Savage Theories Read online

  First published in 2008 in Spanish by Editorial Entropía

  under the title Las teorías salvajes. Copyright © 2008 by Pola Oloixarac

  c/o Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria S.L.

  www.schavelzongraham.com

  English translation © 2017 by Roy Kesey

  This is a work of f iction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used f ictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  First English translation published in 2017 by

  Soho Press

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Oloixarac, Pola, author. | Kesey, Roy, translator.

  Savage theories / Pola Oloixarac; translated by Roy Kesey.

  Teorías salvajes. English

  ISBN 978-1-61695-735-3

  eISBN 978-1-61695-736-0

  1. College students—Argentina—Buenos Aires—Fiction.

  2. Couples—Argentina—Buenos Aires—Fiction. I. Title

  PQ7798.425.L65 T4613 2016 863’.7—dc23 2016017075

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Maxie and EK

  All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity.

  —Minima Moralia, 5 (trans. E. F. N. Jephcott)

  This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

  —The Tempest (V, i, 275)

  Part One

  1

  In the rite of passage practiced by the Orokaiva communities of New Guinea, the young boys and girls are first tormented by adults who crouch hidden in the foliage. Pretending to be spirits, the adults pursue the children, shouting, “You are mine, mine, mine!” They drive the initiates onto a platform similar to those used for the slaughter of swine; there, hoods are drawn over the heads of the terrified children, leaving them blind. They are led to an isolated hut deep in the forest, where they are made witness to the torturous rituals and ordeals in which the history of the tribe is encoded. Anthropologists have confirmed that it is not uncommon for children to die in the course of these ceremonies. In the end, the surviving children return to the village wearing the same masks and feathers as those who’d first threatened them, and join in a wild boar hunt. They are now not prey but predators, and they too shout, “You are mine, mine, mine!” Similarly, among the Nootka, Kwakiutl, and Quillayute tribes of the Pacific Northwest, it is wolves—that is, men in wolf masks—who torment the children, driving them at spearpoint into the dark heart of the rites of fear. When the ritualized torture is complete, the children are taught the secrets of the Cult of the Wolf.

  The life of little Kamtchowsky began in the city of Buenos Aires amid the violence of the Years of Lead, in the late 1970s; her earliest memories dated to the return of Argentine democracy known as the Alfonsinist Spring. Her father, Rodolfo Kamtchowsky, came from a Polish family that had immigrated to the city of Rosario in the 1930s. Rodolfo’s mother died quite young, and he was sent to live with his aunts—the only man in the house. As early as primary school, he demonstrated an exceptional gift for abstract thought, and his fourth-grade mathematics teacher, who’d been to university, spoke glowingly of his capacity for formal innovation. When little Rodolfo brought this news home to his aunts it frightened them a bit, but they nonetheless decided that when he turned thirteen they would send him off to the capital to continue his studies.

  Rodolfo was a happy child, but very shy. He spoke little, and at times appeared not to hear what was said to him. When the time came to move to Buenos Aires, he was taken in by yet another aunt, who lived across the street from Lezama Park. He enrolled at the Otto Krause Technical Institute, and later earned his engineering degree in record time.

  Neither his timidity nor his chosen field had done him any favors in terms of meeting girls. In his engineering courses there had only been two female students, and he hadn’t really considered them girls as such—they were rather dumpy, almost misshapen, much as his own daughter would one day be. It soon become clear that fate and inclination had obliged him to be heterosexual, monogamous, and faithful. It was thus only natural that as soon as Providence brought him a woman (one belonging to the set known as “Girls”), Rodolfo would cleave to her, much as a certain type of mollusk swims freely through the ocean before driving its muscular appendage down into the sediment like an axe, its shell or mantle equipped with the ability to line the mucus-coated appendage with layers of calcium, though of course the lining will at some point disintegrate, and the mollusk will once again be adrift between death and the ocean’s depths.

  When he first spotted her, she was walking along Corrientes Avenue: a short, dark-haired young woman in a tight turtleneck sweater, her black eyes lined in black, mask-like. Though Rodolfo had known of similar sets of empirical data, impressive only because of how perfectly generalizable and thus ordinary they could become, there was something in the moment’s avalanche of concrete detail—perhaps the way the pleats shifted beneath her buttocks, perhaps the bus ticket protruding from her back pocket—that he perceived as supernatural. Something beyond what he’d come to expect of this world. This passageway between a set of environmental data and his individual, untransferable status as eyewitness to it, as synthesized into the phenomenon of “her,” led him to experience a sense of decisiveness. He followed her down the street as if keeping watch over her. Then he noticed that others were watching her too, that an awareness of her was spreading, and as he came to understand the worth, in some sense, of his target, he likewise understood that she couldn’t possibly be oblivious to the fact that he’d been following her for at least ten blocks. Of course, this latter thought was of no importance whatsoever to the present stage of the process—he had already intuited its programmatic nature—and he resolved to stop thinking altogether.

  Then a miracle occurred: it started to rain, and Rodolfo was carrying an umbrella. The young engineer quickened his pace. His heart filled as the young woman laughed a bit distractedly and accepted the protection he offered. They stepped into a bar called La Giralda to warm up and dry off; as Rodolfo had hardly gotten wet at all, he concerned himself exclusively with warmth, and blushed a bit, but she didn’t seem to notice. She peeled off her wet sweater, giving Rodolfo a glimpse of her flesh-colored bra, and he hid his erection by sitting down as quickly as he could. They ordered hot chocolate, and she wolfed down a few croissants.

  Later that same afternoon, caught up in the flood of chatter and delighted with his newfound and apparently innate ability to talk to the girl and imagine her naked simultaneously, Rodolfo told her that the aunt with whom he lived in Buenos Aires had said that his other aunts, the ones who lived in Rosario, had had to work as prostitutes to provide for him. The girl was a sophomore psychology major; she responded languidly that in fact Rodolfo believed that his own mother had been in that line of work. The girl gazed at her reflection in the window, practicing her Evenly Suspended Attention, then glanced at Rodolfo to gauge his reaction. His mother had died of cancer, and in her final years she’d been unable to rise from her bed; stunned, he took a bite of the chocolate-covered churro in his hand, and let his thoughts drift.

  The following day he went to the university to look for her. The Psychology Department was divided into two areas of study—“psychosocial” and “humanistic”—both housed in Philosophy and Lett
ers. Like Rodolfo, the future mother of little Kamtchowsky belonged to the first generation of middle-class youth to throw itself more or less en masse into the market for higher education. In 1968 the Psychology Department produced twice as many graduates as it had the year before; its explosive growth continued, peaking in the early 1970s at more than four hundred graduates per year. When the Peronist party returned to power, the university gutted and rebuilt all of its departmental programs, the course offerings now influenced by the entire spectrum of Marxist doctrine. Many once-mandatory courses became optional, and in 1973 the department’s plan of study was reoriented to emphasize the field’s social aspects, in particular its communitarianism and fieldwork. The new approach downplayed the importance of professional training through coursework and curricular obligations. Marxist epistemology determined that the main priority should be support for popular struggles; the specific obsessions of fields less reliant on partisan imperatives were given second-tier status at best. Enrollment rates had grown precipitously, and forty-five percent of the new female students chose the psychology department, where women outnumbered men by a ratio of eight to one.

  For a university graduate, the statistical probability of interaction with either a professional psychologist or one in training was thus extremely high; nonetheless, this was Rodolfo’s first time. Never before had he received the look of scientific condescension native to a mind that is forever tracing deep connections between unscientific postulates and the world itself. Psychoanalytic jargon allowed both respectable professionals and those en route to respectability to pepper their vocabulary with genital references that would have been out of bounds even in openly lowbrow entertainment contexts such as cabaret shows. Government censors could close striptease joints and ban certain films, but psychoanalysis was perceived as a sort of linguistic vanguard, a close cousin of “freedom of thought,” and the members of its lexical entourage had managed to insert themselves into the moist cavities of the middle class.

  The key to the enthusiasm with which society had embraced the field was undoubtedly its medical origins—its very existence was justified by its alleged ability to alleviate pain. To Rodolfo, the constellation of words that calmly orbited the anal and vaginal orifices seemed indescribably mature and daring, unlike anything he’d ever known (and in this sense much like love); the implications left him all but priapismic. The young woman often let her eyes fall closed as she spoke, interlacing her speech with significant pauses. She seemed intelligent, but it was impossible to know for sure. When she spoke earnestly of the Oedipal myth, of Little Hans and the vagina dentata, of autoerotic mothering in Melanie Klein, Rodolfo hid his surprise as best he could and scrutinized her face, trying to determine whether or not there was, beneath all the eyeliner and mascara, a member of the lettered elite who actually took all this nonsense seriously. It seemed reasonable to him that between the demands of romance and those of political militancy, she wouldn’t have time to get a real degree. Each time she spoke of the passion of the people’s struggle, of mobilizing the masses from below, of shattering the shell of the individual once and for all, Rodolfo got such a hard-on that he could have filled the mouths of all those rebel Marxist woodcutters in Chaco with proteins and fatty filaments, each last one Made in Kamtchowsky. And somewhere in the course of one of these interludes, little K was conceived.

  2

  As the sexual tussle that would result in the birth of little Kamtchowsky was getting underway, another Argentine—a psychiatry student and philosophy TA—was awarded an ad honorem post caring for teenage microcephalics at the Montes de Oca Colony. Slovenly and socially awkward in person, pretentious on the page, Augusto García Roxler’s natural habitat was the shadows of academia. His future as one of the foremost theorists in his field was so much in doubt as to be quite literally unforeseeable; he prowled through the scabrous libraries of the Department of Medicine, blind to everything but his own ideas (and what he took to be prodigious signs proving their validity), living as if walled off from the rest of the world, and in particular from the majestic, blood-drenched corridor in which the great events of his time were taking place.

  He was too shy to be openly pedantic and too nondescript to inspire any sense of mystery. His genius would remain hidden for decades; more importantly, when it finally filtered through—its rays thin and tentative, the bony extremities of a blind man groping about in the darkness—it would only ever reach a single consciousness. Only one (the chosen one, the perfect one) would decide its fate. Only one would gather and sustain its battered photons, rebuild them, send them flitting spirit-like across the monstrous face of the facts. But before that, long before that, back when young Augusto was still spending his days measuring microcephalic crania and undressing oligophrenics and catatonics for his experiments, there was a book, and then a night, a single terrifying night, in which his theory caught its first whiff of the earth’s crust. He was thirty years old, or perhaps a bit older, when he finished the first draft of what would eventually become his Theory of Egoic Transmissions.

  The Theory’s earliest progenitor had sent its first tentative shoots into the air back in 1917, when the Dutch anthropologist Johan van Vliet published an article in Nature describing a series of experiments on human subjects. An inveterate traveler and confessed admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Professor van Vliet saw no reason why his field of study should focus exclusively on wealthy Westerners, or on the proletariat of the remotest corners of Europe. He believed that in order to formulate an authentic theory of human psychology, a theory that would speak to the deepest modes of human action, it was necessary to work with elements taken from outside the process of choreographic adaptation known as Culture.

  For his Ad intra res cogitans experiment—its title was taken from that of his diary—Johan van Vliet organized a small expedition to Dahomey, now part of Benin, in West Africa. At the time, Dahomey was relatively accessible for European travelers, thanks to its two-hundred-year history as a producer and exporter of palm oil and slaves for the White Man. France had recently overthrown the country’s last native dynasty; the consul general (who happened to bear an extraordinary resemblance to Voltaire) gave Van Vliet directions to a Fon encampment that lay en route to the northern jungle. Two of Van Vliet’s disciples—Dr. Fodder and Dr. Fischer—had recently arrived from England. As they stood in line for quinine pills at the consular infirmary, Van Vliet, eager to get into the jungle as soon as possible, forced himself to thumb slowly through an old copy of Le Figaro.

  The Fon people treated them kindly, gave them campsites with good views into the bush, and provided them with smoking materials. The Fon believe not in a single, all-powerful God, but in a spirit-world that is complex and unstable, and shortly after arriving at the encampment, Van Vliet—a genuine pioneer in psychological experimentation—began skulking about wearing nothing but a loincloth. He smeared mud all over his flabby academic flesh so as to move about “unseen” at night. He walked barefoot at all times, and spent hours staring at the moon (which seemed much bigger and brighter than it had during his expeditions to the North Sea, where he’d been researching conflict theory in sea spiders). At times he fell asleep seated there on the porous soil, his notebook still in hand. He took notes using ink made of resin, palm char, and bone ash, and one day while mixing up a batch he befriended a small monkey with almond-shaped eyes. As he anxiously studied the language of the Fon, he quickly learned that of the birds, and set up a provisional academic office complete with all his notebooks high in the branches of a topped tree that had once been home to a family of bushbabies.

  At this point in history, psychological theory was having itself quite un moment. In 1917, Alfred Adler had concluded his fifty-two page work on homosexuality, showing the phenomenon to be the result of an inferiority complex toward one’s own sex. In 1920, Sigmund Freud published his Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Three years earlier Jung had arranged for a private prin
ting of the seven sermons to the dead he’d written and ascribed to Basilides of Alexandria (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos), and in 1926, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, having recently decided that he possessed neither the talent nor the experience a literary career required, abandoned his dream of becoming a fiction writer and applied to do a PhD in psychology. Inspired by Bertrand Russell’s commentaries on Watson’s behaviorist theories, Skinner’s earliest experiments on pigeons (“‘Superstition’ in the pigeon,” 1947) were followed by others of subtle mechanistic design applied first to individual human beings, and then (albeit only in theory) to massive groups (a territory previously considered the exclusive domain of utopian literature); these mega-groups lived in communes where the children were raised according to a strict creed of operant conditioning and various other protocols of social engineering.

  Given this context of psychology on high boil, and the fact that Johan van Vliet didn’t belong to any of his field’s prominent schools of thought, it will come as no surprise that his radically original projects were dismembered by the jaws of time without ever putting up a struggle. In fact, amidst the murky circumstances of Van Vliet’s disappearance into the jungle, Time’s appetite left the new theory headless. One of his disciples, Manfred Fodder, who’d managed to get the results of the African sojourn published in Nature, was eventually absorbed into the Skinnerian hordes; the other, Marvin Fischer, continued to impart the master’s theory at occasional conferences until finally giving up and joining the legions of Otto Rank—who, in 1926, was excommunicated by none other than the Father of Psychoanalysis himself for the sin of “anti-Oedipal heresy.”

  In spite of their firsthand experience of Van Vliet’s genius, neither Fodder nor Fischer was capable of serving as medium for the Dutchman’s voice when seated at the wide oak tables of academia. Neither had his gift for the sort of edge-of-your-seat conceptual theater that might impress their fellow intellectuals, most of whom had given the man up for dead. Neither knew how to summon the murmur of Van Vliet’s singular theory up through the sublunar language of workaday academics. A man with a theory is someone who has something to shout, but a dead man with a theory requires a séance, and even then his spirit is a wad of half-chewed bread lolling about in the medium’s mouth, occasionally pushing back against the teeth but certain to disintegrate and destined to be spit out. The academic presentations given by Fodder and Fischer came out sounding like the bleating of two goats lost and alone in the far hills. Translated into English and German to accommodate the ears of their colleagues, the content resembled the strange unintelligible wailing of a newborn, at best indistinguishable from other theories. The year after Rank’s exile began, Fischer published Cerebral Response and Egoic Transmissions: An Introduction. He and Rank met regularly to discuss their respective hypotheses, but it wasn’t long before Fischer passed away, leaving no philosophical descendants.