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
