the real conditions of existence remain intact precisely because they do not enter into a process of genuine transformation. Rather, the melodramatic structure of the desire for the new life only increases the false contrast between the dream of purity, on one hand, and the world of misery, on the other.
Freedom and Automatism
This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance.
Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ
The desire to “succeed” or “make it big” (dar un golpe) in life can also be read as a pathetic, well-nigh existentialist search for an authentic “act” of freedom. This theme of the act, as we will see in detail below, is actually a constant concern of the later Revueltas.16 In Los errores, though, we can already begin to perceive to what extent the logic of the act encloses an insuperable paradox. On one hand, it is certainly true that a genuine act, if accomplished, would be proof of the human capacity for autonomy. Thus, Mario discovers with an “abyssal and sweet delirium” that he can be somebody, do something, become the “only true but invisible protagonist” of his own history, “in the same way that a magician brings incredible and marvelous things out of nowhere”—something which would seem to constitute a true moment of existential revelation: “A nebulous discovery of his own person: I have done something, me, the one who finds himself here, between the old boxes of the attic.”17 On the other hand, each genuine act seems to bring the individual to a point where it is not he or she but the objective course of things that decides in his or her stead. In this way, the human being, far from giving evidence of autonomy by acting independently, rather becomes a kind of automaton at the mercy of a plan or an order beyond its will.
To decide and to let another decide for oneself, in this sense, would be two sides of the same coin. In the case of Mario, the discovery of “being somebody” in the sovereign act is barely distinguishable from the suspicion, equal parts voluptuous and delirious, of being “handed over” or “surrendered” to a chain of events beyond his control: “This is how events occurred, the anesthesia provided by a sovereign act, foreign and distant, the world, life, which linked him up with their chains without belonging to him, and which sunk their teeth in his flesh that nevertheless was his flesh, his hand, the hand of Mario Cobián.”18 What the subject feels at this point of exchange between act and necessity is the happiness of belonging to a cause greater than him- or herself. This is the pleasure of deciding as a way of letting oneself be decided, so crucial for the good functioning of all ideological interpellation: “The voluptuousness of not belonging to oneself, of being handed over, of not responding for oneself, of letting oneself be led from one side to the other, who knows whereto.”19 Here, as in a Möbius strip, the most sovereign activity, when it continues long enough in the same direction, all of a sudden turns into the highest degree of automated passivity. Revueltas’s novel, among many other achievements, also represents an impeccable narrative investigation into the logic of such paradoxes surrounding the act, freedom, and the objective destiny of things.
Various characters in Los errores on both sides of the intrigue indeed seem to be going through similar moments of crisis, between the anxiety and the pleasure of knowing themselves to be ruled by a destiny that is beyond their individual will. “Elena,” the ex-circus artist (whose nickname is a pun on el enano, “dwarf,” as a homonym for Elena-no, “not Elena”), for example, yearns to exercise his freedom and break completely with his boss and supposed friend “El Muñeco.” Locked up in a tiny suitcase, lying in wait for the right silence in order to jump out and rob the moneylender don Victorino’s shop, he momentarily suffers from delusions of grandeur and imagines himself capable of anything and everything: “But today he would not allow Mario Cobián to take advantage of him in any way. El Suavecito was not going to allow himself to be mocked. He decided to complete the first part of the theft. The moment to act had come: and it was up to him, to Elena. It was his moment.”20 Thus, the moment of absolute freedom arrives:
The dwarf felt the full sensation of a happy, unlimited freedom, which he could express in whatever way he wanted, shouting out loud. So he did: a scratchy, ululating, savage scream, like a drunk Mexican. Absolute, aggressive, untainted freedom . . . Nothing less than that, absolute freedom . . . [all this] was his own determination, free and sovereign, the imposition of his own destiny over things, and not the other way around.21
“Elena,” at the same time that he feels himself capable of being “the absolute author of his deeds and their irrefutable judge,” also experiences the uncannily painful and pleasant feeling of becoming an automaton under the yoke of some other—whether this other is fate or “El Muñeco”; but this sensation is actually indistinguishable from that other, “incomparably terrifying” one, which produces in him “a naked pleasure, without skin, without instruments: the sensation of infinity,” leading to the “paroxysm of a form of happiness both mad and atrocious.”22 What happens precisely is that the fascination with the act—with getting his moment—coincides with the desire for abandonment—for forming part of a plan larger than himself.
Thus, the dwarf feels “an unspeakable contact” with the mandate emanating from the other, “to the point of emptying himself out completely in the void, without being aware of anything.”23 It is by purely and simply obeying orders that the desire of the subject reveals itself to be a desire of and for the other, a desire to which he submits himself as “an abandoned puppet.”24 Instead of being the agile acrobat of his own freedom, this ex-circus artist discovers that he is merely the docile automaton of a destiny that on all sides exceeds and controls him. And something similar happens not only to “La Magnífica”—“Why did she feel pushed liked an automaton to say exactly that which she had promised to keep quiet about?”25—but also, in anticipation of the second storyline, to the linotypist who, at the time of setting the manifesto of the Central Strike Committee (Comité Central de Huelga) “seemed like a somnambulant puppet that was being handled by someone from afar with the precision of a chess-player.”26 In all these cases, the act defines the linkage between an individual and the plane of the supra-individual, in a constitutive oscillation between freedom and automatism, between blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, between one’s own will and the impersonal chain of inevitability.
Mario’s example once again offers the best summary of the paradoxes of the act:
Mario felt that the earth was slipping away from under his feet. Why did things take this absurd and arbitrary turn, as in a grotesque nightmare? The plan did not unfold in conformity with what he had foreseen, it took paths of its own, invented resources, linked distant events, anticipated situations, even though it was not really different from the plan itself. To the contrary, materials and things that belonged to him, that were included in him in order to become realized, took on a destiny and chose an occasion on their own account, appearing in a new light, as in an enchanted mirror in which they looked at themselves as they had always wanted to see themselves and not in the way they were at the point defined by that personal human will. Mario could not have these thoughts or considerations for himself, but he guessed behind everything the existence of a deceitful and sly move, not devised by anyone in particular, but of which he made himself the victim—God knows why, or moved by whom?27
Here Mario in effect appears to be “the Puppet” (El Muñeco) in a false setup, a nightmarish and absurd plan that is also at the same time secretly attractive. The plan that he seeks to accomplish is simultaneously an enchanting mirror in which he recognizes himself not as he is, but as he would like to appear. We might also say that the mirror returns to him an image—an imaginary identity—of his self in the analytical sense of the term, his ideal ego rather than his ego ideal. This is why abandoning himself to the plan, with all its incomprehensible whims included, turns out to be so delirious and painfully sweet. The most objective elements, a destiny woven from strange and alien forces, at the same time seem to communicate with the most intimate materials of the subjective realm, the innermost drives of one’s own being. Thus,
