The genius of Álvaro Enrigue
His new novel is as much a work of political philosophy as it is one of fiction.
Unlike political scientists and social critics, who can diagnose the illnesses of a specific body politic without speculating on the best possible form of social organization, political philosophers are in the business of evaluating present society against an ideal conception of justice. The interesting corollary of this banal distinction is that the latter camp of thinkers cannot merely rely on the factual record for these comparisons, for the simple reason that every society that has actually existed has been unjust. As a result, Western political philosophy has been, to a surprising degree, a close relative of genre fiction: Plato’s Republic is secretly a masterclass in sci-fi world-building, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a fantasy role-playing game in which the reader is invited to imagine that they’re the sovereign of an imaginary city-state in Renaissance Italy, and the protagonist of much of Enlightenment political thought is not a nonfictional person but the main character in an elaborate work of historical fiction—the famous and infamous Noble Savage.
But what if a work of fiction attempted to do the work of political philosophy? Instead of ceding the speculative work of political imagination to the theorists, literary writers have often turned the tables and taken up the contentions of philosophers. Even if we exclude the literary productions of thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau on the grounds that Candide and Julie are not so much novels as treatises in disguise, creating a list of serious novels that contain political thought is easy enough. From canonical texts that explore the social nature of the individual by imaging a man in perfect isolation, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to modernist behemoths that meditate on the aesthetic origins of totalitarianism, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or the more recent middlebrow fables that speculate on future dystopias to warn about present political dangers, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, authors of all stripes have understood that fiction is an excellent tool for inquiring after the nature of justice.
Still, it’s not every day that one comes across a contemporary novel about politics that wrestles with fundamental questions with such argumentative originality and intellectual depth that one walks away from its pages convinced that it ought to be discussed in philosophy journals just as much as in literary reviews. Now I Surrender, the third masterpiece by the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue to be brought into English by the brilliant translator Natasha Wimmer, is unlikely to be received as a major intervention in political theory, but that is precisely what it is. A collage of archival research, field diaries, film criticism, travelogues, nature writing, and narrative history that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, Enrigue’s book accomplishes a nearly impossible feat: It succeeds equally well as a breathtaking historical novel and as a groundbreaking work of political theory that offers the final chapters of the centuries-long war that pitted Mexico and the United States against the Chiricahua Apache as a refutation of both the Hollywood western and the Western nation-state.
Now I Surrender opens with a Mexican white woman running for her life through the inhospitable desert surrounding Janos, a diminutive settlement in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. The year is 1836 and the Mexican-American War is still a decade away, so the theoretical demarcation between the land claimed by the newborn republic of Mexico and the territories where the United States is already fulfilling its manifest destiny to commit genocide lies many hundreds of miles to the north. Still, the scene takes place in a hotly contested borderland: the liminal space where the North American nation-states overlap with the stateless nation of the Apache. The woman—we soon learn that her name is Camila—is fleeing a band of Indigenous warriors on horseback who have just set fire to her family’s ranch in retaliation for the murder of one of their own.
When the Apache inevitably catch her, Camila is so certain that death would be preferable to whatever fate awaits her at their hands that she is dismayed when they refrain from killing her and instead take her captive. But as she adjusts to life among them, she soon realizes that her new existence might be better than her old one. She befriends a young Apache boy who teaches her his language; in return, she teaches him Spanish and gives him the nickname Geronimo, in honor of the patron saint of translators. Neither of them knows it yet, but in a few decades this nickname will no longer call that saint to mind; instead, it will become a shorthand for a philosophy that remains “inexpressible in our imported political language” but nonetheless amounts to a rebuke of “the difference-obliterating machine of the modern nation-state.”
The rebuke of this difference-obliterating machine is a central theme of Now I Surrender, which as much as a novel is a political and philosophical argument for an ideological alternative to that oppressive political theory we still call “the West.” It is an argument that takes the form of a kaleidoscopic journey across space and time that is always dazzling and at times a bit dizzying. A chapter set in the 1830s is just as likely to be followed by one set in the 1920s or by one set in the 2010s. Some scenes are recounted in the third person by an omniscient narrator who frequently lapses into free indirect discourse; others record the stories that Pancho Villa tells around a campfire. A few sections consist almost entirely of telegrams and depositions that may or may not be based on historical documents, but roughly a third of the book consists of the essayistic diary in which a contemporary Mexican novelist records the progress of his research on Apache history and the incidents of his family’s road trip from their home in New York to the heart of Geronimo’s homeland. The stylistic range is so wide that different parts of the novel read like homages to such radically different writers as Cormac McCarthy, Sergio Pitol, and Jorge Luis Borges.
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In the hands of almost any other novelist, this baroque profusion of forms, modes, and registers would achieve nothing more than confusion. But Enrigue is no ordinary writer: By the time we reach the end of Now I Surrender, we know that the grand aria of Geronimo’s final surrender and the melancholic chorale of the writer’s family road trip to a land populated by ghosts are bound together by a tangled chain of events set in motion by Camila’s kidnapping. The Apache past, the novel argues, is not a foreign country—indeed, it’s the present-day Mexicans and Americans who are foreigners in the Apachería. “We aren’t the children of these lands,” Enrigue writes. The political implication is momentous: “We should have to give it all back.”
But the realization that Geronimo’s story amounts to an ethical imperative comes only at the end of the novel. In the meantime, we alternate between the story of Camila’s captivity and the often hilarious tale of the motley band of eccentrics tasked with rescuing her. The members of this unlikely posse include a former barroom singer who pretends to be a nun but can shoot a silver peso out of the sky; a music teacher who may or may not have invented the joyful racket that we now think of as northern Mexican folk music; a pair of Indigenous Yaqui twins with a gift for sarcasm worthy of the wittiest among Shakespeare’s misanthropes; and an Indigenous Rarámuri teenager who will grow up to make history but at present has no useful skills beyond a talent for making potent coffee.
The exasperated leader of this carnivalesque group is one Lt. Col. José María Zuloaga. The son of an officer in the Spanish imperial army who switched sides to fight for Mexican independence, Zuloaga is a patriot who believes that all citizens have a duty to contribute to building their new nation. When he receives orders to rescue Camila, he cannot believe that the clowns under his command are the only locals willing to volunteer to defend civilized Mexico from the “savages.” Eventually, however, he’s forced to admit that his merry band of misfits constitute a community far more fraternal than any republican abstraction. By the time he catches up with Camila’s captors, he, too, has begun to suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the nation-state’s philosophy.
Awhite woman captured by local Apache, an eccentric band of endearing desperadoes, a righteous lawman, an impassible desert, Winchester rifles, parched horses, friendship, violence, ethical dilemmas—the elements of Enrigue’s central storyline sound very much like the ingredients of a classic western. But in one of the essayistic digressions that pepper the novel, Enrigue delivers a devastating critique of the films of John Wayne that makes it clear that he aspires to something quite different:
Westerns are the fairy tales gringos tell themselves to assure the triumph of bureaucratic reason over the excesses of the individual will; they are the most effective vehicle for the dissemination of productivity culture in a country whose other founding myth is respect for individual freedom.
Stripped to their essence, Enrigue argues, classic westerns boil down to variations on the fable that “moral principles” are needed “to foster economic progress in a community of outlaws.” But for this argument to work, the western has to soften the edges of the brutal history that followed the instigation of this economic progress—namely, the violence required to subdue everyone to the bureaucrat reason that controls the individual will and causes it to comport with a capitalist ethos. It proffers the entirely fictional idea that “the North American soul is optimistic and liberal, not tragic”—and certainly not ruthless or violent.
But Now I Surrender is something more than a mere anti-western. In Enrigue’s telling, those looking for a dialectical negation of John Wayne movies should look to the self-conscious spaghetti westerns. In these films, “conceived in the non-US mind,” the storylines of the classic western are inverted: Citizens of the United States arrive in the Southwest, “chaos rules, the bad guys win, things stay the way they are or worse.” Enrigue, however, wants to tell a story that includes not just the United States but Mexico as well in its cast of villains. Mexico, after all, is as much a colonial and imperial power in Apachería as the United States is—and it bears the guilt of forcing its original inhabitants to choose between assimilation into Hispanic culture or state-sponsored extermination. As the Mexican military officer deputized by his government as an official witness to Geronimo’s surrender reflects toward the end of the novel:
To us, they were always just bandits to be stamped out, because we’d given them religion, land, and nation, and they’d rejected it all. We refused to understand that they had their own place in history, and that their history was also ours. To the gringos, these twenty-seven Chiricahuas were an enemy army. What we had to offer them was a fitting death for their warriors and assimilation for their children, absorption into the particular Mexican fabric of sorrows and joys. What the Americans had to offer was a life of humiliation, but one in which their difference would be recognized.
The Mexican officer is speaking in 1886, so he has no way of knowing that the United States would invent an entire film genre to erase the Apaches’ difference. But the fact that the United States turned out to be a more efficient “mill for grinding everything into chaff” in no way implies that Mexico has been more noble. “The gringos may have been cruel to the Apaches,” Enrigue’s fictional stand-in writes, “but we Mexicans were left motherless by what we did to them, and we remain motherless.”
So if Now I Surrender is neither a western nor an anti-western, then what is it? My answer is that it’s a counter-western: a narrative that answers the fictional history of North America not by inverting the polarity of its values, but by adopting an entirely different set of rules. It’s on this point that Enrigue’s status as a political philosopher becomes undeniable: Among many other things, his novel is an argument for a nondialectical approach to fundamental questions that understands that to reduce difference to negation is just another way to erase it. Geronimo was not merely non-Western: He was who he was. The tragedy for everyone involved, including Mexican and American colonizers, is that the insistence that he had to become either Mexican or American or else nothing at all robbed us all of what may well have been our last chance to pull the emergency brake on the locomotive of Western politics and halt its mad race toward disaster. The logical end point of the nation-state, after all, is often the concentration camp: the enclosure of exclusion to which societies so lacking in political imagination as to become convinced that they have no choice but to impose a way of life amenable to the unequal accumulation of capital banish their indocile subjects for no crime other than being different.
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The philosophical conclusion of Enrigue’s novel offers a utopian answer to the West’s catastrophic compulsion to assimilate, exclude, or eradicate all Others: a politics of justice that imagines a society unbound by the territorial claims of any nation and unafraid of the violence of any state. But since Now I Surrender is a work of literature just as much as it is a work of political thought, Enrigue delivers his thesis in the voice of a US Army officer sympathetic to the Apache, who relates the prophetic vision he has shortly after Geronimo’s surrender:
I saw a chingo of Indians returning to Arizona, waves and waves of Indians coming from Mexico and beyond, from the jungles down below, in the farthest south. Big, strong Indians crossing the desert to take back what you’re about to lose. I saw them speaking their own tongues, Spanish and other languages. And they were in Brooklyn and Raleigh and Philadelphia and Atlanta, cities in the old part of the country that you may visit after you’re taken to Florida. I saw their children in schools and parks and hospitals. And truly they were Indians and almost all of them spoke English; they were beautiful gringos the same color as you, and they became army officers and doctors and senators. I saw that this land would become their land, too. Your land. I saw that you would return through them.
The antidote to the catastrophe of the Western nation-state in North America, Enrigue suggests, is to fight for open borders until every person on the continent enjoys the freedom that Geronimo was forced to surrender: the right to live where one pleases and as one chooses. Against the savagery of imperialism, Now I Surrender offers the nobility of statelessness.
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