Monthly Archives: December 2022

Civilización y barbarie revisitadas. Notas sobre Nuestra parte de noche (2019) de Mariana Enríquez I

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Primera parte (bis. p 351)

Nuestra parte de noche de Mariana Enríquez es una novela entre el género de terror y el roman a clef ambientada en los años previos a y durante la dictadura y la transición a la democracia en Argentina (1960-1997). La novela se centra el la familia de Juan Peterson y su hijo Gaspar. Juan es el médium de la Oscuridad, una entidad antigua reverenciada por “La Orden,” un culto transoceánico. La historia de “La Orden” y de la familia de Juan se superpone a la historia nacional: la orden ancla sus orígenes con la llegada den el siglo XIX de capitalistas ingleses a la región del Chaco, Juan es hijo de inmigrantes del norte de Europa llegados a la Argentina en el periodo de la posguerra. Este movimiento que superpone terror e historia es, quizá, una referencia al propio título de la novela, nuestra parte de noche. Desde esta perspectiva, el terror es la parte de noche de la historia, esa parte crepuscular e indecible que aterroriza al discurso histórico, que lo hace temblar, pero desde el cual también se articula. Y Al mismo tiempo, como le dice Juan, agonizando, a su hijo, la parte de noche es el residuo, un resto afectivo “tenés algo mío, te dejé algo mío, ojalá no sea maldito, no sé si puedo dejarte algo que no esté sucio, que no sea oscuro, nuestra parte de noche” (301). En este orden de ideas, la novela, ambiciosamente, revisa momentos terroríficos de la historia argentina del siglo veinte. 

Si bien, la reevaluación de la turbulenta historia de la Argentina en la segunda mitad de siglo veinte ha sido ampliamente revisada, la vuelta de tuerca de Enríquez consiste en de disociar el terror del que muchas veces es el agente de todos los males, el estado. Así, la orden y sus rituales perversos no son una metáfora del estado, pero sí de esa parte también “malévola” en la historia argentina: los capitalistas. Juan, el médium “perfecto,” se casa con Rosario, una descendiente directa de los miembros fundadores de la orden, los Bradford (ingleses acaudalados que expandieron su capital al mudarse a la Argentina). Así, la familia de Juan y Rosario es, en buena medida, el proyecto nacional de las élites “criollas,” ésas que no quedaron dentro de la política de los caudillos, pero sí contribuyeron a la acumulación de capital. De hecho, la novela reformula uno de los temas más fuertes de la literatura nacional argentina: la civilización y la barbarie. Cuando Juan y su hijo visitan las cataratas del Iguazú. El niño le pregunta al padre porque sus abuelos maternos, tan acaudalados, no se construyeron su finca cerca de aquellos parajes, “No se puede, le contestó Juan, es un parque nacional: no es de nadie, es del Estado. ¿Qué es el Estado? Es de todos, no lo puede comprar una familia particular, eso quiere decir” (112). Los bienes “naturales” son de nadie, del estado, y por lo tanto su terror, no siempre es aterrador: Gaspar primero de asusta de la “Garganta del diablo,” la caída del agua, pero luego “se volvió a reír de lo mucho que se habían mojado” (112). Por otra parte, los abuelos de Gaspar, los Bradford, para quienes “el dinero… es un país en sí mismo” (116) mantienen otra relación con bienes similares a las cataratas, el arte (segunda naturaleza). Cuando su hija Rosario, la madre de Gaspar, le pide su pare que done obras de Cándido a los museos nacionales, pues “es robo, esto [los cuadros] es patrimonio, y él respondía que me la vengan a sacar entonces, la puta que los parió, y un carajo se las voy a dar. Rosario fingía indignación, pero Juan podía verle la sonrisa” (118). 

Desde la perspectiva de Nuestra parte de noche la civilización guarda la segunda naturaleza y la barbarie a la primera naturaleza. El asunto es que, en la novela, la barbarie está ya integrada al estado, y esa parte es ya común. Más aún, si el estado está en la “naturaleza” lo bárbaro deja de ser naturaleza, pues lo bárbaro es más cercano a las carnicerías de rituales que la orden realiza: con brazos amputados, sacrificios humanos, tortura y demás. Así pues, no es casualidad que, aunque los espectros también puedan rondar los bosques, en Nuestra parte de noche todo el terror está en las casas, el lugar de la civilización, sobre todo en las casas abandonadas o las casas de los ricos (la casa de Gaspar y Juan en Buenos Aires fue diseñada por los arquitectos O’Farrell y Del Pozo [329] y la finca de los abuelos diseñada a su vez por otros arquitectos de renombre). Si el terror está en las casas, ¿quién puede vivir en la “naturaleza” si ahí mismo es donde el estado, en la dictadura, vacía y desaparece cuerpos? El pasaje de casa a la intemperie y viceversa es también la tragedia argentina del siglo veinte: la transición. De hecho, este es el conflicto de Juan que, cercano a morirse, por órdenes de la “Orden,” debe transferir su conciencia a su hijo, que posee aptitudes de médium también, para continuar con los rituales. Juan se rehúsa y encuentra una manera de “bloquear” los dones de su hijo. Se anula esta transición, pero no se anula el proceso en sí. Al final de la tercera parte “La cosa mala de las casas solas” una amiga de Gaspar es atrapada por una casa abandonada en su barrio. Juan no canceló la transición, la volvió convertible, transformable, transferible. 

Grace Oliver

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My aunt, Grace Oliver, died at age 75 in the early morning of Christmas Day.

Born Stephen Beasley-Murray, her reinvention and transition from Stephen to Grace, and from Beasley-Murray to Oliver, was a journey that lasted most of a lifetime.

Throughout their seventy-five years, Stephen/Grace was curious and prepared to follow their curiosity and desire, sometimes whatever the cost, for them or for others.

Stephen grew up in South London, but went to university (to study sciences) in Liverpool in the early 1970s. He stayed on in the city, working with social services and the Anglican church, under the aegis of former cricketer turned left-wing bishop, David Sheppard.

I think that his time in pre-Thatcherite Liverpool, combining religious vocation with practical work for social justice, was a golden period for him, to which he would often look back with nostalgia, and even try to recreate.

But something went wrong, and he left for the United States, where his parents (my grandparents) were living in Louisville, Kentucky. There he enrolled in graduate work at the Southern Seminary, where he wrote a PhD dissertation on the “metaphysics of the sacred.”

It was also in Kentucky where he met his first wife, Angela (Angie), with whom he had three children (Mark, Philip, and Amanda), and with whom he later travelled, as a Northern Baptist missionary, to live and work in Hong Kong.

Missionary life did not agree with him, however, not least its fundamental premise that “we” in the West had more to teach “them” in the East than they had to teach us. He and Angie withdrew from the mission and settled in New Haven, Connecticut, where Steve became a secondary-school teacher.

By this time, he was increasingly radical. He joined the Communist Party of the USA and began explorations in Wicca beliefs and practices. When he also started experimenting in naturism, I would refer to him as my “nudist, Communist, witch” uncle.

Steve and Angie split up, very acrimoniously, and he moved to Texas with Charlotte Oliver, who became his second wife. He took her name in the marriage. In Texas, he taught philosophy in various colleges and universities.

A decade or so ago, on his retirement, Steve and Charlotte moved to Liverpool where they lived in a small housing-association property, and once more became involved with Liverpool Parish Church, as well as with the Society of Friends (Quakers). They joined the Labour Party, and were fervent supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. They had a caravan in a naturist park in Cheshire.

At some point, Steve began questioning issues of sexuality and gender identity, and started living as Grace. A couple of years ago, they underwent gender-reassignment surgery.

Perhaps Grace finally found the peace and fulfillment that, I fear, Stephen seldom or never did. Indeed, I may be wrong, but my feeling is that Stephen Beasley-Murray was not often happy. I never met him as Grace, but hear that Grace seemed much happier and more relaxed than Stephen had ever been.

Accumulation, Subjectivity, and Existence. Notes on Westworld (2016-2022)

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What follows are some ideas about/on the tv series Westworld. 

The acclaimed and awarded HBO series Westworld (2016-2022) by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy came to a sudden end in November 2022. The show, in its four seasons, explored the relationship between the human, the machine and the non-human. The classic sci-fi topic of the android that rebels against their master is reexplored in four different scenarios, each of them explored on every season of the show. While the timeline of the plot is wide, it constantly overlaps temporalities. Precisely the show shuffles its plot by the way time flashbacks constantly and then jumps further with a certain disorder. This, no doubt is confusing, but at the same, this also expresses one of the main worries about the show: a sensibility beyond human categories. Indeed, the show both explores the rough distinction between human and machine, but it also evaluates many human categories related to gender, race, age, and social class. That is, the androids in Westworld are less an excuse for imagining a dystopia when machines would fight humanity, and more a reflection about the way humanity has been constructed, and hence, how machine and non-machine too have been constructed.  

The first season of the show based in a Western theme park where androids, the hosts, interact with humans granting them every possibility of interaction and “freedom.” This re-enacts the fantasy of the frontier town where everything was possible. The American psyche, with no doubt, is highly stimulated by this scenario. From this perspective, the idea of going west, of going on the road, of escaping the constrains and tedium of life in big cities, is at the chore of the American “dream.” The show, then, plays with this fantasy, as it depicts wealthy humans fulfilling their wildest dreams in a theme park that grants them freedom without consequences. The humans, the guests, can be both foe and/or hero, they can play whoever they want, they can become whoever they want. But as it happens to William, one of the main investors of the park, the game becomes and obsession. William starts as a compassionate guest towards the hosts, but time after time, he sees his efforts failing: there is never a happy ending for the hosts. While humans live without consequences, hosts died and are returned to life endlessly. This takes William on a quest. He looks for something meaningful inside of the park. He realizes that “nature” is chaos, and that if something lies beyond the chaos, he first needs to arrive to the core, the secret, of “nature.” While this secret is never fully explained in the story, this is, for sure, related to the truth of subjectivity: its vacuum and emptiness. And precisely, the show, season after season, reflected on this. 

William, indeed, does not realize that his endeavours are precisely going towards the void that sustains subjectivity until the fourth season. After the androids in the first season realize themselves are androids, and hence, have the chance to change their lives, as they are stronger and “more adapted” than their masters, they lead an insurrection commanded by Dolores, one of the first hosts ever made. While here, the revolutionary winds take many directions, from those who merely wish to achieve something other than rebellion, like Maeve, who seeks her daughter, a group of indigenous warriors, who seek a new land, or Bernard, an android who thought himself was a human and wishes for a less violent resolution, the changes of revolution land on a general state of stasis. In its four seasons Westworld depicts a world of constant civil war, where the relationships between friend and enemy blurry, where human and non-human assemblages come and go. Indeed, the show suggests that the primordial idea of wealth, as accumulation, is tied to a violent force that guarantees the attachment and capture of existence through subjectivity. This means that an endless war is tamed and transformed into accumulation by a sovereign decision. For instance, in the third season, Dolores, now acting “freely,” sabotages the way humans live outside of the park. She destroys the artificial intelligence server that guarantees the way things normally run in the human world. This by consequence transforms her in the “storyteller” of a new world manipulated by Hale, another host who had lived always between the humans. Hale reshapes New York city by controlling humans remotely via micro-robotic-parasites attached to their brains. The world now is a place for hosts to do as they please among humans, but just like the humans faced the rebellion of the hosts, now the androids face the rebellion of humans, and more importantly, their perfect world cracks as many hosts chose to kill themselves. As if hosts were infected by humans, Hale new project of subjectivity, again, goes towards the void. She wishes to give the host the world they deserve in a shape according to their needs. Here is when William’s quest returns. 

William, after being taken down by Dolores in the third season to a state of dementia, is kept alive by Hale. She mixes her code with William’s and creates a host that serves her to grant her ambitions (controlling humans in New York and other cities). Once Hale plans to destroy the world she has created, the “new” William stutters, he doubts of his master. He interviews the human William. The host is worried because Hale is destroying the world he help her built. “What would you do?” asks the host to the human. Here William points out the vacuity of the subject for what can he tell an android who is made just like him. The question of the host is asking for the answer of the subject. This answer, supposedly, is that which gives the host its character as host, as android, as machine. Subjectivity is what makes us host or guest, for the subject is that monster we host or the guest we become. And precisely, the amusement of William, the human, when the android asks him what he so many times asked the hosts. William, the human, now confronts the host with his own existence: “When an atomic bomb comes knocks the electrons right out of your bones, what do you want? To know who you are? To know what it all means? You’ll be too busy vomiting up your organs. Culture doesn’t survive… Cockroaches do.” What all this is radically suggesting is to question if there is time for subjectivity on the face of death? Do we need subjectivity when, after all, all that we have is a deferred death? For sure, Williams response is the articulation of a deterritorialized bond to all subjectivity: he kills the human William, then manipulates Hale’s control signaled, so that humans go on frenzy and kill each other, hosts included, and finally he destroys the signal transmission. 

A world where only cockroaches will survive is a Hobbesian state of nature. However, here, perhaps, the war against all is portrayed as what it is, a second nature state (William still reprograms the rules of the “game”). For once, the first nature of both the human and the non-human is lost. That is why subjectivity lies on a vacuum. And for the same reason, that is why every project of subjectivity transforms all the cumulous that second nature unleashes into accumulation, things to be valued and preserved by the ribbon of subjectivity. There is no time for subjectivity on the face of death. But William’s game is not revolutionary at all, his is a reactionary and conservative impulse. By letting the cockroaches survive, by “natural selection,” one wonders what would it be that is archaic enough and everlasting of humanity for survival. And precisely, the game of William is a suicidal game where only “one” is meant to win it all. This is, indeed, the current panorama of world global turmoil. And yet, today the recalcitrant attempts for subjectivizing all (via artificial intelligence, or by calls on social justice) fail in front of the narco, terrorist, or state violence. Subjectivity has been tossed away. 

In its most radical sense Westworld is a show about the chance to think away from subjectivity. And precisely, the open end of the fourth season, where Dolores plans to run a new test, a new and last game, to see if both human and non-human can face a future open for other things different than extinction, suggest a futurity away from subjectivity but also hinging on total turmoil. The show, indeed, bites its own tale as it returns to the scenario of the first season, the west. In a way, the show never left the theme park. Since its first moments, the show exposes the vacuity of the subject. The interrogatory between Bernard and Dolores, one of the first scenes of the show, where the former ratifies the later as a subject, while also, unknowingly ratifying its own subjectivity, teeter subjectivity into its void. In a way, then, all the violence unleashed on all the seasons is indeed the disembodiment of this interrogatory. Hence, if this process seeks to stabilize subjectivity as the only game in town, the interrogatory itself is already exposing its uselessness, its contingency and fragility, more than once both characters doubt on their questions and answers. It is not by coincidence that both Dolores and Bernard are questioning each other because what has been “humanity” if not a construct edified on top of the gendered and the racialized bodies of humanity’s others. Here, the play between Bernard and Dolores exposes the impotence of subjectivity. The war was already here, in questioning. But perhaps, this was not necessarily a war for destruction, but an open field of interaction, where thinking struggles for itself as it seeks for other ways outside of the cage of subjectivity, as it seeks for its radical existence. 

Jean Franco

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It must have been late 1989 or early 1990 that I first met Jean Franco, the distinguished and pioneering Latin Americanist literary and cultural critic, who has just died at 98 years old.

I was taking a year out from my undergraduate degree, crossing the USA en route to Central America, and at the same time checking out universities to which I thought I might apply to do graduate work.

Finding myself in New York, I headed to Columbia, and made my way to the Department of English where I hoped to meet Edward Said, a founder of postcolonial studies. Professor Said was not available, I was told, but would I like to talk to Professor Franco, who co-taught with him on the MA program?

I remember next to nothing about that conversation, but I must have (presumptuously) left her something of mine to read, or posted it to her later, because the following year, when I was back in the UK, I received a postcard from her. She apologized for taking so long, but she had (amazingly) read whatever it was that I had written and offered some brief, polite comments on it.

It was only much later that I realized just who Jean Franco was: one of the first critics to put the study of Latin American literature on the map, at least in the English-speaking world, with books such as The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967) and An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969), whose range of reference and erudition, but also enthusiasm and clarity, remain impressive even today.

Once I was in the United States (first at Milwaukee then in North Carolina), I would often pass through New York, where I would regularly (and again, presumptuously) call Jean up and we would go for a walk, a coffee, perhaps lunch. She was always and indefatigably hospitable and polite to me, this strange guy who periodically darkened her door.

Some years later, when I was teaching at the University of Manchester, I proposed Jean’s name for an honorary degree, and delightfully both the university and she agreed. It was a great pleasure for once to host her: I remember wandering with her through the center of Manchester, taking a break at the Royal Exchange café, and again chatting about who knows what.

With Jean (I think at the Yang Sing restaurant) in Manchester, 2002

Jean came from the North of England—if I remember right, from Dukinfield, on Tameside in the East of Manchester, near the edge of the Pennines—and retained a distinctive accent throughout her life. She did a BA and MA at the University of Manchester, and then somehow found herself in Latin America. I remember her recounting that—like Che Guevara—she was in Guatemala during the 1954 coup.

She then returned to the UK, where she did a PhD at the University of London and subsequently became the country’s first Professor of Latin American Literature at the then new (and radical) University of Essex, before moving across the Atlantic to Stanford and then Columbia.

Jean’s work continued to be pathbreaking across the decades, from her innovative study of gender and representation in Mexico, Plotting Women (1989), to her magisterial study of Latin America in the Cold War, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City (2002) and her study of the violence of modernity on the periphery with Cruel Modernity (2013).

What I will remember above all, however, is someone with almost infinite time and generosity, even for a whippersnapper like me, with a great sense of humor and a cackle of a laugh, who was always prepared to take risks (literally, in that I’m told she was a fan of the tables at Las Vegas), but above all knew how to live.

I thought she was immortal. In many ways, she surely is.