed optimism regarding the potential of these encounters via the testimonio genre (). I have found that this very ‘trajectory’ can be observed in the transition from Wakolda the novel to its filmic version. Yanka, along with the details of the encounter between the Mapuche family to which she belongs and Lilith’s upper-class family fade from view. The question of the indigenous ‘subaltern’ figure in Argentine society is displaced in the film by the focus on the presence of the (white) German population in Bariloche, and the relationship between Mengele and the young white Argentinian adolescent Lilith. In observing this shift in the work of one single author / director we can surmise that it is not just a distancing between intellectuals and their objects of study that provokes this shift. In this case, the distinct media of literature and film, with their different forms, budgets, audiences and patterns of distribution, might also affect the balance between the themes of subalternity and gender. The ability of gender to insert itself into a wide range of conversations, as Masiello describes, may make it a more profitable angle of approach in the context of the high-cost film industry, and its international circuits of distribution. That is not to say that film cannot be attentive to questions of subalternity, but that in this case gender seems to function as the ‘guiding trope’ to use Masiello’s phrase, which serves to obscure intersectional forms of discrimination and marginalisation, when compared to the novel (). The ‘crisis’ relating to the intellectual in their capacity to represent subaltern figures is also reflected upon within the novel when there is a breakdown in understanding provoked by the irreconcilable epistemologies of the Mapuche family and the upper-class Argentinian family, also leaving the (Western) reader in the dark, as will be discussed in the final section (see ‘Dolls: Female Socialisation and Capitalist Clock-Time’).

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

I turn now to the novel’s insistent focus upon racially determined patterns of exploitation as the unexamined condition which has sustained the Argentine national project since the origins of the modern republic. In so doing, I focus on three moments: first, Puenzo’s treatment of Mengele’s racist gaze, and emphasis on the Nazi’s surprise realisation that eugenicist ideas and practises in Argentina had long pre-existed the Nazi project. This generates an unravelling of Mengele’s ‘scientific’ ideas and sees Puenzo assign agency in the ensuing critique and destabilisation of his Eurocentrism to the young girl, Lilith, and her family. Next, and in order to bring out the intersectional dimension of the novel’s contestation of Western racism, I argue that Puenzo’s novel sets up a ‘point-of-contact’ (Mary Louise Pratt’s term) between the upper-class Argentinian family and a Mapuche labourer family. The precarious labour of the Mapuche family is shown to underscore the ‘developmentalist’ national project (roadpaving) of the s. Finally, I examine the use of dolls as a recurring trope in the novel, functioning as an emblem of the normalising function at the heart of a modern capitalist biopolitical nexus, and as a cypher or ‘host’ for the haunting presence of subaltern figures that have been exploited and/or excluded from the national developmentalist project in the past and present.

The Argentine Hour of Eugenics At the start of Wakolda the reader is plunged into the world of Josef Mengele. Science and affect are brought arrestingly together through the use of a mixture of scientific and corporeal language to narrate the injection of ‘cloruro de sodio y nitrato (chloride of sodium and nitrate)’ into a subject’s eye. In this first paragraph attention is drawn to his numerous painful failed experiments. The attention to detail in describing an injection into one of the body’s most sensitive parts, the eye, serves to re-sensitise the reader to the horror of Mengele’s experiments. Despite the fact that he is not named explicitly, his trademark experiments such as attempting to change eye colour, skin colour, sterilisations, and sewing together twins to make them Siamese make it clear whom we are faced with. The notion of scientific excess and its link to a disregard of human life are emphasised, showing that scientific process has no inherent ethical consideration: Mil veces había imaginado que sostenía al único gemelo rumano al que la tinta le había teñido el iris izquierdo (después de que una dosis excesiva le quemara el derecho), de pie en la tarima de la casa congreso médico de

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The Argentine Hour of Eugenics

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Higiene Racial en los que había participado en la última década, con los nervios ópticos paralizados por el exceso de químicos Thousands of times he had imagined that he still had the Romanian twin, of whom the ink had dyed the left iris [after an excessive dose had burned the right], stood on the wooden flooring of the house of the medical Racial Hygiene conference in which he had participated in the last decades, with the optical nerves paralysed by the excess of chemicals. (Puenzo, Wakolda ).

The quote shows that what is above all important to Mengele is the success or failure of his experiments, the last thing on his mind is the welfare of his ‘human guinea pigs’. Indeed, when asked if he prefers working with animals or humans he says, ‘they are practically the same, no?’ (Wakolda ). This blurring of the boundaries between animals and humans that characterised the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis resonates with Roberto Esposito’s redesignation of Nazi politics as in the order of zoopolitics, rather than mere biopolitics (). In Michel Foucault’s work, which Esposito builds upon, the shift which leads from the disciplinary technology of power of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the biopolitical in the nineteenth, is precisely the conception no longer of a ‘man-as-body’ but a ‘man-as-species’, a configuration which places emphasis on the evolutionary continuity between animals and humans, contrary to the previous anthropocentric philosophical conceptions that emphasised man’s uniqueness (Society ). It was the rise of a constellation of ideas related to Darwin’s theory of the origin of species such as ‘the hierarchy of species that grows from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit’ that Foucault attributes to the shift from disciplinary political operations to biological discourse (Society ). For Foucault, racism allowed for the crucial delimitations within the human species that would provide the justification to kill people or populations, as a necessary step to ensure the overall alleged health of the population. He says that from the nineteenth century onwards ‘war will be seen not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race’ (Society ). The interpretative key that Esposito identifies to fill a perceived ‘semantic void’ between the two elements biology and politics is ‘immunization’ (). Phrases such as ‘Racial hygiene’ situate Mengele’s thinking firmly within the eugenicist logic defined by Esposito as ‘the immunitary therapy that aims at preventing or extirpating the pathological

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

agents that jeopardise the biological quality of future generations’ (). Once racial types are associated with ‘pathological agents’ the question becomes one of a need for internal purity as distinguishable from the territorial mode of sovereignty which preceded the biopolitical era, during which the threat was perceived as external, although as we shall see (and Foucault reminds us) these two modes overlap. The end of the first paragraph of the novel signals this preoccupation with purity, which becomes a key facet to the novel’s exploration of this theme within the Argentinian context: ‘ésa era la verdadera guerra: pureza o mezcla (this was the real war: purity or mixture)’ (). This sentence re-frames war not as a struggle between competing ideologies but between competing identities, and specifically bioracial identities. Mengele tells Perón ‘en una de las tantas fiestas a las que lo habían invitado (in one of the many parties that he had been invited)’ that the levels of ‘mestizaje’ in the Argentine capital ‘empezaba a alcanzar índices de los que no iba a ser fácil volver (were starting to reach heights from which it would not be easy to return)’; the slippage between vocabularies of war, disease, and Mengele’s aim for racial purity are evident in the terms in which he speaks about the situation, using phrases like, ‘perdiendo la batalla (losing the battle)’ (Wakolda ). When Mengele assesses people he does so with an anthropometrical and scientific-racist perspective; for example he classifies each member of the Argentinian family he comes into contact with in the following ways ‘José vio al padre, a quien había confundido con el empleado de la estación de servicio. Era un homosiriacus de cráneo redondo, braquicéfalo de nariz judaica, cuerpo corto y rechoncho (José saw the father, whom he had confused with the employee of the service station. He was a homosiriacus of rounded scull, brachycephalic of Jewish nose, short body and chubby)’ (Wakolda ). The mother on the other hand is ‘tan común como su marido, pero ella era claramente un homoarabicus dolicocéfalo, de cráneo alargado (as common as her husband, but she was clearly a homoarabicus dolichocephalic, of enlarged cranium)’ (). The use of Latin, feels uncomfortable and misplaced in this context, recalling the earlier classificatory impulses of the natural sciences which, as in this case, sought to establish hierarchies between species. The universalist referentiality that such language aspired to, and the scientific assumptions that underpinned genealogies derived from it, are called into question by the appearance of the children of Enzo and Eva, in comparison to their parents. In the following passage Lilith’s brothers defy ‘José’s’ racial expectations and undermine his scientific beliefs: ‘un varoncito de cinco años tan perfecto como su hermano mayor. Los dos parecían haber escapado a los mandatos de la

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The Argentine Hour of Eugenics

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genealogía: eran homoeuropeans altos y delgados, de piel más banca y ojos más claros que los de sus padres (a little boy of five years, as perfect as his older brother. The two of them appeared to have escaped the orders of genealogy: they were tall and thin homoeuropeans, with whiter skin and lighter eyes than those of their parents)’ (Wakolda ). This is not the first time he says he has seen ‘individuos mediocres (mediocre individuals)’ combining to make so-called perfect children, but ‘la combinación lo irritaba, desafiaba sus teorías de limpieza (the combination irritated him, it challenged his theories of cleansing)’ (). If his eugenic policies were carried out to the extreme, this pair would not have been allowed to reproduce and the ‘perfect’ specimens would not have been created – calling into question more than a decade of work in which Mengele ‘había intentado demostrar la clasificación completa y fiable de la genética humana, así como la dimensión del daño creado por genéticas desfavorables (had attempted to demonstrate the complete and faithful classification of human genetics, as well as the extent of damage caused by unfavourable genetics)’ (Wakolda ). Mengele’s encounter with Enzo and Eva’s daughter Lilith, a perfect Aryan specimen, ‘de no ser por su altura (apart from her height)’ challenges many of his assumptions and begins to undermine his forceful opinions showing more key flaws in his scientific beliefs. The initial encounter makes this clear: ‘frente a sus ojos era un ejemplo que desafiaba uno de sus campos de investigación predilectos: el enanismo, entendido como expresión ejemplar de lo anormal (right in front of his eyes was an example that defied one of his favourite fields of investigation: dwarfism, understood as an exemplary expression of the abnormal)’ (Wakolda ). Mengele, who prides himself on accurately dissecting and calculating height, weight, age, weeks into pregnancy, racial profile and so on of everyone that he comes across is radically wrong when he guesses Lilith’s age ‘regalándole uno (giving her an extra year)’ when he attempts to flatter her, guessing that she is nine when he is certain she is eight, only to find out that she is actually twelve. Lilith takes revenge for Mengele’s mistake by pointing out his own most noticeable aesthetic imperfection: the gap in his teeth. Moreover, she shows that she is not afraid of him by breaking social conventions and reaching out and touching the stranger’s mouth the very first time she speaks to him: ‘atravesó el umbral de sus labios y apoyó la punta del dedo índice en la ranura de medio milímetro de ancho que el desconocido tenía entre las dos paletas frontales (she crossed the threshold of his lips and pressed the end of her index finger into the gap of a few milimeters width that the stranger had between the two frontal palettes)’

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

(). She makes a direct comparison between the two of them: ‘¿Ve? Usted tampoco es perfecto (See, you are not perfect either)’ (). Mengele is shocked and aroused by the daring combination of both touching and naming his imperfection: ‘nunca nadie se había atrevido a mencionarla, mucho menos a tocarla (nobody had ever even dared to mention it, let alone touch it)’ (Wakolda ). Lilith’s physical transgression of the boundary between her and Mengele in the previous quotation, as well as her doubling in the figure of her doll Herlizka and the Mapuche girl Yanka, are instances that mark her out as being an uncanny figure. The status of ‘uncanny figure par excellence’ is afforded to the female adolescent by Deborah Martin due to the fact that ‘as both female and child, she twice challenges categorisation as a “proper” subject, embodying anxiety about categorisation and posing a double threat to the power relations of Patriarchy’ (‘Feminine Adolescence’ ). In the scheme of Wakolda, Lilith represents a triple, or even quadruple threat to the idea of a ‘proper’ subject as configured by Mengele in his often narratively-privileged subject view. His worldview, and Nazi discourse more broadly, insisted on rigid distinctions between masculine / feminine, Aryan / non-Aryan and the normal / abnormal in terms of bodily form and sexuality. As is common within the gothic / horror genres, the transgressor of the boundaries of subjecthood is associated with the ‘monstruous’ – when Lilith explains her name to Mengele she confirms: ‘Quiere decir monstruo de la noche (It means monster of the night)’ (Wakolda ). Lilith challenges Mengele not only in terms of her complex physical imperviousness to scientific ‘legibility’, but also, more openly in direct spoken contestations and confrontations. When he describes his work in manipulating the genes of cows so that they can always give birth to twins (with a view to achieving it in Aryan humans in order more quickly to populate ‘racially impure’ areas) she, on the other hand, sees the value in the exercise from a humanitarian perspective: ‘Entonces podríamos alimentar al mundo entero (That way we could feed the whole world)’ (Wakolda ). She discovers more and more about his strange views when she observes one of the items of memorabilia from his past life – a dagger with a swastika and the inscription ‘La sangre es honor (Blood is honour)’ in German (). Lilith asks what ‘Blood’ has to do with ‘honour’ and he replies, ‘La mezcla impurifica la sangre y destroza la memoria (Mixture impurifies blood and destroys the memory)’ (). On the following page after a conversational interlude, the topic of memory is resumed. Lilith

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The Argentine Hour of Eugenics

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asks, ‘¿Qué hay que recordar? (What is there to remember)’ (). Ironically Mengele does not make the connection or ‘remember’ what they had just been talking about. The exchange then proceeds: – ¿Quiénes éramos? – Cuándo – En el principio – ¿El principio de qué? – De todo. – Who were we? – When – In the beginning – In the beginning of what? – Of everything.

(Puenzo, Wakolda )

This imprecise phraseology introduces Mengele’s description of his mystical-racial ideas about ‘Sonnenmenschen . . . Los hombres-sol, los hombres-dios, el hombre-mago (Sonnenmenschen . . . The sun-men, the god-men, the man-wizard)’, which serve to undermine his self-professed status as ‘hombre de ciencia (man of science)’ and illuminate one of the many mythical underpinnings to Nazi ideology (). Lilith’s perspective allows for the defamiliarisation of his ideas there and then: ‘Me parece que usted está un poquito loco (It seems to me that you are a little crazy)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Calling him ‘loco (crazy)’ serves to contest his selfprofessed role as arbiter of what is ‘normal’. The mutual fascination between Lilith and Mengele gives Mengele the chance to infiltrate the family and tamper with the reproductive functions of all of its members: he sterilises Lilith, intervenes in her mother’s pregnancy (twins) and persuades her father to industrialise his production of artisanal dolls (reproductive in an economic sense). He decides to stay and help try to ‘save’ Eva’s premature babies for the chance to once again play with the fates of twins. Instead of making sure that both twins keep developing to their maximum potential he seeks to reverse their fortunes: ‘Dejó a la gemela más fuerte librada a su suerte y se dedicó a sacar adelante a la más débil, empecinado con demostrar que la medicina podía invertirle el destino hasta a lo inevitable (He left the stronger twin to his fate and dedicated himself to helping the weakest, stubbornly eager to demonstrate that medicine could invert destiny, even of the inevitable)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). He is exhilarated when he achieves his goal to reverse their

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

states, and delights in the drama of telling the mother that she should say goodbye to the original healthier twin (). Esposito has analysed the obsession with birth and its suppression within Nazi ideology and practise as a function of a short-circuited nexus linking ‘the concepts of “birth” [nascita] and of “nation”‘ that ‘finds its most exasperated expression in Nazism’ (). He elaborates that whilst for a long time nationes were groups of similar ethnic provenance, it is only when the territorial state emerges that ‘the biological phenomenon of birth (which is impolitical in itself ) needs to be inscribed in an orbit of the state that is unified by sovereign power’ (). In Bíos Esposito seeks to emphasise the continuities between the biopolitical operations of Nazism and of other modern states, continuities which are, likewise, emphasised in the novel. Mengele, for example, is excited to find that ‘Ya Sarmiento y Alberdi estaban convencidos de que la sangre europea mejoraría la calidad de una población constituida fundamentalmente por indios y criollos (Already Sarmiento and Alberdi were convinced that European blood would improve the quality of a population constituted fundamentally by indians and creoles)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Juan Bautista Alberdi, the Argentine diplomat and political theorist’s most famous quotation ‘gobernar es poblar (to govern is to populate)’ referred to his view that Argentina should promote European immigration to occupy the far corners of the territory. In Facundo, Sarmiento’s vision for the ideal direction of the Argentine national project, he puts forward the same suggestion equating ‘urban’ and ‘European’ with ‘civilization’, and the caudillos of rural origin – Facundo and Rosas – with ‘barbarism’; the ‘indio’ is seen as falling outside of the national project entirely. In the thought of both we see the gradual shift from the attribution of positive and negative cultural associations with different populations, to ‘scientifically’ articulated ones evinced in the title of Sarmiento’s  work Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (Conflict and Harmonies of the Races in America), following the wider circulation of ideas linked to the constellation of Darwinian derived concepts described earlier in this section. As we travel further into the psyche of Mengele, and further into the Patagonian hinterland, the links between the world view of one of the Nazi’s staunchest racial purists, and some of the prior policies of the Argentinian state become more explicit. At the start of chapter three the first direct comparison is made between Mengele’s eugenic aspirations in Germany and the ‘limpieza (cleansing)’ undertaken in the South of Argentina. When reading the histories of the Argentine pampas Mengele describes what they served to teach him ‘“Ustedes no fueron los únicos que

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The Argentine Hour of Eugenics

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hicieron un buen trabajo de limpieza”, dijeron (“You were not the only ones who did a good job of cleansing”, they said)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Controlled births, as overlapping with the project of national consolidation (critically diagnosed by Esposito, as the original ‘sickness’ at the heart of the modern biopolitical paradigm) is revealed in the following passage with regards to the indios in the Bolivian goldmines: Se habla de entre diez mil y veinte mil indios que pasaron por esos campos de concentración. Si hasta tuvieron que habilitar dos cementerios especiales in el , eso le da una idea de la magnitud de lo que pasó. La otra política era impedir nacimientos en el grupo. Separaban a las mujeres de los hombres, a los niños de sus padres, les cambiaban el nombre . . . Muchos saben que tienen ascendencia indígena pero no pueden reconstruir su historia familiar porque a su antepasado le pusieron Juan Pérez. La verdad es que la clase dirigente de la época se repartió el botín . . . Si hasta el diario El Nacional titulaba cada tanto ‘Hoy entrega de indios’. It is said that between ten and twenty thousand indios passed through these concentration camps. They even had to prepare two special cemeteries in ‘, which gives you a sense of the magnitude of what went on. They separated the women from the men, the children from their parents, they changed their names ... Many people know that they have indigenous ascendance but cannot reconstruct their family history because their ancestor was given the name Juan Pérez. The truth is that the ruling class of the era reaped the rewards . . . Even the newspaper El Nacional had the headline, every now and then, ‘Today delivery of indians’. (Puenzo, Wakolda )

Elements of this passage could easily be describing Nazi activities, and specifically those enacted at Auschwitz where Mengele himself would have prisoners separated into male and female in order to decide whether they were allocated to forced work, to be the subjects of his experiments, or sent to death in the gas chambers. Likewise, it also resonates with some of the polemical aspects of the Argentine dictatorship whereby babies of militant parents were re-homed amongst right-wing sympathisers and members of the regime, despite the fact that Puenzo disavows such comparisons. By referring to the mines as ‘campos de concentración (concentration camps)’, Puenzo operates in the vein of scholars such as Esposito, as well as Achille Mbembe and Bertrand Ogilvie, who seek to contextualise the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis as one horrific instance within a multitude of violent examples of the operation of racialised biopolitics tied to state sovereignty, as opposed to being an exception. Mengele thinks to himself ‘no podía creer lo que escuchaba (al final, ellos no habían inventado nada) (I could not believe what I was hearing [ultimately, they hadn’t

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

invented anything]’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). This and the parallels evinced earlier in this chapter, force the reader to re-think the history of Nazism as one of a broader global history of nationalist / racist biopolitical policies.

A Patagonian Point-of-Contact It was in  – the year referenced in the citation from Wakolda in relation to the Bolivian ‘concentration camps’ – that, according to Viñas, a military-oligarchic ‘pact’ in Argentina was consolidated with the Conquest of the Desert. Viñas, in Indios, ejército y frontera, finds this pact to be the distinguishing feature of Argentinian politics throughout its history. According to Viñas this long-standing conservative consensus – and history of collaboration – between the national oligarchy and the military continued from  until  (– was known as the etapa radical [radical period]: the interruption of the conservative hegemony in politics), then re-emerged in  and has lasted almost ever since (). This close military–state relationship is also characterised by ‘su peculiar capacidad silenciadora para negar la violencia que subyace a la instauración del estado liberal, y por su ejercicio de la censura ante los problemas vinculados a sus propios orígenes (its particular silencing capacity to negate the violence that underpins the establishment of the liberal state, and for its exercise of censorship in the face of the problems linked to its own origins’) (Viñas, Indios ). Viñas is especially concerned by the unacknowledged violence towards the indigenous populations. He draws attention to the role of historians in erasing the indigenous population from the national imaginary and in obscuring their extermination from the narrative of the Conquest of the Desert. Viñas asks: ‘Si en otros países de América Latina la “voz de los indios vencidos” ha sido puesta en evidencia ¿por qué no en la Argentina? ¿La Argentina no tiene nada que ver con los indios? ¿Y con las indias? ¿O nada que ver con América Latina? (If in other Latin American countries the “voice of the defeated indios” has been brought to light, why not in Argentina? Does Argentina have nothing to do with indios? And indias? Or nothing in common with Latin America?)’ (). Viñas not only criticises Argentinian nationalist identitarian discourses for erasing the voices of the defeated indigenous population, and for presenting Argentina as somehow different to the rest of Latin America (more ‘European’), but also makes the link between the murdered indios of the past and the desaparecidos of the most recent military dictatorship, as described in the introduction to this chapter. In his own statement asserting Argentine biopolitical continuity between murderous states with those

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A Patagonian Point-of-Contact

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that had better intentions he says, ‘ni con las bases de yrigoyenismo ni con las del peronismo – entendidos ambos como movimientos populares de dimensiones nacionales y de ambiguos pero considerables índices favorables al cambio – ha logrado salir de una estructura coloidal sólo episódicamente homogénea (not even with the bases of Yrigoyenism, nor with those of Peronism – both understood as popular movements of national dimensions and of ambiguous but considerable leanings favourable to change – have they managed to escape the colloidal structure only episodically homogenous)’ (Viñas, Indios ). The phrase has biological undertones with the use of the bio-chemical term ‘coloidal’ to describe the repeated, unsettled and unassimilated state of the indigenous populations. The novel, like Viñas’ work, stresses the continuity of the foundational violence of the Conquest of the Desert into the Peronist era. We now turn to an encounter in the novel with a Mapuche family who identify as having been part of a minority that ‘survived’ the attempted destruction of the indigenous population, and we shall see that they are still subject to exploitation and marginalisation during the (Peronist) era of the s. Economically they are involved in paving the road to Bariloche which serves to highlight the ongoing ‘march of progress’ (part of a national developmentalist project) underpinned by the precarious labour that the Mapuche family now undertake. When Mengele and Lilith’s upper-class criollo family are forced to seek shelter in the house of a Mapuche family who are following the labour of the paving of the road, the novel stages an encounter between a number of different subject positions which represent very different historical and social experiences. By staging this encounter between classes the novel recreates what Mary Louise Pratt terms a ‘contact zone’ in which ‘the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures and whose trajectories . . . intersect’ (). We can examine, through this encounter how ‘subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other’ (Pratt ). In this vein, this section of the novel becomes not only a ‘contact zone’ between different subjects, but also a contested ‘memory space’. In such a space, the sons of the families come into conflict over their different understandings of the ‘war of the desert’. Mengele’s sense of class and race-based superiority is unwavering when he is forced to rely on the hospitality of the Mapuche family: ‘ni buscando ser humilde podía bajar la mirada ante un paisano (not even seeking to be humble could he lower his gaze before a peasant)’, but he is worn down by the father, Cumín’s persistence (Puenzo, Wakolda ). When he is first

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

inside he does not bother to join the awkward conversation between Enzo, Eva, and Cumín. Instead, ‘Los miraba preguntándose cómo era posible que un pueblo de raza bastarda, con mezclas tan contrapuestas e indeseables, hubiera podido sobrevivir por milenios en condiciones tan inhóspitas. Una raza genéticamente degenerada por el veneno de la mezcla, inoculada por más de dos mil años en su sangre (He looked at them asking himself how it was posible that a population of bastard race, with mixtures so opposed and undesirable, had been able to survive for millenia in such inhospitable conditions. A race, genetically degenerated by the venom of mixture, inoculated for more than two thousand years in their blood)’ (emphasis added; ). Here, Puenzo underscores the same ‘immunizing’ logic that Esposito locates at the heart of modern biopolitics, yet does so in order to show how Mapuche difference confounds Nazi science. Their ability to survive in these hostile conditions is contrasted with the struggle that Mengele had felt on the journey – not adapting well to the fierce conditions of the endless desert – highlighting his own weaknesses. The ‘scientific’ perspective that he supposedly employs whilst surveying them is also undermined by the religious vocabulary that litters his thoughts. In a reference to the mestizo genealogy of the children, Mengele says, ‘El pecado cometido en contra de las leyes de las sagradas armonías estaba ahí, estampado en sus cuerpos: imborrable (The sin committed against the laws of the sacred harmonies was there, stamped on their bodies: unerasable)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Mengele’s ideas regarding the Mapuche family are proven wrong when he assumes that their silence comes from the servile and naturally submissive nature of the mestizos. Separate from the surrounding paragraphs, on a line apart, the words ‘Se equivocaba (He was mistaken)’ condense and emphasise the novel’s comment on Mengele’s attitude into one line. When the family and Mengele enter Cumín’s house ‘la adolescente arrancaba una por una las hojas amarillentas de un libro que iba abollando antes de tirar al fuego (the young girl tore out, one by one, the yellowing pages of a book that she rolled into a ball before throwing them onto the fire)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). At this point the subject position shifts from Mengele to Lilith and it is she who ‘alcanzó a leer el título (Ciencia Mapuche) y desvió la vista hacia un altarcito con una estatua de yeso pintada a mano (manages to read the title [Mapuche Science] and slid her gaze over towards a little altar with a handpainted plaster-cast statue)’ (). Later, when the daughter Yanka uses more pages of the Mapuche

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book to help fill out Herlitzka, the doll’s, chewed foot it says, ‘Destruía la sabiduría de sus ancestros sin culpa, sus abuelos le habían enseñado que todo debe cambiar de forma para no perderse (She destroyed the knowledge of her ancestors without guilt, her grandparents had taught her that everything has to change form to not be lost)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). The fact that it is ‘Ciencia Mapuche’ that is being burnt, and the way that Lilith’s gaze shifts from the book to the alter, is symbolic of the hybrid cosmovisión that these Mapuche have formulated – a mixture of Catholicism and of the enduring influence of pre-conquest forms of knowledge pertaining to the indigenous communities who populated the Patagonia region. The word ‘Ciencia’ – used to legitimise forms of knowledge since the Enlightenment – is juxtaposed with the superstition that is often associated with personal altars and religion more broadly; but it also evokes Mengele’s constant reference to his own ‘ciencia’ and his mixture of pseudo-scientific and religious language. The Mapuche influence is set out as a culturally distinguishing feature between the two Argentinian families, and the Catholic God (and its links to conquest) unite the upper-class family with Mengele. Lilith is the only person not intimidated or made uncomfortable in this ‘contact zone’, having not formed prejudices or resentments that an adult might harbour. As such, she is a useful figure for illuminating some of the key features of the ‘diverse cultural epistemes’ and contesting visions of history present (Pratt ). Lilith asks of the deity she sees: – ¿Quién es? – Ngenechen – dijo la chica, tan bajito que sólo Lilith la oyó – ¿Un santo? – Un dios – dijo el hombre – ¿Dios de quién? – Basta, Lilith la frenó Eva. ... – Mapuche. – ¿Ésos son los indios que mataron. . .? – A algunos no – dijo el hombre, con una sonrisa en los ojos. – Who is that? – Ngenechen – said the girl, so quietly that only Lilith heard her – A saint? – A god – said the man – God of who? – That’s enough Lilith, Eva halted her.

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Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction ... – Mapuche. – Are those the indios that they killed. . .? – Not some of them – said the man, with a smile in his eyes. (Puenzo, Wakolda )

In the first instance, the subtle difference between ‘saint’ and ‘god’ distinguishes them from each other. We see that Lilith recognises ‘Mapuche’ as ‘indios that were killed’, and that Cumín identifies himself as a survivor of this process. Later, when attempting to distinguish themselves from Mengele, who is refusing to engage in conversation, Cumín says, ‘Entonces los une el miedo. . . (And so you are united by fear. . .)’ and Eva replies, ‘Fear of the Lord’ emphasising their common Christianity. Yet the struggle to distinguish herself from Mengele resumes later when he asks her a question in German that she pointedly replies in Spanish, ‘como si quisiera dejar sentado que no era su cómplice (as if she wanted it to be known that she was not his accomplice)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). However, her status as ‘accomplice’ is unavoidably evident when she lets him stay in her guesthouse in Bariloche. It is the children, who have varying levels of awareness of the difficulty of the interactions, that illuminate key sources of difference between the families. Tomás embarrasses his parents by stating the obvious to Lilith when she asks how the family’s pig ‘se alimentaba del aire (was fed on air)’ by clarifying the meaning, ‘Que están todos muertos de hambre acá (that they are all starved to death here)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). The reaction of Lemún, one of the sons, is that ‘se puso morada, por rabia o humillación (he turned purple, through anger or humiliation)’ Tomás ‘sintió un nudo en la garganta, la mezcla de vergu¨enza y poder que genera la primera estocada de crueldad en la vida de cualquier cosa (felt a lump in his throat, the mixture of shame and power that is generated by the first jab of cruelty in the life of any person)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). The adults are much more sensitive to the fragile balance of relations, whilst the children only learn through the awkwardness that they cause in the adults each time that they illuminate a fault line between the conditions of the two families. The children interact much more freely with each other and in this way the novel draws attention to the ways in which social divisions and taboos are learned over time and accentuated with age. The ‘historietas’ or cartoon strip book that Tomás has, serves at first as a means of bringing the boys together, but then further illuminates the

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A Patagonian Point-of-Contact



differences in their ancestry and education. For two hours the boys laugh and look at the cartoons together before one of the Mapuche boys is forced to admit that he cannot read the captions. It is the intrigue of a picture of soldiers shooting at an indian raid that gets the better of him, and provokes him to seek clarification of what is being depicted. It transpires that the cartoon illustrates soldiers planning to attack an indigenous village, knowing that the caudillos are elsewhere, in order to take the women and children as bounty. In the following pages ‘seguía la matanza de indios y las victorias de un regimiento de hombres blancos de uniforme azul que cavaban un agujero de tierra en medio del desierto (the killing of indians and the victories of a regiment of white men in blue uniform continued as they dug a hole of earth in the middle of the desert)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda –). When Lemún interrogates Tomás as to where he got the cartoon book and where he learnt that the indios were killed, he says, ominously, Buenos Aires, and in school, highlighting the unashamedly mainstream nature of the triumphant narratives of the war of the desert, and their translation into nationalist pedagogies. The kind of educational mystification that Tomás may well have been exposed to is illustrated in the problematic quotation that Viñas opens with in Indios, ejército y frontera. It is from an Argentine history book by Manuel J. Olascoaga which describes the ‘pacification’ of the desert as ‘una serie de acontecimientos felices (a series of happy events)’ (quoted in Viñas, Indios ). Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial reconfiguration of biopower in his  essay ‘Necropolitics’ also sheds light on such an ‘exclusion’ of a massacre from the history books, or rather its shameless inclusion, but as something desirable. ‘Necropolitics’ in this case refers to the right to decide who can live, and in the essay he shows how the ‘centrality of the state in the calculus of war’ obscures violence at ‘frontiers’ or in ‘colonies’ (Mbembe ): colonies are similar to the frontiers. They are inhabited by ‘savages.’ The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies.. . . It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. ()

This non ‘human world’ or logic of de- or non-humanisation accounts, again, for the animalising vocabulary used by Mengele. The situation that Mbembe describes is configured as one of the key ‘states of exception’ deemed to operate in the ‘service of “civilization”’ (). We shall see in the

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

Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

next section that this ‘state of exception’, does not only operate as a function of territorial subordination, but also as a function of the cooptation of labour power, as is also discussed in Mbembe’s text. In the following passages we see the importance of memory (as opposed to direct experience) as a function of understanding one’s place within a structural history of violence. The cartoon strip makes Lemún feel anger towards Tomás, reproducing the anger of his father and conjuring a memory of a prior conversation between Cumín and Nahuel: ‘A mí no me hicieron nada (They did nothing to me)’, said Nahuel, thinking to himself that he had never understood why his father got so angry about something that happened over a hundred years ago. ‘¿Y vos quién te crees que sos? ¿Sin tu tatarabuelo quién te crees que hubieras sido? (And you, who do you think you are? Without your great-grandfather who do you think you would have been?)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Cumín sees his family as ‘la prueba viviente del fracaso de un proyecto (the living proof of the failure of a project)’ – that of the Argentinian republic to exterminate the indigenous populations (–). For the first time, looking at the cartoons, ‘Lemún sintió la misma rabia de Cumín (Lemún felt the same anger as Cumín)’ (). The historical awareness and consequent resentment begins to be internalised by the new generation. In a reversal of the historical power positions, the labourer sons now possess the power over life and death of their visitors, as highlighted by Nahuel when he refers to what would happen should his father see the cartoon book: ‘Éstos no salen de acá si la ve (These would get out of her alive if he sees it)’ however the sons choose not to unleash the fury of their father (Puenzo, Wakolda ).

Dolls: Female Socialisation and Capitalist Clock-Time Each adult character represents a different sector of modern-day labour distribution. The Mapuche family, it transpires, do not observe clocktime: the symbol of the control and rationalisation that facilitated the expansion of capitalism. Enzo undertakes artisanal labour fixing watches and Eva enters the service industry running her guesthouse. Mengele represents the industrialist ‘North’ by promoting the mechanisation of Enzo’s doll-making hobby. Cumín is open about his family’s disregard for time: ‘Acá ni la radio funciona. Y el tiempo. . . Con la punta del cuchillo señaló un reloj de pared que apenas se veía debajo de unos abrigos [. . .] dejó de funcionar y ahora ni eso tenemos acá (Here not even the radio works. And the time. . . With the point of his knife he gestured towards a clock that was barely visible below some coats [. . .] it stopped working and

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Dolls: Female Socialisation & Capitalist Clock-Time



now we do not even have that)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). They are not even sure what day it is. Enzo’s income, on the other hand, would ordinarily rely on his ability to fix as many watches as he could in the time he has available. Eva decides she needs to supplement this income by setting up a guesthouse in the house that she has inherited from her mother, since she says that they could not live from the watch business: ‘¡Ni aunque todos los relojes de Buenos Aires se rompan al mismo tiempo! (Not even if all the watches in Buenos Aires broke at the same time!)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Nevertheless, Enzo also dedicates a lot of time to his hobby, making handmade porcelain dolls, which he does not sell, only gives as gifts (undermining the capitalist logic of consumption upon the basis of monetary exchange for goods). However, he still manages to induct the children who play with them into clock-time, setting their playtime to the capitalist rhythm by inserting a watch into their stuffing to make the sound of a heartbeat. It is Mengele who forces the step beyond this artisan labour by making it his mission to find a factory that can mass-produce Enzo’s carefully crafted masterpieces, as part of his own new mission to spread the Aryan aesthetic ideal to the region. The end of the chapter serves to emphasise the precariousness of Cumín’s family’s situation. Their labour, we are told is ‘Haciendo la ruta . . . La ruta que va a poblar la Patagonia (Building the route . . . The route that is going to populate Patagonia)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). They only work when the truck comes to pick them up which could be fifteen days in a row or not for a whole week. Lilith asks what will happen when the road is finished and Cumín replies, with irony, that there will always be roads to pave. Lilith insists ‘Pero ¿se van a ir moviendo de un lado a otro? (But are you going to keep going from place to place?)’ and Cumín confirms, ‘Si no hay remedio . . . Desde los romanos el mundo siempre se movió con trabajo esclavo, ¿no? (If there is no other way . . . Since the Romans the world has aways run on the basis of slave labour, no?)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). This is a profound comment by Cumín who locates the same origins of the distinction between homo humanus and homo barbarus (justifying slavery) as Martin Heidegger in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ [‘Brief u¨ber den “humanismus”’] to the conquest of the Greeks, and in particular the Greek language, by the Romans. The Heideggerian scholar William Spanos highlights the significance of ‘Letter on Humanism’ in showing that the ideology at the time of German unification, which traced Germany’s origins back to the Greeks, was already a vision of the Greeks as seen through the imperial gaze of the Romans (Spanos ). The above question asked by Cumín is,

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

Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

appropriately, aimed at Mengele who acknowledges his complicity by staring fixedly at the floor. Yanka is the most ‘subaltern’ figure in the novel being intersectionally burdened by both her race and gender, as well as the geographical marginalisation of her family. As Kimberlé Crenshaw has argued, attention to these intersections is crucial in contesting the theoretical erasure of women of colour’s experiences, as it highlights the ways in which subjects can ‘fall between’ often separately treated categories of difference, even as these categories are mutually constitutive (). The notable absence of recognition of intersectional experiences in Argentine nationalist discourses is articulated in Viñas’ work when he demands, ‘Dónde están las mujeres indias? (Where are the indian women?)’ (Indios ). Yanka, estimated to be about fifteen years-old, is six months pregnant, and her pregnancy casts the shadow of incest over her family, adding another sinister dimension to the female adolescent experience charted in Wakolda. Yanka shows Lilith her own doll which she has to keep hidden due to her father saying she is too old for it. Yanka tells Lilith: ‘Dice que estoy grande para muñecas. Que no puedo tener una de trapo si voy a tener una de carne (He says I am too big for dolls. That I can’t have one of cloth if I’m going to have one of flesh)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Her youthful desire to play with a doll is juxtaposed against the reality of the child she will soon have to look after. The Mapuche family and their history are alien to the wealthy family, and there are also elements of their interactions and beliefs which cannot be contained or understood from a ‘metropolitan’ perspective. For example, they experience telepathy, a phenomenon which would be dismissed by ‘rational-science’, but which allows them to evade the networks of communication to which the wealthy family are privy. The other way in which these ‘rational’ conceptual systems are interrupted is through the doll Wakolda, who is said to have magic powers. At the end of the novel, when Mengele is at the point of being pinned down by the Israeli Secret Service, the Mapuche family turn up to claim back the Mapuche doll, that had been swapped for Herlitzka, and are devastated to find that Mengele has performed a caesarean on it and removed whatever was in her stomach. The questions that Lilith demands of Yanka remain for her, and for the reader, unanswered ‘Dijiste que tenía poderes ¿Qué tenía adentro?’ You said that she had powers, what did she have inside?)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). Yanka is alarmed to find that her doll no longer contains what it did before, and as they rip it open, ‘un puñado de ojos de vidrio turquesa se desparramaron sobre la nieve. La imagen fue tan violenta que Lilith se agachó para agarrar a Wakolda, cubierta de nieve y con el vientre vacío

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Dolls: Female Socialisation & Capitalist Clock-Time



(a handful of turquoise glass eyes spilled out on the snow. The image was so violent that Lilith bent down to scoop up Wakolda, covered in snow and with an empty stomach)’ (Puenzo, Wakolda ). That is the extent of the information we are given, and the reader is left unenlightened as to how the eyes got there and what the true significance of the doll was. In The Untimely Present, Avelar sheds light on the historic operation of magical realism – or what is more commonly described as ‘fantastic’ literature – in the River Plate tradition. He explains: It depended, for its effect, on the conflict between two irreconcilable logics. In the case of those more rural societies where magical realism of the Asturian variety flourished, this conflict could be recognised as that of two opposing modes of production, as the fully modern narrative apparatus wrestled with a folkloric or cosmogonic material that could not be incorporated without a previous taming, a constitutive subjugation by no means deprived of violence. ()

The two (or more) mutually incomprehensible ‘modes of production’ I have traced here might account for this violent eruption within the ‘fully modern narrative apparatus’ (Avelar, ). Mengele engages in the ‘subjugation’ by performing the caesarean; taking yet another opportunity to tamper with a ‘reproductive’ system, and violently impose an Aryan aesthetic. The turquoise eyes also function as a metaphor, whereby the wish to expose ‘society’s blindness’ or to reverse ‘invisibility’ (the function of the metaphors of ‘gender’ and ‘subalternity’ according to Masiello) is reflected in the insistent focus on eyes and blindness throughout the novel. The eyes in the stomach of Wakolda mirror the eyes at the start of the novel that Mengele was attempting to colour blue. Both emphasise the way in which the desired elimination of ‘difference’, emblematised by the medical establishment, continues to be perpetuated under democracy. Subjects are haunted by the pressure to conform to aggressively marketed aesthetic standards, and women continue to be denied full control of their reproductive systems. Meanwhile, the more affluent sectors of society are blind to the poor underclass of precarious labourers that underpin their economy. Numbers of immigrants to Argentina from South American countries, in particular Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru have grown both in real terms and as a proportion of the total population of immigrants from other parts of the world, between  and  according to the  Organización Internacional para las Migraciones (International Organization of Migration) report (‘Perfil Migratorio’ ). A report in  showed that despite efforts to legitimise their position in the country

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

Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

with the  Ley de Migraciones (Migration Law), fifty per cent of immigrants still have precarious jobs and are often subject to abuse and discrimination (Lukin). In the film, as discussed, Yanka and her family disappear, but her haunting presence is transferred into Lilith’s doll who is now called Wakolda instead of Herlitzka (as in the novel), and who is dark haired instead of blonde. Wakolda, the doll, takes on the Mapuche name of the absent Yanka’s doll (the doll in the film is not made of wood as she is in the novel, which means she does not look racially mestizo). The fact that Lilith possesses a doll that is ‘different’ in the film is depicted as a function of her father’s acceptance and love of her difference (her growth defect), in contrast to Mengele’s wish to change her. Lilith says of the dolls, ‘Le gustaría que fueron todas distintas, a mí también – por eso elegí a Wakolda, era la más rara de todas, igual que yo (He likes them all to be different, me as well – that’s why I chose Wakolda, she was the strangest of all)’ (Puenzo, ‘El médico’  mins.). In both cases, however, it draws attention to the subjection of women’s bodies to masculinist categories of visibilisation and invisibilisation. Enzo in the socialisation of his daughter, attempts to resist the erasure of difference that industrial production promotes, with its rationalised techniques that produce aesthetically identical dolls. Nevertheless, in the end he succumbs to the temptation to see his handiwork produced on a larger scale when Mengele offers to back him in the enterprise. Enzo, therefore, unwittingly facilitates the production of emblems of ongoing Nazi solidarity in Argentina as well as the perpetuation of unrealistic aesthetic expectations for young girls. The similarities between Puenzo’s own name and that of the father ‘Enzo’, appear to represent an acknowledgement of the complicity she has in participating in the neoliberal economy as part of an industry (the film industry) which is also known to perpetuate the pressure on young girls to look a certain way. Both the novel and film indicate that the contemporary pressure on gendered bodies to be ‘normal’, physically and sexually, is only a few short steps away from the desire of the Nazis to normalise these same elements – with parallels made to the Argentine government’s attempts – both through the historic ‘pacification’ of the desert, and the military dictatorship, to eliminate other forms of ‘difference’ from the Argentine social body. This chapter has examined two novels from the Argentinian context that refer to Nazism and Nazi figures in ways that are differently configured in terms of space and have seemingly different political priorities.

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Dolls: Female Socialisation & Capitalist Clock-Time



Pron’s comparison of the effects of Nazism on the German university system with the Argentine situation – in different historical circumstances – illuminates the insufficiency of any attempt at justice, and the inevitable passing of those involved. Whilst this is no excuse to suspend justice processes, Pron gestures towards a natural end point that both those affected by dictatorship-related trauma, and perpetrators will eventually face in death. For a generation such as his, one that may be less affected by the direct violence of dictatorship, this fact can be a release towards new struggles, and new political tasks that bear more relevance to their own present and future society. It is at the end of the cultural pursuit of memory and justice that the regenerative possibilities of ‘el comienzo de la primavera (the beginning of spring)’ can begin to take effect. Puenzo, I have suggested, is eminently concerned with the biopolitical continuity of operations of racially determined exterminations and modes of exploitation inherent to the Argentine national project. Nazism – often seen as privileged site of horror – provides a vehicle with which to illuminate the autochthonous injustices, that can be masked not only by a gaze turned towards Europe, or the existing ex-Nazi populations in communities such as Bariloche, but also by the belated, past-orientated post-dictatorship inquiries, that continue to divert attention from questions of racial marginalisation and exploitation in the present. As such, both authors can be seen to attempt to enact closure on a certain type of post-dictatorship political memory work commonly undertaken by literature and cultural production in Argentina from the s onwards. In Pron this desire for closure is emblematised by the rejuvenating impulse in the title El comienzo de la primavera as well as the novel’s ending (when the protagonist, significantly, does not ‘look back’). In Puenzo it is through the active and insistent engagement with other occluded political subjects, and circumstances. This is the first example, then, of members of the generation under analysis in this book (authors roughly born from the s onwards) found to be moving beyond memory work (despite memorysaturated themes), to address new political tasks, as well as broader questions of community in the present and for the future. This ‘closure’ of memory work can be contrasted to the overall efforts in both novels to challenge and unpack the notions of closure and self-containment in terms of both nations (Germany and Argentina), and their corresponding and intersecting histories, and to underscore the infinitely proliferating intersectional experiences and exclusions that divide any community from itself.

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

Nazism as Allegory in Argentine Fiction

Notes  From now on, El comienzo.  In an interview when asked about the recent death of General Jorge Rafael Videla, Puenzo warns against the temptation to draw parallels between her investigation of Mengele and the scrutiny of the Argentine generals in the public sphere. She insists, ‘He [Videla] was one of the most hated leaders of the  military coup, which is a completely separate process from the Nazi theme. . .. For us it was really important that he died in jail. We have a government today that is making them pay for what they did. . . Even if they are very old they have to die in jail, not in their houses’ (‘Wakolda’s Study in Contrasts’).  For an analysis of the use of the Holocaust as a cypher in various global contexts, including the Argentine post-dictatorship context, see Huyssen. For a good summary of the various controversies and debates surrounding this use see also Levy and Sznaider. I shall return to these questions in the discussion of Laub’s novel in Chapter .  See for example Jelin; Feierstein.  Compared to ‘allegory’, which in Benjaminian terms can be seen to restore meaning to experience – often for a political purpose – ‘parable’ has a more specific connotation of moral exemplarity.  Biopolitics conceived as a form of ‘immunization’ is proposed and developed by Roberto Esposito in his work Bíos, as will be discussed in more detail in relation to Wakolda’s themes. Building on Michel Foucault’s work, and in particular ‘Society Must Be Defended’, Esposito insists upon the biopolitical commonalities, only hesitantly put forward by Foucault, between Nazism and other modern regimes, and posits that ‘immunisation’ is the interpretative key through which productive comparisons can be made.  This trend of twenty-first-century Argentine literature turning away from the theme of dictatorship has been observed by Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Melissa M. González in their article ‘Orthodox Transgressions’, in which they mention Puenzo’s El niño pez () as an example.  See for example Lebeau; Lury.  As an example of this she cites, amongst others, the character of ‘La Guayi’ from Puenzo’s film ‘El niño pez’ (). La Guayi is a Paraguayan immigrant to Argentina who begins a lesbian relationship with the daughter of the family whom she works for as a maid. The choice of a protagonist who is a Paraguayan immigrant in Buenos Aires shows that Puenzo has a recurring interest in the status of migrants in Argentina (discussed here in relation to Wakolda) and the intersectional matrices of discrimination faced by people of different configurations of gender, racial, occupational, sexual, national and other identities.  Until very recently abortion and birth control have been strictly forbidden and controlled by Law in Argentina. See ‘Argentina: Limits on Birth Control’. At

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Dolls: Female Socialisation & Capitalist Clock-Time



  

 

 



the time of writing of Wakolda, there were also legal trials going on regarding the systematic theft of babies from militant women during the dictatorship. ‘Intersectionality’ is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to articulate the different experiences of discrimination that can occur as a function of intersected identitarian factors which, when combined, can enhance the likelihood and severity of discrimination. These include factors such as gender, race and marginal sexualities (). This distancing is partly attributable to the ‘crisis in representation’ provoked by controversies surrounding the role of the intellectual-mediator in the case of Rigoberta Menchú. For a summary of some of the debates see Levinson. The man with whom they take shelter does not appear to be of indigenous descent. He appears threatening at first, but then does not really play a significant role. A more thorough analysis of the film ‘El médico alemán’ might reveal ways in which racial questions haunt the film, as opposed to being explicitly present. The wider absence of the ‘little black girl’, has been noted in relation to American film by Karen Lury leading to an analysis of the ‘heterosexual romance between adult and child’ in a number of films in which, as she puts it, ‘the little girl’s whiteness and all it signifies – including but not limited to purity and innocence – is determined and supposedly threatened by the darkness that surrounds it, at the same time her necessary but perverse childishness creates dissonance, a disturbance, expressing a sexuality that must be constantly, obsessively restrained, even enslaved’ (). This well known term is singled out by Esposito in his analysis of the thanatopolitics of the Nazi regime (). In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag further confirms that language that begins with a race being equated to disease moves very fluidly into to punitive language and the incitement to violence in Nazi discourse (). The Nazis used to equate mixed racial origin to syphilis, whilst cancer (linked rhetorically to ‘the Jewish problem’) was the disease that came to be, and still is, that which ‘encourages fatalism’ and justifies ‘severe measures’ (Sontag ). See Viñas, Indio, ejécito, frontera. Cited amongst the reasons for this are (political) crisis in Peru, Argentina’s growth and demand for labour, and inclusive migrant policies including the ‘Programa Nacional de Normalización Documentaria Migratoria Patria Grande’ that allowed members of MERCOSUR to gain a ‘Residencia Precaria’ credential (–).

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 

Nazism and Borges: Contemporary Re-readings by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most highly revered twentieth-century writers was one of the first influential Latin American figures to recognise the dangers of fascism. He produced essays that engaged with events as they progressed in Europe, and stories that exposed some of the most critical paradoxes of both Nazism as an ideology, and the support for it amongst Argentina’s ‘Germanophiles’. In cultural terms Borges has an unsurpassable significance in terms of the region’s literary heritage. His incomparable erudition became a standard by which budding Latin American authors would measure themselves. He was held up by most subsequent Latin American literary generations as the master of the literary craft, and not only by the authors of the Boom, but, in particular, those of the Crack generation (examined in Chapter ), as well as Roberto Bolaño; and, most recently, the young Brazilian author Marcos Peres. This chapter examines (heretical) re-readings of Borges by Bolaño and Peres as a function of that which Harold Bloom terms the ‘anxiety of influence’, comparing ‘the relation between poets’ to Freud’s notion of ‘the family romance’ (Bloom, Anxiety ). I then situate these readings within the geopolitical context of the past two decades, and argue that Bolaño and Peres re-cast some of Borges’ key ethical interventions in ways that reflect aspects of the present era that Borges himself did not witness. First, however, it is worth briefly examining Borges’ own fictional and essayistic reactions to the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. These were often produced with the degree of delay required to distil his philosophical perspectives into the precise and condensed forms of his well-known short stories. In his recent biography Edwin Williamson characterises Borges’ work of the period of the s and s as predominantly driven by his hatred of fascism (). Scholars such as Annick Louis and Daniel Balderston have shed light on his oblique but powerful criticisms of fascism through careful chronological readings and detailed attention to historical and intertextual references. These 

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Nazism and Borges



historically situated readings have sought to compensate for the decades in which Borges was read as an irrealist writer whose fiction inhabited other worlds and fantastical scenarios allegedly to escape from politics and realworld concerns. The misunderstanding surrounding Borges’ deep antifascist commitment was compounded by what Edna Aizenberg describes as the ‘leftist and parricidal generation of writers’ from the s who could not forgive his opposition to General Juan Domingo Perón, whom he saw as a reincarnation of the European fascist leaders he so despised (). Of course, Borges’ brief support of the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships was deeply misguided, but it came from a deep disillusionment in democracy after mass populations in so many countries had been persuaded to support fascistic regimes. It is not just the thematic coincidence between Borges’ works and those of the texts I examine at the core of this study that is of interest. His philosophical position, which rejects nationalism and focuses on ethics (as opposed to politics qua institutions / parties), inclines towards a similar championing of ‘inoperative’ community as that which I demonstrate in this book among more contemporary authors. In a previously unedited interview Borges said: ‘A mí no me interesó nunca la política. Me interesa más la ética. Creo que si cada uno actúa éticamente eso puede tener un efecto político muy grande (I have never been interested in politics. I am much more interested in ethics. I believe that if everyone acted ethically that could have a very big political effect)’ (‘Entrevista inédita’). In what follows, I outline evidence for Borges’ deep anti-identitarian feelings – extending to a critique of the Western metaphysics of the subject – through a number of his works that are directly and indirectly related to the themes of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust. The pervasiveness of ‘nazi’ logic in our dominant conception of community, is observed by Borges in his  essay ‘Dos libros (Two Books)’ about H. G. Wells in which he makes explicit the link between a subscription to national identity in general, and Nazism in particular. He says: Wells increíblemente, no es nazi. Increíblemente, pues casi todos mis contemporáneos lo son, aunque lo nieguen o lo ignoren. Desde , no hay publicista que no opine que el hecho inevitable y trivial de haber nacido en un determinado país y de pertenecer a tal raza (o tal buena mixtura de razas) no sea un privilegio singular y un talismán suficiente. Vindicadores de la democracia, que se creen muy diversos de Goebbels, instan a sus lectores, en el dialecto mismo del enemigo, a escuchar los latidos de un corazón que recoge los íntimos mandatos de la sangre y de la tierra.

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

Nazism and Borges Wells, incredibly, is not a nazi. Incredibly, because almost all of my contemporaries are, although they deny or ignore it. Since  there is not a publicist who does not hold that the inevitable and trivial fact of being born in a determined country, and belonging to a given race [or indeed mixture of races], is not a singular privilege, and conceited talisman. Vindicators of democracy, who think themselves very different to Goebbels, urge their readers in the very same dialect of the enemy, to listen to the beats of a heart that responds to the intimate directives of blood and of soil. (Borges, ‘Dos libros’)

Borges’ critique of the belief in privilege derived from ‘the inevitable and trivial fact’ of being from a certain country or of a certain race shows a (still uncommon) understanding of the contingency of birth at which point identities are arbitrarily ascribed. He thus denounces the philosophical incoherence of any speech or action that is derived from the claim to privilege based on these factors. He places ‘defenders of democracy’ who subscribe to this notion in the same camp as Goebbels. Of course, one could point out that the actions of Goebbels were more ethically abominable than those of the average patriot of any country, but Borges wishes to shock the reader into recognition of the fact that Nazism is the logical conclusion of the claiming of not only racial, but also national, privileges. Borges’ story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ exposes the wider mythmaking operation of Nazism. It tells the tale of an invented planet, Tlön, which eventually impinges upon, and takes over, reality. Tlön, the reader finds out, is a collective creation, an ‘obra de una sociedad secreta de astrónomos, de biólogos, de ingenieros, de metafísicos, de poetas, de químicos, de algebristas, de moralistas, de pintores, de geómetras . . . dirigidos por un oscuro hombre de genio (work of a secret society of astronomers, of biologists, of engineers, of metaphysicians, of poets, of chemists, of algebraists, of moralists, of painters, of geometricians . . . ruled by a dark man of genius)’ (). Parallels with Germany are already present in the reader’s mind from a prior passage in which a bibliography about Tlön points towards a German mythical origin: the ‘imaginaria comunidad (imaginary community)’ of Rosa-Cruz described by a German theologian in the seventeenth century and, in turn, documented by another German ‘Johannes Valentinus Andreä’ (). The ‘cultura clasica (classic culture)’ of Tlön is said to consist of one discipline to which all the others are subordinate: psychology. This could easily allude to the disturbing means by which the mass psychology of fascism was able to convince such a varied set of educated professionals such as those listed (astronomers, engineers, biologists, poets, etc.) to subscribe (whether whole-heartedly, unthinkingly, or only in appearance) to the racist Weltanshauung.

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

Tlön is said to have originated as ‘un mero caos, una irresponsable licencia de la imaginación (a simple chaos, an irresponsible flight of the imagination)’. This chaotic flight of the imagination which, nevertheless, starts to impinge upon reality, could be compared to the incoherent ramblings by Hitler in Mein Kampf in which he sets out an illogical programme for a world which likewise starts to take shape with monstrous consequences (Borges, ‘Tlön’ ). The fully-fledged foundation of the planet Tlön with ‘laws that govern it’ represents the realisation of Hitler’s deluded fantasies in the National Socialist project. In reference to the philosophy underpinning Tlön, the narrator says ‘Los metafísicos de Tlön no buscan la verdad ni siquiera la verosimilitud: buscan el asombro’ (The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek the truth or even verisimilitude: they seek astonishment)’ (). ‘Asombro’ can be taken here in its dual signification of both ‘astonishment’ (effected by the mythic sway of incendiary Nazi discourse), but also the dark incredulous kind of astonishment that Borges himself felt at witnessing the anti-Semitic discourse and praxis take hold in Germany. The violent nature of this planet is hinted at in reference to the stir caused by its ‘tigres transparentes (transparent tigers)’ and ‘torres de sangre (towers of blood)’ (). Its imperialist drives are confirmed at the end when Tlön is said to be taking over the world; soon, it is said, ‘desaparecerán del planeta el inglés y el francés y el mero español (the English, the French and inconsequential Spanish will disappear from the planet)’ (Borges, ‘Tlön’ ). At the end of the story in a Posdata from , the implicit similarities of the planet Tlön to the Nazi Gemeinschaft are made explicit. In , the status of Tlön as myth, as a created fiction by the secret society, is discovered in a letter that outlines the origins of the decision to invent it. Nevertheless – despite its proven fictional status – in , fourteen volumes of the first encyclopaedia of Tlön are found. Reality caved in to Tlön, says the melancholic narrator. But he is not surprised, stating that, ‘‘Hace diez años bastaba cualquier simetría con apariencia de orden – el materialismo dialéctico, el antisemitismo, el nazismo – para embelesar a los hombres. ¿Cómo no someterse a Tlön [. . .]? (Ten years ago, just a hint of symmetry with an appearance of order – dialectic materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – was sufficient to captivate man. How could we not submit to Tlön?)’ (). If people can believe in Nazism, they can believe in anything, including a fictional planet. It is, moreover, the human desire to create ‘symmetry’ and ‘order’ out of chaos that provokes this dangerous response. This danger is thematised in many of Borges’ fictions and helps to explain Borges’ own textual strategy which involves avoiding fixity of interpretation.

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In , evidence is found of Tlönian objects making their way into the material world of Earth. The object that the narrator has an opportunity to hold is an exceptionally heavy metal cone: Yo lo tuve en la palma de la mano algunos minutos: recuerdo que su peso era intolerable y que después de retirado el cono, la opresión perduró. También recuerdo el círculo preciso que me grabó en la carne. Esa evidencia de un objeto muy chico a la vez pesadísimo dejaba una impresión desagradable de asco y miedo. I had it in the palm of my hand for a few minutes: I remember that its weight was intolerable and that after the cone had been withdrawn, the oppression remained. This evidence of a very small object, at the same time extremely heavy, left behind the disagreeable feeling of disgust and fear. (Borges, ‘Tlön’ )

The weight of the cone is said to be ‘intolerable’ and even after it is removed, the object has left an impression in his flesh, leaving him with a sensation of ‘disgust and fear’. It is significant that it is in  that these ‘hypermaterial’ objects – as María Díaz Pozueta () refers to them – erupt into the so-called real world, the same year that on the th of December the United Nations issued a statement condemning the carrying out of Hitler’s ‘often repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe’ (‘Parliament’s Reaction’). It is, therefore, at this time that the news of the shocking reality of Hitler’s monstrous impact extends throughout the world, provoking ‘disgust and fear’ and leaving a very real and weighty stain upon the flesh of humanity. There is one more aspect of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ that it is worth paying particular attention to: when the invasion of the planet by Tlön is complete the narrator says, ‘Yo no hago caso, yo sigo revisando . . . una indecisa traducción quevediana (que no pienso dar a la imprenta) del Urn Burial de Browne (I do not pay attention, I carry on revising . . . an indecisive Quevedian translation [that I do not intend to print] of the Urn Burial of Brown)’ (). In making sense of this ending Steven Boldy summarises Borges’ position in the following way: ‘in a world of totalitarian states this negative individualism may be a positive, anarchistic, state of resistance and defiance’ (A Companion ). If we take this view together with that expressed in the article ‘Dos libros’ in which Borges’ calls for us to ‘remember our essential humanity’ and to strive for a world ‘without preferences of a geographical, economic or ethnic nature’ (), then we might well find that what Borges is advocating is not to be labelled under the negative (now neoliberal-inflected) term ‘individualism’ but rather ‘community-in-spacing’ or an ‘inoperative community’. The proximity

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Nazism and Borges



to Nancy’s philosophical position would be further underscored by the particular theme of the narrator’s ‘individualistic’ activity of translating Browne’s Urn Burial: a book about funeral rites; a guide to the death of others – to finitude, the basis of Nancy’s ethical code. Whilst ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ denounces the ‘foundation by fiction’ or ‘myth-making’ operation of ideologies like Nazism, the  story ‘Deutsches Requiem’, skilfully and hauntingly explores the way in which the flawed logic of Nazi ideology comes into its own in the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: ‘in the fully realised metaphysics of the Subject’, a subject that ‘whether it be a class, a race, or a party . . . wills itself to be an absolute subject’ (‘The Nazi Myth’ ). The notion of a sovereign subject is a complete impossibility; we are all constitutively reliant on others to survive and for our desires to be carried out. But Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, as well as Borges, demonstrate that the ideology of constructs such as Nazism operate through the notion of a Subject-State in which individual subjects act in the interest of achieving the ‘absolute subject’ of the state, here: the mythical Aryan. If Hitler had found no subjects to identify with, and carry out, his Weltanschauung then his hatred of the Jews would have remained his struggle. And if people understood themselves as constitutively-relational beings, as opposed to sovereign subjects then they would understand (in advance) the violence they do to themselves when doing violence to others, as the Nazi protagonist in this story learns. ‘Deutsches Requiem’ is the testimony of Otto Dietrich zur Linde, a Nazi officer who awaits his execution for his role as assistant director of a concentration camp. At the start of his testimony he says, ‘Quienes sepan oírme, comprenderán la historia de Alemania y la futura historia del mundo (Those who know to listen to me, will perceive the history of Germany and the future history of the world)’ (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). We see that he believes himself to be an embodiment of the ‘thought of being (and/or of becoming of, history)’ of Germany and the world, which is how the ideology of the ‘Subject-State’ operates (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ). Zur Linde’s belief in his role as contributing to the immanence of the German community-to-come is re-affirmed in the following statement: ‘Mañana moriré, pero soy un símbolo de las generaciones del porvenir (Tomorrow I will die, but I am a symbol of the generations of the future)’ (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). We see his belief in transcendence, a false logic which holds some higher being/community to be worthy of sacrifice (Sense ). Borges highlights in ‘Deutsches Requiem’ the fallacy of this logic, in particular in

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relation to the notion of the triumph of the ‘will’ of a nation or of the ‘Übermensch (“superior man”)’: zur Linde says, ‘Muchas cosas hay que destruir para edificar el nuevo orden; ahora sabemos que Alemania era una de esas cosas (Many things have to be destroyed to make way for the new order; now we know that Germany was one of those things)’ (). He goes on: ¿Qué importa que Inglaterra sea el martillo y nosotros el yunque? Lo importante es que rija la violencia, no las serviles timideces cristianas. Si la victoria y la injusticia y la felicidad no son para Alemania, que sean para otras naciones. Of what importance is it that England turns out to be the hammer and we the anvil? The most important thing is that violence reigns, not servile Christian timidities. If victory and injustice and happiness are not for Germany, may it be for other nations. (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ )

The world he paints is one governed by violence in the service of proving the collective superiority of each (arbitrarily defined) nation. Zur Linde’s presentation of his own identity is also deconstructed. This begins, following the listing of his heroic German military ancestors, with a footnote by an editor noting that zur Linde had failed to mention his most illustrious forebear: the Jewish theologian Johannes Forkel (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). When zur Linde becomes assistant director at the concentration camp – after losing his leg following a skirmish (behind a synagogue) – he meets David Jerusalem. Zur Linde has to suppress his admiration for Jerusalem because ‘la piedad por el hombre superior es el último pecado de Zarathustra (deference to the superior man is the ultimate sin of Zarathustra)’, yet he says – to that day – he can still remember verses from Jerusalem’s poetry (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). This shows that zur Linde’s being has been modified through exposure to Jerusalem’s poetry, establishing a relation between them. As Erin Graff Zivin points out, Jerusalem represents supressed ‘Jewishness’, and – in a wider sense – all that zur Linde had to sacrifice to serve the Nazi cause, including the happiness he derived from the study of poetry, theology, metaphysics and music (). In order to protect his personal (yet illusionary) sovereignty, zur Linde has to be extra severe with Jerusalem. The extent of his torturous actions towards Jerusalem is suppressed by the editor who says, ‘Ha sido inevitable, aquí, omitir algunas líneas (It has been necessary, here, to omit some lines)’ (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). However, zur Linde confirms that Jerusalem managed to kill himself (). Yet, the following sentence frames their connection as fundamentally relational: ‘Yo agonicé con él, yo morí con él, yo de algún

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modo me he perdido con él (I agonised with him, I died with him, I, in some ways, have lost myself through him)’ (Borges, ‘Deutsches Requiem’ ). In other words, enacting violence towards Jerusalem is felt as violence towards himself, due to the established relation between them. Graff Zivin reads the story as a function of the breakdown of the Levinasian ethics of the face. I, on the other hand, posit that it represents the failure of ethics within the logic of the transcendental subject. Despite the fact that there is a facial description of Jerusalem: ‘Hombre de memorables ojos, de piel cetrina, de barba casi negra . . . el prototipo del judío sefardí (A man of memorable eyes, of olive skin, of a near-black beard . . . the prototype of a Sephardi Jew)’, Graff Zivin finds it to be ‘fetishized’ and ‘fragmented’ thus precluding the face from operating to create a sense of responsibility in zur Linde towards the Other (). A related paradox in Levinasian ethics that Graff Zivin notes is that: The face is only able to command the self through speech, through the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ . . . The critical conjunction of face and word is that which threatens to destroy the ego, for it is opposite the speaking face that the self becomes a slave to the Other’s demands. Without the marriage of face and language, violence reigns. (Graff Zivin )

It is relevant to point out that this is one of a number of limitations to Levinasian ethics (compared to Nancy’s) that it is possible to trace in ‘Deutsches Requiem’. Even before introducing the specific injunction ‘Thou shall not kill’, Levinas situates his ethics within a framework of ‘the revelation of infinity’ and the resulting ‘transcendence of thought’ of the subject (Totality –). Writing in the shadow of World War II Levinas is concerned with the visible suspension of ethics during times of war, when a new historically-determined law is seen to take over. His argument is therefore that ‘The idea of infinity delivers the subjectivity from the judgment of history to declare it ready for judgement at every moment’ (). He goes on to propose that the mere marvel at the idea of infinity should limit the ‘essential violence’ that is a consequence of the inability to think transcendentally (). For Levinas it is the awareness of mortal ‘transitivity’ that causes violence, which is of course the opposite of the Heideggerian-derived notion in Nancy’s thought that it is, precisely, an awareness of mortality or ‘finitude’ upon which ethics should be based. The reliance upon a notion of ‘infinity’ or ‘transcendence of thought’ allows the subject’s awareness of finitude to be bypassed or at least conceptually trumped by the ‘desire’ that has to be felt for infinity for Levinas’ schema to work (Levinas, Totality ). This is the fatal limit of the transcendental basis of Levinas’ ethics: if mortality can be overlooked, so

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can one’s responsibility towards the other in terms of protecting their right to life, as one would wish their own to be protected. In the last line of the story, as Graff Zivin points out, zur Linde looks at himself in the mirror (the emblem of subjective self-recognition) and instead of confronting ‘the various others that have populated his life . . . he ends up encountering his own face’ (Graff Zivin ). This totalitarian self-referential circle is that which precludes zur Linde from recognising community in the death of others even though, I would argue, he recognises the humanity in the face of Jerusalem – otherwise why would Borges include a facial description at all, and why would zur Linde agonise in his torture of Jerusalem? What ‘Deutsches Requiem’ comes down to, therefore, is a critique of the difficulty of establishing an ethical framework within the logic of the transcendental subject, a logic which Levinasian ethics does not, itself, escape. In ‘El milagro secreto (The Secret Miracle), Borges’ reference to the historical violence of Nazism is also concrete. As Daniel Balderston points out, it is the first story to deal explicitly with the activities of the Third Reich, compared to the ‘veiled’ references of previous engagements (for example allegory in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’) and pre-dating ‘Deutsches Requiem’ (). The date which opens the story: the th of March,  was the actual date when German troops entered Czechoslovakia, as the story explains: ‘Era el amanecer; las blindadas vanguardias del Tercer Reich entraban en Praga (It was daybreak; the armoured vanguard of the Third Reich entered Prague)’ (Borges, ‘El milagro’ ). In his probing of the historical references (the creation of a ‘parallel fiction’ as he describes it) Balderston attempts to determine the possible literary allusions contained within the figure of the Jewish-Czech writer-protagonist, Jaromir Hladík who is ultimately killed by firing squad by the Nazis in the story. Balderston finds that he appears to represent a composite of Czech artists, many of whom had already died of natural causes prior to the occupation. He identifies Gustav Meyrink as a possible source for Hladík, signalled by the name Jaromir of a character in one of Meyrink’s novels, on which Borges later based his poem ‘The Golem’ (). The surname, however, refers seemingly to Václav Hladík, a Czech novelist who wrote and published work between  and , a reference likely taken from an encyclopaedia article (Balderston ). Balderston goes on to identify at least four other names and influences. The dissolution of the individual subjectivities of all of these different authors, echoes the suggestion by the ‘editor’ in ‘Deutsches Requiem’ that David Jerusalem was ‘perhaps a symbol of various individuals’ (). The singularity and

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plurality associated with the names in each case allow the reader to identify with the loss of one particular person, on the one hand – whilst also understanding and lamenting the mammoth cultural and humanitarian loss that Borges felt in hearing the successive reports of the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the now unquestionable persecution and extermination of the European Jews, on the other. The fact that many of the authors were Jewish writers who were not in fact persecuted directly by the Nazis might represent Borges’ consternation, expressed in other essays, at the Nazis’ systematic attempts to erase and discredit all Jewish cultural history, and the fact that persecuting Jews in the present would also imply the loss of that tradition. In this brief outline of three key fictional texts of Borges’ that dealt with Nazism I have sought to demonstrate that the type of community Borges envisaged as a vaccine against violence, can be compared in many ways to Nancy’s ‘inoperative’ one: pacifist, anti-fascist and anti-immanentist, committed to equality amongst people of all races, with no national or economic privilege to be determined by the arbitrary lottery of birth, and all held together by the ‘very big political effect’ of everyone acting ethically. Even after the end of the Second World War these ideals became a more and more distant dream as the century wore on. The Cold War climate radicalized political positions and, following the Cuban revolution, intellectuals who failed to come out in support of social revolution were dismissed as right-wing. The increasing militarisation (by governments) and militant-isation on the left would have gone heavily against Borges’ pacifist and anti-immanentist beliefs. The extent of the radicalism of his anti-identitarian gestures make for a useful comparison with the contemporary authors in this study, many of whom destabilize identitarian constructions, but only some of whom dismantle them as thoroughly. In the work of the two contemporary authors examined below, I observe an inclination towards the Levinasian ‘ethics of the face’ in different guises.

Heretical Contemporary Re-writings: The Anxiety of Influence The prize-winning novel, O Evangelho Segundo Hitler (The Gospel According to Hitler) by Brazilian author Marcos Peres (), performs a kind of anamorphic re-orientation of the reader’s perspective on Borges’ life and writings. When looked at from the perspective that Peres invites (via his paranoid narrator), Borges is re-written as an all-knowing Gnostic prophet who, via an Ophitic cult and his fictional namesake, helps provide justification for the Holocaust. This hypothetical placing of Borges into a

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position of responsibility for the Holocaust is not far from that which Borges himself undertook in ‘Deutsches Requiem’, when he inhabited the subject position of a convicted Nazi murderer, as we saw. In O Evangelho, as in ‘Deutsches Requiem’ there is a murderous relationship set up in which the narrator, a namesake of Borges, wishes to kill the real Borges for achieving the literary success that he desired for himself. In accordance with Levinasian ethics, the namesake of Borges is unable to kill Borges when they come face-to-face and he keeps attempting to go back and commit the murder but finds himself unable to. Aside from manifesting an ‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom, Anxiety ) in Levinasian terms, this desire of ‘Jorge Luis Borges’ to murder Jorge Luis Borges could also be seen to represent the desire for a ‘unity of the One which every alterity disturbs’ and which cannot be a basis for peace (Levinas, ‘Peace’ ). These questions of totality, alterity, and peace raised at a personal level open towards an examination of Peres’ re-visitation of these Borgesian themes in the wider post-/ political context. Peres is not the first contemporary author to suggest links between Borges and Nazism, nor to creatively re-interpret his work. Roberto Bolaño, in his fictional encyclopaedia of Nazi writers, La literatura nazi en América (), undertakes a project comparable to that of Borges’ Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy). Building upon the cataloguing of ‘universal’ fictional ‘infamous’ characters in the latter, Bolaño catalogues American fictional ‘Nazi’ authors, imagining a network of continental literary complicity with fascism. With birth and death dates ranging between  and , these figures come from across the region including the United States, and their activities range from writing and setting up editorials and journals, to going to Europe to fight for the Axis ‘cause’. In my reading of this text, I draw upon a rhetorical operation laid out by Judith Butler in the essay ‘Competing Universalities’. In this operation the dialectical bind between fascism and resistance can only be broken down by collapsing the term ‘fascism’ in a way that evacuates the possibility of resistance to fascism being accused of potential complicity with fascism itself. Once this is successfully undertaken, another attempt at resistance can be undertaken under a new name (Butler, ‘Competing Universalities’ ). Whilst Bolaño’s work is undeniably marked by the Chilean dictatorship as well as the armed struggles throughout Latin America in the s, and the subsequent transitions to democracy, Peres’ publishing debut comes almost two decades on from Bolaño’s. Peres himself was born in , the year in which the Brazilian military dictatorship (–) came to an

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end. As such, he belongs to a new generation that had contact only with the aftermath of dictatorship. This generation came of age during the s and s during the acceleration of processes of globalisation and economic liberalisation in Latin America. His work may come from beyond the ‘transition’ which Bolaño’s work both charts and resists, manifesting itself in an inwards turn back to more literary concerns, or towards different political horizons. One of the political watersheds that appears to mark Peres’ work is that of the / World Trade Centre attack. The start of the novel situates the reader in the climate of heightened security that we have become accustomed to since the / attacks with an airport security system, a nervous passenger, a powerful weapon which apparently contains the ‘secret of the universe’ and, as we find out, an assassination plot. The world since /, has been divided into categories of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ under different terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ versus ‘terrorists’ and ‘religious extremists’. This has led to new sites of conflict and tragedy in the geopolitical South, and blanket forms of suspicion and racism in the so-called North. A key symbol of this confusion was the tragic killing of Brazilian citizen Jean Charles de Menezes by the London Metropolitan police two weeks after the London bombings of  July . Menezes, from Minas Gerais, was mistakenly identified as one of the bombers and fell victim to the controversial ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy called ‘Operation Kratos’. The terrorism explored directly in the novel is that of the German government against the large subsection of its population who were ostracised, demonised, classified and exterminated with an unwavering and illogical determination that forms one of the central enigmas of the novel. The parallels between these two eras reinforces the sense of continuity between the violent operations of the Nazi regime, and the biopolitical, racist global ‘governance’ of today. In the novel the trace of the present (the airport security apparatus) is soon replaced by a narrative that takes place mainly in the late s during Hitler’s rise to power when different, but not too dissimilar, logics of state paranoia were at work. Instead of the ‘terrorist’ as the scapegoat for society’s repressive policies: torture, surveillance, unlawful detention – there was the ‘Jew’. Slavoj Žižek, commenting in , correctly diagnosed the US terrorist attacks (also applicable to the London bombing) thus: ‘Every feature attributed to the Other is already present at the very heart of the USA’ describing, as an example, the ‘murderous fanaticism’ of Rightist populist terrorists who justify their actions with Christian discourse (Welcome ). In a wider sense Žižek attributes the terror to the ‘excess’ created by ‘“liberal” capitalism’ and makes – as we saw in Esposito

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Nazism and Borges

and Mbembe’s thought in Chapter  – a comparison of this modern manifestation of ‘excess’ with the emergence of Nazism: ‘Throughout the twentieth century, the same pattern is clearly discernible: in order to crush its true enemy, capitalism started to play with fire, and mobilised its obscene excess in the guise of Fascism; this excess, however, took on a life of its own, and became so strong that mainstream “liberal” capitalism has to join forces with its true enemy (communism) to subdue it’ (Welcome ). Žižek’s point that Nazism is both recurrent over time and internal to the democratic ‘system’ is most thoroughly evinced in Bolaño’s La literatura nazi. However, in O Evangelho the origin of the internal murderous impulse is exemplified at the level of personal sovereignty. The personal paranoia of the protagonist is a function of the jealousy he, as a budding writer, feels towards the successful ‘real’ Borges. The fact that they are both called Borges is a doubling technique which implies that the murderous self is internal, and the murderous impulse comes from the desire for sovereignty or the ‘unity of the One’ (Levinas, ‘Peace’ ). The heretical nature of Peres’ re-reading of Borges, which turns against Borges’ own ‘heretical readings’, can be read as symptoms of an ‘anxiety of influence’ provoked by Borges’ unrivalled literary status and erudition, discussed above. As is evident in the title O Evangelho Segundo Hitler, heresy is a key theme of Peres’ novel since it not only makes a ‘heretical’ claim with regards to the canonised ‘humanist’ Borges, but also deals specifically with the references to Gnostic figures and thought that can be found throughout his writings. ‘Heresy’ itself does not fit directly into Bloom’s categorisations of the different manifestations of the anxiety of influence, but he names it as one of the ancestors of revisionism: ‘Heresy resulted generally, from a change in emphasis, while revisionism follows received doctrine along to a certain point, and then deviates, insisting that a wrong direction was taken at just that point, and no other’ (Anxiety ). Peres’ novel is largely founded on a ‘change in emphasis’ in the interpretation of Borges’ writings, but can productively be examined according to some of Bloom’s other archetypes of ‘revisionism’ as well. Bloom’s theory operates on the basis that, ‘Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety’ (Bloom, Anxiety ). In Freudian terms this is because ‘Poems, we can speculate analogically, may be viewed (humorously) as motor discharges in response to the excitation increase of influence anxiety’ (Bloom, Anxiety ). We can note the way in which Bloom self-consciously disarticulates his own use of Freud in this quote, using the term ‘humorously’. Whilst describing the relationship of influence in Freudian terms, Bloom also

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Heretical Contemporary Re-writings



presents an analysis that he says is a deliberate revision of some of Freud’s emphases (). Poets, he says, cannot accept substitutions therefore there are no happy substitutions possible (Anxiety ). Peres and Bolaño’s writing do not fit perfectly into any one category of Bloom’s anxiety of influence archetypes but comprise numerous elements of a few of these. Bloom’s archetype that most closely approximates the operation in O Evangelho is daemonization. The function of this daemonization of a literary forebear, Bloom argues, is ‘to augment repression, by absorbing the precursor more thoroughly into tradition than his own courageous individuation should allow him to be absorbed’ (). In absorbing the precursor, Bloom argues, ‘the Great Original remains great but loses his originality’ (Anxiety ). Peres ‘over-absorbs’ Borges by making his narrator a namesake of Borges and incorporating, discussing, and creatively misreading many of Borges’ stories throughout the novel. This has a function of repetition of Borges work, but also betrays the will to contain and control it. Peres fits Borges’ work into his conspiratorial scheme by progressively revealing the mystic and Gnostic references of many of his texts and the way in which, when read from his perspective, they prophesise the coming of the anti-Christ (believed to be Hitler) and the unleashing of chaos onto earth. The text reveals elements of its own construction in the following example which also evokes the message contained in Borges’ own story ‘Pierre Menard’: ‘Ler Borges com outros olhos, acurados com o que vivi e somados com os fatos históricos determinantes da época, é elucidativo e ao mesmo tempo assombroso (Reading Borges with other eyes, linked with what I went through and the determinant historical facts of the era, is illuminating and, at the same time, frightening)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). The chapter in which this quote appears undertakes the operation described. The narrator-protagonist begins by listing many of the works in which the presence of Gnosticism is explicit: ‘Uma vindicação do Falso Basildes (A Vindication of the False Basildes)’, ‘Fragmento de um Evangelho Apócrifo (Fragment of an Apocryphal Gospel)’, ‘Uma Oração (An Oration)’, ‘Outro Fragmento Apócrifo (Another Apocryphal Fragment)’, ‘O Imortal (The Immortal)’ and ‘Os Teólogos (The Theologians)’. He then undertakes a re-reading of ‘Funes, o Memorioso (Funes, the Memorious)’, a text with no immediately apparent Gnostic themes. It highlights the significance of the protagonist’s name, Irineu: Iriney de Lyon ‘o Santo Irineu que combateu heresias e gnoses (Saint Irineu who battled heretics and gnostics)’, and Funes from the Latin Funu meaning death (Peres, O Evangelho ). Even though Saint Irineu dedicated his life to disproving heretics and strengthening the Catholic

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

Nazism and Borges

Church, namesake Borges finds out he in fact sympathised with – and was believed to be a member of – the Ophite sect who worshipped the serpent (the present-day members of which have kidnapped the narrator believing him to be Borges, their prophet). This revelation is followed by a direct quotation from ‘Funes, el memorioso’ in which the narrator supposes that Funes’ elephantine memory simply prevents him from the performing the kind of abstraction that is integral to thinking. He cannot ‘pensar é esquecer diferenças é generalizar, abstrair (think and forget differences and generalize, abstract)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). The narrator of O Evangelho takes the word ‘differences’ and asks whether, given that the story was written in , it refers to ‘A diferença das raças humanas. A diferença entre os judeus, que produziu a maior hecatombe do século? Ou a diferença entre os cristãos e os gnósticos dos primórdios? (The difference between the human races. The difference between the Jews who produced the biggest hecatomb of the century? Or the difference between the Christians and the Gnostics of the primordium?)’ (). The narrator understands Saint Irineu to be an embodiment of the delicate balance of order maintained by his belonging to the polar opposite causes of Catholicism, and the heretical cult which believes in the coming of the reign of chaos. Funes is therefore the modern-day equivalent, ‘um sujeito imprescindível para que exista paz, harmonia e coexistência em um mundo formado por desigualdades (an indispensable subject for peace, harmony and co-existence to exist in a world formed by inequalities)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). The death of Irineu Funes as foreseen by his name, will unleash the chaos of a world in which differences will no longer be able to coexist. The chapter finishes with the crux of its argument and the spooky revelation: Funes died in , ‘Alguém acredita ser coincidência que  é justamente o ano em que nasceu Adolf Hitler? (Does anyone believe it is a coincidence that  is precisely the year in which Adolf Hitler was born?)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). As such, this reading of ‘Funes’ is a mise-en-abyme of the overall plot of O Evangelho, which posits that Borges somehow foresaw the coming of the anti-Christ who would seek to eliminate all ‘differences’, beginning with the Jews, amongst whom a new Messiah was believed to exist. Throughout the novel, through revelations like these, the reader charts the viewpoint of the protagonist and narrator from a position of cynical unbelief to a progressive immersion into the paranoid logic of the conspiracy as more and more such ‘coincidences’ emerge. The over-identification with the material of the author, in Bloom’s analysis, is not enough to overcome repression but it leads to ‘a kind of

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Heretical Contemporary Re-writings



intellectual acceptance of what is repressed’ (Anxiety ). Bloom asserts in the Preface to his second edition of The Anxiety of Influence that ‘Cultural belatedness is never acceptable to a major writer though Borges made a career out of exploiting his’ (Anxiety xxv). Cultural belatedness is something inherited by all (post-) ‘postmodern’ authors in the light of the crisis of the modernist belief in originality. Once Borges’ followers reconcile themselves to the wealth of Borges’ erudition, and the volume of texts produced, they too can create fiction through his practices as Peres and Bolaño have both done. In any case, as Bloom contends, ‘momentarily the power of newness wins’ (Anxiety ). The ‘anxiety of influence’ itself emerges as a theme in O Evangelho since Borges’ namesake is in fact a budding writer who is forced to live in the shadow of Borges and his literary circles and achievements. The very first time that the namesake Borges has a poem published in a magazine, Borges writes to the magazine to denounce the impostor writing under his name, before criticising the poem itself. The namesake Borges describes his feelings following this episode: ‘O episódio do poema foi humilhante porque, em princípio, mostrava-se um simples caso de plágio que eu poderia orgulhoso, desvender. No entanto, Borges se antecipou negando a autoria. Mais, negou a qualidade do poema e negou a capacidade do seu autor (The episode with the poem was humilliating because, in the beginning it looked like a simple case of plagiarism that I could proudly refute. Nevertheless, Borges anticipated that by negating his authorship. But he also negated the quality of the poem and the capacity of its author)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). This makes it clear that there is not room in the literary world for two Borges. After this incident the namesake fulfils William Blake’s description of anxiety as paraphrased by Bloom: ‘To be enslaved by any precursor’s system . . . is to be inhibited from creativity by an obsessive reasoning and comparing, presumably of one’s own works to the precursors’ (Anxiety ). This is exemplified in the following passage: Minhas letras eram todas anteriores a este fato. Depois, somente desculpas, somente razões posteriores para me justificar, para tentar acreditar que as linhas têm alguma incerta beleza. Mais que me explicar, detratar o outro; olhar seus poemas, achar defeitos, conjecturar desfechos melhores: assim se tranformou minha rotina depois do episódio. Não posso deixar de escrever pelo simples fato de que há um homônimo tambêm literato, pensava com a caneta em punho, as imagens dos meus poemas eram tranformadas em cartas dele para o jornal, criando defeitos para tudo que eu fosse capaz de criar. My literature all pre-dated this event. Afterwards, only excuses, only belated reasons to justify myself, to attempt to believe that the lines had some uncertain beauty. More than explain myself, bring down the other; look at

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

Nazism and Borges his poems, find defects, conjecture better endings: that is how my routine was transformed after the episode. I cannot stop writing due to the simple fact that I have a namesake who is also literary, I thought with the pen in my hand. The images of my poems were transformed into letters of his for the journal, finding defects in everything that I was capable of creating. (Peres, O Evangelho )

We can see here how he struggles to keep writing but his writing is transformed into attempts at criticising Borges or anticipatory justifications of his work based on invented criticisms by his literary double. The humiliation that the protagonist claims to have suffered sparks a lifelong hatred of Borges, and a desire to kill him in order to solve the problem of resemblance. This desire itself overlaps with the narrator’s literary dreams. At the very beginning of the novel the narrator describes the vengeance story that he dreamed of writing when he was young. He describes the supposed usual format: an injustice committed, an Aristotelian catharsis, the trials of the protagonist in their attempt to enact revenge, the final redemption, and resolution. By contrast, he proudly muses to himself, ‘Meu livro seria diferente (My book would be different)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). The planned book would begin with the moment in which vengeance is enacted and the protagonist kills his enemy: ‘Assim começa o romance que, nos capítulos subsequentes, tratará não da saga que permitiu a vingança, mas sim do vazio que se principia a partir desta (That is how the novel starts, the subsequent chapters will not deal with the saga that facilitated the vengeance, but with the emptiness that begins in the wake of it)’ (). The protagonist narrates this as he is on his way, precisely, to commit the act of vengeance that he plans to bring him his happily ever after, or in fact the emptiness which he predicts; knowing instinctively that killing his namesake will not bring him relief. He says in a self-reflexive gesture that he will commit his crime and will not reveal his motives to the reader; however, the novel, born out of the failure to commit the crime, does precisely that. The man he is going to kill, whom we do not know at that point is Borges himself, is described as ‘o último resquício do Mal na Terra (the last vestige of Evil on the Earth)’ (). This daemonization of Borges (not just in the Bloomian sense) starts from the very beginning of the novel, yet ultimately Borges (or Peres) cannot kill Borges. In their first face-to-face meeting Borges explains his own struggle with resemblance and the narrator’s anger dissipates: ‘Você reclama de não ter sido lido, apreciado, discutido. Eu, ao contrário, só queria a solidão e o esquecimento. E, como você, acredito que todas as minhas linhas são desnecessárias, inúteis. Não escrevi nada que já não

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Democratic Conspiracies



existisse no universo e na literatura.’ A voz agora soava embargada, a sensação de tristeza em cada sílaba dita. Por um momento, não senti ódio do inimigo à minha frente e tal fato foi muito estranho. Talvez a ausência do ódio se dava à proximidade, talvez pela fragilidade do senil e cego homem agora a poucos passos, diante de toda a escuridão. ‘You complain about not having been read, appreciated, discussed. I, on the other hand, only wanted solitude and forgetting. I, like you, believe that all my lines are unnecessary, useless. I did not write anything that did not already exist in the universe and in literature.’ The voice now sounded blocked, the sensation of sadness in every syllable uttered. For a moment I did not feel hatred of the enemy in front of me and that fact felt very strange. Perhaps the absence of hatred was due to the proximity, perhaps due to the fragility of the senile and blind man now a few steps away, in the face of all the darkness. (Peres, O Evangelho )

Whether it is through the sadness in Borges’ voice, or the recognition of his ‘fragility’, the ethical operation set in motion by proximity, or the faceto-face encounter (as Levinas describes it) takes over and appears to diffuse the murderous impulse (‘Peace’ –). In terms of Bloom’s own argument concerning the ‘anxiety of influence’, Peres comes face-to-face with Borges by reading, taming, and inserting Borges’ work into his own conspiratorial framework in what would be a closed form had the protagonist managed to kill Borges, and were it not for Borges taking the final word in Peres’ imaginative containment of him. Borges teaches his namesake that all writers have the same insecurities, but that it is these insecurities which produce literature.

Democratic Conspiracies In addition to Borges’ work Peres’ other main source of inspiration for the novel was Umberto Eco’s exemplary conspiracy narrative Foucault’s Pendulum, as explained in the prologue to O Evangelho. O Evangelho, like Eco’s novel, seeks to construct ‘um castelo de areia’ [a sandcastle], as Peres puts it, to explore the way in which conspiracies invent connections that make it seem like there is more to reality than meets the eye (). The genealogy of this concept in fiction leads back to Borges’ own ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (as seen the introduction to this chapter), which is cited by both Eco and Peres as a formative influence upon their novels. The stories all share in common a thematization of the impact that ‘fictions’ or conspiracies can have upon reality. Another cited influence for the novel was Borges’ story ‘Tres versiones de Judas (Three versions of

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

Nazism and Borges

Judas)’ which, Peres explains, caught his attention because it is ‘blasfemo demais. É muito mais vil, muito mais ultrajante do que um O Código da Vinci, por exemplo (utterly blasphemous. It is much viler much more outrageous than The Da Vinci Code, for example’ (Peres ‘Escritor’). Borges’ story playfully uses Christian theological reasoning to propose that Judas, not Jesus, might have been the Saviour of humanity. The debate surrounding the existence of a ‘Gospel according to Judas’, a Gnostic text thought to have been written in the second century, has been reignited in recent years with the emergence of elements of a Coptic Gospel of Judas in the s leading to a series of academic publications and a National Geographic television special in the mid-s. The hype surrounding the Gospel led Archbishop Rowan Williams to deny its historical credibility in his  Easter address and discuss the popularity of conspiracy theories in modern day society saying: We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups; this has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially biblical texts. We treat them as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story; and that real story waits for the intrepid investigator to uncover it and share it with the waiting world. Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect. (‘Archbishop of Canterbury’s Sermon’)

For Žižek the hypocritical, secret, and markedly non-democratic ‘antiterrorist’ state measures which underpin ‘liberal’ democracy, form an ‘ideal breeding-ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia’ (Welcome ). These have intensified (after a brief post-cold war lull) in the aftermath of /. The perceived decline of religion also has a part to play in the genesis of paranoia that gives rise to conspiracy. According to Žižek, conspiracies surface, firstly, as an answer to ‘separation from the big Other’, and occur when ‘the subject takes note of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, purely virtual’ (‘The Matrix’). Second, such conspiracies come to constitute a destabilising force for questioning the structures of power that now govern the way we lead our lives. In Žižek’s scheme, fantasy and paranoia are related and work together to ‘reconstitute the consistency of the big Other’ (‘The Matrix’). This psychic resurrection of the ‘big Other’ is one effect of O Evangelho’s protagonist’s descent into paranoia, and his attachment to the belief that Borges is controlling his personal destiny and setting in motion the Holocaust through his writings. At the end of the novel the protagonist goes again to meet with Borges but finds that he has already died. Borges has, however, left his namesake a

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Democratic Conspiracies

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note which seeks to unravel the murderous web of conspiracy that the protagonist has wound himself up into. In what seems like a direct allusion to Dan Brown, Borges, in his letter avows: Posso afirmar mesmo que o Santo Graal está entre nós, que Jesus casou com Maria Madalena e que teve uma linhagem sanguínea real, oculta na Terra, ou alardear sobre os segredos insertos no Vaticano. E, creia, muitos são os temerários que compram estes tipos de livro, porque queremos que as teorias existam, porque queremos que a realidade seja mais complexa e rica do que realmente é. I could even affirm that the Holy Grail is among us, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that he had a real blood lineage, hidden on Earth, or brag about the secrets of the Vatican. And, I believe, many are the reckless who buy these types of books because we want the theories to exist, because we want reality to be more complex and rich than it really is. (Peres, O Evangelho ; my emphasis)

This human desire to posit a complex, inscrutable order above and beyond perceptible reality was parodied in Borges’ own ‘La muerte y la brújula (Death and the Compass)’ in which the protagonist Lönnrot is determined that the murders that he is trying to solve are related to the Jewish Yahweh, or secret name of God. His solving of the pattern of the deaths and anticipation of the next in the sequence lead him to his own murder by his criminal double Red Scharlach. The link between the desire to attribute a more complex meaning to events, on the one hand, and violence, on the other, is evident at the end of O Evangelho when Borges’ namesake reads the letter and at first still refers to Borges as ‘meu inimigo (my enemy)’: ‘Li três vezes o quase testamento de meu inimigo, procurando algum fato secreto, alguma verdade que ele tenha deixado oculto no texto. Não há verdade oculto (Three times I read the pseudo testimony of my enemy, looking for some secret fact, some truth that he had hidden in the text. There is no hidden truth)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). Once he realises that there is no hidden meaning, ‘Não há verdade oculto (There is no hidden truth)’, his heart starts to beat again, and metaphysical angst is replaced by the material metaphor for ‘living’. As in a Baroque Trauerspiel the meaning of the novel culminates around Borges’ death. The two Borges’ had already established that, for them, their patria no longer existed. The namesake Borges divulges that ‘Buenos Aires, para mim agora é uma cidade mítica, que existe somente em minha mente, com ruas cujos nomes são estranhos, como as que você criou em seus contos (Buenos Aires, for me now is a mythical city, that exists only in my mind, with the streets whose names are strange, as you invented in

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Nazism and Borges

your stories)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). Borges agrees saying, ‘Em minha escura visão, sonho com uma Buenos Aires de louros nórdicos, de anglosaxões primitivos, de lutas e sangue. A única memória que não aparece corrompida em minha mente é a da Recoleta (In my dark vision, I dream of a Buenos Aires of Nordic blondes, of primitive anglo-saxons, and fights and blood. The only memory that does not appear to have been corrupted in my mind is that of the Recoleta)’ (Peres, O Evangelho ). Significantly it is only the memory of the cemetery, a metonym for death, which survives intact in the Buenos Aires of Borges’ imagination. O Evangelho ends with a classically baroque trope – that of the corpse and tomb: Não há verdade oculta. O que há é muito claro. O que hé é muito límpido, e, quando o percebi, novamente meu coração começou a bater descompassado, como da primeira vez que vi Borges, como da primeira vez que cogitei matá-lo. Não há nada mais no tempo presente repeti para mi mesmo. Só há a morte de Borges, só a lança, só há este testamento, que é quase um petitório de um morto, e só há esta tumba, com o nome de Jorge Luis Borges e com a seguinte frase embaixo: and ne forthenon na, que significa, do inglês arcaico: não tenha medo. There is no hidden truth. What there is is very clear. What there is is very limpid, and, when I perceived it, my heart started to beat out of step again, like the very first time that I saw Borges, like the first time that I planned to kill him. There is nothing more than the present time, I repeated for myself. There is only death, and there is only this tomb with the name of Jorge Luis Borges and with the following phrase underneath: and ne forthenon na, which means, in archaic English: Do not be afraid. (Peres, O Evangelho )

In this ending, it is affirmed that there is no ‘hidden truth’; only, amongst all the signs of death, a beating heart. This achieves the same effect as the use of the corpse-as-allegory in baroque Trauerspiel: to impose upon the reader (audience) an awareness of their own brief passage of time on earth. Borges’ last words to the narrator in his letter are ‘não tenha medo (do not be afraid)’ (to live?). Peres’ engagement with Borges’ work takes the form of a self-conscious daemonization, as Bloom would characterise that particular form of ‘creative misprision’. We know it is self-conscious because the literary jealously is explicitly thematised in the relationship between the narrator and Borges. However, the murderous desire which emerges in the protagonist, I have suggested, forms part of a wider exploration of the fact that in the post-/ context, as Žižek posits, ‘the true clash is the clash within each civilization’ as opposed to a genuine opposition between ‘democracy’ and ‘fundamentalism’ (emphasis added; ). At the very least, Žižek declares,

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Borges Multiplied



‘we can clearly experience yet again the limitations of our democracy: decisions are being made which will affect the fate of all of us, and all of us just wait, aware that we are utterly powerless’ (Welcome ).

Borges Multiplied Bolaño has said it is the job of his generation to investigate every trail that Borges left behind. At the same time, he admits, ‘lo que me propulsa es una cosa mucho más salvaje que lo de Borges (that which propels me is something much more savage than Borges)’ and ‘Mi vida ha sido infinitamente más salvaje que la de Borges (My life has been infinitely more savage than that of Borges)’ (Bolaño por si mismo ). Bolaño’s re-reading of Borges, therefore, can be characterised by this salvajismo, and a vision of commitment altered by having witnessed the ‘arquetipo del escritor de izquierda de los  (archetype of the leftist writer of the s)’ in which only those who took up arms were perceived to be able to shape reality (Cobas Carral and Garriboto ). Bolaño’s work has been discussed in terms of the functions of mourning or melancholy that it expresses, refusing to submit to the logic of the transition to democracy that was the pattern followed by many Latin American countries in the s and s. In the immediate postdictatorship era in the Southern Cone, fragile democratic structures were founded on state-led processes of forgetting and forced reconciliation. This was seen by many, including Bolaño, as a betrayal of a generation of victims, the circumstances of whose disappearance and deaths were often not known by their families, such that mourning could not properly be undertaken. As we saw in the Chapter , in relation to Carlos Menem’s Argentina, justice was sacrificed in favour of the health of the nation’s economic markets. In his ‘Discurso de Caracas’ Bolaño explains: En gran medida todo lo que he escrito es una carta de amor o de despedida a mi propia generación, los que nacimos en la década del cincuenta y los que escogimos en un momento dado el ejercicio de la milicia, en este caso sería más correcto decir la militancia, y entregamos lo poco que teníamos . . . los que no murieron en Bolivia murieron en Argentina o en Perú, y los que sobrevivieron se fueron a morir a Chile o a México, y a los que no mataron allí los mataron después en Nicaragua, en Colombia, en El Salvador. Todo Latinoamérica está sembrada con los huesos de jóvenes olvidados. By a large measure, everything that I have written is a love letter, or goodbye letter to my own generation, those of us who were born in the decade of the s and those who chose, in a given moment, the exercise of

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

Nazism and Borges militia, in this case it would be more correct to say militancy, and we gave the little that we had . . . those who did not die in Bolivia died in Argentina or in Peru, and those who survived went to die in Chile or in Mexico, and those who they didn’t kill there they killed later in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in El Salvador. All of Latin America is sown with the bones of the forgotten youth. (Bolaño por sí mismo )

The idea of his work enacting a ‘goodbye’ implies a desire for both recognition of this lost generation as well as, I argue, closure – and a search for new methods of resistance though literature, and not through killing. That is why in his final novel , as we saw with Puenzo in Chapter , he turns to new political subjects – those victims of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez who had been being killed with impunity for a decade by the time the novel was posthumously published in . For Bolaño, as for Julio Cortázar in ‘Apocalipsis en Solentiname (Apocalypse in Solentiname)’, the turning point in terms of the failure of the Latin American revolutionary project is Nicaragua. Jean Franco describes ‘Apocalipsis en Solentiname’ as the ‘epitaph for the destruction of older ideals of community and also of the bounded territory of the literary’ (Decline ). Andrea Cobas Carral and Verónica Garriboto argue in relation to Los detectives salvajes that Bolaño uses different temporal frames to chart the failure of successive militant-literary projects. They argue that Bolaño uses his narration of the aesthetic and revolutionary climate of the seventies to highlight the failure of the modernisation projects of the vanguardias of the s and, in turn, charts the aesthetic trajectory of his poet protagonists in the s in order to narrate the failure of the project of the s (Cobas Carral and Garriboto ). Bolaño’s character from Los detectives salvajes, Ulises Lima, returns from the conflict having come to the conclusion that there is nothing utopic or glorifying about the brutality, poverty and marginality that he has witnessed (Cobas Carral and Garriboto). Nevertheless, if Bolaño uses the nineties to narrate the closure of the project of the seventies (in which literature could not adequately serve the project of armed revolution), there is arguably still an opening towards the possibility of a new project for literature symbolised by the open-ended question at the end of the Los detectives salvajes: ‘¿Qué hay detrás de la ventana? (What is behind/through the window?)’ It is necessary to explore the full corpus of Bolaño’s work, particularly his last project , in order to come to a conclusion about the ambitions of his literary project as a whole. That text, I argue, points towards the desire to evoke an ethical invocation of responsibility towards others that, in a similar vein to Lucía Puenzo’s operation that we saw in

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Borges Multiplied

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Wakolda, uses subalternity and gender to contribute to, and re-circulate, debates about the necropolitical violence inherent in economic liberalisation processes. Before moving on to , however, La literatura nazi has been one of the most difficult texts to reconcile with a more ‘positive’ reading of the function of literature in Bolaño’s work that does not merely glorify the political power of melancholy in refusing to ‘forget’ the dead, a task which, as we have seen in relation to Pron, is eventually superseded by new priorities. In one interpretation, Gareth Williams in his essay ‘Sovereignty and Melancholic Paralysis’, discusses the melancholic reassembly of the friend / enemy divide (as we have just seen occurring in O Evangelho) and relates it to the broader political context of post-dictatorship Chile. Williams does this through an examination of the implications of the fact that the name Ramírez Hoffman, also known as Emilio Stevens, does not appear in Estrella distante even though his figure returns, this time as Carlos Wieder, also known as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. He argues that both La literatura nazi and Estrella distante propose to fulfil the function of enemy recognition but end up disavowing the task again and again. As indicated by the names (Wieder means ‘return’ in German; E. T. A. ‘Hoffmann’ provides a literary case-study in Freud’s text on the ‘Uncanny’), this repeated figure is a spectre or an echo which indicates ‘within such an overall principle of trans-narrative loss, difference, recuperation, and displacement, the enemy cannot be given or gathered into one place or name. Neither can the friend’ (Williams, ‘Sovereignty’ ). Hoffman is undoubtedly linked to the uncanny or the ‘class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’ as Williams suggests (Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ ). Hoffman is a yet unpunished torturer; an escapee of the virtually non-existent system of state-based reckoning; a beneficiary of the impunity inscribed into law to make way for the transition to democracy in Chile. As such he embodies both a source of repression for the families of victims symbolising the false nature of statebased ‘closure’ and represents an ongoing source of anxiety regarding the possible return of the harbingers of fascism in any place, at any moment. In a classically uncanny moment, the sky poetry undertaken by Hoffman in a Messerschmidt during the Pinochet regime provokes the sense of a return of the Second World War as confirmed by ‘el loco Norberto (Noberto the crazy) who ‘se reía y decía que la Segunda Guerra Mundial había vuelto a la Tierra. Nos tocó a nosotros, los chilenos, recibirla, darle la bienvenida, decía’ (laughed and said that the Second World War had returned to the Earth. It fell to us, the Chileans, to receive it, to welcome it, he said)’ (Bolaño, La literatura nazi ).

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Nazism and Borges

One of the key features of the literary production of the uncanny that Freud identifies in his essay is ‘doubling’, a feature common to both Bolaño’s work and O Evangelho. Freud finds that it is in the primary stage of narcissism that the double is commonly created as a mechanism against the destruction of the ego, citing the ‘immortal soul’ as one of the first examples of this operation (‘The “Uncanny”’ ). After this primary stage in which the double seems to guarantee immortality, however, Freud observes that it turns into the ‘harbinger of death’ as is true of both Ramírez Hoffmann and Borges’ double who sets out to kill him in O Evangelho (‘The “Uncanny”’ ). Aside from this, the function of the double after the narcissist stage is one of ‘observing and criticizing the self’ (‘The “Uncanny”’ ). This recalls the effects of anxiety experienced by Borges’ namesake when he tries to write again after having been criticised by Borges. Borges becomes his namesake’s own self-critical ego. Nevertheless, the most significant effect of doubling which can be observed in O Evangelho relates to Freud’s assessment that the double embodies ‘all those unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still cling in phantasy’ (). In his A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, Steven Boldy draws attention to Borges’ concern about the opposition between, on the one hand reading, and on the other, experience: for Borges ‘reading had always preceded reality’ (). Boldy quotes ‘Autobiographical Notes’ when Borges admits to having ‘felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action’ (A Companion ). Peres’ double of Borges, the namesake, seems to fulfil this other possible existence: he encounters real danger when he is kidnapped and taken to Germany and forcefully inducted into a cult; he has a passionate love affair, steals the Lance of Longinus, tries to kill Hitler, and is badly beaten up. One realises as O Evangelho progresses that the reason this active Borges makes such a bad writer is that he does not read. The only books he reads are Borges’ own essays and fictions, yet ultimately he is able to produce the current book as an account of his experiences. In a sense he resembles the double of Borges from the story ‘Borges y yo’ which had playfully pursued the splitting of the ‘yo (I)’, and the authorial self’s progressive disidentification with his public persona, in the line ‘Al otro, a Borges es a quien le occurren las cosas (The other Borges, is to whom things happen)’ (). Nevertheless, the neatness of this split is complicated in the line ‘yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir para que Borges puede tramar su literature (I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can write his literature)’ (‘Borges y yo’ ). The latent vitalist thread in Borges work, this distinction between experiencing life through the senses and experiencing it through books,

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Borges Multiplied

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is what seems to preoccupy Peres in his re-reading – judging by the ending which lends a particular weight to this message as we have seen. Bolaño, on the other hand, is more concerned with recuperating the possibility of a different manifestation of Borges’ self-created doubles: that of his younger self who appears in the story ‘El otro (The Other)’. In ‘El otro’ Borges meets an adolescent version of himself on a bench when he, himself, is now over seventy years old. He converses with his younger self telling him what will happen in the future. He starts with family affairs, describing the health of his mother, the death of his father and grandmother and the marriage of his sister. In terms of history, he distinguishes the Second World War, the birth of another ‘Rosas’ (meaning Perón) and the ‘salvation’ from him enacted by ‘la provincia de Córdoba’ by which he means the coup of , or so-called Revolución Libertadora (Liberationary Revolution) (Borges, ‘El Otro’ ). Russia now, he contends, is taking over and America is not stepping up to stop her. He suggests that Argentina is regressing, stating that ‘no me sorprendería que la enseñanza del latín fuera reemplazada por la del guaraní (it would not surprise me if the teaching of Latin was replaced by that of Guaraní)’ (). In contrast to this reactionary outlook presented by Borges, when he asks his adolescent self what he plans to write, the boy replies that ‘su libro cantaría la fraternidad de todos los hombres (his book would sing of the brotherhood of all men)’ (). He continues, ‘El poeta de nuestro tiempo no puede dar la espalda a su época (The poet of our time cannot turn their back on their era)’ (Borges, ‘El Otro’ ). The boy seems bored when Borges explains the metaphysical preoccupations of the work he actually goes on to write. In Bolaño’s re-writing of La historia universal de la infamia this is the unfulfilled but possible future (Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ ) that Bolaño seeks to recapture: one of a revolutionary Borges. In La literatura nazi en América, Bolaño replaces the ‘universal’ of La historia universal de la infamia with ‘the Americas’ returning, in a sense to Borges’ pan-American outlook of his youth. The melancholic end of La literatura nazi sees Bolaño identifying Ramírez Hoffman (described as ‘el infame [the infamous]’) for him to be killed in a private act of retribution on behalf of a rich Chilean, which represents the privatisation of justice in a context of the enforcement of ‘transition’ for the sake of the health of economic markets in Chile. This is melancholically described as an ‘asunto más feo (a most ugly affair)’ and then an ‘asunto de chilenos (a Chilean affair)’ (Bolaño, La literatura nazi ). In the parallel ending of Estrella distante the ‘asunto más feo’ becomes instead of an ‘asunto de chilenos’, an ‘asunto . . . particularmente espantoso (particularly horrifying affair)’

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Nazism and Borges

(La literatura nazi ). For Williams this indicates the deterritorialisation or de-nationalisation of enmity and friendship (‘Sovereignty’ ). Williams acknowledges that Bolaño’s solidarity can be found through the ‘constant return to the tragic victims and melancholic plight of lives captured in, and abandoned by, a temporal despotism that guarantees the return of the fascist state of exception’ (). Nevertheless, this melancholic paralysis implies, for Williams, a ‘fundamental limit in Bolaño’s approach to, and inscription of, the political in his work’ (). His final assessment is that Bolaño’s work ‘provides for good literature, without doubt. But I think a question remains as to whether it is good enough’ (‘Sovereignty’ ). Rory O’Bryen engages in a more positive assessment of the political possibilities in Bolaño through a reading of Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile. Engaging with the notion of the normality (or banality) of the complicity of literature with state violence implied in Urritia’s discovery of the torture chamber concealed in the basement of a house where he attended literary meetings during the dictatorship, O’Bryen points out the crucial defiance in the figure of Urritia’s alter ego the ‘Wizened youth’ who refuses to accept this complicity as ‘business as usual’ (O’Bryen, ‘Memory’ ). O’Bryen uses a parallel quote from Amuleto which shows similarly that ‘Poetry will not lose its power, but instead become a “non-power”: a way of seeing which, while ostensibly marked by defeat, will continue to carry within it a critical negativity that tugs forever at the ankles of power, inhabiting that power in its interstices and haunting it from within’ (‘Memory’ ). In a continuation of this trajectory, I argue in the next section that there is a space of possibility contained within La literatura nazi in its collapsing of the term ‘nazi’ that paves the way in these other novels for, as O’Bryen contends, something else to begin its presencing (‘Memory’ ).

Fascism and Resistance I read Bolaño’s gesture in La literatura nazi en América alongside a train of thought set out in Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universalities’. This essay forms part of the dialogue in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left in which Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek unravel and debate some of the tensions in their respective philosophical world views. In this particular essay, there is a point of contact between Butler and Žižek in the refusal of the reading of Hegel ‘that would assume that all temporalization in his work is in the service of

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Fascism and Resistance

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teleological closure’ (). According to Butler, Žižek’s reading of the Hegelian problem of time results in an aporia due to his mere illumination of the ‘dialectical dependency which prevails between domination and resistance’ (‘Competing Universalities’ ). She uses the example of Fascism to illustrate the problem: ‘One thinks one is opposing Fascism, only to find that the identificatory source of one’s own opposition is Fascism itself, and that Fascism depends essentially on the kind of resistance one offers’ (). Butler, for her part, does not think that calling attention to this dialectical inversion is sufficient for the theory of hegemony that the three thinkers agree on as a productive notion. She asks, ‘Can there be a more active subversion of fascism that remains more difficult to assimilate to the aims of Fascism itself?’ (). Her response is the following: Moving towards a new configuration of resistance is like coming up with a new name to designate the situation in which resistance is reorganised on the basis of its prior failings. There is no guarantee that resistance will work this time, but there is a new configuration organised and sustained by the new name or the old name in reinscription, which not only takes account of its own historicity, but moves forward to wager on a more effective strategy. The future that the Hegelian operation opens up has no guarantee of necessary success, but it is a future, an open one, related to the infinity that preoccupies Hegel’s non-teleological reflections on time, and which surely has some resonance with the open-ended futurity of hegemony on which both my interlocutors depend. (‘Competing Universalities’ )

Elements of Nocturno de Chile and La literatura nazi at first seem stuck in this dialectical bind whereby resistance is impossible. In Nocturno this is exemplified in the image of the left-wing literary group meeting in a house in which Chilean political prisoners are being tortured in the basement. Silence in the face of – and coexistence with – horror is shown to be a mark of complicity. In La literatura nazi and Estrella distante Bolaño criticises the tactics of the avant-garde artists in Chile who sought a form of artistic practice that would escape the logic of totalitarianism, in that case, the Pinochet regime. Nelly Richard described this as ‘arte refractario (refractory art)’, involving works that, ‘planteaban algo no aprovechable ni recuperable por la lógica totalitarian (propose something that cannot be taken advantage of or co-opted by a totalitarian logic)’ (). Amongst some of the most experimental attempts to rupture previous representational forms were poetry written in the sky and performances of self-mutilation as undertaken by Raúl Zurita and Diamela Eltit, respectively. Bolaño engages with both of these avant-garde acts in La literatura nazi and Estrella

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Nazism and Borges

distante in a way which shows that, contrary to what they aimed for, these forms, whilst not actively adopted by the dictatorship, were somehow mirrored in its unflinching silence. Bolaño highlights the barbaric logic of the militaristic avant-garde that are involved in the two examples of first, skywriting poetry; and second, the torture of women’s bodies (echoing the performance art of self-harm undertaken by artists such as Diamela Eltit with the aim to re-appropriate the body from the torturers). These forms, as he shows, could equally be used by supporters of the military and as such no aesthetic form can exclusively support a given ideological standpoint. He shows that if the idea of mutilating the body for artistic purposes is appropriated by ‘the enemy’, such as Hoffman, it can cause even more harm. In this case it results in the torture and murder of the Venegas sisters, then displayed as a photographic exhibition. Equally, the sky-writing performance is shown to be impractical and illegible when Hoffman is forced to undertake it in bad weather. ‘Ramírez Hoffman escribió: La muerte es limpieza, pero lo escribió tan mal, las condiciones meteorológicas eran tan desfavorables que muy pocos de los espectadores que ya comenzaban a levantarse de sus asientos y abrir los paraguas comprendieron lo escrito (Ramírez Hoffman wrote: Death is cleansing, but he wrote it so badly, the meteorological conditions were so bad, that very few of the spectators who had already started to get up from their seats and open their umbrellas, understood what was written)’ (Bolaño La literatura nazi ). This highlights the fact that any desired ‘message’ that an artist might wish to convey is contingent upon the conditions of its reception, and the perspective of the receiver. Analysis of these seemingly inescapable links between literature and fascism have provoked interpretations of Bolaño’s literature as being without hope of a productive political function. However, consider Butler’s following proposition: In Hegel, the field in which oppositions turn out to have presupposed each other is one that is led into crisis when the practise of nomination becomes so profoundly equivocal that nothing and everything is meant by the name. It is unclear what is resistance, what is Fascism, and the understanding of this equivocation precipitates a crisis of sorts, one which calls for a new organization of the political field . . . it can be understood as precisely the kind of collapse that gives rise either to a new nomenclature or to a radical reinscription of the old. (‘Competing Universalities’ )

By designating the term ‘nazi’ to such a wide range of literary figures and practises Bolaño acts out the scenario whereby ‘nothing and everything is meant by the name’ collapsing the term ‘nazi’ into crisis and paving the

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way for a ‘new nomenclature or to a radical reinscription of the old’ (‘Competing Universalities’ ). In placing the signifier ‘nazi’ into crisis Bolaño paves the way for a new form of resistance, under a new name which comes to fruition, not in La literatura nazi itself, but in . The shift, observed by Williams in his reading from a preoccupation with ‘un asunto de chilenos (a Chilean affair)’ (in La literatura nazi) to an ‘asunto . . . particularmente espantoso (a particularly horrific affair)’ (in Estrella distante) culminates in a shift to a preoccupation, in , with ‘asuntos (matters)’ that are distinctly more global in nature. In this novel, Santa Teresa and its arid, desert environs – Bolaño’s fictional recreation of the border town of Ciudad Juárez – becomes the site not only for the mass production of cheap exportable consumables in the maquiladoras, but also for the daily appearance of the mutilated corpses of anonymous, working-class female workers, who are found in the rubbish dumps near them. However, the novel does not only dwell on the mechanical appearance of these corpses in and around the maquiladoras, even though in so doing it creates powerfully suggestive links between mass production and the mass production of death; indeed, it moves beyond such linkages in order to explore the traumatic resonances, on the novel’s first-world female characters, of the ‘haunting’ presence / absence of the dead. In other words, it extends and develops its political concerns through a series of more decidedly ethical operations. The use of gender as a unifying trope for these encounters recalls Francine Masiello’s argument, observed in Chapter  in relation to Wakolda, that it can provide a useful transcendent category under neoliberalism: ‘Normative identities are disrupted, horizons for solidarity emerge, and the weight of authority, in the final instance, is shifted from one’s place of origin to multiple locations on the map’ (). It is suggested in  that no one regardless of their ‘place of origin’ benefits from the current economic system, and as such there is an attempt to illuminate and construct ‘horizons for solidarity’ amongst people from different socioeconomic backgrounds and nations. The foregrounding of the corporeal vulnerability of the women through forensic style accounts of the torture they have experienced, serves to remind us of our own corporeal vulnerability which, according to Judith Butler, politically constitutes us and our ethical responsibility towards each other (Precarious Life ). The study Precarious Life refers to Levinas’ notion of ‘the face’; the ‘inhuman but humanizing face’ as Butler describes it (), which helps to frame three important elements of ‘la parte de los crímenes (the part of the crimes)’: it accounts for the faces of women which haunt the ‘first world’ women

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throughout the text. Levinas argues, ‘the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death’ (Face to Face –). I argue that Bolaño seeks to invoke the ethical injunction whereby one’s own right to exist is called into question in the face of the Other’s death (Butler, Precarious Life ); the second function of this operation is that it restores the status of the murdered women as lives worth grieving (Butler, Precarious Life ); third, it explains the necessity of the narration of the detail of the physical mutilation experienced by the women. In Butler’s account, facing the full extent of the pain and suffering is required to create a ‘truer image’, and counteract the ‘media’s evacuation of the human’ that Butler discusses in relation to the Iraq war (Precarious Life ). This notion of the ‘evacuation of the human’ describes the partial or absent coverage of the feminicides that Bolaño also seeks to address.

The Ethics of the ‘Face’ Bolaño’s , published posthumously, is made up of five parts with multiple stories and characters that emerge and disappear throughout the narrative. The deconstruction of ‘Nazi’ as a signifier of ‘evil’ continues in ; the main protagonist, and sought out twentieth-century author Benno von Archimboldi, turns out to have fought for the German infantry in the Second World War. As well as providing details of his impoverished childhood, his lack of education, and of his time in the infantry, Bolaño also underscores the absence of any ideological investment in Nazism, and the absence of any act of killing on his part during the war – perhaps surprisingly given that his real name, prior to his assumption of the pseudonym, is Hans Reiter, the name of an infamous Nazi physician and war criminal. In one of the extended narrative episodes from Reiter’s time in the army, he encounters the diary of a Jewish Russian called Ansky who comes to represent the Jewish ‘face’ that accompanies Reiter, and who, in the latter’s assumption of the name Archimboldi, becomes an absent object of care and responsibility for the German solider and writer who does not wish to let Ansky ‘die alone’, in line with Levinas’ ethical operation introduced above (Face to Face –). Every moment that Reiter has to himself, he reads Ansky’s diary. His solidarity with Ansky is confirmed when a fellow soldier asks him who wrote it: ‘–Lo escribió un amigo – dijo. / Un amigo muerto – dijo la voz dormida de Wilke. / Más o menos – dijo Reiter, y siguió leyendo (–A friend wrote it – he said. / A dead friend – said the sleepy voice of Wilke. / More or less – said Reiter,

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The Ethics of the ‘Face’

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and he carried on reading)’ ( ). Reiter sees Ansky in his dreams including one in which Ansky is shot, and he becomes anxious that it was he who killed him. One night he dreams that he is fighting in the Crimea and finds a dead soldier from the red army. As he turns over the body, fearing that it is Ansky, ‘descubría que el cadáver tenía su propio rostro, el rostro de Reiter (discovered that the corpse had his own face, the face of Reiter)’ ( ). At this point, it says, he realises it was not he who killed Ansky; ‘qué alegría (what happiness)’ (). A few pages later Reiter reflects upon the distinction between ‘realidad (reality)’ and ‘apariencia (appearance)’. He comes to the conclusion that ‘El nacionalsocialismo era el reino absoluto de la apariencia . . . Sólo el vagabundeo de Ansky no es apariencia, pensó, sólo los catorce años de Ansky no son apariencia (National Socialism was the absolute reign of appearances . . . Only the wandering of Ansky is not appearance, he thought, only the fourteen years of Ansky are not appearance)’ (). The ‘real’ here is located in the body of Ansky, a body which Reiter comes to know and identify with through reading his diary. When he leaves the house where he found Ansky’s diary, he places the book back in its hiding place in the chimney ‘Que ahora lo encuentre otro, pensó (For another to find, he thought)’ (). This act of ethical recognition undertaken through reading implies that Bolaño may believe in, or at least be performing, the possibility of literature invoking the same sense of responsibility in his reader. The effect of revealing the principal character of the novel to have been an apparently ‘ethical’ Nazi soldier is a step on from the reading of La literatura nazi as a ‘collapsing’ of the usual signifying function of the term ‘nazi’. It implies a refusal to judge individuals according to their labels ‘Nazi soldier’, for instance, and only by their demonstrated responsibility towards others (in other words, their actions), which in the case of Reiter / Archimboldi, extends to his writing too. However, the novel also seeks to direct us towards new political subjects who take the central focus of the novel and occupy the contemporary demand for an ethical responsibility; the deaths of women in the north of Mexico is the theme of the longest section (the fourth section) and these deaths ‘haunt’ – or are present in – all of the other sections. For example, in the passage I was just describing when Reiter is in Ansky’s house, he finds drawings on the roof of the storehouse which depict pictures of the German activities in Kostekino, the town, but also ‘una plaza imaginaria que Kostekino jamás tuvo, llena de mujeres o de fantasmas de mujeres con los pelos erizados, que iban de un lado a otro dando alaridos (an imaginary plaza that Kostekino never had, full of women or of ghosts of women with prickly hair that went from

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one side to the other howling)’ (). These howling women or ‘fantasmas (ghosts)’ are the ethical undercurrent to the novel, as I shall now address. As Butler points out in her reading of Levinas, the face is not just a ‘human face’ but can be represented by bodily parts which ‘are said to cry and to sob and to scream, as if they were a face or, rather, a face with a mouth, a throat, or indeed, just a mouth and throat from which vocalisations emerge that do not settle into words’ (Precarious Life ). In the previous quote describing howling women, we saw these ‘vocalizations . . . that do not settle into words’ and in the following examples we shall see more faces, voices, and body parts that seem to ‘cry and to sob and to scream’ revealing, as Levinas himself puts it ‘the extreme precariousness of the other’ (‘Peace’ ). ‘La parte de los crímenes (The part of the crimes)’ presents the deaths of women in the north of Mexico as a serial crime. Their tortured bodies emerge from the desert and the rubbish heaps, and are narrated like forensic accounts with some similar and other distinct signs of torture. They construe an enigma that multiple detectives are set to work on, and who come up with varying, contradictory explanations, but more often than not the cases are closed (without resolution). One of the most convincing and complete accounts of the phenomenon comes from the diputada Azucena who hails from an old established wealthy Mexican family. Her friend Kelly disappeared in Santa Teresa in mysterious circumstances and she begins to investigate: ‘como política y feminista, además de como amiga, no iba a cesar en mi empeño hasta el descubrimiento de la verdad (as a politician and a feminist, in addition to as friend, I was not going to desist in my mission until the truth was revealed)’ ( ). She professes marked anger at the way in which death is treated as something not absolute in sectors of Mexican society (with literary and cultural precedents) including by her private detective: ¿Quiere decir que cree que Kelly esté muerta?, le grité. Más o menos, dijo sin perder un ápice de compostura. ¿Cómo que más o menos?, grité. ¡O se está muerto o no se está muerto, chingados! En México uno puede estar más o menos muerto, me contestó muy seriamente. Lo miré con ganas de abofetearlo . . . No, le dije casi silabeando, ni en México ni en ninguna otra parte del mundo alguien puede estar más o menos muerto . . . Estoy harta de los mexicanos que hablan y se comportan como si todo esto fuera Pedro Páramo, dije. Do you mean to say that Kelly is dead, I screamed. More or less, he said without losing an ounce of composure. How “more or less”, I shouted. Either you are dead or you are not dead, for fuck’s sake. In Mexico one can

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be more or less dead, he answered me very seriously. I looked at him wanting to give him a smack . . . No, I said almost pronouncing it syllable by syllable, neither in Mexico nor in any other place in the world can someone be “more or less” dead . . . I’m fed up of Mexicans who talk and behave like all of this was Pedro Páramo, I said). ( )

The story that the diputada tells seems to make the most sense in light of the rest of the ‘evidence’ with which we are presented, and it is significant that she bequeaths the dissemination of the information to Sergio González, the fictionalised Sergio González Rodríguez who carried out his indispensable personal investigation into the Ciudad Juárez murders. His book, Huesos en el desierto, points to a similar explanation to that put forward by the diputada. The findings of the diputada’s private detective tell of Kelly organising parties for wealthy business people in Mexico to which she would persuade or hire models or celebrities to attend. As her finances tightened she began to use local girls rather than models, dressing them up in fashionable clothes for the occasions: Así que allí está Kelly, sin modelos, trabajando con muchachas de extracción social baja o ya de plano con putas, en narcorranchos abandonados a la buena de Dios, y en sus fiestas tenemos a un banquero. . . a un empresario . . . a un millonario . . . y si no a Campuzano [narco-trafficker], al menos a dos de sus hombres más notorios . . . además de otras personalidades de la sociedad, del crimen y de la política. So there you have Kelly, without models, working with girls of a lower class of social extraction, or outright prostitutes, in narco-ranches abandoned to the will of God, and in her parties we have a banker . . . a businessman . . . and if not Campuzano, at least one of his most notorious men . . . in addition to other personalities of society, of crime and of politics. (Bolaño,  )

This sentence, by listing all the actors involved, evokes the resolution of a detective novel but instead of presenting the victims, murderer, and motive, we are painted a picture of strong class differentials and a widespread web of involvement and complicity. Bolaño implicates almost all of the wealthy and political classes meaning that the blame cannot be pinned on any one group in particular. The fact that Kelly, a woman, is the agent facilitating the abuse of the women complicates a reading in which the fault simply lies with the male gender, or the patriarchal order. The class dimension does seem to be markedly delineated in the passage quoted here. The men implicated in the quote all possess money whilst the majority of the women are young, poor and

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‘morena’. The great socio-economic divide in Mexican society, as well as the abundance of women seeking jobs in the area, have led to a situation in which they have become viewed as disposable goods, not just in terms of labour but also in terms of their function for the sexual pleasure of others. Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso has discussed the symbolic dimension of the fact that many of the Ciudad Juárez bodies were found in the rubbish dumps around the city, a preoccupation echoed in : ‘El cuerpo se localizó a la entrada del basurero clandestino llamado El Chile (The body was found at the entrance to the undocumented rubbish dump named “Chile”)’ (). The women’s lives are symbolically reduced to rubbish which reflects ‘su poco valor humano, de ser menos mujeres, de ser mercancías fetichizadas sexualmente (their low human value, of being less than women, of being sexually fetishized merchandise)’ (Monárrez Fragoso ). Monárrez Fragoso deploys Marx’s concept that the labouring body is an appendix to capital and invested with a matrix of socially designated value: ‘las mujeres representan mercancías que tienen un valor de uso y un calor de cambio de acuerdo con las construcciones culturales y la vida material en que están insertas (the women represent commodities that have a use value and an exchange currency in accordance with cultural constructions and the material life in which they are inserted)’ (). As Jean Franco points out ‘Bolaño recognizes that the killing of women is one aspect of an entire culture and that waste disposal is its purpose’ (Cruel Modernity ). The women are incorporated into the same logic of waste culture that consumer capitalism has created. In  there is no escaping complicity in the global system of exploitation that sees over half of the world living in undignified conditions where many of the other half appear to be so under-stimulated that they seek ever more extreme forms of experience through drugs, increasingly hardcore versions of pornography (including snuff movies) and, ultimately, sexual violence. It is not just members of the ‘global South’; that are affected by this system, or at least so would the spectre-like apparitions of the murdered women to other ‘first world’ women throughout the novel, suggest. Take for example the following quotation: Una noche Mary-Sue Bravo soñó que una mujer estaba sentada a los pies de su cama. Sintió el peso de un cuerpo aplastando el colchón pero cuando se estiró no tocó nada . . . Cuando Mary-Sue despertó la sensación de que había otra mujer en la habitación no se fue del todo hasta que se levantó de la cama y se bebió un vaso de agua en la cocina. One night Mary-Sue Bravo dreamed that a woman was sitting at the foot of her bed. She felt the weight of a body crushing the mattress but when she

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stretched out she did not touch anything . . . When Mary-Sue woke up the sensation that there had been another woman in the room did not completely disappear until she got up from the bed and drank a glass of water in the kitchen. (Bolaño,  )

The fact that Mary-Sue Bravo is unable to shake the feeling of a woman in her room even when she has woken up, testifies to how insistent these sensations are. Her name is, significantly, a collective composition of two women’s names, and her surname ‘Bravo’ seems to call on this need to be brave and confront the significance of this apparition. In the following two anecdotes the women appear in the forms of faces and voices, which lend themselves to a Levinasian analysis. In the final chapter of her book Precarious Life, Butler engages at length with Levinas’ notion of the ‘face’, she quotes from a passage from Face to Face with Levinas that is useful here as a reminder of the basic principles of Levinas’ formulation and of the ethical challenges contained in the ‘face’. Levinas explains: The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility . . . it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill. In the relation to the face I am exposed as a usurper of the place of the other. The celebrated “right of existence” that Spinoza called the conatus essendi and defined as the basic principle of all intelligibility is challenged by the relation to the face. Accordingly, my duty to respond to the other suspends my natural right to self-survival, le droit vitale . . . To expose myself to the vulnerability of the face is to put my ontological right to existence into question. In ethics, the other’s right to exist has primacy over my own, a primacy epitomized in the ethical edict: you shall not kill, you shall not jeopardize the life of the other. (Face to Face –)

Levinas’ formulation relies in part upon the biblical command ‘You shall not kill’, but it also appeals to a ‘duty to respond’ given that everyone has an equal ‘right to existence’: these women’s lives have been prematurely taken away, whilst ours have not. The identification with the dead Other is explicit in the following quotation in , whereby the British female critic Norton has a frightening dream towards the start of the novel in which she sees a woman in the mirror: ‘Es igual a mí, se dijo, pero ella está muerta (She is the same as me, she said, but she is dead)’ (–). The simultaneous desire not to die alone, underpinned by the accusation of complicity – should this call not be answered – is portrayed in the dead woman’s facial expressions which alternate smiling with negative

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expressions: ‘volvió a sonreírle y su rostro se hizo ansioso y luego inexpresivo y luego nervioso y luego resignado y luego pasó por todas las expresiones de la locura y siempre volvía a sonreírle (she smiled at her again and then her face became anxious and then inexpressive and then nervous and then resigned and then it passed through all the expressions of craziness and always went back to smiling at her)’ (). The haunting, therefore, functions as a cry for empathy and solidarity, whereby Norton’s face takes on the expressions and emotions of many other women at once, returning each time to a smile in between – a symbol of friendship. In the second case, the diputada, like many of the other rich women characters, starts to hear voices. In ‘Peace and Proximity’ Levinas makes it understood that the face can also be figured as, in Butler’s words, ‘a scene of agonized vocalization’ (Precarious Life ). The diputada says, ‘creo que me estaba volviendo loca. Esas voces que escuchaba (voces, nunca rostros ni bultos) provenían del desierto. En el desierto yo vagaba con un cuchillo en la mano. En la hoja del cuchillo se reflejaba mi rostro (I think that I was going crazy. Those voices I heard [voices, never faces or shapes] came from the desert. In the desert I roamed with a knife in my hand. In the blade of the knife my face was reflected)’ ( ). The reflection of her own face in the knife, leaves us in no doubt of her implied complicity, like everyone else’s, in the murders. Her experience of being called upon by the voices of the women moves her to take solidarity with the Santa Teresa dead, ‘mi rabia se hizo colectiva o expresión de algo colectivo, mi rabia, cuando se dejaba contemplar, se veía a sí misma como el brazo vengador de miles de victimas (my anger became collective, or an expression of something collective, my anger, when I was able to contemplate it, saw itself as the arm of vengeance of thousands of victims)’ ( ). In this quotation her voice becomes collective. She, in her position of political power, can and should take responsibility for representing the voiceless victims who, in Derrida’s words, comprise ‘the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead’ (Specters xviii). All of the encounters that the living women have with the ghosts of the murdered women, represent a multiplicity of muted voices crying out for sympathetic hosts to take responsibility for the injustices they faced, and that women continue to face. There are multiple ethical tasks presented by Butler in Precarious Life, tasks which are likewise addressed in Bolaño’s novel. First, as we have seen, there is the need for the acknowledgement of the complicity of all those who have the opportunity to play out their natural lives, for not putting those other lives, which were cut short before their own, first - according to the principle of the ‘usurper of the place of the other’ (Levinas, Face to Face

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–). The diputada responds to this ethical demand by taking on the collective struggle, at her own risk, in order to attempt to expose the perpetrators (via Sergio González) and change the political status quo in Mexico, with a view to preventing future deaths. The second task is one of grieving, whereby the murdered figure ‘asks me not to let him [her/they] die alone’ (Levinas, Face to Face –). In her work, Butler draws on this notion in order to highlight the systems of representation that construct some lives as ‘grievable’ and others, not. Butler posits that ‘The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance . . . because politics – and power – work in part through regulating what can appear, what can be heard’ (Precarious Life ). The novel also demonstrates the way in which the media and government manage to control ‘what can appear’ and ‘what can be heard’ as represented in . It is critical of the allocation of media interest and space; and the way in which groups who sought to denounce the crimes were represented, when they did manage to gain a shred of attention. For example, ‘La parte de los crímenes’ opens with a sub-plot about a man who destroys – and defecates on – religious artefacts in churches, which dominates the media attention within the novel for quite some time, drawing attention away from the women’s murder cases: ‘El ataque a las Iglesias de San Rafael y de San Tadeo tuvo mayor eco en la prensa local que las mujeres asesinadas en los meses precedentes (The attack on the churches of Saint Rafael and Saint Tadeo resonated more in the local press than the women that had been killed in the previous months)’ ( ). This quotation suggests that, initially, the press determine the attacks against the body of the church to be more important than attacks against the bodies of women. Eventually the ‘Penitente (penitent)’ plot falls completely by the wayside and is left unresolved. Like a classic detective novel red herring, but also like many of the sub-plots in Bolaño, we forget all about the ‘Penitente’ as the cases of the murdered women come into greater focus. The media, in a perfect world, could be expected to fulfil a social role: holding authorities accountable, giving a voice to marginalized groups, and denouncing crimes or failures in the system of justice. Instead, we are presented with a situation whereby they too have become accustomed, and indifferent, to the violence. They are corrupt and thus serve as an obstruction to investigation. They form part of the landscape of symbolic violence through the perpetuation of inappropriate jokes about the murders of women: ‘Lo cierto es que la violación “por los tres conductos” se

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popularizó en la policía de Santa Teresa, adquirió un prestigio semioficial que en ocasiones se vio reflejado en los informes redactados por los policías, en los interrogatorios, en las charlas off the record con la prensa (What is for certain is that violation “by the three orifices” was popularised amongst the police of Santa Teresa, and acquired a semi-official prestige that was reflected in the police reports, in the interrogations, in the off the record chats with the press)’ (Bolaño,  ). When Haas Klaus tries to denounce the fact that people are being murdered in prison his lawyer tells him that people already know. When he asks why they do not denounce it if they know, she replies that it is because they are discreet: ‘¿Los periodistas también?, dijo Haas. Éstos son los más discretos de todos, dijo la abogada. En ellos la discreción equivale a dinero (The journalists as well?, said Haas. Those are the most discreet of all, said the lawyer. For them discretion is equivalent to money)’ ( ). Finally, in  there is a tension between the humanisation and dehumanisation of the murdered women by means of their forensic representation in the text, which can also usefully be explained through Butler’s reading of Levinas. According to Butler ‘personification does not always humanize. For Levinas it may well evacuate the face that does humanize’ (Precarious Life ). Butler gives the example of the images of Afghan girls who threw off their Burkas to reveal their faces as a symbol of an American military victory. Aside from the cultural politics at work here, the important factor is that it conceals the other instances of loss and grief that were also suffered in the waging of this war, in short, the images fail to truly give a ‘sense of the precariousness of life’ (). By showing the women in their tortured and murdered state Bolaño challenges the ‘cultural means through which the paradigmatically human is established’ and forces us to confront and acknowledge the precariousness which has been part of the human experience in our lifetime (). For Levinas, it is not the ‘face’ in itself that represents the human, but rather, in Butler’s words, ‘the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible . . . For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure’ (Precarious Life ). In personifying the tortured women, revealing the ‘lives’ that were behind the tortured and mutilated bodies, Bolaño would have implied that the human could be ‘captured’ or ‘rescued’ in its representation, whereas ‘For Levinas . . . some loss of the human takes place when it is “captured” by the image’ ( ). Likewise, if one single killer had been determined, that ‘face’ would have served to represent ‘evil’ (in the style, for example, of Osama bin Laden) which

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would have also masked ‘the sounds of human suffering and the proximity we might have to the precariousness of life itself’ (). The ghostly apparitions, these faces and voices that are not strictly human, nor can be rationally explained, form part of Bolaño’s acknowledgement of the failure of representation and this, in conjunction with the representation of the tortured corpses, creates a ‘truer image . . . more images . . . images that convey the full horror and reality of the suffering’ (). Bolaño deterritorialises Nazism both spatially and temporally to highlight its untimely nature. By expanding the scope of, and pluralising Nazism, he works to overcome a kind of leftist melancholy, that believes that all resistance will be cooped by the logic of oppression that it seeks to resist. In seeking to move on from such melancholy, he directs his focus to new political subjects who are, as we also saw in Chapter , a racially- and gender-determined precarious labour force, seen as disposable within the capitalist order in which they are entrapped. This, alongside Peres’ examination of our contemporary obsession with conspiracy theories, can be seen to conform to Žižek’s cited notion that liberal democracy produces an ‘excess’ which has to be ‘destroyed’ (Welcome ). In a last-ditch attempt to overcome such a state of affairs Bolaño harnesses the power of literature and – in a more direct and ‘savage’ mode than Borges – uses the illumination of the extreme bodily precarity of the women murdered in the north of Mexico to invoke an ethical responsibility of its characters (and by extension the reader).

Notes  In one of the unifying texts of the Boom generation, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (The New Hispano-American Novel), Fuentes credits Borges with ‘una profunda revolución que equipara la libertad con la imaginación y con ambas constituye un nuevo lenguaje latinoamericano (a profound revolution that unites freedom with the imagination and with both constitutes a new Latin American language)’ (). Fuentes crafts a politically neutral vision of Borges which allows him to claim the Argentine as an aesthetic influence and guiding ideology for the Boom, despite the fact that Borges’ anti-Marxism made him opposed to the politically revolutionary spirit of the generation of the s.  Bloom’s analysis in The Anxiety of Influence deals with the romantic poets but his framework can be applied to other forms of literature and even criticism, according to his own ‘Interchapter: A Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism’.  Parts of this chapter’s sections related to Bolaño were first published as ‘“un día más de trabajo”: Liberalisation Processes and the Precarity of Women in Roberto Bolaño’s ’. Modern Languages Open : (): –.

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 This method of reading Borges is described by Annick Louis in Borges ante el fascismo (Borges in the Face of Fascism) as the illumination of an ‘obra occulta (hidden work)’ () and by Daniel Balderston in Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges as the encounter with ‘a new text (a parallel fiction, perhaps) . . . one in which the implicit referents are made explicit’ ().  See for example Ana María Barrenechea’s La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Borges (The Expression of Irreality in the Work of Borges).  Avelar agrees with this position characterising Borges’ work by its ‘radical dismantling of the identitarian fallacy’ ().  His implicit critique of racism is made explicit when he goes on to quote Mark Twain ‘I have no race prejudices . . . All that I care to know is that a man is a human being’. This displays a commitment to ontological equality amongst humans, that is not often emphasised by scholars of his work. Beatriz Sarlo’s book Borges: un escritor en las orillas (Borges a Writer in the Margins) perpetuated a view of Borges as overwhelmingly afflicted by a nostalgia for the criollo past and, thus, anti-immigrant and a linguistic purist. It is enough to read ‘Las alarmas del doctor Américo Castro’ from Otras inquisiciones, the collection upon which Sarlo bases much of her evidence of Borges’ criollo nostalgia, to see that Borges mocks doctor Castro’s denunciation of ‘la corrupción del idioma español en La Plata (the corruption of the Spanish language in the River Plate)’ by acknowledging the inevitable evolution of languages (pointing out the corruption of español in Spain). Sarlo provides no substantive evidence of Borges’ ‘anti-immigrant’ stance.  For a good examination of this and engagement with Silvia Molloy’s extended argument about the operation of a ‘resto diferencial’ (differential supplement) in Borges’ work, see Kantaris –.  This is a loosely derived conclusion from Nancy’s reading of Martin Heidegger’s work in the essay ‘The Being-with of Being-There’ and his diagnosis of the ‘dangerously decisive inflection’ of Heidegger’s thought that allowed him to be involved, albeit briefly, with Nazism (). The undeveloped ethical potentiality in Heidegger’s thinking lies, for Nancy, in the fact that Mitsein and, more particularly, Mitdasein ‘constitutes an essential condition for Dasein’s essence’ (‘The Being-with of Being-There’ ). This is developed fully in Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, which is examined in Chapter .  This distinction is confirmed by Levinas when he says that his book’s defence of subjectivity is ‘not at the level of its purely egoist protestation against totality, nor in its anguish before death, but as founded in the idea of infinity’ (Totality ).  From now on O Evangelho for brevity.  In Levinas’ work ‘anxiety’ is produced by the possibility of having to kill the other, whereas fear is fear of one’s own death (‘Peace’ ).  From now on La literatura nazi, for brevity.  This comparison has been made by Celina Manzoni in La escritura como tauromaquia (iii).

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 It was, of course, Carl Schmitt who characterised political actions and motives as always reducible to the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’ in The Concept of the Political.  For a particular take on the function of ‘heresy’ in Borges’ own work see Kefala.  Of all the facets of Borges’ philosophical outlook, Bloom in The Western Canon, emphasises this particular interest believing Borges to be metaphysically and imaginatively a Gnostic: ‘His metaphysics, when he does not play at Idealism, also follows Schopenhauer and the Gnostics’ (–). Guillermo Riveros Álvarez has also undertaken a systematic study of the presence of Gnosticism in Borges’ work emphasising the similarities between gnostic practises and Borges’ textual strategies; stressing the common irreverence towards pre-existing materials: ‘Los gnósticos . . . eran productores de textos, creadores de mundos imaginativos propios a partir de una heterogénea multitud de materiales preexistentes pertenecientes a distintas tradiciones y credos (The Gnostics . . . were producers of texts, creators of imaginative worlds of their own, as part of a multitude of heterogeneous, preexisting materials, belonging to different traditions and belief systems)’ ().  This form of ‘lettrist’ investigation into the history concealed within names is undertaken by the character Bibliano O’Ryan in Bolaño’s Estrella distante. Bolaño often chooses names that are syntactically similar to the historical figures that they are understood to represent, for example, his own alter-ego ‘Arturo Belano’.  See for example Kasser et al.  See Dean.  In Nancian terms this could be framed as an awareness of finitude that opens up the possibility of community, or the abandoment of all sense – or meaning – that is not the sense of existence itself (Inoperative Community ; Sense ).  O’Bryen identifies a melancholic ‘no-power’ in Amuleto and Nocturno de Chile (‘Memory’ ), and Gareth Williams charts the melancholic reconfiguration of the friend / enemy divide in La literatura nazi and Estrella distante in his article ‘Sovereignty and Melancholic Paralysis in Roberto Bolaño’. Both arguments will be revisited in more detail below.  The right-wing content of the sky writing has been pointed out by a number of critics as being part of Bolaño’s recurring critique of the ‘Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Actions Collective; CADA)’ the leftist activist group who used art and performance to challenge the Pinochet regime (see O’Bryen, ‘Writing’). One of its members Raúl Zurita was known for his performances of sky writing. More will be said about Bolaño’s overall engagement with it here.  This accidental descent of a self-professed bookish character into a scene of barbarous violence also recalls the plot of ‘El Sur (The South)’ in which a character called Juan Dahlmann, who shares biographical similarities with Borges, finds himself in a knife fight on his trip to the south of Argentina.  For a detailed description of this period of Borges’ life, see Williamson, Part II.

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 This was, in a sense, CADA’s aim, see Richard.  For example, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott deduces from his reading of the novel, that ‘Literature does not save but condemns us to be part of the very logic of global violence, and this exhaustion of hopes in literature, in general, cannot be reduced to a single empirical event (From Auschwitz to Hiroshima, from Tlatelolco to Santiago in )’ (). Similarly, for Ignacio LópezVicuña, ‘Bolaño suggests that writing – and culture in general – is profoundly marked by the barbarism of the present: it cannot escape it, nor can it detach itself or constitute itself as a privileged, safe, or civilized space’ ().  Entitled Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert) (). Bolaño sustained a close epistolary relationship with González Rodríguez during the writing of . In an early illuminating study of , the Mexicanist Cathy Fourez points out the significance of the fact that, in the novel, Sergio González works for the newspaper La Razón meaning both ‘Reason’ and ‘The reason’ ().

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 

Myth Interrupted: Identity and the Absence of Nation in En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi and Amphitryon by Ignacio Padilla In the opening of the chapter ‘Myth Interrupted’ in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, there are four main points to be highlighted: first, a set of people are gathered to hear a story by what we might call a ‘privileged storyteller’; second, they were not grouped in any way before gathering but now they are united by the fact that they are all sharing in hearing the story; third, the story binds them together further because it tells them of their common origins; finally, these narratives are called ‘myths’. Nancy believes that no people have any more in common with each other such as to need to be grouped together to the exclusion of other people, a state of affairs which would – and does – lead to violence. And yet throughout history there have always been interests that have tried to do just that, shored up by the narratives of ‘privileged storytellers’. This ‘myth-making’ or ‘foundation by fiction’ () – as Nancy also calls the operation described – has, for much of the twentieth century, been the activity of elites seeking to integrate a national populus into a modern unified capitalist state. Such is the argument of Mexican sociologist Roger Bartra, concerned with the same myth-making operation as Nancy, but who examines it within the particular context of twentieth-century Mexico. The mandate of his book La jaula de la melancolía (The Howl of Melancholy) is presented as follows: ‘Me interesa . . . mostrar críticamente la forma que adopta el mito a fines del siglo xx, pues me parece que los mexicanos debemos deshacernos de esta imaginería que oprime nuestras conciencias y fortalece la dominación despótica del llamado Estado de la Revolución Mexicana (I am interested . . . in critically showing the way in which myth is adopted at the end of the twentieth century, since it seems to me that we Mexicans ought to do away with this imaginary that oppresses our consciences and strengthens the despotic domination of the so-called Mexican Revolutionary State)’ (Bartra ). It is clear that, like Nancy, he recognises the status of myth as a narrative told to people about themselves, which attempts to bind them together with oppressive 

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

and violent consequences. Bartra therefore sets out to deconstruct a number of these myths by illustrating how they correspond to other universal / biblical / mythical archetypes. This serves to prove that the ‘myths’ are not particular to Mexico and the Mexican people, but typical identificatory structures involved in, as Nancy puts it, ‘the staging and setting to work (mise en oeuvre) of a “Volk” and a “Reich”’ (Inoperative Community ). Nancy uses these terms now associated with German National Socialism partly because the effects of ‘myth-making’ in the case of Nazi Germany were a prime example of the utterly horrific logical consequences of closed identitarian systems, but also to add emphasis to the point that the philosophical structures that resulted in those horrific consequences still underpin the way our communities are organised today. This chapter examines the twentieth-century history of Mexican ‘mythmaking’ and, in particular, two moments in which Nazi history is drawn upon by Mexican authors to illuminate the dangers of identitarian closure, which is the desired (and impossible) outcome of ‘myth-making’ according to Nancy’s definition. The first moment was in , when both Carlos Fuentes and José Emilio Pacheco published fragmented, non-linear, selfreflexive novels that tied the Holocaust to different incidents of violence in Mexico and in history (Cambio de piel and Morirás lejos, respectively). The second was in –, during a significant period of transition in Mexican political history, when Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla published fragmented, non-linear, self-reflexive novels that examined conspiracy theories, ethical dilemmas and questions of individual and group identity in detectivesque plots relating to Nazism and the Second World War. By following the line of Nancy’s argument which calls for literature to ‘interrupt myth’ – involving the acknowledgement of the fallacy of identitarian thinking, and of the radical spacing between each and every one of us that ought to prevent us binding together into ‘immanent’ communities – I argue that Volpi and Padilla fulfil this function in their own works by a number of means. First, at the level of content, they address the causes of the two world wars in order to highlight the violence which arises from the desire for immanent communities. Second, their novels are not set in Mexico, make no reference to Mexico, and do not contain any Mexican characters. Thus they perform the severance of Mexican intellectuals (themselves) from the responsibility to articulate Mexican ‘myths’. Finally, by both finishing their novels with bibliographic postscripts, signed off with their proper names, the authors acknowledge within the text their status as ‘singular beings’ that seek to resist and unwork bounded

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

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collectivity, in favour of community-in-spacing (Inoperative Community ). In what follows, I shall give a brief plot outline of the four novels and address the specific controversies they sparked within the Mexican cultural context. Cambio de piel tells the story of two couples on a road trip from Mexico City to Veracruz, but the plot largely takes places in Cholula, juxtaposed with details from the famous massacre that took place there during the time of the conquest. There are details of other atrocities including events at a concentration camp during the s, which had been designed and built by Franz, one of the four travellers. Pacheco’s novel, Morirás lejos, undertakes a similar operation in juxtaposing the events of the Holocaust to other incidents of oppression such as the wars between the Jews and the Romans in the time of Tito in  . These episodes are interwoven with the main plot thread which tells the story of an ex-Nazi observing a man out of the window of his Mexico City apartment, trying to determine whether the man is spying on him. En busca de Klingsor is to Cambio de piel as Amphitryon is to Morirás lejos insofar as the former two are much longer, whereas the latter two arguably achieve equally sophisticated effects but in more efficient packages. En busca de Klingsor is narrated by a mathematician, Gustav Links who, like Freddy Lambert (the narrator of Cambio de piel), turns out to be telling the story from a mental asylum. Links, we learn, has been imprisoned by the Soviets believing him to be the principal scientific advisor to Hitler, known as ‘Klingsor’. Links uses a metafictional series of ‘hypotheses’ (mimicking scientific procedure) to recount the lives of those he has come into contact with, as well as telling the story of his own life. He does this in an attempt to persuade the reader that he has been wrongly accused. Finally, Amphitryon consists of five non-chronological testimonies by different people in different times and locations, gathered together by an English writer / narrator. They deal with a number of intertwined twentieth-century plots, amongst others, a conspiracy plot to replace high Nazi officials with identical doubles for the purpose of a coup. This is one amongst many plot lines in which characters swap identities, often over games of chess, to avoid their fateful destinies of participating in the First and Second World Wars. As discussed, the novels by Volpi and Padilla, in a key difference from Fuentes’ and Pacheco’s, make no mention of Mexico. The authors received a significant amount of criticism in the Mexican cultural context for failing to deal with ‘Mexican questions’ at a politically sensitive time, when the first non–PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) president

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

(Vincente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional) had been elected in over seventy years (in ). Nevertheless, the authors saw this historic moment as an opportunity for re-defining the uncomfortably close relationship between intellectuals and the state in Mexico. By creating a (partial) genealogy of the relationship of culture to the state, we find that the two earlier novels by Pacheco and Fuentes in , marked a significant point in the changing perception of the authority of the nation, and a destabilisation of the notion of ‘Mexico’ or its population as an entity with any fixed ‘essence’. However, as we shall see, cultural nationalism in Mexico stayed strong despite these two moments in which ties between intellectuals and the imagined construction of the nation were narratively severed. All four authors have known their fair share of controversy surrounding these particular novels and other endeavours. Volpi and Padilla had previously caused a stir in , as part of a group of Mexican authors who wrote a literary manifesto called the ‘Manifiesto Crack’ to accompany a collection of short stories. It was by no means a coherent literary strategy, containing five separately authored parts with sometimes overlapping, but often contradictory, statements. Among the sections that created controversy and misunderstanding was Padilla’s assertion that: Ahí hay más bien una mera reacción contra el agotamiento; cansancio de que la gran literatura latinoamericana y el dudoso realismo mágico se hayan convertido, para nuestras letras, en magiquísimo trágico; cansancio de los discursos patrioteros que por tanto tiempo nos han hecho creer que Rivapalacios escribía mejor que su contemporáneo Poe. It is, rather, a mere reaction against exhaustion; fed up that the great Latin American literature and the doubtful magical realism have become, for our literatures, tragical realism; fed up of patriotic discourse that for so long have had us believe that Rivapalacios wrote better than his contemporary, Poe. (‘Manifiesto Crack’ )

Afterwards Padilla was forced to clarify that he did not mean his disparaging comments about ‘dudoso realismo mágico (doubtful magical realism)’ to be directed at members of the Boom generation who pioneered the genre and achieved great commercial success. Instead, he was aiming his criticism at the new generation, particularly the highly successful female authors such as Laura Esquivel and Isabel Allende, who produced bestsellers in the s supposedly using the same formula. The reaction to the ‘Manifiesto’ in Mexico was overwhelmingly negative at first, and disposed critics to be harsh towards whatever production was to follow from the authors involved. However, over time, and with the majority of

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the authors’ notable successes in Mexico and abroad, they were re-instated into national literary favour. The two earlier novels caused controversy due to the fact that fictional representations of the Holocaust, however indirect, were not common at that time in any context, let alone in Latin American works, by non-Jewish authors. Morirás lejos was better received than Cambio de piel, being a shorter and less difficult novel, but also received less attention overall due to Pacheco’s lesser well-known status at the time. Cambio de piel combined, as Steven Boldy suggests, ‘radical literary experimental with intense ethical speculation’ and some reviewers at the time thought that the ethical position expressed was dubious (). In his review of the English translation A Change of Skin in The New York Times, David Gallagher called attention to the problematic doubling of Javier, the Mexican writer, with Franz the concentration camp architect, as well as the blurring of boundaries between intensely traumatic moments of history such as the Holocaust, with pop culture and camp. With regards to the overall effects of these devices he says, ‘I got the uncomfortable feeling that, beneath all his illusive facades, Fuentes was clinging to some sort of hipster lifeforce which apparently the Nazis (or the Beatles) had been most competent to enact’. Gallagher seemed perturbed by the radical ‘anti-Manichean zeal’, as he called it, at a time when Nazism was still comfortably understood by many as an aberration in history, a site of radical evil, and not as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue in their essay ‘The Nazi Myth’, something which ‘belongs profoundly to the mood or character of the West in general, and more precisely to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word’ (). I shall come back to this point in the analysis of Cambio de piel and to a passage which illustrates the fact that Fuentes understood the violence inherent to the Western metaphysics of the subject, in similar terms to those outlined in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay. The ‘anti-Manichean zeal’ that Gallagher calls attention to is, I argue, Fuentes’ response to a generalised crisis in authority, and an aversion to closure, which in much philosophy of the time was linked to totalitarianism. In other international reviews, however, Fuentes received great praise for the novel. The journal La Cultura en México (Culture in Mexico) made a point of publishing, in various editions, many of the comments and reviews that Cambio de piel had received in the international press, as a means of defending Fuentes’ position in heated national debates. These debates were not so much over the internal ethics of the novel, but rather, its overall quality in aesthetic terms, and its contribution to world

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

literature. These debates are discussed at length in Volpi’s own work of intellectual history of  entitled La imaginación y el poder (Imagination and Power), originally his doctoral thesis, and written in parallel to En busca de Klingsor. In the final section of this chapter (‘Premature PostMexicanity?’), I examine Volpi’s interpretation of the debates surrounding Cambio de piel and argue that his treatment of them sheds light on his own personal concerns with regards to the aggressive response of the Mexican cultural establishment to the ‘Manifiesto Crack’ as well as the anticipated reception of his own novel En busca de Klingsor. As discussed, I shall now undertake a brief account of the history of Mexican ‘myth-making’ or, in other words, the production of a Mexican identificatory narrative with particular attention to the timeline of, in Samuel Steinberg’s words, the ‘crisis of the always slowly waning – and sometimes returning – hegemony of the PRI . . . and more specifically of the obscure revolution that grounded its name and that perversely “justified” the party’s staying power for over  years’ (). This necessarily selective treatment of Mexican twentieth-century cultural and political history is useful in terms of understanding the similarities and differences in Volpi and Padilla’s engagements with Mexican identity, compared to those of the previous generations. Moreover, it will pave the way for reflections on the cultural and political differences that shape these engagements with Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust when compared to the Southern Cone texts examined in previous chapters.

Mexican Myths The two literary moments of  and / described above can be situated within (and against) a long history of the construction of the ‘mito del carácter mexicano (myth of the Mexican character)’ by intellectuals (Bartra ). The PRI were unique in terms of political parties within Latin America in being able to forge their hegemony, and direct cultural identitarian policy, for over  years. They justified their stay in power by a number of economic and political means – often described as a form of corporatism – but also by being around for so long such as to become almost synonymous with ‘Mexicanity’ itself. Nevertheless, when discussing the nature and extent of the hegemony that the PRI achieved, scholars tend to conclude that even under the PRI the state was never ‘a stable routinized entity’ (Williams, Other Side ), but rather, as Jeffrey Roubin expresses it, ‘a complex and changing center that coexists with and is constituted and embedded in the diversity of regional and cultural

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constructions evolving throughout Mexico since the s’ (quoted in Williams, Other Side ). One site of these ‘regional and cultural constructions’ was literature, another was visual art (in particular murals), and as such, a constellation of writers and artists responded to both internal and external political and aesthetic forces to undertake the work of ‘mythmaking’ or ‘narrating’ the nation. Charting this process in Latin America more broadly, Gareth Williams departs from a similar premise to Bartra, registering the way in which the formation of the modern nation-state was ‘for the most part predicated on the active integration and institutionalization of the notion of the people – of the common populace, or the popular/subaltern sectors – as the originary ground from which to consider the contours of national history, national identity formations, and national modernization’ (Other Side ). This ‘notion of the people’ took the form of what Williams calls, following Étienne Balibar, ‘fictive ethnicities’ (Other Side –). These were common characteristics invented and represented by the elites, in order to legitimise their governance. The emblematic ‘fictive ethnicities’ that Williams highlights in the Mexican case are those represented in the narratives of the famous murals of the so-called Big Three, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros (Other Side ). These artists went the furthest, as suggested by art historian Desmond Rochfort, in providing ‘the visual vocabulary and narratives of nation in monumental and publicly accessible images that encoded the history, experiences, traditions, and culture of peasants, workers, Indians, and artisans that came to be defined as the Mexican pueblo’ (‘The Sickle, the Serpent’ ). In particular, they cemented the images in the popular imagination of the official heroes of the Revolution such as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. These two regional leaders were chosen because whilst they had mobilised large numbers of followers, they had also been assassinated towards the end of the period of most intense conflict. This meant that their images could emblematise the ‘ideals’ of the post-revolutionary government without calling into question its adherence to them in practice. As Rochfort alludes in the previous quotation, these images were particularly impactful due to their accessibility, both in terms of their public display, and their non-literary form. Whilst these images came to be the most widely known visual expression of the Mexican pueblo, their narrative was also complemented by many different influential figures who contributed further to the contours of the myth of the Mexican identity. The most well-known proponent of a racialized typography in the Mexican context was José Vasconcelos, author

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

of La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), and the man responsible for commissioning the public murals during his time as Minister for Education. His book argued that a genetic mixture between all of the races (such as was closest to being found in the Americas) would form the ‘raza cósmica’, or superior race, having inherited the best of all racial characteristics. These views slipped uncomfortably easily into an admiration of German National Socialism. Vasconcelos became a controversial figure in Mexico when he sought to diffuse the National Socialist message in the magazine Timón, which he directed in the s. Two other figures, Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz, both adopted psychoanalysis as a legitimising discourse for their assessment of the ‘Mexican character’ – a popular trend in the post-revolutionary era. They used cultural texts and subjective observations to perform a kind of national diagnosis of the Mexican ‘condition’ and ‘character’. Ramos’  work El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (The Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico) finds Mexico and the Mexican subject to suffer from a national and personal inferiority complex. In El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), published in , Paz claimed to disagree with Ramos’ analysis of the archetypal ‘pelado’ male Mexican figure, who exemplifies these characteristics. However, he himself produced a similar essentialist assessment of the national character, that according to Bartra ‘la repitió, la profundizó y la consagro (repeated it, deepened it, and enshrined it)’ () relying on characterisations such as the ‘macho’ and ‘la chingada’ to explain the national psyche. The crisis in what Williams calls ‘fictive ethnicities’ begins following the end of the Second World War. This is partly because the horrors of the Nazi genocide, once discovered to their true extent, starkly called into question the characterisation of a privileged national racial (or any other) ‘type’. As Williams shows, regimes with fascist leanings such as Peronism in Argentina maintained a strong process of interpellation of a nationalpopular subject through their party (rather than racial) ideology (Other Side ). By  the Mexican revolution had become fully institutionalised, as reflected in its name change to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Now the association of the state with radical artistic projects such as the murals could no longer mask the stagnation of the revolutionary project. Eric Zolov writes of the political context of the fifties: By the late s the PRI’s official nationalism had begun to generate a backlash not only among artists and intellectuals – not to mention workers and peasants who fought for more material gains – but also among a new middle class generation of youth for whom Juárez and Zapata were more

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ossified heroes of the official party than living emblems of liberation. Mexico’s nationalism, once heralded for its cosmopolitanism and vibrancy, was now being charged by critics as insular, authoritarian, ‘dead.’ . . . an incipient cynicism had entered. ()

Fuentes, at the end of the s was eager to react to the political moment in which the dreams of the Mexican revolution appeared to have died and, according to him, ‘la burguesía mexicana había llegado al poder (the Mexican bourgeoisie has come to power)’ (Fuentes quoted in Van Delden ). In , he set about the task of re-opening Mexican culture to the rest of the world becoming co-editor of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. In his first edition he quoted Borges’ essay ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición (The Argentine Writer and Tradition)’, Borges’ famous response to the Argentine cultural nationalism of the s, in which Borges complains that ‘los nacionalistas simulan venerar las capacidades de la mente argentina pero quieren limitar el ejercicio poético de esa mente a algunos pobres temas locales, como si los argentinos sólo pudiéramos hablar de orillas y estancias y no del universo (the nationalists pretend to worship the capacity of the Argentine mind, but want to limit the poetic exercise of this mind to a few poor local themes, as if we Argentinians could only talk of riversides and ranches)’ (). Fuentes was likewise concerned with asserting the fact that Latin Americans had the capacity to address ‘universal’ themes (Van Delden ). Most of Fuentes’ interviews and critical essays from the late s and s are dedicated to raising the profile of the new literature coming out of Latin America by the generation to which he belonged: the Boom generation. José Donoso, an author closely connected to the Boom, attributes Fuentes with the first decisively conscious and active role in working towards the ‘internationalization’ of the Hispanic-American novel (). It was clear that Fuentes was operating with a doble mirada (double view) both inwards towards domestic politics and outwards towards his international literary standing. Nevertheless, despite attempts by Fuentes to open up Mexican culture to the rest of the world, the exclusions from the elite-run modernisation projects began to threaten Mexico’s national-popular hegemony. By the late s when Fuentes and Pacheco were producing their novels, ‘the threat or possibility of revolution became the dominant horizon for Latin American subaltern and intellectual sectors’ (Other Side ). For Williams, this effervescent atmosphere was a reaction to the failure of states such as Mexico to ‘integrate all their inhabitants as citizens with equal rights, equal protection, and equal representation’ (Other Side ). This threat, in turn,

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

contributed to the increased militarisation of the late s with national security policies becoming deemed necessary to ‘keep the lid on social tensions and the increasing possibility of popular insurrection’ (Other Side ). The international context of unrest, coupled with the influence of the rebellious US counterculture in Mexico led public figures and student groups to speak out more frankly than at any other time since the institutionalisation of the PRI. This crisis in ‘authority’ and, in particular, that of the nation-state, is registered in the form and content of the novels Cambio de piel and Morirás lejos. Despite the fact that Mexican and global tensions were almost at their peak there remained significant pressure, culturally speaking, from nationalist critics for work to remain ‘Mexican’ in its outlook and allegiances (Van Delden ). It is, however, at this point that authors such as Fuentes and Pacheco move away from the search for a national ‘essence’, or articulation of a specific ‘fictive ethnicity’ and instead engage with more global issues. Their engagements with Nazism and the Holocaust were a function of the deep loss of confidence in the authority of nations. Nevertheless, however disillusioned Fuentes was when it came to closed identitarian structures, an examination of his literary critical work La nueva novela hispanoamericana shows that he was also concerned with balancing out the distribution of ‘universal culture’; or finding Mexico’s ‘possible role in a culturally pluralistic world’ as Malva E. Filer puts it. He wanted Latin Americans to use the ‘universality of language’ to create myths that would write Mexican history into ‘universal history’ and help cement the decentring of European culture, that had begun with the two world wars.

The Novel as Myth, Language and Structure Cambio de piel and Morirás lejos warrant chapter-length discussions of their own, but since the authors are not from the generation upon which I am focusing, I shall limit myself to exemplifying a few points about the place the novels occupy both in terms of the Mexican cultural history I have just charted, and as significant prior engagements with Nazism and the Holocaust that Volpi and Padilla were evidently familiar with. These novels were written at a time of increasing protest and militarisation contributing to – and exacerbated by – an overall mistrust of authority, both in the Mexican context and globally. Protests about the Vietnam War were reaching their peak in the United States, and student and worker tensions were building towards the well-known protests that culminated in repression in many cases in , a year after the publication of these two

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novels. Mexico was an extreme case in this regard; it was during October of that year that it experienced one of the watershed moments in terms of the public image of the PRI: the massacre of Tlatelolco. This involved the deadly repression of a student protest in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in which around three hundred people are thought to have been killed, and many more were imprisoned. It is after this that the Mexican middle classes were said to have ‘woken from the dream’ to paraphrase the title of Louise E. Walker’s recent book charting the diminished faith in the PRI following this shocking event. After this act of repression, the government was no longer seen as a strict but benevolent father of the big ‘Revolutionary Family’ but a repressive killing machine, willing to fire upon its own ‘children’ (Zolov ). Cambio de piel and Morirás lejos could not have registered the massacre since they were published the year before it happened, but they did bear witness to the deep crisis in authority sweeping Mexico and the rest of the world. This manifested itself in a rejection of narrative authority within the texts themselves on multiple levels. The novels are both fragmented, non-chronological, and do not adhere to traditional formal models. Above all, they self-reflexively disarticulate their own narratives as they go along, refusing the traditional relationship between didactic narrator and passive reader / consumer. Cambio de piel contains multiple shifting voices in first, second and third person. At another level a meta-commentator discusses the decisions of the supposed overall narrator Freddy Lambert. Morirás Lejos is just as fragmented as Cambio de piel, and even more experimental in terms of the format of text and punctuation on the page; sometimes words and clauses zigzag out from the margins, and much of the prose is given in the form of listed hypotheses. It is a much shorter novel than Cambio de piel and somewhat more readable due to the use of classificatory elements such as a], b], c] and so on, which relate to the central enigma of whether the man sitting on a bench reading El Universal is there to kill the Nazi (called ‘eme’) watching him from the window. However, this classification system which might give a superficial semblance of order is destabilised at the level of the content. The points contradict each other and metafictional elements call into question whether the characters or locations even exist at all ‘k] El pozo no existe, el parque no existe, la ciudad no existe (k] The well does not exist, the park does not exist, the city does not exist)’ (Pacheco ). Comments such as these serve to undermine the authority of the text and leave the reader with no certainty regarding any ‘message’ that may be offered. This is compounded by the presentation of six different possible endings for the reader to choose between.

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

Neither of the novels provides any sense of resolution to the questions that they raise. This refusal to provide any certainty or to convey any ‘message’ as such suggests a rejection of closure, which in much post– World War II philosophy was associated with totalitarianism. In Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, he critiques art’s ‘reconciling glow’ and instead calls upon art to ‘turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber’ (–). In Fuentes’ own work of criticism-cum-Boom manifesto La nueva novela hispanoamericana he sees ‘apertura (openness)’ and ‘ambigu¨edad (ambiguity)’ as a remedy to both Latin America’s foundation in feudal and hierarchical language of the colony, and the subsequent language of the bourgeois elites who sought ‘una literatura sublimante, que las salvase de la vulgaridad y les otorgase un aura “esencial”, “permanente”, inmóvil (a sublimating literature, that would save them from vulgarity and lend them an “essential”, “permanent”, “immobile” quality)’ (). We see here the influence of structuralism on Fuentes, and the idea that deciphering the codes of language could reveal information about society at large. Fuentes goes on to state that the contradictory and ambiguous world in which the Latin American intellectual lives, obliges them to ‘radicalizar su obra no sólo en el presente, sino hacia el futuro y hacia el pasado (radicalize their work, not only in the present, but towards the future and towards the past)’ (nueva novela ). The resistance to closure at all temporal stages (past, present, and future) further resists the totalitarian ideological structure, as defined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, she defines ideology as a closed system which provides, and is enabled by, a self-fulfilling interpretative key that accounts for all historical eventualities: ‘Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process – the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future – because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas’ (Arendt ). It is clear that by refusing closure or facile interpretation Fuentes is, one the one hand, attempting to respond to the kind of aesthetic mandate put forward by thinkers such as Adorno. However, on the other hand, in La nueva novela we see an adherence to a certain kind of structuralist logic involving the belief in the universality of the structures of language, which undermines this claim to radical openness. This ambiguity, in itself, betrays the fact that it was around this time that the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism was beginning to be made by the younger generation of French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, who was two years younger than Fuentes and who was also working closely with Paul Ricœur during Fuentes’ time in France in the s (Bennington ).

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The Novel as Myth, Language and Structure

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In La nueva novela Fuentes cites the influence of Ricœur who, around the time when Fuentes was writing Cambio de piel and La nueva novela, was recognising the limits of Saussurian structural linguistics and asserting the openness of language as discourse, as opposed to the closure of language as sign and formula. Ricœur’s essay, which is explicitly quoted by Fuentes, ‘Structure – event – word’ discusses ‘the end of structuralism conceived of as a science of taxonomies, closed inventories and already settled combinations’ (‘Structure’ ). Nevertheless, Fuentes’ overall proposal in La nueva novela, more closely approximates Ricœur’s position as articulated in ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’, a chapter from History and Truth, originally published in , which it is worth briefly summarising. At the start of the chapter, Ricœur holds that the separation of humanity into distinct ‘cultures’ is inevitable because it has always been that way, as evident in the splintered distribution of diverse languages. However, in the chapter as a whole he is concerned with the need for cultures to encounter each other, and he sets out the terms by which this might happen. Indeed, he refers to ‘Human truth’ as a confrontation between ‘civilizations’ in which ‘each civilization will work out its perception of the world by confronting all others’ (). And yet, the language Ricœur uses to describe this relationship betrays the limitations of this statement. He says, ‘In order to confront a self other than one’s own self one must first have a self’, then further on, ‘When one has penetrated to the depths of singularity, one feels that it is harmonious with every other’ (). In this chapter ‘self’, ‘one’ and ‘singularity’ are problematically interchanged with ‘civilization’, ‘nation’ and ‘cultures’. The equation of the singular self to ‘civilization’ is evident in the following phrase ‘I affirm myself in my origins and give myself to another’s imagination in accordance with his different civilization’ (). However, when it comes down to what defines the broader ‘civilization’ (Ricœur cites ‘Islamic’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘European’ here) he says that one needs ‘a writer, a thinker, a sage’ in other words a ‘privileged storyteller’ to articulate this ‘culture’ (). Ricœur argues that ‘the way in which a nation develops its culture is based upon a law of fidelity and creation; a culture dies as soon as it is no longer renewed and recreated’ referring, here, to the role of the artist in this necessary renewal (). This essay by Ricœur, therefore, straddles the boundary between openness and closure by suggesting that there can be such a thing as ‘European’, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Islamic’ civilisations without recognising the internal differences that each contains (implying closure), whilst at the same time advocating that these civilisations undergo a constant ‘renewal’ of their culture, in contact with the other civilisations

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

Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

(implying openness). This same contradiction is observable in La nueva novela. Consider the following passage: Después de [Thomas] Mann, no se puede volver a escribir como Mann porque los europeos saben que su cultura ya no es central; el poder se desplaza a los polos excéntricos previstos por Alexis de Tocqueville: los Estados Unidos y Rusia; la conciencia – la exigencia de ser – se desplaza a la excentricidad central, sin polo: América Latina, África y Asia. Pero al perder su universalidad a-priori, y a-crítica, el escritor europeo descubre que debe conquistar una nueva universalidad, esta vez verdaderamente común al quehacer literario: la universalidad de la imaginación mítica, inseparable de la universalidad de las estructuras del lenguaje. After [Thomas] Mann, it is not possible to write again like Mann because the Europeans know that their culture is no longer central; power has been displaced to the eccentric poles as predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville: the United States and Russia; the conscience – the requirement of being – is displaced to the central eccentricity, without a pole: Latin America, Africa and Asia. But by losing his universality a-priori, and a-critically, the European writer discovers that he must conquer a new universality, this time really common to the literary exercise: the universality of the mythic imagination, inseparable from the universality of the structures of language. (Fuentes, nueva novela )

The operation described here as necessary for the ‘European’ in terms of finding a universality that includes everyone, is a slight variation of what Fuentes calls upon the Latin American writer to do which is to use the universality of the structures of language to create their own universal myths. As such, in La nueva novela Fuentes is ultimately concerned with his role and that of a few other ‘privileged storytellers’ in creating the ‘myths’ that can decentre European cultural producers as arbiters of the ‘universal’. The difference between Nancy’s position and Ricœur’s as articulated in ‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures’ is that Nancy holds, in the first instance, that the differences within civilisations are as great as those between civilisations; and second, that grouping persons together to ‘encounter’ each other as ‘civilisations’ leads to more conflict than it does understanding. Nancy extends Arendt’s and others’ work to show that all identification mechanisms, even a desire for individual sovereignty, are ‘totalitarian’ in the sense of leading to violence towards the Other. In Cambio de piel there is a warning against identitarian ‘closure’ and the violence that results from a desire for ‘sovereignty’ (national or individual). The following plot thread from the end of the novel shows that Fuentes understands the danger of identitarian closure. The quotations illuminate

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The Novel as Myth, Language and Structure

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both the violence towards the Other that can arise from such closure, and likewise the frustration of creativity that is also a consequence of it. In the first instance, Fuentes disrupts identification (national, ethnic, religious or otherwise) throughout the novel by pairing and doubling the main characters with each other (of different nationalities / religions, etc.) and then in turn with lesser-characters, and so on. Elizabeth the (possibly) NorthAmerican Jew is doubled in Isabel, the young sexually-liberated Mexican, and they both swap sexual partners between Javier the frustrated Mexican writer, and Franz, the German concentration camp architect. At the end of the novel the two foreigners remain trapped within the pyramid at Cholula (as if swallowed up by Mexico’s pre-Hispanic bowels) and Javier and Isabel, the two Mexicans, drive off together. Isabel fantasises about becoming Javier’s muse and the stimulus for the renovation of his writing (significant given that she is a Mexican and they have abandoned the foreigners, leaving them to die). However, it turns out that Javier cannot stand to have his personal autonomy taken away, anticipating that Isabel will merely come to fulfil the role that Elizabeth did – an old and oppressive anchor – not a young rejuvenating inspiration. As such, Javier pursues his personal independence (or ‘sovereignty’) by strangling her with a ‘rebozo’, the traditional Mexican shawl used by mothers and pregnant women (Fuentes, Cambio ). It is very clear from the way in which this section of the novel plays out that the identitarian purification that gives Isabel and Javier the possibility of forging a future together as ‘Mexicans’ is both founded upon violence (the necessary confinement of the foreigners) and does not lead to the autonomous creative literary output that they appeared to dream of at first. Sovereignty is shown to be a matter of ‘where does one draw the line’ given that Javier decides he needs autonomy not only from the foreigners but now from Isabel, the other Mexican, in order to be creative, which leads to further violence (her death). Moreover, predictably, this isolation does not solve the problem of his creative productivity, as emblematised by his strangling of her with a Mexican shawl traditionally used in conjunction with reproduction and new life. This condemnation of identitarian enclosure can be seen as an extension of Fuentes’ critique of the Mexican state’s closed and inward-looking status of the s. In failing to endorse the modernist notion of an ‘original voice’ (by engaging with – and incorporating – mass cultural references, for example), Fuentes seems to acknowledge the inevitable plurality of voices that make up a writer’s vision in an increasingly complex global context. From the passage analysed it appears that Fuentes knows that identitarian closure in terms of ‘civilization’ or ‘national’ isolation leads to violence.

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

Yet in practice he is still concerned with his status as Mexico’s privileged storyteller that can ‘renew’ culture in the sense described by Ricœur. This is justified, for Fuentes, in the understanding that the European ‘civilization’ has enjoyed a privileged status in regards to the creation of culture as ‘universal’ for a long time, and that this therefore needs to be re-balanced from the ‘periphery’. Secondly, by using ‘myth’ (in this case classical myths) in a dialectical fashion, as argued by Steven Boldy, Fuentes settles on ‘openness’ rather than ‘closure’ paving the way for further and ongoing ‘renewal’ (The Narrative ). Derrida, writing at this time, understands (along with Fuentes) that European culture has been ‘dislocated’ or ‘forced to stop thinking of itself as the culture of reference’ (‘Structure’ ). According to Fuentes this opens up a space for Latin American authors to take up themes that used to be ‘taboo’ for them as part of the act of cultural decentring. Referring to this he cites as an example, precisely, Morirás lejos with reference to two events, in particular, that the novel engages with: ‘la destrucción de Jerusalén por las legiones romanas de Tito y el exterminio de los judíos en los campos de concentración nazis (the destruction of Jerusalem by Tito’s roman legions and the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi Concentration Camps)’ (nueva novela –). In this case, it is Roman history and Nazi history that Latin Americans are now entitled to incorporate into their frame of analysis. Fuentes, furthermore, says that ‘nuestros escritores pueden dirigir sus preguntas no sólo al presente latinoamericano sino también a un futuro que, cada vez más, también será común al nivel de la cultura y de la condición espiritual de todos los hombres (our writers can now direct their questions not only to the Latin American present, but also to a future which, increasingly, will also be common at the level of culture and in terms of the spiritual condition of all men)’ (). In other words, themes such as classical history and Nazism might be necessary not only for denouncing European imperialism, but also for understanding and shaping a common future. Volpi and Padilla take this one step further insofar as they deal with themes, according to Fuentes, not traditionally approached by Latin American authors but they also completely refrain from exploring, what Ricœur calls, the ‘subconscious’ or ‘unconscious’ of the ‘cultural resources of a nation’ (History ); in other words, they are not concerned with the other half of Fuentes’ task which is to articulate the Mexican ‘myths’ that define the civilisation’s place within this multi-centred history. What we have in Volpi and Padilla’s texts, then, can be configured as the suspension – or ‘interruption’, as Nancy would have it – of the myth of the origin, which is enacted in the severing of the text from any form of

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Interrupting the Myth

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national reference. They speak, as shall be shown, from the position of a ‘singular voice’, thus directly acknowledging the fact that closed civilisations do not exist.

Interrupting the Myth In ‘The Nazi Myth’, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy underscore exactly why myth-making is such a dangerous operation, with specific reference to the Nazi ‘case-study’. They do so by examining both Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, a theoretical companion to the Nazi project, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, they find that ‘myth’ is not precisely configured as they defined it, a ‘narrative symbolizing the origin’, but is in fact a power in and of itself: ‘the power to bring together the fundamental forces and directions of an individual or of a people, the power of a subterranean, invisible, nonempirical identity’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ). We see, therefore, that myth still fulfils, for Rosenberg, the function of an identificatory mechanism, but the difference that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe highlight is that, in Rosenberg’s terms, myth ‘designates this identity as the identity of something which is not given, neither as fact, nor as discourse, but which is dreamed’ (). It is presented as an originary dream that ‘Germany’ needed to ‘dream’ (). Myth in this configuration is, therefore, bound up with belief: ‘A total belief, an immediate adhesion to the dreamed figure’, this ‘figure’ is in turn a ‘type’, which is ‘the realisation of the singular identity conveyed by the dream’ (). Hitler was, therefore, the ‘visionary’ who dreamed the dream of the German ‘subject’ or ‘type’ (the Aryan subject) and articulated it. The role of the ‘people’ was simply to believe in it. Hitler fulfilled the role of not only articulating the German ‘subject’ but also, in Arendt’s terms, presenting an interpretative key that would ideologically integrate the past, present and future. In this case, it was that the Jews were responsible for all of the ills in society, and that their elimination would facilitate the communion between blood and soil and the prospering of the German people. In the following passage from Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor, we see the myth-making operation described, with Hitler cast as the privileged storyteller that binds the tribe together though the notion of a shared future. It also comments on how powerful the narrative is, given the human tendency to seek meaning and direction: ¿Por qué somos débiles? Por la simple razón de que no conocemos el futuro. En medio de la confusión permanente, nunca falta quien aprovecha la ceguera ajena para aliviar sus propios temores. Alguien se eleva por encima

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation de los otros y, como si se tratase del mayor acto de heroísmo, insiste en ser dueño de una verdad superior. Convencido de sus propósitos, se lanza a procurar el bien de su pueblo, de su raza, de sus amigos, de sus familias o de sus amantes, según el caso, imponiendo su propia fe a la incertidumbre ajena. Toda verdad proclamada es un acto de Violencia, una simulación, un engaño. ¿Cuándo un débil se convierte en fuerte? No es tan complicado. Todo aquel que puede hacer creer a los demás – a los demás débiles – que conoce mejor el futuro es capaz de dominar a los otros. Su influencia, claro está, se basa en una ilusión: como señaló Max Weber, el poder no es más que la capacidad de predecir, con la mayor exactitud posible, la conducta ajena. Hitler era un visionario. Why are we weak? For the simple reason that we do not know the future. In the middle of permanent confusion, someone never fails to take advantage of others’ blindness in order to alieviate their own fears. Someone elevates themselves above others and, as if it consisted of the biggest act of herioism, proclaims themselves guardian of a superior truth. Convinced of their proposals they throw themselves into acquiring the best for their people, their race, their friends, their families, or their lovers, according to each case. Every truth proclaimed is an act of violence, a simulation, a deceit. When does a weak person become strong? It is not too complicated. Anyone who can make others believe – the weaker ones – that they know the future better, is capable of dominating them. Their influence, clearly, is based upon an illusion: as signalled by Max Weber, power is nothing more than the capacity to predict, with the greatest possible precision, the behaviour of others. Hitler was a visionary. (Volpi, En busca )

The middle section shows precisely the way in which these narratives are designed to bind people together in a closed privileged group of beneficiaries, ‘su pueblo, su raza, sus amigos (their people, their race, their friends)’. By determining an inside which relies on the (mythic) ‘common origins’ of the chosen people there is, of course, always an outside. Furthermore, it confirms the human desire for ‘directive images’ that Nancy flags up in The Sense of the World as being another of these human traits that derails community and leads to violence (). Both En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon play with mythic identification but destabilise the claims to their universality, which was held up rhetorically in Fuentes’ La nueva novela. As the title En busca de Klingsor suggests, identity is the central question of the novel, specifically the search for the vilified ‘Klingsor’, a scientist rumoured to be the chief advisor to Hitler regarding scientific policy of the Reich. Crucially, the true identity of Klingsor is never revealed, and the very existence of this character is questioned. The protagonist, Links, as part of his attempt to convince Francis Bacon (the significantly named military / physicist / detective from

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Interrupting the Myth

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the United States) that he is not Klingsor, narrates the story of Parsifal, the opera by Richard Wagner that was partly based on the quest for the Holy Grail. Links represents the cursed and wounded Amfortas whose absolution ultimately lies in the hands of Parsifal (corresponding, in the narrative, to Bacon). Despite the events playing out more or less similarly to the story of the opera, they radically diverge at the end. Kundry, the femme fatale of the opera is represented by Irene who has tried to seduce Bacon (Parsifal), but who turns out to be a spy for the Soviets. At the end, instead of Parsifal / Bacon absolving Amfortas / Links, and Kundry / Irene dropping dead, Bacon is persuaded by Irene to denounce Links as Klingsor and run away with her. As such, any determined outcome or premonition of the future in the novel that may have been made based on one being familiar with Parsifal is actively dismantled by the actual ending of the novel. Although the recounting of the story, and our identification with Links as the narrator, might incline us to think he is innocent, we cannot be fully sure; and, as with Fuentes and Pacheco’s novels, definitive resolution is not provided. In Amphitryon identity is also central to the plot and is destabilised on multiple different levels. The title itself refers to a Greek mythological figure, Amphitryon, and subsequent dramatic interpretations of his life by the likes of the seventeenth-century French playwright Molière. This myth tells of the seduction of Amphitryon’s wife by the God Jupiter who impersonates Amphitryon while he is at war. The myth corresponds to Padilla’s story only insofar as they are both about shifting identities; there is no corresponding romantic dimension, nor resolution to the identitarian enigma, as in the original myth (when Jupiter reveals the deception to Amphitryon). As such, again, the identificatory mechanism that the title of the myth / novel might evoke is disrupted. Padilla’s novel diffuses, swaps and fragments identity on a personal level more radically than Volpi’s. It begins with the following epigraph by Fernando Pessoa who notoriously defied the Cartesian belief in the individual subject by inventing and writing under many fictive identities: Sinto que sou ninguén salvo uma sombra De um vulto que não vejo e que me assombra, E em nada existo como a treva fria. I feel that I am nobody, but a shadow Of a face that I cannot see and that frightens me, And I exist in nothing, like the cold darkness. (Padilla, Amphitryon epigraph)

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

This last verse of the  poem ‘Súbita mão de algum fantasma oculto (Abrupt hand of a hidden ghost)’ anticipates a novel full of shadowy ‘figures’ caught up in the wars of the first half of the twentieth century, the context in which Pessoa, himself, was writing. The ambiguity with regards to identity is present in the opening sentence of the novel which reads, ‘Mi padre decía llamarse Viktor Kretzschmar (My father said he was called Viktor Kretzschmar)’ (Padilla ). He says he was called or ‘decía llamarse’ Viktor Kretzschmar but this first narrator’s father turns out to have swapped his identity in a game of chess in order to escape conscription to serve on the Eastern Front in the First World War on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is just one of many different swaps over games of chess that leave the reader struggling to keep track of who is inhabiting which name. This dissolution of identities and the lack of correlation between names, passports, and flesh, resists the biopolitical classification attempted by states in order to have control over their populations. Nevertheless, the novel also shows the extent to which ideological formations such as national, ethnic or regional identities still appear to govern the actions people take. Amphitryon emphasises the anonymity of war in contrast to overdetermined identitarian loyalties, and the broken promises made by states seeking to boost their fighting numbers at any cost: ‘En esa guerra que parecía prolongarse hasta el infinito, tarde o temprano todos los hombres terminarían desangrándose en la misma trinchera. Y sus nombres, como sus vidas, se igualarían al fin en el más rotundo de los anonimatos (In this war that appeared to prolong itself ad infinitum, sooner or later all of the men would end up bleeding to death in the same trench. And their names, like their lives, would end in the most decisive anonymity)’ (Padilla ). The sense of scepticism towards the kinds of broken promises made by states to the fighting population is expressed by a character, Goliadkin, who speaks disparagingly of any kind of loyalty or what he calls ‘aborrecible romanticismo (abhorrent romanticism)’ (Padilla ). Talking about the state of affairs with regards to all of the complicated identitarian struggles during and prior to the First World War he says: Pocos años atrás cien mil cosacos se habían hecho matar en los Cárpatos contra los prusianos. Y ahora otros tantos luchaban por el Káiser y el Emperador sobre la esperanza de que éstos sabrían arrebatar a Kerensky un pedazo de tierra rusa donde enterrar a sus muertos. El inútil y eterno peregrinar de los jinetes ucranianos, divididos siempre entre la lealtad a su raza y las promesas incumplidas de recibir un día, en pago a sus servicios, una nación por demás improbable se repetía así con su acostumbrado saldo de traiciones, masacres y desengaños.

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Interrupting the Myth

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Only a few years before one hundred thousand Cossacks had got themselves killed in the Carpathians against the Prussians. And now so many others are fighting for the Kaiser and the Emperor based upon the hope that they will know how to snatch Kerensky, a piece of Russian territory for them to bury their dead in. The useless and eternal pilgrimage of Ukrainian horsemen, eternally divided between their loyalty to their race and the unfulfilled promises of one day receiving a payment for their services, a nation [wholly implausible], repeated itself with the usual tariff of betrayal, massacre and disappointment. (Padilla )

This passage highlights the sheer number of people persuaded to sacrifice themselves for a postponed or uncertain future community, or piece of land, which never arrives; and which, even if it did, they would most probably not be there to see. These anonymous soldiers are duped into sacrificing themselves for a future community by their ‘loyalty to their race’, in other words, their identity. The final aspect of the novel relevant to this discussion is the detectivesque plot involving a conspiracy theory that copies of Nazi officers were created in order to attempt a coup to overthrow Hitler. Since the coup was discovered and aborted, any doubles who were not immediately caught had to go on the run. This called into question whether the Nazi officers who were later tried for war crimes were actually the officers themselves or their doubles. In this case, it is inferred that one of the novel’s protagonists may have been surgically made to resemble Eichmann and therefore may have been wrongly imprisoned. The resolution of the ‘enigma’ in Amphitryon regarding the true identity of Eichmann remains incomplete because the manuscript containing a coded solution is confiscated by a man with a gun. In this sense the novel sees the triumph of a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ defying the traditional detective novel’s paradigm of resolution by code breaking, empirical observation, or logical deduction. The doubling of Eichmann and the multiplication of the name Francis Bacon in En busca de Klingsor, are just two examples of duplications and fragmentations of identities which occur in the novels, echoing a popular Boom and modernist trope, such as that seen in Cambio de piel, but giving it a postmodernist twist. The difference between modernist ‘doubles’ and postmodernist ‘copies’ is that the doubling tends to represent, in psychoanalytical terms, parts of oneself that have been psychically rejected, leading to them to be killed off, or defeated (for example, the foreigner Franz to the Mexican writer Javier in Cambio de piel). Postmodern ‘copies’, on the other hand, are evidence of the plurality or ever-changing nature of the self; in other words, they do not represent a deeper psychic

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

meaning. The following quotation from The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction by Gordon Slethaug could well describe the function of the double as we have seen it in Padilla’s novel: ‘moving away from a consideration of the Cartesian self – an indivisible, unified, continuous, and fixed identity – and universal absolutes, the double in postmodern fiction explores a divided and discontinuous self in a fragmented universe. Its mission is to decenter the concept of the self, to view human reality as a construct, and to explore the inevitable drift of signifiers away from their referents’ (). The dominant signifiers of ‘self’ – the proper names – drift away from their referents throughout the novel as a means of resistance to the saturated identitarian landscape of competing sovereignties during the First and Second World Wars.

Premature Post-Mexicanity? In this final section, I take up the story of Mexican ‘myth-making’ where I left off with the publication of Cambio de piel and Morirás lejos in , and the tragic events of Tlatelolco the following year in , to complete the story up to the turn of the millennium when Volpi and Padilla’s novels were published. In La imaginación y el poder, Volpi gives a good account of the intellectual landscape leading up to, and after, the watershed moment of the Tlatelolco Massacre, himself situating the Mexican ‘crisis of authority’ in the wider global moment of effervescent political activity. Fuentes is one of the figures that Volpi determines to be a key contributor to the constellation of influential ideas circulating during the lead up to the events of . Volpi addresses at length the significance of the reception of Cambio de piel taking the time to analyse it in the context of Fuentes’ wider writings, and examine the reaction it provoked both at home and abroad. In Mexico he finds that the debate coalesced around the issues of whether reading the novel was a painful experience, or whether, according to Fuentes’ friend Emmanuel Carballo, it was ‘la única aportación significativa que México ha hecho, en los últimos años, a la novela universal del siglo  (the only significant contribution that Mexico has made, in the last few years, to the universal novel of the twentieth century)’ (quoted in Volpi ). Testifying to the strong support for the novel in certain spheres Volpi says, ‘Si sólo se hiciera caso a la crítica literaria publicada en La Cultura en México en aquel momento, la conclusión sería que en México sólo había un narrador y una novela dignos del país: Carlos Fuentes y Cambio de piel (If one was only to take notice of the literary criticism published in La Cultura en México¸ at that time, the conclusion

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Premature Post-Mexicanity?

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would be that in Mexico there was only one worthy narrator and novel in the country: Carlos Fuentes and Cambio de piel)’ (). Cambio de piel achieved international success winning the Premio Biblioteca Breve of the Spanish editorial Seix Barral, and its popularity rose even further when it was censored by the Franco regime. Volpi makes the personal assessment that it was indeed Fuentes’ most ambitious novel yet, and achieves ‘una valiosa renovación del lenguaje narrativo (a courageous renovation of narrative language)’ (). Nevertheless, in a less flattering comparison Volpi compares Fuentes’ ambition with regards to Cambio de Piel (in terms of the desire to be admired abroad) to the project of the Mexican Olympics, which was the source of the severity of the repression at Tlatelolco: ‘Proyectos ajenos, modelos antagónicos si se quiere, pero en ambos casos está presente una idéntica obsesión por el reconocimiento mundial (Different projects, antagonistic models if you like, but present in both cases is an identical obsession with global recognition)’ (). Volpi presents Cambio de piel as an embodiment of Fuentes’ desire to cement his position alongside Julio Cortázar and Vargas Llosa at the heights of Latin American experimental literary production, with their acclaimed works Rayuela () and La casa verde (), respectively (La imaginación ). In Volpi’s eyes, after the publication of Cambio de piel, Fuentes joined a club over the next few years: ‘la del escritor que se siente vilipendiado en su país y que, sin embargo, recibe un clamoroso éxito internacional (that of the writer deamonised in their own country, and who nevertheless receives uproarious international success)’ (La imaginación ). It is likely that Volpi identified with that situation as he wrote En busca de Klingsor in Spain, with the same desire for international recognition, but with a project that would end up receiving heavy criticism by national commentators for the lack of Mexican content. Volpi keenly highlights the fact that productive literary discussion of Cambio de piel was absent in Mexico, and the national critics were more interested in the person than the work or its aesthetic or philosophical value (). The reproduction, at length, in Imaginación y poder of a damning assessment of the state of Latin American criticism by Fuentes in an interview in Nuevo Mundo in Paris, around the time of the publication of Cambio de piel seems like an unsubtle cypher for that which Volpi wishes to express following the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the Manifiesto Crack which led both him and Padilla to take their refuge abroad at the time of writing of La Imaginación y el poder, En busca de Klingsor, and, in the case of Padilla, Amphitryon. In the interview Fuentes says the following, ‘El novelista latinoamericano, por lo común, debe esperar a que sus libros sean

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

publicados en Europa y en Estados Unidos para establecer un diálogo crítico. El crítico en América Latina por lo general es monolingu¨e, provinciano, y no ha leído las obras críticas fundamentales del pasado y del presente (The Latin American novelist, in general, has to hope that their books will be published in Europe and in the United States in order for a critical dialogue to be established. Criticism in Latin American, on the whole, is monolingual, provincial, and has not read the fundamental critical works of the past and of the present)’ (quoted in Volpi, La imaginación ). Whether or not this was the case, or to the extent that Fuentes suggests, by the time En busca de Klingsor was published, Volpi’s work was certainly received with a high level of culturally nationalist consternation. Volpi and Padilla’s novels were received in a Mexican context still marked by a strong cultural nationalism and the authors were called upon to justify their lack of concern for ‘Mexican’ issues. Felipe Coria described them as ‘renunciando a ser mexicanos (renouncing being Mexicans)’ (quoted in Ortega Ávila). In a  interview responding to this kind of criticism Volpi says: Para mí era absolutamente natural escribir sobre un país que no fuera el mío – por un lado, continuando una vasta tradición latinoamericana que tiene su punto medular en Borges – y no dejó de sorprenderme que la crítica señalara con tanta asiduidad esta aparente voluntad de distanciarme de lo latinoamericano. Ahora simplemente creo que un escritor latinoamericano puede escribir sobre cualquier tema posible con la misma naturalidad crítica. For me it was absolutely natural to write about a country that was not my own – on the one hand continuing a vast Latin American tradition that has its central locus in Borges – and it never ceased to surprise me that critics will signal with such assiduousness this apparent desire to distance myself from ‘the Latin American’. Now, I simply believe, that a Latin American author can write about any given topic with the same critical capability. (En busca de Volpi –)

Volpi was probably thinking again of Borges’ ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’ which, likewise, Fuentes had quoted all those years before in the Revista Mexicana de Literatura to justify Latin Americans’ engagement with ‘universal’ themes. In the essay Borges argues, not only that a Latin American writer could deal with ‘cualquier tema posible con la misma naturalidad crítica (any given topic with the same critical capability)’ (La imaginación ), but that they were in fact in a privileged position to innovate within Western culture being at once on the inside and the

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outside of such culture. Relevant here is Borges’ statement about the narrowness of the scope for invention if artists are limited to a confined set of ‘national’ themes, saying ‘Shakespeare se habría asombrado si hubieran pretendido limitarlo a temas ingleses (Shakespeare would have been horrified if they had tried to limit him to English topics)’ (‘El escritor’ ). The main difference between these two moments, however, is that when Borges was writing nations were arguably at the peak of their influence with postcolonial nationalist movements gaining strength all over the world, and Latin American states pursuing policies of self-reliance by creating Import Substitution Industries (ISIs). When Volpi and Padilla were writing, on the other hand, there had been two decades of integration of these economic markets into the globalised economic system including the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in . Such free-market policies worked hard to erode state intervention, and reduce the significance of national borders for the expansion of trade and movement of capital. Nevertheless, politically, the state apparatus of the PRI took much longer to be dismantled than authoritarian regimes in other Latin American countries in which there had been much shorter-lived dictatorships. The advancing implementation of neoliberal market policies since the beginning of the s, economic crises, and the immanent replacement of PRI rule by that of another party for the first time in over  years left Mexico, at the time of writing of these novels, in a position of great change and uncertainty with regards to the future. The Tlatelolco Massacre in  and the corruption revealed by the Mexico City earthquake of  had turned the tide of public opinion on the PRI – from the population being able to tolerate the regime when times were good (for example the economic boom or so-called Mexican miracle of the s) – to wanting an end to the corruption and authoritarianism. Heavily influenced by US-favoured economic models from  onwards, the Carlos Salinas-Ernesto Zedillo era (–) did not see the need to alter the Mexican political model immediately (Camp ). A key difference for Mexico to other post-authoritarian transitions in the region, therefore, was that ‘whereas the rest of Latin America, almost without exception, moved dramatically away from authoritarian regimes, most of which were far more repressive than Mexico’s, Mexico dragged its feet to the very end of the twentieth century in making such a transition’ (Camp ). This feet dragging serves to help explain why, at this moment in  during the transition to democracy, Volpi and Padilla feel the need actively to turn

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

away from the ‘Mexican’ national project and ‘myth-making’ and take the opportunity to sever the relationship between state and intellectual. Volpi’s desire for the re-shaping of the relationship between intellectuals and the state in Mexico, in light of the ousting of the PRI, was outlined in his  article ‘The End of the Conspiracy’. In the article Volpi comes to the following conclusion: ‘if Mexican society has finally managed to complete its difficult divorce from the PRI party, then perhaps it is time for something similar to take place between Mexican intellectuals and political power. As with any separation process, the terms of the new relation must be clearly set forth in order to ensure that it is a more distant, healthy and advantageous one for Mexico’ (‘The End’ ). Volpi characterises the historical relationship between intellectuals and the Mexican state as expressed in the categories of ‘resentful opposer’ and ‘decorated sycophant’, or ‘conspirator’ and ‘bootlicker’. The bootlicker is the intellectual who will justify the ‘powerful person’s politics’, and have their services rewarded (). On the other hand, the ‘conspirators’ –those that oppose or criticise – must be ‘seduced, intimidated, persecuted or, in extreme cases, eliminated’ (‘The End’ ). By publishing a work which is apparently void of ‘Mexican’ concerns or locations (defying ongoing culturally nationalist expectations) Volpi and Padilla perform the new separation that Volpi outlines. In questioning identity on many different levels in En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon, as well as performing the separation of the intellectual from the articulation of national ‘imagined communities’, Volpi and Padilla interrupt the ‘myth of communion’ of the Mexican people (Nancy ). Interrupting the myth is that which Nancy deems the necessary task of literature. It is in this interruption that, for Nancy, a new form of community is articulated, that of being-in-common. It is not a community that is limited, closed to anyone, or demanding of sacrifice. This community relies not on the bonds between people, seeking to find privileges as one group over another, but spacing between each and every person, which prevents precisely such binding. Nancy calls this voice of interruption ‘literature’ but it is literature understood as the articulation of a ‘singular voice’ (Inoperative Community , ); not speaking on behalf of a community, but on behalf of a singular being. Both authors sign off their novels with a postface, initialled by themselves, which directly undermines the self-referential voice of the narrators prior to that, and emphasises the literary status of the text at hand despite their historical content and explicit bibliographic notes. It is my contention that this reclaiming of the narrative for themselves, indicates that the authors see

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literature in similar terms to those of Nancy: as the expression of a ‘singular voice’ with which to participate in an always-open community of other singular voices. In this chapter I have not dealt at length with all of the possible interpretations of different facets of these four rich novels but, rather, I have been concerned with what they represent as intellectual ‘gestures’ to be situated within a long and complex history of the relationship of artists to the state in twentieth-century Mexico. Writers in Mexico, as we have seen, contributed to the construction of Mexican ‘myths’, associating general characteristics and racial typologies to those that inhabited the Mexican territory well into the s and s. In his work to unify the Boom movement and in Cambio de piel, Fuentes shifted the focus from articulating internal essences to finding the mythic language that would bring Mexican (and Latin American) history into the narrative of universal history. Whilst the Boom shifted the horizons in terms of expectations for writers to participate in a more regionally-united cultural sphere, the Mexican establishment was not apparently ready for a complete detachment of novels from the Mexican or Latin American contexts at the turn of the millennium. For Volpi and Padilla the themes of Nazism and the Second World War can be broadly seen to complement a post-nationalist literary agenda. First, due to the fact that the Second World War is seen as relatively unassociated with Mexico, despite that nation’s contributions to the Allied cause, and acceptance of Jewish refugees which is now, however, a more controversial topic. Second, because Nazism and the Second World War (as well as the First World War in Amphitryon) provide exemplary case-studies of the paradoxes and dangers of identitarian logic and the competition for territorial sovereignty. Having introduced the idea of writing as a ‘singular voice’ as a way of escaping closed communitarian binding I now turn, in the final chapter, to two novels that embody that perspective much more clearly: both contain single male narrators, embedded within immediate familial and local structures, who share biographical details with the authors themselves.

Notes  In The Sense of the World Nancy writes: ‘The “someone” does not enter into a relation with other “someones,” nor is there a “community” that precedes interrelated individuals: the singular is not the particular, not a part of a group (species, gender, class, order). The relation is contemporaneous with the singularities’ ().

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

 This continuity is stressed in Nancy’s chapter ‘Myth Interrupted’ but also more systematically pursued in the article ‘The Nazi Myth’ written with Lacoue-Labarthe, as discussed in the Introduction to this book.  For example Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez.  Misunderstood comments such as these led to dual, and somewhat paradoxical, criticisms which came from both those who thought they were arrogant in what was perceived as an attempt to rupture with the Latin American tradition and others who objected to them presenting that rupture as a new phenomenon.  The Mexican literary establishment were forced to at least reconsider the talent of Volpi and Padilla when their novels received prestigious prizes in Spain: the Premio Biblioteca Breve () in the case of Volpi and Premio Primavera de novela () in the case of Padilla.  Illiteracy in Mexico was, for a large part of the twentieth century, a barrier to the reach of literature as a means of identity formation. Even when literacy figures improved, the television was already taking over in its influence upon households.  This ‘slippage’ can be explained via the mechanism examined in ‘The Nazi Myth’ by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy which discusses the reason why the ‘German subject’, as constructed in Nazi discourse was a racial type, as discussed in Chapter .  See Orestes Aguilar.  In his book La jaula de la melancholia, Bartra compares a number of these above described characterisations to different archetypes from the history of Western culture since antiquity (). One example of this is his relation of the virgin–whore dichotomy emblematised in Mexico by the ‘Virgen de Guadalupe’ and ‘la Malinche’ to the same biblical dichotomy (Bartra ). In doing so he deconstructs the identitarian pillars for the idea of a ‘homo Mexicanus’. He further highlights the logical fallacy of such identitarian groupings by intermittently making parallels between their characteristics and those of a mythical amphibious creature called the ‘axolotle’.  This vision was put forward in Fuentes’ novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz.  This figure is still debated. For a comprehensive account of the student movement and the massacre written at the time see Poniatowska. For other historical interpretations of the event and its effects see Toledo; Walker.  In Cambio de piel, however, a passage in which the electoral propaganda from the recent election of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is being rubbed off, is juxtaposed with the massacre by Cortés and his men at Cholula, in an uncanny prediction of the violence that would come to define Díaz Ordaz’s presidency the year after the novel was published.  This mocking of classification recalls Borges’ story ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’ and the famous passage quotes by Foucault in The Order of Things about the classification of animals in a ‘cierta enciclopedia china’: ‘los

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Premature Post-Mexicanity?

  



   



animales se dividen en (a) pertenecientes al Emperador, (b) embalsamados, (c) amaestrados, (d) lechones, (e) sirenas, (f ) fabulosos, (g) perros sueltos’ and so on. This perspective is put forward, amongst other places, in the essay ‘Structure – Word – Event’ that Fuentes cites in La nueva novela (). The essay was originally part of a symposium published in the periodical Esprit in May . Indeed, this is not the first time that Javier had violently prevented new life from being created; he previously forced Elizabeth to have an abortion. Francis Bacon, the renaissance philosopher whom Bacon is named after was one of the inventors of the empirical scientific method, key to Enlightenment thinking, whilst still holding on to the superstitions and faith in the old traditions of the Church and the English Monarchy. This combination is that criticised by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, of which there are resonances throughout the novel. ‘Imagined communities’ that demand the sacrifice of people for their future immanence, are not only condemned by Nancy, as we have seen, but also provided the impulse to theorise the origins of nationhood for Benedict Anderson. For him, ‘the central problem posed by nationalism’ is also the question of sacrifice: ‘what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices’, writing as he was during the intense conflicts in Indo-China of the s (Anderson ). I do not have space to explore the details of the different traits and sub-genres of detective fiction. See Simpson for the development of the genre and its evolution in the Latin American context. This operation was discussed in Chapter  in relation to Bolaño and Peres’ doubles, although those doubles also resisted being ‘killed off’ in the usual way. On Mexico’s transition see Camp. This marks a significant difference compared to the Southern Cone countries’ post-dictatorship circumstances. In the Southern Cone, the relatively quick turn to open-market policy on the part of the dictatorships, and then the relatively quick transitions to democracy (in comparison to the ‘dragging feet’ and ‘slow waning’ in the Mexican case) meant that there was less time to come to terms with unresolved issues. Cases of torture and disappearance were brutally swept under the rug, in the first instance, for fear of a return of the military, and, in the second, for the sake of the successful functioning of the newly neoliberal economic markets. Compared to the length of PRI governance in Mexico, the Southern Cone military regimes were shorter, and had co-opted many less members of society into their structures of ideological selfjustification. Despite its waning hegemony, the PRI had represented ‘Mexico’ and ‘Mexican politics’ for almost a whole lifespan. The task of dismantling it, perhaps seemed to Volpi and Padilla the most urgent task to undertake both at home and on the world stage. In other words, whereas the Southern Cone

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Myth Interrupted: Identity & Absence of Nation

countries turned to national healing, Mexico needed assurance that it could live without the PRI.  In a recent study, Daniela Gleizer argues that Mexico’s tolerance and acceptance of refugees from the Spanish Civil War has led to the misconception that they were as welcoming to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, whereas in fact policy under the Cárdenas administration forbade this immigration (). For details of Mexico’s contribution to the Allied cause see Niblo.

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 

Sovereignty, Democracy and ‘Nonselfsufficiency’ through Touch in Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub The narratives of Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub, are both centred predominantly on the relationships between a father and son. In Los informantes a feud between the narrator and his father is provoked by the son’s publishing of the memories of their Jewish family friend Sara. Her testimony about her family’s exile to Colombia following the outbreak of the Second World War, causes the narrator’s father to have to face up to his dubious actions undertaken during a time of harsh internal treatment of suspected axis sympathisers in Colombia. Laub’s novel, on the other hand, explores trauma in male members of three generations of the same family, the narrator, his father and his grandfather. The grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor, decides to make a new life in Brazil, but never speaks of his experiences prior to disembarking in Porto Alegre. He withdraws physically from those around him and eventually commits suicide when his son, the narrator’s father, is only fourteen. The father suffers the trauma of being the first to discover his father’s body after the suicide. In a typical trait of the so-called second generation after the Holocaust, the father tries to compensate for the distance he felt from his own father by over-identifying with the suffering of Auschwitz and narratives of Jewish oppression throughout history. The narrator, therefore, self-consciously positions himself in relation to this weighty cultural and personal memory that surrounds him whilst examining a traumatic moment in his own life: his involvement in the bullying of a young economically disadvantaged gentile boy João at his Jewish private school, a memory that is at odds with the narrative of Jewish oppression told to him by his father and his teachers. Both novels use accounts of family interactions to deal with questions such as the extent to which guilt, blame or trauma is inherited – questions which have a bearing on the way in which we can understand the legacies and consequences of prolonged conflicts such as the Colombian Violencia and the Second World War and its aftermath. Both novels have been 

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

subject to interpretations in which they are understood to represent narrative workings-through of events through which, as Luz Mary Giraldo puts it in relation to Los informantes, ‘el olvido regresa a la memoria y da la estocada final. Queda la palabra para exorcizar tanto dolor (forgetting turns to memory and gives the final stab. The written word is all that is left to exorcise such pain)’ (). However, contrary to this, I find that both novels make significant and deliberate departures from a straight-forward narrative-as-therapy model. In the case of Los informantes the therapeutic function of ‘the written word’ is directly called into question in the epigraph taken from ‘Sobre la corona (On the Crown)’ by Demosthenes: ‘Nunca te purificarás tú de las acciones por ti mismo allí realizadas; no hablarás tanto como para eso (You will never purify yourself from the actions you yourself have undertaken; you will never talk enough for that)’. This sums up the idea that language, specifically talking, is not a device for purification (contrary to the theory of the ‘talking cure’ made popular by Freudian psychoanalysis). In the novel the father, despite his willingness to talk, is unable to achieve self-purification (he, like the grandfather in Diário da Queda, also commits suicide). Talking and writing between the father and son seem only to exacerbate the distance between them. Touch, on the other hand, has a much more successful record of reconciliation in the novel. I therefore provide evidence to suggest that Vásquez places emphasis on forging relationships through embodied interactions and, ultimately, advocates for forgetting (rather than remembering and repeating) as a remedy to the generational inheritance of conflict that has plagued Colombia for over fifty years. Likewise, in the case of Diário da Queda, it is not a uni-directional talking cure model that will help the family members overcome their trauma. Talking and writing must instead be understood as sharing, or, as Jean-Luc Nancy also describes it, ‘compearing’: a two-way process that facilitates proximity and ‘interdependence’ (Sense ); and it also must be supplemented by touch and physical affection in order to have a chance of ending the record of suicide, depression and alcoholism that has plagued the narrator and his family through the generations. Laub has declared Diário da Queda to be a ‘fictional autobiography’. Regarding the extent to which the novel is faithful to his own biography, in an interview Laub said, ‘in some ways it is not biographical but in other ways . . . it is – not at the level of what the narrator is saying – but . . . I can see experiences that inform the book’ (Personal Interview.  Sept. ). This ambiguity seems to show an honest acknowledgement of the fact that writing is always, in some form, grounded in our own experience, but that

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Trauma and Memory Studies

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any attempt to translate a life into writing (whether fictional or not) is, by definition, a displacement into language – a representation – and thus an entirely new artefact. A complex matrix of debates from different contexts and disciplines have emerged around the genre of (fictional) autobiography. At first sight Laub would appear to engage with a literary autobiographical tradition associated with French production, as alluded to by a number of Brazilian literary critics (Hidalgo ; Barbosa do Amaral ). Fictional autobiography, and one of its specific forms: autofiction (a term coined by Serge Doubrovsky, and translated to ‘autoficção’ in Brazilian literary studies) has become an increasingly popular genre amongst contemporary Brazilian authors. However, Luciana Hidalgo, in an article about the trend in autoficção in Brazilian literature, warns of the term’s use having become ‘banalizada (banalized)’ in the Brazilian context (). ‘Autofiction’ comes with its own set of conventions, theorised by Doubrovsky, and exemplified in his work of autofiction Fils. These include dealing with family relationships (for example between fathers and sons as evinced in his original novel’s title), an engagement with psychoanalytical notions of narrative as therapy and Freudian ideas relating to the unconscious (the form often appearing as a stream of consciousness), and being shaped by an experience related to the Holocaust (Jones –). By that description, there are elements in common with Laub’s text (in particular father / son and Holocaust-related themes), and yet there are also key differences, which bring to the fore Laub’s critical deployment of the genre’s conventions. Laub’s distancing from some of the most notable conventions of ‘autofiction’ might be attributed to his hesitation towards a thoroughly enthusiastic embrace of psychoanalysis-as-cure, when compared with Doubrovsky who has been described as using his fiction to attempt to ‘prolonger son analyse (prolong his analysis)’ (Lejeune quoted in Jones ). Another thing that stands out in relation to Laub’s text is that, for Doubrovsky, the author of autofiction should include their proper name in the narrative, and take on the burden of criticism that might ensue. Neither does Laub use his proper name at any point, nor does he use the term ‘autofiction’ in describing his work, which would be natural given the term’s circulation in the Brazilian context.

Trauma and Memory Studies In Diário da Queda the weighty legacy of the Holocaust both in global terms and within private sphere of Laub’s own family, creates a bridge

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

between ‘personal’ questions regarding relationships, trauma, and identity and the ways in which these interact with more global concerns involving ongoing instances of genocide and conflict. Taking a different angle of approach to a number of existing studies, I posit that Laub’s novel demands to be read alongside an ever-growing corpus of global postHolocaust fiction and theory, as much as within contemporary trends in Brazilian literature, which has so far been the norm. I have found, for example, that that Laub’s work shares a number of characteristics identified by scholars in German-language third generation narratives. These include the impulse to ‘creatively re-invest’ in family histories; but also, more specifically, the presence of ‘multi-generational perspectives’, and an examination of the ‘complex and at times difficult processes by which family history is remembered and reconstructed’ (Heffernan and Pye ). Furthermore, there is a self-reflexive awareness of the possible ethical traps of creative remembering and an ultimate dedication to ‘preserving the boundaries between examples of self and the historical other’ (Seeman ). At stake in preserving these boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘historical other’ are debates about the ‘inheritance’ of Holocaust memory, on the one hand, and its ‘deterritorialisation’ and instrumentalisation on the other. The timeline by which Holocaust survivors and the societies within which they lived came to terms with what had happened to them was slow and drawn-out. The immediate post-war era was characterised by a generalised silence regarding the Holocaust, which – at that time – had not yet been named the ‘Holocaust’ or indeed the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’, as the Jewish Holocaust is also known. Levy and Sznaider () partially account for this due to there being very little information yet known, however they also highlight the paradox that some of the most shocking images of corpses and mass-graves had already begun to circulate in the public domain at that time (–). Public silence was mirrored by private silence since there was not yet a vocabulary or cognitive model framework for interpreting or describing what had happened; it was at this time that intellectuals such as those of the Frankfurt School, and individuals such as Primo Levi (discussed in the novel) began the task of creating these vocabularies (Levy and Sznaider ). In the s, an influential wave of ‘new memory studies’ emerged that drew upon – but also revised – ideas developed as part of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in the relationship between memory and culture, as discussed in the work of figures such as Sigmund Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Janet, Abram Kardiner, Emile Durkheim and Walter Benjamin (Erll ). In the context of the United

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Trauma and Memory Studies

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States Marianne Hirsch describes the effect that the showing of the  television series Holocaust had. Being already influenced by feminism and decolonial social movements, the Dartmouth University faculty, of which she was a member, were inspired to find out how memory-work in regard to the Holocaust, ‘might constitute a platform of activist and interventionist cultural and political engagement, a form of repair and redress’ (Hirsh ). This ‘repair and redress’ was often understood to be facilitated by representation and witnessing, influenced by psychoanalytical theory such as Freud’s ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’. This essay remained influential for texts that discussed the narrativisation of memory as a form of therapy (particularly in the context of work on the Holocaust) despite Freud’s privileging of intrapsychic theory as the main source of trauma / neuroses, as opposed to external events (Ringel and Brandel ). Many subsequent studies of the experiences of post-Holocaust generations started from the premise that the act of organising experiences into narrative was a necessary part of ‘working through’ trauma in line with Freud’s proposed method for discovering repressed memories and treating them (see Bergmann and Juvovy ; Epstein ). Nevertheless, by the time research and public interest caught up, it was almost too late to have an impact upon an aged generation whose lives had been characterised by trauma and repression. Diário da Queda begins with the statement that the narrator’s Grandfather did not like to talk about the past. For him there is only one type of memory, the type that returns again and again and ‘pode ser uma prisão ainda pior que aquela onde você esteve (could be a prison, even worse than that which you were in)’ (). The doubt contained in ‘could be’ indicates the uncertainty with which any statement can be made about the grandfather’s memories or feelings since he did not speak about them, or document them and he committed suicide when his son was fourteen years old. In many ways, the grandfather’s life followed a similar pattern to that which characterised the survivor generation. As Levy and Sznaider describe it ‘After World War II, people affected by the war wanted more than anything else a stable life, a steady job, and a nice family with clearly defined roles for men, women, and children’ (). Each element of this characterisation is documented in the grandfather’s diaries; his determination to set up a life for himself, find a wife, and have a child. In his notebooks he outlines the role such a wife would have: ‘Esposa – pessoa que se encarrega das prendas domésticas, cuidando para que sejam empregados procedimentos os mais rigorosos de hygiene na casa e também para

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

que no dia do marido não existam perturbaçãoes quando ele deseja ficar sozinho (Wife – person that is in charge of domestic tasks, making sure to employ the most rigorous hygienic procedures in the house, and ensure that the husband’s day not contain any disturbances when he wishes to be alone)’ (Diário ). This illuminates the defined role the grandfather has in mind for his wife, as well as a preoccupation with hygiene that surfaces in his writings, ‘possivelmente em contraste às condições dos campos de concentração (possibly in contrast to the conditions of the concentration camps)’ (Corrêa Batista and Azevedo Kuhn ). Regarding the general characteristics of the recovery of survivors Susan Brisan explains, ‘a trauma survivor needs to be able to regain control over traumatic memories and other intrusive PTSD symptoms, recover a sense of control over her environment (within reasonable limits), and be reconnected with humanity’ (Bal et al. ). As is evident in his notebooks, the grandfather attempts to control his environment to the extent that the ‘reality’ fails to match up with his expectations. The end of the above quotation in which he expresses his desire to ‘ficar sozinho (be alone)’ emblematises the fact that the reconnection with humanity prescribed by Brisan is not achieved, and may be one of the barriers to his overcoming of trauma. Despite the fact that he finds a loving Brazilian wife, and has a child, he is not able to engage in true intimacy with either of them. The narrator reflects at length about the fact that his grandfather filled sixteen notebooks, each of one hundred pages, and never once spoke about how he felt (Diário ). He focuses solely on narrating a perfect world, alone in his office, instead of establishing a true ‘reconnection with humanity’ (Bal et al. ). There are other hints that suggest that even had the grandfather been able to narratively integrate his experiences, they would not necessarily have managed to save him from suicide. Laub’s hesitation to fully adopt the principle of narrative-based recovery is staged via frequent direct comparisons made between the narrator’s grandfather and Primo Levi who, unlike the grandfather, wrote about every detail of the camp routine. Contrary to the broadly acknowledged silence following the war, in the particular context of Italy there was a flurry of publications of narratives of deportation; forty-seven in  and , eight in  with a significant tailing off of only one or two on average each year until  (Gordon ). Gordon relates this boom to the fall of the fascist regime after twenty years in Italy, and the subsequent mythologising of anti-Nazi / fascist resistance. Levi himself was captured as part of the Italian resistance in  and spent eleven months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated in .

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Second-Gen Postmemory, Third-Gen Forgetting

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After the liberation, he returned to his native Turin and began writing about his experiences soon afterwards. Having returned to his native country, in the heart of Europe, where a process of investigation and narrativisation of war experiences was beginning to unfold, Levi found more adequate conditions for working through his experiences than the narrator’s grandfather in Brazil, which was in the throes of its own fascistinfluenced and anti-Semitic regime under Getúlio Vargas (in power – and –). Levi lived until his seventies, whereas the grandfather in the story committed suicide at a much younger age. However, Laub chooses to emphasise the similarities in their situations as opposed to the differences: ‘A única diferença é que, em vez de ter uma vida familiar aparentemente comum e décadas depois se jogar de uma escada, ele teve uma vida familiar aparentemente comum e décadas depois começou a escrever aqueles cadernos (The only difference is that, instead of having an apparently normal family life and decades afterwards throwing himself down a staircase, he had an apparently normal family life and decades later started writing in those notebooks)’ (Diário ). The phrase ‘The only difference’ and repetition of the ‘apparently normal family life’ reinforces the comparison. It is in fact not known conclusively whether Primo Levi’s death was a suicide but the narrator suggests that it was in the phrase ‘throwing himself down a staircase’, as is the case with Primo Levi’s principal biographers at the time. At this point the narrator chooses not to emphasise the point that his grandfather also committed suicide, ending with ‘começou a escrever aqueles cadernos (started writing those notebooks)’. The implication of similarity is emphasised in its absence. Dealing with a survivor suicide, Diário da Queda, bears crucial witness to the sort of ‘deathlife’ or ‘necrotic consciousness’ that Lawrence Langer insists be added to the list of commonplace responses to atrocity that includes ‘amnesia, evasion, denial, indifference, healing “working through,” resistance and transcendence’ (xii). He reminds us that ‘As someone who has outlived the camps, the survivor moves further from death; but as someone who has returned to the realm of the living, he or she moves closer to it’ (Langer xiii). It appears that this ‘moving closer to death’ is the case for the grandfather of the story.

Second-Generation Postmemory, Third-Generation Forgetting If the generation of survivors were characterised by a desire to return to a stable life, what of the children who were brought up with different levels

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

of awareness of the fact that their parents had suffered deeply traumatic experiences? One of the most influential concepts in relation to the experience of the second generation is that of ‘postmemory’: Hirsch’s contribution to this tradition that describes the common psychoanalytical responses of a generation whose lives are overshadowed by the horror suffered by their parents. She defines the term as a ‘structure of interand transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove’ (Hirsh ). In clear parallels with Laub’s depiction of the father’s experiences, Hirsch interprets the work of second-generation photographer Lorie Novak as ‘a drama about the power of public history to crowd out personal story’ (Hirsch ). These tensions whereby the second generation feel that their own emotions and experiences are subordinated to those of their parents, is visible in the following early quotation: ‘Meu pai falava muito na Alemanha dos anos , em como os judeus foram enganos com facilidade, e era fácil achar que uma casa invadida era um evento isolado (My father talked a lot about Germany of the s, how the Jews were easily tricked, and how it was easy to think that one house being invaded was an isolated event)’ (Diário ). Despite not having been alive or in Germany during these events the quotation says that the father ‘talked a lot about Germany’ as if he had witnessed them himself. The narrator’s father’s awareness of what his father may have experienced had to be acquired through historical and testimonial accounts since the grandfather did not speak of it himself. As such the father deliberately ‘crowds’ himself with the ‘public history’ of the Holocaust, reading Primo Levi and others, in order to feel closer to his father, but also to distract himself from his own history of pain and loss. At stake for the narrator’s father in learning everything he can about Auschwitz, is the need to suspend his resentment of his own father ultimately choosing to take his own life. The narrator posits, ‘É mais fácil culpar Auschwitz do que aceitar o que aconteceu com o meu avô. É mais fácil culpar Auschwitz do que se entregar a um exercício penoso, que qualquer criança na situação do meu pai faria . . . enxergar meu avô não como vítima, mas como homem e marido e pai, que deve ser julgado como qualquer outro homem e marido e pai (It is easier to blame Auschwitz than to accept what happened with my grandfather. It is easier to blame Auschwitz than to submit oneself to a painful exercise, that any child in the situation of my father would do . . . to judge my grandfather not as a victim, but as a man and husband and father, who ought to be judged like any other man and husband and father)’ (Diário ). This need to ‘blame

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Second-Gen Postmemory, Third-Gen Forgetting

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Auschwitz’ becomes a fixation for the father since, as the quotation suggests, normal judgements of fathers and husbands were suspended in these special cases. He is unable to admit the negative impact that his father’s withdrawn personality and suicide had on his own life: ‘É possível odiar um sobrevivente de Auschwitz como meu pai odiou? (Is it possible to hate a survivor of Auschwitz as my father did?)’ (Diário ). This hatred that the father feels is a source of pain that he himself then had to repress, causing him acute bouts of depression, which he also hid from those closest to him. The narrator’s father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at which point he begins his own writing project which is structurally similar to that of his father: ‘as horas no escritório como meu avô, um projeto mais ou menos como o do meu avô, um livro de memórias com os lugares aonde meu pai foi, as coisas que ele viu, as pessoas com quem falou (the hours in the study like my grandfather, a project more or less like that of my grandfather, a book of memories with the places where my father went, the things he saw, the people with whom he spoke)’ (Diário ). Here an explicit comparison is made between the two patterns of behaviour, even though the content of the writing turns out to be quite different. When his father begins to write his own memoirs, the narrator believes he is trying to open up to him about his depression. The father writes, ‘Minha mãe nunca soube que eu às vezes me trancava no quarto para chorar. Ninguém na loja soube que eu fechava a porta do banheiro, no meio da manhã, e ficava lá dez minutos, meia hora chorando (My mother never knew that sometimes I locked myself in my room to cry. No one in the shop knew that I closed the door of the bathroom, in the middle of the morning, and stayed there for ten minutes, half an hour crying)’ (Diário ). This phrase ‘My mother never knew’ is an exemplary one within the novel; positive consequences come from the progressive bridging of these knowledge gaps through ‘presentation’, ‘offering’ and ‘compearance’, the words used by Nancy to describe means of forging ‘interdependence’ and ‘being-in-common’ (Inoperative Community ). The opening up to his son about his depression, through his writing, comes almost too late; however, the reciprocal act of sharing that they both undertake at this stage, facilitates a turning point, not just in their relationship, but also in terms of the narrator’s relationship with his wife, and decision to have a son of his own. When the narrator finds out about his father’s Alzheimer’s it is as if the fact of his impending memory loss allows the narrator to properly open up to him for the first time. The decision to have a child – structurally linked within the novel to this process of sharing – makes way, in the following

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

chapter for a ‘passing-of-the-baton’; the father’s condition holds out long enough for him to meet and hold his new grandson. It is at this point, for the first time, the narrator addresses the reader as ‘você’ (‘you’) directing the whole narrative to his child and opening up the pathways of intergenerational sharing at a much earlier life-stage. However, before examining the implications of the narrator’s conciliation with his father and the addressing of the narrative to his own son, it is necessary to examine the narrator’s awakening to his own experience of trauma. Through his father’s lectures and the history lessons in his Jewish private school the narrator learns at a young age that the Holocaust is an unquestionably traumatic subject. Yet he only comes closer to understanding his grandfather’s experience once he has suffered a trauma of his own: the experience of an underprivileged gentile boy, João, being dropped and injured in front of his family at his thirteenth birthday, as part of a prank by the narrator and his schoolmates. He says, ‘Se na época perguntassem o que me afetava mais, ver o colega daquele jeito ou o fato de meu avô ter passado por Auschwitz, e por afetar quero dizer sentir intensamente, como algo palpável e presente, uma lembrança que não precisa ser evocada para aparecer, eu não hesitaria em dar a resposta (If in that era you asked me what affected me more, seeing that happen to my classmate or the fact of my grandfather having been in Auschwitz, and by affect I mean feel intensely, like something palpable and present, a memory that does not need to be evoked in order to appear, I would not hesitate in giving the reply)’ (Diário ). The implication is that the lived experience of the fall of João had a stronger impact upon the narrator than knowing of his grandfather’s time spent in Auschwitz, a grandfather whom he never met, and in a time and location far removed from his own. As such, the narrator works to narratively integrate his own moment of trauma, and to fulfil the progressive therapeutic unworking of the self into effective ‘nonselfsufficiency’ and ‘interdependence’ (Inoperative Community ). The first mark of difference that introduces the narrator’s bullied schoolmate João is class rather than religion; with ‘it’ referring to the fall that traumatised the narrator, he says, ‘A festa em que isso aconteceu não foi num hotel de luxo, e sim num salão de festas, um prédio que não tinha elevador nem porteiro porque o aniversariante era bolsista e filho de um cobrador de ônibus (The party in which it happened, did not take place in a luxury hotel, but rather in a party hall, a building that did not have a lift or a doorman because the celebrated one was on a scholarship and the son of a bus attendant)’ (Diário ). This quotation describes the humble location of João’s birthday party in comparison to the lavish bar mitzvah

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Second-Gen Postmemory, Third-Gen Forgetting

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celebrations of the narrator’s Jewish peers, and highlights the low-skill, low-paid occupation of his father. The narrator, on the other hand, is characterised by his wealth and cosmopolitan mobility: ‘Aos treze anos eu morava numa casa com piscina, e nas férias de julho fui para a Disneylândia (At thirteen years old I lived in a house with a swimming pool, and in the summer holidays I went to Disneyland)’ (Diário ). The following phrase lists all of the commodities that the narrator owns, ‘um videogame, um videocassete, uma estante cheia de livros e discos, uma guitarra, um par de patins, um uniforme de NASA . . . uma raquete de tênis que nunca usei (a videogame, a videocassette, a bookcase full of books and disks, a guitar, a pair of ice skates, a NASA uniform . . . an unused tennis racket)’ (Diário ). Nevertheless, the following chapter juxtaposes the richness in goods with the lack of intimacy in his life which goes on to characterise his adult relationships: ‘Aos treze anos eu nunca tinha tido uma namorada (At thirteen years old I had never had a girlfriend)’ (Diário ). He goes on, ‘Eu nunca tinha ficado doente de verdade. Eu nunca tinha vista alguém morrer ou sofrer um acidente grave (I had never felt real pain. I had never seen anyone die or suffer a serious accident)’ (Diário ). This high point of innocence, material abundance, and never having felt pain sets the narrator up for his own fall, foreseen in the title, and mirrored in the actual fall of João on his birthday: the moment of rupture in the narrator’s account of his life. The fall of João takes the form of a traumatic memory for the narrator who, at first, represses the fact of his own involvement in the prank. The night of its occurrence he dreams of João’s father, uncles, grandparents at the party, and the moment of silence post the fall itself. There is a repeated return to the account of the event in the text with a slight difference in the story each time. The narrator’s evolving narrative about his involvement in the prank mimics the logic of Freud’s ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ in a process of identification of the repressed memories, repetition of them, and thereby a working-through. After presenting himself as merely an observer the first time, the second time the narrator discusses the incident he says, ‘Não sei se participei por causa desses outros colegas, e seria fácil a esta altura culpá-los por tudo, o se em algum momento eu fui ativo na história: se nos dias anteriores tive alguma ideia, se fiz alguma sugestão se de alguma forma fui indispensável para que tudo saísse exatemente como planejado (I do not know if I participated because of those other classmates, and it would be easy at these lengths to blame them for everything, or if at some moment I was active in the story: if in the previous days I has some idea, if I made some suggestion, if somehow

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

I was indispensable to everything playing out exactly as planned)’ (Diário ). Here he toys with the idea that he might have even been the person to suggest the prank, or instrumental in its carrying out. In the following chapter section he says: Não sei se fiz aquilo porque me espelhava nos meus colegas. João sendo jogado para cima uma vez, duas vezes, eu segurando até que na décima terceira vez e com ele ainda subindo eu recolhi os braços e dei um passo para trás e vi João parado no ar e iniciando a queda, ou se foi o contrário: se no fundo por essa ideia dos dias anterriores, algo que eu tivesse dito ou uma atitude que tivesse tomado, uma vez que fosse, diante de uma pessoa que fosse, independentemente das circunstâncias e das desculpas, se no fundo eles também estavam se espelhando en mim. I do not know if I did that because I was reflected in my colleagues. João being thrown up once, twice, me catching, until the thirteenth time and with him still rising I withdraw my arms and take a step backwards and see João stopped in the air starting the descent; or if, on the contrary, two days earlier, something I might have said or an attitude I might have taken, one time that it might have been, infront of someone, independently of the circumstances and the apologies, if at the bottom of it all they were also reflected in me. (Laub, Diário –)

This passage invokes debates about complicity; what was the narrator’s role as part of this act of collective violence? Did he play a decisive role in either the decision or the implementation, or what provoked him to go along with it? By the time the memory re-surfaces once more the narrator has taken ownership of what happened: ‘Para mim tudo começa aos treze anos, quando deixei João cair na festa de aniversário (For me everything starts at thirteen years of age, when I allowed João to fall during his birthday celebration)’ (emphasis added; Diário ). By discursively processing his experience in retrospect, the narrator appears to come to terms with his involvement. The Jewish school that he attends, is like any other school apart from the fact that ‘você passa a infância ouvindo falar de antissemitismo: há professores que se dedican exclusivamente a isso (you spend your childhood hearing talk of anti-Semitism: there are teachers that are exclusively dedicated to that)’ (Diário ). These narratives are reinforced by his father’s own strong investment in him with regards to Holocaust memory and anti-Semitic oppression throughout history. The narrator explains that he did not see his father very often in those days because he would come home exhausted from work, but when he did, he would embark upon interminable lectures about ‘os judeus que morreram nas Olimpíadas de , os judeus que morreram em atentados da OLP, os judeus que

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Second-Gen Postmemory, Third-Gen Forgetting

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continuariam morrendo por causa dos neonazista na Europa e da aliança soviética com os árabes e da inoperância da ONU e da má vontade da imprensa com Israel (the Jews who died in the Olympics of , the Jews who died in the attacks on the PLO, the Jews who carried on dying at the hands of the neoNazis in Europe and of the Soviet alliance with the Arabs and the ineffectiveness of the UN and the bad treatment of Israel in the press)’ (Diário ). We see, therefore, that the father’s strong engagement with the Holocaust memory leads to a political sympathy with Israel and contemporary Jewish causes. When he was young the narratives of his father’s lectures haunted the narrator, surfacing in his dreams, and making the memories of Jewish oppression seem much closer to him than they actually were: ‘as suásticas ou as tochas dos cossacos do lado de fora da janela, como se qualquer pessoa na rua estivesse pronta para me vestir um pijama com uma estrela e me enfiar num trem que ia rumo às chaminés (the swastikas or the Cossac’s torches outside the window, as if any person in the road was about to dress me in pyjamas with a star and cram me into a train on its way to the chambers)’ (Diário ). As he gets older, with the repetition of the stories, their effects diminish and they become more alien from his lived reality in ‘Porto Alegre, morando numa casa com piscina e tendo sido capaz de deixar um colega cair de costas no aniversario (Porto Alegre, living in a house with a swimming pool and being capable of allowing a classmate to fall on his back at his birthday)’ (Diário ). The tendency in post-Holocaust representation: ‘that constructs the child as an unexamined emblem of vulnerability and innocence’ (Hirsch ) is contested by Laub’s presentation a cruel group who are now well-fed, well-holidayed, and capable of humiliating a boy who does not share the same economic advantages as them. The discourse of anti-Semitism directed at Jews through the ages is juxtaposed with the detailed description of the extreme present-day bullying of João. The way the passages are written creates empathy for João by lingering on elements of the torture by his classmates, which he accepts with complete passivity: o colega o mandava ficar de pé, e ele ficava. O colega jogava o sanduíche de João longe, e ele ia busar. O colega segurava João e o forçava a comer o sanduíche, mordida por mordida, e no rosto de João não se via nada nenhuma dor, nenhum apelo, nenhum expressão. The classmate orders him to stand, and he stands. The classmate throws the sandwich far away, and he goes to retrieve it. The classmate traps João and forces him to eat the sandwich bite by bite, and all the while João’s face does not give anything away – no pain, no plea, no expression. (Laub, Diário )

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

The focus on the dehumanising treatment of João, narrated in this description with a detailed repetitive rhythm, functions as a visible fault line in the narrative of Jewish victimhood dominant in the school and in the narrator’s father’s discourses. In contrast to these detailed anecdotes of personal oppression in which the language leads one to identify with the pain and humiliation of João, the list of atrocities committed against the Jews in history is given in an impersonal list form, blurring events together and thus diminishing the individual significance of each one: você passa a infância ouvindo falar uma explicação para as atrocidades cometidas pelos nazistas, que remetiam às atrocidades cometidos pelos poloneses, que eram ecos das atrocidades cometidas pelos russos, e nessa conta você poderia botas os árabes e os muçulmanos e os cristãos e quem mais precisasse, uma espiral de ódio fundada na inveja da inteligência, da força de vontade, da cultura e da riqueza que os judeus criaram apesar de todos esses obstáculos. You spend your childhood hearing an explanation for the atrocities committed by the Nazis, that remit to the atrocities committed by the Polish, that were echoes of the atrocities committed by the Russians, and by this account you could include the Arabs, the Muslims, the Christians and whoever else you need, a spiral of hatred founded on the envy of intelligence, of the force of will, of the culture and the richness that the Jews manage to create despite all of these obstacles. (Laub, Diário –)

The wider unworking of Jewish commonality is evident in the following passage in which he says he experiences ‘o desconforto cada vez maior diante do meu pai, uma rejeição à performance dele ao falar de antissemitismo, porque eu não tinha nada em comum com aquelas pessoas além do fato de ter nascido judeu . . . e por mais que tanta gente tivesse morrido em campos de concentração não fazia sentido que eu precisasse lembrar disso todos os dias (the growing discomfort in relation to my father, a rejection of his performance when talking about anti-Semitism, because I have nothing in common with those people apart from having been born Jewish . . . and as much as so many people died in concentration camps, it doesn’t make sense that I should have to remember that every day)’ (Diário ). It is telling that in the phrase ‘eu não tinha nada em comum com aquelas pessoas (I have nothing in common with those people)’, he uses the most distant demonstrative Portuguese pronoun ‘aquela (those)’, as opposed to ‘essas’ or ‘estas (these)’. In his opinion, the oppression suffered by the Jews in his father’s discourse is no excuse for João’s oppression. By going to great lengths to emphasise the personal difference between him and members of his own family, his gender, his school, his city and – by extension – the national and international communities, Laub seeks a

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Second-Gen Postmemory, Third-Gen Forgetting

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‘new beginning’ in the refusal to claim an identitarian position and, in particular, seeks to criticize the political instrumentalization of Holocaust memory, which had begun to be used to justify violence in the context of contemporary conflicts. A crucial part of this process involves surrendering the notion of the Holocaust as a privileged site of violence in the twentieth century. This constitutes the most radical unworking of identity of the contemporary authors analysed thus far. In the following passage, Laub uses an ironic tone to question the status of the Holocaust as a uniquely horrific site of tragedy and decentres it from a history of twentieth-century destruction. In order to illustrate the full effect of the passage I shall quote at length: se Auschwitz é a maior tragédia do século xx, o que pressupõe a maior tragédia de todos os séculos, já que o século xx é considerado o mais trágico de todos os séculos, porque nunca antes tanta gente foi bombardeada, fuzilada, enforcada, empalada, afogada, picada e electrocutada antes de ser queimada ou enterrada viva, dois milhões no Camboja, vinte milhões na União Soviética, setenta milhões na China, centenas de milhões somando Angola, Argélia, Armênia, Bósnia, Bulgária, Chile, Congo, Coreia, Cuba, Egito, El Salvador, Espanha, Etiópia, Filipinas, Haiti, Honduras, Hungria, Índia, Indonésia, Irã, Iraque, Líbano, Líbia, México, Mianmar, Palestina, Paquistão, Polônia, Portugal, Romênia, Ruanda, Serra Leoa, Somália, Sri Lanka, Sudão, Tchecoslováquia, Tchetchênia, Tibete, Turquia e Vietnã, cadáveres que se acumulam, uma pilha até o céu, a história geral do mundo que e tão somente um acúmulo de massacres que estão por trás de qualquer discurso, qualquer gesto, qualquer memória, e se Aushwitz é a tragédia que concentra em sua natureza todas essas outras tragédias também não deixa de ser uma espécie de prova da inviabilidade da experiência humana em todos os tempos e lugares. If Auschwitz was the biggest tragedy of the twentieth century, which presupposes that it is the biggest tragedy of all the centuries, since the twentieth century is considered the most tragic of all the centuries, because never before were so many people bombed, gunned down, hanged, impaled, drowned, stabbed and electrocuted before being burnt or buried alive, two million in Cambodia, twenty million in the Soviet Union, seventy million in China, hundreds of million adding up Angola, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Chechnya, Chile, Congo, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Myanmar, Palestine, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, the Philippines, Romania, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, Turkey, Vietnam, corpses that accumulate in a pile up to the sky, the general history of the world that is simply an accumulation of massacres that are behind whatever discourse, whatever gesture, whatever memory, and if Auschwitz is the tragedy that

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’ concentrates, in its nature, all of these other tragedies as well, it doesn’t stop being a form of proof of the impracticability of the human experience in all times and all places. (Laub, Diário )

This passage confronts the reader with many of the major conflict zones and massacres of the twentieth century, including some that – as is explicitly stated – saw many more deaths than the Jewish Holocaust. The alphabetical list allows notable exceptions to be identified quickly: Israel is not on the list but Palestine is. Leaving out Israel and including Palestine makes clear that the narrator does not subscribe to his father’s branch of political solidarity with Israel based upon a common Jewish identity. This list recalls another list of proper names which can be found in the preface to Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, which makes more explicit the role of identity in causing the proliferation of twentieth-century conflicts. He says: I want to emphasize the date on which I am writing this. It is the summer of , and as far as specifying the situation of the earth and humans is concerned, nothing is more pressing (how could it really be avoided?) than a list of proper names such as these, presented here in no particular order: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya, Rwanda, Bosnian Serbs, Tutsis, Hutus, Tamil Tigers, Krajina Serbs, Casamance, Chiapas, Islamic Jihad, Bangladesh, the Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, Hamas, Kazakhstan, Khmers Rouges, ETA militia, Kurds (UPK/PDK), Montataire, the Movement for Self-determination, Somalia, Chicanos, Shiites, FNLCCanal Historique, Liberia, Givat Hagadan, Nigeria, the League of the North, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Sikhs, Haiti, Roma gypsies of Slovenia, Taiwan, Burma, PLO, Iraq, Islamic Front Salvation, Shining Path, Vaulx-en-Velins, Neuhof . . . Of course, it would be difficult to bring this list to an end if the aim was to include all the places, groups, or authorities that constitute the theatre of bloody conflict among identities, as well as what is at stake in these conflicts. These days it is not always possible to say with any assurance whether these identities are intranational, infranational, or transnational; whether they are “cultural,” “religious,” “ethnic,” or “historical”. (Being Singular Plural xii–xiii)

Nancy makes clear that it is identities that cause this state of ongoing ‘bloody conflict’ and, moreover, no type of identity can be blamed in particular. Some of the ‘proper’ names included in Nancy’s list coincide with Laub’s and others pertain to more detailed sub-groups involved in the conflicts within and across the national groups that Laub chooses to highlight. The choice by Laub to only include national ‘proper names’ is perhaps a pragmatic one: nations are still a heavily naturalised construction

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both in people’s imaginaries and in our structures of governance. It was around the time of Nancy’s writing, during the Bosnian war, that debates arose over the use of the phrase ‘Holocaust’ to describe other massacres that were not specifically the persecution enacted by the Nazis towards the European Jewish population (Levy –). As time has gone on, however, more scholars have acknowledged – as Laub and Nancy do – the extent to which the Jewish Holocaust was one horrific case of multiple horrific cases of violence.

Sovereign Father, Democratic Son Los informantes, like Diário da queda is a novel that uses personal relationships to reflect upon the philosophical underpinnings of wider political conflicts. It, likewise, appears on the surface to be about memory, but ultimately advocates forgetting and forgiveness rather than remembering; and asserts that touch and affection are an integral part of the process of reconciliation. In his book Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture, Rory O’Bryen takes up the themes of memory and forgetting in a number of important works that attempt to construct a cultural memory of the period in Colombian history known as La Violencia. He finds that the task undertaken by authors such as Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal, Fernando Vallejo, Laura Restrepo and others compensates for ‘the absence to this day of any organised national attempt to understand the origins and genesis of the conflict, to adjudicate responsibilities, and to pay homage to the dead’ (). As O’Bryen points out, the dates traditionally ascribed to the period of La Violencia (roughly –) and its insertion into a narrative of ongoing conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, serve to simplify a highly complex multidimensional situation (–). O’Bryen finds amongst his authors, that narrative engagement proves useful for contesting this sense of an inescapable continuity of historical conflict and a ‘cycle of violence and revenge’ stemming from both multiple distinct, and otherwise unclear, points of origin (). These authors and cinematographers, born in the s, work to undertake a ‘kind of collective “exorcism”: an attempt to “work through” conflicts that would have remained opaque to them in their early years’ (Literature ). Vásquez, however, belongs to a new generation; he was born in , a few decades after the authors and directors dealt with in O’Bryen’s study. Whilst he too makes references to various periods of Colombian history such as the riot, or ‘bogotazo’, set in motion by the

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in , the narrative takes place during two important turning points,  and . In , the current Colombian constitution was inaugurated, sparking a wave of hope for an end to violence which had not been felt since the election of Gaitán almost fifty years before. Gaitán was a unique symbolic figure in Colombian history. Whilst he was a member of the Liberal party, he was also the first Colombian politician to unite the population across party divides and expand the democratic field by reaching out to actors and social classes who were previously excluded. The democratising potential of the figure of Gaitán came to an end with his assassination during the campaign that might have otherwise finally seen him become president. Furthermore, as a response to the decade of extreme violence unleashed by the assassination, formal restrictions were placed on Colombian democracy, known as the National Front pacts (–) that ‘excluded third parties but also limited competition between the two majority parties: the Liberals and Conservatives’ (Bejarano and Pizarro Leongómez ). As such, the new  constitution was invested with symbolic hope, as had been embodied in the figure of Gaitán almost fifty years before. However, by  – the other main point of reference from the novel – this hope was shattered. The failure of the  constitution to uphold human rights or civil liberties in practice was emblematised by two more high profile assassinations: those of Andrés Escobar, a national footballer who scored an own goal in a match against the United States in , also referred to in an episode in the novel; and Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, a member of the constituent assembly responsible for drafting the  constitution, in . By making a narrative link between the assassinations of Gaitán in , and Escobar in , Vásquez draws attention to the lack of change, over almost five decades, in the State’s ability to uphold the rule of law and protect the lives of its citizens. The other main points of reference in the novel are the late s and early s when the effects of the Second World War reached Colombia via both German and Jewish immigration (as well as through the cultural ties of the pre-existing immigrant population). The novel deals with the effects of United States foreign policy at the time. Its aim was to crack down on suspected Axis sympathisers in the Americas. The German and Japanese populations were heavily scrutinised by the compliant Colombian government, and suspicion between people heightened as some Colombians took on the role of ‘informers’, including the narrator’s father. The government relied on informers to report on the activities of immigrants as well as naturalised foreigners. The immigration of Europeans to

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Sovereign Father, Democratic Son

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Colombia in the twentieth century was limited in comparison with Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and is referred to in Los informantes as such: Colombia . . . no había sido nunca un país de inmigrantes . . . Estaban los que llegaron a principios de siglo para buscar dinero, porque habían oído que en estos países suramericanos todo estaba por hacer; los que llegaron escapando de la Gran Guerra, la mayoría alemanes que se habían desperdigado por el mundo tratando de ganarse la vida, porque en su país eso ya había dejado de ser posible; estaban los judíos. De manera que éste resultó ser, ni más ni menos, un país de escapados. Colombia . . . has never been a country of immigrants . . . There were those who arrived at the start of the century to seek a fortune, because they had heard than in those South American countries, everything was there for the taking; those who arrived escaping from the Great War, the majority of them Germans who had scattered around the world attempting to make a living, because in their country that had stopped being possible; there were the Jews. That was how this became, nothing more and nothing less, than a country of escapees. (Vásquez, Los informantes –)

The phrase ‘país de escapados (country of escapees)’ takes the position of viewing the immigrant population in their status as victims rather than as a menacing threat to national and international security. This coincides with the main plot of the novel which seeks to understand why the narrator’s father falsely denounced his friend’s father as having Nazi affiliations leading him to be put on the lista negra. The lista negra was an expansion of the United States-led trade embargo of Axis countries, seeking to identify people and businesses in all of the Western hemisphere that might be harmful to national security, and used to prevent US businesses from trading with them. It was announced on  July  but had existed unofficially for six months prior to that. In practice, the lists had much more far-reaching consequences than just halted trade with US companies. Families would lose their businesses and be cut off from all economic activity. They would not be allowed to buy gas or electricity from North American suppliers, buy their goods, or receive loans from banks. As the situation intensified suspicious individuals were also confined to a hotel in Fusagasugá known colloquially as ‘El Campo de Concentración Hotel Sabaneta (The Hotel Sabaneta Concentration Camp)’. In the novel Sara Guterman, a Jewish émigré, refuses to use the nickname: ‘No, me niego a hablar de “campo de concentración”, el lenguaje no nos puede hacer estas trampas. Una cosa es una cosa y otra es otra cosa (No, I refuse to talk of a “concentration camp”, language cannot play these tricks on us. One thing is one thing and the other is something else)’ (Los informantes ). Sara rejects the

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

equivalence that might be inferred from this turn of phrase given that the hotel was elsewhere referred as an ‘encierro de lujo (luxury confinement)’ in a phenomenon that had significant class dimensions; wealthy Nazi sympathisers were more likely to avoid the list or live comfortably until they were able to overturn their inclusion, whereas humble Germans who engaged in no political activity would find themselves isolated and ruined. Broad parallels can be noted in terms of the time when Los informantes was being written and the era it returns to. Vásquez has said in an interview, ‘If historical novels don’t comment on the present, I don’t see the point . . . They can remind us of roads not taken – how things could have been better’ (Vásquez, ‘A Life’). During the ‘antisubversive’ campaign of ‘Plan Colombia’ to destroy drug crops and fight the guerrillas, President Álvaro Uribe (in office –) ‘había anunciado la organización de “un millón de cooperantes” y de redes de “informantes”, lo que produjo preocupación en las asociaciones de derechos humanos (had anounced the organization of “a million volunteers” and of networks of “informers”, which provoked worry amongst human rights associations)’ (Pécaut ). The fears described by Pécaut included the possible infiltration of these networks of ‘informantes’ by guerrillas or paramilitaries, as well as false denunciations (). One significant scandal was the accusation of the creation of ‘falsos positivos (false positives)’ in which innocent civilians were killed and passed off as guerrilleros to claim successes in the conflict. When speaking about Uribe’s ‘democratic crackdown’, Vásquez alludes to a number of these issues saying, ‘In the process, he’s destroyed Colombian democracy . . . Civilians have been spied upon, or killed and passed off as dead guerrillas’ (Vásquez, ‘A Life’). It therefore seems likely that the false denunciation involved in Los informantes, and the return to this particular period of Colombian history in general, may be an example of the ‘comment on the present’ and may offer some suggestions of ‘roads not taken’ (Vásquez, ‘A Life’). In determining ‘how things could have been better’ it is valuable to note a phrase Vásquez uses when he speaks positively about the ex-Mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mockus, who is credited for making the city much safer. He says that he ‘did an incredible job as mayor. When I left, Bogotá was a very violent, stressful city to live in. People had forgotten how to resolve conflicts peacefully; he taught them to live together again’ (Vásquez, ‘A Life’). I argue that Los informantes asks, after decades of violent fighting, if establishing blame through history writing is productive, or whether we should focus on building a new form of community, or ‘teaching people to live together again’ (Vásquez, ‘A Life’). I suggest that this new community

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might be based on a common bond of humanity, consolidated through embodied interactions, and based on a recognition that we do not have to inherit the mistakes of the previous generations. As such, Vásquez takes up the task alluded to at the end of O’Bryen’s study when he returns to the notion of ‘forgetting’, finding that the works analysed ‘also demonstrate, in a more paradoxical vein, that the failure to forget can produce much the same effect, impeding the necessary task of a collective imagination of ways out of said repetition’ (Literature ). The philosophical dimension to Vásquez’s critique of Colombian politics involves an examination of flaws inherent to ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ as seen in the novel through their allegorical representations by the father and son. When the journalist-writer protagonist Gabriel Santoro decides to publish a testimony of the life of his father’s lifelong friend Sara Guterman, an émigré Jew originating from Germany and moving to Colombia in the s, Gabriel is shocked by the extremely negative reaction of his father. In his mind, he was simply trying to give voice to ‘la boca menos ajena de mi vida (one of the closest voices to me)’ (Los informantes ). It is only towards the very end of the informe by Gabriel that Sara reveals what was set up as an enigma at the start of the novel, involving the reaction of the father: mi padre había leído el libro tan pronto lo recibió, y lo había leído con lupa y en tiempo récord, buscando declaraciones que lo pudieran delatar . . . ‘No encontró nada, pero lo encontró todo’, dijo Sara. ‘Todo el libro le parecía una gran pista que le apuntaba a él, que lo señalaba’. my father had read the book as soon as he received it, and had read it with a magnifying glass and in record time, searching for statements which could implicate him . . . ‘He did not find anything, but he found everything’, said Sara. ‘The whole book appeared to him to be a gigantic trail that pointed to him, that signalled him’. (Vásquez, Los informantes )

The father saw himself in the text despite the fact that the son did not know of his involvement in denouncing his family friend to the authorities as a Nazi. This is the first instance of a number of cases in the novel in which language (in particular, writing) causes conflict between characters. The father appears to represent the notion of ‘sovereignty’ or the ‘community of the one’ (Sense ) which Nancy describes as ‘the empiricotranscendental (or aleatory-necessary) circumscription that determines the law of such and such a city as the ne plus ultra of the “civity” of this city, the first and last point of its institution and decision’ (Sense ). He is firmly associated with the law through his occupation as Professor of

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

Oratory at the Supreme Court. His power stems from his authoritarian control over the ‘order of speech’ based on both seizing control over the discursive space and attempting to monopolise it by demanding the silence of others. Accordingly, the verbs used to describe his activities are ‘dictó (dictated)’, ‘pronunció (pronounced)’, and he sits on a ‘poltrona autoritaria (authoritarian throne)’ (Los informantes ). Whilst his son is a writer he, ‘siempre rehusó acercarse a cualquier forma de periodismo (always rejected associating himself with any kind of journalism)’; he is a ‘profesor’ from the Latin ‘profiteri’, ‘profess’ – to declare publicly, as opposed to ‘doctor’, ‘académico (academic)’, or ‘lector (reader)’ (). The father illustrates one of the key differences between ‘speech’ and ‘writing’ in his privileging of form over content. When, in one of his classes, a student suggests that a particular speech is effective because of its ideas he cuts him off and says: Nada de ideas. Las ideas no importan, las ideas las tiene cualquier bestia, y éstas en particular, no son ideas, sino eslóganes. No, la serie nos conmueve y nos convence por la repetición de la misma cláusula al comienzo de las invocaciones, algo que ustedes, de ahora en adelante, llamarán anáfora, si me hacen el favor. Y al que me vuelva a hablar de ideas, lo paso por las armas. Nothing of ideas. Ideas do not matter, any beast can have ideas, and these, in particular, are not ideas but rather, slogans. No, the series moves us and convinces us because of the repetition of the same clause at the start of the invocations; something that you, from now on, will call anaphora, if you will do me that favor. And I will shoot anyone who talks to me about ideas again. (Vásquez, Los informantes –)

He not only dismisses ‘ideas’ as belonging to ‘any beast’ but, like Jacques Lacan’s ‘name of the father’ he enforces his control over the Symbolic Order (calling the technique ‘anaphora’) with the threat of violence (‘I will shoot anyone’). The defining moment in the father’s career is a speech he gave for the th anniversary of Bogotá, which was described as a ‘texto legendario que llegó a ser comparado con los mejores ejemplos de retórica colombiana desde Bolívar a Gaitán (a legendary text which came to be compared to the best examples of Colombian rhetoric from Bolívar to Gaitán)’ (Los informantes ). The father is a great admirer of Gaitán and frequently imitates him in his Oratory classes. Like him, the father’s influence comes from taking control of language in his sphere by occupying it through speech events that serve as ‘persuasive’ in the moment. Yet he has a fatal lack compared to Gaitán: he is missing four fingers from a machete attack, which prevents him from being able to imitate Gaitán’s gesture of pointing

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Sovereign Father, Democratic Son

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to the sky with his right index finger extended. This lack represents the non self-sufficiency of his sovereignty – he has no authority if he has no subjects or if the subjects refuse to obey his sovereign authority (Nancy, Sense –). The father’s machete injury meant that he had to re-learn to write with his left hand, making his writing childlike and frustrated. Gabriel hypothesises that this may be why his father never wrote a book ‘un hombre que había pasado su vida entre los libros de los otros (a man that had spent his life among the books of others)’ (Los informantes ). It may be that the father uses speech – inherently less fixed than writing – to mask the secret of his betrayal of his friend’s family. When Gabriel goes to visit him he is surprised at there being very few books in his house ‘¿Dónde estaban sus libros? . . . ¿Dónde trabajaba él, dónde leía? (Where were his books? . . . Where did he work, where did he read?)’ (Los informantes ). This makes it all the more significant when the father makes an exception, entering into the realm of the written word to publish a slating review of his son’s book, which he thinks contains the tale of his betrayal. The father enters the son’s turf to contest his narrative, not realising that the son does not even know of his denunciation, and that by writing about it he is perpetuating the reach of the book further by causing controversy around it. Whilst the first epigraph appeared to address the father in his inability to purify himself through speech, the second quotation states, ‘¿Quién quiere hablar? ¿Quién quiere hacer acusaciones respecto de los acontecimientos pasados? ¿Quién quiere garantizar el porvenir? (Who wishes to speak? Who wishes to make accusations with regards to past events? Who wishes to guarantee the future?)’ This refers more closely to the son and narrator, asking who has the right to speak and, in the last phrase, suggesting language’s inherent will to power (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals –). The fatal flaw of the son is his impulse to document and appropriate the stories of others, sometimes against their will. In his desire to document these stories and, as such, open up the discursive sphere to multiple voices, the son can be seen to represent ‘democracy’ or, what Nancy calls the ‘community of the other’ (Sense ). The father laments the son’s lack of silence, or what could be seen as the crowding of his sovereign discursive space and attacks this democratic impulse. When the son writes his book about Sara the father says, ‘Callarse no es agradable, exige carácter, pero tú no entiendes eso, tú, con la misma arrogancia de todos los demás periodistas que en el mundo han sido, tú te creíste que el mundo no podía prescindir de la vida de Sara (Shutting up is not agreeable,

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

it requires character, but you do not understand that, you, with the same arrogance as all the other journalists that have ever existed, you thought that the world could not live without knowing about Sara’s life)’ (Los informantes –). In the following quotation he attacks, directly, the problem of using language even as a figure for democracy when he says, ‘porque te parece que Sara lo es todo, que la has conocido a ella y nos has conocido a todo (because you think that Sara is everything, that once you know her you know everyone)’ (). He points out that Sara is just one figure amongst many who deserve a voice and who are all different. This is reinforced within the novel when later Angelina, a physiotherapist, says to Gabriel, ‘Tiene que respetar más a los otros, Gabriel . . . No todos somos iguales (You should respect others more, Gabriel . . . we’re not all the same)’ (Los informantes ). The word ‘same’, in Spanish, ‘iguales’ is significant in that it means both ‘the same’ and ‘equals’. Angelina is making a point about Gabriel not being able to speak for more than just himself and drawing attention to the power dynamics involved in attempts to do so. The ethics of appropriating stories and writing on behalf of others are called into question progressively throughout the novel. Ultimately, the implication is that all writing, even about the Other, is actually about the self. Another character, Sergio, confirms this when he reprimands the narrator for not recognising him saying, ‘“Yo me fijo más en la gente”, dijo él. “Usté en cambio no hace más que mirarse el ombligo” (“I notice people”, he said. “You, on the other hand, you can’t see beyond your own belly button”)’ (Los informantes ). Gabriel’s ‘curiosity’ and democratising impulse is critically presented as he doubles the betrayal of his father’s friend Enrique by making public the content of Enrique’s personal archive that he specifically asked to remain private. The narrator also pushes Angelina past the point of things she wants to share with him because of his ‘curiosidad (curiosity)’ and justifies it by saying ‘No se ponga así. Es bueno hablar de estas cosas. Es terapéutico (Don’t be like that. It is good to talk about these things. It is therapeutic)’ (). Angelina retorts, ‘Mire, si ustedes se pasaban la vida hablando de todo y eso les servía, pues me allegro, pero dígame una cosita, ¿por qué putas me toca ser igual a mí? . . . Además, la terapeuta soy yo (Look, if you lot spent your lives talking about everything and it helped, well I am glad for you, but tell me one thing, why the hell does it have to be the same for me?. . . In any case, I’m the therapist)’ (Los informantes ). The assertion of Angelina as being the therapist is significant since she is a masseuse and therefore the ‘healing miracles’ that she proudly recounts are undertaken through tactile – and not talking – therapy.

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Sovereign Father, Democratic Son

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Writing on behalf of the Other is not only ethically problematic but language in general is shown to be imprecise and divisive. Enrique says of the father, ‘Con él cada palabra tenía su contenido, pero también era una herramienta para mirar desde arriba, o si era inevitable quedarse a la misma altura, para conservar la distancia (With him every word had its meaning, but it was also a tool he used to look down his nose at you, or if you absolutely had to be on the same level, to conserve distance)’ (Los informantes ). Here words are specifically related to creating distance, opposed in the novel to the proximity achieved by touch. The destructiveness of words is summed up in the following phrase by Enrique: ‘Había una familia entera vuelta mierda por una palabrita suya así que no viniera a dárselas de tener buena memoria (A whole family was turned to shit because of a tiny word or two of his, so I have no sympathy when he comes around here claiming to have a tortured memory)’ (Los informantes ). The use of the diminutive for ‘palabra’ further reinforces its power in having destroyed Enrique’s family. The comparison of, and similarities between, father and son in terms of their repeated betrayal of Enrique (to be discussed) appear to coincide with Nancy’s point that ‘sovereignty and community can be the mere outline of an area of shared jurisdiction’ (Sense ). They both share the name ‘Gabriel Santoro’ and when the father dies Sara forgets to add the second surnames to their names on the invitation so ‘Gabriel Santoro invitó a las exequias de Gabriel Santoro (Gabriel Santoro cordially invites you to the burial of Gabriel Santoro)’ making it appear that Gabriel Santoro, the father, lives on (Los informantes ). There is a progressive blurring of the boundaries between them; at one point the son looks down to check if his right hand is still intact or whether he has inherited the mutilation of his father (Los informantes ). The destinies of the father and son match precisely a phrase used by Nancy to express the problem of politics based on either ‘sovereignty’ or ‘democracy’. He says: ‘the totalitarian [sovereign] subject turns out to be suicidal, but democracy without identification turns out also to be without any demos or kratein of its own’ (Sense ). The suicidal nature of totalitarian sovereignty is exemplified in conflicts such as the Second World War, when Hitler’s Germany destroyed itself in the process of trying to become all-powerful. On the other hand, the inherent problem with representation-based democracy, as emblematized, is Gabriel’s failure to represent the voices of everyone. Elected leaders will never represent the exact will of the people that they speak for. The final twist in the story is that Gabriel Santoro, the father, killed himself and deliberately took a bus

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

load of people with him in an act of ‘joder a los demás para joderte bien a ti mismo (screwing everyone else over, in order to screw over yourself )’, a repeat of the original and unexplained act of denouncing Enrique’s father as a Nazi (Los informantes ). The son, on the other hand, who betrayed both his father and Enrique for the sake of writing his stories, loses touch with Angelina, and supposes that he would have lost touch with Sara had she not died. As such he ends up with no ‘demos or kratein’ of his own (Nancy, Sense ) and reflects, at the close of the novel, ‘Así me voy quedando solo, así me he quedado solo (As such I am ending up alone, I have ended up alone)’ (Los informantes ). This, once again, echoes an earlier phrase of his father’s when he realises no one has come to visit him in the hospital, and he too says, ‘me he quedado solo (I have ended up alone)’ (Los informantes ).

Touch As a ‘Setting-in-motion’ In one of Jacques Derrida’s last projects, On Touching, he focuses on ‘touch’ as the central thread for understanding the significance of Nancy’s work. Derrida expresses the meaning of ‘to touch’ in Nancy’s Ego Sum as ‘to tamper with, to change, to displace, to call into question; thus it is invariably a setting in motion’ (On Touching ). In both Los informantes and Diário da Queda, touch appears to function as a positive ‘setting in motion’ leading to the reconciliation of characters in the novels, and there are also, crucially, examples in which the absence of touch frustrates the opportunity for such reconciliation. In Los informantes, the opportunity for reconciliation between the father and son, after the publication of Sara’s testimony, had occurred when it was discovered that the father needed an operation to replace an obstructed artery to his heart. It is made clear that this is the original act that sets in motion the narrative, through a phrase that the narrator reads several times before he writes up the informe: ‘nada sería como es si no lo hubieran operado (nothing would be as it is, if they had not operated on him)’ (). In On Touching Derrida describes the heart, in Nancy’s work, as symbolically representative of the ‘absolute intimacy of the limitless secret, no external border, absolute inside, crypt for oneself of an untouchable interiority’ (). In the novel, it is appropriate then that the father’s heart operation, the physical opening of the ‘crypt’, frames the revelation of his most guarded secret: that of having denounced Enrique’s family as Nazis. The son says:

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Touch As a ‘Setting-in-motion’



me ha parecido evidente que debo empezar de esta manera: recordando el día en que me llamó . . . no para detener el alejamiento en que nos habíamos embarcado, sino para sentirse menos solo cuando le abrieran el tórax con una sierra eléctrica y le cosieran al corazón enfermo una vena extirpada de su pierna derecha. it is clear to me that I should start in this way: remembering the day on which he called me . . . not to overcome the distance that had come between us, but to feel less alone when they opened up his thorax with an electric saw and sewed up his diseased heart with a vein removed from his right leg. (Vásquez, Los informantes )

The father does not call him to seek the linguistic reconciliation that would be implied by him explaining the reasons for his negative response to Gabriel’s book. Instead, he wants physical proximity ‘para sentirse menos solo (to feel less alone)’ (Los informantes ). Vásquez makes a point of describing the operation in detail to draw attention to the physical element of the opening up of the father’s heart. The heart operation is also, indirectly, an impulse for the father to reveal his secret to Angelina (his physiotherapist who becomes his lover): ‘había cometido el error que acaso cometemos todos: hacer confidencias después del sexo (he had made the mistake that we are all perhaps guilty of: exchanging secrets after sex)’ (Los informantes ). The touching between Angelina and Gabriel then also inspires him to attempt to seek reconciliation with his friend Enrique whom he betrayed ‘setting-in-motion’ another chain of events. The meeting between Enrique and Gabriel’s father is full of frustrated moments, opportunities for touch and reconciliation that pass by, one after another. In the following extensive passage Enrique discusses at length the effects of Gabriel not having sought a handshake upon being reunited, Gabriel me había saludado al llegar, pero no me había dado la mano [. . .] muy en el fondo, me chocó que no me diera la mano, sentí que no me saludaba como es debido. Si me hubiera ofrecido la izquierda . . . si me hubiera abrazado (no, esto es impensable). Pero nada de eso pasó. No hubo ese contacto al vernos, y eso me hizo falta [. . .] Es curioso lo que darse la mano tiene de conciliador, aun a pesar nuestro. Es como desarmar una bomba, yo siempre lo he visto así. Gabriel had greeted me when he arrived, but had not offered me his hand [. . .] the fact that he did not offer me his hand shocked me very deep down. I felt as if he did not greet me properly. If he had just offered me the left . . . if he had embraced me (no, that is unthinkable). But none of that occurred. There was no contact between us when we met, and I missed it [. . .] It is curious that shaking hands has something reconciliatory about it, even in our situation. It is like disarming a bomb, I have always seen it that way. (Vásquez, Los informantes )

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

The ellipses that appear in the text after ‘Si me hubiera ofrecido la izquierda . . . (If he had offered me the left . . .)’ leave the reader to consider the possibility of a different ending had they engaged in this simple gesture. Enrique and Santoro continue to eschew all other forms of contact: ‘At that moment we had gone for a walk towards the shop on the corner. It was not that we needed anything, but there are conversations in which one stops without meaning to, and then starts to walk, because when you are walking you do not have to be face-to-face all of the time’ (Los informantes ). This walk, without looking at each other, reinforces the distance between them. Finally, Enrique offers Gabriel a cigarette, which he refuses. This last lost opportunity for physical interaction leads to Enrique sending Gabriel away, forbidding him to enter into his house and denying him the reconciliation he sought. Learning from the mistakes of his encounter with Gabriel the father, Enrique and his wife Rebeca welcome Gabriel the son with affection and touch. ‘Rebeca, su esposa, me había saludado de beso al presentarse; al contrario de lo que suele pasarme, la intimidad inmediata me había gustado en ese momento, pero me había gustado más la disculpa que me ofreció la mujer en su acento de paisana despreocupada (Rebeca, his wife, had greeted me with a kiss on introduction; as opposed to what usually happens to me, I had liked the immediate intimacy at that moment, but I had preferred the apology the woman had offered me in her carefree country-folk accent)’ (Los informantes ). Despite enjoying the embrace Gabriel, faithful to his occupation as a writer, values the words, which turn out to consist of an unremarkable comment about her having her hands full. Enrique’s recourse to touch is presented as affectionate and gratuitous: ‘antes de que me diera cuenta ya Enrique me había tomado por el codo y se apoyaba ligeramente en mi brazo para bajar las escaleras, a pesar de que nada en su cuerpo parecía necesitarlo (before I had realised what was happening Enrique had taken me by the elbow and supported himself lightly on my arm in order to get down the stairs, despite the fact that his body showed no signs of needing it)’ (). The meaningfulness of touch is further reinforced in anecdotes told by Enrique. He attributes his own redemption to his wife Rebeca who, when he met her, ‘Se dedicó todo el almuerzo a hablarme de sus antepasados vikingos como si yo fuera un niño de cinco años, y a tocarme con la rodilla por debajo de la mesa. Qué digo tocarme, se estaba frotando contra mí, era como una gata en celo (She dedicated the whole lunch to talking to me about her Viking ancestors as if I were a five-year-old child, and to touching me with her knee under the table. I say touching me, she was rubbing up against me like an

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Touch As a ‘Setting-in-motion’

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affection-seeking cat)’ (Los informantes ). Enrique suggests that her words were patronising but her touch, on the other hand, was alluring, and that which brought them together. Enrique consolidates the atmosphere of reconciliation by explicitly suggesting that Gabriel let go of his sense of inheritance of his father’s mistakes, combining it with a touch that moves Gabriel: ‘no cargués vos con las cosas que hizo él, no es justo. Vos olvidate, viví tu vida’. Se limpió los dedos en el delantal y me dio una cachetada cariñosa. Era la primera vez que me tocaba con la mano (ese momento siempre es memorable). ‘¿No te importa que me meta?’ ‘don’t burden yourself with the things that he did, it isn’t fair. You forget about it, live your life’. He wiped his fingers on the tablecloth and gave me an affectionate slap. It was the first time that he had touched me with his hand (that moment is always memorable). ‘You don’t mind that I’m muscling in?’ (Vásquez, Los informantes )

This advice could be allegorically interpreted as relevant to the long-term Colombian conflict discussed previously, in which political animosity is passed down through generations. In contrast to his father, Gabriel is welcomed in, invited to dinner, and even stays over. Yet he still cannot help but satisfy his desire to appropriate elements of Enrique’s story that he wished to keep private. Rather than making his family’s history public, Enrique wishes to end the divisive cycle that history-writing can perpetuate by establishing blame. Gabriel risks the bonds that have been created by sneaking out in the night to transcribe Enrique’s documents, which he reproduces in his informe, betraying Enrique’s wishes for the sake of his writing. The father and son, in their ‘shared jurisdiction’, both operating in the sphere of language (oration and writing) are unable to avoid their tragic destinies of committing suicide, in the case of the father, and ending up alone in the case of the son. ‘Communicability’ or ‘sharing’, on the other hand, are elements of that which Nancy envisages as an alternative form of horizontal politics called ‘tying the (k)not’ in which each person speaks for themselves, and opens themselves up to others in acts of ‘exposure’ and ‘exchange’ (Sense ). This is also described as a politics of ‘nonselfsufficiency’ or, ‘dependence or interdependence’ (). In this schema ‘Politics would henceforth be neither a substance nor a form but, first of all, a gesture: the very gesture of the tying and enchainment of each to each, tying each time unicities (individuals, groups, nations or peoples) that have no unity other than that of its enchainment’ (). The possibility of this alternative form of politics consolidated through relationships of

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

‘interdependence’ is explored in the novel through tactile associations, most notably exemplified by Angelina, in her role as a physiotherapist. After Angelina publicly defamed Gabriel’s father (occupying the violence of language) Gabriel wishes to confront her. His anger dissipates when he finds a copy of the Kama Sutra that Angelina had brought for his father. The recognition of the intimate contact between Angelina and his father fades his anger and allows him to have a phone conversation with her in which they separate as friends. During the conversation Angelina undertakes a process of self-conscious sharing with Gabriel specifically related to her love of touch. She says: A mí me gusta tocar. Me gusta sentir a la gente, eso no se puede decir en voz alta. Otras fisioterapeutas sientan al paciente a veinte metros y desde ahí le dicen qué hacer. Yo me acerco, los toco, les hago masajes. Y decir que los toco y me gusta no está bien visto. I like to touch. I like feeling people; you can’t say that out loud. Other physiotherapists sit the patient down twenty meters away and tell them what they are going to do to them. I get close, I touch them, I do massages. Saying that I touch them and I like it is not well viewed. (Vásquez, Los informantes )

The relationship between Angelina and her patients is in the order of interdependence because she says, ‘Me gusta el contacto, qué puedo hacer. Después de un fin de semana sola en mi casa, pues me hace falta (I like the contact, what can I do? After a weekend by myself, alone in my house, well, I miss it)’ (). The same applies to contact with complete strangers: ‘Me gusta meterme en un ascensor bien lleno de gente. Me siento acompañada, me siento tranquila. En esos sitios los hombres se rozan contra uno, mis amigas odian eso, a mí en cambio me gusta. Eso no se lo he dicho a nadie nunca (I like getting in lifts that are really full of people. I feel accompanied, I feel calm. In those places men rub up against you. My friends hate it; I like it. I have never told that to anyone, ever)’ (Los informantes ). Each of these phrases expresses a sense of shame: ‘qué puedo hacer (what can I do)’, ‘eso no se puede decir en voz alta (that cannot be said out loud)’, and ‘eso no se lo he dicho a nadie (I have never said that to anyone)’. This highlights the taboo nature of physical contact, and yet for Angelina it is the main thing that keeps her going after her family were killed in a terrorist attack. The sharing brings Angelina closer to Gabriel and this is consolidated through actions when she sends him a Christmas card with a cut out picture and a note: ‘Un recuerdito de nuestro último encuentro telefónico. -XII-. PS: A ver si algún día nos vemos en vivo y en directo (A little reminder of our last telephone exchange, -XII-. P. S.

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Community Revealed in Death and Birth



Let’s see if one day we can meet again in person)’ (Los informantes ). Gabriel is touched: ‘Me conmovió que se hubiera acordado de mí . . . y también que se hubiera tomado el trabajo de buscar unas tijeras y recortarla y comprar una tarjeta y meterlo todo en un sobre y ponerlo en el correo, el tipo de diligencias cotidianas que siempre me han sobrepasado (I was moved that she had thought of me . . . and that she had taken the time to find some scissors and cut it out, and buy a card, and put it all in an envelope and put it in the post, the type of daily diligences that have always passed me by)’ (). By listing all the elements individually, he acknowledges the care that went into the gesture. Nevertheless, he says: Sí agradecí el gesto; y sin embargo nunca la llamé para decírselo, ni tampoco hice intento alguno para verla en vivo y en directo, y Angelina salió de mi vida como sale tanta gente: por mi incapacidad para tomar contacto . . . por esa ineptitud terrible que me impide mantener un interés sostenido y constante – un interés que vaya más allá del intercambio de información, de las preguntas que hago y las respuestas que espero y las crónicas que redacto con esas respuestas. Yes, I was appreciative of the gesture; and yet, I never called her to tell her, nor did I make any attempt to see her in person, and Angelina faded out of my life like so many people: because of my incapacity to make contact . . . for this terrible ineptitude that prevents me from keeping constant and sustained interest – an interest that goes further than just the exchange of information, of the questions that I ask and the answers I hope for, and the stories that I write with those answers. (Vásquez, Los informantes )

Gabriel’s inability to maintain contact with people is presented as a problem; he realises that there is more to life than the incessant desire to appropriate the stories of others, yet he cannot seem to follow through with the kinds of meaningful gestures that would help maintain closeness with people like Angelina.

Community Revealed in Death and Birth As we saw, the narrative in Los informantes was set in motion through the narrator’s father’s heart operation. The event that triggers the narrative in Diário da Queda is likewise related to the narrator’s father: in this case, the discovery of his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. The narrator in Diário da Queda says ‘não há tema sobre o qual já se escreveu tanto quanto um filho diante o pai que vai morrer (never was a theme so much written about as that of a son facing the death of his father)’ (Diário ). A reference to a Blanchot

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

citation by Nancy can help to illuminate the impulse to write in the face of death: ‘The basis of communication . . . is not necessarily speech, nor even the silence that is its foundation and punctuation, but exposure to death, and no longer my death, but someone else’s, whose living and closest presence is already an eternal absence’ (quoted in Nancy, Inoperative Community ). This passage poetically reflects the situation here of a lost loved one whose ‘living and closest presence is already an eternal absence’ (relating to the father’s Alzheimer’s); but it also forms part of a wider placing of importance on the awareness of finitude in Nancy’s configuration of communication and community. This is exemplified in the following idea: ‘Communication consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance (com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal themselves to be constitutive of being-incommon’ (Inoperative Community ). In Diário da Queda the narrator self-consciously reflects on this apparently common pattern of writing in the face of a father who is about to die: ‘Eu não gostaria de contar mais uma dessas histórias de reavaliação da própria vida numa situação-limite, como se a perspectiva do fim de alguém próximo nos fizesse ver o quanto tudo o mais é desimportante (I don’t want to tell another of those stories of re-evaluation in the face of a limit situation, as if the perspective given by the end of someone close, allows us to see that everything else is unimportant)’ (Diário ). Yet, despite the hesitation expressed Diário da Queda is effectively this ‘story of re-evaluation’. The biographical similarities between the narrator and Laub are revealed when we observe that the novel is dedicated to his father, but his father was no longer alive when it was published. ‘Community is revealed in the death of others’, says Nancy, because, ‘The genuine community of mortal beings, or death as community establishes their impossible communion’ (Inoperative Community ). However, birth for Nancy is also the symbol of a new beginning, a proof of community in spacing, as described in the following passage: ‘instead of fulfilling itself in a work of death and in the immanence of a subject, community communicates itself through the repetition and the contagion of births: each birth exposes another singularity, a supplementary limit, and therefore another communication’ (Inoperative Community ). In line with this thinking, the birth of the narrator’s son – and the key moments leading up to the decision to have a child – constitute significant turning points in the novel, and contradict some of the assessments by commentators who note a circular structure in the novel, and a lack of ‘progress’ (see Torres ). The title of the final section of the novel, ‘The

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Community Revealed in Death and Birth

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Diary’, significantly reverses the title of the novel when combined with the previous section’s title that was ‘The Fall’, reversing the flow of fortunes of the narrator. It shows progression from the downwards motion of a fall to the forward motion of writing, and repudiates the idea of a ‘circular structure’ inhibiting change, instead pointing to renewal in the form of new life. It is the narrator’s third wife who gives him an ultimatum to stop drinking because she wants to have a child. In fulfilling this mandate he breaks the cycle of what Auschwitz represented according to the novel’s repeated trope: ‘a inviablidade da experiência humana em todos os tempos e lugares (the impracticability of the human experience in all times and all places)’. He says: ‘Ter um filho é deixar para trás a inviabilidade da experiência humana em todos os tempos e lugares (Having a child is to leave behind the impracticability of the human experience in all times and all places)’ (Diário ). Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous generation, who withdrew from physical contact and ‘sharing’ as we have seen, his focus is on haptic interaction with emphasis on the baby knowing it is loved: ‘o colo e a pele da sua mãe, o cheiro dela, o toque das mãos passando você para o meu colo, a roupa que estarei vestindo, a minha barba, o som da minha voz, as palavras que direi e que ainda são incompreensíveis, mas você olha para mim e sabe intuitivamente o que está por trás de cada uma delas (the lap and skin of your mother, her odour, the touch of her hands passing you to my lap, the clothes that I’ll be wearing, my beard, the sound of my voice, the words I’ll say that will still be incomprehensible; but you’ll look at me and know intuitively what is behind each one of them)’ (Diário ). The words are incomprehensible for the baby, but the bond is formed, and it is the start of a new beginning for both the narrator and his son. More so than ‘autofiction’, then, the way in which I suggest Laub understands the relationship between writing and therapy is akin to Nancy’s understanding of the limits of psychoanalysis and the benefits of ‘compearance’, sharing and touch. Nancy distinguishes his understanding of ‘sharing’ from the emphasis in psychoanalysis of ‘recognition of the other’ – which originates from and upholds – the self-other dichotomy: the essential grounding of the sovereign ‘subject’, which he fervently seeks to dismantle. Instead of ‘recognition’, then, we have ‘resemblance’: ‘A likebeing resembles me in that I myself “resemble” him: we “resemble” together, if you will. That is to say, there is no original or origin of identity’ (Nancy, Inoperative Community ). Laub’s revision of the psychoanalytical model of therapy, as we have seen, places emphasis, on relationality and touch as important aspects of therapeutic process.

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Sovereignty, Democracy & ‘Nonselfsufficiency’

The notion of writing as the expression of a ‘singular voice’ is also observable in the single (fictional autobiographical) voice and perspective of the narrator. In an interview Laub says, ‘Everything is autobiographical in a book, because the writer is based in his own memory, even if it is used to invent’ (Frey ). He continues: ‘at the moment of writing you struggle with the dilemma to expose or not to expose. When you write you go against your shyness and overcome it, or don’t write’ (Frey ). Echoing Nancian vocabulary he explains that one has to make a conscious choice to ‘expose’ in order to write. It is only by sharing our most intimate desires and fears that we can ‘compear’ and enact our status ‘in-common’. It is significant to note that the author Juan Gabriel Vásquez also shares a name with his narrator, Gabriel. As such we may argue that Vásquez, too, sees writing as process of ‘exposure’, ‘sharing’ and ‘presentation of the self’ that contributes to Nancy’s literary community of ‘being-in-common’ (Inoperative Community ). In this final chapter, I have read Diário da Queda in relation to theories of narrative therapy and autobiography, as well as with reference to postHolocaust generational theory. I have argued that, contrary to existing criticism of the novel, which had predominantly situated the novel within national trends – or in dialogue with the trend in ‘autoficção’ in the Brazilian context – there is more to be gained from its consideration within global narrative frameworks, in line with an overall anti-identitarian position that Laub adopts in the novel itself. In relation to theories of narrative therapy, I suggested that the novel undertakes a significant revision of purely psychoanalytical models for the overcoming of trauma, including the literary elaboration of one of these models in the form of Serge Doubrovsky’s ‘autofiction’. This is based upon the revelation that the language used for therapeutic ‘working-through’, in itself, is not enough, but that humans also need tactile association, and a deeper unworking of the self through ‘sharing’ and ‘compearance’ to form lasting (k)nots of interdependence. This echoes the message put forward in Los informantes. But whereas the narrator in Los informantes ended up alone, ultimately Laub’s protagonist chooses to opt for the community revealed to him in the birth of his son. As such, the novel is more optimistic as to the possibilities of forging these non-binding, mutually supportive relationships – starting at a familial level. The open end of Diário da Queda, in comparison to the closed form of Los informantes reflects the idea of writing as ‘exposure’, or the act of being ‘“posed” in exteriority’; open, in other words to the inoperative community of being-in-common (Nancy, Inoperative Community xxxxvii).

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Community Revealed in Death and Birth

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Notes  Parts of this chapter’s sections on Vásquez were first published as ‘“Darse la mano es como desarmar una bomba”: Division by Language and Reconciliation through Touch in Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez’. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos : (): –. With thanks to the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos for permission to reproduce here. Parts of the sections on Laub were first published open access as ‘Writing as “Compearance” in Diário da Queda by Michel Laub’ Bulletin of Latin American Research,  (): –. With thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their comments.  It was in the French literary critical context of the s that Doubrovsky contributed to growing theoretical debates about the characteristics of autobiography and its fictional variants. Another of the key texts of this wave of debates is Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique (). For a recent summary of the French debates see Jones.  Amongst others, Hidalgo distinguishes Cristóvão Tezza, O Filho Eterno (); José Castello, Ribamar (); Bernardo Gustavo, O Gosto do Apfelstrudel (); Ferréz Capão Pecado (); Rodrigo de Souza Leão, Todos os Cachorros são Azuis ().  In the case of Doubrovsky this included accusations that he was responsible for the suicide of his wife, in having documented in detail her alcoholism (Jones –).  See Barboso do Amaral; Corrêa Batista and Azevedo Kuhn.  Brazil is also excluded from the list, foreclosing any parallels between Laub’s narrative ‘message’ and the national history of dictatorship which saw a lesser death or disappearance count than, for example, Chile, which does appear – and Argentina, which puzzlingly does not.

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Epilogue

This book has taken a thematic route through contemporary Latin American literature, which has allowed for a cross-sectional view of a generation of authors that are ostensibly less likely to share commonalities across national and regional boundaries than previous generations. Whilst acknowledging the inevitable internal differences that frustrate any attempt to delineate ‘generations’, I have suggested that there is a useful distinction to be made between the immediate post-Boom generation, and the generation of authors born in the s and s examined here. The broad political, social and economic challenges of the past two decades, and the particular generational experience of the younger authors have produced different necessary responses and emphases in their work, compared to their predecessors. In this regard, I observe two broad tendencies: first, a desire for an end to political memory discourses associated with sources of national trauma that largely took place before the authors were born. This is linked, in turn, to perceptions of the urgency of the conditions for many under neoliberalism in the region including growing and unsustainable levels of inequality and its associated problems of precarity, crime, violence and underlying racism. The second observation involves a turn towards engagements with ethical ontologies and embodied interactions as means of overcoming social divisions, exclusions and sources of conflict. In short, the authors have lost faith in the ability of modern politics to create safe, caring, and dignified associations between people, and have turned to ontology to attempt to build ‘community’ from a different metaphysical starting point than the self-contained Cartesian cogito that has determined our prevailing view of the subject throughout modernity. These findings could suggest an ‘ontological turn’ in Latin American literature, a turn that has been observed in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy (Martin and Heil), anthropology (Paleček and Risjord) and literary theory itself (McDonald). Vásquez and Laub’s exploration of the significance of touch can be understood as an engagement with the 

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philosophical call for a ‘new materialism’ developed in various ways by a so-called new generation in French philosophy, one that Nancy is considered part of (James ). Ian James, in describing this particular landscape focuses on figures such as Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Bernard Stiegler and Catherine Malabou as departing from the preoccupations of a prior generation emblematized by Gilles Deleuze, François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The shift is characterised by a distancing from ‘the linguistic paradigm’ of structuralism and post-structuralism towards the radical rethinking of ‘questions of worldliness, shared embodied existence and sensible-intelligible experience’ and highly original engagements with the question of ontology (James ). I am tempted to hedge a similar comparison regarding the shift in Latin American literature from the Boom to the present. The Boom were of course known for their non too ‘reader-friendly’ textual experiments, whereas the more recent authors take relatively more realist approaches to writing and, as I have suggested, are more concerned with haptic interaction and ‘sensible-intelligible experience’ than language and the symbolic (James ). But indeed, the angle of approach to cultural production is determined, to a degree, by theoretical trends. The critics influenced by the so-called linguistic paradigm, would have placed emphasis on structure and language, and not necessarily been as attentive to vitalist currents within the work produced in the s and s. If, as Brett Levinson suggests, productive inroads into the Boom texts have barely begun (), then one task might be to examine those works for latent or manifest concerns with ‘shared embodied existence’ and ‘questions of worldliness’ (James ). A future direction of study in relation to the contemporary generation would be to examine a broader profile of recent work (no longer thematically limited to Nazism) to see whether the ‘ontological turn’ holds up more generally in Latin American literature, or whether it is only this particular topic in history that provokes a loss of faith in politics qua governance. One novel that could have been included here – but for the fact that it addressed very different concerns to the others – was Pola Oloixarac’s  novel Las constelaciones oscuras (Dark Constellations). This novel deals with the ‘nazi’ theme in a relatively minor way, embedded within a wider examination of the concern with bio-technics and bio-power, or what has been referred to by Foucauldian scholar Colin Koopman as ‘infopower’ (). This novel presents a disturbing near future in which nation-states and multinational corporations bid for control of a huge database of biometric and genetic information with the hope of matching

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Epilogue

these data to individuals and their geo-locational trajectories. The database is held in Bariloche, the notorious hub of ex-Nazi war criminals in Argentinian Patagonia. The spectre of Nazism here functions as the representation of deeper, instinctive fears that many people have regarding the ever-expanding digital data sets and their political potential in ‘societies of control’ – fears, that is, that if an evil ‘big Other’ (with Nazi inclinations) were to find a way to control and act upon the information, we might find ourselves once again, in some easily imaginable dystopian future, in the midst of another Holocaust. Oloixarac, much more than the authors examined here, creates a continuum that runs from parasites, through plants and animals, to humans and their technological prostheses. As such she imaginatively engages with post-human theorisations such as Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, which emphasises the co- and inter-dependence of humans with other organisms and their natural surroundings. These imaginative formations, like the novels of Vásquez and Laub examined in this book, again call into question the notion of a sovereign subject, yet do so now with an additional assertion of the genetic, and therefore, philosophical plurality of the human being in its relation to nature and the planet. The question of balancing the prioritisation of immediate humanitarian needs with long-term planetary health and sustainability must also be left for a followup study; but what is striking is that Oloixarac’s novel exemplifies, once more, the endurance of ‘Nazism’ as a conceptual resource through which Latin American authors imagine the unfolding of their futures. My main argument has been that the theme of Nazism, in the novels examined, is very rarely, if ever, a signifier of pure ‘Evil’ and – even more unexpectedly – is rarely merely a pretence for the discussion of (Latin American) authoritarianism. Instead, the works draw attention to the acute present-day injustices in the divisions of people and labour that allow some people to live in a house with a swimming pool and holiday in Disneyland (to use Laub’s fairly modest example) and others to emerge anonymous, tortured, murdered and dumped in an industrial rubbish dump in Mexico’s maquiladora belt (Bolaño, ). They also deploy the theme of Nazism in order to decentre Eurocentric narratives of terror, and to shed new light on the continuum of European Nazism with post-independence

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biopolitics (Puenzo), and with altogether less historically specific questions about cultural authority and influence (Peres, Volpi and Padilla). Bolaño once said in an interview: La literatura se parece mucho a las peleas de los samuráis, pero un samurái no pelea contra otro samurái: pelea contra un monstruo. Generalmente sabe, además, que va a ser derrotado. Tener el valor, sabiendo previamente que vas a ser derrotado, y salir a pelear: eso es la literatura. Literature is very much like fights between samurais, but not a samurai fighting against another samurai: fighting against a monster. Generally, he knows that he will be defeated. Having the courage, knowing in advance that you are going to be defeated, and yet going out to fight: that is literature. (Bolaño quoted in Paz Soldán and Faverón Patriau )

Watching events unfold in Britain, the United States, Brazil, the Ukraine and across the world at the time of writing this epilogue, it is striking how uncannily timely the message of these novels is. The so-called rise of the right and the dangerous return of nationalist identity politics that has seen the hardening of borders across the world, was anticipated by up to two decades by the Latin American authors examined here. This shows that the critical power of the ‘periphery’ both asserted and enacted by Borges in relation to this same theme (up to eighty years prior) is still at work today. Whether or not this literature – or literature in general – has the power to change circumstances, or the way we relate to one another, remains a suspended question; or for Bolaño, an anticipated defeat. For all of the authors here there seems to be only one option: to try.

Note  I referred here to the elections of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the activities of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The final proofs were submitted just as Russia invaded the Ukraine.  See Cockburn.

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Index

/ Attacks, , ,  Adorno, Theodor,  Aesthetic Theory,  Aizenberg, Edna,  Alberdi, Juan Bautista,  Allegory, , –, –,  Amado, Ana,  Anderson, Benedict, ,  Anti-Semitism, – Arendt, Hannah, , ,  Origins of Totalitarianism, The,  Argentina, , , –,  Conquest of the Desert, , , –,  Dictatorship, , , , , –, –, , ,  Economy,  Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,  Migration,  Nazis in,  Peronism, , ,  Post-dictatorship, , –, ,  Autofiction, , – Avelar, Idelber Untimely Present, The, ,  Balderston, Daniel, ,  Bariloche, , , , ,  Baroque Trauerspiel. See also Benjamin, Walter Bartra, Roger, , – jaula de la melancolía, La, ,  Bayer, Osvaldo, – Benjamin, Walter, , , –, , ,  Origin of German Tragic Drama, The, , , – Biopolitics, , –, , , , –, , ,  Bloom, Harold, , , , ,  Anxiety of Influence, , , , –,  Bolaño, Roberto, –, , , , , , , –, ,  ‘Discurso de Caracas’, 

 ,, , , , –, –, ,  Amuleto,  detectives salvajes, Los, ,  Estrella distante, , , , ,  literatura nazi en América, La, , , , , , –, , ,  Nocturno de Chile, – On Borges,  Boldy, Steven, , , ,  Boom, , , , , , , ,  Borges, Jorge Luis, –, , –, , , –, –, –,  ‘Borges y yo’,  ‘Dos libros’, ,  ‘escritor argentino y la tradición, El’, , , – ‘milagro secreto, El’,  ‘muerte y la brújula, La’,  ‘otro, El’,  ‘Deutsches Requiem’, –,  ‘Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius’, –, ,  ‘Tres versiones de Judas’, ,  Fictional, , –,  Historia universal de la infamia, ,  Namesake, ,  Reinterpretation of, , , –, , –,  Brazil, , , , , ,  Dictatorship, ,  Literature,  Vargas, Getúlio,  Butler, Judith, , , , ,  ‘Competing Universalities’, , ,  Precarious Life, , , , – Chile,  Dictatorship, ,  Post-dictatorship,  Transition to democracy, , , , 



https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Ciudad Juárez, , , – Colombia, , , , –  Constitution,  Bogotazo,  Informers, ,  Mockus, Antanas,  Uribe, Álvaro,  Violencia, La, ,  Community, , –, , ,  Cortázar, Julio, , ,  Rayuela,  Crack Generation, ,  Crenshaw, Kimberlé, , See also Intersectionality Cuba,  Cuban Revolution, –,  Darwin, Charles,  Deleuze, Gilles,  Democracy, , , , , , ,  As Allegory, , – Derrida, Jacques, , , ,  On Touching,  Desaparecidos, , ,  Dictatorship, –,  Donoso, José,  Doubrovsky, Serge, ,  Durkheim, Emile,  Eco, Umberto,  Foucault’s Pendulum,  Economic liberalisation, , , , ,  Eltit, Diamela, – Esposito, Roberto, , –, , ,  Immunization,  Ethical responsibility,  Ethics, , ,  Levinasian, , , See Levinas, Emmanuel, Nancian. See Nancy, Jean-Luc Of the Face. See Levinas, Emmanuel Suspension of,  Feierstein, Daniel,  Feminicide, ,  Film Industry, The, ,  Finitude, , , , , ,  First World War, , ,  Foucault, Michel, , ,  Franco, Jean, , ,  Frankfurt School, The,  Freud, Sigmund, , , –, – ‘Remembering, Repeating, Working-through’, ,  Melancholia,  Uncanny, The, –



Fuentes, Carlos, , , , –, , –, , – Cambio de piel, , , , –, , –, –, –,  muerte de Artemio Cruz, La, ,  nueva novela hispanoamericana, La, , , , , , ,  región más transparente, La,  García Márquez, Gabriel, , ,  González Rodríguez, Sergio,  Huesos en el desierto,  Graff Zivin, Erin, – Halbwachs, Maurice,  Haraway, Donna ‘Companion Species’,  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ,  Heidegger, Martin,  ‘Letter on Humanism’,  Hirsch, Marianne, ,  Postmemory,  Holocaust, The, , , , , , –, , –, , ,  Memory, , , ,  Post-Holocaust fiction,  Representation of,  Second Generation,  Survivors, –, ,  Huyssen, Andreas, ,  Identitarian closure, , – Imagined Community. See also Anderson, Benedict Immanence, , , ,  Inequality, , ,  Intersectionality, –, , –, See also Crenshaw, Kimberlé Janet, Pierre,  Kant, Immanuel,  Kardiner, Abram,  Kirchner, Néstor,  Lacan, Jacques,  Laclau, Ernesto,  Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, , , ,  Langer, Lawrence,  Latin America, , ,  Latin American literature, –, , , , – Laub, Michel, , , , , ,  Diário da Queda, , , , , –, , – Levi, Primo, , –

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press



Index

Levinas, Emmanuel, , , , , ,  ‘Peace and Proximity’,  Ethics of the Face, , –, , , – Levinson, Brett, , , ,  Louis, Annick,  Lyotard, François,  Magical Realism, , , ,  Malabou, Catherine,  Manifiesto Crack, , ,  Mann, Thomas,  Maquiladoras,  Martin, Deborah, –,  Marx, Karl,  Masiello, Francine, , , –, ,  Mbembe, Achille, , ,  McOndo movement,  Memory work, , , , , ,  Menem, Carlos, ,  Mengele, Josef, , , –,  Fictional, , –, –, – Metaphysics, ,  Of the Subject, , , ,  Mexican Miracle,  Mexican Revolution, , ,  Villa, Pancho,  Zapata, Emiliano,  Mexico, , , , – Cholula massacre,  Crisis in authority,  Deaths of women, –,  Identity, – Intellectuals, ,  Myth, , , ,  Socioeconomic divide,  Transition to democracy, ,  Monárez Fragoso, Julia Estela,  Nancy, Jean-Luc, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –,  Being Singular Plural, ,  Compearance, , , – Ego Sum,  Inoperative Community, The, –, –, , , , , –, , , – Myth, , , –, ,  ‘Nazi Myth, The’, ,  Sense of the World, The, , , , , , , , –,  Nationalism, , , , , –, ,  Nazi Germany, ,  Nazism, , , , , , –, , –,  Deterritorialised,  Emergence of,  Heidegger’s endorsement of, 

Nazi Ideology, , –,  Spectre of,  Necropolitics, , ,  Neoliberalism, , , , , , , ,  New Materialism,  Nickels, Joel,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, ,  O’Bryen, Rory, , , ,  Ogilvie, Bertrand,  Oloixarac, Pola, – Onetti, Carlos, – Ontological Turn, , – Ontology, , –, , , – Orozco, José Clemente,  Pacheco, José Emilio, –, , –,  Morirás lejos, , , –, , –, ,  Padilla, Ignacio, , , –, , –, , , , , –,  Amphitryon, –, , , , –, – Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), , , , , –, – Paz, Octavio,  Peres, Marcos, , , –, ,  Evangelho segundo Hitler, O, , , –, – Perón, Juan Domingo, ,  Pessoa, Fernando,  Piglia, Ricardo, , ,  ciudad ausente, La, –,  Respiración artificial, , –,  Poniatowska, Elena, ,  Post-Boom, , –,  Post-dictatorship, ,  Post-structuralism,  Pratt, Mary Louise, ,  Contact Zone, ,  Pron, Patricio, , –, ,  comienzo de la primavera, El, , , , –,  Psychoanalysis, , , –, , – As cure,  Puenzo, Lucía, , , –, ,  médico alemán, El, , –, ,  Wakolda, , , , –, , –, –, ,  Ramos, Samuel,  Rancière, Jacques,  Richard, Nelly,  Ricœur, Paul, –, 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Rivera, Diego,  Rochfort, Desmond,  Sánchez Prado, Ignacio,  Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino,  Second World War, –, , , , , , ,  Shoah, The,  Siqueiros, David,  Sommer, Doris,  Sovereign Subject, , , , , ,  Sovereignty, , , , , , , , –, , , , ,  Steinberg, Samuel,  Stiegler, Bernard,  Structuralism, ,  Subalternity, , , ,  Testimonio,  Tlatelolco Massacre, The, , , – Totalitarianism, , , ,  Transcendence, , ,  Transcendental Subject, – United States, The, , ,  Vargas Llosa, Mario, ,  casa verde, La,  Vasconcelos, José, 



Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, , , –, , , , ,  informantes, Los, , , , , –, –,  Vietnam War,  Viñas, David, , ,  Indios, ejército, frontera, , –,  Volpi, Jorge, , , , –, , –, , , –, , –,  ‘End of the Conspiracy, The’,  En busca de Klingsor, –, , , , –, –,  imaginación y el poder, La, , – Wagner, Richard Parsifal,  Wedekind, Frank Fru¨hlings Erwachnen,  Williams, Gareth, , , , , – Other Side of the Popular, – Williams, Rowan,  Williamson, Edwin, ,  Žižek, Slavoj, , ,  Conspiracies,  Welcome to the Desert of the Real, , , ,  Zolov, Eric, , ,  Zurita, Raúl, 

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009067195.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press