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
