There are many terms in language that prescribe a certain relationship to nonhumans. Take the term “meat,” which establishes a clear-cut separation from the living being that gave its life for it. Though the organic properties of the signified are identical, “meat” is so different from “flesh” that it would be odd, even blasphemous, for a priest to say at the altar: “Christ gave his meat to save us” (I give this example not out of religious sentiment but for emphasis). Or take the term “beef,” which somehow sanitizes the fact that, well, one is eating from a calf; or “ham,” a piglet; “poultry,” a chick; and so on. Some are terms of untroubled consumption, others of endearment; some describe an animal mass, others a singular animal. And yet they refer to the same “thing.” Or take the term “thing” to begin with! It is anthropocentrism at its best: an umbrella for everything else, a perfect device of othering. Never mind that humans are animals, and things, too: we are mammals like those we eat; we are made of carbon and water, like those things out there. The TV host–astronomer wonders that we humans are made of the same stuff as stars. Well, what else could we be made of?
This line of reasoning will be familiar to readers of new materialism and cognate critical currents. In “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” Bruno Latour criticizes how humans claim preeminence over “mute things”; meanwhile, Peter Singer makes an ethical argument for vegetarianism on the basis of our shared animality with livestock.1 This chapter’s contribution to those debates revolves around language, particularly the contributions of literary language in decentering the human. In the introduction, I have presented my notion of “transcultural materialism,” which I continue to develop in the pages ahead and throughout this book. Two elements that I would like to flesh out at present (pun intended) are the postanthropocentric thrust of this narrative mode and the manner in which it cuts across cultural divides. This two-pronged investigation recalls a comparable pairing in the work of Fernando Ortiz: on the one hand, the idea that sugar and tobacco are actors alongside plantation workers; on the other, the finding that the cultural traditions of Africans and Creoles—that rub against each other, eventually configuring Cubanness—are always already embedded in material transformation. The German term Geisteswissenschaften, literally the “sciences of the spirit,” is most at odds with my Ortizian approach, which foregoes the rigors of science for the insightfulness of storytelling and finds that “the spirit of the Cuban people,” or any other cultural phenomena for that matter, is not ectoplasmic, like a spirit, but rather solid as clay.
I have just used a term in a foreign language to stress a specifically cultural element. The language we use to other the nonhuman does not always translate well. As Patricia Valderrama pointed out to me, Colombians would not raise an eyebrow when hearing the terms jamón de pollo or jamón de cordero: literally, “chicken ham” and “lamb ham.” In the country, jamón is generic for sliced, processed, or cured meat; it is not specific to any one animal. This mismatch is revealing; if we read into it, we will discover an instance of how language and its gaps can reinforce or question anthropocentrism. We assert our preeminence as the earth’s top predator also in words; in words, we can undo it. Meanwhile, Russian formalists considered that literary language was a different province within language—an idea that, if taken to its limits, is easily discredited by the close proximity of the everyday to the literary.2 However, I believe we can adopt a more modest version of that view. Literary and nonliterary utterances are easy to distinguish, in fact, in everyday life: there can be bursts of poetry in the metro or the stadium bathroom, say, but generally poetry happens in books, readings, and similar contexts. It’s all part of the same language, but it can be used literarily or not—the two modes are not always easy to distinguish, but they are distinguishable for the most part. A foreign language—which, as modern translators understand it, is horizontally and not diametrically separated from our own, like a somewhat removed city rather than a parallel universe—allows us, in the examples above, to reframe human-nonhuman interaction. Couldn’t literature do the same?
In this chapter, I shall focus on a notion that is particularly adept at capturing the role of language in prescribing a certain relationship to nonhumans: “raw material”—in Spanish, materia prima. What is raw or primordial about a sheep, a mountain of gold, a forest of rubber trees? Primordialness, in these cases, lies in the eyes of the beholder—and in her language, novels included, unless we read them against the grain. We have understood since Ferdinand de Saussure that language signifies through differentiation. This means that the core operation of generating difference is codified in all language; arguably, it can be decodified there too. And since everyday language is straightforward and communicative, while literary language can afford a different economy, the latter seems to be the place to look for answers. With this in mind, I now focus on raw material to develop a facet of transcultural materialism. Ortiz relied on literary examples, but he did not develop the implications of his work for hermeneutics. This is, of course, a task that Ángel Rama undertook under the aegis of historical materialism.3 As previously stated, my own take converses with that tradition but drives it in a different direction. Here, I show how transcultural materialism can be a way of reading literature. First, I will compare two narratives that, as I argue, interrogate raw material. One is from the early decades of the twentieth century, the other from those of the twenty-first. In a second moment, this comparison will allow me to further characterize the post-1989 material turn and the shifting role of fiction within it. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to make explicit the main tenets of transcultural materialism as a means for the study of contemporary literature.
The Black Flock
For a thought-provoking image of raw material, picture the massive, twenty-to-fifty-kilogram balls of natural rubber that tappers would send floating downstream in the Amazon basin to be harvested closer to major maritime ports (figure 1.1). A liberal economic historian might regard the scene as a token of ingenuity, for this process saves the redundant effort of loading the rubber onto a boat. A Marxist historian might rightly wonder about the strenuous labor involved before and after the balls are afloat. Whether one intuits here wealth-creation or exploitation, these perspectives have in common the parsing out of human and nonhuman elements: in both accounts, the life of the commodity has begun, and the organic connection to the surrounding jungle is suspended. By contrast, José Eustasio Rivera’s 1924 The Vortex gives us the formidable metaphor of the rebaño negro—a “black flock,” as if the rubber was ushered by an invisible human shepherd, or as if the river itself showed the way.4 Here, in greatly condensed form, the relationship of humans, rubber, and jungle is remediated. Given the abusive, unsustainable collective of human and nonhuman elements that made the extraction possible, this is rightfully rendered as an ominous sight. The metaphor counteracts that other, more pervasive metaphor that is “raw material” in the first place.
Arquivo historico de Manaus.
Some of the works studied in the present volume are underappreciated local gems; others are undisputed regional classics. The Vortex belongs to the latter. It tells the story of how Arturo Cova, his lover Alicia, and their allies win a battle against ruthless rubber tappers who seek to enslave them, but ultimately lose the war against the jungle. The backdrop is the first rubber boom in the Amazon, periodized (by Tulio Halperín Dongui and others) between approximately 1870 and 1910.5 The atrocities committed by rubber barons on indigenous peoples and other enslaved workers are so egregious that talking about nonhumans in this context seems, well, inhuman, even in literary criticism. But given that an ample human-centric bibliography exists and that, after all, rubber is at the heart of the matter, I would like to explore that less-traveled road. This does not suspend the political and ethical concerns that influence even the more philological, stylistic analyses. Actually, it contributes to a better understanding of such issues, for the forces of capitalism alone did not dictate the fate of the victims of the rubber boom. If Rivera wanted to write an essay about greed and the limits of the rule of law in the Amazon, he would have done so. (Indeed, some of his letters and other documents set themselves to the task.) As purposefully uneconomical as Ortiz, Rivera recreates complex assemblages that revolve around rubber: think of sliced barks of trees, whipped human backs, water currents and mood swings, guns and insects, the fevers of beriberi. Let us examine, then, what the novel can tell us about power relations across the human-nonhuman divide.
Glimpses of nonhuman autonomy are numerous: Cova hears the sands asking him to tread lightly and toss them into the wind, shortly before he himself fears becoming a tree; he learns that the son of Clemente Silva, his guide through the jungle, was “killed by a tree”; an “accomplice” tree tangles Silva in his lianas, aiding his persecutors; referring again to Silva, the narrator reports that “the secret voice [of things] filled his soul.”6 The jungle makes men mad; the jungle suspends moral precepts; and so forth. Eco-critical readings downplay these descriptions of Nature as ruthless and evil, favoring instead the passages where characters extol the jungle or decry the extinction of a species, as Scott DeVries observes in the case of the balatá.7 Similarly, Jennifer French claims the text anticipates radical environmentalism.8 But how can a text that vilifies the jungle so extensively be properly environmentalist? Or should we just look at the passages that suggest the opposite?
This environmentalist cherry-picking is the opposite pair of socio-critical readings that turn their backs on Nature. The Russian translation of La vorágine, which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1935 and may very well epitomize this trend, introduces Rivera as “a great and honest bourgeois artist” whose work offers “a view that overcame bourgeois class to appreciate the authentic social truth.”9 William Bull goes as far as to suggest that an “excessive” psychological characterization would result from Rivera not being able to grasp the objective realities of rubber tappers.10 David Viñas, in a lucid but rather partial statement, claims that “Cova’s vital immersion in peasant barbarism produces…the bookish emergence of Rivera in the city. The rural ‘coming of age’ of the protagonist ends with the publication of a book for a bourgeois readership in Bogotá.”11 Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees: those readings miss the trees to begin with. They want so much for the book to make a legible social critique that they rewrite it in their minds. Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of some environmentalist readings, although, in addition to being partial explanations, they reproduce what they seek to challenge—that is, the separation of nature and culture.
There is no depiction of the “environment” in a novel where the jungle is a protagonist; there are networks that bind quasi subjects and quasi objects. La vorágine is as much about capitalism as it is about our interactions with nonhumans. Even sexual desire, which we often fancy to be an exclusive province of the human, involves the assemblage. The rich literature on The Vortex has rightly noted that Cova’s dreams symbolically approximate rubber milk with semen and rubber trees with phalluses, among several other more or less veiled sexual references. In an often-overlooked passage, however, Cova is literally aroused by feathers:
That afternoon, sadness possessed my spirit. Why must I always live alone? Why could I not share with someone these ermine feathers; this wing of the marine codúa, where the rainbow lies imprisoned; this spring-time vision of birds and colour?
With humiliating pain I discovered Alicia flitting in the hazy background of my dreams; and then with crude and bitter realism I strove to blight the thoughts that harboured the intruder.12
The feathers in this scene would not be out of place in a story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, except that, given the setting, the fetish is emphatically a part of the natural world. The final allusion to ejaculation is lyrical to the point of being hermetic—that is, circuitous enough so as not to be censored for a mainstream readership of the 1920s. Yet it is unequivocal. Disturbingly, it involves rage, as the protagonist resents longing for Alicia, whom he thinks has been unfaithful. Passages like this have rightly led Monserrat Ordóñez and Sharon Magnarelli to note that the novel presents a masculinist storyline through the eyes of the protagonist, but also provides spaces for the critique of patriarchy in the silences and contradictions of his discourse.13 Ordóñez also reminds us that feathers were commodities; indigenous gatherers picked them up in the jungle and sold them to criollos, who would export them.14 In a sense, then, Cova is getting off to the thought of riches. Beckman elaborates on this point to show how the sexual frustrations of Cova mirror the export reveries of capital fictions.15 I would, however, like to complement such interpretations by recentering, if you will, the feather as feather. Its materiality, which we should not ignore, reveals the hybrid cathexis of the novel.
It is useful to turn for a moment to Michael Pollan, who rethinks desire in light of the coevolution of humans and nonhumans.16 “Coevolution” is a more accurate term than “domestication,” which is one-sided. So-called domestic plants and animals get phenomenal returns from their dealings with humans: rosemary thrives on this planet, as do dogs. Nonhumans give and they receive; they domesticate us, we them—intention is beside the point. Thus a desire for sweetness informs our relationship with apples; for beauty, with tulips; and for intoxication, with marijuana. Like human bumblebees, we have favored colored tulips and other flowers; they, in turn, have an effect on our ideals of beauty, as countless metaphors attest. But of the plants Pollan analyzes, I find that none comes closer to rubber than potatoes. Potatoes codify a desire for control: the fantasy that the human species can feed any number of its individual members, any time, in any weather. This backfires, surely: think of the Great Famine of the nineteenth-century in Ireland. Or consider today’s genetically enhanced potatoes, which accompany a global desire for, say, McDonald’s fries to taste the same wherever we go, regardless of the unrealistic demands that makes on local agriculture.
Extrapolating, I would like to propose that a desire for absolute control defines our modern relationship with rubber trees, with the obvious caveat that fully developing this view would require input from a botanist-historian. Still, it is striking to see how much the literary evidence bears out this point, as The Vortex so vividly illustrates. The iridescent colors in Arturo Cova’s ticklish feathers make a startling apparition in the title scene of the novel, in which two indigenous men, who had been enlisted to guide Cova’s expedition against their will, succumb to a whirlpool—in Spanish, vorágine. They leave behind two spinning hats “bajo el iris que abría sus pétalos como la mariposa de la indiecita Mapiripana.”17 The understated sexual connotations become luridly clear in Earl K. James’s 1935 rendering: “under the rainbow that pulsated like the butterfly of the little Indian girl Mapiripana.”18 Not coincidentally, Seymour Menton refers to a vagina dentata.19 One is reminded of Rubén Darío’s verse: “y los moluscos reminiscencias de mujeres.”20 Petals, feathers, butterfly wings, and labia constitute a symbolic, but also literal, material sequence in a violent form of desire that traverses the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms.
This finding calls for a revised reading of the entire novel. As readers will recall, the drowning scene anticipates the famous ending, “¡Los devoró la selva!”—literally, “The jungle swallowed them whole.”21 Yet it also connects to Cova’s variegated wet dreams, in one of which “numberless people bent over the creeping ribbon of liquid [rubber milk] and drank of it.”22 And, of course, it alludes to Mapiripana, a mythic indigenous maiden, most likely a product of Rivera’s own gothic imagination and not of local traditions, who punishes a rapist priest by bearing his children, a pair composed of a bat and an owl, who suck his blood for years—that is, until he dies; then a blue butterfly illuminates the cave with its flight. Critics have struggled to make these heterogeneous and diverse elements conform to a Freudian reading. Yet instead of immoderate metaphorization, what I see here could be described as becoming, or, in Latour’s terms, as nature-culture. It is the material trail of a desire for absolute control.
Note that this desire cannot be satisfied. It is akin to wanting to pull a body in a vacuum, without an opposing force. Control can only be partial; it is defined by resistance. The substance of rubber itself makes this clear, but it also promises to become everything else, to give limitless satisfaction to a will to shape. This is Arturo Cova’s predicament. Alternatively, he wants control over his feelings or wants to let them loose; he desires the saint and the libertine; he is a disinterested poet and an avid entrepreneur. He has, to echo the title of an iconic rock album, a rubber soul. His will seeks to impose itself over Indians, nature, women, language, criollo male competitors and allies, and even over his own desire.
This belongs within a particularly ill-fated attempt at coevolution with rubber trees at the cost of human lives and ecological balance. Hence in the denouement, to borrow a concept of Spinoza dear to political ecologists, Cova’s party loses its conatus, its perseverance in being. That is exactly what it means to be devoured by the jungle, an ecosystem described in another famous passage as “an enormous cemetery that rots and resuscitates.”23 The minerals in their bodies will not be lost, and yet the organisms will not endure: the biological mirror image of cultural assimilation. It is not that the object jungle prevails over human subjects, but that their collective has become untenable. Rubber is then the substratum for transculturation, as tobacco and sugar were for Ortiz, and the novel a reflection not only of an exploitative economic model but of an unsustainable experiment at coevolution. Something similar could be argued about César Uribe Piedrahita’s Toá (1933), which takes its name from a half-Indian princess who, at the end of the novel, dies giving birth to the baby of a Covaesque protagonist.24 The man, Antonio de Orrantia, has earlier asked her to be happy; otherwise he will leave her. Amid the pangs of death, Toá tries to smile and tells him that she is indeed happy, for fear of losing him—in the afterlife? One wonders. Perhaps this perverse scene of love surrender is one of domestic domestication. Such are the fantasies that rubber dictates. Not coincidentally, Uribe Piedrahita was also a pathologist who studied arrow poison and tropical parasites in chickens—both “obstacles” for the expansion of farming and the nation-state into the “wilderness.”25
Beyond the natural rubber booms in the Amazon and their effects in cultural production, a trail of latex continues until this very day. Rubber is the stuff of preservatives and sex toys, but also of toys tout court, of the soles of our shoes and the raincoats that keep us dry. Along with nylon, it ushered in the plastics revolution; it was such a staple of daily life that it begot suburban Tupperware parties and the adoption of the term “plasticity” as a trait of character. Works of literature that deal with rubber allow us to interrogate our relationship with rubber and the Constitution, in the Latourian sense, that underpins it. A case in point is the underappreciated, brilliant Argentine writer Ariel Magnus’s Muñecas (2008), to which I devote the next section of this chapter. If Ponte gave continuation to the transcultural materialism that, in my revisionist reading, Ortiz founded, Magnus does something similar for Rivera and Uribe Piedrahita. Here the past and the present illuminate each other: literature serves as the conduit for a reassessment of our place among things throughout history—not merely by representing it, as in a realist novel, but by interrogating the underexamined scaffoldings that determine our relation to nonhumans, including, above all, those implicit in language.
An heir to the awkward-genius tradition of César Aira, Ariel Magnus is in many ways eccentric for an Argentine writer—for one thing, he resides in Germany. This geographical fact is more or less present throughout his heterogeneous, growing oeuvre. There are two historic atrocities in the background of Muñecas: extermination and extractivism. The first is evident in as much as its characters are, as if part of some vulgar joke, a Jew and a “Nazi.” To be more precise, they are an unnamed, immigrant librarian in Germany whose father was a socialist worker in some faraway place about which we know little, and Selin Sürginson, a library patron and daughter of a Nazi soldier who was stationed at Auschwitz. Without thinking much about it, Selin invites the librarian, whom she does not know, to her thirtieth birthday party. Almost no one goes to the party. Drunk and disappointed, she offers to drive him back home. On the way they have an unfortunate encounter with the police. Upon arriving at the librarian’s place, they stop talking, as a secret is revealed about him. A certain sexual tension grows between them, and Selin ends up in his bed, offering herself up, but at the close of the narration, he does not seem inclined to reciprocate. Extractivism comes to bear regarding the librarian’s secret, which is a secret not because he hides it but because it only makes itself apparent once they enter his apartment: he lives with six dolls made of inflatable silicone, which he collects, he explains, “as one would collect horses, or cars. That is, I have them in the stable or in the garage but also…”26 As I see it, the long history of rubber extractivism, the dolls’ historical precursor, is as present in the narration as what historian Saul Friedländer would call “the years of extermination,” referring to the crimes taking place in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.27 It is worth elucidating how Magnus situates his writing in the double erasure of these historical atrocities and their corresponding literary traditions.28
Rubber originates from the Amazonian tree Hevea brasiliensis, which the Witoto and Tupí peoples, among other ethnic groups, used for centuries before its commercial exploitation. The latter coincides with those peoples’ own exploitation at the hands of Casa Arana and other colonists. As crude as it often is, Rivera’s novel pales in comparison to the horrendous accounts and documentation from nonfiction sources. In the frontispiece of Walter Hardenburg’s early denunciation piece The Devil’s Paradise (1912), there are indigenous slaves in shackles; in the interior pages, there is a picture of the emaciated carcass of a woman who was reportedly condemned to die of hunger; for contrast, there later appears a picture of “free Indians” with the following caption: “Observe their robust appearance when not enslaved.”29 The understudied and insufficiently memorialized killing of thousands of natives through work exhaustion, summary execution, and outright torture was, in a strict sense, a genocide comparable in scale to the pogroms that were carried out in Eurasia. As is well known, the phenomenon that Friedländer documents was the first genocide to carry this name, the only one of its scale. Works by Rivera, Uribe Piedrahita and Euclides da Cunha accompany the first event, and those by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Paul Celan, and many others accompany the latter one.30 As John Tully reports in A Social History of Rubber, Nazi Germany synthesized rubber as part of the arms race and in response to the embargo.31 The English had brought natural rubber to Asia, where it was cultivated on plantations and no longer in the middle of the jungle. As one can see, the trajectory of this group of substances (gutta-percha, rubber, plastic, silicone)—first natural, then artificial, and later synthetic—is rich in meaning. The twentieth century, with its neocolonialism and its wars, is inscribed in this trajectory.
The first appearance of rubber in the novel, which is 115 pages long, is on page 43, with inflated condoms that hang from the ceiling during the failed party. On page 79 Selin makes reference to the “verga de plástico” that her ex-boyfriend, Günther, had asked her to stick in him. On page 85, the dolls appear. Starting on page 87, the librarian lectures on the advances in “materia de androides,” especially with the arrival of silicone. Putting to the test the work’s pact of verisimilitude, which carefully borders on the absurd, he states, “The doll you see there, for example, it breathes, its heart beats, its body warms up, it menstruates every 28 days. And that’s a relatively old model, I bought it a year ago. The new ones talk and carry a video camera in their eyes.”32 Noting that the plants are also plastic, Selin thinks that the librarian, “perversely ecologically-minded” is “more German than the Germans.”33 Beginning on page 113, Selin kisses the librarian, who remains undaunted. Just after, she lies down on the bed with Lais, the doll, hoping that Magnus “sticks it in me like he sticks it in Lais…His latex cock in my silicone hole.”34 In the end, when Selin falls asleep with the dolls, she asks if “this thing about women getting silicone implants everywhere does not take after dolls” because “nature imitates art and vice versa.”35
These moments reveal the latex plot that runs throughout the novel. As can be seen from the page numbers that I have emphasized, the récit is just as or more important than the histoire: the novel is made up of what it tells, but the way that it tells is indispensable. Beginning on page 58, the librarian mentions that he is Jewish, and Selin talks about her father. The first fifty pages are in free indirect speech focalized on him, in a section astutely called “Her,” and it goes until the end of the party. The second section, a little longer, is called “Him” and corresponds to her free indirect speech as they make their way to the librarian’s apartment. This inversion of names brings to mind the expression “twin souls,” yet it is also about false symmetry: the characters would almost fit into a joke or fable, but not quite. Much like César Aira, who, as Mariano García has shown, begins each of his short novels in one genre and distorts it along the way until converting it into another,36 Magnus begins with a love story and, as I see it, skirts the boundaries of rubber novels and writings of extermination.
I interpret as ars poetica one particularly notable passage during the party when the librarian, Selin, and Ben (her landlord) resign themselves to bringing out seats to sit on, since they already suspect that no one else will arrive. In a work in which the border between animated and unanimated objects is of great importance, the librarian points out that another name for the expression “baile de las sillas” is “viaje a Jerusalén” (Reise nach Jerusalem).37 Without dwelling on it, just to make conversation, Selin supposes that somewhere behind that expression there must be “a modern fable, of the sort that relegates the moral to the ethical creativity of its listeners.”38 This describes the novel as a whole. If one accepts the invitation to look for a moral, one would find that there is none (just as there is no moral in Ortiz, even though what he says about tobacco and sugar suggests a fable). The Spanish saying is, “El que va a Sevilla, pierde su silla” (“He who goes to Seville loses his seat”). Travelling to Jerusalem and back again only to be incapable of finding one’s place could be related to the Crusades or to Zionism. Selin wonders if there might be something anti-Semitic in the expression, since throughout the novel she alternates between an exacerbated sensitivity to other cultures and disdain for them. One seat always corresponds to one human, singling him out: the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo represented the so-called Holocausto del Palacio de Justicia in Bogotá with an array of chairs in the façade of the new building that the missing judicial branch would have occupied.39
With a very Airean metonymic drifting, Selin goes from talking about the game to remarking that she does not understand jokes. The librarian responds by saying that he does not get thrillers:
“I can’t ever fully grasp what is one supposed to expect so impatiently.”
“First there is a corpse, and then they find the assassin,” I reasoned out loud. “But to me what’s dead is suspense and the scriptwriter is the killer, in the worst case with the director and the actors as accomplices.”
“By contrast, in love stories,” carried on Selin, as if she were explaining my train of thought, “since the beginning you want them to kiss and you know they are going to kiss, but nonetheless you cannot step away from the TV until they do finally kiss—that’s what I call suspense.”40
This dialogue is both nonsensical party conversation and diegetic revelation. Freud showed how jokes are exudations of the unconscious. Magnus’s novel is, as was his earlier work Un chino en bicicleta (2007), a long joke.41 It is easy to appreciate that the political unconscious of the text, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase, is the memory of the Holocaust and of Nazism in a postcolonial context.42 Add to this the memory of rubber and of other malleable substances that are as important as the chairs in the party. Like them, they index individual human bodies, but they do it to the point of molding to them. The ending is not a revelation about the profound relationship between rubber and Nazism but a realization of the possibilities of Magnus’s emplotment. In the absence of a moral, what the novel does achieve is a staging of the contradictions at the heart of the memory of these events, and having them constellate—that is, if you concede that things hold a certain material and cultural memory, as plants did for Ortiz, that waits to be narrativized.
These days, silkworms are genetically modified to produce thread for industrial purposes. Latex was the original super substance: the first thing that promised to become everything else. Ambitions court hubris and tragedy, and this one was no exception. Rubber proposed a new effective border between nature and culture through the process of isolating the wet from the dry or, in a word, waterproofing. Here was a space to overcome the human, so intrinsically bound with water. As Latour points out, when attempts are made to stop hybrids between the human and nonhuman, which are in reality the norm and not the exception, such hybrids proliferate, and not necessarily with favorable consequences. Waterproofing supposes a new radical pact between objects. Racism, that organizing principle of National Socialism, is a fantasy of perfect impermeability. Its forceful institutionalization triggered a new and lamentable disruption in the order of things, which also led to the objectification of millions of human beings.
Fittingly, Selin approaches historical National Socialism in an oblique way, similar to the way Roberto Bolaño’s characters do in La literatura nazi en América (1994), which I have analyzed in a previous study.43 In Selin’s apartment, the empty seats hardly evoke victims; however, this reading gains weight when other elements are taken into account. The phrase “imagine if there were a war and nobody came,” said at the party regarding the small probability that Germany and France would participate in the war in Iraq, is iterated again at the end of the night when the librarian justifies his solitary life: “Life is a party where you’re invited and when you go no one is there.”44 When a car passes by, the basement apartment is illuminated. Selin recounts, “Suddenly the room seems like a trench swept by the enemy’s headlights. Are we below sea level?”45 Notice how the latent war is represented as permeability. Before, in the party, the librarian feels in his overcoat the weight of the many gifts that he has brought for the birthday girl—like stones that drag him to the bottom of the sea.46 That contrasts with the brutal image, impermeable and dry, of the latex penis in a silicone hole. Selin, whose Electra complex, let us remember, would have her desiring a perpetrator, here searches for total friction, violence.
Seen in a different way, she wants to be objectivized. That said, in this novel humans are no more than things. Genocide is horrific not because it reduces its victims to objecthood (there are things no one would do to things) but because it is the very definition of that which is horrific. It is not tragic, however, as Hayden White observes about the work of Saul Friedländer.47 If ever he had it, Magnus resists the temptation to give pathos, agony, destruction, and anagnorisis to genocide, as if there existed a tragic destiny or a cosmic plan. Instead, he displaces that narrative onto the plot of rubber and onto the discrete drama of a bad night drinking between a shy, solitary man and a self-reproaching woman. A fable or joke would ask that a general inference be made from these characters, much in the way that the hare and tortoise teach something about patience and ethical values, or that the laughter of a Jewish joke mobilizes and dissolves (absolves?)—to say it with a German concept—Weltschmerz (the pain of the world). White says that Friedländer “de-narrativizes” (destorifies) extermination, as Toni Morrison did for slavery, following a modernist paradigm present in Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and Joyce.48 Like Magnus, they prefer a presentation technique that, taking up again the vocabulary that I advanced earlier, is paratactic. Horror is incommunicable, but the unending searches to understand it are not, especially when constellation is privileged over crude data.
There are many traces of extermination literature in the novel. At the party, the librarian is a “witness to a tragedy” or, even more suggestive, “the only survivor of a personal tragedy which would keep happening in another form in Selin’s memory, invisible to others and in the course of time to her as well.”49 This is not the habitual language used to speak of a trivial embarrassment, namely, that Selin’s social circle left her along with her ex-boyfriend; it recalls discussion about giving testimony in Primo Levi as something both necessary and impossible.50 It also mirrors the role of the writer facing trauma in Dominick LaCapra, for whom there would be written works about compulsive repetition and others about healing, without it being possible beforehand to distinguish between them.51 It goes without saying that the name Selin alludes to is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a nihilist and Nazi. The librarian refers to himself as an idiot “in the etymological sense” of the word, which is precisely the way that Hannah Arendt criticizes those who, as in the Greek root, are “for themselves”: if every man focuses only on his own matters, neither political action nor a space for the commons is possible.52 Of course, this last position fully coincides with the final monologue of the librarian, for whom the dolls appear to have been emancipated, as Rimbaud would say, from that hell that is other people.
What interest might Magnus have in collapsing a witness, a victim, an idiot, and even, potentially, a victimizer into one figure? In my view, the last line of the novel leaves space to think that when the librarian leaves the room to let Selin sleep off her drunkenness, he awaits the opportunity to possess her. Throughout the novel, he has conspicuously said on various occasions that he likes women seated (like dolls). In contrast to the first part, we do not have access to the librarian’s interior speech, though by extrapolating from his previous behavior, we can imagine how excited and frightened and infuriated he must have been with the arrival of the woman in his space. However, his way of speaking as an ethical idiot who does not seek to harm anyone (just that they leave him alone), could be a façade. Already he has lied to try to please. The novel’s epigraph is from Ovid, from the episode of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which the adored sculpture turns into a woman. Muñecas could invert that trajectory, wherein the evening could—it remains unclear—end in consensual sex or in the rape of an unconscious woman. Recall the passage previously cited: “I wonder if this thing about women getting silicone implants everywhere does not take after the dolls. Nature imitates art, Lais. Give me your hand. First art imitates nature, then the other way around. And so on. And when you can get pregnant, it flips again. Back andforth backandforth backandforthandba [idayvueltaid].”53
The last line, in which the syntax breaks down, marks a rhythm like that of intercourse, which, after all, is a central motif throughout the book. Sophistication and vulgarity go hand in hand: Lais is the name of the octosyllabic medieval poems of courtly love; the truncated word “id” could be the beginning of a dream, or it might refer to the Freudian id. The fantasy about the pregnant doll does have touches of science fiction, but it could also allude to the character, Selin, who just prior has declared that she does not have any condoms because she used them all to decorate for the party. The bit about nature and art is a product of having internalized the librarian’s erudite speech: the lovers become one in language, so to speak. After all, one of the few things we know about the librarian’s past is that, in his mother tongue, the verb for “to go” and “to come” is the same (We also know that the route of the 36 bus reminds him of his childhood. With an autobiographical wink, Magnus pairs the Heidelberg-Handschuhsheim route, literally from “the city of the heath” to “the home of gloves,” with the Palermo-Caballito route.) Having said that, in the spirit of the cultural turn for which Ortiz cleared the way, as he does now for the materialist turn, one could replace “art” with “culture.” In this way, we can appreciate the final scene, with its ambiguous permeability and impermeability, as the final denarrativization of the intermingled plots of extermination and extraction. For some, the moral will be that history has ended, and that only its most distant echoes remain—or that technology will make ethical idiocy possible, or usher in the posthumanist utopia. Or the lesson might be that, facing the onslaught of androids, we must return to a state of nature.
The collapse of victimizers, victims, witnesses, and idiots could form the basis of a relativist argument and, dangerously, even one of denial. Instead, my sense is that this is both about negative critique and about confronting politically correct, thoughtless platitudes. With the important qualification that its misogynistic subplot suggests a truncated scapegoat mechanism, the novel’s great merit is finding an internally coherent narrative solution for the contradictions that situate it historically. They come at a time when the memories of both extractivism and extermination lose some of their poignancy, slowly fading into the background. And yet the synthesizing of rubber and its afterlife in new materials, in which both ruthless caucheros and Nazi scientists played a part, provide the very fabric of the modern world. The uncanny effect of the story, which stands out among a flurry of recent works in which more or less kinky sexual fantasies play a prominent role, stems from its historical situatedness in this double erasure. We live on the brink of a sex toy revolution, says the industry.54 We also live in the aftermath of extermination, whispers Muñecas, which leads me to circumscribe both epochs to a contradictory desire, self-cancelling and imperious, for absolute control.
This is why works such as La vorágine, Toá, and, decades later, Muñecas are fascinated with fascist and sexist ideas. The possibility of creating something that can take any form is an aspiration to omnipotence. Inventions from the fields of nanotechnology and synthetic biology, not to mention from the combination of the two, announce a very near future in which what silicone is to gutta-percha, new compounds will be to silicone. This underscores Catherine Malabou’s ideas about plasticity as a figure of historical thought that reframes the relationships between the universal and the particular; hers would be an antifascist act of molding.55 The contemporary materialist turn also enhances the status of the literary works—more singular than particular, and certainly plastic—of Latin American authors like Magnus. My related proposal is that World Literature think of itself not only in terms of space and time but also in terms of materiality.
I’ve allowed myself to extend the origin myth of the dolls to the domestication and exploitation of Amazonian rubber. Transactions of globalization are implicit when the librarian, granting himself the more or less precarious place of enunciation of the country where he has resided for ten years, affirms that even though the dolls began in California and are developed in Japan, “Germany is well ahead of the curve, I’ll have you know.”56 It bears repeating: there would be no sex dolls, as there would be no modern syringes in hospitals nor transatlantic flights that make literary conferences possible, without the exploitation of Amazonian rubber and its synthesizing by the German military-industrial machine. The dolls in this basement are always already global. They are also and in a similar sense Latin American, of course, since they are inscribed in a tradition where librarians harken back to Borges, who wrote “El tema del traidor y del héroe” and “Deutsches Requiem,” founding a thematic that Bolaño would later revisit. Magnus writes in a moment in which extraction is already a fait accompli, and the only thing left is for the dolls to be imported to Latin America as luxury goods, mutatis mutandis, as Ford’s cars carried in their tires, on their way back to the Amazon, the latex of trees from that same jungle.
The novel also suggests that trauma lives in the things themselves—but neither in the way of Pierre Nora’s institutionalizing figure of lieux de mémoire nor in the way of the boom of memoirist production in our time. If Ortiz were to write his counterpoint today, he would have to go as far as transgenic tobacco and artificial sweeteners. We can, through the transcultural materialism that Muñecas exemplifies, summon the things themselves: the substances, in the most basic sense, of historical content. I consider this an urgent task in the midst of a contemporary materialist turn, when our way of relating to objects is rapidly changing. It would do us well to have at our disposal other directives and figures of thought than the mere accumulation of capital. Magnus responds to the commodity counterfetishism that (as Coronil describes well) informs Ortiz’s writing with a hyperfetishism that stimulates the critical imagination—or perhaps the “ethical creativity”—of the reader (see chapter 4).57 Muñecas speaks to the risks and pleasures of becoming things, and it raises the question of a new way for humans to dwell with nonhumans.
As he contemplates the empty party, “something in the purity of the air and the overexcited stillness of the furniture” reminds the male protagonist of the library before it opens, before the books are “handled.”58 In both settings there are more seats than people. Later the apartment, where there are more dolls than people, is another sanctuary. Faced with these three impermeable spaces, curated in close proximity to one another like an artistic installation, critics must choose where to sit. But the novel is anything but hospitable: one can only sit, as Selin does, next to a thing, or hold a book and smear it with one’s fingers, as one unavoidably does, in that act called “reading” that somehow evokes more spiritual and less physical phenomena. There does not appear to be any one moral or primordial scene—or is there? Infer: If it is better to have a crowded library than an empty one, and a lively party than a deserted one, would an orgy with dolls be the punch line of this long, protracted joke of a novel? In the librarian’s monologue, life is either anomie or sexual perversion. To take this at face value, however, would be the same as reading the words of Sade’s dying man to a priest as an authorial statement, rather than as the more puzzling literary device that they constitute. For one, what I take away from this fascinating little book is a rather consequential “as if.” While Christian hermeneutics asks its readers to approach the Bible as if it were the word of God, and close reading, its secular daughter, asks them to read texts as if they were complete worlds unto themselves, my modest hermeneutical contribution, in formulating the notion of transcultural materialism, is to read as if in the presence of things with a history.
The Worst of Architects and the Best of Bees
By inoculating historical materialism with material history, works such as those studied in this chapter traverse the human-nonhuman divide to offer a postanthropocentric vision of history. They grant objects the agency and importance they are due without, in so doing, taking importance away from themes that are essentially human, political, and social, such as justice and work. Upon revisiting Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar, I made a note of how the two crops do not allow themselves to be reduced to allegories about socialism or capitalism, or to being the representatives of two cultures whose de-essentialized union Ortiz supposedly dedicated himself to celebrating. An approximation along those lines would not exhaust the literal and botanical meaning of the counterpoint. What happens to those two plants matters: from germination to their incorporation into the lungs and bloodstream of men, and from domestication as crops to their proto-industrial exploitation, each stage is associated with social orders. The effects that the plants have on the world also matter, what they give and what they receive. In this way, narrating the paratactic development of what Latour would call “nature-culture” is Ortiz’s great contribution to contemporary criticism. As we have seen, Rivera prefigures some of these operations in the early twentieth century, while Magnus retraces the footsteps of these two authors in the early twenty-first century. Together, their works know how to speak simultaneously of things and humans, and permit us to understand vegetal-human history along a continuum.
Beyond rubber novels, one logical step forward would be to consider cultural products that revolve around other pivotal commodities for Latin America. These include bananas, central to García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), whose denouement takes after the 1928 Banana Massacre in Ciénaga, one of several along the Caribbean basin to target unionizing workers. There is also Pablo Neruda’s poem “The United Fruit Company” (1950), which had already rendered the banana as a symbol and agent of exploitation: “[UFC] rebaptized these countries / Banana Republics, / and over the sleeping dead,…encouraged envy, attracted / the dictatorship of flies: / Trujillo flies, Tacho flies.”59 The physical layout of the banana plantation itself is a matrix for material transformation: the endless rows of banana trees, shimmering under the equinoctial sun, are a model for dysfunctional human and nonhuman interaction. The story of the domestication of the Asian Cavendish banana could very well inform an understanding of its accompanying worldwide cultural products and human consequences. Something analogous could be said of cacao, a Meso-American crop predating colonization that Diego Rivera painted in heroic murals (figure 1.2) and Brazilian contemporary conceptual artist Vik Muniz featured as molten chocolate in playful portraits (figures 1.3 and 1.4). Or imagine a longue durée, nonhuman-centered study of the many paths that go from coca leaves to cocaine. At present, I merely insinuate these readings, inviting others to turn them into convening agendas; in my mind, they yield themselves not just for a series of articles but for a series of volumes.60
Author photo.
For its part, “raw material” has distinct stories to tell, particularly through the articulation of historical and new materialisms. Grammar sometimes gives the erroneous impression that we are in charge of nature, as if we ourselves were not also subject to it—recall the active, not passive construction of the verb “to domesticate.” But literary language, which often challenges grammatical convention and explores the limits of the sayable, can contribute to reformulating our ways of thinking about these matters and potentially lead us to reconceive our place among nonhumans. Consequently, theory stands to benefit from the kind of critical exercise I have put forward in this chapter. For one, appreciating the rich language of transcultural materiality developed by the likes of Rivera and Magnus leads to questioning a certain U.S.- and Eurocentrism in this emerging theoretical movement. Texts from the region articulate a new materialist theory of literature, especially as it has undergone, in a short period of time, such a radical transformation in its regimes of materiality. This would supplement the prevailing practice of citing literary works epigraphically, to elucidate critical issues, without examining what is at stake in that operation. Reciprocally, Latin Americanism stands to benefit in more ways than one. This includes stylistics, as literary figuration operates differently when regarded through the lens of nonhuman agency: an appreciation of Rivera’s over-the-top language changes when one fully realizes the nonancillary role of nature in his writing. This is yet another reason to tell in cultural studies, with a nonexceptionalist Latin American emphasis, the material revolution of the century.
But before any such developments can occur, it is necessary to lay more groundwork in transcultural materialism. I now return to that task: first, by further characterizing the contributions from the above discussion of Rivera and Magnus and, second, by briefly discussing Marx’s notion of raw material in order to elaborate on the theoretical import of my findings. Rivera, like Ortiz, but in a more dramatic register, throws us into the task of reassessing human rapport to things by seizing the turning points that made it into what it presently is. As a society, there are many ways in which the awareness of history leads to certain negotiations in the present. Former colonial powers face backlash from the citizens of their former colonies when they ask of them tourist visas, thereby suspending a long-standing, if often painful, bond. (This was the case when Spain, after joining the European Union, required visas for several Spanish American nations.) Affirmative action in the United States is informed by the knowledge that those descended from the formerly enslaved and disempowered do not have the same opportunities as others. The past is nowhere, someone could say, and nothing that happened centuries ago should matter in that way. I disagree, obviously, and think we ought to expand the operability of history, so to speak, to turning points in human and nonhuman history. Literature contributes plenty to the heuristics of this proposal, as it has always done for politics in an exclusively human sense.
Simply put, if historicism is the belief that history is the greatest determinant of human affairs, then this, I contend, is Magnus’s framework, however idiosyncratically he may subscribe to it. Unlike Ortiz, who seeks elucidation, Magnus confounds with palpable delight. He unsettles a past that mainstream thinking takes as either solved and overcome, or enduringly problematic in “familiar” ways only (the case of extermination). At the time he writes, confounding may be as important a contribution as elucidating was in Ortiz’s time. Magnus’s affinities lie closer to Antonio José Ponte, whose Cuban ruminations on food I analyzed in the introduction. The Argentine’s frequent allusions to Nazism and extermination, some more explicit than others, suggest in the final analysis a concern about their hollowed-out place in the daily life of disaffected, purportedly ahistorical subjects. At the same time, Muñecas rejects the humanist orientation of historicism. The novel, evidently, is not only about human history but also about the evolution of androids, which it describes in a gothic register, with fascination and fear. It invites us to imagine an anthropodecentric historicism, which is, in my mind, one of the essential traits of transcultural materialism. Jargon aside, the task is to think of the past through the prism of things.
How does this all square with Marxism? As is well known, Marx founds a branch of historicism that eschews the Hegelian unfoldings of the Spirit, focusing instead on economic—in this sense, material—processes. It is also a markedly anthropocentric approach. Capital defines “raw material” by opposition to Nature, in a passage worth citing at length:
All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature, such as fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins. If, on the other hand, the object of labour has, so to speak, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material. For example, ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is an object of labour [Arbeitsgegenstand], but not every object of labour is raw material; the object of labour counts as raw material only when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labour.61
In the examples above, while the Amazon forest itself would not qualify as raw material, the floating rubber ball would: it has already been transformed by means of (human) labor. The new materialist might retort that nature does not “spontaneously provide” in the first place: from an ecological perspective, because taking something from its environment is not without consequence; in terms of coevolution, because this taking does not happen once, or over the course of a generation, but over many. Following Michael Pollan, one could say that “the timber which we fell in the virgin forest” evolves, as do we, in this iterated operation over time. The startling thing about Marx’s concept is that it seems to reify what it seeks to criticize, with a deft portmanteau: Arbeitsgegenstand. There is something problematic in this process that he is trying to get at, which is the accumulation of surplus value. This happens when the capitalist treats labor as just another resource, on a par with ores and fish, and then does not remunerate laborers proportionally to their contribution to a finished product, which can itself become raw material for a more complex and profitable product. In Marx’s words, “Whenever products enter as means of production into new labour processes, they lose their character of being products and function only as objective factors contributing to the overall process.”62 (Think of the makers of tiny cameras for the iPhone and their labor next to the minerals extracted to make them.) And yet his deployment of this suspect notion of raw material, arguably, creates the problem at the outset.
The exploitation of workers is the issue that eclipses all others. This is fine, as no nineteenth-century Western thinker, not even one as visionary as Marx, should be held to the standards of the ecological thought of our day. However, it is troubling that Marx is leveraging his argument for workers on the separation of man and nature. The life of the commodity has begun, never mind that whatever the product is, it will have to be disposed of, becoming waste that may decompose in a few years or hundreds. In the vast continuum of nature-culture, the product, and its laborers, are but a snippet. And yet it would be callous to cite a sub specie aeternitatis perspective to neglect those exploited over a single, precious human lifespan. What Marx could have done was somehow extend the notion of exploitation to nature itself, as Rivera does, not predicate it on the basis that workers are being treated as nature. In a thinker who values process over product, dialectics over axiomatics, this origin story of value is rather questionable. But what are we critics to do, throw out the baby with the bathwater? This is what Latour would advocate in We Have Never Been Modern, as much a break with Marxism as a bolstering of ecological thinking. Transcultural materialism offers a different answer, which is preserving the dialectics while suspending the anthropocentrism.
For a case in point, consider the example Marx gives a few lines below those just quoted: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”63 It is startling to think that bees are Pollan’s motif as well, with a very different emphasis. What worries Marx, and rightly so, is that, unlike the bee, the laborer has to subordinate his will to a result that only exists in his imagination. It is one that, of course, is not his own: Marx cares more about the workers who follow the architect’s blueprints than about the architect who, presumably, sketches them more freely. Pollan’s cheerful image of the human bumblebee implies artisanal production, not factory-grade apiaries. Coevolution with bees and certain plants has, for the most part in human history, been done at an ecologically sound scale. Today, the mass extinction of bees is all but around the corner, inextricably linked to modern agricultural production. It is not just doomsayers but people of common sense who fear for the fate of our species when we depend on bees’ pollination (their “work”) for our sustenance. Marx’s focus on the subordination of human will is not wrong, but it is merely one part in a bigger process. That process does not start when humans take “what nature spontaneously provides,” as if we were separated from nature, but when they enforce such a separation in the first place. In language, they do so with terms such as “meat,” “raw material,” and so on. Whether bees have a will or not is beside the question. We do, for what it’s worth.
It exceeds the scope of this chapter, and of the present study, to explore that road not taken by Marx and to fully ground the notion of exploitation as it pertains to critical ecology. This will, in any case, require doing away with deceptive linguistic constructs like “raw material,” trading its myth of origin for alternative narratives of material change over time—something the chapters ahead will provide. It also requires trading an abstract notion such as “labor” for actual laborers who are part of nature, or exchanging an idea such as “product” for objects that, in one way or another, result from nature and will return to it too, like discarded silicone sex dolls. Reading as if in the presence of things with a history contributes to these tasks.