The Lost Art of Evil

On Fernanda Melchor’s Circuits of Transgression

Joan Miró, Woman (Opera Singer), 1934, Pastel and pencil on flocked paper

Adjacent to recent conversations and debates about the relationship between art, politics, and the canon, another rumbles just below the surface, informing and making possible the very question of a work of art’s politics or ideology. I’m going to get to a specific case in a bit, but before I do, here are a few assumptions that complicate everything I will suggest:

1. Trotting out and dusting off the good old intentional fallacy here, the potential difference between an author’s worldview, or ideology, and their work makes it difficult to parse out the politics of a text, let alone the internal contradictions that make attempts at buttonholing it so fraught. What, for instance, to make of the “politics” of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which gives so much agency to Hester Prynne while nonetheless punishing her at the end? (The same ambiguity keeps the classic femme fatale so electric and alive today.) If we’re talking about art, are we not also talking about works that remain relevant precisely because of their slippages and contradictions?

2. In a competition between the most pointed, aggravating, obvious-yet-not-so-obvious critiques of ideology, the winner has got to be Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s (of course they’re French!) 1969 essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” which argues that any effort to uphold or work against the dominant ideology is already compromised by the medium itself, which favors a sort of bourgeois realism. Or, as Laura Mulvey suggests in her classic “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the very structure of looking — the film apparatus itself — is already loaded, no matter the content or genre of the film. In other words, can we talk about the politics of art without accounting for its medium and the limited range of false choices it affords — choices that are not separate from content but in fact constitute its very parameters?

3. A work of art only exists insofar as it has an audience — an audience that includes its commentators, critics, publicists, advocates, and haters: the voices who continually frame and reframe it. Is it possible to come to any work of art without moving through its onion-like layers — what Gérard Genette called paratexts: the blurbs, the book covers, the notifications, the algorithms, the word of mouth?

Which brings me to the Mexican author Fernanda Melchor, whose work I approached conditioned to discover what the reviewers had discovered — only to discover something else. The weird shift happening now, as we seem to move out of the recent era of literature-as-social-good-luminous-empathy-generator, is a discussion for another day. (Jennifer Wilson hints at something like this in “The Empathy Industrial Complex,” her review of George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.)

I approach Melchor as a turning-point author, whose recently translated novels Hurricane Season, which had its English-language debut in 2020, and Paradais of 2022 emerged in the U.S. cocooned in a critical framework that seems designed to inoculate readers against the radical, transgressive, at times pornographic violence that makes the books what they are. In these readings of her work, it’s as if the violence is just there, a tool for getting at something grander and more abstract, such as a commentary on systemic injustice, or the neoliberal order, or machismo, or, or, or. This approach downplays and even negates the sheer aesthetic power driving Melchor’s books, with their massive unparagraphed blocks of prose and long, roping sentences that unspool while dosing out degradation after degradation.

Melchor’s books seem to tip us slantwise toward hell.

But what if we don’t believe in hell anymore?

I think this safe, hell-free approach to Melchor’s work stems from current notions about how literature these days is supposed to recuperate such spiderwebbing, graphic depictions of violence into something meaningful. Or maybe it stems from the implied frameworks that underlie contemporary Anglo assessments of literature not only from Mexico but also across South America — as if literary fiction from these regions depicting violence does so cloaked in the service of some larger, magic-realist-inflected ethical project, where graphic depictions are a mere delivery device to some grander statement.

Literary fiction today is framed, marketed, and often written about for its value in generating empathy. Depictions of suffering must be, it seems, attached to some larger moral and reasonable purpose — some grand narrative that recuperates the depicted violence from, well, the violence itself. I’ve got the Fitzcarraldo edition of Hurricane Season and the New Directions edition of Paradais here in front of me, so I’ll refer to the blurbs on these editions, and to a few reviews, as examples of how they inflate the critique value of Melchor’s work.

From Hurricane Season:

Hurricane Season explores the violent mythologies of one Mexican village and reveals how they touch the global circuitry of capitalist greed. —Ben Lerner

Melchor has crafted an unprecedented novel about femicide in Mexico and how poverty and extreme power imbalances lead to violence everywhere. —Idra Novey

. . . a loud memorial to the victims of a society in crisis. —Jon McGregor

From Paradais:

Paradais continues her examination into the metaphysical assault embedded in patriarchy and classicism. —Jessica Jacolbe

Paradais is about the faultline between the 1% and those who service their needs. —Chris Power, The Guardian

Paradais reveals in grimy detail how desire is deformed by a political economy whose greatest good is getting what we want when we want it. —Lowry Pressley, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Her books sound pretty boring, don’t they? There’s no sense or feeling here for the stomach-churning danger of the writing. No sense of the shocking, bright, transgressive power of her prose. Consider this passage from Hurricane Season, where a character named Brando fantasizes how a video clip of bestiality porn might end, after the portion he watched cut off abruptly:

He had to make use with those two minutes, playing them on loop for hours when all he wanted to see was how the dog fucked the little bitch; how, having sucked its cock, that bitch got on her knees and let the dog hump her mercilessly until it had pumped her rosy red cunt full of sticky cream, warm dog cum running down the girl’s pale thighs as she moaned and squirmed to free herself from that foul beast; an imaginary scene, which Brando would try and fail to wipe from his mind over the following months, even when he found himself in places and situations where it was truly inconvenient to get a raging hard-on: at school, for instance, all it took was for one of the girls in class to bend down to pick up a pencil from the floor for Brando to imagine himself as that enormous black dog jumping his classmate and ripping her pants off with his teeth to pin her to the ground and fuck the absolute brains out of her with his cruel and inhuman black cock.

There is no relief from the degradations — a violence reinforced by the spooling, unbroken sentences and paragraphs, as if someone is holding the reader’s head underwater. There is no surface to surface to, as the circuit between the violence inside and the violence outside is unbroken in Melchor’s prose.

Here is Franco, Paradais’ sexually obsessed protagonist, fantasizing over the object of his sickness, Señora Marián: “Franco’s cock would be throbbing and a ribbon of cum would squirt from the tip, wrapping itself around his numb fingers, which were suddenly no longer Señora Marián’s tight cunt or puckered asshole, but his own chubby fingers . . . . ” This heart of darkness is a specific heart of darkness: so much more disturbing for its granularity and particularity, something disguised or lost when framed as a strategy to expose the inequities of a certain type of political economy.

Melchor’s novels suffer at the hands of the well-intentioned.

Have the well-intentioned actually read her books before blurbing them with bad-faith phrases exaggerating the ethical dimensions of her work, framing them as somehow sideways-didactic — as if their value lies in what they are about rather than how they are about it? In this ethically recuperative model, transgressive fiction by the likes of J. G. Ballard or Dennis Cooper or Kathy Acker (“Pussy, King of the Pirates is a devastating critique of fill-in-the-blank”) might easily slip into some proscriptive, lesson-teaching mode. And although authors are notoriously unreliable decoders of their own work (red flag warning: intentional fallacy danger), Melchor has on more than one occasion distanced herself from what she calls “committed literature.” As she told Latin American Literature Today: “I don’t have much belief in committed literature, inasmuch as I don’t believe literature is a good space in which to deliver messages that have a deliberate bearing on political change within people. I think there are other, better ways: activism, for example.”

Extracting what is perceived as the critique aspect of Melchor’s writing — is it really about the gap between the have and the have-nots? — and amplifying this to suggest that her novels revolve mainly around this issue — instead of exploring the intricate folds and realities of violence itself and the oily, eel-ly language that articulates it — creates a numbing sense of security. Readers freely encounter vivid and extreme depictions of violence without the discomfort of feeling like mere voyeurs because they are reassured that they are engaging, at the end of the day, with an analysis of concepts like neoliberal violence and classist structures. Such positive, orthodox readings also fit comfortably as empathy exams, of sorts: Are you the right — and right-minded — sort of person to read Melchor’s work the correct way? Are you reading it for some higher reason or simply relishing the performative violence of her language?

Sophie Hughes, who translated Hurricane Season into English for Fitzcarraldo Editions, has, in an interview with Asymptote, a wonderful way of framing her decision to work so closely with such dark material: “I won’t translate anything I find morally reprehensible, but that doesn’t mean that the characters won’t be morally reprehensible. These are two very different things, right?” And yet, the relentless horror — presented largely from the point of view of depraved male characters whose obliterating psychoses are so very Technicolor widescreen — makes the space for something other than moral reprehensibility quite small. You really have to search to find it. Melchor’s dangers as a writer — her transgressions — involve the same sort of staring-down-evil that the films of one of her heroes, David Lynch, did.

As an English professor, I have felt the terrible burden of empathy. The contemporary literature I teach, no matter how bleak in content — whether Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys or Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars — must fit squarely within a larger narrative of redemption. Just who is being redeemed? My students are, in their engagement with these books. I am, as a sensitive and nurturing professor. Together, we conjure the notion of literature as a space of forward movement, unshackled from the deterministic logic of history. No story is too bleak to escape the force of our bright intentions as readers.

There is no special kind of evil around.

There is no evil.

I shut my eyes, enter the classroom, and pretend as if this is true.

Nicholas Rombes is the author of the novels The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing (Two Dollar Radio) and The Rachel Condition (CLASH Books) as well as Ramones, from the 33 1/3 series. His work has appeared in The Believer, Filmmaker Magazine, and BOMB Magazine. He can be found at his Substack Specimen Days.