criticism no less ferocious or peremptory for belonging to the space of fiction—that is intimately tied to Revueltas’s political activism. Historically, moreover, melodrama has always been the genre of preference for the staging of this formless mass of poor people, beggars, and prostitutes. To be more precise, one of the interpretive keys to understand the success of melodrama, not just as a literary genre but as a cultural matrix in a much broader sense as well, depends on the possibility that, through this genre or matrix, the so-called populace or scum succeed in incorporating themselves into a people, and the people in turn may embody itself as the—modern, urban and, as we will see, post-revolutionary—masses:
The stubborn persistence of the melodrama genre long after the conditions of its genesis have disappeared and its capacity to adapt to different technological formats cannot be explained simply in terms of commercial or ideological manipulations. One must continually pose anew the question of the cultural matrix of melodrama, for only with an analysis of the cultural conditions can we explain how melodrama mediates between the folkloric culture of the country fairs and the urban-popular culture of the spectacle, the emerging mass culture. This is a mediation which, on the level of narrative forms, moves ahead through serial novels in newspapers, to the shows of the music hall and to cinema. And as we move from film to radio theatre and then to the telenovela, the history of the modes of narrating and organizing the mise-en-scène of mass culture is, in large part, a history of melodrama.5
The story of Los errores obviously traverses many of these scenes and, due to its heightened theatricality, its comical effects, and its moral polarizations, it resembles nothing more than the old feuilleton or the contemporary farce. The novel takes advantage of the whole structural matrix of melodrama so as to re-launch the dream of a social revolution that would really subsume the rabble and mass of all those who, from the most ruinous lumpen to the disenchanted intellectual, do not count in the eyes of the high command of the Party.
On the other hand, however, we also ought not to forget that Revueltas himself, in Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza, refers to the small-time leaders of the Mexican Communist Party as “lumpenproletarian” in a purely condescending way, speaking of the “crisis of the split” that began toward the end of 1961, “again provoked, against independent opinions, by the national leadership of the PCM, made up of the same lumpenproletarian political gangsters that ejected us from the PCM in that monstrous usurpation of party sovereignty (fake delegates, nonexistent representations, hidden documents and so on and so forth) that was the 13th National Convention.”6 This sarcastic mention suggests that Revueltas, with regard to the lumpenproletariat, is perhaps not so distant from the denigrating orthodoxy of Marx and Engels. In Los errores, furthermore, the narrator refers ironically to the populism hidden behind the rhetorical invocation of the lumpen on behalf of one of his characters, the party boss Patricio Robles: “On certain occasions, he liked to use certain lumpenproletarian phrases common among pool players and gamblers, in the belief that this would give his words a nuance, a touch reminiscent of his origin as the man of the people that he had been.”7 Thus, we also cannot exclude the possibility that a similar motivation, albeit ironically, may determine the use of certain phrasings and invocations of the lumpenproletariat on the part of Revueltas.
In any case, we should underscore the fact that the strong melodramatic overtones of Los errores derive not only from the structural contrast between the two storylines of the novel, with all that this contrast entails in terms of the critique of the notion of the party, but also from the internal development of each one of these stories. This is, after all, the true lesson of the Marxist notion of uneven development for someone like Althusser as well: “The whole history of Marxist theory and practice confirms this point. Marxist theory and practice do not only approach unevenness as the external effect of the interaction of different existing social formations, but also within each social formation,” as we may read in For Marx. “And within each social formation, Marxist theory and practice do not only approach unevenness in the form of simple exteriority (the reciprocal action of infrastructure and superstructure), but in a form organically internal to each instance of the social totality, to each contradiction.”8
The New Life
He thought about his savings, about using all of them, without sparing a cent, in order to construct that new life—unexpected, miraculous, finally the peace and quiet—that they would live together, Mario Cobián and she, as husband and wife.
José Revueltas, Los errores
The two worlds that only precariously cohabit in Los errores are in similar ways marked by an internal disjunction. It is this disjunction that really defines the text’s melodramatic nature. What is at stake, therefore, is not so much the history or the social function of the genre so much as its formal structure: a dual, or Manichaean structure, which tends to oppose good and evil, justice and injustice, ethics and corruption, in a pseudodialectical opposition—an opposition that is dialectical only in appearance. This is because the notions of good, justice, and salvation, due to the extreme dualism in which they are portrayed, do not genuinely enter into contradiction with the otherwise no less patent realities of evil, injustice, and exploitation. In the final analysis, there is no true contradiction, only the projection of good conscience onto real conditions of existence. This projection continues to depend on old ideological elements, such as religion, which have nothing in common, really, with the life of the underworld in the name of which melodrama speaks. “In this sense, melodrama is a foreign consciousness as a veneer on a real condition,” Althusser writes in a brilliant discussion of Brecht and Bertolazzi’s theatre. “The dialectic of melodramatic consciousness is only possible at this price: this consciousness must be borrowed from outside (from the world of alibis, sublimations, and lies of bourgeois morality), and it must still be lived as the consciousness of a condition (that of the poor underworld) even though this condition is radically foreign to the consciousness.”9 Several features considered typical of melodrama, such as the rhetorical excess of moralizing polarities, can best be explained if we start from the disjuncture that serves as their structural base.
Within the first storyline, that of the underworld, the disjuncture expresses itself above all through the desire for a “new life”—that is to say, a total break with everything that defines the present of the subjects in question. Though the same holds true for several other characters, this desire for an absolute break is particularly clear in the case of the couple made up of Mario Cobián (“El Muñeco”) and Lucrecia (“Luque”). Mario, especially, dreams obsessively of “that new life that he proposed to lead, of that break with himself, with his past, with the whole inferno”;10 he wants to be somebody, dreaming that “for once that I am going to make it big in my life,”11 and above all, he wants to stop being El Muñeco. Concretely, the dream of a new life, so typical of any melodrama, is translated in Los errores into the ideal of a perfect, almost sacred love. For Mario, this would mean getting Luque out of prostitution, cutting all ties to the past in order finally to take the leap toward a completely new existence:
This new existence was so extraordinary, it meant so much for both of them, that Mario would offer it to her, well-rounded, clean, and finished in all its details, similar to a true blessing fallen out of the sky, so that Lucrecia might embark upon it without the slightest obstacle, easy-going, natural, grateful, like something that had to be in this way and not in any other way.12
The vocabulary, as is often the case in melodrama, is borrowed from religion, or from what Marx and Engels, in their discussion of Eugène Sue in The Holy Family, had called “theological morality.”13 This can easily be understood insofar as, with the exception of suicide or the dream of ending it all—also quite common between Mario and Lucrecia—only the beyond of a pure and sacred ideal can be adequate to the desire to leave behind, once and for all, the world of injustice below. “Lucrecia was sacred, a sacred and pure ideal,” Mario thinks: “Lucrecia was sacred, sacred, sacred. The new life.”14 And later: “For sure she will never ever leave me, once she knows how happy we’ll be with the new life I’m going to give her.”15 Once again, the melodramatic nature of such wishes depends on the fact that what
