Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas by David Kelman (review)

If there is one thing that conspiracy theory-ists (i.e., those who study conspiracy theories) can agree on is that their subject of interest has intrinsic value, even as the nature of this value remains in flux. Earlier academic treatments attempted to root out the symptom: conspiracy theories, denounced as aberrant and illogical, were usually read as an underlying expression of social discomfort that could not be voiced in legitimized ways. Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas, by David Kelman, belongs to a newer breed of scholarship. Kelman’s argument is that every form of political expression involves an occluded conspiratorial narrative, and that by isolating this mechanism in literature—what he calls “reading for the complot”—we might appreciate it as a prerequisite for political discussion. Counterfeit Politics not only attempts, thus, to resituate conspiracy from the fringe to the quotidian, but also to expand it geographically. Kelman, a comparatist, pits the usual suspects of postmodern U.S. conspiracy literature—DeLillo, Pynchon—against canonical Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Rigoberta Menchú.

One of the dangers of such a broadening is that it might be accomplished by systematically blurring the definition of conspiracy theory itself. If, as Victoria Emma Pagán puts it in Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature, conspiracy theory “meets the challenge of the lack of knowledge with a preponderance of explanation,”¹ Kelman’s ambitious book runs the risk of being subsumed by its own category of study. But the author’s attention to previous scholarship—including Richard Hofstader’s notion of the “paranoid style” and more recent work by Mark Fenster—and to Argentine literary sources, in particular Ricardo Piglia’s theories on narrative, allows for a productive balance between specificity and breadth. Kelman focuses, largely, on the narrative elements of conspiracy theory, and his reading method involves searching for moments when a work’s “visible” plot is interrupted by the hint of a secret, “invisible” parallel plot. For Piglia and for Kelman, this sort of movement—particularly as a final revelation that demands a reevaluation of that which preceded it—is an essential component of most short story writing, by no means limited to what we might categorize as traditional conspiracy narratives.

After detailing his reading method, Kelman pairs a U.S. author with a Latin American counterpart in each of the remaining three chapters. In the second chapter, he reads Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) alongside Jorge Volpi’s essay “La segunda conspiración” (1999) to argue for conspiracy theories as a form of catachresis that forces the reader or listener to take an imaginative leap. It is this unstable space that constitutes, for Kelman, the mark of a political event: “one that necessarily keeps happening, that never stops happening, even if the content of the event changes” (79). The third chapter deals with hidden figures, linking the Trystero from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to instances of secret-keeping in I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), with particular attention to the traps, literal and symbolic, used by Menchú’s people against enemy soldiers. And the fourth chapter consists of a reading of Borges’s short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) alongside Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to reinforce the argument that politics cannot exist without a threating background complot. “If politics is to take place at all, it necessarily takes place in the ruined form of conspiracy theory” (150), Kelman writes.

The book’s main strength lies in the diversity of its sources. Kelman’s insights, often broad and universalizing, are propped up by evidence that encompasses a variety of time periods and locations. He manages to merge multidisciplinary strands with particular skill, considering he is venturing into an area historically dominated by the social sciences. And his writing is kept lively throughout as he offsets passages of...