are some of the fundamental theoretical questions—regarding the limits of nature and structure, determinism and freedom, humanism and anti-humanism—that will continue to be raised in art and literature in the form of melodramatic oppositions, as witnessed in the novel to which I turn in the next chapter.
2
MARXISM AND MELODRAMA
The Double Intrigue
What the bourgeoisie and proletariat, middle class and lumpenproletariat look for throughout the length and breadth of the culture industry, and find without knowing it, or without needing to know it, is a systematic understanding of society unified and transfigured by melodrama.
Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards
Any discussion of Los errores (The Errors), the sixth and last novel by José Revueltas (if we except El apando, a short narrative whose generic nature remains unstable but which in any case hardly qualifies as a novel), published in 1964, must take as its point of departure the structural tension between its two storylines: that of the social outcasts and lumpen, with its prostitutes, pimps, small criminals, and circus artists; and that of the Communist Party, with its militant workers, its cadres, and its ideologues, as well as its typical class enemies, such as the usurer or the fascist police.1 In itself, the contrast between these two sides of the story already carries great potential for melodrama, and in fact the entire novel breathes the feuilleton-like atmosphere of the genre, mixing elements of farce, the comedy of errors, the morality tale, and the popular theater. But we should avoid any premature judgment as to the exact value of these melodramatic elements within the context of Revueltas’s literary work or political thought, since they fulfill various functions all at once.
On one hand, there can be no doubt that the sheer persistence of the criminal underworld—the inframundo or bajo mundo—left to its own devices far removed from the high-sounding debates among leaders and intellectuals of the Party, serves the effect of brutally unmasking the latter’s hypocrisy, not to say its utter historical inexistence in Mexico, as Revueltas had discussed it two years earlier in his Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (Essay on a Headless Proletariat). In this sense, we might say that, for the Mexican author, there will not exist a genuine communist party unless it finally includes those members of the underworld whom orthodox Marxism had always excluded under the denigrating term of “lumpenproletariat.”2 In spite of their enormous curiosity for the genre of melodrama, especially the work of Eugène Sue, about whom they write several eloquent pages in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels only rarely show a comparable appreciation for the group of marginals that typically are the genre’s protagonists. “Marx and Engels do not spare their invectives with respect to the latter,” Ernesto Laclau comments, referring to the lumpenproletariat, in his recent book On Populist Reason, before he recalls how Marx speaks in this regard of “the scum of society,” whereas Engels uses even stronger language: “This rabble is absolutely brazen . . . Every leader of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.”3 And yet, with the help of Peter Stallybrass, Laclau goes on to demonstrate how, even in Marx’s perspective, the lumpenproletariat appears after all as a key reference for the articulation—this time contingent and hegemonic, not deterministic, in nature—of any and all emancipatory politics. This perspective is further confirmed in Revueltas’s Los errores.
Precisely insofar as it lacks any stable social inscription, the lumpen constitutes something like an ideal term of heterogeneity from which to articulate a political identity without essentialisms. This is how Frantz Fanon understood it, long after Marx, in a fragment from The Wretched of the Earth in which he would appear to offer an anticipation of the whole gallery of characters that populate the pages of Los errores:
The lumpenproletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the “security” of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals . . . throw themselves into the struggle like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood . . . The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month . . . all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation.4
In Los errores, of course, we are a far cry from such an awakening of the lumpenproletariat to the solution of its troubles. The worlds of misery and of communist militancy do not really meet in this novel, except in crime and the repression of crime. Even so, it would seem as if this entire underworld, by its sheer physical presence, were loudly proclaiming the void of a duty, like the task of an ethical or moral revision of really existing communist politics. The party, the narrator seems to tell us through all the classless characters gathered in his text, should also include the latter as the true motor of history, far from the preachings about history as the “objective” history of the class struggle, according to the hefty manuals from the Soviet Academy.
The gesture of converting the lumpen, by way of the genre conventions of melodrama, into an integral part of the world as presented in Los errores would thus have to be read as a denunciation of communist politics—a 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