The affects that most insidiously circulate through the universe of Revueltas’s narrative—rage, fear, and hatred, not to mention the desperate yearning for justice—all serve to link the individual to a supra-individual ideological cause. Don Victorino, the moneylender about to fall prey to an attempted robbery on behalf of the communists, considers that such a linkage offers a point of commonality that he shares not only with his accomplices in the Anticommunist Mexican League, such as Nazario Villegas, but also with his most feared class enemies, among whom we find one of his own employees, the communist infiltrator Olegario Chávez. The following sentence also offers us a good sample of Revueltas’s quite unique and inimitable style—for who else, aside from Martí, can sustain for over a dozen lines a single sentence without losing its dialectical cadence and fluency?
If he had felt capable of kneeling down before Nazario—don Victorino thought, precisely because of the secret generosity of his impulse, without fear that he would interpret it as abject behavior, it was so that a gesture of such desperate eloquence would make him understand, all of a sudden, the way in which he, don Victorino, appreciated the situation not only with respect to his own person but also, above all, insofar as in this person, in his concrete and individual destiny, there lay condensed the logic, the reason, the justice—and also the tribulations and impiety—of the cause for which both of them fought, a condensation whose discovery (barely ten minutes before, when don Victorino began to measure the magnitude of the threat represented by Olegario Chávez by his side as a communist spy) was a kind of common patrimony, an appalling common responsibility, that both had to grasp and share in everything new, radical, and unusual that it would require from their lives.30
Something in Olegario Chávez, for this same reason, ends up seeming curiously seductive to don Victorino. Despite the hatred each of them feels for the other, both men ultimately operate in identical ways, devoting their lives to a cause in which they simultaneously recognize their most profound and personal vocation. Thus, still according to don Victorino,
The communists had signaled him and nobody else, in the same way in which Judas had chosen Jesus; in the same way in which Judas had destined Jesus, inevitably, to bear witness. Both had ended up being entwined and sentenced from the beginning by the same destiny and the same fear, the fear that overcomes those who know themselves in a way to be in possession of the truth: of both sides of the truth. Above all, this is what Olegario was to don Victorino: the presence in which he contemplated himself, the inexorable and hoped-for justification of his life, of his history, of his form of being the way he was and of the reason for that vital, superhuman, and impious violence, out of spite for the mediocrity, pettiness and hatred in the midst of which he had always had to live, solitary, strong, and disdainful.31
The communist traitor, in this sense, plays a fundamental role in the psychic economy of his archenemy, the proto-fascist usurer don Victorino:
Olegario Chávez plays next to him, from the point of view of the communist plans, a very special role of transcendence . . . quite the opposite of a vulgar spy or provocateur. Neither his conduct, nor the fundamental traits of his character, displayed the slightest deceitfulness: he was frank, straightforward to the point of insolence and rudeness, if one wanted, but by no means deceitful, by no means was he a type who would play with marked cards. His tactic of open, frank, and frontal attack, for this very reason, revealed the truly singular perspective of his goals.32
Above all, what we begin to glimpse in this impeccable narrative exposition is the way in which a certain dogmatism, on the part of communists no less than of their class enemies, nurtures itself with the full spectrum of human affectivity. With this critique of the subjective logic of dogmatism and authoritarianism, however, we already find ourselves at the center of the second intrigue in Revueltas’s novel.
Rethinking the Twentieth Century
The nineteenth century announced, dreamed, and promised; the twentieth century declared it would make man, here and now.
Alain Badiou, The Century
The twentieth century did not exist. Humanity made a huge leap into the void from the theoretical presuppositions of the nineteenth century, through the failure of the twentieth century, to the dark beginning of the twenty-first century in August of 1945, with the atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
José Revueltas, Dialéctica de la conciencia
Aside from its melodramatic plot line pitting the lumpenproletariat of prostitutes and pimps against the fascistoid anticommunists, Los errores in a second and parallel story presents a narrativized judgment regarding the dogmatic excesses of Stalinism and its nefarious effects in the rest of the world, including in the Mexican Communist Party. In this sense, the novel participates in a much larger self-evaluation of the twentieth century, in which we could also include Alain Badiou’s The Century or, closer to Revueltas’s home, parts of Bolívar Echeverría’s Vuelta de siglo.33 In fact, Badiou once commented to me that he had planned originally to include a chapter on Mexico in The Century. I am not sure what events (texts, artworks, political sequences) would have been summoned in this chapter, which for better or for worse remained in the drawer of good intentions. What I do know is that Los errores had already asked, forty years earlier, some of the same questions that drive Badiou’s project in The Century. In particular, Revueltas’s novel gives us important insights into the potential destiny of a whole jargon of finitude when it is combined with an antitotalitarian, antidogmatic, left-wing revisionism. A central place in this combination is reserved, as we will see, for our human capacity for error—our human finitude—reconceived as the essential truth in Hegel’s dialectic.
Revueltas, like Bertold Brecht in his play The Decision, to whom Badiou devotes a chapter in The Century, is concerned above all with the interpretation that history has in store for the great events in the international expansion and perversion of communism. Its main problem is addressed in an odd parenthesis, in which the narrator for once seems indistinguishable from the author’s own voice:
(One cannot escape the necessity of a free and heterodox reflection about the meaning of the “Moscow trials” and the place they occupy in the definition of our age, of our twentieth century, because we true communists—whether members of the party or not—are shouldering the terrible, overwhelming task of being the ones who bring history face to face with the disjunctive of having to decide whether this age, this perplexing century, will be designated as the century of the Moscow trials or as the century of the October revolution.)34
Revueltas leaves us no clear verdict in this regard. Was the twentieth century criminal or revolutionary? The disjunctive remains open throughout Los errores, since there is also no single character capable of occupying the organizing center of consciousness that we might attribute to its author. Critics such as Christopher Domínguez Michael, after expressing their dismay at Revueltas’s “far-fetched and immoral” hypothesis regarding the Moscow trials, are quick to add how much they lament the fact that Revueltas could have suggested some kind of dialectical justification of sacrifice and terror: “Revueltas takes the liberties of a novelist with regard to history and, in his enthusiasm for the Hegelian triads, he converts Bukharin’s tortured mind into a precise and chilling dialectical synthesis.”35 In reality, the text is far more ambiguous; and it even stages this ambiguity itself by providing several characters with a split conscience.
Thus, we find examples of an analysis of the problem in terms of the corrupting nature of power with regard to historical truth. This is the case of Olegario:
The Moscow trials in this sense—Olegario had told himself from that moment on—present an entirely new problem for the conscience of communists: the problems of power and historical truth split off and grow apart, to the point where they become opposed and violently exclude one another in the arena of open struggle. Meanwhile, the historical truth, in the margin of power, becomes invalidated, without support, and without any recourse other than the power of truth, in opposition to everything the truth of power represents in terms of compulsive force, repressive instruments, propaganda means, and so on. This is when