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To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited

Samuel Steinberg
Version of record first published: 03 Aug 2011.
To cite this article: Samuel Steinberg (2011): To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited, Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 20:2, 105-120
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2011.588511
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TO BEGIN WRITING: BELLATIN, REUNITED
This article reads the works of Mario Bellatin, a writer and artist working in Mexico City,
as paradigmatic of new artistic and social forms. It examines a number of spheres of
production (performance, pedagogy, novels, the plastic arts) but maintains the centrality of
the operation of writing. Bellatin’s writing, the article suggests –in a way that is notably
distinct from many of contemporaries’ resentful attachment to the Spanish American
narrative boom – toys with but cannot ultimately be made legible through the modes of
Downloaded by [Daniel Mesa Gancedo] at 11:04 29 January 2013
national-political allegory that so often determine readings of Latin American texts.

History’s virtual ‘failure’ to appear legibly in Bellatin’s work suggests a new way of
understanding allegory—of indeed reading Latin American writing—under what the
paper calls interregna1 times. That is, the paper argues that today there is no order or
sovereign condition—no social formation, no future project or shared history—that would
guarantee the legibility of history’s inscription in these texts and this illegibility is precisely
the trace of the historicity of the present.
I am mario bellatin and I hate writing [ . . . ] Being a writer is beyond conscious

decision [ . . . ] for me it is nothing more than a condition that I have no option
other than to bear.
—Mario Bellatin
In his recent, incomprehensible, claustrophobic, even boring 2006 novel, La jornada de la

mona y el paciente, the Mexican-Peruvian writer and artist Mario Bellatin recounts a story
that he has often related in public appearances: ‘ . . . when I began writing, I would
normally copy names from the phonebook or fragments of my favourite writers’ (2006a:
30). He goes on for another 20 pages to conclude: ‘Is it possible to begin writing?’ (2006a:
53). The question might seem peculiar to those who have seen Bellatin’s numerous, often
pamphlet-length texts, stacked on the shelves of bookstores or libraries. Yet this very
prolific – indeed, obsessive – production is precisely what makes unclear whether Bellatin
has done much of the writing that one thinks of when one thinks of writing, which generally
implies something beyond the simply mechanical operations which all writing requires
(pen to paper, hand to keyboard, voice into recording device): our shopping lists, our
tax forms, our phone books are not writing, are they? It seems that Bellatin intends on
deferring forever this beginning-to-writing – as something more than a physical or
mechanical everyday procedure – by way of a kind of occupation of writing, understood as
a compulsive adherence to the mechanical procedure of inscription. Writing, true writing,
should begin, or begin again, but has no space in which to do so.
Such a writing – an uncertain and deferred writing – is perhaps the one most
adequate to our times. Bellatin’s work, in its very groundlessness – that is, its
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 June 2011, pp. 105-120
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2011.588511
106 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES
commitment neither to a project of the future (utopia), nor to the re-articulation of the
people’s relation to history – exposes both itself and its reader to the precarious
uncertainty of the prevailing interregnum. That is, more specifically, Bellatin’s writing
opens onto a moment whose as yet indeterminate periodisation might be understood as
the present crisis of the always slowly waning – and sometimes returning – hegemony
of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and, more significantly, of the obscure
revolution that grounded its name and that perversely ‘justified’ the party’s staying
power for over 70 years. Perhaps this waning itself is still nearly imperceptible; the
contemporary vacuum of institutional power-in-legitimacy expresses precisely the
continuity of the Mexican present with nearly 70 years of PRIist impunity, and, in a
sense, with the reigning impunities of the years before that as well. Yet its intensities
might be at least indicated by a series of more or less proper names: Tlatelolco, the
banking crisis, Salinas, neo-Zapatismo, Fox, among, to be sure, many others.
Here I will follow Ryan Long’s (2008) reading of the ever intensifying
disarticulation of the Mexican national-popular state envisioned by a certain
revolutionary ethos, associated forever with the name of Cárdenas, in favour of a
neoliberal state, associated with the names of de la Madrid and of Salinas de Gortari.
While the Mexicanist social sciences have developed a longstanding reflection on the
histories and political economies of this ‘transition’, Long’s study, Fictions of Totality:
The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State, counts among the surprisingly
few readings of ‘transition’ in Mexico from within the humanities.1 Indexing the
decline of the national-popular state to a series of novels published in the second half of
the twentieth century, Long maps both a topography as well as a chronology for
making legible this transition as well as Mexican literature’s engagement with it.
Long’s study concludes by way of pointing to recent cultural phenomena: the
chronicle, associated with Poniatowska and Monsiváis, as well as more recent writers
surrounding the so-called ‘Crack movement’, of which the most widely read is Jorge
Volpi. Such interventions come ‘after’ the totalising novel, and, Long suggests, ‘must
be understood in relation to the dissolution of the national-popular state and the
totalizing thought it fostered’ (2008: 185). The present essay takes up the very task that
Long’s conclusion sets out, that of reading in light of this still undetermined present, a
present without name, a time between times or epochs, a transition that has, as yet,
lacked any decisive adjective and which thus offers only a kind of groundlessness. In so
doing, I hope to begin the task of periodising the cultural artefacts produced at what
might be designated as the ‘end’ of the Mexican Revolution as an active project, of its
status as desideratum of a state that justified its hegemony in the sovereignty of a people
that the state itself once invented and convoked.
The contemporary political and social formation in Mexico remains obscure, as
does its relation to the artistic production of its moment. I suggest that in this
transitional time, Mexican narrative has lost anything like an authentic relation to the
thought – however totalising – that largely grounded any possibility for Mexican
historical being and also organised the horizon of its future under the name of the ‘to-
come’ of Revolutionary promise. This is not to say that a certain revolutionary legacy
does not persist, but rather that its logic or reason is today largely inaccessible. The
signifier ‘revolution’ increasingly invokes the spirit or spectre of a past, rather than any
kind of active or ongoing engagement; it is, I wish to suggest, this very tension in the
body of the signifier that is also at work in Bellatin’s body and body of work.
TO BEGIN WRITING: BELLATIN, REUNITED 107
Put still otherwise, the horizon of the contemporary Mexican arts is rather unclear,
unmoored from the logic of a peculiarly deferred Mexican temporality, characterised
by the constantly postponed or incomplete future guaranteed by Revolution.2 If
contemporary works, such as those of Bellatin, narrate or are inscribed by something
external to their own becoming, it is this present, severed from any temporality but the
now; it awaits not the deferred utopia that once served as a horizon for thinking and
writing in Mexico. It simply waits. The larger suggestion of my exploration here is thus
that Bellatin’s works instantaneously – in the moment of their appearance – archive
themselves, announce their own ‘untimeliness’, and it is not the work, but the archive
of the work, through which the arts might hope to endure this Mexican interregnum.
The books appear as an afterthought, as the after-effect of something else, and this
after-effect, it seems, is projected as the point of departure, as Reinaldo Laddaga has
put it, for something else, or nothing else (2007: 151). Bellatin’s work can be said to
occupy a space, and more importantly, to take up a stretch of time. Its significance
resides in this occupation of the world in which readers read, without ends, which is
also to say these books engage their present through their coldness toward it, a
symptom precisely of their hope to avoid a full encounter with the unclear terms of our
now. Such is their commitment to politics and their commitment to a submission to
thought – finally their only reason for being.
In 2005, Alfaguara published Bellatin’s Obra reunida, a collection of nearly all of his
little novels. An unusual happening, perhaps, for a writer of his age, a relatively young
living author, who, in the space of some ten or 12 years has published some 15 or 20
works – and who surely in the time between this article’s conception and its
typesetting will have published several more. Perhaps more unusual: upon the
volume’s publication, Bellatin died. As he later recounted in an interview: ‘and with
this I died’ (Bellatin 2006c). Yet surely he, Bellatin, is not dead, for he lives on to
recount the exact moment of this death, to – quite impossibly – bear witness to the
end of his own life with the publication of the Work, to commit himself to the end of
the Work – its finitude and its closure – in its collection. There is no sense of tragedy
in this death – and not only because it is not a death, but rather the parody of mawkish
performance. Rather, there is also a coldness and an irony with which the author relates
his expiration, perhaps the distance required by a death that can only be understood as a
kind of duty, scripted and foretold. Bellatin’s death, in other words, is a repetition
required by the literary today, a ritual that permits its presence, a pseudo-sacrifice that
grants its continued, if funerary persistence, its spectral dwelling in our world.
Reunited
On the front cover of the Obra reunida, the author appears, photographed by Fernando
Montiel Klint, in a scene filled with objects that recall his texts (see figure 1).
‘Reunited’, here – in Bellatin’s own Colonia Juárez (Mexico, DF) apartment, no less
– is not just the work, but also a series of visual elements that refer to the work, a kind
of Bellatin-community – dogs (Perros héroes), flowers (Flores), fish (Salón de belleza).
Bellatin sits on a futon facing the camera. If the book’s publication kills the author, or at
least illuminates his death, then the photograph evokes the ancient practice of
burying servants and wives along with the king. It is funereal; it depicts the burial rite.
FIGURE 1 Photograph by Fernando Montiel Klint for Mario Bellatin, Obra reunida (Mexico:
Alfaguara, 2005), front cover.
The cover opens and closes not only the book-object, but also the relation between
fiction and reality. It constitutes and crosses this threshold, which is also the threshold
between the life and death of an author. The image discloses a crypt, an archive, and
also a screen, as Laddaga has put it, ‘the uncertain depth of a screen’ (2007: 142).
These ‘reunited’ works, it seems, possess a depth across this surface, a surface that
archives and is archived and collected on the surface of the book Obra reunida. This
screen presents already the literal threshold, the surface of this writing.
In this photograph Bellatin founds an extensive fiction, an assemblage that is
irreducible to mere writing. The book, like Bellatin’s prosthetic arm, is yet another
addendum, and we, readers, addenda to that addendum, a chain which promises to
close itself off beneath the archival surface of the Obra reunida. The question concerning
Bellatin’s work can thus no longer address what these books pretend to thematise, nor
how well they achieve such thematisation. Rather, we should wonder what space they
occupy, what period of time they can sustain, what actions can be organised around and
through them. That is, perhaps: not can we read, but can we pay attention?3 Put in still
other terms, these books establish a series of extra-textual consequences for the reader
– they involve the reader in an entropic becoming for a determined period of time.
They exact a temporal duration and posit the reader’s inclusion in or exclusion from a
kind of society that lives this duration. The society is organised around its reading task.
In Obra reunida a threshold promises to begin, to become, to cleave what is from what
will be – a tearing or circumcision, an archive that both commences and collects
(Derrida 1995). These works cut themselves from the world and create a society to
decipher them. They act out a ritual cutting that always understands itself as such.
Bellatin’s work, through this division and despite it, constantly cuts itself off from its
own appearance within history, its own being in time. It constantly repeats this gesture
of the cut, in a citation of a vanguard idiom and also as the mark of this gesture’s futility,
today. If this cut, if this break had ever been effective, Bellatin’s work seems to suggest,
then it would not require the repetition that transforms it into ritual. This death, an
attempt to sever the body of work, an attempt to kill the name of the author and lock
his work in an archive-crypt, announces the new work to begin. A threshold appears
between the work before this split and the later work – between the living work and
the ‘posthumous’ publications. This division in the Work, this line, allegorises the site
for the closure of the Work – even in its extension – to that which it is not.
The archive’s archive is the word ‘arkhē’, which ‘coordinates two principles in one:
the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence – physical,
historical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to the law, there
where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this
place from which order is given – nomological principle’. That is, ‘the commencement
and the commandment’ (Derrida 1995: 1). As Laddaga writes: ‘ . . . Bellatin’s books
tend to take the shape of an archive, of a collection of little data . . . the author’s task is
ruled by the fantasy that these data are offered to the reader as a fluid architecture, a
volume (a contingent flow) in which the reader might suppose that information is
possible and necessary to gather, and he or she should, for this reason, advance through
the work just as the uncertain depth of a screen is traversed and navigated’ (2007: 142).
This death stands as the ritual that allows for the continuation of writing. The work
is now a repetition of an earlier, fallen, archival text, which seems to ceaselessly re-bury
that text. As Bellatin himself tells it, after his death, he merely wished to repeat, to re-
write the texts he had written before. Bellatin’s textual manoeuvring leaves little space
for a critical approach – the work contains its own critical apparatus. The text moves
outside of itself in order to block the piercing of the text’s surface from without. Bellatin
constantly opens and closes literature, closes it, within its archive-crypt and un-encrypts
it, ‘auto-exegetically’ from within.4 The 2000 novel El jardı́n de la señora Murakami ends
with the didactic, almost textbook-style ‘Addenda al relato del jardı́n de la señora
Murakami.’ Here Bellatin provides a list of comments, ‘clarifications’, and what appear
to be reading comprehension questions: ‘Why do we never find out whether or not Mr.
Murakami knows how to drive’ (2000: 106). For Bellatin, literature requires addenda,
it opens onto and contains these addenda; yet these addenda must be something other
than literature. Such is the text’s defensive gesture, extended towards its outside in
order to hold off its own bleeding-out onto the reader’s desk.
In perhaps a more interesting example, towards the end of his 2001 novel La escuela
del dolor humano de Sechuán, there appears his ‘Señal para el lector’, in which the author
aims to ‘discourage clumsy opinions’ (2001: 97). Bellatin himself – not only in writing
but in the auto-exegesis that he constantly offers at public gatherings, readings, and
happenings – discourages clumsy opinions about his work. At the same time, in a
perhaps unintended irony, the text itself seems to thematise the critique of totalitarian
political orders and their organisation of reading as such.5 That is to say, the text both
mocks and enacts a certain closure of the possibilities of the literary, of a politics of the
literary. Indeed, allegory, as the privileged mode of bringing about the pseudo-
clandestine politico-historical functioning of the literary – notwithstanding the very
involuntary nature of allegorical politico-historical inscription – has been the object of
a great disavowal in Bellatin’s public performances.
There is a relatively clear division in the work before this split, before the collected
works, and what appeared after. The novels to follow – Lección de una liebre muerta, La
jornada de la mona y el paciente, El Gran Vidrio, and even his exploration of a theme as
national as Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas – seem to intensify the closure of the work to
what Bellatin has called ‘that sociological thing’ (Rodrı́guez 2006: 64). Its point of
departure is the insufficiency of literature, an insufficiency that in Bellatin emerges
from what is perceived as his work’s extension into the social, from its entry more or
less into the sphere of public performance – the creation of sociological addenda to the
work. The Congreso de dobles and the much talked about but non-existent theatrical
adaptation of his novel Perros héroes – supposedly extra-literary endeavours, upon
which I touch below – repeat or extend rather than merely supplement Bellatin’s
writing. Anticipating an effort to ground his work in the social, Bellatin has developed a
more direct, if slightly parodic appearance of his work’s social extension, of ‘that
sociological thing’ which Bellatin is at pains to void. Bellatin’s work, in turn, allegorises
literature’s false overcoming of these ‘sociological’ connections by way of a rhetorical
operation that seeks to finally abandon representation and purge literature of its
impurities, that is, more broadly, to save art from ‘extrinsic’ demands made upon it to
perform a task of socially productive labour, understood in the Latin American context
as the remittance to the reader of raw material for national-allegorical interpretation.
The Spanish American narrative boom, as a last ‘great moment’ of the literary, was
characterised by its attempt to symbolically compensate the unfinished modernity of
Latin America; it advanced configurations of art and politics that ran their course.
Bellatin’s symptomatic closure of the text to such a socio-historical horizon and duty
melodramatically asserts that the literary can no longer redress the limits of Latin
American modernity. If at one moment cultural expenditure was justified in terms of
its bringing into (symbolic) modernity an incomplete Latin American social field or of,
more radically, destabilising or reconfiguring the subject’s relation to its unachieved
modernity, today literature assumes the rather more ambiguous end of convoking a
public, or bringing people into a space to witness an art world with no clear relation to
its outside. Bellatin’s move serves the double purpose of rescuing literature from its
annexation to a politics, while, however inadvertently, also reserving the possibility of
politics as such. Literature’s long connection in Latin America to the dynamics of social
articulation and state pedagogy need no longer reside as its ultimate condition of
reception. As Patrick Dove has put this dilemma, what happens ‘if and when “culture”
ceases to represent a pedagogical instrument of the state?’ (2006: 77). Liberation and
irrelevance. This dilemma is that of Bellatin, inscribed allegorically in his early novels.
Moridero
The 1999 novel Salón de belleza illuminates a false choice: either Bellatin’s texts can be
read violently, perhaps unsustainably, in a national-allegorical mode, or we can read
them as the point of departure for the constitution of an art world, organised by what
art historian Nicolas Bourriaud would call a ‘specific sociability’, a sociability
determined by the parameters of the appearance of the work, by its production, its
forms of display, its contemplation. While it is rather apparent that Bellatin has set out
the first possibility as a kind of lure or trap, no reader has yet assumed that this second
possibility is also a fake. Bellatin’s texts, I wish to suggest, allegorise the constitution of
the false art world onto which they open, and this allegorisation yields itself as a social
symptom for the status of literature in Latin America today.
Among Bellatin’s works, Salón de belleza is perhaps the most conventional. It seems
to be set in a decaying city – perhaps Mexico or Lima – in a time of crisis: the
spreading of infectious disease and also social breakdown. Salón de belleza involves a
kind of plot, elaborated in more or less determined spaces and by more or less
determined characters: the owner of a beauty salon is forced to transform his place of
business into a hospice, where AIDS sufferers can go to die. They form a certain
society, a certain alternative collective being or community. He contracts the disease
himself. He also neglects his aquariums – for he is obsessed with fish. Without a clear
resolution, the novel seems to trail off. And in this regard, at least, the text anticipates
Bellatin’s more recent works in its cold, uncanny, entropic becoming. In a sense, this
text, like so many of his others, produces an atmosphere, a space, a certain duration.
At first blush, an allegorical reading would not seem to require a justification
considering that the text constantly lures the reader towards such an allegorical mode.
We find in Salón de belleza what would seem to be a call to a new community for
neoliberal times: ‘A few years ago’, begins the narrator, ‘my interest in aquariums led
me to decorate my beauty salon with fish of different colours. Now that the salon has
been transformed into a Moridero, where those who have nowhere else to do so go to
die, it depresses me to see how, little by little, the fish have been disappearing’ (1999:
11). If along these lines the text is fundamentally the story of an alternative form of the
social, it would constitute an allegorical writing of the end of the national-popular
state, which can no longer administer life and death, a state which can longer ground
the social field and provide a horizon for the reading task demanded by the work.
Such a writing replaces, or updates, the kinds of communitarian and utopian spaces
imagined by an earlier writing whose relation to the sphere of its reception, while in flux,
while characterised by shifting geopolitical alliances and, to be sure, the profound

division of the social field in which those works appeared, presented itself in a less
ambiguous fashion. The novel was the privileged cultural site for thinking and even
mediating state and society, for compensating the failure to achieve modernity as it
should have been achieved (Avelar 1999; Moreiras 2001). As Arguedas famously put it:
‘In technology [the first world] will beat us and dominate us, we don’t know for how
long, but in the arts we can already compel them to learn from us and what we can do
without even leaving this very place’ (2001: 14, emphasis mine). This site – this very place
and the possibility it held, the credibility of the compensatory logic by means of which
technological backwardness is overcome by artistic achievement – has faded. The arts
dedicate themselves to thinking the ruinous outcome of this compensation, the ruins of
the project of modernity. Put otherwise, it would appear that in Salón de belleza literature
has received its due update and traces the rise of a new form of social articulation. It once
again opens itself to what Bellatin has disparagingly called ‘that sociological thing’. After
its so-called compensatory function ends in loss with the decline of the Latin American
narrative boom, with, perhaps most forcefully, Arguedas’s literary act – his refusal to
finish his last novel and his real, not literary, suicide, it maintains, formally, its
sociological grounds. In still other terms: replacing the utopian site of Macondo at the
centre of Garcı́a Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Bellatin’s work is grounded in the
Moridero, as the scene of the rise of the new, abject community. From Macondo to the
Moridero, the literary is reunited with the social world.6
At the same time, to say that this merely elusive or enigmatic manner of narrating the
AIDS pandemic and the neoliberal moment is truly allegorical would seem also to buck
against Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of the ‘profoundly discontinuous’ spirit of
allegory. On Jameson’s terms, the third world text’s constitutive, necessary
articulation as national allegory does not inhere in a series of ‘one-to-one’ equivalences,
but rather in ‘the multiple polisemia of the dream’ (1986: 73). Nevertheless, this is the
bait Bellatin sets out: with the promise of a substitutive and ‘direct’ national allegory
we follow him into the ruins of the literary itself, and thus perhaps also into the
discontinuous and dreamlike ruins that is the spirit of allegory that Jameson intended. It
is here that the text yields to its own symptomatic nature as effect, to its own status as
an involuntary writing of its present. To encounter this involuntary logic of the text is
to believe Bellatin’s own most powerful admissions, to respect and carry out his artistic
last will and testament. For Bellatin himself has established in his fictions the very
involuntary nature of the writing task: ‘I am mario bellatin and I hate writing [ . . . ]
Being a writer is beyond conscious decision [ . . . ] for me it is nothing more than a
condition that I have no option other than to bear’ (Bellatin 2005: 502).
Salón de belleza’s false-allegorical moment conceals Bellatin’s seductive ruse – a
ruse we see repeated most powerfully in Perros héroes: tratado sobre el futuro de América
Latina visto a través de un hombre inmóvil y sus treinta Pastor Belga Malinois, whose title
obliquely references the nineteenth-century Mexican martyrs los Niños Héroes and
perhaps also the dog-hangings visited upon Lima by the Sendero Luminoso in 1980.
Like Salón de belleza, the text places its reader in the position of the paranoiac, whose
task requires the search for a Latin American prophecy in the work. Yet what Salón de
belleza, like Perros héroes, finally allegorises is the very withdrawal of the literary. It is
singular in its allegorisation of its own symptomatic appearance. With grave matters at
stake, the narrator opens the text with reference to his Royal Guppies: ‘The people at
the store assured me that these were the most hardy fish, and thus, the easiest to care
for’ (1999: 11). His first effort is thwarted, however, when, on the following day, his
finds the male fish floating. His co-workers warn him against the frivolity of the
enterprise, which, as the narrator relates, becomes increasingly obsessive. ‘In the same
store I learned that in certain cultures the simple contemplation of carps was a
pleasure. I began to feel the same way. [ . . . ] Someone told me later that such a hobby
was foreign amusement.’ ‘What wasn’t amusing at all,’ the narrator continues, ‘is the
increasingly large quantity of people that have come to die at the beauty salon. No
longer just friends in whose bodies the disease is advancing, but rather, the majority are
strangers who have nowhere to die. Other than the Moridero, the only alternative
would be to expire in the street. But about the fish . . . ’ (1999: 13 –14). The socially
symbolic dimension of the fish here is suspended in a return to their status as narrative
distraction. This rhetorical turn, this ‘but’, seems to indicate that the co-workers were
right, for the fish here merely seem to distract the narrator from the narrative task, that
is, thinking the AIDS crisis and more generally, our neoliberal present, and thus from
his own labour. Put otherwise, the fish steal time back from work and are thus, finally,
the allegorical face of the text’s refusal to do a certain kind of work – a kind of labour
that is ‘allegorical’, but not in the spirit of allegory, a work that, in other words,
provides the material for reflection on the AIDS crisis and the end of the national-
popular state. Or put in still other terms, the fish serve to recall – in much the same
way as the body of the ‘dead’ author on the cover of his Obra reunida – any condition
external or extrinsic to the work (again, the social, the political, the historical). They
allegorise the refusal of such conditions, notwithstanding, to be sure, Jameson’s
compelling reminder that such conditions ‘will not forget us’ (1981: 102).
This refusal, this closure of the text to the social is not, as some critics and even
Bellatin imagine, a rejection of the boom’s ethos. Bellatin’s works, in particular the
earlier works, like Salón de belleza, are intended to thwart an allegorical reading, and
perhaps also the scholarly reader who is tempted by such a reading.7 Diana Palaversich
writes, in the prologue to Bellatin’s Obra reunida:
The western reader – and here I certainly include the Latin American reader,
steeped in the boom and the post-boom – tends to approach the literary text with
the intention of finding its ‘deep meaning’, or a critical vision of the world that
frames the text and that confirms the commitment of the author to the surrounding
reality. Furthermore, readers nostalgic for the totalising logic of the ‘great novels’
that characterised the Latin American Boom, will search – in vain – for the same
intentionality in Bellatin’s texts, refusing to accept that they are written
deliberately against the grain of [such] literary projects. (2005: 12)
This ratification of Bellatin’s stated desire returns to a ‘largely unspoken’ historical

condition: ‘the complicity between literature and criticism in Latin America’ (González
Echevarrı́a 1998: ix). According to such a perspective, relatively little has changed for
Latin American literature since those ‘great novels’ were written because it is
fundamentally still heroic, a work that, as Palaversich has it, ‘resists being domesticated’
(2005: 14) by external or extrinsic critical procedures. However, whether Bellatin’s
works legibly relate his ‘commitment . . . to the surrounding reality’, the surrounding
reality has not, to paraphrase Jameson, forgotten him. Indeed, Craig Epplin has situated
Bellatin’s writing as a definitive example of what he calls ‘late book culture’, a cultural
form that, ‘intentionally’ or not, corresponds both epochally and in a number of
thematic and formal ways to what Epplin designates its analogous term: late capitalism.8
Perhaps it is thus for ‘auto-exegetical’ reasons – to maintain the auto-exegesis as
the ‘correct’ reading – Bellatin has attacked allegory, understood, as I write above, as
the privileged mode of bringing about the pseudo-clandestine politico-historical
functioning of the literary in Latin America (and again, not forgetting the way in which
this horizon will always inscribe itself, however much it is resisted). Indeed, Bellatin’s
public appearances have served to ‘discourage clumsy opinions’ as, again, Bellatin
himself has put it. In a presentation at Princeton University, for example, Bellatin
presented a version of his short novel Perros héroes; the reading was delivered through a
tape recording and accompanied by a slideshow. Bellatin appeared to be there simply to
press ‘play’ and advance the slideshow. However, as the result of a technical
malfunction Bellatin was forced to abandon the recorded version and read the text
aloud himself. During the question period, Bellatin responded to one attendant’s
intervention regarding the status of allegory in his work with the rather programmatic
assertion: ‘I hate allegory’ (Bellatin 2007b).
The allegory of this failed flight from allegory, from the failed closure of the text to
a kind of predictable reading, a ‘sociological’ reading, as again Bellatin has put it,
changes nothing with regard to the relation between literature and the social world in
which it appears, but simply updates the terms of that relation. The text, in other
words, always appears as a statement on or symptom of the social form to which its
appearance would seem to correspond (neoliberalism and the decline of the national-
popular state, above all). However, according to Palaversich, the final truth of
Bellatin’s texts is uniquely available to those readers studied in the avant-gardes and in
what Palaversich calls ‘postmodern fiction’, for as Palaversich notes, Bellatin’s ‘true
commitment is not political but aesthetic’ (2005: 14). Here, from the prologue to
Bellatin’s archive, as it were, another false choice. There are two sets of two things that
should not touch. First: aesthetics and politics – for the aesthetic is Bellatin’s true
commitment. And secondly, art and thought, for art that submits itself to thought risks
domestication. Yet this division cannot be maintained. For above Palaversich’s
endorsement of Bellatin’s stated intention and desire to void our own readerly
‘intentions’ – those of finding a ‘deep meaning’, those intentions grounded
‘nostalgically’ in the search for the ‘same intentionality’ in Bellatin’s text as one finds in
earlier texts – because Bellatin has intended to write ‘deliberately against the grain of
[such] literary projects’ (Palaversich 2005: 12, emphasis mine). Above all these
objections, again, we hear another voice, and it is still that of Jameson, a lesson from so
many years ago (although perhaps Palaversich would object that it is also mere nostalgia
to still believe, today, in the continued validity of this lesson): ‘History is what hurts. It
is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis’
(1981: 102). No choice in commitments: the condition of the present as a future
historical inscription sets ‘inexorable limits’. Such is the secret and always involuntarily
inscribed ‘deeper meaning’ that haunts Bellatin’s work; his death-work sets forth an
escape from precisely the impossibility of escaping this involuntary inscription. But he
cannot die and simultaneously witness the liberation of the work from an involuntary
inscription: ‘a condition’, as, once again, Bellatin himself put it, ‘that I have no option
other than to bear’ (2005: 502). A clearing, a new redoubt must be forged.
The Line
‘These are books despite themselves’, writes Laddaga, ‘against themselves, on the
threshold of disappearance, of not being what they have been, of becoming like
something else, or like nothing else’ (2007: 151). Acting upon this threshold of
disappearance or transformation is not the writer, but the book itself, the book despite
itself – a series of books that forms a surface, that corresponds to the surface of a
threshold between two things, between appearance and disappearance, art and
thought, aesthetics and politics, between something other than literature, and nothing
at all. For Laddaga, this ‘something else’ expresses itself perhaps most concretely in the
theatrical or cinematographic tendencies of Bellatin’s texts. While many of these books
are either supplemented by or invoke the logic of image-sequences, the cinematic or
theatrical nature of these texts – despite themselves – is frequently avisual. Bellatin’s
books possess an almost cinematic investment in the time span demanded by reading-
labour. The books are, as Laddaga notes, ‘platforms’, stages, so to speak, which
convene a gathering, which provide a mere point of departure for ‘something else’, a
potential scaffolding across two sides of a threshold.
Along these lines Bellatin is dedicated to the creation of social fictions that subtract
even writing from the work. One thinks here of the Congreso de dobles, the literary
conference that Bellatin organised in Paris in which Margo Glantz, Salvador Elizondo,
Sergio Pitol, and José Agustı́n were invited to a gallery under the auspices of the
Mexico Institute to speak on Mexican literature. Those in attendance were surprised to
discover that instead of the promised writers stood their doubles – people that each
writer had trained to go to Paris to speak in their place. Attendants stood in line to
speak to the double, and in turn, would be permitted to ask a question from a list. A
book appeared later to document the project (Bellatin and Volpi 2003).
One thinks also of the even more ephemeral theatrical adaptation of Bellatin’s novel
Perros héros which existed as a rumour: Bellatin rented a theatre, placed the title on the
marquee, and then went around telling people about the (non-existent) performance
they had missed. For their benefit, Bellatin himself – along with a well-trained dog –
later publicly re-enacted the piece, describing it in detail: the proliferation, again, of the
forms of literary appearance. These social grounds culminate in the Escuela dinámica de
escritores, which Bellatin founded in 2001, in the Condesa neighbourhood of Mexico
City: ‘A place where there is only one prohibition: that of writing’ (Bellatin 2006b: 9). It
is notable that these performances and actions have a clear root not only in earlier avant-
gardes but also in Latin American conceptualism, precisely one of the most politicised art
worlds imaginable (Camnitzer 2007). It might be that Bellatin continues this tradition in
the creation of apparently depoliticised fictions and fictional actions that precisely
allegorise the groundlessness of writing and the arts in the face of the consensual
neoliberal project that threatens to become the horizon of the world as such.
El Gran Vidrio, a collection of three autobiographies, is one of Bellatin’s more recent
books. The text, like most of the others, occupies a time and space, but lacks a
determinate narrative time or location. These stories lack a setting or site, their time or
temporality are not established or made visible. Instead, the book’s stunning cover –
Enrique Metinides’s photograph of the ruins of the Hotel Regis, taken just after the 1985
earthquake in Mexico City – serves in place of such data (see figure 2). The cover,
like the titular reference to Duchamp’s late work The Large Glass, announces once
FIGURE 2 Photograph by Enrique Metinides for Mario Bellatin, El Gran Vidrio (Barcelona:
Anagrama, 2005), front cover.
more a certain funerary persistence of literature. It is also an oblique reference to the

cover of the Obra reunida. Another ruin, another crypt, the image references the 1985
catastrophe and thus, perhaps unconsciously, the catastrophic inauguration of the
neoliberal era.9
The first autobiography references again this funerary space. Entitled ‘My skin,
luminous . . . in the surroundings of the tomb of the Sufi saint’, the text presents a
numbered list of actions. It is unclear what has happened, but the reader might
discern that the narrator is locked away in an asylum, that his family has been
dispossessed, and that, in order to feed the family, his mother has travelled around the
country exhibiting his genitals. Perhaps this artwork, the genitals on display, returns
us to the title of the book, to Duchamp. Yet more striking for my purposes here is the
second autobiography, ‘The true illness of the sheik’. Here Bellatin recounts a visit to the
house of a married couple, the protagonists of his last book, he says (2007b: 73). The
narrator intersperses a series of anecdotes that constitute the autobiographical dimension
of the work:
Since I was born my parents were almost obsessively bent on my using a prosthesis
to supplement my missing arm. They were able to indoctrinate me that I needed to
use it, but they didn’t seem to be aware that this kind of apparatus requires
expensive and frequent maintenance. For this reason, being unaware of this
exigency and perhaps also for lack of economic resources, the apparatus that I went
around with have always been in calamitous conditions. (2007b: 80)
The author finally leaves behind this arm, makes a break: ‘Such was the obsession of my
parents that more than 40 years had to pass in order that, in the middle of a kind of
exploratory trip [viaje iniciático ] to India’ – and here the notion of the iniciático, the
preparatory, or the waiting and exploration in anticipation of something else – ‘I
threw my last arm into the Ganges. I did it two days before the tsunami came and
levelled [arrasó ] part of the coast’ (2007b: 80 –81, emphasis mine). The coast is levelled
– as the Hotel Regis on the cover is levelled. 10
This levelling repeats that more famous instance found at the conclusion of Cien años
de soledad, in which ‘the city of mirrors (or of mirages) would be levelled [arrasada ] by
wind and banished from the memory of men in the moment in which Aureliano
Babilonia finished deciphering the parchments . . . ’ (1983: 448 –49, emphasis mine).
This is a return, to be sure, merely crystallised here in the image of a levelling – in the
perhaps entirely coincidental repetition of the verb ‘arrasar’ – to the ‘clearing in the
jungle’, understood by González Echevarrı́a as a foundational gesture of Latin American
writing. In this sense, Bellatin’s is once again an archival exercise; he wishes merely to
repeat – in this case to repeat the ‘founding archival fiction’, already repeated in Cien años
de soledad, of Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, which, as González Echevarrı́a convincingly
suggests, ‘dismantles the central enabling delusion of Latin American writing: the
notion that in the New World a new start can be made, unfettered by history’ (1998: 4).
Here Bellatin travels to India – a clearing – to unwrite his own (prosthetic) body, his
corpus, to leave behind the weight of his parent’s demands and pretensions (the demand
of the prosthesis – left unmaintained for lack of economic resources). In this sense,
Bellatin’s little calamitous books that organise actions, his threshold writing, return to
the scene of Aureliano Babilonia’s deciphering, which is also devastation. It uncovers
and burns these parchments – these parchments, as we know, are Latin American
writing itself, its archive, its entire history (González Echevarrı́a 1998: 2). It is this
ritualised pseudo-rupture that is today the only way for securing the continued
appearance of the literary, after Macondo. If there is a pedagogical or moral moment in
all of Bellatin’s writing – if it strives to transmit a truth about the world external to its
own becoming – it serves to remind us that our parents’ demand for the deciphering of
these parchments has led us into calamity, into ruins.
In place of this deciphering, in place of the search for a productive outcome to the
reading task, Bellatin offers the logic of ‘squandered energies’, spent in unproductive
labour, a gathering of meaningless data and their collection, their reunion.11 Yet this
wasted effort points to a reunion to-come: the collection or gathering that will no longer
serve to restitute an inequitable or failed modernity, a reunion in work. Bellatin’s is a
patient and preparatory writing – a present writing that is open to the future. Until that
arrival, we are enjoined to wait – in the wilderness, in the desert, among the dunes or on
the bank of the Ganges – for the Work to-come, a beginning, a reunion in and with
writing.
Notes
1 To be sure, this situation is quite different in other regional contexts of Hispanist
cultural studies. One need only cite the cases of Spain and the Southern Cone to see a
rich and rigorously theoretical engagement with the question of transition – an
engagement that tarries fruitfully with the possible adjectives that might ground our
reading of transition: post-dictatorial, neoliberal, democratic. I have commented

upon these issues elsewhere (Steinberg 2010).
2 As César Gilabert puts it: ‘For the Mexican leadership, real inequality derived from an
unequal distribution of wealth does not contradict the State’s generosity and
effectiveness regarding the goal of achieving social justice. On the contrary, the
distance of the objective confirms the “necessity” of the State itself, with precisely the
features that have characterised it until now’ (1993: 23).
3 While somewhat beyond the scope of the present argument, Jonathan Beller’s (2006)
work on perception, sensual labour, and attention economy under late capital might
delimit a fruitful reading of this aspect of Bellatin’s production. Such a reading, it
seems, would formulate the question of a ‘relational aesthetics’ not of the encounter,
as Bourriaud (1998) would have it, but rather of the factory.
4 I borrow the term from Santner (2006).
5 One thinks of, for example, Castro (1961).
6 More about this transition in the section below.
7 Perhaps it would be more precise to say that Bellatin’s works are intended to
thwart reading as such, and perhaps also the scholarly reader who is tempted by
reading.
8 I take this chance to signal a debt to my longstanding dialogue with Epplin’s work; his
book in preparation, ‘Mario Bellatin: Literature for Nonhumans’, might well suggest a
final post-modernity that arrives and becomes visible in Bellatin – as a writing truly of
and adequate to our present crisis.
9 I borrow from Lorenzo Meyer (1995) the year 1985 as a more or less official
beginning to the neoliberal era in Mexico.
10 It is also suggestive that this ‘unwriting’ occurs by way of a voyage to, and
encounter with, the land to which the original colonial enterprise had wished to
arrive. In this sense, the scene is once again taking part in the tradition of
‘founding archival fictions’, remixing, as it were, the original inscription of a missed
encounter.
11 My deployment of the phrase ‘squandered energies’ in this context is owed to
Cuauhtémoc Medina’s reading of the work of artist Francis Alÿs (Medina 2005: 178).
This borrowing is owed largely to my sense that various kinds of ‘wasted effort’ are at
play in the contemporary Mexican arts’ negotiation of and with its contemporary
interregnum. The present essay is indeed part of a larger exploration of this present
through the key figures of Mario Bellatin (letters), Francis Alÿs (plastic arts), and
Carlos Reygadas (cinema).
References
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499– 522.
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Princeton University
Bellatin, Mario. 2007b. El Gran Vidrio. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Bellatin, Mario. 2008. Las dos Fridas. Mexico: CONACULTA.
Bellatin, Mario, and Jorge Volpi. 2003. Escritores duplicados: narradores mexicanos en
Parı́s/Double d’écrivains: narrateurs mexicains à Paris [un proyecto / un projet de Mario
Bellatin]. Paris: Landucci Editores.
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the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods.
Paris: Les Presse Du Reel.
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University of Texas Press.
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artistas de apoyo a la revolución cubana apoyo a la revolución cubana apoyo a la
revolución cubana.
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estudiantil de México, 1968. Mexico: Miguel Ángel Porrúa.
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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las últimas dos décadas. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora.
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Samuel Steinberg is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Denison University. His work has
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Mexico.

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To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited

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TO BEGIN WRITING: BELLATIN, REUNITED

national-political allegory that so often determine readings of Latin American texts.

I am mario bellatin and I hate writing [ . . . ] Being a writer is beyond conscious

In his recent, incomprehensible, claustrophobic, even boring 2006 novel, La jornada de la

while characterised by shifting geopolitical alliances and, to be sure, the profound

This ratification of Bellatin’s stated desire returns to a ‘largely unspoken’ historical

more a certain funerary persistence of literature. It is also an oblique reference to the

reading of transition: post-dictatorial, neoliberal, democratic. I have commented

Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica.

Laddaga, Reinaldo. 2007. Espectáculos de realidad: ensayo sobre la narrativa latinoamericana de

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