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RACE
Dagoberto Gilb’s Phenomenology
Because something serious was going to happen. He knew it, knew it in his bones.
—Dagoberto Gilb, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
In 1790, during a project to level the zócalo in Mexico City, workers uncovered the Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), a massive stone monument to the Aztec calendar that Alonso de Montúfar, the second archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to 1572, had ordered buried sometime around 1559. Though a few Europeans had likely seen the Sun Stone around the time of the conquest of Mexico, and Diego Durán, the Dominican friar who in the sixteenth century produced some of the best-known accounts of pre-conquest Mexico, appears to write about it in his History of the Indies of New Spain (1581), by 1790 it had been long forgotten. Since 1790, however, the Aztec Sun Stone has become one of the most famous archeological objects in the world, puzzled over by scholars and venerated by mystics and seekers.
The Sun Stone is everywhere and nowhere, endlessly reproduced on all manner and size of objects, yet fundamentally unknowable and mysterious. It is an irregularly shaped basalt slab weighing 24.5 tons, out of which has been carved a disk with an 11’5” diameter. The disc comprises a series of concentric circles containing an unidentifiable face in the middle surrounded by images of human hearts, glyphs representing previous suns, or worlds, and signs for the twenty days of the Aztec ritual calendar beginning with Cipactli (Alligator) and ending with Xochitl (Flower).1 Around the outer edge of the Sun Stone are two xihcoatls (fire serpents), tails meeting at top, faces confronting each other at bottom (figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), Museo Nacional de Antropología. Photo by El Comandante.
These images have long absorbed researchers, though in the years immediately following its rediscovery scholars primarily debated how the Sun Stone was used and for whom it was created. The past century of scholarship, as Khristaan Villela, Mary Ellen Miller, and Matthew Robb explain, has dwelt mostly on iconography and ideology, with scholars parsing the meaning of the stone’s many glyphs and learning to sit with the impossibility of knowing for certain who or what is at the stone’s center. According to Villela, Miller, and Robb, this shift of attention from use to ideology is due to the assumed transparency of Mesoamerican calendars. Ross Hassig, however, in Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico, argues that Aztec temporality is both more and less complicated than scholars have previously thought.
The Aztecs, like all Mesoamerican cultures, maintained two calendars: a 260-day ritual calendar (the tonalpohualli) and a 365-day solar one (the xihuitl). The Sun Stone contains glyphs associated with the former, though the two calendars were imbricated. Hassig describes the Aztec calendar as “composed of multiple, interlocking cycles of days, building into still larger cycles, until the culmination of 52 years, which itself repeated endlessly” (159). The fifty-two-year cycle was called a xiuhmolpilli and could be bound into the huehuetiliztli, or double calendar round, forming, according to Hassig, the temporal building block of Aztec historiography, which had a definite cyclical cast (8). Hassig, however, warns against granting cyclicity too much importance, arguing that there is ample evidence that the Aztecs operated with linear historical understanding and manipulated time for political gain.
The Sun Stone thus embodies a beautiful set of contradictions. It gestures toward a calendar of whose use and significance no one can be entirely sure, bearing images nobody fully understands, projecting competing notions of time. Its materiality, its impenetrability, and its politicization of time correlate in this chapter to my reading of corporeality in the work of Dagoberto Gilb, a late twentieth/early twenty-first-century US author. Across the whole of his oeuvre Gilb, as I will argue, uses the human body to narrate a durational sense of time. As the Sun Stone gestures toward the opposition of indigenous to colonial time, Gilb’s temporal elasticity forces readers away from narrative time toward the time of the body that refuses to be known. The corporeal time Gilb enacts with his writing is a lingering, such as I describe in the introduction to this book, that is on par with the erratic cyclicity of the Sun Stone.
By drawing this parallel, I do not mean to invoke a mystic indigeneity that stands in contrast to the European temporality informing colonial politics. Time was just as political, and frankly just as colonial, for the Aztecs as it was for the Spanish. To call Aztec time cyclical is to call attention to the fact that, unlike the Mayan long-count calendar, the Aztec calendar lingers in the xiuhmolpilli. It repeats instead of progressing. To call that cyclicity erratic is to call attention to the ample documentary and monumental evidence suggesting that Aztecs understood themselves as political actors not beholden to the ideology of their calendar. Time was flexible for them, in other words, and not nearly as fatalistic as it may initially appear.
There are many things scholars do not understand about Aztec timekeeping, such as when the Aztec day began, or how the Aztecs understood hours, for example. Because the Aztecs appear to have used no clocks, sundials, or other timekeeping devices, their time, observes Hassig, “was task focused, inherently contextual, and thus necessarily elastic” (36). He grants, moreover, that many archival sources pertaining to the calendar contradict each other (35). A certain amount of temporal pliability is to be expected, then, in studies of any Mesoamerican culture, but the Aztecs appear to have directly and purposefully manipulated time.
The archives describe, as one would expect, the moving of important events such as military or trading expeditions to more providential days, but birthdays and other fixed occurrences were often changed as well, suggesting, as Hassig argues, that ordinary Aztecs saw the divinatory powers of the calendar as avoidable (36). Aztec leaders went beyond changing their relationship to the calendar; they manipulated time itself by, as Hassig describes, occasionally double counting days (38) and moving the New Fire ceremony, which marked the end of one xiuhmolpilli and the beginning of another (39). The Sun Stone itself stands as monumental evidence of one of the Aztecs’ most significant temporal changes: the stone indicates the existence of a fifth sun, or world, in contradistinction to the four suns accepted beyond the Valley of Mexico, a change that Hassig suggests was made to both assert Aztec political authority and explain the fact that the world did not end when the tonalpohualli suggested it should have (65). These deliberate alterations suggest that the calendar controlled neither Aztec belief nor action, and, moreover, that they understood time as a political tool.
Calendars are inherently political. As Hassig argues, “political concerns create the calendar, manipulate it, and use it for practical purposes” (71). It is a commonplace to set Aztec cycles against the Mayan long-count, but the Aztecs bound their calendar rounds and enumerated events in chronicles that indicate linear notions of time. This suggests, as Hassig asserts, that the calendar did not necessarily condition Aztec belief so much as it served political purposes in helping to regulate tributes across the empire (123). Hassig argues further that contemporary notions of Aztec time are a legacy of Spanish friars who, concerned about the ways Aztec ritual overlapped with Catholic, placed outsized emphasis on its cyclicity at the expense of its linearity. “Modern theoretical biases have reinforced this inheritance from the colonial perspective,” Hassig concludes (162).
Despite the colonial emphasis on Aztec cyclicity, I maintain that the Sun Stone presents a resistant lingering by rendering time as a fungible site of political resistance and aggression. The Aztecs engaged in both: they used their calendar to control their outlying tributaries, and indigenous timekeeping persisted well into the colonial period, with many early records indicating European and native dates (Hassig 140). The Sun Stone paves my way into Gilb as an impenetrable object that defamiliarizes and denaturalizes time. The Sun Stone makes the visceral, colonial politics of time fleetingly visible, much like Pancho Villa’s death mask in one of Gilb’s early short stories.
In his story “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa” (1993), an unnamed narrator is roused from bed in the middle of the night by his friend Gabe. The narrator, who has not seen Gabe for a while, is surprised by Gabe’s visit and wonders at the mysterious stranger Gabe has with him. Román Ortíz, Gabe explains, possesses one of three existing death masks of Pancho Villa, whose memorabilia the narrator collects.2 Ortíz plans to take the mask to Moscow, where the journalist John Reed, who wrote Insurgent Mexico (1914) about his four months traveling with Villa, is buried. Gabe wants the narrator to come see the mask, but the narrator, who must work the next day, declines. Before leaving, Gabe and Ortíz drink some beers and smoke a joint with the narrator, who, at the end of the story, is left wondering why Gabe really came to see him and why he, the narrator, refused to play along.
Like much of Gilb’s fiction, “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa” is short on plot; it has no clear conflict and no resolution, circulating instead around questions concerning the relationship between the human body and historical narrative. The painfully self-conscious narrator wonders about his vulnerable, aging body in relation to Villa’s mask and the history it symbolizes, while the story itself posits the corporeal trace of the mask against the textual trace of Reed’s history. “Death Mask” asks us to consider whether body or text conveys greater historical truth, or whether, as Mel Chen argues, language functions as an “embodied condensation of social, cultural, and political life” (Animacies 13). In “Death Mask,” that is, like Villa’s mask, body and text operate as congruent, corporeal forms of knowledge.
The whole of Gilb’s oeuvre can be read as an extended investigation of this relationship between body and text, and yet it is not common to read Gilb as making interventions in philosophical debates about meaning and ontology. He is certainly well known, and well received as a Chicanx chronicler of Mexican American lives on the border, having published two novels and several short story collections. Bridget Kevane’s very favorable review in the New York Times of Gilb’s most recent short story collection describes a narrator’s “struggles with his Chicano identity.” Peter Donahue, moreover, reads The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, Gilb’s 1994 novel, as the drama of Mickey Acuña’s coming to terms with his own cultural identity (33). Readings of Gilb tend to follow this pattern, paying scant attention to Gilb’s philosophical explorations of the body, time, language, and what it means to know.
But that is exactly what I am interested in here. In particular, I am interested in how, for Gilb, knowing is not opposed to feeling, and what that non-opposition means for reading Chicanx literature and writings by people of color more broadly. Embodied experience is a chief concern in Gilb’s writing, but he does not depict it in antagonistic relation to language or cognition. Quite the contrary, the subject in this chapter’s epigraph knows—he does not feel—something in his bones. Affective experiences, like those of the narrator in “Death Mask,” have value for Gilb, but that value is neither ideological nor post-ideological. That is, Gilb’s fiction seems to argue that physical feelings do not represent some truth about racial experience, nor do they offer a way to transcend the ideologies of race.
Feeling is not the domain of a post-racial utopia in Gilb’s writing. His work foregrounds ethnic experience and is characterized by an intense, almost playful attention to language. Yet stories like “Death Mask” do not suggest that feeling exists apart from language or that race is discursive. Conversely, we might read Gilb as suggesting that race constitutes language, that words, as Mel Chen describes them in Animacies, “complexly pulse through bodies (live or dead), rendering their effects in feeling and active response” (54). Such a view as Gilb’s and Chen’s relies on an understanding of feeling far removed from theories of affect articulated by Brian Massumi and his followers, anti-intentionalists who believe that our feelings are precognitive and can thus potentially liberate political subjects from their ideological confines.3
Massumi’s work has been roundly criticized by historians of science like Ruth Leys, who contends that humanists misunderstand and misuse scientific data, ignoring the long history of neuroscientific debates surrounding the relationship between affect and cognition. Only a very small percentage of “thinking” is entirely cognitive, Leys notes, citing one scientific school of affect studies that understands “thinking” as largely nonrepresentational practices of embodied habit (Leys 452). Similarly, Chen, emphasizing speech as a “corporeal, sensual, embodied act” (53), describes language as a series of “multimodal, conceptual directives” that happen simultaneously and constitutively in body and brain (52). Gilb’s fiction, which assumes the mutual interplay of mind and body, parallels Chen’s language theory and occupies the middle ground between the opposing schools of scientific thought on affect described by Leys. But Gilb is not making scientific arguments, and neither am I. What I aim to do here is use the ambiguity surrounding affect to frame my readings of Gilb and to outline a nonrepresentational way of reading race.
This poses a not insignificant methodological challenge since, as Chen notes, it is nearly impossible to read any other way. Since Western philosophy’s linguistic turn in the early twentieth century, language has, Chen writes, become “bleached of its quality to be anything but referential, structural, or performative” (53). Inspired by Chen’s work on the animative, vivifying, and material power of language, in what follows, I track Gilb’s inscrutable yet influential bodies across three texts: Gilb’s short stories “Death Mask” (1993) and “please, thank you” (2011), and his first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994). Throughout these three pieces, the body maintains an ambiguous and tenuous relation to language and narrative, hovering between the poles of materiality and abstraction in the same way the Sun Stone oscillates between linear and cyclical time. The human body refutes the death mask of ethnic labels in a deconstructive critique that leans toward a redemptive, if unknowable, materiality in “Death Mask.” Last Known Residence embraces the mysteries of the body as the protagonist, Mickey, turns away from the pursuit of knowledge to an appreciation of sense experience. Finally, in “please, thank you,” the body becomes a way of being in the world, a mode of interpretation in which the protagonist, a recovering stroke victim, undergoes hours of confusing “speech therapy” that appear to him to have little to do with speech. Thus we move, in the twenty-year trajectory these texts bookend, from physical disquietude to a productive sense of “sense.”4
To get at this sense of the imbrication of words and feelings, or text and body, I read choratically, borrowing from Rebekah Sheldon’s work as I describe in the introduction to this book, in order to propose a concept of “racial immanence.” With this phrase I do not mean, as Manthia Diawara does, to imply racial truths or pure racial characteristics.5 Quite the contrary: there is no racial truth; “racial immanence” is shorthand for my argument that language, especially as Gilb deploys it, is part of an embodied, racial process. With the term I play on Kant’s transcendent categories of thought to suggest race not as an abstraction but as derived from the material world. Race might elude totalizing narration, but that does not mean it is beyond our perception. Here I am influenced by Quentin Meillassoux’s rejection of “finitude”: the idea that absolute knowledge of any sort is impossible, that we can know the world only as it is revealed to us, through, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our bodies.6 Race might not be a transcendent category of truth, in other words, but it is, I argue, a category of physical, affective experience that catalyzes personal and political change in the world.
The Immanent Time of the Body: “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa”
Race functions as just this sort of catalyzing agent in Gilb’s writing, and racial immanence is, in many ways, a strategy of disidentification. As José Muñoz defines it, “disidentification” describes “the strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). Gilb’s deployment of the body is a disidentification with racial discourse in the majoritarian and the minoritarian contexts of ethnic studies. He privileges the body but not, as Merleau-Ponty does, as a means of achieving knowledge about the world. Gilb’s approach to sensory experience more resembles that of Henri Bergson, whose theories of sense, duration, and narration, as I explicate below, illuminate Gilb’s fictional project, which relies on close, at times clinical, attention to human bodies that function for him, as the Sun Stone has for centuries of archaeologists, as durational, nonreferential narrative objects.
In “Death Mask,” for example, the narrator uses his physical imperfections to limn the outlines of a truth he cannot narrate. He tells the reader that he has been “getting soft” (17) from being out of work, that being barefoot makes him feel vulnerable to violence (18, 19, 21), and that he sees Gabe as “somehow being healthier than” him (19). The narrator perceives, but can neither fully understand nor articulate, his physical imperfections. Gabe’s lighting a joint makes the narrator want to go back to bed, which confuses him as he usually enjoys smoking. He accepts the joint because he does not “know how to say no to this too” (21). The narrator has trouble understanding other bodies as well as his own. He takes careful note of Gabe’s body language but can interpret it only as “some excess of something” that he “can’t figure out” (22). Ortíz’s body, too, confuses the narrator: “his gauntness … translates into something else [he] can’t quite put a name on” (19), and his smile, which contrasts sharply with his awkward and otherwise humorless demeanor, is disturbing (19, 21).
This attention to physical health, gauntness, and inarticulable excess foregrounds the body in ways that invite analysis within a disability studies framework. Two problems arise from such an approach, however. First, while several key disability studies works share my interest in the interplay of bodily sense and social knowledge, they focus primarily on representations rather than enactments of sense experience, and I read Gilb as interested in the latter.7 Second, while disability scholars do take careful account of disability as a function of global capital’s attempts to manage the body, race is often seen as just one facet of such management.8 Foundational works in the field tend to assume that the disabled body grounds all other physical particularities.9 While more recent scholarship moves away from identitarian hierarchizing toward increasingly philosophical and ecumenical considerations of physical difference, such work still puts representational pressure on bodies perceived as different.10 It is a slippery slope from representation to identity, an explanation of being that Gilb’s work, with his imperfect bodies driving readers relentlessly away from meaning, is designed to resist.11
Just as scholars have been unable to identify the face at the center of the Sun Stone, bodies in Gilb’s fiction refuse to become objects of truth; refusing knowledge of any sort, they represent neither things nor ideas. Affect theory presents itself as a welcoming home for fiction such as Gilb’s that dwells on, but explicitly rejects interpreting, the body, and yet affect theory also tends to suborn race to a universal physicality. Scholars have long understood race as an ideological construct, exactly the sort of thing that affect theory might help us move “beyond.” As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg explain in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, affect is “the name we give to those forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” (1). If race is ideological, a function of “conscious knowing,” then where do we find it in a story like “Death Mask”?
Race in “Death Mask” is wholly immanent. It manifests at the end of the story, after the narrator has definitively refused to see the mask, and he describes himself, after forcing Ortíz to justify his travel plans for the mask, as having “stolen his smile” (25). The stealing of the smile is a moment of racial immanence where history can be narrated only through bodily interaction. The men’s bodies become a site of conflict that remains unwritten; the body’s opacity masks interpersonal tensions that cannot emerge in narrative form because the narrator can only physically experience rather than comprehend them.
I use “race” rather than “ethnicity” to describe this sensory entanglement between the narrator and Ortíz, and it is crucial to keep the difference between the two terms in mind when thinking through racial immanence. Race, a concept developed from purportedly biological characteristics, has been used to justify all manner of state-sanctioned violence against people of color and to systematically exclude them from institutions of power and social mobility. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is seen as an index of cultural affiliation, mutable and multiply signifying.12 Those distinctions are evident across Gilb’s writing, but complicated in their analogy to body and mind respectively, or sense and language, putative oppositions whose imbrication Chen explains in their discussion of cognitive linguistics (52), and whose entanglements Gilb’s writing reveals. Race, however, remains at the core of Gilb’s exploration of sense experience, particularly in “Death Mask’s” scene of the stolen smile.
The physicality that escapes narrative—that stealing of the smile—allows the action to remain on narrative’s periphery and outside time. When the narrator returns to bed, his wife asks him what time it is, which “makes [him] smile all over again” and reply, “What’s the difference?” (26). Time does not matter to the narrator, who remains in the now of physical experience. To think in terms of time and its organizing structures would vitiate the significance of the physical exchange between Ortíz and the narrator, which has something to do with Villa and the Mexican Revolution. That historical experience marks the men’s bodies in ways beyond the historicity of narrative logic. The narrator cannot answer his wife’s question; he can only deploy his stolen smile.
Gilb’s eschewal of narrative time and logic recalls the mystery of the Sun Stone: was it meant as a connotative or denotative representation of time? His rejection of telos also puts Gilb in close conversation with Bergson’s work on time, language, and experience. For both thinkers, language is a function of sense experience, not knowledge, part of the human experience of intuiting, not knowing, which unfolds over time and has no cognitive teleology (Guerlac 107). For Bergson, all beings are enmeshed in a web of dynamic matter where change and action occur via the transmission of stimuli, like words, and matter is ultimately “nothing but a path along which” the energy of change passes (Matter and Memory 36). Merleau-Ponty identifies Bergson’s conflation of subject and object as a “mistake” that “consists in believing that the thinking subject can become fused with the object thought about, and that knowledge can swell and be incorporated into being” (Phenomenology of Perception 62). Unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, Bergson is interested in action, not speech—presence, not representation—a preference paralleled in Gilb’s writing.
Gilb’s racialized bodies do not represent knowable, ethnic selves. The Mexican Revolution and its indigenous heroes are important to the narrator of “Death Mask,” but the reader never learns why, and the particularities of the narrator’s life are so insignificant that the character remains nameless throughout. The narrator is simply present, by which term I mean to indicate both “here” and “now.” The significance of presence for Gilb’s work becomes clearer when read through Bergson, for whom presence is transformation, and “to be” is to be always in the process of changing. Presence, for Bergson, is impossible to narrate because subject and object interact not in sequential time but in duration. He defines duration in Time and Free Will (1889) as “the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states” (100). Suzanne Guerlac clarifies, succinctly explaining the difference between duration and time when she writes that “time is the symbolic image of Pure Duration.… It is what duration becomes when we think and speak it” (69). Language, the realm of the symbolic, typically removes us from pure experience, according to Bergson—time is to duration as language is to sense, in other words—but I contend that Gilb uses language and narrative not to represent but to enact a sense of duration.
For example, we can read the narrator in “Death Mask” asking his wife what difference time makes as Gilb staking a narrative claim and articulating the terms of his fictional project. The exchange between the narrator and his wife presents the reader with two ways of conceiving time and history: the wife operates in a teleological mode in which the sequence of events gives them meaning; the narrator, on the other hand, eschews chronology and time—“What’s the difference?”—to argue that the body retains a historical knowledge that resists narrative’s organizing logic, just as the Sun Stone has refused to be archaeologically known. The body’s resistance to text and narrative time is a core tension of Gilb’s writing around which I organize my readings of Last Known Residence and “please, thank you.” How to make sense of the fact that Gilb’s temporal resistance unfolds in a form that conditions temporal existence? Narrative gives shape to duration; it puts physical, human time into historical time, contextualizes it and gives meaning to action, as Paul Ricoeur has discussed.13 In what follows I look at how, in Last Known Residence and “please, thank you,” Gilb has grappled with this aesthetic, philosophical, and political conundrum.
Bodies in Time: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
Last Known Residence opens by presenting the reader with a protagonist, Mickey, desperately trying to make narrative sense out of his sense experience. Constantly telling stories about himself, Mickey often cannot remember whether his stories are fact or fiction. He perceives his stories about Mexico as “bullshit” that “was allowed as plausible” by other characters as a way to “help pass boring time using noisy words” (44), and his own ancestry is explicitly referenced only once, early in the novel. He is an “American, a U.S. citizen of Mexican parents, one from this side of the río, one from the other” (11). Mickey understands himself as a Mexican American telling “bullshit” stories that other characters are afraid to question. In place of this “bullshit” the novel offers moments of racial immanence during which the narrator argues against Mickey’s narrative cynicism. Mickey perceives his inability to tell effective stories as a failure of language. He sees language as the way to truth, but his challenge over the course of the novel is to understand language as a function of sense; Mickey must learn to value duration over time and sense experience over cognition.
Mickey’s journey toward embracing sensation emerges from the tension the novel presents between form and content, as in the early scene when Mickey first meets Ema and immediately imagines that a great romance has blossomed between them. He suppresses the nagging suspicion that his love is imaginary and unrequited, but reality, in the form of physical contact with Ema and detailed descriptions of other bodies, impinges on Mickey’s stories (20). As he and Ema walk through Ciudad Juárez, the corporeal materiality of Mexico’s poverty and its subordination to the United States fracture Mickey’s sense of self and narrative control. He intuits that his stories cannot create order out of this chaos, but the novel is not ready to give up on story altogether. Story shifts, over the course of the novel, from the past-tense, mental activity of Mickey “looking for clues” to his story’s ending (40), to his future-oriented, physical certainty, “in his bones,” that “something serious was going to happen” (127). By freeing Mickey from the cause-and-effect, linear patterns of scientific time, Gilb introduces the idea that causality and contingency are integral to the self, but require narrative creativity for their recounting.
The narrator’s curious grammatical choices illustrate just such creativity. While Mickey throws away the western novel he’s been reading because he is tired of its racist generic conventions (207), the narrator offers three grammatical workarounds for writing the things that cannot be written: the conditional tense, appositions, and double negatives. The conditional introduces contingency at the level of the word. In sentences such as “He’d work out with weights. He’d push himself into major shape” (2), the conditional is used to indicate the future, but in other places its meaning is less clear. With apposite phrasings the narrator gestures similarly toward Mickey’s need to appreciate shades of gray. Mickey wants to be prepared “for the better or the worse, mind and body” (2). He doubts the suitability of the YMCA for him because he “wanted anonymity, not publicity, privacy, not spectacle” (4). These appositions, this lexical bouncing back and forth, mirror the endless games of ping-pong Mickey plays at the YMCA and open an in-between space for the interstitial self to emerge: what is the ping-pong ball as it flies through the air? What is the middle ground between publicity and privacy, better or worse?
Gilb’s use of the conditional and appositional clauses highlights Mickey’s desire, implicitly subverted by our narrator, to construct a narrative world of surface. The narrator, conversely, makes consistent use of double negatives to force the point that language hides a world of meanings. Positivity lurks beneath the profusion of negative terms in double-negative constructions. For instance, the reader learns that while Mickey and his friend Butch enjoy each other’s company, they both guard their private lives closely, and “that wasn’t unlike anybody there at the Y” (55). Repeatedly using the negative to indicate the positive suggests that meaning lies in the difference between what is spoken and what is intended. Mickey reads this difference as an absence of meaning, but the narrator suggests that a deep significance lies in the novel’s linguistic slippages, a point Butch makes when he tells Mickey, “It’s not lo que dice [what you say], bro. It’s how” (52).
With Butch the novel challenges Mickey to find significance in meaning’s present absence. Mail, like meaning in Last Known Residence, is also present in its absence. Mickey waits for the mail to deliver what he describes to Fred, the YMCA desk clerk, as a “check with a bunch of zeros,” an indeterminate indicator of either a lot, or very little (89). Other YMCA residents anxiously await their mail, one character is fired on suspicion of tampering with it, and another, Charles Townsend, collects mail from the trash and organizes it into dated bundles (202). Charles is unique amidst all the narrative attention to mail’s absence in that he makes the mail visible in his attempts to organize it chronologically. The narrator suggests that Charles’s efforts are in vain, however, when Mickey discovers the bundles in Charles’s room along with a .22-caliber pistol (202). Mr. Fuller, the YMCA manager, is later shot with a .22. Charles owns the gun, but Mickey has access to it, and the reader never learns for certain the identity of the culprit. Charles’s abstract chronologies yield to the finality of the gun and death, from which no meaning can be drawn. Fuller’s story has no resolution; the identity of his murderer is less significant than the fact of his death, just as the content of the mail is less significant than that it reach its destination.
The gun and the mail matter, but they do not mean anything. Mickey cannot tell a story about them, and so ideas about free will and sense certainty take center stage here in this moment of Mickey’s narrative failure. For example, the scene of Fuller’s murder is not described in the novel, but we read of Mickey’s physical reaction to Fuller’s death before we learn he has died: “It had happened.… And he was still alive. This he was absolutely sure of. He could hear his breath and heart beating. This was true. There was a strangeness in this sensation of life, a joy that ached like sadness” (212). Fuller’s death shifts “truth” from knowing to being, from cognition to the sensual experience of the breathing, beating bodies.
Before Fuller’s death, however, Mickey agonizes over what he can and cannot know, as well as whether he or some higher power is determining his actions. Mickey’s anxiety is only heightened when Mária, who has been fired for allegedly tampering with the mail, tells him, “I didn’t touch the mail, never,” and reminds him, “Nothing is unintentional” (102). Earlier, Mária suggests that there is no intention but God’s (83), but her double negative in this instance throws a shadow of doubt over such claims: if she did not never touch the mail, then perhaps she did touch the mail. God’s intention may supersede Mária’s, yet her choice of words reveals the possibility of her own, human intention. Logical puzzles such as this question about intention throw Mickey into a tailspin of doubt. But with Fuller’s death, the human body emerges as will and vitiates Mickey’s need to know. Mickey comes to the conclusion that his knowledge and choices do not matter: there is no such thing as a truth that stands outside the self’s will to believe.
Mickey’s choice of belief over knowledge is best understood in the context of philosophical debates over the nature and existence of free will. Throughout Last Known Residence, Mickey wonders why he is doing what he is doing, whether he is writing his own story or playing a part in a story that has already happened, whether he is, in short, acting of his own free will. Philosophy offers essentially two ways to consider Mickey’s problem: his actions are predetermined or they are not; there is either order or chaos in the universe. On the side of order we have Benjamin Libet, who found that our bodies move and react to things before our brains begin processing relevant information, suggesting that the human capacity for rational thought has little bearing on what we do: our actions are predetermined through bioscience; there is no free will.14 Libet straddles this fine line, though, arguing that free will resides in our capacity to veto undesirable actions. The more robust counter to such hard determinism points to the random catalytic action between agents. The course of particles through space and time might be predetermined but there is always that unexpected swerve, that coming together of forces producing something new that Merleau-Ponty referred to as folds in the flesh of nature.15 This fold, or swerve, opens a space for human intention, like Mickey’s belief or Mária’s possibly touching the mail, and grounds the potentiality of free will.
Still the question remains: how do we exercise the will to control our actions in the moment of the fold? Can we be morally responsible actors? For Mickey this question is moot. Culpability for Fuller’s death is unresolved; Mickey embraces the swerve, embraces the chances he embodies, and the novel closes with him wandering off into indeterminate border space. That conclusion reinforces the novel’s larger argument that Mickey must learn to act on what he feels and not be incapacitated by his inability to know (just as the reader must forge on even though significant plot points are never resolved). For example, Mickey doubts Sarge’s friend Philip’s story about a local Mexican restaurant that has different menus for its Mexican and Anglo customers (67). Philip’s lack of evidence, coupled with Mickey’s inability to be precise about what evidence he would accept, prove to Mickey that the story is not true. But there is an element of truth in Philip’s story that cannot be pinned down textually. Though Philip may have invented the story about the menus, racism is still an undeniable fact in El Paso: a force radiating from the lived experience of the brown, Mexican body. In the same way that the novel implies the insignificance or unknowability of truths such as Fuller’s killer and the fate of the mail, here the novel suggests that Philip’s invention of this story is more significant than its truth.
Race is immanent in the menu story: to believe Philip is to understand that race matters even if Mickey cannot know what it means. When Mickey recognizes that “you do have to decide,” eventually, what will be true, he begins to perceive the experiential belief that resides in the body. Mickey eventually associates Mária’s “nothing is unintentional” with the meaninglessness of the universe as he walks through the desert and comes to see the sky, the moon, and the earth as an encompassing emptiness. “Right then, he’d say, he decided” (196). This sense of emptiness, rather than evidential proof, helps him decide against hard determinism in favor of chaos. He begins to believe that he can make intentional decisions, though the reader never learns exactly what he decides.
Mickey is as in the dark as the reader as he moves into his uncertain future. He is certain, however, in his refusal to be tied to a past he cannot remember, to be a character in someone else’s story. Ethnicity exemplifies just such a performance and so Mickey refuses this too, rejecting Chicanx identity as performed by Sarge and Omar, two fellow Chicanx residents at the YMCA. Omar, a “mixed metaphor” of defiant chicanidad (86), stands in opposition to Sarge’s espousal of “American” values (35). Mickey is suspicious of both models of chicanismo as performances beholden to a higher authority of meaning. Omar and Sarge want to pin down the self, to make their racialized bodies mean something, while Mickey wants to let his sense certainty evolve into a future of its own mattering. For Mickey, identity becomes a process of historical and temporal negotiation. That is, history is significant, but the self cannot be overdetermined by it; history matters, but it doesn’t mean anything. Mitchum Huehls has written on this paradox, noting that historical “content is irrelevant for producing meaning and grounding identity” in the novel while “the purely formal fact of past-ness” underlines the “foundationally temporal truth” of Mickey’s life: that history is always a present absence, always past, always lost (Huehls, Qualified Hope 184). History is not a problem of knowledge for Gilb, according to Huehls, but rather an existential mode.
To illustrate, Mickey refers to “loop[s] in time” (2) or “location[s] in time” (74), which suggest that time is both nonlinear and spatial for him, an idea reflected in his anxiety over his story’s conclusion and his feeling that he is actually reliving past events. To resolve this anxiety, he must, as the novel progresses, move away from a conception of time as space, as progression, to time as sense, toward Bergson’s duration, or toward the unknowable temporality of the Sun Stone. Mickey intuits this in his argument with Sarge about Mexican politics. Sarge sees Mexico’s problems as stemming from an inability to progress historically, while Mickey views history less as progress and more as process (45). When one of the imaginary commentators in Mickey’s head declares, “Not everybody comes up the same way … there’s a past you don’t see or know about” (85), history is presented as one of many multiple states of consciousness Mickey might inhabit, something sensed but not known. To put this in Bergsonian terms, the past cannot be measured and narrated; it can only be sensed through the intuition of duration. This is analogous to the novel’s broader theoretical assertion that the self cannot be known, but it can be believed, and belief is achieved via the body, through sense perception. Therefore, the force of history, ultimately, cannot be known via a performed ethnic identity such as Sarge’s or Omar’s; it can only be felt.
Mickey only comes to this understanding once he can act on his own sense perception, once he lets go of his anxiety over his inability to know. Finding significance in his own body is not enough, however. The novel suggests that in order for him to mobilize his new insights, to push himself to action, Mickey must come to terms with other troublesome bodies. He has to learn how to experience rather than understand the other, to intuit them instead of treating them as cognitive objects. “Others” for Mickey include women and queer characters, who test the limits of Mickey’s narrative capacity.
Women pose the biggest challenge to Mickey, in part because he understands gender as corresponding with race. Mickey appreciates women as mystical, mysterious beings around whom he can craft elaborate fictions, but in his stories he objectifies as much as he subjectifies himself. Mickey breathlessly describes woman as “heaven and earth, the best of life itself,” but he also says, “I feel how much she sees me seeing her” (46). That both Mickey and women exist as objects to be seen allows Gilb to correlate the narrative construction of femininity with equally fantastical narratives of race. When, for instance, a “cowboy” with whom Mickey has contracted for day labor refers to him continually as “mess-i-kin,” Mickey retorts, “Don’t call me Mexican again!” The narrator glosses, “It was often confusing when that Mexican word came up with people like the cowboy because sometimes it didn’t mean anything and other times a lot,” much like Mickey’s check full of zeroes. The cowboy acquiesces, but continues, “They are the best women, though.” Mickey replies that Mexican men would disagree, believing that “the light ones from this side have the pink nipples” (31). The dialogue draws a strong connection between gendered bodies and ethnic tensions, suggesting that the significance of race and gender lies less in the specific identities they reference than in their structural similarity as ways to manage human difference.
Though the novel hinges on Mickey’s interpretations of his sense experience, race and gender are not abstractions for him. They matter just as much as the workings of his own body do. The novel refuses to privilege disability as a defining corporeal subtext, preferring instead to equalize all physical distinction as material with which the reader must grapple, just as Mickey must grapple with women like Isabel, the YMCA maid, who keeps Mickey from escaping into flights of narrative fancy. In his dealings with Isabel, Mickey is forced to contemplate reality, a reality signified in the novel by the disrupting presence of bodies that cannot be ignored. Mickey’s conversations with Isabel are consistently punctuated by his neighbor’s flatulence, and her physical activity in his room makes Mickey keenly aware of his own body (11, 45, 92).
Similarly, Lola, the waitress at the YMCA coffee shop, keeps Mickey’s storytelling in check. These women signal the limits of language, where Mickey must grapple with his own status as physical object in relation to other objects. He experiences his own body as a confusing mystery, which he tries to control and order through a disciplined regime of physical exercise (100). Mickey sees that this is all for naught, however, when he is surprised by the instantaneous revelation of his body’s own inner, intentional logic. When Omar teases Mickey about his excessive exercise, Mickey realizes, inspired by fantasies of physically harming Omar, that his exercise was all for a purpose: “at this moment he felt it was by design, not accident. Intentional” (190). Notably, his realizations do not unfold in space; they happen “right then” (191, 196) and “at this moment” (190) and they are sensual rather than cognitive experiences. The logic of the body unfolds in duration, in other words, in the moment of pure sensation that, for Mickey, is here figured as fantasies of bodily destruction, of kicking Omar’s “fat butt,” cracking his nose, and breaking his teeth (190). The intention Mickey discovers in his own body leads to his rejection of the absolute during his midnight walk (196) and a newfound faith in himself.
Physically sensing the intention of his own body pushes Mickey finally to act, to decide, to feel. Bodies are real in Last Known Residence; they refuse to have their differences categorized, hierarchized, or abstracted into racialized notions of the corporeal. Mickey privileges the sexed and raced body as a site of knowledge production; the novel refuses to construct those bodies as objects from which universal truths—such as the idea that disability trumps all other modes of physical difference—may be abstracted. Last Known Residence forces a consideration of the real: the troublesome poverty of Mexico that Mickey cannot narrate away, and the bodies broken by inexorable American values as ubiquitous as what Mickey, in conversation with Sarge, ironically refers to as “this good clean McDonald’s food” (42).
Bodies All the Time: “please, thank you”
Last Known Residence fully realizes the redemption hinted at in “Death Mask”: the human body is real in duration. What new idea of the self can emerge at this juncture, then, if the body is not the sign of some larger abstraction? Performances of ethnic identity like Sarge’s and Omar’s are moot in this case. Even the significance of history is up for grabs given Mickey and Sarge’s disagreement about Mexico, and the temporal play combined with the elusive meaning of the Mexican Revolution in “Death Mask.” How can the self emerge from materiality if the meaning of time and history is so unclear? Gilb’s refusal of abstraction and the confusion of materiality in his fiction preclude a clear explanation of what it means to be a person in the world if personhood is rooted in the body rather than in ideas of what the body signifies. “please, thank you” (2011) unravels this puzzle.
