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 is being sought is a degree of purity that is such that, in comparison, the real world can deliver only a series of disillusionments and deceptions. Meanwhile, however, 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