The physicality that escapes narrative—that stealing of the smile—allows the action to remain on narrative’s periphery and outside time. When the narrator returns to bed, his wife asks him what time it is, which “makes [him] smile all over again” and reply, “What’s the difference?” (26). Time does not matter to the narrator, who remains in the now of physical experience. To think in terms of time and its organizing structures would vitiate the significance of the physical exchange between Ortíz and the narrator, which has something to do with Villa and the Mexican Revolution. That historical experience marks the men’s bodies in ways beyond the historicity of narrative logic. The narrator cannot answer his wife’s question; he can only deploy his stolen smile.
Gilb’s eschewal of narrative time and logic recalls the mystery of the Sun Stone: was it meant as a connotative or denotative representation of time? His rejection of telos also puts Gilb in close conversation with Bergson’s work on time, language, and experience. For both thinkers, language is a function of sense experience, not knowledge, part of the human experience of intuiting, not knowing, which unfolds over time and has no cognitive teleology (Guerlac 107). For Bergson, all beings are enmeshed in a web of dynamic matter where change and action occur via the transmission of stimuli, like words, and matter is ultimately “nothing but a path along which” the energy of change passes (Matter and Memory 36). Merleau-Ponty identifies Bergson’s conflation of subject and object as a “mistake” that “consists in believing that the thinking subject can become fused with the object thought about, and that knowledge can swell and be incorporated into being” (Phenomenology of Perception 62). Unlike Merleau-Ponty, however, Bergson is interested in action, not speech—presence, not representation—a preference paralleled in Gilb’s writing.
Gilb’s racialized bodies do not represent knowable, ethnic selves. The Mexican Revolution and its indigenous heroes are important to the narrator of “Death Mask,” but the reader never learns why, and the particularities of the narrator’s life are so insignificant that the character remains nameless throughout. The narrator is simply present, by which term I mean to indicate both “here” and “now.” The significance of presence for Gilb’s work becomes clearer when read through Bergson, for whom presence is transformation, and “to be” is to be always in the process of changing. Presence, for Bergson, is impossible to narrate because subject and object interact not in sequential time but in duration. He defines duration in Time and Free Will (1889) as “the form taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when our self lets itself live, when it abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states” (100). Suzanne Guerlac clarifies, succinctly explaining the difference between duration and time when she writes that “time is the symbolic image of Pure Duration.… It is what duration becomes when we think and speak it” (69). Language, the realm of the symbolic, typically removes us from pure experience, according to Bergson—time is to duration as language is to sense, in other words—but I contend that Gilb uses language and narrative not to represent but to enact a sense of duration.
For example, we can read the narrator in “Death Mask” asking his wife what difference time makes as Gilb staking a narrative claim and articulating the terms of his fictional project. The exchange between the narrator and his wife presents the reader with two ways of conceiving time and history: the wife operates in a teleological mode in which the sequence of events gives them meaning; the narrator, on the other hand, eschews chronology and time—“What’s the difference?”—to argue that the body retains a historical knowledge that resists narrative’s organizing logic, just as the Sun Stone has refused to be archaeologically known. The body’s resistance to text and narrative time is a core tension of Gilb’s writing around which I organize my readings of Last Known Residence and “please, thank you.” How to make sense of the fact that Gilb’s temporal resistance unfolds in a form that conditions temporal existence? Narrative gives shape to duration; it puts physical, human time into historical time, contextualizes it and gives meaning to action, as Paul Ricoeur has discussed.13 In what follows I look at how, in Last Known Residence and “please, thank you,” Gilb has grappled with this aesthetic, philosophical, and political conundrum.
Bodies in Time: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña
Last Known Residence opens by presenting the reader with a protagonist, Mickey, desperately trying to make narrative sense out of his sense experience. Constantly telling stories about himself, Mickey often cannot remember whether his stories are fact or fiction. He perceives his stories about Mexico as “bullshit” that “was allowed as plausible” by other characters as a way to “help pass boring time using noisy words” (44), and his own ancestry is explicitly referenced only once, early in the novel. He is an “American, a U.S. citizen of Mexican parents, one from this side of the río, one from the other” (11). Mickey understands himself as a Mexican American telling “bullshit” stories that other characters are afraid to question. In place of this “bullshit” the novel offers moments of racial immanence during which the narrator argues against Mickey’s narrative cynicism. Mickey perceives his inability to tell effective stories as a failure of language. He sees language as the way to truth, but his challenge over the course of the novel is to understand language as a function of sense; Mickey must learn to value duration over time and sense experience over cognition.
Mickey’s journey toward embracing sensation emerges from the tension the novel presents between form and content, as in the early scene when Mickey first meets Ema and immediately imagines that a great romance has blossomed between them. He suppresses the nagging suspicion that his love is imaginary and unrequited, but reality, in the form of physical contact with Ema and detailed descriptions of other bodies, impinges on Mickey’s stories (20). As he and Ema walk through Ciudad Juárez, the corporeal materiality of Mexico’s poverty and its subordination to the United States fracture Mickey’s sense of self and narrative control. He intuits that his stories cannot create order out of this chaos, but the novel is not ready to give up on story altogether. Story shifts, over the course of the novel, from the past-tense, mental activity of Mickey “looking for clues” to his story’s ending (40), to his future-oriented, physical certainty, “in his bones,” that “something serious was going to happen” (127). By freeing Mickey from the cause-and-effect, linear patterns of scientific time, Gilb introduces the idea that causality and contingency are integral to the self, but require narrative creativity for their recounting.
The narrator’s curious grammatical choices illustrate just such creativity. While Mickey throws away the western novel he’s been reading because he is tired of its racist generic conventions (207), the narrator offers three grammatical workarounds for writing the things that cannot be written: the conditional tense, appositions, and double negatives. The conditional introduces contingency at the level of the word. In sentences such as “He’d work out with weights. He’d push himself into major shape” (2), the conditional is used to indicate the future, but in other places its meaning is less clear. With apposite phrasings the narrator gestures similarly toward Mickey’s need to appreciate shades of gray. Mickey wants to be prepared “for the better or the worse, mind and body” (2). He doubts the suitability of the YMCA for him because he “wanted anonymity, not publicity, privacy, not spectacle” (4). These appositions, this lexical bouncing back and forth, mirror the endless games of ping-pong Mickey plays at the YMCA and open an in-between space for the interstitial self to emerge: what is the ping-pong ball as it flies through the air? What is the middle ground between publicity and privacy, better or worse?
Gilb’s use of the conditional and appositional clauses highlights Mickey’s desire, implicitly subverted by our narrator, to construct a narrative world of surface. The narrator, conversely, makes consistent use of double negatives to force the point that language hides a world of meanings. Positivity lurks beneath the profusion of negative terms in double-negative constructions. For instance, the reader learns that while Mickey and his friend Butch enjoy each other’s company, they both guard their private lives closely, and “that wasn’t unlike