Category Archives: language

The Savage Detectives V: Was it Worth It?

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And so, after some 450 pages, with Part III of The Savage Detectives we are back with García Madero, who along with Belano, Lima, and Belano is barreling along the highway in Quim Font’s borrowed Chevy Impala, heading north to Sonora, in search (we now know) of the forgotten avant-garde poet and original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. An instant has passed, with the clock ticking over from 1975 to 1976. It turns out that the whole of Part II took place not only over the twenty years of Belano and Lima’s itinerant wanderings, nor even only over the eight to ten hours of late night drunken conversation with Amadeo Salvatierra, but in the seconds that separate the old year from the new.

If anything, the end of Part I and the beginning of Part III overlap, as García Madero explains in the his entry for January 1: “Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday, I really wrote today.” Time, indeed, seems to have gotten out of joint (almost as though we were back also in Auxilio Lacouture’s time-travelling bathroom reverie): “What I write today I’m really writing tomorrow, which more few will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day” (591). By declaring this lapse of time to be insignificant or invisible, it is as though García Madero were unconsciously taking his revenge on his own invisibilization during the entirety of Part II.

For, after several hundred “interviews” in that “invisible day,” in conversation with over fifty informants, taking us from Mexico City to Paris, Austria, Israel, Africa, we are firmly back with García Madero as narrator, in a series of diary-style entries. Before long, we perhaps feel as claustrophobically ensconced with him, his thoughts, and his limited point of view, as if we were squished in the back seat of the car between him and Lupe.

Have we missed him? If we have, I suspect we very soon tire of him again, as he returns to the game (though no doubt he himself doesn’t see it as a game) with which he started the novel (way back on page four), of testing people on their knowledge of obscure rhetorical and poetic terms: “what is free verse? [. . .] a testrastich? [. . .] a sestina? [. . .] a hempiepes [. . .] a mimiambic [. . .] a zéjel” (591, 592). “Oh, Jesus,” says Lima (591). If this is García’s idea of fun, perhaps we’d rather he were banished from Part III, just as he was from Part II.

The others, however, get their own back (not that García Madero necessarily notices) by asking him in turn about his knowledge of street slang. Lupe starts turning the tables by asking “All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?” Belano instantly replies that it’s “a toke of weed,” but García Madero seems to be clueless. Similarly when he is asked for the definitions of “lurias” (“crazy”) “jincho” (“Indian”), “la grandiosa” (“jail”), and so on (597). We have a feeling that such terms are going to be of more use to this quartet than the arcane terminology of aesthetics that García Maduro has to offer them. 

For they are not only hunting a poet but also on the run from Alberto, Lupe’s enraged ex-pimp, and whatever reinforcement he has managed to bring with him. Phoning the Fonts back in Mexico City, they discover that, though they thought they had shaken him on the outskirts of the capital, he had gone back to Quim and got from him the name of their destination. The threat of violence hovers around their endeavours. Belano buys a knife. We may be in the last act rather than the first, but still the weapon is much like Chekhov’s famous gun: we know it will be wielded in anger sometime in the few pages that still lay ahead of us.

And so, behold, the book’s dénouement is indeed tragic–perhaps better, a tragicomedy of errors. In a dramatic confrontation on a dusty desert road, a confrontation ensues as Alberto and his policeman sidekick catch up with them now that Lima, Belano, et. al. have finally located the mythical (but ultimately, almost monstrously physical–visceral, if you like) Cesárea Tinajero. 

In a confused “blur” seen from García Madero’s limited perspective forever in the back seat (the only thing Tinajero ever says to him is “don’t move”), Lima and Belano end up killing both their aggressors and also Tinajero herself (641–42). García Madero overhears Belano telling Lima “that we’d fucked up, that we’d found Cesárea only to bring her death” (643). The two friends split from García Madero and Lupe, set to bury the bodies and head back down south. Perhaps it’s not now so far-fetched to think that their constant traveling, as documented in the novel’s Part II, is at least initially because they are on the run from the law–or, more likely still, from Arturo’s criminal associates if they ever got wind of why their buddy never returned from Sonora.

In the meantime: was it worth it? We can ask this question both of the book and also of the quest that has structured it. Lima and Belano get to meet and talk to Tinajero, but (seeing everything as we do from García Madero’s perspective), we have no idea what they may have said. Lupe, for now, has escaped her pursuers.

And García Madero’s final diary entries go from a list of placenames that presumably indicate ongoing peregrinations through remote towns in the desert north (“El Cuatro, Trincheras, La Ciénaga” [646]) to picture puzzles that remind us both of Tinajero’s sole published poem (“Sión”) and also the joke representations of “Mexicans” from above with which he had earlier passed the time with his companions. Either way, his earlier facility with language (or rather, with the meta-language of aesthetic terminology, as well as with the narcissistic self-reflection of the diary form) is replaced first by mere names, and second by line-drawn riddles.

“What’s outside the window?” are the last words of The Savage Dectectives (648). They are followed by a broken rectangle, or a rectangle of broken lines: a dissolving frame perhaps, an illusory or precarious dividing line between inside and outside, between the thing and what holds the thing in place. What’s outside the book? Well, at last this long one is at an end, so maybe we’ll find out.

La noche de Tlatelolco

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One of the repeated chants of Mexico’s student movement in the 1960s, among the many reproduced in Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco, is a demand for dialogue: “DIA-LOGUE-DIA-LOGUE-DIA-LOGUE-DIA-LOGUE-DIA-LOGUE.” As one of her informants puts it, this is because “the government’s been talking to itself for fifty years now” (30; 38); or as another puts it, “The PRI,” the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, “doesn’t go in for dialogues, just monologues” (86; 90). Hence no doubt the form of Poniatowska’s own book, composed as it is of a multitude of snippets (of interviews, pronouncements, chants, newspaper articles, and so on) from all sides. Dialogue proved impossible in the real world, on the streets or in council chambers, as it was cut short by the violent repression of the student movement, the imprisonment of its leaders, and particularly by the massacre at Tlatelolco, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, that gives this book its title. But it is as though that impossible dialogue were now (almost) realized on the page as slogans face headlines, and witnesses from a variety of backgrounds speak of their experiences, one after another. Moreover, as Poniatowska makes little overt effort to impose a unified narrative or reconcile disparities (though there is no doubt that there is artfulness and intention in the ordering and placement of the various fragments), it is almost as if we catch that dialogue in midstream, any conclusion endlessly postponed.

But I say that this fantasy of dialogue is only almost realized on the page, not merely because it is in the nature of testimonio (as we have seen for instance with Biografía de un cimarrón) that the written word betrays, by fixing and so deadening, oral expression. It is also that the extreme fragmentation here threatens to undermine any attempt to make sense at all, refusing not only the forced coherence of the authoritarian state but also any unity to which the student movement itself might aspire. Even the chant itself, as it is printed here, breaks down the demand for dialogue into its constituent syllables and no longer respects either the unity of the word or its separation from any other: “DIA-LO-GO-DIA-LO-GO-DIA-LO-GO-DIA-LO-GO-DIA-LO-GO-DIA-LO-GO.” In the frenetic repetition of the march, meaning slips away to be replaced by sheer sound, by elements that could be recombined in more than one way, to more than one end or effect. The onus then is on the reader to pick up and combine the pieces, but even so it is not clear that any single narrative could ever gather together all the fragments and make them cohere. But then surely this is part of the point: if ever there had once been a chance for dialogue, now not even literature (or testimonio) can bring that moment back.

Poniatowska does not claim to establish the truth of what happened at Tlatelolco. Even as she effectively undermines the official version of events, she makes little attempt to substitute it with a new, more authoritative, version. She wrests the monopoly of the truth from the state, without presuming to claim ownership of it herself.

For hers is less a fact-finding mission than a therapeutic howl that puts language to the ultimate test. As she says in one of her very few editorial interventions, halfway through the book, even to consider delving for the truth would be somehow offensive to the victims: “Grief is a very personal thing. Putting it into words is almost unbearable; hence asking questions, digging for facts, borders on an invasion of people’s privacy” (199; 164). Instead, what she aims to provide is a space for the expression of that inexpressive grief that makes the animal within us (bare, unqualified life) come to the fore, as with the mother that Poniatowska describes as “so stunned that for days and days she uttered scarcely a word, and then suddenly, like a wounded animal–an animal whose belly is being ripped apart–she let out a hoarse, heart-rending cry, from the very center of her life.” This is “the sort of wild keening that is the end of everything, the wail of ultimate pain from the wound that will never heal” (199; 164). As such, even to call La noche de Tlatelolco an exercise in therapy is to say too much, as it would imply that healing can someday come–a claim as offensive and intolerable as the high-handed notion that there is some relationship between truth and reconciliation, or even that either were ever desirable. No. What matters is less what these fragments say than what they can never say, or what they say only by revealing the insufficiency and arrogance of any claims to truth or certainty. These pages, if they express anything, are the place for “the mute cry that stuck in thousands of throats, the blind grief in thousands of horror-stricken eyes on October 2, 1968, the night of Tlatelolco” (199; 164).

See also: Testimonio and the Politics of Truth.