El monstruo mundo by Azucena Hernández (review)

The perennial question of how literature is to engage violence lies at the heart of Azucena Hernández’s novella El monstruo mundo. Set in a dystopian city-world that bears the traces of globalization, neoliberalism, human and drug trafficking, and femicide—as well as a casual complicity in these forces— Hernández’s fragmentary antinarrative gives us a philosophy of language in which expression is fated: “pues el defecto de la palabra fue el mundo, seis días de labores extenuantes y uno de afasia” (10). Periodic revelations like this one propel the narration inward, rather than forward, deeper into the consciousness of an unnamed narrator. The result is a surreal and uneasy mindscape, “el oscuro eco de la noche que es la mente” (11).

Despite the futility of language it proclaims, El monstruo mundo is a highly literary work. At the level of the word, Hernández’s writing is luminous, even loving; at the level of the sentence, her prose is contemplative and rhythmic. Yet nihilistic self-doubt winds its way through the lyricism. Language is poor, the narration says—but it says so in poetry. Creationism, or the esperpento of creationism, is an important register here. From the chaos of fear—“En el principio era el miedo” (26)—emerges the already-failed word: the divine is aphasic, and it is a senseless world that tumbles forth. Thus, the novella implicitly asks: What creation myth explains the postmodern world? And what is the status of humanity in this world?

While the narration draws the reader deep into the narrating mind, the narrator’s identity remains uncertain. The narrator-as-entity is distant from the narrative enunciation. Occasionally the first-person narration turns omniscient. The narrator’s neighbor and dealer, D., is also indeterminate and seems at times more like a hallucinatory figment of the narrator’s dependencies than a separate character. Their interpersonal encounters are vaporous: “Hablaba con alguien que tampoco existía” (13). Of the narrator’s body, we know little but its penetration of and by the city: the narrator roves the city’s seams, works in a pizza joint, falls back into a drug haze, vomits. The city is similarly anonymous, faintly tick-marked by the nocturnal landscape of sex club, fast-food chain, factory, slum. This phantasmatic quality of the text works to channel the forces of our late capitalist world, which is violent and disconnected from the past: “El pasado ya no decía nada” (21).

Despite the narrator’s corporeal abstraction, bodies—often illicit bodies—remain a constant across the disjointed time and space of the narrative. That bodies inflict and suffer misogynistic violence is a subtext throughout the novella, and the repugnance of bodies—or, in Slavoj Žižek’s words, the “radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing” (163)—is a drive in Hernández’s language. This is not a spectacle of horror but an intervention. By looking head-on at that which is disgusting, the novella inquires into the ideological practice of disgust: disgust, too, is a force that courses through the monstrous world, now masking, now enabling. Across the social differences it upholds, disgust inspires arousal: “La repugnancia es recíproca, otra forma de seducción” (67). When the narrator weeps in a café, the scene is not about the first person but rather the discomfort and shame of the other patrons. In a parenthetical gloss of the incident (again, the narrating mind is at a remove from the narrator’s somatic experience), the narrator draws an analogy between the stranger who cries in public and the beggar who asks for money, saying of the latter: “extiende la mano que precisa dinero. El afortunado caritativo estira a su vez un billete de diez dólares cuando apenas ha mirado al hombre menesteroso, y vuelve rápidamente la vista a su lap top, como si intentase suprimir esa visión desagradable con la tecla Delete” (25...