Violence, Ethics, Representation: Don Winslow and Roberto Bolaño in Ciudad Juárez

Abstract

Violence, Ethics, Representation:Don Winslow and Roberto Bolaño in Ciudad Juárez Andrew Pepper (bio) What is at stake when writers of fiction try to represent violence? What ethical and aesthetic problems are enacted when the frame of fiction is placed around the "real," and how far can these problems ever be adequately addressed? This essay looks at how ROBERTO BOLAÑO and DON WINSLOW, in their respective novels 2666 (2004) and The Cartel (2015), represent the real world violence afflicting the U.S.-Mexico border city of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez from 1993 to the present. There are significant overlaps between these novels in terms of their narrative scope, their genre-bending ambitions, and their desire to tie this "new" violence to the accumulative tendencies of contemporary capitalism. However, these novels' aesthetic practices, linked to not always commensurate understandings of genre, push the ethical claims that each is able to make in new directions. In the case of 2666, BOLAÑO'S unwillingness to offer straightforward explanations for the murders of women in Juárez and his desire to push against the crime fiction genre's demand for explanation [End Page 575] allows him to, daringly, think about how the violence is normalized across society. In the novel, violence operates in plain sight—a key ethical claim—even if the attendant obliqueness of vision means that the dead women are not afforded much of a voice. In The Cartel, WINSLOW'S self-identification as a crime fiction novelist means he instrumentalizes the violence by representing the ambitions of a few narco bosses in order to make visible the links between individual action, global capitalism, and state sovereignty. Thus, a different set of ethical claims are enacted. WINSLOW'S move to disclose allows us to see and understand the victims and perpetrators of violence as fully realized characters and in turn speaks to a desire to map the full range of social relations in Juárez, even if "totality," as a term derived from FREDRIC JAMESON'S "cognitive mapping," remains tantalizingly out of reach.1 The "ethical" turn in literary studies has produced much soul-searching about the responsibilities of novelists and literary critics with regard to the subjects of their works, the counter-maneuvers that ask why novels or literary criticism should have any ethical responsibilities, and, further, whether ethical claims are inevitably complicit in the systems of power they ostensibly oppose.2 In this essay, I am less interested in answering the more general question of what is meant by "ethical" when it comes to literature than in asking what is at stake when the frame of fiction is placed around the "real" and how these two novelists' fraught ethical responses to the dilemma of dead bodies, in particular female ones, are connected to understandings of genre. "The world is real but not easily apparent," argues Jairus Victor Grove, and as such, "the fight to see, think, and feel things as they are requires an affirmative sense of genre."3 By "affirmative," Grove does not mean positive or uplifting, rather that genres, widely understood insofar as "CNN is a genre, security reports are a genre, terror alert levels are a genre," are not merely reflections of our world but help constitute it.4 The problem with these "everyday" types of genre, Grove suggests, is that they produce a "common sense of reality" or "consensus reality."5 Hence, he argues it is to the "wilder" or "contrarealist" genres like horror and sci-fi that we need to turn to in order "to make visible what is meant to be ignored or normalized" and "to pierce the veil of consensus reality."6 Self-evident ethical work in this move to "make visible" and "pierce the veil" provides the jumping-off point for my [End Page 576] consideration of the complex relationship between violence, ethics, and representation in 2666 and The Cartel: what the utilization of genre in both novels allows us to see, and not see, requires further elucidation. We tend to think of literary genres as static and self-actuating, with their own codes and conventions, where the distinctions between crime, espionage, horror, sci-fi, and war...