Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and The Literatures Of Extraction In Contemporary Latin America

What can literature tell us about human interactions with such basic, enduring nonhumans as soil or dirt? Or elementary particles? I have already discussed how transcultural materialist narratives transcend their here and now by decades or centuries. Recall Ortiz on precolonial tobacco growing, Ponte on the foods of yore, Rivera on whispering old trees, and so on. But to write about, say, the desert is of a different order of magnitude. Here narratives, in one way or another, must hint at a time before narrative and mankind. That distant past is a site of contestation and a matrix of cultural meaning, as sources as diverse as the book of Genesis, the Theory of the Species or the big bang theory illustrate. Accounts of the distant past—religious, secular, scientific—are at the crux of it all. As I will show, literary accounts make distinct contributions to how we frame that past and appraise those things available to us today, such as volcanoes or sunlight, that bear witness to it.

My main goal in this chapter is to demonstrate something that may at first sound counterintuitive. In keeping with the integration of historical and new materialisms that has structured my argument so far, I will first examine the political dimension of something as seemingly impervious to human affairs as the desert. The desert is a void: a radical absence of polis and demos, and thus seemingly alien to politics or to political systems like democracy. But it is also a void that can be filled symbolically, with meaning, and demographically, with people. The egregious campaign to exterminate or corner indigenous populations in Patagonia (1878–1885) was precisely called the “Conquest of the Desert.”1 In North America, similar coinages include “no-man’s-land” and, of course, the “Far West.” The South American phrase also communicates a bloodless, all-but-peaceful settlement, when in fact it was very much the opposite. Undemocratic practices capitalized on the desert as imaginary and physical space, subordinating not just men but nature itself. Meanwhile, the Cold War revolved around harnessing the power of radioactive materials that take thousands of years more than garbage to decompose; scores of books and films address this. These “conquests” of the desert and of uranium are both instances of extractivism cutting across the human-nonhuman divide and leaving its imprint on both nature and culture.

Today, there are significant, alarming echoes of these struggles. New mining operations are taking place all over South America, displacing peoples and threatening ecosystems. Driven by digital technologies, notably the smartphone—discussed in chapter 5—there is a forceful push to extract lithium, cadmium, and other minerals from remote locations in Colombia, Bolivia, Patagonia, and elsewhere. In the colloquial terms of one firsthand account, “With these new mining techniques it is like, now you see a mountain, now you don’t.” Comparisons with slicing open a fruit are not uncommon. Such developments defy the age-old notion, which was already receding in antiquity but never as quickly, that nature is an obstacle to human ingenuity. (As a case in point, China has built a high-speed train over permafrost; fantasies of geo-engineering become fact.) In order to understand literature’s contribution to our understanding of such unfathomable scales, I’ll examine the Bolivian Blanca Wiethüchter’s short novel El jardín de Nora (1998) in conversation with Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, among other sources. The fascinating contradiction that underwrites this remarkable work is between the pressing needs of the present and the very long lithic history of the world. It is a dialectics I now turn to explicate, for it generates an alternative appraisal of the role of our species within the geological realm—and beyond it, as a novella by César Aira, El té de Dios (2010), thematizing the big bang and quantum particles, playfully makes clear.

Article 255 of the Bolivian constitution establishes harmony with nature and the nonprivatization of biodiversity as preconditions for subscribing to international treaties, while Law 71, promulgated in 2010, goes further by granting juridical personhood to Mother Earth. We read the following in article 5 of the latter: “For effects of the protection and administration of its rights, Mother Earth is considered a collective subject of public interest.”2 The language used eschews the familiar terminology of Roman law, and leaves room to speculate whether a “collective subject” differs from a “juridical person”—namely, a legal fiction that extends the rights and obligations of “natural persons” (i.e., individual human beings) to other entities, such as corporations. The mismatch is arguably purposeful, for Bolivia has been charting for itself a path that seeks to break with Western tradition. One example is the adoption of el reloj del sur on the facade of Congress (figure 2.1). It runs counterclockwise, with the numbers 11 and 10 where 1 and 2 usually are, as if clocks, those visual representation of the rotation of Earth, had been modeled on the exposure to the sun in the Southern Hemisphere.

Literally a change of axis, this contrarian ethos is also present in the peculiar frame of rights accorded to nature. One cannot straightforwardly assume that “collective subjectivity” is indeed juridical personhood, despite the obvious nod to that legal notion. But scratch the surface of the palimpsest and Roman law is there. Similarly, the hands in the southern watch may rotate in the opposite direction, but they are still on a dial. Both are gestures of decolonization: of law and of time. Both meet real obstacles, in logic and in custom. Nature can have rights, but can it have obligations? Can an entire nation, indeed a hemisphere, unlearn how to look at a watch? To be sure, these are open questions, for the Bolivian political process, with its many supporters and not a few detractors, is still unfolding. It is too early to say whether its defiance of conventional logic will result in a different axiomatics. The ultimately arbitrary constitutive power that emerges from a phrase like “We, the people” could conceivably emerge from an assemblage of human and nonhuman: “We, the human collective embedded in nature,” say. At best, we witness the rebirth of the modern state; at worst, mere sloganeering. If the convoluted history of Bolivia is any indication, these gestures might not lead to lasting institutions—one decade old is “young” for a constitution. Be that as it may, they provide a valuable thought experiment and powerful heuristic device.

Crucially, the law enshrines the rights of “Mother Nature,” not nature tout court. Article 3 defines it as the “dynamic living system composed by the indivisible community of all living systems and living beings, interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, that share a common destiny.”3 One line down, with an ambiguous use of passive voice that might worry legal scholars, the article notes, as if clarifying, “Mother Earth is regarded as sacred by the worldviews of the originary indigenous campesino nations and peoples.”⁴ Three features are especially noteworthy. These are the understanding of the state as enforcer of ecological balance; the reliance on broadly defined custom and on ancestral religious beliefs as sources of legitimacy; and the emphasis on teleology: it is the common destiny of living beings and their systems of sustenance that justifies legislation. The thrust is to decolonize language. “Mother Nature” debunks “nature,” which separates subjects from objects, as if trees, rivers, and sky were merely props for human affairs. Amerindian epistemologies, as Bruce Albert observes, do not take for granted the separations of human and nature, and subject and object, that sit at the cornerstone of Western, analytic thought.⁵ Briefly put, there are two movements here: unsettling core principles in law and language, and then seeking to found new ones inspired by alternative traditions. Blanca Wiethüchter’s writing anticipates aspects of both of these developments.

A beloved poet mostly unknown outside Bolivia, Wiethüchter produced only one novel. From its title onward, El jardín de Nora binds womb and earth. Etymologically, the name “Nora” is related to honor. Honorable Nora’s breasts swell as holes break open the ground of her beloved garden. As I see it, the book is a becoming Pachamama. The plotline is simple, at first sight, and can be summarized in a few words: the earth prevails over Nora, wife of Franz, who hires an Aymara gardener to grow an Austrian garden in the highlands of Bolivia. At the onset, the gardener rushes in to share the troubling news which he thinks, we learn from indirect monologue, would “make her die from sorrow” and “bring pain to her heart.”6 “¡Señora, a ver, ven; a ver, ven!” he demands, in a phrase that denotes deference, familiarity, and genuine affliction, with the Spanish syntax of many plurilingual speakers from the altiplano—roughly, “See, to see, come, Madame; to see, come!”⁷ Nora dallies, building suspense; it is the first of many postponements in the novella. Despite the bad feeling she’s been having in her gut, she asks the man to wait while she finishes starching her husband’s shirt “with infinite care,” like “a loving present.”⁸ Franz only has three in the drawer, she muses in her own indirect monologue; the assessment heightens the tension between the inanity and seriousness of her task.

To appreciate the pregnant language the novel deploys, it is worth citing at some length from before Nora seizes the damage. There is a significant gap between what is told and the act of telling. In straightforward language, someone would merely say: “The lady makes her gardener wait while she finishes up her chores; she has a bad feeling about the man’s beckoning, and she remembers her ailments.” What follows says as much, and yet so much more, and not just at the level of descriptive detail:

She took another while before getting going, waiting to feel the rumble in her chest, that murmur that was pestering her for years now…since the day she decided to force the soil to produce a garden as if in Vienna. She kept the gardener in oblivion, self-absorbed, took the iron once again, dipped her thumb, index finger and middle finger in the cold water to mechanically spray it over non-existing clothes, until the fizzing of water on the hot surface of the iron awoke her from her daydream, but without the rumble in her chest…in the garden of her chest, “who could deny the authority of a doctor, after so many exams?” she had returned home, knowing that what happened had nothing to do with nerves but with a way of in which things express themselves, Franz, those things one does not talk about. [My emphasis]⁹

These are very long sentences, even for a Latin American tradition accustomed to baroque feats of subordination and coordination. Language here elucidates as much as it obfuscates: it gives, and it withholds. Paraphrase cannot replace it without sacrificing its qualities, particularly its remarkable concretion, which yields to manifold interpretation. Nonetheless, observe the incantation quality of the syntax; the very succinct and effective characterization; the flashbacks; the combination of dialogue and indirect monologue; and especially the thought-provoking turns of phrase I have emphasized above. To “force the earth,” “retain the gardener in oblivion,” hold “a garden [huerta] in the chest,” or have “things express themselves” transcend poetic license: the passage seeks to sublate the oppositions between nature and culture, subject and object. Instead of enforcing these pillars of Cartesian rationality, Wiethüchter undoes them. This happens both at the level of the phenomena described and in the language upon which it is predicated. On the one hand, there is the sinister gravitation of chest and garden; on the other, a grammatical and semantic bending of the rules. That an Austrian rose garden does not belong in the altiplano is as much a cultural as an ecological statement. Moreover, it is a revelation that must be experienced through the body, and yet is always incomplete.

Numerous interpretative possibilities compound with the deft allusion to the biblical motif of paradise lost. Some references are straightforward: the cover of the book’s first—and for many years only—edition features Raphael’s Adam and Eve; at one point, Nora and Franz flip through the pages of a coffee-table book with images of Dürer’s Adam and Cranach’s Eve, before pausing, with a metanarrative wink, on Raphael’s couple.10 Yet subtle cues frame the relationship of Nora and the unnamed “jardinero aymara” in such a way that, at times, this bearer of bad news resembles the serpent that disrupts Eden, or rather the angel that ejects the sinner couple, or even the god (real owner) that created it all in the first place. The very denomination of aymara is an intromission of Franz’s voice within Nora’s own interior monologue; the husband, a vigorous young patriarch, is “always on the look for traces of indigenous ethnicity.”¹¹ Conversely, in the gardener’s mind, we read, “perhaps” he does not call her señora but qh’ara—white or blond—or gringa, or finally just señora.¹² The narrative voice suspends its own certainty over such matters, representing a situation where the burden of ethnic determinism happens in both directions, if asymmetrically. Nora’s thrust to find paradise anew, the foundational narrative of colonization, fails to meet a tabula rasa either in the land or in the mind of the would-be colonized.

Fittingly, the storyline cultivates and then distorts allegorical expectations: we learn that the couple has children, who are at one point described as an “apple of discord”—so much for trying to map the novella onto the book of Genesis.13 Instead of an enticing, animalized Satan, there is the premonition of a great Evil that makes Nora’s breasts swell and its correlate in the ground under her feet: huecos, that is, voids or holes.¹⁴ They advance relentlessly, a negative growth punctuated with alliteration and musicality: “She stared stunned at the not being of Nothingness that now took the place of the rosebush” (my emphasis).¹⁵ To Wiethüchter’s credit, this double negation comes across less as philosophical treatise than as anguished lament. It inspired critic Marcelo Villena Alvarado to describe the title character as an “un-Penelope,” the negation of a negation.¹⁶

Even Evil, which Thomas Aquinas famously theorized as the absence of the good, is less important as a plot device than appears at first sight.¹⁷ Initially, it serves to give the story its gothic, powerful thrust. But ultimately there is no one to blame for two phenomena that are mysteriously of a piece: Nora’s apparent fertility (although her milk is sour) and the land’s apparent infertility (although native weeds do grow). They are connected not through the familiar conventions of fantastic literature or of lo real maravilloso (magical realism), but through a narrative language that enacts human-nonhuman transformation: I have been calling this transcultural materialism. What underlies is a clash of temporalities: the nine months of a human pregnancy, the several-years lifespan of a garden, the slowly accruing but suddenly manifest temporality of erosion, the novel’s secret protagonist. The story of the earth is not easily told in a readily comprehensible scale. As previously noted, recourse to sources like the book of Genesis is one theocentric—and, vicariously, anthropocentric—attempt to do so. Meanwhile, ecological developments are not easy to communicate, which is one of the reasons why global warming deniers abound. (They are fewer in the high Andes, where snow peaks patently recede year after year.) It is not true that nature exists as some kind of setting for man’s great story. However, our narratives make that falsity verisimilar: Paul Bunyan comes to mind. Meanwhile, in a mouthful, the “human-nonhuman continuum” is real. Wiethüchter’s juxtaposed temporalities confer on it a much more poetic language and an elusive narrative quality: verisimilitude.

Tim Morton has grappled with similar issues with his notion of “hyperobjects”—namely, “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”18 Time: consider how even a millionth of a gram of radium-226 will be around for thousands of years. Space: try to “picture” the solar system. The human eye (or any other eye, for that matter) only gets to see pieces of a hyperobject, if anything at all, but its effects are unequivocal. Hyperobjects contribute to our thinking in a number of ways. They force us out of anthropocentrism, in particular out of correlationism: a form of circular reasoning that assumes that all there is to think about is what is available to human cognition in the first place. This might have, Morton asserts in passing, unaware of new Bolivian subjectivities, political consequences. “Hyperobjects have dispensed with two hundred years of careful correlationist calibration. The panic and denial and right-wing absurdity about global warming are understandable. Hyperobjects pose numerous threats to individualism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, you name it. Possibly even capitalism itself.”¹⁹ The Bolivian legal framework, predicated on the juridical legitimacy of Pachamama, a distinctly culturally encoded hyperobject, is an example of the latter. Retroactively, Wiethüchter contributes to this task. Her textured language upends the subject-object divide that simple, declarative sentences so often and unreflectively reinforce.

As Morton asserts, hyperobjects make evident the impossibility of a metalanguage “that could account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them”; instead, intimate impressions are “footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark—that is, me. I become (and so do you) a litmus test of the time of hyperobjects.”²⁰ One such litmus test is Nora’s interior monologue. That she is affected by earth is a truism; that this elemental truth comes across as verisimilar is not—hence her unhinged lyricism. Tellingly, Morton speculates that what is known as a “schizophrenic defense” in psychotic episodes could extend to our general relationship to things: we enforce a distance with things in language and in thinking at large to ward off their disquieting proximity. In literary terms, this becomes the familiar motif of the topsy-turvy world: when Nora sees a doctor about the swelling of her breasts and meets his patronizing dismissal (“Es cuestión de nervios, señora”), the madwoman is in fact the sage. Moreover, El jardín de Nora would conform to some of the traits of what Morton describes as hyperobjective art. His quirky examples include the guitar riffs of My Bloody Valentine, which literally make the chest vibrate. In the Bolivian author, there is the representation of one such bodily reaction to/within nature, but also a humming, musical writing style that readers, in turn, internalize. Hyperobjects are “more than a little demonic,” says the critic; meanwhile, evil holes spring up in the novelist’s garden.²¹ Less aesthetic choice than representational imperative, the gothic register of the novella serves a greater purpose of making verisimilar, and to some extent graspable, the temporality of hyperobjects.

I must tread lightly here, for the goal is not to “apply” Morton, a metropolitan theorist after all, to a literary phenomenon that belongs within an alternative genealogy, traced throughout this book, of Latin American transcultural materialism. Still, there are many instances of agreement and of complementarity. If, pressing Morton’s point, one could say that the only way out of correlationism is through schizophrenia, then Wiethüchter’s character would enact and embody this. We read the following: “The hole, more than a yell, seemed to her a diabolical wretched smile in the harmonious and luminous serenity of grass, green leaves and assorted flowers.”22 Once again, Wiethüchter resorts here to poetry, the medium of most of her published works, to explore the limits of her protagonist’s sanity. Either we let objects speak to us, she could be saying, or we will fail to understand. Of course, talking things are the fodder that Disney peddles, for children no less. The difference is that those cartoonish characters are safely encapsulated in fantasy, while in transcultural materialism, becoming nonhuman appears as a verisimilar, disturbing possibility—death, the dissolution of a body into its constitutive elements, is just that. Nora’s uncanny children are themselves, like holes in her chest, the passageway into that realization.

Wiethüchter’s novel complements Morton’s critical insight in two important, interconnected ways: her attention to cultural specificity and her exploration of the boundaries of the sayable. A subplot of muteness weaves into the main plot of erosion; their eventual juxtaposition leads to the story’s moment of crisis and brings us back to the present of the spoiled garden. After the gardener beckons Nora to see the damage, there is a flashback to a failed rite of passage, in which the couple try to “integrate” their oldest son with the garden. Instead, the child pricks his finger on a rose stem and his blood falls on soil; it is from that moment on that the children become mute and Nora’s breasts begin to swell. Clearly, this is about imbuing him with European culture: they present him with a wooden doll, a secular ornament out of place in the Andean landscape and worldview. (A garden gnome is but a very faint trace of a more enchanted relationship to nature.) But the scene is also a play on pago a la tierra, that is, making offerings to Pachamama or to sacred mountains—achachilas in Aymara and apus in Quecha.23 Pago a la tierra is an act of reciprocity, a tit for tat: in exchange for an offering, often of coca leaves, the earth will deliver a favorable crop. But it can also chastise—in this case, with muteness and phantom pregnancy. Unmanicured, Pachamama—a hyperobject always already enmeshed in a culture, a legal system, and an ethos—rejects the cultural and ecological imprint of the garden. Wiethüchter does not so much represent cultural clash with gaping holes under the rose bushes, pain in Nora’s chest, or a child’s Babelian drift across languages when he stutters, “Kala…piedra…Stein.”²⁴ Rather, these elements themselves are part of a clash that involves both nature and culture.

Meanwhile Morton, the posthumanist, despite engaging works of art, seems to want to get culture, that messy concept, out of the way. He does so in order to situate everyone in a shared plain of indexicality—hence his insistence on the “real” world. True, there is a planet we live on and share, whether we like it or not. It is real, out there, and beyond the hold of correlationism. But is culture any less real? “Earth” itself, as a concept, is always already culturally coded. Seeing “it,” speaking about “it,” is already an act of framing with decisive political, and indeed life-changing, implications. There are resources in culture and in language, her writing shows, that allow one to push the limits of correlationism. This is not just to make the unthinkable thinkable, in an ever-expanding quest for knowledge, but the opposite: to make the thinkable unthinkable—that is, to bring down a fundamentally flawed epistemological edifice. Wiethüchter knows this to be the case and makes it the core principle of her writing.

Consequently, the plotlines of secularity versus animism or Christianism versus Andean cosmology tell only part of the story: there is also the undoing of language in the face of geological might and the colonial power struggles embedded in everyday vernacular. Villena Alvarado approximates this treatment of language, with less emphasis on its political implications, when he notes that in the novel, as in the cognate long poem Ítaca (2000), Wiethüchter valorizes negativity: absence rather than presence, Penelope’s undoing rather than her weaving—as he puts it, “the generative, motherly dimension of that absence.”²⁵ Indeed, El jardín de Nora captures a different “politics of nature” through this negative poetics. Again, with Villena Alvarado, the Bolivian novelist and poet would present the “textualization of a social conflict”²⁶—a conflict, one may add, that involves nature as well.

This is useful to better situate Wiethüchter’s contribution. Too culturalist for a squarely posthumanist account, she is also too materialist for a humanist and not culturalist enough for a post- or decolonialist narrative, as I will show in a moment. But first, note how this speaks to the mediatory nature of transcultural materialism at large: the dwelling in narrative and literary language as a space for elucidation and contradiction, where the material and historical come to bear upon each other. The novel never presents an essentialist conflict along the lines of Aymara culture versus European culture, but neither does it leave out cues that invariably invoke such entelechies. If anything, one could talk of an Andean nature-culture that overlaps and enters into conflict with its European counterpart, in a fluid exchange that seems to suspend the principle of noncontradiction. There is both something one can objectively call “nature” and also a way in which nature is always constructed; a real thing that can, in one breath and under the spell of literary language, also be a cultural phenomenon. Aporetic as this path undoubtedly is, it is also able to narrate conflict as conflict, and not domesticate it under essentialist humanist notions like the “clash of cultures” or tautological posthumanist pleas to seize the reality of the real world.

For a humanist account of the garden, my Stanford colleague Robert Harrison’s book-length essay Gardens: An Essay into the Human Condition is exemplary. There, as the title suggests, the critic shows how, across a vast swath of mostly Western cultures, gardens exemplify notions of mortality, order, and power.27 His argument is eminently anthropocentric: it is fair to say that gardens, as much attention as they receive in his study, are ultimately a stage and a catalyst for cultural values and spiritual needs. Despite the obvious differences between this school of thought and my own, Harrison makes an important point that one could paraphrase as “Tell me how you garden, and I’ll tell you who you are.” He does so in the interest of showing some purportedly universal truths about gardens, but nonetheless he does so, dialectically, by looking at gardens across cultures. If we weigh differently the dialectic of the universal and the particular, and focus on particularity where Harrison prefers universality, we will find valuable insights for the present discussion. Moreover, in a movement that is more sympathetic to posthumanism, Harrison does confer agentic qualities to gardens, which indeed have an effect on humans and their ideas about beauty, balance, and so on. One can think of Nora when Harrison asserts, for instance, that “the garden has provided sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult of history.”²⁸ Is this not an adequate description of what the Austrian immigrant couple was looking for? Further aligning himself with an aestheticist, humanist ideal, Harrison will go on to claim that gardens are about the cultivation of civic virtues against the destructive forces of history.

Wiethüchter has a more favorable view of history. Her novel shares the aesthetic drive, no doubt, but it goes toward history, not away from it. It is difficult to miss the dialectic of master and slave that serves as the backdrop of Nora’s relationship with her Aymara gardener. Meanwhile, in Gardens, there are no workers with muddied clothes but rather high-minded garden designers. The point is not to criticize a thorough study, done within a certain frame of reference, but rather to use it as a point of comparison. Gardens indeed cultivate civic virtues, but they also impose them. One needs just think of settlement landscaping in early modern North and South America, where transplanting an Old World garden entailed chasing natives off their land.29 For her part, Wiethüchter, building on the Homeric tradition and the high art of poetry that humanists cultivate, subjects her garden to the forces of history. Terrible or not, they are there; no gardener can fence them out. In this way, the Bolivian poet and novelist illustrates an aspect of transcultural materialism: it pays keen attention to form, as traditional humanism has done, but also to form’s role within both a politics of nature and politics tout court. To understand the impact of this novel on our thinking it is relevant to appreciate its many clever formal elements—for instance, those involving changes in focalization building to a dramatic intromission by the narrative voice.³⁰ In this study, I engage for many a page in the laborious (humanist?) task of appreciation. But art for art’s sake is only part of the equation. If the language of transcultural materialism remediates nature-culture, then its aesthetic inquiry is an exercise in political ecology.

For this to be the case, however, we must pay attention to both nature and culture. The task is easier said than done. My impression is that when one is dealing with things of a geological magnitude, it is often easy to err on the side of nature, as if human agency, every day more powerful, were all contemplation (not a bad outcome, but a wishful starting point). Anything cultural or linguistic, let alone political, is bracketed by the sheer presence of Mountain. Conversely, when scale—relative size—brings us closer to the matter at hand, then nature is suspended, and Man and his will act in the void. In this example of all-or-nothing thinking, humans are either negligible or all-important, while the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is not easy to change ways of thinking, even when evidence to the contrary looks us in the face.

A case in point is an article by Elizabeth Monasterios, a milestone in the small but illuminating literature on Wiethüchter, which takes head-on the question of transculturation that has been a subtext of my book. In her otherwise valid critique of the notion, Monasterios pays insufficient attention to nature. There is nothing wrong with her analysis; rather, it results from the extrication of transculturation from botany that, as I discussed in the introduction, happened to this longstanding and always evolving concept once Rama and others discarded the abundant natural elements in Ortiz. She writes, “The catastrophic fulfillment of events anticipated twenty years ago by the Indian expert, who predicted the impossibility of planting roses where only kiswaras or kantutas could live, questions the success of that ‘cultural plasticity’ attributed to transculturation.”31 This might strike readers of Things with a History as counterintuitive. Recall the sequence of events: concerned about the garden, the settler couple summons a native expert—a descendant of the Uru people, per Franz’s ethnographic gaze—and he tells them in so many words that a Viennese rose garden will not grow there. Monasterios takes this as a sign that there is a limit to “transculturation,” but surely this only holds true if kiswaras and kantutas are symbols or allegories of Aymara culture and not, first of all, plants themselves, like sugarcane and tobacco are.

Explaining her use of the term, Monasterios describes Ortiz’s transculturation as a “twofold phenomenon, both cultural and economic,” when in fact, as I have been proposing, it is threefold: cultural, economic, and botanical.³² This view informs Monasterios’s reaction, as do Rama’s domestication of Ortiz’s constellar, interdisciplinary narrative in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside García Canclini’s celebration of hybridity in the postmodern 1990s.³³ If transculturation means appeasement in the name of an idealized cultural blend, then clearly it does not apply here. But ajiaco is no light stew; if you recall my earlier discussion of Ortiz’s essay: distinct elements do more than blend. And so, Monasterios goes on to note that when “los mudos” (the mutes) themselves grow a secret garden with native crops, this demonstrates that transculturation failed.³⁴ However, one could just as well say they got their mother’s green thumb, if only more successfully. So are Nora’s children a sign of the failure of transculturation or of its success? After all, babbling or not, they are acquiring the three languages: Aymara, Spanish, and German. And Wiethüchter, the second-generation immigrant author, is the mute child who broke silence and cultivates a garden of words.

In sum, while Monasterios is right in pointing out that El jardín de Nora challenges what circulated as transculturation in the early 2000s, her limited consideration of the role of nature in Ortiz’s original formulation, and her inherited emphasis on the alleged conciliatory “products” of transculturation rather than its process, leads her to the above contradiction. Still, there is much in her findings to elaborate upon for our current critical horizon. In her words, El jardín de Nora is a narrative “whose inner logic has the capacity to destabilize our system of meaning.”35 I couldn’t agree more with this description, reminiscent of Foucault’s hysterical laughter upon reading Borges, who reportedly “shattered the familiar landscapes of [Foucault’s] thought.”³⁶ Because Monasterios writes under the aegis of postcolonialism and subalternism, such a destabilization or shattering occurs in two ways: by revealing the enduring presence of the postcolonial wound and by showing how, in cultural syncretism, there are winners and losers. In other words, we cannot idealize hybridity à la García Canclini, because it is predicated on continuing hurt and injustice. These are all valid points, as is the observation, which she shares with Villena Alvarado, that the novel lays bridges with Andean epistemologies.³⁷

It appears, then, that El jardín de Nora, a case study for transcultural materialism, converses with, yet is not circumscribed to, humanism, posthumanism, and postcolonialism. But what about decolonialism? What circulates under this moniker is active resistance against the colonial legacy, an attempt to rid the subject of its manifold burden—down to how to read the clock, as I began this section by noting.³⁸ Crucially, the decolonial project has become state doctrine in Bolivia. Its conservative critics may point out that five centuries cannot be erased, which is, as with utopias more generally, no reason not to try. Other critics worry that the ruling party, MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), concentrates power by ventriloquizing a lost past. I read this latter position between the lines of Bolivian critic’s Mary Carmen Molina’s appraisal of how the novel represents “continuous dissent.”³⁹ I started out by claiming that El jardín de Nora anticipates some of the political and juridical developments of later years. Molina, who lives in a present where to a significant extent these are a fait accompli, poses the following rhetorical question: “How does El jardín de Nora distinguish itself from the affirmation of the actualization of a new, complex, disperse, and multiple subject, without affirming the subalternity of Latin America’s contemporary cultural protagonists?”⁴⁰

By way of an answer, Molina give us her notion of continuous dissent, as if there is no state under which Wiethüchter could truly become a national author. Not only is her analysis antipatrimonial, but she follows Monasterios in pointing out the mismatch of Wiethüchter with major critical currents. To this list, long already, she adds Cornejo Polar (whom Monasterios had also mentioned briefly) and calibanismo. Leaving aside the fascinating intricacies of these cultural theories, what matters here is her inclusion of “nuevas subjetividades,” which alludes to the doctrine of President Evo Morales and the vice-president and chief ideologue Álvaro García Linera, who have held office since 2006. Theirs is a socialist, grassroots movement that, for the first time in Bolivia’s republican history, congregated, successfully and enduringly, the country’s multilingual indigenous majorities. In a strict sense, it coalesced a new political subject. If I read correctly between the lines of Molina’s argument, Wiethüchter would share the questions posed by MAS, although not necessarily its answers. These include questions about coexistence with Mother Nature, about creole and indigenous relations, about how to appraise the country’s living past, and about what new languages to forge to even formulate such questions in the first place. The novelist-poet would be at home on shaky ground, and not on the stately edifices built upon it. I agree, if not necessarily for political reasons, but because Wiethüchter, like other Latin American transcultural materialists, engages the past too thoroughly to bank the future on its repudiation.

This bears out in the novel’s ending. It could be seen as an anticipation of the decolonial triumph of MAS, as a representation of the postcolonial wound, as a humanist twist on the motif of paradise lost, and as a posthuman rendering of hyperobjectivity. While each of these readings has a grain of truth, there is a supplemental element that only transcultural materialism can capture. A new teacher has been working with the mutes, and the stage is set for show and tell. Moët Chandon and beluga caviar await. The firstborn rises to the challenge: “The eldest stood up: a slight rattle, followed by a sort of hiccup that swallowed air as if to gain momentum as he closed his lips and let out a strange whistling sound like bbbbb. He breathed in and—bbbbbbaabbáa…And closing his lips—Mmmammá…Everyone applauded.”41

It is a scene of Lacanian violence: the rupturing of silence into language, of the real into the symbolic. After all, the force of the significant has been present from the author’s Germanic last name onward; autobiographically, it evokes an actual immigrant mother.42 In this way, author, narrator, and poetic voice all take the place of the mute child who has to puncture her way into language. Lacan meets ecofeminism, for this critique of the patriarchal order has obvious ecological ramifications. Recall how Nora dwells in her symptom, still ironing shirts as the world unravels: it was an act of protest folded into one of obedience. In this final scene it appears that the mutes, those savages, are finally domesticated. But then, in one deft movement, an excited Franz urges the rest of the children to follow the lead of the stuttering firstborn. Immediately, Nora’s breasts swell violently, and a grumbling, black, winged sound (“un rumor negro y alado”) grows. The reader cannot quite place the sound, which may come from the mutes’ throats, from Nora’s chest, or indeed, from the surroundings. The protagonist is silent. But when the husband asks the kids what else they have learned to say, she senses that “the old dam is broken” (in her breasts? in the garden?) and at the same time ten “coarse and rancorous” mouths open to say:

¡Wwwhoooooole! [¡Bbbbuuuueeeeccccoooooo!]

The one that opened up right there, abysmal and deep, that opened up with a wind of voices as if a throat that hurled over to the bottom, uncovering the negated fluids of a hidden garden, uncovered with a multitude of rocks like dry fruits, now precipitated over Franz and Nora, submerging them with no chance of talking into that black hole, cleared by those ten mouths unmouthed, surely designed for something else.⁴³

The heart-wrenching yell of the mutes pierces with typographic emphasis the surface of a text that has been so meticulously cared for. In this powerful way, the themes that Wiethüchter has been building from the start all come together. The distant flapping of wings—a modernista trope—foresaw the plunge ahead. Nowhere else does her language evidence so much agentic force, generating in the reader an effect that potentiates what is being told. Squarely at odds with mere reporting, the text produces what it describes; the reader is thrust into a void, experiencing vicarious vertigo. The children speak with “viento de voces,” a wind of voices. In the very tight economy of the text, alliteration makes plausible the uncanny idea that the children’s yell has literally broken ground, founding anew. The hole is akin to a throat, rocks to dried fruits and, understatedly, to breasts; the swallowing earth motif is reminiscent of novela de la tierra, the useful if equivocal designation for works such as Rivera’s La vorágine, discussed above, but also the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926) and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929).44 But unlike in those works, the recurrent vagina dentata motif is not vilified but vindicated. Nora’s “garden” is genitalia within, rather than isolated from, the body and the continuum of life. A final, nonchalant allusion to the mouths’ design suggests mammalian sucking and the absent designer: God.

The humanist has his field day: this is paradise regained. The posthumanist sees an illustration of the force of the geological, the post- and decolonialist of the imperial legacy and its overcoming. But in various ways and to different extents, all of these approaches instrumentalize language and narrative; they share a penchant for grand theory that ultimately dispenses with the literary event. They do not let the text speak. By contrast, in transcultural materialism method and narrative converge. Art makes the stone stony, as Shklovsky’s previously cited phrase would have it.⁴⁵ Wiethüchter is all about making the hole holy, with every implication: making the void perceptible, rendering it sacred, giving expression to the force of the signifier through the playful lucidity of a pun.⁴⁶ Suitably, one of the phrases the mute overhear during the cure that a traditional healer practices on them is none other than achachilas phutunku, the protective spirit of the hole.⁴⁷ Although a roman-à-clef reading would do well in highlighting this phrase, rather than a secret message, it reveals the force of buried revelation that underwrites the entire novel.

Humor makes a noteworthy, late appearance: the hyperbole of Moët Chandon and beluga caviar in the Bolivian highlands pokes fun at the archetypal European settler couple. There is something of the serious lightheartedness of Ortiz’s counterpoint also in El jardín de Nora. It isn’t quite the comedic, if mordant, dressing up of tobacco in fancy boxes or sugar’s passing as white. And yet this broken earth is laughing matter, in the way that the best of Borges can be. The pact of verisimilitude is also fracturing; the book ends much like a vignette from across the Andes, in the popular Chilean comic strip Condorito, in a “¡Plop!” (Franz would occupy the place of the perennial character who falls backward in astonishment, feet up in the air). See how the final denouement, immediately after the Bueco crisis, is purposefully absurd: “At the other side of the void, there was nothing. Phutunhuicu, said the mutes correctly when they learned to speak; Phutunhuicu, that in proper Aymara is phutunku and in proper Spanish, hole. But, well, no one understood.”⁴⁸

These are perplexing last lines for a book whose central conflict has been the overcoming of muteness. Matter-of-factly, the narrator flashes forward to a future when the children do speak and yet are not understood. That all this effort goes unheard is ironic, if not self-effacing, as the novel, unlike “the other side of the hole,” is not nothing—it exists. Equal parts comedic disappointment and rage, this ending peters out into farce, disavowing the artifice the novel has been up to this last hour. Again, the text foregrounds its own theatricality, as before with the mention of champagne and caviar. This rendering of colonialism is many times removed from convention—think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Having explored the limits of the sayable and of familiar allegories of paradise and hell, Wiethüchter brings readers back to the rough ground of an ongoing colonial history that plays out across the human-nonhuman continuum. It is a farce that may lead to laughter or to crying, but not to the comfort of anagnorisis. There is no final moment of recognition when true evil, as in that much different cartoon Scooby-Doo, is rid of its mask.

Negativity is crucial to counter the effects of affirmative subalterity. Wiethüchter advocates a vision of hybridity at odds with positive formulations of identity (or of hybridity as new identity), for these are prone to commodification and political manipulation. For present purposes, hybridity is not compromising or conciliatory, but rather “savage,” as Alberto Moreiras would call it in his seminal piece “Hybridity and Double-Consciousness.”49 Similarly, transcultural materialism ought to be measured more by what it problematizes than by what it solves. In this regard, it shares the familiar gesture of unmasking—arguably a philosophical revision of anagnorisis—common to many Marxist traditions. However, it does so in the negative, through literary language, binding the human and the nonhuman. Its form, then, is crucial, for it is in its deployment that this operation comes into its own. Supplementary to (post-) humanism and to (post/de-) colonialism, transcultural materialism recreates contradiction, rather than appease or hastily attempt to solve it. It does so in multiple registers, with both history and ecology in sight, exposing tensions beneath the surface.

Wiethüchter’s politics of the desert playfully subvert historical materialism, making room for suspicion but not for prescription. Master-slave dialectics gives way to housewife-gardener dialectics and, at one point, to the woman’s peculiar proxy rule over the household via the governess, “Frau Wunderlich” (German for whimsical or strange, possibly “Wonder Woman” by association). Wiethüchter—note the homophony once again—also transforms new materialism, whose emphasis on the autonomy of objects she takes, literalizing a metaphor, to heart. She refuses to get language and, alongside it, cultural specificity, out of the way. In this fashion, El jardín de Nora purports that these elements are always already part of the assemblage. Hyperobjects speak through literature too. This grounds the idea that, as short as human lifespans are in geological time, they matter. And matter they are, of course. A more transparent, less literary language would have failed at the task. There is a distinctive operation that literary form affords: aporetic exploration. Language can underscore its literariness to give voice to mute things. Literary language is a means and an end, subject and object, source and instrument of signification—if only we let it speak. A hermeneutics attuned to the performativity of language makes reading whole.

What to make, then, of the language of the law? Is Bolivia rendering Latour’s hypothetical Constitution a reality? Personhood, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro puts it, is a “phenomenological unity that is purely pronominal in kind applied to a real radical diversity.”50 The anthropologist-theorist writes with a certain man-jaguar from the pages of Guimarães Rosa in mind, brilliantly discussed by Gabriel Giorgi.⁵¹ Personhood, in what arguably amounts to the most avant-gardist and polemical decision of modern American jurisprudence, has been conferred to corporations.⁵² The conferral of juridical personhood to nature in the Bolivian constitution and its cognate laws may be at least in some degree aspirational (rather than functioning) components in a system of rule of law. But they are in any case important instruments of political economy: the secularization of a theological notion, Pachamama, is every bit as significant as the provisions against privatization. The water wars of 2000 loom large on the horizon. To say that water is sacred amounts to saying it cannot be privatized—neither can natural gas, which banks the Bolivian state and, by proxy, until not long ago, the Argentine and the Venezuelan states. In this way, Pachamama’s legal personhood is a line of defense against foreign powers. However, government-sanctioned mining operations, with new technologies and otherwise, continue to drill apus and scoop salt pits relentlessly.⁵³ As this section has shown, regardless of any affinity to the actual regimes and parties in power, the denaturalization of our discourse on nature, which they claim as their cause and which structures Wiethüchter’s fiction, extends the reach of transcultural materialism to geological time.

From the vastness of earth and the very wide timeframe of geology, Aira takes us to the smallness of subatomic particles and the even wider timeframe of quantum physics. Wiethüchter wrote relatively little and has received modest critical attention; Aira, on the other hand, is a prolific and avidly discussed writer, one who is likely to be critically examined even more in the years ahead. Of the works that throughout the present study I have posited as representative of transcultural materialism, Aira’s is the most idiosyncratic and, in a word, fun. It could be described as a plot-driven nonplot: a page-turner whose story, rather than build up to something meaningful, takes an absurd premise to its final, exponentially more absurd consequences. The cast of characters in this short and thought-provoking work are apes, an Ape King, God, and a particle. First published in 2010 as a slim, thirty-three-page standalone volume with a print run of two hundred by Mata-Mata, a minuscule publishing house in Guatemala, it later appeared as one of the short stories collected by the behemoth Spanish publisher Mondadori in Relatos reunidos (2013). Chris Andrews’s capacious English translation of the latter volume was titled The Musical Brain, and Other Stories; it was released by New Directions in 2015. From the periphery of the global literary market to a major node of the Spanish-language publishing world to a medium-sized, discerning venue in the preeminent language of World Literature, the text’s circulation has its own story to tell.⁵⁵ It is the story of a singularity—an unlikely event in contemporary culture. Meanwhile, the story that unfolds in its pages is a singularity in a different sense of the word—namely, that of physics. As I see it, its motley crew of characters provides a retelling of the foundational narrative of modern physics: the big bang.

Summary fails to do justice to the story, as the experience of reading it is all about not knowing exactly what is going on at any one moment. With that caveat, a one-sentence description could be “Apes are having a rowdy tea party to celebrate God’s birthday, until a subatomic particle interlopes and truly wreaks havoc.” Already the mind reels. The style is a cultivated parody of highbrow, peppered with faulty theological reasoning, which clashes in meaningful ways with the events narrated. Some episodes would not be out of place in an animated series for children.56 There are six chapters, indicated with roman numerals, and roughly four moments. First, the narrator dwells on exploring different aspects of the comically absurd premise. Then, there is a scene in which the Ape King, sitting in for God, tries to calm down the other apes who are, well, monkeying around. He winds up raising a bigger ruckus and abusing the others. Third, the particle crashes the party—literally and figuratively—creating even more chaos, splitting space into different planes as she (sic) passes through. Finally, the narrator reports that God retroactively finds an explanation for the origin of the particle, which for theological reasons had to always have been part of the divine plan, but tells no one.

Readers discover each of these elements only gradually, in carefully calibrated astonishment. The opening line sets the stage by combining a sententious style, reminiscent of sacred texts, with deadpan humor. It is worth citing it in the original and in the translation. Note how Andrews prefers to channel Aira’s ludic proliferation of meaning instead of trying to be faithful to his words in a literal sense. Compare the following: “According to an old and immutable tradition in the Universe, God celebrates His birthday with a magnificent and lavish Tea Party, to which only the apes are invited”; “Por una vieja e inmutable tradición del universo, Dios festeja Su cumpleaños con un suntuoso y bien provisto Té al que acuden como únicos invitados los monos.”⁵⁷

Making a nod to the ultraconservative grassroots movement known as the “Tea Party” was an opportunity not to be missed in an American translation. To the presumably mostly liberal, cultured readers of New Directions, the unexpected mention of apes at the end of the sentence would be doubly humorous—first with regard to Judeo-Christian sacred texts, parodized here through the use of capital letters to signify divinity; second with regard to the members of said political phenomenon, often portrayed as brutes. The translation charts its own path for interpretation; to the point that, as I will merely insinuate here, an American reader could read the entire short story as slapstick on the Tea Party. Aira would probably find that felicitous, though it surely never crossed his mind at the time of writing. However, I think he is more interested in apes as a way of showing the continuity of humans with nonhumans, rather than as the frontier that separates us from them. Apes, Donna Haraway writes in her eminent feminist critique of primatology and primate representation, have served humans as a means of othering.58 Among many case studies, she discusses fearful, towering King Kong, a figure that allows mankind to extricate itself from nature and incarnates inherited gender roles, colonial impositions, and race prejudices. Mindful of this pivotal role of apes in Western culture, Aira goes on to jovially speculate that perhaps apes were not so much invited to the celebration as much as humans were disinvited from it.

In that same spirit of transforming cultural references through wordplay and subverted expectations, Andrews puns with Tea Partiers. Multilingual puns were already present in the original: the title El té de Dios evokes Te Deum, the Latin title of the early Christian hymn of praise that starts with the words “Te Deum laudamus” (We praise thee, O God). This particular novelita, as Aira calls his numerous and predominantly short works of fiction, takes after an altar boy’s joke. So what effect could a text of this nature possibly have? It is not serious. It does not bring down American conservatives, vindicate apes, popularize quantum physics, or defy the Inquisition with anachronistic heresy. However, it is by virtue of not quite being serious that it produces many effects, whether by itself or in coordination with the rest of Aira’s unique oeuvre, which is written under the aegis of what he calls “the serious smile.” Some effects have to do with the subject of the book and others with the notion of literature itself; many exceed the scope of the present argument. As I now turn to show, in addition to intervening in religious and secular stories of origin, El té de Dios provides a model of how fiction acts.

What god do readers imagine? Aira is aware that divinity has many forms and is always culturally embedded—this is already a question for World Literature. The book, for it is fair to call it that in its original form, features in its Guatemalan edition an uncredited illustration that, to the uneducated Western eye, may at first glance look like Indian decor. When mainstream Western readers finish the book, they might choose to ignore the cover as an additional whim on the part of the author or editor. Or they might be puzzled and intrigued by the fact that, while so many things in the text seem to allude to a Judeo-Christian god, there on the cover is what appears to be a Hindu deity (figure 2.2).

As it turns out, the cover depicts Hanuman, the Monkey God, a popular character from the Ramayana who is Rama’s aid against the devil Ramana. A statuette of the epic hero stands approvingly in the background while he plays a chipliya.59 Hanuman is often portrayed in classical and modern Hindu iconography, and would be immediately recognizable to millions of people, but not to most of Aira’s readers. They would see here an image of the book’s tea party, say, of the Ape King calling other apes to order. It is a two-way mirror, which produces a different image when looked at from different vantage points—in this case, that of cultural expertise. Yet the image is also an enticement to speculation. Interestingly, at a time when World Literature writers often strive for immediate cross-cultural intelligibility, Aira prefers to harness mediation in order to multiply possible interpretations rather than find a one-size-fits-all account.⁶⁰ (Andrews gets this.) The Ape King only tangentially resembles a Hindu deity, as when he dreams about having a thousand hands to slap every guest at the same time.⁶¹ He is mostly a caricature of a fear-instilling Old Testament God, mixed perhaps with a heightened version of King Kong. God cannot make himself present at the party, readers learn through amusing aphorism, for that would entail his absence elsewhere. And so the appointed “Acting-God” Ape King, inebriated with power, relishes in exerting sovereign violence against the bodies of the other apes.

At this point, intertextual references juxtapose. Think of a different tea party gone awry, the one convened by Lewis Carroll’s memorable Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.⁶² At first, Carroll promises such a civilized gathering that even animals can partake, only to later use them to liberate the child from a regimented life. For his part, Aira gives us the Ape King, who is an exacerbated version of that dialectics of order and chaos. Suspense and disbelief peak and reach relief through cartoonish, hyperbolic violence:

Aggression quickly escalates, in a manner best captured with children’s literature and pop culture references. In a polysyndeton, we go from the benign buffoonery of a Mad Hatter dipping his pocket watch in tea, to the sadism of, say, Tom and Jerry: lemon-sprayed eyes and burned fingertips. Then we move to the perversity of the latter’s crasser avatars, The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy: candies are plugged into ear canals, marmalade into nostrils. The next step in this genre-bending passage is entirely off-color, the hysterical climax of a penetration sequence that would not be out of place in a racy stand-up comedy routine: silver spoons into anuses. An ellipsis follows, giving readers a chance to burst into laughter. To top things off, the narrator states matter-of-factly that “in the breaks” the Ape King gulps down tea, as if abusing others were his day job, yet this tea fuels his “causeless fury”—theological mumbo jumbo again. The icing on the cake, pun intended, is the phrase “There must be something in that tea.” It is none other than God’s tea. Surely, Aristotle never foresaw this objection to his argument: that perhaps what moves the unmoved mover is a natural stimulant.

Meanwhile, lemon juice, ready to burst from turgid cells at a moment’s notice, with no reliable connection to how vigorously the fruit is squeezed, is just the right material-semiotic reminder of the limits of domestication—in this case, of animals, nourishment, and appetite. The agency of a halved fruit can disrupt a codified ritual, turning the world on its head. (This suggests a reason for stretch wraps, which also capture seeds—civility in a membrane.) Aira is enlisting nonhumans in his tale, conferring them unusual forms of agency. The “original” (i.e., Western) “God’s birthday” is Christmas, an event that also convenes nonhumans, whether the star of Bethlehem or the donkey and ox who warm the baby with their breaths. For his part, Carroll punctuates his own mad tea party with this unsolved riddle: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The flat ontologist would reply: Why not? Aira, by going from apes to a subatomic particle, is equally invested in such continuities across the organic and the inorganic. The particle “glided through a meteorite of nickel and iron as a bird crosses the blue sky on a spring morning…. With the same oblivious fluidity, she passed through an atom. Or a sheet of paper, a flower, a boat, a dog, a brain, a hair.”64 This is taking the disruptive potential of the tea scene to a different level altogether. The new materialist in Aira appreciates, and fools around with, the connections between ravens, desks, apes, and atoms.

The historical materialist in Aira, however, involves a different, political dimension. It might strike one as surprising that quantum physics even have this aspect to it, had Wiethüchter not made the case for geology. What monkeys and tea have in common is that they both come from the Indian subcontinent, as Hanuman does. Britain’s tea parties were affirmations of imperial might. (Arguably, this made the original eighteenth-century coinage of the “Boston Tea Party,” in that other former British colony, all the more rhetorically effective.) In the twentieth century, laboratory research demanded the extraction of apes from India to Europe and North America. The more or less successful imposition of religious beliefs, textbook postcolonialism and plain common sense tells us, happened in the opposite direction. To an extent, Hinduism and the coexistence of apes and humans made Indians reluctant exporters of laboratory subjects. Moreover, the presence of monkeys themselves, Haraway notes, questioned the epistemological basis of the colonial enterprise: “Hardly always harmonious, the historical interaction of monkeys with people in India, in practical affairs of everyday life, makes cultural nonsense of the notion of primates as revealing the secret and primitive nature of ‘man.’”65 Contemporary India is no ecological utopia. Regardless, ape-man coexistence, which might lump together locals and animals in the colonial mind, further reinforcing hierarchy, suggests, in fact, a more horizontal relation among humans, be they colonizers or colonized, and apes. The Ape King could stand for “man” as much as for God, thereby questioning that triumphalist narrative in all its heteronormative, racist, speciesist, colonial glory.

It is telling of Aira’s guerrilla-style (gorilla-style?) publication strategy that the Chilean first edition, a fourteen-page affair which appeared from Sazón publishing house (as miniscule as its Guatemalan counterpart) in 2011, features a drawing of what appears to be a Muslim man wearing a taqiya and a thawb serving a single cup of tea that sits off-center on a tray. Readers may wonder, Why the tray, if it’s only one serving? Recalling that the Prophet cannot be represented stops reflection in its tracks: this is a one-man God’s tea party. With the cover of this edition, which works too well in conversation with its Guatemalan iteration for there not to be some form of authorial intent, Aira is again short-circuiting World Literature.⁶⁶ God only knows what hurdles Andrew’s counterparts, translators to Hindi and Arabic, will have to overcome.

The point is not to turn Aira into a theologist, a postcolonial critic, or a proponent of animal studies or object-oriented ontology. Rather, it is important to appreciate how his work manages to destabilize at the same time different stories of origin. This is the case of creationism, obviously—the kind of doctrine that, as it happens, many actual Tea Partiers adhere to. But it is also the case of Darwinism, social or otherwise, deftly intertwined here with behaviorism: “The invitations, addressed ‘To Evolution,’ are automatically transmitted to the ape’s instincts, like the sound of a doorbell.”67 In a different passage, evolution is layered with the civilizing mission, as the narrator wonders whether manners themselves will evolve to such a degree that, in a distant future, “we would arrive at a divine, unprecedented spectacle: a gathering of apes sitting quietly around a table, lifting their teacups in one hand, their little fingers pointing at the surrounding void…, perfectly demure and genteel.”⁶⁸ This is reminiscent of evolution-themed comic strips in which, from left to right, amoeba become fish become reptiles and so on, until they become man and then, say, a golfer or a white-collar worker. Despite its concretion and expressive economy, the text draws from many narratives and visual and cultural referents to produce its powerful, intricate effect of double take.

The particle is the most powerful agent of all. It takes after a modern, secular, scientific origin story that has fueled public imagination in recent years: the quest to find the Higgs boson, nicknamed “the God particle,” conducted at CERN, the multibillion-euro facilities along the Franco-Swiss border. Bruno Latour, in one of the few articles in which he makes explicit his views on literature, to which I shall return, rightfully remarks that “as usual, whenever the hard questions of constructivism are tackled, God appears—no matter how ironic his appearance may be.”⁶⁹ This is true both of the Higgs boson’s nickname and of Aira’s quantum physics–themed story. The Argentine’s particle bears no Higgs moniker, but the allusion is obvious, and its implications are worthy of note. Aira does not engage in great detail with what goes on in laboratories, but rather works with its ripple effect among a general public. Fascination with the big bang has an analogous role to those concurrent, circulating narratives of evolution, civilization, and creation, thematized above. The intromission of the particle into the party could be read allegorically, given that for many the existence of the Higgs boson calls into question religious belief and various aspects of anthropocentrism. More interestingly for present purposes, it illustrates the agency of literature.

For one, there is the generative power of spoken language itself, down to its most basic material component: sound. Homophony, as Diego Vecchio has perceptively demonstrated, is the starting point of many of Aira’s improvisatory acts of storytelling.70 Reflecting on how likely it is for a partícula to show up uninvited, the narrator muses that maybe they are attracted to social gatherings, for it is not for nothing that the word for fiesta in English is “party.”⁷¹ Bosón de Higgs approximates “baboon.” Puns occur naturally within a language and across languages; this is what Derrida might call the “freeplay of signifiers.” Aira does not choose just any word, however, but one that denotes a building block of matter. Deliberately or not, it is a notion that would interest the deconstructionist and the constructivist, one that sits at the crossroads of the linguistic and material turns.⁷² He does not simply make a note of the pun, but runs with it as far as it will take him, past any non sequiturs along the way. Above, Wiethüchter did something similar across German, Latin, Aymara, and Spanish—here the languages are English, Latin, French (briefly, as seen below), and Spanish, plus the languages evoked by the different cover art.

If infiltrating was an aesthetic ideal of subversive literature in the past, interloping is what this is all about. The particle “was there and not there…she was the prototypical interloper.”⁷³ This statement amounts to an ars poetica, for Aira clearly understands his writing as having in some sense that effect, but it also corresponds to his vision of the transformative power of art at large. In a different metaphor he uses elsewhere, the goal would be to short-circuit—again, Borgesian shattering laughter. The particle’s interruption of the ape tale plays out along gender lines. King Kongs are unlike the majority of male apes, who are in fact more social and less dominant than females, thus unsuitable as mirror images of mighty man. As Haraway notes, many Western primatologists and writers saw in apes what they wanted to see. In Aira, that narrative reached its hypermasculine climax in a thousand-hand orgy of anal rape. To counterbalance this (but drawing on the same logic of a caricature of patriarchy), a few lines down the next chapter introduces a fragile, feminine, and cautiously eroticized subatomic particle: “Her tiny little body [su cuerpecito huidizo], on which not even the finest brush could have inscribed a single letter.”⁷⁴ This wandering less-than-Aleph packs a punch.

The particle is a “she” just as Time, in Lewis Carroll, is a “he.” “If you knew Time as well as I do,” ripostes an indignant Hatter to Alice, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting IT. It’s HIM.”⁷⁵ These are idle pronouns and capitalizations, to be sure. And still they generate meaning, signaling agency at a very basic level, this time of script, rather than sound. “March Hare” and “Ape King” turn words into characters and personify animals with the most minimal of gestures. Meanwhile, the climactic event of the story, the particle’s grand entrance, deploys the power of language to feed the spatial imagination:

What makes the particle flirtatious, or “coquettish,” as Andrews puts it, is that she identifies herself as a geometric point—a masculine punto. A template for this story could be a cowgirl who walks into a bar brawl, making things worse. The geometrical basis is midschool Euclidean axiomatics, which the passage seems to recite in quick succession, translating each axiom into action, the a priori into a posteriori. First the point, then the line, then the multiple planes that make up space: each of these utterances titillates readers’ minds, banking on the suspense that sound and script had helped to build. Delight comes, and the release of psychic energy. The particle is not making the world whole again, as Lukács wished for the novel as genre, but beautifully shattering it into a million pieces. Or is it? It is hard to miss the other template: the big bang, origin of origins.

What is most fascinating of all is that, later on, the denouement approximates words themselves to the particle: “At bottom, it was a question of language. There weren’t any things in reality, only words, words that cut the world into pieces, which people end up taking for things.”⁷⁷ Non sequitur is an art that Aira cultivates all too well. The particle may slice God’s tea party, but it ties the work together. The title El té de Dios, in some cases the label of a book cover, singles out this work from the continuum of improvisation and recombining motifs that constitutes Aira’s oeuvre. If there are no things in reality but only words that cut the world into pieces, then what world would there be for words to cut in the first place? A chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, this is the nominalist versus realist debate folded into one circular, hilarious sentence. It is also reminiscent of Jacques Rancière’s well-known notion of the partition of the sensible, rendered both literally and literarily.⁷⁸ “The windmill of superfine screens,” as Andrews puts it, is a radical illustration of how words cause an effect.⁷⁹ An alternative one would be showing how the phrase “just an ape,” used in derogatory fashion, can justify rather ignominious experiments.

Upon closer examination, the way Aira frames the dilemma of words versus things provides a key to the parable and to the model of literary agency it espouses. For laypeople, the search for the Higgs boson resembles what for realists, Tim Morton included, is the quest to find the bedrock of indexicality. Some fifty years after its existence was hypothesized, the boson was finally “found” in 2012, prompting other scientific questions and (contrary to some forecasts) no landslide, worldwide crisis of faith. The drive to an origin story remained intact. In Aira, the narrator tells us that God finds an origin of the particle that, by “logical necessity,” always must have been, but he does not tell it. (The English translation calls this discovery “her birth certificate”: Obama’s birth certificate for the “birthers” in the Tea Party?)80 The final solution is not in a thing, out there, anterior to language and culture, the original point of reference. Neither is it in an originary word, unavoidably embedded in some culture, whence everything results. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Aira’s partycle disrupts these isomorphisms with an unassimilable remainder: “And the particle was not a detail in a story; she didn’t contribute any information or advance the plot: she was an accident and nothing more.”⁸¹ Early deconstruction thought that this ultimate undecidability affects signification at large—a position that Latour and many others have, more or less validly, rallied against.

Yet the ultimate certainty would be God’s Word, the nano-brushstroke on the particle. The very end of this mutating novella, novelita, or short story is, as might be expected, an overdetermined deus ex machina. God, who has never spoken (he is there and not there) would have to utter the particle’s birth certificate into existence. It is not an obvious task for him, we learn, as he has every language to choose from, “living, dead, and potential,” and is thus afflicted by l’embarras du choix.⁸² One can read here the Spanish false friend embarazo, pregnancy, for he is, after all, giving birth. He is also breaching his way into language, like a Wiethüchter-Lacanian infant (“[God] had no choice but to take part in the linguistic game”) and piling a Sapir-Whorfian reference onto the many allusions already implicit in this comedy (“Each of them carved the world up differently”).⁸³ The turning point, though, is the Higgs boson, which is, as the journal Nature explains, “a key part of a mechanism that gives all particles their masses.”⁸⁴ True to fact, Aira situates the particle at a crossroads, “from which the paths of mass and energy depart.”⁸⁵ Reportedly, it takes God less time to solve the riddle than for the narrator to explain it, and then it is already solved, and always has been. The deus ex machina in this Borgesian garden of forking paths keeps the secret to Himself.

Other than upsetting origin stories across religion, politics, and physics, Aira is providing, via metonymic displacement, an inquiry not into the convertibility of energy into the matter, as CERN scientists did, but of matter into language. He represents a hyperobject, in Morton’s nomenclature, that is both a powerful cultural trope and a subject of scientific inquiry. What the fantasy about the “God particle” shows is that even the quest for the building blocks of the universe cannot let go entirely of language, literature, and culture. It does not provide a culturalist reading of science or a scientific reading of culture, but multiplies contradictions to an effect. It teaches one to see words as mediators between matters of fact and matters of concern. And fiction slides along. Like the particle, “To her the Void and the All were one; She roamed them both, in free fall, idle and unattached.”86 El té de Dios is but one of Aira’s novelitas; to date, he has published over a hundred. Each one is its own agent, capable of making the mind trip.

Democritus, the founding figure of materialism in its atomist variant, was known in antiquity as “the laughing philosopher,” so much did he value cheerfulness for philosophy. In Greek, “atoms” are literally “uncuttables,” which seems a fitting etymology for Aira’s antics. But imagine a less cheerful materialist who came along to ask, Where, exactly, is the indivisible unit of action of literature, the final cut? Show me the atom, so to speak, where literature does: the moment in which El jardín de Nora resituates the reader vis-à-vis nature, the instant when El té de Dios subverts tales of origin, the mechanism by which Las comidas profundas transforms our rapport with food, and so on. Many possibilities could open up here, including reception theory, phenomenology, neurological approaches to literature, or sociologies of literature. But allow me to turn briefly to a recurrent interlocutor throughout the present study, Latourian thought, to extrapolate and formulate theoretical takeaways for this chapter. Again, I do so with a caveat, because the experience of reading works like the above is not easily replaced by abstraction.

Aira coincides with Latour in many respects; in some important ways, some more obvious than others, they differ. The French thinker does science studies, including formal, theoretically-rich ethnologies of laboratory practices; the closest Aira comes to that is, arguably, God’s Tea Party. To my knowledge, Latour’s sole sustained engagement with literature is his article on the American novelist Richard Powers. Still, as Rita Felski eloquently puts it in an influential 2015 article, the “pact of mutual noninterference is reaching its end.”87 In my mind, Latour has been scapegoating critique for too long; Felski does something similar with suspicion.⁸⁸ I find this unnecessary now that Latour has situated himself (having contributed to establishing the field of science studies itself) at a third position that is neither “pure science” nor “humanities.” My own contribution to these debates, the notion of transcultural materialism as a sublation of historical and new materialisms, is keen on not throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Felski’s own rather apologetic defense of literary studies does not go far enough: critique, suspicion, and interpretation are all alive and well. Perhaps they enjoy better health in Latin Americanism than in other subdisciplines. Be that as it may, materialist literary exegesis that combines attention to form and to social content, as outlined in this chapter and elsewhere throughout this book, illustrates this.

What Felski, paraphrasing Latour, gets quite right is her understanding of “actor” as “any and all phenomena whose existence makes a difference.”⁸⁹ A “Latour litany” (the term is Ian Bogost’s) conveys the radically equal footing on which this puts all nonhuman and human actors.⁹⁰ Felski’s example is “strawberries, stinkbugs, quarks, corgis, tornadoes, Tin-Tin, and captain Haddock.”⁹¹ Recall Aira, above, having the particle go across a sheet of paper, a flower, a boat, a dog, a brain, and a hair; similarly, we read that the particle could have emanated from anywhere, including “a flare from the surface of Alpha Centauri or a pan used to fry a dove’s egg in China [la sartén en la que un chino freía un huevo de paloma], in a child’s tear or the curvature of space, in hydrogen, blotting paper, a desire for revenge, a cube root, Lord Cavendish, a hair, or the unicorn.”⁹² At different levels, one could talk about the agency of each of these elements, of their assembly, or of their place within a work of literature. Aira’s second list seems to obfuscate rather than to elucidate, throwing in the mythological creature at the end chiefly for comedic purposes. Nonetheless, God’s Tea Party would subscribe to a distributed, nonhierarchical view of agency. A single book, with all its powers to capture our attention—from its cover through its typography to its storyline, metaphors and puns—is an actor too.

The less-than-jovial materialist might object that, clearly, there is a categorical mistake at work here. It would require some kind of subatomic Bovarism, or indeed magical thinking, to believe that Wiethüchter’s collapsing soil or Aira’s erratic particle could do something in the world. Reading about an earthquake and experiencing one at the same time would be a fantastic coincidence; only a radioactive book, should such a thing exist, could literally project a particle that could slide through our bodies. But where, if not in the world, do these things cause an effect? One may hypothesize that neurological studies of literature include MRIs of the moment when something changes in the brain’s circuitry at the exact moment that a reader understands something. That would be one way of showing how the soil and particle on the pages do something. This, however, is not necessarily the best way of answering a question that Latour borrows from Alfred North Whitehead: “Can we write about an event, that is, extend its eventfulness?”93 This is where interpretation inevitably and rightfully comes into the picture. Referring to this same problem, I quipped above that “books don’t have arms.” They do, as it turns out: readers are their arms. The road for a renewed take on reception theory and sociologies of literature lies open, but this should not subtract from close reading and interpretation, for what do readers “receive” in the first place, or what do reader communities revolve around? Interpretation is the sine qua non of extending the eventfulness of literature.

By necessity, suspicion comes along. Without it, El jardín de Nora would be but a convoluted tale about a suffering housewife and her tortured children, El té de Dios the random result of improvisation in storytelling. To make recourse to metaphor: if no one connects the dots, there is no drawing in the first place. But what makes a work of art interesting is often not found in the work alone but in societal concerns, such as the quest for minerals in the Andes or for the basic structure of reality in the Swiss Alps. The eventfulness of literature, down to the very circulation of books, depends on more than what immanent reading, narrowly construed, can offer. It also depends on the place of authors within World Literature, which is, to a significant degree, a function of history and politics. Foregoing suspicion would lead to overlooking this, as the Latin American cases studied throughout the present volume demonstrate. Represented hyperobjects, such as a subatomic particle or Pachamama, can do plenty—that is, once interpretation elucidates their place within works of literature as well as within other, more complex assemblages.

At stake is what the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli lucidly identifies as the new frontier of contemporary politics: the opposition of life versus nonlife, which underlies Foucaultian biopower—“geontopower,” in her coinage. Organic and inorganic chemistry exist in a continuum: “we” are made of the same carbon as, well, carbon.94 Although scientists themselves do not know where to draw the line, the state always seem to know. Who has the right over what (inanimate, unliving) rocks or particles is a watershed question in many arenas, from mining to nuclear disarmament. Rationalization of such legality, more or less valid, hinges upon humanist, Cartesian ideals, a policing of the separation of subject and object at all costs. “Animist beliefs” should pose no contest, for bios and zoe—the axis of Foucault’s distinction—are not geos. (However, corpses, the subject of the next chapter, are revered without qualm, as if they were still animated.) Povinelli reports how, in Australia, indigenous people are invited to participate in government only as an animist voice, which is already a step toward domination: “The demand on Indigenous people to couch their analytics of existence in the form of a cultural belief and obligation to totemic sites…is a crucial longstanding tactic wherein settler late liberalism attempts to absorb Indigenous analytics in geontopower.”⁹⁵ I leave it to more qualified politologists to ground my suspicion that strikingly similar dynamics may operate under a socialist, indigenous regime in the Andes that is, nonetheless, keen on mining.

Whatever the case may be, there are conclusions to be drawn about how we study and teach literature, Latin American literature in particular. My disciplinary formation allows me only second-hand familiarity with the many non-Western languages and traditions that populate the continent. Many of them have a keen relationship with the lithic entities addressed in this chapter or conceive of the constitutive elements of reality in ways sharply different from the vulgar, mechanicist atomicism typically taught in primary school. (Few things strike me as more animistic and superstitious than pointing at an atom or solar system modeled by colored Styrofoam spheres and telling a six-year-old that that is reality.) Wiethüchter and Aira, and my reading of their work, explore alternative epistemologies and ontologies mostly from within Western coordinates, if also pointing at their limits. However, one way to redraw the field of Latin Americanism, and to reform its scholarly training, would be to carry out more substantive comparison. This would not happen so much among “different cultures” but among differentiated, though contiguous, experiences of nature-culture. Understanding this requires building bridges between anthropology and literary studies—clearly, it’s high time to stop talking past each other.

Yet this conversation too must be historicized. Not long ago, in the pivotal year 1968, the famous New York intellectual Lionel Trilling claimed condescendingly from his lectern at Columbia that Latin American literature had “an anthropological interest.”96 (One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published a year earlier.) Latin America reproduces internally this ethnocentric anthropologization of the alleged Other: its globally celebrated Spanish- and Portuguese-language novels and poetry, squarely situated within an art form and its genres, are its Western bits, while the region’s cultural production in other languages, including rich, underexamined oral traditions, are objects of anthropological interest. Remedies are not easy to come by. Looking for commonalities in the world rather than primarily in cultural production, as transcultural materialism does in the wake of Ortiz’s sugar and tobacco, is a step forward. Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena’s account of the inauguration of President Alejandro Toledo in Machu Picchu as “an occasion when earth-beings and the state shared the same public stage” might offer a model to follow.⁹⁷ (She shows how the same event, and the same “mountain,” registers differently among the audiences congregated.) For his part, Jeffrey Cohen shows how medieval Christian writers, notably in the Arthurian cycle, are fascinated by the erotic properties of stones or think of love in lithic ways.⁹⁸ The medieval urtext to Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo, the Archpriest of Hita’s The Book of Good Love (1343), also bears this evidence out.⁹⁹ Indeed, comparison across literatures, and beyond “literature,” should keep us busy in the years ahead.