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
