University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2014-01-01 Dust : Polvo Jonathan Scott ehlN s University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Modern Literature Commons Recommended Citation Nehls, Jonathan Scott, "Dust : Polvo" (2014). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 1689. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/1689 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DUST : POLVO JONATHAN S. NEHLS Department of Creative Writing APPROVED: José de Piérola, Ph.D., Chair María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, Ph.D. Lex Williford, MFA Bess Sirmon-Taylor, Ph.D. Interim Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Jonathan S. Nehls 2014 DUST : POLVO by JONATHAN S. NEHLS, B.S. Industrial Design THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO May 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful thanks to all of those who helped shape this novel through criticism, encouragement and guidance. I am indebted to all my professors and colleagues at UTEP for their friendship, for their vision. To Jesús Silveyra, who opened up Juárez for me, whose keen eye and ear served to fine tune early drafts, I’ll see you at the Kentucky Club. I would like to thank my readers, Dr. María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba and Lex Williford, for their insight and enthusiasm. I owe special thanks to Dr. José de Piérola, my thesis director, who saw this novel through from beginning to end. And finally, most importantly, to my wife Carmen, whose sacrifice, patience and support inspire me always. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................. v PREFACE TO DUST : POLVO .................................................................................................... vi BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... xxv DUST : POLVO ......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I .................................................................................................................. 2 CHAPTER II .............................................................................................................. 18 CHAPTER III ............................................................................................................. 32 CHAPTER IV ............................................................................................................. 54 CHAPTER V ................................................................................................................ 71 CHAPTER VI ............................................................................................................. 86 CHAPTER VII ........................................................................................................... 101 CHAPTER VIII ......................................................................................................... 116 CHAPTER IX ............................................................................................................ 135 CHAPTER X.............................................................................................................. 153 CHAPTER XI ............................................................................................................ 175 CHAPTER XII .......................................................................................................... 194 CHAPTER XIII ........................................................................................................ 212 CHAPTER XIV ......................................................................................................... 233 CHAPTER XV .......................................................................................................... 249 CURRICULUM VITA............................................................................................................. 263 v PREFACE Mario Vargas Llosa in his book Letters to a Young Novelist describes the inclination to write as a sort of rebellion, a rebellion that stems from a sense of dissatisfaction with life as it is and an urge to question reality (7). I don’t know that I would have described my inclination to write in such terms, but certainly, I would agree, I write because the world never is. The world as determined by ideology and belief, by common sense, by “truth”, often does not square with the world I encounter, and I write to disinter what agitates beneath the surface of reality, to interrogate the moment’s “truth.” In attempting to chart the origins of this novel, I again quote Vargas Llosa, who later asserts, “The novelist doesn’t choose his themes; he is chosen by them…My impression is that life…inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.” (17). To identify what inspired me to write this novel, I would have to untangle a snarl of dreams and readings, snatches of conversation overheard, stories lived and told. Vargas Llosa has often described writing a novel as an inverse strip tease (Historia Secreta, 4). In the beginning the writer is naked, and when finished, fully clothed—that is to say, the autobiographical material exposed in the writing of the novel is covered up, interwoven with the work, creating a disguise that often the author himself can’t recognize, woven from his demons and obsessions. vi The themes, stories and characters that have marked my consciousness are many times beyond my own personal experience, but nonetheless, affect me as, however odd, however foreign, a startling revelation of the human condition. I often search newspapers, the internet, books for such stories, they are not difficult to find. I am moved by stories that call into question our professed values, the sort of stories that beg the question: How can this be? and more importantly, why? Stories we don’t want to believe, periodical tragedies, bizarre incidents that crop up every so often, stories I can’t shake free of, many of which take place daily in the border lands: eleven immigrants found starved or suffocated to death in a rail car, trapped for months, mummified in stifling darkness; hundreds of women kidnapped, raped, tortured, mutilated and killed, while the perpetrators of the crimes go unpunished; an avowed neo-Nazi, who called for armed patrols and land mines along the border, murders his girlfriend and her family, and turns the gun on himself. Stories that go unvoiced, ignored, buried in our collective memory. It disturbs me to find I live in a world where such things are possible, a world that can stomach such horror. And the reaction to such tragedies disturbs me as much as the tragedy itself. Tragedy happens to others, not you, and when it strikes, they always say, I didn’t think it could happen to me. We digest others’ horror as inescapable. We shrug our shoulders and say, these things happen. God works in mysterious ways. It is what it is. Stated more succinctly: tough shit or fuck it. Struggling to keep it down, to alleviate our indigestion, we finger a culprit (we make order of the arbitrary), and the victims themselves become perpetrators. We say, they knew the risks, they shouldn’t dress like sluts, they should have seen the warning signs, and accept hopelessness and absolve ourselves of guilt. René Girard describes this sort of scapegoating as the resolution in the cycle of mimetic violence. Lost in battle over legitimacy, disputants only forget their quarrel when an invented crime is pinned to a scapegoat, and once dead, feast in its honor. What I have noticed about such stories is that in accepting their occurrence (admitting our helplessness, demonstrating our indifference, scapegoating), tragedy becomes normalized. vii In Language and Power, Norman Fairclough delineates the naturalization of ideology. A dominant discourse, the dominant ideological belief system, seeks legitimacy through containing and suppressing competing discourses. Thus established, the dominant discourse comes to be seen as natural, common sense, as the only valid means of understanding reality (91-92). In the stories I mentioned above, the dominant discourse was carried out to its logical— though extreme—conclusion, and the tragedy rationalized as a natural result of the victim’s transgressions. The scapegoat, the marginalized other, the voicer of an opposing discourse, once stripped of their humanity, unites the community through their humiliation and destruction (Girard). The humiliation of the other becomes ceremonialized, embedded in the core of dominant discourse, however contrary to its professed values. Intrinsic human dignity, justice, the value of life, extend only to those who partake in the dominant discourse. I see this as a disconnect