Bring Me the Head of Julián Herbert, or A Review by Julian Robles of Julián Herbert’s story collection Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
Julián Herbert, Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, translated by Christina MacSweeney. Graywolf Press, 2020. 176 pp. $16.00.
mise-en-scène
Rosendo gets out of the car. The tattooed Latino runs toward him, with the uniformed police officer in pursuit. Sirens sound in the distance. The tattooed Latino gives a half-turn and fires at the police officer. The officer fires back. Twice. A stray bullet hits Rosendo in the leg. Rosendo drops to the sidewalk, extracts his gun from his shoulder holster, and opens fire:
their origins
In July 2015, the author visits Acapulco. The author’s name is Julian. He is distinguished from the writer, whose name is Julián. That they share a name is not in itself significant, but the coincidence will cause the author much consternation upon discovering the writer’s published works.
That summer, the author stays in Costa Azul in the apartment of his granduncle, a retired engineer. This is the man who, in the year 1976, left the author’s father in the arms of a stranger along with a fold of bills, an address in California, and the threat of violence should anything happen to the boy. The author finds his granduncle to be pedantic and overanxious, but very kind. He has a hard time imagining him putting a gun to anyone’s jaw or putting his lips to a small child’s forehead, but the stories exist—and that is all that matters. For several nights in a row the author and his granduncle get drunk and watch old Mexican films. They debate the significance of the movies, they pause and analyze scenes for hours. One evening they drive to the top of a hill overlooking Acapulco’s bay and visit a television transmission tower where the granduncle once worked for Latin America’s largest media company. They stay there until dawn watching TV shows projected through dozens of screens.
*
The writer is also from Acapulco, in a manner of speaking—he is born there to a prostitute in 1971. At age six he leaves the city with his mother and half-siblings; an itinerant childhood ensues. Episodes of this childhood are described in the writer’s autofictional novel Tomb Song.
the writer on critics, as spoken by the narrator of the collection’s title story
“I’m a film critic and the main function of criticism is to misread everything. To imagine it all incorrectly in order to highlight its absurdity.” Shortly after this statement is made, the story’s narrator is marched into a drug kingpin’s underground bunker, and in the darkness discerns the scent of flowers, which he identifies with the taxonomological specificity and pretension of a critic (“gardenia and Arabian jasmine”). It is a moment of confused beauty: the belief that there could exist flowers growing beneath the desert, somehow thriving without any exposure to sunlight. But when the film critic touches them, he realizes that the plants are plastic, the scent is artificial. This scene mirrors the humiliating mistake made by the protagonist of the story “Caries,” earlier in the collection. There, the originality-obsessed conceptual artist Ramón Rigual discovers that tooth decay has left musical notes etched into his teeth. After transcribing the music and staging an exhibition, he learns that he has actually transcribed a well-known composition by a New York composer, and he then spirals into psychosis.
Miracles abound in Julián Herbert’s collection—not as life changing phenomena but as willful acts of interpretation, and Herbert never luxuriates long enough in these miracles for anyone to forget the artifice. There is always some jaded, burned-out character reminding you that Herbert’s stories should be read with the caution heeded to a hustle staged on a street corner: watch for the dodginess in his eyes; look for the bystander who is secretly in on the act; understand that you can lose everything in a second.
music tastes
In past interviews the writer has described his college-age infatuation with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The author also went through an alt-rock phase, but it occurred during his middle school years and so he feels as though he has scored a small victory over the writer. More and more the author hopes to distinguish himself from the writer, especially as he discovers their overlapping tastes in film, their shared opinion of Mexico City’s art scene, and their mutual interest in genre-blending metatextual commentaries on literature, violence, and originality.
The author has convinced himself that his writing has illuminated unseen threads between music, art, and popular culture; and he is terrified to learn that the writer, who shares his name, has also done so. But he scores another small victory when he fails to unearth any connection between the writer and hip-hop. The author tells himself that the writer only took his popular music education as far as rock; that the writer’s inability to grasp the revolutionary potential of hip-hop means his artistry is stunted—the author still has a chance to prevail.
abandoning stories
The writer’s characters treat stories like commodities. Literally, they are assigned market value. One narrator runs something like a ghost-writing business, turning other people’s stories into profitable tomes. He claims that he could have been a rising literary star, but chose to be “corrupted by money, not flattery.” In another story, a cocaine addict dons a cowboy costume, impersonates a best-selling writer of western fiction, and travels the country performing lines of the man’s work. These characters remind us that all stories are imitable, fungible—the rules of their exchange dictated by the market and by violence. They lead readers to terrifying climaxes, only to drop the tale and walk away; or if you do get the whole story, there’s no promise the ending won’t feel sappy or deliberately derivative. You’re left wanting another ten pages or a new draft, and you won’t get either, because you already paid so take a hike unless you’re looking for trouble. Because either the narrator is too exhausted by the decay that surrounds them to keep telling or someone has a gun to their head, daring them to speak another word.
flashy quotes from the writer’s previous interviews which induce jealousy in the author for the writer’s apparent ease of genius
I’m interested in genres, but only to the extent that you can see them as processes in search of a structure: more as intuitions than institutions.
*
I suppose literature is a bit like a screwdriver, isn’t it? You can use it to repair a fuse box or to stir vodka and orange juice in the mornings, to stab a woman in the darkness. Ideally, you should repair the fuse box, turn on the lights and not end up stabbing anyone in the darkness.
*
It’s hard to tell what I invented and what was real. I like the uncertainty, though. It’s proof that I can’t write with impunity. When I try to get in the reader’s head, I destabilize myself, too.
the author responds to the writer’s flashy quotes
In interviews Julián Herbert is circumspect in his discussions of violence and its relationship to contemporary Mexican culture. He is careful not to frame violence as a uniquely Mexican issue. In his writing violence finds counterpoint in humor, or at least parody. Throughout this collection, we witness violence overdone, mis-en-scène, Tarantino style. But the narration also focuses on violence’s aftermath, like in the cryptic story “White Paper.” Violence is described most obliquely by Herbert’s narrators, however, who are prone to make broad statements on the Mexican condition. One indelible line: “Most Mexican are genetically incapable of distinguishing between a criminal and a policeman.” No one is killed or maimed by that observation, but thousands had to be to make it true.
At a glance Herbert’s interview quips dazzle—until you deconstruct the analogies and begin noting inconsistencies in their logic. Where did the screwdriver come from? Who is the woman?
translations
To English-speakers, MacSweeney is perhaps best known for translating the novels of Valeria Luiselli and Daniel Saldaña Paris, two Mexican writers of a similar intellectual pedigree (cosmopolitan educations, upper class, light-skinned) whose work has been lovingly embraced by the American literati. These and her other collaborations might suggest a professional proclivity for a certain category Latin American writer—that UNAM-educated crowd whose ennui and alienation form the scaffolding of dreamy, literary worlds where identity is undone by art and the slough of office work and technocratic erasure.
But Christina MacSweeney deftly pivots from the literature of anxious, cell-phone-scrolling part-time activist-artist-porn addicts into Herbert’s irreverent tragicomedies. Her translations move language along vectors that keep Herbert’s mixture of crude humor and performative intellectualism entirely intact. Some of that is a result of her fidelity to ambiguity. Julián Herbert is a more prolific poet than he is a fiction-writer, and strewn across his character’s soliloquys and expostulations are turns of phrase and mutations in syntax that crumple the text around them: monuments or black holes of language. And language itself is often the subject of this ambiguity. Here’s one: in a story titled “NEET,” condom-hating performance artist says of a prostitute’s AIDS-infected body: “nothing more than virus soup: the castoffs of a language.” Now what could that possibly mean? Where is the referent in that metaphor? What is cast off? Flip to the original Spanish and you’ll find no clearer explanation: desechos de un lengaja. Here’s another: a narrator describes the face of a man who looks exactly like Juan Rulfo, saying he has an “alexandrine tercet of wrinkles”. Again, the Spanish is no help to us here—MacSweeney has left the sentence untouched.
direct addresses
The writer has a fondness for Shakespeare. In the collection’s title story, the film critic narrator confidently expounds Harold Bloom’s theory of “self-overhearing.” But our film critic knows that he isn’t the only person hearing what passes through his mind—and he isn’t the only character aware of an audience: “Don’t despise me or hate me,” says one narrator. “Stop kidding yourself,” begins a different story. “And that’s it,” ends another. Samuel Beckett said that a story is not compulsory, but a life is. In the writer’s country, which is the author’s country, which is the author’s father’s country, violence is always the context of storytelling—that means characters good and bad are thrust into the role of narrator. Stories are as compulsory an experience as working and breathing; everyone here is compelled to explain themselves, exonerate themselves, provide testimony.
the author’s roommate (a communist) responds to the writer’s flashy quotes
“some people deserve to be stabbed with a screwdriver”
the anxiety of influence
The author’s consternation upon discovering the writer’s oeuvre partially arises from manifestations of ideas of reference, the notion that events and coincidences are connected to one’s destiny or one’s personal narrative. The author interprets significance in their shared name. One Julian, one Julián, both with roots in the state of Guerrero. Ajax the Lesser and Ajax the Greater. Which will he be? Both the author and writer have written stories set in Berlin. Both are interested in the production and movement of images in their writing. Both depict characters grappling with compulsion and hypersexuality.
It is either fate or the author’s own insecurities about his art that have brought him to this point—two different stories to explain the same set of coincidences. Whose voice does the author overhear telling either story? His own voice made alien, of course. His own voice become omniscient narrator: the imagined voice of history—which is to say, the imagined voice of a future generation of writers making history of the author’s present.
The author is not alone in his anxiety: originality and parody are major preoccupations shared by the writer as well. The collection’s title story is narrated by a Quentin Tarantino fanatic who turns his imprisonment by narco kingpin (who looks exactly like Quentin Tarantino) into an opportunity to preach on the value of imitation and cultural tradition. Despite the book’s affected, low-brow grit, it is profoundly intertextual, and loudly engaged in a discourse with Harold Bloom, Pseudo-Longinus, and T.S. Eliot in that uncouth way that low-brow intellectuals have of making a scene in the lecture hall. But the canon is far from harmless. In the story “There Where We Stood,” the narrator—here indistinguishable from the real Julián Herbert—encounters the ghost of Juan Rulfo in an airport. The woman travelling with him has been writing a biography on Rulfo. And what does the menacing apparition of the patriarch of Mexican literature want? Oh, just the woman writer’s love.
the concept of travel
Notes before bed: What kind of cosmopolitan writers does the writer approve of? He has a story dedicated to Valeria Luiselli, so I assume they’re friends. But what about all those upper-crust, literary stars he calls “grand absurdities” in the collection’s first story? Isn’t he an absurdity now: travelling the globe, going to conferences, writing metafiction about being adrift in foreign lands?
In his novel Tomb Song the writer travels to Cuba and Germany after his mother dies of cancer. Two countries I have also visited or lived in. I don’t know if it’s kitschy or brave that the writer visits Germany and attempts to tie its history to the history of the hospital his mother languished in, and to then reckon with the terrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. We’ve all read Sebald.
oxymorons
The writer has previously identified oxymorons as his favorite rhetorical device. And sure, he constructs paradoxes rhetorically, but the writer is just as interested in paradoxical existential conditions. Love is an oxymoron under certain conditions of violence. Hope, too. And what about the fiction of a narrative self? Perhaps the purest distillation of the oxymoron of storytelling is uttered in the collection’s final pages: “I’m going to tell you that story because I love you but don’t know you.”
faces
In photographs the writer appears short, chubby, and bright eyed. At once cheerful and serious, he has a tendency to furrow his eyebrows and tilt his chin slightly when he poses. The author loves this about the writer’s photos. He looks as though he could be a truck driver or an accountant. There is none of that pretense and mystery that so many of the author’s friends bring to their author photos. Why, he wonders, do Americans (and cosmopolitan Mexicans) insist on looking like authors in their photos? Why don’t they look like writers?
One day the author watches interviews of the writer online. He is struck by the writer’s posture and hand gestures. He touches his nose exactly like I do, the author thinks. He rubs his face just like me.
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado on what it means for the writer to truly be cross-genre
Herbert’s prose instead deploys deconstructed and extrapolated resources from all forms of prose writing (fictional and nonfictional, from the novel and the short story to the memoir and the historical chronicle) into textual hybrids that render visible both the formal workings and the ideological implications of everything said.
berlin
The writer’s Berlin story centers around a croissant on the seat of a train car, and even that incident becomes a humiliation for the Mexican narrator. The author’s Berlin story centers around hip-hop music and cancer research. It, too, ends in humiliation.
Mexicans don’t seek out Berlin in the same way Americans do; they find themselves in Berlin incidentally, unbelievably—adrift, humiliated, terrified at their own cultural bastardy.
revisions to the book review
Re-define terms in future drafts: the author to be called our author. Swap article for pronoun—closer association between reader and self. Now you have clearly circumscribed your allegiances, made yourself subject of a secondary self. What did Barthes say about ‘constituting’ oneself in autobiography? Refer to passages from Barthes’ memoir. Regret leaving my copy of Michelet in Celine’s apartment. Talk more about the book. Talk less about yourself—remove details of romantic history with several white Latin American Studies academics. Discuss the implications of the writer’s fictionalized self: the politics of autofiction, it’s implications in the authorship of working-class writers. Re-read third story in the collection, “White Paper”: faint traces of Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, inscrutable and perfect.
travel in itself
For most of his life the writer has resided in one Mexican city: Saltillo.
allegory
In an excellent review of Tomb Song, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado argues that the writer enacts a “radical resistance to the work of allegory in fiction.” Specifically, it is his own personal story of loss that the writer refuses to turn into a “stand-in” for Mexico, Mexican culture, or the country’s political crises. However, in this story collection the writer is much more willing to allegorize speculative worlds along seemingly political lines. One narrator, who has turned writing into a business, claims to have authored the entire history of Mexico. In another story, a zombie-like pandemic sweeps across Mexico, and the political classes appear must unchanged upon infection.
Allegory seems to exist competitively with metaphor in this collection, and it is through metaphor that the writer most effectively defamiliarizes the world. “Max’s stomach becomes his mind and his memory,” says one narrator. Another narrator, who spends his days dialing random numbers and extorting people with empty threats of violence, looks at the desert landscape and describes mounds of “virgin rock that made you think of giant hands emerging from the land of the dead to punch the sun.” Metaphors become scenes unto themselves: abstractions blooms from more familiar abstraction; ungrounded, the language suggests that the starting point of dialogue isn’t anything concrete, it is our shared confusion: the terror of a country where being alive means being compelled to tell stories.
mise-en-scène
The author reaches for the doorknob. He pauses to look at his warped reflection: his oversized hand and the body that streams from it like a trail of smoke. Just as he is about to grasp it, the doorknob turns from within. The door slumps on its hinge and slides across the wooden floor. Standing in the doorway is the writer, his arms crossed (as though they were not just used to open a door). The writer’s eyebrows are slightly furrowed; he stands pivoted slightly, not quite in profile but neither is his looking straight ahead. His chin tilts downward, but his eyes look up at the author, who is taller. “At last,” says the writer, grinning. “How have you been?” “I’m doing well,” the author replies.