Professional Documents
Culture Documents
EDITED BY
JOSÉ EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ
AND TIMOTHY R. ROBBINS
URBAN SPACES IN
CONTEMPORARY LATIN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Hispanic Urban Studies
Series Editors
Benjamin Fraser
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC, USA
Susan Larson
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX, USA
Hispanic Urban Studies is a series of scholarly monographs, edited vol-
umes, and translations focusing on Spanish, Latin American and US
Latino urban culture. The humanities and the social sciences are closer
in methodology than ever before. Hispanic Urban Studies serves a dual
purpose: to introduce radically original humanities work to social science
researchers while affirming the relevance of cultural production to dis-
cussions of the urban. This book series takes advantage of and further
contributes to exciting interdisciplinary discussions between Hispanic
Studies and Cultural Geography with the aim of bringing in new ideas
about space, place, and culture from all parts of the Hispanic world.
Monograph titles bring together analyses of the cultural production of
the Hispanic world with urban and spatial theory from a range of disci-
plinary contexts. The series also welcomes proposals for edited volumes
related to cities that contribute in creative ways to our understanding of
the spatial turn in Hispanic Studies. Translations published in the series
introduce English-language readers to the rich legacy of materials on
urbanism, urban culture, and cultural geography originally published in
Spanish.
Advisory Board
Malcolm Compitello, University of Arizona, USA
Monica Degen Brunel, University, London, UK
Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, University of Oregon, USA
Amanda Holmes, McGill University, Canada
Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers University, USA
Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain
Armando Silva, National University of Colombia, Bogotá
Michael Ugarte, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA
Víctor Valle, California Polytechnic State University, USA
Urban Spaces in
Contemporary Latin
American Literature
Editors
José Eduardo González Timothy R. Robbins
Department of Modern Languages Languages and Literature Department
and Literatures Drury University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Springfield, MO, USA
Lincoln, NE, USA
Index 217
Notes on Contributors
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
J. E. González (*)
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
Contrasts between the male and the female responses to this urban space
illustrate the multiple codification of this site, one that includes both the
extremities of a centralized dominating presence and the deteriorating
body of the urban inhabitant. The city’s hostile oppression of the female
body opposes the male ambivalence toward the space. …Sergio’s body is
described as “ausente” (absent) in relation to his surroundings, contrast-
ing dramatically with the pained presence of the female body. Sergio does
not even understand the feelings of oppression aroused by the city in the
female narrator. (2007, p. 138)
Without a doubt, the most significant work in the study of the city in
Latin American fiction in recent times has been done by feminist read-
ings of women writers’ fictional representations of urban space in a
male-dominated society like the previous two examples show. Here is
where the impact of the post-structuralist rethinking of the relationship
between urban space, power and the subject has yielded some of its most
important results. The gendering of urban space, which as we have seen
was only part of larger studies of the literary urban space in Schwartz
and Holmes, became the central emphasis of Unfolding the City, an
important collection of essays edited by Elisabeth Guerrero and Anne
Lambright focusing on how women “belonging to the intellectual and
professional elite, as well as to marginalized or disenfranchised groups,
negotiate their dwellings and articulate their urban lives” (2007, p. xi).
Collectively, the essays included in the volume, the editors assess, employ
a wide variety of literary texts to study how women writers decode the
“signs of the city,” “interpret race, ethnic, and class dynamics” (2007, p.
xii) or respond to contemporary disorder and the presence of mass media
in their urban environment (2007, p. xv).
A shared theme and target of critique for many of these feminist
approaches to literary geography has been the traditional relationship
between literature and the city in Latin America described in Ángel
Rama’s The Lettered City (1984).6 Rama’s well-known and influential
study argues that since colonial times a Latin American lettered elite or
letrados has existed in a relationship of dependency with the city. Latin
America provided a blank canvas on which Europeans could realize their
dream of creating a city from which they could control and mold real-
ity to their liking. The city became the center of power and one of the
ways it could use that power to order the surrounding environment was
through writing. The early lettered elite gained its prestige from its con-
nection to writing and to the city that validated the power of writing to
1 THE SPATIAL TURN AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LATIN … 5
shape reality. As the original functions the city assigned to them changed,
the letrados saw the need to continuously reinvent themselves. In order
to protect their privileged position, with every major social change, intel-
lectuals needed to prove their usefulness to the political power. Rama’s
book recounts the history of the transformations that the letrados as a
social group, or the “lettered city,” as he calls them, undergo in their
search to protect their interests. After the book’s initials comments about
the connection between the foundations of the Latin American cities and
the power of the written word, the city becomes a synecdoche for polit-
ical power. In his historical overview of the letrados, Rama details the
social and political changes that took place from Colonial times to the
early twentieth century and how the lettered elite managed to fend most
attempts to question its connection to power. In Rama’s reading, the
lettered city remains unchanged as it is able to co-op the social groups
seeking to challenge it. However, for many contemporary critics, toward
the end of the twentieth century begins to emerge the notion of la ciu-
dad posletrada, a moment in which the Latin American writer has lost its
privileged position in part due to the social and cultural changes brought
about by mass media and globalization.
The gendering of space has been a long-time concern of feminist
criticism and, as we have seen, recent readings of women writers’ fic-
tional representations of urban space have brought a necessary cor-
rective view of the city in Latin American fiction. In some of these
readings, the notion of the lettered city plays a central role as it obvi-
ously designated of a group of (overwhelmingly male) scholars defend-
ing a patriarchal system.7 Guerrero and Anne Lambright explain that
“a careful reading of Rama’s work reveals the masculine nature of his
model of the lettered city, to the exclusion of women intellectuals, who
were still rare during the periods that Rama studies (first the colonial
era, and then the years of literary expansion following independence,
particularly from 1880 to 1920)” (2007, p. xix). Hence, as Schwartz
has noticed, the notion of the post-lettered city, so essential to the rela-
tionship between twenty-first century writers and their fictional rep-
resentation of the urban space, needs to take into account the impact of
women rewriting the city: “The concept of a post-lettered city, a social
space not just vaguely ‘beyond’ but more critically after the earlier func-
tioning of the written, stretches Rama’s work on urban elite cultural
space in the broadest contemporary perspective, where women’s writ-
ing, not only their resistance, their orality, or their sexuality, can play
6 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
During the first part of the twentieth century, government and civil society
strove to create a city where the urban infrastructure, the parks, schools,
hospitals, and banks, the transportation and commercial centers, would be
evenly distributed around its territory. As a result, Buenos Aires was a rela-
tively successful and democratic city. Things have changed in the last three
decades and especially in the last few years. Buenos Aires is now a broken
city: radiant in the northern neighborhoods, where tourists find a replica
8 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
One could then summarize the overall image of the Latin American
postmodern-neoliberal city as resulting from: a sociospatial fragmen-
tation based on class and racial status, an increasing income gap gener-
ated by the new economy, the presence of a new type of violence, lack of
confidence in the nation-state, and a general sense of decay and loss of
control. The characteristics just described, though not all of them pres-
ent in all the texts, find an echo in the fictions and topics studied in our
volume. They suggest a pessimistic view about the urban scene in which
the characters of these fictions navigate. For example, Eduard Arriaga’s
reading of Antonio José Ponte’s representation of Havana’s urban ruins
connects it to the situation of the Cuban capital as a “globalized colo-
nial city” and explains how for the author “citizens become part of those
ruins” as a result of the global capitalist market. Both Regalado-López
and François interpret the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic images of
Mexico so common in turn of the century literature as reflecting the
growing concern for the overpopulation, violence, poverty, and all the
aspects that make the megalopolis uninhabitable. Evaluating the apoc-
alyptic representation of the city in novels published by Crack writers,
Regalado-López situates them within “the atmosphere of skepticism,
deception, and hopelessness associated with the burial of utopias and
with the Mexican crisis in the mid-nineties.” Juan Pablo Melo’s studies
Bolaño’s fragmentation of space and time as resulting from his attitude
toward global capitalism, which “ultimately tend[s] to disorder, chaos,
and destruction.” Perkowska emphasizes the civil war, the inability of the
local political situation to improve the conditions of living, and the ram-
pant corruption as some of the factors creating the sense of destruction
that permeates Franz Galich’s depiction of Managua.
In a sense, one could argue that our analyses continue a critical tra-
dition that sees narrative writing from a specific literary period—in this
case, twenty-first century Latin American fiction—as responding in their
structure to the social and material evolution of the city, while perhaps
announcing the end of such tradition. An excellent example of this clas-
sical way of reading the city is Richard Lehan’s The City in Literature
(1998). This critic sees in the emergence of the capitalist system the
most important force in creating the modern urban world, explaining
that it transformed the medieval-renaissance world, moving it “from
a feudal to an urban base, as the cities of Europe became the money
capitals under the influence of the new middle-class merchant, traders,
10 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
style for the Latin American novelist is the Baroque. Carpentier’s elegant
argument is however still trapped within the logic of Anglo-European
literary history. It is because Joyce’s modern style has been frequently
explained as a reflection of the modern city life that Carpentier feels that
Latin American writers will only produce great novels once they start
writing about their urban reality. On the one hand, in recognizing the
synchronicity of diverse stylistic periods that shape the Latin American
city, Carpentier appears to understand the origin of those urban charac-
teristics in a situation of economic and cultural marginality. On the hand,
however, his solution to the “problem” reinforces a specifically Anglo-
European version of literary history in which styles evolve from changes
in the urban landscape. Carpentier’s theory about a link between style,
urban space and local or regional identity was not a unique response, but
probably a generational characteristic. Holmes has argued that “through
experimentation in narrative structure, linguistic variation, and neologism,
characteristic of Boom literature, [Boom novels] generate images of the
of Spanish American urban environment as at once vertiginous, exhila-
rating, unfathomable, inspirational, and exemplary of Spanish American
cultural identity” (2007, p. 28). The time to use descriptions of Latin
American cities in an attempt to capture some kind of essence of a local
cultural identity, however, is long gone. Nothing seems farther from Latin
American writers’ minds than to develop a style out of their desire to
register an “authentic” or “essential” Latin American urban reality. It is
true that in Carpentier’s comments about the Latin American city there
is a recognition of their marginality (“falso helénico, falso romano, falso
Renacimiento”), but that gesture pales in comparison to the twenty-first
Latin American author’s awareness of globalization as responsible for the
features and ruins of their cities, which is very palpable in the narrations
studied in this volume. Under the conditions of globalization, it is hard
to see the features of the Latin American cities as anything other than
responses to international economic and cultural trends.
Some have interpreted features of postmodern literature within the
logic of the “urban change as literary style” version of literary history
that Carpentier espoused. For example, having followed, in his 1998
book, the traditional account that links the modern city and modernist
literature, Lehan’s view of the postmodern city, sees the postmodern rep-
resentation of urban space as reflecting the complex economic system of
late capitalism, “the money system has become so complex that it should
be thought of as more of a self-enclosed, self-energizing system than
as anything material” (1998, p. 273) and, as a consequence, a “human
1 THE SPATIAL TURN AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LATIN … 13
Notes
1. We have presented a general description of this generation of writers and
some of the features that separates them from the Boom writers in the
introduction to New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative
(González and Robbins 2014).
2. For a definition of the term see the Introduction to Warf and Arias’ The
Spatial Turn (2008). For overall view of many of the directions in which the
study of space—not limited to urban space—in literature is being taken, see
Tally’s chapter “The Reassertion of Space in Literary Studies” (2017: 1–6).
3. Foucault’s main essays on space are “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and
Heterotopias” and his “Questions on Geography.” On Foucault and space,
see also Crampton and Elden’s edited volume (2012). Elden also offers
a good introduction to Lefebvre’s ideas about space in his Understanding
Henri Lefebvre (2004).
4. See also Wesphal’s comments in Geocriticism (2011, pp. 90–94).
5. Among some of the great contributions in Latin America, see Marta
López’s 1996 essay “Ciudad y desencuentro” (1996). Another work from
this period worth mentioning is Mabel Moraña’s edited volume, Espacio
Urbano (2002).
6. Rama’s theory is analyzed in Holmes (2007, pp. 18–19), Schwartz’s first
chapter (1999) and, as already mentioned, Guerrero and Lambright’s
introduction to their edited volume.
7. See comments by Rama’s translator about the lettered city (Lambright and
Guerrero 2007, p. xix).
8. However, one should also notice that the emphasis on the post-lettered
city condition might also result on a limited critique of Rama. The fact
that Rama’s views on other subjects—his definition of the Boom period—
has been similarly criticized in the past, for example, should alert us to the
possibility that the theory of the lettered city possess inaccuracies, gaps and
16 J. E. GONZÁLEZ
problems that are being ignored. In our desire to move beyond the restric-
tive nature of the lettered city, one should be careful not to legitimize it
in the process. One runs the risk of naturalizing Rama’s reading by focus-
ing only on the fact that the lettered city has crumbled. Instead, it is also
important to question the validity of his theory, to question whether the
lettered city was as powerful as he said it was to begin with. It is important
to go back to the periods in which the lettered city was supposedly domi-
nant and study how women, for example, challenged and modified existing
notions of space. For examples of these approaches, see Ángel A. Rivera’s
essay on Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo, a Puerto Rican writer whose turn of
the century novels “not only represent nineteenth-century Caribbean and
Spanish women within the context of the city, they also explore the kind of
intellectual endeavors that would allow female writers to express or to con-
struct their subjectivities” (Lambright and Guerrero 2007, pp. 209–210).
Also, see Marta Sierra’s chapter on Victoria Ocampo and Norah Lange
during the 1920–1950 period (2012, pp. 21–62). In the present volume,
see Eduard Arriaga’s comments about Rama.
Bibliography
Bentley, Nick. 2014. “Postmodern Cities.” In The Cambridge Companion to
the City in Literature, edited by Kevin R. McNamara, 175–187. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Carpentier, Alejo. 1987. Tientos y diferencias. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés.
Draper, Susan. 2003. “Cartografías de una ciudad posletrada: La República de
Platón (Uruguay, 1993–1995).” Revista Iberoamericana 69, no. 202: 31–49.
Elden, Stuart, and Jeremy W. Crampton. 2012. Space, Knowledge and Power:
Foucault and Geography. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.
Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Franco, Jean. 2009. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in
the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
González, José Eduardo, and Timothy R. Robbins. 2014. “Posnacionalistas:
Tradition and New Writing in Latin America.” In New Trends in
Contemporary Latin American Narrative, edited by Timothy R. Robbins and
José Eduardo Gonzalez, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Holmes, Amanda. 2007. City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American
Urban Space. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Humphrey, Michael. 2012. “Citizen Insecurity in Latin American Cities: The
Intersection of Spatiality and Identity in the Politics of Protection.” Crítica
Contemporánea. Revista De Teoría Política, no. 2: 101–118.
Jaffe, Rivke, and José Carlos G. Aguiar. 2012. “Introduction—Neoliberalism
and Urban Space in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Singapore Journal of
Tropical Geography 33, no. 2: 153–156.
1 THE SPATIAL TURN AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LATIN … 17
Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt. 2015. “Urban Fragility and Resilience in Latin
America. Conceptual Approaches and Contemporary Patterns.” In Violence
and Resilience in Latin American Cities, edited by Koonings Kees and Dirk
Kruijt, 1–29. London: Zed Books.
Lambright, Anne, and Elisabeth Guerrero. 2007. “Introduction.” In Unfolding
the City: Women Write the City in Latin America, edited by Anne Lambright
and Elisabeth Guerrero, ix–xxxii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lehan, Richard Daniel. 1998. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and
Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
López, Marta. 1996. “Ciudad y desencuentro: dos miradas de mujer.” In Pensar
la ciudad, edited by Fabio Giraldo Isaza and Fernando Viviescas, 416–429.
Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores.
McNamara, Kevin R. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moraña, Mabel. 2002. Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América
Latina. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.
Prieto, Eric. 2011. “Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond.”
In Geocritical Explorations, edited by Robert T. Tally, 13–27. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Sarlo, Beatriz. 2008. “Cultural Landscapes. Buenos Aires from Integration to
Fracture.” In Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing
Age, edited by Andreas Huyssen, 27–49. Durham: Duke University Press.
Schwartz, Marcy. 1999. Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in
Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press.
Schwartz, Marcy. 2007. “Short Circuits: Gendered Itineraries in Recent Urban
Fiction Anthologies from Latin America.” In Unfolding the City: Women
Write the City in Latin America, edited by Anne Lambright and Elisabeth
Guerrero, 3–26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sierra, M. 2012. Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women’s Literature. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in
Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso.
Tally, Robert T. 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. New
York: Taylor & Francis.
Varma, Rashmi. 2011. The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi,
Bombay. London: Routledge.
Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. 2008. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Westphal, Bertrand. 2011. “Foreword.” In Geocritical Explorations. Space, Place,
and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert T. Tally, ix–xv.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
CHAPTER 2
Liesbeth François
When talking about Mexico City in the present tense, and about its lit-
erary representation in particular, sooner rather than later the words
“chaos,” “disorder” or even “monstrosity” will enter the conversa-
tion. One of the most famous expressions of this tendency is Carlos
Monsiváis’s characterization of the Mexican capital as a “post-apoca-
lyptic city,” a city where “Lo peor ya ocurrió (y lo peor es la población
monstruosa cuyo crecimiento nada detiene)” (2001, p. 21). The same
idea informs a large strain of thinking that can be found in theoretical
works on urbanism and the cultural products referring to it—the title of
Diane Davis’s study of the city, Urban Leviathan, or of the first chap-
ter of Lucía Sá’s research into the cultural representations of Mexico
City and São Paulo, “Approaching the Monster” (2007) are only two
other telling examples. It does not come as a surprise, then, that many
literary descriptions of the last two to three decades appear closely
L. François (*)
Faculty of Arts, French, Italian and Spanish Literature,
KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium
among many others, but has appeared largely beyond the boundaries
of France and French literature. On the other hand, an anxiety about
the dehumanizing and disorienting effects of modern metropolises has
progressively tempered this enthusiasm. From the nineteenth century
onwards, philosophical reflection and observation lead to the conclu-
sion that the city had become “overwhelming” or even “hostile” to
individuals.3 This way, it is clear that the impression of incommensura-
bility and chaos are neither limited to Mexico City nor to the last two
decades. What is more, the historical optimistic responses to the growth
of the metropolis provide a possible antecedent for overcoming the
abovementioned order/disorder binary, which is strictly bound up with
the latter vision of the city as ungraspable. In this sense, the flâneur has
resurfaced as a way to explore the fragmented heterogeneity of the city
without necessarily imposing an ideological categorization in terms of its
(non-)conformity to the organized and the rational. Peter Krieger uses
the Citámbulos project, a website where the pictures and impressions of
several urban walkers are gathered, as an example of a way to avoid fall-
ing into the chaotic stereotype. In a similar way, Vicente Quirarte, whose
Elogio de las calles is one of the foremost panoramic works on the liter-
ary representation of Mexico City until the end of the twentieth century,
proposes in his characteristically lyrical style to “modify the disaster” by
recovering those elements that are witnesses of the city’s past and of its
many attractions (2001, p. 596). His account of Mexico City literature,
while recognizing the existing problems of chaos and expansion, refuses
to limit itself to the exclusive treatment of these problems, and several
modern-day urban crónicas can be said to attempt to do the same. And
within the narrative and poetic genres, works such as Y retiemble en sus
centros la tierra (1999) by Gonzalo Celorio, Papeles falsos (2010) by
Valeria Luiselli and Luigi Amara’s A pie (2010) are just a few examples
of how a flâneur-like perspective on the megacity can be used to reach a
point beyond either critique of chaos or blindness toward the daily reali-
ties of the urban landscape.4
The purpose of this article, however, is to explore a more unexpected
way of escaping the dead end of the city’s conceptualization in terms
of order and disorder: the one of visiting the Metro. Several texts writ-
ten by contemporary Mexican authors choose this space as their back-
ground, which in fact becomes very much a foreground, and connect it
to alternative experiences of the Mexican capital. These works, initially,
adopt the normative gaze that sees the city as a place where order should
2 BEYOND THE RUINS OF THE ORGANIZED CITY … 23
No era mi rostro ya, sino el del huésped. Mis manos crispadas, la forma
de caminar, reflejaban ahora una torpeza pastosa, la lentitud de quien ha
dormido muchas horas e intenta despabilarse de golpe. Al mismo tiempo,
descubría con asombro una sensualidad nueva. Mis caderas y mis pechos,
antes totalmente pueriles, eran cada vez más prominentes, como si los
dominara una voluntad ajena. Poco a poco, el territorio pasaba bajo su
control. (Nettel 2006, p. 124)
Yo, que desde hacía tantos años llevaba un parásito dentro, lo sabía mejor
que nadie; también la ciudad se estaba desdoblando, también ella empez-
aba a cambiar de piel y de ojos. El proceso era inevitable, al menos ésa
era mi impresión, y solamente esperaba que esa otra cosa, LA COSA
urbana, no permeara a los subsuelos, para que al menos quedara en la ciu-
dad ese espacio libre como a mí me quedaría la memoria. (Nettel 2006,
pp. 175–176)
In the same way Ana experiments the rise of La Cosa inside her, an
unknown presence is taking over Mexico City. Through her traditional
perspective, however, Ana identifies “LA COSA urbana” unilaterally as
an urban monster, as the problems suffered in the megacity—corruption,
ugliness, repression—and of which she only recently is becoming aware.
What she fails to see at this moment is the way in which these problems
are now visible to her because of the widening of her experiences and
knowledge. “LA COSA urbana,” as the Metro itself, appears as chaotic
and unpleasant to a normative eye, but it is, in the end, what makes up
the heterogeneous tissue of today’s megacities. As in the case of Ana
and La Cosa, between whom occurs a kind of reconciliation at the end
of the novel, getting a closer look at what has always been seen merely
as a problem, is fundamental for a plural understanding of the urban
landscape.
and the corporeal contact that evidently takes place during the massage,
suggest that the massage in the Metro is a way to reduce precisely the
gap between the individual and the multitude, or between private space
and the urban landscape, without erasing it altogether, as there still is
a glass wall between them. What is more, the activities performed by
the blind man while he is giving the massage—receiving money from a
sect of blind people living in the Metro of which he is the leader, and
giving advice to them when they have been badly treated by traffic
officers—brings the narrator in touch with a particular social universe.
As in El huésped, with which this story strikingly shares the imaginary
of an organization of blind beggars that is operating in the Metro, the
isolation of the protagonist is overcome. Here, as in Nettel’s novel, the
Metro functions as a compression mechanism and a detonator of corpo-
ral and social experience. In opposition to the “normal,” divided space
where each place corresponds to a particular possession and function, the
subway offers the possibility of recuperating the “representational space”
that regulates our symbolic and sensorial understanding of the world in
which we live.
This partial overcoming of solitude and isolation also has its conse-
quences at the level of writing. As Sergio Delgado has shown with
respect to Bellatin’s novel Salón de belleza, a strong connection can be
made, in his work, between the two main historical meanings of the
“aesthetic”; these are, on the one hand, its current sense, referring to
the beautiful, specifically in the arts, and on the other hand, the mean-
ing it had up until the eighteenth century, and which includes everything
that can be experimented through the senses (Delgado 2011, p. 70). A
similar association can be made in the case of “Giradores en torno a mi
tumba”: precisely at the moment when the narrator finds himself naked
on the massaging bed, in close corporal contact with the blind man and
in the proximity of thousands of travelers, he receives a kind of epiphany
with respect to his literature. This sudden realization corrects his earlier
reflections on the act of writing: “Constato entonces que no hay equivo-
cación possible. Que a pesar de las tinieblas en que a veces están inmersas
mis palabras, en sus aparentes faltas de sentido, se encuentra presente la
realidad. Lo constato con las cientos de gentes que, lo quería ignorar, me
estuvieron rodeando todo el tiempo. La palabra, los textos, no era cierto
que se gestaban en la soledad más absoluta” (Bellatin 2014, p. 651).
What the narrator first conceptualized as a fissure between self and mul-
titude, as something to be realized in a solitude that is only underscored
2 BEYOND THE RUINS OF THE ORGANIZED CITY … 39
(Bellatin 2014, p. 652); this is, to discover the point where any con-
crete conduct touches the absurd and, in so doing, opens up to a vari-
ety of inscriptions and interpretations. This is another way to adopt the
“volumetric perspective” commented by Mark Anderson (2016): it
surpasses the bidimensionality of the page and the idea of writing as an
activity to be completed in isolation from the exterior world, in order
to activate the tridimensional dynamics of the rhizome. Instead of the
separation between the autonomous worlds of literary discourse and
reality, the experiences of the narrator in the Metro activate a sense of
containment in the masses, a sense of copresence of reality and writing,
without reducing the latter to a reflection of the former. This realiza-
tion about writing brings the character back to the theme of the city;
he concludes, right after his reference to the “non-evident point in each
concrete behavior,” that, in spite of all the problems that originate in
the megacity, his choice to work in Mexico City is the right one. The
city itself, then, becomes the ideal rhizomatic environment for literary
creation in the way in which the narrator of “Giradores en torno a mi
tumba” understands it. Rather than sticking to a unilateral focus on “las
incomodidades de esta ciudad, de su inseguridad, de la engañosa amab-
ilidad o la ética del horror” (Bellatin 2014, p. 652), the narrator is led,
through his visit to the Metro and the massage, to appreciate the hetero-
geneity of urban experience. Writing (and living), in this sense, does not
occur between walls, with the dynamics of the city as a mere background
rumor, but it actively engages with them. It overcomes the separation
between the inside and the outside, the autonomous, orderly world of
discourse and the “chaotic” tissue of reality.
Here too, as in the case of Nettel’s novel, however, the text does not
admit a unilaterally utopic reading. Although there is a sense of salvation
to this conception of literature and of the city, this redemption can nei-
ther be absolute nor stable. One of the aspects that complicate the image
of redemption through a nomadic sense of writing is a certain twist at
the end, when the narrator notes that his choice to work in Mexico City
is the right one, but relates it to the fact that he has even already pre-
pared his burial in this city. This way, it becomes clear that the existential
doubts that force him to write and to go out into the crowds do not
disappear, but are only momentarily eased. The desire toward death is
not expelled, it is postponed and reformulated—as is the obsession with
death in most of Bellatin’s texts. The rhizomatic engagement with reality
is neither necessarily univocally benign nor definitive, as is reality itself.
2 BEYOND THE RUINS OF THE ORGANIZED CITY … 41
The quest for an aesthetic space, in this sense, seems to connect more
closely, again, to the eighteenth century definition of the aesthetic, as
the whole of phenomena that can be experimented through the senses.
It is neither a quest for the beautiful nor for the good; it is an immer-
sion in the complex and dynamic flows of everyday life. A variation of the
massage-in-the-Metro-sequence that appears in El libro uruguayo de los
muertos adds to this ambiguity, when the narrator describes not only the
benign effects of the massage, but also a kind of anger he senses while
receiving it:
The dependency of the lover and the loved one suggests that the mas-
sage does not have simply benign effects, but that it is, in fact, an addic-
tion, and an ultimately humiliating activity. Likewise, the constant
movement and hustle of Mexico City is a starting point for the narrator
to write, but this is in no way a glorification or concealment of the prob-
lems of violence and insecurity that also exist in the metropolis, of which
several examples from “Giradores en torno a mi tumba” have already
been mentioned.8 Yet again, what the Metro adds to the experience of
the city is a certain opening of the sensory and aesthetic pallet, but it is
in no way a utopic space that functions as an opposition to the surface.
Notes
1. For other references, see, for instance, Ordiz (2014) and Santos López
(2012).
2. Many intellectuals and writers from these centuries have shown a clear fas-
cination toward technological evolutions: in the case of Mexico, the avant-
garde movement of the Estridentistas is the best-known example of the
poetical recuperation of a city progressively organized around machinery
and modern technology. The attraction of the modern metropolises has
also taken the shape of a preference for exploration and curiosity, which,
in Latin America, has given way to a solid tradition of crónicas that sought
to capture and reassemble the heterogeneous and fragmentary city impres-
sions into new narratives (Ramos 2009, pp. 213–260).
3. These ideas were condensed in, among other examples, Walter Benjamin’s
elegy of the flâneur—although it can be seen that in other uses of flânerie,
this activity precisely functions as a defense mechanism against the frag-
mentary nature of new urban phenomena—and Georg Simmel’s famous
essay on the overstimulation by the new city centers, “The Metropolis and
Mental Life.” Texts like these depart from the premise that urban growth
is detrimental to individual as well as social well-being. This perspective
has, throughout the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning
of the twenty-first century, overshadowed the early enthusiasm of futur-
ists and cronistas, and relegated the “rational” and “optimistic” vision on
expansion and development to the domain of urban planning and engi-
neering. In today’s metropolises, as Kevin Lynch and Fredric Jameson
would have it, urban growth “has finally succeeded in transcending the
capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its
44 L. FRANÇOIS
Bibliography
Anderson, Mark. 2016. “The Ground of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth.”
In Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical
Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia
Bora, 99–124. New York: Lexington Books.
Augé, Marc. 1986. Un ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Hachette.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1997. La poética del espacio. Translated by Ernestina De
Champourcin. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Bellatin, Mario. 2012. El libro uruguayo de los muertos. Pequeña muestra del vicio
en el que caigo todos los días. Mexico City: Sextopiso.
———. 2014. Obra reunida 2. Barcelona: Alfaguara.
Cote Botero, Andrea. 2014. “Mario Bellatin: El giro hacia el procedimiento y la
literatura como proyecto.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
2 BEYOND THE RUINS OF THE ORGANIZED CITY … 45
Davis, Diane. 1994. Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Universtiy of Minnesota Press.
Delgado, Sergio. 2011. “Estética, política y sensación de la muerte en Salón de
belleza de Mario Bellatin.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 64, no. 1: 69–79.
García Canclini, Néstor. 1997. Imaginarios urbanos. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
Heffes, Gisela. 2008. Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana.
Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Holmes, Amanda. 2007. City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American
Urban Space. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Krieger, Peter. 2006. “Megalópolis México: perspectivas críticas.” In Megalópolis:
La modernización de la Ciudad de México en el siglo XX, edited by María
Teresa Uriarte, Bernd M. Sherer, and Peter Krieger, 27–54. Mexico:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas.
———. 2012. “The Image of the Megalopolis—Understanding the Complex
Visual Construction of Mexico City.” Diogenes, 58, no. 3: 55–66.
Laddaga, Reinaldo. 2007. Espectáculos de realidad: Ensayo sobre la narrativa lati-
noamericana de las últimas dos décadas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald
Nicholson-Smith. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell.
López-Labourdette, Adriana. 2012. “¿Devenir mujer, devenir monstruo?
Cuerpos y textos monstruosos en Carmen Boullosa y Guadalupe Nettel.” In
Fiestas infinitas de la máscara: Actos performativos de feminidad y masculini-
dad en México, edited by Claudia Groneman and Cornelia Sieber, 149–168.
Hildesheim: Olms.
Monsiváis, Carlos. 2001. Los Rituales Del Caos. Mexico: Era.
Morris, Adam. 2012. “Micrometanarratives and the Politics of the Possible.”
CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3: 91–117.
Nettel, Guadalupe. 2006. El huésped. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Ordiz, Javier. 2014. “Pesadillas del futuro. Distopías urbanas en la narrativa mex-
icana contemporánea.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 7: 1043–1057.
Pike, David Lawrence. 2007. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern
Urban Culture, 1800–2001. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Pitois-Pallares, Véronique. 2015. “Sous le signe du Je: Pratiques introspectives
dans le roman mexicain (2000–2010).” PhD dissertation, Université Paul
Valéry-Montpellier III.
Punzano Sierra, Israel. 2006. “Guadalupe Nettel retrata en ‘El Huésped’ la verdad
de lo oculto.” El país, January 23. https://elpais.com/diario/2006/01/23/
cultura/1137970801_850215.html (accessed September 14, 2016).
46 L. FRANÇOIS
Quintero, Gustavo. 2014. “El cuerpo monstruoso del texto o Mario Bellatin
escribe.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 1, no. 1: 189–204.
Quirarte, Vicente. 2001. Elogio de la calle: biografía literaria de la ciudad de
México, 1850–1992. Mexico: Cal y Arena.
Ramos, Julio. 2009. Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: liter-
atura y política en el siglo XIX. Caracas: El perro y la rana.
Rechniewski, Elizabeth. 2011. “When and Why Did the Flaneur Die? A Modern
Detective Story.” Literature & Aesthetics 17, no. 2: 90–103.
Sá, Lúcia. 2007. Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and Sao Paulo. New York:
Routledge.
Santos López, Danilo. 2012. “La metrópolis en la novela mexicana a partir de
los años noventa: El postapocalipsis del Distrito Federal.” Taller de letras 50:
87–104.
Tester, Keith, ed. 1994. The Flâneur. New York: Routledge.
Villoro, Juan. 2004. “The Metro.” In The Mexico City Reader, edited by Ruben
Gallo, translated by Lorna Scott Fox, 123–132. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Weizman, Eyal. 2002. “The Politics of Verticality.” Open Democracy. https://
www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp (accessed
February 13, 2017).
Williams, Rosalind. 2008. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology,
Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 3
Marta Sierra
Spectral Cities
A child coming back from the grave, a villa haunted by unwanted pres-
ences, a mysterious substance that turns bodies into ghosts. In the nar-
ratives by Mariana Enríquez (2016) and Samanta Schweblin (2015), the
city becomes a haunted space where strange occurrences happen. Their
short stories move away from the city and its urban dreams. They build
what Marc Augé (1997) calls a “non-place,” a hollow place that con-
nects reality and fiction, the natural and the supernatural. Their haunted
spaces show the disruption of what Julian Holloway and James Kneale
name as the affordances of objects, and the normalized configurations
of materiality, embodiment and space (2008, p. 303). Spectral presences
disrupt the relationship between space and its object relations as they dis-
locate the material world, and unsettle our senses of place.
How can we interpret this turn away from the city as the beacon of
modernity and rationality? The city no longer expresses social order; it
is no longer the lettered city that Rama had in mind when writing about
M. Sierra (*)
Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, USA
rescue past defeats out of oblivion and remain open to an as yet unimag-
inable future” (1999, pp. 20–21). It is in the recurrence of the past that
we can find many of the spectral presences that emerge in the stories.
Whether or not it reflects the traumatic realities of Argentina, the
ghost that materializes in these stories is not only a fantastic trope but
also a social figure acquiring different meanings. As Avery Gordon states,
haunting is a way of knowing, a way of experiencing what has happened.
“Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and
always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to
experience, not as a cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition”
(2008, p. 8). What I would like to address in this essay is the ethical and
political potential of such spectral geographies, as the city becomes a site
for experimentation and questioning of what is perceived as the estab-
lished social order. In other words, I propose that the ghost is an unsta-
ble discourse or epistemology that questions established formations of
knowledge, and that invokes what is placed outside it, excluded from the
archive of the acknowledged past and the reimagined present and future.
“El chico sucio” places us in a threshold that is both spatial (the bor-
der between Constitución and Barracas) and temporal (the present and
the bygone days of wealth and prestige). The city that the story describes
is a city populated by ghosts coming from stories cultivated by popular
imagination. One of them is “El gauchito Gil.” According to the legend
that takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, the police followed
and later captured Mamerto Antonio Gil Núñez, who was accused of
desertion. The police tried many times to end his life, but the belief is
that “San La Muerte” protected him. “El chico sucio” has references to
both figures: “El gauchito Gil” is considered a saint that produces mir-
acles helping people, and “San La Muerte” is a protector of those who
live a violent life, burglars and drug dealers who, people believe, offer the
saint children as human sacrifices.
In the story, two of the main characters are a homeless pregnant
mother and her son. The protagonist is a young woman who—contra-
dicting her family’s advice—lives in the old family house. The “dirty
kid” and her mother live on her street corner. She has seen the kid many
times begging in the trains that go to the capital: he hands out prayer
cards of Saint Expeditus in exchange for money: “Tiene un método muy
inquietante; después de ofrecerles la estampita a los pasajeros, los obliga a
darle la mano, un apretón breve y mugriento. Los pasajeros contienen la
pena y el asco: el chico está sucio y apesta, pero nunca vi a nadie lo sufi-
cientemente compasivo como para sacarlo del subte, llevárselo a su casa,
darle un baño, llamar a asistentes sociales” (Enríquez 2016, p. 14).
The story shows the protagonist as someone who is comfortable liv-
ing in the margins of society. Surrounded by the dangers of the neigh-
borhood, she seems to enjoy an immunity that keeps her protected.
Contrary to the revulsion experienced by the train passengers, she thinks
of the kid and his mother as two unlucky people who need her help. The
fact that she is comfortable in the neighborhood changes when, one day,
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 51
after the mother and the dirty kid disappear, the police find the body
of a little kid decapitated, and showing signs of torture. The narrator is
convinced the body belongs to the kid, and that he was sacrificed in a
“San La Muerte” ritual. However, she cannot identify the body, leaving
open the possibility that the victim is not the dirty kid. At this point, her
narrative position changes to one of fear and hesitation. Haunted spaces
embody an interpretative position caught or frozen between a familiar
explanation of events, and a purely supernatural explanation of situa-
tions. In “El chico sucio,” haunting becomes both a textual process—an
unstable discourse that drags the reader into doubt—and an interpreta-
tive position that shows the narrator’s internal instability.
As Rosemary Jackson explains, the fantastic and the spectral share
many traits:
“The etymology of the word fantastic points to an essential ambiguity:
it is un-real. Like the ghost, which is neither dead nor alive, the fantas-
tic is a spectral presence, suspended between being and nothingness. It
takes the real and breaks it” (1995, p. 20). The fantastic opens a wound
in the real; Bataille refers to this kind of infraction as “une déchirure,”
a tear, a wound, laid open in the side of the real (Jackson 1995, p. 21).
The stability of the narrator’s world is torn apart by the emergence of
the child’s crime, also challenging the securities associated with her social
class. The story destabilizes space and with it, her social identity. Antony
Vidler describes “spatial fear” as built upon the figures of the double and
derealization: the uncanny expresses a sense of strangeness and homeless-
ness that embody the fear of modernity represented by the bourgeoisie
(1992, p. 9). The notion of home and the private world, foundational
concepts of the modern sense of urban space are shattered in “El chico
sucio,” pushing the narrator into a position of homelessness as evidenced
at the end of the story. What the story eventually installs is the dark space
that has otherwise been erased in modernity.1
After she finds the mother back on her corner but not the son—
according to the mother she gave the son to “them,” meaning the
witches performing the “San La Muerte” rituals—the narrator goes back
to her house only to discover that what was before, the safety of her
home no longer exists:
The story thus builds a spectral space, transforming the family house
into a haunted place where the narrator no longer can find refuge, and
where she awaits the return of the child. The absence, emptiness, and
the imperceptible represented by the missing boy materializes into a
representation of the city that can be described as “post-modern” and
“post-mortem.” The city is no longer her refuge: haunted by the mem-
ory of the begging boy, the protagonist experiences homelessness as the
condition of the fantastic.
The story fulfills the three conditions of the fantastic described by
Todorov, the most important being here the rejection of the allegorical or
poetic interpretations, placing this story within the category of the “pure
uncanny.”2 At the end of the story, we are left with a sense of loss. Cities
evolve and transform accommodating the ghosts from the past, revealing
what Pile defines as a “fractured emotional geography cut across by the
shards of pain, loss, injustice, and failure; an emotional world in which
the ghost is the emblematic resident” (2005, pp. 162–163). What the
story reveals at the end is that “fractured emotional geography,” showing
the fragility of social order. As another victim of a failed social network,
the child in “El chico sucio” embodies the fears of the middle-class, the
disappearance of its territorial securities. But his disappearance also points
to those erased by society, those absences in the city, the invisible citizens
marked by poverty and marginalization. Ghosts with no home, they walk
the streets everyday even when we are unable to see them.
better times. Paula is recovering from depression and has recently been
fired from her job, where she worked as the director of a shelter for chil-
dren at risk. From her experiences at work, we are introduced to the vio-
lence of the city, where young girls resort to prostitution to get drugs,
and abandoned children wander the streets. The harsh realities of city life
take place in the story’s background, as if they were threatening the frag-
ile happiness of the couple and their precarious domesticity. The story is
narrated from the perspective of Paula. However, we do not know what
to believe as Paula’s mental health is described as fragile. And it is in the
protagonist’s weak mental state, and in the surroundings’ spatial instabil-
ity where lies the story’s potential for the uncanny.
As in Julio Cortázar’s “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”), the
house is progressively invaded by strange presences. The story destabi-
lizes the sense of home and belonging that both Paula and her husband
so badly crave. In the story, there is a close connection between space
and the uncanny. As Antony Vidler states, the uncanny is a projection
of a mental state that elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal
in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking
and dreaming; as a projection of the consciousness, it disturbs our spa-
tial perceptions (1992, p. 11). In the story, we witness the invasion of
a darkness that destabilizes any possible notion of home and that comes
from the off-space that we cannot see, the neighbor’s house. The cou-
ple’s house is invaded by dark forces in stages: first there is a pounding
on the door that wakens Paula in the middle of the night; then a mysteri-
ous kid shows up one night at the foot of the bed, abruptly disappearing
without any trace. One day Paula sees the leg of a boy chained up at
the neighbor’s courtyard and, at this point, the story takes a different
turn. She becomes obsessed with the child and breaks into the neigh-
bor’s house. Contrary to her expectations, the house is in excellent con-
dition. Nothing is out of place, the bed is made, and the kitchen is so
clean that Paula can even feel the smell of housecleaners. However, she
soon finds containers with rotten meat stored in the pantry, and the walls
of the bedroom covered with a strange writing. The house’s incongruent
elements locate the reader in the realm of the uncanny. When she comes
back home, a mysterious boy is sitting on her bed, holding her cat Elly in
his arms. Horror takes over the story:
Cuando escuchó su voz, el chico sonrió y ella le vio los dientes. Se los
habían limado y tenían forma triangular, eran como puntas de flecha,
54 M. SIERRA
There are many ways in which we can read the appearance of the
monstrous child in this story. The figure of the monster embodies a
form of liminality, a body marked by the combination of the human and
the inhuman, as the description makes clear. From a psychoanalytical
approach, the monster is that which used to be a part of the self and
needed to be cast away in order for the self to become unified or, at least
functional. Repression is closely linked to the concept of the “other,”
not as external to our culture, but rather as representational of those
characteristics that we repress in order to fit into the cultural norma-
tive regime. The true Otherness is then a repressed unfamiliar familiar,
or the uncanny. Monsters represent the return of the repressed, or our
repressed collective cultural desires, anxieties and nightmares (Levina and
Bui 2013, pp. 3–4).
What the monstrous child brings to the surface of the story are the
underlying anxieties that haunt Paula, her incapacity to become accus-
tomed to domesticity, the insecurities in her marriage, the fears brought
about by her life’s changes. In a way, she also feels like a monster for
having behaved so irresponsibly at the shelter, where she got fired for
not taking care of an ill child. She is perceived as “abnormal” by oth-
ers: “Paula había pasado de ser una santa—la trabajadora social especial-
izada en chicos en riesgo, tan maternal y abnegada—a ser una empleada
pública sádica y cruel que dejaba a los chicos tirados mientras escuchaba
cumbia y se emborrachaba; se había convertido en la directora malvada
de un orfanato de pesadilla” (Enríquez 2016, p. 147).
But the child’s appearance can also be interpreted as a projection of
the story’s many liminalities: the border between reality and hallucina-
tion that Paula cannot fully distinguish; the limits between sanity and
insanity; the borders between the city of the middle-class where she lives
and the city at night, the city of drug addicts and criminals that she expe-
riences in her work. But he is also a projection of Paula’s own feeling
of monstrosity that she is afraid to confront. At the end, she is forced
to face the horror of the scene only to realize that her nightmares are
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 55
real and that she is trapped in that world that makes no sense, and that
she tried to leave: “Eran las llaves de la puerta. El chico las hizo tin-
tinear y se rió y su risa vino acompañada por un eructo sanguinolento.
Paula quiso correr, pero, como en las pesadillas, le pesaban las piernas, el
cuerpo se negaba a darse vuelta, algo la mantenía clavada en la puerta de
la habitación. Pero no estaba soñando. En los sueños no se siente dolor”
(Enríquez 2016, p. 153). With this ending, the story places the reader in
the realm of the uncanny by avoiding any form of explanation of what is
happening with the strange neighbor and the kid. We are submerged in
the world of horror that Paula is experiencing and, like her, we are una-
ble to move.
Contrary to the previous story that destabilizes the spatial order of
the family house, “Bajo el agua negra” (“Under the Black Water”) takes
the reader to a land of monsters and ghosts. The protagonist is Marina
Pinat, the district attorney working on cases that come from the city’s
south side, where crime and hardship are frequent. She is investigating
a case of police brutality. Two teenagers may have been thrown into
the Riachuelo, a polluted river at the south end of Buenos Aires, and
drowned there when they tried to swim through the black grease cover-
ing the water. The body of one of them, Emanuel, was never recovered.
The story suggests that dead Emanuel has come back from the river
where he drowned, and is later worshipped by the villa’s residents.
The location of the story in Villa Moreno next to El Riachuelo is sig-
nificant. The neighborhood is a place polluted by tanneries and factories
that have dumped chromium and other toxic waste into the water for
decades:
Detrás de esas fachadas, que eran mascarones, vivían los pobres de la ciu-
dad. Y en las dos orillas del Riachuelo miles de personas habían constru-
ido sus casas en los terrenos vacíos, desde precarios ranchos de chapa hasta
muy decentes departamentos de cemento y ladrillos. Desde el Puente se
podía ver la extensión del caserío: rodeaba el río negro y quieto, lo bor-
deaba y se perdía de vista donde el agua formaba un codo y se iba en la
distancia, junto a las chimeneas de fábricas abandonadas. (Enríquez 2016,
p. 164)
Enríquez chooses the villa as a setting for her horror story and, as in
other examples, the tale is linked to a commentary on marginalization in
the contemporary city. The villa has very distinct borders: it resembles
56 M. SIERRA
a walled city where the dead are among the living, and where the living
resemble being dead. The villa fits the territorial description of the col-
ony by Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon. As Achille Mbembe states,
the colony is the area where there is no state, an area of war and disor-
der, the place where the controls and guaranties of judicial order can be
suspended, where the violence of the government can dictate a state of
emergency and justify any form of violence operating to the service of
“civilization” (2011, p. 39). Biopolitics operates in the colony because
the colonial “other” is seen as an animal life without rights: the govern-
ment can kill at any time, in any form (2011, p. 40). In the colony, the
inscription of new spatial relations (territorialization) consists of produc-
ing demarcation lines and hierarchies, different “zones”; the questioning
of the sense of property; the classification of people according to differ-
ent categories (2011, p. 43). Like a colony, the villa is subjected to the
violence of the government, represented in the story through frequent
police abuse. And, as in the colony, there is biopolitics in place: the gov-
ernment can kill any time, in any form, as we see in the story about the
two teenagers who were thrown in the river by corrupt policemen. An
area subjected to a clear territorialization rules, the villa is the land of
society’s outcasts.
In the story, all forms of authority have collapsed. The only church
has been vandalized, the priest kills himself, and the police are not to
be trusted as they constantly abuse power. One of the most poignant
moments of the story is when Marina enters the church, where she finds
that a wooden pole with a cow’s head has replaced the figure of Christ.
It is clear that Marina descends to an apocalyptic land; her Virgil is a
child resembling a monster, half human and half animal: “El chico se le
acercó y, cuando estuvo a su lado, ella pudo ver como se habían desar-
rollado los demás defectos: los dedos tenían ventosas y eran delgados
como colas de calamar (¿o eran patas? Siempre dudaba de cómo llamar-
las)” (Enríquez 2016, p. 169). It is a no man’s land similar to Fanon’s
description of the colony: “The colonized’s sector, or at least the ‘native’
quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable
place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow.
You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are
piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The
colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes,
and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 57
sector on its knees, a sector that is prostate. It’s a sector of niggers, a sec-
tor of towelheads” (2004, pp. 4–5).
The villa embodies a geography of absence, a deserted town that
represents the other side of the planned and readable modern city. The
villa depicts what “comes after” modernity, trauma, and death. As stated
before, Enríquez represents the Latin American city as post-urban in the
sense that it rejects the order of urban planning, and the notion that the
city is a sovereign space representing the nation-state. What we see in
“Bajo el agua negra” it is a city existing on the margins of modernity,
in a world with no order, plagued by monsters. At the end of the story,
Marina sees an impossible vision of this city’s inhabitants: “Era una pro-
cesión. Una fila de gente que tocaba los tambores mugrientos, con sus
redoblantes tan ruidosos, encabezada por los chicos deformes con sus
brazos delgados y los dedos de molusco, seguida por las mujeres, la may-
oría gordas, con el cuerpo desfigurado de los alimentos casi únicamente a
base de carbohidratos” (Enríquez 2016, p. 172).
The monster acquires new meanings in this story. Monstrosity has
been associated with the imaginary order prior to the Symbolic where the
ego creates a relationship between the self and its reflected image. The
monster not only embodies this other order, but we can read the monster
from a biopolitics perspective, meaning that the monster shows a “politics
of life.” The monster is a political figure because it shows the different
attempts to control and regulate life (Giorgi 323–324). His body disrupts
the grammar of society. It is an ideological figure that embodies the rela-
tions of domination and narrates political truth. The monster is the ulti-
mate representation of an aesthetic threshold because it takes the borders
of fiction to an impossible place. As in the story, the monster embodies
the possibilities of destabilization that the uncanny poses. But as Giorgi
also reminds us, the monster is an ethical interpellation, a metaphor for
power that cannot be reduced to the order of reason.
The monsters in the story are those who, abandoned by the state, chal-
lenge a social order that has excluded them. The victim of police brutal-
ity, Emanuel, a being that is between life and death, becomes their object
of cult. Enríquez pairs the fantastic with a commentary on the lack of
social justice in contemporary Argentina. A land of monsters, a land of
half dead people, is the land that exists in the margins of the city but that,
from there, challenges to collapse social order, represented in the story
by the figure of the district attorney Marina. As in previous examples, the
uncanny is that which exists underneath the surface, in a parallel world, in
58 M. SIERRA
Through David’s mother, Carla, we later find out that he had gotten
very sick after drinking polluted water from the river. She is able to save
his life thanks to the help of a strange woman, a curandera, through a
procedure she calls “a migration:” “Si mudábamos a tiempo el espíritu
de David a otro cuerpo, entonces parte de la intoxicación se iba también
con él. Dividida en dos cuerpos había chances de superarla. No era algo
seguro, pero a veces funcionaba” (2015, p. 27). Schweblin introduces
here the idea of the double: David looks like himself, but we are not
sure if he really is the same kid. As David’s soul migrates, he transforms
into a child whose monstrous presence menaces the safety of others. As
almost a specter, David is a character that moves in the story as if he was
a shadow: we only hear him talk when he whispers in Amanda’s ears, and
we barely see him. Besides Amanda, he has no interactions with any of
the characters. He is a strong force always menacing the characters; Carla
is terrified that he would hurt Nina. David is part of a group of mon-
strous children; other children having short appearances in the novel,
and who contribute to create the novel’s obscure atmosphere.4
Carla is obsessed with the idea that there is something malign in
David, and we can read David’s monstrosity as a projection of Carla’s
guilt for having allowed the “migration.” Her fears and obsessions are
what create tension in the story, whereas Amanda does not perceive any
problems with David: “Ahora que estás al sol, descubro algunas man-
chas en tu cuerpo que antes no había visto. Son sutiles, una cubre la
parte derecha de la frente y casi toda la boca, otras manchas te cubren
los brazos y una de las piernas. Te parecés a Carla y pienso que sin las
manchas hubieras sido un chico realmente lindo” (2015, p. 52). And it
is Amanda’s faulty perception of danger that later triggers the tragedy
60 M. SIERRA
that happens to her and her daughter when they get infected with pesti-
cides. Although a novel, the story flows with an intensity that resembles
a short story, the narrator constantly tensing different narrative threads.
This is how Schewblin conceives of her stories: “Para mí cualquier texto
está atado a una cosa material, que tiene que ver con la tensión como si
fuera un hilo. Una punta la tiene el escritor, la otra, el lector, y se está
tirando constantemente para un lado y para el otro de ese hilo. Y ese hilo
siempre tiene que estar tenso, no puede aflojarse y no puede romperse”
(Kolesnicov 2017).
There is another narrative element central to the story: the worms.
As we later learn, worms are symptoms of an illness that affects those
victims who are in contact with the pesticides that abound in the area.
But worms can also be interpreted as each of the different narrative
threads that are working in the novel, stories that emerge thanks to the
dialogue between David and Amalia. But David is the one who triggers
the tension by pulling the narrative thread in the direction that he wants
through the questions he poses to Amanda. David is in control of the
narrative whereas Amanda is trying to understand—through flashbacks—
what happened to her and her daughter. Amanda’s lack of knowledge is
what creates narrative tension in the novel, the worms being a metaphor
of the menace that threatens to surface at any moment. The novel is in
the hands of the specter, David, who is like a larva existing at the heart of
the narrative. As Blanco and Peeren state:
But there is also another type of spectrality that we may call larval, which
is born from not accepting its own condition, from forgetting so as to pre-
tend at all costs that it still has bodily weight and flesh. Such larval spect-
ers do not live alone but rather obstinately look for people who generated
them through their bad conscience. They live in them as nightmares, as
incubi or succubi, internally moving their lifeless members with strings
made of lies. (2013, p. 40)
threatening the boundary that separates life and dead. They are both
projections of their parents’ fears as they are located in the place of the
abject (González Dinamarca 2015, p. 98). In the novel, the relationship
between monstrosity and adulthood is represented by the figure of the
mother, a mother that fluctuates between guilt and fear. The monstrous
child is the consequence of an adult world that has been devastated
(González Dinamarca 2015, p. 103), in this case by pollution. We can
interpret the children’s possession not as a possession by an evil spirit,
but rather by the past of pollution and death that agricultural compa-
nies have left in sediments in fields and farms. Schweblin employs this
residue, this worm, as a fantastic element, a ghost that triggers surreal
elements in fiction.
Steven Pile states that ghosts manifest the emotional state of grief: they
represent both personal and social anxieties and traumas. The novel cre-
ates a phantasmagoric atmosphere, as Amanda is progressively less and
less able to see. The novel’s last images create the impression of a dream.
The town becomes the image of a haunted place: twenty eight graves that
appear at the side of the road, a procession of deformed children cross-
ing the street: “Son chicos extraños. Son, no sé, arde mucho. Chicos con
deformaciones. No tienen pestañas, ni cejas, la piel es colorada, muy colo-
rada, y escamosa también. Solo unos pocos son como vos” (Schweblin
2015, p. 108). As Pile states following Walter Benjamin, there are two
ways in which phantasmagories “make space” or exist in a natural spatial
form: nested in spatial scales for instance from body and home through
the transnational and the global; another is the creation of common-
place spaces in which phantasmagoric things are habitually housed. For
Benjamin, phantasmagories create an experience of dream-like and ghost-
like figures that resembles dreaming (Pile 2005, p. 165). Years and years
of pollution have devastated the area and, what we see in the novel are
the remains of that tragic past embodied in a phantasmagoric space. A
town of ghosts, that is, ghosts that carry a historical content, for the
specter is an intimately historical entity (Blanco and Peeren 2013, p. 38).
As in Enríquez’s fiction, Schweblin describes spatial relationships as
haunted, housing the ghosts from the past. Whereas in Enríquez the
stories center in marginal areas of Buenos Aires, Schweblin displaces her
narrative to a town in the countryside. They both explore the histori-
cal implications of the fantastic genre by pointing to the remains of a
traumatic past in places that house the phantasmagoric. Their narratives
occur in a non-place as defined by Marc Augé:
62 M. SIERRA
In other words, the non-places of Enríquez and Schweblin erase the rela-
tional, historical, and identity markers to show instead, the place as an
absence, as a haunted presence, and a ghost of memory.
Conclusion: Spiderwebs
Non-places point to the absences of history, they whisper in our ears sto-
ries from the past, unresolved traumas and mysteries. The post-urban
spaces considered here show the fragility of social relationships, the con-
stant menace of dark social forces. Spectral geographies show the impos-
sibility of a sense of place, as defined by Augé, they are places of absences
and silences.
Avery Gordon describes the ghost as a social figure: “The ghost is
not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investi-
gating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make
social life” (2008, p. 8). As we have seen in the stories discussed above,
spectral geographies have a relationship with social trauma; they point to
society’s lacks and anxieties, and they show in their narrative structure
the fractures and gaps of allegorical expression. What is significant is that
the stories by Enríquez and Schweblin narrate fictions that are like “spi-
derwebs,” tales that create a space where present and past, reality and
fiction, the living and the dead, coexist. These social spaces are similar
to the description of the oppressive environment of Northeast Argentina
that starts Enríquez’s story “Tela de araña” (“Spiderweb”): “Es más
difícil respirar en el norte húmedo, ahí tan cerca de Brasil y Paraguay,
con el río feroz custodiado por mosquitos y el cielo que pasa en minutos
de celeste límpido a negro tormenta. La dificultad se empieza a sentir
enseguida, ni bien se llega, como si un abrazo brutal encorsetara las cos-
tillas” (Enríquez 2016, p. 93). This is a perfect description of spectral
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 63
spaces, spaces that trapped us and create a web around us until we are
completely immersed in the strange world of the uncanny.
The fantastic stories by Enríquez and Schweblin describe an alternate
geography, a geography of darkness that engulfs the dreams of the mod-
ern city. Space adopts the form of a labyrinth, a rhizome that represents a
net of past and present relations; as Lauro Zavala states, such labyrinth is
the space of virtuality and, we can add, the space of the uncanny (2004,
p. 356). As readers, we are compelled to occupy this space, to become
inhabitants of such virtual and impossible worlds that, as Freud describes
well referring to the uncanny, are both different and the same to our tan-
gible reality.
Notes
1. Foucault has studied this idea: “A definite fear prevailed during the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century: the fear of a dark space, of a screen of
obscurity obstructing the clear visibility of things, of people, of truths. It
became imperative to dissolve the elements of darkness that blocked the
light, demolish all of society’s somber spaces, those dark rooms where arbi-
trary political rule foments, as well as the whims of a monarch, religious
superstitions, tyrants’ and priests’ plots, illusions or ignorance and epidem-
ics. […] During the period of the Revolution, Gothic novels developed a
whole fanciful account of the high protective walls, darkness, the hide-outs
and dungeons that shield, in a significant complicity, robbers and aristo-
crats, monks and traitors” (Foucault 2008, pp. 12–13).
2. According to Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastic requires the fulfillment of
three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the
world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between
a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second,
this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s
role is entrusted to a character: the hesitation is represented, it becomes
one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain atti-
tude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic”
interpretations (Todorov 1973, p. 33). The “pure uncanny” or the “fan-
tastic uncanny” occurs when all three conditions are met, as it occurs in
Enríquez’s story.
3. While I will not offer extensive exploration of another story that has as
a protagonist a monster child, I would like to mention in passing, “An
Invocation of the Big-Eared Runt.” In this story there is an alternative
story of the city that is written by a tour guide that offers tours in Buenos
Aires. His tours center on horror stories in the city, and we can see this
64 M. SIERRA
example as the other side of the prideful Buenos Aires, a city that feels
proud of its culture and its European architecture. What Enríquez’s sto-
ries show us is the dark face of the modern dreams that built the “Paris of
South America.”
4. One example is the little girl they see at the grocery store: “La mujer
estira la mano hacia el otro pasillo y, cuando se da vuelta hacia nosotras,
una mano chiquita la acompaña. Una nena aparece lentamente. Pienso
que todavía está jugando, porque renguea tanto que parece un mono,
pero después veo que tiene una de las piernas muy corta, como si apenas
se extendiera por debajo de la rodilla, pero aún así tuviera un pie. Cuando
levanta la cabeza para mirarnos vemos la frente, una frente enorme que
ocupa más de la mitad de la cabeza” (Schewblin 2015, p. 42).
Bibliography
Augé, Marc. 1997. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso.
Avelar, Idelber. 1999. The Untimely Present. Postdictatorial Latin American
Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Blanco, Maria del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities
Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London:
Bloomsbury.
Enríquez, Mariana. 2016. Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. Barcelona: Editorial
Anagrama.
Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Phicox.
New York: Grove Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. “The Eye of Power.” In The Impossible Prison.
A Foucault Reader, edited by Daniel Defert, 8–15. Nothingham:
Nothingham Contemporary.
García Canclini, Néstor. 2005. Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L.
López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giorgi, Gabriel. 2009. “Política del monstruo.” Revista Iberoamericana 75, no.
227: 323–329.
González Dinamarca, Rodrigo Ignacio. 2015. “Los niños monstruosos en
El orfanato de Juan Antonio Bayona y Distancia de rescate de Samanta
Schweblin.” Brumal 3, no. 2: 89–106.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holloway, Julian and James Kneale. 2008. “Locating Haunting: A Ghost-
Hunter’s Guide.” Cultural Geographies 15: 297–312.
3 SPECTRAL SPACES: HAUNTING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CITY 65
Tomás Regalado-López
T. Regalado-López (*)
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures,
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA
are not identifiable anywhere or anytime, worlds that at the same time
can be located in all places and all times” (Carrera and Keizman 2001,
pp. 141–142). At a spatial level, Crack writers denied longstanding
tropes in Latin American literature such as local color, patriotic identity,
magical realism, nationalism and rural environments. This new paradigm
in the geographical reconfiguration of narrative space linked the Mexican
group with other trends in Latin American literature in the nineties, such
as the anthology McOndo by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, also
published in 1996. Years later, Volpi stated in Crack. Instrucciones de uso
that “Crack members have the right—like any writer in the world—to
locate the action of their novels in the space they prefer” (Chávez et al.
2004, p. 183), adding ironically that “the only forbidden narrative space
for the Crack novelists are Comala and Macondo, except in those cases
of extreme urgency” (Chávez et al. 2004, p. 184). The group’s novels
in the years surrounding the “Manifiesto Crack” reflect the writer’s free-
dom to choose the narrative space, being the apocalyptic representation
of Mexico City a non-prescriptive spatial configuration.7
The apocalyptic line was one of the themes in the “Crack Manifesto.”
In the last chapter, “¿Dónde quedó el fin del mundo?” (“What Became
of the End of the World?”), Volpi defined the concept using as a point of
departure Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (1895), writing “apoca-
lypse” where the German philosopher had written “kingdom of heaven,”
because “they [the characters in the Crack novels] lack the fortitude and
bravery to realize, paraphrasing Nietzsche, that the end of days does not
occur beyond the world, but rather within the human heart” (Chávez
et al. 2007, p. 173).8 Later Volpi elaborates on the apocalypse as an inti-
mate experience, rather than a cinematographic destruction: “more than
a decimal superstition or a market necessity, the end of the world presup-
poses a particular spiritual condition; what matters least is the external
destruction, compared with internal collapse, with that state of anguish
that precedes our personal Judgment Day” (Chávez et al. 2007, p. 173).
However, the Nietzschean rhetoric does not prevent the Crack writers
from interpreting apocalypse in the atmosphere of skepticism, decep-
tion, and hopelessness associated with the burial of utopias and with
the Mexican crisis in the mid-nineties. On the one hand, in an interview
published on July 7, 1996, one month before the reading of the “Crack
Manifesto,” Volpi stated that the Crack novels “use the onomatopoeia
to refer to the financial crack, the crack in the stock market, and the
74 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
collapse of all the established values before the end of the millennium”
(Castro 1996, p. 55). On the other hand, in the “Postmanifiesto del
Crack, 1996–2016,” these writers also identified the events of 1994 as
the generational trauma that gave unity to their configuration as a group:
instincts govern the lives of the political class that rules the country. The
contrasts between light and darkness denote allegorical dichotomies
between the public and the private, reason and instinct, honesty and cor-
ruption, life and death, and they are particularly intense in the nocturnal
description of the Plaza del Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, the space
where all the historical pasts and critical presents are condensed:
La catedral parecía una nave espacial inmensa desde que le colocaron las
flores fluorescentes: entonces era un monstruo marino saliendo a flote
desde las profundidades de la noche del Zócalo, una ballena multicolor en
medio de la negrura de sus piedras, los focos permanentemente apagados de
Palacio Nacional y los edificios que la circundaban, la plaza vacía e inmóvil
cada noche […] El asta [de la] bandera permanecía invisible, opaca, mien-
tras los últimos automóviles huían ferozmente hacia sus casas o se refugia-
ban en los estacionamientos de bares y restaurantes. (1995, pp. 138–139)
failure of community life in Mexico City. According to this critic, they are
novels that “express socio-political frustration and delve into apocalyptic
themes self-consciously associated with the end of the millennium” (2000,
p. 10), and they also “indicate a larger social phenomenon of disenchant-
ment with the unpredictable circumstances of collective life in Mexico”
(2000, p. 10). Oswaldo Zavala assigned La paz del sepulcros to two novel
genres that would seem mutually exclusive: historical and futurist. He
mentioned the former because it offered “a historical account of end-of-
the-century events that correspond to many aspects of recent Mexican his-
tory” (2004, p. 346). He included the latter because the novel acquired
a second level of historicity, “an unforeseen future” (2004, p. 353)
granted by the political events in the year 2000, five years after its publica-
tion, when Vicente Fox and the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) won
the elections and put an end to the seventy-one-year rule of the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In 1994, Volpi served as the secre-
tary of Diego Valadés, the Attorney General of the Mexican Republic,
and it was with some insight that he defined La paz de los sepulcros as the
“reflection of the decadent atmosphere that Mexico was living through”
(Carrera and Keizman 2001, p. 252).
Indeed, La paz de los sepulcros warrants a third generic label, for it is
also closely related to one of the most important political novels in
Mexican tradition, La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Caudillo,
1928) by Martín Luis Guzmán. Volpi adapts Guzmán’s allegorical tech-
niques (like the metaphorical use of light and darkness) to the political
circumstances in Mexico during the mid-nineties, with the aim of fic-
tionalizing and deconstructing the national events of 1994 from the cen-
tral perspective of Mexico City. Among them are the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas—the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) guer-
rilla movement has an urban counterpart in the novel, simply known as
the FPLN—and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo
Colosio on March 23, metaphorized in the figure of Alberto Navarro,
Minister of Justice, whose corpse is found in the room of a highway motel
in the opening scene of Volpi’s novel. Although minimally allegorized,
the political events narrated correspond to the post-NAFTA social and
political reality in Mexico, including political assassination, widespread
corruption, the unprecedented economic crisis and the institutional fail-
ure to maintain social order (Urroz 2000, pp. 145–187; Zavala 2004,
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 77
pp. 345–354; Regalado 2006, pp. 41–49). At the end of the novel, the
narrator, a journalist named Agustín Oropeza who works for the tab-
loid paper Tribuna del escándalo, has been co-opted by the government,
which awards him the National Journalism Prize for supporting the offi-
cial truth, thus hiding the facts of his journalistic research that contradicts
the government’s discourse about the events that happen every day in
the city. What Volpi narrates, then, is a political apocalypse: the novelist
is interested in Mexico City as the scene of the power struggles, the plots
of corruption, and the arbitrary way the nation is governed. The urban
inhabitants in La paz de los sepulcros constitute an anonymous multimil-
lion-strong mass, oblivious to actual political destinies and obedient to the
truths fabricated by the mass media. Closer to the second type of apoc-
alypse described by Salvioni—the representation of a social and political
apocalypse after the failure of the neoliberal policies implemented across
Latin America—the city in La paz de los sepulcros is, citing Boris Muñoz,
“the space where the modern capitalist state explicitly collapses, revealing
the total absence of power of the citizens” (2013, p. 76).
In Monsiváis’s Los rituales del caos and Volpi’s La paz de los sepulcros
the post-apocalyptic chaos paradoxically guarantees the daily survival of
the city, being the raison d’être of urban dynamics. In Memoria de los
días, on the contrary, Palou imagines a catastrophic Mexico City that
already stopped working and is about to disappear. Only a few inhabit-
ants remain, and the whole area is on the verge of extinction.The pop-
ulation of Palou’s imagined city reached “ochenta millones” (1995,
p. 23) but two years later, when the narration begins, the destruction
of the ozone layer caused an epidemic of skin cancer, killing most of the
population and forcing the rest to abandon the city.10 Under these cir-
cumstances, the Church of the Peace of the Lord begins a pilgrimage
to Los Angeles to proclaim the end times. The pilgrims include char-
acters like a healer, an alchemist, a court of dwarves, a priest (who also
performs as a Mexican wrestler), and two outstanding characters, María
Guadalupe, an incarnation of Virgin Mary, and Dionisio Estupiñán, an
alcoholic self-proclaimed grandson of the Redeemer, a role which mir-
rors Matamoros Moreno, the religious ayatollah in Fuentes’s Cristóbal
Nonato (Ordiz 2014). At the beginning of the novel Dionisio leaves
Mexico City in a bus, and the narrator describes the urban space in the
following terms:
78 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
El día del hurón by Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, the third Crack novel
in narrating this urban apocalypse, describes a dystopia that takes place
in the imagined city of Zagarra, where all kinds of crimes and threats
against personal security occur: epidemics, robberies, explosions, mur-
ders of pregnant women, prostitution, begging and the theft of babies
(1997, p. 30). Chávez Castañeda’s city is divided into two moieties, the
wealthy neighborhoods and the low-income areas, separated by a sym-
bolic line, a white river made of toxic waste that functions metaphori-
cally as a social, economic and anti-ecological border between the two
sections. On the one hand, “Zagarra alta” (1997, p. 26) or Upper
Zagarra is divided into four hierarchically settled districts (Palisades,
Villela, Apiza, and Temple). It is described in terms of urban organi-
zation—“frías casonas y un crucigrama de avenidas desiertas” (1997,
p. 25)—and was founded thanks to the wealthy position of its inhabit-
ants, when “los ricos perdieron el centro ante la crecida de miseria y se
construyeron su propio suburbio en la montaña que se levanta al norte”
(25). On the other hand, there is Zagarra baja or Lower Zagarra, the
city below, defined as “la misma Zagarra pero muchos metros más al
fondo” (26). In contrast with Upper Zagarra, Lower Zagarra grew spon-
taneously without urban planning, and its description emphasizes chaos
and disorganization. It was built once an overflow “se tragó a la mayor
parte de la población” (26), its square “no es sino el yermo que dejó
una de las primeras bombas,” (27) and some citizens live in a shed “que
se levantó a propósito [después de una explosión], en una noche, con
la promesa increíble de ser transitoria” (27). Lower Zagarra is an une-
ven “laberinto de callejuelas” (28) without electric light, with streets that
“semejan corredores, algunos tan flacos que los muros se comban hacia
dentro” (27), and there is no personal security, to the extent that “nadie
se arriesga a llevar su auto al centro” (26). Remarkably, Lower Zagarra
has a lower level, a subspace that radiates negative energies, and a con-
centration of human degeneration. It is called Lafaveiga, a zero chrono-
tope impregnated with filth, destruction and horror, an unlivable area
that breaks the traditional dichotomy between barbarism and civilization:
Like in La paz de los sepulcros, there is a symbiosis between the city and
its inhabitants. For example, the murderer Rosas Palazán, an outsider vis-
iting the city, is immediately drenched by this physical and metaphorical
decomposition. In his own opinion, “la ciudad es estúpida con esas calle-
juelas que sisean y de pronto, en una doblez, se consumen convertidas en
una azotea que se corta con violencia a tres metros de otro suelo” (46).
Consequently, “la ciudad y él mismo se le están volviendo intolerables
porque presiente un contagio de estupidez” (46). However, Zagarra’s
apocalyptic chaos is not total, opening the hypothesis of the narration of
a post-apocalypsis, in Monsiváis’s terms, rather than the almost absolute
apocalypse narrated in Memoria de los días. In the contrast between chaos
and hope that defines Chávez Castañeda’s fiction, there are also signs of
civilization. Upper Zagarra survives as an urban utopia, there are maps of
most areas in the city, the narrator speaks about the city founders (26),
and the transportation system seems to work fairly well. The airport oper-
ates without issues, there is a taxi service, trams work fluently, and there
is even a subway train that effectively joins distant areas of Zagarra (27).
It is true that much of the violence that affects Zagarra is comparable
to the violence suffered by many a Latin American megalopolis, exposed
to a neoliberal invasion at the end of the twentieth century. The fictitious
city is the public space for homicides, personal insecurity, robberies, pros-
titution and, as an explicit example of what theorists call urban segrega-
tion, a clear distinction of socially inclusive and socially exclusive zones,
what Michael Humphrey called “the spatializing of security” (2013,
p. 1) and “the risk management of dangerous urban spaces through
repression” (1).11 However, the representation of urban space in El día
del hurón is different from the one in La paz de los sepulcros and Memoria
de los días. As Sánchez Prado decisively points out, there are no direct
references between the extra-fictional reality in Mexico City and the city
imagined by Chávez Castañeda, nor are there recognizable geographical
references, as in Volpi’s and Palou’s novels (2017, p. 171). On the con-
trary, Sánchez Prado found in Zagarra a “radical ahistoricity of its literary
topoi” (2017, p. 172) and, against the opinion of Kristina Puotkalyte-
Gurgel—who suggested an allegorical reading of the novel from the
perspective of the end-of-the-century Mexican crisis—he convincingly
argued that “it is tempting to read El día del hurón as a fiction that seeks
to cognitively map contemporaneity, as many science-fictional works
do” (2017, p. 172), but that Chávez Castañeda resists “clear historicity”
(2017, p. 172) by not identifying Zagarra with Mexico City or with any
other recognizable place. Sánchez Prado considers El día del hurón is “a
82 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
public evidence is the Verdugo’s show. When the whole city is interested,
the show becomes a significant part of urban life (Chávez 1997, p. 64)
because, according to El Verdugo, “una ciudad humillada es una tragedia
y en la tragedia nadie se rebela contra su destino” (Chávez 1997, p. 140).
The novel ends right before the Day of the Ferret, and the foreseen urban
apocalypse is only suggested.12 Overall, the novel alerts against the power
of media enterprises and the decisive influence on urban community life.
In the mid-1990s, a group of Crack novels reflected urban spaces
from an apocalyptic perspective. They inherited traces of a long Mexican
tradition that linked the country’s literature with representations of its
capital city. In the nineties, the Crack group did not reject this millennial
apocalyptic discourse. It also occupied a chapter in its foundational text,
the “Crack Manifesto,” and it was one of the thematic line in three nov-
els written by the group between 1995 and 1997. La paz de los sepulcros,
Memoria de los días, and El día del hurón narrated apocalyptic dystopias
where urban space, on the verge of extinction, is affected by the prob-
lems that plagued many Latin American megacities at the time, such as
ecological catastrophe, the collapse of the social system, the hegemonic
control of media powers, an institutional crisis and, above all, an urgent
problem of overpopulation. Halfway between a universal apocalypse—
caused by postmodern skepticism—and an apocalypse related to the
Mexican social and political circumstances in the nineties—the immedi-
ate effects of oppressive neoliberal policies in post-NAFTA’s Mexico—
Volpi, Palou and Chávez Castañeda offered different versions of this
urban apocalypse. In La paz del sepulcros, the city suffers its daily
post-apocalypsis, identified with the perspective of the political crisis dur-
ing the annus horribilis of 1994. In Memoria de los días, Mexico City is
on the verge of extinction, but the apocalyptic destruction is universal,
shared with the rest of humanity. Finally, the city in El día del hurón—
not even Mexico City—suffered a rather simulated, fictional and cine-
matographic apocalypse, an Orwellian Big Brother conjured up by the
media. Not always alien to the Mexican social, political and economic
reality, urban dystopia was another option among the numerous the-
matic lines of the Crack. With isolated exceptions (such as Volpi’s No
será la Tierra/Season of Ash, published in 2006), it disappeared in the
group’s later narrative production and its posterior manifestos. Ironically,
twenty years later, Mexico City is still living in its everyday chaos. A post-
apocalypse in which, paraphrasing Monsiváis, the worst prophecies
already took place and, at the same time, the worst prophecies are also
about to happen.13
84 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
Notes
1. In October 1996, Mexican novelist Gonzalo Celorio wrote “México,
ciudad de papel” (“Mexico, a City Made Out of Paper”), his speech as
a new member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (the Mexican
Academy of Letters), about the literary cartography of Mexico City. In
his own words, “the history of Mexico City is the history of its succes-
sive destructions. The colonial city destroyed the pre-Hispanic city, the
city built after Mexican independence destroyed the vice royal city. The
post-revolutionary city, still under construction, destroyed the city built
in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, as
if culture were a matter of accumulation rather than displacement […]
A neoclassical façade that was taken to a different house, a church was
surrounded by the Periférico, another church was literally torn apart by
the November 20 Avenue. They made two buildings with asphyxiating
mirrors next to a fine Porfirian house” (qtd. in Rovira 2005, p. 209). All
translations in the paper are mine.
2. The links between Mexico City and literature can be traced back to dec-
ades earlier. Considered the first novel in the history of Mexico and Latin
America, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (The
Mangy Parrot, 1816) was already a detailed analysis of the social groups
in New Spain. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Manuel Payno
portrayed in Los Bandidos de Río Frío (The Bandits from Rio Frío, 1889–
1891) the social differences in Mexico City, determined by geographical
separations. At the beginning of the twentieth century poets like Manuel
Gutiérrez Nájera, Ramón López Velarde, and Amado Nervo had Mexico
City as one of their main thematic motives. They are, in all cases, imaginary
cities, fictitious representations, with a stronger or weaker resemblance
with the city in extra-fictional reality. In Las ciudades imaginadas en la lit-
eratura latinoamericana (Imagined Cities in Latin American Literature,
2008) Gisela Heffes recalls that “in the Latin American imaginary, cities
seem to have a different social order, and their modes of social interrela-
tion obey to a particular imaginary. Unlike ‘real’ cities, imaginary cities are
developed in books, they are not made of quarries, sawmills and foundries,
but rather of imagination” (2008, p. 17). Ignacio Sánchez Prado kindly
recommended to me Robert Tally Jr.’s essays about spatiality, urban atmos-
pheres and literature. In the prologue to Literary Cartographies. Spatiality,
Representation and Narrative (2014) Tally talks about literary cartography,
a term than encompasses the commonalities in the works of the narrator
and the cartographer: “indeed, although certain narratives may be more
ostensibly cartographic than others, all may be said to constitute forms of
literary cartography. In works of fiction, in which the imaginative faculty is
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 85
perhaps most strongly connected to the verbal and descriptive, this map-
making project becomes central to the aims and the effects of the narrative.
In the words of J. Hillis Miller, “a novel is a figurative mapping.” Speaking
figuratively, then, one could agree with Peter Turchi that every writer is
also, in some ways, a cartographer—and vice versa, perhaps” (1). For a
compilation of literary works related to Mexico City, see Armando Pereira’s
Diccionario de literatura mexicana: siglo XX (Dictionary of Mexican
Literature: 20th Century, 2000).
3. Mexico City is portrayed in two additional ways in Mexican literature at
the end of the twentieth century. First, Sara Poot-Herrera (2002) sug-
gested the concept of the besieged city, whether attacked by external
forces (El sitio/The Siege by Ignacio Solares, 1998), or as the victim
of a collective sacrifice (Y retiemble en su centro la tierra/Let the Earth
Tremble to Its Very Core by Gonzalo Celorio, 1999). This representation
does not completely abandon the dystopic-apocalyptic tone, but it also
relates to the remote historical past. Second, Mexico City was the main
urban space of the so-called literatura basura or dirty realism, influenced
by Charles Bukowski and proclaimed by Guillermo Fadanelli and Naief
Yehya. In novels like Yehya’s Obras sanitarias (Sanitary Works, 1992) and
Fadanelli’s ¿Te veré en el desayuno? (Will I See you at Breakfast?, 1999),
Mexico City is portrayed with a hyperrealist technique, in fictions where
drug addiction, prostitution, violence and citizen insecurity determine
everyday life, denying any sense of community.
4. This deterritorialization is not unique to Mexican narrative, but also is an
extended phenomenon in the narratives of other Latin American coun-
tries. Rodrigo Fresán’s Mantra, for example, was written by commission,
as a part of Mondadori’s Año 0. Young Latin American writers were asked
by the publishing company to write a novel set in a world megalopolis,
with the aim to narrate the arrival of the new millennium in these cit-
ies. Among others, Chilean Roberto Bolaño wrote Una novelita lumpen
(A Poor Little Novel, 2002), set in Rome; Cuban José Manuel Prieto
wrote Treinta días en Moscú (Thirty Days in Moscow, 2001); Colombian
Santiago Gamboa wrote Octubre en Pekín (October in Beijing, 2001);
and Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa wrote Cartas de la India 1912–1914
(Letters from India, 1912–1914, 2001), set in the city of Madras. In
“Tradition and New Writing in Latin America,” introduction to the com-
pilation New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative (2014),
Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González analyzed this geographic
decontextualization in relation to the reconfiguration on the national dis-
course in Latin America. Robbins and González called this generation the
post-nacionalistas, a group of Latin American writers who reconfigured the
concept of nation, and whose work reflects the new social and economic
86 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
order in the world. In their own words, “the last couple of decades of
the twentieth century Latin America has been transformed by a series of
social and economic changes that many have been acknowledged as deter-
mining the direction of contemporary fiction writing: the neoliberal reor-
ganization of the economy, cultural globalization, astounding advances
in technological communication such as the emergence of cyberspace, to
mention a few” (Robbins and González 2014, p. 3).
5. In “Pesadillas del futuro. Distopías urbanas en la narrativa mexicana con-
temporánea,” Ordiz shared a list of novels where Mexico City is repre-
sented in an apocalyptic tone. His essay focuses on four of these: Carlos
Fuentes’ Cristóbal Nonato, Homero Aridjis’ La leyenda de los soles,
Guillermo Sheridan’s El dedo de oro, and Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la
tierra. In “La ciudad de México en la imaginación apocalíptica,” Boris
Muñoz studied this thematic line in the chronicle genre, focusing on
four examples: Elena Poniatowska’s “Ángeles de la ciudad” (“Angels
of the City,” 1980), Carlos Monsiváis’ Amor perdido (Lost Love, 1997),
José Joaquín Blanco’s “La ciudad enemiga” (“The Enemy City,” 1997),
and Juan Villoro’s “El yuppie salvaje” (“The Wild Yuppie,” 1998). In
“La utopía apocalíptica del México neoliberal,” Ignacio Sánchez Prado
extended this urban apocalyptic approach to other genres: novel (Memoria
de los días, El día del hurón, and Los trabajos del reino/The Works of the
Kingdom by Héctor Toledano), short-story (El llanto de los niños muer-
tos/The Cry of the Dead Children by Bernardo Fernández) chronicle (Los
rituales del caos by Carlos Monsiváis), and poetry (“The Third World,” in
Los textos del yo/The texts of the I, by Cristina Rivera Garza).
6. See Ávila and Domínguez Michael (“La patología”) for criticisms against
the alleged malinchismo in the Crack literature, and further discussions
about geographical displacement in the Crack novels.
7. The Crack novels published in 1995 were Volpi’s La paz de los sepul-
cros (Aldus), Padilla’s La catedral de los ahogados (The Cathedral of the
Drowned, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) and Palou’s Memoria
de los días (Joaquín Mortiz). The five novels that accompanied the “Crack
Manifesto” were Memoria de los días, Chávez Castañeda’s La conspir-
ación idiota (published in 2003 by Alfaguara), and three other books
published by the Grupo Patria Cultural company in its collection Nueva
Imagen in 1996, thanks to the involvement of the editor Sandro Cohen:
Volpi’s El temperamento melancólico, Urroz’s Las Rémoras (The Obstacles
in its English translation), and Padilla’s Si volviesen sus majestades (If Their
Majesties Returned). Chávez Castañeda’s El día del hurón was one of the
four novels in a second group of Crack novels published in 1997 also by
Grupo Patria Cultural, which also included Urroz’s Herir tu fiera carne
(To Hurt your Fiery Flesh), Volpi’s Sanar tu piel amarga (To Heal your
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 87
Bitter Skin), and Palou’s Bolero. The Crack novels published during this
period fluctuate between the apocalyptic representation of Mexico City
and the search for other geographical locations. La catedral de los ahoga-
dos was set in a remote island, and it still belonged to the first stage in
Padilla’s works, characterized by the rural atmospheres, the magical-
realist techniques, and García Márquez’s influence. Si volviesen sus majes-
tades, Padilla’s next novel, was set in a medieval castle with no recogniz-
able spatial or chronological references, where a seneschal, much in the
way of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, waits for his
lords to return. The novel is the perfect example of the zero chronotope,
described by the writer in the “Crack Manifesto,” and close to the aesthet-
ics of the comic. This abstract space is also present in La conspiración idiota
by Chávez Castañeda, set in a family house where several teenagers meet
to remember their childhood. The psychoanalytic treatment of space par-
tially recalls the short-story “Casa tomada” (“House Taken Over”, 1951),
by Julio Cortázar. In two other Crack novels in the mid-nineties, its char-
acters leave Mexico City to seek refuge in other Mexican regions: the plot
in Volpi’s El temperamento melancólico takes place in a provincial haci-
enda, where actors and actresses from the capital gather to film a movie.
In Urroz’s Las Rémoras two young writers narrate each other’s story, one
in Mexico City and the other one in Las Rémoras, a fictional town in Baja
California. The first one leaves Mexico City and they meet in the coastal
town, where they put together their manuscripts. In Bolero Palou also
avoids Mexico City as the setting. The novel takes place in Puebla, Palou’s
birthplace, described as “the chameleon city that changes color, pigmented
with the chromatic aromas of absence, nostalgia” (1996, p. 38), but also
as “the scorpion city, filling its children with fear. The viper city with two
tongues, breaking everything apart with words” (1996, p. 38).
8. In addition to La paz de los sepulcros, Volpi published two novels related
to apocalypse, that did not take place in Mexico City. El temperamento
melancólico was set in a Mexican provincial hacienda, and El juego del
Apocalipsis. Viaje a Patmos (The Game of Apocalypse. A Trip to Patmos,
2000) was set in Patmos, the Greek island where San Juan proclaimed the
Apocalypse in the New Testament.
9. According to World Population Review, the population of Mexico City in
1995, the year of publication of La paz de los sepulcros, was seventeen mil-
lion inhabitants. In Volpi’s novel the city has forty million inhabitants,
while Palou’s imagined Mexico City in Memoria de los días has reached
eighty million.
10. The narrator uses a biblical term—exodus—to narrate the extinction of
humanity in Mexico City: “sé decirles que un día [Dionisio Estupiñán,
líder de la secta] se dio cuenta de que la ciudad empezaba a quedarse
88 T. REGALADO-LÓPEZ
vacía, puedo contarles que mucho antes se había negado a usar máscaras
para protegerse del ozono y que más cerca aún del éxodo final, se había
resistido terminantemente a usar trajes especiales para no morir, como
muchos otros, ahí nomás en cualquier calle: asfixiados, quemados por
rayos ultravioleta” (Palou 1995, p. 22).
11. Although Zagarra is a fictitious city that avoids identification with any
concrete urban reality (Sánchez Prado 2017, p. 172), the social, geo-
graphical and urban division of Zagarra, with its socially delimited neigh-
borhoods, is shared with many a megalopolis in Latin America. It serves
as a reminder, to a certain extent, of the system of city walls that divide
areas between different income levels, “an imaginary that inherently
brings together inside and outside the walls into a conceptually symbiotic
relationship, albeit a rather tense one” (Rodgers et al. 2012, p. 10).
12. The Day of the Ferret is a fabricated discourse by media, as it can be
deducted from the Verdugo’s words: “institucionalizar el caos, una
explosión con licencia. Destituir, desafectar el día, domesticar al hurón,
producir una anarquía subalterna e inofensiva, un mero carnaval pasteur-
izado” (Chávez 1997, p. 168). El Verdugo fears that citizens will actually
get involved in this fiction to the point where chaos that cannot be con-
trolled: “nada podemos hacer si la ciudad completa decide tomar parte.
No hay salida: o los matamos a todos o esperamos que sobrevivan solos al
día del hurón” (Chávez 1997, p. 172).
13. I would like to thank Stephen Gerome and Robert Goebel for their help
and advice in the English version of this document.
Bibliography
Aínsa, Fernando. 2002. “¿Espacio mítico o utopía degradada? Notas para una
geopoética de la ciudad en la narrativa latinoamericana.” In De Arcadia a
Babel: naturaleza y ciudad en la literatura hispanoamericana, edited by Javier
de Navascués, 19–39. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Alvarado, Ramón. 2017. “The Crack Movement’s Literary Cartography (1996–
2016).” In The Mexican Crack Writers: History and Criticism, edited by
Héctor Jaimes, 41–59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Anderson, Danny J. 2000. “The Novels of Jorge Volpi and the Possibility of
Knowledge.” Studies in the Literary Imagination. Borders and Identities in the
Mexican Novel 33, no. 1: 1–20.
Ávila, Antonio O. 2000. “La nueva generación Crack de narrativa mexicana
irrumpe en el panorama europeo.” El País, April 19. http://elpais.com/dia-
rio/2000/04/19/cultura/956095205_850215.html (accessed June 1, 2017).
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 89
Miklós, David. 1999. Una ciudad mejor que ésta. Antología de nuevos narradores
mexicanos. Mexico: Tusquets.
Monsiváis, Carlos. 1995. Los rituales del caos. Mexico: Era.
Muñoz, Boris. 2003. “La ciudad de México en la imaginación apocalíp-
tica.” In Más allá de la ciudad letrada: crónicas y espacios urbanos, edited by
Boris Muñoz and Silvia Spitta, 75–98. Pittsburg: Instituto Internacional de
Literatura Iberoamericana.
Ordiz, Javier. 2014. “Pesadillas del futuro. Distopías urbanas en la narrativa mex-
icana contemporánea.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 91, no. 7: 1043–1057.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14753820.2014.919766
(accessed June 1, 2017).
Palou, Pedro Ángel. 1995. Memoria de los días. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz.
———. 1996. Bolero. Mexico: Nueva Imagen.
Parkinson Zamora, Lois. 1994. Narrar el apocalipsis. La visión histórica en la
literatura estadounidense y latinoamericana. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica.
Pereira, Armando. 2000. Diccionario de literatura mexicana: siglo XX. Mexico:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Poot-Herrera, Sara. 2002. “México es más laberinto: la ciudad en Solares y
Celorio.” In De Arcadia a Babel: naturaleza y ciudad en la literatura hispano-
americana, edited by Javier de Navascués, 299–309. Frankfurt and Madrid:
Vervuert and Iberoamericana.
Quirarte, Vicente. 2002. “2001: odisea y ciudad.” In De Arcadia a Babel: nat-
uraleza y ciudad en la literatura hispanoamericana, edited by Javier de
Navascués, 311–325. Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert and Iberoamericana.
Regalado López, Tomás. 2006. “Literatura contra sistema: la dialéctica individ-
uo-poder en La sombra del caudillo de Guzmán y La paz de los sepulcros de
Volpi.” Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea 31: 41–49.
———. 2018. Historia personal del Crack. Entrevistas críticas. Valencia: Albatros.
Robbins, Timothy, and José Eduardo González. 2014. “Introduction.
Postnacionalistas: Tradition and New Writing in Latin America.” In New
Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative, 1–13. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Rodgers, Dennis, Jo Beall, and Ravi Kanbur. 2012. “Re-thinking the Latin
American City.” In Latin American Urban Development into the 21st Century,
3–37. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rovira, José Carlos. 2005. Ciudad y literatura en América Latina. Madrid:
Síntesis.
Salvioni, Amanda. 2013. “Lo peor ya ocurrió. Categorías del Postapocalipsis
hispanoamericano: Alejandro Morales y Marcelo Cohen.” Altre Modernitá,
304–316.
4 A TALE OF THREE CITIES: URBAN SPACE IN THE CRACK … 91
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2007. “La utopía apocalíptica del México neolib-
eral.” AlterTexto 10: 9–15.
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2017. “Ricardo Chávez Castañeda: The Limits of
Fiction.” In The Mexican Crack Writers: History and Criticism, edited by
Héctor Jaimes, 161–176. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tally Jr., Robert T. 2014. “Mapping Narratives.” In Literary Cartographies.
Spatiality, Representation and Narrative, 1–12. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Urroz, Eloy. 2000. La silenciosa herejía. Forma y contrautopía en las novelas de
Jorge Volpi. Mexico: Aldus.
Volpi, Jorge. 1995. La paz de los sepulcros. Mexico: Aldus.
———. 1996. El temperamento melancólico. Mexico: Nueva Imagen.
———. 2009. El insomnio de Bolívar. Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre
América Latina en el siglo XXI. Mexico: Debate.
Zavala, Oswaldo. 2004. “El futuro que ya fue: Jorge Volpi y la novela histórica
del presente.” In En busca de Jorge Volpi. Ensayos sobre su obra, edited by
José Manuel López de Abiada, Félix Jiménez Ramírez, and Augusta López
Bernasocchi, 345–354. Madrid: Verbum.
CHAPTER 5
Magdalena Perkowska
M. Perkowska (*)
Department of Romance Languages, Hunter College, CUNY,
New York, NY, USA
Managua by Night
Two elements make up the atmosphere in which the action of the
novel develops: the night and music. The plot begins at six in the after-
noon, when “Dios le quita el fuego a Managua y le deja la mano libre
al Diablo. […] de no se sabe dónde, empiezan a salir los diablos y las
diablas. Managua se oscurece y las tinieblas ganan la capital…” (Galich
2001, p. 9). Twelve hours later, when La Guajira and “rat-face” leave the
villa where the final battle occurred:
From its beginning the novel presents the city as an arena where the
symbolic fight between the forces of day and night takes place, a zone
reclaimed by two seemingly opposite impulses. The narrator blurs this
difference by affirming that the majority of the day dwellers make their
appearance only to “vivir de la caridad, el robo o la estafa” (2001,
p. 126). The shadows that cover Managua by night are at the same time
real and figurative. On the one hand, they allude to the lack of light-
ing, the fact that “las luminarias no sirv[an] del todo y las pocas que sir-
ven, o se las roban los mismos ladrones de la Empresa Eléctrica o se las
roban los del gobierno para iluminar la Carretera del Norte cuando vie-
nen personajes importantes, para que no piensen que estamos en total
desgracia” (2001, p. 9). On the other hand, they symbolize a noctur-
nal space of otherness and ex-centricity, both threatening and tempting
at the same time, populated by “devils” or “creatures of the night,” in
which Rossana Reguillo-Cruz sees “la metáfora de los márgenes y de la
irreductibilidad al discurso moral de la sociedad” (2002, p. 56).10
The nocturnal ambience of Managua resounds in the novel with refer-
ences to popular music that burst into sentences as if they suddenly blare
from a loudspeaker:
Rush,” the Tropicana), bars (El Escorpión), strip clubs that also double
as brothels (the Night Club Aquí Polanco), motels (Remembranzas) and
popular restaurants (el Munich). All of these spots seethe with illicit and
transgressive activities like theft, drug trafficking, prostitution or other
forms of sexual exploitation, and they invite a hedonistic attitude and
debauchery through drug and alcohol abuse and furtive sex. It is a con-
text that, from the perspective of the dominant social norm, can be char-
acterized by “el relajamiento moral y por los vicios” that “sale[n] de esta
norma, amenaza[n] la estabilidad y el orden y por consecuencia [son]
portador[es] de violencia” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002, p. 56).
Since the publication of Facundo and “El matadero,” Latin American
cultural thought tended to conceptualize the city as the privileged space
of civilization in which modernity and progress were instituted and
achieved. However, works of “costumbrismo de globalización” (Franco
2002, p. 222) or “realismo sucio” (Ferman), like those of Franco,
Vallejo, Gutiérrez, Rodríguez Juliá, Fonseca and Galich, question the
idealization of modern liberal thought, portraying the contemporary
city as a space of transgression and otherness. Like the acts of pedestrian
speech acts that Certeau describes (1984, p. 97), the journey that the
characters in Managua, Salsa City undertake defies the practical urban
rationality and, in this way, its displacement is an act of resistance that
opens the space to something different. As Silvia Gianni suggests, Galich
“dibuja una ciudad carnavalizada, que de noche se quita el disfraz de
centro legal, de ciudad del trabajo y del comercio […] Managua se con-
vierte en la urbe de la fiesta, de la salsa, del placer sexual; la ciudad que
devora…” (2007). The novel blurs the city as a formal, public and offi-
cial space while at the same time the image of an ex-centric, marginal
and subaltern city takes shape. This perspective, while attractive in the
sense that it grants to the ex-centric space an agency that resists, disre-
gards the fact that while this space opens up to something different, at
the same time it represents a loss. The party, the carnival of drink, drugs,
food, and sexual pleasure are all, in fact, manifestations of an insatiable
individualism and a competitive attitude (in the end, all the masculine
protagonists compete for La Guajira) that can lead to the dissolution
of all forms of solidarity, as David Harvey signals in A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (2006, pp. 23, 82). Consequently, this partying city would
be a space where neoliberalism co-opts the anti-normative resistance to
secretly achieve its ideal: destroy the force of community and make the
collective memory of its political dissent invisible. In this partying city,
100 M. PERKOWSKA
The journey of Pancho Rana and La Guajira, which the narrator traces
through synecdoche and asyndeton—naming bars and neighborhoods,
highways, streets, traffic signals, roundabouts, markets, buildings and
the spaces of nocturnal life already mentioned, charts a spatial and cog-
nitive map of Managua from which a decentered and chaotic city, with-
out center nor axis, emerges. Galich describes these characteristics of the
Nicaraguan capital in Y te diré quién eres, the second part of his unfin-
ished Cuarteto centroamericano:
Esa ciudad que no es ciudad, son varios satélites girando a la loca, alrede-
dor de nadie sabe qué ni quién, aunque pensándolo bien es alrededor de
los dos soles de la tamalada. […] No hay núcleo, no hay centro, descen-
trada, desconcentrada, deschavetada, dejicarada, una ciudad sin jícara pero
a la vez con muchas jícaras, con sus potreros con semáforos dentro de la
misma ciudad y a la par las Catedrales con techos como cajillas de huevos o
descachimbadas por el terremoto y más potreros alrededor y centros com-
erciales con dos elevadores y dos bandos de gradas eléctricas y lagunas de
aguas podridas como sus políticos …. (2006, p. 102)
The lack of center to which the protagonist refers here and which the
narrator of Managua, Salsa City suggest in his mapping is at the same
time literal and figurative. The earthquake on December 23, 1972 dev-
astated the old sector of Managua and destroyed 80% of the urban struc-
tures including hospitals, schools and other important institutions (Babb
2001, p. 52). The tree lined avenues and almost all of the tall buildings,
with the exception of the Hotel InterContinental and the Banco de
América Central, disappeared. Despite substantial international aid, the
city did not recover because Somoza and his family squandered foreign
aid by investing in their own properties and projects. As anthropologist
Florence Babb observes, “Three decades after the earthquake destroyed
it, the city has a feeling of structurelessness, with open spaces where
there was once an urban core” (2001, p. 52). In the 1990s, Arnoldo
Alemán launched an urban development plan for the capital that cre-
ated a new “center” designed around modern or ultramodern architec-
tural projects: the new cathedral, a shopping mall (Metrocentro), a hotel
that now carries the name InterContinental and a gigantic rotunda (the
rotunda Rubén Darío) that is adorned with fountains and colored lights
(2001, p. 56). In the novel, this illuminated rotunda represents a piece
of the United States for La Guajira (Galich 2001, p. 20). However,
102 M. PERKOWSKA
para mientras tanto, aquí en el infierno, digo Managua, todo sigue igual:
los cipotes piderreales y huelepegas, los cochones y las putas, los chivos y los
políticos, los ladrones y los policías (que son lo mismo que los políticos, sean
sandináis o liberáis o conservaduráis, cristianáis o cualquiermierdáis, jueputas
socios del Diablo porque son la misma chochada. (Galich 2001, p. 10)
The Underdogs
As the previous quote brings forth, the narrator shares the language of
the novel’s characters—escaliche, a slang from youth gangs and the mar-
ginal sectors of Managua.17 Like music, it forms a part of the urban
culture and environment that Galich recreates in his texts. At the same
time, it is an index of the world from which the characters come and to
which they belong. For Bakhtin, language is more than an instrument of
communication or system of abstract grammatical rules; it is above all, a
worldview. Because it is a social and ideological system, language refracts
class relations (1981, p. 271). In this sense, the colloquial language of
Managua’s streets that Galich portrays in Managua Salsa City situates
the optic of the narration and of the diegesis among the underdogs. In
this novel, the underdogs are the individuals discarded by both sides of the
conflict in the 1980s in Nicaragua (Kokotovic 2003, p. 25) and excluded
from the processes of neoliberal restructuring that began in the 1990s.
The intertextual tie with Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs that
I am creating by using his title to refer to Galich’s characters is not coin-
cidence. Although Azuela recreates everyday language of rural zones in
his text, it is one of the first Latin American novels that makes popular
spoken word a part of its aesthetic project. It is a novel about individ-
uals outcast by both sides of the historic-political process that was the
Mexican Revolution, and furthermore about the gradual decomposition
of the revolutionary ideal. A crucial difference manifests, however, in the
narrative voice. The language that The Underdogs’s narrator employs is
cultured, sophisticated and, at times, poetic, and it contrasts strongly
with the rural orality of the characters that comes through in the novel’s
104 M. PERKOWSKA
dialogue. The contrast reveals the narrator’s attitude and relative position
as superior. In Managua, Salsa City, the narrator shares the same per-
spective and belong to the same level as the characters (with the excep-
tion of two erotic passages). The language that they use, like the music
that they share, is a centrifugal force, an ex-centric expression: its ludic,
almost carnivalesque character revels in double meanings, irony, puns,
and other word games as well as the abuse of coarse or vulgar terms.
This language defies the habitual expression of the lettered city (cul-
tured, civilized, literary) and the centripetal normativity of a public and
official national language, which seems as foreign to Galich’s characters
as national history is to La Guajira. Through an ironic displacement of
positions, the poor and marginalized underdogs, and their speech, con-
stitutes the center of Managua, Salsa City’s world.
All of the novel’s characters are fictitious, but at the same time, they
are real and historical because they represent concrete social types and
situations that were common beginning in the 1990s in Nicaragua. Their
lives, actions and attitudes incarnate the misery and neglect into which
descend the economic strata abandoned to their own fortune by the
government’s neoliberal philosophy. La Guajira describes herself as “una
mujer que jefea una pandilla de tamales y que además putea cuando la
necesidad de culear aprieta” (Galich 2001, p. 26). Beauty and independ-
ent character defend her from poverty, but at the same time that they
make her depend upon male desire:
Aquí estoy yo una mujer pobre que tiene la suerte de ser bonita y atractiva
pero en el fondo soy una auténtica mierda, que no sirvió para mayor cosa,
más que para culiar y vivir de la riña. Desde que tenía como 14 años me
desvirgaron y como soy bonita, y con buen culito, no me tiré a la pega,
pues los muchachos se peleaban por mí, entonces me daban buenas cosas
…. (2001, p. 54)
appears for whom a client’s money means something to eat and clothes
for her children: “por lo menos paga la cuenta y de puro ipegüe me lleva
al motel y me da unas mis ciento cincuenta cañas para con eso poder
golpear algo sabroso en la casa y comprar ya sea una cruz o un caballo
y algo para los chateles, porque no me gusta que anden en bolas …”
(2001, p. 12). Another fragment denounces sexual exploitation of
minors: “En el Molino Rojo no los encontraron, pero se quedaron
viendo el show de una muchachita de quince años a quien todavía se le
veían los huesos tiernos, pero que ya se comportaba como una profe-
sional” (2001, p. 83). In Managua’s hell, the poor woman is one of the
“criaturas de la noche” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002, p. 56) that offers her body
as a product of consumption to the highest bidder.18 Her most success-
ful social “climbing” would mean that a rich man would make her his
lover, as La Guajira’s fantasy attests when she confuses Pancho Rana with
a nouveau riche.
La Guajira’s gang consists of three ex-soldiers who fought in the
armed conflict of the 1980s: Perrarrenca and Paila’pato were part of
the Contra, while Mandrake was conscripted by force to fight for the
Ejército Popular Sandinista (Sandinista Popular Army). Demilitarized,
without any profession, preparation or social protection, they resort to
assault and robbery in order to survive.19 Like them, Pancho Rana is
ex-military and represents a very common fate in the new social scenario
of Nicaragua in the 1990s. A Captain in the Irregular Battalion of the
Sandinista Special Forces and trained by the Vietnamese, Pancho Rana
finds himself demilitarized and abandoned to his fate. He finds work as
a CPF (Cuerpo de Protección Física) or private guard, protecting the
life and goods of a couple that personifies the new economic elites. Two
anonymous male characters complete the picture: a violent thief who was
recently “en las calles de Miami desvalijando incautos turistas europeos
que andan de abre jeta, creyendo que los yunais es el paraíso terrenal”
(Galich 2001, p. 111) and who now hopes to rape La Guajira, and his
libidinous but pusillanimous friend “cara de ratón” (2001, p. 88). All
of these individuals remain armed as if they were still in the ranks of an
army: Pancho Rana carries a Makarov attached to his leg (2001, p. 76),
while at home he keeps an “escopeta 12 recortada” (2001, p. 89), car-
tridges, magazines and fragmentation grenades. The gang’s members
bring a 38 special, a revolver and a folding AK (2001, p. 87), while the
thief-rapist flaunts a Browning 45 (2001, p. 103).
106 M. PERKOWSKA
None of them are plugged into the work economy (with the excep-
tion of Pancho Rana who still has a job, even though given his past it is
a degrading one for him—as such, he considers abandoning it and taking
his employer’s jewels in the process). As we have seen, La Guajira believes
that “en el fondo [es] una auténtica mierda, que no sirvió para mayor
cosa, más que para culiar y vivir de la riña” (2001, p. 54). Mandrake
“nunca había hecho nada de nada, excepto robar, beber guaro, fumar
monte, putear, canear y andar con la pandilla” (2001, p. 119). The top
down model of modus operandi—imposed by politicians, government
officials and the supposed forces of order—is that of corruption, fraud,
theft and easy earnings. Like what happens in Mexico City portrayed in
Reguillo-Cruz’s essay, in Galich’s Managua “[p]olicías y políticos asumen
[…] la forma de demonios que, al amparo de una supuesta legalidad,
son percibidos como agentes importantes del deterioro y cómplices de
una delincuencia que avanza, incontenible, no sólo sobre la institucion-
alidad, sino sobre ciudadanas y ciudadanos …” (Reguillo-Cruz 2002,
p. 63). In this situation, the characters’ anti-normative acts (or “anti-so-
cial,” according to official discourse) can be considered in the same terms
that Harvey uses to explain the actions of rioters and looters in the streets
of London in 2011, who were described as “savages” by official jour-
nalism. Harvey argues that “They are only doing what everybody else
is doing, though in a different way—more blatantly and visibly, in the
streets” (2013, p. 156). Given the crisis of values and institutions, trans-
gression and aggression are the way of life for the “diablos y las diablas”
(Galich 2001, p. 9) of Managua, Salsa City, who incarnate and symbol-
ize a post-work society and culture (Ferman 2007).
This concept comes from María Milagros López’s study on Puerto
Rican society, where work culture was completely redefined after the
1960s due to the increasing economic and political dependence of the
island on the United States. It alludes to ways of life that “do not pre-
suppose the centrality of work or its supporting reproductive apparatus
in individuals, families, and communities” (1995, p. 165), as the result
of a strategy of development and modernization that is based on “the
exclusion of a large sector of the working population from the produc-
tive process” (1995, p. 168). Historical and political differences aside,
the process of neoliberal reconversion in Nicaragua also produces a
post-work subjectivity, whose imaginary favors instant gratification, by
discarding the idea of sacrifice in the name of an abstract, insecure and
5 THE NIGHT THAT REPEATS ITSELF … 107
Having said that, this scene, or rather its ending, can also be inter-
preted as an allegory of the fate of the nation in the 1990s. Franz Galich
has signaled in numerous interviews that the character of La Guajira is
a metaphor of Nicaragua that symbolizes a “riqueza codiciada” (Gianni
2007).22 Pancho Rana, as ex sandinista, and the gang of ex contras fight
to conquer this woman—nation, Nicaragua—in order to later exert
dominion and control over her. However, the combatants mutually
annihilate each other so that, in the end, La Guajira as the survivor of
the battle goes with a third masculine character— “cara de ratón,” who
seems “buenote, y hasta baboso” (Galich 2001, p. 125), but who also
starts with taking some of the jewels that Pancho Rana had given her.
In Y te diré quién eres (Mariposa traicionera), which continues the story
of Managua, Salsa City taking off from the final scene, “cara de ratón”
is shown as a libidinous, depraved and morally corrupt man who abuses
La Guajira, prostitutes her, and forces her to collaborate in the founding
of a transnational business that traffics in women and prostitution. The
national allegory opens itself thus to an unequivocal interpretation (per-
haps too unequivocal): after the war-battle in which both factions end
up defeated, the woman-nation falls into the hands of the character who
incarnates corruption and deprivation, and who looks to maximize his
earnings. The fact that the figure of a prostitute becomes a metaphor for
the nation turns out to be very significant, because it signals the state
of need and neglect in which the poorest and most marginalized citi-
zens find themselves. It recognizes the abuse and humiliation they suffer
daily in order to survive. La Guajira as metaphor of the nation incarnates
thus the social dystopia of Nicaragua in the 1990s. The utopia, this ideal
place that does not exist, whose spirit passed by Nicaragua in the 1970s
and the beginning of the 1980s, has never been more than an idea or
desire. In contrast, the dystopia, an imaginary place of misery and mis-
fortune, has been made real. It has settled on the ruins of the conflict
that had swept aside all ideals. The hell of nocturnal Managua, the city
that devours its inhabitants and where everything stays the same, is one
of its incarnations. Browitt (2017) and Kokotovic (2003, p. 28) attempt
to find a positive take in the fact that La Guajira survives the battle and
escapes at dawn with “cara de ratón.” This hopeful reading of the critics
forgets, however, that from its very first page the novel underscores the
repetitive nature of the diurnal and nocturnal life in Managua; after the
dawn another night will come, a night that repeats itself. If, as I have
argued here, the rebellious attitude of the characters is the symptom of
5 THE NIGHT THAT REPEATS ITSELF … 109
Notes
1. Franz Galich (1951–2007) published three short story collections and
four novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays that appeared in
magazines, newspapers and literary or critical anthologies. His published
works include Ficcionario inédito (1979, stories), La princesa de Onix y
otros relatos (1989), Huracán corazón del cielo (1995, novel), Managua,
Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (2000, novel), El ratero y otros rela-
tos (2003), En este mundo matraca (2004, novel), Y te diré quién eres
(Mariposa traicionera) (2006, novel), Tikal futura. Memorias para un
mundo incierto (novelita futurista) (2012, novel) y Perrozompopo y otros
cuentos latinoamericanos (2017). Managua, Salsa City, together with Y
te diré quién eres are the first two parts of a project titled Cuarteto cen-
troamericano. This project was never finished due to the premature death
of Galich in 2007.
2. These texts include narratives by Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco
(Colombia), Rubem Fonseca and Paulo Lins (Brazil), Juan Villoro
(Mexico), Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (Puerto Rico), or Pedro Juan
Gutiérrez (Cuba), and the essays of Villoro, Juan Blanco, Emilio Pérez
Cruz (Mexico), Alfonso Salazar (Colombia), and Boris Muñoz and José
Roberto Duque (Venezuela). Franco writes: “The life and death of delin-
quents has become a common theme of urban chronicles, newspapers,
magazines, and the fiction I describe as the costumbrismo of globaliza-
tion. Costumbrismo was a nineteenth-century response to moderniza-
tion. But whereas in the nineteenth century the old customs could be
captured as quaint anachronisms on the verge of disappearance, the con-
temporary texts are postapocalyptic, reflecting the horror of the middle
classes as their whole cultural world implodes” (Franco 2002, p. 222).
Galich’s novel does not include the middle class perspective on the cul-
tural changes that Jean Franco refers to, but it portrays the force with
which they take over Nicaraguan society.
110 M. PERKOWSKA
salvajes (1978), Arturo Arias’s Después de las bombas (1979) and Itzam
Na (1981) which recreate the speech of the urban middle classes and
youth gangs. Dante Barrientos Tecún relates this direction in Central
American novels with other contemporary litereary phenomena: “Es
indudable que esta estética de recuperación de las hablas urbanas cotid-
ianas de las clases medias juveniles, de escritura fragmentaria y desenfa-
dada, se inscribe dentro de la línea de la literatura llamada ‘de la onda’ en
México (Gustavo Sáinz, José Agustín), se articula con estructuras narrati-
vas barrocas (Severo Sarduy) e igualmente con las propuestas de incorpo-
ración de técnicas cinematográficas a la literatura (Manuel Puig)” (2007).
18. The proliferation of prostitution has been denounced in the Nicaraguan
press; see, for instance, Mairena Martínez (1999), Lara (2001), and the
editorial piece “Managua ya tiene 2 mil prostitutas” (2002).
19. The demobilization of the Contra (Resistencia Nacional) forces offi-
cially ended June 27, 1990. The reduction of the ESP and the demobi-
lization of its soldiers took place between 1990 and 1993. Silvia Gianni
observes that like the Sandinista ex combatants, the demilitarized ex con-
tras had to incorporate into civil life without any institutional support. The
autor quotes the sister of Israel Galeano (who was one of the leaders of
“Resistencia Nicaragüense”): “nosotros pusimos los muertos y la oligarquía
puso los ministros, ahora estamos muriéndonos de hambre, pues los liber-
ales nos abandonaron en todos estos 16 años” (qtd. in Gianni 2007).
20. “Ways of life that can no longer presuppose formal waged or salaried
jobs, job permanence, and the discipline of labor find alternative discur-
sive practices in what Maffesoli calls the ‘conquest of the present.’ The
conquest of the present tries to abandon self-sacrifice as the mediation
necessary to achieve pleasure. It is profoundly distrustful of any public
discourse that call (sic) for the deferral of gratification for the sake of the
future…” (López 1995, p. 181).
21. “Paradójicamente, el disparo que le cortaba la vida, le permitía ubicar
la posición del francotirador (como en la guerra, así los cazábamos, era
lindo verlos por las miras telescópicas y ellos sin saber siquiera que eran
sus últimos segundos que les quedaban de la vida, tal vez chillaban), como
a mí, ahora…” (Galich 2001, p. 115); “Montó el percutor de su 38 espe-
cial […] y sin ningún miramiento, asco o contemplación, jaló el gatillo.
Perrarrenca se recordó las veces que hizo lo mismo con los heridos o pri-
sioneros en la guerra y resignado pensó que por lo menos se acababa toda
esta vaina, que a decir verdad, ya me estaba cansando…” (2001, p. 116).
22. See, for instance, the interview with Erick Aguirre: “el personaje de la
Guajira es muy simbólico, porque ella es realmente la mujer deseada […]
¿Y quién es la mujer deseada en aquella época? La Nicaragua, la Guajira es
entonces Nicaragua” (2007).
5 THE NIGHT THAT REPEATS ITSELF … 113
Bibliography
Agüero, Arnulfo. 2006. “Franz Galich: la novela de la Mariposa traicionera.”
La Prensa, July 7, 2006. http://archivo.laprensa.com.ni/archivo/2006/
julio/08/suplementos/prensaliteraria/entrevista/entrevista-20060707-1.
shtml (accessed February 21, 2010).
Aguirre Aragón, Erick. 2004. “Novelando la posguerra en Centroamérica.”
Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 9.
http://istmo.denison.edu/n09/foro/novelando.html.
———. 2007. “Franz Galich: La narrativa de la intrahistoria.” Istmo. Revista vir-
tual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 15. http://istmo.deni-
son.edu/n15/articulos/aguirre.html.
Arias, Arturo. 1998. Gestos ceremoniales. Narrativa centroamericana 1960–1990.
Guatemala: Artemis-Edinter.
Babb, Florence E. 2001. After Revolution. Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics
in Neoliberal Nicaragua. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Translated by
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Barrientos Tecún, Dante. 2007. “Algunas propuestas de la narrativa centroamer-
icana contemporánea: Franz Galich (Guatemala, 1951–Nicaragua, 2007).”
Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos 15.
http://istmo.denison.edu/n15/articulos/barrientos.html.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Browitt, Jeff. 2007. “Managua, Salsa City: El detrito de una revolución en rui-
nas.” Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos
15. http://istmo.denison.edu/n15/articulos/browitt.html.
———. 2017. Contemporary Central American Fiction. Gender, Subjectivity, and
Affect. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press.
Castellanos Moya, Horacio. 1993. Recuento de incertidumbres: Cultura y tran-
sición en El Salvador. San Salvador: Ediciones Tendencias.
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven
Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chávez, Daniel. 2015. Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia. Development and
Culture in the Modern State. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Cortez, Beatriz. 2010. Estética del cinismo. Pasión y desencanto en la literatura
centroamericana de posguerra. Guatemala: F&G.
Equipo Nitaplán-Envío. 1999. “Violencia: ¿un ciclo interminable?” Envío 206.
www.envio.org.ni/articulo/936 (accessed February 26, 2010).
Esch, Sophie. 2016. “La novela del desmovilizado: Un nuevo subgénero en la
ficción centroamericana contemporánea.” AFEHC 69.
114 M. PERKOWSKA
Eduard Arriaga
The exploration of the city and the urban landscape is not a new topic
in Latin American literature and culture. In fact, the image of the city
and its connections to ideological, political and economic forces became
one of the main lenses through which scholars and critics such as Ángel
Rama or Alberto Flores Galindo read the region’s literary and cultural
production. Likewise, authors from the 1970s Latin American Boom,
such as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, as
well as pre-Boom authors such as Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and
José Lezama Lima, among others, embodied what Ángel Rama defined
as a “cosmopolitan aesthetic” (2008, p. 21). Such type of an aesthetic
opposed, and in a certain sense also complemented, the so-called trans-
cultural endeavors that, according to Rama, intended to connect mod-
ern literary techniques with mythical conceptions and rural languages/
dynamics to decipher Latin America’s deep essence. It was the latter
E. Arriaga (*)
Department of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies,
University of Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA
aesthetic, however, that stuck with the global reader and became the
image of what was considered “actual” Latin American literature.
Since the end of the twentieth century, Latin American fiction writers
have declared themselves at odds with stereotypes that portray them as nat-
ural producers of magical realism and narratives connected to rural land-
scapes. While the origin of the city, and particularly of the lettered city (see
Rama 1996; Franco 2002), seems to be located in the desire to organize
the territory—of the New World, of complex overlapped cultures, of new
locations “without name” and “logic”—Latin American writers in the late
twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first seem to have con-
sidered the city as a way to reorganize those ideological orders previously
imposed on a region that overflows its mythical images. These writers do
not see themselves as part of Macondo, a village full of magical possibili-
ties although with limited worldwide connections, but as dwellers of cities
belonging to several networks in the world of globalization (Fuguet and
Gómez 1996).1 Writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Santiago Roncagliolo
and Santiago Gamboa, among others, produce fictional representations
and images based on their own nomadic, transnational experiences of
cities and citizens that are constantly looking for their place in the world
and dwelling at the border of their own fantasies. Such representations
are connected to what Navia and Zimmerman have pointed out as a net-
work of fluxes and interests, where “individuals more than citizens become
nodes connected to global circuits” (2004, p. 2). But what happens when
those nodes are limited by the boundaries of the nation-state as a struc-
ture of control and regional localization? How do writers immersed in
such a dynamic of limitation—due to political, social or cultural reasons—
represent their cities and make them globally connected?
This chapter aims to respond to these and other questions by explor-
ing and analyzing Un Arte de hacer ruinas y otros cuentos by the Cuban
writer Antonio José Ponte. Contrary to contemporary transnational
nomadic authors writing from a complex Latin American point of view
about, and from, global cities, Ponte writes about, and from, Havana—a
globalized colonial city itself. In doing so, Ponte exiles himself into the
interior of Havana’s urban ruins in order to explore forgotten global
connections that make this city/island part of an imperial, political, social
and cultural network.
The case of Ponte, as well as of the wider Cuban literary and cultural
fields, is of great interest as a way to reflect on the effects of globalization
and postmodern deterritorialization in Cuba, a nation considered at odds
with such projects. In fact, from the 1959 Revolution onwards, Cuba
6 URBAN DEBRIS AND NETWORKING IMPERIALISM … 119
seems to have found its own global project connected to the discourse
of resistance and anti-imperialism. Such a project was developed on the
assumption of a binary struggle against forces that, from the opposite
end of the dichotomy, were embarked on a crusade against communism
in order to restore democracy and freedom as universal abstract values.
However, the Cuban project of liberation faced another apparently more
definitive change due to the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s—
for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet
Union—and the subsequent emergence of a neoliberal economic and
symbolic order. Ponte and other writers of the so-called Special Period
Fiction (Whitfield 2009) got caught in the uncertainty and paradoxical
deterritorialization of a Cuba committed to revolutionary struggles for
liberation and territorial sovereignty.
In his work, Ponte takes an aesthetic stand contrary to the socialist
realism that dominated the Cuban literary field from 1970 to 1975, a
period referred to as the “quinquenio gris” [five gray years] (Buckwalter-
Arias 2005, p. 110), and which had a huge impact on the island’s cul-
tural life. Such realism seems to be the byproduct of the Soviet influence
on the Revolution, as well as of the process of decolonization under-
stood by the Revolution as a way to overthrow oppressive, “non-real”
images imposed by colonial powers. Ponte, more sympathetic with aes-
thetic proposals such as those from the Orígenes literary group, aligns
himself with a vision of art as a human product that adds new layers to—
and in a certain sense creates, explains and refracts—one’s understand-
ing of reality. Through his vision, a sort of Caribbean romantic aesthetic,
Ponte reflects about the city, the urban landscape and human nature in
constant dispute with Nature’s own forces. It is from such a vision that
Ponte manages to bring up and make visible the global, transnational
and transcultural connections of a city such as Havana, which lies appar-
ently disconnected by the imposition of the US embargo, as well as by
the decline of the Soviet Union and the globalization of neoliberalism.
as global (e.g. the Cold War, the liberalization of markets, the emer-
gence and increasing importance of communication technologies, etc.).
In literary terms, those displacements are represented by the emergence
of “subaltern accounts, testimonios, popular texts, and other discourses
excluded from the canon” (García Canclini 2001, p. 8; Franco 2002,
p. 11). In urban, political and cultural terms, cities became global, citi-
zens became consumers and identities started to be considered fluid, par-
tially determined by what is being consumed. In that process of change,
constant movement and connection, cities as well as nations begin both
to create new spaces and destroy old ones. The physical and symbolic
spaces that are destroyed become ruins, which are inhabited and from
which Un arte nuevo de hacer ruinas emerges to fictionalize the sensation
of scandal and tragedy that accompanies such ruination.
del imperio” (Short Stories from All Over the Empire), made up of five
stories, one prologue and one epilogue; and “Corazón de Skitalietz”
(Skitalietz’s Heart) made up of five short stories and a novella. In only
two of those thirteen stories is the city presented as the center of the nar-
rative: “Un arte de hacer ruinas,” which gives its name to the collection,
and “Corazón de Skatalietz,” the title of the second section. For the rest
of the stories, the urban landscape is insinuated as having an impact on
the behaviors, feelings and actions of the characters. In a remarkable
move, Ponte uses Un arte de hacer ruinas to represent Havana, a city
thought of as disconnected from neoliberal global circuits, as part of an
imperial network that, in its expansions and contractions, manages to dis-
perse citizens and create inhabited urban debris.
In her prologue to the 2005 edition of Un arte de hacer rui-
nas, Esther Whitfield asks “¿qué es y dónde se encuentra ese imperio
cubano…?” (2005, p. 9). Ponte himself responds to that question in
interviews, essays, and in the shorts stories that comprise the collection.
At odds with Ángel Rama’s idea that the city exists as a result of the
power of writing, Ponte proposes that his stories, his writings exist and
can only be explained because of the actuality of the empire. The empire
consists of “ese aroma amargo que sale de las tazas, en el humo picante
del tabaco, en palabras, en música, en aire, en fin, en todo” (2005a,
p. 41). Such a domain is made up of imaginations, memories and stories.
At the same time, the city is a physical space and an imaginary location
where all the reminiscences take place and come together. However, the
city is also fashioned by the characters and narrators in each of the sto-
ries, who draw and define its limits and its connections to the empire.
In “Lagrimas en el congrí,” for instance, the narrator assesses his pres-
ent condition on the island from the perspective of his previous experi-
ence as an exchange student of atomic physics in Russia. Remarkably, the
narrator reflects on how physically departing a space does not actually
mean leaving it. As part of a “tribe” of Cuban students (los cabecitas de
congrí) created to survive in a foreign country, the narrator reflects that
“conseguíamos vivir como si no hubiéramos dejado atrás nuestra tierra”
(2005a, p. 44). In the same vein, in “Por hombres,” another story in
which exile and return are fundamental topics, one of the characters
comes back to the island after a long trip in search of her true self. In
the airport’s bathroom, she meets the narrator, to whom she tells her
travel adventures. To express her impressions about the empire, this par-
ticular character says “La locura me dio por pensar que los que viajaban,
124 E. ARRIAGA
y las maletas, y los aviones estaban allá afuera, para hacerme creer que
existían otros países, cuando había uno solo y era este” (2005a, p. 51).
In her account, the empire is marked by the power of her own land
overshadowing the existence of all other countries and locations in the
world. Such a traveler realizes that leaving or trying to negate the exist-
ence of her country is impossible because it is an empire that extends
its tentacles far beyond its physical boundaries; the empire is everywhere
because all travelers leaving the island carry it inside them. That is pre-
cisely why, by the end of the story, the character asserts that “Islandia
es el fin del mundo, pero incluso en el fin del mundo encontré gente
de aquí” (2005a, p. 54). Like in the powerful narrative pieces of the
Latin American Boom and the post-Boom, such as Viaje a la Habana
by Reinaldo Arenas or Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, Ponte’s characters
are always tied to their homeland. Although they leave their country of
origin and spend time abroad, they always come back, and even when
they are not able to return, they remain Cubans/Argentineans wherever
they go.
Contrary to contemporary Latin American writers who want to
explore the global city by naming and speaking about “global” loca-
tions, Ponte manages to use local images, and sometimes just insinuated
locations, to highlight the global condition of an island that became
the center of the Global South project for liberation. As Lievesley pro-
poses, after the Revolution, Cuba “was committed to the restructuring
of the international system in order to empower the poor states of Latin
America, Asia and Africa” (2004, p. 14). Such a commitment implied
the configuration of an alternative global design (an alternative empire)
to defy the order inherited from the beginning of the twentieth century,
an order that was accentuated after the end of the Cold War through the
imposition of ideologies and economic systems of global development.
It is in that panorama that Ponte proposes the existence of an empire (a
Cuban empire) with global connections, as well as with local impacts and
global images.
In Ponte’s proposal, the city—sometimes a central character, some-
times a backdrop or an insinuated dynamic in which the actions take
place—seems to be at the center of that empire. The urban space is not
only where those international and transatlantic travelers return, or the
place where those countryside dwellers want to come in search of new
opportunities. It is also a type of force that moves subjects to act or liv-
ens up other spaces that would otherwise be considered phantasmagoric.
6 URBAN DEBRIS AND NETWORKING IMPERIALISM … 125
In the short story “Estación H” Ponte writes that “La estación H se alza
a medio camino entre dos ciudades […] el lugar cobra vida solamente
con el cruce de los trenes” (2005a, p. 133). In that passage, he shows
how those spaces between cities come alive thanks to the influence of
cities and travelers who commute. Commuters bring back with them
parts of the city, or, when they are city-bound, contribute to building/
destroying it. In any case, the city becomes a multilevel space that offers
a variety of experiences, attracting people who want to both live in it
and escape from it. That is precisely what happens with the characters
who appear in Un arte de hacer ruinas: they seem to want to fly away, to
escape, to go beyond the city; but the city—the center of the empire—
hunts them down. “Verdad que cada día es más duro salir de la Habana”
(2005a, p. 161), says one of the characters in “Corazón de Skatalietz,”
while the narrator confirms that Veranda and Escorpión, the story’s pro-
tagonists, “tenían el deseo de viajar y sin embargo se les hacía imposible
salir de la ciudad” (2005a, p. 171).
It is in the interplay of those forces that the ruins and the debris
emerge. Wanting to leave the city, the island, and the empire is opposed,
in a certain sense, by the desire to stay and the impossibility to leave.
Inspired by the romantic conception of ruins, Ponte uses the trope to
question, to evaluate, and to protest his own political, social and cultural
context. According to José Luis Marzo, the contemplation of ruins by
romantic poets, artists and philosophers “is not only the manifestation
of despair or the acknowledgement of human limitations but also and
over all the materialization of a protest against a period, their own, that
makes them feel disappointed” (1989, p. 51). Although Ponte’s char-
acters do not seem to be protesting, they are represented as constantly
disappointed with their limitations, and, at the same time, with the far-
reaching arm of the empire that manages to follow them wherever they
go. In that sense, the making of ruins is not only the effect that Nature
and time have on what humans build, but above all a human strategy to
look for alternatives and to delay the passage of time or challenge the
impossibility of change.
In explaining the concept of ruins, Florence M. Hetzler argues,
“a ruin is defined as the disjunctive product of the intrusion of nature
upon an edifice without loss of the unity produced by the human build-
ers” (1988, p. 51). In that sense, the ruins emerge from the connection
between human action (building), natural effects (dust, rain, snow, etc.)
and time. From Hetzler’s perspective, time, due to its multiplicity, is one
126 E. ARRIAGA
arte de hacer ruinas” that gives the title to the collection. It is a satiric
story and a detective narrative that shows how the ruins are not only the
outcome of natural effects on buildings, but also of a human attempt
to take control of their existence. It is the “tugures”—another tribe
that in this case is located at home—who create the ruins, who inter-
vene with buildings in order to break them down as a way to continue
with their “nomadic spirit” (2005a, p. 66). However, the impossibility
of moving around and leaving for other parts of the world make them
look for alternatives: “si no puedes salir entonces entra” (2005a, p. 66),
reflects the narrator. Wandering around the city and witnessing how its
dwellers die under collapsing buildings but still fight to live in them, the
narrator concludes that the existence of such a city, with sparse founda-
tions that support more than they were designed to, is only understand-
able by flotation as a way of existing (2005a, p. 63). The destruction of
the material city goes hand in hand with the reconstruction and exist-
ence of the symbolic urban space. In the case of the story, it is a book
(“Tratado de estética milagrosa,” written by the narrator’s tutor) that
explains how the city manages to continue existing even under the ruins.
Reading and discovering such a book makes the narrator come to the
realization that all those who have read it are dead, and that all that is
happening around the city—the demolition of buildings, the creation of
ruins, etc.— is explained there. When the book disappears and his tutor
dies, the narrator starts to investigate; he eventually faces the reality of
his city: it is being destroyed to create a new underground city that in a
certain sense is similar to the one above. Based on the similarity of the
two (one above and the other below), the narrator thinks that the under-
ground city called “Tuguria” must have been “planeada por quienes cau-
saban los derrumbes” (2005a, p. 72). With this idea of two cities, one
feeding on the destruction of the other, one on the surface and the other
underground, Ponte sets up the center from which material and symbolic
orders make up the urban space he describes throughout the collection.
The other story that serves as a link connecting those two levels is
“Corazón de Skitalietz,” which tells the city-wide journey of a historian
(Escorpión) and a psychic (Veranda) in search of themselves. These two
characters representing past and future decided to live in the present by
obeying their heart of skatalietz in order to get to know a city that is
multiple in nature. “¿No sientes que no existe future ni pasado? ¿Que
presente es lo único que tenemos?” (Ponte 2005a, p. 170), Veranda asks
Escorpión while walking around the city. Veranda and Escorpión become
128 E. ARRIAGA
those from the Latin American literary Boom of the 1970s, were closely
allied to the activities carried out by these agencies. However, accord-
ing to Buckwalker-Arias’s analysis of Encuentros, “Cruz’s celebratory
rhetoric [heralds] the death of that collective project” (2005, p. 362).
What had been the center and the model of cultural production in
Latin America was displaced to metropolitan centers such as Madrid
and Barcelona, cities representing a world order that the revolutionary
Latin American project had considered on its way out for a long period
of time. However, the practices of art, literature and of the cultural field,
in general, showed the failure of utopian projects of liberation and the
reemergence of new/old world orders of cultural production and dis-
semination: Latin American literature and cultural production was once
again determined by the guidelines produced in the metropolises outside
the continent.5
Those able to leave the island continued to write and create in exile,
becoming part of publishing circuits whose centers grew increasingly
complex.6 In contrast, those who stayed experienced a reduction of
possibilities to publish and disseminate their work, due to the break-
down suffered by the institutions mentioned above which affected such
institutions’ apparent capacity to impact global audiences,7 and the
ban imposed by the revolutionary government on aesthetic and politi-
cal ideas that differed from those mandated by the state. If the writers
in exile managed to get connected to global publishing circuits, those
who stayed on the island were left searching for alternatives in order to
remain current and active writers.
In the case of José Antonio Ponte, his alternatives to create a net-
work of publication and dissemination were determined by both the
limitations inside the country and the possible connections outside of
it. Armed with “phone and email” (Ponte 2011), as the interview by
Abel Gilbert shows, Ponte decided to connect with those external nodes
to avoid official censors, as well as the economic and ideological limi-
tations of the official Cuban cultural field. One of the most important
partners in disseminating his work and opening the door for him to be
a writer once again was the magazine Encuentros. As a Cuban magazine
published in Spain, Encuentros gave Ponte the opportunity to reach a
readership that could include Cubans in exile or non-Cubans interested
in reading contemporary Cuban literature. In addition, such an outlet
allowed for a combination of literature, discussions about politics, social
life and other topics that Cuban official publications would not accept.
6 URBAN DEBRIS AND NETWORKING IMPERIALISM … 131
the strategy of the Revolution to stage a war that has not happened and
probably will not happen but whose destruction is evident.
José Antonio Ponte left the island and settled in Spain in 2006, one
year after the publication of his short story collection by the Fondo de
Cultura Económica in Mexico. Although he is now an actual exile, living
in another city and connected to other freedoms and limitations, Ponte
will continue to be part of that empire he represented in his stories. He
is now a diplomat of the empire, and the city in ruins will continue to fall
apart because Ponte, as a writer and an artist, immortalized such ruins
and took them with him. Much like the characters in his own short sto-
ries, he will travel the world, but he will also continue to be connected to
that city that is now part of a global network of ruins in a world full of
decay and detritus.
Notes
1. While Macondo is seen by authors such as Fuguet as a trope limited in
connection to the sporadic appearances of Melquiades the gypsy, what they
propose is the understanding of a region that is highly connected to the
world through several networks: of communications, of the economy and,
most important, of drug trafficking.
2. One of the most traditional and accepted conceptions of global city
comes from Saskia Sassen (2005), who understands it as a category
highly connected to global economic trends that belong to the so-called
Globalization. Although Havana does not coincide with the seven hypoth-
eses she proposes to study global cities, the Cuban city represents an alter-
native globalization in which tourism and a central connection to the
Global South become fundamental elements to reconsider the effects and
actions of global economic and cultural trends.
3. This connection between spatial and symbolic is the point of departure
employed by Ángel Rama to develop his analysis of Latin American cities.
Romero, however, goes beyond the limits of the written word and the let-
tered epistemology to explore diverse semiotics and processes of meaning
construction, and particularly to advertising in the city and other contem-
porary symbolic systems.
4. In the documentary Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins, José Antonio
Ponte argues that the Cuban ruins are a sort of governmental strategy
to keep the Cuban population in a state of constant contemplation and
lack of action. He advances such an argument in his short stories but con-
nected to the idea of the empire as a power that extends beyond the limits
of the nation, chasing its dwellers to any location of the world they move
134 E. ARRIAGA
to. Ruins are not only material debris but also symbolic burden that goes
inside Cubans in exile, creating networks with global ruins. In that sense,
the empire is an overarching presence without specific form or identity.
5. Madrid, and especially Barcelona, have been central for the development
of a Latin American literary field. However, it is from the 1960s onward
that these cities became centers for the creation and publication of Latin
American literature. Pablo Sánchez points out three fundamental factors
that facilitated this: (a) The Seix Barral award granted to Mario Vargas
Llosa in 1962; (b) a new publication strategy by Carlos Barral that made
Latin American literature the main product to be marketed in Spain and
Europe; (c) and the emergence of figures such as Carmen Balcells, a liter-
ary agent who played a fundamental role in fostering the careers, and writ-
ing as a professional occupation, for Latin American writers (2008, p. 53).
6. See my work on the Colombian literary field, Las redes del gusto (2013),
which shows how the globalization of markets directly affected national
literary fields and the way literature was read locally, and how it was pro-
duced there or in metropolitan centers.
7. The supposed “death” of these institutions deserves more research, as
some of them remain active, granting awards and playing an important
role in Latin American culture.
8. Borchmeyer revealed that his interest in ruins motivated him to study
abroad in Havana in order to live in a socialist country “before the wall
falls,” referring to his experience as a German citizen and his connection to
the Berlin Wall (Christoph 2010, p. 218).
Bibliography
Arenas, Reinaldo. 1990. Viaje a la Habana. Madrid: Mondadori.
Arriaga, Eduard, and Yamilet Angulo. 2012. Las redes del gusto. La novela en
Colombia: 1990–2005. Bogotá: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas.
Borchmeyer, Florian. 2006. Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins. DVD.
Germany: Global Films.
Buckalter-Arias, James. 2005. “Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and
Post-Soviet Cultural Politics.” PMLA 120, no. 2: 362–374.
Christoph, For. 2010. “Transnational Cinema and the Ruins of Berlin and
Havana: Die neue Kunst, Ruinen zu bauen [The New Art of Making Ruins,
2007] and Suite Habana (2003).” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren
Germanistik 75, no. 1: 211–230.
Cortázar, Julio. 1992. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Archivos.
Desai, Vandana, and Robert B. Potter, eds. 2013. The Companion to Development
Studies. New York: Routledge.
6 URBAN DEBRIS AND NETWORKING IMPERIALISM … 135
Cecily Raynor
C. Raynor (*)
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
this occupation gives one pause for reflection; not only is the narrator
embedded in letters, but in the subset of foreign translation that is car-
ried out almost solely in dedication to the craft, without much prospect
of financial gain. Later on, as her hunt for Gilberto Owen takes center
stage, the novel becomes a meta-reflection on the importance of assign-
ing value to writers that fall outside of the world literary canon. Not only
does Owen have little prominence within Mexican or Latin American lit-
erature, but his marginalization is compounded by the infrequency with
which his subset of literature is translated into English. As such, Owen
embodies the notion that non-popularized and undiscovered writing has
value. To take this idea a step further, the work acts as a homage to the
very obscurity that this poet symbolizes, to the idea that creative expres-
sion has inherent worth regardless of immediate or long-term readership.
The author’s commitment to researching Owen’s life and translat-
ing his body of work soon takes a personal turn; readers have the sense
that the young woman is on a quest to rescue him from anonymity
while seeking something within his story that could illuminate her own.
Literary critic Regina Cardoso Nelkey ruminates on the duality of this
search, noting that it is fractured into two voices, that of Owen (through
the narrator) and that of the narrator herself (2014, p. 77). This is fur-
ther complicated by the various temporal moments at work; the present
in which the narrator lives in Mexico City with her unnamed husband,
young child and infant, and her past life in New York City working in
the publishing house. Throughout Los ingrávidos, temporalities over-
lap as these two chronologically disparate narratives unfold and collide.
Furthermore, readers are confronted with the two past lives of Owen
which the narrator slowly uncovers, one as a young man in New York
City and the second, in which his older version struggles with alcoholism
in Philadelphia. The poet also succeeds in entering into the narrator’s life
in the form of a ghost, disrupting the distinction between past and pres-
ent, real and imagined. Early on in the novel, the ghost makes his pres-
ence known in the house she occupies in Mexico City with her young
family, “Nos gusta pensar que en esta casa hay una fantasma que nos
acompaña y observa. No lo vemos, pero creemos que apareció a las pocas
semanas de nuestra mudanza” (2011, p. 16). Despite his lack of visibility,
the specter residing among them opens and shuts doors, turns on stoves
and knocks down towers of books, and is an accepted and legitimized
aura that does not seem to provoke fear in either the narrator or her
husband. In the present tense, the young woman is also writing a novel,
140 C. RAYNOR
which further complicates matters. This writerly turn extends her dedica-
tion to letters as a reader and translator, while allowing for new modes of
place-making in the fictional world she is constructing. At times readers
are transported temporally as discussed, on other occasions the narrator
undergoes a meticulous process of occupying, carving out or even clear-
ing out spaces through her own writing. As I discuss later on, this impre-
cise shift between fictional and real spaces places the narrator’s reliability
into question as she moves between the historical, the fictive, the present
and the future.
It is important from the outset to recognize that the writer may not own
all, or any, of the identities which she constructs for herself in this way.
She may intentionally or unintentionally have created a multiple textual
identity which ascribes characteristics to her which she may not claim or
desire. She may also intentionally or unintentionally have concealed aspects
of her identity which she might reveal on other occasions but not here.
(1994, p. 6)
Not only does Ivanic speak to the instability of all narrative voices
despite their aim at objectivity, she also reminds the reader that identi-
ties may play out at the level of the subconscious and in multiple forms.
Los ingrávidos is a novel in which narrative reliability is constantly placed
into question, diminishing and then eroding entirely as it reaches its
final pages. In fact, the novel relies on the multiple textual identities
Ivanic discusses in order for the narrator to be able to come into con-
tact with the poet, a supernatural occurrence that seems to enter into
other dimensions, other layers of consciousness. Ivanic’s statement is also
thought-provoking when considering the many decisions the narrator
makes in writing her novel, some of which approximate her lived reality.
Indeed, the spatial syntaxes she creates through writing are at times inti-
mate and related to identity and self, on other occasions they allow for
spatial takeover or empowerment.
For example, readers learn that the narrator’s husband has left her and
journeyed to Philadelphia. In the first instance of this news, one has the
impression that this is happening in the present-day narrative. His rea-
son for leaving is due to “[…] el odio. Romper al otro, quebrarlo emo-
cionalmente una y otra vez. Dejarse romper.” (Luiselli 2011, p. 84).
A few fragments later, however, this same occurrence is written in the
mode of a creative decision, a narrative intervention. She writes, “El final
no importa. Mi marido se mudó a otra ciudad. Digamos, Filadelfia […]
Digamos que encontró a otras mujeres […]” (2011, p. 87).3 Here, the
certainty of the first fragment is destabilized, placed into the realm of
the fictive. Readers become privy to the knowledge that the husband’s
departure is something that is being crafted, a choice that has an almost
capricious air to it. Finally, the dialogue comes to a head as the narrator’s
husband reads about his own departure to Philadelphia in the pages of
his wife’s novel, asking why she sends him away. She responds, “para que
pase algo” (2011, p. 89). While at first glance this utterance may feel
arbitrary, its significance is deeply rooted. There is a tension mounting,
142 C. RAYNOR
[…] The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition.
From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness,
freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of
space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause; each pause
in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.
(1977, p. 6)
Following Tuan’s argument, the narrator’s use of hers and others’ places
is a direct affront to the notion of place as secure, closed and stable. It
is transformed, rather, into realms that are open, free, unstable and in
motion due to the bodies that enter with varying degrees of anonym-
ity. This representation of the home is telling in that it defies traditional
space-place dichotomies, turning places into spaces and vice versa.
At the same time, the danger in this transformation is the “threat”
that Tuan discusses, the alteration of a space that was once secure into a
communal zone in which place-bound parameters and rules take on new
meaning. While it is unclear as to what exactly goes on in these rotating
apartments—the narrator gestures at sexual contact but is vague in her
wording—she portrays her apartment and those of others as a singular
place with a revolving door, challenging traditional conceptions of the
home. This treatment also unsettles the boundary between public and
private, inside and outside, hers and others, a process that has reverse
consequences for space as well. Indeed, the narrator inhabits pub-
lic spaces in ways that are also nontraditional; she imbues them with a
depth of meaning conventionally assigned to places. Elevators, subways,
park benches, public bathrooms, all become her zones of occupation,
realms in which she has significant encounters or to which she assigns
value. Just as her investigations of Owen bring new associations with the
places and spaces of the city, her rich literary life blends into her real-life
in New York City. She writes, “Los espacios públicos, como las calles y
las estaciones del metro, se iban volviendo habitables a medida que las
asignara algún valor y se les imprimiera alguna experiencia. Si yo recitaba
un pedazo de Paterson cada vez que caminaba por cierta avenida, con
el tiempo esa avenida sonaría a William Carlos Williams” (Luiselli 2011,
p. 26).4 Indeed, the opportunities for contact and collision between the
real and imagined, literary and real worlds, allow for a delicate dance that
turns traditional spatial associations on their head.
It is not only her New York City apartment which becomes dissoci-
ated from the trappings of place, but also her homes in Mexico City and
144 C. RAYNOR
que a veces veía en el metro” (2011, p. 73). The brevity of this frag-
ment catches the reader’s attention; it is a mere three lines, and could
be interpreted as a type of aside, a footnote, words in passing. It is also a
message laden with apathy spurred by the futility the young woman feels
while writing: the only company she keeps is the illusory ghost. The nar-
rator draws steadily upon comparisons with the physical world in order
to explain the underpinnings of writing, remembering and crafting fic-
tion, despite the fact that she does not consider the process of writing to
have the real-world legitimacy or the inventiveness of architectural plans
designated for real-life production.
Not only does the narrator often see the writing of her novel as illu-
sory and without substance, she describes her loneliest days in New York
City as a type of scaffolding, “Lo único que perdura de aquel período
son los ecos de algunas conversaciones, un puñado de ideas recurrentes,
poemas que me gustaban y releía una y otra vez hasta aprenderlos de
memoria. Todo lo demás es elaboración posterior. Mis recuerdos de esa
vida no podrían tener mayor contenido. Son andamiajes, estructuras,
casas vacías” (2011, p. 14). These architectural comparisons aid readers
in grasping the materially barren life of that particular period, both in
terms of the contact she had with others and in the lack of physical items
surrounding her, “En aquel departamento había sólo cinco muebles:
cama, mesa-comedor, librero, escritorio y silla” (2011, p. 13). All that
remained of her life then was in the form of words: echoes of conversa-
tions, ideas and poems. Although the narrator comments on these let-
tered vestiges as hollow and lacking the consistency of filled-out memory
or the material strength of a home ripe with many artifacts, her remark
returns readers to the power of the textual in the novel. In the face of
stark rooms and restless lives, words, experiences and people carry on.
Finally, I would like to comment briefly on how the novel treats the con-
cept of community and solidarity between two expatriated subjects who
collide in increasing intensity across space and time. In addition to giv-
ing value to the noncanonical, Los ingrávidos deals with another recur-
ring theme in contemporary Latin America, that of writing outside the
boundaries of homeland. One need only turn to the canon for a mul-
titude of examples of writers who both worked on themes extending
7 PLACE-MAKING IN THE SOLITUDE OF THE CITY … 147
Conclusion
Luiselli’s debut novel is indeed an extended reflection on space. The
spaces of the work are material and figurative, real and imagined, literal
and literary. Above all, they are defined by an augmented plasticity that
invites encounters between past and present, between Owen and the nar-
rator, in ways that play out in symphonic form. As the novel progresses,
place-making has real consequences for the young woman. She creates
places through narration, through a dedication to literary worlds that
bleed into real life, and by making places out of nontraditional, shared
and public domains. In doing so the narrator combats the solitude of
the city, finding points of human contact that seem to know no bounds.
She also insists upon the importance of Owen as a literary and ghostly
companion, challenging canonical and world literary standards around
the lack of value of the marginal, the peripheral, and the liminal. It is
within the liminal space that her connection to Owen thrives, in the
non-regulated gray areas of an increasingly flexible narrative world. In
the final pages of Los ingrávidos, there seems to be no material or liter-
ary boundaries. The collapse of the novel (and the novel within a novel)
plays out in material ways, as seen poignantly in the crumbling house in
Mexico City that lies in shambles filled with holes, at least according to
our increasingly unreliable narrator. However, the value of narrative reli-
ability itself is scrutinized in Los ingrávidos. As readers learn to inhabit
the novel within the novel and release themselves from the confines of
reliability, they abandon their fixation on the untrustworthy narrator and
enter new worlds uninhibited by strict dichotomies of place and space. It
is within the marginal, that which lies between and beyond, that strange
and delightful encounters are made possible.
As readers reach the end, literary figures begin to enter into the nar-
rator’s real-world interaction fluidly, without consequence. Federico
Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and
Gilberto Owen all scatter the final pages as though they were ordi-
nary protagonists, no longer vanquished to the confines of the strictly
literary, existing in plain sight (2011, pp. 140–145). One has the sense
that the narrator is living fully in all of her multiple narrative identi-
ties, that of reader, translator, writer, mother and wife. As Los ingráv-
idos reaches a close, each vignette becomes ever shorter, just three to
four lines in length, giving readers the sense that the narrative is racing
to the finish line. There is a sense of urgency at the close, as the young
150 C. RAYNOR
Notes
1. Valeria Luiselli originally published this novel in 2011 under the title, Los
ingrávidos. In 2014, the work was translated into English by Christina
MacSweeney under the title, Faces in the Crowd. It should be noted that
some substantive differences in the content between the original Spanish
and the English translation exist, some of which are addressed in this
chapter.
2. Gilberto Owen Estrada was born in Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico in 1904
and died in Philadelphia in 1952. He was a Mexican poet and diplomat
whose body of poetic work was substantial. Luiselli’s interest in the poet is
long-standing. She published a short piece on the author in a Mexico City
based literary magazine, Letras Libres in 2009, entitled “Gilberto Owen,
Narrador.”
3. In the English publication of Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd, 2014),
this fragment is followed by “Or maybe he just got fed up, locked himself
in an apartment in Philadelphia, and allowed himself to slowly die” (81).
4. Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams. The
poem was published between 1946 and 1958, and comprises a total of five
volumes.
5. Further diminishing the narrator’s reliability, the young boy does not seem
to be aware of the breakdown of the house around him. When the nar-
rator suggests they keep out of the kitchen in case the house begins to
shake again, the boy asks “¿Cómo que si vuele a temblar?” (141). In the
English publication (Faces in the Crowd), when the narrator suggests that
the ghost could help them glue the house back together after the earth-
quake, the boy brings her back into his reality, stating “Earthquakes don’t
exist, Mama” (138).
Bibliography
Cardoso Nelky, Regina. 2014. “Fantasmas y Sosias en Los Ingrávidos, de Valeria
Luiselli.” Romance Notes 54: 77–84.
Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Ivanic, Roz. 1994. “I Is for Interpersonal: Discoursal Construction of Writer
Identities and the Teaching of Writing.” Linguistics and Education 6, no. 1:
3–15.
7 PLACE-MAKING IN THE SOLITUDE OF THE CITY … 151
Luiselli, Valeria. 2009. “Gilberto Owen, Narrador.” Letras Libres 11, no. 121:
58–59.
———. 2010. Papeles falsos. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2011. Los ingrávidos. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2014a. Faces in the Crowd. Translated by Christina MacSweeney.
Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
———. 2014b. La historia de mis dientes. Mexico: Sexto Piso.
———. 2014c. Sidewalks. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press.
———. 2016. Los niños perdidos: un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas. México: Sexto
Piso.
Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991.
London: Penguin.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 8
Camilo A. Malagón
C. A. Malagón (*)
Department of Int’l Languages and Literatures, Department of English,
Saint Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN, USA
of these characters are also dislocated in their own way, and through his
relationship with them, Frank changes his ideas about his work and life
while the novel reflects upon dislocation in the global world.
Novels and other cultural artifacts from the last two decades in Latin
America are reflecting upon globalization and Hotel Pekín is no excep-
tion.1 The Beijing described in most of Gamboa’s novel is a Beijing of non-
places. Non-places are spaces of transit, circulation and consumption where
identity, history and representation cannot be deposited (Augé 2008).2
Michalski moves mostly through these new spaces favored by globaliza-
tion: hotels, their restaurants and bars, high-rise corporate offices, airplanes
and airports. All the non-places in this new Beijing reinforce its status as
global city, a term coined by sociologist Saskia Sassen (2001) to describe
the function that some cities serve in the global capitalist economy of the
twenty-first century. Global cities serve as nodal points for transnational net-
works of capital, amassing managerial control of global operation—and in
consequence, amassing capital as well—and becoming a new world urban
reality. Cities like New York, Tokyo and London are considered global cities
in Sassen’s configuration (2001), and arguably, Beijing is also a global city
in Hotel Pekín. Frank Michalski’s work is directly related to the global city
operations of Beijing as he will be there teaching his seminar for entrepre-
neurs and top executives of corporations.
My discussion here deals with dislocation: the conflation of subjectiv-
ity and space in an irreversible movement that causes a feeling of unheim-
lich [uncanny] (Freud 1955), of disarray, of lack of place.3 I deal here
with subjects that have lost their place in the world, that have exchanged
the immobility of home for the mobility of the world. In this chapter, I
study the ideas of mobility, and mobile subjects; subjects in movement,
subjects that through their movement in space have come to question
their home, their nation, and their sense of location within the nation in
the novel Hotel Pekín.
I have chosen to describe these subjects with the category dislocated
subjects because it ties their questioning of their own national affiliations
with spatiality. I have come to this term particularly through the cate-
gories of “vagabond” and “tourist” put forward by Zygmunt Bauman
(1925–2017) in a chapter of his book Globalization: The Human
Consequences ([1998] 2005). Bauman’s book analyzes the underbelly
of globalization: the negative consequences of the continuous road to
turn the world into one global capitalist economy. Bauman proposes that
the contemporary world is a postmodern reality where nation-states are
8 DISLOCATED SUBJECTS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: SANTIAGO … 155
losing the power to define the identity of their subjects and global capi-
tal has erased, or at the very least greatly questioned, nation-state auton-
omy as well as created a hyper-consumerist society which he calls “liquid
modernity.” This new global reality is one of nomadic subjects, moving
through space for a variety of reasons, and no longer completely bound
by ideological, economic or other ties to their nation-state.
Bauman’s ideas were not necessarily sui generis in the 1990s. After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, several social scientists foresaw similar fates for the
power of the nation-state (Appadurai 1996; Habermas 2001; Jauregui
Bereciartu 2004; Guéhenno 1995). The first decade of the twenty-first
century has in many ways not lived up to the promise of this deterritori-
alization theorized by many, when in a post-9/11 world, the nation-state
continues to have relevance and inspire war and patriotic sentiments (Held
and McGrew 2007). In the case of Latin America, the return of left-wing
governments and social programs in the region further complicate the pic-
ture of unfettered, unquestioned globality (Levitsky and Roberts 2011).
Nevertheless, within this picture, mobility continues to increase in differ-
ent ways: Cities in the region continue to grow with mobility from rural to
urban areas, Latin Americans continue to leave their countries for greener
grasses elsewhere due to insecurity and precarious economic and living
conditions; global connectedness, the result of technological advances and
political will, continues to inspire people to move in the contemporary
global landscape. Even if the larger premises of Bauman (1996) cannot
completely be accounted for in the twenty-first century, some of his meta-
phors can still help us understand some types of contemporary mobility—
including the variety of terms he uses for mobile subjects or nomads.4
Yet, the term “nomad” was problematic for Bauman. He argues that
“the fashionable term ‘nomads,’ applied indiscriminately to all contempo-
raries of the postmodern era, is grossly misleading, as it glosses over the
profound differences which separate two types of experience and render
all similarity between them formal and superficial” (1996, p. 87). Bauman
creates two categories to understand these two experiences, namely, “tour-
ists” and “vagabonds.” The tourists are the subjects that can move about
the world freely, the global businessmen and women, the global culture
managers or global academics for whom borders have been dismantled, as
they have also been for the world’s commodities, capital and finance mar-
kets. The vagabonds are the opposite of the tourists within this paradigm;
they are the dispossessed, the displaced, the subjects dedicated to serve the
world of the tourists (Bauman 1996, p. 92).5
156 C. A. MALAGÓN
the terms, and how this can help readers better understand the critical
discourses that have defined them. Exiles, according to Kaplan, corre-
spond to Euro-American expatriates in the 1920s and 1930s that moved
with some freedom through national borders, engaged in intellectual and
artistic writing and who maintained a complicated and, at times, antag-
onistic relationship with their homelands. However, these writers were
mostly privileged white men, of middle-class origins, who reproduced
a colonial logic of exoticism of the other, and did not effectively see
their lives as related to other mobile subjects: immigrants and refugees
(Kaplan 1996, pp. 27–57). Edward Said (2002) has also theorized the
figure of the exile, but for him, it does not correspond as much to a spe-
cific set of expatriates or émigrés from the 1920s and 1930s, but rather
to a type of traveler that no longer has a home, that was forced out of a
home, and, he believes the term should include the large masses of ref-
ugees displaced globally. For Said, the term does not have a historical
specificity necessarily; for Kaplan it does.
Moreover, Kaplan sees exiles as the precursors to tourists. The term
tourist “arises out of the economic disasters of other countries that
make them ‘affordable’ or subject to ‘development,’ trading upon long-
established traditions of cultural hegemony, and, in turn, participating in
new versions of hegemonic relations” (1996, p. 63). While I think that this
definition of tourist also engages in a Eurocentric formulation (What about
tourists that make the opposite move: from countries or places considered
“affordable” or “subject to development” to Disney World?), it presents a
continuity between exiles and tourists. Exiles create modernity by moving
freely around the world documenting it, with their gaze of imperialist nos-
talgia (Kaplan 1996, p. 34), and tourists create postmodernity by consum-
ing commodities while, also, moving freely around the world.
The term dislocated subjects dialogues with the work of all of these
critics but it is particularly interested in the relationship that subjects
have with spaces, as it relates to their relative mobility, and how this
mobility changes through time. In the case of Hotel Pekín, the protag-
onist deals with situations that change his mobility and cause disloca-
tion, but this dislocation is not solid and immovable, it is rather fluid and
changes with his fluid perceptions of space itself. This dislocation does
not pertain to a mobility operated only by necessity (exile-vagabond), or
only by choice (tourist), but rather to the complex relationship between
the need to move in space, through borders and cultures, and how
8 DISLOCATED SUBJECTS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: SANTIAGO … 159
exactly they do it and why. It is only through the instance of reading and
understanding this protagonist, and the other characters of the novel,
that we can understand how different characters embody this dislocation,
and what it means to them—and more importantly, what it means to us
and what it can tell us about narrative and culture.
Bauman’s work has consistently deployed metaphorical categories
such as these two to make sense of reality, and it is part of his theoretical
paradigm to believe in the blurring of disciplinary boundaries to explore
the connections that interdisciplinary work may bring upon critical anal-
ysis (Jacobsen and Marshman 2006). This is, partly, the reason that they
can be easily borrowed and used in the task of the hermeneutical study
of texts. While I am providing, perhaps, a tout court justification of the
epistemological operation that I am suggesting grounded in Bauman’s
own theoretical processes, I do think that Bauman’s reformulated cat-
egories as the category dislocated subjects helps explain certain rep-
resentations, connected to imaginaries of globality, in cultural artifacts.
Dislocated subjects are both tourists and vagabonds, their mobility can-
not be understood either as effortless travel or forced displacement: it is
both, and this ambiguity is one of the constitutive factors of the disloca-
tion itself. Yet, to understand how these dislocated subjects are deployed
in texts, and what their political relevance is, one must ground these
representations in the relevant contextual framework of the novel, but
also in how they are being deployed within a larger context of meaning,
intra- inter- and para-textually.
The novel Hotel Pekín, by the Colombian author Santiago Gamboa
is not sui generis: the story of a Western traveler going East to find him-
self spiritually, finding a renewed sense of self in this encounter. In this
case, the story is that of Frank Michalski, the protagonist, who travels
to Beijing to embark on a new professional task. Michalski is one of the
top “international trainers” for a company called Enhancing the Future,
a center for economic studies that specializes in teaching the manage-
rial elite of emerging economies the unspoken rules of business and
consumption. In this seminar, he will be teaching them techniques of
conspicuous consuming behavior that should accord with Western ste-
reotypes of business: what suits and shoes to wear, how many to even
own, how to do effective wine and food pairings according to loca-
tion, weather and circumstance and a number of other seemingly vac-
uous enterprises that should enhance the manner in which these top
160 C. A. MALAGÓN
tools to help deal with, namely a student who usually seems uninter-
ested or resistant to the ideas explained in the seminar. Qiang sees the
etiquette and conspicuous consumption practices espoused by Michalski
as either superfluous or obvious.
Moreover, there is also a tension between Michalski and Bordewich,
the former trying to homogenize cultural and economic difference
through his seminars and the latter looking for originality everywhere
he travels. In a conversation with Michalski on a plane to China where
they originally meet, Bordewich explains that he is in search of an origi-
nal story in the country, an important imminent announcement from the
Central Committee, or the upper echelons of the Chinese government.
Yet, as the reporter explains, he will not be covering the main story, as
for him, real stories are near the epicenter of an event, but not quite in
the center. He will rather walk about different places in Beijing looking
for an untold, original thing to write about. Bordewich tells Michalski in
this first conversation between them that he does not quite believe in his
work, and that he thinks he will find it very hard to succeed—a comment
that, at the end, turns out to be true, as Michalski, due to his interac-
tions with Bordewich and Qiang, starts questioning his work.
Hotel Pekín continues a decade or so of interest in China by Santiago
Gamboa. The writer worked as a correspondent in the country for inter-
national newspapers, and has also written Octubre en Pekín [October
in Beijing] (2001), a literary travel narrative—sponsored by Grijalbo
Mondadori as part of their series titled “Año 0” (EFE 2001); and the
novel Los impostores [The Impostors] (2002a), also set in Beijing, about
three intellectuals, a German philologist, a Sino-Peruvian literature
professor who lives in Austin, TX, and a Colombian journalist living in
France who all meet in Beijing and get involved in an international con-
spiracy looking for an ancient lost Chinese manuscript. These works by
Gamboa, along with other texts by César Aira, Ariel Magnus and other
contemporary authors, are part of a new literary current that focuses on
transpacific imaginaries and transpacific connections between China and
Latin America (Hoyos 2013). These texts are all part of a global phase
in the work of Gamboa, who at the beginning of his career focused on
novels and stories dealing directly with Colombian reality in the 1990s
(See, e.g. Páginas de vuelta [Pages of a Return] (1995) and Perder es
cuestión de método [Losing is a question of method] (1997)), turning to
representations of globalization in many novels in the 2000s and the
2010s.6 In recent years, Gamboa has turned his attention again to novels
162 C. A. MALAGÓN
Bordewich’s stay in Beijing is filled with walks around the city follow-
ing the locals to where they spend their leisure time, looking at cemeter-
ies, exploring the underworld of a controversial religious group that is
against the communist government and meeting and talking to a woman
who is a singer at a shady bar/brothel and learning her story. These are
the little dramas that he pursues. Bordewich, thus, configures his work
within a postmodernist outlook of the world. Truth, with a capital T,
is transient, relative or non-existent; we do not have History, just sto-
ries to tell—and these are the stories he is looking for. This theory of
Bordewich’s becomes important at the end of the novel—after hav-
ing looked and found possible stories to tell, in the last few lines of the
novel, Bordewich tells Michalski that he might end up telling Michalski’s
own story. Perhaps the novel Hotel Pekín is that very story (as mentioned
earlier, Gamboa himself worked in Beijing as a journalist). Bordewich
and Michalski have a series of conversations about their work in China,
capitalism and globalization. They meet in the hotel’s bar every night to
talk about their days and their work. Bordewich believes that “real glo-
balization” is impossible because the world is too diverse, and Michalski
believes that there are some universal ideas that can be salvaged from a
world of multiplicities—among them, of course, capitalism, the expan-
sion of which is his main goal.
As part of his Beijing wanderings trying to find a story to tell for his
newspaper, Bordewich meets Mi-Mi, a singer and waitress at a Karaoke
parlor. She brings drinks and sings in private rooms to visitors, but she
is not an escort or prostitute, as she makes clear to Bordewich: “clientes
no pueden tocarnos” (Gamboa 2008, p. 132). After Bordewich touches
her by mistake, she storms off, and the next time she sees Bordewich on
164 C. A. MALAGÓN
a different night, she insists, “hoy usted no toca el hombro, hoy bien”
(2008, p. 172). Mi-Mi’s father was Chinese but grew up in Moscow
playing classical piano. After Mao took control of the country, Mi-Mi’s
father, like many sympathizers of the revolution, came back triumphantly
in the 1950s to take part in the new Communist project in the coun-
try, and eventually accepted a teaching position in a new conservatory in
Beijing. In the 1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, when the party
became more nationalistic, he was imprisoned and sent to Mongolia.
He was later released and came back to Beijing to teach but was never
able to play again, his hands destroyed during his imprisonment. He died
years later, and left his instruments to his daughter, hoping she could
study and play as he never could again. With no money, she could not
study, and worked at the Karaoke joint to survive. Mi-Mi has a Chinese
boyfriend, also from Beijing. However, he lives in Singapore, and they
only know each other through their online conversations: They have
never met in real life.
Mi-Mi’s personal life is also one of a dislocated subject, in a way: from
the story of her father who grew up as a Chinese émigré in Moscow,
his return and later rejection, and her lonely life with her only intimate
connection with her boyfriend in Singapore through a computer. But
with her story, there is also a linguistic dislocation revealed in the novel:
Her strange use of language (“Clientes no pueden tocarnos” without
the appropriate definite article “los”) perhaps points to a lack of formal
education. Here, we can attribute a linguistic dislocation to the novel
itself: Gamboa’s choice for Mi-Mi’s grammatical stumbling is curious,
when it is clear that these characters are most likely not speaking Spanish
in reality, but probably English or some other language. Why does
Gamboa choose this register for Mi-Mi? It is part of the way that the
novel constructs these Asian characters in an orientalist way. With Mi-Mi,
it is her linguistic register, with Li Qiang, his nationalistic reticence and
close-mindedness to the work of Michalski.
The character Cornelius F. Bordewich appears as Fergus Bordewich
in another text by Santiago Gamboa, the short story “Muy cerca del mar
te escribo,” part of the collection of Colombian short stories Cuentos
caníbales [Cannibal Stories] that came out in 2002, featuring young, up
and coming or moderately established fiction writers, including Santiago
Gamboa, Antonio Ungar, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Mario Mendoza,
Diana Ospina and Ricardo Silva Romero among many others (Gamboa
2002b). This story takes place in Algiers, and it follows a Colombian
8 DISLOCATED SUBJECTS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: SANTIAGO … 165
reporter living in Paris who meets Bordewich every night in the bar of
the hotel where he is staying, Hotel El-Aurassi, just like Michalski meets
Bordewich in Hotel Pekín. Both Bordewich and our nameless narrator
are covering the upcoming elections, and exchange a few stories during
their time there. Bordewich tells the narrator the same theory that he
tells Michalski in the novel about human matters, and overall seems to
have the same ideology regarding globalization.
Some of the dialogue from the short story seems to be copied almost
verbatim in Hotel Pekín. It looks like Gamboa reworked his character in
the short story to include him in the novel, and it is interesting to think
that there might be inter-diegetic continuity as well between the two
texts. Yet, the appearance of the character Bordewich in both these texts,
one happening in Algiers, and another one in Beijing, with some of the
same lines, speaks to the textual interchangeability of these two locales to
Gamboa, reinforcing the orientalist reading that Héctor Hoyos (2013)
attributes to Gamboa’s Los impostores, another of Gamboa’s novels set in
Beijing mentioned earlier.
Another dislocated subject in the novel is Li Qiang, who was born in
a rural community in China, but whose life was changed with the explo-
sive modernization in the country in the second half of the twentieth
century. He was an avid student and became an officer in the Chinese
army; he later studied engineering and worked as an engineer at a tele-
communications regional company and after a rapid rise in the corpo-
rate world, moved to the largest telecommunications company in China.
He was finally relocated to Beijing with his family, becoming a star in
the corporate world of Beijing, and now spends his days in meetings and
seminars like Michalski’s. Qiang was displaced, moved by his company
to Beijing, a place he does not like very much, but at the same time, he
seems to have benefited tremendously, along with his family, from the
money that he has made in the process. Despite these large changes in
his life, Li Qiang seems reticent to accept completely the changes hap-
pening in China, he still leads an ascetic lifestyle, and continuously sees
his young adult children’s modern lifestyle of consumption—focused on
fashion and other Western products—to be somewhat unacceptable.
A third dislocated subject in the novel is Ming Cheng, who was
married and had a son with another corporate world workaholic, both
devoted to their work more than their marriage. Eventually, her husband
received a job offer in Hong Kong and not having much to look for-
ward to relationship-wise, he decided to move and took their son with
166 C. A. MALAGÓN
the text itself that we are reading. It is important to note this lack of lin-
guistic correspondence because it brings our attention to language, and it
shows that the transpacific connection created by the novel between China
and Latin America, only exists through the mediation of a center of cul-
ture—in this case, I am referring to the English language as an institution
as well as to Frank’s diaspora to the United States. Moreover, let us reflect
upon Gamboa’s choice to include some of Bordewich’s ideas in the short
story “Muy cerca del mar te escribo,” adding another layer of orientalism
to the mix. Not only the language mediating the experience is English, a
neocolonial language, but the interchangeability of location conflates vastly
different cultures and spatialities with the novel’s colonialist gaze.
This transpacific connection occurs in very subtle comments in the
development of the plot as well. As the reader learns, Michalski has an
aversion for his country of origin, Colombia. Yet, the relationship to the
country is not as simple as it seems. After his first set of meetings with
executives, he decides to take a tourist stroll through the city, and ends
up going to Tiananmen Square. When he gets to a corner, he experi-
ences some seemingly strange feelings, “vio la inmensidad de la plaza y
quedó sobrecogido por su tamaño, pero la sensación no fue agradable.
Ese espacio anónimo y repleto de espectros, le avivó viejos temores”
(Gamboa 2008, p. 51). The reference to old fears points to a traumatic
past, perhaps embedded in Michalski’s personal experience in Colombia,
or the political violence of the country in the last fifty years. Later in the
novel, in a conversation about his Colombian nationality, Qiang ques-
tions Michalski about his past—and about his relationship with his for-
mer country. He asks him if he has ever been back there, perhaps taken
his seminar to Colombia. Michalski reacts defensively, explaining that
he owes his former country nothing, and that he did not choose to be
born there, or anywhere else for that matter—it was just random chance.
Right after this, the seemingly belligerent tone of the conversation starts
to dissipate, but Frank utters the following sentences: “A veces mirar
demasiado hacia el pasado nos vuelve ciegos…el pasado es un escenario
repleto de sangre, ríos de sangre corriendo desbordados por el estrecho
canal de los siglos” (2008, p. 98). The lines seem excessive with its ref-
erence to rivers of blood, themselves overflowing out of the conversa-
tion, and out of context. But that feeling of gloom in the first instance
in Tiananmen Square, and his gory lines in the second in the conversa-
tion with Qiang seemed to be triggered by specific situations where the
imaginary of the nation was present. In the first one, Tiananmen Square
168 C. A. MALAGÓN
Notes
1. And by globalization, I refer here to the creation of networks of peoples,
ideas and goods across the globe; expansion of neoliberal economies; tech-
nological advances that have facilitated these networks and sped up the
mobility of capital, goods and people among other characteristics.
2. According to Augé, non-place is a space that can only be defined in rela-
tion to its contrary: anthropological place. “If anthropological place could
be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity, then the
space that could not be defined as relational, historical or concerned with
identity would be the non-place” (2008, p. 63). Augé defines this new
space as one of “circulation, consumption and communication” (2008,
p. viii). Spaces such as airports, train stations, the metro are all non-places,
as well as the machines themselves of transit: airplanes, buses, etc. Also,
temporary abodes such as hotels, or even hospitals, can be considered non-
places (2008, p. 63). In the contemporary world, there exists a prolifera-
tion of such places: The life of a human being in the society of the end of
the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first is filled with many
encounters with such places.
3. The term unheimlich or uncanny was popularized by Sigmund Freud to
refer to a combination of something that is frightening, secretive and
unfamiliar—defined in contrast to heimlich [homely] (1955, p. 219). The
words heimlich and unheimlich in German have some similar meanings,
including “secretive.” This leads Freud to define uncanny as “something
which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become
alienated from it only through the process of repression” (1955, p. 240).
Here, I use the term uncanny and relate it to my concept of dislocation for
its connection in opposition to words such as homely and familiar, but also
for its resonance with feelings of fright and disarray.
4. Bauman himself can be thought of as a dislocated subject. He was born in
1925 in Poznan, Poland and moved to the Soviet Union escaping from
the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust. Although he first
studied Physics, he eventually joined the Soviet Army and rose through
the ranks to become captain, until he was expelled during a purge of peo-
ple of Jewish descent in the army in 1953. After this, he got an MA in
sociology and became professor of sociology at Warsaw University. During
student protests in 1968, he would be accused of being an organizer and
instigator, and an intellectual leader of the demonstrations. After a few
years moving through various countries, including Israel and Australia, he
finally settled in England at the University of Leeds where he taught until
his retirement in 1990. Surprisingly, most of his globally known academic
papers and books come from a period post-retirement where he wrote
172 C. A. MALAGÓN
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Augé, Marc. 2008. Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Translated by
John Howe. New York: Verso.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1996. “From Pilgrim to Tourist—Or a Short History of
Identity.” In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Du
Gay, 18–36. London: Sage.
———. 2005. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity.
Best, Shaun. 2013. Zygmunt Bauman: Why Good People Do Bad Things. Surrey:
Ashgate.
8 DISLOCATED SUBJECTS IN THE GLOBAL CITY: SANTIAGO … 173
Despite the now extensive critical bibliography coalesced around the work
of Roberto Bolaño, little has been written about the image of the urban
in his writing. This state of affairs begs the question: What is the logic
of the urban, of the image and representation of the city, in Bolaño’s fic-
tion? To answer this question, account must be made of two constitutive
and intertwined elements of Bolaño’s work. There is, on the one hand,
the construction of Bolaño’s works: Chris Andrews has argued that by its
very design Bolaño’s fiction tends in the direction of constant expansion.
There is, on the other, Héctor Hoyos’ proposition that at least Bolaño’s
most voluminous novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, are character-
ized by Aleph-like logics—that is, that these novels evince the impossible
desire to articulate a totalizing vision of globality, to stage in compressed
form the limitless world in its infinite complexity (Hoyos 2015). It is
my sense that this Aleph-like logic is at work in the entirety of Bolaño’s
J. P. Melo (*)
Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA, USA
fiction, an assertion that can be made consistent with the proposition that
the Chilean’s writing is characterized by a genetic propensity to expan-
sion. Not only is each element of Bolaño’s fiction a root that sprouts fur-
ther roots; as a thinker of immanence, Bolaño sees literature as part of the
world and therefore as internally remaking the world (Hoyos 2015, pp.
13–14). In method and form, Bolaño’s work stretches out to totality and
not only seeks to convey but also to reshape the totality of the world. The
consciousness of Bolaño’s oeuvre is planetary in scope.
If this is correct, little can be said about the image of the urban as
manifest in Bolaño’s work without taking these two elements—design
tailored to expansion and an Aleph-like logic—into account. More
specifically, this means coming to terms with the idea that Bolaño’s liter-
ary work qua Aleph, in commenting on globality from a Latin American
perspective, entails a critique of dominant discourses of globalization.
As Hoyos notes: “at a distance from the Cold War and not entirely
subsumed under the logic of the War on Terror, contemporary Latin
American writers have an unprecedented chance at imagining the world
differently, at modeling an alternate globality” (2015, p. 21). This is not
to suggest that Bolaño proposes a thoroughly consistent discourse on
globality characterized by comprehensiveness and order. If he proposes
a new attitude toward the global as such, it is one that distrusts static or
centered panopticism, and sees as illusion any ideal of synthetic integra-
tion. Nonetheless, it is from a peripheral Latin American perspective, one
schooled, as Hoyos has emphasized, in negotiating multiple geo-cultural
positionalities, one able therefore to hold on to a specific geo-cultural
frame even as it engages with the totalizing optics of the global as figure,
that the role of the urban in the work of Bolaño can be understood in at
least two of its primary dynamics. The first of these deals with the image
and figure of the urban as metaphor for and representation of emergent
global configurations of the urban as these spawn new global publics and
new spatial coordinates. This function of the image of the city relates to
a fundamental Bolaño theme: the unruly proliferation of art and social
practices as they elude institutional regularization and categorization.
The second dynamic features the urban as multidimensional Aleph, as
labyrinthine object that begs the detective’s exegesis. In this capacity,
the figure of the urban (1) not only represents the materialization of the
world under a given project of globalization; more importantly (2) as
eidetic metaphor for the global it ties the achievement of an ethical stance
to the cognitive mapping of globalized space.
9 ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S URBAN LABYRINTHS … 177
These dynamics escape the purview of one of the few sustained anal-
yses of the figure of the city in Bolaño that I am aware of, Fernando
Saucedo Lastra’s México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y
territorio. Mexico City in The Savage Detectives is presented by Saucedo
Lastra as a space that progresses from sense to senselessness; in other
words, that contains micro-worlds of meaning that are destabilized
through deeper explorations into the metropolitan fabric and wider
gazes out toward the urban horizon. Mexico City as seen through the
eyes of the young Juan García Madero is initially a space that represents
youthful certainty and a stable lettered canon. This stable vision of the
urban progressively opens itself to multiple realities, to an opaqueness
which suddenly makes it hard to read. Cities are “no longer images of
modernity and of progress, but almost organic megalopolises that grow
like viruses, anonymous spaces that incite chaos and the fall” (Saucedo
Lastra 2015, p. 101). Much of Saucedo Lastra’s analysis focuses on the
contrast between Mexico City and the Sonoran Desert, between the city
as a space of heterogeneity and the desert as a space of silence and empti-
ness, the latter presaging the devolution of order into disorder, of kinet-
ics into cosmic cooling. This reading of the figure of the urban in Bolaño
redounds on a now fragmented subject, as the urban becomes the stag-
ing ground for Bolaño’s elaboration of the deeply experiential and there-
fore fragmented nature of space and time. Evocative as this reading may
be, my interest here is with understanding how the fragmentation of
space and time represented by Bolaño in his images of the city signals a
diagnosis of a given form of globalization.
Perhaps the most commented upon detective figures of Bolaño’s
oeuvre are Juan García Madero, Arturo Belano, and Ulises Lima, of The
Savage Detectives; the four critics, Oscar Fate, and Oscar Amalfitano,
of 2666; and Abel Romero, Bibiano O’Ryan, and the unnamed narra-
tor of Distant Star. Meanwhile, the most present urban palimpsests
in the Bolaño universe are Mexico City and the fictional Santa Teresa.
However, in the spirit of backing up the claim that Bolaño’s works in
general function as Alephs or as constituent elements of one enormous
Aleph, and that the urban as labyrinth is central to their/its logic, I
want to focus on some of Bolaño’s minor works. The first of these texts
is “El policía de las ratas” or “The Rat Police” (Bolaño 2003), a story
that explodes its own finitude through the intertextual gesture of pos-
iting a sequel of sorts to Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse
Folk” (Kafka 1971). In “The Rat Police” Josephine the Singer’s nephew,
178 J. P. MELO
Pepe el Tira, is marked, like his aunt, as different from the average rat.
Joining the police force, Pepe soon finds himself exploring a labyrinth
of underground sewers and rat tunnels, carrying out the task of tracking
down and retrieving the bodies of victims of snakes and other predators.
Developing the habit of straying into the most peripheral and danger-
ous of tunnels and sewers, Pepe becomes engaged in the search for a rat
who has gone missing from a borderland explorer colony. Her murdered
body marks the first of a series of crimes that Pepe is convinced have
been committed by a fellow rat. Dissuaded from further inquiry into the
matter, assured by his superiors that rats do not kill other rats, Pepe per-
sists in his investigation, eventually tracking down the rat serial killer.
This audacious sequel maintains the contents of Kafka’s tale. The
characters in both stories are rats that behave like rats even as they
share formal—institutional and communicational—characteristics with
humans. The setting in both stories is the claustrophobic world of the
communal rodents, a life-world whose material correlate is a labyrin-
thine system of sewer and rat tunnels (more implied than described in
Kafka’s tale). Just as in the Kafka tale, the rats and mice in Bolaño’s tale
live lives beset by existential threat. Similarly, Bolaño’s rats and mice are
obdurately communal and generally unreflective creatures consumed by
the task of burrowing in search of food while avoiding floods, poison,
and predators. Determined in their habits by necessity, by well-defined
hierarchy developed over the longue durée, the rats shun any behaviors
characterized by individual license or inofficiousness. Driven to burrow
and seek food to feed their ever-expanding numbers, forged as a species
by material exigency, the rodents have little in the way of childhood or
leisure. They therefore have little use or care for art. Kafka’s story latches
upon this zero-level state of existence, life reduced to its barest elements,
to reflect on the nature of art. The rats and mice are a weary race con-
stantly in the throes of danger. The need to abide by the imperatives of
reproduction structures their apprehension to the phenomenon of song
as it is articulated in the performances of Josephine. Her piping has no
unique quality except Josephine’s thematization of it in performance.
This alone confers upon her performances the quality of art. It is this
claim to indulge fully in the refinement of purposeless activity—an activ-
ity practiced without artistic pretensions by all the other rats, usually dur-
ing work—that pits Josephine against her community.
This is an opposition nonetheless subsumed within a dialectic
resolving itself in favor of the community’s practical imperatives. To
9 ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S URBAN LABYRINTHS … 179
Josephine’s moody antics and haughty demands for attention and cele-
bration there is the community’s condescending acquiescence and pater-
nal care. To Josephine’s perpetual sense of the artist’s solitude there is
the community’s reception of her art in their “unlettered” terms. To
Josephine’s petitions for abstention from work there is the communi-
ty’s silent refusal, solidified by an intractable practical sense that makes
it impossible for them to seriously consider such demands. As allegory,
Kafka’s tale parallels Adorno and Horkheimer’s infamous interpretation
of Odysseus’ sailing past the Sirens in their essay on Enlightenment.
“Their [the Sirens’] allurement is that of losing oneself in the past.
But the hero exposed to it has come of age in suffering. In the mul-
titude of mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his
life, the identity of the person, has been hardened” (Adorno 2002,
p. 25). What Adorno says of Odysseus could well be applied to the rats
as communal subject. Just as Adorno locates in the psyche of Odysseus
that liminal space where myth rubs against Enlightenment, so the effect
of Josephine’s song on the rats indexes the dialectic entwinement of
ritualistic and autonomous art. Despite their apprehension in the face
of Josephine’s sublime art, in the “brief intervals between their strug-
gles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if
the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at
ease in the great, warm bed of the community. And into these dreams
Josephine’s piping drops note by note; she calls it pearl-like, we call it
staccato; but at any rate here it is in its right place… Something of our
poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never
be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gai-
eties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated”
(Kafka 1971, p. 370).
Bolaño’s story interjects into this space of inquiry as to the sig-
nificance of art in a world driven by economic necessity, yet it acts on
Kafka’s tale by mutating its genetic code, not least through the applica-
tion of the detective genre as organizing framework. Whatever else “The
Rat Police” happens to be—police procedural, fable—it flaunts, by dint
of its intertextual relations, affinity to discourses about the possibility and
existence of art in a world beset by Sisyphean toil. Yet even the bound-
aries of the meta-aesthetic are ultimately superseded, or at least punc-
tured, by a dialectic that transcends aesthetics: the theme of “The Rat
Police” is the nightmare of history allegorized as the struggle for order
in a chaotic universe, portrayed as an individual’s search for meaning in
180 J. P. MELO
colonia de ratas-topo que vivían entre nosotros ejerciendo los oficios más
humildes” (Bolaño 2003, p. 71). Pepe also meets an old white-haired
rat who speaks of having been born in a surface laboratory where he was
inoculated with a deadly disease meant to wipe out black-haired sewer
rats. Despite the deaths of many rats the white rats and the black rats
feverishly reproduced; the black rats not only became immune to the
virus, but a new species of brown rat emerged that was impervious to
all viruses. Later in his investigation, Pepe runs into an explorer colony
of rats that lives at the very margins of the known rodent territory and
consequently displays a healthy suspicion of the institutional authority
represented by Pepe. These rats speak of having opened tunnels to the
surface, where they sometimes spend entire days exploring the sprawl of
semi-ruinous human buildings.
Whether it is implied or not that humanity has been wiped out by a
virus of its own creation, with the figure of ruinous urban spaces Bolaño
gestures in his story at a post-apocalyptic situation, one where the ruins
of human cities remain to be mined and explored by an ever-expand-
ing horde of rats, the inheritors of the earth. Like a dark celestial object,
these rumors of a defunct and ruined human urbanscape—which arise
through indexical and catalyzing elements, and therefore appear of sec-
ondary importance—exert an inescapable gravitational force on the
material world depicted in Bolaño’s story. In a play of mirrors, these
post-apocalyptic images cast a framing light on the underground laby-
rinth of tunnels and sewers where the life of the rats goes on as usual:
production, reproduction, expansion. In this way, the frenetic and com-
pulsive reproduction of the rats is transfigured allegorically into a fable
of humanity’s self-destruction. In turn, readers are confronted with an
image of their very practices of production and its relation to the pro-
duction of space.
As it turns out, the tale’s exoskeleton of labyrinthine space and
bifurcating paths is the key to situating its mediation on evil. The sto-
ry’s immanent construction and allegorical code depict the struggle to
forge meaning in some as-yet untheorized globalized space, one char-
acterized by an expansion proceeding through instrumental reason and
tending to destruction and extinction. Let me emphasize that Bolaño’s
construction is not be interpreted along the lines of the traditional
model of the fable. The point is not that the reading subject, faced by
the fable, finds reflected the image of a moral lesson, the fanciful animal
receptacle of the story shedding its surface to reveal a socially binding
182 J. P. MELO
normative claim. The refracted allegory, under the pull of the post-apoc-
alyptic urban images produced by Bolaño, shoots past the life-world level
in the direction of the object realm. The dialectical play of images does
not arrest itself at the level of the ethical, as initially signified in the final
showdown between Pepe and Héctor (the rat serial killer). The ethical
inquiry is transcended through the injunction of the ostensible negative
spatial realm in the story (the above-ground urban space), which signals
a higher-level allegory that links the forms of production of the rats to a
specific framework of tunnels. In short, it links a form of production and
reproduction to the production of space.
Note the inversion of the static quality of Kafka’s tale. The latter takes
place in an amorphous vacuum within which Josephine, the rat com-
munity, art, production and reproduction, figure as broad categories in
tension. In Bolaño’s story, a shift away from high art as subject to the
popular genre of the detective tale as framework facilitates the creation
of an incidental cartography of space that in its becoming picks up an
apparently disparate set of elements and brings them into new relation.
In this context, the ethical dimension of Bolaño’s story takes on new
meanings. Pepe’s confrontation with Héctor, the rat murderer, is punc-
tuated by Héctor’s enigmatic words: Héctor asserts that he shares some-
thing in common with Josephine and Pepe, and this something is radical
fear. Pepe responds that Josephine was not afraid, only insane, and that
Héctor is mentally disturbed and incapable of fear. Héctor, however,
assures Pepe that Josephine was full of fear, with each musical perfor-
mance perishing and recomposing herself through an engagement with
that fear. “Yo soy una rata libre,” Héctor concludes, “Puedo habitar el
miedo y sé perfectamente hacia dónde se encamina nuestro pueblo”
(Bolaño 2003, p. 81).
Accounting for the unpacking of the symbolic function of the fig-
ure of the urban that was carried out above, this exchange can be taken
as commentary on the state of the ethical in a meaningless universe,
one privy only to the imperatives of instrumental reason. Considering
Josephine’s, Pepe’s and Héctor’s stances, the Nietzschean perspective
can be seen to devolve into three ethical positions: the negative of art
singing its utopian themes, theorized by Adorno as a form of sublime
negativity that places a critical mirror up to a fallen world; the ethical
stance of the brave detective who resists evil even though he knows
that the battle is lost from the outset or is only ever won momentarily;
and the renunciation of the ethical altogether, the full incursion into
9 ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S URBAN LABYRINTHS … 183
behind which she finds a zombie. Attempting to escape through the net-
work of tunnels, Julie is aided by the coronel’s son. The couple man-
age to escape, but not before Julie is bitten by the zombie. When they
emerge on the surface Julie is already well on her way to transforming
into a zombie. Looking for food, the couple enters a convenience store.
Shortly thereafter the store is held up by “four Mexicans.” In the strug-
gle that ensues one of these Mexicans is bitten by Julie. The rest of the
film features Julie and the coronel’s son fleeing from the revenge-driven
Mexicans—now transformed into zombies—across a ruinous urban
landscape.
Taking into consideration the negative-oriented frame of the story,
its substance can easily be situated somewhere other than in the content
of a banal cinematic romance and horror flick. The network of opposi-
tions founded on negativity as signaled by the zombie genre qua allegor-
ical instrument extends to the story fabric itself, rendering its substance
the commentary on the urban setting of the imaginary film, its produc-
tion, and the nature of the action presented in it, as carried out in the
unnamed narrator’s critical commentary on the film. This commentary
begins a soon as Julie and the coronel’s son exit the labyrinthine sewers
that connect military base to the city. “Cuando salen a la superficie el
hambre de Julie es incontrolable. Las calles de la ciudad, por otra parte,
presentan un aspecto desolador. Probablemente las locaciones están ubi-
cadas en el extrarradio de cualquier ciudad norteamericana, barrios aban-
donados, semirruinosos, en donde los cineastas sin dinero filman pasada
la medianoche y que es el sitio por donde emergen el hijo del coronel
Reynolds y Julie” (2007, p. 34).
What is of interest in this description is that the urban images in ques-
tion present an amorphous space that nonetheless points to a recogniza-
ble urban form, one corresponding to the North American metropolis.
“Cuando la pareja abandona la red de pasillos subterráneos el paisaje, de
alguna manera, nos resulta familiar. El alumbrado es deficiente, los vid-
rios de los edificios están rotos, casi no circulan coches” (2007, p. 35).
Also of interest is that this immediate recognition is carried out by a non-
North American spectator. “El hijo [del coronel] parece un joven tonto,
un joven alocado, un joven temerario y poco reflexivo, como fuimos
nosotros, solo que él habla en inglés y vive su particular desierto en un
barrio destrozado de una megaurbe norteamericana y nosotros hablamos
en español (o algo parecido) y vivimos y nos ahogamos en las avenidas
desoladas de las ciudades latinoamericanas” (2007, p. 35). Within the
186 J. P. MELO
Julie and the coronel’s son, are portrayed in the film as “tres chicos y una
chica, veinteañeros, abobaliconados, dispuestos a morir en un callejón
cualquiera” (2007, p. 36). Yet the stereotyped representation of urban
Mexican-American youth is undercut by the narrator’s commentary on
the actors playing these youths. “Uno los puede imaginar con igual fac-
ilidad estudiando interpretación dramática en una escuela como repar-
tiendo droga en las esquinas de su barrio o recogiendo tomates con los
braceros de John Steinbeck” (2007, p. 36).
Through a spatial and temporal dislocation of the image carried
out by the narrator, a figure that has become reified within the North
American urban imaginary is exploded from within. The dissonance
between the portrayal of Latin Americans in a North American cultural
product and the Latin American’s perspectival capacity to recognize
the artificiality of this portrayal, points, if understood within the system
of determinate negations constitutive of the story, at the disjunction
between a briefly constituted public and the experience of multiple oppo-
sitional publics. The recognition of this disjunction between cultural
representation and horizon of experience therefore activates a truly dif-
ferentiated oppositional public: one that sees the distortion of its image
in the products of the “production public spheres,” and recognizes these
as mystifying portraits of a horizon of experience. The Latin American
narrator of the story is not shocked by the distorted representations of
Chicano/Mexican youth mobilized to dramatic effect in the low-budget
zombie film. On the contrary, she or he shows a clear understanding of
these representations as clichés, a perspective related to the narrator’s
depiction of the film as humorless yet full of laughs. Considering the film
as pure cliché within a network of determinate negations signaled by the
allegorical charge of the zombie genre qua sign of allegory, renders the
whole exercise of the movie one of pure irony, perhaps purposely so on
the filmmaker’s part. One could argue that this is what the narrator of
the film refers to when he talks about its revolutionary nature. What the
film portrays is not a love story or a horror tale or even a parade of cli-
chés (though these are, evidently, the content of the film). The material
receptacle for these actions, and the ironic attitude toward these actions
and representations, both from the perspective of filmmakers and spec-
tators, constitutes the very subject matter of the film—as understood
through the narrator’s critical commentary.
If this is the case, the oppositional public referred to by Bolaño in “The
Coronel’s Son” is characterized by an ironic stance toward the themes and
190 J. P. MELO
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by
Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Andrews, Chris. 2014. Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Bolaño, Roberto. 2003. “El policía de las ratas.” In El gaucho insufrible, 53–86.
Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
———. 2007. “El hijo del coronel”. In El secreto del mal, edited by Ignacio
Echevarría, 31–48. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfriend Kracauer,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Kafka, Franz. 1971. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” In The Complete
Stories, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, 360–378. New York: Schocken Books.
Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. 2016. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis
of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi,
Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. London: Verso.
Saucedo Lastra, Fernando. 2015. México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño: Memoria y
territorio. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Tafuri, Manfredo. 1976. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge: MIT Press.
CHAPTER 10
Timothy R. Robbins
T. R. Robbins (*)
Drury University, Springfield, MO, USA
He chooses to place his narratives in real spaces, but ones that are dis-
tanced from a national context and in some cases even a Latin American
one. I will argue that Fresán creates a tourist aesthetic within his works
that produces a juxtaposition between the tourist Self and the culture of
the tourist site as Other. In Mantra (2001) and Jardines de Kensington
(2003), Fresán uses the position of the tourist with its inherent dynamic
of Self and Other to explore the nature of the author in contemporary
Latin American literature—and does so through an explicitly urban
context.
Before turning to Fresán’s fiction, it is useful to consider what at first
seems a simple concept, that of the tourist. The idea of the modern tour-
ist is as complicated, nuanced and even charged as any other critical idea.
A relatively new phenomenon, international tourism was made available
by the growth of capitalism and the rise of the middle class combined
with advances in technology that allow for more rapid travel. At the root
of the tourist experience, especially for the international tourist, is the
idea of leisure and travel. The tourist has the economic freedom to travel
outside his or her own sphere to engage in other experiences (or, to put
it another way, in experiences of the Other). In fact, the idea of the tour-
ist can be, somewhat simplistically, reduced to that of the individual and
his or her desire to confront the Other. Sociologist Erik Cohen defines
the tourist as, “a voluntary, temporary traveler, travelling in the expecta-
tion of pleasure from the novelty and change experienced on a relatively
long and non-recurrent round-trip” (2004, p. 23). For many theorists,
tourism is seen as an attempt to escape from modern society. Hans
Enzenberg (1996) argues that tourism is a way of escaping the modern
world, but at the same time it contains the paradox of the very thing
from which the tourist seeks to escape.1
As an escape from modern largely urban society, tourism is also preoc-
cupied with the idea of experience. The tourist seeks the experience of a
premodern utopian naturalism or the experience of the Other, all with-
out leaving completely the safe confines of one’s comfortable modern
lifestyle. The tourist maintains a delicate balance between the comforts
of his or her own culture and identity with the experience of the Other.
Cohen (2004) nuances this balance by proposing a typology or spectrum
of tourist identity that varies from one who uses a preestablished group
tour, thus maintaining a strong connection to the norms and values of
one’s native culture, to those who shun any semblance of stereotypical
tourist practice in search of an authentic experience.
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 195
Thus, the tourist seeks an escape through the rituals of tourism in a quest
for an authenticity that the individual finds lacking in modern society.2
Furthermore, for MacCannell, “[t]he rhetoric of tourism is full of man-
ifestations of the importance of the authenticity of the relationship
between the tourist and what they see” (1976, p. 14). The experience
gained from the tourist attraction is indelibly tied to an authenticity that
cannot be reproduced.
The tourist can be seen, then, as the traveler who attempts to bridge
the gap between Self and Other while remaining to some extent within
the confines of the safe space of familiarity. This experience of Other var-
ies in depth as well as authenticity. The final aspect to note about the
tourist, then, is the generally negative view that many, including fel-
low travelers, theorists and even citizens of tourist zones, ascribe to
the tourist. In many cases, this is connected to the authenticity of the
experience—the tourist wants to authentically engage in the tourist expe-
rience as if he or she were a part of the culture to which it pertains. To
appear as tourist, in the sense of not belonging, is to rupture the authen-
ticity of the event.
One can identify a set of core concepts related to tourist theory, like
the idea of Self and Other, tourist attraction and guide which connect
Fresán’s novelistic explorations of the city. Fresán utilizes urban space
in his novels Mantra (2001), which takes place in Mexico City, and
Jardines de Kensington (2003), for which London serves as the geo-
graphic focus, as a way to explore the identity of urban space, but he
does so largely through the lens of an outsider looking in. Both nov-
els share an aesthetic that brings them closer to a chronicle or catalog—
an encyclopedic pastiche of images and references that approximates a
196 T. R. ROBBINS
The experience of the non-place at the same time provides safety, but
also excludes true experience. For this reason, the manager of the hotel
El Universo repeatedly claims the distinction of being the place where
Apocalypse Now was filmed, in this way fusing the safety of the non-place
with the authenticity of the tourist site. The exclusion of experience
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 199
Ciudad de México desde arriba, en esos cielos precisos desde los que se
trazan los mapas, parece más un país o continente. Un mapa que esconde
otro mapa que es el mapa del lago fantasma de Texcoco y que si se lo
invoca en mapas del siglo XV descubrimos que tiene la forma reconocible
de un feto humano flotando dentro de una bolsa de líquido amniótico con
200 T. R. ROBBINS
The map of Mexico City returns to the palimpsest containing the mod-
ern megapolis layered above its pre-Colombian origins.8 Through the
ritual involved in the guidebook or map, the tourist can also attempt
to bridge the gap between non-place and tourist location; exploring
the Other from the safe confines of one’s own homogenous postmod-
ern framework. The narrator observes this by stating, “[d]esplegamos
mapas demasiado grandes en calles donde la gente camina apretada como
frijoles. Marcamos un punto, una x, un círculo. El sitio adonde llegar.
La cuestión es claro, en dónde estamos, dónde quedamos. Buena pre-
gunta. ¿Dónde queda algo en Ciudad de México?” (2001, pp. 257–258).
The need to experience the tourist site is combined with the uncertainty
of the unfamiliar. This is the space the guidebook attempts to combat,
bringing the familiar into the exotic unknown.
Concurrent with exploring the tourist’s desire for immersion in the
authentic premodern, the novel nevertheless maintains a strictly negative
image of the tourist—Fresán uses the metaphor of illness to explain the
connotation of the tourist as inauthentic and damaging. The combina-
tion of the tourist and illness found in Mantra is paralleled in Gerhard
Nebel’s early critique of tourism when he describes “[t]he swarms of
these gigantic bacteria, called tourists, [who] have coated the most dis-
tinct substances with a uniformly glistening Thomas-Cook slime, mak-
ing it impossible to distinguish Cairo from Honolulu, Taormina from
Colombo” (qtd. in Enszensberger 1996, p. 120). While the tourist
seeks, and sometimes appreciates the primitive sublime, his or her pres-
ence also mars the relative value of the experience. The authenticity of,
for example, pre-Colombian architectural ruins is diminished when the
experience is populated by the teeming masses and the tourist is una-
ble to see it in its pristine, sacred and natural form. The novel sums up
the cohabitation of tourism and illness through the phantom of the pre-
Colombian primitive sublime that confronts the modern world. In a con-
tinuum of famous tourists to Mexico City, the text manifests this illness
through:
The corrosive effect of the tourist, seen through the metaphor of sick-
ness is perhaps best demonstrated through the recurring image of Hans,
the German tourist. At one point, the text describes Hans vomiting on a
statue of Chacmool (Fresán 2001, p. 182). This passage highlights the
attitude taken both by the tourist and toward the tourist in the novel.
On one hand, the tourist shows an apparent disdain toward the culture
being consumed, as a product like any other that can be defiled with base
human waste material. On the other hand, the culture exacerbates the
flaws that the tourist demonstrates. In another passage, Hans faints after
consuming spicy food. The tourist is one who claims the experience, but
in many ways cannot fully embrace it. The process of tourism maintains
a clear separation between the individual and the other, never allowing
the individual to fully understand the other and thus maintaining a strict
division of experience. Thus, the tourist is portrayed as the invader or
the blight which comes from beyond the boundaries in order to mar the
primitive perfection of the tourist site. Through the focus of tourism, the
tourist site has diminished value without the ability to be seen and par-
adoxically the proliferation of tourists also diminishes the experience by
eliminating the primitive nature of the place.
An important aspect of tourism, according to Dennis Merrill (2009),
is the soft power of the tourist which enables the establishment of
empire. Merrill explains that the hegemonic process involved directly
with tourism is a cultural conversation in which the tourist is only
one of a number of factors that enable empire to occur.9 The tourist,
then, can be seen as an enabler of empire, so it is no surprise that the
primary description of the tourist in Mantra is that of the invader. The
guidebook, or the map, allows the invader to plan the conquest of the
other. Early in the novel, the narrator exclaims, “[s]iempre me fascinó
esa pasión turística de los monstruos gigantes” (2001, p. 88), mention-
ing Godzilla as a specific example. The text goes on to cite a number
of invaders to Mexico City, with all the accompanying negative connota-
tions. From the conquistadores, most notably Hernán Cortés, the narra-
tion passes to the more contemporary Beat poets who spent, “[t]odo el
tiempo revolviendo en cajones ajenos, llevándose la ropa colgada de las
202 T. R. ROBBINS
sogas en los patios traseros, drogándose para que todo les pareciera una
iluminación” (2001, p. 232). The image of the Beat poets, as symbols
of drug tourism, is especially poignant given the effects of drug tourism
on Mexico. After R. Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article in Time magazine
which described his trips to Mexico to experience the effects of hallu-
cinogenic mushrooms, hippies from the United States flocked to Mexico
in order to “experience” the primitive sublime of consciousness-altering
substances at the “authentic” site of pre-Colombian culture. At the same
time, the drug tourism of the 60s and 70s had a degenerating effect on
Mexico, introducing the drug subculture into Mexico City.10 The novel,
through the metaphor of invader, highlights the ways in which the tour-
ist acts as a mediator of the dominant culture of empire through his/her
soft power.
Thus, Mantra reveals a negative definition of the tourist as one who
neither fully understands the idealized primitive sublime of the pre-
Colombian world and who also infects this very space with the con-
queror’s mentality. Above all, the novel critiques the shifting landscape
of signification in postmodern society at the same time that it actively
participates in the cultural milieu of pastiche and pluralism. In the end,
the narration advocates for a futuristic return to the primitive by creat-
ing a new science fiction mythology based on a fusion of primitivism and
postmodern society with the technological advances that accompany it.11
The focus on tourism in the novel becomes another arena in which the
interplay between the ideal primitive and modern society plays out, and
in which the fiction of the primitive ultimately gains the upper hand, rel-
egating the tourist to an object of revulsion and contempt.
While the tourist is seen as unwanted invader in Mantra, the tour-
ist aspects of Jardines de Kensington focus on the flip side of empire.12
The novel balances recognition of the extent of empire (in this case the
British Empire) with a marked nostalgia as this empire crumbles into
decline. The novel explicitly complicates the place of Great Britain as
world power by the fact that the novel vacillates temporally between the
empire at the height of its power at the turn of the twentieth century
and an empire in its moment of decline in the 1960s. London, as the
seat of empire, plays a crucial role in the description the novel offers of
the metropolis. A curious example of this nostalgia comes in the form of
the narrator’s parents—famous rock stars who advocate a very conserv-
ative and monarchic response to the antiestablishment counterculture
of the 60s. Even the initial name of the band, The Beaten Victorians,
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 203
In many ways, this passage imitates the novel’s approach to both world
history and that of the British Empire. It starts by emphasizing the rela-
tionship of family elders—who are in a position to retrospectively look at
the past and which also gives a sense of intimacy in exploring large histor-
ical trends. These family elders note the decline of morals in a concrete
political way through the crisis of the monarchy due to Edward VIII’s
relationship with divorcee Wallis Simpson as well through imagined gen-
eralizations—the increasing lawlessness of the city. Added to the moral
decline, the passage recognizes the demographic realities of a country
that has fought two brutal and devastating world wars in two successive
generations. In the end, what remains is the nostalgia for previous times
and the final glimpse of hope placed on the aging hero of the past.
The pervasive reflection on nostalgia for empire and the past juxta-
posed with an explicit recognition of decline and change also finds a
parallel in the very geography of the novel—physical location plays
a supremely important role in Jardines de Kensington as it does with
Mantra. In keeping with the style of Mantra, in which the narrator
acts as chronicler or compiler, Jardines de Kensington reads almost like
a simple biography interspersed with reference book. As chronicler, the
narrator gives painstaking attention to place and time throughout the
narration. For instance, in talking about the death of Barrie’s brother,
the narrator locates it, “junto a las colinas de Grampian, en las afueras
de Kirreimuir, en el condado de Angus, alguna vez conocido como
Forfarshire, a cinco millas al noroeste de Forfar, en Escocia, en aquel
terrible e inolvidable enero de 1867” (2003, p. 26). The narrator’s fas-
tidious nature as chronicler forces him to insist upon giving the address
of the various residences in the novel whenever they are mentioned.
This attention to detail is not limited to geographic space, however, but
extends to temporal space as well. His fixation on place and time is best
exemplified in the suicidal last thoughts of one of Barrie’s sources of
inspiration for Peter Pan: “Peter Llewelyn Davies piensa en que el 5 de
abril de 1960, en que no hay tiempo, en que ya es la hora, en qué hora
es, en que aquí llega el metro a la estación Sloane Square puntual como
siempre …” (2003, p. 23). Like the tourist, who feels the need to mark
the experience in place and time, the narrator of Jardines de Kensington
perpetually keeps these markers at the forefront of the narration.
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 205
Mi padre no fue un héroe; y si hay algo más terrible que no ser un héroe,
ese algo es querer ser un héroe y no conseguirlo. Aunque tal vez el
heroísmo de [mis padres]… no pasa por lo que quisieron hacer sino por lo
que acabaron siendo. Él y Ella como las más perfectas y mejor consumadas
obras de sí mismos: una épica del fracaso condenada desde el vamos por el
dictum y el slogan de una década que obligaba a cambiar absolutamente
todo para recién entonces poder ser verdaderamente revolucionarios y des-
cubrir, al final, el no haberse convertido en otra cosa que en niños con-
fundidos con pedazos irreconocibles de juguetes supuestamente inmorales.
(2003, p. 103)
This extensive quote gets to the heart of the band’s position regarding
the 60s, the narrator’s childhood and the nature of culture and coun-
terculture. The band itself becomes a symbol of nostalgia only because
of its futile dedication to the idea itself as a way to hold back the tides of
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 209
change, an effort which in the end fails. The Beaten become the quixotic
symbol of the noble martyr.
While Jardines de Kensington is certainly less implicitly connected to
the tourist, devoid of the direct observations and reflections found in
Mantra, the tourist ethos can still be seen throughout the novel. An
essential part of the compilation nature of the novel includes the need
for academic referentiality. The narrator makes use of numerous bio-
graphical texts in order to represent the life and times of J. M. Barrie.17
Furthermore, in his lengthy reflections at the end of the novel, Fresán
offers an extensive list of sources which he used in order to construct the
novel.
The most enlightening section, however, is Fresán’s assertion that,
“no puedo decir que conozco a Londres,. Estuve allí un par de días,
hace muchos años, en los que apenas salí de un hotel de las afueras de
la ciudad … En resumen: nunca estuve en Kensington Gardens. Sin
embargo, conozco muy bien Heathrow” (2003, p. 462). While many
would and have used the lack of direct knowledge as ammunition to crit-
icize Fresán—how could he dare write a novel not only devoid of a Latin
American context but for which he has no direct personal experience
of?—the fact that Fresán’s understanding of the London he writes about
depends intimately on his own studies does raise some interesting points
about the nature of literature in general and that of Latin American liter-
ature more specifically.
Fresán’s aesthetic finds a direct antecedent in the works of Latin
American literary icon Jorge Luis Borges. Fresán in many ways imitates
the narrative of Borges.18 He creates a double vision of the metropolis.
On one hand, he forges a version of London that has its basis in real-
ity. Barrie’s London comes complete with references, facts, dates and
details—all of which Fresán collects through his own research and which
he alludes to in the author’s notes. On the other, he creates an apoc-
ryphal vision of London through the narrator’s life and works, but this
version is equally based in created texts and pseudo-academic citations.
Beyond the stylistic similarities, Fresán connects with Borges in his vision
of Latin American literature. In his famous essay, “The Argentine Writer
and Tradition,” Borges defends the use of foreign locales as a part of spe-
cifically national literature. For him, the Argentine literary tradition is
firmly grounded in that of the West—he argues that, “nuestra tradición
es toda la cultura occidental, y creo también que tenemos derecho a esta
210 T. R. ROBBINS
tradición, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitantes de una u otra
nación occiendental” (1974, p. 272).19 Within this more cosmopolitan
tradition, Argentine literary tradition is one that can encompass gauchos
alongside the streets of Paris, the tango alongside the British pub. In the
spirit of Borges, Fresán also explicitly connects Argentine literature with
a lack of specifically Argentine themes. Fresán calls upon Borges’s essay
in defending his novel Jardines de Kensington, which he calls “uno de los
libros más argentinos que yo jamás he escrito, más argentino incluso que
Historia argentina y Esperanto que son para mí, apenas, ‘asquerosamente
argentinos,’ lo que no es lo mismo” (2012, p. 355). At the same time, as
Emilse Hidalgo (2014) points out, Fresán takes great pains in his inter-
views to distance himself from magical realism—a literary style that never
had a strong tradition in Argentina. Thus, Fresán is positioning himself
as a cosmopolitan writer not only within the Argentine, but more impor-
tantly within Latin American literary history.
In this sense, the literary vision of Borges and of Fresán complements
the groundbreaking study of Pascale Casanova, who envisions the pub-
lishing industry and the circulation of ideas and of artistic expression as
a market system. In this system, Casanova identifies literary centers—
for much of the nineteenth century Paris, but later London, New York
and Barcelona, this last especially for Latin American authors. Casanova
argues that, with few exceptions, writers seek to enter what he dubs
the world republic of letters, and recognizes the importance of trans-
lation into the “literary” languages of the republic—French and later
English—for legitimacy.20 At the same time, she recognizes the nec-
essary grounding in a literary tradition that is both within the nation
but looking outward: “National literary and linguistic patrimony sup-
plies a sort of a priori definition of the writer, one that he will transform
throughout his career. In other words, the writer stands in a particular
relation to the world literary space by virtue of the place occupied in it
by the national space into which he has been born” (2004, p. 41). Thus,
for legitimacy in the world republic of letters, the writer must take his
or her position of birth and transform it, through both direct linguistic
translation as well as cultural and aesthetic translation, in order to merit
a space in international literary circles. This speaks to the fact that many
Latin American writers like Roberto Bolaño, Patricio Pron, Santiago
Gamboa, and Fresán moved to Europe in order to further their literary
careers.21
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 211
Notes
1. In exploring the contradictions entailed in an escape from crowded urban
society into tightly packed tourist resorts, Enzensberger states that, “the
yearning for freedom from society has been harnessed by the very society
it seeks to escape” (1996, p. 129). The tourist leaves the hustle and bus-
tle of modern society for the same hustle and bustle of the tourist site.
2. The concept of ritual in tourism is another area in tourist theory that is
debatable. Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, for instance, in writ-
ing about the highly ritualistic culture of the Mexican fiesta argues that
“la Fiesta niega a la sociedad en tanto que conjunto orgánico de formas
y principios diferenciados, pero la afirma en cuanto fuente de energía y
creación. Es una verdadera recreación al contrario de lo que ocurre con
las vacaciones modernas que no entrañan rito o ceremonia alguna, indi-
viduales y estériles como el mundo que las ha inventado” (2000, p. 187).
For Paz, the fiesta is a fount of ritual based on the communal experience
it involves while modern tourism or vacation is devoid of the communal
aspect and thus is a hollow approximation. For his part, Néstor García
Canclini explores the tensions between popular fiesta and tourism. He
argues that in an age in which traditional practices are transmitted via the
culture industry, communities make use of this vision through the tour-
ist trade to benefit economically from it. García Canclini states that, “por
causas económicas, políticas o ideológicas la cultura dominante preserva
bolsones arcaicos refuncionalizándolos y recontextualizándolos” (1982,
p. 51). Ironically, the mass culture vision of these traditional festivals and
the communities that embrace such a vision for their economic gain help
preserve the traditional practices that seem to be in danger due to the
foreign, capitalist invasion. The problem for García Canclini lies in how
212 T. R. ROBBINS
20. Casanova argues that, “The writers of the Latin American ‘boom,’ for
example, began to exist in international literary space only with their
translation into French and their recognition by French critics” (2004,
p. 135).
21. Others, like Edmundo Paz Soldán and Jorge Volpi have followed another
literary tradition of living and working in the United States.
Bibliography
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to the Anthropology of
Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso.
Becerra, Eduardo. 2013. “Rodrigo Fresán (Argentina, 1963).” In The
Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After, edited by Will
Corral, Juan E. De Castro, and Nicholas Birns, 339–346. New York:
Bloomsbury.
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings,
Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott et al.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1974. Obras Completas. Edited by Carlos Frías. Buenos
Aires: Emecé Editores.
Brown, J. Andrew. 2010. Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave.
Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B.
DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cohen, Erik. 2004. Contemporary Tourism: Diversity and Change. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Enzensberger, Hans Magus. 1996. “A Theory of Tourism.” New German
Critique 68: 117–135.
Fresán, Rodrigo. 2001. Mantra. Barcelona: Mondadori.
———. 2008. Jardines de Kensington. New York: Penguin Random House.
———. 2012. “La cosa, o apuntes para el ser argentino como Expediente X.” In
Entre la Argentina y España: El espacio transatlántico de la narrative actual,
edited by Ana Gallego Cuiñas, 351–364. Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert.
García Canclini, Néstor. 1982. “¿Fiestas populares o espectáculos para turistas?”
Plural 11, no. 6: 40–51.
Gras, Dunia. 2006. “Del espejo enterrado al Mictlán: Presencias míticas en
Villoro, Fresán y Bolaño.” In La palabra recuperada: Mitos hispánicos en la
literatura latinoamericana, edited by Helena Usandizaga, 73–97. Madrid:
Iberoamericana.
Hidalgo, Emilse. 2014. “The Historical and Geographical Imagination in Recent
Argentine Fiction: Rodrigo Fresán and the DNA of a Globalized Writer.”
In New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National
Literatures and the Canon, edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo
González, 105–131. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
10 THE TOURIST AESTHETIC AND EMPIRE … 215
Kupatadze, Ketavan. 2012. “Magic of the City: Travel Narratives of the Project
‘Año 0’.” Topodynamics of Arrival: Essays on Self and Pilgrimage. Edited by
Gert Hoffman and Snjezana Zoric, 203–216. London: Brill.
Llarull, Gustavo. 2011. “Technology, Mass-Media, and the Legacy of the
Modern Latin American Novel: Rodrigo Fresán’s ‘Mantra’.” Chasqui 40, no.
1: 48–65.
MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New
York: Schocken.
Merrill, Dennis. 2009. Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in
Twentieth Century Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Paz, Octavio. 2000. El laberinto de la soledad. Edited by Enrico Mario Santí.
Madrid: Cátedra.
Paz Soldán, Edmundo. 2003. “Mantra (2001), de Rodrigo Fresán, y la novela
de la multiplicidad de la información.” Chasqui 32, no. 1: 98–109.
Zolov, Eric. 1999. Refried Elvis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Index
A D
Allegory, 48, 108, 179, 182, 187, 189 Debris, 10, 123, 125, 132, 134, 144
Año 0, 85, 122, 128, 161, 196, 212 Deterritorialization, 48, 69, 85, 118,
Apocalypse, 68–70, 72–75, 77–83, 87 119, 129, 155
Augé, Marc, 23, 47, 61, 62, 154, 171, Disaster, 20, 22, 25, 27, 30, 78, 79,
198 158
Dislocation, 48, 49, 58, 72, 154, 158,
159, 162, 164, 166, 169, 171,
B 189
Benjamin, Walter, 21, 43, 61, 197 Displacement, 48, 70, 71, 84, 99,
Boom, the, 15 104, 122, 147, 159, 162, 166
Drugs, 53, 99, 207
Dystopia, 67, 69, 71, 78–80, 83, 108,
C 191
Certeau, Michel de, 26, 98, 99, 102,
111, 140
Chaos, 9, 19–22, 25, 33, 36, 75, 77, F
80, 81, 83, 88, 102, 177, 191 Fantastic, the, 48, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60,
Consumption, 8, 102, 105, 154, 159, 61, 63
161, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, Fear, 14, 24, 51, 52, 54, 58–61, 63,
187, 188 71, 82, 87, 88, 139, 167, 182
Corruption, 9, 34, 75–77, 94, 96, Flâneur, 21, 22, 36, 43, 44, 172. See
102, 103, 106, 108 also Walking
Crime, 8, 51, 55, 74, 80, 178, 180 Foucault, Michel, 2, 15, 63
G O
Geocriticism, 2, 15 Order, 4, 7, 14, 15, 20–22, 25, 27,
Geography, 2, 4, 52, 57, 63, 122, 142, 36, 47–49, 55, 57, 58, 84, 86,
186, 204, 207, 208 102, 106, 119, 124, 130, 177,
Ghosts, 47–50, 52, 55, 61, 145. See 183, 191
also Specter Other, the, 190, 194, 198, 200
Globalization, 5, 7, 12, 14, 86, 94, Overpopulation, 9, 20, 67, 83
109, 118, 119, 122, 133, 134,
154, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166,
170–172, 176, 177, 190, 191 P
Postmodern city, 7, 12–14
Poverty, 9, 20, 52, 74, 94, 96, 103,
H 104
Home, 28, 29, 51–53, 61, 105, 127, Production of space, 25, 181–183,
132, 142–144, 146, 154, 158, 187, 188, 190, 191
168, 169 Progress, 20, 23–25, 42, 71, 99, 148,
Homeless, 33, 50 149, 177
Prostitution, 53, 80, 81, 85, 94, 95,
99, 103, 108, 112
I Public space, 7, 8, 71, 81, 98, 100,
Immigrants, 147, 158, 162, 170 143
Inequality, 94, 96, 212
R
L Rama, Ángel, 4–6, 15, 16, 20, 47,
Lefebvre, Henri, 2, 15, 25, 26, 31, 32, 117, 120, 121, 123, 133
48, 102
Letrados, 4, 5
Lettered city, 5, 15, 16, 20, 27, 47, S
102, 104, 118, 120, 121 Segregation, 81
Soja, Edward, 2, 7, 14, 15
Solidarity, 33, 99, 109, 146, 188, 190
M Specter, 59–61, 139
Metro, 14, 19, 22–25, 27–35, 37–44, Subway, 23, 25, 28, 31–35, 37, 38,
171. See also Subway 41–43, 81, 137. See also Metro
Surveillance, 13
N
Nation-state, 118, 155 T
Nomadic, 40, 118, 155 Technopolis, 7
Index 219
W
U Walking, 26, 98, 102, 111, 127, 128,
Uncanny, the, 48, 51, 53–55, 57, 62, 140
63 Walled city/neighborhood, 7, 8, 49,
Underground, 14, 23–25, 27, 42–44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 69, 74, 80, 101,
127, 128, 178, 180, 181, 184, 205
190, 191
Unemployment, 96, 103
Urban planning, 20, 43, 57, 80